Ask HN: How do you tune your personality to get better at interviews?
(Under the advisement of my lawyer (ChatGPT) I won't say the company's name).
It has really annoyed me; I ended up doing three interviews over the course of four weeks, and I'm pretty confident that I got the technical questions right. It could be that my resume is too "jumpy", which is fair, but they could have read my resume before they wasted my time and theirs with three multi-hour interviews.
The only thing I can think of is that they just didn't like my personality during the interviews, which is honestly the most frustrating. If I had messed up the technical portion then that would be a goal to work towards by learning more technical stuff, but I'm not 100% sure what about my personality is screwing up these interviews, and even less sure on how I'm supposed to change anything about it.
It's hard to stay motivated but I guess I don't have much of a choice since I still need to pay my mortgage, so I was curious if anyone here had any advice on how to best tune my personality to do better in interviews? Preferably I'd prefer to stay honest (if for no other reason than I'm a pretty terrible liar).
In the most common case where I see engineers who say they struggle with the soft skills parts of interviewing, the underlying issue is a lack of skill in communication - working out what's important, stating it clearly and concisely, and in a way appropriate to the audience. I read some of your blog and found it pleasantly chatty, well structured, and obviously technical. If you communicate like you do in writing, there is obviously no problem there. I have no doubt that your account of performing well on technical questions is correct. However...
After some quick google searches, what I did find in your digital footprint is:
- A relatively high number of online posts complaining about employers in general across several years
- A tweet from a few years ago where you say you're fed up of software engineering but are forced to stick with it
- (as you stated) a jumpy work history
My best guess is that you're failing the digital footprint check. If I was hiring and post interview was doing a little more digging on candidates to help do a final pick, I would look at the short tenures, the outwardly directed frustration at employers, the stated lack of desire to be a software engineer at all, and pass on you.
As for why this is happening after several technical interviews? Most likely that's when you undergo final background checks and get cut out of the process. If you are burned out, sick of workplace social narratives, and don't want to work as a software engineer, I sincerely empathise for you. However: don't let me, a random hacker news commenter, find that out in under 2 minutes of time spent on Google.
The posts on LinkedIn should probably go too.
Some of these opinions are ones I don't really hold anymore so deleting isn't a big deal. I will admit that some of the ones I am deleting upset me because I still do think that way.
And, as others have said... this rejection might have nothing to do with you. If they had 1000 applications, and you were their choice above 998 of them, you still get the rejection because they hired the person who was above 999 of them.
This has never been my experience. Quirkyness in the interview loops have never dictated my on the job experience. And having been pulled in to conduct interviews, I can say that its all so last minute and unplanned, that it reinforces how little it matters. Judge a company all you want, just get the offer first.
You’ll probably never talk with the hiring manager or that recruiter again. You’ll probably be working with a different PM and engineers.
From my POV, if you don’t have any strong signals about why you were rejected, I would just move on rather than trying to infer the reason.
The problem with advice here is that, if you're right and there's something personality-related and it's not just fierce competition or tiny sample size, we can't really tell through a post. I'm talking about the je ne sais quoi of you, the body language, the attitude, the unwritten vibe you give off, and posting videos here is uh, well, yeah, unlikely.
So, I'd echo the advice of others to talk to your friends and ask them to give you feedback. Hopefully they're observant and willing to be blunt.
I'll opine, though - have you tried a little masking and humility? I ask because if I had to guess based on probability, the archetype of the highly intelligent, technically excellent nerd tends to also run adjacent to underdeveloped social skills, or at least indifference to using them. Arrogance, defensiveness, ego abound. That's what I coach my team and friends on who have cracked this type of discussion open.
If you were going to mask for an interview, coming across humble/hungry/smart (smart is probably not a problem for most here, but humble?...). Consider mirroring with the interviewer. Stay detached and practice this, especially when a finger is pointed at you or you don't ace a question, or they disagree.
In all, it's probably the stuff you can't describe easily without being next to you. You may not even realize the signals you're putting off, if that is even what's going on.
I know the struggle - my wife has been turned down over and over and over, and she takes it personally, but she's also going for jobs that clearly have tons of great applicants. Is it her attitude? Did she make a mistake bringing up that experience? Or maybe...or maybe it's just out of our control, and we have to stick to the plan and stay in the market. The losing move is not to play.
In my normal personal life I tend to be pretty sarcastic and self-deprecating. My therapist says it might be a defense mechanism to avoid actually confronting problems; if you make a person you're talking to laugh then they usually think everything is fine and stop worrying about you.
I try not to do that during interviews. I don't think I'm coming off like I'm trying hard to be smart or brag, but it's very possible and likely that some level of my normal insecurities are bleeding through, and that happening even subtly might be enough to poison it for me.
You don't have to be 100% sure about what it is personality-wise that you need to tune up to start making changes. You're an intelligent agent; your intuition is much better than random about things like this. I would say act on your intuitions about what specifically you are going that is rubbing them the wrong way, and be less like that - regress a little to the mean, in other words. This is generally good advice in the business world, even if it isn't good advice for e.g. becoming a celebrity on Twitter.
Take note that most psychological studies suggest that personality is very unlikely to change dramatically in adulthood no matter what you do. It's better to focus on techniques that let you chill out for a few hours/days/weeks than it is to try to actually change who you are at core.
Deep introspection is really hard. Assuming it is you that is the problem, and working from that assumption is anything but natural for most people. Even in your own thoughts. Arrogance, defensiveness and a skewed sense of self are things most people tend to carry with them.
I've read, listened to (audio book) and otherwise experienced a lot of leadership training in my life. A lot of it didn't really click until I was at a point where I could really self reflect, and literally seeing my own flaws in another person changed me significantly.
You'll never know the real reason you weren't hired anyway, so it doesn't make sense trying to focus on changing something that you don't know is a problem to begin with. You're assuming it is personality, but it could also be other things related or not to you.
Interviewing is ultimately a numbers game; you can get better at it (with the myriad interview-prep materiel out there), but you are still subject to various uncontrollable factors. The most significant thing you can do is apply to more jobs, and thus increase your odds of getting hired.
There are probably 300 people interviewing for the job you interviewed for. So they need to not just pick someone who checks the boxes, but the BEST of all the people who checked the boxes.
Assuming you checked all the boxes, you weren't the best and someone else was chosen. That's all it is. What makes them the best? Who knows. There's likely 50 of them they had to choose from.
Job hunting has always been a numbers game but now it's worse by a factor of 100x. Don't take it personally, and keep going.
Dunno, it's just hard not to take this a bit personally sometimes. As I said, if I felt like I knew what I was screwing up, then that would be something I could work on. It's not hard to buy textbooks and learn more about concurrency theory or distributed systems or something, or to build a project on my server to play with a library, or something like that. It's extremely hard to solve a problem if you have no idea what the problem even is.
You're not wrong with anything you said though. I just need to keep applying and go from there.
This is the worst job market I've seen since the dot com bust. It's much worse than the Financial Crisis. There are tens of thousands of out of work programmers, and in the next few years more and more new grads are joining the mix. You have to understand who your competition is. There is also the existential crisis of AI taking our jobs as well hanging over us. It's pretty rough out there. That said, during the dotcom bust is when we first saw offshoring to India and people were worried to death that all the jobs were going to go to India and for the most part they didn't, there was still a competitive advantage to continue hiring in the US for the next 20 years.
The only way to get a job right now is either through connections from a friend or coworker that thinks you're great, or by hustling and applying to thousands of jobs, or by forming your own company.
Everything you know about finding a job, increase things by 100x. If last time you sent out 20 resumes and got a job, this time send out 2000 resumes. I'm not joking.
It's going to be tough, but if you're resilient, you will find a job. If you're worried about money, move your spending down to as close to 0 as possible. Move in with friends or family, eat ramen, and keep applying. You can do it!
That's not saying much. While there was a month or two early on where it was a bit touch and go, granted, all-in-all the Financial Crisis period was one of the best times ever to be a programmer. That was the App Store gold rush era and all the investment dollars running away from every other industry due to financial crisis concerns was funnelling into tech.
If you are up for playing, why not play with sales and marketing? Playing isn't limited to tech. Grab a pencil from your drawer and try to get someone to buy it. Just like with those little low stakes tech projects, as you keep prodding at it to get it to work, you are bound to learn something.
And if you truly have nothing left to learn about sales and marketing, well, then you will have at least learned that the problem you have isn't what you are currently suspecting.
There might be a middle ground between "technical skills" and "personality", though, which we do take into account, falling under "soft skills", which may be affected by certain personality traits. Things like polling the interviewer for their thoughts, asking thoughtful questions, being curious about the source of disagreement or misunderstanding, not being dogmatic, and so on. I think it can be harder to demonstrate these kinds of skills with certain personality types -- I used to be very nervous in interviews, and it wasn't always easy to have the presence of mind to exercise these soft skills.
But even still, at least in technical interviews like programming or system design (as opposed to cross-functional/manager/tech leadership interviews), I've found it relatively rare for a candidate to be rejected for 'soft skill' failures when the right signals are there for technical strength.
But when I get the technical questions correct and TLA+ seems to agree with me, that's where I get really confused. I'm not typically interviewing for management positions, I'm interviewing for engineering jobs.
Most technical jobs can be done by most sufficiently skilled, or motivated candidates with enough intellect to handle the work. Not always to a certain level of craft, efficiency or trend setting, but it's not about that to most business stakeholders. I say this as someone who deeply cares about the craft, despite a rather insulting depiction, including some of my opinions and age I came across earlier today (grugbrain.dev).
Likeability is hard, and even then striking a balance in a given context is also hard. It often comes down to a level of self-reflection, which is where I think TFA is at right now. Which is an attempt to establish a balance of personal responsibility, with "culture fit." Given that many of us have personality traits that tend to be deviations from the norm in many ways, it's all that more important to understand that in ourselves and our efforts to adapt to society.
A pinnacle of this in Television is the show Dexter, where he regularly brings in doughnuts. I've had coworkers that did similar, and it's impressive the amount of affect this has on the working environment and relationships in turn.
Beyond this, comes the counter-intuitive position of being far more skilled than an interviewer. This can definitely work against you at times as well for a number of reasons. Just because you are the most technically adept for a position, doesn't mean you get the position. The technical aspects of most jobs are more about a minimum of, can they do the job. Not, are they the best fit.
This has been happening to me a bit, at an increasing frequency lately
I don't want to come off as cocky, but I think I have a decent understanding of concurrency and distributed systems, and I think a lot of interviewers simply do not. Sometimes I'm "corrected" on my whiteboard examples, and I have to push back because I'm not actually wrong about something.
And that kind of makes me seem like a douchebag, but at the same time I'm not going to pretend that I'm wrong on something if I don't genuinely think I might be wrong.
I've always found it very irritating when I felt people were trying to force saying my name in a conversation, but I think you're probably right and I'm just a weird case.
Salary requirements are a valid point; in this most recent example my salary requirements were smack in the middle of the listed range so I don't think it was an issue for this particular one but it's possible that they feel I'm too expensive.
Also keep in mind it could be as simple as that they had a better candidate.
The issue is not just this one company. I have been at this for months with similar stories for a lot of them.
Sometimes I get the technical questions wrong, so that's fair enough, I understand why they'd decline me for that and as I said that's something that I can at least work on for myself by reading through textbooks and/or building sample projects to understand a concept a bit better.
A lot of the time, though, I won't get the technical questions wrong, and it's this recurring thing of "I really don't know why I'm constantly being declined".
Mock interviews are a pretty good idea though.
If it was just one company, I wouldn’t start trying to change who you are. If you make up a new personality for the interview and get the job, then what? How long can you keep the character going? Do you want to work with people you can’t be yourself around?
In terms of what to possibly change, that’s almost impossible to say without seeing what you’re like in an interview.
You sound unsure and defeated in your post. Were you feeling confident the day of the interview, or do you think you seemed desperate for the job?
I will say that all the best technical interviews I have had are ones where I spoke in short sentences, was able to end on a point rather than rambling, and left plenty of time in my answers to ask questions of the reviewer and demonstrate curiosity.
Well I see the problem already.
On topic: this job market is a complete circus and I wouldn't gleam any rejections as it having anything to do with any factor you can control. So many jobs just disappeared for me mid-interview, with a few ending up as ghosts after 4-5 rounds. There's interviews where I do well but it's clear they had someone else in the pipeline with double my experience. Recruiter disrespect is also at very high levels and you'll be rejected for reasons they cannot legally disclose. Then there's the whole outsourcing issue and how the interview never intended to hire you, even if you were the perfect candidate.
Maybe one day we'll have a sane market again thst hires on the quality of the candidate. But that's not 2025.
That was a joke. I did ask ChatGPT how much trouble I could get into by saying their name and it wasn't clear but honestly the problem is bigger than one company so I don't really need to throw them under the bus anyway.
I don't disagree with anything you're saying.
Maybe you need to work on soft skills, learn on how to read other's expectations, so that you can dynamically adapt your strategy to meet their expectations.
Do you. You're the only one who can do it as well as you do.
https://www.google.com/search?q=bob+firestone+job+interview+...
I was having trouble with interviews circa 2006 and I bought his course and it was a great investment.
Also, having been on both sides, I can tell you that hiring is just a crap shoot. My (anecdotal!) experience is that a lot of hiring is e8ther 50% gut feelings-based or 50% keyword-based. And in the worse case, both.
From their perspective, they might be interviewing, say, six people. As you say, they've already weeded out people from their resumes before they even get to the interview. From my experience, and I have heard people note this before, interviews tend to be a Gaussian curve with a normal distribution. People are weeded out by resumes and such. However, if I interview six people, usually someone slips through the cracks who knows nothing or next to nothing. That leaves the remaining five.
Of the five, four are usually interchangeable. They're like you - they get the technical questions right, or right enough. It's obvious they've been writing features for code for a company like yours. But of the five, often one person seems to not just know the easiest questions, or normal questions, but has a very good understanding of the subject matter. You keep probing how much they know, and they have in-depth knowledge about a lot of things. They know how registers on a processor work, they know about cache, they know the big O space of various algorithms, they can explain different approaches to concurrency in depth, or testing, or a lot of things. So you got the answers right, they just did better.
It could be something else - you might be just as good as someone else, but they were recommended by someone already on the team, or on an adjacent team, and they get brought in.
I guess personalities are on a bell curve as well. Maybe one out of six people fail on this. Maybe they're disorganized, or immature, or arrogant. Sometimes they miss basic social cues, or don't follow instructions, or even seem like they have a screw loose. Then four out of six people seem nice enough - professional but friendly. Then maybe one out of six just seems very sharp and smart, or avuncular, or what have you. A lot of it ties together - someone who has done the work to learn a programming language more than the other candidates, you assume is going to be hard-working on features as well, and they also seem sharp because they know so much (about IT, but other things as well).
Some things are contrasting. The hard-working person who knows the programming language in and out, and who gets a lot of feature work done is probably willing to sacrifice a little comity within the group to get a feature out. On the other hand, some people are so stubborn and argumentative, their presence would be a negative, even if they have technical skills. But some personality traits can contrast - I've working with friendly, supportive leads with great technical skills, but if they are a little bit hard charging this type of thing might be expected to come with the package of being very good technically.
I stay interviewing while I have a job so the consequences aren’t as large but over on cscareers and blind, many people have the same experience
I wouldn’t over think this from one employer
Now, I've had a few strange things myself with interviews. Except for the company I ended work for, all other were a disaster. Everyone from HR knew 0 about Linux or programming. One guy was really dumb. We talked about bash for Linux and at the end he starts reading his notes and says "Sad you did not talk about scripting in Linux..." and I just went "Ok bye bye".
Before someone thinks I'm being cocky about me being right and them being wrong, after every interview involving concurrency I always write a PlusCal/TLA+ spec with my answer and use the model checker to make sure that my answer actually solved the problem correctly. This is why I can be confident that my answers were correct; I'm not smarter than anyone really, it's just that I try and verify my work.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zmp_--Oow5o
I've never really had much of an issue saying what's on my mind, so I don't know that alcohol would really help me much, generally all alcohol does is make me louder and sleepy; according to my wife I don't really talk different when I'm drunk.
Multiple times we rejected strong senior devs because of that. It could be things like: - language issues eg. we have to repeat questions multiple times - bad team players eg. they feel close minded, they seem judgemental
On the other hand, we recruited juniors who were not great technically but who had a positive mindset and the potential to grow. And I think they were the best people we hired.
In general they don't tell me when I do ask though. I understand that; they don't want to risk me suing them if they divulge anything that could be even construed as illegal, I probably wouldn't give feedback either honestly.
For what it is worth in my recent experience most interviewers have commented about how pleasant and likable I am before they reject me, usually for some perceived technical flaw such as not realizing the essence of software quality is embracing their favorite fuzzing solution.