Austen McDonald Reflects on Mastering Behavioral Interviews

Austen (00:00)

I think that we can all see that we've made mistakes in the past or maybe we could have done things differently or whatever, but like there's still the future and there's still tomorrow and we can turn things around and we can improve if we start now.

Carter Morgan (00:18)

Hey there, you're listening to Book Overflows, the podcast for software engineers by software engineers where every week we read one of the best technical books in the world in an effort to improve our craft. I'm Carter Morgan. I'm joined here as always by my co-host, Nathan Toops. How are you doing, Nathan?

Nathan Toups (00:30)

Doing great here, everybody.

Carter Morgan (00:32)

Well, we're really excited today. We have a special episode for you. We hinted at this in our discussion episode. We read the book Mastering Behavioral Interviews by Austin McDonald. And this was a book where we were fortunate enough ahead of time to know that Austin wanted to appear on the podcast to discuss it. that's what this is right here. Austin McDonald has come on the podcast and we had a great conversation with him and we just kind of want to give you a preview of what you're about to hear. Nathan, you want to let them know kind of what they can expect from this conversation?

Nathan Toups (01:01)

Yeah, so Austin is super active online. Like he is engaged with some of our ⁓ LinkedIn posts. He's actually the first author to come onto our Discord. ⁓ Super friendly guy. I think you could tell that from the tone of the book, but in his interviews, it's just, he was super prepared. He had great books recommendations at the end and he elaborated on everything that we were wanting to talk about. I don't know. This is one of my favorite conversations we've had, I think.

Carter Morgan (01:29)

Yeah, shocker. The guy who wrote the book Mastering Behavioral Interviews is quite personable. ⁓ No, Austin is ⁓ it's fantastic. And you're going to hear us talk about over this interview. But ⁓ this book, Mastering Behavioral Interviews, really fills a void in this kind of particular subject matter and kind of the software engineering book canon. We can't recommend it enough. And we're really excited for you to get to hear from the author himself, Austin McDonald. So please enjoy this special conversation with Austin McDonald as he reflects on his book.

Mastering Behavioral Interviews.

Carter Morgan (02:05)

Well, thanks for coming on the podcast, Austin. It's such a pleasure to have you.

Austen (02:09)

Yeah, it's great to be here. Thanks for having me and thanks for talking about the book. It's exciting.

Carter Morgan (02:12)

⁓ it was a fantastic book. And Nathan, I was going to say, I think we had this in our backlog independently. Like we saw it on LinkedIn or something, and then you reached out. It was something like that. I had heard about this.

Nathan Toups (02:22)

Yeah,

it's exactly right. think whatever you were doing, Austin, ⁓ as far as promoting it or however, I found it somehow. Either somebody said something about it or maybe I your sub stack. can't remember, but I was like, I need to learn about this.

Austen (02:34)

Great, Yeah,

Carter Morgan (02:36)

Yeah. So yeah.

Austen (02:37)

hashtag book marketing. Like maybe there's some kind of book marketing podcast we could open about that. Let's do it.

Carter Morgan (02:42)

⁓ yeah. And, ⁓ we've been fortunate to have a lot of authors on the podcast, but a lot of the authors we contact after reading the book. so there's been a few, and this is your case where we knew prior to reading the book that we'd get the chance to speak with them. And so I always love doing these interviews because I've been, I've had questions brewing in my mind the whole time I've been reading. ⁓ I guess we'll start, usually, we like to ask authors kind of like, okay. Describe the software engineering industry at the time you wrote the book.

You just wrote the book, so I don't think anyone needs that. But you mentioned in the book that you've conducted over a thousand behavioral interviews, predominantly at kind of big tech fang companies. So when over the course of that, did you start noticing patterns and thinking, you know what, there's a book to be written.

Austen (03:23)

Yeah, it really wasn't until I started coaching. when I was at Metta, I was hiring committee chair. So I was the person who picked the interview questions and picked other people on the committee and sort of make decisions for leveling and then also make decisions for whether we hire people or not. But then I also took on the role of training the behavioral interviewers. I think I really loved behavioral interviews. I felt like that was the one that was most interesting to me. guess I was a manager, a people manager, right? So maybe I could have drifted more towards those soft skills evaluation and that sort of thing. But to me, just seeing people's potential and being

Carter Morgan (03:25)

Okay.

Right.

Austen (03:53)

to talk to them about their life and be able to talk to them about their their career that was always really fun. mean I feel like

That was way more fun than just, like, please, you know, implement this, whatever binary tree thing for the 100th time that I've seen that every interview, of course, every behavioral interview is different. So every behavioral experience is like, is unique. And I love that. so I, but I really didn't think about the book until I started coaching folks. So after I sort of semi retired from, from Metta to support my wife's business, I got into doing some side stuff. I actually did it for my church originally. So I was like trying to do this fundraiser for the church and the church that makes whatever it makes, bakes cookies or does different things.

Carter Morgan (04:04)

Ha

interesting.

Austen (04:29)

I'm

like, can we do something that's a little bit more like substantive here? So I started to coach people on behavioral interviews and that was awesome. A lot of fun. And I kept, of course, noticing myself saying the same things over and over and over again. And I thought, you know, where is this resource? Right. We cracking and coding interview. We have the system design books. People have put all these these these courses together. But like, where is the content for behavioral interview preppers? And I think there's some interesting reasons for that. can maybe talk about that at some point why there was less has been less content in the past. But that was a really big gap for me. And there's a whole journey of writing the

Carter Morgan (04:31)

Hahaha

Austen (04:59)

book

and stopping writing the book and starting it again or whatever but that was really when I picked it up was after I did maybe 10-20 coaching sessions I realized I'm saying the same things over and over again there needs to be a resource for people out there.

Carter Morgan (05:11)

Well, think one of the, a sentiment I sometimes hear from software engineers is that kind of like behavioral interviews are sort of fundamentally unfair. That like, hey, my job is to produce code, is to have technical solutions, right? And then all of a sudden you bring me in here and we're talking about like conflict resolution or like more kind of the wishy washy soft skills stuff. That's not a position I hold necessarily.

But I imagine you've probably heard some of that too from software engineers. mean, what do you say to that?

Austen (05:37)

All right.

Yeah, for sure. I think usually hear this from more junior and more junior folks, right? Who have have not spent enough time in the software development life cycle to see that, you know, what the really big problem is. It's not always like which code to write or like what system to design, how to put it. But it's like, how do we get all these people to agree and organize and do this thing that we all we all need to do? How do we push this organization forward? That becomes the thing that becomes really hard, right? Which is the reason why, you know, as you as you move up in in a pay scales, you move up in in levels, there's

Carter Morgan (05:48)

Right.

Right.

Austen (06:13)

more

more expectation that you're able to lead others and do things through others, right? The reality is only so much, even with the cloud codes, only so much that we can do as an individual. so when you magnify, when you put people together and you can do a lot more. so people who can put other people together, people who can organize, who can resolve conflicts, those are the people who can take on more and more ambiguous roles. And I think in this AI zone, AI world that we live in now, where...

hey, more and more of technical implementation is being done by the machine and less and less maybe individually by us, then what does that leave us to do? Well, it means like full stack is like, I own everything, know, everything from business contacts to customer relationships, all the way through to shipping and like following up with issues afterwards. So just this ownership stack is getting a lot taller for engineers. And of course, the way that you assess those kinds of skills, that kind of ownership, that kind of perseverance, that kind of communication is always in the behavioral interview. So I think...

that this behavior interview gets more important as you get more senior, right? And I think the more senior you get, you see that. And then also the more that AI does more of an implementation work, the more this behavior interview is going to become the place where people really assess success.

Nathan Toups (07:56)

This is the first time that I realized how big of a gap I had in my personal abilities to do behavioral interviews. I I always kind of had a few stories up my sleeve. I kind of was pretty good at thinking about my accomplishments. And I think maybe it's because I did theater and improv, I was able to kind of just wing it and get away with it. But it wasn't until recently when I bombed, like pretty

badly when it was a behavioral interview that I realized that if I had had this framework, I think I would have been able to recover from sort of a faltered situation. ⁓ I can't believe I got this far in my career before doing this. I wanted to, I wanted to better understand ⁓ the evolution. there's the star framework, which again, I had no idea about. I guess I kind of just winged something that's like star-ish. ⁓

Austen (08:41)

Yeah.

Carter Morgan (08:42)

Ha ha.

Austen (08:53)

Yeah.

Nathan Toups (08:54)

Did you come up with Carl or is this, ⁓ and then maybe we can explain to our listeners, ⁓ what is Star, what is Carl, what are these storytelling techniques?

Austen (08:57)

No.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Right. like how is it that other engineers have gotten so far? How come that we have 500,000, whatever, software engineers in the US or all over the world, and they've never had to take a book like this? Why don't we use a book now? Right. So I think part of that is the change that AI is bringing about. so the other thing that's changing is the job market. as more and more candidates are available, the bar is increasing. Right. So now it's no longer just enough to get by in the behavioral interview. You really want to showcase your skills. You want to shine in that interview. So I think that's part of

Nathan Toups (09:06)

Rape.

Carter Morgan (09:14)

Right.

Austen (09:33)

just

the cycle that we're in, the part of the career cycle that we're in. But I would also say that expectations of, over the course of my career, in the last 20 something years or so, the expectations of soft skills for engineers has been increasing. in the 90s, it was kind of like a Dilbert sort of environment. Like you could kind of get away with being a jerk and like, yeah, the IT guy, you know.

he's gonna be this way, it's gonna be that way, he's not gonna know how to work with people or he's not gonna know how to speak well, whatever, like that was okay. But I think that the more that we've advanced the industry, which is a good thing, I think the more that we've seen how critical it is to work with other people and how much more you can accomplish. So I think part of that is the the drift in, not drift, but the advancement of the industry as a whole and what we value and what's important for us on Teams. The other thing I would say is, you are a podcaster, so you probably have some kind of, I you guys mentioned this in previous conversation,

You probably do have some sort of inherent innate maybe or built up skill in communicating and you deploy that skill in an interview situation. if you have the fact that you've even done like an improv class is probably way more than a lot of other engineers have done. And so you're probably getting a little bit of benefit from that and maybe you don't need this. But to answer your specific question, we talk about different frameworks in the book. And I think one thing I'd like to talk about here is the tension between.

Carter Morgan (10:40)

You

Austen (10:55)

who you are and what you've done in your career and the reality of communicating that in a sort of very compressed time scale. And I think that's some of the undercurrent of your question is like, why do I even have to think about this? Or like, I was an engineer, I just wanna be myself, or I just wanna talk about what I've done. Why do I have to put these trappings on top of it, these extra things? Why do I have to think about this communication piece? I think that's a very legitimate question. Ideally, we would love to be in this world where...

We evaluate each other. There's no interview process. We just know, you're great. You did awesome. You've got a great product organization. Come on board. Come on. We're excited to have you. I think we love to live in that world, but we don't. We don't live in that world. And so there is this reality of how do I talk about myself in this short period of time, which is most of the time very stressful, stressful for the candidate. And sometimes it can be stressful for the interviewer too. They're having to...

Carter Morgan (11:28)

Hahaha

Austen (11:49)

take notes and like talk to you and try to be a human and try to be relatable and then also kind of move the conversation forward to the place where you want to go. That can be difficult. we can put frameworks in place as a candidate to try to help us overcome some of these challenges. And so the frameworks you're mentioning, Star and Carl, Star is situation, task, action, results developed in the 70s.

And it's just a way to an easy mnemonic for us to be able to tell easy and clear stories that have an arc. Stories have a beginning and middle and end. This is a way to tell a work-oriented story with the beginning and middle and end. And I did not develop this Karl framework that you mentioned, context, action, results, learnings.

I did not develop that, I found that on the internet. But I really liked it, and I really liked it because ⁓ it helps me as a user, as a candidate, get away from having to differentiate some things which maybe are not easy to differentiate, like the difference between situation that I'm in and the task that I'm doing, especially for big, big.

projects like what is the situation and what is the task? I don't know. And then also tries to up level a little bit of the conversation and tries to add these learnings or this reflection on what I learned or what I picked up or what I would have done differently, whatever. So I feel like that kind of framework is useful. Now, I think that as a candidate,

when you walk in with a framework like this, it can be a double-edged sword. maybe you, you know, like now I gotta fit all of my responses into this thing, right? This is what people were expecting. I gotta have C, gotta have A, you gotta have R, you have L. And I think that's not where I'm trying to get people with the book. I think it is a way to get started. But I try to communicate a little bit more about the value that the interviewer is trying to assess or trying to get out of the conversation. And to me, if you understand what the questioner is seeking,

you can give them that in whatever format you need to give it to

Nathan Toups (13:36)

Yeah, that's great. Carl resonated with me as well. I'd never heard of the Carl framework and I liked the idea of the situation and tasks sort of being part of this context thing and then actions being this plural of like, you know, how did these things move stuff forward and your results and your learnings? ⁓ Something you said in this ⁓ response though, fascinated me. I haven't ever really put myself in the shoes of the interviewer and

I can't imagine, when you go into an interview, do you...

Is it like a breath of fresh air to see somebody who's like, okay, they've got like solid story arcs to these things. Like I know somebody who's like obviously done their work, they know how to do Star Carl, or is it one of these where like, I guess I'm just curious, like, how are you walking into the room and what makes you disappointed? Like, ⁓ this person sounds like they're great, but they're so disorganized and now they're telling their story.

Austen (14:34)

Right, and most of the time it's a little bit less maybe disorganization and more of lack of detail that comes out in the action side or too much details coming out in the context side. mean those are the two biggest things that I work with my coaching clients is people will be like, hey, I worked on this project.

Carter Morgan (14:40)

Mm.

Nathan Toups (14:41)

Okay.

Austen (14:50)

Yeah, you know, was a great idea. I shipped it. It was it was good. Right? I'm like, what? What is that? Like, they didn't give me anything there. And I think what they don't understand is that the behavioral interview is built around behaviors, right? So it's about talking about your the things that you have done in the past, the repeatable behaviors that you have done in the past, that you will then do once you get into this new organization. And that's, that's the mindset of the interviewer, the interviewer was trying to be like a weather forecaster, trying to look at the current situation with you look at sort of like past experiences with you may run some mathematical models in their head and

Carter Morgan (14:54)

Right.

Austen (15:20)

Okay, tomorrow it's gonna rain right and I think they're trying to look at your past career and say you've done these things in the past in similar situations I have you know some situations in their mind and their team that they're thinking about and they want to see how are you gonna how are you gonna perform once you get into these situations and in some ways it's like I don't actually care about what you did in the past the details right so people will ask question interviews ask questions like well tell me about a conflict you had with a peer over prioritization right and honestly they're gonna throw a bunch of that detail away like if you asked me in three days

Carter Morgan (15:20)

Hahaha.

Right.

Austen (15:50)

what

that candidate said, I'm not gonna remember. What am I gonna remember? I'm gonna remember, oh, did this person think through roadmap? Did they work effectively with others? That's what they're trying to assess. And so when you walk in as a candidate and you know what the interviewer is looking for, you kind of understand, hey, these are the parts of my career that I really love to tell.

If they heard that I did this, if they heard that I was able to accomplish that, if they heard that I would build proofs of concept or pull data as far as part of research, or I can debug these really hard technical problems, or I can figure out a way to organize the team and keep them motivated through difficult parts of the project. If I can get that across to the interviewer, they're gonna wanna hire me. And to me, that's the difference between an amazing candidate and one where I'm sort of pulling information out of them. And I tend to be a pretty...

forgiving interviewer, even when I was doing it as a job at Metta, I would look for opportunities to hire this person. I would look for ways in which I found that this person would be successful. But the reality is lot of interviewers aren't like that. So if you don't get a gracious interviewer like that, then as a candidate, you need to be the one who's guiding your question or your listener to the parts of your career that are most relevant for them, the parts that demonstrate that you can be successful in their organization. to me, that's probably the biggest thing. It's less...

Carter Morgan (16:47)

Right, right.

Austen (17:08)

I think Carl is a structure for me if I say, I have this project about this refactor. I have no idea what to say. Like, how would I even start? I think this gives you this nice arc to be able to fit your stories into in a way to prepare them. But really the meat is in the action. So if you can identify those points that you push the needle, you change the trajectory of the project. You added something specifically. Your behavior has added something specific to the success of this project. To me, that's the...

That's what you gotta get to as a candidate. And I tried to accomplish that. I think there's pretty, like two really difficult things I tried to do with the book. So one of them was this, like how do I help you understand as a reader what the interviewer is looking for when you may never have been a people manager. You may never have conducted a behavioral interview. I think people have worked with a lot of code and so they maybe have worked with systems even and design systems before. So they have some sense of like what I'm supposed to deliver in a coding interview and a system design interview. But if you've never been a people manager before, you've never had to.

hire somebody, fire somebody, select them for a job, give them a performance evaluation. If you've never done any of that, it can be kind of hard for you to know what manager's looking for. So I tried to do that. And the other one was try to help people adjust their stories to be able to talk in a way that's relatable to a Silicon Valley company, even if they've never worked in one, which I'm sure we'll talk about later.

Carter Morgan (18:29)

I do want to follow up on that. I also want to follow up on something you said earlier, which is you say the bar for kind of behavioral interview performance is rising. ⁓ And to give my kind of like subjective assessment of, think some macro trends in the industry and feel free to disagree with any of these if you think I've got it wrong. Cause you kind of call it the nineties, right? Like, you know, the Dilbert era. But I think as we got further along, especially like the 2010s, software engineering one becomes to be seen as a

cooler field, and two, it becomes much more widely known how well-paying it is. And that culminates in the COVID era market, white, hot. And so I think that naturally draws in more of your generally ambitious people, the people who in the 90s might have gone into finance. I think there are some of them who then wound up going into computer science in the 2010s. ⁓

Austen (19:01)

Great.

lucrative exactly yeah.

Carter Morgan (19:25)

And so I can see why the bar starts rising there because you're just kind of naturally, you're not drawing in people who are just so in love with programming, but rather they're generally competent, generally ambitious people who could succeed in a variety of fields. And they come with better behavioral skills. But now we enter this era where we have two things going on at the same time, maybe related, maybe not where one, it's just a softer job market than it was, you know, during the COVID era. And also the introduction of AI and large language models is drastically changing how we code. And so.

To me, it's unclear how that affects kind of those market dynamics. Well, so one, the software job market, I think would naturally pull away some of those generally ambitious people. They might say like, this doesn't seem like the gold mine it used to be. So maybe I will be a lawyer or a doctor or who knows what, right? ⁓ But, and again, disagree with any of this if you want. then, but then AI, we talk a lot about it, maybe also enabling a lot of people who weren't extremely technical to become software engineers. ⁓

Austen (20:10)

Right? Okay.

Carter Morgan (20:26)

So I don't know, we're in this era of lot of really interesting macro dynamics on the market. How does that all affect behavioral interview performance now?

Austen (20:36)

Yeah, yeah, I mean I for one thing I don't think anyone understands the macro behavioral macro environment right now I could put their finger on it. I think for one thing I think the second thing I would say is

Carter Morgan (20:43)

Right?

Austen (20:47)

Yes, I think that perhaps in terms of who is available, your statements are true, but I would say in the last, whatever, 12 months, hundreds of thousands of software engineers have been laid off. Those people are unlikely to suddenly switch to finance or switch to some other discipline. And so you're competing with a lot of people in order to get a role in software engineering. And so that means that you really got to shine. And you got to shine across all the interview types. But then what I would say about AI is,

Carter Morgan (20:58)

Yeah, yeah.

Right, right.

Mm-hmm.

Austen (21:14)

is a rehash of what I said earlier, which is when you can do more and more technical work with only English, then that's going to give you a lot more opportunity for you to conduct other kinds of work, the kind of work that more senior engineers would do. So I think that the shifting of the window of what's expected out of a junior engineer and what's expected out of a senior engineer is shifting. I think in the past, we could just task junior engineers with tasks, things to do, whatever bullet points on a JIRA ticket or something, and they would go and do those things, and that was successful.

for a junior engineer, but given that we can give that kind of work, if we can spec it out to that level, we can give that to Cloud Code. Well, now I need a junior engineer to think about how does this gonna affect the user? What's the interface supposed to be like? So this is more of like what we would expect from a startup engineer or product oriented engineer in the past. We're gonna be expecting that of even of people right out of college. So I think that this...

Carter Morgan (21:56)

Right.

Mm-hmm.

Austen (22:10)

ability to consume information, understand what's happening around you, understand what's happening in the business market, understand what's happening in technology, of course, like every three weeks or some new approach to software engineering that we have to completely unlearn it before, right? that kind of, am I gonna hire this person that's gonna keep up with that? How am I gonna assess that? I need to assess that again in the behavioral interview. So I do think that it's hard to get precise about what the effects are and maybe there are like countervailing effects

Carter Morgan (22:25)

You

Austen (22:41)

different directions, but to me I think that this, in the future...

software engineers are going to be owning more and more of the stack, just as product managers are owning more and more of stack. Everybody's owning more of this. All the roles are colliding and collapsing in a way, right? And this sort of curious generalist, this person who can understand context from lots of different domains, whether that's a technical domain or whether that's a business domain or customer service domain, sales domain, all those things, and then be able to bring that together and then build something that the business really needs and be able to sell that idea, sell that result to

the, you know, to the leadership chain, like that person's going to be very successful.

Carter Morgan (23:23)

What about, so you talk about how someone from a not-thing company can kind of build their experience. This is the part of the interview where I selfishly just ask you questions I'm interested in. We have this with several interviewers. We had Steve Flanders, one of the founding contributors of OpenTelemetry. And at a certain point, I just started asking him about my OpenTelemetry configuration. I'm like, I'm having trouble with this.

Austen (23:49)

That's right. Let's debug.

Carter Morgan (23:52)

So I have kind of exclusively worked at ⁓ a couple kind of like thing level companies. And before that, ⁓ like big fortune 500s, right? Last year, recently left the thing level company and came to a startup. ⁓ And I'm really, really enjoying my time at the startup. And I feel like as an engineer, I'm growing in a lot of ways where I wasn't able to in the past, or at least it was harder to maybe find those opportunities. And I'm understanding more of the stack and understanding kind of the whole

process end to end, I'm really enjoying it. But something that's always in the back of my mind is scope and scale. Like in terms of impact, the stuff I'm doing like affects whether or not the business continues to exist in three months, right? Which is a great position to be in from like impact, so to speak. But then when we talk about, especially as you move up and you're, you need to be like a senior engineer or a staff engineer and they want to know like, what about a project that stretched across multiple months? What about a project where you had to align?

Austen (24:51)

Mm-hmm.

Carter Morgan (24:52)

several teams and I'm like, well, we have one engineering team and like a long project for us would be like a six week project, right? And is it the case that those kinds of experiences just have no translation over into the big tech world or is it a case where you need to be able to sell them so to speak?

Austen (24:54)

All right. All right. ⁓

Yeah.

Yeah, mean, great question. I would say that there are times when your past experience is going to create a ceiling in FANG. So I think if you have only had three, four person teams only working at very small technical scale, very small organizational scale, if projects have only been six months, six weeks for you, for your entire career, I think that that is going to put a damper on your ability to say to get to staff level out of FANG. So I don't want to tell people like, doesn't matter what your experience is, like you can make

it just like 1995 plus shipping and handling and I'll get you there so I think I think that's that's not that's not possible but I I do think that there's more available more people can be successful at big tech than most will think so I think everybody has to remember that every person who worked at big tech was did not work at big tech at some point so that like a first experience in big tech I mean I I certainly did I mean I worked at a company with three four engineers right

Carter Morgan (25:45)

Hahaha

Yeah.

Right, right.

Mm-hmm.

Austen (26:11)

And

we never had huge projects and I was able to get hired at level five ⁓ at Metta. And I think level five is probably the ceiling, right, for a person with that level of experience. Correct, sorry, yes, level five is senior, right. Thank you for.

Carter Morgan (26:20)

Right. Level five is, is senior ish, right? I, yeah, I just know cause Amazon,

Amazon is like one level above like that. They're L5 or they're L6 maps to L5 at a lot of other companies. ⁓

Austen (26:34)

Yeah, sorry, for senior

engineer, right? Somebody who probably has five, six years experience, who's expected to lead projects that are the order of a couple months long. And they oftentimes work underneath another kind of tech lead person, like a staff level person. But I will say that you can frame your experience in ways that are more amenable to big tech. let's think about what a big tech person might be thinking if they are coming into an interview with a candidate like yourself. They might be saying,

has the technical readiness to work inside of our stack. So I think that then in your stories, you need to include details about how maybe you didn't build something for a billion users, like how many companies did you really do that in the world? Very few. So you didn't build it like that, but you did think about, well, I thought about structuring the microservices like this, because if we scaled and da-da-da. So you're adding a little bit of thinking, a little bit of how you have approached software engineering practices from a best practices perspective.

I think that's going to go a long way to helping Tim.

allay some of those fears that the interviewer has. They're also going to be concerned that you can't operate inside of a larger team structure. And so when you are talking about what you're doing, you need to show a lot of communication. You need to show a lot about how you communicate, not just you talk to them, but like, did you use an email? Did you use a document? Why? What was the point of how you went about accomplishing that communication task? Or you can talk about how you resolve conflicts. Oftentimes smaller environments actually have sometimes a lot more conflicts than larger ones. Yes, they don't often have the

It's kind of like road mapping between teams over 12 months kind of planning conflict, right? But they do have, there's a lot of opinions and people have less power dynamics inside of small organizations. And so there can be a lot more friction sometimes. So how you navigated that, how you thought about it. So I think that those kinds of, if you know what the interviewer is gonna be concerned about, you can come in and frame your stories in a way to give them more confidence that you can operate within their environment.

Carter Morgan (28:10)

Right, right.

Nathan Toups (28:36)

Yeah, I actually found that my entrepreneurial background was very helpful sometimes when they were trying to hire a gap of not having enough self starters or not having ownership, which I was able to use my spin machine to kind of demonstrate this. One of the things I wanted to talk to you about, and I think this is probably something that is affecting a lot of our listeners, is layoffs, career gaps.

Maybe they job hopped during COVID, then there was a layoff. They sort of have that perfect storm of like, ugh, this is like a hard thing to explain. ⁓ I would love to hear, especially because you had a coaching background as well, like what are some refreshing sort of approaches to how to own that? Like, do you, what are good strategies for owning these gaps, these places in your career that are not always so easy to talk about?

Austen (29:31)

Yeah, totally, right? There's these difficult situations, I think is what I call them. And yeah, there are number of them and they kind of depends on which one it is and what tactic you want to employ. And there's a couple of different dimensions to how you would approach this. So one of them is like, do you proactively bring this up to people or do you wait for them to ask about it? That's kind of one dimension. And then how honest are you? For example, you might have been laid off or...

for either directly a performance related reason or maybe there's a suspicion that it might be performance related reason. And so how do you go about navigating that? And so in general, think the principle here is that you should only proactively handle the things that are really obvious and the ones that you think the person is going to notice just by immediately looking at your resume. For example, for me, ⁓ I haven't worked at a FAANG for three years. And so I would want to proactively address that in my Tell Me About Yourself. And I think the Tell Me About Yourself is honestly

This first question that you often get with a behavioral interview, this kind of, hey, how's it going, Austin? How you doing? Why don't you tell me a little about yourself? That's kind of how most of these interviews begin. And so I think you setting the stage for how you want the person to think about whatever that gap or that layoff or that issue is.

Oftentimes with a layoff, you don't need to say that you were laid off, right? think unless you looking, you just came from a giant company who just had a very high profile layoff and then here you are looking for a job the next week, I think that it's probably best that you don't mention it, right? And I think there are ways to also.

Carter Morgan (30:55)

Right.

Or even a layoff, you think it's

best to not mention being laid off.

Austen (31:08)

I think as a rule, yes, I think there are some times when the person's asked you something like, why are you no longer working at ACME Co., right? Then here's a direct question at you. And you can say, ⁓ well, I was let go, or I was laid off, or I was affected by restructuring. But I think the key thing that you need to do is you need to frame that. So if you just drop it, leave it at that and.

Carter Morgan (31:16)

Right.

Austen (31:30)

then I'm kind of up to my imagination. And usually, interviewers have very ⁓ active and very negative imaginations. That's typically what they're gonna be coming in with. So you fill that kind of imagination in my mind with something. You say, well, you know, my entire team was laid off, for example, right?

Carter Morgan (31:32)

Right.

Ha ha ha ha.

Austen (31:46)

if it wasn't performance related. If it was performance related, I think you can say something like, you know what, I was making a lot of contribution here, here, and here, but I think it'd be better for me to be in a company that's like this. And hopefully the like this is something similar to the company that you're applying to for some reason. I think you can frame the conversation in the person's mind. But I would not open your tell me about yourself unless there's no other way to do it. I would not open you to the conversation with.

Carter Morgan (31:56)

Right, right.

you

Austen (32:14)

Hi, my name's Austin, I was raised and laid off from X and here I am, you Because I think that that's just, it's framing the conversation in a way of like, well they didn't want me, so here I am talking to you, right? And I don't think that's a great way to frame the conversation.

Carter Morgan (32:22)

Right,

That's interesting. ⁓ Do you, no, no, no, no, I'm just trying to think, I have been laid off before. ⁓ But I guess what I'm trying to think about right now, it's tough for me to get in the headspace sometimes, because I think I'm like you, where I'm a pretty generous interviewer. Like, I want the candidate to succeed, and I'll try to gravitate, or I'll try to navigate the situation, the interview.

Austen (32:31)

Sounds like not what you would do.

Carter Morgan (32:55)

towards an area where I think they can do well. I'm also a pretty, not harsh, like evaluator, but like, at our company, we have a high talent bar and I wanna make sure that we keep that talent bar high. And I've turned down plenty of candidates before. I guess what's really sticking out in my mind lately is we had someone come visit the office. He was kind of a friend of the company and he, this guy had an interesting kind of career trajectory where he had been at Google for like eight years. ⁓ And then,

the pandemic happened and he moves from Google, you he's in Irvine, California, and he moves back to be with family in Utah, where I'm at. And then ever since doing that, he kind of has had like nine months to one year stints at like several different companies over the past like four years and a lot of startups. ⁓ And I think you could look at that and be like, what's going on here? Like, is this guy, can he not sick somewhere? Is there, you know, yeah, is there something I'm not seeing here?

Austen (33:40)

Yep. Yep.

Carter Morgan (33:53)

But in my entire conversation with him, he was brilliant and he understood technical things very well. He was very easy to talk to, a gifted storyteller. so kind of what's registering in my mind is like, this guy's had some bum luck, right? Like he was at Google for eight years, did very well there. And then since then, it's just not been able to find something that sticks. you know, maybe this could be the place where he sticks. But again, like I'm a fairly generous interviewer. And so I'm trying to figure out like, is that a

Austen (34:20)

Yeah,

Carter Morgan (34:23)

pattern that other people see? Like if you're a gifted interviewer

Austen (34:25)

Yeah.

Carter Morgan (34:26)

and communicator, do people kind of think, well, maybe that resume, maybe it was just dealt a bad hand or do they kind of go against that, you know, sort of gifted interviewing ability and say, well, wait a minute, maybe there's something more that we're not seeing here.

Austen (34:40)

So this is another example of something that is very obvious on your resume. When you have lots of recent stints, lots of short stints in a place, this is something you should proactively address in the Tell Me About Yourself. And so in fact, when we were on the hiring committee and I would, of course we would look at a resume as one of the first things I would look at, it's on top of the top of the packet as a person's resume. When I would see those short stints, I would immediately go to the behavioral interview to try to understand why are there so many short stints? And if this was not covered in the notes or explicit question asked, I would always provide feedback.

Carter Morgan (34:45)

Right, right.

Right.

Yeah.

Austen (35:09)

to the interviewer, like you cannot take someone with this kind of resume and not ask this question explicitly. So I think as you're an interviewer out there, I highly recommend that if you do find someone with short stints, you should ask questions. Now people can lie, right? They can say all kinds of things, but I do honestly, I think it's pretty hard to be a good actor. Like being a good actor, you could pay a lot of money down in LA. So pretty hard to lie. So I think when you can often detect, you know, as an interviewer, as a human, part, that mammalian part of your brain is like, this is not right. It doesn't sound good. So I think you should definitely ask that question of someone

Carter Morgan (35:15)

Hmm.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Austen (35:39)

as an interviewer, why do you have so many short stints? If you do have lots of short stints, ideally you would say something truthful, but I think there's also ways to frame. I like what you said in the previous conversation, we don't always lie, but we want to be the best version of ourselves. And I think that you can frame in the tell me about yourself why those short stints are an asset. I worked on lots of different stacks, I did a lot of zero to one work, or I've been able to work in lots of different kinds of business environments, or lots of different kinds of markets.

Carter Morgan (35:46)

Yeah.

You

Austen (36:09)

to different kind of customers. This kind of thing, there's often a lot of value in putting in lot of reps like early on, especially in the startup world. ⁓ But if things have not been working out, I would still say that positive thing, that positive spin. And then there's no reason why you should have to confess, for example, to being fired, especially from a small place. ⁓ There's no reason why you can say something truthful about how it's not working out for you at that place. I would not phrase it that way. I would say, ⁓

Carter Morgan (36:28)

Right, right.

Austen (36:39)

⁓ It is ⁓ something like the customer, the technology, right, I'm really looking for, is not working, I'm really looking for this, right? And hopefully the this in the future is the thing that the company is offering you, right? As part of this conversation that you're having with the hiring manager.

Nathan Toups (36:59)

So in your most recent newsletter, you talked about an annual reminder to update your deck of stories, basically. ⁓ I was actually thinking about this. I wish I had brought it up in the podcast when we were discussing the book, because I feel like this is not just a good behavioral interview framework, but also companies where I've done self-assessments or making a case. We've talked to Will Larson about staff engineer.

and that you have to put a packet together on why you deserve to become staff engineer. And it feels like a lot of these tools and techniques translate. ⁓ Has that been your experience as well, or is like, what's your general advice here? Okay.

Austen (37:40)

totally. In

fact, originally wrote the book from that framing. As you do this behavioral interview preparation, it's actually going to make you a better person. So one of my deep core beliefs is that who we are on the inside comes out on the outside. And a good behavioral interview is one that really gets on on the inside. What are their motivations? How do you interact with people? What's important to you? So those kinds of assessments are what both make the interview powerful.

Also dangerous, right, as a candidate because again, people can have negative imaginations about and fill in things about you that may or may not be true, but also is a powerful force for assessing people's future performance based on who they are. And I originally framed the book as ⁓ behavioral interview prep will make you a better engineer because it's one of the things that you do is you talk about your stories and you prepare to tell your stories as you identify what made this story, what made this project so successful, right? What was it that I did in this project that really

created this result that we talk about, right? And I think ⁓ if you understood what makes you successful and then you reflect on what didn't work, then you put that into practice in your future life, like you will be more powerful, you'll be more effective. ⁓

But honestly, the early beta readers of my book did not appreciate this. I think the folks who are not interviewing right now loved it. They kind of love this sort pontification thing, like, yes, I would love to think about how I present my background and how I make it me better. But the people who were just, they're like, hey, I got an interview in three weeks. How do I do this and how do I be successful? So I sort of gave in in some ways to the people who need that to help right now. And I think that was really who I had in mind as I was writing this book was,

Carter Morgan (38:54)

Hahaha ⁓

Austen (39:21)

you're an

engineer, you have a behavioral interview coming up, how do you get ready? And the more theory and kind of whatever, know, mumbo jumbo self-improvement stuff that I bring to maybe that's valuable for you in the course of your life, but like that's not valuable right now. I need to get this job right now. so, but I do agree that's true. So I think if you, especially if you're listening to this and you're like, I don't have an interview, why am I listening to this guy talking about behavioral interviews? Well, you should do that because...

A, you may have a behavioral interview in the future, and so you'll need to take notes or make your life lot easier if you take notes now on what you've accomplished. I've heard this called a yay me file. Some people call it brag file, whatever. I like yay me. That was fun. So what are the things that I've done and what are the actions that I have taken in order to create those results? And of course, anybody who's written a resume after a long time will know, like, what was that percentage and performance improvement that I did from that project three years ago? ⁓

Nathan Toups (39:59)

Yeah, I like that.

Carter Morgan (40:00)

Ha

Austen (40:17)

So having that kind of ⁓ record of yourself is really valuable. And then as you're doing that kind of self-reflection and writing, you will find things to improve even in your day-to-day life, even in the next week, even if you don't have a behavioral interview coming up. So yes, I think these kinds of ⁓ communication techniques.

of understanding what the other person needs to get out of this conversation and then being able to drive them and draw them towards the most important information. I all that stuff is just communication skills that will pay off in other parts of your career.

Nathan Toups (40:50)

No, that's great. This also makes me think again, taking this where Carter's been taking this of being like, have I been building things that would sound good in a behavioral interview prep session? And I know that you shouldn't put the cart in front of the horse, but it is interesting to think of like, what is the long game here? Like, what am I doing that's really impacting positive outcomes for the business? Or how does this, how am I representing myself in this project that

Austen (41:02)

Yeah.

Nathan Toups (41:17)

shows my leadership, maybe that's one of my goals that I have is like, hey, I can take ownership and sponsor someone's project and make sure that they get credit for it. And ⁓ sometimes it's nice to just think about your future self. And I guess if you have this framework, that's a good way to think about it too of like, how do I have a good Carl story that comes out of this?

Austen (41:37)

Yeah, mean, most, if you work at a place where there's structured ⁓ performance reviews, I mean, like any FAANG organization, they're gonna ask you to write down, like, what did you accomplish? ⁓ And so when I would coach my engineers, they reported to me, I would say, well, do you want to write down in this performance review at the end of the term? Like, what do you wanna say? And you sort of begin with the end in mind, right? That's one of the books I'll talk about is seven habits of highly effective people. So I think when you begin with the end in mind, you understand, where am I going in my career? I wanna be somebody who,

has taken ownership over large business problems, who has initiated ideas, who has been able to drive things end to end, who has been able to expand the scope of the team and solve really difficult technical problems. If you want to be that person, then that will help you understand what you should do today.

Carter Morgan (42:23)

I think the kind of level of conversation we're having right now is kind of almost what I would call like a post-career awakening conversation. And what I mean by that is like, ⁓ so my first job out of college, I worked for one of the entertainment companies in the country. ⁓ it was, okay, Nathan and I tried, we have a soft rule that we don't mention the companies we worked for, but the story is just gonna sound stupid if I.

Don't mention it was Disney. worked for Disney right out of college. It's an entertainment company with theme parks. Like, okay, so there's two of those, right? Anyhow, so I worked for Disney right out of college. I worked there for like five years. ⁓ And then COVID happens and I'm working for the theme park division. And as you can imagine, that's not a great place to be during COVID. And so ⁓ furloughs happened. And then, so I got furloughed. so ⁓ I had been doing well at the company and it's kind of one those things, especially as a junior engineer. I'm like, well, you know,

Nathan Toups (42:52)

You

Austen (42:56)

you

Carter Morgan (43:20)

My tickets come in, I get the tickets done, know, boss is happy, like things are good. And then I get launched into this job market, which thankfully my saving grace was like, even though it was the worst market in the world for tourism, it was the best market in the world for software engineering, right? And so that, ⁓ I was able to kind of pivot and start working big tech jobs after that. But at least at the very beginning, I was like, well, wait a minute, there was a lot of stuff I was apparently supposed to.

to be learning, some of you can fix kind of when you find yourself in that, like we're approaching a post-leak code world, but kind of in the past, leak code was a big one. was like, crap, like I was supposed to be learning this, like, okay, by cracking the coding interview, let's get down to business, right? And then behavioral interviews, I someone, you know, I think your book now is a fantastic resource for that. Like, okay, let me buy this book and let me bone up on this. But then there's kind of like the whole.

Austen (43:58)

Yeah. Right. Yeah.

Carter Morgan (44:14)

Some of the stuff that's too late to fix and we've been talking about that, right? Which is like you need to make sure you're working on the right projects. You need to make sure that you are uh, structuring your career in such a way so that you know, you're you're setting yourself up for success And again, that's why I call it kind of like a career awakening because I was like, whoa, wait a minute I guess it just wasn't good enough to show up and like do the job every day. I guess I was supposed to be like Really actively managing my career And for me that awakening happened after an unfortunate furlough

But for a lot of people, I'm constantly thinking about how do you accelerate that awakening? How do you get exposed to this knowledge where now you understand kind of everything it takes to have maybe an excellent career as a software engineer? Do have any thoughts on that? Yeah. ⁓

Austen (44:51)

You

Yeah, so yeah, I have a lot of thoughts ⁓ so the number one the

number one habit in seven habits is is be proactive right and that's the habit that that you you're saying like if I was only proactive like I would have been able to advance this in my career, but I remember we I Kent Beck did this ⁓ Series for a new engineer. Yes. Yeah, great ⁓ Did the series at meta while he was there Facebook and ⁓ he was sort of like a

Carter Morgan (45:10)

Yes.

Friend of the podcast, we've had him on.

Austen (45:27)

Like for new engineers, how do you think about your time? How do you think about project? How you think about technical debt? Sort of like how can we ingest this massive amount of 20, 30 year experience of someone who's thought deeply about the industry? How can we inject that into junior engineers? And I remember talking to him once and... ⁓

I was saying like, this is like a really hard problem. Like, how do you do this? And then we had this conversation like, well, look, people have been trying to this for thousands of years, know, taking some wisdom of the elderly and like putting it into the young. It's like really hard, really hard problem to do, you know, we tried lots of different methods. Not sure any of those went really successful, right? I think ⁓ that there is an inherent problem of how do you communicate.

Carter Morgan (45:59)

Yeah.

Austen (46:10)

wisdom and depth of how to run your life in any different way into someone who is just getting started. I do think that nowadays there are so many more resources than there were when I was coming up.

I mean, the level, the number of podcasts like this one, the level of books, the number of newsletters. I mean, it's just amazing what is available now versus what was available when I started. And so I think soak that up, right? I think consume as much of that as possible. And the other thing I would say, which I think is really important, and I want people to come away with this, is that...

You your career is not over. Like because you didn't make some, I don't know, you didn't like build this thing last year that is big enough. That does not mean that you will never get this job in the future. I think that we can all see that we've made mistakes in the past or maybe we could have done things differently or whatever, but like there's still the future and there's still tomorrow and we can turn things around and we can improve if we start now.

Carter Morgan (46:49)

right right

Austen (47:06)

And so I think that sometimes maybe in this conversation I could see some folks coming out thinking like,

It's over, know, I'll never work. I'll never work at this kind of company or I'll never have this kind of career because I haven't had it so far, right? And I think that that just to give you a couple of extra stories. So when I started at Metta, ⁓ I was a tech lead for the team, a mobile team, news feed team.

So I don't think I understood what levels were. I think the interns actually knew a lot more about what levels were than what I started. I didn't understand what it meant to be a senior engineer. didn't understand the difference that there were, like I had come from a place where there were no titles basically, so ⁓ I didn't really understand that. I had come from academia, I had gotten a PhD, so I had spent a bunch of my time avoiding industry, the way that industry does things. And so when I was there, I just didn't get it. I had to learn about that. And then I remember having this conversation with the VP of product, ⁓

and

we were giving this presentation about goals and I set this goal of like, you know what, we're going to have zero bugs, zero crashes, zero crashes. And everyone looks at me in the room and is like, are you sure you want zero crashes? Maybe you should prioritize the crashes based on what the impact is and then burn them down. I think I just had no idea what the scale of Facebook, there's no way that Facebook would have zero crashes, it's impossible, The scale which they're operating at, that's just so much. But for me, when I was working on the small apps, yeah, it's possible.

Carter Morgan (48:14)

Yeah.

Right, right.

Austen (48:30)

We got five or six problems with the code, we'll fix them and get them done. So I think this like I'm not ready, everyone goes through this, right? Everybody has holes in their knowledge, holes in their experience. And ⁓ the key is just to not let that hold you back from.

taking whatever that next step is in your career, applying to that place, going to that conference, ⁓ talking to that senior engineer, finding somebody who can help you in your career. I think don't let the lack of past experience stop you from gaining experience in the future.

Nathan Toups (49:02)

And you could just for the listeners out there too, you can get really creative. My undergrad is in theater with a focus in sound design. And you don't understand how many times I've been like, well, actually I've been working on cross-functional teams under constraints, under a budget all the way back since college. Cause I worked with a director and actors and set designers and applied this to how this works, like in in a startup. And that isn't a throwaway thing. Like it is a real thing of like having to deal with egos and

the desires and the motivations. And so just because you have something that doesn't maybe fit into what other people you've heard of, you can still own your story. And I think that was actually one of the cool things that I heard in this book is that if you prepare, you can be authentic, right? There's this whole authenticity that comes with it is that you can own that story. And if you aren't prepared, if you just kind of wing it, you can kind of get knocked on your butt if you're not careful, right?

Austen (49:46)

Mm-hmm.

I don't think you'll be the person that you want to be, the person that you really are, right? If you don't spend some time reflecting on who, I think everyone understands that now. I think we've gotten to a place of societal emotional intelligence to know that like some reflection is required to understand who you are and what motivates you. And I think you're very right that you can take experiences that are not, know, I refactored the code in a one billion user environment to accomplish X, like you can take experiences from different domains and then pivot them. And the key way to do that is to understand what kind of language

Nathan Toups (50:00)

Great.

Right.

Austen (50:27)

that

these companies are looking for when you do tell those stories. And that's what I've tried to accomplish in the book. And I do that in two different ways. So one is providing a lot of examples. So you can go read through these examples and see like, oh, this is how somebody talks about this kind of challenge. Or this is how someone talks about, you know, the situation that they had at work. And so even though if you haven't worked at a big tech company, you can take your experiences, filter through that. And then I talk about, as you guys talked about in the previous podcast, I talk about these different founding ideas or myths that Silicon Valley has and how the work that

we do is sort of filtered through these ideas that we have around how teams should operate and how people should interact with each other and how people should interact with the code. And I think if you understand that and you could have consumed that, then you can take your theater experience, you know, working cross-functionally, right? Even this word cross-functionally, like you probably never use this word in a theater context, but because you read the book or like because you've talked to some folks or if you've listened to some podcasts like this about Big Tech, now you know to use this word, you know, when you're talking about things. So.

Carter Morgan (51:11)

Yeah, yeah.

Nathan Toups (51:15)

Right.

Austen (51:25)

I talk about other words, not to use like procurement process or something like this, right? It's kind of like a big company speak that works at a bank or works at an insurance company, but doesn't work at a FAANG. So I think ingesting those kinds of lenses to tell your stories through, it will enable you to take your very valid experience, things that you've done that do prepare you for working on a big tech team and then being able to convince someone that in case, yes, that is indeed the case.

Carter Morgan (51:29)

Yeah.

I really like that about your book and those kind of founding myths you talk about in Silicon Valley. I guess maybe to recap for some of the listeners, there's like the idea of kind of like the 10X engineer, the like indie hacker, right? Like, I guess maybe could you just kind of summarize for our listeners, like, what does that mean? Like, what does it mean to frame something in kind of like a more standard way and like a Silicon Valley myth sort of?

Austen (52:24)

Yeah, so here's another book or recommendation. Well, I'm only allowed to three, but here's one I'm sneaking in. So Sam Lesson wrote this. Sam Lesson is a famous sort of Silicon Valley guy. was at Meta for a long time, as you see. He recently wrote this book about ⁓ etiquette, like Silicon Valley etiquette. And I have not yet, I've yet to read the book, but as I've sort of been perusing the examples in the podcast that he's been on, I saw a lot of echoes in terms of what I've tried to do in this book, which is if you can surround yourself with ⁓ examples of how

Carter Morgan (52:29)

Hahaha.

⁓ interesting.

Hmm.

Austen (52:54)

Silicon Valley has done things in the past, then you can kind of figure out how to change your language or how to reframe your conversations in different ways. And so that's, that's, there are six different ideas that I talk about. Let's just take, you know, one of them, the one that you mentioned is one that I call lone hacker, where we really value the deep expertise and independence of individuals in order to accomplish tasks. Yes, we do things in teams and yes, we're working in teams is important, but we do expect people to kind of push against the team, right? Kind of like, that's not raw, it's wrong. I'm going to go.

and spend all evening or all night or whatever it is, like doing research into the code, into the data so that I can come back with this creative idea tomorrow and yes, this is gonna be the thing, right? And the reality of working inside of an organization is that that's not how everything gets done. Like oftentimes things get done in meetings with like shared documents and all the different ways that people do things all over the world. But we do have this idea of like, yeah, like.

Mark Zuckerberg built Facebook in his dorm room, right? Or Steve and Woz are hanging out and they're accomplishing this thing in their garage, right? So I think if you can instill those ideas, then you can start saying, instead of saying something like, ⁓

something like, I was assigned this task, right, by my manager, which might be true. I think that sort of takes all the agency and takes all the creativity and takes all the skill out of what you're doing. Then you can say like, well, I was really excited about this task, so I took it on. It's not a lie. You were excited about the task and you did take it on, but you were assigned. Maybe just leave that part out. And so changes like that are subtle. And I like how subtle it can be. I think you guys referenced the...

Carter Morgan (54:08)

Yeah. Right.

Hahaha.

Austen (54:33)

the office meme about like, corporate wants you to tell the difference between this and this, but they are the same thing. And yes, in some ways they are the same thing, but I think that one will resonate more with a big tech interviewer than the other one. And so when you read the book, there's a number of examples like that. And then think if you go watch some Silicon Valley style documentaries, the ones that are real, the ones that are mocking Silicon Valley, all those things, think that they can, ingesting that kind of culture can help you.

Carter Morgan (54:35)

Yeah.

Yeah.

You

Austen (55:00)

be more comfortable in those situations and then frame your experience in ways that make sense.

Carter Morgan (55:06)

That's what I love about the book. I'll often kind of say, just tell me the rules of the game and I'll decide whether or not I want to play. And I think you can read a book like this and go like, whoa, Silicon Valley, that is not the place for me. I don't want to work at any company where I can't use the word procurement process. And that's fine. If you say this isn't my style, that's great. ⁓ But I think sometimes I'll talk to engineers who like,

Austen (55:25)

Yeah.

Carter Morgan (55:36)

want that they feel like they're kind of owed or at least maybe they aspire to like all of the rewards of like a thing level job. But then they also kind of like despise all that goes into getting a thing level job. Like, you know, the way you talk about have to tell these stories. As you mentioned, your book, Leak Code is a big one. Again, I know that's changing with kind of the rise of AI. And it's a little like, I don't know what to tell you, man. Like, again, these are the rules of the game. If you don't want to play it, that's fine. But don't complain about the game, right?

Austen (56:02)

Yeah.

Yeah, I

a lot of pushback from my early beta readers. So originally the Silicon Valley cultural piece was more front and center because I thought it was one of the more creative parts of the book and one of the more unique parts of the book. I think you can find sort of Star or Carl advice on blogs on the internet, but really helping to get inside the mind of the interviewer is something that I've never seen before. But I got a lot of pushback from people who are not in Silicon Valley style tech hub, either directly in the valley or

Carter Morgan (56:10)

interesting.

Austen (56:33)

and whatever, Seattle, London, New York, these people that are, these places that are sort of Silicon Valley adjacent, right, or have imported a lot of similar culture. And that made sense to me. I think that there was some framing that I needed to change in the book to help people understand that, hey, this is not the way to run tech teams. Silicon Valley does not run tech teams in the way that you ought to do it, and everyone should copy that way. I think it is more like, yes, but if you want to work in this way, then this is the things that you need to adjust to. So I agree with that. If you wanna play the game, you know.

Carter Morgan (56:35)

Right, right.

Austen (57:02)

Don't hate the player, hate the game, I guess. So if you wanna play this game, then these are the rules, right? This is what you need to do.

Carter Morgan (57:04)

Yeah. ⁓

Austen (57:12)

I think, you know, I think, but honestly, we experienced this in all areas of our life, right? In etiquette, for example, as I was mentioning etiquette earlier, and in social relationships, like we understand that there are certain dances or certain things that we do that maybe don't have intrinsic value or intrinsic worth, but are we do that as a way to, you know, to participate in that culture and the key. think as someone who's inside, I would advise them to sort of understand, you know, where

Carter Morgan (57:17)

Right.

Austen (57:41)

what those things are so that you can get in, but then also understand where you want to be a different person, right? Where you don't want to embody those things. And that's another reason why I use the word myth is because they're not really true, right? So it's not like some hacker somewhere putting Facebook meta whole code base on their back and carrying it over the finish line. That's not what happens. It is a team-based environment. So you do need to understand that these things are...

Carter Morgan (57:53)

Hahaha.

Austen (58:05)

these things permeate the minds of big tech ⁓ engineers and managers, but there are also untruths or like counter myths that fit each one.

Carter Morgan (58:16)

Well, mean, Austin, it's been such a pleasure having you on. It's a fantastic book. ⁓ We were remarking as we were reading it, we're like, we've been doing this podcast for going on two years now. And like, how have we never had an episode devoted to kind of behavioral stuff? And I think the answer is just because there's not really a ton of resources out there. And so I think this fills a much needed void in the kind of software engineering canon. We always like to ask our authors. ⁓

Are there any books you'd recommend to our audience? And that can be technical or non-technical, fiction, non-fiction, know, whatever you think would be a good read for our audience. We'd love to hear it.

Austen (58:50)

Yeah, I'll be talking a little bit about how the inside of ourselves comes out in the work environment and how a great behavioral interview is one that really understands the inside. I three different books that ⁓ sort of address the inside, right? And they may be a little bit different than what you typically get from recommendations. So I did mention Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey. I think this one, I really needed this one when I got a Meets Most coming right out of parental leave. And I was really bitter and frustrated

Carter Morgan (59:04)

Bye.

We love it.

Austen (59:20)

where the team was at and where why I was why I was getting I was very much like why am getting this this like lower than meets expectations rating you know why am getting this disciplinary rating I think it really came to me at this time when I had to accept that I needed to be proactive I needed to be a much more less reactive leader and much more ⁓

one where I'm sort of understanding where I wanna go and then putting the choices in my life every day in order to accomplish that thing. So there's a bunch of sort of deep insight into that book. I think it'd be valuable for anyone, especially early career folks. ⁓

The other one is a book by John Meacham, who's a historian. ⁓ It came out a couple years ago. It's called And There Was Light. It's all about Abraham Lincoln. Abraham Lincoln is one of my favorite people, but ⁓ it's about his moral transition on slavery and how he went from his initial beliefs into eventually pushing for emancipation. And ⁓ I thought that was insightful because it showcases how people can change. And I think we live in this world where ⁓

Carter Morgan (1:00:02)

⁓ lovely.

⁓ interesting.

Austen (1:00:20)

You know, we either don't believe people can change or we don't change ourselves. And so to see how interactions with people and how the world stage was changing around him and how he changed his views over time was encouraging. And also the other thing about that is I think we can all experience a little bit of ⁓ darkness right now, so dark thoughts, right? What's happening in the world today, you what's happening out there. And I don't know what I can do about it, but I think it was really encouraging to see that people, ⁓ yeah.

Carter Morgan (1:00:38)

Right.

Austen (1:00:48)

And if you're not part of the United States, Abraham, if you're not citizen of the United States or have lived here or know much about the history, Abraham Lincoln was the president during our civil war. Certainly the worst part of American history.

book showcased individuals as well as the country as a whole being able to push through difficult times. And I thought that that gave me hope and interest in seeing the future. And the last one I'll take is a little bit.

I don't know, maybe even deeper. It's a Christian oriented book by ⁓ Henry Cloud. It's called Changes at Heal and it talks about four different sort of character shifts that you make in your life in order to become a better person. It talks about the importance of bonding, being able to form healthy relationships, but also separating, being able to establish healthy boundaries, accepting good and bad ⁓ about yourselves and about others and sort of not living in this black and white world. And then ⁓ learning to be an adult, we would call it adulting.

It's an older

Carter Morgan (1:01:42)

Yeah

Austen (1:01:43)

book so it doesn't have that phrase but we'll call it adulting, like dealing with authority, dealing with responsibility. And I feel like those, all three of these books helped me in significant ways and they may be into a different person and I think that that comes out in the career so hopefully that'll be helpful for listeners.

Carter Morgan (1:01:59)

No, I love it. mean, for me, at least you're firing in all cylinders because Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. I don't believe I've read it all the way through, but Stephen Covey, ⁓ he's a great, he got his doctorate from my ⁓ alma mater, BYU. And so he's a very popular figure amongst kind of my people. ⁓ Abraham Lincoln, consider myself an amateur American historian, particularly presidential history. And so I've never heard that book. so honestly, I just finished my last kind of pleasure book. We always have a podcast book we're reading and then.

I'm usually reading for pleasure. So I'm gonna buy that tonight because that sounds fascinating and then and I'm also you know religious and so your final book from a Christian perspective I Really admire too. All you needed was like a book about Walt Disney and you would have been hit like bad of 100 and for ⁓ For things I'm interested in ⁓ Austin such a pleasure to have you on I'd be remiss if I didn't mention I was looking at your LinkedIn and saw that you are your bachelor's degrees from Georgia Tech Nathan and I are both

Austen (1:02:33)

It's great one.

I would hit all the things. Next time.

Of course,

yeah.

Carter Morgan (1:02:58)

graduates

of the online masters from Georgia Tech, which we recognize is not completely analogous to the on-campus experience, but we have great affection for the institution of Georgia Tech. So always happy to meet, yeah, yeah.

Austen (1:03:01)

Great.

I love it. It was great. Great.

Well, best school. I ⁓ got my PhD at Stanford, got my undergraduate at Georgia Tech. And honestly, maybe I'll get in trouble for saying this, but I would say if I was going to hire an engineer, I would hire an engineer from Georgia Tech.

Carter Morgan (1:03:16)

Nice.

Nathan Toups (1:03:23)

A rambling wreck. Yeah, there we go.

Carter Morgan (1:03:23)

Georgia Tech. Well, ⁓

Austen (1:03:25)

you

Carter Morgan (1:03:27)

my apologies for beating you in the Pop Tarts Bowl recently. I don't know if you follow Georgia Tech football, but that was fun. BYU played Georgia Tech. You had a good season. Yeah, they're my second team. BYU football is like my passion in life. then Georgia Tech I like to keep up with. They've been having a couple of good seasons.

Austen (1:03:32)

I don't I don't it's the worst I have friends I have friends who didn't go there, but like they they remind me like hey Did you guys did great this weekend? I'm like what ⁓ Yeah, okay? Thanks. That's my that's my sports sports ball for me

Nathan Toups (1:03:44)

Ahem.

My undergrad was at LSU and it makes every football fan so disappointed that I had literally know nothing. I'm like, yeah, cool.

Carter Morgan (1:03:53)

Yeah, isn't that crazy?

Yeah.

Austen (1:04:02)

I'm horrible. I'm horrible with sports. Yeah, anyway.

Carter Morgan (1:04:02)

⁓ Well, Austin, is there anything you'd obviously we'd like to ask authors if there's anything they want to plug before leaving? Obviously, we've spent the whole podcast kind of plugging your book, mastering behavioral interviews. Anything else you'd like to let our audience know about?

Austen (1:04:16)

Well, I do offer a free newsletter and when you sign up, you get a bunch of free resources that I send you, so prep plans and some of the greatest hits off the newsletter. So I highly recommend you sign up, it's free. ⁓ And I think if you're going through a preparation experience for interviews, I think it's the best place to get behavioral interview prep info.

Carter Morgan (1:04:22)

Great.

That's fantastic. Austin, thanks so much for joining us. ⁓ Listeners, you can always find us on Twitter at BookOverflowPod. I'm on Twitter at Carter Morgan. You can contact us at contact at BookOverflow.io. You can go to BookOverflow.io to see our website. You can see our upcoming reading schedule, what we've read in the past, some leaks of some of more prominent interviews we've done. And you can also subscribe to Nathan's newsletter for his consulting agency, Rojo Roboto, at RojoRoboto.com slash newsletter.

Austin, such a pleasure to have you on. Can't recommend the book enough people mastering behavioral interviews, a must have, especially if you have behavioral interviews coming up or feel like that's somewhere you've struggled in the past. ⁓ Like we said, really is, I would say the seminal book in our industry about this specific topic right now. So big, big recommendation from us here at Book Overflow. And Austin, again, thanks so much for coming on.

Austen (1:05:25)

Yeah, thanks. It's awesome to be here.

Carter Morgan (1:05:27)

All right, we'll see you around,