Austen McDonald is a former hiring committee member at Meta, where he led mobile hiring and conducted hundreds of interviews. In this episode, we talked about what happens behind the scenes in a hiring committee, unethical candidates, and the role referrals play.
Check out the episode wherever you get your podcasts: YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts.
Timestamps
00:00:49 - What goes on in hiring committees
00:09:02 - Unethical candidates
00:12:50 - How leveling is determined
00:23:12 - Can you negotiate level mid-process
00:32:30 - How non-tech leads can signal scope
00:45:28 - What the rubric looks like
00:50:00 - OpenAI and Anthropic specific discussion
00:52:22 - Most common mistakes senior candidates make
01:02:31 - How to prep depending on your level
01:08:34 - Subjectivity and bias
01:21:02 - The questions you ask at the end matter
01:30:31 - How he got promoted to Senior Manager (M2) at Meta
01:33:32 - His biggest career regret
01:38:13 - The best advice he ever received
01:39:54 - Advice for younger self
Transcript
00:00:49 — What goes on in hiring committees
Ryan:
[00:00:49] Behavioral interviews are one of the most common signals in hiring committees that down levels candidates and so and I think this is especially important for senior engineers and higher. And so today I wanted to cover all of the common mistakes people make, how to prevent from getting down leveled and also I’d like to go over some company specific tips for people who want to work at hot companies like OpenAI and Anthropic.
[00:01:21] So yeah, I’m hoping that with your experience working on recruiting, leading iOS and Android recruiting across meta and after having conducted hundreds of interviews, I’m hoping you can kind of give us some of the behind the scenes in these hiring committees so we can learn about how to do better in our behavioral interviews.
Austen:
[00:01:41] Oh yeah, a behavioral interview is my favorite thing to talk about. So I’m excited to be here.
Ryan:
[00:01:45] What actually goes on in the hiring committees?
Austen:
[00:01:49] The first thing I would say is like when I would get a packet in front of the hiring committee and it was a senior packet, the first thing I would do is go to the behavioral interview. I would want to understand what is the scope that this engineer has operated at in the past, what’s their level of influence, what’s their level of insight, what’s their level of communication, what’s the level of organization that they’ve operated in.
[00:02:09] And that’ll be the first thing I did. And these committees are built of other engineers. They’re built of other engineering managers who are influential in the company. They’re recruited by someone like me, the hiring committee chair. And their job is to partner with recruiting to understand Whether or not this engineer should be hired hire, a no hire decision, but also a leveling decision. And then they send that, that up to sort of company wide committee of people who honestly most of the time what they do is just sort of a gut check on, on a sort of a cross, you know, across company hiring bar.
Ryan:
[00:02:40] So I’d love to learn more about the, the back end of the recruiting. So let’s say I’m a staff candidate and I’m going to go get hired at Meta. But who are all the people involved? What do they care about and how do they contribute to the hiring process?
Austen:
[00:02:55] Yeah, great question. So the first person you typically engage with is somebody called a sourcer. This is someone who is responsible for finding potential candidates. Oftentimes they’re more junior on the recruiting side or this is an entry level job for a recruiter. Their job is to cold contact you or maybe to process referrals. This sort of first touch point. They’re looking at some kind of job description.
[00:03:15] They’re looking at your years of experience. That’s probably the biggest thing. They’re assessing your past companies, your past, whatever they can find about your, your past experience. Looking through the referral that they look at and seeing whether or not they want to pass you through to some kind of phone screen process. Right. So this is the part where you see it as a, as an engineer. Some, sometimes this phone screen is a technical one where they are going to be giving you some kind of, you know, coding interview.
[00:03:38] Right. That’s really common. It could even be a pre, you know, pre phone screen conversation where they’re asking you. Sometimes we would give out multiple choice questions for engineers like oh, tell me about this part of iOS or time, this part of Android. And then you’d have to be able to answer those questions. Questions just as a sort of a, like a pre filter. Right. To make sure that we’re doing phone screens in an efficient way.
[00:03:59] Of course once your phone screen happens it goes to a, to back to the hiring committee actually. Unless it’s a very solid hire, if it’s a very solid hire on the phone screen side you get passed directly on to the scheduling for an on site interview. But if it’s kind of on the border then we would review it as a hiring committee. We would look for signals, all the signals that, that people talk about in coding interviews, communication and problem solving and all those things and we would see whether or not it would be worth to, to, to a follow up interview or we should just pass on this person on through to the, to the, to the rest of the, of the hiring process to on site or if we should maybe, you know, pass on that person overall and just maybe come back to them some other time.
[00:04:33] So that’ll be the first time the hiring committee is involved in a hiring decision after that. Sometimes a hiring committee would be consulted when there’s a certain kind of candidate has specialized experience. So for example, if you were like a very low level mobile engineer doing like C work, for example, on the mobile side, we would want to make sure that you were giving you an appropriate system design interview that really assesses you for your specific skills.
[00:04:54] So then we would also typically be consulted at times when there’s a choice of whether or not this person is a staff level engineer or a senior engineer. Oftentimes that’s the place in companies where the hiring process starts to change. So for example, at Meta specifically staff level engineers would have two system design interviews and so they, we would not be able to hire someone at a staff level unless we had provided two system designs.
[00:05:20] So that sort of decision about how to structure the loop starts, starts, starts there at that, that on screen, on site scheduling point in the, in the hiring process. And then of course if you, as you go up, as you go up to principal or as you go up to distinguished engineer, those hiring processes are very different and they add additional behavioral interviews. That’s what they add. So we can talk about that at some point.
[00:05:40] That’s how they are assessing whether or not someone is a principal engineer or distinguished engineer. And then after you go through the on site experience, then it comes back to, to us as a hiring committee and we make a decision, do we hire you? At what level do we, do we add any additional follow up interviews? Maybe one interview didn’t go very well. Maybe an interviewer, maybe you, you flubbed it and we want to give you another chance.
[00:06:01] Maybe we, maybe the interviewer didn’t do a very good job acquiring signal. And that happens a lot actually in the behavioral interview. So the behavioral interview is one of the hardest ones to, to give and one of the hardest ones to interpret. So oftentimes we would do follow ups on, on behavioral interviews if we didn’t get the right signal. And then after that, at least at Meta, it would go to a committee of engineering directors and they would make the final hiring and leveling decision.
[00:06:23] Sometimes members of the hiring committee would accompany the recruiter to that conversation with the engineering directors and advocate for our decisions as a, as a hiring committee. So possibly we’re deciding to take a chance on somebody, maybe this aspect of their packet is weak. But we’re really excited about that. We think that the company would really benefit from having engineers who have whatever that specific trait is, this problem solving piece or this technical skill or this organizational influence skill that they’ve demonstrated in their on sites.
[00:06:49] And we would need to go and advocate for that before the engineering directors. So that would be the process for a, you know, for an engineer from start to finish.
Ryan:
[00:06:58] At the beginning you said there’s that low level recruiter that makes some gut reaction. And just to understand, because the leveling decision is the thing I’m most curious about, the way that they would judge the level of the person to kind of enter the funnel is mostly based off years of experience. Is that right?
Austen:
[00:07:17] Years of experience and previous title. So if you are a staff engineer at Google, then they’ll probably try to bring you in a staff engineer here at Meta. Now a lot of companies like Meta don’t have public levels so it can be difficult to see just from someone’s LinkedIn what level they are. So that’s why they rely so much on years of experience.
Ryan:
[00:07:36] A lot of people, their companies, I’d say it might be someone outside of FAANG who has many years of experience and their title is extremely high. Let’s say they’re principal.
Austen:
[00:07:49] So they work in finance and they’re a vice president.
Ryan:
[00:07:51] Yes, yes, exactly.
Austen:
[00:07:52] Vice president gets a vice president like four years. Yeah, yeah.
Ryan:
[00:07:56] But like let’s say it’s, it’s someone, you know, principal architect at some non FAANG company for instance, what’s that recruiter going to set them at and how do they get leveled when you’re not in faang, coming into faang.
Austen:
[00:08:10] So sources understand this and recruiters understand that there is level inflation in different parts of the industry. And so we would take somebody, you know, who worked at even sometimes big tech companies, but non, non FAANG companies, like maybe companies that are, that are more oriented towards business, we would take them and download them significantly. So they would be, they would even be supporting maybe 10 or 15, 20 people as a manager, maybe even more, maybe 50 or 50 or 75 people as a manager.
[00:08:35] And sometimes we would down level them and just give them a team of eight or ten FAANG engineers right at Meta and likewise for, for, for ICs. So it’s not just that if you put on LinkedIn, I’m a principal engineer, you can suddenly get principal engineering sorcerers reaching out to you. They understand that that different companies have different expectations for, for their levels and maybe there’s some world which we would like to live in that this is all consistent, but it’s not, that’s not the world that we live in.
00:09:02 — Unethical candidates
Ryan:
[00:09:02] Just out of curiosity, what if you had some really unethical candidate who they were, they worked at Google, but let’s say they, in reality they were only a senior engineer or something wherever they were, but they had the years of experience where it’d be believable that they could be maybe a senior staff engineer or something like that and that was listed on their resume. What would happen if someone did that?
[00:09:29] And I imagine that first hop would go to senior staff. What then happens that prevents that from working?
Austen:
[00:09:36] Yeah. So the, for example, the first phone screen with an engineer that you have for staff level engineer or above is usually some kind of, not just a simple coding exercise like you would for a mid level or a senior engineer, but it is also sort of scope check. There’s a mixture of coding system design, oftentimes a conversation with you about your past experience where you walk yourself, they walk you where the candidate needs to walk the interviewer through some large project that they shipped now.
[00:10:05] So that’s the first, the first sort of check. Can you pass a sort of system design conversation at a high level such that we would pass you through for the on site, the real system design interview. And then can you tell me a story which is of sufficient scope of what you’ve executed now? You know we can talk about lying, right? There are some really famous liars in the world, we call them actors.
[00:10:23] So. But I will tell you that Los Angeles restaurants are filled with people who are trying to get into the lying business, right? And they can tell you how difficult it is to be an actor. So yes, I do think you can. Maybe you can come up with a story, right? And maybe you can use AI to tell you, oh let me tell you about this like company wide project that I shipped at Google. It is pretty challenging to lie in a convincing way.
[00:10:46] We, as, as you know people, we have this sense of, of is this person really telling me the truth. And then there’s always the follow up questions. And I’ve, I’ve experienced this in my coaching, coaching job where I can tell someone’s telling me a story that they have gotten from an AI because I start to ask them these follow up questions especially about technology and then they start to give me these kind of vague an answers or they really don’t.
[00:11:07] The answers don’t sort of don’t fit together. And then I get the sense of like, this person’s just not telling me the truth. Am I, am I foolable? Like, yes, everybody’s foolable. If you’re a good enough liar, yeah, you can, you can make this happen for sure. But I think it’s actually much harder to lie than most people expect it to be. And so that’s the first, that’s the first step. And then after that, you have this, this barrage of on site interviewers, interviews with highly calibrated people.
[00:11:31] So when we put interviewers for staff level or for, or principal level engineers, we send very senior people to those people who have been in the industry for very long time who have interviewed a very, a lot of people. They’re highly calibrated. And yes, you will have to like, lie repeatedly to these people in a convincing way in order to get all the way through. Now if you can do that successfully, I don’t know, maybe you are good enough to be a staff engineer or principal engineer.
[00:11:55] You know, maybe you’ll be fine and then we’ll hire you. Right. And then, then the question is, can you meet expectations at that level? Um, I, I do not have stories about people that we hire that we just, we thought was totally lying to us. Even though I’ve hired thousands of people, I, I have not heard that story. I think it’s much more difficult than people expect it to be.
Ryan:
[00:12:19] In theory, if someone was a, a generational liar, they, they could, they could do this. It’s just a lot harder than people think. Okay. Because yeah, I think that’s, that’s on a high level when maybe it’s just an engineering mindset. When I’m coming in and I’m thinking about interview prep, my, my first thought is, okay, I got to be good at the technical, but the behavioral, I can kind of, I can kind of wing it.
[00:12:44] You know, I can tell some stories. It’s a little bit of a softer thing.
00:12:50 — How leveling is determined
Ryan:
[00:12:50] What is it in the behavioral interviews that leads to the leveling determination? So you mentioned there’s an initial leveling determination, kind of a gut call by the first hop in the layer. And then at some point you’re placed into. Sounds like a range. You mentioned in one case.
Austen:
[00:13:17] Exactly.
Ryan:
[00:13:19] They’re trying to figure it out. And so then you’re Maybe staff, maybe senior. And they give you another loop. What do you need to do such that you are placed in staff if that were your goal?
Austen:
[00:13:30] One of the most important things when you’re choosing any kind of story to tell in a behavioral interview or when you’re having a conversation with a recruiter, which is also kind of like a behavioral interview, is to ensure that you’re establishing yourself as a certain scope. And that scope is about what size business problems have I solved with technology and what level of ambiguity and what level of organizations have I operated within and what have I been able to accomplish in that operation.
[00:13:53] So when you’re having a conversation with a recruiter and you’re talking about your past, past experience, you have got to land in that first tell me about yourself kind of thing. Like, oh, hey, who are you talking about? You’ve been up to that conversation is super critical. And people think about it from an interviewing perspective, but it starts there in that conversation with the recruiter. And so you have to come in and say, I have demonstrated and delivered large business value with, with technology.
[00:14:14] And it’s kind of like the greatest hits from your resume, right? People always tell you have, you know, measurable impact and results that’s, that’s present on your resume. That’s, that’s using some kind of metrics, right? That’s super important. It’s also to convey a sense of depth, right? A sense of complexity. You could say something like, well, you know, I improve performance in the Facebook app.
[00:14:31] And then people say like, okay, that doesn’t sound super hard. But if you said something like, well, you know, I organized across 100 engineers, this entire organization, to spend a 12 month performance improvement project that ran into multiple very difficult, you know, technical issues that required multiple staff level engineers in order to solve. Many months of investigation and experimentation.
[00:14:52] And then we came out with these like three core principles. And then we, then we, you know, we shipped this performance improvement. So I think when you start talking, talking about the complexity of the work, you need to communicate the technical depth, you need to communicate the organizational depth, you need to communicate the business value and the business impact that you delivered. And those are the things that the recruiter is listening for.
[00:15:09] And likewise, everybody in the process is listening to that. All the interviewers listening for the same thing. So getting really crisp and practicing that tell me about yourself piece is the first place where you can ensure that you’re getting into the right leveling bucket.
Ryan:
[00:15:23] I noticed there’s a lot of correlation between what you’re talking about and also promotions as well. For instance, when you’re talking about promotional behaviors for staff, your projects don’t just want to be, hey, I ship this thing and it’s good for my team. You want to be doing things that are across the org and larger and complicated and challenging. So are you saying that those are pretty similar and.
Austen:
[00:15:48] Oh yeah. Oh yeah. In fact, preparing for behavioral interviews will actually make you a better engineer. And I think being a great engineer is how being a great communicator, especially about your impact is the thing that you need to do is to be a great behavioral interview. So yes, for sure, you need to be able to quantify your impact, communicate it efficiently, communicate effectively and honestly.
[00:16:08] We’re talking about lying earlier and trying to keep people from lying. But most of my clients, most of the people I talk to in my coaching business, they have a problem not telling enough of the truth. Like not telling. They’re not boosting themselves enough, not talking to me enough about the accomplishments that they’ve done. So to me, that’s the thing that most people need help with. They need help showcasing how difficult the problem was.
[00:16:30] They need to help showcasing what kind of impact they made not just on whatever top line business metric it was, but also what kind of impact did it have on the team? What kind of impact did it have on code quality? What kind of impact did it have, you know, long term in the organization that they were, they were operating within? So for me, think about, if you’re, you know, I’m coaching engineers to do this, I spend a lot of time thinking about, you know, what are all the implications of the work that you’ve done and then how can you be really crisp about having that conversation?
[00:16:54] Because the flip side of that is like, well, if I want to talk about all the things I’ve done, then it takes a really long time. So that’s why it takes some, some, some preparation, but certainly getting really good at behavioral interviews. Communicating, telling stories, for example, telling stories about what you’ve done. You do that all the time. You do that to your manager every week in a one on one.
[00:17:10] You do that to the executive whenever you’re presenting your results.
Ryan:
[00:17:14] learn as a senior engineer in the interview process. It sounds like at every point, whether you think you are or not, you’re actually being assessed. What I mean is usually that first call, at least from my recollection, it was pitched to me as, hey, this is a little chat you don’t need to prepare for just Go ahead and come and talk to me. I’m just the recruiter but actually that call is hey, talk to me.
[00:17:40] I’m trying to figure out what level you are so I can place you in the right loop and even see if you’re worth talking to for follow up. So am I understanding that people should just sell themselves at every single minute of this recruiting process?
Austen:
[00:17:55] Yeah, always be closing for sure. Definitely. This first call is an evaluating call. They are interested in you. Right. Usually they, they may have contacted you or they have you applied and they’re contacting you. So it is a softer kind of evaluation. You shouldn’t be super nervous about it. They are your, they are your, your buddy, they’re your partner. Let’s remember that especially at a big company, these sources and recruiters are incentivized by how many hires they can deliver.
[00:18:17] So no, they’re not your friend. Right. There are certain, certain conversations you should be care very careful about, especially about compensation with these folks. But they are advocating for you. It is actually benefits them to find some a great candidate and be able to get them all the way through the process that is in their best interest. So it is a, you know, it is not a confrontational experience you need to prepare for.
[00:18:38] But yes, it is evaluative. Like you should not just show up to that phone call emotionally disconnected or unprepared to talk about your past experience. You should and if you’re, if you are like that, then I would delay the call. So reschedule the call. Spend a little bit of time preparing what you will say to the recruiter so that they get an accurate sense of the kind of impact that you’ve delivered and that’s going to be your best bet at getting that, that higher level offer.
Ryan:
[00:19:03] I’ve had experiences where I got through everything and at some point they said congrats, you’ve got the offer. It’s verbal, but you have an offer now. So congrats. We just want you to talk to the hiring manager just one last time. And this is for you. They want to tell you about the company, this and that usually is that also a case where the hiring manager is trying to get signal on you?
Austen:
[00:19:30] Oh, of course, of course. I mean the same exact things apply. So yes, it’s a little bit lower pressure than say the behavioral interview or the coding interview in the middle of the process. But definitely when you’re having this hiring manager chat or at a place like Meta or Google, they have a team matching phase where you’re having conversations with Multiple managers and they’re trying to find a fit for sure.
[00:19:49] You know, that conversation is super important for you to have a buttoned up introduction of yourself. Tell me about yourself. I do think that that one is a little bit more social. So in an interview setting, the interviewer has a set of questions. They want to go through the questions, right? So the longer you spend introducing yourself, you’re actually hurting your time management there. You’re preventing them from collecting other signal about you.
[00:20:11] However, I think this hiring manager conversation, it is more of a like, do I want to work with this person? Right? Do I, do I want to hang out with this person? So you do need a little bit more of a loose social engagement, especially as those early, that kind of, early phase of the, of the, of the conversation, hey, you know, how’s it going? Whether, you know, sports something, something, right.
[00:20:30] I think that, that connecting with the manager on whatever’s important to them is really, is really key for that, that interview. But certainly it is not just a, a formality or it is not purely for you. It is certainly the case that the hiring manager wants to see, do I want this person on my team? And they need to come out of that conversation with a couple things, you know, one is, do I like this person?
[00:20:48] Do I think they’ll be successful in the team? Will they fit the team culture? Will I, you know, will I as a manager benefit from bringing this person onto my team? And then they need to come out with a sense that you can deliver and solve problems that are similar to the problems that they have. So it’s so important for you to do as much research with the recruiter and sourcer in advance if you’re going to have this conversation.
[00:21:05] Understand what this manager values, understand what their team is working on, and then be able to tell your stories in a way that, that showcases that, yes, you can solve the problems that this manager has.
Ryan:
[00:21:14] You mentioned briefly there. You said the recruiter, the compensation conversations with the recruiter and how you need to be extremely careful in those conversations. What’s the most common mistake people are making when it comes to those compensation conversations?
Austen:
[00:21:30] Yeah, look, I’m not a negotiation expert. I won’t, I won’t present myself as one. You can even hire people who are, who are really good at helping you negotiate with, with these big tech companies. And I recommend that you go get some advice from them. But I will say that, you know, early anchoring, any negotiation is dangerous. So if, if, if early conversations where they’re asking you about your compensation expectations you should be very careful about what you tell them because that will, that will anchor you into the expectation to the conversation that you, that you talk about.
[00:21:58] You should definitely get some advice and, and understand the laws in your local jurisdiction. So for example, in California and New York, you’re required, the recruiter is required to tell you about the bands and salary bands and total comp bans for, for each, each of the, the jobs that you’re being applying for. So you can leverage that to understand where you are in the comp bands at that point.
[00:22:18] But I would not say I’m an expert at negotiation. I think probably the, probably the biggest mistake most people make is they don’t have multiple offers. So if you are negotiating from a position of weakness like I don’t have any other offers, I’m just talking to you and you’re the only company I’m talking, it’s gonna be very difficult for you to get to extract anything from that company. And which is why it’s so important for you to orchestrate your offers to land at a somewhat similar time.
[00:22:40] I know that’s more stressful. I understand it takes more work to go through the interview process at the same time. But if you have multiple offers in hand, that’s your best bet for being able to improve your compensation position.
Ryan:
[00:22:54] So I guess going back to the leveling side of things, let’s say I’m staff engineer and I, I will only take an interview if it’s staff and I make a mistake early in the process. Like I’m talking to the recruiter, like
Austen:
[00:23:10] on the phone screen, for example. Yeah, yeah.
00:23:12 — Can you negotiate level mid-process
Ryan:
[00:23:12] Can I be direct with the recruiter and say, hey, I’m, I see that I’m getting a lot of coding interviews. I think maybe I got the wrong, I might have sent the wrong signal. In which case it’s fine, let’s just end the process. Or can I get leveled at a higher. Can you negotiate at that level in mid process?
Austen:
[00:23:31] Yeah, that’s a really good question. I’m sure it depends on the company in the process. I would say that’s a good conversation to have with your recruiter. If, if you know that you’re being placed in to consideration for a level that you don’t want to be. What I will say is that there are many times when we would up level people as well as down level people. And so the recruiter will, it’s their interest.
[00:23:50] They’ll try to keep you in the process. They will say, let me stick around, you know, maybe we’ll Evaluate you and maybe we’ll, you know, we’ll, we’ll offer you this second thing. And I would push for to go ahead and try to get as much of that evaluation process done for the level that you would like to, to be hired for as much as possible. That way you don’t have to go through follow up interviews or they don’t have to, you know, change something about the process late in the game.
[00:24:10] Try to collect as much information for the hiring committee as, as possible at once as possible. So yes, I think that’s a good conversation to have. But you know, if it was a job you were really interested in and they were offering, they were considering you for one level below and they were not willing to change anything, I, I would, it depends on the job obviously depends on the total comp. Opportunity and where you’re at.
[00:24:31] But I would say try to rock the interviews as much as possible and then get that consideration for the higher level. And you can do that in a couple of key ways. So the first way is to make sure that you’re anchoring every conversation you have with all of your interviewers at that higher level. Which again comes back down to that. Tell me about yourself when, when they especially behavioral and system design interview and you’re having these conversations and you are talking about very large scope projects, talking about impact which is commensurate with that higher level.
[00:24:56] The behavioral interviewer especially will notice that and then they will want to dive into that and they will want to ask you questions and they will then you’re re resetting their mind about what, what to expect from the interview and that’s super important. And then the second place is in, that is in the story choice that you have for your behavioral interviews. So remember that this, whenever someone’s asking you a behavioral interview question, there’s always a question behind the question.
[00:25:17] Like why are they asking me this? They don’t actually really care about my favorite project. Or like, like they really don’t actually care that much about some time I had a conflict with my manager. They’re probably going to forget a bunch, bunch of those that, that, that detail right after the interview. What they want to see is are you operating at the level that they’re expecting you to operate.
[00:25:32] So make sure and I talk about this in the book. There’s four different considerations for whenever you choose a story and the number one choice is scope. You want to make sure that you have come out of that behavioral interview telling the stories that that are the highest scope and the ones that represent you the most, the ones that you would love to tell to a hiring manager. So that’s your job as a behavioral interviewer interview candidate.
[00:25:51] I want to leave that interview having told the most important stories from my career. And sometimes that can be kind of challenging because they, they you are not driving. Right, the interviewer is driving. But your task as a candidate is to guide the interviewer towards that signal, towards that place in your career where they’re going to collect the signal that you think best represents you. And, and you do that by choosing stories that are of the highest scope and the highest impact that you’ve delivered.
Ryan:
[00:26:15] So around a year ago, a buddy of mine, he was applying for a senior role at all of the top AI labs and he actually got an offer at Anthrop. When he was going through the process, I remember him telling me that the single most impactful tool for him in preparing for system design was the free resources that hello Interview has on their website. If you are preparing for technical interviews, I highly recommend you check out hello Interview.
[00:26:39] I would have said that even before they sponsored this episode. I think they’re providing something that’s great for the community. Also, if you’re preparing for behavioral interviews, they’re actually partnering with Austin to provide more interview behavioral interview resources on their website. So I’ll put a link in the show notes so you can check it out. This is the absolute first ad I’ve ever done for this podcast after over a year.
[00:26:58] Right now the podcast is running net negative. Hopefully it can sustain itself soon. This is a step in that direction and I just want to say thank you so much for supporting the podcast with that. Let’s get back into the episode. Austin’s about to tell us how to avoid being down leveled accidentally. The big question then is how, how do you do it concretely? Maybe we can go over some concrete examples.
[00:27:21] What would a senior Scope project look like? What would a staff project look like? Senior staff, principal? Maybe we can take the same example and kind of evolve it so people can hear. What are the keywords people are looking for?
Austen:
[00:27:35] Right. I’ll give you a sense of where big tech companies like faang oriented companies are at with their levels now. But for the specific company that you’re applying to, you should go do some research and figure out what is expected of a mid level engineer. What is a staff level engineer? Oftentimes you can find this information on the Internet, but I’ll tell you, the very simple rubric is something like a, you know, a new grad engineer is doing tasks.
[00:27:55] You know, they do a task, come back to the team, go to the manager or Jira, whatever, whatever is giving them the task, they go do another task, right? That’s their job. A mid level engineer is doing a feature. A feature has many tasks and, and the feature is something that might take, you know, a couple of weeks or something. And that’s what they’re, that’s what they’re working on. And the senior engineer is doing projects.
[00:28:14] Projects have many features which have many tasks. Oftentimes projects are ones that are working through others, perhaps other mid level engineers or other junior engineers who are working underneath them. So there’s some kind of leadership and delegation and organization and communication expectation for this level 5 person or the senior person, staff person. Level 6 at Meta, for example, would be somebody who is responsible for some kind of goal, right?
[00:28:38] So this is the goal. In order to accomplish this engagement goal or this, you know, revenue goal, we have need to have multiple, multiple projects which have multiple features or multiple tasks, right? So there’s this natural cascading hierarchy of what’s expected based on ambiguity, right? That’s what levels really mean is how much ambiguity can you handle. The ambiguity of an intern is very different than the ambiguity of the CEO.
[00:28:59] And that’s what differentiates the levels and differentiate compensation. And then this like level seven or this principle or distinct, whatever you want to call it, this next level is more about organization. So I’m responsible for an entire organization which has many goals, which is many projects. It’s just many features, many tasks. And then maybe whatever the next level is, it sometimes it’s distinguished or different people have different names for this thing, but that’s responsible for industry.
[00:29:25] I’m responsible for this industry which has, over this entire business, which has many organizations, which has many goals, etc. So I think that when you’re choosing stories to tell about landing a certain job, you understand what those level expectations are at the company that you’re targeting and then making sure that you’re telling stories that hit those, hit those notes. So let’s take for example, staff, Staff level engineer is a big difference between that and a senior engineer.
[00:29:52] And really it comes down to how the, the breadth of impact that you’re making. So you’re, you are making impact more than just your small project and your small area. Oftentimes it’s an entire team or maybe multiple teams you’re working with. Oftentimes you’re telling stories that involve a lot of, of working across an organization, a very large organization. So this is why it’s so difficult for, for startups up engineers, unless you were the founder, for example, to get a job at staff or higher is because those, those experiences are oftentimes limited by the number of people that you’ve worked with.
[00:30:22] So if you didn’t have to, you know, if there was only one stakeholder CEO and like two or three engineers, it’s pretty difficult for you to demonstrate the kind of depth of organizational leadership that is required for that, that staff level position. Then there’s like a technology complexity. So here you can, and it’s really difficult. In a behavioral interview, how do I communicate the difficult to this technology problem, this, this bug or this, this, this decision?
[00:30:45] And you have to quantify that. So you have to talk about the amount of time it has you to quantify the risk. You have to talk about the number of people you had to talk to to get advice. Or you have to somehow give me a sense of how risky it was, right, in order to make this choice, how difficult it was for you to back out of this choice, for example, so you can, you can talk around the complexity of this technical problem and give me a sense of what is there.
[00:31:07] And then there’s oftentimes leadership pieces. This is something that people forget about. They talk, maybe they, maybe they talk about tech. Almost always they talk about technology, right? Engineers, oh, I love talk about tech. You know, probably if anybody, they talk too much about tech, right? Then there’s this organizational thing which I talked about before. But sometimes people forget to even talk about the leadership parts.
[00:31:25] A lot of projects involve some kind of influence and mentorship, for example, over others. So now you’re convincing people to do things maybe they don’t want to do. That’s a big part of a staff engineer. Motivating people or getting concessions out of other teams, aligning on roadmaps, that sort of thing. And then there’s also mentoring. So how did I mentor and help the people who worked underneath me and made them better?
[00:31:44] How did I make the team better? How did I make the org better, better? So those things are oftentimes forgotten about when people are trying to anchor this, the listener and make them think, yes, this is a staff level engineer. So really, and we go back to what you said earlier. If you can reflect on your own career and understand what makes you successful and you can identify those pieces which differentiate you from other engineers, those are the things that you need to talk about in the behavioral interview and vice versa.
[00:32:10] So if you reflect back on your career as A behavioral candidate and you think about what made me successful, then you can start to repeat those things in your day job and you’ll be more successful in what you do.
Ryan:
[00:32:20] If you know the rubric, then you can do the rubric. And you can also talk the rubric as well.
Austen:
[00:32:26] Right. So know the rubric. Right. That’s the most important thing.
00:32:30 — How non-tech leads can signal scope
Ryan:
[00:32:30] I think one of the biggest ways that you talked about scope was kind of in the organizational complexity or how many. What’s the leadership position you are in the org. But what about specialists? So I’ve worked with engineers who. They’re solving problems that no one else can solve. They’re their own snowflake and we need that person because they’re pushing the industry forward and it’s having a lot of impact.
[00:32:52] How is someone like that supposed to talk about their work?
Austen:
[00:32:55] Yeah. So the first thing is to understand business impact of what you’re doing. And I think this is really hard for some engineers, right. Who are focused more on the technology. But there is some reason why this technology was required and some kind of context around which it lives. And I always encourage people to think about, what would Steve Jobs say about this technological advancement that you’ve brought about?
[00:33:16] Why is it that that this project was so important or so critical to the company? What’s the business context? So make sure that you’re delivering that one.
Ryan:
[00:33:23] Framing. I know that’s common in promo committees is this person solved problems that those people couldn’t and, well, those people are staff. So then if he’s solving problems, staff people, then he or she must be greater than staff. So when your manager’s saying that on your behalf in a promo committee, it makes sense. If you say that on your own story, you say, yeah, I landed this project and actually there’s a team of five staff engineers that failed for a year before I got there.
Austen:
[00:33:55] like too much, I don’t think. Actually, I don’t think so. I totally disagree. So I think this is one of the methods that I hear and is very successful is again, you’re talking around this complexity to give people a sense and to pattern match in their mind. So behavioral interviewers are pattern matchers. They are looking to see if you match the patterns that they expect for this level. And one of those things is going to be whether or not you have solved problems other people haven’t.
[00:34:18] So I don’t think it is necessarily bad to say something like, when I took on this project, I was the third owner and this is where they had Failed. And this is where I’m looking for. There is not just like, haha, I’m better than all these other people. I’m looking for the insight that made their efforts unsuccessful. So oh, these people attempted, you know, this product market fit and that didn’t work.
[00:34:37] Or these people attempted, you know, this technical approach and that didn’t work for these reasons. And that kind of judgment and reflection is a big part of, of, of, of of assessing someone at a senior level and something that people often forget. They just tell the story. I had a problem, I solved the problem, I’m done. And not giving me some sense of what they learned or what the deeper insight is.
[00:34:58] And to me that’s the sign of somebody who’s, you know, above staff level.
Ryan:
[00:35:03] The analogues between promotion conversations and recruitment conversations. It makes a lot of sense to me. And one thing that I see actually because when I was looking through the YouTube comments of previous interview done, there were some people were saying people can just oversell themselves and the person was a little bit salty that someone could manage the optics and kind of get a good recruitment outcome.
[00:35:31] And I see very similar stuff on the promo. The promo content that I’ve made is some people, usually a vocal minority is saying, oh, this person just really knows how to sell themselves. And I think that’s true and unfortunate that it can just be not necessarily your achievements by themselves just objectively being true. You kind of have to, it’s a very human process. So how you sell it, that is going to have a big impact on how it’s perceived in both of these.
[00:36:06] So I, I guess it’s one of those things where it’s just how it is and you need to learn how to play that game if you want to have good results in the game.
Austen:
[00:36:15] Yeah. Welcome to the world. Right? And this, this works for, this works. This is the case in our careers, this is the case in our personal relationships. Don’t you know that I love you? Can’t you, can’t you just feel that I love you? That doesn’t work. Right. You have to do the behaviors. You have to demonstrate the things that in your relationships. You have to demonstrate the things in your career and you have to, to, to tell people.
[00:36:36] Right? You have to communicate those things. And that may be unpleasant for some, some folks and it can be difficult. But this is part of, of, of us maturing as, as people and us, us maturing in our careers is understanding that there are certain things that are worth doing that maybe is a tax like on our, on Our progress. You don’t have to do this them, but you also will not get promoted or you also will not get the like staff level engineer the job.
[00:37:04] Right. I, I, I tell people, look, on the other side of this principal engineering job is a million dollars a year compensation. So you better eat your Wheaties before you go into that interview. Right. You better be ready. And, and you can say what you want about like how difficult it is to assess people, whatever, but they’re going to give you a million dollars a year. They’re going to put you through the ringer.
[00:37:23] So you need to be to ready, ready for that.
Ryan:
[00:37:26] So going back to the, the, the promo committees, I, I wanted to understand. I’m just kind of like recollecting all the people you mentioned. So there’s the sorcerer, there seems to be a hiring committee. There’s the people, there’s a recruiter. Okay, yeah, the recruiter. There’s the people in the hiring committee. There’s the people who conduct interviews and I guess they draft up notes that the hiring committee reviews.
[00:37:49] But who’s the actual interview decision maker in these processes?
Austen:
[00:37:53] Right, right. So we should talk. There’s a sourcer. There’s also a different person called a recruiter. I forgot to mention them. But usually the source for someone who finds you, they typically will hand you off to someone called a recruiter. Once you get into the process, once you get through the phone screen and this person is the person that you’re going to be doing the negotiation with, the person who’s going to be organizing your loop.
[00:38:10] The person’s going to be advocating for you in front of the hiring committee. So there are obviously many decision makers. There’s a sourcer who’s just looking at your LinkedIn and deciding whether they should contact you. There’s that, that decision. There’s also the decision of the, you know, the initial phone screener or whoever’s talking to you at different levels that could be again that, that sourcer doing a, a multiple choice question or it could be an engineer who’s giving you a phone like a coding phone screen.
[00:38:34] Then there’s the hiring committee. So the committee makes a decision based on, and usually it’s driven by consensus. So but sometimes we would have to fall back into voting but the consensus would be established of whether or not this person should be hired at this level or whether we should do a follow up or whether we should drop the person from the process. And then again, like I said, there’s this decision being made generally as a consensus among Two or three engineering directors who are, you know, who are above us making that final call.
[00:39:05] And those folks would operate mostly in consensus, but sometimes they would vote in the hiring committee.
00:39:11 — Referrals and bias
Ryan:
[00:39:11] Have you ever seen cases where there was some obvious bias? Maybe someone’s son happens to land in the hiring committee of the father or something like that?
Austen:
[00:39:26] I’ve never seen an experience where there’s any kind of overt nepotism or bribery or anything that’s really exciting like that. But I have seen cases where referrals play a huge, a huge, you know, huge role. Whether or not the referral comes from somebody who’s very senior or whether or not someone has actually showed up to, in the room in the hiring committee. So sometimes there’s a friend or there’s someone who’s worked with this person before and they will show up and advocate for you in the room and to the hiring committee.
[00:39:51] And that does make a big difference. So if you can find a referral, I know this is not news or to anybody, but if you can find a referral, you can find somebody who knows you and who will be willing to go and spend their time in a meeting that will make a big difference.
Ryan:
[00:40:04] When I worked at Meta, I mean referrals and as a low level engineer, they just kind of felt like this thing where I just fired it off and forgot about it. It. But are you saying that at a higher level, like the, the level of the person matters and to the point where they can even hop into the hiring committee, Is that right?
Austen:
[00:40:24] For sure. So. Well, yes, for sure. The level, the person who’s, who’s providing this advice is, is very much matters. So if it’s a VP or a director who is referring this person, they understand that their, their reputation is on the line. They are not just passing through someone they found on LinkedIn to this, to this process. They are, they, I’ve directly worked with this person, most likely and are willing to put their personal reputation on the line to, to hire this person, that’s a big deal.
[00:40:48] I will say that referrals of course have varying qualities. So we talked about level, also the content of the referral. So if it’s like, hey, I knew this person in school, like maybe consider them is very different than I work with this person. They have this quality, this quality, this quality, this quality. And that’s why you should hire them. And so for certainly when you are asking for a referral, especially if the person has worked directly with you, you should provide information to them.
[00:41:08] You should like write the referral for them, provide them information about that they should pass on to them, the, to the hiring committee. And we would certainly look at that. So we would, we would read through those referrals and understand whether or not this is just somebody who happened to come across one of our employees and that’s how I got referred, or someone who worked directly with them.
[00:41:21] And if it worked directly with them and they say relevant things, that makes a big difference. And I would say the biggest difference it makes is when you’re on the border, when you’re on the bubble. So if you are, you know, maybe you, you flubbed a couple of interviews. I actually think this was my, my situation. So when I applied I, I flubbed a couple of the interviews, especially in the phone screen stage.
[00:41:39] And I got an, I got a follow up and I’m pretty sure I got the follow up because I had a, a referral from somebody that I was in school with who worked directly with me. And so. Thank you. Thank you, Nathan. I appreciate it.
Ryan:
[00:41:48] Let’s say I, I did relatively bad. Like I probably would not have passed. Not, not terrible. But it’s pretty lukewarm from everyone in the room at best in the hiring committee. But my, my referral is the strongest referral you’ve ever seen from a vp. Let’s say at their previous startup I was their chief of staff and I was really organized and I did an excellent job. And then now they’re a VP at Facebook or something like that, and then that person comes in, guns a blazing.
[00:42:22] Would that type of referral make me pass in that case?
Austen:
[00:42:26] So typically referrals are going to be helping you on that bubble. And this was saying earlier. So it’s really about whether or not you’re going to get a follow up interview. I have never seen a case where there’s a general consensus that we should not hire this person. But yet the referral results in them getting a hire. I think that may happen more at leadership levels where the kind of people that you bring from your previous jobs that, that could be very sensitive to that.
[00:42:49] And leadership hiring is a different, whole different ball of wax. But on the engineering side, I’ve never seen a case where there’s almost a, you know, unanimous consensus that we should not hire this person. They don’t meet the bar and suddenly a like VP comes in and then is able to push the, the committee to, to hiring them. I haven’t seen that case, but I have seen the case where the VP will be able to, or whoever it is we’ll be able to push the committee into giving a follow up or maybe multiple follow ups.
[00:43:12] Right. And so I think that you, there is a, you still have to perform in the interviews as an engineer, but if you have reached like a senior manager or director level, I think that it is a little bit more about who you know sometimes than, than your raw performance. I will say that a good hiring process is not like that. So good hiring process is one where you have identified what success, what makes people successful inside the organization and then the hiring process is evaluating that and people are making a non biased decision.
[00:43:37] But I think the number of decision makers is smaller as you move up and more influenceable by those around them.
Ryan:
[00:43:45] One thing that I think you can only really see with experience and you worked at Meta for quite some time is I’m always curious what is the correlation between someone’s performance on interviews and their downstream performance at the company? And I know that you, you’ve been involved in hundreds of interviews and you’ve seen people go and enter the company. What would be that correlation? Like how often do you see that that person smashed interviews and they’re doing excellent at the company or maybe they’re off.
Austen:
[00:44:18] So what we have looked at is not so much in terms of the number of interviews that they succeeded or failed, but rather the confidence level. So the confidence level oftentimes people would assess the interviewer’s confidence level. You would put in a hiring decision level decision. And like how conf are that confident decision does correlate with someone’s future performance. And I think what that goes to show is that people, there is some sense that, that the interviewers are sort of applying to their.
[00:44:44] Even there’s a rubric and they try to structure it as much as possible. There is this kind of, kind of sense that they get from, from whether or not someone will be successful. And that is predictive of, of future success. And it makes sense, right? We, you know, if you’ve done hundreds of interviews as a calibrated person, you, you kind of know what of kind good looks like. It may be hard to define and you try to define as much as possible.
[00:45:03] It reduces bias when you do that. But ultimately sometimes it comes down to these kind of, you know, feel things. I will say that certainly there have been people who rock the interview and don’t do well and certainly people who are kind of rocky in the interviews and they do great. And I, I think that what that shows you is, is what we’re talking about earlier, interviewing is a skill. So it is not the same skill as doing the job.
[00:45:23] And unfortunately, in the world we live in, you do need to spend some time getting good at the interviewing skills skill.
00:45:28 — What the rubric looks like
Ryan:
[00:45:28] We talked earlier about the rubric that those interviewers are trying to fill out and I’m curious for the, the behavioral side of things, what does that rubric look like?
Austen:
[00:45:39] So every company is a little different. A well run company, especially big companies, oftentimes they hire PhDs in industrial psychology. They’re called selection scientists. And what they have done is they’ve assessed, they’ve gone around your company, they’ve talked to different people, they’ve tried to understand what makes an engineer or whatever the role is very successful and they’ve codified those things into a set of signal areas that they look for in the behavioral interview.
[00:45:59] So at, at Meta, there’s five of them. They are driving results, embracing ambiguity, resolving conflicts, growing continuously, and communicating effectively. Every company is going to have different ones. They might purely just be the company values and we can talk about that. But for example, at Meta, those are not the five company values at Meta. So you, you should definitely talk to the recruiter and as you’re having, as you’re preparing for the interview and get this rubric in advance, it’s very important if you can get it or go on the look for it.
[00:46:26] So these, you know, whatever five to eight things, generally they fit into a broader set of categories that I talk about in the book that I call signal areas. And there’s eight of them. And so when you’re, when you’re working on your stories and your preparation, you need to have this rubric in front of you as you’re thinking about your stories and then you’re categorizing your stories based on these signal areas.
[00:46:47] And then what you’re doing inside the interview is this decode, select, deliver, loop. This is your core operating system. When you’re inside of a behavioral interface interview, when you’re listening to a story, you’re understanding, decoding what this, what is it? Why are they asking this question? What is, what is it they’re interested in? And it’s probably one of these eight areas or something related to their, to their company values.
[00:47:07] And so if you can identify that, then you can select a story which is appropriate and fits that, you know, delivers the kind of signal that the interviewer is looking for. And then you can deliver that in some kind of engaging way. And that’s your core loop, decode, select, deliver. So it is really important that you understand what these rubrics are oftentimes a recruiter will give it to you, you.
[00:47:24] And at a smaller company, it’s a lot harder. They may not have thought about this at all. They may not have structured their, their, you know, their behavioral interview process with any kind of rubric. So there, I think you rely on company values. You also rely on conversations with the recruiter, usually at smaller places. You may have even talked to somebody on the team before you get to the behavioral interview.
[00:47:43] And I think you should ask them questions like, what makes engineers successful in your company? What do you look for in the hiring process? And then take that and build your own little sense of what’s valuable for that company and then use that as you’re going through your decode select deliver loop.
Ryan:
[00:47:57] That decode part is so important because, I mean, I’ve also been an interviewer for hundreds of interviews. I did a bunch of engineering management interviews as well. And it’s interesting is a lot of candidates, I feel they would tell me something and I’m looking for a signal and I ask a very targeted question. I say, can you tell me about this? And then they don’t get. And they talk past it or they continue on their spiel.
[00:48:28] I thought you’re missing opportunity. Help me, please help me fill this out. I got a blank spot here I’m trying to fill out. I asked you the specific thing, but you’re continuing on some rehearse thing. It’s actually like a mutual exercise and helping fill out this rubric. So, yeah, I think that’s so important to interview to what they’re actually thinking about.
Austen:
[00:48:52] Your job as the candidate is to sort of tell the story from a perspective. Like you would build a trailer out of a movie. Different trailers. Robert Hamilton, the PM behavioral coach, talks about this and he says, like, well, this movie, this movie may have some action parts, may have some romance parts, right? And you can sort of remix the trailer in different ways to see what this movie is. Right?
[00:49:10] And at the same way with these stories. So when you have a story, it may have a part about ambiguity, it may have a part about communication, it may have a part about conflict resolution. And so you can take the same story. And in fact, you probably should take the same story. Like I said earlier, you should identify what are those core stories of stories. You really want to get out and be able to build a movie trailer which sort of fits the question that they’re asking about.
[00:49:32] And you need to do that early, right? To your point. So you can’t be that in three Five minutes in, then we’re starting to get to the ambiguity part that the person asked about ambiguity. It needs to come up upfront in that initial context setting. And this is, this is the way that you know that you are internalizing you being a partner with the interviewer. I think people forget about that, that like you said, the interviewer is trying to accomplish a task, trying to evaluate you.
[00:49:55] You need to be a partner in that and you need to help the interviewer get to the signal that they’re looking for.
00:50:00 — OpenAI and Anthropic specific discussion
Ryan:
[00:50:00] You mentioned tailoring your stories and your experience to the specific values of the company. And I was thinking what might be interesting, we could go over some concrete examples maybe with some hot companies right now like OpenAI and Anthropic. And yeah, I’d be curious to hear what you see in their values and how you might mold stories to help people who are looking to get hired at these companies.
Austen:
[00:50:27] Yeah. So the first thing I would say encourage people to do is first understand your stories from the perspective of these eight core areas that I talk about. Because most company values come can be bold down into these eight different areas. We could talk about them at some point, but inevitably, especially for newer companies like these AI companies, there’s some part of their company values that don’t fit within that.
[00:50:47] So, for example, OpenAI has this one that’s called act with Humility. Really what that means is growth. That’s my one of the eight areas. Do you respond well to feedback? You know, do you, do you, you know, are you, are you seeking to improve yourself, improving the people around you? That’s kind of the same thing. But they do have one called Feel the AGI, which is not really one of my eight areas.
[00:51:06] So you’ll need to understand what that that means for them. And so what that means to them is that you are very optimistic and positive about what AGI and what AI could do for the world. Now, Anthropic has one called Hold, Light and Shade. And really what they’re trying to assess there is that you can understand both the positive and the negative implications of AI in the future. And so for me, you need to understand what the cultural zeitgeist is of this company that you can assess via their company values and by researching them them before you go in.
[00:51:34] So how might you do that? Right. If you are telling a story about how you leveraged AI in the past to Anthropic, you would really want to mention how you thought about the potential negative implications of this project from an AI perspective. How did you go about mitigating those, how did you go about assessing those? And if they don’t hear those things, they’re not going to feel comfortable about hiring you.
[00:51:55] And likewise on OpenAI, if you are not somebody who’s very AI forward and very much excited about, about new domains that we can apply AI to, they’re not going to be as interested in hiring you. So when you’re reviewing your stories, you need to understand what every behavioral interviewer looks for. Those are those different, those eight different areas. Things like ownership, handling ambiguity, conflict resolution, the things that we do on a daily, daily basis, but also mixing in what are those specific things that are, that are unique to their company.
00:52:22 — Most common mistakes senior candidates make
Ryan:
[00:52:22] We covered how to avoid getting down leveled and, but I’m, I’m also curious, before we kind of leave that kind of topic, what are the most common mistakes that people make in behavioral interviews that lead to worse results than they should have?
Austen:
[00:52:38] Yeah, let’s stay focused on senior engineers for a second because I think that, that they are slightly different. So the number one, what we talked about before, which is inappropriate choice of stories, so you didn’t choose stories that fit the appropriate scope that you’re targeting. So that’s number one. One, I would say the, another one is usually as you’re more senior, you’re a better communicator and so you might talk a lot.
[00:52:58] So this happens especially for manager loops. Oh yeah. Like, let’s be talking about this project and da, da, da, you should talk, talk, talk, talk, talk. So this sense of giving around too much context is really common. And the, and the key there is something like you should only give the kind of context which is required for me to understand the behaviors. Again, that’s what I’m assessing you on, is the behaviors that you’ve done in the past.
[00:53:17] And if you give me too much context as relevant for this, then, then I’m, you’re just, you’re just using your own air, wasting your time. And another guideline there is when you’re, when you, even if you are talking about the middle part of the project and what you did, if it’s been like 30 seconds since you have told me something that you did, like some kind of action, you know, some kind of verb is coming into this conversation.
[00:53:37] If it’s been that long, then you should rethink that. Like maybe I’m providing too much content, too much technical detail, too much backstory, too much asides. Whatever it is, you need to keep the, you know, keep the, keep the action coming. Keep that Work stories are just not that exciting. Okay, let’s just be honest, like Stranger Things versus like me listening to a behavioral interview like I’d rather watch Stranger Things, right?
[00:53:57] So I, I think people want to, want to be, they want to see action and movement in the story. So keep it, keep it moving. Another one that’s really common for senior engineers is opening themselves up to uncharitable interpretations. And I call this one the opposite is thinking defensively. You need to think defensively. So in this, in this kind of senior role role, it’s very risky to bring people on, bring leaders on.
[00:54:17] They have a huge impact on the team. And so interviewers are very risk averse. So if you start presenting and telling stories like, well, you know, the code base had a lot of technical debt, so we decided to do X. Sounds like a great story, right? Hey, you’re, you’re somebody who solves technical debt. But if you’re the senior engineer in the room then like how did we get this technical debt? Right?
[00:54:34] It’s your fault, right? So I think this kind of how can my stories be interpreted as unfavorable is really important for you to consider and the, the way around that is to make sure that you are compensating when you’re telling the, the context in the story. So it could be that like we were a startup, we needed to, to close, you know, our next round of funding. Therefore we decided to, to take on this technical debt and then it was our role to solve it and I decided to prioritize it because xyz.
[00:55:03] So here we are giving some kind of thinking or backstory or judgment people piece to how you ended up in this situation. We touched on it briefly before, but another one is not talking enough about the non technical parts of the work that you do. Obviously technical parts, super important. You need to establish yourself as somebody who can solve hard technical problems. But if you’re a senior engineer or a staff engineer, principal engineer, a lot of what you do is working with people.
[00:55:25] How you mentored, how you organized, how you delegated, how you influenced the roadmap, how you resolve conflicts, how you worked across teams, how you managed up, right? So those parts of the story are super important. Other thing is that oftentimes you’re telling stories that are very long. Okay. So you’re talking about, especially a principal engineer, they’re telling stories that are often multiple years, two, three years worth of refactors or, or some, you know, large product build in a new product space.
[00:55:49] So you need to have your stories well organized. And you need to understand what’s really important for the listener out of that story. So I recommend people have some kind of table of contents at the very top, which requires you to understand what’s important. So you could say something like, well, some business context and this is why I’m doing this thing. Da, da. And then you say, oh yeah, there are like five interesting parts of the story.
[00:56:06] You know, how I initiated the idea with management, how I aligned the stakeholders on the technical approach, how I solved some difficult technical problems and like how we did this very complex rollout over, you know, multiple, multiple years, something like that. So now set the stage for the conversation and then I can tell a longer story, keeping it organized in these different verticals. And it also gives me a way to come back to them.
[00:56:28] So if I’m a candidate and the interviewer is peppering me with follow up questions and they’re interrupting me, which is super common for these senior engineers, senior, senior interviews, then I can always come back to, oh, you know, remember that part that I was telling you about the hard technical problems? Like let me go back to that. Then you can, then you can bring the listener back to the most important part.
[00:56:45] So that story organization piece is super, super important for senior, senior candidates. We didn’t talk very much about choosing those stories. And I did say that the most important thing is scope, which I don’t think is immediately apparent to most people who’ve thought about behavioral interviews. Oftentimes you would think, well, relevance is the number one thing. I have to tell a story which fits the question that they’re asking.
[00:57:07] And that’s very logical. Right? But like I said earlier, the most important thing is that you get out of the behavioral interview having told the stories that showcase your impact the most. So scope is the number one thing when you’re choosing a story. How can you fit a big scope story into the question, question that is asked? Number two is relevance. Obviously you can’t tell a story about, you know, sometime when that wasn’t very ambiguous.
[00:57:28] If you’re being asked about ambiguity, the third thing is recency. So of course, you know, newer stories are more important than older stories, but I would rather hear a large scope relevant story from a senior engineer versus someone that’s very new. So recency is not the most important thing. And the guideline there is something like two to three years for sure is okay beyond three, four years.
[00:57:52] Now you have to have a really good reason for telling that story. And of course this scale increases as you get more Senior. So if you have a 30 year career then telling and you’re applying for a principal role, then telling a story from 10 years ago probably isn’t that bad. And the last one is uniqueness, which is some people don’t often think about. But how can I tell a story that I haven’t told already?
[00:58:12] And this becomes super important for interviews where there are multiple behavioral rounds where you’re likely to tell multiple answer, multiple tell me about a time kind of questions. So maybe the, the question in the like Project Deep Dive might not be the same story that you use when you’re just asked about an ambiguous project in the general behavioral interview. So thinking about how you can balance uniqueness across the, the portfolio of behavioral interviews that you’re being given as this loop is important.
Ryan:
[00:58:37] When you said that scope is more important than relevance. Is it like let’s say I’m in a behavioral interview, I’m, I’m giving my stories and it almost reminds me of a politician where they ask a question and I, I have my rehearse thing that’s not exactly what they asked, but it’s filling in the rubric is that you’re saying that’s best as opposed to saying that is best exactly what they say.
Austen:
[00:59:01] So be like a politician I guess is unfortunately what I’m advocating that you do. Because I think that again, you want to, to leave the interview having showcased the ways that you have delivered business value, solve problems, done the things you do as an engineer the best. Right. And if, if you just stay focused on answering their specific question. For example, like a question like tell me about the time you had a conflict with a product manager.
[00:59:25] Maybe you do have a story that you had a conflict with a product manager, but maybe the bigger story is a conflict with, with the director of engineering or a conflict with your direct manager. So what I would do is I would try to pivot that, that story into the one that is, is larger. And they may, they may constrain you, you know, they may come back to it and then you’re stuck telling the smaller story.
[00:59:45] But what I would do is I would showcase that you have this other story. So you can say something like I did have a conflict with a product manager. It involved this and this. And I was able to overcome that conflict by compromising on this. You know, I could tell that story, but there is this other story that I could tell about how I had to go through a longer conflict resolution experience where I had to collect data and I had to, you know, collect other People and we had to have multiple meetings about it.
[01:00:07] That might be a more interesting story. I can’t tell that one. So you can pivot the conversation focused on conflict resolution into a story that might fit better for what the interviewer is actually looking for. They may or may not really care about when you had a conflict with a product manager, they might just be collecting conflict resolution signal.
Ryan:
[01:00:25] Let’s say you’re in the middle of the interview and you’re trying to figure out, am I talking for too long or is this person still with me, or should I, am I saying the right thing things? How often should the interviewer be talking? How often should you be talking?
Austen:
[01:00:40] So there are different style of interviewers. So some interviewers really are listening. So I tend to be that kind of person where I would. Interested in what I think. Interested in what you think is interesting. So. And I’m assessing you based on what you think is interesting and where you’re taking me. And I’m getting a lot of communication signal out of that. But some interviewers are not like that.
[01:00:58] They are. They interrupt you frequently. They look at, they want to look at, pick out some part that you mentioned and like, turn it over a couple times in their hand and then get back to you. So they may have a lot more thoughts, follow up questions. They may interrupt you a lot more or they may switch questions. They may collect a little bit of signal on this question and then like, move rapidly to the other one.
[01:01:14] So I think you’ll figure out which kind of interviewer you have pretty, pretty quickly in the, in the interview. And you should be emotionally prepared, especially for the second one. This person who interrupts you frequently can be kind of jarring for you. And you can think, oh, I’m failing, I’m not doing the right thing. But no, you’re just getting an interviewer who likes to interrupt people and likes to bounce around.
[01:01:31] But to answer more specific to your question, I think you can look for signs. So this is where you need to use your human part of your brain, not just your, your structured and organized part of your brain, but you need to assess, like, are they looking at me? Are they taking notes? Are they any kind of indication that they’re. That they’re engaged? And if you notice some lack of engagement, then I would pause and ask them, is this what you’re looking for?
[01:01:50] This is what I was about to say, like, is that still relevant? And give them this opportunity. Can. A good interviewer is willing to interrupt you. A good interviewer, a calibrated interviewer, someone who is, is confident in what they’re doing, they will be a little rude to you because they are, look again, they are looking to acquire that signal and they are willing to, to go through a little bit of social awkwardness in order to acquire it.
[01:02:08] But some interviewers aren’t that good. And so you need to make that easy for them to be able to stop you. Which is why I recommend not talking for more than, you know, two to four minutes if you’re over. If you’re talking for more than four minutes, five minutes, you got to be really good at giving a monologue like that. It better be really interesting for the, for the listener. And you probably, you probably should know what you’re doing if you’re talking for that level of time.
01:02:31 — How to prep depending on your level
Ryan:
[01:02:31] When it comes to interview prep, I mean, a lot of what you said sounds like there’s a difference between the levels. Senior engineers make different mistakes than junior engineers. And I imagine the weight of the behavioral interview’s importance differs across the level. Sounds like as you get higher up and higher up, they add extra behavioral interviews. So I’m thinking if someone was preparing for interviews across those high level buckets, how would you recommend they split up their interview prep time across coding, system design and behavioral?
Austen:
[01:03:08] Most people are spending way too much time on coding and not enough time on system design and behavioral interviews because those are the more murky ones to prepare for. However, I will say that junior engineers, your most important signal is going to be technical. So making sure that you nail those coding interviews, mailing the system design interview interview, it’s going to be the most important.
[01:03:24] And then the behavioral interview, the key to focus on is your thinking, your motivations because you may not have a ton of accomplishments to lean on there, but you can lean on what you thought about or what kind of ideas you had or things that you tried. Maybe they didn’t work. So those kinds of signals of what my future performance could be or my future impact is going to be super important for junior engineers.
[01:03:46] For mid level engineers, I think you need about balance. I would say that AI is changing this game. In the past, I think you could still focus even as a mid level engineer, only on the technical parts and just make sure that you didn’t flub the behavioral. I don’t think that world exists anymore. Number one, there are so many candidates in the market with so many layoffs recently that you need to shine across all different interview types.
[01:04:07] And the second thing I would say is more and more of that technical work is being done, you know, by an agentic coding experience. And so we are looking for mid level engineers who can own problems problems end to end. And how do you see that kind of ownership? You’re going to see that in the behavioral. We need mid level engineers who are excited about growing and learning new things because the technology and the approach to engineering is changing so rapidly.
[01:04:26] And how are you going to assess that? It’s going to be assessed in the, in the behavioral interview. So I would, I would balance more balance your time. Right. The beginning part of the interview process that we talked about before is often some kind of coding assessment. So you need to get your coding interviewing practice in early. But you know, once you get that on site schedule or ideally even before that, some weeks before that, you have spent some time thinking about your behavioral questions.
[01:04:47] You’ve spent some time identifying the core stories from your past that you’d like to tell. You’ve looked at their, their values. You’ve looked at the rubric that you find for the behavioral interview. You’ve made sure that you have some stories that fit each one of those key areas that they’re going to be asking you about. And then once you get to senior and above, a lot of it’s going to come down to the behavioral interview.
[01:05:05] So like I said before, first thing I would do when I look at a staff level packet is I would go to the behavioral interview. There just aren’t that many different ways to design like a web crawler in a system design interview. Or aren’t that many ways to solve twosome in a coding interview such that I could see whether or not someone is a staff level or just a senior level. And I would go directly to the behavioral interview to see what the organizational impact is, what their level of influence is on others, how they resolve conflict.
[01:05:32] I would look to see what scope of projects they’ve they’ve been able to, to accomplish and what, what level of business impact they’ve been able to deliver deliver. And that would be my how I would determine whether or not they were really truly a staff engineer. And like you mentioned at that, that you know, super senior like staff plus kind of percent principal distinguished level. They’re adding additional behavioral interviews and oftentimes they’re looking at specific things, things like how you work cross functionally with, with partners.
[01:05:56] They may give you a PM for example, or another person from a cross functional partner that will interview you and see how you work with others. Or they’re going to be wanting to get more information about one of Your bigger stories, one of your bigger projects. So they’re going to give you some kind of project deep dive interview where you walk them through some technical and organizational challenges you’ve solved in the past.
[01:06:16] And so those become the differentiators and the technical ones become kind of like check marks. Like you have to pass, you have to get over the bar. But really what’s going to get you hired is going to be shining on those behavioral sides. So certainly a slide. I would say that most people under invest in behavioral interview. So, so it’s probably going to take you at least a few weeks to, to, to perform well.
[01:06:37] And if you are at that staff or above, I would say, you know, start, start when you start doing your leetcode right, Start thinking about those past stories, start working on how you position them. Get some feedback, go do some mock interviews at least with a friend, if not with a professional. And especially if you’re going to be applying for a FAANG or, or you know, open eye or anthropic one of these big companies that’s very in demand.
[01:07:01] I would try to find somebody who is calibrated at that company who can give you a mock interview and give you that, that squishy cultural sense that we were talking about earlier and reflect back to you whether or not you’re hitting the right cultural notes.
Ryan:
[01:07:13] When you were in hiring committees in the past for maybe more senior candidates. When you have a candidate who does okay on the technical sides but really kills it on behavior girl. Is that the type of packet that could go through at the highest levels?
Austen:
[01:07:32] Certainly at the highest levels, definitely. If there’s a place where you’re going to flub a coding interview and be okay, I think that staff or principal level or manager level, those places where we just don’t expect you to be doing as much day to day coding. And so we would discount poor performances in those interviews for sure. I think it’s much harder to do that at the junior levels. I will say that I had a candidate that I did the behavioral for and this candidate was, had not accomplished a ton in their career.
[01:08:00] The, the technical things were just okay. But I kept seeing glimpses of, you know, ideas that this candidate had had that maybe they weren’t able to execute on or the manager didn’t agree or they couldn’t get it done in their organization but they kept thinking about things. And I said now this person has so much like potential in this person’s career that I pushed for that person to be hired. And that person ended up Being a staff person eventually.
[01:08:22] And I think that that was a good indication that, you know, there is a. There is like a. There’s a slope that we’re trying to assess, and the slope is often assessed there in that behavioral interview, even for junior folks.
01:08:34 — Subjectivity and bias
Ryan:
[01:08:34] We talked about some of the subjectivity in. In this type of interview and talking about how you talk about the. The scope of your work and all of those things that kind of help you with leveling conversation. But also another part of subjectivity is just how much does this person like you and their bias towards you based off of a lot of the soft influence you might have as you speak to them. So I’m curious how much influence you think that has on the outcome of the interview.
Austen:
[01:09:03] It scales exactly with level. So with a more junior candidate, I think that at least at a big company where they’ve spent some time structuring these behavioral interviews, interviews, and they’re trying to reduce this kind of do I just want to have a beer? You know, with this person kind of vibe that they’re. That they’re collecting. They’re trying to reduce that by structuring it and making. Giving the.
[01:09:22] The interviewer some sort of form to fill out or some clarifying what’s. What’s important in the hiring decision. But as you get more senior now, they’re expecting you to influence other people on the job and that. So how you come across in the meeting, are you confident? Are you comfortable? Are you able to hold on to this kind of like casual. Casual excellence. Right. Which I think is very much a quality, a cultural quality that, that.
[01:09:45] That Silicon Valley has in particular, this idea that I can kind of show up and I look cool, and I look. Not look cool, but I look calm, but yet I’m still very competent and can sharply discuss things and deliver things. I think they are looking for that kind of signal. And it’s. It’s definitely subjective. And so I think your. Your ability to connect with the interviewer in the first few minutes, if you come in and you’re disheveled or you come in and you’re nervous and you’re not able to be present in the meeting, well, that’s part of the signal they’re acquiring because you’re gonna have to show up into meetings and be, you know, put together and be confident and be able to stand in front of the CEO and deliver, you know, deliver good news or bad news or ask some questions or whatever, and they are looking for somebody who will do a good job with that.
[01:10:28] And they’re you know, this is a high pressure situation, an interview. You’re going to be in a high pressure situation at work and they’re assessing you there as well. So I think this is where you need to understand the cultural expectations of your companies that you’re, that you’re, that you’re applying for. Different countries have different expectations around leadership and hierarchy and how they approach things.
[01:10:47] I think we’re talking mostly about like a US centered kind of Silicon Valley centered or you know, associated places. Seattle, New York, those kinds of culture. And that place is one, one of, we need to be able to start the meeting with some kind of playful banter, you know, and then we continue with like hard hitting pieces. But sometimes I, I’m self deprecating and I kind of pout out of that and we laugh about a few things, but then we’re back in it and we’re doing this like intense thing.
[01:11:11] So that’s super common for, for, for those environments. Other countries, other companies, they may have different expectations. I think you need to understand what those are before you go in.
Ryan:
[01:11:20] Let’s say someone is maybe a staff engineer. They’re not necessarily the most, they wouldn’t describe themselves as a people person, but they want to come off strong in that interview. How would you reverse engineer how to represent yourself strongly in terms of all those soft influence type of things?
Austen:
[01:11:38] So the first thing I say is that the inside always comes out on the outside. Okay, I know you don’t want to hear that, but the reality is what you believe about yourself, what you believe about others really changes how you present yourself. So the first thing I would say is it is not just some like list of things that we need to do or a checkbox stuff that you kind of put on. It’s not a mask that you put on, put on.
[01:11:56] You need to change your, your internal beliefs. And Sam Lesson has this, this book he just released about Silicon Valley etiquette and he did this podcast recently where he talks about the importance of lowering your own heart rate before you go into the conversation. So yes, this might be your like one and only shot at this job. It’s possible. Oftentimes that’s less the case than, than most than most candidates believe.
[01:12:18] So sometimes we think like, oh, this is my one shot at getting this company. Well, if the company’s gonna be around for a while, you probably have other shots. So don’t put so much pressure on yourself. I know it’s hard, but it, that is the reality. You need to tell yourself, give yourself an internal Belief structure that makes it okay for you to make mistakes in this environment, you will come across a lot more calm.
[01:12:35] The second thing I say is try to, try to understand what. And be empathetic of the other person. So again, this is an internal thing. Believe that the other person is looking for a great engineer, a great manager. Whatever it is, whatever the role that you’re applying for. They’re looking for somebody who’s going to do really awesome. They really want, they want to find that person. They’re spending their time interviewing you.
[01:12:55] They really want to find somebody who’s great. And they’re not just looking to nitpick you and like, throw you out and judge you. Right? So I think this kind of internal belief where you believe, you know, this person is, is, is not my enemy. This person is, is, is, is, is, is a human doing their job. I would love to do my job alongside this person. Let’s have this great conversation. So that’s the first thing you have to start, start on the inside.
[01:13:17] If we are looking for other things, then I would say how you show up physically, so what you’re wearing, you know, go that like one notch above. That’s classic interview advice. What’s in your background so you know, how, how does your room appear when you’re doing a video call? Especially, how are you. How are you expressing care and interest in the person in the first few minutes of the meeting?
[01:13:40] So if you’re just, if you come in and you’re just waiting for the other person to say something, this is a very. You’re taking a very passive role and you’re showcasing that, you know, maybe you’re not ready for these kinds of, of more active of roles where I need you to build relationships with other people. Show me that you can be, be. You may not be like the most extroverted person, but you probably do value people in some way.
[01:13:58] Like, people are probably important to you. You know, your mom is important to you. Maybe your significant other is important. This, There are people who are important to you. And so let that come across in that first few minutes. Hi, how are you? I’m doing good, you know, or I, I’m, I’m interested in, in. I’m really excited to be here. Right. You can express enthusiasm even if you’re, you know, not the most extroverted person.
[01:14:15] So those first few moments, the, the brain is really looking at that, like kind of just figuring out, is this the kind of person I want to be with? And you’re making a lot of. They’re making a lot of split, split second decisions. And so how you show up in those first few minutes are important. Practice that, practice that with your mock interviewers. Don’t just jump right into the questions. Practice that kind of, you know, early, early part.
[01:14:37] Make the other person feel comfortable. Sometimes the interviewer is, is nervous too. Actually giving a behavioral interview is quite complicated, quite difficult, I would say. It is hard to, to engage the person in some meaningful way. Ask relevant follow up questions, but making sure that you’re collecting the information that you want to collect, also making them feel comfortable so that they give you the best signal.
[01:14:55] Also the behavioral interviewer, sometimes the hiring manager or some kind of leader in the organization. And so how they are coming across in the meeting is affecting the candidate’s perception of the company and perception of the team. So, you know, have some empathy for that, for that person who’s given this behavioral interview. Make them feel comfortable, make them feel like you’re right. Ease.
[01:15:13] How you do that is by changing first what you believe about the, about the situation.
Ryan:
[01:15:18] Who do you think would perform better on average in a behavioral interview? Someone who is extremely curt and cold, but excellent. Everything you ask them, they give you the right words, really concisely, great stories, but they’re not there to be your friend. They’re kind of cold and they’re silent and they wait till you ask a question. Follow up questions, they say no follow up questions. Okay, thank you for your time.
[01:15:47] Or someone who’s very warm and bubbly and oh, how’s your day? Okay, let’s get into this. Oh, I hope I do well. And they kind of build some rapport with you and then they, they do so. So on the, the actual stories themselves across the body of people who conduct behavioral interviews, which one do you think would do better on average?
Austen:
[01:16:09] Well, that’s the key. Who conducts the interview? So if I’m conducting the interview, the second person will probably be doing better because I, I like to engage. Or you might have, might have noticed that, right? I want to get those more people sides. So this is where, when you say building rapport. Building rapport doesn’t mean that you’re bubbly. Building rapport means that you are connected to the other person.
[01:16:27] So you need to understand in that first few minutes, like what kind of person is this? Is this a person, person who wants to be more business like and wants to assess things in a more, you know, cold and calculating way? Fine, that’s okay. Or is this person, you know, somebody who will kind of chop it up with me in the first, in the first few minutes. So I think you can, you should start on a positive note.
[01:16:46] I think you should start energetic. You should start, you know, believing that with some excite, showing excitement to be there but respond to the other person and how they, you know, how they present themselves. They may, for example, if there’s someone who doesn’t even ask you for introduction, doesn’t even ask you for tell me about yourself. They may jump into, tell me about a time when you had an ambiguous problem.
[01:17:06] Well, you know exactly who you get now. And somebody who just wants to go down the list and, and, and, and, and bang out the signal and, and be very efficient. And so you need to, to match that and be very efficient with what you, what you say. But if the person starts two or three minutes of weather sports, you know, how you feeling? How’s the rest of the interviews going? Like, you know, you have a different kind of person that you’re talking to and so you need to match their energy.
Ryan:
[01:17:30] When it comes to these subjective parts of the interview experience. What do you think’s more important, the first impression or the last impression?
Austen:
[01:17:40] Do we have to choose? Like, why do we have to choose? So let’s, let’s do, let’s knock it out on the beginning and the end. But if I’m forced to choose, I would say the beginning. I think most of the time I am making a decision within the first 10, 15 minutes of the interview about whether I’m going to hire the person. And it’s because I have been asking usually my biggest scope questions. Tell me about your favorite project.
[01:17:59] Tell me about your most ambiguous project. Tell me about something that you’re really proud of. And then I’m seeing what they’re saying. And if I would like to have that kind of performance replicated in my organization, then the rest of the interview is more like, let me check the other things. Let me check conflict resolution, Let me check growth. Let me make sure that this person is going to be successful.
[01:18:14] But ultimately I would love for them to replicate their past success in my organization. So if I had to pick one, I would pick the beginning. But you can rock the end. Like, why not? And the most important way to rock the end is to have relevant questions for the interviewer. And people oftentimes forget about this in their behavioral interview prep. They spend all the time talking about their, their stories and they’re getting really excited about telling, answering questions.
[01:18:34] But then when it comes to, you know, a question that questions they have for the interviewer they come up with something like, tell me about a day in the life of the engineer. Like the day of life of the engineer is pretty much the same across the company. Okay. You know, it’s like, hey, we go get up, we do some work, go to meetings. It’s just not that interesting of a question. So I think if you’ve thought deeply about the team, about the organization, about the product, about the company, and then you have some question which is helping you decide whether or not you want to work there, the interviewer is assessing you on that even.
[01:19:01] And so you can leave the impression that you are engaged in the process, you’re excited about the role, you’re really evaluating whether it’s right for you. That’s a great way to leave the conversation.
Ryan:
[01:19:11] What percent of these interviews? Because you mentioned the, the first impressions. More important, if you had to make the call, what percent of interviews do you think the result is decided within the first 20% of the interview?
Austen:
[01:19:27] Yeah. So lots of social science has been applied here. I’ve not seen any social science applied directly to tech interviews. And sometimes you cannot apply like cross apply, you know, interviewing at a fast food company to interviewing at a tech tech company. But the, the, the research says something like in the first 15%. Right. The first like 10 minutes of the interview, most maybe like 40% of of the decisions has already been made.
[01:19:50] And I would say that that happens for sure in, in our experience as well as, as you know, in engineering. Again I, I’m, it’s rare that I don’t want to hire you in the first 10, 15 minutes and then suddenly you say something at like minute 38 that’s making me, oh, I changed my mind. I think it is common for me not to, to know. Right. So for me to kind of feel like I’m not sure. Let me think about it.
[01:20:11] And then when I go back and I would write the notes down, I would consider it, consider them according to the rubric, which is the goal of the rubric, right. To shift our decision making out of this initial gut response and into something which is more cerebral, left brained. And there would be times when I was not sure and then I would make a decision later. But if I’ve made a decision in the first 10 minutes, it’s pretty hard for you to overcome that.
[01:20:37] And most of the time it’s because you’re choosing the wrong stories or I can clearly tell that you just, you have not done work at the level that we’re expecting for this company or you can’t communicate very well. So like you can’t tell stories very well. And that’s giving me for one thing usually means I can’t collect enough relevant signal to. To on the other axes to hire you. But also I know that if I hire you into my organization, like you’re not going to be a very good communicator.
01:21:02 — The questions you ask at the end matter
Ryan:
[01:21:02] I, I guess a lot of people, I’ve experienced this as well too, where you’re in the interview and it’s not going so hot and then halfway you realize they’re zoning out because they’ve already decided that you’re not getting hired. So that first half is so important. Another interesting thing I wanted to follow up on is it sounds like that last few minutes of the interview where they say, hey, do you have any questions for me?
[01:21:28] This sounds like a not evaluative part of the interview you. But it actually is and you should continue to sell yourself by saying, hey, I ask questions that matter that are important. I am aware of the things that are important and I’m asking about those. So what are good follow up questions to ask to make sure that you get the most out of that section?
Austen:
[01:21:52] Yeah, so one of the themes here in our conversation is everything is evaluative, right? So the early conversation with the recruiter is evaluative. The end of the behavioral interview is evaluative. The like hangout chat with the hiring managers, evaluate. Everything is evaluative. And I think that makes sense. That’s just part of life. But yes, definitely. So I think first, first off, you should understand what’s important to you.
[01:22:09] So what do. Are you concerned about the like long term product prospects of this company? If that’s concerning to you, why don’t you ask about that? If it’s, if what’s important to you is career growth and a manager that’s going to be supportive of your promotion and you’re talking to the hiring manager. That’s key. Then I would ask about that. Tell me about a time when you, you tell me a story about how you help somebody grow from my level to the next level.
[01:22:32] Right. So that’s the story that you want to hear, understand what’s important to you. And it could be about the, the technology, although I think that those tend to be a little bit more on the junior side. If somebody’s asking me about like what kind of stack we use or how we overcome this particular technical problem, to me that feels a little bit more junior. Although if, you know, maybe in an AI context that might not be so like you could ask a question about, you know, model construction or evaluation or something like that.
[01:22:56] That could be really important for, for you to join the company. You could ask about the role. So oftentimes one that I really liked would be something like tell me about what makes this role really successful. Like someone in this role really successful. And you can get us a lot of signal on how to be successful in the, in the, in the company once you get there and showcase to the interviewer that you’re interested in in being successful by asking a question like that.
[01:23:18] I mentioned company ones and manager ones. So like I think those are the, your categories for, for choosing one some kind of insightful question. But it. I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t approach it as in like how can I impress this person with a deep question. I would approach it more like what’s important to me? And then that will come across in as a deep question to the person that you’re. You’re talking to.
[01:23:39] But I would avoid certain things that might be important to you. Some questions like tell me about the conversation of this role. Right. That’s not a conversation that you have with the painful interviewer or like how is the free food? Right. These things might be important to you but like this is not the time to talk about those things. I think it needs to be more related to, you know, something that the hiring manager also or the interviewer also cares about.
01:23:59 — Storytelling tips
Ryan:
[01:23:59] One last thing I think on behavioral interviews we did, we did a lot of, a lot of stuff on, on behavioral. Here is there’s this idea of storytelling that kind of unifies everything. If you can storytell well, you’re going to do well in your behavioral. You’re going to do well when you’re advocating for yourself actually on the job job. So I want to get your thoughts on how to tell stories. Well. What are the most common ways to get the most benefit with the least amount of time?
Austen:
[01:24:30] Yeah. So a story has to have an arc. Has to have some beginning, middle, end. It needs to give the person whatever the story listener is looking for. Maybe in some kind of novel. We’re looking for entertainment and we’re looking for something deeper meaning about. About life. In a behavioral interview, I’m looking to. To see if you are demonstrating past behaviors which are repeatable in that organization.
[01:24:53] I’m hiring you into which align with the signal areas. Right. So that’s the goal. So let’s just remind ourselves that is it have a sort of arc and it needs to deliver this, you know, this signal area. There’s A couple of different frameworks people have talked about in the past for shortcuts for how we can get to this. And the most common one is Star. Right. Situation, task, action, result. If you’ve looked up anything about behavioral interviews, you’ve definitely seen Star Method.
[01:25:13] If you. I will begin by saying I don’t love the Star method. However, if you have an interview tomorrow and you have a bunch of Star stories that you prepared, go for it. That’s great. It’ll give you that arc. It’ll, it’ll showcase those actions. It will bookend the actions you have with some kind of context to understand them and then some kind of impact or results so that they can understand why you did the things that you did.
[01:25:33] I prefer one called Carl, which is context, actions, results, learnings. I don’t think the difference between a situation and a task is like super relevant when you’re telling a story story. Oftentimes stories just have context like what’s going on in the business, what’s happening on the team, why I got this project in the first place. So I think trying to you as a preparer, trying to figure out like what’s the situation here?
[01:25:54] And then I’m moving to the task and what is the task on like a two year project. Right. Like many, many, many tasks really which are attached to the actions. Right. So I think that thinking in terms of just context and jumping into the actions is super relevant. And then I think for senior engineers, STAR doesn’t provide any kind of, of space for reflection or any kind of space for, you know, judgment or learnings.
[01:26:17] Right. And that’s, that’s why I like adding learnings to the end of every story. Especially for senior engineers. I’m looking to see whether or not you can look at your past experience, understand what made you successful or unsuccessful, and then apply that going forward. So this gives you a nice and easy mnemonic, right to, to remember to add those things to your stories. But I also think that when you’re telling stories, you need to be cons cognizant of where you are in the interview.
[01:26:40] And I think this is another, other differentiator between junior interview and junior candidates and senior candidates. A senior candidate is managing the time so they understand that hey, when I ask some kind of big, I call it trunk question, trunk, branch, leaf, trunk question, which is like talking about, you know, a project that was really ambiguous, then you’re giving, you’re being given a carte blanche by the, the interviewer to tell a longer story.
[01:27:03] So you tell A longer story. But then if I ask something about like, well, you know, who did you talk to in order to get this, you know, piece of information, then to, you know, to, to do some action as part of the story, then now I’m asking some kind of like, middle grounds, maybe. I probably have some thought about who I talk to and how I talk to them. It’s a communication signal, right? So I should give them something, but I shouldn’t give them like a complete Star or Carl story at that, at that level.
[01:27:25] And sometimes they just want like some very specific information like, oh, like tell me about the framework that you used for this particular project. Okay. They’re just kind of like checking off a box. Right. So I understand a little bit of context I didn’t have before. And so that’s a leaf question. Just give them the answer and move on. So I think your ability to detect what kind of question, how long the interviewer wants to listen to a response is going to be an indicator of seniority and also like an important skill for you, managing the interview for storytelling.
Ryan:
[01:27:55] What do you think is more important, what you say or how you say say it. So, for instance, is it the actual words that are coming out of my mouth that makes the biggest difference or is it my presence, how confident I am, and is there one versus the other that you’d say people should really focus on to really nail their stories?
Austen:
[01:28:16] Engineers tend to be pretty structured people, and engineering interviews tend to be very structured. Even at smaller places, someone will at least perceive that they are structuring the interview and some kind of rational way. And so I think it is less about how you say it and is more about what you say. So if I, even if you came across confident and positive and encouraging and like somebody I would love to work with, but if somehow I did not hear that you were handling ambiguity in some kind of structured way or that you were applying some kind of conflict resolution framework to the conflicts that you had, then I’m, I’m, I’m.
[01:28:50] That interview is not going to go well and I’m not going to be able to support hiring you. So I do think that, that it really does come down to substance. I think that’s the most important thing. You know, form follows function as in most engineering environments, and I think that it’s the case here as well. However, I would say at more senior levels, then how you come across and how you tell the story does make a lot more, does make more impact because we are expecting you to be telling stories like this one one, for example, when the VP says how’s that project going in the, in the, in the status meeting?
[01:29:24] You need to be able to tell like a. An engaging and entertaining. As much as entertaining as any work thing is entertaining story about how the project is going. And so I, I am looking to see if you are providing interesting details, for example, like a detail that might be showcase something that some thinking that you did or some unique situation that you were in. Oftentimes whether to include details is a big part of what you’re going through as a behavioral interviewer.
[01:29:51] So you should only include details which help to accomplish some tasks. So maybe the task is that I want to showcase, I’m deeply technical, I want to include a few details like that. Maybe the task right now for me as the candidate is to showcase that I am somebody who can work across teams. So I want to include the part about how the other tech lead had had a mean look on his face when I went to talk about this thing.
[01:30:14] Maybe that detail is relevant, right, because it showcases how I push through difficulty and pushback on other teams. So yes, I think those things are relevant. I think most candidates probably need to spend more of their time on basic story structure, basic identification of what actions they did that are repeatable.
01:30:31 — How he got promoted to Senior Manager (M2) at Meta
Ryan:
[01:30:31] You know, I wanted to ask you about your senior, your promotion to M2 at Meta. Actually, you’ve told me so much about how to speak about scope at this point, maybe you could tell me or tell the audience how you got promoted to M2, why you got promoted to M2 and speak about it in a way that illustrates the scope of a senior manager.
Austen:
[01:30:54] In order to get to M2, I had to solve some difficult problems in the recruiting space. And probably the most important one was around diversity. So I left a team which was focused on building things for teenagers, which is another hard problem that I got myself involved in. Very difficult time for Facebook during that time. But I left that team to lead a couple of teams within their internal recruiting products organization, which is all about supporting candidates, supporting recruiters and sourcers and their goals.
[01:31:23] But the thing that really drew me over there was working on supporting a team that was hiring more diverse engineers. That meant a lot to me. So how can I help make the world a better place? Place as in my position as a manager would be to make what is the most, the largest wealth opportunity in the world today, which was technology and is technology. How can I make that available to more people in the world?
[01:31:45] That’s really motivated me. So I. That is not an easy problem to solve. It’s not, definitely not an easy problem to solve from a perspective of a, a product team. Right. I’m not an education institution. Right. I, I don’t get to make all hiring decisions, for example, example. I don’t get to pick, you know, what people learn in school, so. But we were able to move the needle there by improving preparation of all things like interview preparation and that’s how we were able to help improve the diversity hiring for meta and that as well as supporting a number of other teams, helping to establish high quality of candidate data that would be established for Facebook’s applicant tracking system system and being able to, you know, clarify like what’s important in, in terms of candidate data and being able to improve the quality that we have significantly over time.
[01:32:34] I think that’s, those are the reasons why I was promoted to M2.
Ryan:
[01:32:38] So when I, when I think I. That story I just heard as if I was an interviewer. I heard that you were supporting multiple teams. I heard that you were taking on a, an ambiguous problem like how do you solve diversity? It’s not immediately obvious and it sounds like you had a significant self motivation to go towards this problem space and solve for the company. So am I hearing that those are the signals that you hope that an interviewer would have got if you were interviewing for a behavioral interview?
Austen:
[01:33:12] Yeah, for sure. I would say I would add a few other ones. So one thing that I didn’t mention is impact across the company. So. So I think leading the iOS and Android recruiting pipelines is an important way that you’re scaling yourself and applying yourself across more than, than just the teams that you’re directly responsible for. So that was also a big part. I should have included that.
01:33:32 — His biggest career regret
Ryan:
[01:33:32] I understand you left Big Tech at this point and you know, looking back on your experience in Big Tech, is there anything that you regret or anything that you wish you could have changed?
Austen:
[01:33:42] I don’t regret leaving. I think I had a really great time. I worked with a lot of wonderful people. I think that I regret the anxiety that I put into the teams and the anxiety that I put into myself. I think we can all look back on parts of our life, whether it’s school or early career or even now, and we think, wow, I really wish I hadn’t worried about that. At the end of our lives, we don’t say things like, I wish I’d just gotten a few more percent out of that engagement number and that project xyz.
[01:34:09] Like nobody thinks that way. Right? People value relationships. They Value, value. They value connection. And I, I think that I added a lot of anxiety to my life in various parts of my career and I, I regret that part. I think that like I told you earlier, I made conscious choices to optimize for my life experience versus my career. I think there were times which, when I was not honest with myself about that, when I was not honest about what that that trade off was, would mean in terms of compensation or in terms of career progression or in terms of status for myself.
[01:34:44] And I think being honest with yourself about what you really value and being okay with the trade offs in advance. And since I’ve left Big Tech and supporting my wife as she’s building her, her, her business, certainly that has come with like a decrease in pay. And one of the things, one of the ways that I have been able to apply the learning that I’m telling you is before I left, I knew, okay, I’m paying, cash flow is going to be low.
[01:35:07] I’m going to be okay with that because I’m making decisions to spend more time with my kids, because I’m making decisions to support more community organizations here and volunteering and I’m going to be okay with that choice. And that’s been really helpful. I’ve been able to go back to that choice a number of times when the cash flow situation has, you know, maybe wanted to improve that, maybe we missed that kind of paycheck and maybe you’ll experience this, I don’t know, you know, having, having just, having just left Big Tech.
[01:35:32] But I think having that honest conversation with myself has really helped in the last couple of years. And I wish I had done that earlier and said, you know, what I really value are these things and that means I’m not going to have those other things in life. And that’s okay, that’s okay if that’s what you want, right? So making that kind of conscious and values driven decision and then coming back to it, maybe sometimes revisiting it, maybe you want to change it, but that kind of intentionality is something I wish I had was more honest with myself about.
Ryan:
[01:35:58] So when you’re saying you were, you were not honest, you still thought you wanted that cash flow and those things.
Austen:
[01:36:04] I think I was frustrated. I think I was frustrated at various points about, about not being able to progress. And I think that there was, I would even say bitterness at times when I would say I’m frustrated that so and so got this job, so and so got promoted, you know, so and so was able to do XYZ right here, look at me. You know, I’m doing this, I’m doing that. But not being honest with myself of, of you know what, you, you didn’t do the things that they did.
[01:36:25] You did not move teams as rapidly as they did. You did not work as hard as that person. You prioritize other things in your life. You prioritized your family, you prioritized in making an impact in, in, in the community around you outside of work. And, and that has consequences, right? So I, I think we, we can live in this world where we think you can have it all, right? Like you can, you can be a, whatever level 7 IC and go home at 5 o’ clock clock, right, and have a wonderful and engaging family life.
[01:36:53] And maybe some people can do that. Right. I think that that could be a skill that people have, but that depends a lot on, on your, your talent level and what kind of skills you’ve built up over time. But the reality for most people is that if you want to accomplish something extraordinary in your life, you have to have extra, you have to take extraordinary steps. And I don’t think I was honest with myself and I think that that resulted in some frustration and bitterness along the way.
[01:37:16] But I think that once I decided, decided kind of in the middle what’s important to me, where I really want to be, what I want my kids to say about me in 10 years, that was what really what guided me, what do I want them to remember about me 10, 15 years from now.
Ryan:
[01:37:32] that intentionality got rid of those feelings for you.
Austen:
[01:37:36] Well, I think that it comes back sometimes. So especially living in a place like this where people are stacking wealth in and as fast as they possibly can and you’re going to see people like that around you all the time, living in Silicon Valley. And so you have to, to, to ask yourself like, is that what I want? No. Maybe it is, that’s fine, maybe it’s not. And then, so it’s going to come up and it comes up in my life, you know, on a, on a semi regular basis.
[01:38:00] But it’s really helpful to be aligned with your own values and have that kind of mission statement or vision that you have for your life and what’s important to you in the future. And if you live like that, you’ll be satisfied.
01:38:13 — The best advice he ever received
Ryan:
[01:38:13] You worked a long time at Meta across other companies as well. And I’m curious, what was the best advice that you ever received in your career?
Austen:
[01:38:22] I would say that the best advice that I ever Received was the importance of creating scope. So if you would like to get promoted or if you would like to advance in your career, oftentimes we are waiting like we are waiting for somebody to give us that opportunity. And I remember one of my managers said, like, if you want this, you know, M2 role, you have to create an M2 scope. Scope team, right? You have to, to accomplish and solve problems that are, you know, that are, that are of this scope.
[01:38:55] And so I think that this, this kind of honest reflection on like what it really takes to get to the next level that you have to change not just how, what you do, right? That’s often advice that you hear not just doing the same thing that you’re doing at your level better, you have to do something different. But what is that difference? And really that differences about creating additional scope and creating space for the, the organization to succeed?
[01:39:18] That was another key part of that advice was, you know, what is your VP saying about your project? And if your VP is not going to be talking to any of their peers or their manager about what you’re doing, then the question is, am I doing the right thing? So what can, what kind of, what kind of. How can I work backwards, right? And we do this a lot. We work backwards in the behavioral interview. What do I want to present kind of signal to area do to.
[01:39:38] I want present. You work backwards in a promotional experience. What do I want the packet to be like? And I think you can work backwards in terms of creating scope, which is what do I want the, you know, the VP or the organization’s leadership to say about what we’ve accomplished and then go and figure out a way to do that thing.
01:39:54 — Advice for younger self
Ryan:
[01:39:54] Yeah, that’s, that’s great advice. I mean there’s, there’s always situation and luck when it comes to career growth and promos. But I feel like the most satisfying promotions are the ones where, where you take initiative and you create the scope and no one can stop you in that case. So you don’t need anyone’s permission. And then the last question I’d ask is if you look back on your entire career and right when you graduated college and you could give yourself some advice now that you’ve learned what you’ve learned, what would you say?
Austen:
[01:40:28] I had a lot of imposter syndrome, so I avoided. For example, I got a PhD out of, in computer science, out of, out of undergraduate school. But during the summers I would work just in, in, in the research in the university when a lot of my peers would go and work in in industry they would go get a, like a internship right at Google or Facebook or wherever and work there. And really what held me back was insecurity.
[01:40:52] I didn’t want to go through the interview process. I, I didn’t want to be rejected. And so I, I think that kind of fear and allow the imposter syndrome that I felt to hold me back from those choices. I, I do think that that had a. My career was great. I love my career. It’s great. I’m not sure I would change a ton, but I think it did help me back. I think I was slower to understand how big organizations operate.
[01:41:12] I was slower to understand how large code bases operate, certainly coming from, from academia. So I think that that kind of insecurity and fear. Fear really held me back. I know that’s super common kind of advice to give oneself in the past is like don’t give into fear. But that’s the biggest advice I would tell myself is don’t give into fear.
Ryan:
[01:41:36] Awesome. Well, thank you so much Austin, for your time. I really appreciate it and I hope it’s helpful for people.
Austen:
[01:41:43] Yeah, thanks Ryan. Great to be here.
