What not to say at LinkedIn’s Interview or any Interview
By: Double Pointer
Tags: Coding, LinkedIn, Coding Interviews, Behavioral Interviewing, Technology

Behavioral Interviews

The Bay Area sun shone bright and golden in the blue skies of summer of 2013. I was shackled to an uninteresting job at the Microsoft campus in Mountain View. A few blocks down the road stood LinkedIn’s hip and trendy offices, teeming with youthful engineers, typical of a Silicon Valley startup. The contrast was stark. Microsoft’s dull buildings were laid with grey carpets, and not-so-motivated engineers walked over them. No wonder, Hotmail the team I worked for, had miserably failed to blunt the onslaught of Gmail, which boasted far more users than Hotmail even though Hotmail had enjoyed a head-start of several years.

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One fine morning, I had an email from a LinkedIn recruiter staring at me in my inbox. I was hesitant to interview as I was still riding the immigration roller coaster to a Greencard and changing jobs would have meant a reset of the immigration process. Nevertheless, I agreed to a phone-screen and luckily cleared it without any preparation. I didn’t want to invest time preparing since I thought I would never leave Microsoft without attaining the Greencard, which felt akin to a superpower for an immigrant. When I went in for the on-site, I was swept away by all the free-food, happy faces, equal gender representation, cool offices and just the all-around jovial vibe. A far cry from the coding dungeon I had just walked over from.

Fast forward, halfway into the interview and two people came over to take me to lunch. I felt grand, escorted by two LI engineers. “LI must think I am important”, I thought to myself. Slowly and subconsciously, I put my guard down and eased-in. My lunch hosts were very friendly and talkative. I responded in kind and with a lot of enthusiasm. One of them coyly started sneaking-in behavioral questions, “Where do you see yourself in 5 years?”. I took the bait and opened-up my heart. I told them I saw myself making millions of dollars with a startup, retiring, working on my health, spending time with my family and giving speeches and lectures on how to make millions in a startup, thus making even more money. Alas! I hit several nails in my candidacy’s coffin during that dreadful lunch hour. The foods was great with a view of the Moffett federal airfield in the distance and I had no clue I was being tested for culture-fit.

A day later, the recruiter delivered the rejection over the phone and chided me for the answers that I had given. Instead of narrating what I truly felt where I should be in 5 years, I was told to have made tall claims of fixing 13,591 bugs, making 5150 check-ins, attending 20,721 meetings and sloth-ing up the corporate ladder to an even more stressful position with a longer and fancier title. Exaggeration aside, my answer should have reflected a strong desire to work in technology and an unbridled ambition to grow professionally, even if my heart and soul told me otherwise.

I learnt my lesson and learned it the hard way. Nowadays, I lie through the nose in behavioral rounds, convincing the interviewer with superlatives, adjectives, change-the-world crap, name-dropping, imagined goals and made-up professional titles I want to achieve. My not-so-genuine intentions are taken at face value and I am labelled an ideal candidate who “fits right into the company’s culture cast”. Little does the hiring committee know, how my heart still yearns for that retirement with no 9:00 AM stand-ups and no one to have a one-on-one with. Fast-pace, stress, weekends and all-nighters, annual reviews, production environment time-bombs, concurrency bugs, pointless meetings, to-be-promotions, all traded for bliss, peace, family, friends, ample-time, comfortable and rich obscurity — any day.

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