<story><title>Just did the Y Combinator interview: here are my notes</title><url>https://blog.checklyhq.com/just-did-the-ycombinator-interview-here-are-my-notes/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Yajirobe</author><text>&amp;gt; Interviewer: So tell me about yourself&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Me: Alright, there are three perspectives I&amp;#x27;d quickly like to touch:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; 1. Personal&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; 2. Educational&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; 3. Professional&lt;p&gt;That seems so forced and unnatural that it makes me cringe. &amp;#x27;Tell me about yourself&amp;#x27; should be a natural conversation starter, not an exam that you did your homework for.</text></item><item><author>mettamage</author><text>&amp;gt; Order your thoughts. Keep it short. Communicate one idea in one sentence. etc. etc. etc.&lt;p&gt;This is true in general. I remember when I did consulting interviews you needed to talk like that and the feedback I got was that I didn&amp;#x27;t do enough of it.&lt;p&gt;Funnily enough, I could clearly tell that whenever I had a programmer job interview, everyone was always really impressed with how &amp;#x27;structured my thinking&amp;#x27; was.&lt;p&gt;Other than being impressed the biggest benefit that you also describe in your blog post is that it is simply very clear what you are about! And people seem a lot happier when listening to you feels like a simple thing to do.&lt;p&gt;Here&amp;#x27;s an example of how I do it. The following that I wrote down was typed as quickly as possible.&lt;p&gt;---&lt;p&gt;Interviewer: So tell me about yourself&lt;p&gt;Me: Alright, there are three perspectives I&amp;#x27;d quickly like to touch:&lt;p&gt;1. Personal&lt;p&gt;2. Educational&lt;p&gt;3. Professional&lt;p&gt;With 1. personal, I&amp;#x27;m all about fantasy and curiosity. Understand that and you understand me.&lt;p&gt;Educational: I studied to become the bridge between the business world and the computer world while also trying to become an expert in both. Therefore, I started of with business informatics. Upon graduation I immediately started studying psychology - people, and computer science - computers. And I studied game studies to merge them back into one topic again.&lt;p&gt;Professional it&amp;#x27;s rather interesting: the past 8 years I saw my university as a playground and I just applied to any job that didn&amp;#x27;t feel like work. This resulted in me becoming a teaching assistant, a coach for teaching assistants, a bootcamp instructor and a programmer&amp;#x2F;web developer. In total I have about 2.5 years of work experience, 1.5 on teaching development and 1 on development.&lt;p&gt;---&lt;p&gt;It was a huge improvement compared to my standard 15 minute answer. This answer above is just told under 1 minute.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mettamage</author><text>(haha, that&amp;#x27;s a fun username, kamehame... okay I&amp;#x27;ll show myself out O:) )&lt;p&gt;I am right in the middle of interviewing right now (I&amp;#x27;m open for any interdisciplinary business&amp;#x2F;dev&amp;#x2F;get things done role).&lt;p&gt;IMO when you interview you&amp;#x27;re always on the spot and always being judged. I&amp;#x27;ve done it the other way. I am the type of person who likes to just drift away and associatively talk about things (hmm... the very astute reader could&amp;#x27;ve inferred this given what I said in &amp;quot;1. Personal&amp;quot; :P). It has never done me any favors when I did this in a job interview.&lt;p&gt;The issue you run into is (quote from the article):&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; &amp;quot;So, yeah, like, we&amp;#x27;re like working on this thing, but then my cofounder quit, and now we have this customer who&amp;#x27;s really loving the product but then we hit a bug with Docker because it uses React in the Kubernetes and now, you know, I&amp;#x27;d like to know if you reimburse travel cost when I do the interview and stuff&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s better to make the mistake of being too formal at an informal moment than the other way around. And honestly, I have been surprised to what extent I should &lt;i&gt;not&lt;/i&gt; have been informal in the first place.&lt;p&gt;Moreover, people will somehow signal to what extent you&amp;#x27;re being too formal. I can tell from their body language. However, when I&amp;#x27;m too informal I can&amp;#x27;t actually tell to what extent I&amp;#x27;m too informal.</text></comment>
<story><title>Just did the Y Combinator interview: here are my notes</title><url>https://blog.checklyhq.com/just-did-the-ycombinator-interview-here-are-my-notes/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Yajirobe</author><text>&amp;gt; Interviewer: So tell me about yourself&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Me: Alright, there are three perspectives I&amp;#x27;d quickly like to touch:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; 1. Personal&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; 2. Educational&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; 3. Professional&lt;p&gt;That seems so forced and unnatural that it makes me cringe. &amp;#x27;Tell me about yourself&amp;#x27; should be a natural conversation starter, not an exam that you did your homework for.</text></item><item><author>mettamage</author><text>&amp;gt; Order your thoughts. Keep it short. Communicate one idea in one sentence. etc. etc. etc.&lt;p&gt;This is true in general. I remember when I did consulting interviews you needed to talk like that and the feedback I got was that I didn&amp;#x27;t do enough of it.&lt;p&gt;Funnily enough, I could clearly tell that whenever I had a programmer job interview, everyone was always really impressed with how &amp;#x27;structured my thinking&amp;#x27; was.&lt;p&gt;Other than being impressed the biggest benefit that you also describe in your blog post is that it is simply very clear what you are about! And people seem a lot happier when listening to you feels like a simple thing to do.&lt;p&gt;Here&amp;#x27;s an example of how I do it. The following that I wrote down was typed as quickly as possible.&lt;p&gt;---&lt;p&gt;Interviewer: So tell me about yourself&lt;p&gt;Me: Alright, there are three perspectives I&amp;#x27;d quickly like to touch:&lt;p&gt;1. Personal&lt;p&gt;2. Educational&lt;p&gt;3. Professional&lt;p&gt;With 1. personal, I&amp;#x27;m all about fantasy and curiosity. Understand that and you understand me.&lt;p&gt;Educational: I studied to become the bridge between the business world and the computer world while also trying to become an expert in both. Therefore, I started of with business informatics. Upon graduation I immediately started studying psychology - people, and computer science - computers. And I studied game studies to merge them back into one topic again.&lt;p&gt;Professional it&amp;#x27;s rather interesting: the past 8 years I saw my university as a playground and I just applied to any job that didn&amp;#x27;t feel like work. This resulted in me becoming a teaching assistant, a coach for teaching assistants, a bootcamp instructor and a programmer&amp;#x2F;web developer. In total I have about 2.5 years of work experience, 1.5 on teaching development and 1 on development.&lt;p&gt;---&lt;p&gt;It was a huge improvement compared to my standard 15 minute answer. This answer above is just told under 1 minute.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kinkrtyavimoodh</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s futile to keep trying to force fit an interview to a natural conversation. It simply is not.&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Tell me about yourself&amp;quot; is simply not the kind of thing normal people ask each other for breaking the ice. It&amp;#x27;s a stressful question that puts people on the spot and forces them to &amp;#x27;create&amp;#x27; a first impression.</text></comment>