- No Wave
- Sep 18, 2005
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HA! HA! NICE! WHAT A TOOL!
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Large company asks for comp expectation before on-site. what's the right thing to do?
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Jun 7, 2022 21:13
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Feb 6, 2025 22:35
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- No Wave
- Sep 18, 2005
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HA! HA! NICE! WHAT A TOOL!
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Ty, will try to push discussion back. Also - I tend to get rejected from large company jobs because I have a bad personality and fail behavioral very hard. Is there anywhere that has actual answers to behavioral questions verbatim written out? There are tons of websites that list questions with vague advice like STAR but seeing actual answers would help a lot.
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Jun 8, 2022 14:38
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- No Wave
- Sep 18, 2005
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HA! HA! NICE! WHAT A TOOL!
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Lots of big companies have a heavy focus on behavioral now... I'm not talking about MBTI, I mean very basic stuff like "tell me about a time you used something outside of work during your job" and "tell me about a time you gave up short-term efficiency for long-term gain".
No Wave fucked around with this message at 16:10 on Jun 8, 2022
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Jun 8, 2022 15:55
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- No Wave
- Sep 18, 2005
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what kinds of answers do you give to these that cause you to fail hard
I literally don't come up with anything. Or if I do answer the question it feels like I'm not answering it correctly. I do not have a good answer for "tell us about a time you went above and beyond" either. If there are correct answers written out anywhere it would be nice to read them.
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Jun 8, 2022 17:37
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- No Wave
- Sep 18, 2005
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HA! HA! NICE! WHAT A TOOL!
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You're going about it wrong. You need to have a script with canned answers for those bullshit questions
Yes! I just want to see examples of good answers.
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Jun 8, 2022 19:56
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- No Wave
- Sep 18, 2005
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HA! HA! NICE! WHAT A TOOL!
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google STAR method which gives gives you a framework for answering these questions and a few sites have examples. the examples are less useful than the framework itself.
have you ever seen a politician being interviewed? you notice how they have a set of packaged stories that they answer with instead of answering the question directly? that’s the game basically, you build up a library of 8-15 star method rehearsed stories, then pick the one that most closely aligns to the question. this is a learnable, practiceable skill so treat it as homework and get it done. it’s annoying nonsense but unlike most annoying nonsense it is worth tens of thousands of dollars.
Yes - but I learn best off of actual examples, and I find a lot of advice but never find actual examples. Like college applications you have to write your own essay but people sell books full of tons of examples. Obviously it's not something someone would ever write out here, I was just curious if a resource like that existed.
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Jun 8, 2022 23:24
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- No Wave
- Sep 18, 2005
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HA! HA! NICE! WHAT A TOOL!
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I posted a few weeks back about having a bad personality, ie, failing behaviorals. I ended up taking the process seriously and got a job I wanted because for once I was actually prepared (and ofc I also got a little lucky in the technical interviews). I prepared for the Amazon interview (but ended up not applying) and if you're prepared for the amazon process every other behavioral is a piece of cake, just tailor your answers to what you understand the company culture to be. Memorizing 12 or so stock stories sounds onerous when Amazon makes it a required part of the interview process but it helps so, so much at any of the large companies these days.
Also. If you're interviewing remotely and you have multiple monitors, which you should, you can have all your behavioral stories written out in a word file for fast reference and just look for your best example if you draw a blank. You can also have an outline of the components of a large system to make sure you cover them all during the system design portion. If you do all that the only hard part of the interview is LeetCode which we all know about at this point ofc.
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Jul 18, 2022 21:22
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- No Wave
- Sep 18, 2005
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HA! HA! NICE! WHAT A TOOL!
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Reading the blind forums really helped/opened my eyes as to what was actually available in the job market. Seeing people type like channers about 300k+ salaries really motivates you to get back into the job market. I had really bad motivational issues about interview prep until I started reading it.
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Jul 26, 2022 22:05
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- No Wave
- Sep 18, 2005
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HA! HA! NICE! WHAT A TOOL!
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question: what are actual good responses to the question, "what are some of your weaknesses"
because I feel like that question is a trap. you're not supposed to answer truthfully unless it's 1) utterly inconsequential, or 2) easily spun into a strength like "I care too much"
My answer is I have a natural inclination to go straight through a difficult task instead of finding a workaround by changing the requirements, because I mistakenly see hard tasks as a challenge rather than an obstacle. I talk about past experiences where I did something a hard way when I could have easily changed the requirements with better stakeholder interaction, then talk about how I try to fix that now. Your weakness doesn't have to be "what makes you a bad employee", it can be "what has made you a bad employee in the past that you're actively trying to address".
I'm not an interviewer tho so I don't know how many points this gets.
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Aug 1, 2022 13:54
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- No Wave
- Sep 18, 2005
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HA! HA! NICE! WHAT A TOOL!
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The current behavioral interview meta is getting candidates to talk about specifics as much as possible to prove that they are what they represent themselves as. Five years is a medium timeframe so you can talk about why you want to go in a particular direction, preferably by citing your own past experiences. It's also an opportunity to demonstrate why this job specifically is something that will take you where you want to go, indicating that you will be engaged at work. This question, like a lot of interview questions, is hard if you're unemployed and need a job badly, these things are hard to answer well unless you feel like you're choosing between multiple good opportunities.
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Aug 1, 2022 20:24
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- No Wave
- Sep 18, 2005
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HA! HA! NICE! WHAT A TOOL!
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one of my great professional victories was getting stuff like "passion" and "enjoys hard work" removed from all our tech job postings and getting people to ask more questions like "what kind of non computer hobbies do you have" has improved interviews immensely
This is not a good thing for a wide variety of reasons, there isn't any reason to do this. You're asking interviewers to say they like or don't like a candidate because of how they talk about their hobbies and by extension their personal lives.
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Aug 2, 2022 17:39
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- No Wave
- Sep 18, 2005
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HA! HA! NICE! WHAT A TOOL!
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Hobbies aren't an LP, ergo, they have no interview value.
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Aug 2, 2022 17:53
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- No Wave
- Sep 18, 2005
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HA! HA! NICE! WHAT A TOOL!
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another thing computer touchers always need reminding on: you are allowed to lie. just lie. interviews have the same relation to the actual truth as the first 5 minutes of a first date or the first 5 minutes at a used car dealership
There are lies you can get away with easily and ones you can't. A lie that always works is a time you came up with a solution to a difficult problem where you claim a co-worker's idea was your own. It's basically airtight as long as you understand what the solution was. Other lies are harder though if the interviewer starts asking for more and more details.
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Aug 2, 2022 18:00
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- No Wave
- Sep 18, 2005
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HA! HA! NICE! WHAT A TOOL!
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As an interviewee you should definitely be ready for a hobby question though obviously, this whole discussion is proof of that.
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Aug 2, 2022 18:03
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- No Wave
- Sep 18, 2005
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HA! HA! NICE! WHAT A TOOL!
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what's the most diplomatic way to say "upon reflection, there's no amount of money you could pay me to do this job, and i probably could have saved us all some time a week ago"
Thanks so much for reaching out! After looking at the job description I don't think the role is a good match for what I'm looking for, but I appreciate your contacting me. If I change my mind, I'll make sure to get in touch with you in the future.
Thanks,
XXX
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Sep 1, 2022 00:12
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- No Wave
- Sep 18, 2005
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Hi,
Thanks so much for the offer - I really appreciate how much consideration you've shown me throughout this process. Unfortunately, I've decided to go a different direction with my career and won't be able to accept. I apologize for the inconvenience this causes, and wish you and everyone at XXX the best.
Thanks,
XXX
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Sep 1, 2022 01:12
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- No Wave
- Sep 18, 2005
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HA! HA! NICE! WHAT A TOOL!
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I wouldn't mind wearing fewer hats for more money and less stress. I think that having worn the other hats has given me skills that would be beneficial in the single-hat roles. some examples:
- I built our CI pipelines. they run all the automated tests, check for exposed secrets, run security scans and enforce formatting and linting. prs can't be merged without passing pipelines
- I stood up a chunk of our original cloud infrastructure (which has since been replaced properly by a real devops person)
- I built a project template repo that lets us start with a skeleton that has all our formatting and linting rules configured, has a baseline CI template, and will set up your dev environment with the tools we use for managing python versions, venvs, and dependencies. when updates are made to the template it's easy to sync them with projects that are linked to the template, which beats the hell out of "oh, I think project x is the most up to date, you should copy its config". it's pretty slick and I'm proud of it
I think that experience gives me good perspective when writing the actual product code. how will this design decision impact how the project is built and deployed? does this change affect our infrastructure requirements? how will it impact other devs using this code, or having to update and maintain it?
mostly I'm trying to figure out how to get that across
You can literally just say these, these are good examples that your interviewers will want to hear. You'll be asked during behavioral rounds for specific examples of things you did that were good (ie tell us about a time that you X, see Amazon leadership principle prep materials to see the prompts every company is using). Write out your best stories and use them during appropriate prompts, feel free to have a word doc open with them on your other monitor. You'll still have to do the leetcode thing if you want figgies.
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Oct 4, 2022 01:13
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Feb 6, 2025 22:35
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- No Wave
- Sep 18, 2005
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HA! HA! NICE! WHAT A TOOL!
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guess these feelings were there because i got a rejection. 3 points brought up, solution was to stateful and fragile, i tied up some writing to a persistant log and some network requests together so that would lead to a nightmare of errors, and i didn't mention resource management at all.
the last one is a huge goof that as an ios engineer i should have considered from the jump, and once i read those words i immediately came up with what i think would be an adequate solution. it's definitely better than what i came up with.
either way feels bad. i'm going to take a break and try to come up with a study plan. my job doesn't give me enough experience in certain situations and can not provide them at all for others(sole ios eng so any knowledge gained from team interactions i have to read about or recall from my previous job). maybe i'll build an app of my own to get some experience in technologies i don't touch during work.
i feel like layoffs are coming for my org so studying instead of interviewing is hard to come to terms with, but interviewing in this way has only resulted in a single offer in the past 2 years.
I find it helpful always thinking and articulating in terms of trade offs. After you mention a proposed solution you can talk about which design goals it meets, what the downsides are, and why those downsides are acceptable given the outlined scenario. If the interviewer feels differently, that the downside you mentioned isn't acceptable, they'll usually tell you and give you a chance to fix your implementation.
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Jun 12, 2023 15:54
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