One problem we have on our service (genenetwork.org) is stylistic consistency across many different pages and forms. Even one programmer can invent five different ways to close a window or pop-up. Table styles can be annoying diverse.
I wrote some instant reaction comment when I read this earlier today but then I went back and re read the whole thing and now I think the post is one of the best blogs I’ve read this year.
This was a proper rant and I’m glad it stirred up so many great discussions. Thanks to Matt.
> manage yourself and manage your peers, but you also have an engineering manager and a project manager and the CEO is your skip-level manager and the CEO’s brother is also your skip-level manager too
This is hilarious and I’m sad I’ve seen versions of this more than once.
Overall I enjoyed most of this article but disagree about the objection to behavioral interviews. I think they’re an important part of the modern hiring process but I will agree that the approach is sometimes done wrong by companies and individual interviewers.
its a test of EQ, if a simple question about past conflicts makes you this defensive then its exactly the type of thing it was meant to screen for. I’d encourage OP to put some thought into this part for their own sake. You don’t need to make everyone feel better but if you show up with the attitude that you’re never wrong, then nobody will want to work with you. I know I don’t.
Behavioural interviews are extremely effective provided you do them properly. Running behavioural interviews properly is extremely difficult and takes legitimate skill and experience to orchestrate. It's not something you can pull off by simply following a few rote questions in an interview pack.
As a result, most behavioural interviews are ineffective and absolutely riddled with bias.
That's one of the reasons that they are best done by experienced HR personnel.
Good HR people are worth their weight in platinum. I used to work with one whose thumbs down became an automatic "no" from the team because we discovered that she was so good at reading people that everyone she didn't like inevitably threw off massive red flags in the rest of the interviews.
This is foolish. Anyone can have a bad day, including the clairvoyant HR. Don't build an interview panel around pleasing "that one gal"; that kind of situation happens enough by accident.
And if you have a bad day, tough. That's one job you won't be getting. No one ever said that life is fair.
No one is building a panel around pleasing anyone. If you have a member of your team who is particularly skilled in any area, it would be foolish to not take advantage of it.
I haven't decided how I feel about behavioral interviews. I always pass them, but it feels like I'm telling the interviewer what they want to hear. I don't lie, but I certainly cherry-pick examples that make me look good and present an analysis that makes me seem more emotionally intelligent than I probably was in the moment.
My assumption is that everyone does this, and the interview is largely a test to determine if you even know what a "good" answer would sound like. The assignment is to describe how you think an emotionally intelligent and mature person would act, and if you don't even know what that looks like then there's no way they're hiring you.
If you say "I repeatedly managed to singlehandedly save the day despite being surrounded by idiots" then you've done them a huge favor of letting them know you're a pain in the ass to work with. I would assume that most people know better than to admit to an interviewer that this is how they think, but I don't conduct these interviews so I'm not sure.
This is well said. And I would say there is huge value simply in demonstrating that you know the right answers and what effective teamship looks like. Nobody is perfect, but if you know what perfect looks like, you can keep getting better.
Behavioral interviews seem like the new way to reject candidates based on "culture" without saying that though, because saying a candidate was rejected due to "culture incompatibility" can be taken as a bias or discrimination.
I interviewed at Netflix. The market is tough right now and they pay really well. I really wanted to pass.
I did great on their tech rounds. Their "culture round" is notoriously hard, people throw out advice like "read the culture memo". I did. Now I have no idea what I did "wrong" in the culture/behavioral interview with the first hiring manager, they passed, they gave me no feedback, but they still booked me for an interview with another team. I also failed with that hiring manager.
Yea, I thought the whole part on Behavioral Interviews was spot-on and appropriately dark and cynical.
> As far as I can tell, the “behavioral interview” is essentially the same as a Scientology intake session except, you know, for capitalism instead.
> A secondary goal of the “behavioral interview” is personality homogenization where companies want to enforce not hiring anybody “too different” from their current mean personality engram.
It really, REALLY does seem this way at many places.
Apologies if I am misreading you, but the fact that you keep putting culture and EQ into quotes signals to me that you think these are not important things. If that is the case, then yes, your EQ is bad.
Behavioral interviews select for people who are good at lying. Why else is interview prep a multi-million dollar industry? I can train anyone to tell interviewers exactly what they want to hear. Do you want people who are honest but maybe say things you don't want to hear? Or do you want drones?
> its a test of EQ, if a simple question about past conflicts makes you this defensive then its exactly the type of thing it was meant to screen for.
You see, to do the behavioral interview properly the interviewer must have a psychological degree and a special training relating to these interviews. The hiring interview is a special situation for an interviewee, they act not like they do in a normal working circumstances. For example they tend to overthink questions, searching for the best answer that will be marked by the interviewer as a good answer. They incentivized to lie, because it is easy to find these questions in advance and to invent the best answers out, and no one ever will find out that it was a lie. So, the interviewer asked some questions and got some learned answers, how can they now interpret these answers and say something about the personality traits of the interviewee?
> I’d encourage OP to put some thought into this part for their own sake. You don’t need to make everyone feel better but if you show up with the attitude that you’re never wrong, then nobody will want to work with you. I know I don’t.
You advice is probably misplaced. The article is not a part of a job interview. So their EQ didn't show any failures, they wanted to rant and they had chosen the right place to do it. If he ranted at the interview, I'd agree that he needs to work on their EQ or self-control or something.
The comments here is full of diagnoses for the author, but I'm really reluctant to form any opinions about the author mind. It is just one article, that was probably written in a single take. What you see may be not the persistent personal traits, but situational and temporary state of mind. The article has a theme and the author provides examples to his points, and do you think he should provide examples against his points? Again: if they were writing a scientific paper, I would expect them to go through all the evidence, and to do it much more rigorous, but it is just the fucking blog post. Yes a long one, but still the blog post.
And on this basis I'd encourage the most commenters in the thread to work on their EQ. More specifically to read about Fundamental Attribution Error. People are largely driven by the situation they are in, but observers interpret behavior mainly in terms of enduring personal traits.
Thanks for the thoughtful feedback, lots to think about. I reread the whole post and feel less strongly about my previous comments. Overall the original post gives me a lot to think about and I’m grateful for that.
Yeah, that is fair, its better than nothing. But he could have also done the thing that every other good journalist does and ask both sides for comment instead of speculating for 1000 words.
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