Effective Interviewing Through Storytelling

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Jonathan Maltz [email protected] / @maltzj (github/twitter) Effective Interviewing Through Storytelling

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Hi! I’m Maltz! ● Full-Stack at Yelp Eat24 ● Previously: Yelp Consumer App ● Have done 100s of interviews ● Big fan of cheesy grins

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What Am I Here To Talk About?

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What Am I Here To Talk About?

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Great Coaching Exists for Coding Questions

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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?

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You Tell A Story

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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?

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Let’s First Breakdown a Simple Story

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What’s The Structure Here? ● Setting - Animal Kingdom is having a race

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What’s The Structure Here? ● Setting - Animal Kingdom is having a race ● Character Introduction - Tortoise and the hare step up to the starting line

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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

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How Do These Apply To Projects? ● Setting ● Character Introduction ● Actions ● Resolution

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1. Setting

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What are you talking about? & Why does it exist?

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Goal: Get you both on the same page

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Quick Aside

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Avoid using “Just”

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Example!

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How Do These Apply To Projects ● Setting ✅ ● Character Introduction ● Actions ● Resolution

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2. Character Introduction

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Possible Characters ● Code modules ● Databases ● Web backends ● Mobile Applications ● External APIs

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Goal: Create a mental picture like this

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Start with how a human interacts with it

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Lean towards oversharing

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Example!

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How Do These Apply To Projects ● Setting ✅ ● Character Introduction ✅ ● Actions ● Resolution

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3. Actions

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1 - 2 Biggest Challenges

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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?

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These are micro-detective stories!

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You may have new characters

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Example!

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How Do These Apply To Projects ● Setting ✅ ● Character Introduction ✅ ● Actions ✅ ● Resolution

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4. Resolution

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What shipped? & How did it work?

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How Do These Apply To Projects? ● Setting ✅ ● Character Introduction ✅ ● Actions ✅ ● Resolution ✅