The Guerrilla Guide to Being Interviewed

In a famous¹ blog post from the great Joel Spolsky² entitled “The Guerrilla Guide to Interviewing,” he lays out very practical, fundamental, and altogether good rules for how a company should interview technical people.  Laurie Voss, CTO of npm — who, by the way, was just super great to apply to, because Laurie actually keeps you updated on your status, like omg what a breath of fresh air³ — referenced the post in his excellent post “You Suck at Technical Interviews,” which I also highly recommend reading. These were obviously super useful to me back in the day as someone who had to interview technical people (duh).

But what about people interviewing for a technical position?  Or, more broadly, any position? As someone who recently went through the process of interviewing for a technical position — unexpectedly successfully, I might add — I present to you the guerrilla guide to being interviewed.

The premise, for those who didn’t read the above-linked post, is that a bunch of guerrillas have hijacked a ferry and demanded something you’re good at making (Spolsky uses a Fortran compiler as an example), and you have to prove that you should be on the team that will produce this thing in a life-or-death scenario.  Ultimately, you are going to be able to do this by proving to the team that you are smart (able to produce the thing in question, or learn how to)m that you get things done (you can produce it before the guerrillas blow up the ferry), and that you’re not an asshole.

So how do you do that?  First, I’ll walk you through the interviewing process, because it’s good to know what kinds of opportunities you’ll have to demonstrate your value.  Then, I’ll give you a couple of good ways to show that you’re a non-asshole who’s smart and gets things done throughout the process.

The process

I went through the full spectrum of interviews with five companies over the course of two or three weeks, and every single one of them went something like this⁴:

1. Talk to a recruiter
2. Phone screen (this may not happen if the job is in town)
3. On-site
4. Decision

The recruiter is there to determine if you’re a crazy person or not; for smaller companies, it may be any sort of non-technical person (I spoke to a CEO at one company).  The phone screen may be Skype-based, and if it’s a technical position, it should include some coding — it’ll almost certainly be with a technical person.  The on-site usually consists of a tour of the office and a few face-to-face interviews, which may be technical or not, and the decision will probably be made as a team and delivered over the phone (probably not in-person that day).

There are obviously variations on this theme, so ask the recruiter what to expect.  In fact, ask everyone what to expect next, always.  It can give you a good insight into whether or not you’re going to get to the next step; if someone really liked you, they’ll probably say it.  Plus, a lot of people don’t like the awkwardness of telling you you didn’t make the cut, so they just won’t get back to you and leave you in a weird limbo. It’s good to know when you should expect to hear something, and if you don’t then send an email or follow up.  The worst case is they don’t respond.

Know your audience

It’s critical to understand the role of the person you’re talking to.  For instance, the recruiter is really interested in three things: do you know what you’re applying to, have you just completely fabricated your resume, and are you a sane person.

To the first point, it is essential that you know what you are applying to, and can reasonably say that you are interested in the subject.

To the second, remember recruiters are not engineers, and although they will ask you basic technical questions about your resume, you should not get into the weeds about how your solution to X problem was linearithmic in time compared to the previous solution, which was quadratic.  They may have a few key words they’re looking for (e.g., if your resume mentions you have SQL experience, they probably want you to say “SELECT,” “UPDATE,” etc. and maybe want to hear that you have DDL and DML experience).  They are also interested in applications — what did you do with your SQL experience? If you say that you developed a login GUI, you are lying.  But if you say that you persisted user info to a DB, great!  You passed the test — you are smart (know the stuff you claim to know) and you did a thing.  Obviously, if prompted, give additional detail.

To the final point, this is your first personality screen; you want to sound intelligent without sounding like an asshole.  You can be the smartest man in the world and be an asshole, and no one will want to work with you.  Remember that the recruiter will be your primary point of contact and, in many cases, will end up going to bat for you after the interviews are done and it’s offer time (I think some may even be paid on commission), so you want them on your side.

Similarly, if you’re talking to an executive or a high-level manager, it’s almost certainly a behavioral interview — you want to sound inquisitive and curious about the business while demonstrating that the things you have gotten done have driven value for the business.  A lower-level manager or someone in the position you’re being interviewed for wants to know that you have technical chops and aren’t a huge pain to work with.

Fail early, fail often

Even the smartest people are really dumb sometimes (or maybe it’s just me?).  If you haven’t interviewed in a while, you should apply to as many marginal places as possible, so you can use them as practice.  These can be places that don’t really have a position that matches your skills, a place that seems really cool but you’re probably not qualified for, or a place you’re just not that interested in working at, but you are qualified for.  You want to apply to as many as possible, since only a few will actually get back to you.  This way, you can get out your dumbness before you need to demonstrate that you’re smart to people you really care about.  This also lets you know what sorts of things people are going to ask about — but more than that, when you lay awake at night wondering why you bombed such an easy question, you’ll be kicking yourself for not saying the obvious, glorious answer that has formed in the last few days since the interview.  Go with that answer when you want to demonstrate that you’re smart.

For instance, I interviewed for a really cool-sounding drone company, and they asked me my experience with deployment.  I basically responded with, “I dunno, we sorta emailed folks, and then if no one objected, we pushed it?”  That is, just, like, such a bad answer — but my problem was that I hadn’t thought about that question, and I wasn’t sure of a good way to answer it that would be interesting.  Within 24 hours, I had considered every single time I had deployed something that wasn’t super vanilla, and even though it was like 1-2% of total deployments, I still had 15 examples of things that needed backward compatibility built in during a transition phase; communications and documentation that needed to support multiple versions; OS upgrades on servers; daemon upgrades for job central, firm-critical scheduling software; core parsing software that we ran two versions in parallel for a month to ensure there were no unexpected differences (hint: there were!); the very versioning system we used!  I could have gone on and on about all of it, and the next time I was asked that question, I nailed it, and I sounded super smart and I got to tell people about a lot of the stuff I did.

Prepare, prepare, prepare

It’s not hard to prepare for an interview, and it gives you a chance to look smart to anyone you’re talking to.  There are a couple of things you really want to do, and, assuming you are even slightly qualified, they just aren’t that hard and they don’t take that long.

• Basic company research: go to the website, check out TechCrunch (or whatever); see what’s new.
• Basic job research: what do they want? What should you be emphasizing? This information will be in the job posting.
• Basic interview research: if they tell you who will be interviewing you, check out their LinkedIn page; they’ll see you viewed it (“Hey look, the candidate prepared!”), and you can use this to tailor your questions to your interviewer.

It takes two hours or less to do this, and if you come up with an intelligent question or insight, guess what? You’ve just demonstrated that you’re smart.

Additionally, if they send you any materials, look them over.  98% of applicants won’t do that, but it gives you a good starting point for what sets this company apart from others — more importantly, though, it gives you a starting point for what this company thinks sets it apart from others, and you can hone in on that to your advantage in the question phase.

Speaking of the question phase, most interviewers will leave a little time at the end for you to ask questions.  It’s really good to have a few questions you can ask everyone, and a few questions you can ask certain people.  Your questions should reflect positively on both you and the company, or else you risk looking like an asshole.  A really good question to ask is, “What do you love about the company?”  It’s positive (never ask “what do you not like,”) and you’ll get a really good idea what the people at the company value.  Plus, you can ask the same question to everyone, and you’ll learn something new every time.  Another good one is, “why did you join?”, which is a very different question — “I joined because the hours and pay, but I stayed because I love the product.”

Otherwise, ask questions targeted to the role of the person interviewing you — ask a person doing your job what his or her day-to-day is like, but ask senior folks when they joined and what role they had (does the company promote from within?), and what the direction of the team / company is — where will we be in 5 years?  Also, use “we” — it makes it seem like you’re already seeing yourself there.  These sorts of questions make you sound like a thinker — a smart person!

You can convince them you get things done by asking questions about how they get things done — “Tell me about some production-level code you’ve shipped in the last three months?” is a great question for a peer, while, “What are the key milestones to hit in achieving that vision?” is a great follow-up to the question above for a more senior interviewer.

Be one with the interviewer

If you haven’t interviewed someone before — or maybe even if you have — maybe especially if you have? — and you’re applying for a technical position, make sure you read those two posts I mentioned earlier⁵.  They should give you keen insight not only into what a good company is looking for, but also into the fact that no one who is interviewing you knows what they are doing.  This is important to understand: most interviewers are not professional interviewers, they are professional something-elsers.  They are evaluating whether or not they want to work with you.  If you’ve never worked with someone who is awful to work with, congratulations on interviewing for your first job!  The rest of us know that there’s nothing worse than someone who’s defensive and protective of their knowledge, or someone who just can’t get a single thing done… or, of course, an asshole.

Another reason to read those articles is it gives you a chance to evaluate the company.  I, for one, agree with those articles, so pretty much anything that deviated from them was a knock against the company for me.  For instance, I had a technical phone screen with one company, only to be brought up to the office and have four half-hour behavioral interviews.  No whiteboards, no coding — no one gave a hoot what I could do or how I wanted to do it. Just the same questions asked over and over again on loop.  Likewise, I had a few interviews where people just asked me rote questions — they were OK questions, designed to see if I was completely lying on my resume, but they weren’t coding — and it kinda put me off, because I kept thinking, “This doesn’t matter.  Ask me to solve a problem.” The message I got was that the company interviewed to find people who were smart, not people who could get things done, which meant they probably had a relatively high proportion of people who couldn’t.

It’s also important — especially for the more junior people you interact with — not to underestimate the kindness of strangers.  They want you to get the job; it’s uncomfortable to judge people.  I can’t tell you how many people I interviewed that were marginal at best that I passed along, just because I didn’t want to be the reason they were out on the street.  That’s absurd, of course — they’ll get a job somewhere — but the only part of their life I see as an interviewer is the part where they perform their trade in front of me and I say, “Meh! Not good enough.”  So relax, they’re on your side.

Talk too much

The interviewer doesn’t know what you’re thinking.  He or she doesn’t know what you know.  You, and you alone, do.  Your job is to tell them what you’re thinking and convince them that you know what you know you know.

Consider the following completely ridiculous example: you are handed a clicky pen and told you need to write a letter.  How would you do it?

You can either click the pen and write the letter — congrats, you know how to operate a clicky pen — or you can walk through the absurd amount of knowledge required to get to even that stage: “This is a pen. I know that because I’ve used a number of pens before, of many types.  Pens are good for writing, so this is an excellent tool to write the letter.  I know pens come in many different colors; this appears to be blue, because the pen itself is blue and the pen color usually matches the color of the ink, but we can test that in a moment.  Pens I’ve used have largely come in three varieties — clicky, twisty, and capped.  Additionally, I know of a fourth type — fountain — but I’m not very familiar with them. From experience I can say that this appears to be clicky; there’s no twisty portion and certainly no cap, so I’m going to test that assumption by clicking the end, which should — aha! — produce the writing tip…” Not only do you know how to operate a clicky pen, you know how to operate all pens, and you’ve demonstrated deep knowledge of the subject and clearly identified that you understand the boundaries of your knowledge.  You are smart, and what’s more, your vast experience in pen applications suggests you also know how to get things done.

Admittedly, it’s not a bad idea to preface your spiel with a quick, “I’m going to explain everything I do, so if I’m going too slowly or being overly explanatory, just let me know.”

Know what you don’t know

The above example hits on something really important, that Laurie Voss also mentions: it’s important to know your limits.  As he states, “Strong candidates say ‘I don’t know’ as soon as they hit their limit, and may start asking questions.”

There’s no better way to prove that you’re not smart than to try to bluff your way through something you don’t know.⁶ Instead, it’s important to be up front about it — “I don’t know how I’m going to write a letter with this pen, the pen doesn’t appear to write.”

As Voss continues, “The very strongest candidates say ‘but if I had to guess’ and then attempt to extrapolate.”  It’s a great chance to show what you do know, even though you don’t know exactly what they asked.  “I don’t know how to use this pen because it doesn’t write and there’s no top to remove, but I’ve seen pens that need to be dipped in ink.  They look different than this one, though, so that might not be it either.  Can you give me a pointer here?”  Then, when they say, “Yeah, this is a clicky pen, click the thing,” extrapolate further — show that you internalized and learned something: “Ah!  The tip protrudes!  I bet there’s other mechanisms — maybe you could twist a pen and have the tip retract and protrude like that.  This retracting tip concept might offer a few advantages over the models I’m familiar with; for instance, I bet it does not dry out as quickly.”  Not only have you learned something, you’ve also shown that you’ve internalized it and can apply it to other situations.  You’ve turned a weakness into a strength!  People love that stuff.

Be honest

This is sort of in the same vein as “Know what you don’t know,” but broader — be honest about what you don’t know, and about what you do.  For one company, I had six or seven interviewers.  Three of them asked me basically the same question.  The first time, I took a broad approach — “You could do X, but I could see how Y, Z, A-W, and a few more options could really work.”  The second time, I said, “I’ll be honest, I’ve already been asked this question,” to which the interviewer replied, “Great!  Where did you end up?” and I told her, and she said, “OK — can you take that one step further?” I had the chance not only to score Honesty Points (TM), which are only awarded to people who aren’t assholes, but also to show her that I’d Learned Something (TM), which is what smart people do, and that I could Apply What I had Learned (TM), which gets stuff done.  If I had just walked through the exactly the same thing as the first time, I wouldn’t have really shown anything new, and — worst case — they’d have figured out they asked the same thing and I gave the same answer twice without saying anything.  When the third interviewer asked it, I told her I’d heard it twice before, and when she asked where I got to and I told her, she decided to use a different question, and I got to show how smart I was in another way.

This also goes for other parts of the interview — be open and up front about whether you’re looking at other companies or whether you have other offers.  Yes, you can use another offer to get a quicker response from a company you’re interested in, but don’t lie about it.  If you have an offer from a company you’re not interested in, let them know immediately that you won’t be taking the job.  Likewise, don’t make up an offer in order to get a faster / better response from a company you are interested in.  Don’t be an asshole.

Keep an open mind

My mother was a recruiter, which was a super valuable resource in my job hunt, because she’d seen it from the other side (see “Be one with the interviewer”).  The best piece of advice she gave me was, “Don’t decide on the job until you have the offer.  Until then, you’re interested.”

This has a really practical application: if the job you’re really interested in turns you down, and you stuck around with a job that gave you an offer you weren’t so interested in, guess what?  You still have a job.

But on another, less practical level, it gives you two more things.  You get something to compare other jobs to — you get additional experience with a number of different companies, and if you’ve been asking everyone your canned questions, you get a lot of answers to cross-calibrate by.  You may also not know that you’re interested in something until you go through the process.  I got an interview at an internet behemoth — something that predates Google — and I thought it would be a terrible job.  When I got there, I found out they were under new management, had a clear and high-impact way to get back on track, and were solving a really interesting problem.  Likewise, for another job in “business analytics,” I started off thinking that it wasn’t what I wanted to do.  After I went to the office and met everyone, I realized that the company was full of incredibly intelligent, bright, professional people that I wanted to work with, the position involved developing data-driven applications more than analysis, and the company had a great culture. If I had said no up front, I would probably be in Charlotte right now instead of San Francisco.  So don’t turn the job down until you get it.

Closing thoughts

I’ve spewn a lot of nonsense at you, but this is the stuff that worked for me.  In the end, you want to present yourself as someone who’s smart and gets things done, but also as someone who’s not an asshole.  The best way to do that is to show that you can learn, show that you can solve problems, and be open and honest.

And if that’s not enough?  You didn’t wanna work there anyway.