Interview tips (part 1)

Interview the Interviewer (part1)

For the prelude to this 3 part post please go back to the prologue .

band practice night

I usually blog about things that I do not want to forget, but since I have to login to Linked-in every day while job-hunting anyway, I have decided to write roughly 1 article per week. I know that I can sustain this, because a few years back I made almost 100 blog posts over 2 years. I later switched to writing game reviews and managed to meet my goal of 1 per fortnight over the same period. Lately, however when I review or blog, I'm actually practicing my communication skills as well as doing a regular brain-dump. Practicing a thing you suck at is a great way to improve it purely through wrote learning or to overcome a personal barrier to the skill. Rome, was also not built in a day. at-sxsw-bluesky-ceo-jay-graber-pokes-fun-at-mark-zuckerberg-with-latin-phrase-t-shirt

No I'm not on Blue Sky, but let's stay on topic here. 

Job interview notes to self.

1. Practice your interview technique. 

You will often find you can get 2 job interviews booked in close together. For maximum effect you will want to book the job you want most, as the last interview. You will be able to reflect on the 1st interview and not make the same mistakes when it comes to the job you really want. It is common to step out after an interview and say to yourself, "I wish I had". At least if you have ADHD tendencies you will, apparently the brain likes to not only pre-rehearse conversations, but it also records them. For example in my recent article about Motivation, I spoke about the one question I got wrong interview-tips-prologue .

2. Interview the interviewer

The way I see it, I'm never going to be a 10X developer, that engineer who is 10x more productive than the average, but I can get that extra 20% productivity that happy workers give, just by making sure I am working at a place that I can love. And that's a extra 20% that extends to every minute of the day and every situation, not just your strengths. Which brings me to Career goals

3. Have Career Goals

You are always going to be asked a hard question in an interview, my favourite one is not:

 - "If you were an animal which animal would you be and why?"

Better questions are:

 - "Why did you leave your last job?"

 - "Where do you see yourself in 5 years time?"

And to be brutally honest my answer usually has been, 'with a paid up mortgage?'. That is everybody else's goal too, and so to rise above anyone's estimation of you, you have to articulate more inner spark or energy. A clear desire to grow in value and brightness almost. To me this was never in my nature. Every year when career goals came up in a one-to-one I just made up something vague that lined up with what I thought my boss wanted to hear.

I think the big reason I have never held myself accountable on a career goal, is that, well I've had 8 different jobs over my career, and some of those jobs have even changed tack unpredictably. But accountability can be a big motivator, as I already hinted at, in the my post linked above. So for accountability I am going to put security down as a career goal. More specifically code security, static analysis and code quality security, not penetration security. I'd like to learn how to pen-test, but a rotation back to being almost pedantic about clean code is probably my next goal. expect more on this in future.

4. Listen

When I step into an interview, my brain goes into overdrive a bit. I want to answer every question as quickly as possible. You cannot do that with words. most often to me, time wasted with a conversation pause feels like money wasted, it's not. In the real world, that's not how I write code, I write something, then review and rewrite it. Sometimes taking a moment to double-think before you speak has 3 advantages:

A: People think that you are wise because you didn't just blurt out a pre-made answer, you actually solved the problem in real time, as a brand new problem.

B: You calm things down and take the "rush" out of things

C: You can file away for later any extra information the interviewer just gave you. People are super impressed when you can recall a minor point they made hidden in a much longer exchange because you just listened.

5. Relax

Probably linked to the listening skill, relaxing requires my being super prepared. Most people do not know how to prep for an interview. I don't. Lately the way I get myself ready for an interview is my getting a mental image of each person I will meet in the interview. I look up things like how long they have been there, which uni they went to and any notable companies they have worked at in the past. Having some common base in a company you both worked at before is often a good culture clue, for engineering jobs at least, it often is.