Goal Setting & The Interview Process

[00:00:00]
>> A note on success and failure. Major League Baseball. People that get paid millions and millions of dollars to spend literally their entire lives training to do one thing, and it's generally to hit a ball with a bat. That's American baseball for those not familiar. This 0.300, this is considered a good batting average.

[00:00:23]
This actually considered an excellent batting average. This means that every time that you step up to bat, swing that ball, you have three tries, or four or five, it doesn't matter. Every time you go up to hit, seven out of ten times you're gonna miss. So you're gonna fail most of the time.

[00:00:40]
But if you succeed three out of those ten times, you're considered a very good hitter. You're considered excellent. Excellent player, you're probably getting paid millions and millions of dollars. So what I wanna do is reframe thinking about failure, because there's winning and then there's learning. Cuz you can always learn from your failures.

[00:01:00]
Really what I wanna do is get us at 0.500. That means about one out of every two interviews, you're gonna succeed, which is amazing. It sounds like failure. And at the time's where you're getting rejected and rejected, you're thinking, interviewing's hard, I'm a failure. I'm not a good engineer.

[00:01:19]
Maybe I'm not smart enough. But if I can get you to half, as in you pass half your interviews, you are doing phenomenal. And I talked to a lot of people, nobody's at this. I don't know a single person that can pass one out every two interviews. Smart people, too.

[00:01:35]
People that you've heard of. People that have written libraries. People that have changed the way we think about JavaScript, they couldn't pass one out of two interviews. I'd like to get us there, as a community, as a culture. And I wanna get you to 0.501. So I wanna get you slightly better than half, cuz that's pretty good.

[00:01:52]
Today we're gonna go through the steps of an interview. We're gonna start with the application. We're gonna go into that initial call with the recruiter or the hiring manager. We're gonna go into the code tests. And then we're gonna talk about the phone screen. Then we're gonna get to the onsite, kind of the meat and potatoes, if you will, of interviewing.

[00:02:08]
And then we're gonna talk about the results, how to deal success, how to deal with failure. And if you're saying Jem, why can we just skip straight to the on-site part cuz that's the part that I care about? I got some bad news for you. Statistically speaking, most of you will never get to the on-site.

[00:02:23]
That's just a numbers game. I would say a lot of the big companies, they probably hire maybe 10% of the people that apply. It's easier to get into Stanford or Harvard than some of these big companies, just by running the numbers. So I wanna talk about the steps to get to the on-site.

[00:02:40]
And then we're gonna cover a lot of the questions that you might get, or the style of questions you're gonna get. [BLANK AUDIO]