<story><title>Stuff I&apos;ve Messed Up While Interviewing</title><url>http://blog.ellenchisa.com/2014/04/13/stuff-ive-screwed-up-while-interviewing/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>shalmanese</author><text>Holy hell, just reading that made me feel sympathetic anxiousness. Don&amp;#x27;t do the things she&amp;#x27;s suggesting, it&amp;#x27;s a short walk to a lifetime of stress, anxiety and being underappreciated for your work.&lt;p&gt;The problem is that the OP is fundamentally approaching the interview process as a role in which she must please the interviewer in order to be granted the prize of a job. All of her advice is to prepare better and be more on your game so that the other person might perhaps like you more. Coming in with this mindset automatically puts you on a back footing and makes everything more difficult.&lt;p&gt;Instead, focus on flipping the status game around. When you&amp;#x27;re with the interviewer, you&amp;#x27;re with a peer. Talk to them as if you&amp;#x27;re talking to a friend, not as if you&amp;#x27;re in a high pressure, life or death situation. Take the VC interview, for example. Imagine if you&amp;#x27;re catching up with your best friend from college and they ask you if you&amp;#x27;ve made any friends in NYC yet. Do you freeze up and start blabbering incoherently? No, you laugh about it and bitch about how tough it is and ask them if they have any advice or whatever it is that you would do. Approaching it this way changes the entire tenor of the interview process.&lt;p&gt;This is where unskilled and unaware of it genuinely comes in handy. People who are just bad enough that they have no idea how they compare easily sail through interviews since they assume they&amp;#x27;re above average while genuinely talented people spend so much time comparing themselves to others they get wracked by insecurity.&lt;p&gt;I know this is something easier said than done and that some people in particular find it especially challenging. So is learning Javascript or Photoshop, yet we don&amp;#x27;t complain when a job requires us to know them to be hired. Learning social skills is as equally important to your career as technical skills so just nut up and do it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jghn</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s well and good to say this, and this is always my tactic anyways (although it&amp;#x27;s also how I naturally interact in any meeting).&lt;p&gt;However, that only gets you so far. I have a dirty little secret, I&amp;#x27;m really bad at a lot of the types of whiteboard questions which get asked and while i have a good natural intuition on things like big O that intuition doesn&amp;#x27;t translate well into actual words.&lt;p&gt;So instead I end up in a situation where for instance I&amp;#x27;m told by my boss that I could easily&amp;#x2F;quickly get a job most anywhere I wanted and yet fearful that I&amp;#x27;d get turned away from Bob&amp;#x27;s CRUDapp shop. It is what it is and I realize these are the entry bars that our industry uses &amp;amp; I don&amp;#x27;t complain about it, but there&amp;#x27;s more to the equation than simply owning the room.</text></comment>
<story><title>Stuff I&apos;ve Messed Up While Interviewing</title><url>http://blog.ellenchisa.com/2014/04/13/stuff-ive-screwed-up-while-interviewing/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>shalmanese</author><text>Holy hell, just reading that made me feel sympathetic anxiousness. Don&amp;#x27;t do the things she&amp;#x27;s suggesting, it&amp;#x27;s a short walk to a lifetime of stress, anxiety and being underappreciated for your work.&lt;p&gt;The problem is that the OP is fundamentally approaching the interview process as a role in which she must please the interviewer in order to be granted the prize of a job. All of her advice is to prepare better and be more on your game so that the other person might perhaps like you more. Coming in with this mindset automatically puts you on a back footing and makes everything more difficult.&lt;p&gt;Instead, focus on flipping the status game around. When you&amp;#x27;re with the interviewer, you&amp;#x27;re with a peer. Talk to them as if you&amp;#x27;re talking to a friend, not as if you&amp;#x27;re in a high pressure, life or death situation. Take the VC interview, for example. Imagine if you&amp;#x27;re catching up with your best friend from college and they ask you if you&amp;#x27;ve made any friends in NYC yet. Do you freeze up and start blabbering incoherently? No, you laugh about it and bitch about how tough it is and ask them if they have any advice or whatever it is that you would do. Approaching it this way changes the entire tenor of the interview process.&lt;p&gt;This is where unskilled and unaware of it genuinely comes in handy. People who are just bad enough that they have no idea how they compare easily sail through interviews since they assume they&amp;#x27;re above average while genuinely talented people spend so much time comparing themselves to others they get wracked by insecurity.&lt;p&gt;I know this is something easier said than done and that some people in particular find it especially challenging. So is learning Javascript or Photoshop, yet we don&amp;#x27;t complain when a job requires us to know them to be hired. Learning social skills is as equally important to your career as technical skills so just nut up and do it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ellenchisa1</author><text>Hi! Author here. Point well taken. Trying to post quickly before class...&lt;p&gt;I hope I didn&amp;#x27;t imply that you should walk into the interview feeling like you were on the defensive - I don&amp;#x27;t think that&amp;#x27;s the case at all. I just think being well prepared (a) makes you feel prepared and (b) makes you more likely to be able to handle something on the fly.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m also not sure what roles you&amp;#x27;ve been interviewing for. I&amp;#x27;ve found these sorts of things to be more important for PM&amp;#x2F;Product than for Engineering or Design. The other roles have some more concrete goals to judge off of. It&amp;#x27;s hard to tell if someone is &amp;#x27;good&amp;#x27; at Product, and I&amp;#x27;ve found things go better for me if I keep all of this in mind.</text></comment>