Effective Interviewing Through Storytelling

Tons of resources exist for how to deal with the coding portion of technical interviews, but very few exist in order to help people deal with the question of "Tell me about this project you worked on".

In this talk, I'll discuss how we can use storytelling as a framework to answer questions about technical projects you've worked on.

Transcript

1. Jonathan Maltz maltz@yelp.com / @maltzj (github/twitter) Effective Interviewing Through Storytelling
2. Hi! I’m Maltz! • Full-Stack at Yelp Eat24 • Previously: Yelp Consumer App • Have done 100s of interviews • Big fan of cheesy grins
3. What Am I Here To Talk About?
4. What Am I Here To Talk About?
6. Great Coaching Exists for Coding Questions
7. What Do You Do When Someone Asks? What did you build in your systems programming class? Teach me your favorite data structure. What did you work on at your last job?
8. You Tell A Story
9. Stories Aren’t Just For Fires and Books • Why I joined Yelp? • What did you do last weekend? • That last thing you built for class?
10. Let’s First Breakdown a Simple Story
12. What’s The Structure Here? • Setting - Animal Kingdom is having a race
13. What’s The Structure Here? • Setting - Animal Kingdom is having a race • Character Introduction - Tortoise and the hare step up to the starting line
14. What’s The Structure Here? • Setting - Animal Kingdom is having a race • Character Introduction - Tortoise and the hare step up to the starting line • Actions - Hare gets ahead and takes a nap
15. What’s The Structure Here? • Setting - Animal Kingdom is having a race • Character Introduction - Tortoise and the hare step up to the starting line • Actions - Hare gets ahead and takes a nap • Resolution - Tortoise gets ahead and wins
16. How Do These Apply To Projects? • Setting • Character Introduction • Actions • Resolution
17. 1. Setting
18. What are you talking about? & Why does it exist?
19. Goal: Get you both on the same page
20. Quick Aside
21. Avoid using “Just”
22. Example!
23. How Do These Apply To Projects • Setting ✅ • Character Introduction • Actions • Resolution
24. 2. Character Introduction
25. Possible Characters • Code modules • Databases • Web backends • Mobile Applications • External APIs
26. Goal: Create a mental picture like this
28. Start with how a human interacts with it
29. Lean towards oversharing
30. Example!
31. How Do These Apply To Projects • Setting ✅ • Character Introduction ✅ • Actions • Resolution
32. 3. Actions
33. 1 - 2 Biggest Challenges
34. Answer 5 Questions • What was the problem? • Where did you think the bug existed? • How did you instrument code to find if you were right? • What was the final problem? • How did you fix it?
35. These are micro-detective stories!
36. You may have new characters
37. Example!
38. How Do These Apply To Projects • Setting ✅ • Character Introduction ✅ • Actions ✅ • Resolution
39. 4. Resolution
40. What shipped? & How did it work?
41. How Do These Apply To Projects? • Setting ✅ • Character Introduction ✅ • Actions ✅ • Resolution ✅
42. What Next?
43. Be prepared for follow-ups
44. Be prepared for follow-ups
45. You can follow the same framework for these!
46. Questions