Chapter 5. The Nerves
There’s a collection of emotions competing in your head before an interview, and no matter how many interviews you go through, some version of them will always show up. I think they can be collectively viewed as the Nerves.
The Nerves are the jumble of every single emotion and question bouncing around your head trying to get out. Questions like:
Who am I going to meet?
Are they going to ask me to code?
Can I accurately communicate how cool the stuff is that I build?
Is my love of this potential new job going to come off as desperation?
My opinion is that the biggest source of the Nerves is judgment. In the next six hours, your career is literally on trial. You are about to be cross-examined by a handful of strangers regarding your education and your experience. The result of this cross-examination will be a decision regarding your future livelihood.
An interview is a crucible where everything you’ve learned and everything you’ve done is being measured and understood in a day, and it’s your responsibility to elegantly and eloquently describe this experience to a bunch of strangers.
I understand why you are nervous.
In this chapter, I’m going to give you a simple strategy for handling the hardest part of the interview: answering questions.
Question Types
First, let’s understand the questions that are going to show up. There are three classes of questions you’re going to encounter.
- Specific
These questions are focused. How’d you end up at that company? Why’d you leave? While the answers to these questions might make them feel open-ended, these are warm-up feeler questions intended to give the interview context. They’re exploring you and your resumé, but they haven’t really asked a hard question. Answers to the questions are short, specific, and don’t require much strategy.
- Problem solving
These questions are intended to qualify and demonstrate ability. How many times a day do a clock’s hands overlap? These are the dreaded coding or brain-teasing questions that, while hated, give the interviewer an idea of how you think. You go into these questions intentionally not knowing the answer, because they want to see how (and if) you arrive at an answer. These are “show your work” questions intended to shine light on your thought process.
- Open-ended
These are like problem-solving questions, except they’re for the other side of your brain. Explain your design philosophy. Tell me about your biggest failure. Even though we all dread the problem-solving and coding questions, I believe open-ended questions are where we screw up the most, and I blame the Nerves.
While I think the strategy listed next helps with any of these question types, I think it’s best suited to tackling ambiguously slippery open-ended questions.
The Answer Process
First, understand the question.
Tell me what you learned at your prior gig.
It’s a big, ambiguous, open-ended question, and because you have the Nerves, you’re going to want to just start talking, but before you say a thing, before you even think of an answer, you need to make sure you understand the question.
Sure, I learned all about design in my last gig and....
Stop, no. You’re answering and you still don’t understand the question. It’s not what you learned, it’s what did you learn that this specific person is going to care about? Who is this person, and why is he asking the question? If it’s an engineer, it’s the engineering version of the answer. If it’s a program manager, go for the program manager version.
You’re spinning these folks by altering your answer. They asked a big, huge, vague question and you, hopefully, learned a ton at your prior gig and are using some of that knowledge to give the interviewer an answer that will be relevant to him.
OK, can I start talking now?
No.
Before you do that, you need to have an answer.
You understand who is asking and what he’s asking, but do you have an answer? You don’t open your mouth until you can feel the answer. My biggest interview pet peeve is when I ask a question and the candidate wastes three minutes of our time talking and never answering the question.
The flawed reasoning here is that you need to say something immediately. But since you don’t immediately have an answer, you’re going to open your mouth and, hopefully, verbally wander toward one. This strategy can work, but when it fails, when you’re two minutes into a rambling answer that has nothing to do with what I asked, we’re both going to know it. Two minutes have passed and all I’ve learned is that you’re mentally messy.
Wait until you have an answer. Wait until you can feel it, and don’t start talking until you do. If a couple of seconds have passed and the silence is becoming palpable, it’s one of two situations:
a) You really don’t understand the question, or
b) You really don’t have an answer.
Here are three moves:
If you don’t understand the question, clarify. Are you asking what I learned that I cared about or what I learned about relative to design? The clarification demonstrates active participation in the interview and I love it. I love that someone is past the Nerves and is engaged in the interview and actually listening.
If you don’t have an answer, if you’ve clarified, maybe twice, and you’re still drawing a blank, I have a cheap trick that is going to give you another 10 seconds: repeat the question.
Yeah, repeat it. Word for word. It’s lame, but you’ve got a mental logjam in your head. Maybe it’s the Nerves. Maybe you really don’t have an answer, but the simple act of sounding out the question can sometimes fire the right neuron.
Don’t look at the interviewer; the Nerves are going to tell you that they’re wondering why you’re stalling. Look at the ceiling, look at the window, and repeat the question.
You’ve clarified twice, repeated, and you’re 10 seconds into another round of silence. Still nothing. The Nerves are screaming, but I want you to ignore them. The Nerves see silence as a weakness, but I believe silence demonstrates composure and thoughtfulness, and you’re going to need that composure because your next move is to look them straight in the eye and say, “I don’t know.”
It feels like interview suicide, the admission of ignorance, but look at the alternatives: rambling, praying, and hoping that inspiration strikes.
Both problem-solving and open-ended questions are designed to show me how you think. Even though I’m giving you space for being nervous, when your answers come out as a rambly mess, I’m wondering how much control you have over your facilities. Where’s your head going to be when we’re three months into a shipping death march? Are you going to be rambly then? How about when you’re demoing to the executives?
I understand the courage it takes to acknowledge ignorance during a time when you’re pitching yourself as a worthy hire, and it’s that courage that will make an impression.
The Confidence of Knowing a Thing
Understand the question and have an answer. As interview advice goes, it’s pretty simple, but you’ve got to keep it simple because of the Nerves. Think of your last interview when you totally blew the question and went so off-topic that neither you nor the interviewer knew where the hell you were going. Tell me about the Nerves after that disaster of an answer.
By keeping your answer strategy simple, but making sure you understand what is being asked and being certain you have something to say, you’re providing comfortable mental structure around your interview; you’re making it a bit more predictable.
The mental state I want you in is the one after you nailed that open-ended question. They vaguely asked you about your design philosophy, you clarified, you considered, and then you spoke for three whole uninterrupted minutes about your philosophy, and as you watched the interviewer, you saw him getting it.
Your job in an interview is to lose the Nerves and show them who you are. With each successful answer to a question, you provide a more complete picture of who you are and gain confidence, and confidence kills the Nerves.