
Storytelling Tips for Technical Interviews - stanete
https://stanete.com/storytelling-tips-technical-interviews
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pcmaffey
Here's one of my favorite examples:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDoH15ylAeo&feature=youtu.be](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDoH15ylAeo&feature=youtu.be)

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suyash
haha, this was fun!

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diN0bot
i lol'd. hey, if anyone wants to practice answering behavioral questions for
real on my youtube, let me know. it's a nice way to practice and help others
learn from what you do well and can improve. it's meant to be earnest and
lighthearted, not intentionally comedic, though making an interviewer chuckle
is not a bad way to connect ;-p

[https://www.youtube.com/CandidatePlanet](https://www.youtube.com/CandidatePlanet)

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codeformore
Being interesting is generally more important than being right:
[https://codeformore.com/technical-interviews-interesting-
is-...](https://codeformore.com/technical-interviews-interesting-is-normally-
more-important-than-right/)

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es7
This is true for life in general, but I'm not sure it works for technical
interviews.

I've seen many candidates derail themselves by trying to tell interesting
stories without realizing that the interviewer doesn't care. Many companies
treat technical interviews as a test and have strict rubrics that are specific
to the question.

If I ask a candidate:

"Okay, but how would you replace that XMLHttpRequest with fetch?"

all I want is a straightforward answer that shows you know the answer to the
question, or an explanation of why you don't, ex:

"Oh, I would Google that. I exclusively used Axios in my prior job but I could
learn fetch in an hour or two"

I know you want to feel heard and I will listen if you want to tell me how you
fought your boss and won in a quest to replace all of your homegrown internal
tooling with jQuery, but pay attention to your interviewer's body language and
responses.

In general, my advice for an interview is never talk more than 1-2 minutes
without getting active encouragement from your interviewer to continue on the
current thread of conversation.

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jowdones
And in today's interviews environment, telling the greatest stories along the
greatest CV, training for months and months on leetcode problems and being
able to convincingly act like you never seen them before during the interview,
generally bending over backwards and taking it into your ^H^H^H or what else,
all that that will dramatically raise your chances of getting hired from 0.1
to 0.2%.

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asimpletune
I think if you actually did all that then you’d almost certainly get the job.
I wonder why there’s that disconnect?

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lowiqengineer
I've done all of that, and the best job I got was Amazon :/ It seems like this
industry only works if you're just naturally intelligent (or lucky)

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ABeeSea
“The only job I got is one of the statistically highest-paying companies for
engineers in the country that can be leveraged to move to any company I want
in a couple years.”

It’s hard not to cringe at the amount of entitlement in being upset that your
only job was Amazon.

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TomMarius
They surely must have meant in the warehouse?

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lowiqengineer
No I’m an SWE

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itronitron
Taleb makes the observation in his latest book Skin in the Game that the best
storytellers are necessarily also bullshit artists.

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aspaceman
Hard disagree. A bullshit artist is a good storyteller because they tell you
exactly what you want to hear. The best storytellers can change your mind.

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Wistar
I've seen both. I had a manager who was a mesmerizing storyteller but was
really full of bullshit and I have watched the even more mesmerizing Brian
Greene who is not full of bullshit.

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eatbitseveryday
> You can read this post in Spanish here.

Just a small comment: isn’t this better written in Spanish? Just this
sentence. Non-English speakers won’t know what this says to click it.

The Spanish version has this, too:

> Puedes leer este post en inglés aquí.

I wouldn’t know this means the same for reading the post in English.

