Hey, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Developer Tea. We have gone back to an interview for this episode. It's been a long time since we did an interview. I'm very excited about this particular interview because this person has changed my career personally. He's given me a lot of tools to use both now and into the future. I want to be totally transparent with this. I did agree to bring Brian Pulliam on the show as a part of my payment for his coaching fee. Hopefully, that tells you that I believe in Brian's coaching methods because I'm using him personally. This is certainly not a typical sponsorship. It's not a sponsored episode in that traditional sense. I really suggest you take to heart what Brian has to say. He has a ton of experience over a decade more than I have. I highly recommend if you're considering looking for a coach to check Brian out. He did not ask me to say any of this myself. This part is all on me. What he did ask me to mention is that he is going to be offering 10% off if you mention Developer Tea when you sign up for an intro chat. You'll get 10% off a coaching package with three or more sessions. Three or more sessions is about what I would recommend for anybody in the first bit of time that you spend with Brian. He has a very structured approach to this. This isn't just three or as many as you want kind of sessions. Brian has a structured approach to what he does in each session. You will be making the most of each of those. Head over to refactorcoaching.com to get started. That's refactorcoaching.com to get started with Brian. Here's what I'll encourage you to do. Listen to this episode. Listen to the next one. Before you make a decision about having Brian as a coach, you can kind of get his style and see some of the tools that he's provided with me and how I use those in my most recent job search. Let's get into the interview with Brian Pulley. Welcome to the show, Brian. Thanks for having me, Jonathan. Great to be here. I am excited to talk with you again. I guess I should mention up front here. Brian has worked with me recently in my career transition, leaving my previous role and moving into a new role that's starting actually next week, which is why we're timing this episode when we are. But we'll get into all that. Brian, can you tell us just a little bit about what you do in your role as a coach? Sure. So, you know, a lot of people in the workplace have never had a coach before. So I get this question a lot. But think of a career coach as someone who is there to be an accountability partner, a sounding board, and is 100% focused on your goals. So in a way, it's like a coach of an athletics team you're on, but there's no one else on the team. And so we get to focus entirely on what it is you want to accomplish. You often get the benefit of a neutral third party who has connections and sometimes has lived experiences that you have yet to experience yourself. And oftentimes, just asking questions in a different way can help unblock the connection. Things that may have been holding people back in the past. So it sounds like a coach is, I mean, we've all heard of coaches, particularly the first thing that comes to mind when you hear the word coach is probably something in athletics, which I believe you have some experience coaching in athletics. Is that correct? Oh, yeah. So I was in tech for about 26 years, which is a long tech career. It feels more. I like a thousand when looking back. But when looking backwards, the most fulfilling thing I've ever done wasn't really in tech at all. It was being an athletics coach with my wife. She and I met playing sport, met playing volleyball. And I didn't think I was really going to like it. In fact, my wife sort of had to force me to go. And I was kind of grumbly about it. And then it ended up being this most fulfilling thing I've ever done in my career. And I remember thinking, wow, I want to take. How great I feel helping other people succeed. And I want to wonder to empower that with this tech experience I have. How do I do that? And so I sought out my own career coach. I had been a coach for 13 years in athletics. And I said, there's got to be someone out there that does this for the workplace. And I found her. Her name was Melissa. And she and I worked off and on together for a year or two. And I can tell you right now, I'm living my dream lifestyle. Working part-time, helping people be successful. Paying my bills because of my career coach. And now that I've discovered I want to do that same thing for other people. That's what I'm getting to do. And it's super fulfilling. I love working with lots of people. So when I hear career coach, a lot of things pop into my mind. And yes, of course, athletics. But setting that aside. The next thing that I think of is, okay. A career coach is somebody that is going to help me, you know, to, I don't know, maybe help me through some sticky situations at work. A lot of people who hear this might think, oh, that's a bit of a racket. Or those people are listening to this podcast right now. And I want them to continue listening because, as I've already mentioned, or I don't know if I mentioned it yet or not. Oh, yes, I did. I did mention. I want those people to continue listening because I have found this an incredibly valuable kind of relationship and discussions that we've had helped me in this transition immensely. Not just from the perspective of, you know, kind of like thinking out loud. You're not a therapist to me. That's not the role that you're playing in our discussions. Very tactically speaking. A lot of. My approaches to an interview or to a call with a recruiter. Changed pretty dramatically after our discussions. And I would say, you know, based on the results, at least for the better. I think immediately after our discussions, I had a different frame of mind. So before we go into this discussion any further, I want to kind of dispel the idea that coaching either a is only for an executive level or maybe only for VPs. Or directors or something where you're trying to do like a headhunter style. You know, career move. How does this apply to just the average kind of, let's say, a senior engineer who might be listening right now? Yeah, sure. So. You know, a coach. Is kind of. Let's see. What's a good analogy. You know, you, you see a group of people that go to Mount Everest and they have these Sherpas. Sherpas are these guides and they. They've traveled these paths. A hundred times over. And sometimes the people they're guiding have never traveled those paths before. And you seek out those people because they have experience. On the right routes to take the things to watch out for. Pip falls to avoid deadly in the case of Mount Everest, right? Maybe not quite so deadly in the tech industry, we hope. But. We see value in those people. And. That corollary. Applies to our careers as well. You know, when we feel stuck with something. Once you get to senior engineer, you're it's pretty clear to you that. It is no longer just about what you can accomplish. It's about what you can accomplish with a group of people. And to have someone who's an advocate in your corner, nurturing and cultivating your success. Who you can have unfiltered chats with about how much you hate your boss or how much you love your boss. And that. That is a person that's there to help you be successful or look at. Something in a different way or give you data. On experiments. That have been running where the results would help you. Shortcut. The time and the effort it takes to get to your own goals. That sounds like something really appealing, right? You know, like we, we optimize things left and right. We optimize for memory, right? We optimize for CPU. We optimize for cloud spends. We are used to saying. Optimization is worthwhile. And I, and I think coaches can help you. Learn how to optimize and shortcut the path to your own goals. In ways that sometimes it's hard to see yourself, especially if those solutions are in blind spots. Because we call them blind spots for a reason, right? You can't see them. Absolutely. And I wonder. I kind of want to zoom in on a specific thing you mentioned, which is. That. That you can talk to this person unfiltered. Uh, you know, but let's say I have a really great. Uh, relationship with my manager today. And I feel like, oh, well, this person, this person really does help me. I feel like I can be honest with them, et cetera, et cetera. Tell me why. That doesn't fill this gap. I don't believe that it does. Uh, but I can imagine thinking that, uh, if I had. A great relationship with my manager. Why, why isn't that the same thing? Sure. So a lot of it is buried in what a coach doesn't have. That's a conflict of interest, maybe with your own boss. As a career coach, you know, I'm self-employed. I, I run a business. I have no boss. Uh, so there's no boss I have to make happy. Especially in a case where there might be a side effect in making some of the goals that my directs are trying to achieve. Take a little bit longer. I don't have a budget to approve, to promote three people this year. Uh, I don't have that constraint. I don't have a review I'm writing. I'm not trying to get a promotion. Uh, I don't have to sell my team on something I disagree with, but the company says I have to sort of tow the company line. So in that way, there's a lot less conflict of interest in ensuring that we're here to help make you successful. So even if you do have a great manager, it doesn't. It doesn't mean that there isn't another company out there that's trying to hire someone. And it just happens to be at your dream company. Your boss is probably not going to volunteer information that they are so excited to share with you. That means that they've helped find you a lead on a job, which means you are going to leave the company, right? That there's a conflict of interest there. So, uh, but I've helped dozens of people. By connecting them with people in my network to help them find roles. That are more suitable for the next chapter in their career than where they are now. And sometimes they don't hate their jobs. They just want to work in a new industry. They want to relocate. Um, they really believe in the mission of this other company. All these reasons that sometimes can't be changed because it's not like I can come in tomorrow and ask my boss to change the charter of my engineering company. Like, you know, we've kind of been given this charter. Uh, it's unlikely we can just dump what it was we were focused on before. And so the opportunities for growth. Yeah, they can exist inside a company. But we all know there are several orders of magnitude more opportunities outside of the company we currently work for. Of course. And having a successful manager, even if it's a great relationship, there's only so much they can offer. And so a coach can help you. Honestly, look from the outside. Who doesn't have any skin in the game about whether you leave or stay. All they want to know is like, well, what are you, what are your goals and what are you good at? And how do we tie those things together? How do we say, well, if Jonathan is good at these things, he's going after these goals. How do we see those strengths as tools in his tool belt? Just to shortcut the time it takes for him to achieve the goals that he's interested in. Mm-hmm. And because it is kind of interesting, like a great manager. Right. If you were to think, what are the qualities of great manager? One of them is they are able to retain talent. Right? Like, that's a key, you know, I know from my roles as a manager that a lot of, you know, even when I'm interviewing, one of the things that I will say is I have the ability to retain talent because I know that's important. It's one of the key things that a good manager can do. Yeah. And so that's not because necessarily I want to hold my people back. It's because I actually think that, you know, the goal of a manager is to create an environment where somebody wants to work. That said, the explicit goal of a manager is not, you know, amplifying or maximizing each individual's career. Correct. Very rarely at least. Yeah. Would you find that? You know, some companies will say that. They'll say, hey, this person is here to support your career. But I would put a lot of money on a company not really appreciating if a manager is actively looking outside of the company for somebody to move along. That is one of those things that happens when you need to move somebody off your team for bad reasons rather than good reasons. Right. That tends to be what managers are tasked with. So this is probably the key differentiator for me. Is that I have two parts. One, I can kind of check my gut without changing the situation. So in other words, if I went to my manager, I said, hey, you know, I just want to check to see if I'm thinking about this the right way. And then I shared something with him that let's say is totally off. Right. Let's say I'm falling victim to my own anxieties or something. I share that with my manager in confidence. And I'm hoping that it doesn't change. I'm hoping that it doesn't change the situation. Unfortunately, it does. Right. No matter what you do, when you have a discussion with somebody that you work with, you are possibly mutating something. You're touching the relationship. You're touching the discussion. And whatever you say now changes the situation ever so slightly possibly or perhaps very much. You may change the way that your manager looks at you entirely. This is not true with a coach. Right. You may be able to change yourself through that discussion, but you're able to separate those concerns entirely. And that to me is a huge value in these discussions. And I know it's a little bit edging on what we were saying about therapy, for example. Right. You can kind of get a similar thing. But your therapist is not going to know the industry that you're in unless you just so happen to get a therapist that all of a sudden is going to be a coach. Right. Or a therapist that also worked in tech at some point or something. I don't know. Yeah. So have you had that experience when you were working with your coach where you wanted to kind of square what you were thinking about versus what an external party? We were talking before this discussion. Maybe you can share this idea of viewing yourself as an outside objective viewer would view you or a scientist. Have you had that experience with your coach? At your position, were you bringing your evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution She had experience as a PM. And I said, I kind of want somebody who understands the culture and what's reasonable and what's not reasonable. That was important to me. It may not be important to everybody, but I said, I want a career coach that has some tech experience. And when Melissa and I sat down, I kind of took a A-B test hypothesis approach. And I said, I'm really fulfilled by this work that I've done for over a decade, but I've done it in a capacity where I really didn't get paid for it. And then I've done this tech work. And the more I do this tech work, the more I'm falling in love with the people part of the job and less with the tech job. And 26 years is a long time. It's a quarter of a century. And then I asked myself, could I combine these things together? Could I take what I've learned in athletics and in technical leadership, and could I provide it to people agnostic of an employer in a way that they would see value and in a way where I could take? What I've learned running these A-B experiments with other people and give this guidance like a Sherpa would to people who feel alone in the problem of who can I talk to about not feeling fulfilled by my job or I'm frustrated that my promotion is taking so long. What can I do to maximize my chances? And to do that with somebody who has the benefit of having. I've worked with lots of other people, so they can tell you whether what you're doing is reasonable or whether there are better tactics. I don't know if we ever talked about the butter knife analogy in our talks yet, Jonathan. Did we talk about that? I don't think so. This one's new to me. Yeah. So if I ask you to chop down a tree, okay, imagine you've never chopped down a tree before. You've never seen anyone chop down a tree. And I give you a butter knife. And then you go to town and you're swinging and you're cutting. I don't think that your strength or your discipline or your dedication or your stamina is really going to play out in feeling like you're successful, right? This sounds a lot like the job market right now. Yes, it is. In fact, most of the resume formats that I see end up being more like a butter knife. When they're trying to chop down a tree. And so the thing to note is that you have all these skills. Everybody who has a job that has been in the industry for more than five years, they have the skills to do the job. But the skills to get a job and the skills to do a good job, they're different. And so this is what's so frustrating about the engineering interview process, right? It's so contrived because it's more like an audition. Uh, for a part, uh, but the way that they orchestrate that interview is such to minimize false positives. They're terrified of making bad hires and they're okay with saying no to people that would work out and, and the odds are so stacked in their favor. And so what does that mean for us when we apply? Well, if we don't realize there's a better tool out there to achieve our goal, if we're swinging at a tree with a butter knife. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Instead of a sharpened ax. Um, we're going to feel like a failure no matter how strong we are. And it's not because we're not smart. It's because the tools that we're using are not really suited to the job that we're trying to achieve. Right. So, uh, I've worked with people that have 15 years of experience and they're getting 1% callback rate. You know, one out of a hundred applications are resulting in a recruiter, uh, emailing them saying, Hey, Brian, I'd love to talk with you. Uh, and that's very, very different than maybe it was five or six years ago. Absolutely. So I've been, so I decided as working with my coach, like what can I offer? And I said, what if I AB tested? What if I take these AB testing experimentation framework that we've all been trained to do, or a lot of us with front end experience have been trained to do. And what if I applied that to the interview process? What would I learn about what really moves the needle and what doesn't. And so to your point before, I think that's a really important thing to think about. And I think that's a really important thing to think about. And I think that's a really important thing to think about. Can you look at your situation like a scientist, which is hard to do at times, but if you can do it and say, what activities can I try that are different than what I've done in the past? And do they result in much better results than I've been receiving historically? Because if they can, then I should turn up traffic, right? This is what you and I would do, right? You know, if we're running an AB, you know, we're going to do this. We're going to do this. We're going to do this. We run a 1% traffic experiment. It looks great on the metrics. We'll turn it up to 5% or 10%. If we could apply that same framework to our own career without judgment about whether we're awful or terrible or whether we're a rock star, whatever, we set all that aside, what would we learn about what works really well in this environment? And so that's what I've been doing, helping, gosh, now 60 to 80 people land jobs in the last year and a half. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. on your resume because everybody does that, right? You know, this recruiter is going to look at 105 resumes and if they all list the duties, like how do you stand out? Um, and it's not listing all the duties. That's not the way that's the butter knife. Don't do that. Bad developer. No Twinkie. Don't do that. And so we're going to get into some of the, some of the tactics that you're talking about. Some of the things that you've already shared with me, uh, perhaps, and then also some things that are new to me because, um, as I mentioned before, I'm at this, this interesting juncture where I'm getting ready to start my new role. And so, uh, you and I are this, we're going to kind of treat this as, as a little bit of a coaching session, um, live for everybody here. But, um, I kind of want to rewind a little bit because there's probably people who are listening right now who have what they feel like is a good job. They feel like, Hey, you know what? I'm, I'm enjoying my, my role. Uh, you know, I don't want to, to move necessarily. Um, or I don't want to move now. I'm not, I'm not looking to change my role this month, but, uh, the thesis that I'm going to put forward here. And I think Brian, you, you would agree with me here is that that doesn't necessarily mean it's not time to look at the market. And my basis here is, right now, uh, the job market for tech in this isn't a surprise. Uh, as you mentioned before our discussion began about two years or so of kind of a down market in these, in, in jobs in tech, a huge boom before that, uh, which has now kind of dropped, dipped pretty low. And, and we're seeing a little bit of a revival or a thawing out, but do you want to kind of, share a little bit about how that kind of macro picture, uh, what you've seen over your long career, uh, in, in that macro picture of, of boom and bust for, for jobs in tech? Yeah. So 26 years is a long time in tech. It's like what it's like a 22 year old cat. It's really old. So, uh, what, what does that gain us? Well, it gains us perspective and something. Um, I think that I shared, maybe a couple of years ago online was this sense that tech has hiring seasons, spring, summer, fall, winter, the, the challenge with the hiring seasons in tech to your point that you made earlier is that they are of indeterminate length. So you don't know how long the summer will last, but you know that there will be a fall after summer. And so the benefit of perspective is to recognize when you're in an environment that feels like summer. And in this case, just to, explain the analogy a little bit, summer is when it's really easy to get a job. And, you know, uh, if you have a pulse and you show up, you got about a 50% chance of getting an offer. And there's the compensation is really high and you've got a lot of stock awards and companies are IPOing left and right. That's kind of a summer. Uh, now if you've only lived through summer, uh, because you've only have experience in the last three to five years before the slowdown, you would never know. That winter even exists much less fall because the seasons are of indeterminate length. So perspective shows us that if we can recognize what summer we're in and take appropriate steps to prepare for what's coming, even if we don't know when, then we're in a much better position to write it out. Like, you know, what it reminds me of Jonathan, have you ever watched any of those like Alaskan shows? Like people who live in Alaska? Oh yeah. Well, I've watched, um, I watch alone actually, which is equivalent. Yeah. Equivalent. So if you watch these Alaskan shows, you know, these people who live in Alaska, they spend all summer getting ready for when summer ends, right? Like, you know, in Alaska, there's a lot of sunlight in the summer, you know, 18, 20 hours worth of sunlight, depending on your latitude and they grow a lot of food and then they can't, and they store it and they're chopping wood and they're putting all this away. And they're doing that because they know that this summer has an end date. And if we thought of our careers like that, you know, and we recognize when we're in a summer and in a very game of Thrones way, yes, winter is always coming that we, we set aside what we needed, you know, that we built up a emergency fund or a job freedom fund. And that when we started to feel like it was fall that we started interviewing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. See how easy it would be for us to switch jobs. If we lost our job, that we would feel a lot, we would much better understand the relative difficulty we might have in landing a role in the market. And it feels very counterintuitive to say, well, if I'm employed and the market's bad, why would I interview? And the question's kind of like, well, because winter is coming and if winter is coming, don't, when I want to be ready for it. And, and especially if you've only had that, last three to five years, most of your job moves have been on your own terms, probably. Oh yeah. You've been able to say, Hey, you know what? It's time to look for a new job because I am ready for a new job. It is time to look because if I could today snap my fingers, I would move to a new role. But that's not what we're talking about here. What we're talking about here is, okay, we're, we're looking at, we're trying to kind of anticipate, uh, potentially, for example, uh, your company is going to experience a layoff, right? That's something that's happening. Something that happened in my company, um, not my company, but in my last role, uh, we had multiple layoffs over a couple of years. So, uh, are you ready for that? Are you, are you ready for that to happen? And what we were talking about just before we started recording, once again, uh, we probably should have pressed the record button a little sooner. Um, yeah, that's retrospective notes. Like we could have prepared. Um, we, we discussed this idea that, uh, the amount of time or lead time, let's say if you were to kind of create this, um, you know, uh, uh, uh, an equation to decide when is the time to look for a job? The amount of lead time that you probably want to give yourself is not dependent on you. It's dependent on the market. So if the market is not doing well, increase your lead time. And this is because again, this, this is, I think this is the mental shift that I'm imploring the people who are listening to this episode right now. Uh, try to take this mental shift, which is, uh, moving away from when am I ready for a job, right? Versus when am I preparing for a job shift? Right. What, what, what date would I like to hit to be ready for a job shift just in case? So if you can imagine your company, uh, in the next three to four, you know, even in the next year going through a major change like that, right. Restructuring layoff, whatever in the next six months. And you know that the average time for somebody to land a new role is three or four or six months, whatever it is. Then now is the time. Right. Now is the time to start looking. Even if you feel totally fine. If you, your roadmap is full, you know, your boss is smiling. Every time you have a one-on-one, everything feels great. Right. Um, but you, you don't necessarily have to wait for those signs to show up. If you can imagine, because here's the thing. And Brian, I want you to kind of comment, tell me I'm wrong here. Okay. You can always say no. When, when you get an offer, if you're not ready to take that offer, you have the opportunity to say no. Um, probably the, you know, the shoe is on the other foot in this case, because there's so many no's that are going out for these roles, but now you're saying no on the other side of the fence, you have all of the agency to do that. Would you agree with that strategy to look early? I wish I, I wish I could say you're wrong, Jonathan, but, uh, we've talked about this a little bit in the past as well. So I can't say no. Uh, you are wrong about being wrong. I can say that. How about that? There you go. There you go. I got, I worked it in there. So, uh, I can share a quick story about me. My very first job out of school that was not temporary full-time role was game development. So I worked in game development. I worked in children's software and I loved it. I loved every minute of it. I love the people. I love what we built. Um, and I thought I was doing well. And then I got laid off very unexpectedly, very first job in tech. You know, I had a contract QA testing role at EA before that, but that was more like, I don't know, a little bit of a mean, you know, do I not know enough about myself? Even setting that aside, which probably takes a good three months to six months to recover from, from your first layoff. Uh, I remembered thinking, I don't ever want to be nodding the driver. Ever again. And that, and that if I do find myself without a job unexpectedly that I am never not prepared for it. Uh, so there's implications to how I've, the jobs I've accepted over my career and the types of jobs I seek out because of the, that learning I had so early on. So I've been laid off twice, very first job and very last job. So 26 years between layoffs. Uh, first one was traumatic. Second. One, I was dancing in my kitchen because I was two days away from volunteering to be laid off because I wanted severance to, to go become a coach. And, uh, and it was a gift, but the only reason I could see it was a gift is because of what I learned the first time around. And, um, and one of those things is on the anniversary of my first layoff for probably eight to 10 years, I would test my emergency layoff system, my ELS, you know, like, you know, in the TV, you know, you get the boop, you know, that whole thing. Yeah. So I would say, what would happen if I got laid off tomorrow? And I not like from an emotional standpoint, but more of a readiness standpoint. So to your point, the market is really what we should use to dictate when we need to be ready to find a new job. And so if you test your ability to get a new job, when you don't need a new job, the power you have, Jonathan, when you go into an interview. And you are happily employed, uh, is something every tech person should experience at some point in their career, because you do not have to accept anything. In fact, the recruiter will be confused why you're interviewing. Cause you're not giving them ammo to use against you on why you should accept an offer for 10% less than what you're making now, or, or it's in office and you want to be remote or, uh, that you're not getting the title you need. Uh, I have colleagues. I interview every year and man, the last four or five jobs they've accepted have come at a time when they didn't need their job, which put them in a very strong position of negotiation. You know, they made an offer and then they, they just responded with no. And the recruiter is like, well, what do you mean? No. It's like, well, no, that's way too low. Well, are you going to counter? Well, I don't know. Are you going to offer a realistic number? You know, like, like they didn't like, in a sense, they could always walk away from the table. Right. They're negotiating from a place of strength. And so, yeah, I think seeing your ability to get a new job, if you were to unexpectedly lose your own, that is a skillset. And when you have that, it's like survival skills, right? If, if your car breaks down and you have survival skills, you're probably not so worried about whether or not you'll survive the night, but having that set of skills and keeping them sharp in your career means. Uh, you will always have this ability to seek out a new job and be successful. It's kind of this interesting effect. Um, it's a, it's a psychological phenomenon. I don't know if you're familiar with this one, but it's, it's weirdly appropriate for this discussion. So the, the phenomenon is, um, when you, let's say you're, you're getting ready to go drive. And, uh, you are not wearing your seatbelt. Okay. Let's imagine that you're the, the speed limit is 45. You're probably going to go just a little bit over the speed limit, right? That's what the data tends to show. Just a little bit, not, not drastically. You're going to generally follow, uh, traffic rules, et cetera. Okay. When you put your seatbelt on. The. Opposite of what we would think happens. So you would imagine that what is the kind of person who wears their seatbelt? The kind of person who wears a seatbelt may also follow the speeding, the speed limit. Right. Or the kind of person who wears a seatbelt, uh, they, they may always follow the traffic laws and never deviate, but the opposite is true. So when a person puts their seatbelt on, they actually give themselves license to be a little bit more reckless. Now I'm assigning reckless in this case to be a good thing. If you have a seatbelt in this case, if you don't need this role drastically, right? You have a backup plan. You have some safety. You can be a little bit more reckless. And in this case we're saying reckless, but what I really mean is you have a lot more flexibility in what you try. So we're going to talk about this AB testing idea that you mentioned earlier. But what it allows you to do is, Hey, you know what? I'm going to try something that's totally different than my normal in this interview and see how it goes. I'm going to try asking for a crazy, uh, benefit that nobody in their right mind would actually give me. What's going to happen? Well, if you have safety and you don't get the job because you asked for this crazy benefit, perfect. You've learned something. The safety, the seatbelt, you know, saved your life. And that's what I'm going to do. In that case, I suppose it's kind of a weird mixed metaphor, but, uh, this, this freedom of action or freedom to flex around the norm. I think it doesn't just give you freedom. It gives you confidence, which is really what that metaphor is about. You have confidence that you can go and act in ways that are a little bit more, um, impulsive when you're driving. But in this case, A little bit more outside of what you, of what the, uh, person you're talking to may be expecting, right? This person you're talking to is expecting somebody to come in and lauding the company that they're applying to saying it's their dream job. You know, this is anything you want. I'm going to give you because I need this job so badly. Right. Yeah. So you lose a lot of agency when you have this backup, this safety, you gain a lot of agency. Now, what are you going to do with that agency? What, what freedom does that give you? Uh, what are you going to do with the freedom that it gives you brother? Yeah. Well, you know, if you're Jonathan, you, you might apply for a job and get them to create a role that they didn't plan on hiring for yet. Right. Congratulations to you, by the way. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. The, you know, there's this sense, gosh, if there's one thing, maybe where's my magic wand? I have a piece of foam on the, on pencil on my desk. So I'm waving my magic wand. Right. Right now. So, uh, if there's one, uh, lesson that I would give people who are interviewing now is it's so easy to fall into this trap of treating the interview like a test and you want to score the highest because you have this hypothesis that if you score the highest, you will get the offer. Uh, now I think if I remember correctly from our prior discussions, you've been a part of hiring of interviews on the other side. Oh yeah. Many, many interviews. Oh yeah. Yeah. So I've interviewed hundreds of people. I've interviewed them at Zillow, at Microsoft, at Coinbase, number of companies. And what percent do you think, I'm curious what your number is here. I won't share mine yet. So we're going to do a Marco Polo here. So, uh, what percent of the time do you feel like an offer is extended to the person who's the most technically capable? Oh, geez. Um, I would say the most technically capable. That's like, that's the reason we decided to do this. We decided to extend an offer to somebody like an hiring panel or debrief or whatever. Maybe 5%. Yeah. Yeah. And I think, I think there's, I think about 10,000 people listening to this podcast, just drop their coffee in their car or something like that. They're like, what do you mean? 5%. Did he say 95%? Like did the audio skip? No, it didn't skip. You know, I think it's around 5% for my experience as well. And that's something we can't expect people who haven't interviewed others to maybe understand, um, is that the technical capacity of an individual in an interview is like a pass fail component of, of deciding whether to hire somebody. Right. We're only really there to decide is Jonathan a thumbs up or a thumbs down for, can he do this job? And I think, I think there's this impression that we spend like 75% of our hiring debriefs talking about how they, you know, was there. Was there technical solution, you know, big O notation optimal. It's like, no, we like, we spend maybe two minutes on that. And the other 28 minutes we talk about, are they going to add something to this culture or, or are they a good fit within this culture? Like, what did they bring to the table that, that would benefit the team that it doesn't have right now? Like, can they train or mentor or grow junior developers? Um, did they tell compelling stories about the way they, they solve problems? And I think if more people knew that, then when one of the great advantages you get when you go in interviewing for a job, when you don't need one is how authentic you can be and that you're not so tied to the result and that you're here to talk about one concept in many forms, you know, Jonathan is this puzzle piece and he's not shaped like anybody else. Now in this interview, can you mutually identify if this open? In the jigsaw puzzle, this job opening, this company has, is it shaped like Jonathan or not? Right. Because, but if I don't share what makes me different, then there's no way to know what, like what kind of a shape of puzzle piece I am. Do you know what I mean? It's like, if all we're doing is just trying to score highest, we're robbing our interviews of being able to hear the most memorable things that we, you and I are so desperate to hear. In the interview process, right? Like you've probably, you've probably had the same experience, but I've interviewed like 150 people that I couldn't remember. And we're like, Bob, who? Right. Like, because like, there was just nothing different about what I heard because they, they just didn't take advantage of this opportunity to be memorable. We'll be right back with a continuation of my interview with Brian. How long should it take to write seven lines of code? Minutes? An hour? What if it takes five days? You might be tempted to think the developers on your team need help writing code, but that's not usually the case. The biggest drag in software development isn't writing code. It's having enough context to know. What code to write. In a perfect world, your engineering team wouldn't waste time, days even, searching for the context to understand your application. But on average, most developers spend more than two hours a week trying to find information about how a code base works. That's why there's Unblocked. To give your engineering team the answers they need to get their jobs done at the speed they and you both want. Your code base is a compilation of thousands of past decisions and discussions. That live across tools like GitHub, Slack, Jira, Confluence, and more. And Unblocked surfaces this history next to your code. So everyone on your team has the context they need. And when someone has a question, Unblocked answers with the accuracy of your most experienced engineers. Get started today at getunblocked.com. That's G-E-T, unblocked.com. Unblocked.com. Unblocked.com. Ultimately, such an unreliable measuring stick in the first place. So if you walk in and you're incredibly technically proficient, and this particular day, they give you a weird problem that you haven't seen before, and you're suboptimal, and this has happened to me recently, actually. There was a front-end problem that I just, you know, I was a little bit out of practice on. And so I got passed on for this particular interview. But... The ability to evaluate somebody's overall technical proficiency, if you're really banking on that one thing to make you a compelling candidate, that is such a risky thing to choose. Yeah, for sure. Because your specific area of technical expertise may not be the one they evaluate you on. You could be highly proficient, especially given a certain circumstance, but they're not going to hand you that circumstance to work against. It's going to be something completely different. One of the tactics that you share with me, and I know we're going to jump in to some of these tactics, but one of the ones that you share with me about technical interviews that I think you were mentioning is for an architecture interview, but it also works for more specific technical, direct algorithm type interviews. It's the idea of pulling back and looking at the overall, the big picture. But what does this do? I think the interesting thing that we discussed when you shared that tactic with me is it's not a technical answer. You're not showing your technical prowess by asking this question. In fact, I did ask this question in my last interview process for the architecture problem, and the people I was talking to… The people that were interviewing me, they said, wow, I haven't really thought about that. I haven't even thought about that question. That is a memorable moment, to your point. They're going to remember, and they're going to bring that into a debrief. They're going to say, hey, he thought to ask this question. Maybe we should consider this. You're getting more airtime by asking that one question than any of the time that you spent learning. You know? Learning. Some sliding door algorithm optimization. That's never going to yield nearly the upswing that asking good questions would or telling good stories would. Yeah. And why is that? Think about that for a second, right? Coachable moment. Yeah. What does it tell you if someone can successfully rattle off, suspiciously quickly, this optimal solution? At the end of the day, they may have taken the plunge, they may have taken the plunge, they may have taken the plunge, they may have taken the plunge, they may have taken the plunge, they may have taken the plunge, they may have taken the plunge, they may have taken the plunge, they may have taken the plunge, they may have taken the plunge, they may have taken the plunge, they may have taken the plunge, they may have taken the plunge, they may have taken the plunge, they may have taken the plunge, they may have taken the plunge, they may have taken the plunge, they may have taken the plunge, they may have taken the plunge, they may have taken the plunge, they may have taken the plunge, they may have taken the plunge, they may have taken the plunge, they may have taken the plunge, they may have taken the plunge, they may have taken the plunge, they may have taken the pl when you ask this meta question, it suggests a level of experience and a line of thinking that ensures the other person realizes there's not a single right answer. And it's sort of, it's challenging in a way, right, to the interviewer. Do you want to share what this meta question was? Yeah, yeah. So the question that you had given me in our coaching discussion was, okay, let's look at this problem that they've presented. They've laid out all of the detail of the problem. In this case, I think it was like a notification system. You need to be able to share notifications through multiple avenues and whatever else. It's like, okay, cool. Now, the question that you might ask in this situation is, how important are these notifications? Or to what degree? What is the audience is really the underlying question that you're asking. Who is this for? Because if it's for, you know, let's say NASA, like, if it's for mission critical notifications that cannot be missed, if this is like a medical notification system, something like that, then your design may look drastically different. You may have backups to backups to backups. But if you are designing something that's like a, you know, a light social media notification marketing system, for example, deliverability rate could be 95%. And that may be not a problem at all. So by asking this question, you're kind of framing, okay, I'm not going to assume anything about the, uh, the criticality of this. I'm going to find out what the criticality of this is. I'm going to find out about the criticality of this system that I'm getting ready to design. And you could imagine this applying to any other, uh, similar kind of line of question, right? Another example of this to kind of zoom in on an algorithmic, uh, version of the same thing. Uh, how, how fast does this need to run? What, what are the, the input sizes that we're dealing with? Are there any bad actors in the system? These are kind of the stepping back and asking, asking about the things that they didn't already tell you about getting more context than what they already gave you. Um, would you say that those questions kind of fit the same, um, general kind of spirit of that original question? Yeah. You know, I think like we'll spill a secret here. I'm as probably the world's worst kept secret, right. For senior engineers in being interviewed, but, uh, the biggest telltale sign of someone who's interviewing at senior and probably is not quite ready is the person who measures their own response time and how quickly they can start coding a solution, uh, you know, in seconds, you know, the person who starts writing code right away after a question has been asked is almost certainly not perceived as a senior developer because they know that the solution is part of what they're looking for, but what we're all looking for is the signal. Right. And, and sometimes, uh, we intentionally leave things out that we want people to ask because we want those people who think about what's not being said to stand out, uh, you know, your magic question that you use. Like I used the same thing. Uh, when I interviewed at Coinbase, I got asked a question, uh, about building something suspiciously similar to what Coinbase does in a, in an interview, which you should be expected, you know, to be able to answer a question like that. If you're going to be an engineering manager at Coinbase. And, and I asked the question, I mentioned, I said, who am I building this for? And they're like, what do you mean? And I said, well, am I building it for Coinbase in its current state? Like just after it's IPO, like two months after IPO and it's flush with cash, uh, and a system already exists, or am I building it from scratch? And this is a startup and cost is a major concern because we don't want to run out of money before we find product market fit. Uh, because my, my, my implementation details are going to be, are going to be, are going to be, are going to be, are going to vary. Um, what does the team know? He's like, what do you mean? What does the team know? It's like, well, I'm building this for a team to support, like, does not got to build a solution in rust. If everybody uses Python, like why, like, you know, you know, or if this is a GCP shop, like why would I use AWS and my solution? And I remember the interviewer kind of probably had the same look on his face that your interviewers did on yours on theirs. It was kind of like, wow, I've never been asked that question before. Yeah. Nobody's ever thought that that was important, even though very much so that people are listening to this podcast right now, you would probably not go and actually implement a solution like this without asking those questions, right? There's some wisdom that you already have in you that you, most people, myself included, you set aside, but kind of by default, I set it aside. To go into interviewing mode, which I don't know where I learned about that, but I did, right? I set aside myself to try to present or to project the thing that I think the other side wants. But actually, actually the better thing to do would be to walk in with that wisdom, to walk in with that self that I have developed over time to actually say, you know what, I'm going to treat this as if I already know that I have the skills necessary for this role. And then I'm just going to use them. I'm going to use them in this discussion. Of course, I would ask, who is this for? Of course. Why wouldn't? That's the beginning of any project. That makes total sense why I would do that, right? So if you can conceive of this idea that there are these two selves, there are these two selves, there are these two selves, there are these two selves that we've accidentally created. And this happens for most people. It happens. And people have more than two selves. They have a multitude of identities that we present, depending on the situation. We don't have to get into all of that necessarily, but the more distinct you've created this interviewing identity, probably the more problems you're going to have, you're going to feel uncomfortable, right? Because how often are you operating in that interviewing identity? And I think that's a really important part of the interview. Yeah. Probably only when you're interviewing, right? So you're going to feel uncomfortable. You're going to feel pressure. You're going to feel all this stuff that will lead to worse performance in an interview than is warranted. And you really could probably do a much better job if you were to lay aside that kind of interview persona and adopt something different. And I think that different identity is what... Really this discussion is about. For sure. We are desperate. I know you feel the same way about this. We've talked about it before, but as interviewers, we are desperate to find signal. And we use this word signal a lot when we talk about candidates. So it's worth talking about here. Signal is, am I confident in understanding how this applicant not only is competent, but in how they think about solving problems? And I think that's a really important part of this interview. Yes. What kind of questions they ask. And if you come in, I mean, there are a lot of reasons why the interview process is ridiculous and contrived and backwards in engineering. It's probably beyond the scope of our chat today. But that company, pretty much all tech companies, take a very sort of dodgeball approach to this. If you can dodge a wrench, you can dodge a ball, right? So they give you this ludicrous technical evaluation. And the reason they jack up the difficulty on that is because they know that there's this wide margin of error in their own process. So if they throw a wrench at you and you can dodge that, then there's a pretty good chance you can do this job. But make no mistake, the bar to get into a company is much, much higher than the bar to stay at the company. Because they have to take into account this poor, highly repeatable process that's not very work realistic that they've created to evaluate us as candidates. So that's why we often leave the rational, high effectiveness version of ourself at the door. But what we have to do is resist that. We have to say, no, I'm going to show up in this meeting, in this interview process. As much as how I do my job as possible. Because I want the other person to see who they're getting. And I want to be myself in this interview. And that means asking questions. And that means not rushing into solutions. And asking who the customer is and what it's going to be used for. And what does the team know? These are all things that help you stand out. So don't drop everything that makes you unique and memorable at the door. And go in like, this is an SAT exam. Do we ever go over the blackjack analogy? I don't remember if we did when we were talking. No, I don't think so. Yeah. So people think interviews are like SAT exams. And you get a high score. And if you get a minimum score, you can get into this university you want to get into. And that's not true. Because there's a lot of uncontrollable inputs in an interview. Because more than one human is involved. So the best way. To think about interviews is like a hand of blackjack. Card game 21. You can get a great hand. You can get a 17 or an 18. Right? And if you know blackjack, you can see one of the dealer's two cards. It's called the up card. So you think your 18 hand is great. And then the dealer's up card is 10. And now what goes through your mind, Jonathan, when you see a 10, like a face card in the up, has the up card from the dealer. And you have 18. Oh. Um. I probably hold. I. Well. Yeah. But like you hear that you hear that voice. You hear that quivering your voice. Like what's the emotion you're feeling when you see this. There is one card they could get that would just give them a 21. Yeah. Or they could have 20 right now. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Right. Yeah. So like I tell you what goes through my head when I see that I'm like, damn it. You know, like I thought I had a great hand at 18. And then I see a 10, a Jack, Queen, King, whatever. As a face card. And I'm like, damn it. I thought I had a great hand. And now I don't know if I do. And now I have a choice to make. There's only three cards in the deck that won't bust me. And yet some tactics would tell you that I might want to hit in that scenario. Now you could argue, you could argue whether accounting cards or something like that, whether you have more data. But my point being, you can lose with a bad hand or with a good hand in blackjack. Right. You can have a great hand. You can win with a really bad hand in blackjack. Right. Because you don't have control over all the inputs. And that is just as much true in the interview process. And so if there's a second thing I would give all of the listeners, it would be like free yourself from this idea that you have control over whether you get the offer. All you can do is assess the hand you've been dealt and play it to the best of your abilities. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Remember, you don't have to win every hand. You only have to win one hand when you're looking for a job. You know, and a bad hand in an interview often looks like an interviewer that's late or an interviewer that's not prepared or an interviewer that halfway through the interview realizes they asked the wrong question, asks you to start over and conveniently forgets to write in their interview feedback that they messed up. So you don't get as far through the coding question as other candidates did. Right. Yeah. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. And so you can't control them. You can't ask necessarily for a new hand to be dealt. But what you can do is free yourself from saying, I'm a failure because I didn't get an offer. That's not true. Yeah. You know, if more than one person that's qualified interviews, then somebody qualified is not getting an offer. Right. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And you mentioned this idea there that, well, just kind of taking that analogy. the losing a hand you actually walk away with less right yeah getting denied in an interview the only thing that you've really lost is your time but i would say even then you actually have learned something right your denials and i know this this is probably edging on cheesy a little bit because everybody says this but you know every failure you have in your interview process you're learning something from it maximize that as much as possible and you really have lost virtually nothing right you're not walking away having lost the pot like maybe you would have in blackjack uh you walk away possibly better than you were before what did you learn you know and there are diminishing returns eventually probably if you're going through 100 interviews and perhaps the hundreds you don't learn quite as much as you did on the 10th but in any case that you you still have this this option i guess uh very few times is a single interview really that important to your overall career getting it right over the course of many interviews is the trick right would you would you agree with that like that overall strategy you're not trying to set yourself up for it the perfect interview you're trying to develop a better interviewing strategy and winning is not necessarily the best strategy but it's the best the goal in every interview it's part of the goal perhaps but if you win by telling the interviewer that you you know that you're going to do something that you don't really want to do in your role is that really the best outcome right like if if you get an offer for a role that comes with a bunch of stipulations that you don't really want maybe a lower offer than you really wanted um for some people maybe that is exactly fine you know if you're out of a job but that goes back to our earlier discussion if you're doing this when you're already employed uh you have so much more agency to make it as good of an offer as you can get so in this case wouldn't you rather get a rejection um rather than a bad offer because you actually get to learn and practice you know shooting for the offer that you want rather than just trying to pattern match and get the offer that they want to give you yeah when it gets worse than bad offer right you know what's worse than a bad offer it's a good offer that you're miserable at three months later yeah tell me tell me more how can i figure that out like i want to know because we can't tell the future of course there's always a risk of that but how do i reduce you know let's say it's a 50 50 shot by default how do i reduce that to 85 that i will like it versus 15 that i won't yeah so you know if if we think of interviews not like a test so you know we mentioned this before okay well what should i think of them like it's a little bit more like assuming you have say three to five years of experience uh so you know you have enough background um that you can get uh that your lack of experience doesn't prevent you from getting interviews in the first place so every job that you've been miserable at you got the offer for correct yep so we know that there are jobs that we've had in the past that we thought would be good or we just had to take and but if there's a tactic out there that will get us more offers but also gives us the signal on our end on whether or not it's more likely to be a great place for us to work that would be a good thing to know right that those would be tactics worth worth learning especially if they don't vary so much from job to job from interview to interview and that's kind of what we worked on right you know in some of our sessions so we as engineers were used to looking at a spec and saying this is what this thing needs to do now what now how are we going to build it you know like that a good a good pm is not in our business with implementation details they're kind of like make sure it meets these acceptance criteria or requirements can be met so as it turns out if you can be about 20 polarizing as a tactic in your interview and you share stories that showcase what your unique talents are your strengths if you tell those stories and they resonate with the people in the interview that's strongly correlated with that company or that leader valuing those strengths okay so uh like there's a story i tell about how an art director came to me in game development said oh we need to re-render all the art and um this is back when rendering art was expensive and costly took a lot of time and i knew i was pretty sure we didn't need to re-render the art but the art director was new and i said what problem are you trying to solve because i recognized my art director was coming to me with a solution but not but not a problem and i said what problem never you trying to solve never yeah right that never happens so uh and i said tell me more like instead of being combative i got curious and i said what problem are you trying to solve and he said the art looks bad he didn't say bad he used a word i won't use here but it's game development so he went back to his office and i said show me so he shows me the art and i said ah uh this is a long time ago jonathan so we used 8-bit palletized art so for people who understand graphics uh 8-bit palletized art is technically a 20-bit palletized art and it's a 20-bit palletized art and it's a 20-bit palletized art and it's a 20-bit palletized art and it's a 20-bit palletized art and it's a 20-bit palletized but you can only choose 256 255 colors basically uh to put in any one palette now the art he was looking at didn't have a final palette it was a draft palette so artists make these quick and dirty palettes just so that things show up on the screen and then they come by later and then they fine-tune them so my art director was looking at a non-final palette which didn't mean the art had to be re-rendered at all and i said hey go pick this other team you know we were building this uh hockey game backyard hockey and and he said oh the art looks great so those have been re-rendered right and it's like he still didn't get it right and i said um well we don't need to re-render this but but rest assured like your concern about the art looking bad will disappear as a part of this process okay great thank you so telling that story like if you heard that story in an interview like what are you what are you thinking when you hear a story like that if you received that as an interviewer if you're interviewing someone else i would think this person is focused less on um you know appeasing people and instead is looking at outcomes they're focused on the outcomes they also know how to manage uh the expectations of like manage up right they know how to discuss these kinds of problems or technical problems at a degree of abstraction that uh they don't get into an argument with their boss over the detail it doesn't really matter what you really care about is uh does it look better or not right and and you know how to navigate you know the different levels um to be able to accomplish that thing without creating conflict yeah like i was able to adjust my level of technical communication to my audience right uh just because someone was more senior than me even if they're in a different discipline uh i wasn't uh an order taker right you know i used my brain um you know that's a desirable quality yeah brain usage using brain good good thing use brain good thing so uh and then i i just asked and then i got curious when somebody presented to me something that i was pretty sure but i didn't hold it over their head i didn't call them a moron right i didn't say you're wrong like i did it in a way that saves face for leaders but educated along the way this person was a new art director to the company so i didn't know that we used palletized art um i didn't expect them to but there's a lot of insight you can get from a answer like that about whether you want to work with that person right yeah yeah absolutely and and a story like that tells me so much more about the individual and whether or not they're going to be able to do it right and i was able to do it i want them that kind of person on my team then whether or not i can i don't know code up an lru lru cache right um you know or do uh do an islands problem or any of this type of stuff that you might find on leetcode or hacker and those are the things that we desperately seek out in our interviews so that we can talk about them and debrief because those stories are the things that people repeat and it's probably the problems that we're experiencing in the world that we're experiencing and i think that's a really important thing to say uh now that we want to solve and it's we have an issue with people being able to manage up and it's causing x y and z right so one time i'd like to discuss the tactics with you to see you know what your recommendation would be i want to know what those kinds of problems are at the place that i'm looking to work at i want to understand like are they is this role what's a critical thing that's going to be a critical thing that's going to be a critical thing that's going to be a critical thing that's going to be a critical thing that's going to be a critical thing that they're trying to accomplish with this role that's not technical because as we've already discussed that's not the issue right in almost every case but instead what are the interpersonal things and how do i how do i choose the right um layer the right story uh we can get into maybe maybe we'll do this in the next episode but uh we can get into the the jeopardy board um if you if you want to share that with us but how do we how do we choose the right thing um to speak to that to that problem because in that case you can say okay tell me about a time that that you were uh that you needed to manage up you could pull that story and it would it would fit well it's a good story to to kind of answer that question um what what do you think is the right way to ask you know what are what are the kinds of problems do you think that the company or the interviewer is going to ask questions about the problems they're experiencing or do you think they have in most cases like form questions i've seen both in my experience i ask free form questions that are relevant in my personal opinion but then we also have kind of these form level questions they're like tell me about a time that you had to do x you know that we're not necessarily struggling with so how do you get to the meat i guess is what i'm is really the question i'm trying to ask yeah when you join a new company or when you're in the interview i think both right because i think i think you're going to have a little bit of a different experience on both sides of that fence i'm curious like where do you feel like in both in both situations what's the right tactics yeah so when it comes to an interview remember our goal is to stand out to be memorable can't get an offer if people don't remember who you are and and i'm a big believer that as long as you have enough experience that people that your qualifications don't come into question this is you know this is not a tactic maybe a call coach grad could take in this environment right now but you know let's assume the senior engineer like we talked about so at least probably five years experience at this point although what senior means has been diluted now that staff has been inserted so the and staff and principal yeah staff is the new senior basically so um you know people with three years experience having a senior title it's very i do a confused dog look when i see that but uh but from an interview perspective If you have clarity on what it is you bring to the table and how that's different than what other people in your role can bring, you're almost 90% of the way to an offer. Now all you got to do is figure out how to communicate it. And I think one of the challenges that you can have going into an interview that I love helping people with, and you and I worked on this quite a bit already, is what is it about Jonathan? What are his superpowers? Is he really strategic? Is he really good at executing? Can he build relationships? Is he good at influencing other people? What kinds of things set Jonathan apart? Because if I know what those things are, and you and I can get clarity on that, then as a coach, I can say, okay, if these are the ingredients or the tools you have at your disposal, how are you going to show or demonstrate that you have these skills? And the answer, you've already provided it, is mostly in behavioral interview questions. Because, I mean, I'm curious what your experience is here, Jonathan. But generally, our technical... Technical questions are very tightly contained. It's a very bounded context because we don't want people going off the rails. When I was trained as an interviewer at Zillow, you could pick your own coding question, but you had to ask it a hundred times before you could change it. And the reason for that is because we want to have a rubric. You want to be able to identify a rubric for your own answer. What does a bad or a good or a great answer look like? But it's hard to stand out because it's so tightly bound, right? It's very rare you see a standout answer because you're asking the same question over and over again. But behavioral interviews, they're less bounded and open-ended. And as an interviewer, that is the weakness, if you will, that you want to attack. That is the scale that's missing on Smaug the dragon. Right? Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. That is what you aim for if you want to take down this dragon that is this interviewer. And the beautiful thing about behavioral interview questions is there's so much overlap from company to company in the types of behavioral questions you get asked that it's a place that makes a lot of sense for you to practice. Unlike lead code or hacker rank, you could get asked a thousand questions there. And it might help you identify the class of the problem. Like, oh, I should use a graph to solve this, you know, or this is a doubly linkless problem, whatever. But just like 80% code coverage, and I'm probably going to ruffle some feathers with this statement, but like... I can see where it's going already. Yeah. The 80% is way better probably than 70%. There's a lot of people listening that are like, why would you go over 80 or why would you aim for 100? I'm not here to argue religion with people. But if you could get 80%. With your behavioral interview questions, just by setting aside time to practice like a dozen of them, that would put you in a really great position to be able to answer these questions. As long as when you answer them, you use them as the opportunity they are, which is not only to answer what they've asked, but to share a little bit more about what makes you different. Yeah. And I think that's what you do in an interview. That's part A. But yeah, go ahead. I was just going to say, as an interviewer, I can tell you, if you are good at answering those questions, that is kind of a meta skill that on its own helps you stand out. Yeah. Especially if you're in any kind of leadership or senior level role. The ability to communicate clearly and to show that you're prepared on its own is a useful skill. It's a useful thing to show. So if you're... If you're listening to this episode, you've already started, right? You've already started becoming a better candidate for a role because you're listening to this ostensibly because you want to be better at this. Right? Yeah. You're trying to get better at this. And so that kind of person, somebody who is focused on improvement, in most cases, I don't know any interview process where I would say this wasn't true, is a desirable characteristic. Yeah. And so by being ready for those questions, by having a game plan, you're already setting yourself, I would say, in the top 5%. Yeah. My guess is most people who are interviewing for that role have not prepared to the degree that we're talking about preparing, right? Yeah. To 12 stories. Imagine taking a day, one full day, to prep this. You are probably... you know, head and shoulders above the next person who's, who's interviewing. Now I can't promise that. Um, people of course, especially in this environment are focusing a little bit more on interviewing skills. So perhaps you're going to have more people preparing and you'll have a little bit of a different competition profile. But my guess is, uh, this still holds true because people don't see this as, uh, something that you prepare for. You don't, you don't prepare for, um, a casual conversation usually, right? If this, and we should say like you and I have prepared for this conversation, it may feel casual, but these important conversations that you're having are not just conversations. The other side is taking notes. They're going to make a decision about this. So imagine going into a work meeting, uh, in your job, totally unprepared. What would, what would that look like? Probably not great. Right. So going into an interview and somebody asking you, tell me about a time where you had to manage up and you're like, um, uh, let me think. And you take, you know, 30 seconds and you pull out a story. That's not all that engaging. That's, that's not a great tactic, right? That's not a good approach to this problem. Yeah. It's not particularly painting your capabilities in the best possible light. Right. Because there's a difference between not remembering this story and being brilliant means there's no, there's no difference on the interviewer's part between you don't have a brilliant story and you don't remember your brilliant story. Right. Yep. They don't know the difference. All they can, all they can hear is what you say. Exactly. Like, I mean, I can't tell you some of the ridiculous things. Well, I can tell you some of the things that I've heard in interviewer interviews. When I interviewed in game development, uh, we did a panel interview. Yeah. And there was two males and one female like interviewing candidates. And one of the candidates got to the end of the discussion where, and he said, Oh, I just want you to let you know, I don't have a problem working with girls. Oh man. And we were like, you know, and, and so we sort of kind of looked at each other and we sort of jotted down some notes and it's like, uh, and then we asked them this, a behavioral interview question. We said, when you encounter a problem and you don't know what to do, like, what do you do? What do you do? What do you do? What do you do? What do you do? What do you do? And he said, well, I've never encountered a problem where I didn't know what to do. Oh no. So you take those two things together, Jonathan, it's like that person's pretty much like at the bottom of like, yeah, immediate, all of the interviews, like firstly, like, like glaring amount of like, uh, like perceived capability around genders. Like we don't want anything to do with that. To start with, uh, and to call a woman, a girl is also very demeaning, like, you know, in the workplace, like we wouldn't do that either. And third, the ego that comes along with saying, I've never had a problem that I didn't know the answer to, like, do you want to work with that person? Right. Well, here's an observation here. And I want to see what your thoughts, you just said a whole lot more than they said, right? You took this and you had to extrapolate because this is what happens in a debrief. Yeah. This conversation we're having right now about this person that you, you know, has years gone by. He was memorable in a bad way, right? Yeah. Like probably the worst possible way. Right. Yeah. And, and it's perhaps with best intentions from this person. We don't know a lot about them. We know a couple of things. Perhaps they said, you know, maybe they had, uh, uh, there, if I was to give them the absolute crazy benefit of the doubt, you could say that they were very nervous. They wanted to, uh, communicate that they, uh, see people equally and, and they just chose bad word, you know, like bad, bad choice of words could be interpreted in the best light. The problem is it's not going to be like, yeah, it's not, you're, you're, you're taking this risk, um, by not preparing, which clearly he was not ready for this interview or, or it didn't prepare in the way that we're suggesting to prepare. Yeah, definitely. Yeah. You know, there are questions, questions we should all be expected to ask, right? Right. Like a senior engineer, I can list off seven questions right now, pretty easily. Tell me about a time you had a conflict with a coworker. How did you resolve it? Tell me about a time you had to push back on leadership and correct them, but not do it in a way that's demeaning to them where they save space. Right. Tell me about a time you had a technical problem and you had to try three or four different approaches, uh, in order to find the solution. Like, you know, tell me about a time you had a unique technical solution to, a novel solution to a problem people hadn't seen before. Like these are very common. Like nobody who is a senior engineer should be surprised by those questions. Tell me how you balance tech debt versus, uh, versus feature work or tell me about a time when you had a conflict with, with your product partner. Um, and, and hopefully people are taking notes on these because this is literally like, these are your template go and write down stories for these questions. I want to say a huge thank you to Brian for joining me on the first part of our interview. Uh, and the second part should be coming out next week. So watch out for that. If you haven't yet subscribed in whatever podcasting app you're currently using, go ahead, subscribe. So you don't miss out on the second part. It's very possible. I'd say it's likely, uh, that Brian and I will have another interview, uh, even beyond the part two, uh, to talk a little bit more about, you know, kicking off your, your job. Right. It's starting, you know, we're talking a lot about interviewing these two, uh, these two episodes. We want to get into how do you succeed once you're there? Um, so we will likely do another interview for that. Thank you again to today's sponsor. I'm blocked your developers know how to write code. What they're missing is the context to know what code to write and unblocked gives engineering teams, the answers they need to get their jobs done without having to wait on or interrupt their teammates. You get started for free at get unblocked.com. That's G E T unblocked.com. Thanks so much for listening. And until next time, enjoy your tea.