Why Being A Good Interviewer Is So Hard

Every software engineer know what it's like to be interviewed, but few know what it's like being on the other side of the table giving the interview. It's important to understand this flipped perspective as it will help you resonate with the interviewer.

Here are the core points from the video:
- A good interviewer has 2 core goals:
  - Get signal on the candidate's abilities
  - Provide a great candidate experience
- Unfortunately, these 2 things usually conflict. In order to get good signal, the candidate often times has to struggle to solve a tough problem. Struggle is generally not associated with good experience.
- *A truly good interviewer makes it so that the candidate enjoyed their round even if they didn't pass.* This means that you need to get signal in a positive way by building the candidate up and bringing out their true skills without solving too much of the problem for them.

Related resources:
- [[Taro Top 10] Effective Interview Prep](https://www.jointaro.com/playlist/HLBYxJI7D1j8STolrwum/)
- [[Masterclass] How To Ace Your Big Tech Interview - Data Structures And Algorithms](https://www.jointaro.com/lesson/V4sTACzfOh22nMVcUV3w/masterclass-how-to-ace-your-big-tech-interview-data-structures-and-algorithms/)
- [[Masterclass] How To Ace Your Big Tech Interview - System Design](https://www.jointaro.com/lesson/J3I9fTW9ulr6T9KjxpqY/masterclass-how-to-ace-your-big-tech-interview-system-design/)
- [How Alex Got Into Meta With 0 Prior LeetCode Experience](https://www.jointaro.com/lesson/ZYiTbN21FsqFxFdpwt5a/how-alex-got-into-meta-with-0-prior-leetcode-experience/)

Closing Advice- Relationships Control Your Progress

In this lesson, we discuss the **career lesson Ethan wishes he had understood earlier: being right and technically capable are not enough to determine how far you progress**. Understanding the organizational dynamics happening around you—and recognizing the importance of relationships—can be just as important for navigating your career as the quality of your individual work.

- **Being right isn’t enough:** Technical expertise and strong execution matter, but they are only part of what determines your ability to succeed and advance within an organization.
- **Take organizational dynamics seriously:** Even individual contributors are affected by management decisions and workplace politics, so dismissing them as simply “management stuff” can leave you unaware of forces shaping your career.
- **Invest in relationships throughout your career:** Relationships play a significant role in creating trust, opportunities, support, and ultimately your ability to progress within an organization.

Original podcast link:[ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WaeGfLnRvc&t=24s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WaeGfLnRvc&t=24s)

Breaking The Plateau

In this lesson, we discuss why **career progression at senior levels requires developing new skills rather than simply becoming better at the skills that earned your earlier promotions**. Hard work and strong execution can drive early career advancement, but moving beyond levels such as staff engineer or frontline manager requires learning to delegate, communicate, influence others, and let go of responsibilities that no longer belong at your level.

- **Stop doing your current job harder:** Working longer or producing more of the same output may not demonstrate readiness for the next level. Advancement requires understanding what is fundamentally different about the role above you.
- **Learn what to let go of and what to develop:** Senior roles require stepping away from hands-on control and micromanagement while developing skills such as delegation, communication, and enabling other people to perform effectively.
- **Ask for advice from people who have already made the transition:** Talk to leaders one or two levels above you about what they had to stop doing, what they needed to learn, and what they see holding you back. Asking for advice can also produce more useful insights than simply asking for feedback.

Original podcast link:[ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WaeGfLnRvc&t=24s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WaeGfLnRvc&t=24s)

The Transfer Play

In this lesson, we discuss what happens when **employees believe their manager is underperforming and consider escalating the problem to their skip-level leader**. Raising concerns about a manager can be difficult because acknowledging the problem creates significant work for senior leadership. The conversation explores why a single complaint may be dismissed and how multiple independent reports can make an organizational problem much harder to overlook.

- **Understand your skip-level manager’s incentives:** Accepting that a manager is failing may mean managing them out, finding and training a replacement, and temporarily absorbing their responsibilities—giving senior leaders practical reasons to be cautious before acting.
- **A single complaint may be interpreted as an individual conflict:** When only one employee raises a concern, leadership may question whether the issue lies with the manager or the employee making the complaint.
- **Corroborating experiences make concerns more credible:** When several employees independently report the same pattern of behavior, it becomes easier for senior leadership to recognize that the problem may be systemic and requires investigation or action.

Original podcast link:[ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WaeGfLnRvc&t=24s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WaeGfLnRvc&t=24s)

Why Nice People Get Stuck

In this lesson, we discuss how **reorganizations can sometimes be used to indirectly manage leaders out of a company**. Rather than formally terminating someone, leadership may assign them responsibilities that are less desirable, less influential, or poorly aligned with their ambitions—knowing they may eventually choose to leave. The conversation also explores why agreeable “team players” can inadvertently receive less desirable assignments and why communicating your career goals is essential.

- **Reorgs can be used to encourage voluntary departures:** Moving an ambitious employee into a role they don’t want can be an indirect way of signaling that their future opportunities within the organization are limited.
- **Being a team player can have unintended consequences:** Reliable employees who rarely push back may be given undesirable responsibilities precisely because leaders trust them to accept what the organization needs.
- **Managers can’t always guess what you want:** You don’t need to become confrontational, but clearly communicating your ambitions and preferences gives leadership the information needed to advocate for your career instead of assuming you’re satisfied with whatever role you’re given.

Original podcast link:[ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WaeGfLnRvc&t=24s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WaeGfLnRvc&t=24s)

Two Paths To The Top

In this lesson, we discuss how **solving meaningful problems for your manager can become one of the most effective paths to career advancement**. By becoming the person leadership trusts with difficult problems, you increase your value and create leverage to pursue your own career goals. At the same time, career growth doesn’t have to come exclusively from assigned work—high performers can also create their own opportunities by identifying promising ideas, taking calculated risks, and turning them into meaningful business impact.

- **“Solve problems for your boss” is a powerful career strategy:** Taking ownership of difficult problems builds trust and makes you someone your manager wants to retain, support, and advocate for.
- **Create opportunities instead of waiting for them:** Career-defining impact can also come from identifying problems or opportunities yourself and pursuing ideas that leadership may not initially recognize or prioritize.
- **Balance execution with calculated experimentation:** Deliver on the work your organization depends on while reserving room for thoughtful bets of your own. Not every experiment will succeed, so recognize failures quickly while maintaining a strong overall track record.

Original podcast link:[ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WaeGfLnRvc&t=24s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WaeGfLnRvc&t=24s)

The "My Career Is Important To Me" Script

In this lesson, we discuss how to **advocate for what you want in your career without crossing the line into unreasonable demands or threats**. Being vocal about your ambitions can help managers understand and support your goals, but effective self-advocacy requires diplomacy, awareness of business needs, and an understanding of your company’s culture.

- **Be ambitious, but keep your requests defensible:** Asking for greater responsibility or scope can help advance your career, but pushing for resources the business doesn’t actually need—such as unnecessary headcount for a promotion—can undermine your case.
- **Communicate your ambitions without making threats:** Clearly express that career progression matters to you while leaving room for a constructive conversation, rather than using ultimatums or creating an adversarial relationship with your manager.
- **Adapt your approach to your company’s culture:** The right level of assertiveness varies between workplaces. Understanding your organization’s norms can help you find the balance between being too quiet and becoming so pushy that your advocacy works against you.

Original podcast link:[ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WaeGfLnRvc&t=24s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WaeGfLnRvc&t=24s)

The Squeaky Wheel

In this lesson, we discuss how **individual career ambitions and communication can influence decisions during a reorganization**. Leaders are rarely considering business needs alone—they are also balancing retention risks and what individual employees have communicated about their goals. This creates an uncomfortable reality: employees who clearly advocate for what they want may receive more consideration than equally strong performers who remain quiet and assume their work will speak for itself.

- **Reorg decisions balance business and people:** Leaders may shape an organization around both business objectives and the career ambitions, retention risks, and demands of individual employees.
- **The “squeaky wheel” can get more attention:** When two employees perform similarly, a manager may prioritize the person who has been more vocal about their expectations or more likely to leave.
- **Career advocacy matters:** Being reliable and agreeable doesn’t guarantee that leaders understand what you want. Employees who clearly communicate their ambitions and ask for opportunities give managers more information to consider when making organizational decisions.

Original podcast link:[ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WaeGfLnRvc&t=24s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WaeGfLnRvc&t=24s)

Writing Well As A Software Engineer

In this lesson, Philip explains how he transformed from someone who dismissed writing and other “soft skills” into a prolific writer who considers communication essential for technical professionals. He shares how reading great literature changed his appreciation for language and how deliberate practice—especially rewriting and editing his own work—helped him develop his distinctive writing style.

- **To write well, read well.** Philip developed his appreciation for writing by reading exceptional authors and paying attention to how they structure sentences, tell stories, and communicate ideas. He continues to notice and learn from effective rhetorical techniques in other people’s writing.
- **Great writing comes through rewriting.** Many of Philip’s posts went through multiple revisions before publication. Being willing to edit heavily, discard material, experiment with structure, and occasionally seek professional feedback helped him continually improve.
- **Writing creates leverage for technical ideas.** Strong communication allows engineers to share knowledge beyond the people they work with directly. Philip’s Great Posts Explorer extended this idea by helping employees rediscover valuable, evergreen writing that might otherwise have disappeared into the company’s history.

Gratitude & Paying It Forward

In this lesson, Philip shares the story behind spending more than $23,000 to buy coffee for everyone at Facebook on his final day at the company. What began years earlier as a simple Christmas gesture became a meaningful way to close out a chapter of his career and express gratitude to a company that had given him extraordinary opportunities, mentorship, and financial success.

- **Recognize the role luck plays in success.** Philip credits hard work for parts of his career, but also acknowledges circumstances outside his control—from when and where he was born to joining Facebook at an unexpectedly transformative moment.
- **Gratitude can be expressed by paying success forward.** After Facebook’s IPO, Philip donated his proceeds to charity, and when he eventually left the company, buying coffee across several offices became another way to give something back.
- **Small gestures can create an outsized impact.** What began as buying coworkers coffee for a day created genuine joy and became a memorable tradition—showing that generosity doesn't always need to be complicated to be meaningful.

Taking a Step Back from IC9 to IC7 at Meta

In this lesson, Philip shares the story behind his decision to move from E9 to E7 at Facebook after transitioning from site leadership back to an individual contributor role. Rather than viewing the change as a career setback, he saw it as an opportunity to align his level, compensation, and expectations with the work he actually wanted to do—and knew he could perform well.

- **Optimize for the role where you can perform well, not the highest title you can hold.** Philip preferred excelling at E7 over struggling to meet expectations at E9 and believed his level and compensation should reflect his actual contributions.
- **Moving down requires separating status from career satisfaction.** Going from leading hundreds of people to becoming an individual member of a team requires being comfortable giving up hierarchy, influence, and prestige in exchange for work that better fits you.
- **When you leave leadership, you also need to relinquish the authority that came with it.** Successfully stepping back means supporting the new leaders rather than continuing to use your previous influence to shape decisions that are no longer yours to make.

Senior Managers Adam Admires

In this lesson, **Adam Ernst**, Software Engineer at **Meta**, reflects on the engineers he most admires throughout his career and the qualities that set them apart. Rather than attributing success to a single skill, Adam highlights how exceptional engineers excel in different ways—from writing code and debugging complex systems to communicating ideas, launching new initiatives, and aligning teams. He emphasizes that there is no single blueprint for becoming a high-impact Individual Contributor.

- **Exceptional Engineers Have Different Superpowers:** Adam highlights colleagues who excel in distinct areas, including high-volume coding, deep debugging, launching ambitious projects, technical communication, and organizational alignment. There is no single path to becoming an outstanding engineer.
- **Leverage Your Strengths While Appreciating Others':** Adam recognizes that his own strengths lie in hands-on engineering, while others surpass him in areas such as cross-team leadership, strategic communication, and stakeholder management. Great engineering organizations thrive because individuals bring complementary skills.
- **Learn from Role Models, Not Copies:** Rather than trying to emulate one person completely, Adam encourages engineers to study the specific qualities they admire in others—whether it's technical depth, problem-solving, writing, or leadership—and incorporate those strengths into their own unique career path.

Original podcast link: [**https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YA_OYJF3Mmw**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YA_OYJF3Mmw)

How To Handle a Failed Project

In this lesson, **Adam Ernst**, Software Engineer at **Meta**, reflects on the difficult decision to end **ComponentScript** after realizing it was not achieving the impact it was designed for. He discusses how performance reviews provided honest feedback, why responsibly shutting down a project can strengthen rather than damage your reputation, and the importance of recognizing when persistence becomes counterproductive. Adam offers valuable advice for engineers navigating ambitious projects that may not succeed.

- **Performance Reviews Should Inform, Not Define You:** Receiving a "Meets Most" performance rating helped Adam recognize that ComponentScript was no longer delivering the expected impact. Rather than viewing the feedback as a failure, he used it as a signal to reassess the project's direction.
- **End Projects Responsibly:** Instead of abandoning ComponentScript, Adam personally helped teams migrate to alternative solutions, removed the framework entirely from the codebase, and documented the lessons learned. Taking ownership of the cleanup earned trust and demonstrated strong engineering leadership.
- **Listen to Early Warning Signs:** Looking back, Adam realized he had sensed for nearly a year that the project was losing momentum. His instinct was to write more code in hopes of turning things around, but he later learned that recognizing when to pivot—or stop altogether—is just as important as technical execution.

Original podcast link: [**https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YA_OYJF3Mmw**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YA_OYJF3Mmw)

The Story Behind Component Script

In this lesson, **Adam Ernst**, Software Engineer at **Meta**, reflects on one of the most ambitious—and ultimately unsuccessful—projects of his career: **ComponentScript**, a cross-platform UI framework designed to unify iOS and Android development. Although the framework was technically sophisticated and solved many engineering challenges, it failed to gain widespread adoption. Adam shares the key lessons he learned about product strategy, developer adoption, and why technical excellence alone is not enough to ensure success.

- **Technical Success Doesn't Guarantee Product Success:** ComponentScript delivered strong technical capabilities—including type safety, seamless integration with native frameworks, and bidirectional interoperability—but these strengths were not enough to drive widespread adoption.
- **Know Your Users and Focus Your Strategy:** One of the project's biggest shortcomings was failing to identify a clear target audience. By trying to appeal to both native mobile engineers and JavaScript developers, the framework ultimately resonated with neither. Adam also learned the importance of concentrating efforts on winning over a single committed team before attempting broad adoption.
- **Embrace Failure as a Learning Opportunity:** Adam openly documented ComponentScript's failure through a detailed postmortem, using the experience to share hard-earned lessons with the engineering community. His reflection highlights the value of transparency, continuous learning, and recognizing that successful engineering requires balancing technical excellence with usability, adoption, and organizational alignment.

Original podcast link: [**https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YA_OYJF3Mmw**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YA_OYJF3Mmw)

Getting Promoted to Senior Staff Engineer

n this lesson, **Adam Ernst**, Software Engineer at **Meta**, shares the story behind **ComponentKit**, the declarative UI framework that played a pivotal role in his promotion to **Senior Staff Engineer (E7)**. Faced with a rapidly growing Facebook News Feed that was becoming difficult to maintain, Adam and his team reimagined iOS development by adapting the core ideas of React for native mobile applications—years before SwiftUI and React Native became mainstream. He also discusses how he overcame resistance to a radically new approach and the leadership lessons he learned while driving large-scale technical change.

- **Reinventing UI Architecture at Scale:** To address performance issues, crashes, and increasing complexity in Facebook News Feed, Adam developed **ComponentKit**, a declarative UI framework inspired by React that improved maintainability, rendering performance, and developer productivity long before similar technologies became industry standards.
- **Winning Adoption Through Evidence and Collaboration:** Convincing engineers to embrace a new programming paradigm required more than technical excellence. Adam demonstrated tangible improvements through cleaner code and better performance, leveraged trusted allies to advocate for the framework, and found compromises that incorporated ideas from competing internal projects.
- **Strong Conviction with Practical Flexibility:** Adam remained confident that ComponentKit was the right solution for Facebook's highly dynamic feed while acknowledging that no architecture is universally optimal. His experience highlights the importance of understanding trade-offs, tailoring solutions to the problem at hand, and leading innovation through collaboration rather than ideology.

Original podcast link: [**https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YA_OYJF3Mmw**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YA_OYJF3Mmw)

What Are Advanced Concepts I Should Know?

In this lesson we talk about how to effectively prepare for AI-assisted coding interviews, with a focus on shifting your study habits to match what these interviews actually test.

- **Learn the "why" before the "how"** — rather than drilling implementations, focus on understanding the canonical problem each data structure solves and practice explaining it in one sentence out loud; with AI handling the code, being unable to independently identify the right approach is now much harder to hide or compensate for.
- **Know the common gotchas for each pattern** — every classic structure has a specific edge case trap (e.g. the `is_end` flag in a trie, recency updates in an LRU cache, off-by-one errors in sliding windows); getting familiar with these upfront dramatically speeds up your ability to verify AI-generated output during the interview.
- **Practice reading code, not just writing it** — since interviews now involve more time spent reading starter code and verifying AI output than typing from scratch, deliberately train yourself to mentally trace logic quickly by reading existing solutions online or having AI generate code for problems you already understand, then tracing through them by hand.

How Do I Talk Without Sounding Chaotic?

In this lesson we talk about how to communicate effectively during an AI-assisted coding interview without sounding scattered, frantic, or going completely silent.

- **Avoid the two extremes** — narrating every single keystroke comes across as junior, while going silent for several minutes leaves the interviewer in the dark; the goal is to sound controlled and intentional somewhere in between.
- **Choose the communication model that fits your thinking style** — Model A is light, continuous commentary as you work ("I'm pulling the date out of each event to populate the per-day set"), while Model B is stating your high-level intent upfront, working silently for 60–90 seconds, then summarizing what you did before repeating the cycle.
- **Practice talking while you work before the interview** — like touch typing, verbalizing your thought process while solving a problem is a skill that needs to be rehearsed, not figured out on the spot; a few mock sessions with a friend or mentor can make a significant difference.

How To Debug Effectively with AI As My Partner?

In this lesson we talk about how to debug effectively with AI as a partner during a coding interview, and when to use it versus when to rely on your own judgment.

- **Use AI to generate more test cases, but step through code yourself** — AI can rapidly produce test cases that would take much longer to write manually, but since it predicts words rather than executing code, it can reproduce the same bugs it originally introduced, making it unreliable for tracing logic line by line.
- **Avoid leaning on AI for debugging, but use it strategically when stuck** — rather than asking AI to find or fix a bug directly, prompt it to brainstorm multiple possible causes, which keeps you in the driver's seat, surfaces hypotheses for you to validate with your own judgment, and reduces the risk of confidently wrong AI suggestions.
- **Always rerun all tests after a fix, not just the failing one** — thorough test coverage lets passing tests serve as reliable verification; if your test suite is thin, compensate with more manual code inspection to avoid introducing regressions you won't have time to track down later.

What Should I Do In The First 10 Minutes?

In this lesson we talk about how to strategically approach the first 10 minutes of an AI-assisted coding interview to set yourself up for success.

- **Resist the urge to dive in immediately** — instead of jumping straight into coding or prompting the AI, start by restating the problem in your own words and doing a strategic skim of the codebase to understand existing functionality and function signatures.
- **Uncover hidden requirements** — as you explore the code, actively look for things like bot user filtering, non-active event handling, or data normalization that may not have been spelled out in the prompt, and clarify these with your interviewer.
- **Turn requirements into tests early** — unlike traditional interviews, convert each discovered requirement into an executable test case upfront (using AI to help generate them if needed), since verifying AI-generated code is a core part of the assessment.

Take Some Time To Reflect

We wrap up by reframing layoffs as a rare opportunity to pause, reflect, and intentionally design the next chapter of your career. Here are the core points from the lesson:

- A layoff often comes with severance and time, which is an incredibly valuable resource that gives you space to step off the hamster wheel and think clearly.
- Taking days or even weeks to reflect is worthwhile, since deep self-introspection about career direction, values, and long-term goals is difficult but high leverage.
- Being laid off can surface important questions you may have ignored while grinding, including whether you enjoy your role, your function, or even the tech industry at all.
- Boredom and distance from day-to-day work can spark creativity, learning, and exploration that are nearly impossible when you’re constantly shipping and firefighting.
- With persistence, reflection, and conversations with trusted people, a layoff can become a pivot point that leads to a more aligned, fulfilling next step—even if that path looks very different than before.

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