Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 369: Staying at a sinking ship and behavioral interview questions

Episode Date: August 14, 2023

This episode is sposored by OneSchema, the best way to build CSV import into your product. Check OneSchema out at https://oneschema.co/softskills In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: My employer offered a retention bonus after: The CTO left two weeks after I arrived Two weeks later 1/4 of the staff was laid off Two weeks after that the COO left Two weeks after that 2 board members resigned Three or Four weeks after that the Director of Engineering left What does that mean? What do I look out for? I discovered your podcast just about 2 weeks ago and I love it, and I listen to them daily when driving to office, this make forced RTO feels a little bit better. I am currently a mid to senior SWE at FAANG. For the past 1.5 years I have been trying to interview for other opportunities at Staff level. I have good result with coding and design interview but I felt like I’m always falling short at behavioral questions. Example is “Tell me a time when you have a conflict”. How do I go about showing seniority in these type of questions? I led a few projects and powered through a lot of conflicts to deliver results at my company, at the same time I can’t think of a particular methodology I used to get through them. There were times I compromised, pushed back hard, meet halfway depends on situation. I dont want to show i’m a pushover at the same I don’t want to show i’m not easy to work with. What are the signals they are looking for for a Staff level engineer in behavoral style questions

it takes more than running an a a test and proclaiming everything is under control to be a great engineer this is soft skills engineering episode 369 i'm your host dave smith i'm your host jameson dance soft skills engineering is a weekly advice podcast for software developers who just want to keep everything under control but sometimes want to keep everything under treatment i don't eat the same thing for breakfast every day because i'm boring it's because i'm running an a a test i'm just trying to keep everything under control yeah i didn't not change my shirt because i'm a slob no it's very scientific i have actually okay in a former job we did an a a test because we were

suspicious about the the pipeline that was oh doing the statistical crunching to assign significance to things how many of these things originated with a question that can't be right well it yeah we we we did an a test and they were quick to point out oh something clearly significant here and uh and we had to tell them actually we didn't change anything so you tricked the experiment infrastructure team i'm pretty sure it was because we wanted to do something and there was there was a test that showed a tiny teeny tiny decrease in some metric that hit some threshold of significance and we were like that can't be the case we basically used it to challenge the idea of ab testing it's really beautiful actually i mean it

whether oh yeah that is really amazing i had never thought to do an aa test to test your ab testing framework but that's really cool yeah that's one of those really clever that's not what this is about all right sorry everything's under control let's get back into the show dave do you want to thank our wonderful no i do i want you to if if what you were trying to ask is do i want you to thank our patrons the answer is yes do you want to tell me to thank our wonderful yes yes i do that's what will happen right now thank you too nick cantar brayden canes john grant travis nick hathaway oladapo fadier ragnar jonathan king webtau awesome n10 testing will angel monkey face emoji ira chan patreon.com we're hiring tuscarora

someplace in ohio craig motley i love mavis alice jost owen chardall jenny kim cody sale can see dots noah frazier lobe the reelect jameson dance committee santa hope are the reelect jameson dance boogie brigade the computer science book.com trash panda and one-time shout outs to quit my job got new job starting soon freaking freaking out need urgent access to slack things sarah french and vernon kesner thank you so much oh thank you so much we appreciate it you keep the show going you pay for the the copious amounts of delicate and fancy cheeses dave requires to maintain his decadent lifestyle which is a requirement for doing the podcast. It keeps my voice fresh for this microphone. Yeah. Coat it. That throat is

coated in cheese all the time. The syllables just flow out. It's so smooth. If you contribute any amount, you get an invite to our Slack team. So it's coming. Quit my job. Got a new job starting soon. Need urgent access to Slack. We got you. And if you contribute enough, then we'll shout you out one or many times, depending on how much enough you do. I'm actually tempted to go and give quit my job got new job starting soon freaking out need urgent access to slack thanks an early invitation to our slack community for that name they did say it was urgent all right i'm gonna i'm gonna make that happen right now on on the air there we go when you hear this later just know you quit my job got new job starting soon freaking out person you got early access

all right well now that that's done do you want to ask me if i want to read the next question or the first question i i don't i just want you to read it okay all right this comes from an anonymous listener who says my employer offered me a retention bonus after and here comes a bulleted list of five things number one the cto left two weeks after i arrived number two two weeks later one fourth of the staff was laid off number three two weeks after that the coo left number four two weeks after that two board members resigned and number five three or four weeks after that the director of engineering left what does this mean what should i look out for what should i look out for i like that yeah what should you look out for

screwed up this company what'd you do look at this high impact i'm just gonna yeah on your linkedin just for this one just wrote made a huge impact on the company at all levels cut costs by millions oh my goodness even the board of directors good work well i believe what it means is the company is going out of business that's possible oh yeah what do i look out for this is really scary your paycheck bouncing that's that's your first sign i just have this image of a software engineer picking up a paper paycheck from the front desk on their way out of the office. Just going to walk. I'm actually just

going to skip and whistle down to the bank. Deposit the check. Sir, this check has bounced. Curses. Rats again. Same thing happened to my last paycheck. For the third time in a row. That retention bonus is coming though. Yeah, this seems like all is not well, certainly, which I assume you have gathered. Yeah. I mean, the retention bonus is an obvious reaction to huge attrition huge this is a big deal i mean they did it it's interesting that they did a 25 layoff and all these people left and now they're offering retention bonuses to the ones that are remaining yeah i mean i assume they're worried that everyone is thinking what we are saying which is that they're worried folks will assume the company

is dying and go quit and get a different job so they're trying to avoid and maybe it's not maybe Maybe the company's not dying. It's possible that this was actually all part of the grand plan for this company. Maybe that CTO is terrible. I think it is a unique experience to ride something to the ground. And if you are a paid employee, you get to observe it from a bit of a remove. I mean, you still are invested in the success of the company and theoretically kind of want it to do well maybe you have some equity you're not like a co-founder you're not an investor in it though so if the paychecks are still arriving then you kind of get a close-up view of like a volcano erupting or something that's kind of cool yeah i think i think it would be

interesting if i felt pretty secure in in either the money continuing or and me having enough warning to no it wouldn't or my ability to quickly get a different job right right i mean if i didn't like the job already then the level of fun you can have depends a lot on your next step and how sure that is otherwise it's just all worry yeah that's true if you if you have an urgent need to not miss a paycheck then certainly less fun to watch your paycheck volcano erupt that's right oh man i i think i would stay and ask a lot of questions about the health of the business and maybe you would get straightforward answers maybe not but i mean your job as a software developer is is somewhat removed from the day-to-day business metrics but i think we've

talked a lot about how it can be valuable to be able to position your work as more directly related to the business and and where am i going with this i think that's a way to increase your value to the companies is like connect what you're doing to the business value this is sort of like the opposite direction is like you want you want the company to push more business information to you so you know more about what is going on and can make better decisions so you can decide what to stay or go to stay and maybe there's get fired and then get a severance or to leave early and not get the severance yeah i mean that's i think you're saying maybe the folks who are laid off got severance i don't know if that's what you're saying what are you saying yeah i mean i'm saying

i am making an assumption here but i assume that if you get let go the chance of getting a severance check on your way out the door is much higher than if you leave of your own accord which by the way the chance of you getting a severance check when you leave of your own accord is zero but the chance of getting one if they fire you is non-zero i'm also going to assume this is a startup they didn't say that explicitly but if if you know that the board members resigned either it's like in the news or it's a startup yeah and oh i swear i had a point here what was the point oh yeah i was going to talk about burn rate a number that i whatever my role in a startup a number i always want to know is is well two numbers i guess burn rate and and runway and

i'm consistently surprised by folks who work at a startup and don't think about that like there's a trade-off you're making which is this company is not sustainable and it will run out of money at some point unless stuff changes where that either means we're going to become profitable or we're going to raise more money but there's there's like an end date built in to how the company works and some people don't really know that or think about it so if you don't know what those numbers are i i would find them out i would ask right away what's our burn rate what's our runway or tell me as much as you can about those if you can't share the exact numbers yep that's a good thing to know something i think sometimes that information stresses engineers out which

is why they yeah kind of intuitively just shy away from knowing it i'll tell you it's more stressful though getting laid out your company ran out of money yeah yeah that's having no idea it's happening. That's pretty stressful. Yeah, I guess I think everyone should know when you go into a startup that the vast majority of startups are actively losing money during the startup phases. And vanishingly, few of them turn into companies that make money. And by definition, if you lose money for long enough, you will stop existing because it's very rare for a startup to pivot to a charity where everyone is a volunteer and they keep working. Maybe there's a scandal here i mean we've been talking about the health of the business maybe like the co-founder murdered

the other co-founder and all these people are finding out one by one and leaving and leaving this first the cto it's like an it's like clue the movie you know yeah maybe they're actually being murdered ah yeah laid off is even darker than what terminated yeah what did you think it meant you have stumbled onto the set of a murder mystery unfolding in real time the bad one was when quarter of the staff got terminated that was pretty yeah that was yeah that was there's a lot of manual labor to dig all the holes oh man all right this took a turn for the dark would you negotiate your retention bonus yeah sure why not they're offering a retention bonus means it's they're they're like you have some leverage here you might not normally have as just an

employee of a company who wants to stay at that company. I mean, just for future reference, Jameson, if you ever feel inclined to ask me, would you negotiate? You don't even have to finish the sentence. The answer for me is pretty much always yes. Would you negotiate? Wait for it. I don't know. I can't think of anything. I was hoping for something good. I don't know. The length of the handshake when you see someone in person for the first time. Excuse me. Can we shake hands just a little longer? I promise to make it worth your while. what oh what do you get in return well i mean besides my clammy hands presence against the palm of your hand for an extra few seconds i don't know i didn't say i'd be good at negotiating i

just would like to do it something about microbiome you're gonna pass your healthy bacteria onto them try that that'd be a good way to negotiate down the length of the handshake i mean retention bonuses are by definition well at least not by definition in this case there definitely is a leverage imbalance and it's it's a good thing for you as the employee because they obviously have a problem on their hands that they're trying to solve and they understand that that they're about to face a pretty serious attrition at least that's the risk that they perceive so they're coming at you with a retention bonus to try to keep you that's normal i don't always see retention incentives come out after layoffs it kind of

depends on the market conditions that are around you you know if people but basically if people have options for other employment, and they've just done a morale killer, like layoffs, then retention table is a good tool to reach for. And so could you negotiate it? Sure, you could. And I think, you know, you might be negotiating, it's kind of funny, because you might be negotiating, essentially converting runway into your retention bonus. Yeah, so yeah, you got to be mindful of that. Yeah, I was just thinking about that. If these are partially financial difficulties then they might just say yes to whatever knowing that they will never actually be able to pay it yeah it's like if you stay for six more months we'll pay you a retention

bonus of half your salary and they're like we have three months of runway if we can raise money in the next three months we won't care about the retention bonus cash won't make a difference yeah if not we'll all be out on the street anyway have we answered the question i think so i mean this is what you look out for i think you've already seen everything you needed to be looking out for so does it get very literal about the question what do I look out for you've already seen the biggest worst stuff I think at this point now just watch for paychecks to start

bouncing I think that really is the next thing yeah good luck sorry I feel bad that we laughed a little bit maybe a little bit too much it's just like so extreme and talked about murdering people I know we went to weird places I don't think laughing was the worst part of what we just said

I'm so sorry I don't know where that came from let's get out of here Jameson, have I told you my one rule? There's a lot of one rules. Hit me with this one rule. My one rule is never build your own CSV importer. My one rule is to never say never.

Well, building a CSV importer always seems like it would be so simple. It's just commas, new lines. How hard could it be? Well, no. Have you heard of byte order marks, escaping, header mappings? Oh, you need Excel format too? oh and your users have comma separated values inside their comma separated values i've actually tried to do this at a previous company we tried to build our own csv import

and it was almost done for like six months yeah because to get it working in just the initial setup is pretty swift yeah and then there's so much extra that goes into it to really polish it to give error handling and user feedback and handling all the unexpected stuff that isn't like the test data that you feed into it before you call it done. Well, I have good news for you. There's a new product that I wish had existed for the last 20 years to save me from myself. It's called One Schema.

One Schema provides an API that takes care of the pain of building CSV imports. It gives you automatic field mapping, data validation, and much more. Get world-class CSV import into your product without reinventing the comma-separated wheel. Go to oneschema.co slash softskills. that's o-n-e schema dot co slash soft skills i'm gonna read the next question okay okay okay and not joke about murdering people in the answer i appreciate that let's do it thank you this is from a listener named calvin 17 who says i discovered your podcast about two weeks ago and i love it

and i listen to it daily when driving to the office this makes forced rto feel a little bit better what is oh return to office i was like yes recovery time objective okay uh i am currently a mid to senior software engineer at fang for the past 1.5 years i've been trying to interview for other opportunities at staff level i have good results with coding and design interviews but i felt like i'm always falling short at behavioral questions an example is tell me a time when you had a conflict. How do I go about showing seniority in these type of questions? I have led a few projects and powered through a lot of conflicts to deliver results at my company. At the same time, I can't think of a particular methodology I use to get through them. There are times where I

compromised, pushed back hard, met halfway. It depends on the situation. I don't want to show I'm a pushover. At the same time, I don't want to show I'm not easy to work with. What are the signals they are looking for from a staff level engineer in behavioral style questions? Good. Good question. We haven't really done a lot of interviewing questions recently, like kind of how do I interview well. Yeah. So this is good. Timely. I think there's a lot of people interviewing now too. So this is a good one. Yeah. Well, we should cover the basics first of all, which is try to make yourself taller. Try to position yourself so you are vertically higher than the interviewer. That's number one. Establish dominance. Yeah. You can do this with

platform shoes you can make your hair taller bring your own office chair that just goes way up yeah exactly comically high like eight feet off the ground maybe bring another chair for the interviewer that's really short then maybe like six inches down just here sit here please yeah okay those i would feel more comfortable if you were sitting on the floor during our interview can you do that please maybe tell me about a time when you've had a conflict maybe just role play a conflict right there maybe create a conflict like no i will not tell you about a time i had a conflict i can't believe you said that to me let's work through this even think that's a good idea

yeah let's okay well i like yeah let's work through this shows you can do it instead of just fighting them that's probably better yeah exactly then at the end say not only am i good at working through conflicts i can create them and resolve them at will yeah most people can only resolve them i can create them and resolve them nice the total package yeah i think you should have a story picked out i mean it's kind of implicit in the question tell me a time they're kind of asking for a specific experience oh yeah but if you there's there's gonna be the space of behavioral questions they could ask is technically unbounded but in reality is probably pretty small this conflict one is very common at almost every more senior role there's sort of a

suite of them that gets asked for kind of a management or leadership role so i i don't think it would be a bad use of time to do a little digging poke around see if you can find i don't know three or five of them and and select a story from your past and and like practice it think about explaining that story to someone else of of a time when you did this thing so this is kind of a meta it's not how you answer it directly but right if you are trying to think up an example on the spot that's rough that can get stressful yeah your brain might not work as well at recalling past stuff during the interview and the stress and so prep is one answer absolutely and i totally agree with your recommendation to write down stories ahead of time from a bank of questions

that people are likely to ask. Because like you said, there's only so many. There's probably 50, honestly, in the universe of commonly asked behavioral questions. And so you should be able to have a narrative. That'll take time, by the way, to write 50 little stories. That's time consuming. Yeah, that's a lot of time. I'd be way too lazy to do 50. Yeah, it's hard work. I remember when I was prepping for a Fang interview about seven years ago, I wrote down a bunch of these stories. I just ran out of energy. I'm like, man, after five or six, I'm like, this is too much. It was a lot. But what's valuable about the exercise is jogging your memory to recall situations that you've been in and exactly what

you did. And that's what they're looking for. So I think it's time for me to establish my credentials on this topic. I worked at a fan company for four years. And during that time, I interviewed 250 people, which means that I got to see a wide spectrum of responses to behavioral questions. Oh, and by the way, it was a super big behavioral interview company. So that's almost all we did was behavioral questions. And I can tell you that, at least at my company, the important thing about the answer is not only that it's a good answer, but that it rises to the level that you're interviewing for. So here it said staff level interviews. So that's like usually one step up from senior, kind of team lead kind of level. And so your answers need

to demonstrate that you have done these behaviors at the level that you're interviewing for. So for staff, that would be something like conflict would not just be, you know, I was in a code review with a fellow peer individual contributor and we disagreed on syntax. You know, that would be like an entry level level of, of, uh, conflict. This is more like, you know, there were two teams who both had competing visions for the future of this service and they came into conflict and we had to resolve them. What did you do? You know, that's more like staff level conflict. I love that. That makes a lot of sense. I, the interviewer or the interviewer, the question asker said basically i've i've done it differently each time there isn't like the one response i've

had to conflict yeah well you want to pick the best one just tell that one the best one that's a good one yeah you don't have to tell them all yeah there also might be some some common principles to them if you look at all these different situations if you if you can think about what kind of trade-offs you were making and how you decided which approach to take that might be useful as well like when you pushed back hard why why did you push back hard why was it worth yeah yeah tell them the kind of the framework that you were following yeah yeah and maybe you just felt like the impact to the business was was so hard that it was worth i mean there's a cost of pushing back hard you can harm relationships you can make working together harder you can

become the person who cries wolf or whatever. So why was it worth it in that case? I totally agree with that. The most successful behavioral interview candidates that I've heard from on the other side of the table are people who are able to explain what they did and how the outcome was good. And also what, like you said, what principles guided them. And people who have kind of strong principles that are clear and easily to articulate, they tend to actually be really great co-workers too, you know, because they'll tell you like, I'm favoring this over that when I make this decision. And it's like, oh, great. Now, not only do I know what decision you made, but I also know why you chose that. And for some reason, that's very, very comforting

to the rest of your co-workers, I think. And especially comforting to interviewers, because they can kind of get a glimpse into the machinery. It's almost like a self-describing neural network. You know, you trust the neural network's results, sort of, but when it can explain why it came up with those results, which they don't do a good job of generally, you trust the results a lot more. Yeah, I love that. Yeah, it's a lot more comforting to hear why and that helps you predict kind of what might happen in different situations than to hear, well, my principle is I just think of the right thing and then do that thing. Yeah, exactly. Another thing I'll suggest is that giving a weak answer is worse than giving

no answer to this question. So for example, if you say, I had a conflict with someone, I yelled and screamed and stormed out of the room, and it's still not resolved to this day, that's worse than just saying, hmm, I can't think of any examples of that. It's kind of like your wrong answers will penalize you in these behavioral questions. So just don't even go there if you don't have a strong answer. It's like no answer is like negative one, a weak answer is like negative five yeah exactly exactly is what you're saying yeah and and back to the leveling thing if you have examples to these behavioral interview questions but they're at the wrong level that can also harm you i can't tell you how many candidates i saw probably 60 or

70 percent of the candidates that we recommended for hire we recommended at a level lower than they interviewed for and that's because we were able to see good answers to behavioral questions but they were at the level down. You know, the scope of impact wasn't big enough for the level they were interviewing for. So we suggested higher, but at a reduced level. So if you're going for staff, make darn sure that you're only sharing

staff level behavioral question answers. I'm glad you're on this podcast. You have expert advice on this. Well, I'm always glad. It was hard earned. Yeah, I've only, I mean, I've done, I haven't given a lot of behavioral interviews actually, but i have done them in my own interviewing one so one more thing i will offer is

another replacement for prep is interviewing a lot and that's true you get it you get to go through the exercise of thinking up these answers in real time in the interview and for me at least it was much easier to kind of uh once i'd done some practice even though that practice came in earlier interviews. I was kind of used to the flow and had some examples picked out that I had gone to earlier. And so that can be a replacement for practice. I agree. In fact, I think real interviewing is the best practice. And that's why for many years, I would go and do job interviews just kind of for fun. You know, just see what's out there on the market, interview at other companies, see what their process is like, but also build up valuable

experience. And the most valuable experience is tolerance for stressful interview situations. You know? That is the most applicable interview experience. Yeah. From interviewing, you learn to get better at interviewing. Yes. That's the most directly transferable skill. That's exactly right. Maybe you get a little better at some work stuff. Well, we assessed the candidate and we have determined that they are an excellent interviewer we assess their interviewing skills i think you could shortcut a lot of hiring processes if you just said that like yeah because i think that is what's happening a lot of the time yeah you're assessing their interview skills so we should probably cover the star acronym this is the go-to acronym for how to handle behavioral questions

but I like to cut one of the letters out. Let's see. What is it? Okay. Why don't we go through the letters? And then there's one I always like to cut out because I think it's redundant, but star. So star is a guide for how you answer a behavioral question. So the S stands for situation, which means you explain the situation you are in. This needs to be brief. You don't want to spend 20 minutes just setting up the situation. T stands for task. Task. Yes. And this one I think is redundant because the next letter a is action and i think task and action are basically the same thing you know it's like basically what did you do in the situation and then r stands for results which means what happened as a result of your action so i would actually call it i call it the

sar method that's okay situation action result you know what was situation why was there a problem what did you do and did it work and then the result section is probably the most important because it's very hard to judge someone's actions if they were good or bad but if there are results that speak for themselves. Like, and we increased productivity by 27%. You know, that result really tells all the story you need. And again, the result is where you need to have the level of scope that you're interviewing for. So if, you know, if you're interviewing for a staff or more senior position and your result is, and I got my editor to work finally, you know, it's like, well, that's not a senior, that's not a senior thing because you're not influencing other

engineers. But if the result is, and everyone on the team cut their cycle time down by 45% on all new tickets delivered hereafter, that is a staff level result because it affects the whole team. Yeah. And numbers are like super powerful, which is kind of sad because a lot of really valuable results are more qualitative in nature. But for interview purposes, if you can throw a number up there, it helps the interviewer have this really concrete example of a good outcome that you generated. And then when they go and try to justify their hiring decision, they can say, they can just keep going back to that number. Oh yeah, but he reduced cycle time by 47% for a team of 11 engineers, you know, and then you got managers going 45% times 11 engineers. That's

an incredible, you know, incredible impact. I'll be honest. I don't think I've ever given a number as a result. I'm trying to think if I ever have, I don't think I have. Not even a seven? and we saved one dollar in our cloud costs behold dollars actually cost savings is a really good one and i know right now there is a big emphasis throughout the industry on cost savings especially on the cloud bill which is what you just i'm sure that wasn't a coincidence you brought that up so if you have experience saving money on infrastructure costs hosting costs any vendor you know like identifying waste and

eliminating it that's like the easiest way to produce a number to one of these behavioral questions yeah it's interesting this this method is also it's like the same setup although different terms for it from for something i've used in giving critical feedback which is situation behavior impact oh yeah that's good situation action result like here's the situation here's what you did here was the impact of that it's kind of the reverse of it here's his situation here's what i did yeah situation you had a conflict your action was to scream at the other person result today is your last day with the company i used the star method didn't it feel good to get the star method used on you that meant no i interviewed well

well actually i think this is an argument for the t the t is what was the goal yeah you're right i was just looking that up towards so yeah the tat like what was your responsibility trying to do yeah but like so i mean so i guess if you're trying to have it be your last day then mission accomplished uh i guess yeah you know i don't know i've always found that the t for task and the a for action usually are just the same thing you know it's like my responsibility was to fix the bug so i fixed the bug and the result was customers were happy yeah so anyway star i mean star obviously is better to say out loud it just sounds better than sar or stir yeah yeah i could see that the goal being pretty obvious from describing the situation yeah yeah the house was

on fire i had a task porcupine was trapped inside i thought you were gonna say my task was to make sure the rest of the neighborhood caught on fire too ah well there you go that's where it would be useful to clarify okay so we've covered murder arson what else do we need to what else what other checkboxes do we need to hit today to achieve our task? I think we'll have to leave those for a future episode. Okay. Dave, what can people do if they would like their own questions answered? Oh, well, if you really want to do that, even after hearing today's episode, you can go to softskills.audio and click the ask a question button. We give you a heartfelt thank you to everyone who does that each week. So many wonderful questions from you. We love reading them. We love

hearing from you and thank you so much for keeping them coming. Thank you. Thank you. We will catch you next week.