Take control of your interview

I’m helping some colleagues interview programmers, and for once I’d like to offer some suggestions to the interviewees and not the interviewers. This post is about using the interview to maximize your chance of landing the right job.

have an objective

First, you need to walk in with an objective. No, not “to secure a strategically progressive position leveraging your forward-going architectural vision and hands-on experience to advance the division’s mission,” but a simple, tactical objective for the interview.

Here’s what I suggest. Think of three things you want the interviewer to know about you that you think they are unlikely to find out if they ask all the questions.

The important ideas are that (a) you want the interviewer to know about each of the three things, and that (b) the interviewer is unlikely to ask about all three if you don’t exercise some control over the interview.

Let’s start by ruling a few things out. First, don’t bother with how many years of technical experience you have with the company’s tools and platforms. If they are using in-house Common Lisp macros compiled to C and then distributed on a grid with MapReduce, I guarantee that they will ask whether you have any Lisp or distributed programming experience all by themselves. (You can still take advantage of your experience, I’ll show you how below.)

Second, rule out anything that doesn’t really help sell them on you. Yeah, yeah, hockey is competitive and it takes a special kind of focus to be a goalie. I get that, but it really only sells when the interviewer is also a hockey player. My suggestion is put that kind of thing at the bottom of your resumé and let them ask about it if they care.

the three things

The three things you want to take into the interview should be stuff that matters to them but is hard for them to ask about. Stuff that doesn’t pop out of your resumé. I don’t have a pat formula for generating these items that I can share, but here are a couple of ideas to get you started.

Remember the technology buzz-phrases we rejected (“five years of JEE” “Common Lisp”)? Think about the difference between yourself, presumably an expert in these areas, and someone who has only worked on one project with the same technology. You both touched all the same tools and code, but there’s something special about you, your extra experience means something. What is it?

Joel Spolsky and Peter Norvig both suggest that you cannot pick up a new programming language or platform and become proficient overnight. That being said, if you tell me that you have five years of experience, I have no idea whether you have five years of experience or whether you simply did the same thing over and over again. What is it that you learned that makes you special? What secrets to you possess that can’t be listed on your resumé?

For each person, there will be different answers. One person might say that their “secret sauce” is that they have learned the ins and outs of the platform, they know what works and what doesn’t, they know how to work around the shortcomings. Another might emphasize the non-technical skills. I would personally be impressed with anyone who said that what makes them special is that they are very, very accurate when they estimate tasks and projects.

This leads naturally to another area I would mine for nuggets: Soft or non-technical skills.

99% of the dreck you read about interviewing programmers is about finding out whether they can actually write programs. Rightly or wrongly, most interviewers focus on the hard skills. But if they never get around to discovering your ability to juggle priorities, or write effective technical documentation, or analyze requirements, how will they know that you are far and away superior to the other five people they will interview this week?

You have to tell them, that’s how they’ll find out.

tell them about it

Walk into the interview with your three things. Now, the interview is a game. Presuming you don’t get thrown out or you don’t walk out before it ends, you win the game if the interviewer discovered all three of your things. If you like games as a metaphor, call them goals.

If the interviewer asks you about one of your things, that’s an easy goal. Take it.

If the interviewer asks you if there’s anything you’d like to mention about yourself, that’s an easy goal. Talk about one of your things.

If the interviewer asks you about something related to one of your things, answer the interviewer’s question and then ‘coat tail’ your thing onto the end. For example:

Interviewer: It says here you worked on JProbe, that’s a Java tool, right?

Interviewee: Absolutely. JProbe is a suite of tools for JEE Server-Side development (answers the interviewer’s question). Under my management, we released three consecutive versions on schedule. I’m really hoping that there’s an opportunity to apply my focus on hitting plan to this team (adds on).

Watch politicians “staying on message.” Now matter what question they are asked, they spit out their own pat statements. You don’t want to be that plastic, but you have to take responsibility for a a successful interview. And you know what? If the interview ends with your best features undisclosed, the company loses as well.

One more time with the coat tail:

Interviewer: What’s your experience with Ruby?

Interviewee: Well, I was the lead developer on the Certitude project. We built that with Rails and we included a fairly heavy dose of Ruby idioms, including a domain-specific language for pattern-matching and lots of dynamic meta-programming (answers the interviewer’s question). One of the things I discovered on that project was the importance of a bomb-proof quality control process when you have such a powerful language. I customized our continuous integration server to track changed files, tests, bugs in a unified report interface so we could monitor the most troublesome modules. It really saved our bacon late in the project when we had to really tighten up our risk management to ship on time (the add on, emphasizing the process).

if all else fails

Perhaps you didn’t get a good opportunity to mention your three things and the interview is winding down to a close. Don’t try a desperation coat tail where you try to stick two completely unrelated things together. Instead, try using a question to introduce one of your things indirectly.

Some examples:

• “Could you describe the product management process for me?” leads to an oportunity to talk about your product management experience or your experience working with product managers.
  
• “What tools do you use for source code management, builds, and bug tracking?” is a great opportunity to talk about your experience with the full software development life cycle, not just the coding.
  
• “How do you plan and track ship dates?” turns the conversation towards how well you estimate dates, manage priorities, and your track record of shipping code on time.
  

Opportunities to ask questions should not be wasted on trivia like the company’s dental plan or whether they prefer cubicles to private offices (actually, neither are trivial, but they are not important until you have given the interviewer every reason to hire you).

My suggestion is to only ask questions about areas where you have something positive to contribute if the question leads to a spirited discussion. And the best way to make that happen is to plan in advance.

You have three things you want to say, and you should walk into the interview with three questions you can ask that will turn the conversation towards your agenda.

back to square one

So here’s how to get started.

1. List your three things you want the interviewer to know about you that you think they are unlikely to find out if they ask all the questions;
2. Write a one-paragraph description of for each thing that you could use to ‘coat tail’ onto another question;
3. Think of a question you could ask for each thing that would naturally lead to a discussion.

Good luck.

Labels: jobs, popular

  ¶ 5:11 PM