(Transcript)

tl;dr

The number 1 reason engineers fail interviews is going to sound obvious, and you have heard similar things before. I’m going to ask that you put that aside and listen with an open mind because engineers fail countless interviews because they think they understand this problem, but they don’t.

The solution to this problem, which we’ll show you at the end, seems to increase the chances of passing a non-technical round by ~10% and it also seems to have a similar effect in technical interviews.

The problem

The number 1 reason engineers fail interviews, as it’s described by companies, is: “Kevin didn’t know anything about us and didn’t seem to care.”

That does not mean you need to study in-depth for every round of every interview. It means you need a quick solution to gather enough information to demonstrate that you did your homework.

This does not mean that you need to fake enthusiasm. It means that you need to find a few items about this opportunity that genuinely are interesting to you. Interesting enough that you’d genuinely like to learn more.

Every interview normally ends with “Do you have any questions for me?”

Most candidates ask questions which make it seem like they “don’t know and don’t care” such as, “Is this opportunity remote?” Or “What do you like about working here?” These questions aren’t bad questions. They are ineffective. They are ineffective because they are too general. You could ask any company these questions. When you are on the other end of this–in the company's shoes–you would assume “It seems like Kevin is just asking what he normally asks, we seem like just another company to him.”

Anything you can easily Google, don’t ask your interviewer.

Any questions your recruiter could answer over email, don’t ask your interviewer.

Anything relating to considering the opportunity, save it until after you have an offer.

These questions should be avoided because they don’t demonstrate any signal to move you on to the next round.

Until you get an offer, you have nothing to seriously consider.” Therefore, until you get an offer, or better yet multiple offers, all your effort goes not into considering the opportunity but rather demonstrating enough signal to get invited to the next round. How many current employees feel about their workplace–good question, once you get an offer. Bad question before you get an offer.

The solution

For every interview you have, every company you would seriously consider–so practice companies don’t apply–make 3 questions before the interview takes place. You can do this in the 5-10 minutes right before the interview.

The purpose of these questions is to make them so specific that if you asked them to another company, it wouldn’t make sense.

Give your questions a wide surface area to cover by having one in a few different categories. For example, 1 about the role, 1 about the company, and 1 about the industry. (I will use these categories for my examples, but there are other categories such as “questions specific to this individual interviewer, or this specific team, or this specific product, or this specific org” and many more you can make up yourself.) Again, the key is to find what genuinely checks your box of “I’d want to learn more about that.”

Let’s say you’re interviewing with Uber for this ML engineering role.

Make a specific question about the role. Take a phrase off the job description that genuinely interests you and ask about it. “I saw on the JD that this role involves some dashboarding. Is that the focus? Or is the focus in a different area, such as modeling?”

Make a specific question about the company. The easiest way to leverage recency, is with a quick Google “News Search.” I just did that just now for “Uber”, scanned the first genuinely interesting article I found, which would lead me to ask this question: “What are the plans looking like for adding autonomous vehicles to Uber’s fleet? I read a recent article that projected 2026 to be a potential release date.”

And a question you could ask about the industry is “What current strategic items are on the roadmap to help Uber differentiate itself from Lyft over the next few years?”

Put yourself in the shoes of an interviewer. Compare the 3 of the questions I just asked to “Is this role remote?” Which gives more signal? Which sends the signal of knowing and caring about this opportunity?

It’s a no-brainer.

And all that was done in less than 10 minutes of research.

From now on, for every interview that you would seriously consider an offer from, prepare 3 questions specifically for that interview.