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?