The Importance of Transparency & Owning Your Story During the Technical Interview
8 Bytes Interviews Eric Gong on Engineers Hiring Engineers
As part of our weekly series, 8 Bytes, we got a chance to interview Eric Gong, former VP of Engineering at Sema4, on making the interview process more transparent and how he accelerated his career to VP in under six years.
Some key takeaways:
- Mastering your ability to state your interest in the company, tell your story and highlight past experiences are critical.
- The companies that work on a transparent process and improve the candidate experience will gain a significant competitive advantage in the market.
- A great engineering team needs empathy and psychological safety.
The full interview with Eric:
Eric’s 8-word bio
Ambitious, helpful, creative, caring, open-minded, decisive, optimistic + more
Prior to becoming an engineer, you were an equity trader. How and why did you make this transition?
In 2013 after 10 years of Finance, I wanted to make a different impact on the world. That’s when I looked down at my phone and realized all the world’s information was on it. That made me drop everything to learn how to code and build technology.
It was the best career decision I ever made.
In the past 6 years, you went from being a QA engineer at LiveIntent and Cota Healthcare to becoming VP of engineering at Sema4. How did you accelerate your career growth so quickly?
- Do what was on my job description and everything that’s not on it. That mentality helped me gain skills that I wouldn’t have otherwise. Every time I leveled up as an engineer, hiring managers were knocking down my door.
- Build strong relationships with team members and stakeholders. They are on the same journey of success. Ensure that they know you’ll be a good partner along the way. A rising tide lifts all boats.
- Do my best on everything whether it is big or small. It could be a bug fix or a big release. No work was ever ‘beneath me’. Your teammates and leaders will see your passion for quality work and advocate for you during your career.
Recently you’ve started your own consulting company to help engineering teams recruit and enhance their teams. What’s a common mistake you see first time engineers making during the interview process?
Thinking that if they can solve algorithm challenges they will get a job. The interview process is part technical and part behavioral. Mastering your ability to state your interest in the company, tell your story and highlight past experiences are critical.
What’s your advice for passing the behavioral screen with a hiring manager?
My favorite piece of advice for candidates is to have their stories prepared:
- A 60-second background
- Their reason for wanting to join the company they’re applying for
- Stories around them shipping products and working as a team
Craft those stories over and over and use it everywhere you go.
What advice would you give to an engineering team as they are figuring out how to build a reliable hiring process in today’s market?
Think about the candidate experience: from the moment that they hear about the company for the first time to the moment they receive an offer. Create a consistent and fair process for every candidate and make it transparent. You’ll find the results are worth the effort. For example, a company called Webflow wrote about their technical interview process and put it on a blog post. They outline in detail what a candidate should expect and tips to improve their chances of success.
What I’m seeing with most interview processes is a lack of transparency.
Candidates are unsure if they are going to be asked Computer Science questions or take a JSON blob and display it on a UI. The companies that work on a transparent process and improve the candidate experience will gain a significant competitive advantage in the market.
If you could reinvent the developer hiring and recruiting process, what would you change?
Wow, a lot of things! As I’ve mentioned, transparency in the process would be at the top; letting candidates understand step by step what’s expected of them before going through it. It would improve outcomes dramatically for hiring managers.
Another big one is the way that technical interviews are structured. Computer Science concepts are important but I’d also advise hiring managers to spend more focus making the technical interview as close to the job to be done as possible. For example, spending a couple of hours building a feature from scratch.
You’ve spoken a lot about the importance of building great culture at a company, what do you believe are the traits of a great engineering team?
Empathy and psychological safety:
- Empathy because you never know the constraints and challenges your team members are going through. Try to think about things from their perspective and in their shoes before judgment. High empathy teams tend to gel together.
- Psychological safety because it’s important to feel safe in the workplace. Meaning your ideas are not attacked when you share them. I always share the “foo bar” story with candidates. If you’re in a high-pressure meeting and someone says “we need more foo bar!”, do you feel comfortable enough to ask “what is foo bar?”, or keep it inside because your idea will be attacked?
Every team requires psychological safety in order to be great.
What are you currently working on, learning, and reading?
- Building my recruiting agency at https://www.ericgong.com. After working at 4 startups, and hiring lots of engineers over the years, I found my passion for recruiting. Why? Because it’s still one of the biggest unsolved problems in technology, for both hiring managers and candidates alike. Companies have a hard time hiring engineers. Candidates go through a painful job search. I’m convinced that an engineer and former hiring manager would be the best person to improve the state of hiring in tech. That is why I created Eric Gong & Company.
- Learning how to build a business, build a brand, and be engaging on social media.
- Reading lots of Tweets!
To learn more about Eric Gong, visit his LinkedIn, Twitter, and company page.
