Interviewing

This business of projecting confidence in an interview is forced. Confidence derives from competency, which in turn derives from experience and success. The more accomplished you are, the more confidence you should naturally project. If you’re not projecting confidence, you need to focus less on imitating confidence and more on gaining experience. That means you have goals. Listing specific goals is useful in an interview as it projects a sense of direction, careful thought, of making and following a plan, and it helps narrow down what you want from the company and the deliberate activity you will bring to it.

I’ve interviewed more than 50 times and less than 100 times. I’ve lost count. At least half of my interviews have been face-to-face. I used to never turn down an interview. It was a chance to practice selling myself, listening to requirements and addressing them. I came to enjoy interviews. I have had a few when I controlled the discussion and turned it into a conversation between peers. I still interview both well and poorly at times, but there is a particular weariness from too many repetitions of a practiced sales pitch when you are your own product. There emerges an overriding wish to simply dispense with the sales, be drafted into service and get back into what you love doing.

A lot of energy is mis-spent in interviews attempting to convince the other that you are the right candidate. This seems suited to junior candidates or in a market where applicants outnumber the jobs. When the opposites are true, it is entirely possible to ace an interview and find yourself ineffective in the position. There are many reasons for this, among them:

The company’s situation changes between offer and hire. This may not be honestly or immediately communicated. You are offered role A, and are immediately repositioned into a very different role B. I was offered a Network Architect role, and quietly pushed forward as a Project Manager. It was unexpected, awkward, uncomfortable, and resulted in enormous frustration, resentment and distrust. Rather than concentrate on the work at hand, I was back on the market within the first week. Being eager to leave increases the odds of repeating a short tenure. I lasted 2 months in the next position, judging it to be an improvement over what I had, ignoring factors that might make it a poor fit. Whatever the reason for leaving, not feeling that you “need” to leave instinctively cultures you to evaluate carefully whether the next position will allow you maximum effectiveness.

The interviewers or company may not understand their business. Job descriptions may be outdated or recycled. They may, inexplicably represent a role that never existed or will never exist. The seasoned interviewee should carefully scrutinize the interviewer’s words for red flags, and no matter what is offered, pay attention to the red flags. The higher the compensation or perks, the lower the overall risk for accepting the position in terms of improving one’s general situation, but if the job is a poor fit, that won’t make the next months any more enjoyable.

Sometimes, the right people are missing from the critical interviews. If the interviewer does not understand precisely the role and skillset for which you are considered, they must understand precisely the nature of their business itself and what it needs. It falls to you to propose what needs to be done to meet that need, by which they may still see that you have or can get the right skills. If the interviewer neither understands the particular skills in the role, or at the least what the company needs, this is almost certainly not going to be the right fit.

Superior social skills may easily distract the interviewer from the primary task of determining whether the candidate is an optimal fit. My social skills are not terribly impressive. But in the engineering world, assuming some competency, those skills simply have to be better than the interviewer’s to have the same effect. Passing an interview in this manner amounts to a false positive and doesn’t indicate at all whether you would be a good fit.

Very few interviewers are terribly good at what they do. Having interviewed others as well, I appreciate that this is a difficult art to master. Interviewing requires 1) a clarity as to what is needed as the candidate's bottom line as well as what the company has to offer (beyond compensation), 2) the appropriate discernment to determine whether what is needed (and perhaps wanted) can be met by the candidate and 3) that what the company has tl offer will meet the candidate's needs (and some wants). I have landed in excellent positions despite insufficient personal skill in the interviewer because the work turned out to be good.

The best interview in recent memory was extremely challenging, evaluating my philosophy of approach to problems apart from my technological skillset. It left me with no certainty that I had made the cut as well as an impression that if I did, this was a great team to join.

Companies often want people who have already demonstrated that they can do the same work. I perform at my best having to do work for which I am as yet unqualified. I’m always looking for an employer to trust me with ambitious work that I can’t yet handle. And I’ve flourished with companies that severely underestimated the actual work they had to do.

Counter-intuitively, contradicting the interviewer is sometimes the right move. I interviewed with one company years ago. Their lead engineer asked me a question about Etherchannels. He was assured that my answer was wrong. I explained in detail why it was in fact correct, to his obvious unhappiness. Fortunately, it convinced his manager who was also present. Another time, a CCIE with antiquated knowledge asked me whether a switch port connected to a computer via a VOIP phone was configured in trunk or access mode. I replied "access mode", which he deemed incorrect. However, it is in fact a special case trunk configured in access mode with a voice vlan. He remained unconvinced, but I stood my ground. And the company later stood by me as the best candidate when presenting me to their large client. It makes sense. I'd be embarrassed, but still impressed with a candidate who revealed a weakness in my thinking and had the temerity to stand by convictions.

At some point I stopped apologizing for information I don’t know. You either know it or you don’t. You can either learn it or you can’t, which is demonstrated clearly in your history. Sometimes companies have specific, nonnegotiable needs and you’re not the right fit. But more frequently, a short-sighted company doesn’t think beyond the immediate requirement and if hired, there likely wouldn’t be much growth beyond that list anyway. Some of the best groups with which I’ve worked focused on understanding how quickly I assimilated and used new information. You find some of the most talented engineers here.

It stuck in my head when one engineer on a very capable team told me that they don't expect the engineers to come in as the expert, knowing everything. But they will soon become the expert in that position.

If you don't know it, if an opportunity presents itself, engage the interviewer and ask for an explanation, what it is, how it is being used, and repeat back at judicious times what you are learning to make sure you've got it right. It might impress the interviewer, how you assimilate the information and can present it cogently. And if not, maybe your explanation impresses the next company. If you fail in the interview, make sure you learn something from it.

Three interviews stand out. One with a smaller company, had the manager usher me into the team where they took turns firing questions at me. Another with a F500 company, saw me into the interview. The manager promptly left to handle a crisis that had come up, leaving me with two other senior engineers. After a grueling hour or so, they invited me out with the group to a vendor-sponsored dinner and I got to watch them interact and even feel part of the team. Another interview, with a government contractor, skipped the interview altogether and I just had lunch with the team. The manager later showed himself to be a remarkable reader of people, so he already had figured out whether I could technically do the job without further questions. In each case, the interest was to see how well or not would I get on with the team. I’ve had more similar interviews. For both employer and employee, I’ve always felt that this was the best predictor of success or failure. My preference, continues to be interviews with as much of the team as possible.

One of my favorite interviews was the manager calling me into a conference room, in which sat 10-12 members of his team. They each took turns asking me questions, principally about their own technologies. It was stimulating, and much preferred to speaking with a single person.

Most interviews always end with them asking if you have any questions. If the interview never graduated to a proper back-and-forth conversation where you've already asked a number of natural questions, there's a good chance that you don't have anything that doesn't fall into the category of HR concerns (pay, benefits, etc.). I have often admitted that, no I do not have questions, and that there is a substantial number of unknowns that may not be clarified until... (e.g. the next interview, actually working in the group, etc.). In lieu of specific questions, it is acceptable to state what information is as yet unknown to you (which you are considering).

Yet, I have a few standard interview questions of my own for interviewers, none original.

What do you like most about this job? Give an excited engineer or manager a chance to talk about something they really like and they will. The most cringe-worthy response was from one who replied “the stability”. That sunk a marginal interview for me. I still ended up taking the job, months later. Later discussion of the job restored my interest. It resulted in an incredible period of growth but my initial impressions never fully left me. It took an increasingly high amount of energy just to keep myself motivated. Toward the end, I just saw institutional stagnation ahead, a good paying job with very little further growth and advancement, and couldn't wait for something fresher on which to bring to bear what I'd learned.

Given what you’ve asked and I’ve told you, do you have any concerns about my candidacy? This seems to catch them by surprise, and my impression is that it conveys a sense of professionalism. You expect criticism and you’re not put off by it. It gives the interviewer unexpected permission to re-evaluate any inferred deficiency before it solidifies. It also gives you, the interviewee, insight into what they are really looking for. Do they care most about their checklist of specific items, or are they looking more for a type of person who grows into and past today's requirements. Usually I hear a few items, mostly needing this or that technology, where I already had a sense from earlier questioning that I was weak. This has rarely stopped me from proceeding to the next stage (including offers) and in some cases has contributed to success in unrelated interviews later where I learned the terminology or technology lacking earlier.

Some interviews are worth taking. I’ve interviewed with Amazon twice, Facebook once, Netflix once. I failed in at least three, and took myself out of the running (I believe I was just shy of an offer) for another. In each case, at least at the outset, I thought the odds of accepting an offer (if made) were low – I didn’t want to move. But interviewing with companies like these is worth it in its own right, since you gain insight into how the recognized "best" do business, what technologies they use, and in some cases how they use it. I also find that the bigger companies are supremely reluctant to give real feedback of the interview as to specific weaknesses. Amazon had the most rigorous first and second stage technical interviews. I got at least one really good head scratching question from them that taught me more about a technology I believed I had mastered. I failed Facebook (so I was told) not on the networking side but not knowing a very specific programming language for a specific application. I failed Netflix early on in my career, not knowing some very basic elements of BGP. I fixed that deficiency shortly thereafter.

Good companies may give you the answer to questions you answer wrongly in the interview. It lends the sense that you’re not just being asked “gotcha” questions to make you look stupid. Good engineers like to learn from the mistakes. Amazon and Facebook both did this. I do this now.

You can read a lot into what the company does with its technology by the questions they ask. Inept or pre-screening interviewers ask from standardized lists and its clear they don’t know the what the answers mean. They are hoping that you get the answers “right” to prove you meet the minimum requirement for what they need, which is assumed to be what’s on the list. Solid interviewers ask follow-up questions which demonstrate the depth at which they need the expertise. Those questions also invite your own questions to determine the depth at which they are used. This is also a good chance to figure out how one company does it versus the last one, which enables you to speak intelligently about it to a third later. Some interviews broaden horizons.

You can’t always read into the questions interviewers ask. The most impressive interviewers are usually very deeply involved with the technology, or manage those who are, and thus have a clear idea of what they need from the right candidate. But, in larger companies, many engineers graduate into less technical roles. I’ve been asked some impressive questions only to have the interviewer volunteer that it’s been years since they did anything so technical and they researched  their questions from Google or their books. I appreciate the honesty amidst my disappointment. This has seemed to be a good predictor for environments that sound impressive on paper but in which the actual scope of the engineering for a given role was limited. This is not a role for unrivaled career growth. With some of the more impressive sounding companies, I've found the roles discussed not likely to offer the challenge and growth I look for.

Don't trust people who come too well advertised. Don't trust jobs where people are touted far more than the work is actually discussed. In all fairness the direct recruiter didn't know anything about IT. But she talked about my potential manager as if he was the most ground-breaking engineer ever, pointing me to a few news sites where he is discussed working on something green for the real-estate management company for which he works. The actually technological needs I discussed with him were in fact much more modest than what I'd worked with. The recruiter told me how much people learned from him. She also recommended that, when I spoke with him directly I didn't contradict him very much. By the time he finally called, I had decided on another offer, in part so I could get started on a complicated moving process for my family. When he asked I told him I had interviewed with other companies and one had made an offer. He said goodbye normally. The recruiter called back unhappily and let me know I should never have mentioned this to him and that doomed the process. I was taken aback by this but it didn't affect me. It just confirmed my suspicions something was off. He's a CIO of a very large company, still advertising very modest certifications. I suppose it might have been a big step forward if I'd joined and lasted, but it would have been pure misery.

Among my worst interviews was one with a jewelry company, towards the beginning of my career. The previous fellow had left after a short spell, like his predecessor before him. It's always good to ask about the last person who had that role. The lecture I received from the interviewer, my potential boss, was about how they needed loyalty above all. Because of this speech I still remember that guy's name, and shudder. It only got worse from there. Companies that are keen on demanding loyalty without giving any indication on how they plan to earn it are bad news. Employee loyalty is earned. Good companies expect to earn it. Bad companies expect it from the outset.

It is an oft-repeated mantra that if you are employed by a company that can terminate you for any reason (and may or will) then no loyalty is owed and you can as well leave whenever you want to, without commensurate guilt, as is strategic. I mostly agree with this thinking, with the clarification that loyalty is to people not to companies these days. It is also said that people will often leave good work with a bad boss, and rarely bad work and a good boss. I don't feel guilty leaving a company. I have felt very miserable announcing my departure to kind managers, let alone a few I've found to be  both kind and effective. But such guilt is good. It can be a powerful motivator in ensuring you don't let them down while you're there, and that you leave a well documented role for them to use after.

I once interviewed with a law firm. This was when I was a seasoned network manager looking to move on. I don’t remember much of that interview. I was met first by two junior lawyers who were well meaning but clumsy. They didn’t know much of what the firm wanted and had brought the list of questions they'd been handed without any ability to parse the answers. An older lawyer, who doubled as the IT expert (the younger lawyers constantly talked him up to me about his computer ability) took over, observing their immediate deference. I remember him asking questions that were well below my level, and a few that betrayed a stunning ignorance of what some technologies did and what the firm actually needed (as parsed from what was said). The most striking takeaway was the sense that whenever and whatever they would need, big or small, reasonable or not, you would have to be always available to them and immediate to provide it. From what others have later expressed, this may by more typical than not of law firms.

Farthest from an original thought of mine, your prospective new employer has no need to know what you make currently or previously. “Market rate” should be the standard response when asked. They promise to pay you commensurate with ability, you expect to paid commensurate with your ability. In a good job market, market rate is defined by the best rate a number of different employers offer.

Your prospective new employer has no absolute right to ask what you have made previously. The easy proof is that if you should counter with the question as to what he/she makes and what all the other engineers on the team make, they would quickly refuse and you wouldn’t fault them for it. Of course, that's being cheeky with an interviewer and it will doom you immediately. So you don't say that and instead opt for something more more diplomatic, if only to keep your options open. The point of their question is so they can make their lowest offer that still exceeds what you make, regardless if others similarly qualified make substantially more. And they often write “mandatory” for previous salaries in the job application, and so you rightly fear taking yourself out of the running by evading or refusing to answer. Since I’d rather not work for a company that starts out by offering “just enough” I’m not as worried as I used to be about losing opportunities if they don’t accept my evasions. I don't think I've lost any truly good opportunities this way.

If you happen to believe you make more than the market rate, there is a benefit to putting your compensation requirement out sooner rather than later. With rare exception, a company that will not or cannot offer at least what you already make should be excluded from your search. Exceptions include: 1) if the work offered is at a substantially higher level, and you will emerge far more marketable, and 2) if the work is attractive, the salary differential is low, and you believe that once the company finds out what you can do, they will make it happen. Of course, this works much better if you're currently employed, rather than formerly. If unemployed, then whatever they offer, if better than anyone else, regardless of what you made before, that is the market rate and you are wise to take it.

I interviewed with a very well known financial company that handled mutual funds. I was very interested to be there. I got on very well with the IT director -- we even had some career overlap. I would be working under another technical lead, a middle-aged engineer, who showed me around the datacenter and NOC. He bragged that at one point he had his CCNP, but he had let it lapse and never missed it. And frankly, with a little training, a monkey could do his job. With me as the younger engineer, he concluded the interview with lots of advice, to the effect that you can work yourself into a comfortable job, no complexity, no challenge and stay there forever. I thanked him politely, got in my car, and immediately took the other offer that had been presented me. From time to time, I keep seeing the same and similar positions pop up for this company. No thanks. I told a recruiter later that for the sake of the interviewee, this gentleman should not be around. By this time he was a known factor, but the company had little control over it. Iron sharpens iron. Dull makes dull.

Some companies cling to horrible innovations in interviewing. I won’t name the company. If you’ve interviewed with them you know who. I got this interview session with a big name contracting company. So I know I’ll be contracted out to a customer and I’m looking forward to learning what this customer is doing. Instead, I am shuttled into what looks a little like classroom (a presentation room emptied of most chairs) in their very well appointed office building, with perhaps twenty tables spaced throughout, and many candidates like me assigned one. I think the idea is to make us partially feel like we're the ones interviewing others. Then it is speed-dating interview time, with a number of different couples of engineers or PMs shuttling between tables of the candidates in which they are interested, maybe five to ten minutes each. At the end, a very pleasant gentleman walked me out and told me that a number of different groups had expressed interest in me, and which ones would I be interested in? I had to tell him the truth. The impressions were so superficial, so short, that I hadn’t gotten enough to be interested in any one of them. I held my tongue that it stands out as possibly one of the worst ways a company can interview people. Maybe it works for them, but it felt like a colossal waste of time and I think it sends the wrong message to potential recruits. I was put off. Soon after, I accepted an offer with another company. I’ve since gotten a few calls from this company, but I’m not going through that again. In all fairness, I mentioned this years later to another of their recruiters, and she admitted the process was not well designed and understood why I didn't want to do it again.