Interviewer & Candidate Perspectives

[00:00:00]
>> So we interviewed for front engineers. This course is to help lay that groundwork. I can't guarantee by the end, I will have answered every single possible interview question you will ever get in your life, that is not possible. But what I can guarantee is you're gonna have a better understanding of what interviewing is, and what it should be, specifically for frontend engineers.

[00:00:26]
And this course is a little unusual because it's told from two parts. It's told from the candidate's perspective. That would be the interviewee if you will, but I like candidate cuz it'll get a little messy. And it's told from that perspective because that's the perspective most of you are coming from.

[00:00:42]
You're saying, I have a lot of anxiety about interviewing. It's arbitrary, it's terrible, it's a long process. Yeah, I wanna settle that, I wanna say, here's how you approach these problems that you're probably gonna see and here's how to solve them. And here's how to behave during the interview and these are the things to expect from an interview but a little bit more unusual in a twist, a Jem twist, patent pending.

[00:01:06]
I'm gonna give the questions from the perspective of an interviewer. So I ask you now, you don't have to raise your hand, you don't have to say anything. But how much time have you spent studying how to interview people? Probably not that much. If at all, does your company give you a course on how to interview people?

[00:01:32]
Some do, some don't. Now contrast that against how many hours you've spent studying the interview. Hm, there's a disconnect somewhere. I wonder why interviews are so hard. Because we focus so much on passing an interview, but we never think about when we're on the other side of the table.

[00:01:49]
And to create this course, I talked to a lot of people. I talk to people at Netflix, and Google, and Facebook. And I talk to people who work at small startups, I talk to people who work at medium-sized startups. I went out and I interviewed, which I agree if we all know it's a bit unpleasant, but I went on an interview because I wanted to find out what are companies asking these days.

[00:02:08]
What are the type of questions they wanna know? What are they looking for in an engineer? But also I wanna know, how did people treat me? What did I like? What did I dislike? We never think about this. I tweeted this out the other day and maybe I'll share it with you at some point.

[00:02:23]
But here's a typical interviewing experience. Walk in. Someone asked you to implement, I don't know, a binary search tree on the whiteboard and already you're like, [SOUND] but you did it because you spent three months studying for this interview, and you pass. You're like, that was terrible. [LAUGH] I will never do that, that was awful.

[00:02:43]
I'm glad I got through, I got the offer, now I'm going to eat my free lunch. And then, six months later, someone comes in, a little nervous. They're like, welcome to Acme Corp. Now you know what I want you to do, I want you to implement a on the whiteboard.

[00:03:02]
That's a very fast way of finding prime numbers. But you wouldn't know that unless you study because it's not something you use every day. But it's kind of like University hazing. It all sucks but the cycle just keeps going and going and going. Because we forget what it's like to be on the other side of the table, we are forgetting that basic empathy.

[00:03:18]
So I wanna tell this course from the perspective of the interviewer as well. Sound good, yeah. And I wanna challenge you to go back to your place of work and say, how come we never study how to interview people? How can we not have this common rubric? I wanna start that conversation because interviewing is not great.

[00:03:36]
I think we can fix it.