Just LUCK?! How Did I Get This Far In My Software Developer Interview?

Transcript is auto-generated and may contain errors.

hey folks I'm going to go to LinkedIn for a question that came in uh this person wrote a novel which is a good thing uh for extra context um I apologize I'm incredibly burnt out from work uh but I wanted to make some time to get through some videos because these questions that I saw come in from LinkedIn there's one more I'm going to do after this tonight still I think they're really important to get to and I want to make sure that I can I can try to help so um I'm not going to read the entire thing that this person sent but uh essentially they had an opportunity so they're they're Junior trying to get into a development role and they're already kind of working at a company and uh they had the opportunity to do a project and given some personal circumstances

whatever they had a you know pretty short timeline to do it they presented it they were honest that they had some AI assistance um and you know there's some parts of they don't fully understand but like you know was able they were able to deliver something um they said you know showed some aspects of my human nature was myself was honest and they said they were surprised by this but um one of the managers called them up and said uh it'll give you three weeks to learn you know some of the basics and fundamentals of the language that they're using um and then he said he didn't mention anything about an assessment or a test or anything like that just wants this individual to gain that understanding uh said the position will be junior for backend uh and they said that they're basically coming to

a close under 3 weeks so uh looks like you know he was putting in trying to put in the effort and then he's essentially asking given the situation that they're in um you know they're feeling anxious and you know I think that makes sense for someone in this situation they're going to feel anxious so they said I know you're an engineering manager so you're the closest thing I can ask um if you were the manager in the situation what aspects of the candidate are you going to look for how can I make myself the best viable candidate as a junior Dev I thought thought I messed it up in the first place and so I'm even more confused why they're letting me go ahead and go for a second chance to get this and they gave a little bit more background about themselves um and

I think that this is a it's an interesting situation to be in so um you know I I'm very hopeful this will be a success story and uh part of me uh you know I whatever I'm about to say in this video is not going to I don't I don't personally feel like it's going to fundamentally change uh this person's success trajectory um but part of me was is kind of like it would feel really cool to hear back from this person and uh they tell me how it went and it was successful so I I'm selfishly like you know I I want to be part of the success story um and I just wanted to to say to folks you know if you have questions you want answered you can leave them in the comments send me a message on LinkedIn I try my

best here like I said um had a super long day I'm not you can Pro if you watch my other videos you can probably just tell like I'm not currently myself um but this kind of stuff is super important to me so um okay where to start I think that I wanted to kind of talk about the fact that this person's like kind of surprised and I my gut tells me like they have uh the people that they're talking to that are like hiring for this position are probably looking at what I would call like good characteristics of of a junior and that's one of the reasons why I was saying like I don't think that anything I say on this video is going to um fundamentally change how this person operates to change their success trajectory um is I I think that they are

going to be successful at this and what I mean by that is that the people that are giving them this opportunity especially for junior candidates of course when we're talking about and if it wasn't clear and I maybe I I kind of skimmed over it when they were kind of providing this information they're taking like a bit of a like a backdoor path into the job opportunity right it's not hey let me submit my resume into the portal it's going to get automatically put through software or it's going to be put into the pile of like a thousand other applicants someone's going to have to skim through it that's a part of the job application process process that in my opinion is just so broken right now because of the volume okay so when when we look at this kind of thing like stages like

I need to even get my my uh I can't think of words my my resume notice right for this job application and then I have to go do the interview like even that first step of like standing out to get the um to get the interview I think is is really challenging and it sounds like this person kind of did like a an assignment based interview as the first part so they're already partway through like this interview you know I'm going to call it like interview process it's a little bit I don't know um uncommon but the reason I'm calling this out is because like when people are always saying hey it's impossible there's no job opportunities my my point in covering this part in a little bit more detail is like notice how this is isn't really a traditional way of doing it right

they were kind of using uh call it like their inner Network to try and find the opportunity go forward and and make something of it and and it's kind of like working so far so it's not sometimes in the traditional paths it feels like statistically very impossible just given the volume but this in my opinion this is a very interesting and creative way and interesting circumstance so just wanted to kind of touch on on that but um I think in this case the people that are hiring for the position the reason I think that this is sort of good characteristics they're looking for is it sounds like it's not that other people aren't trying so I I want to be careful about how I say that and given my current like I don't know like state of mind I I don't I don't want to

slip up all my words and like say the wrong thing that sounds like uh sounds off-putting to to different groups of people but what I'm trying to say is like this person they did like a take-home Project A lot of people are outright like absolutely not like screw your interview I'm not doing that this person's like okay I'll do the project it's two weeks to do it so um they go put in the effort to do it and and it's and then they're honest right so they're talking about they're not trying to the people that are uh interviewing them and I said this in a recent video but um when you can be calm and confident and honest and talk through things that actually says a lot um it's not like it's not like often times the number one characteristic like if people are blown

away by someone's technical skills and their behavioral interview skills like those things might really shine but there's something to be said about when you're having a conversation with someone and you're depending on how this person's being interviewed if the person on the other end the interviewer is like I could definitely see myself like working on problems with this person debugging things like designing stuff together if they're getting that feeling based on the conversation I I feel like that carries some weight and it's kind of hard to quantify that so I do try to recommend that people and it's so much easier said than D try to try to be calm try to be yourself um and that's one of the the things like it takes practice right I I am saying this as someone that gets nervous in interviews I said this in the other

video I made the fact that I make these videos is an opportunity for me to practice like kind of fumbling on stuff like you're seeing me pause here and think and like like that's not normal for my my main YouTube channel that stuff all gets edited out but this just lets me practice like be you just talk right share your experiences share your thoughts try to be articulate in the things that you're saying so this person I think was able to to nail that which they're saying hey I'm surprised I even had the chance but I think what these individuals are looking for is like that's a a set of characteristics and traits that probably stands out to them so that's great they see someone that's willing to take some initiative to go work on a project go do some takehome stuff um and whatever

they put together like sometimes people are having this skewed perspective of like just because they're seeing other people in the industry saying like oh all the juniors are using Ai and like that's ruining them and stuff I think people are getting kind of confused like so should I not use AI like what am I supposed to do maybe this employer is like we don't care like you're G you're able to use AI when you're working here I don't know that for a fact by the way but maybe that's how they look at it and they're like whatever use whatever tools to build stuff like you're going to be building stuff that's how you build it okay um so I kind of think that they're just looking for someone who's like Curious and willing to I don't know like to put the effort in so now

this individual has spent some extra time to go brush up on their skills try and learn some fundamentals I'll be totally transparent the timeline that was presented here like two weeks for a project and then three weeks to learn some fundamentals we're talking that's like a month and a week it's five weeks in total right it's not a lot of time for anyone to get very far however this is for a junior role and I think that some of the characteristics that can be demonstrated can go far so to me how I'm looking at this is like if this company had a list of a thousand people that were applying and they're like okay we got to filter through these they can just keep setting the bar Higher and Higher and they can say great we'll take the person with the most experience blah blah

blah because they can they have that many people applying now that's one way to look at it and another another way to look at it is like and my personal opinion from building engineering teams is like you when you're trying to create a team you genuinely do want different levels of experience so just to give you an example it's it's contrived obviously because I'm making it up on the spot if I had a team of five software Engineers or let's say it's four and I want it to be five I have a principal level engineer I have uh two seniors I have a mid-level engineer okay and then I'm like hey I don't have any Juniors if I had a bunch of applications coming in and I want to get a junior engineer I'm not necessarily like say someone applied and they were like I've

been a software engineer for 10 years that's cool but like I actually might not want that in structuring my team and I realize some people are like that's Nick like why wouldn't you take the person with the most experience it's because I'm trying to get a junior engineer there's a reason for it I want to have continuity in the team I want to make sure that the mid-level engineer can have someone they can work with that's more Junior than them like we need to think about these coaching opportunities we need to think about what people the types of work people can focus on imagine if that was now a team of five principal engineers and there's smaller changes and Bug fixes and stuff they're not going to want to do that the types of work that might be challenging or engaging with will look different

depending on people's level of experience the more like the principal level Engineers might say I'm looking for bigger organizational type impact work that might be months of like coordinating and putting things together and delivering on stuff and and then it's like yeah but we have like this backlog of like bugs we have to get to and stuff like those might be great for someone Junior to be like hell yeah I'm building momentum on this stuff I'm learning about the system like there's I'm giving you some like very high level reasons but I think there's many good reasons I can think of why I would genuinely want to make sure I have continuity and levels you you if you're not an engineering manager or you are and you structure teams in a different way I don't know what to tell you but that's how I look

at things so I don't think that it's totally out of the ordinary that they're just there might be they might be looking at this person and saying this would be a great Junior person to bring in okay so back to what this person's asking specifically CU if you know me I like my tangents um if you were the manager in the situation what aspects of the candidate are you truly going to look for from their View and how come I make myself the best viable candidate as a junior Dev okay so first thing is that um it sounds like they gave you homework to go learn some fundamentals and I want to address this part because it sounds like that's something where they're like this seems like it still might be a little bit of a gap so we want to make sure that we

could make some progress here they also didn't mention a test right so like we I don't know how this is going to be evaluated but I would put some thought into that like how do we anticipate that they're going to say like like how do we follow up and confirm this person put in the effort right so I would try to think about the major topics that you learned about okay I have to acknowledge like this is not a long period of time and given that this person was saying they're ending that 3-we period it's not like I can say oh go like my advice is always like go build projects and spend the time building things like you're out of time it's it's how it is so I would try to think about some of these Concepts right like what did you learn about

object oriented programming in c that's the language you're using by the way I didn't mention that I was trying to omit it because I didn't think it was relevant but and it's not really but I just blurted it out so um you know what did you learn about that in C what did you learn about uh I don't know if they had to build like an asp.net core but like be ready to kind of think about some of these things that you went and to explore you know how does a dictionary work how does a list work maybe not the low-level data structure like theoretical Concepts but like do you understand like what that is in C or whatever language if you're trying to relate this to your situation like think about some of the basics you learned so that you can talk about those

things now they might they might quiz you on this stuff it's kind of weird um I'm trying to think if I were in this situation I said I want someone to go brush up on C what am I going to do honestly I think one of the best ways would be to put some code in front of them that's not convolute it's not like something that I dug up that's like you know 15 years old that I wrote when you know was a lot more rough every year that goes by I'm like I really wrote that um but you know not dig something up that's ridiculous something they should be able to follow and just be like hey can you walk me through like what this code is doing like I think that would be a cool thing to do to be able to say

like if you don't understand anything and I've picked something that I feel like is relatively straightforward you know maybe I have a method that goes and operates on a collection or I have something that's going to call a database um and then it does like a two array and maybe I want to and then it's like doing a for each Loop or something I might say hey like did I need to do that two array up here what's the implication of that like can you might not know but can you like reason about what's going on there um you know just different things like that like if you see async await code maybe I might show you something with a small bug in it and say like hey you know so maybe there's some async await code and I'm not awaiting something again sorry if

these details aren't making sense because of the language constructs but maybe I'm like hey I would expect that someone would have learned this and could I show you some code with a bug and say hey there's a bug in here can you tell me what it is and what's happening and how we would fix it so like just some really simple scenarios that's that might be how I go try engage what someone's learned but that's it's hard to answer this right because I don't want to tell them hey that's what's going to happen and then it's not so my advice would be anticipate something like that because if I were the people that you know were on the the hiring side of this and I said I would like you to go learn some of the fundamental stuff I would be preparing myself to answer

those types of questions or think through a scenario like that so that's that's one part um now on the rest of it I think something and I'm kind of speculating here but I'm guessing something that's working really well for this individual is that they are demonstrating that they're eager that they're willing to learn um right they've been put some challenges put in front of them right like how are you going to adapt and go learn this stuff I think that I would be leaning into to that because I think that that's working well personally when I talk about characteristics of Engineers that I would like to hire this is a level agnostic kind of thing by the way because these are going to be characteristics that I like to hire for and your level of experience uh isn't going to change the fact that I'm

looking for these things your level of experience will gauge my like expectations on technical contributions or experiences like leading projects and that kind of stuff so the the things that I like to look for are genuinely people that are um curious right because there's going to be problems we're going to have to debug stuff stuff isn't always going to work there's going to be things that are ambiguous I need people to be curious right so that's one part I want to make sure that people are um I I don't know a better phrase but like eager to learn is another thing because being curious is one part of that but eager to learn is another because when we're faced with challenges I want to make sure that people are not only curious about what's going on but like if they need to be put into

a new situation they're like hell yeah like this is new this is cool like I want to dig into this so I kind of look at those two things um I like like for me it's all soft skills just to to make it short right like it's soft skills So like um your ability to to problem solve and explain what's going on I think is very important it's for me that's mostly about I need you to articulate your thought process because if you're curious right you're going to go dig into things that's great but I need you to be able to communicate that as well so um that's another aspect but honestly um for for really Junior people I'm kind of like you know I want you to be able to learn I want you to learn quickly and I want you to be curious

about stuff I want you asking questions I want you to dig in and try to like try to be like proactively like how like tell me how this works I'm curious like I need uh I need to like learn and understand because I think that when people are acting like that it's like I don't know a good way to put it it's like this eagerness to uh to improve um and then as I'm working with Engineers like on my teams if I if I can see that if I can kind of tap into that then for me it's like okay like how do we steer into their strengths how do we address their weaknesses but then I have someone who's at least like I kind of look at it like they have some momentum um and not everyone's going to be like that and sometimes

it just feels like the momentum is slower I think that's kind of what I'm saying so for a junior person those are some of the things that I would really like to see demonstrated so um you know this person that's why I said I think this person is doing this kind of stuff right so um yeah I think I think that's how I would answer this um I I'm excited for this person I think that they if they genuinely put in the effort that's the thing I don't know right I'm reading this I can't possibly know maybe they're like ah I kind of slacked off I didn't do anything or I put I put in the time but didn't translate into anything I don't know that I'm very hopeful for them I'm excited uh I'm hoping that they watch this and I'm hoping it's helpful

and but I like I said I think that they're already doing the things that I would hope for so um yeah I hope that's hope that's helpful uh and for other folks too like I said if you have questions you want answered like this individual didn't leave a comment they sent me a message on LinkedIn um I really appreciate that thank you for it's kind of a weird thing to say but thank you for for kind of like trusting me to to offer some perspective like that actually means a lot to me so uh thanks so much I will send this video over to this person and I hope that it helps them and I hope that it helps someone else so thanks and I'm going to record the next one take care