Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 350: Bombing a technical interview and background vetting

Episode Date: April 3, 2023

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Hi, have you ever been through a technical interview and bombed a question? I did, and it feels awful, especially when the question was easy but I couldn’t focus due to time pressure and stress. Do you have any tips for dealing with interview anxiety, and get rid of the bitter feeling if the interview goes bad? Thanks! A listener Dustin asks, ‌ Do tech companies or recruiters dig into our individual backgrounds during the hiring process? Also is there a bias towards part-time courses vs. Full-time? To keep it short, I’m 28 and from 18-22, I was homeless and involved with specific substances. Ultimately got on my feet around the age of 23 and now I’m currently attending university, part-time while working full-time. I have noticed a bias from full-time students towards part-time and I’m wondering if this happens as well in regards to employers?

It takes more than spending three hours to understand your SaaS vendor's pricing model only to conclude that it is unknowable and you have wasted your time. This, oh, sorry, to be a great engineer. This. Just in life. This is Soft Skills Engineering episode 350.

I'm your host, Dave Smith. I'm your host, Jameson Dance. Soft Skills Engineering is a weekly advice podcast for software developers and occasionally those who want to understand how much things cost and conclude that you cannot. Imagine if like gas worked that way. Like there's not a price. You have like tiered usage-based billing that also depends on your enterprise contract you have negotiated with 7-Eleven.

You get a certain amount of refund credits if you spend up to X dollars. As soon as you see the word credit, you know you are never going to understand your actual costs. Yeah. Usage-based billing sounds so simple. Like, oh, you use a thing and then you pay for it. Just pay for what you use. Yeah.

And then spend the next six months trying to figure out what you paid for. Yeah. And if you used it, actually. What does use mean here? Also, I'm going to have to do a commit to a certain amount of spending two years in advance. Yeah. pay for what you use and you will use this yeah no for me it's more like pay for what you use

and a three hundred thousand dollar a year contract that i negotiate with you yeah whichever is great for your audacity of wanting to use our product pay for it pay for my enterprise sales reps time that's what i'm paying for to use yeah i guess they didn't say what the usage was um yeah that's true it's time on the phone with the sales rep yeah all right uh that's not what this show is about though do you want to thank our patrons so so much i want to thank you to systematic guy anthony ungaro kyle boss connie lee santa hopar noah frazier loge kent c dodds jenny kim owen chardo craig motlin i love mavis the stochastic parrot alice jost ganandon hooten ohio patreon.com.au we're hiring ira chan monkey face emoji jonathan king testing

is documenting.org oladapofadje will angel pronounce like that town in ohio slash scotland with an unpronounceable name ernga nick hathaway travis sanders braden canes john grant bartek tatkowski cody sell nick cantar and philip john basile thank you thank you so much to this crew this group of people slash places slash companies or domain names at least if you would like to support the podcast you can go to softskills.audio and click support us on patreon where any dollar amount will get you invited to our slack team and the joy of interacting with a group of other people who have contributed any dollar amount which is a pretty good filter for for good folk i have to say and if you contribute up to a certain level then you will get a one-time or

weekly shout out thank you yes we appreciate it it is above a certain level jameson and yeah we're switching to a greater than or equal we're switching to a credit system it's usage based so it depends on the amount of characters in the message yes yeah oh my commit a minimum commit minimum spend it's 4700 characters or sorry 4700 credits per character there's a special rate for emojis and if you go above the free tier there's a new rate and also for really high volume characters there's a different rate it's all very simple i'm getting a like free to play mobile game vibe from this is there some way to get gems definitely there's gonna be gems you can go to our store and exchange your credits for gems or coins yeah

we promise not to email you and say hey i've noticed you can optimize stuff where optimize means you pay us a lot more money yes go more go faster oh yeah okay we'll enunciate more clearly i guess i don't know somehow it'll be good for you don't worry also you'll pay us a lot more money definitely the last thing definitely the last thing some some cynicism coming out okay let's get to the questions all right this comes from an anonymous listener says hi have you ever been through a technical interview and bombed a question i did and it feels awful especially when the question was easy but i couldn't focus due to time pressure and stress

do you have any tips for dealing with interview anxiety and get rid of this bitter feeling if the interview goes bad thanks oh my goodness so relatable i have i think i have one question i bombed the most stuck in my mind and it was a brain teaser puzzle that i've talked about on this podcast before because it's stuck in my mind okay and my tip for dealing with it and getting rid of the bitter feeling is transfer all of my upset feelings about not doing well on this question in front of other people, to anger at the company for daring to ask me a question I would do poorly on. I didn't do bad on it. They showed poor judgment in asking such a stupid question, where stupid means I don't know how to answer it. I'm not smart enough to answer it.

I do have, I think, legitimate objections to how that is a good filter for someone going to be a good software developer or not but it's hard for me to objectively step back and separate those legitimate objections from the grumpiness that just struggling for half an hour on a whiteboard in front of people in front of people who are just sitting there with their arms folded sighing yeah and they keep asking what seem to be very pointed questions about like well what if you considered this thing i'm like i then i would be stuck then i would not knowing i would remain if i considered that yeah so that's worked pretty well for me

i actually i don't think i've gone through a like technical gauntlet interview process like what you'd find at one of the mega tech companies of of like you really have to study hard and and they're they're this this genre of tough technical questions i don't think i've gone through that and i imagine i would fail pretty hard i have so and that's when i bombed in fact i wrote a whole blog post about this experience seven years ago and i never posted it it just it's still i actually i'm just pulling it up and looking at it right now it's sitting in my drafts i see you you use the transfer all of your failure to anger at the company to fuel a blog post a blog post which has remained unpublished why why not publish it i don't know well so i

probably should at this point it's probably okay to publish it yeah so this was at one of the big techcos and i uh i basically described my interview experience through all the sessions there were let's see six sessions including a lunch it was an all-day event it was in seattle if that gives any clues as to where anyway it was rough so i remember i got up to the whiteboard this is one of those questions where you write your code with a marker in your hand as we do as practitioners that's totally normal the question was fairly simply stated i actually made a even though i absolutely bombed the question and didn't end up getting the right answer a i still got the job and b i i decided in that moment i was like i don't think i'm going to be

able to answer this question this is kind of my recovery mode when i can't answer a technical question that's it's and it's not like a knowledge question you know it's more like a solve a problem question my fallback is explore if you can't answer the question with a solution fully explore the problem instead and so i did i actually got up on the whiteboard and started writing unit tests so i wrote out like six unit tests and i kind of i then checked with the interviewer you know like hey does this adequately express the problem space that we're trying to solve and the interviewer was kind of like yes and that was pretty much the only word he said to me the whole session like He just was completely...

And then you ran out of time. You're like, oops, guess I can't reveal my solution. Oh, I had so many good ideas. But it would pass these tests. Yes. And then I started writing the code and I realized, oh man, I'm in trouble. Like I just, I could not provide an answer. And so I kind of got a portion of it implemented on the whiteboard and then failed and then

failed and then failed. And then we ran out of time. And I can only attribute the fact that I got a job offer to the fact that I put in a lot of work to fully understand the scope of the problem and just demonstrate that i can really work through a problem space you know enough that the interviewer is willing to give me a green check mark so it was rough though yeah i actually i i do remember a technical question that i bombed on and i think i felt a kind of similar vibe to that puzzle or brain teaser question but much less strong because the question was much more focused on writing code to solve a problem as

opposed to an aha moment as opposed to like yeah yeah like yeah it was literally like a riddle yeah do you remember do you remember that question i do i think if i look it up it's the bridge and torch problem oh yes i guess it's not it's not a riddle it's not a brain teaser and you can translate this into like technical i don't know requirements that is totally a brain sure i did not in my opinion i sure yeah i didn't do it and i would probably do poorly on other problems of this nature like the people getting across the river in a boat or yep i don't know there's yeah i just i don't yeah i hate those questions you're right to feel bitter some people like them and i could see how there's potential overlap from being amazing at these questions and amazing

at like defining and solving hard complex technical problems but maybe boys they're not it's not obvious a lot of ways to be good at software that aren't solving the bridge and and vice versa yeah yeah that's true and maybe maybe more importantly you could be really good at solving the bridge and torch problem like wow i've never seen such an amazing explanation to that problem that only has one answer yeah that i am i'm actually i guess what people are testing for when they give that question in an interview is have you googled this brain teaser in the past i mean there are some questions like that i think i think somebody could figure this out but that was not me in this interview yeah i don't do well with those either myself

i i did have an interview that had a like a graph traversal problem and that was a more technical question the more like i don't know you traverse graphs sometimes in in software and i failed at I think it was like a graph coloring problem, if I'm trying to remember the specifics. Oh, was it the bipartite problem? Probably. And I think I know the name of the person who gave you that. And I think it was at a company I was working at. Yeah, I think I interviewed at a company that Dave worked at and did not get an offer.

That's right. And my boss loves that. He loves that question. Bipartite. It happens to be applicable to graph coloring or to map coloring. Map coloring, that's right. I think. But yeah, bipartite, separating a graph into nodes that are connected directly versus every...

I can't remember. it's like a it's an okay problem yeah that one felt less unfair yeah like i don't care about this and i think you're dumb for caring about it like i could see how it wasn't quite that but i did not do well i did not solve it yeah correctly in my memory did not get a job offer well that was because i worked there and they asked for my you blocked my application i think this was before the podcast so before we made a truce over this before we agreed we would we would not block each other's applications anymore yeah yeah oh man but i think that one felt less unfair and more like i don't know maybe i should go learn some of this stuff and then i didn't and then i uh well not

learn i don't know i i took cs classes i did graph things but i i did not reproduce them correctly on the whiteboard. And then I just interviewed at more places and passed other interviews. And that probably helped my confidence more than if I had gone back and rigorously solved the problem that I got stuck on. Although that could help too. It's just not going to do any... I don't know. You're not going to be able to go back to the interview and say, guess what? Hey, remember when I failed? I'm ready to pass it now if you ask me the same question. Hey, remember nine years ago when you gave me this interview question? Yeah.

Yeah, I think that's a great point. I think the more you interview and the more successes that you can accumulate in your success bin, the less bad you will feel about the ones you failed. Understanding that failure at interview is just kind of a natural part of doing the interview. And the more failures you can rack up and the more successes you can, well, hopefully you can rack up more successes than failures. That will help. Yeah.

But if you can just get even a few great successes, I think it'll go really a long way to not feeling so bad about the ones you bombed yeah i think passing an interview is a lot to do with the combination of the kinds of things that people are evaluating in the interview and the kinds of things that you present in an interview yeah and and ideally passing an interview would mean that you can do the job well but in practice it doesn't mean that it means like you you look good on the stuff they ask you in the interview which is not often what the job involves and maybe that's the other technique is telling yourself and believing that your own self-worth and value as a human being, and even professional skill as a software engineer, is not really gauged by the outcomes of

these interviews. It is a non-deterministic test about your skill that doesn't hold a ton of water. And if you can convince yourself of that, and I believe that, then I think you will feel less bad. i think another thing that would help me i haven't done this but now i want to is is just go pick the the developers you respect the most and ask them to tell you about a time they bombed guaranteed all of them will have one like yeah the the the finest developers in the world however you define that have all just bombed technical interviews oh yeah and and it's i don't know it's kind of a universal thing it absolutely is and i mean you and i both have stories and we're good developers i'm not the finest developer in the world i'll admit it i've

it's it's out there you deserved you deserve finally coming clean to fail those interviews some of them i certainly did me too i got i have a couple more ideas yeah one is try to get an opportunity to be on the other side of the interview table and you'll start to calibrate what good interviewing looks like and you might find that you're not that bad you know you'll see a lot of people. You don't know what bad looks like. Is that what you mean? You haven't seen the full extrema of good and bad. You've only seen your own performance in an interview, but get on the other side of it. And it'll also give you some empathy because you'll see so many people struggling in the hot seat that you'll start to feel better about your own performance

there, I think. Yeah. I like that. Tips for dealing with interview anxiety. I honestly don't have a strategy beyond, if you can, getting more interviews so that failure in an individual interview, while painful, is less of a blow to your job prospects. If you have one interview lined up... And it's your only chance. Yeah. I mean, you will likely be anxious no matter what the situation is going into an interview. But if it's like, I have to pass this or I do not have a job then those stakes are pretty high yeah there's nothing you could do to not feel nervous about that yeah yeah most people would feel nervous and and i don't know other tips yeah if you do a lot of them you also you get better at interviewing you just there's a there's

a skill you don't practice a lot in the real day-to-day of talking about the kind of work that you do instead of doing the kind of work you do that's right talking about the work instead of doing the work that's a good point i have a that's exactly what i was going to suggest next i have a friend who, he identified in himself a weakness for certain types of interview questions. And he knew that I had been on the other side of the table on hundreds of interviews over the recent years for that specific type of question. So he actually asked me if I would interview him in a mock interview. And I did. We spent one hour in a room together and I gave him a marker and a whiteboard. And I just threw one of my interview questions that I've given to a whole bunch of

candidates and we worked through it and it was great and then afterwards this is the great part about practicing with a friend afterwards we could talk about what he did whereas in a in a real interview context they will very rarely give you that kind of detail and so i was making notes while we interviewed and i i had a whole bunch of you know because i've seen a bunch of people work this problem before i had a whole bunch of ideas for him from things i had seen other people do and it was great and so i'm like you know it's way less pressure when you're doing a mock interview with your friend and if you can accustom get accustomed to the pressure or let me put it another way generate synthetic pressure the same way you generate synthetic load for your software

when the stakes are low yeah maybe put together a interview practice group at work of all the disaffected engineers that want to get other jobs hey we're practicing interviewing your manager dress we're practicing working what at the next place we're gonna work what are you doing don't worry about it have we answered the question i think so great good luck you're not alone and there are ways to lessen the anxiety but not eliminate it yes should i read our next question go for it this is from a listener named dustin who asks do tech companies or recruiters dig into individual backgrounds during the hiring process also is there a bias towards part-time students versus full-time to keep it short i'm 28 and from 18 to 22 i was homeless and involved with specific

substances ultimately i got out on my feet around the age of 23 and now i'm currently attending university part-time while working full-time i have noticed a bias from full-time students against part-time students and i wonder if this happens as well in regards to employers Oh, great question. Yeah. Yeah, there's a couple of questions here. One is about kind of background in general. Another one is about...

Biases. What kind of student you are, I guess, or what... Or were. What kind is the wrong way to put it? How you attended school? I don't know. Are you a part-time or full-time student? The number of hours, right?

Something like that. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's the easy one. I think let's tackle that one first. Well, it seems easy to me. We'll see in a minute here. But once you get out of university and employers bring you on,

Whether you were a part-time or full-time student, in my experience, has never come up. It doesn't matter in the least. In fact, virtually nothing I achieved, nothing I worked so hard for in my university days has had any airtime at all in my professional life once I got my first job. But until I got my first job, it was like everything, you know? Yeah. Although even in that process, I don't think the interviewers cared if I was part-time or full-time. Yeah.

I think the fact that you are working full-time already, I'm assuming this is working as a software developer, but if that's the case, then I would say that probably carries a lot more weight than whether you are a full-time or part-time student. In fact, if you were working full-time and a full-time student, I think it would be harder to get a job. I would be wary of hiring a software developer who is attending school full-time just because that's a lot of time, commitment, and it'd be hard to do both those things at the same time. Do you think there's any bias one way or another on the hiring front

when you're getting ready to graduate? I don't think so. Again, I think the fact that you have full-time professional experience way outweighs, frankly, probably even whether you went to school or not for it, but also what type of attendance you had. Yeah, I agree with that. I haven't seen that. it sucks that the students are being snooty about it though it does that's kind of silly i wonder but also there could be some ageism going on here so instead of like it might not be part-time full-time fully it could also be you're 28 that's so old i remember there was a 26 or 20

like mid later 20s student who had worked for a while and then had gone back was going back to to school to get a cs degree but they were cool we liked them but but they did stick out a little bit as someone different how do you do fellow young people yeah they were very efficient at getting through school yeah you could tell they were there to get the stuff done i'm not here to goof off yeah yeah i was like well i am i'm here to goof off a little bit i don't understand what else there is all right should we talk about background checks that was another question here Or do recruiters or companies dig into your individual backgrounds during the hiring process? What do you think, Jameson?

Have you seen this? I have gone through background checks. I'm trying to remember if I... I remember very clearly the background check at the Megatech Co. Because the UI was... Or mega company I worked for. The UI to start it was really painful. I feel like maybe I said something like,

sure, you can check my background for some of the other jobs I've worked. But I don't remember it at all. So I actually don't remember directly from experience how much my background has been checked. I think we do background checks in my current employer. I'll bet you do. So I think I did one. I'll bet you do.

In fact, it's so common that most applicant tracking systems, that's the software they use to track hiring and stuff. Most of them have this feature built in where you can just click a button and boom, you get an automatic background check and it'll do like a criminal records check and things like that. So that's pretty common in my experience just as a built-in part of the process. So that will probably come up, depending on if you have a criminal record, that will probably be something you have to answer.

I haven't seen any candidates fail them. So I don't know what happens. Or I don't know, fail is the wrong word. Be flagged. Yeah, exactly. So I probably hired 30 or 40 people over the last couple of years. And I think probably 60, 70% of them just came through and it just puts a green mark by their name.

And it's like, there's nothing to see here. And then the other third, it will say things like, there are things in here you might want to look at. and you click into it and it'll say stuff. And then you got to make a judgment call. So it will probably come up. This will probably be something you need to prepare for. Like if I had, I mean, let's talk about what some of these substances might be. I mean, obviously we're talking about diet soft drinks, I think. Yes. The famed diet seven up addiction. I mean, that's probably, you know, you're going to need a story to talk about that. You know,

some kind of narrative to, to put your, the mind at ease of your recruiter or hiring manager. that whatever it was was in your past and that you are no longer involved in that and have no intention of ever becoming involved in it again you know whether true or not just kidding um you say as you stroke the case of diet seven under your desk nothing soft about this drink but yeah you'll need to prepare and i would probably role play that to be ready for the question like hey it says here you had a criminal case or whatever you know conviction of this or that be ready to talk about it and you might want to practice it with a friend would you bring it up ahead of time or just let it i would not because there's a chance you roll the dice

and it doesn't actually come up right and and i would bank on that chance don't don't force it to come up you know the right number on the dice yeah bank on it not coming up because it might not i i am i'm unfortunate because i have the opposite problem my name is David Smith. So anytime anyone runs my background, they get like 400 criminal records hits for people who aren't me. And so my story is always, it wasn't me. It must have been some other Dave Smith. And they're like, okay. No, actually sometimes that turns into a pain. I'm like, look, I've had to go back. I've had to go the rounds a couple of times. Like I remember once signing a lease agreement. I proved that it wasn't you. Yeah. It took a while anyway. Yeah. That must

be famed serial tulip ripper upper dave smith not me responsible dave smith i never rip up tulips yeah i think you should be you should expect some offers to get rescinded from this it just i don't know probably will happen there there might be some legal protection depending on your your background and the place you live but certainly in some countries it will be an option to say actually we don't want to hire this person because of some some background stuff and they may not even tell you right they might just say yeah yeah they might just go dark yeah yeah might just ghost you and sometimes they although sometimes they do the offer first and then run background contingent on passing a background check yeah yeah and sometimes they won't even

say it out loud and then they'll just at that point it's going to be very clear what happened to you right like you'll you'll know yeah so it might happen i hope it doesn't happen also sometimes the check happens after you accept the offer oh boy well yeah interesting that's true i'm thinking about that that's true i have that is how i think it usually works actually because it takes some time yeah and and you might need to so so one way like it might be a numbers game you might need you might need more offers to end at one accepted offer that will deal with the stuff in your background check and you might also have to accept multiple offers and then reject some of them and and that's tricky because they usually have a start date and then if like yeah i don't

know there's there's some it'll be more complicated yeah that is more complicated because you got to commit to a date and then they're gonna start the background check after you accept the offer and then oh man that's that's tough you can't you also makes it harder to shop offers against each other too because you know ideally you'd get three offers and you don't have to answer any of them until you've gotten all three of them, you know, or some whatever number you want, right? Yeah. So this is why I'm wondering what the cost of revealing it at offer time is. That's a good point. Because if they're going to say no to you because of something in your past, they're either going to say no to it now, or they're going to say no to it after they discover

it, which may happen because you ran a background check, or it may happen a year into the job. You know, so maybe maybe we should maybe it would be best to disclose that earlier rather than finding out six months into your job that you that it was a deal breaker, you know, because your point was it might not show up on the background check. You might be able to test that. I'm sure you can like run your own background check. That's a good idea and see what pops up. Yeah, you know, an easy way to do that would be to go to one of these landlord websites where you are like pretending you could pretend to own a rental property and then run background checks for people. Just run it for yourself. Yeah.

yeah kind of feels like we're we're getting dangerously into legal territory here and as we all know we are we are space lawyers not earth lawyers yes so we will give valid space law advice and i think my valid space law advice is if you feel like stuff will show up on the background check i would bring it up when there's an offer extended to you because at that point they they want you they've yeah they've committed some amount already right if if you do it in the interview stage then that might just they might say they might weigh your interview differently and say all right we're gonna offer this other candidate instead or whatever so so there's some amount of they've invested a bit in you already yeah and if you have a really coherent clear story

for why this happened and why it's not going to affect your your future performance then then that's the time to kind of prep them for it maybe so so like hey this is something i had in my past and and i've i've learned and grown a lot since then it's been x number of years since i've whatever and and here's the the systems i have set up to help me and i don't know i would workshop that and practice it but tell them i want to let you know in case stuff comes up on the background check and and can you help me understand how you would react to that is is this a deal breaker for you or do you feel like we could still work together right because i don't think it is i don't think it is either i mean it might depend a little on the on the thing well yeah i guess

you probably want to say you don't think it is yeah yeah if it's like white collar crime from deleting someone's source code yes at your previous software developer company then that'd be a bit of a problem i embezzled millions of credits and gems i used to work for candy crush sales platform yeah and i have so many coins now there was that guy who worked at microsoft who i think stole a bunch of like microsoft store gift cards figured out how to generate them oh man did you hear that story ever no yeah that seems like it could be relevant to yeah that could be right yeah oh boy yeah i mean i think one One gut feel-based thing I'll say is I think in software, you might have a better time

finding work that is okay with stuff coming up in the background check, depending on what it is, because of the fancy white-collar privilege that gets associated with software development. Right. Also, the risk levels are lower. And I say risk levels. You're not going to steal petty cash from the company. Right, right.

There's no petty cash. this deal. Let me restate, the perception of risk, I think, will be lower among software development employers compared to other employers that, for example, send people into homes of pearl-clutching people, people with sensitivities to that. You're not going to be surrounded by the petty cash, like Jameson said, and so on. So it's like, yeah. And frankly, I have hired people with criminal pasts, and I have just no problem with it for those people. It didn't concern me whatsoever maybe that's because they had a really good story but anyway yeah i do believe this is a great industry for that because a lot of the reasons whether fake or or justified

or not that people put up for not hiring people with a criminal history are actually not that relevant in software development we have tons of criminals i mean just look at the look at all the billionaires just look at look at web three yeah oh i've been resisting men making mention of ftx i i'll make them i'm sure there are good people that work in crypto but or the the theranos yeah i mean yeah that's that could be an option go work in crypto yeah go work in finance crypto yeah any number of opportunities for you okay have we answered the question we have we've insulted an industry i'm so sorry i know people who are not criminals who work in crypto but also most of the criminals that i am aware of in the technology

the industry seem to be working in crypto so i'm just saying oh boy all right what should people do if they want their own questions answered okay go to soft skills.audio and click the ask a question form thank you so much to everyone who asks us questions every week we love your questions please keep them coming you should see the way jameson's face lights up when he opens up the web page with all the questions on it oh it's it's like christmas every week maybe you can see it if you go to youtube we've got our shows posted up on there now if that's a way for you to listen and you want to see our heads and listen to our voices the most common reaction we get in the comments of the videos is so that's what you look like that is not at all what i thought you looked

like yeah and it's never you're so much more beautiful that's right than i imagined all right thank you so much for listening we'll catch you later