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Interview Tips

I wrote about a small mindset shift that helped both my mental health and my success rate when job interviewing. In a nutshell:

View the job interview process primarily as a learning experience, and secondarily as an opportunity to get a job.

Preparing for an Interview​

Questions to Ask Your Interviewer​

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Ask at least one question that shows you've done your research on the company. Start by looking into whether they have a technical blog, or whether there are any recent news stories or interviews with company leadership. These sources can help you identify problems the company is trying to solve, and asking more specific questions about those problems will demonstrate that you are thoughtful and informed.

caution

Be mindful of your audience when asking questions. For example, questions about compensation and benefits are best suited for a recruiter. In-depth questions about the tech stack are more appropriate for someone on the engineering team. Questions about company mission and vision are great ones to ask a CEO. Questions about company culture could be suited for any of the above.

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If you're struggling to come up with questions to ask your interviewer, I really like this list that was shared by Alejandro Ñáñez, and it could be a great starting point for you to brainstorm questions that will be useful to you:

  • Let’s say you walk into a bar with your friends, and then you start talking about the company, what would you say?
  • How important is diversity for you, what are you doing to make it happen?
  • How do you deliver feedback?
  • How often you find yourself working outside of your 9-5?
  • How often is engineering involved in decision making?
  • If you had unlimited budget, what would you do?
  • What would you like to change?
  • You have GOOD engineers, and you have GREAT engineers. What set those two apart?
  • A year from now, I’d like to say that I’ve {a goal you have for the next year, for example "contributed to at least one of the backend/infra/mobile projects"}. Do you think that’s feasible?