Author: motleyruse

Giving your kids the freedom to be different

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As a parent, we want our children to succeed. Part of that success is in learning what their strengths are, and developing those strengths. In order to cultivate these strengths, children need to exercise a daily habit of disciplined focus. These habits will help them to surmount obstacles that invariably come up during life. My advice: let kids explore their passions, and then by modeling your habits of developing these skills, they will transfer that to their area of interest (and it won’t be forced).

As a musician, I would practice a couple of hours a day as a kid to improve my abilities, I know first hand the importance of the habit of practice and developing strengths. When my kids were little I found it difficult to know the great importance of practice and see them neglect to practice, because it ultimately did not align with my kids’ interests. I became a musical tyrant in trying to conform my kids to my model of developing strengths: practicing musical skill. Although all of my kids are gifted musically, none of them have developed the same love that I had for the habit of practicing and improving musically. It was hard for me to let go of that, but I had no other choice. You don’t know when your kid will reveal their area of passion. When they do start demonstrate passion for an area, that is when you can help nurture developing disciplined practice habits.

During my son’s junior year, I was trying to figure out what could possibly motivate him to study for the SAT. He is good academically, but doesn’t love school. I asked him point blank: “what would motivate you to study for the SAT?” His answer, “buy me a squat rack*”, was a window into what he was developing a passion for. He was developing a love for exercise and fitness. He ended up studying daily for the SAT, and I bought the squat rack for him, it was a win-win.

A little backstory is needed, during Covid my son was in eighth grade, and he did what most other teen boys at his time: play video games. Even though he had grown up doing sports, the draw of the competitive 1P shooter games was too alluring, so he spent A LOT of time playing video games. Because he prioritized this above all other activities, including being active (not even going for walks), he got out of shape. 

As his school opened back up mid-sophomore year, he decided during the summer break to get back into shape. At first, he focused on improving his cardiovascular health, by using the elliptical machine. He transformed his body and got the svelte shape of a marathon runner. He decided at that point to pivot to develop healthy muscle tone by weightlifting. He was hooked and quickly transformed from a marathon runner physique into what can best be described as a linebacker: muscular.

He was demonstrating his passion when I observed this transformation, which was driven by intense habit forming around improving his (literal) strength, and started observing him coaching others to improve their strength. It was him developing that practice skill/habit that I wanted to instill in him for music, but it expressed itself in the area of his passion: fitness.

On a vacation during spring break, his junior year, he challenged me to start lifting weights. Now while I won’t share any before and after photos, because my body shape hasn’t changed much, my strength and mood have both improved. Recently, using my fitness tracker app, Strong, I hit the 200 workout milestone (over 1.5 years). I have him to thank for modeling his discipline, and encouraging me to exercise the habit of strength training. Thanks son, I’m proud of you. Your grit and determination to improve yourself is admirable, and I love seeing the habit and discipline.

  • Squat rack is a piece of workout equipment that allows a person to rack weights on a barbell and do heavy duty squat exercises.

Interviewers be better … no games

motleyruse

Interviews are brutal, especially for those who suffer performance anxiety. I have been interviewed literally a couple of hundred times now. I am confident in my STAR-type behavioral examples across a wide variety of topics (tech, people, process, product, and project management). Yet, I still get nervous, even though I am prepared and know my narratives. I have carefully chosen these narratives to highlight my role, how I work with others, and demonstrate increasing scope and impact.

I recently wrapped up an interview loop for a senior engineering manager role. I knew I didn’t do well on a few of the questions in the loop, so I wasn’t surprised to find out I wasn’t going to receive an offer.

My call out: don’t play games by introducing fictional stress into an already stressful scenario, in order to “measure” how a person handles stress. 

There is a power imbalance in the interviewer and interviewee relationship. Interviewers should be aware of this, and avoid playing games. In the aforementioned interview, I spoke with the recruiter and received feedback (which you don’t always receive from companies) about two reasons that I wasn’t getting the role, both related to the questions I hadn’t performed well on. The company had developed tests in the interview for how an interviewee deals under pressure by 1) forcing a change of narrative, and 2) creating a fictional role-playing for an operational issue which somehow needed to be navigated with a PM(!?). 

Research indicates these interview tactics (role-play vs behavioral) are ineffective and poor predictors of performance. The specific tests were 1) the VP of eng asked for an Operational Excellence (OE) example, I offered an OE example which demonstrated a focus on customer outcome, a clear KPI (latency) improvement I introduced and how I aligned teams on implementing the cross cutting operational metric. What was the game played? Intentionally or not, the VP wasn’t listening, and did not understand the impact, so I had to explain it a couple of times. After my final explanation, he suggested that was not an appropriate example (using a demeaning term for the impact of my role), and asked for another example. After the interview, I found out that this was part of a test to see my ability to do a hard pivot when talking with executives. 2) the partner PM peer to my hiring manager asked me a fictitious scenario where there was a latency problem with the data pipeline, and asked how I would work with him to resolve the issue. It’s the strangest question I think I have ever been asked in an interview setting. How many engineers / engineering managers would be working across diagnosing and debugging an operational issue involving the PM? I can definitely see involving the PM to talk through operational trade-offs once we have determined problems, but I wouldn’t be talking with a PM to understand and diagnose latency problems, I would be talking with other engineering leaders to understand where the problems could be, and potential solutions.

I gave this feedback on these tests to the recruiter, and I think it is equally important to share with others. Candidates deserve interviews that reflect the actual work environment and challenges of the role, not tests that measure how well they navigate arbitrary roadblocks. What games have you seen interviewers play during interviews?