Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 88: How To Dress For Interviews and Learning To Interview

Episode Date: December 22, 2017

This week Jamison and Dave answer these questions: How do you dress for interviews? Full on informal beach bum? Smart casual? Formal suit tie? I’m a new developer and have been asked to interview incoming developers. How do I learn how to interview? This is the NoRedInk interview process. This is the blog post Jamison likes on getting data out of the technical portion of the interview. This is a slightly pessimistic look at pitfalls in the standard interview process. Google wrote a great article about structured interviewing that might also be helpful.

It takes more than great bloom filter skills to be a great engineer. This is soft skills engineering episode 88. I'm your host Dave Smith. I'm your host Jameson Dance. Soft skills engineering is a weekly advice show for software developers and marsupials. I mean some marsupials are software developers so that could be partially redundant. That's true. Uh isn't that okay you know the Air Bud franchise? Uh Air Bud that rings a bell. Air Bud is the dog that plays basketball. oh my gosh from the 80s they kept pivoting to have different animals play different sports and i believe now they've ended up at marsupial software developers airbud 87

marsupial is a marsupial who codes yeah wow airbud that is a blast from the past oh my is it that old i gotta look this up airbud entertainment home page what is there like an airbud cinematic universe yeah there is okay okay 1997 i'm thinking of something else i'm gonna close this page before i learn too much about the airbud cinematic universe anyways do you want me to read our first question that's exactly what i want you to do how did you know just experience and intuition combined this is from a listener named god 2.0 uh that's that's what they said so that's what we'll call them how do you dress for interviews full-on informal

beach bum smart casual formal suit tie good question what is there like a informal beach bum is there such a thing as a formal beach bum a formal it's a one of those tuxedo t-shirts and patent leather flip-flops and board shorts yeah but your board shorts have like a really nice crease in them they're pressed so i think smart casual is where you wear cargo shorts but they're connected to the internet right and it just keeps track of like how many startup waters you have in your giant pockets it automatically alerts you when your startup water inventory is yeah in your pocket yeah you can go check an app on your phone instead of just like look in your pocket like a human oh man i can't believe and also they can get hacked that's the other feature

of internet of things stuff now your shorts can get hacked oh man so worth it though for the convenience yeah do you remember how crappy it was to be on the cutting edge to look into your pockets that was terrible yeah your shorts are now google glass so to my first technical job interview i wore a full-on suit and tie me too i got there and the guy that interviewed me was like you don't have to wear a suit yeah that was the first thing he said and it did not start off well that's exactly what happened to me it was a university interview i sat down in this little interview pod and the guy says to me you didn't have to wear a suit yeah just right away putting you at ease by the way you're dressed wrong and everyone's looking

at you funny you picked up the red pen and made a mark on the piece of paper yeah i've been going through some job interviews recently and i wore a t-shirt to my last on-site interview and my wife was like are you sure that's okay yeah it's fine don't worry this is how we signal competence to each other and then i had some remote interviews uh and i may have not showered one of the days of one of my interviews because i got the time zone wrong just like real quick threw on a hat to cover your your greasy mop yeah yeah i don't get like the good bed head where you look like a model i get the bed head where it looks like i just woke up from a very long and and restful but also energetic nap there's a lot of tossing and turning a restful but energetic nap

yeah like i used a lot of energy smooshing my hair around oh my gosh anyways yeah i've i've never worked at a place that has had a formal dress code as a developer and i believe that they are out there but i've never worked there nor interviewed at one so i've always either been the right amount of dressed or way overdressed yeah yeah yeah me too in fact there's kind of a degradation of my formality as i think back over the job interviews i've attended my first job interview was a suit and a tie just like you second job interview i think i wore no suit but i still wore a tie this is like a year year and a half in i hadn't quite realized and then third job interview i think i wore just whatever the heck i was wearing when i went to work that day

and ducked out for the interview and then from there on out i have no recollection i'm pretty sure i wore gym shorts on my remote interview but that's okay because they did not factor in yeah i've probably worn a button-up shirt i don't think i've ever worn a tie uh for an interview besides that first bad experience i i think the general advice is you would like to be maybe at the same level or slightly a little bit more formal than the dress at the at the place you work yeah that's exactly what i was thinking take it like one increment higher so you need to do a little recon where you figure out what people wear to work you know if they wear flip-flops then you can wear birkenstocks yeah with socks the the classy person's flip-flops

yeah there could be a lot of subcultures around that though that i am not aware of like maybe maybe i don't know you know how there are watch people who will just they know a lot about watches and you only know of casio i think there are probably things like that for flip-flops of like oh those flip-flops those reveal exquisite taste in a gentleman or lady i don't think so i don't think that subculture exists for flip-flops okay as a flip-flop connoisseur myself if it was there i'd be aware of it yeah i'm pretty sure i would know so so how do you find out what the formality level is so you can be at or slightly above it if you have a trusted insider who can give you advice that you think is you know competent in this area that's the first thing i

would go to but then otherwise ask the recruiter what people wear i think if you just say hey what do people wear to these interviews rather than say what should i wear just say what is normal that people wear most commonly and they'll say oh you know whatever or they'll say you know people really dress up or whatever i think that's a good way the recruiters they may not know everything about the company but they know how the candidates dress yeah i think one option also is to put on a disguise and then just sneak in and pretend to be like maintenance or something you know so we actually hired a infosec person four or five years ago oh did they have to do like i don't there's probably a name for it like i don't know operational security or something

actually so he just did it on his own it was funny so he was an infosec person awesome and he walked into the front door and started social engineering the front desk and stuff just to see how far he would get i'm the password inspector i need to see all your passwords keyboards up everyone give me those post-its he only got like 10 or 15 feet into the building before someone stood up and said hey who are you what are you doing and he was like awesome anyway he was super impressed so the next day he came back and interviewed he made up some story and then left he's like oh i'm just looking for the bathroom you know and then the next day he came and interviewed and people recognized him and

they were like hey weren't you that guy that came in yesterday he's oh he did it before a job so he was going to interview there right he was coming to interview but the day previously he hacked did he get the job he did yeah he did that's really cool and a funny side note he he then went on to orchestrate many like basically spoofed phishing attacks against our own company to train people you know what it looks like when you get spearfished and you know try to collect employees passwords and stuff and then and then yeah you know and then when people did a good job and stood up to them and whatnot they would have like you know employee of the month who defeated the security guy anyway it was cool that's cool anyway so that has nothing to do with what you should

dress though yeah when you do this make sure you go up to people and ask them like that's a nice shirt what brand is it just do a lot of reconnaissance yeah exactly okay one caveat to this if if you are a woman i have no earthly idea what the answer is but i'm pretty sure it's a lot more complicated than the advice we just gave i have i have a you know i've interviewed a fair number of women and i've interviewed women in jeans and you know like not t-shirts but you know jeans and you know the next step over a t-shirt and i've also interviewed women who wear much more uh much more formal not like evening gowns but more formal stuff um so i think in the in this industry at least it's for sure more flexible than in other industries even for yeah

now that's yeah that's not to say that they aren't necessarily judged by a different standard subconsciously or maybe even consciously by other people but from my experience i didn't judge the women any way differently based on how they dressed yeah i don't think i did either i'm just think i can't i don't know what the formal what what the official advice would be mm-hmm one one broad baseline though is like you should have good hygiene that's for sure you should you should do your hair even even if the dress code is sweatpants if you come in with cheeto stain sweatpants that smell like that's no good and you better do really good on the whiteboard interview no i don't think there is i don't think there's a thing you could write on

the whiteboard where if you stood up to write it and i saw a stain on your pants really i would i would accept really no not just i'm not talking like a stain i'm i don't know you mean like a extended period of cheeto i think wiping if someone lacks basic personal hygiene they would not be a good co-worker okay actually i just read a book it's on my shelf right now it's called the dirt on clean and it talks about the history of cleanliness over like the last two millennia and how much our ideas of what being clean is are cultural and not absolute so maybe that's not even true if you work with lots of people from different cultures but i mean like gross cheeto stains i think that's that's that's that's a universal thing

so like when you went out to interview did your wife say hey there's cheeto stains on your pants don't worry that's how we signal competence yeah if you look closely the cheeto stains are actually in the form of the big O notation for how good Quicksort is. Okay. I can't say that I've ever interviewed someone who had obviously acute hygiene problems. Have you ever been in that situation? I have, yeah.

They didn't do well in the interview, though, so it wasn't a dilemma of like, they would do so awesome at work, but they smell bad. Right, right. It was more of a clear-cut case. yeah yeah but i'm saying regardless of the level of formality you dress i think just looking neat and nice you can do that no matter if you have a t-shirt on or or a suit jacket on okay so if you had to choose one of these things from the list in the question which is full-on informal beach

bum smart casual formal suit tie i would go with smart casual with a topping of google glass like an actual google glass like a topping as in the top hat of some kind i meant literally on top but also like a metaphorical topping on the cake yeah you know like the cherry on okay here's what you do you layer first layer uh outer layer is very formal but also all tear away so you walk in the door you notice everyone's in jeans and t-shirts you tear off your outer layer of tuxedo and underneath you maybe have some like slacks and maybe a button down shirt or polo shirt or something still too formal that's also tearaway tear it away shorts jorts actually maybe maybe some homemade cut off jorts and a tech t-shirt and then you'll need some tearaway shoes tearaway

like uh tearaway shoes yeah maybe they're not tearaway you just kick really hard and they go flying off and it reveals a uh flip-flop yeah you just kick send your shoes flying leave this pile of tearaway clothing stride in the door dominate the interview that's true see then you have to do a lot less legwork this way because you can just walk in and you can make a game day decision about what to wear by just being prepared for any eventuality yeah and if i guess if you're really worried what if they have different layers where the people near the front are very formal or very informal that would be the worst people near the front are very informal you get further in the formality rises the further in you get this is a pathological you might need

to layer you might need to have several layers of super formal informal and then maybe one more super formal layer as a backup that's the base layer yeah just in case would you can deal with that you can hide your tuxedo under your jorts and t-shirt yeah it would need to obviously roll down your pants like roll down your leg it'd have to be rolled up but maybe you pull you you like pull a ripcord and it just flies down maybe there's some compressed air in there to help it smart casual on its way it's actually all controlled by your cell phone though okay so it doesn't tear away you press a button and some small shaped explosive charges fire blasting your formal wear off you're like is that what you're saying hey siri down level formal wear

i like it okay i think that means we've answered it oh yeah be ready for anything literally anything yeah uh you'll need to do some some manufacturing to prepare what if they ask you to like engage in some kind of physical challenge and you're not ready for it like downhill skiing or something like should you bring should you bring the material to do that yeah i guess you'll need rock climbing i need a lot rock climbing is like you need i think you can rock climb in jorts all right not not that you would know whatever okay uh yeah this comes from listener steven steven says hi i'm a relatively new developer

but was excited when my manager asked if i would like to interview incoming engineers oh steven why do you say that he was excited to interview incoming engineers oh i don't know i like interviewing do you really yeah i enjoy it okay i would have i would have pegged you as someone who doesn't like to do interviewing because you've never found a process that actually works and you feel like you're just throwing i like it because i feel like i can do the bare minimum of effort and still have it be such a better experience than the null interview process okay it makes me feel like i'm helping a lot all right so steven says i know you've answered how to prepare for an interview as a candidate but

do you have any tips for preparing for an interview as an interviewer i will be on a team of two or three that would be interviewing candidates the other interviewers will be analysts and non-technical folks so i'm in charge of gauging their technical proficiency specifically would you approach a team interview or an interview where you focus only on technical details differently than if you were the only interviewer thanks love the pod thank you steven you saved a lot of time there i like that efficiency that means you'll interview well that's right jump right to the heart of issues how do you prepare you've never you've never interviewed anyone oh man i still remember the first interview i did this is actually it's kind

of a good story yeah yeah i've been out of college for maybe six or eight months and my company which was small was going to expand and hire a few engineers and they the first candidates they brought in were like long-time friends and former co-workers of the other more senior engineers at the company and they were like hey dave would you interview this guy this particular this particular developer had like 20 years of experience had done so many amazing things like i don't remember specifically but i want to say he was like an apache web server core contributor or something oh cool and i was like i'm looking over his resume and i just look up at him and i'm just like so how how is it being an engineer i had no idea i felt like chris farley on the

saturday night live where he interviews celebrities have you seen that no i haven't he gets like paul mccartney on and he's like so um you're you were in the beatles paul mccartney's like yes yes i was and he's like that's awesome anyway that's how i felt on my first interview experience do you feel like they were doing that on purpose to kind of like give you a softball because it sounds like they wanted to hire this person anyways i felt like my interview was a formality after i looked at his resume and talked to him for a few minutes and i think maybe they just wanted me to get to know him before they hired him interesting okay so how how did you figure out how to interview i feel like now that

i'm a master of interviewing well i don't know i i think we both have ideas maybe they're not 100 compatible but i feel like we both have a process that we like for interviewing how did you arrive at this process it's probably mostly influenced by the process that i observed at my second company where i felt like they did a really good job of selecting candidates that were that had a very high probability of being successful on the job and so i just i think i was mostly influenced by observing that process that already existed and participating that way sure so you just interviewed a lot basically yeah but these were like panel interviews so it was like four interviewers and one interviewee and i just kind of would observe for a while and i'd see what

people would say and how they and how the candidates would respond and and just watching that i think started to shape my interview process and and really it's only really tweaked from there it's like it hasn't fundamentally changed so i don't know it's kind of a crappy answer i guess you have failed the interview dang it what about you how did you learn how to interview i think i just did it a bunch and saw a lot of things i didn't like and a few things i liked and then i read about it a lot i've never had any formal training of anyone sitting me down and saying here's the correct way to interview people and i was probably too arrogant for it to even have worked back in the day it would have been like what do you know you fuddy-duddy yeah

exactly but but definitely no one ever no one ever tried to show me how to correctly interview it was just like, here's how we do things. I'm thinking back the first place I did interviews. I don't know why I even got into them at first. I think I just wanted to, because I cared a lot about the culture and making the company a good place to work. So I wanted to be involved in the interview process to make sure like we're hiring people that I thought would do well there. My interview process has also been influenced by my own interviews I've gone through. And I've just pick things i liked and also things that i will never ever ever do yeah that's actually that's actually something i should have mentioned as well as you as we've said on the show before i'm a bit

of a serial hobbyist interviewer um on the candidate side and so yeah i've definitely picked up stuff i'll avoid but also i've seen a few things that i that i liked yeah every time i've utterly bombed an interview i think utterly bombing could have been avoided on the interview interviewer's side oh really if i if they had either given me more information to know like listen there's no way you're even close to qualified or what we're looking for that i wouldn't have done the interview or or just like changing some of the processes so what about have you ever bombed an interview that you felt like you were qualified for the position but the process was stacked against you yeah i think that's happened a couple times fewer than the other

thing where i just was not at all qualified but there definitely have been times where i felt like i could do the work here but there's no way i will do it because of this interview oh wow of how i'm performing on this interview oh meaning it will be withheld from me yeah yeah like they're not going to say yes because i'm doing really crappy well a lot of times i would then get mad and be like well i don't want to work here anyway and take my toys and go home yeah but looking back i feel like there are definitely places i could have worked and enjoyed and done a good job at that i just didn't didn't jump through their hoops man we're we're rambling a lot though we haven't answered the actual question like what do you actually do yeah what should steven do as a

as a new interviewer steven should go and interview at like five other companies okay make notes and bring back the best stuff and use it in your own interviews yeah i'm actually only half kidding when i say that uh we would have at my second job out of college several of my engineering peers would go and interview at kind of the big tech companies and they would bring back notes about what they asked them about and it definitely influenced our interview process it was it was great to see how other people do it yeah i mean steven you said you're a relatively new developer but you probably had to interview to get this job so you've at least been through one process maybe you went through some other ones too so you can take some some insight from that what did you like

what did you not like about it i think the source of a lot of bad interviews in tech is people doing what was done to them though yeah you need to be a little careful to not just blindly repeat what other people have done because often what you're blindly repeating is not very helpful that's right yeah cargo culting you're interested specifically in evaluating technical skills this is i think going to be a challenge for steven as a new developer because he's in the situation one interview also yes you're the only technical interviewer you're relatively new to development and i don't know if you're going to be hiring people who are more experienced than you are less experienced than you but it's going to be difficult to assess their talent especially if

they have experience in technologies that you're not experienced with yeah that's a really good point um at that point you might assess uh how good they are at explaining stuff to people that don't have their same depth of knowledge for sure that's different than knowing can they just do the work in this thing i don't understand yet it is but it's a decent proxy for that um and it doesn't necessarily predict quality of work, but I do think that if you can explain the stuff you've done in a way that makes sense to an engineering peer, that's a good predictor that you'll work well with them on the job. Yeah. I believe that there are trade-offs with asking for work samples or asking someone to code before the interview, but I think they're worth it overall usually

if you do it right. So I think you should ideally have some code they've written either specifically for a problem you've submitted to them or some open source or other code that they've done. I think you should be able to look at their code because that's going to be a lot of their output. And if you want to know if they can code, great way to do that is look at what they've coded. For sure.

Speaking of code, have you ever pair programmed with someone during an interview? Yeah, that was actually my default for part of the interview process for a long time. Yeah. Do you recommend it? Yeah, I think it's great.

it's not exactly the same as pair programming at work because you might you might for example be doing a problem that you is your fixed pair programmer interview problem so you already know all the answers but you don't just tell them but i think if you pair program with someone you get to see how they code and you also get the opportunity to make them feel more comfortable and and have kind of a personal connection with them so i think that's a big part of interviewing is allowing people to show off their best selves, not just how they perform under fire. There's a blog post I'll mention

that talks about how interviews, developers are not like combat infantrymen. They don't need to just show up under pressure. You know, like normally the work you do is pretty different than this typical interview process of kind of adversarial, kind of intense. So anything you can do to calm people down, make them feel more at ease,

get them to feel like they would feel during the normal workday will get you a better idea of how they will work during the normal workday maybe like put a scented candle on the desk and nice aromatic soothing yeah yeah maybe give them some helpful backpats while they do it like attaboy attagirl yeah good job sport nice curly brace you drew on the whiteboard there but yes i do like pair programming both because you get to work together and see how it feels to work together and also because you get to if you sense that they are feeling very nervous you get to try and diffuse that a little bit um the the broader point though i think is that as much as

possible the interview should reflect the work yes a lot of people um like to use proxies there some logic puzzles or, uh, I don't know. There's all kinds of stuff you can ask about or do that isn't the work that you would do. Right. And then people think that that will demonstrate how you would work, but why don't you just do the work and see how they do. So speaking of that, um, even whether you choose to pair program or do something with a computer in isolation or whatever, you're going to have to choose some kind of problem space for the candidate to demonstrate their skills. and before you walk into an interview with the candidate and you've got this problem in your hand that you want to present and work on with them be sure to test it first by and when i say

test what i mean is present it to another engineer and see how they do you need a baseline for if nothing else just to check if your question is insane but also something you can compare against to say well you know in a non-pressure non-interview situation my co-worker solved this problem in this way um and you can then compare that to the what the candidate does so i think yeah it's really important that you don't just show up and be like well i i thought of this problem i've worked through it in my mind now i'm going to throw it at a candidate and see how they do like that's you're too late you should have already tried it out that was how i did it when i first started here's a here's a tricky problem that i just thought of part of the way through

and it turns out i don't explain it very well exactly exactly or pick a good problem even yeah that's a good point i think another thing you could think about is trying to get some kind of data or some kind of you're going to have a feeling after either coding with them or looking at their code or asking them some technical questions and feelings are very hard to compare against feelings you have about other candidates so if you can make some kind of rubric i think that's pretty helpful maybe if you're looking at code you score it on like completeness and test coverage and maintainability or i don't know you pick some criteria yep um probably tell them exactly yes huge important if you're going to be grading them on some aspect of their code

you owe it to them to tell them what those aspects are yeah yeah and and then go through the code and make some numbers make a scale one through five or whatever another thing that actually when i read this question raises a red flag in my mind is that you are the only technical interviewer i think that's a quite possibly a bad process um not because that's not like a criticism of steven the interviewer but rather um you're making a big decision about a candidate here and you've only got one person assessing their technical abilities and i think you should have a couple at least to be able to say you know i saw this did you see that um and come to a consensus rather than uh you know one person who holds this decision in the balance yeah if there

was only one person assessing someone's technical proficiency i would want it to be someone very comfortable assessing people's technical proficiency um which steven i'm sure you're great you're also very new to this so i i would want it to be someone a little more experienced if it was only one person yeah for sure so that is a little weird i'm sure you'll do great though but just as a process overall this feels weird yeah i agree at my current company we actually go through eight hours of training before we're ever in a room with a candidate and even then when we go into a room with a candidate we actually have to shadow another interviewer where we don't participate actively we just observe and make notes and then before we get

left alone in a room with a candidate we have to be shadowed by someone else who's experienced to watch us and then give us feedback and you have to do those through several iterations before you can become a full-fledged solo interviewer and i really appreciate that because um not only is all the training just great but being able to see a whole bunch of other people's interview style and then learn from them and ask them questions and then have them sit back and criticize and and um comment on your interview style it's super handy and yeah that would be interesting it has shaped my process a lot you know to have someone sit down and say that question you asked um i would have asked this follow-up question and i'm like oh great idea you know i never would have

thought of that yeah yeah that's a really good that's a really good point do you feel like the training was helpful or just having feedback on it was more helpful the training because i could see the training's role being to enforce kind of here's how we do it at this company yeah yeah that's exactly like you already you already went into it with a pretty yeah i feel like you're pretty comfortable interviewing before that i was but i wanted to know the way my company did it and that's what the training did for me and it also you know went over important legal things stuff you're not allowed to ask about uh you there is a lot of stuff that you might be surprised to learn it is not legal to ask about and so your

company owes it to you to provide that training to keep them out of a mess if you go in there and screw up yeah if they didn't tell you though just google it real quick before your interview yeah that's true it doesn't take eight hours that is the only that's the only formal training i've ever had in an interview is someone pulling me aside and saying hey don't ask this uh and it wasn't until i had done a lot of interviews and i don't think i asked anything well no i don't think i did going back but maybe i did i don't know i sure didn't know it was illegal are you allowed to ask what brand of smart cargo shorts they're wearing you are but they don't have to answer right do ask don't tell that's yeah and you can't hold the answer the answer cannot affect

the outcome negatively or positively hmm i talked a lot about interviewing in general and steven's asking specifically how you assess someone's technical proficiency and i have a lot of thoughts about how you interview in general but assessing someone's technical proficiency i think i think my go-to would be one look at their code that they've written before to do some kind of pair programming and the three i might do some kind of systems design exercise oh yeah something i would use a whiteboard to solve in real life not a fake whiteboard question so like we need a system with these properties how would you structure it what would your back end look like what would your i don't know so as your schema

look like as you're pair programming with someone what are you looking for how do you assess the performance i'm looking to see if they make progress on solving the problem that's that's a big one i'm looking to see how it feels to interact with them i've pair programs with some people that are very overbearing or people that i felt like we fit together naturally that they asked good questions and had we had a good back and forth trying to solve the problem i'm looking to see what kind of questions they ask to kind of like get an understanding of the problem um and then i'm just i mean we're doing it in a language that they're comfortable with so i'm looking to see how comfortable they are with their comfy language of choice even if that's not the language

they would use at work that's kind of a proxy for what they would be able to do once they got up to speed on the tech at work yes so here this actually leads me to a uh something that's a pet peeve of mine which is that i never hire for a laundry list of skills that my company happens to be using today in other words i don't sit down and say well tell me about your experience with language x or with tool y i'm not interested in that i'm interested in in the tools that they have used have they developed expertise in those tools and that's hard to assess if you don't have experience with them but that's what i'm looking for if they just happen to have experience in tools that we don't use today no problem i don't care at all i'm looking for developers who can

learn new things and chances are the stuff that i'm using today isn't going to be the stuff that i'm using in a year or two anyway even if i stay at the same company so i want a developer who can grow with the times yeah i'm i mean if we're doing it in a language i don't know very well i'll probably ask a lot more questions about stuff and then it's a chance to see how how they explain things technically like we talked about earlier for sure i haven't explicitly tried to challenge design decisions in these pair programming interviews i haven't tried to say like well why why are you doing it this way is there a better way i don't know maybe if maybe if there's some glaring performance issue or something like that i might try and suggest things but i talked

about having a rubric i don't have one for pair programming i have one for looking at code that is pre-written oh okay but i should probably make one for pair programming huh yeah for sure okay well good advice dave to me yeah hey i'm here to help um just trying to make you a better interviewer i will be it's my job as i do this one more thing you might want to ask steven of the other people who are interviewing and also of the people who are going to be making the final decision is what's the process after i'm done with a candidate what will i need to tell you is there paperwork uh how do we evaluate the candidate do we meet together oh man and you need to know this stuff before you sit down with the candidate so that you can be sure to get to

the right material with the candidate so that after the interview you have answers to the right questions does that make sense yeah what happens next is a pretty standard question and you need to be able to i'll tell a story we we did an interview as a team with a candidate the candidate pair programmed with everybody on the team there was a next step that would happen then if we decided we liked the candidate and wanted to move forward and there's a separate process if we were unsure or were a no and someone kind of got the team together in front of the candidate and we're like so what what happens next like someone in the interview process on the team and we we had to be like well that depends you stand over there while we talk about it awkwardly so yeah it should be

very clear what happens next and ideally it should be clear before the interview starts yeah what happens next so you don't have this awkward like well if we like you we'll do this if not then we're done yeah has the question been answered one more thing since this is the beginning of your illustrious interviewing career it's a good idea to occasionally step back and take stock of the people that you have interviewed especially those that got hired and ask yourself did i make the right call and if i did great and if i didn't what do i need to change about my interviewing to be able to get that information earlier in the process so we don't have to make a mistake in hiring you know and it's not always clear whether you did or did not make a right choice even if

they got hired but over time it usually becomes pretty clear yeah i can think of several notable rejections that i have done that i i looking back i'm like man that was such a why didn't we hire that person and it's it's changed how i approach things for sure yeah that's the harder one is like a lot of times when you reject someone you may never see them again and unless they're internet famous you might not ever find out whether they actually would have been a good candidate so that's the hardest one i think to get feedback for yourself on is did i make a good call when i rejected them yeah so uh just be facebook friends with them and just talk them very closely after that connect with them on linkedin and see if you can get a testimonial

from their future co-workers yeah yeah all right is the question answered yep i think so okay good luck steven you'll do great have fun yep be nice yeah yeah good advice all right what can people do if they want their own questions answered dave go hit us up on softskills.audio where you can click ask a question and fill out a form you can give us as much detail as you like about yourself or keep yourself completely anonymous and we will get to your question we are very thankful for the many many people who have submitted questions there are too many for us to answer but one day if you're patient enough and my health holds we will answer all these questions also follow us on twitter at soft skills eng where we tweet occasionally about

new episodes and other goings on and check out the comments at the bottom of each episode page there are some great comments forming good good discussion threads about things we left out or uh other you know alternative answers that people have to questions which are super insightful to read each week all right with that i think we're done all right see you next week