Hate Life, Will Travel

Why answering “no” is almost a certain no-hire.

An interview loop is a full day of your time. And the company you’re interviewing at is burning at least six hours of their people’s time not developing features, or answering phones, or building a production infrastructure, to talk to you. Now, I know that not everyone on the loop reads the resume before they go in, but unless I’m tagged in at the last minute (which happens too often, certainly) I’ve spent 10-15m just reading your resume, and after we talk I’ll spend another 10-20m writing up interview feedback. Multiply that by six… You can spend 15 minutes to prepare.

If you’re considering taking a job with a company, you should know why. It can be as simple as “I need a job”. I’m fine with that. But why at the company you’re interviewing at, and not another? Or why do you think you’d be content working on this particular widget, and not another? If you have no interest in where you work, and I really care about what I work on and who I work with, well… it’s going to be hard to bridge that.

If you haven’t used the product… fire up the web site and look around. Download a demo version of the product and play with it. It says a lot of good things about you to say “yes!” and have thoughts about what features you’d add, or an issue you encountered:
- you’re curious and interested
- you’ve given the product some thought
- you can talk about the product
- there’s a reason you’re applying for this particular job

And better still if you can talk about the product compared to others, for instance.

By contrast, the immediate doubt that comes in if you say “no” is that you’ll find the work not to your liking and no one’ll be happy. Or you’ll toil away and leave when you find something you are interested in.

Not having taken a couple minutes to prepare before the loop is akin to showing up in sweats, or being late, in that they all give the people who are taking time out of their day the impression that at best you don’t really care about the interviews, and probably don’t care much about whether you get the job or not. It’s operating at an enormous disadvantage compared to other candidates, too — they’re almost certainly going in prepared and interested.

I love interviewing. As much as anything else we do, it’s the chance to help pick the people who determine what the job’s going to be like, and the direction of the company. I’ll volunteer for any loop, I’ll substitute for anyone who is sick or working on a production issue, whatever. So I’m going to write about that for a couple of days.

When I interview people at Expedia, I only get an hour, and I’m pretty good about reserving at least half of it for the candidate’s questions. I want to answer questions about culture, what the roles are like, what we’re working on, and all of that, because
a) I think the answers to those questions provide as a far better argument for why people should work there than the job description or the salary offer or anything else
b) I’m curious what people will ask

One of the most common questions is “what do you like about working at Expedia?” and my answer depends a little about things have been going, but almost every time, I’ll say
a) huge problems to work on
b) my peers are tremendous people

Tomorrow I’m on two interview loops. And on both of them there are at least two other people that I’ve worked with, respect, and would love to have on any project I’m on. I love that I get to say, “the next three people you meet are just awesome”. Which isn’t to say that the people I don’t know aren’t great… I just haven’t worked with them.

As someone on the other side, I’ve found that part of the conversation’s great — I once got all the way through a loop and when I asked a simple question about the group’s culture, discovered there was no way I’d be a fit… and equally, I talked about sense of humor once and the detailed, thoughtful answer made me desperately want to work there.

A lot of candidates don’t have any questions. I don’t hold it against them, especially if I’m interviewer 5 of 6 that day. But I have to wonder — taking a new job’s a huge life change. What are you concerned about? What would make the job more attractive to you, or less, and how do you ask that in a reasonable way?

For instance, think about:
What’s the culture like at ____?
What did you work on yesterday?
What’s the biggest challenge you’re facing as a team? As a company?
What do you like about working here?
What’s interesting about your job?
Why do you work here, and not, say, your competitor?
I’m really interested in ____. Does your company have non-business DLs? Are they active?
I saw you launched feature X. Why did you do Y and not Z?

I can tell you a lot you want to know in thirty minutes if you ask the right questions. Ask! Ask!

I saw this by Fraser Speirs excerpted at Daring Fireball:

The iPad is an intensely personal device. In its design intent it is, truly, much more like a “big iPhone” than a “small laptop”. The iPad isn’t something you pass around. It’s not really designed to be a “resource” that many people take advantage of. It’s designed to be owned, configured to your taste, invested in and curated.

Everyone’s experience will vary, sure, but for me, “something you pass around” has been one of the best use cases of the ipad. I do this at least once a day. In meetings where we’re talking about design and how the live site looks, I pull it up and hand the ipad over so someone can look at it. We use a web-based project management program, and when we do our daily huddle I have the day’s tasks in front of me and can show people what they’ve pulled down and should update us on.

I find the ipad’s a far more social device than a laptop, that the barrier to handing it to someone else is so much lower. And I know that it’s not that far off from the size factor of a netbook, and yet if I was using a netbook and had something up, the expectation if I pulled up a web page would be that other people would move their chairs over to me, or I’d project.

I agree entirely that the ipad’s an intensely personal device. Yet there’s also something about the same things that make it personal, from the form factor, the size, the beautiful display, the speed of interactions, that also makes me want to share it. I know that I can hand it to someone and they’ll get it, and be able to look at the design, or the view of the day’s tasks, and use them immediately.