The Tech Interview
By: Chase Overmire
Tags: Interview, Information Technology, Interviews And Insights, Technology

Ramblings from a veteran

I have gone through many interviews in my nearly 20 years in the IT field. Many of them I had little interest in before even accepting an interview. I know some of you might be thinking “why waste everyone's time if you’re not interested?”. Well simply put, its an interview and it goes two ways. I am just as unsure if I am interested in working with them as they are with me.

An interview isn’t just about the candidate selling themselves. The company must also sell to the candidate. It’s a fine balance of yes I want to work for you, here is what I can bring to the table and we would love to have you here and this is what we can offer you. I feel like some where along the way a lot of people I have interreacted with may have missed the memo there.

I often walked away from most interviews never feeling like I got a real interview at all. Most of them always felt so…static…so rehearsed…so weak. I don’t recall many interviews where I felt like I was challenged or the company got to see what I was really about or capable of.

Boring basic questions, silly brain teasers and preposterous situations designed for you to fail even if you know how to avoid them always turned me off from a company and I declined my fair share of offers simply because I was unimpressed by the interviewers. Of course I had my fair share of bad interviews where I just plain did poorly as well — I spent a lot of time reflecting on those.

What I always wanted was engaging interviews. Make me prove that I know what I say I know, don’t just ask me silly questions about ports, or ask me to code on a white board or some other text book garbage. Make me DO something. Challenge me with situations that are relevant and everchanging to see how far I can go, test my creativity and my drive to learn. Test my ability to swim by making me swim!

In the book How to Win friends and influence people by Dale Carnegie, Mr Carnegie makes a tremendous amount of wonderful points and offers tons of great advice on how to interact intelligently with people. I have consumed this book multiple times because I love the messages inside and as an imperfect human I find it offers me motivation to push myself to be better.

So when it came time for me to start giving the interviews, even though I was offered a sudo script, I decided instead to work on creating my own style based on what I felt would be beneficial to the candidate and help the company really see if the person was a good fit or not. Mr Carnegie’s book was something I thought a lot about during these times.

Gone were the silly basic questions you could google if you didn’t know it off the top of your head (save 1–2 intro questions designed for easy home runs to build the candidates confidence). Bye bye to the brain teasers that offer little in terms of actual relevance to the job. My approach was logical and methodical. I would study the resumes and learn about technologies the candidates claimed to know if I was unfamiliar.

We will discuss your experiences, some of the tough lessons and things you wish you had known earlier and so on. Sure, those are core basic things you just have to talk about. When it came time to get really technical though is were I deviated heavily. Instead of machine gun tech questions I would build out scenarios ad-hoc around the skills the candidate had listed in their resume and change them on the fly based on their responses. Even at times asking the candidate to teach me by doing it for me. Or pretending to be a customer and knowing absolutely nothing at all.

Are you a database guy who dabbles in networking and has Linux skills as well as a coding background? You better believe I am going to manifest a scenario where you have to use all of them to find the problem(s). Here's the thing though, there was never technically an end and never a right answer.

What I am offering is engaging conversation where I, the interviewer, are genuinely interested in what you say. Your ideas, your thoughts, how you speak and you reactions when I change the scenario up on the fly. Are you introspective and interested in the increasing complexity or do you begin to buckle? Why are you buckling? Are you aware of it? What can you do to get back on what you feel is the right track?

As I said, I never actually have a right answer for any of these scenarios. The goal is for us to talk, as two professionals, about different scenarios and how you as a candidate might approach them. One of my favorite things to do is throw down a challenge to a candidate when they get stuck. Once stuck I ask how you would figure it out and after they respond I ask if they want to take a few minutes and go try and find me the answers.

The surprise, and in some cases, excited responses I get from some people is something that I won’t soon forget. You see…I don’t evaluate you based on your resume or how many text book questions you respond correctly to. No. I am far more interested in you as a person and how that mixes with your technical skills. Maybe you’re newer to tech or your experiences have simply limited your exposure so badly you are not aware there is more. Or more commonly, you are REALLY nervous in interviews. Does that make you you a bad candidate? Absolutely not.

When in these scenarios you can tell right away who the engaging and curious people are. They ask questions, they seek clarity and they offer ideas on what they could to do learn more. My goal isn’t to simply fill a role with someone who can check off all the preverbal boxes. My goal is to find a candidate who will be successful not only for the company but for themselves. Just because you can do the job that doesn’t mean you’re the best candidate. On the flip side just because you don’t tick off all the boxes that doesn’t mean you cant become the right candidate.

To date I have put ‘YES’ on so many candidates that wouldn’t pass a tough technical book interview that have ended up growing into great engineers …well… it boggles my mind. These people, while lacking experience or knowledge in an area that some would consider absolutely critical, instilled confidence in me that they could grow into great engineers if we simply invested the time. Some people might be thinking that the investment would be too large in some cases…

Well you are right. In some cases the investment is too large for us up front. If I feel adamant that the person is an asset we don’t want to pass up on, I offer up another challenge. Take two weeks, study, learn, play, grow, and let’s chat again. Show me that the investment, large as it may be, is something that we as a company should not pass up because of the opportunity you offer us to develop a wonderful engineer.

What I try to sell, as the interviewer, is that coming to work for my company is going to offer you challenges and growth opportunity. That you’re not alone, we are here in this together learning, failing, adapting. You invest in us, we invest in you. Like most things in life, you will get out of it what you put in…to some degree at least ;)