Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 496: Passing non-technical interviews and my internship with only other interns

Episode Date: January 19, 2026

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Listener Tom says, I’m a software developer with six years experience, mostly at small startups with engineering teams anywhere between 2 and 10 developers. Because these startups have been small, most of the interviews were really casual. I’d speak to either the CEO, or CTO about my past experience, and we would talk about the direction the company was heading, and whether I’d be interested in joining. They felt less like interviews, and more like free-flowing conversations. I’m now back on the market, and I’m looking at larger, more established tech companies. I can get past the tech interviews just fine, but I’m struggling with the soft-skills interviews. Compared to what I’m used to they’re a lot more structured and it feels like they’re looking for answers that fit a certain criteria and format. What advice would you give to someone used to interviewing at small startups, but now interviewing at larger companies? I took an unpaid full stack internship role at a new non-profit, and it turned out to be a team completely made of other interns. There isn’t a single experienced engineer on the team. I have gone way deeper than originally intended and am now functionally a founding engineer where the founder pretends I’m a lead engineer and calls me an intern. The founder is also hellbent on having the highest development velocity, and sometimes will contribute their own AI-generated code, often bypassing the review process especially for things I’m not comfortable signing off on like an AI-generated TOS and user agreement. I recently learned that the founder is not viewed highly in their local area after a scandal where they were accused of scamming a large sum of money, which is likely why they are doing their free community projects they started now in order to save face. This has backfired, and now people are calling their projects “AI generated schemes” despite the services being completely free. I’m not sure if I should continue contributing to these projects anymore. Since the founder rushes things to get done, walks through legal areas with their AI “lawyer,” and has a bad image, I’m worried about whether my resume will be taken seriously by potential future employers. Should I continue working for this person or is the experience not worth it?

it takes more than calling your dumb idea a best practice to make it sound less dumb to be a great software engineer this is episode 496 of the soft skills engineering podcast where i'm your host jameson dance i'm your host dave smith soft skills engineering is a weekly advice show about all the non-technical things that go into the technical field of software development like the art of persuasion by saying everything you do and think is a best practice this is the best practice it's the meta best practice for persuasion is that what you mean oh yeah the best practice for persuading is labeling everything a best practice i worked with someone who was genuinely smart and talented and knew their stuff but drove their co-workers insane because he would

always cite best practices as the reason for everything then if you pushed on it he could kind of provide underlying reasons but it was like that was the magic phrase that was supposed to just turn off everyone's brain that's actually great though if it's someone who says it's a best practice then they can they can explain why because i've had co-workers who claim something is a best practice but they're in the wrong domain you know like semantic versioning is a best practice i'm like yeah but this is like a web api not a not like a package vended and they're like yeah but it's a best practice i'm like yeah it is in like another world you know like yeah like wearing shoes is a best practice in running but it doesn't work great in high diving

yeah unless maybe there's some secret shoes that somehow make your dives smoother they're super heavy so you can rotate your body around the shoes instead of around the center of your body's gravity i feel like that would have some bad consequences if you dove into water wearing very heavy shoes yeah i seem to recall the mafia had that technique yeah they yeah they do yeah it was a best practice for disposing of bodies exactly that's it okay there's another good example best practice for the mafia maybe not best practice for high diving it's so funny that all i thought about with the heavy shoes was what it would do to your rotational physics and nothing about what do you do when you're in the water

i think it's because i assume i'm so scared of heights that i would just die in the air on the way down it doesn't yeah it doesn't matter what happens to me once i get in the water yeah it's just harder to retrieve your body from the bottom of the pool yeah but otherwise identical okay let's let's thank our patrons this is a list of patreon Patreon patrons who contribute so much that we say whatever their Patreon name field is every week. And let me just say, some of you are very creative. They are.

Let me just share my screen. Okay, can you see it? Valentin, does the subservice org do Rubens or is it just cold cuts? Joel, learn how to test React apps at howtotestrunning.com. balance the prints but forgot the emote icons with a sad emote icon you can't fix stupid but you can put it in a container and hope for the best i love that one my actual name on linkedin

is yami debugging in the dark candy the mobile development ordinary first of his name quote or one equals one drop table myomics jacob chandling hey dave and jamison let's get your jams on record that soft skill song that skill song soft skill at nation everybody sing along the missing semi-colon christy the world's okayest programmer my biggest fear is the fear of making a typo in one of these shout outs that completely ruins the joke happy mary nick molyneux embedded software engineers are software engineers to javier gonzalez chui ted timbrel dave smith a single open paren dan from drone to play never is not just a critter a marsh let me go emoji i like chicken i like liver miyamix miyamix please deliver swiss python okay i will measure text

bandwidth beautiful is better than ugly explicit is better than implicit simple is better kyle boss kent z dodds jenny kim the stochastic parrot ira chan jonathan king zanai beautiful functional user documentation neil breen is the most i'm sorry neil breen is the best movie director of all time i have a tab in my browser to remind me to go watch one of his movies just so you guys know will angel from drone deploy ragnar brayden canes john grant britney ellick and closed parenthesis followed by a single closing parenthesis character thank you thank you thank you to everyone who contributes on patreon for any patreon contribution amount we will email you an invite to our slack community and um for the right amount we will say your

patreon display name field on the air and i just want to say thank you for filling my life with joy it's literally the only source of joy in my life is reading these names that's a weighty responsibility and i think you're up to it i do i agree you can you can keep the light in dave's eyes alive um dave should i read our first question yes let's do it this is from a listener named tom who says i'm a software developer with six years of experience mostly at small startups with engineering teams anywhere between two and ten developers because these startups have been small most of the interviews are really casual i'd speak to either the ceo or the cto about my past experience and we would talk about the direction the company was heading and whether

i'd be interested in joining they felt less like interviews and more like free-flowing conversations i'm now back on the market and i'm looking at larger more established tech companies i can get past the tech interviews just fine but i'm struggling with the soft skill interviews compared to what i'm used to they're a lot more structured and it feels like they're looking for answers that fit a certain criteria and format what advice would you give to someone used to interviewing at small startups but now interviewing at larger companies ah so you're used to just a vibe interview yeah and vibes you can't you can't hire a team of 30 000 engineers off of vibes it will not scale yeah the vibes yeah if you're if you're hiring everyone based off the cto's vibes

that's very different than a team of 50 recruiters over 15 years and yeah hmm i'm assuming this is talking partially about behavioral interview questions or the oh yeah tell me about a time when you did thing x or i'm sure that's the case here yeah for better for worse there is a large corpus of these type of questions on Google. And by now, it's made it into LLM training data sets as well. So you could talk to an AI about this. I don't know how much it would be like an actual interview at your specific company you're interviewing with. It's kind of the average ground up in a blender of all of them, but it could at least give you some cheap practice. because I think the best way to do this is practice, get a feel for it, see what sounds

real bad when it comes out of your mouth. And you used to have to either grab somebody and make them practice with you or do an actual interview where the stakes might be high or do an actual interview of a job you had no intention of taking, which also is a lot of work for practice. But I do think just setting up some prompts and then talking to an AI about this could be a useful way to do it. I think that's a great idea to start. I'm sure there are products out there. I know there are products for explicitly practicing interviews with humans that have credentials, but there's probably some LLM stuff out there too.

Yes, there are products like that. And I'll tell you about my experience being on the other side of that in a minute. But I think your idea to do an LLM practice session is a really good idea. And do the verbal thing where you actually speak into the computer. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And like you said, Jameson, I think your own critique of what you said is probably the best, like better than the LLM's critique will be because the LLM's critique is, it

could be random. It'll be kind of sycophantic and yeah. Yeah, there's that too. I mean, if you ever read, last night I literally did this, but I'm sure you've all heard of the classic LLM conundrum where you ask an LLM, how many R's are in the word strawberry? Have you seen this? I have. and it's it's just crazy how wrong it is and how i'm like there are how many r's of course it says

two and i'm like where are the r's and there's like oh well there's one after the w and i'm like okay i mean technically that is it is after the w i'm like there is one after the w it's so weird and i i finally convinced that there were three hours but it took quite a while um and i tried to ask it to explain itself to me like why did you think there were two hours and just couldn't do it. And like you said, it just always went to sycophantic, like, oh, I can understand why you would ask that. It makes a lot of sense to me why you would say that. You know, I'm like, okay, just tell me why. Anyway, that's why I don't think I would necessarily trust the output of this thing to review your interview. But like Jameson said, just sometimes

when you say things out loud, it forces your own mind to go into a more critical mode. So it's a great way to start. I've found that true for myself when I'm interviewing that it takes me a few to get into the habit of answering these kinds of questions because it doesn't come up in real life normally. But so, so if, yeah, if the value of it is just you going through the motions with a little bit of scaffolding around it, then yeah, I agree. LLMs are great for giving you some entity to listen and vaguely respond in some way. Yeah, exactly. And I think the LLMs can be counted on to write, to give you good representative questions. And so that's where I, that's where I would use them. Now I do have a couple of ideas for what you can do to prepare in general. And

this is based on me doing literally hundreds of these interviews that ask more structured behavioral questions. And number one is get very familiar with your own work history. I can't tell you how many times I've done an interview where I get asked a question and I just can't think of a good example from my own work history. And then I leave the interview and I'm like on the way home and I'm like, oh, there was like three things I could have said that were so much better. I just couldn't think of them in the moment. And so I advise people to go and if you've been very good at writing down like an annual journal of your contributions or successes at work, this is where you will finally get the return on that investment. Go read that. If you can't do that, go read your

own resume and try to refresh your memory on all these different projects and try to write down a few bullets of all the things you've done at each project that you can remember. And just bring that stuff to the surface of your memory so that it's ready to go when you get asked a question. I am pretty sure I got at least one job because I practiced writing down a convincing example of how smart I was from a previous job. And it came out of this. It came out of interviewing for a few different jobs and some prep for that. And it did make me go back through and refine this vague fuzzy project that took like a year into a coherent narrative that i could share quickly and still in a way that would make some sense to people and i think i wouldn't have been able to

do that off the cuff and and yeah so i totally agree that the prep of breaking down all of the things that you've done into the right combination of explainable and impressive and yeah yeah it pays off did you use the word best practice in this particular narrative i did not but i did write i wrote like a little a blog post about it basically a little pdf with some graphs and oh yeah and yeah and then we walked through it that's that's a great idea to make that all very concrete did you actually share the blog post in the interview i did i did i mean i didn't post it on my blog but yeah i sent it to them and then we went through the interview that's really cool oh i would love that as an interviewer okay so that's that's my that's my preparation suggestion

And then for the actual delivery of answers to these questions. So you mentioned the interview, the question asker mentioned that these are more structural soft skill question interviews. And the more structural way to answer these questions is to use the STAR method, which we've talked about on the show before. But just a quick recap. I actually like to take the T out of STAR and just do S-A-R. I was just thinking I couldn't remember what the T was. Yeah, no one ever can. It's like, well, OK.

The t stands for task I think but I no one can ever really differentiate task and action for me So situation task action result and I I guess sometimes you could say Situation and then task is kind of like the outcome you were going to try to Achieve you could like describe the end goal and then a stands for action and r is the actual result So t is the task you were supposed to achieve and r is the result you actually achieved I just say three steps situation action results like what was situation what did you do and what was the result and focus on giving in the situation section giving just enough context to where the person can follow along but not so much that you just drown them

in situational context it's not not good but not too little that they can't follow your action or result so there's a balance to be struck there and then action is just literally a kind of a narrative of what you did and then result is like how how did this work out and people care a lot about results i'll tell you like you you will shine in these interviews if you can follow this method and there are strong compelling and concrete results that came from what you did but if you leave off the results you will do good but never great where it's like here's all the things i did and it's like it leaves the interviewer going oh this is a smart person a capable person an action oriented person but i have no idea if they're the kind of person that makes an impact on their team

or does good work that actually matters yeah i like it sound advice sar sar isn't sars like a viral disease or something yeah i believe it is i was about to say it sounds like a comic book villain from the 50s sar behold the power of sar uh have we answered the question i think so good luck with your interviewing yep good luck dave would you like to read our next question yes let's do it okay this comes from an anonymous listener who says i took an unpaid full stack internship at a new non-profit and it turned out to be a team completely made of other interns there is not a single experienced engineer on the team i have gone way deeper than originally intended and am now functionally a founding engineer where the founder pretends i'm a lead

engineer and calls me an intern the founder is also hell-bent on having the highest development velocity and sometimes will contribute their own ai generated code often bypassing the review process especially for things i'm not comfortable signing off on like an ai generated terms of service and user agreement oh so tempting to write these contractual things in ai but oh no idea what's in there okay sorry continuing i recently learned that the founder is not viewed highly in their local area after a scandal where they were accused of scamming a large sum of money which is likely why they're doing their free community projects they started now in order to save face this has backfired and now people are calling their projects ai generated schemes despite the

services being completely free i'm not sure if i should continue contributing to these projects anymore since the founder rushes things to get done walks through legal areas with the ai quote lawyer and has a bad image i'm worried about whether my resume will be taken seriously by potential future employers. Should I continue working for this person or is this experience not worth it? My eyebrows are the highest up they've ever been on my head. This is not where I thought this question was going to go. I thought the question was going to be, I'm on a team with nothing but interns. What do I do? But it's, I'm on a team of interns working for a scammer who's not paying us yeah you gave me a brief summary of the first part of the first paragraph and i

that's what i thought too and then oh boy it is so hard sometimes to get your first job because it's the chicken and the egg you need experience to have anyone take a chance on you but you need to how how will they hire you if you don't have any experience and and so i can understand why this would be tempting but generally places that are looking for free software development are going to be somewhat of a dumpster fire yeah yeah i still think they are not going to be as big of a dumpster fire as this one surely surely there's some other non-profit that you can work for for free that is not going to leave a black mark on your reputation for being associated with it oh my goodness like i don't know there's got to be something that helps like

i don't know single moms find child care or pay for rent i don't like some social good cause that isn't tied to a shady character yeah man so you can i guess what i learned from this experience is you can take the scammer out of the scandal but you can't take the scammer out of the scammer because look what he did yeah he literally did a bunch of scamming and then to save face started some non-profit scams where they somehow convinced a bunch of interns to work for free and i understand how they were able to pull that off too because there's a lot of people out there especially on the earlier end of the experience spectrum looking for work and you tap into that you get 10 of them in a room and then they all start talking and they realize

they're all unpaid interns meanwhile you've got this workforce that's kind of amazing but what a scam. I cannot emphasize how much you should get out of this. You're all in. There's no redemption here. No, there's so many bad things all at the same time. The experience you are gaining is not experience that you want to be useful in your life. What do you mean? If you learn a lot about how to identify scammers and deal with not having any payment from your employer. And like, these are all skills that I hope you don't have to use,

but from getting a good job and working for reputable employers, this is brutal. There are places that will happily take advantage of very excited, precocious junior developers and pretend like they are in charge and really not be in charge, but they actually pay you also like it could be a really bad job and they also pay you money

to live instead of an unpaid internship oh man how why are the services how is he paying for the ai that y'all are using i mean is it literally just everyone's on free chat gpt plans and what the founder rushes to get things done yeah i i'm worried whether my resume will be taken seriously by potential future employers. You should be optimizing your experience for getting your first full-time job. And I don't think this is going to help with that. Nope. If you show up to an interview and all of the stories you have to tell are about how horrible of a dumpster fire your previous employer was, and you can't say, and here's how I saved it, which you can't. I don't know. If you could, it would not be worth your time.

have you ever seen anything this kind of what's the right word for this questionable not in my own career no so this is like a new a new low for you anyway the combination of it is yeah yeah i've never worked on a team of unpaid interns being an intern myself i mean i did in school when i was going to school like that was our class it wasn't it wasn't someone's charity washing like uh effort to save the reputation it was it was an experience to help us learn how to build software on a team charity washing that's a new term for me i think it probably exists but i got it from sports washing which is where you've got a you're you're a maybe a certain country with a famously bad reputation and also have billions of dollars and spend it on sports

leagues to try to rehabilitate your reputation would like olympic teams qualify this specific case i'm thinking of is more professional leagues and famous players from other leagues and stuff but maybe i don't know but yeah don't don't be associated with this person there surely you can find yeah i if the bar is i will work for free there are less horrible places that you can also work for free yeah i don't think any of them will be highly functional or awesome but they will at least be less actively negative is there an option here where all the interns kind of band together to go form like their own little corporation that they also don't get paid at but they all work together to get some experience and they produce something useful for the world maybe like maybe

they're like 12 co-founders um sure but they use the time that they're sitting all together in this maybe they're provided an office space i don't know probably not they're probably all working from home right yeah that's a good point though i mean are there people on the team that you really like and want to bring along with you i don't i don't know if i just bring everyone along from this dysfunctional place but maybe that's the best the only silver lining is you just got an opportunity to network with a dozen other engineers yeah but it doesn't help you directly because now your network is 11 other people that also couldn't get a full-time job and ended up in this horrible scam i'm just trying to i'm trying to pull some silver lining out of this crazy story

ai generated to us user agreement i'm sure that happens more than we suspect even i'm sure that it's everywhere all the time now free community projects in order to save face people are calling projects ai generated schemes yeah that's what they are i think they are it's at least ai generated terms of service yeah i keep going back to the experience is not worth it anywhere that cannot afford to pay software engineers will not know how to work with them effectively generally so you will have some dysfunction if you're saying if you're trying to show up and volunteer your time and there's also costs going even if your your labor is free they need servers and services and and so you might represent free labor but also still more money but it's got to be surely you

can find something better than this if if you're trying to work for free yeah oh boy wow what a crazy situation to end up in. And it sounds like this person didn't really know going into it, what was going on, especially the fact that every other person was an unpaid intern. Good news, you can just not go anymore. Yeah, exactly. The paycheck cost of quitting is pretty low. Yeah, I think this makes your suggestion, Jameson, which I agree with, really easy to take. You're not walking away from a paycheck. You're just walking away from,

as far as i can tell only downside i could see maybe you being worried about letting down your co-volunteers i almost said co-workers but and and you're kind of in the trenches with them you're abandoning them to this horrible situation i could see you feeling that way and i would still say get out it's you i don't think you'll you don't need to stay to save them maybe you leaving will give them conviction to also get out of there yeah well have we answered the question it's kind of a simple one we have man i'm i'm continually surprised by what you can get away with i know you can just do this you can just scam a bunch of people and then make a fake non-profit i mean maybe it's a real non-profit but it just doesn't do anything useful yeah how would

you both practically convince a bunch of people to work for you for free and how would you live with yourself how would you be able to convince yourself that that was an okay thing to do i i don't know you think that given this guy's history that paying a bunch of unpaid or having employing a bunch of unpaid interns is the worst thing that he has to live with himself about no but wild world i think this one's uh this is probably the thing that this scammer legitimately believes is the only good thing he's ever done oh my quit your not job that's our summary of our advice quit your fake job that's not going to pay you anyway go find i mean even an unpaid internship at a legitimate company would be a step up from this yep i didn't know there was a rung on the ladder

lower than unpaid intern but there actually is unpaid intern for a scammer at a non-profit yeah i'm sorry to say i'm feels a little bit heartless to say it this way i'm sorry to have to be the one to break it to you. They're better for hearing it, Dave. I hope so. Well, have we answered the question? I think we have. Good luck. And thank you so much for sharing your story. I hope you feel like it was worth it for you to share. But I just, I love, I'm very happy. I'm very sad for this situation because I think it's a downer for all these people. But I'm also very glad to know about what the range of possibility looks like in our world. It feels like every couple of months I read a question and I go, all right, that just shifted my... It increased the

size of the known universe for me a little bit. Yeah. We are so lucky. That's what I think when I read this question. It could have been me, given the right circumstances. All right. If you want to have your own question answered, Dave, can you tell them what they need to do? Yeah, but I'm not, I'm going to skip around all the bad answers and I'm just going to go straight to the best practice, which is go to softskills.audio and click the ask a question button where you can fill out our form. Perfect. It's the best and only practice. The only, yeah, that's a stronger form of best practice. Only practice. Yeah, exactly. The only practice is a subset of best practice and it is the best of the best you have made illegal states unrepresentable you've created

the pit of success all it took was conquering the world becoming a totalitarian taking away all choice so where everyone is an unpaid intern for my global non-profit yep best practice it is the best business practice unpaid labor no taxes yeah and tons of money for you somehow i'm sure the money comes somehow yeah great thank you for listening we will catch you next week