Transcription
Good evening everyone. This is Soam. Um, thank you for coming in. Looks like uh, yeah, it's on the dot—uh, 7:30 on the dot. Let's see; people are still rolling in, which is very good. Some familiar faces in the audience, folks. Very welcome, welcome Chandra and Kevin, and Sta as well. You all see—let's give it a—let's give it a minute or so, see if uh, more people want to show up, then we—then we keep going after that. Interesting topic today. Interesting topic today: Mark interviews for EMS, or interview practice with managers. Okay, why don't we get started? Uh, we have about an hour, folks. Very, very warm welcome. My name is Soam. Um, I'm one of the founders of Interview Kickstart. My sense is you are going to see Mr. Varan Vales pop in—pop in at some point as well. Uh, we have Steph who helps manage the whole show. Uh, we also have Chandra and Kevin uh, here. The topic today is interview practice with Managers from Facebook, Amazon, um, Uber, and such. And so the idea today is to see if we can um, do some, you know, rudimentary mock interview type practice. Okay. Um, we'll—we have some questions that we'll start with. If—um, we would love for—for any of you to practice your answers with us. Yeah, and—and we can give feedback right after that. So pretty live feedback format. Uh—um, and then obviously more people want to say—more people we can do—we'll discuss that as well. Discuss the answer, discuss feedback, discuss uh, how—how it could do better as well. Um, let's see. Let's—oh, look at that, Val is here as well. Welcome Ryan, yo. Um, awesome. Let's—let's do quick introductions. Uh, Chandra and Kevin, if you don't mind.
All right, so I'll go first. Um, so thank you, Soam. Thank you uh, Stephanie, for—for getting us here so that I can share my experiences. But I want to uh, set forth some—a big disclaimer: I mean, I'm not representing Facebook as a company. I'm just here on my personal capacity. I mean, so I'll share my lessons from interviewing in all the other companies that I have been—I have been a manager in: obviously Facebook, Microsoft, Uber, Amazon, Yahoo, and PayPal. Um, and I can share my experiences while interviewing others and also while I was interviewing as an engineering manager. Uh, and I learned a lot with failing, so I'm looking forward to this experience. Okay. Awesome. Awesome. Thank you, Chandra. Kevin, how are you? I'm well. How are you, Soam? Very well. Very well. Please—please tell our audience about yourself. Also, sure. My name is uh, Kevin Finley. I'm in the bar raiser program at Amazon, but I like Chandra, I'm am not here uh, in that capacity. I'm just here in my personal advisory capacity. I've also worked at Google and um, I, you know, I'm—I'm looking forward to helping some of you uh, succeed at the interviews at some of our companies. And for those who are interested, yes, I am hiring. Wonderful. Wonderful. Chandra, Kevin, thank you. Um, appreciate it. Let's see. Um, let's—let's get—let's get started. Let's get started with something—some—let's start with some Basics. Um, so uh, in—when it comes to mock interviews or just interviews, uh, especially here on a platform like this where we don't have coding platform and such, um, most of the—all the questions that we going to do are going to be more behavioral type questions or things that are like soft skills type questions and—or project type questions, right? Um, which are easy to—to debate about. It's easy to probe into—um, and such. Um, let's—let's start with—let's start with sort of the age-old question. Uh, given there are a lot of people here, um, folks, I will—I will start with a question. If you want to volunteer and just speak your answer, please just raise your hand. Yeah. Um, and—and we'll—we'll bring you up to the audience and—and—and you can speak, and then we'll give you feedback. Okay. All right. Let's start with the age-old question, which—which is still the most telling question for everybody. Um, tell me about yourself. Right? That is—this is a nice breaker question, which often is asked at the beginning of the interview, and um, people—people speak about themselves, and then the interviewer is basically just trying to understand you, where you're coming from. Tell me about yourself sometimes comes in other ways: Hey, what do you do? Um, and—and such. Uh, but generally just tell me about yourself, that's—that's the question. Um, what are some—what are some Basics around it? Um, Kevin, what would you like to hear when it—when you have a question like that, and then for how long would you like—like the answer to be? What are some things you would like to hear? K, for a question like that.
So honestly, the only reason I ask that question is as an ice breaker to get the candidate talking and warmed up. I usually—the form that I ask that question is: Tell me a little bit about yourself and why company blah. And—and so I'm interested in just giving them that first opportunity to warm up, and then it—it tells me a little bit of something in the why of what they're looking for in the company. Um, so you ask—ask it together: Tell me about yourself and—and why—why—why Amazon or why whichever company you're for, right? Makes sense. Chandra, what are you looking for when—when you're asking this question? If—if you ask this question, do—do—like, this is always your ice breaker question, like Kevin was saying. I think one of the things to remember is the fact that a lot of times you already assume that you have the resume, and a lot of people generally end up going through the whole history of their background. Uh, again, tell me about yourself is not a history of what you have done, and assuming that you know the interviewer has already read your resume, the biggest thing is to assume that what you're talking about in tell me about yourself is going to set up the rest of the interview, which means focus uh, on your—you know, on your wins, on what—on who you are and what you recognize yourself as uh, primarily in a very short and concise way. Like I would assume this should be within two minutes. Like this is your—your top wins, um, and—and who recognize yourself as, and that would be really great. Yeah. Um, that—that makes sense, folks. Um, if you—if you would like to practice the answer to this question, please just raise your hand. I'll bring you up to the audience. One of us will bring you up to the audience, and—and we can give you live feedback. Um, it is going to be very, very valuable to get it if you—if you want to venture in. Don't worry about it; we are not going to judge you. We just going to give you feedback for it. Ryan Vales, how are you? Good, dude. So I just want to quickly add to what you're saying: uh, there is no right or wrong answer, guys, here. Okay. Yeah. So feel free to come. It's not every day that you are going to get people like Chandra and Kevin who are willing to give you this feedback live and Soam, right? So uh, feel free to come. I think this is a question that everybody gets regardless of what level and what role, and in the 20 years that I have, you know, either being interviewing or being interviewed, I don't think I have—I have very rarely seen people answer this question well, even though it's a very predictive—predictive, you know, predictable question. I have a standard way in which I think uh, you know, what makes good answers, but we'll—we'll go—we'll go with that in terms of feedback. I think Chandra and Kevin's points are very valuable. So let's just take questions—let's just take answers. Yeah. Satya, do you want to go?
Yeah, Soam, sure. Um, so I—I can start introducing myself, right? Yes, please. Just—just—just immediately start answering. Yep. Certainly. Um, uh, this is Satya. I work as a senior engineering manager in uh, Samsung for the past seven plus years. Um, I'm currently in the e-commerce domain, taking care of uh, fulfillment service backend for 15 different countries, leading teams across geographies in uh, Bellw, Mountain View, Brazil, India, and Korea. And I also recently launched uh, uh, reward service for uh, France Samsung, um, which yielded like uh, 35 percentage of returning customer, and the new user signups increased by about 56 percentage. And prior to that, I did launch e-commerce uh, for Samsung Germany and to across all our 23 different microservices suite, integrating with a number of uh, different partners in uh, Germany, like payment partners, fulfillment partners, like carrier adapters, similar to like Verizon, AT&T, and uh, like trade-in partners as well. And—um, working with like different product managers, uh, TPMs, and um, different tech leads across different countries and launched this product successfully, um, which yielded a revenue of like 56 million all the way up to like 125 million. And uh, uh, prior to that, I did work on U—uh, music app as well, Samsung Music U, which had about 20 million subscribers and 4 million plus uh, monthly active uses. So uh, this is my um, experience at uh, Samsung, and uh, I mean, I can continue about my management style and other things if you—if you want. Interesting. Um, I certainly have—have—have a little bit of feedback, but—but let's—let's—let's start. Chandra, what's your—what's your top of mind on this?
Yeah, so I think uh, this is to some extent—obviously you talked about metrics. So first, I mean, thank you for coming uh, uh, and volunteering for—so you were the first. Um, so thank you. Um, overall, I think you did talk about metrics, you did talk about some numbers, but remember, I think one of the things is I still don't know exactly what your team does. I mean, um, so it would make sense, like, for example, talked about music. I'm not—you did give numbers around your product, um, but what was your uh, your team's role in that particular—like, you can always say I worked in Amazon; Amazon has billions of users or whatever, but what's the use of that? So you could very well talk specifically about what was your—your role within that particular uh, organization and what—what did you move? And you did talk about that in your primary role. Yeah. Got it. And—and do I need to talk anything about my um, uh, like my core values about building teams or like how—how I hire and those kind of things? Do I need to mention that or like should—should that be based on the uh, follow-up questions that comes up? Yeah, not necessarily, otherwise it gets pretty long, but I—I'll leave it to Soam and you know, Kevin to also talk about that, but uh, I would assume two minutes is good enough. Okay. Okay. Kevin, what did you think? Uh, so I really liked the first part of it. Um, it was at a good detail level, and what I would have liked to have gotten out of that—I was left wondering what did you do. You know, you've been at Samsung seven years; what did you do before that? And so maybe having a—a more cursory overview if that's—um, the face that you want to present to me. Sure. To your point about um, should you explain your core values, I think that you should lead with your strength, and if—if that is more important to you and conveying that to me as an interviewer than the specific metrics, then I think you should include that in your—your tell me a bit about yourself, because this is what's going to set up the follow-up questions. Like if I'm interested in metrics, I can go probe into that. If I'm looking for, you know, behavioral things in this particular interview, I'm going to be more interested in hearing about your core values and—and how you build teams. So maybe just a little more surface—leave the opportunity to ask deeper questions rather than—than trying to enumerate everything. Got—got it. Got it. Should I also talk about the uh, technology that I worked on, like Node.js, Kafka, AWS, all those things? Should—should I talk about that as well? I—I wouldn't be interested in—in the detailed tech—no. Certainly at a company like Amazon or at—at Google, it's, you know, you're—they're interested in, you know, smart people who can adapt, and the—the general categories of Technology, sure, you know, if you're generally a database person, that—that's useful information, but knowing that I worked on, you know, version X of—of technical thing Y, nah. Um, just kind of knowing the general areas of your expertise is certainly valuable. And by the way, I think we—sorry, Kevin, go. Yes, I know that—that it's—it's the—it's the—it's the person who goes first who brings everybody else, which is pretty awesome. So I was saying that I think we should move—move on. We've got four, five more people up just for this specific question. H. Yeah, why don't we do this then? Why don't we hear from everybody and then give—give feedback at once? That might actually help—help really just elevate the question and—and figure out what are the patterns of answering. That—what—how does that sound? R, you know, I would say let's go with individuals and give them quick feedback, and then let's try and overall pattern, because I think if you're giving somebody—what might happen is some of the nuances of—of what will help people might get lost along the way if you give feedback to everybody at once. So maybe we give shorter feedback to everybody uh, and then try and highlight the pattern at the end. Makes sense. So—um, folks, then let me time box this as well, this question. Yes. Yes, let's time box this. Exactly. This—this question, um, like Chandra said, um, doesn't need more than two minutes, um, generally, and—and possibly even less. So—so please keep your answers to less than—less than like minute—minute and a half maximum, right? Um, and—and to—to—to—to the point from feedback from Kevin and—and Kevin and Chandra before earlier, um, keep it slightly higher level, right? Like worked at—I currently work at this company; before that is this—before that is that something like that. Um, slight level of detail. The only piece of feedback I have is—which I have is that uh, try and tailor it to the type of role that you will apply to, right? Often you have the luxury to know what kind of role that you apply to, um, and—and I think Kevin hinted this as well. If you're database person, include things that—that generally tell me that you are a database person, assuming you applied to database role and you are a database person. I mean, that—that actually builds trust, right? This question adds to trust, builds trust, um, and—and—and this is the opportunity to build trust with the—with the interviewer. Um, so—so try and put some words which align to the type of role that you might be applying to, um, and—and again to Kevin's point, um, make it—make it curious. Right? Add a couple words which—which elicit questions out of me as an interviewer, right? Like make me curious about yourself. That this is the opportunity to steer the conversation in the direction where you want it to go, right? Just put—put a few words which make me curious about the things that you have done and things that you can talk about, right? Just that. Okay. Uh, with that, I'm going to—I'm going to time box this—to minute—minute—minute and a half. Try—try a minute if you can, minute and a half maximum. Okay. Uh, Naven, go.
Hey, S. Hi. Uh, my name is Naven, and I'm a lead software engineer at Del, and currently I'm leading two high visibility products. Uh, one of the teams I joined in late 2019, and since then uh, the revenue generation has grew to 150%. Uh, here the uh, clients are the asset management clients, uh, and we are building the product for them so that they can start uh, make uh, accounting easier for them. Uh, the other product is actually a Greenfield project, and here our clients are banking firms—uh, clients who are using our product uh, they have reduced the execution time of the performed operations by 91.66%. So because of that, we kept on uh, signing new clients, and uh, it's been seven years, and the uh, we still have uh, ongoing client—growing client base. Along with soft—software development, I enjoy mentoring my team, do their code reviews, and have multiple people on board uh, to the team successfully and effectively. I also hold my graduate degree in computer science from NYU. Uh, in my next role, I'm looking for a leadership role in backend systems at an internet-scale company. Um, that's it from my side. Okay. Chandra, top of mind?
Yeah, uh, I think—I mean, this is reasonable, at least the size—the timing was uh, good. Um, one of the things is again, um, a little bit more uh, like this is making accounts easy or—um, like you can be very specific about it, like what did you do to make accounts easy, like—or you could say my goal was um, you know, overall making accounts uh, you know, accounting EV or whatever. So—so a little bit more clarity would be—um, you know, useful. M. Okay. But otherwise good. Thank you, Soam. Kevin? So for the—the first minute or so, I was sitting there going, but what did you do? Um, it was—there was a lot about how well the group is doing and—and how well accounting is doing, and there were some metrics, but nothing about you. Okay. Yeah, I kept just going, but what exactly did you do? Now finally towards the end, you got into things like code reviews and—and stuff, um, which at least told me a little something about you, the person. Like I—I really couldn't care less how well Deo is doing. I care about you. Yeah. Makes sense. Thank you. All right. Awesome. Um, Ryan, do you have any feedback on this or—no. I—I think most people have already echoed uh, what I was—what I was thinking. Um, it would have been nice to know specifically what you did upfront, um, but I thought overall this was—this was pretty good. I wanted to just echo what Soam said before: this—think about—about this question as an opportunity to leave breadcrumbs for people to pick up and ask you follow-on questions. Okay. But overall, S, I thought this—this was—this was—this was pretty good. For everybody answering this question here, this is a question you should know the answer to in your sleep. So if somebody wakes you up and says, tell me about yourself, you should be able to give them a very crisp, concise answer with two or three things that make you really special within a minute and a half, right? But that's—that's more generic. I thought this was good. Thank you. Okay. Awesome. Rajat, go.
Hi. Uh, this is Rajat Kter. Um, currently I work at Chetu as a director of engineering, uh, managing a 100-plus team of managers and engineers across three continents. Um, I joined this organization in 2013 as an engineering manager and grew with the organization into this role in like three years. Uh, I specialized in designing large-scale uh, technology solutions to solve large problems, um, and lead complex, highly available uh, fault-tolerance systems. Now, um, I have a deep interest in engineering uh, management, especially on the servant leadership uh, side. Uh, now prior to Chetu, I have worked on big payments product with MX. I worked on a manufacturing plant automation for Toyota and a secure cloud-based solution for Stage Bank. Uh, I interned at IBM and have a bachelor's of engineering in computer science. And in my next role, I would like to use my technical and leadership skills uh, to basically enable and deliver enterprise solutions for business-to-business as well as business-to-customer uh, applications at, you know, my next organization. Well within time. Thank you. Um, awesome. Kevin, you want to go first this time?
Sure. Um, that was really good. Um, it left me wondering, oh, what—what kinds of uh, complex solutions? And—and so I would want to start probing uh, into what kinds of solutions, what are these reliable solutions, what's their complexity? And it gives me a great place to start the conversation. Um, part of me was frustrated, like I want to—I want to get to that stuff now, um, which is great. That's what you want out of an interview, that—that's how you take—basically your job is to corral us, the interviewer, to take us down the paths that are in your favor, and—and I thought she actually did a pretty good job of that. Awesome. Chandra? Yeah, I mean, I agree with—with—
What Kevin was saying, um, so effectively I heard pretty much everything what I wanted to hear, in in a more concise way. Now, clearly this will lead to more follow-up questions, but that's actually great. So thank you. Good, awesome. Um, Raj, just my for my taste, there was slightly more buzzwords in in there. You could you could, I think, tone some of them, like slightly more sort of heavy words in there as well, uh, especially the last sentence. Um, but but but but otherwise I also thought this was pretty good. Thank you.
So I just want to make a quick Point here for everybody listening: if you if you listen to the feedback from Chandra, Kevin, and Soam right now, you realized that there is no perfect answer, right? For Chandra and Kevin, this was really good; for Soam, this was good, but Soam was not a fan of the buzzwords at the end, right? And so you are going to get answers and people who will have their unique perspectives, so don't worry about making this the perfect answer. That is something that is very important to to keep in mind. Um, yep, very well made, Ryan. Very your point very well made. Um, and and I think I'm going to I'm going to die on this hill: the interviews are a date, they're not a test. S's favorite favorite thing. Yes, yes folks.
Uh, just quickly refreshing the room: um, we are in the Great careers in tech club R and I uh and step run interview Kickstart um the and and we prepare people for interviews. Uh, feel free to follow each other and such. Feel free to join us every Thursday evening for some of the other funky topic that we talk about. Um, and yeah, next let's so guys, if you want to know about the rooms that we run that help people prepare for interviews, the easiest way to do it is follow Soam and me, and next to our names you'll see this Bell. Click on the Bell, follow the club um as well. That way you will know whenever we run uh whenever we run these rooms. We run it at the same time every week, and we're always fascinated about helping people get in, prepare, accelerate careers at at all the Fang and other top sets of companies, right? So follow, click the Bell; that's the best way to know what's going on. Awesome. All right, Navdeep, go.
Hi guys, uh, this is Navdeep. I currently work as an engineering manager at the New York Stock Exchange, and at uh New York Stock Exchange I own the product that's responsible for processing and distribution of Exchange Market data to hedge funds and Brokers. Previously I worked as an SVP at J Morgan Chase, and before that for about nine years at Bloomberg LP. I have a bachelor's degree in mathematics and I have a master's degree in computer science. I have a passion for Engineering Management, and I have a proven track record of building successful low latency distributed Market data applications. That's but myself. Thank you. I like it. I like short um short sweet things, but let's let's have let's have uh um yeah, love it, love it, love it, love it. Yeah, awesome. Chandra, Kevin, yeah.
Um, so I think I obviously it's short, this is really good. One of the things is again, uh, it would be nice to know—you did say you're an engineering manager at NYC and you own a product—um, it would be great to know your team setup at a very high level, like you lead a team of X number of Engineers, and you know, are they all backend Engineers, software Engineers, or and you then you can talk about a little bit more about your product, but otherwise, you know, obviously it's it's a very short and concise answer, so good. Sure, thanks. Yep, I think I would uh Echo the things that have been said, um, you know, maybe talking about like the engineering environment, um, you know, potentially things that come to mind um that may may be good, may be bad, depending on the interviewer that you you get. New York Stock Exchange could be viewed as um something of a a tried and true, maybe waterfall kind of thing, and so if your your management style is more agile, you might want to call that out. If it's more um tried and true, 100% reliable and bulletproof, and and you want to play up um the waterfall-ness or um the reliability angle, I might call that out. Um, it it really depends on what you're interviewing for, um, but you know, to the earlier points of tailoring it to the the job that you're you're going for, but um as far as a a cold, you know, this is about me for generic question, I thought it was fine. Sure, thanks for the feedback. Awesome, awesome.
Thank you. I have a quick quick uh thought, right? So we've already answered, we already seen—oh, sorry, we already heard—Clubhouse about hearing five people's answers, right, to this question, and we are about half an hour Midway through into the room. Do we want to uh continue with the same question, or do you want to take the next question and have people answer the next question? Because I think we've got five people here, a couple of folks who've just raised their hands who have brought up to the stage as well. How do you want to do this? My sense is maybe we hear everybody out. Um, I I know it might take a little bit longer, but let's um let's stop um let's let's have people on the stage just just have a chance to uh to do this. Um, that that might be that might be better, and then we can go to the next question. Okay, okay. So I think we'll have we'll have less time to take on other questions then. Yes, yes. And and folks, um, if you're bringing up bringing you up to Stage, um uh and it's possible that we may switch the question um uh after we have brought you up, so so just FYI, but but still just be ready. Nobody's judging you here. You can you can also answer new questions, so okay. Let's uh let's hear uh let's hear from uh from Rook.
Hi, uh, my name is Rup Goyel. I'm a principal software developer manager at Esri. At Esri, we make ArcGIS. GIS stands for geographic information system, and there actually I have pioneered and created a service which is called Feature Service. Feature being geographic features like roads, wildfires, and so on, and this service is used by about a quarter million organizations around the world. When fires happen in California, it is used, and when utility inspectors are going around looking at the faulty circuit breakers and so on, it is used. And so basically the applications are many, many. I pioneered it, and I'm leading our team of four people, four developers, and I interact about 20 people on a day-to-day basis to make the work done, to get the work done. I'm about a third of the time I'm a developer; other time I'm a designer and collaborator. I'm looking forward to use my skills to do even more scalable work than I have done, and I think uh we can drill into more whatever you are interested in. Thank you. Yeah, Chandra, go, go ahead.
All right, so thank you, Rup. I think one obviously uh you did connect it to the world problem, so it was pretty exciting to know that your work uh you know really helps the world. Uh, one of the things that will be useful is which I really did not understand is your role. Uh, you did talk about—I'm a principal software developer manager, architect—so sometimes when there's a lot of confusion around what your role is, it it makes it a little hard to understand, you know, what will be your future path and what will excite you. So you should hone on a particular um role, and you should talk more like—you don't need to add everything that I'm an engineer, I'm a manager, I'm an architect, I'm a product manager—doesn't really help much. Uh, so that's the only feedback I had. Okay. I think I would Echo that. Um, it was one of those things that I I wasn't sure what you did, and it um it leaves you in a it leaves me feeling awkward, so I I'm taking a—yes. I think what you do is you're an engineering lead, which has some overlap with all of these other areas, and and there's nothing wrong with being an engineering lead, and I think I would lead with that. Assume that I as an interviewer am stupid and I don't know you and I don't know what you do, and you you can't explain to me the breadth of you as a person, you can only explain to me a few facets. Pick what, how many of, say, three facets do you want to explain. Um, you know, I'm an engineering lead, I'm interested in uh mentoring my team, I'm uh interested in working on big problems that help the world. That would be three facets. Um, you know, I'm not saying that that's what I got out of what you said; it's just something that could be gotten, and I think clearing it up that way might help a bit. Okay, agreed. Um, Rup, I think I think one important thing you have to do is you have to exactly know the type of role you're applying for—whether is management, whether it is engineering. If it's a small company, sometimes it is it is hybrid, but but whichever it is, um uh I think having that Clarity will help, and that will help you tone this uh tone this pitch as as well. Generally I also like the connection to the connection to to actual problems, so MH. Okay, thanks. Awesome. Thank you.
Um, N, go.
Yes, sure, thank you. Uh, my name is Niha Purohit. I describe myself as a highly determined and positive person. I'm currently working as a software engineering manager at Accenture, where I'm leading the transformation of testing into continuous and efficient end-to-end quality Engineering Process through the use of AI and Java-based framework. I developed the framework, uh, the foundation of the framework from scratch, and now leading the team of four, four to six people. My team uses predictive and intelligent testing approaches uh to to enhance overall overall quality Engineering Process for my client. I've been in the industry for more than 10 years now, and I I have worked in various capacities. Started my career as a software developer and paved my part to become an engineering manager. Throughout my Accenture, I designed, developed, and delivered IT projects in different tech stacks, ranging from large-scale distributed application to currently intelligent automation framework. Uh, over the years I believe I have built the expertise not only in the technical aspect of the project but also managing projects from initiation to deployment. As a manager, I believe I have interpersonal skills and decisiveness and the ability to achieve tough targets uh while under pressure. In the past I have transformed an underperforming team to a high-performing team. I work extremely hard to make sure both my myself and my team is successful in delivering valuable work to my client and to the company. At present I'm looking for a role where I got to work with a team of talented engineers and decisive leadership to evolve uh to to evolve myself as a better leader. That's all. Um, uh, slightly a little too long for my taste, but let's hear let's hear from uh Chandra.
S, all right. So obviously there was a lot of clarity in the uh in the speech, at least. Uh, it did feel prepared, which is actually a good thing. Yes, yes. I don't know if you were reading it from somewhere, but it did feel like that, so that's what I was thinking, but otherwise, I mean, yeah, it was a little long, but I really like the clarity in speech. I mean, it felt like a radio DJ talking kind of thing. Thank you. Okay. Yeah, actually I've been practicing it for a long time, so now I memorized it. Yeah, and that's how it should be, you know. Yes and no. I'm I'm not completely convinced, guys. So I I thought the the stuff you said was very good, Niha. One of the things to be careful of is um, you know, if when interviews are remote, the entire environment is different, right? When it's much easier to see body language, appreciate body language, be influenced with body language when you are live, when you are remote, which is how almost all interviews are, you should modulate significantly. Right now, what happened was I think the points you made were very good. I think the the the clarity with which you spoke was excellent. I think, you know, like Soam and Chandra said, it clearly showed that you had you had prepared it, but for my liking I would have loved if it was a little bit more natural rather than just spewing it out uh by heart, because I'm listening to it on audio right now. If I can see you on Zoom, it might be slightly better, but just be aware that when you do this in a remote context, it's super important to modulate; it's super important for the other person to to realize that you're not just you know spewing it out. Okay, that's the one thing that I that I that I felt you could have done better, but overall I thought it was very good. Okay, makes sense. Thank you. So the the points that have been brought up, I I think I would I would generally Echo. Um, I I thought it was a bit too polished, um, and I thought that it tried to be everything to everyone, so like you enumerated a bunch of good points, and and I think focusing on fewer of them uh would have given it a little more punch and left room for more questions. Um, so and obviously reduce the length. Okay. Yes, yes. And I suppose let me just very quickly say that that it was a little too long for my taste, and I think um what Kevin was alluding to, you could have left some things out for follow-up questions, though I think not um not not overly, not overly so. That was fine. Okay, okay. Awesome, awesome. Thank you. Ni, um, DP, Ti, go.
Hi, good evening. I'm Deepti. I have a total of 10 years of experience. I'm working at Morgan Stanley as an engineering manager. Uh, I led the liquidity risk workflow and tooling team uh of 10 Engineers. I'm responsible for Designing risk and customer-centric solutions to manage all the liquidable assets for the firm. I did my undergraduation in India, uh, taking back uh uh and uh I had the opportunity to represent India as one of the two students selected at the international Youth Forum in Geneva. This led me to actually pursue my masters and uh come to the US, and uh since graduation I've joined Morgan, and uh here my uh role has been uh to work across the multiple disciplines within the risk Department, uh ranging from Market to liquidity. I have developed and delivered uh on products uh including uh data procurement, data analysis, process automation. One of the highlights of my career has been uh to work on a regulatory requirement which is an annual regulatory exercise called a CARD, where the data procurement uh was improved by 99%, and this helps save the firm close to uh $2 million year-over-year. And uh I've also uh spearheaded the project uh for the first Enterprise library for the firm. Again, this is for the same SEC CARD annual regulatory process uh which normally the company spends 10 to 15 million. And uh having uh worked on similar projects, now I'm considered as the go-to person in my department to build products which ranges from like, you know, assembling the correct team, brainstorming, scoping it out, data modeling part as well as finally the release into production. In my next role, I'm right now ready to amalgamate both my Technical and my managerial skills, and I would be uh interested in building B2C scalable systems uh so that I could help solve some real-world problems. Thank you. Um, thank you, DP. I appreciate that. Uh, Chandra, yeah. I think uh this like uh we see, I mean, um it was a bit well modulated, at least uh your answer was clear, modulated. Um, one thing that'll be useful is to know like when you talked about your team itself, you said you're leading this risk and tooling team. I think you can also talk a little bit more about what are your um, you know, top level in this. I wanted to hear a little bit more about what are the problems that you are solving. I mean, just just tooling, but what what what does this tool do? Like it'll be much more easier than a very generic uh you know just tooling kind of thing. Uh, and a little bit more about your team would be very helpful, like what's the size of the team, and um where is it? Is it Geo-distributed, or is it in a certain location? And all, but otherwise I think I really like the answer over what Y. Um, I so I thought it was well modulated, and I thought there were components that were good. I thought it was a little like—this is a pattern um that is is frequent to the these kinds of uh responses—like I don't want to see an enumeration of metrics. Um, like I I can read that off your resume. I I'm I'm certain that every one of those metrics uh that you mentioned is on your resume, and if I'm looking for that, I'll glance down at the paper, so I'm I'm much more interested in the things that are probably not there. As Chandra said, um, you know, obviously you know Geo-distribution of your team and team size are probably on your resume, but what did you do to improve the team would have been more interesting to me than um $X millions of dollars and the like. Um, but overall it was it was a pretty decent answer. Okay. Very well. Thank you, DP. Thanks. K, Chandra, I appreciate that. Um, awesome. Chu, go.
Hi, I am currently working in HP as an engineering manager. I started in HP seven years back as a solution architect for full-stack and e-commerce domain, uh, and slowly moved to uh supply chain domain as an engineering manager. Currently I have three scrum streams, which include the PM, architect, and QA, and my role is being a building block between the business customers and the engineering teams and Architects, and move the requirements into the deliverables and uh match the metrics that they require. I am passionate about two things: one is technology, and the other is people relationships, and I have uh done um and I keep on building on my technology knowledge, and as my teams grow, I meet different people and love to build teams and work with them as a big family. Thank you. Um, awesome. Sounds sounds good. I'll let Kevin and Chandra Chandra do most of it. Uh, my taste, I think there was some some towards the second um the second-to-last sentence: I'm passionate about technology and people, which generally is assumed you're an engineering manager, so but anyway, sorry, Kevin, go ahead.
Um, yeah, I mean, there there's gonna be some buzzwords. Um, yeah, I noticed that too, but overall tonight that's been my favorite answer so far. Um, it opened up uh for me the um invitation for me to ask you some detailed tech and some detailed personal relationship questions. Um, it concisely enumerated your growth from solution architect to manager by just giving me the bookends as opposed to every single transition along the way, and it explained to me that um your three teams are um diverse in what they cover as well as um their skill set. And um so yeah, overall I thought it was a great answer. Yeah, yeah. I Echo what uh both Kevin and S were saying. I think one of the things which would be really useful is when when people say I lead three scrum teams, I generally get confused because um I mean the scrum team is made up of multiple components. You have, you know, sometimes you have front-end Engineers, back-end Engineers, you have test Engineers, you have product managers. Um, so it's it's a little hard to know what does that uh leading three scrum teams mean. Um, I mean, are you a scrum master? Or when you said an EM, so it might make sense to pass that out like, you know, you are probably responsible for the supply chain domain area which has three scrum teams, and you you manage certain Engineers within some of the scrum teams, so it'll be easy to know the setup up front, but otherwise it was a it was a good answer, short answer, excellent. Sorry. No problem. No, I thought it was an excellent answer, very very good. Uh, I think just the right length, and like Kevin and Chandra said, posed a few questions that one could ask as follow-up. If I were to be just overtly critical and just to try and find something that you could improve on, I think you started off really well; you tapered off towards the end, right? This is quite a common common pattern when when answering a question. You don't want to taper off in the end because the end is what people are going to remember in many ways, right? So apart from the buzzwords, I think you had some repetition.
Right in the end, and it was almost as if you were you were trying to come up with stuff to say to wrap it up. So if you could just make the end strong, end on a strong note, I think that would make this even better. But otherwise, like the guy said, I thought it was a very good answer. Thank you. Thanks for the comments, and yeah, I—it's totally unprepared. I just thought that I should jump in and just answer this, so it makes sense. What I need to thank you. Excellent. Very well. That's that's sh—how interviews typically work. Um, uh, and I'm I'm overly generalizing, but but either interviews work when you when you have zero prep, or it works when you have full prep. So something in the middle like it practically never works the way you want it to work, but very good. Um, okay, awesome. Uh, Rohan, uh, actually before uh before Rohan goes, um, Ran, should we announce this engineer manager thing?
Yeah, I think I think this would be a good time, and also after that step, there are a couple of people who raised their hands who I am not able to get them up to the audience. Uh, so I think Saam is waiting if you could just get him up as well. All right, so you want to go ahead and announce the EM stuff?
Um, yeah, folks, so uh, we have been thinking about it for a long time; we've been talking about it for a long time, but finally we are going to we are going to launch an engineering manager program uh sometime end of this month. Um, and such and uh, the the details obviously I won't go into it right now, but uh, feel free feel free to reach out um to our enrollment team um if uh if there is any sort of interest uh in there. The um anyway, I mean nothing nothing more I suppose. There's going to be a a specific section there for leadership where we will practice a whole bunch of these questions which are floating around on the Engineering Management end, um and we will practice them with with people like Kevin and Kevin and Chandra and others as well, and obviously there's going to be mock interviews and such, but but more details I think—yeah, sorry. I think the key the key thing that we're going to do differently, guys, you know, as all of you know, we have had EMs in the program consistently over the last six years. Um, what we have decided as a team and based on the feedback that we've gotten is that a lot of people are really excited about doing this; in fact, many of our alums now looking to move to EM roles. So so the big difference is going to be that this course will focus only on folks with the uh with the with the with the view of becoming EMs, and it's going to be taught by EMs from the top companies, and interviews are going to be also with EMs from the top companies. Right, so it's very specific, a cohort carved out only for folks who are curious about engineering leadership roles, engineering managers as well as for directors. Right, so uh, more coming up uh, we launch the first first cohort towards the end of the month. All right, let's let's keep going. Uh, Rohan, what's what what's your answer? Let's go.
Hello everyone. I'm currently working as a senior engineering manager for CBRE. CBRE is the world's largest commercial real estate company. Um, in CBRE I'm managing and leading two engineering P&Ls with around 10 members, members. Hello, sorry. Yeah, these two teams are building for the company its next-generation commercial real estate valuation platform. Within this platform, my teams are building a task-based workflow uh web application UI. I joined this company last year, and uh, last year I was able to uh my teams were able to deliver this application. And previous to this, I have worked as engineering manager for Capital One uh in its auto finance division where I last led development of its flagship portal to allow auto dealers work directly with Capital One uh for processing auto loans. Here I also profiled design patent for segmenting their dealer customers, and I started my career at Capital One where I started as uh as a software engineer and work through the chain and I contributed and led modernization and cloud migration of their several systems, um um and uh such as their internal Loan Servicing application, their payment processing system and so on. My core expertise lies in building enterprise-scale web applications, staffing software engineering teams from the ground up, and uh establishing uh running of well-managed systems. I'm currently looking for a a leadership role for teams that are building high-impact systems. Thank you.
Awesome. Um, Kevin, to—so um, I'm I'm thinking maybe just a a couple more rounds of practice. Um, it felt um it felt like you were a little bit nervous, and that and that kind of came through, and typically for the level of seniority that I inferred from the the content of the introduction, um that might be that might be a negative mark. Um, you know, not obviously negative marks are not the end of the interview or anything like that, but um I think it would have I I would note it. So I think just a little more practice would help.
Thank you. Yeah, actually uh, when my voice echoed, I just stumbled and I lost track what I was planning to say. Yeah, so Rohan, I think that is actually very good that that happened because you can't predict what's going to happen in an interview. When something like this happens, it's okay to stop yourself, take a deep breath, and start again. Right, or continue from where you left off, probably right, preferably. So you know, you can't predict what's going to happen; it's okay. Everybody's human. Your internet connection might break, the light might go off, you might drop something, uh you know, the other person might have somebody enter the room. All of this stuff is acceptable in a remote environment. No biggie. Take a deep breath, just continue. Okay, don't worry about it. Yeah, sometimes microphones also go bad. Yeah. Okay, awesome, awesome, awesome, folks. Uh, looks like—sorry, so I'm going I'm going to take a minute to just point out something really funny to people just so that everybody understands that you know this is human and not you know and inspires you to not get worried. I have been in an interview, guys, where I have yawned consistently throughout the interview. It was a it was a face-to-face live interview, and obviously it is incredibly rude to keep yawning in the interview, so much so that the interviewer asks me, "Am I boring you?" And I had to say, "No, I'm really sorry; it's been a crazy week. I've been working nonstop," uh, "and I tend to yawn quite a bit." Needless to say, I'm absolutely you know excited about the interview as I wouldn't be here, uh, and the interview went off really really well. So on a lighter note, you never know what's going to happen; just calm, collect, compose yourself. Remember the person interviewing you is also human; they just happen to be on the other side of the table at this point of time. In another context, you could have been on the other side of the table, right? So don't don't overly stress out.
Yep. One interesting way of of picturing that is that the person on the other side is actually wearing a mask—this is pre-COVID days—um, where they really are very friendly, but they just have to be wearing a mask during this hour that they are with you as well. So don't don't worry about it. And one of the things I think Soam and I talk about a lot is that when you go in for interviews, many people think that the interviewer is against you; they're not against you. They actually want you to succeed. They're desperate for you to succeed because they—you know, a Kevin or a Chandra—they are spending highly valuable time in an interview room interviewing you, so you and they are really on you. They—the company, the recruiter, the consultant, everybody everybody's on the same side. Every single person wants you to succeed, right, including us. So everybody is hoping and rooting for you to do incredibly well, and so you know, keep that in mind. It makes the interview a lot easier. It's not us versus them; it's everybody wanting you to succeed.
Sounds sounds good. Sounds good. Let's uh yeah, sorry, Rohan, you saying something?
Yeah, thanks Ryan and Soam for the kind words. All right, Himansu, go.
Hi, this is Himansu, and um, I I'm a pretty core technologist by heart and have a quite a distant experience in application development side, enterprise applications development, and I have like quite a lot of domains under my belt, like insurance, health care, uh, finance, and and the retail and e-commerce. So out of which retail and e-commerce is the there the biggest experience that I have—around eight years at Macy's.com, and then I had like two years at Albertson's. So I will mostly talk about like my greatest experience at Macy's where I I joined as a software developer, but I grew pretty quickly into a development manager, and I was working mainly on the um on the search, catalog, and browse domains, and and it it actually grew with the organization to to like, and I was like seeing it growing from from the uh startup kind of world to like more enterprise. So from there, I took a little bit detour in my career to become an architect uh and get more hold of and understanding of the enterprise applications um across the organization and how things work end to end for a couple of years, and then again came back to the management side to lead the lead a team of like pretty good engineers for the search platform, which was an in-house platform, and we were planning to um like change it to a to a more advanced UI, advanced search engine. So that was my uh pretty much um uh like journey at Macy's, and I and I came back to management side because I like interacting with more like people and people management skills and have an interpersonal communication—people. So that is the reason I came back to management, and then at Albertson's I was a director at director of platform. I actually went uh came back to something to do and the platform side, and there they needed my help on uh helping the like the organization from getting uh getting to the cloud quickly from their on-frame uh infrastructure. So I had built a uh built a platform on the on Kubernetes and also give them the pipeline to build build their applications pretty quickly to go to the cloud and cultivated a culture of like a team of like 15 people uh to start with and um and culture of agile methodologies, agile development over there, which was missing. So that that was like a quite a heavy lifting over there, and then I was also uh heading the integration Services platform to convert it into a more advanced platform, but um eventually I moved to—right now as a senior engineering manager at SHI and to deal with more of like real-world problems uh and and and overall like I'm like still a technologist, so I don't care about the domains, but definitely my uh aim in the next roles is to uh work with work with the gig companies and uh solve the problems at the internet scale and develop the enterprise-level applications and solve problems for the customers. Okay, I will I'll definitely let Kevin, Chandra um say stuff, but but but Himansu, from from my perspective, I think this needs a lot of practice. Um, I think you will you will need to practice this um many more times, make it more concise. Um, my taste—there are too many buzzwords also, uh, but but I I really appreciate the attempt. Um, not easy to come up um in front of 70 people and speak. Uh, very good. Chandra saying—
But one of the things which will be very useful is—now in this case, I was a bit confused at the end because um like, are you currently at Macy's or Albertson's? And you mixed a little bit around the roles, like you did. The good thing is you are very honest, like, "Hey, I was an EM, then I became an architect," but sometimes these moves need to come with a very valid justification, like nobody just becomes an EM and then suddenly becomes an architect. It means something you didn't like in an EM, so you should be very clear—either the setup was not right, or you like being an architect—and the and the worry is you are a manager now; tomorrow you might say, "No, I want to be an architect again." Um, so you have to somehow convince the interviewer, some sort of a justification of your career progression and what what uh were the reasons for that, uh, and obviously it was a little longer, so like S S was saying, maybe a little bit more preparation would would give you a very good context around it, but thank you for the answer.
Thanks, thanks for the feedback. So it was hard for me to get past—it was way too long.
Um, like to me it was not a little too long; it was way too long. Um, the other thing that I noted uh, so a bit of advice, um you could try um uh you like where you started out, where you ended up, and say, "And along the way, I kind of did some switching between I management roles to make sure that I kept my technical skills sharp," something like that is a justification. Um, the other thing though is you mentioned in there several times that you're a technologist, and so I didn't believe you by the time you said you wanted to do things for customers. Like uh, coming from Amazon and being very much ingrained in customer obsession, I believe that you—from that description that you you care more about technology than you do customers by a long shot.
Yeah, makes sense. That's a fascinating—thanks, thanks. And Himansu, the—you know, we've all said this was quite long. Uh, the way to—you know, let's try and figure out how you cut it shorter. The the the way to cut it shorter is to remember that you don't need to tell people every single thing that you've done, right? You want to pick two or three of the most important things. Like Kevin said, I thought it was a really nice way of saying it—this is where I started, this is where I ended, along the way I I dabbled in moving from ICM a couple of times for this reason—that would have covered you know maybe 20% of your answer in a very short period of time, right? So pick the top two or three things that make you interesting; the rest is all in your resume. Okay, but like SW said, thanks for coming up here and you know for speaking in front—we have about 250, 260 people; we have 180 people on YouTube—so coming up and speaking in in front of 250 people unprepared is is very commendable. Good stuff.
Thanks, thanks, man. Awesome. Um, thanks Manu. Last but not the least, James, do you want to go?
So hi everybody, my name is James, and I'm an engineering manager at a Silicon Valley startup called Leia. It's a nanotechnology startup. I joined the company a couple years back, um, and I was tasked with building the software engineering team to help complement the hardware engineering team. I went from being an individual contributor to an engineering manager because I quickly realized that in order for the company to grow, we had to get really good at solving very hard software problems to complement the very hard hardware problems in building our core technology, um, which is a holographic display. One of the things that I learned very quickly was that in order to do that, we had to learn how to break down hard problems into very small, digestible things that were easy to distribute amongst the distributed team, because we had members or team members all over the world. My daily—the way I achieve this on a daily basis—um, is by helping the team put together first a really good model for creating architecture that's scaled and so on. A daily basis, it's my responsibility to um work with my lead engineers to help them build architecture patterns that they can uh give to the senior engineers on the team. It's my job to help run the engineering ceremonies, and so um I run the daily scrums and the daily meetings, and um I also help the engineering team build and maintain an uh software application life cycle. Um, over the course of the last uh few years, I've had the opportunity to work on some other really interesting projects across uh various media companies and finance companies, and um I've—one of the things that that's led to most recently is uh an opportunity to bring the skills I've learned from some of those other media companies to Leia, um and our most recent project is launching a streaming service uh that will become the world's first holographic streaming service on a dedicated holographic uh device. So going forward, um I'm really looking for opportunities that let me solve really tough hardware problems um by building engineering teams working on the hardest kinds of problems that you have to solve in software. That's it.
Okay, thank you. James, appreciate that. Chandra.
Yeah, um, thank you, James. Uh, one of—I mean, overall, I think one of the things that I still don't know is what does your software team do? So uh, focus a bit more about your team setup, like what is the team doing? Like you did say holographic display software for holographic display, but your ending was good, like you said, "Hey, I'll build a streaming," which is the first in kind, so it would make sense to talk more about your team setup uh upfront, but otherwise, I think I really liked your ending. It specifically—I thought it was a little buzzwordy, um and and some of those words, like you emphasized "hard, hard," and and said it with emphasis several times, um that was I found to be quite off-putting actually. Um, I would have been more interested to know what made it hard; what did you do? So the the very useful thing that I got out of that was that you deal with um geographically distributed teams, and your response to that is um to break the work down into very small uh units. Um, that has pros and cons, and I would you know I would definitely dive into that um during your interview. Thank you.
Interesting, and this time I didn't find it that buzzwordy. Um, but—see, yeah, this is where uh this is where perspectives differ. Very good. Um, okay, awesome. Um, thank you. Uh, thank you, James. Folks, we are up to the hour and a little past the hour as well. Um, we definitely intended to take more questions, but I think this just one was uh was quite popular, quite informative as well. We will do more of these. Um, there are there are a whole bunch of different types of questions that that that are floating around today, especially for engineering managers. Uh, there are questions on the team culture, questions on hiring, firing, questions on performance and morale building, questions on on planning, prioritization, business strategy and leadership, um self-growth, all of that, uh and even for IC, certainly there are there are many questions that are floating around. There are some questions which are like slightly psychologically deeper that are also floating around today. Um, uh, many of these can be answered with practice, and actually all of them can be answered with practice. Um, we'll we we'll be here again uh next Thursday with something uh interesting, uh but but otherwise uh thank you very much for coming. Thank you very much for putting yourself out there and and answering questions. Like Ryan said, we have 200-plus people, 250-plus people listening; it is not easy to do this, uh uh and and needs needs quite a bit of courage. I hope this was very useful, um and and Chandra, thank you very much for your time, for your perspective, very accent, very direct answers, very awesome. Thanks. Uh, Kevin as well, uh very insightful. Uh, I think this I think I would have loved to get this feedback sort of in my early career when I was interviewing as well. Uh, thank you both for coming in and and giving very relevant feedback uh to this and and and I'm sure uh I'm sure it was was useful.
Yeah, thank you. Thanks for having us. And uh, just a note to everybody, uh while we may be critical up here, it's really to try to help you. These are things that we might want to say to actual candidates, but because we have to wear that mask, we're not allowed to. So you know, we were trying to give you the unblemished uh or unvarnished version of what goes through our head as as we hear things.
Yeah, and I wanted to add one more thing—this was a great experience to hear not just from from everyone, but even the perspectives like so so—to me this was a learning experience as well. So thank you everyone.
Perfect. Awesome, guys. This is uh thank…
You so much everybody. And we'll see you guys uh next week for a for another Clubhouse chat uh same time. Thanks Kevin, Chandra, Steph, Prid. Thank you for putting this together.
All right guys, thanks. Have a good one. Bye. Enjoy. Bye everybody.