Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 58: Dropping Out and Interview Prep (Rerun)

Episode Date: May 2, 2017

Dave and Jamison were out this week, so we have a re-run of a DEEP CUT for you. This originally aired as episode 18. We answer these two questions: I have a part-time job as a developer while I��m still in school. Should I drop out and just work full time? How do I prepare for a job interview?

Hey there, listeners. This is Jameson Dance. I'm one of the hosts of Soft Skills Engineering, and there's no other host this week because we have all been traveling, sick, Disneyland, busy. We just had some stuff come up, so we couldn't record an episode this week. However, we do have a deep cut from the archives. Episode 18, Dropping Out of College and Preparing for Interviews, which was recorded... I should have looked this up. Softskills.audio, best website. in the whole world. July 18th. So July 18th, 2016. It's almost a year old. The wisdom it contains is evergreen, though. And I hope you still enjoy it. We will be back with a fresh new episode next

week. Thanks. Being a great engineer takes more than great code. Welcome to Soft Skills Engineering. I am your host, Jameson Dance. And I am your secondary backup host, Dave Smith. I love that we rotate who's the backup host each week i think it shares the responsibility effectively yeah yeah we actually have an election midweek each week to decide who's going to be the primary one and it just happens to work out that we take turns yeah there can't possibly be any bugs in our distributed systems code because there never is in any distributed systems code nope um yeah how's it going dave not too shabby yeah actually have you ever heard anyone say that it's going kind of shabby i think that happens in not america more often where people are a little more honest

but in america you say everything's great amazing or if you say good then someone close to you has died and you are distraught i'm good yeah oh man what's wrong wow stage an intervention for that person because they're having a hard time uh but but actually i am good too the real good great glad to hear it should we uh should we just kick it off yeah let's do it so um uh here's a question from a listener who apparently i forgot to credit so dear listener i'm sorry i didn't write down your name uh the question is as follows i am a computer science major who still has a couple years left of school i also have a part-time job doing web development i love what i'm learning and doing at work to the point that i question if it's worth investing two more years into school

how would you counsel someone in my position um let's talk about our own backgrounds first so i went to college i am two classes short of graduation and have been for the last several years and that's your phd right uh no i'm just two classes short of a phd yeah i think you just take classes and then you get a phd that's right i think that's how it works maybe that's why i I didn't get one because I misunderstood. That was a computer science degree with an emphasis in bioinformatics. How about you, Dave? I have a Bachelor of Science degree in computer science.

And I just thought of that episode from Community a few years ago where there was a lawyer and he had a degree from Columbia, but it was the country, not the university. Anyway. But you don't have one of those. i don't have one of those i don't i don't have a fake degree from columbia or a law degree i just have a computer science bachelor's degree so the reason i suggested that is because we're kind of biased towards college i feel like yeah except you're a dropout jameson i am but like i'm close enough that my dad uh gave me credit for it oh you got an honorary degree like in crayons my dad stopped bugging me about finishing those two classes degree

close enough son yeah yeah after a while um i loved college and it totally made me the person that i am today and i would not be that person without going to college so for me personally it was a transformative life experience i was a uh i was kind of like a i don't know my friends and i were kind of these like anti-intellectual bros in high school we just like did the least amount possible in school and our goal was to wakeboard as much as we could in life and then that was the end of our goals um and we've all grown up and matured but i feel like if if i did not go to college uh i would not know things i would not know that i enjoyed knowing or learning things like okay my my high school experience wasn't amazing and it wasn't until college that

I realized I really like learning and I really like thinking and these activities of the mind are things that I enjoy. And programming is very much that for me. So to me, it changed who I was as a person. And it also led to my career. I didn't code when I was a kid. I wasn't one of those kids with a calculator who like his parents were engineers or anything. So for me, it was amazing. So once you like recognize that about yourself, is that when you dropped out of college? no no i dropped out of college because uh i was working and i had an like a full-time offer that was like as soon as you're done with this last term of school then then this is what you get and i stroked my chin and said my college offers online classes i can just start working right now

and do the classes online uh and famous last words yeah there's there's a lot of other stuff you can do online besides college classes um so i never i never did them it was not a calculated plan to drop out um it just just happened it snuck up on me the reason i didn't drop out was because i played so many arcade games growing up that said be cool stay in school you know at the end like after you defeat the final boss it was like don't do drugs and stay in school i'm like Okay, I'll do that. Thanks, arcade game dad. And then I went through the 16th grade.

And I really prepared you for the real world with all those barrels rolling down, like, horizontally flat planes that you had to jump over. Yeah, exactly. In a two-dimensional world. i once went to a chemistry show where these chemists do magic shows and they're like for kids and so of course i go and the chemist goes don't worry kids i can do this because i'm in the 23rd grade he was like a postdoc student or something anyway that's awesome so i feel like it's important to acknowledge that i personally benefited a lot from college um but i know and And it helped me find motivation and drive to do something with my life.

But I think not everyone needs that. I have several friends who are amazing developers who didn't go to college at all. And I guess it's hard to do like an experiment and take a version of themselves where they had gone to college and compare it. So many times in my life I've wanted to do that. But they are doing great and they're successful and productive and they don't have the stigma in hiring against people who don't have college degrees is much lower, especially given all the boot camp stuff. And so I feel like there's never been a better time if you personally can pull it off to not need a degree as a programmer. Yeah, as far as like employability goes, I agree. It's never been, never have programmers been more employable with as little formal credentials as today. Does that sound right? Did I say all those words correctly? I wouldn't know because I didn't finish college.

Freaking dropouts everywhere. I personally have had people on my teams ranging from no degree, no high school diploma, to English degrees, psychology degrees, all the way up to astrophysics, doctoral degrees, and pretty much everything in between. Crazy amount. And so, yeah, as far as like your professional achievability, I don't think there's a ceiling anymore on where you can go just based on where your education ended. Yeah. Um, what about, this kind of ties into the bootcamp question. So a lot of people go to bootcamps after graduating from college in an unrelated field and even having a career in that field. And, and sometimes that gets used as an argument to say, you don't need this four-year

formal computer science education because you can pick up some, some very practical skills in a bootcamp and then kind of pick the rest up. Um, but what is, how do I phrase this? So what about the, just like the, I don't know, the maturation, how do you even say that right? The maturation? See? That is correct. Yeah, if only you had taken those last two computer science classes. I will ask the degree holder.

What about the maturation that might occur during college? Like, I feel like a lot of the reason for hiring boot camp grads who are mature, experienced people in other fields is because they learn people skills and they learn life skills and dependability and all these kind of soft skills, if you will, that are not emphasized in a pure CS education. And if you don't go to college, you might miss out on some opportunities for those as well. Like, as a young person, you mean? Yeah, yeah. Just you are 18. there's a lot you haven't seen in life one thing college does is show you a lot of stuff and that can be helpful for you at age 18 i already had seen everything and knew everything

man and you have a degree you're so far ahead of me um yeah i i agree with that i think college is a lot more than just the technical skills that you gain i i think there are two other factors that for me were really big one of them was what I think you already mentioned, sort of, which is it really honed my ability to learn, you know, large volumes of information quickly, learn how to, you know, read tons of material and get the crux out of it quickly, learn how to approach a subject you've never heard of, and then become proficient in it to the point that you can take a test on it or demonstrate it in a lab relatively quickly. I mean, you know, college classes only last 12 weeks on, you know, give or

take. And the other thing I got out of college was some of the most awesome and rewarding relationships in my entire life came from college. The people that I met there, many of which I'm still in close contact with, and many of which I just am like Facebook friends with, but I still love knowing them and having known them. And it's huge to me, like it's a really big deal. And so I don't tell, I like to tell people that professionally your college experience is less important the more that time goes on but from a life perspective uh for me at least and many and actually for many people i know there's a lot more to it that you can get out of it yeah and and that's i guess that's where um where i'm torn on this question you can definitely have

a successful career if you're the kind of person who is very self-driven and motivated and and willing to work hard i i suspect but i have no data that you might be kind of a better rounded human being if you go to college just because you are forced to interact with all these people in these kind of weird artificial somewhat stressful situations and that just i think that just teaches you life skills um but where's that can you get those just as well without going to college from from working somewhere yeah i think you can get those in most gangs so you could maybe pick up some of those skills yeah certainly you can uh i mean i'm not saying you can't um and it's really hard to speak for anybody else but from my own personal experience

that was a great place to do it and i will say that there are people who are really bothered jameson obviously is not one of them but they're really bothered when they don't finish their degree. Um, I've known several people who just, it troubled them for years. Uh, and some of them finally went back, you know, after their kids were grown and got that degree. And really it was just a matter of finishing it for them. Like psychologically they had this need and they just really needed to do it. And so, you know, figure that out about yourself because you know, that might haunt you if you're one of those kinds of people. It is interesting how, um, For a long time, college has been the path in life to be successful.

You go to high school, and then you graduate, and then you go to college if you want to make something of yourself. Right, it's like the factory. Yeah, and I think that actually does some people harm. Not everyone is suited to an environment like college, and being forced to go into it means that they miss out on opportunities that they're more suited to. um so so i think one of the side benefits of uh like the crazy student loan crisis and and this emphasis on more technical training is it might fit people better where they don't feel like in order to be to have prestige in life they have to go to college and i think that i think having

more options that way can only be a good thing yeah definitely but i feel like especially if you're getting a computer science degree and you're not interested in in in research or or or kind of more advanced computer sciencey stuff like that as a career i almost feel like there could be more benefit to doing something else that you're interested in like kind of a liberal arts degree because it would emphasize the the thing i've talked up as a benefit which is the broad experience to a lot of different things you wouldn't be exposed to normally good point like i actually love computer science i i enjoy reading about it and geeking out about it but um i don't use any of it really so it's kind of like an intellectual thing where it's just a a brain

hobby i think that's the technical term for it computer science yeah computer hobby science i like that term but that's all stuff in kind of the same wheelhouse you know it's what i do for work it's what i do for fun it's it's what i do for a hobby and and i think again coming back to that boot camp thing a lot of those people it seems like are more well-rounded and and they bring different skills and talents to a team because of the variety of experiences yeah yeah it sounds reasonable i don't know speaking of that one of the other advantages to college is you know my wife for example she took a geology class and they went on this field trip down to like this geological place with rocks and like they looked at the rocks and it was awesome and

she as boring as that sounds she loved it and i think to myself how often in life would you really just go do that you know if you weren't being forced to by a college class yeah and other friends of mine they took uh international folk dancing you know are you really going to go sign up for a folk dancing class you know you just you probably just won't but in college like yeah of course i will you know why not yeah so there's a lot of cool stuff uh that i think you missed out on it i'm kind of repeating myself now and repeating what jameson said but don't discount that because it's really cool and life has a way of getting into a rhythm or a rut once you get out of college and kind of get into the working nine to five life so i would say don't be to people who

are young and uh have a flair for these kinds of things don't be too hasty to get into your to settle into the rut you have your whole life for the rut but you have a limited amount of time when you're a young you know 20 something in college experiencing crazy stuff um and uh don't squander that that's that would be my advice to many people i'd like to say one more thing about this is which is when you're very first starting if you go to college and you study computer science there is a very clear path to your first job like you just present this piece of paper that says i did this thing and people are like okay we'll hire you as a junior developer um and from talking to people it sounds like the path to getting your first job is is often a pretty big hanging point for people

coming out of boot camps or coming from non-traditional backgrounds it always seems like it's some miracle where like they know a person who needs a thing and they build it someone else sees it they're like i like people that can do that and then they hire them or it's like this weird chain of events um that it seems hard to generalize and repeat uh but with college it's it's it's factory like you just go and then you get a job it's like automatic yeah so you can definitely do it without that um but in that way i think it is more safe um i was just thinking about this if i were hiring someone if they had zero experience then college would be relevant to me if they had been working for a couple years then i wouldn't care if they went to college or

not i'm the same way um but it but yeah that's that's one more thing to consider is it's a lot of work to just get that first job but it's it's it's got a pretty guaranteed payoff i feel here's one other cool benefit to college um this is a soft skill thing but your whole life resets every semester often you know you get all new classmates usually now depending on you might be going through some of the same classes with them, but you get a lot of new classmates. Sometimes you move between semesters. You have new professors that you have to learn how to work with. And every time that happens, you get a chance to change the way you are and try out new ways of interacting with others and see what works for you and what works well. And the reason this is

cool is because in real life, sometimes people's expectations on you, they're sticky, right? It's like oh that's dave he's the thus and such you know insert stereotype x here um and you you sometimes can become trapped by that but i'll tell you a funny story about my wife in college one semester she changed her name like that's how drastic you can do it and to this day we bump into people and they call her that name like they didn't even know and so you it gives you a great opportunity to experiment it's kind of like what you were saying earlier jameson about how don't you wish you could like fork the universe and have people go down two different tracks and then see how they come out well you can do that a little bit because of the semester system and i think

that's pretty cool i feel like um my true feeling about this is it could go either way and i've talked a lot about how awesome and all these benefits the college has but really i think it depends a lot on the person i think if you're going pure employability this person specifically has a job already so my my gut is college will not help them that much in their career because they have a job and they can point to this experience and they know people already at that job and uh definitely as far as your professional like employability goes definitely so maybe it's good for you but it's very expensive too true the opportunity cost often outweighs even the day-to-day costs especially if you're going to a private school and you have to take out

that tends to hundreds of thousands of dollars in loans. I have one other thing, though. And I know we're kind of, I think James and I are both playing both sides of the fence. You know, like, is that the right word? Both sides of the fence? Both sides of the field? We need a PhD. We need a PhD in sports metaphors.

And here it is. Here's my point. So going to college helped me build confidence. because what college was for me was a series of challenges just over and over and over that at the outset all looked insurmountable. But at the end of each class, I surmounted them, all of them. And, you know, even when you fail and maybe you retake the class, you eventually surmount it or you don't graduate like Jameson. Just kidding. I surmounted all the two challenges. And that really helped me build confidence. And it told me, look, you can do hard things.

given enough time and resources you can do this and um i don't know for sure if this is the reason but this may be why i've never really suffered from imposter syndrome um where i know a lot of people do suffer from it and uh i wonder if a college experience might help i don't know maybe it would it made it might have with me it's possible you're just the best too you can't be an imposter when you're the best yeah one other thing i thought of is we've listed all these benefits of college um college is not the only place to get these though i mean you can you can yeah try lots of hard things yourself absolutely there's not this built-in setup system for forcing you to do that yourself though yep so i think to me it comes down to how self-driven are you

and i was not very self-driven so college was was great um but i know people who are very self-driven and they're very successful at growing as a person and growing their career without college and the uh yeah it's absolutely true and i think so far we've been speaking to a young audience uh for most of the comments at least that i've been making and if you are more experienced you know maybe you're in your 40s and you know the the teenage ship has sailed long ago um you know i'm approaching my 40s now uh now the question is do i go back to college and get a computer science degree and it's a completely different conversation at that point and so i don't think we have time to go into that but i have a bunch of stories of people who have done that but we

should probably point out though that i think most of what we've been talking about is scoped to young people to 18 ish people 18 ish year old 18 year old ish if only i had that degree god jameson just every day it would have taught me how to say words correctly well that's all i have for that dear listener hopefully that was uh helpful advice for you question answered oh and i just realized the person who wrote this question actually was uh he says he's 44 years old i'm so sorry we totally answered the wrong question that's the next question oh i'm no you're right i'm dumb we totally nailed this last question you can't be dumb you went to college i went to college i don't do anything wrong all right i'm gonna read the next question this is from a

listener named antonio and it's pretty short how do i prepare for an interview oh man i have so many feelings about the interview process. I will try to avoid ranting. I think the number one way you prepare is find out what the interview process is going to be like, because I think it's a lot easier to prepare for a specific process than for interviewing in general, because there's no stability or agreement on what a good interview process is or what that even means. So everyone kind of does it differently. And often they'll just tell you if you just ask them like, hey, what's the interview like they'll tell you you meet with these three people and you'll do like whiteboard coding with this person with this person you'll do some algorithm design problem

and with this other person they'll ask you about distributed systems or something like that and then great like you know and then you get to prepare yep there's very little general advice though jameson's totally right but i can give one piece of general advice that applies to every interview and it's going to come in the form of a hilarious story. Are you ready? I'm ready. I taught an interview prep class to a cohort of graduating students from boot, from a bootcamp. And the way I did it is I actually had one of the students come up to the front of the room, you know, like put on some high pressure to make it feel like an interview. And I asked them interview questions in front of their whole class. And this student, I asked them one question. They

did not know the answer, but rather than saying, I don't know, they just started to make up an answer about a minute into their answer i just stopped them and i said do you know the answer to this question and he just kind of puts his hands in his face and and says i mean puts yeah puts his hands on his face says no i don't know the answer and i said i said look it's really important that you be honest if you don't know the answer you can talk about how you would find the answer but if you don't know don't make it up because they'll know that you're making it up and he goes i'm so sorry and i'm like okay let's do another practice so i ask him another question And he does the same thing two times in a row.

He just starts making it up. And so I stop him and I say, what are you doing? And he goes, I just don't know the answer. And I said, what's going on? He goes, I'm so sorry. My previous career was in public relations. He's like, in PR, you always have an answer. So be honest about what you know because you will be found out if you're making it up.

Yeah, that kind of gets into some advice about specific interview styles. One style, and it's a style that I like, is you're not quizzing them. Like, do you give me the right answers on these 10 problems? You're exploring the boundaries of their knowledge. And you're finding out what do they know a lot about? What do they not know a lot about? And no one knows everything about everything. So eventually you will run into something that you don't know.

So if you don't feel like that's a failure, then that can make the process go more smoothly. Definitely. I talked about asking the company what their interview process is like. Sometimes the company will have what they think the process is like, and then it will not be the same as what the actual process is like. What they tell you might be a little more aspirational than reality. So if you can swing it, probably the best way is just ask someone who either works there or has interviewed there what it was like for them, and then you'll get the real deal. And sometimes you can crowdsource that by using websites like Glassdoor. Yeah, that's true. I have seen that a couple times.

I guess another vague general thing is interviews are nerve-wracking for the most part. It's like the closest you come regularly to being judged for your value as a person. It's true. And it's so different from what it is actually like to work somewhere, hopefully. If working somewhere was like an interview, then I would not work there. Like anywhere you've ever interviewed. Yeah, yeah. But just some generic advice is try and stay calm.

The people interviewing, like in their heads they know this is a stressful situation. people are probably not reacting to their best people sometimes don't even perform their best in general in stressful situations but if you if you even if they know that um seeing someone just kind of like break down under the pressure is is not uh the way to get a yes i guess like they won't be like this person made stuff up but they're under a lot of pressure so we'll give them a pass so just kind of staying calm even if you don't know the answer or you feel like the process isn't going very well i think that helps a lot too yeah definitely i don't know how to do that but i can just tell you to stay calm and that's easy you could like put secret bluetooth

headphones in that are playing kenny g yeah maybe or or put bluetooth headphones in the interviewers ears that are giving good answers yeah like in i feel like that shows up in a million disney movies like in first kid where the the agent is advising the kid on what to say to the girl like that's actually probably cheating don't cheat that's don't cheat don't cheat what about here's a good question often especially places like google these these giant companies that lots of people interview at it's really easy to find a list of questions that people have asked how do you feel about that just searching for questions and practicing answers to them like ethically or as far as effective interview uh both um if you can google for a google interview

question i think it's fair game that's true you know their product uh yeah i think it's totally fine google i'm sure these companies know when their questions get leaked and they I'm sure, adapt. And then as far as practicing, yeah, I think it's a great idea. If you can find examples of interview questions, you should definitely practice. But let me tell you a hilarious story about that. One time at my last company, we had twin brothers come and interview one day after the other. And the first one came in and we asked him a bunch of questions, including a zinger question that he could not figure out the answer to. And he went home and then his brother came in the next day and we asked a different zinger question that he also did not know the

answer to but here's where things got hilarious he gave an answer to the previous day's interview question so we were like okay this guy's clearly colluding with his twin brother and they gave maybe it was the same person he just said he was a twin that never occurred to me till just now yeah i've got a twin brother anyway so he gave the answer to the previous day's question and we we really just thought that was so unethical uh that we we felt it wasn't the only factor but we disqualified him um on those grounds and others at the time because it's like look if you don't know the answer just tell us it's cool we can work through it together but if you're just going to make something up or even worse cheat and come up with the wrong answer that you're just

obviously guessing at it just says something about you so anyway yeah no cheating um one other chunk of advice i'd give is uh interview a lot um yeah interviews are like anything where i think your performance probably falls on some distribution it probably depends a lot on what kind of day you're having and what the people are like and whether it's late in the day and they're all tired and grumpy or whether the room is brightly lit or a dungeon or all kinds of factors that are sort of out of your control. And if you just hang everything on this one interview, there's just a chance that you'll have a bad interview and people have bad interviews and good interviews. So if you interview a lot, you have a wider range of choices. I guess this

is supposing you can get a lot of interviews, which is not true for some people. Yeah, if you're just starting out, that might be hard. But when I was less experienced, I used to interview a lot, like a couple times a year, even when I wasn't really looking for the job. And I think we've talked about this, right, Jameson? I don't remember if we have, but I was just about to say that. You should take it away. I did this because I enjoyed it.

Like I wanted to see other people's interview process. And what I found was that when I wasn't desperate for the interview, for the job, I mean, I was able to perform much better and I was able to be calm because I didn't desperately need it. It was like, I'm just doing this for fun. And if it turns out to be a great company, yeah, I'll change jobs. That'll be awesome. And it really made the interview process a lot more pleasant. Yeah.

One of my friends, Trek, he talks about how he just goes in interviews every six months, like no matter if he's happy or not or looking or not, partially to keep practice at it and partially just to see what's out there. Like maybe he thinks he's happy, but there's some amazing opportunity out there. And I think that probably helps him perform better in interviews. So Antonio wrote a longer, more detailed question that we summarized into this simpler question. But one of the things he asked was, should I focus on language fundamentals? And I, like Jameson said, it's impossible to know because every interview process is so different, but I still think you should. And generally speaking, people who are able to talk intelligently about the fundamentals of the tools or language or framework that they're being interviewed for do much better in my experience. Now, that won't be true for every interview.

And like Jameson said, it's really important that you figure out the actual process, but you can't go wrong by really mastering fundamentals. That's true. What about the whiteboard, Jameson? I think we're going to battle about this. I hate whiteboard coding. I hate it so much. Oh, I despise it. Because it exacerbates all of the artificial things about the interview. It really makes you it pits you against your interviewers like you're clearly facing off against them at the front of the room. you're not working in the environment where you code like the whiteboard doesn't have vim how do you how do you go up a line or something you know like the environment is so different um and and i think it makes it harder to discover what their true skill is because you just layer

all this other stuff on top of it so someone just totally nails a whiteboard interview um or whiteboard coding question that like might indicate that they're really good at their job but it might just indicate that they're really good at coding in front of strangers on a whiteboard which is probably not what their job is uh so i kind of hate them i like whiteboards for things you would use a whiteboard for in real life like designing a system or like laying out some database schema or something like that but i but i dislike them as just a tool to like test people's knowledge in general i like to do whiteboard interviews where i put the whiteboard up higher than the candidate can reach and then ask them to implement fibonacci sequence oh my gosh

so the real test is will you pull the whiteboard down or like ask for a ladder or something you have passed the test congratulations candidate and there's a loud gong noise so whether or not you love or hate whiteboards during an interview how do you do you should you prepare for them because they're very common right i just prepare by getting all indignant and i stomp out i try to intimidate them into going my way yeah i guess you should no no i don't i don't know i i hate that they exist so i i mean one way that i've done it um which has had mixed success for me is to state very clearly like i don't usually code on a whiteboard i might miss a curly brace or like i might get some very

specific syntactical thing wrong because i don't have all my tools helping and i farm that stuff out to my tools and i approach it more from a pseudocode perspective um i think that can work if they believe you when you say you actually know the language but like you miss a curly brace or whatever but if they don't they're like this guy doesn't even know what he's talking about then that might backfire yeah but but that that in some cases is free me from worrying like will this compile correctly like that's the job to tell me that yeah true yeah i don't know if there's a way to prepare for whiteboard interviews uh that i've ever employed um i do use a whiteboard a lot in my day-to-day work but more for the things like that jameson was just talking about

and so i don't know don't use the yellow marker on a white whiteboard that's that's the tip yeah i mean i guess you could practice have someone ask you they put you in a dark room they put a bright spotlight facing into your eyes like you're being interrogated and then they just shout out like reverse a string in place yeah how do you detect a cycle in a linked list go on the whiteboard i don't know there are there are books of interview questions you can buy and maybe you just practice doing those on the whiteboard instead of in your computer You know, as I was just thinking back on all the interviews I've done, and I've used a whiteboard in probably 90% of them, but I can't actually think of times when I've written more than, like, three or four lines of code on a whiteboard in any interview. So I think I've used them mostly for conceptual discussions and, like, you know, drawing pictures of architectures or, like, sequence diagrams or workflows and things, but never really writing code.

Really? yeah i i've had candidates write lots of code but i've never had i don't i've rarely had anyone ask me to write more than just a few a few lines yeah i haven't had to write like hundreds of lines of code in one interview but i i feel like most of the whiteboard stuff involves a lot of writing code down yeah hard to say um but one way or another i've not really prepared for that aspect of the interview myself i i think you can though and it it makes sense too because for better for worse you're going to be judged on your performance in it even though that doesn't reflect your performance in the job and i hate them but all i can do is take over the world

and forbid them and until that happens they'll still exist that is true so in let me sum this one up. I'd say that we avoided giving any very specific advice because the best technique we know of is quite meta, which is figure out about the specific interview process and then practice

for that. And that process varies so much from company to company that there's very little specific advice we can give on technologies to learn, whether to focus on fundamentals or tool specifics, things like that. It's just so hard to say.

Yeah. yeah and and i think practicing by interviewing a lot is another thing i'd make sure shows up in the summer just because if you're if you get really nervous in them more exposure to them will make you less nervous you'll see a wider variety of things so it'll be less likely you'll be completely surprised by something they just like hand you some balls and tell you to juggle them like what i didn't know this was a thing um yeah i guess we didn't even talk about like developing a rapport with the interviewers there's all kinds of like you'd like to be friendly to them because all part of what you're trying to do is make them like you

um for better or for worse again but yeah just just smile a lot yeah a firm handshake a lot of those i'll say soft interview skills um carry less weight with me at least in the interview process um i i want to make sure you're not a jerk and i want to hire nice people but most people aren't a jerk in the interview anyway you know yeah well that's just because you haven't felt the firmness of my handshake it's true he missed seven curly braces but boy was that handshake firm yeah and did you see the eye contact i'm still yeah i'm not tall though that's important too to to impress people it's true get some big shoes okay i'll do it yeah i think i think we answered this question yeah definitely said things

we said them said them good well dave how can people find out more about us if they want to for now you should visit us on twitter at soft skills eng and later actually jamison and i have been thinking that the internet needs something and what it needs is one more website because we don't think it has enough not quite it has n minus one websites but it needs n websites yeah and so eventually here soon we will be putting up a website that you can also visit in the future this is a teaser a teaser for a marketing website

for a podcast we know you've all been desperate to be like where is the soft skills engineering website your wait will hopefully soon be over it's coming we're going to hire the movie trailer announcer

guy to record something soon also thanks this summer soft skills engineering thanks everyone for all the tweets we've gotten uh a slightly elevated tweet volume this week it's been great hearing from you nice compliments uh some people have said some very nice things and so far zero people have said mean things which i'm surprised by but you know don't hold back say what you want um lots of good direct messages our question queue keeps growing

yeah thank you so much it's really nice you listeners are great you are great even though we can't hear you we know you're great by the firmness of your handshake do tcp handshakes have a firmness level when i do them they do and it's super firm tcp eye contact that's a kernel parameter you can tweak i'm pretty sure it's like you limit with a dash dash firm and then echo firmness greater than proxys tcp net I think that's a sign that this podcast is done. Thanks for listening. We'll catch you all next week.

Bye-bye.