Learnings from conducting ~1,000 interviews at Amazon

Steve Huynh, formerly Principal Engineer at Amazon, shares observations from 10+ years of interviewing software engineers, and an excerpt from his new book, Technical Behavioral Interview

Steve Huynh, formerly Principal Engineer at Amazon, shares observations from Bar Raiser, and an excerpt from his new book, Technical Behavioral Interview

Tech interviews have two parts: the technical interview – with a focus on things like coding, software architecture, problem solving – and the behavioral part – with a focus on past experience, and the situations that show you’d be a good fit at the company you’re interviewing with, along with things like attitude, motivation, culture fit. Technical interviews are going through a big change, thanks to AI tools: some companies are bringing in new, AI-assisted types of interviews, while others are trying to make “pre-AI” type interviews work.

What doesn’t seem to be changing is the second type of interviews: the behavioral ones. I’ve found the topic of behavioral interviews from a software engineer’s perspective somewhat under-discussed – even though this interview carries huge weight in securing an offer and what level you come in at. No matter how strong your technical skills are, especially at mid-sized and larger companies, you are unlikely to get an offer if you are deemed to not be a fit for what the company is looking for.

Steve Huynh was an engineer at Amazon for 17 years – I previously did a podcast episode with him on the reality of being a principal engineer at Amazon. During this time, Steve conducted nearly 1,000 interviews, of which around 600 were Bar Raiser ones. Bar Raiser interviews are unique to Amazon: it’s an interview conducted by someone outside of the hiring team, with the goal of ensuring that the new hire raises the company’s talent bar.

After leaving the e-commerce giant, Steve spent 2 years researching and writing the book Technical Behavioral Interview: An Insider’s Guide.

My copy of Technical Behavioral Interview: an Insider’s Guide

Today, we cover two topics on interviews and behavioral interviews:

1. Learnings from conducting ~1,000 behavioral interviews at Amazon. Steve reflects of major observations from his 17 years at Amazon, covering:

• You’re over-prepared for one interview and unprepared for the other

• How you deliver the story matters as much as the story itself

• The interview is an audition for what it’s like to work with you

2. What companies are looking for during behavioral interviews. An excerpt from Steve’s new book, Technical Behavioral Interview, covering ~75% of a full chapter of the book (out of the 14 total chapters.) We get into:

• Understanding fit: role and company

• The four dimensions that determine your level

• What each level looks like

• Reading and calibrating your own level

• Researching what companies really value

Longtime readers might remember Steve from my podcast with him a year back: What is a Principal Engineer at Amazon? With Steve Huynh

My usual disclaimer: as with all my recommendations, I was not paid for this article, and none of the links are affiliates. See my ethics statement for more.

With this, it’s over to Steve:

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1. Learnings from conducting ~1,000 behavioral interviews at Amazon

A Bar Raiser is a specially trained interviewer whose job is to ensure that every hire raises the average talent level at Amazon. I had veto power over any candidate. I sat on nearly a thousand interview loops across every level from intern to Principal Engineer.

After 50 or so interviews as a Bar Raiser, the patterns became impossible to miss. And this was the biggest one:

The candidates who didn’t get offers seldom failed because they lacked technical skill. They failed because of how they presented themselves.

For sure, technical preparation is crucial, and I’m not telling you to skip it. But most candidates have massive blind spots when it comes to non-technical matters, which is a big problem. Why? Because that blind spot is where most hiring decisions are made.

The Bar Raiser who trained me put it this way:

Technical skills are the ante. They get you into the game. But they’re not what wins you the hand.

I didn’t fully appreciate what that meant until I’d seen candidates who were technically very strong get rejected because of everything else.

Think about it. By the time you’re sitting in a final round of interviews, you’ve already passed at least one technical screen or take-home assignment. The company already knows you could probably do the job. They already know you want to work with them.

But that’s not what the final round is for.

The final round is when the team figures out whether they want to work with you. Being technically proficient is part of it, but it’s not all of it. Can you explain your thinking clearly when you’re stumped? How do you handle it when things go wrong? Can they picture you in a design review or in a tough conversation with a partner team?

Fit.

Fit is what decides most hiring outcomes, yet it’s the thing most candidates spend the least time preparing for. After nearly a thousand interviews, I can tell you exactly where the gap is and how you can close it.

Learning #1: You’re over-prepared for one interview and unprepared for the other

The average candidate preparing for a tech interview probably spends 95% of their time on technical preparation and 5% on everything else. Some spend literally zero on everything else.

I get why. Technical preparation feels concrete. You can grind coding problems and measure your progress. You can study system design patterns and feel yourself getting sharper. There’s a clear input/output relationship. Do more problems, get better at problems.

For most technical interviews, even if you haven’t seen the exact problem before, you can still do a decent job. It’s simply not possible to prepare for every problem, so it’s expected that you can reason through an unfamiliar coding question and pick up on hints the interviewer gives you. You can work through a system design problem by applying fundamentals you already know. It’s expected that you will encounter new questions during an interview, so it isn’t fatal if you’re a competent engineer who can think on your feet.

However, the non-technical rounds are the opposite. You cannot wing them and expect to do well. When an interviewer says, “Tell me about a time something went wrong on a project and how you handled it” and you haven’t thought about that question before, there is no hint they can give you. There’s no reasoning your way through it in real time. You either have a prepared story ready to go, or you’re going to mumble your way through a word salad while the interviewer watches.

I’ve seen this play out hundreds of times. A candidate would crush the coding round, then I would ask them about a difficult decision they made, and they would fall apart. They would pick a half-remembered example, start rambling, backtrack to add context they forgot, in the process losing track of the question. Then, five minutes later, they would land on something like, “So, yeah, it worked out in the end.”

These candidates were often strong coders, but that didn’t matter. At the debriefs, the feedback was always some version of “I couldn’t get a concrete answer about their experience. Every story was vague and unconvincing.” We couldn’t extend an offer when a candidate couldn’t articulate how they worked.

The technical bar was met, but the hiring decision was made in the behavioral round.

Here’s what’s frustrating about this. Non-technical preparation takes a fraction of the time for technical.

If you’re going to spend 80 to 100 hours preparing for an interview cycle, spending a single weekend on your stories might be the highest-leverage investment you make.

Ten hours of story prep can completely change the outcome of your behavioral rounds. Meanwhile, your 80th hour of LeetCode will give you almost nothing you didn’t already have at 60.

The returns on technical prep diminish rapidly. The returns on story prep are exponential because almost nobody does it at all.

What to do: How are you currently splitting your interview prep time? If it’s 99% technical and 1% everything else, you’re over-indexed on the part with diminishing returns and under-indexed on the part where hiring decisions get made. You don’t need to cut your technical prep dramatically. Just reallocate. If you’re planning to spend 80 hours preparing, take 10 of those hours and move them to non-technical preparation. That reallocation will do more for your odds than 10 more hours working on practice problems.

Learning #2: How you deliver the story matters as much as the story itself

You can have the most impressive accomplishment of your career ready for your interview and completely waste it with bad delivery. The most common version of this is what I call the “ramble and stumble.”

The candidate starts talking, and you genuinely can’t tell if they’re figuring out the story as they go or if they’ve simply never said these words out loud before. Or they might give you five minutes of context and then still backtrack to add details they forgot. By the time they reach the outcome, you’ve lost track of how you got there.

Here’s something that’s always struck me as odd. If you had a big presentation at work, you’d spend hours preparing for it, right?. You’d think about the structure, the flow, the key points. You’d rehearse it. You might even do a couple of dry runs with a colleague. Nobody wants to walk into a presentation and wing it.

But in a job interview, where the stakes are arguably higher than any single presentation you’ll ever give? People wing those constantly. They walk in having never practiced their stories out loud. They might have thought about them, but they’ve never spoken the words, heard how they sound, or timed how long they take. Then they’re surprised when the words come out as a mess.

Think about any other high-stakes skill. You wouldn’t expect to be good at golf without practicing at the driving range. You wouldn’t expect to give a great keynote the first time you stepped on stage. Nobody calls a musician fake for rehearsing before a concert.

But for some reason, many people feel that preparing interview stories is inauthentic. As if it’s cheating somehow. As if the “real” version of you is the one that stumbles through an unrehearsed answer under pressure.

It’s not. The real you communicates clearly what you’ve done and what you’re capable of.

What to do: Good delivery doesn’t require a lot of charisma or natural presentation skills, but it does require practice. Start with the two questions that come up in virtually every interview: “Tell me about yourself” and “Why do you want to work here?” Write down your answers. Then record yourself delivering them. Watch the recording and take notes. Where did you ramble? Where did you fill space with filler words? Did you look nervous? Then do it again. And again. Keep going until you watch the recording back and think “That sounds like someone I’d like to work with.”

Once those two are solid, pick stories from your career and do the same thing. This process will be uncomfortable at first. Most people hate watching themselves on camera. Do it anyway. Thirty minutes of this will up-level your interview performance much more than 20 hours of coding exercises could ever do.

Learning #3: The interview is an audition for what it’s like to work with you

Most candidates think the interview is an exam. If you get the right answers, then you’ll pass the test and get the job. That’s simply not how it works. Yes, you are being evaluated, and what you say matters. But there is no answer key. The interviewer doesn’t have a rubric with the “correct” responses to which they compare your answers. They’re forming an impression of you as a person, and that impression is far more nuanced than “right” or “wrong.”

By the time you’re sitting across from the interviewer, you’ve already jumped through some technical hoops. The company already has evidence from your resume that you can code or design systems at the level they need. That bar has been cleared. The final round goes deeper on the technical side, but it’s also trying to answer a completely different question: Would we want this person on the team? Would we trust their judgment in a crisis? Would they make our team’s software better or worse?

As a Bar Raiser, my specific job was to determine whether a candidate would raise the bar, meaning that they would be better than at least 50% of the people already at the company in that role.

The thing most people don’t realize is that the type of coding we asked about in interviews wasn’t what we did on the job. Nobody was writing algorithms on a whiteboard during their workday. The questions we asked tested problem-solving ability in an artificial environment.

But the behavioral questions, the soft questions, those tested situations we dealt with every single day. Navigating disagreements, handling projects that were going sideways, influencing without authority, making tradeoffs with incomplete information. These weren’t hypothetical scenarios pulled out of a textbook. They were just another Tuesday.

So when I asked a candidate to tell me about a time they had to push back on a stakeholder, I wasn’t waiting to hear the right answer; I was picturing them in our next planning and prioritization meeting. When they described how they handled a conflict on their team, I was asking myself whether I’d want to be in that room with them. Every answer was a preview of what it would be like to work alongside that person day to day.

The candidates who treated it like a test tried to figure out what I wanted to hear and then gave me that answer. That’s exactly the wrong approach. They gave polished, rehearsed answers with no rough edges and perfect endings where everything worked out and every decision was the right one. I’d walk out thinking “I have no idea what it would actually be like to work with this person.” And when that uncertainty showed up across multiple interviews in the debrief, it almost always turned into a “No.”

What to do: For each story you’re preparing, stop thinking about what the interviewer wants to hear. Instead, think about what you’d want to hear from someone interviewing to join your team. You’d want to hear how they actually think. You’d want the real version of what happened, including the parts that were hard and the calls that were close. You’d want to walk away feeling like you understood what it would be like to work with them on a tough problem. Give your interviewer that same thing. Be honest and let them see how you think. That’s worth more than any polished answer.

What ~1,000 interviews taught me

After all those interviews, the lesson I keep coming back to is simple.

The people who get hired are the ones who can walk into a room and tell a clear story. This story is about their work and their capabilities, and makes the interviewer think, “I want to work with that person.”

Being able to tell this story is a skill. And like any skill, it gets better with practice. Most people never practice it because they don’t think of it as something you can prepare for, but you can. And a little preparation here goes further than almost anything else you can do for your career.

2. What companies are looking for during behavioral interviews

The below are excerpts from Chapter 2 from Technical Behavioral Interview: An Insider’s Guide. Some sections have been cut out and lightly edited for this article. Copyright © 2026 Steve Huynh. Used with permission.

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Technical skills alone don’t determine your offer. Otherwise, those who can solve the coding and system design problems would get the same result. Instead, companies use behavioral interviews to answer two critical questions: Do you fit with both the role and the company? And if you do fit, at what level will you be most effective?

Get both right, and you will receive an offer at the appropriate level. Get the fit wrong, and you’ll be rejected regardless of your skills. Get the level wrong, and you’ll be either down-leveled or rejected for being underqualified.

This chapter explains how companies make their assessments of fit and level by analyzing the signals in your stories. Once you understand these dimensions, you’ll pick better stories and signal the right level.

Understanding Fit: Role and Company

The primary consideration for any tech role is whether you have the technical skills to do the job. Companies will assess this mostly through the technical parts of the interview, for example, coding challenges, system design, or whatever technical evaluation matches your role. If you can’t demonstrate the core technical capability, nothing else matters.

But technical skills alone don’t predict success. Companies learned this the hard way by hiring smart people who couldn’t work effectively in their environment. That’s why behavioral interviews focus on two additional types of fit:

Role Fit: Can you handle the specific challenges and working conditions of this position? A backend role at a fast-growing startup requires different capabilities than a backend role at an established enterprise. The technical skills might be similar, but the role demands will be different.

Company Fit: Will you thrive in the environment in which this organization operates? This goes beyond surface-level culture. They are assessing whether your working style, decision-making approach, and values match with how the company gets things done.

How Companies Detect Fit Through Signals

Companies can’t directly ask the question, “Would you fit here?” What candidate would torpedo their chance of success by answering with a “No”? Instead, companies look for signals in your stories that indicate alignment or misalignment.

Role Fit Signals emerge from how you describe handling situations similar to what the role requires:

• If the role requires working with ambiguous requirements, do your stories show comfort with uncertainty?

• If the position involves cross-team coordination, do you show an ability to cope with organizational complexity?

• If the job needs rapid iteration, do your examples show shipping quickly and adjusting based on feedback?

Company Fit Signals come from the choices you made and how you describe them:

• A company that values “bias for action” looks for stories that show you moving quickly despite incomplete information.

• An organization that prizes “customer obsession” wants to hear examples of you going deep to understand user needs.

• A place that emphasizes “radical transparency” seeks stories that show you sharing information openly, even when you’re uncomfortable.

The same story can send different signals to different companies. You spending three weeks perfecting a solution might demonstrate attention to quality at one company but analysis paralysis at another. Moving fast and fixing issues later demonstrates good judgment at a growth startup but recklessness at an established healthcare company.

Common “Mis-Fits”

Even a talented candidate will get rejected sometimes if they are not a good fit. The same behaviors that are positive at one company can signal poor fit at another.

Independence vs. Collaboration: This covers both how you work and how you make decisions. Some companies need people who pick up a problem, run with it, and come back with a solution. Others expect you to bring the team along at every step. These often go together: companies that want you to work solo also tend to want you to make calls on your own, and companies that want collaborative work also want group buy-in on decisions.

If every story you tell involves going off and building something alone, consensus-driven companies will worry you’ll steamroll people or make choices that won’t stick. Flip it around: if every story involves checking with the group before you act, companies that prize individual ownership will wonder whether you can make a decision without a meeting.

Speed vs. Thoroughness: Startups often need rapid experimentation, where you ship MVPs and iterate based on feedback, while companies in healthcare or finance require careful validation before any release. This tension also shows up in how teams think about code quality: some organizations will happily spend extra weeks on clean architecture, while others want a working solution on deadline even if the code needs cleanup later. Whereas stories about methodical testing might bore a startup, your “ship it and fix it” examples could terrify a medical device company.

Excellence vs. Pragmatism: Some organizations value technical excellence and clean architecture above all else. Others need pragmatic solutions that ship on deadline even if imperfect. Focusing on perfect code fails at deadline-driven companies, just as accepting technical debt everywhere fails at companies maintaining critical infrastructure.

Innovation vs. Stability: Some roles require creating new solutions and challenging existing approaches, while others need you to maintain and optimize proven systems. If you say that you’re constantly reinventing established processes, teams that value stability will not consider you a good fit. Conversely, stories that show you only follow existing patterns will disappoint teams that are looking for creative problem-solving

Direct vs. Diplomatic: Some cultures prize radical candor and want you to say exactly what you think. Others value maintaining harmony and face-saving communication. If you are too blunt, you will not fit in well at a relationship-focused company. If you are not direct enough, you will not like working at a company that values “disagree and commit.”

Data vs. Intuition: Some companies require data to justify every decision (”data-driven” cultures), while others trust experienced judgment and move on gut feel. Showing that you make decisions based on instinct does not impress analytical companies, and telling a company that values experienced judgment that you conduct three A/B tests to choose a button color will get you struck off their list.

Specialist vs. Generalist: Large companies often want deep experts who master one domain, while smaller companies need people who are comfortable wearing multiple hats. Know which sort of company you are walking into.

Once you understand fit, you can pick stories that match the company and the role.

The Four Dimensions That Determine Your Level

Companies assess your level through four dimensions that appear in every story you tell. Each dimension reveals different aspects of your capability. Together, they show the company where you operate most effectively.

Scope (Dimension #1)

Scope provides a measure of the number of people on your team and, extending outward as you advance, whose work was affected by your actions. The greater the number affected, the higher your level for this dimension.

Entry Level: Your work affects your own productivity and starts to help other team members. For example, you might improve how you handle assigned tasks or fix issues that were slowing down a few teammates.

Mid Level: Your work affects aspects of the team and shapes how it operates. You might redesign a process that changes a significant part of how your team works or solve problems that affect most of the team’s effectiveness.

Senior Level: Your work directly impacts your entire team and is beginning to influence at least one other team. Perhaps you create solutions that change how your whole team operates and affect workflows in adjacent teams, or you solve problems that require coordination with other groups. You may also start collaborating more closely with product or design partners on your immediate team’s work.

Staff Level: Your work directly impacts at least two teams and is beginning to have an influence on the broader division or organization. Examples of this include developing technical strategies that change how multiple teams make decisions and solving problems that require buy-in across several parts of engineering. Your influence extends beyond engineering into product, design, and program management as you shape solutions that affect how cross-functional partners work.

Principal Level: Your work affects many teams or changes how large parts of the organization operate. Perhaps you have created technical strategies that have influenced how dozens of teams make decisions. Or you have solved problems that cut across a large engineering organization. At this level, your influence regularly extends into business strategy, shaping decisions alongside product, design, program, and business leadership.

Contribution (Dimension #2)

Contribution captures what you did, not what happened around you. It is important to be precise about the line between “I” and “we.” Companies will expect to see evidence of increasing leadership and ownership as you advance in your career.

Entry Level: You execute assigned work and are beginning to take ownership of small pieces. Examples: implementing solutions designed by others; fixing bugs in existing systems; taking full responsibility for well-defined features within larger projects.

Mid Level: You own complete solutions from problem to implementation while also guiding others. Perhaps you have identified issues, designed the approaches, implemented them, and you have verified that they work, and you have helped your teammates understand the reasons for your decisions.

Senior Level: You lead initiatives requiring coordination. You’re expected to make progress even when the requirements are unclear or the path forward is uncertain. Examples of this include driving technical decisions for your team; mentoring others through complex problems; architecting solutions to be implemented by others; and ensuring quality work outcomes for many people.

Staff Level: You lead cross-team initiatives and establish technical direction, often in situations where the right approach isn’t obvious and stakeholders have competing priorities. This could look like defining technical approaches that are adopted by multiple teams, creating systems that enable other teams to solve problems on their own, or driving agreement on complex technical decisions across several teams.

Principal Level: You create organizational capabilities and establish new ways of working. At this level, you’re frequently operating in highly ambiguous environments where you must define the problem before you can solve it. You might define technical standards that guide dozens of teams, build systems that enable others to solve entire classes of problems, or transform how the organization approaches its hardest challenges.

Impact (Dimension #3)

Impact shows what changed for the better as a result of your work. Companies want to see that your work produced results worth the investment. Strong stories put numbers on the impact and connect technical wins to business or user outcomes.

Entry Level: You improve your personal productivity and are starting to help the team work better. Examples include reducing the time you spend on repetitive tasks, fixing issues that were slowing down teammates, or improving the quality of code in the areas you touch. Even simple measures matter at this level: time saved or bugs prevented.

Mid Level: You improve team effectiveness in specific areas and influence team-wide practices. Perhaps you reduced deployment times for specific workflows, eliminated categories of bugs in your domain, or you created tools that have made the team more productive in particular areas. You can quantify these improvements and connect them to broader outcomes like feature velocity or reliability.

Senior Level: You transform how your entire team works and are starting to have an impact beyond your team. For example, you might have introduced new workflows that changed your team’s capabilities. Or perhaps you eliminated major sources of operational problems, or the improvements that you have created have been adopted by adjacent teams. Your impact extends beyond just engineering metrics to product outcomes, user experience, or operational costs.

Staff Level: You improve how multiple teams operate and drive organizational improvements. These sorts of impact come from achievements such as establishing practices that several teams adopt, solving infrastructure problems that were impeding multiple teams, or creating new capabilities that open up new types of work across teams. Your measurable impact can be tied to business metrics like revenue, customer retention, or time-to-market.

Principal Level: You create organizational capabilities and drive strategic changes. Impact at this level could come from establishing technical foundations that dozens of teams use to build upon, solving problems that were blocking major business initiatives, or creating leverage that compounds benefits across the company. Your impact is measured in business outcomes and strategic capability, not just technical improvements.

Difficulty (Dimension #4)

Difficulty reflects the complexity of problems you’ve tackled, the constraints you have faced, and the trade-offs you have managed. Under this category, solving easy problems with big impacts is less impressive than hard problems solved well.

Entry Level: You work on straightforward problems within established patterns. For example, you might face challenges learning new technologies or debugging unfamiliar code, but the path forward becomes clearer once you understand the problem or ask for help.

Mid Level: You work through challenges and obstacles in your work. The problems you tackle have more moving parts and less obvious solutions. These could be competing requirements or having to work through technical complexity you haven’t seen before. Or perhaps you have had to manage dependencies within your team that affected your timeline or figure out solutions when the approach wasn’t immediately obvious.

Senior Level: You manage constraints and make technical decisions with team-level architectural implications. The problems you solve involve multiple interacting systems and competing concerns. You might have to balance needs across multiple stakeholders with different priorities. Maybe you make architectural decisions that affect how your whole team works, or you have to work around technical limitations that require creative solutions, or solve problems that require you to address both technical and business factors.

Staff Level: You manage competing trade-offs across multiple teams while handling problems with significant technical and organizational complexity. Examples of difficulty at staff level include:

• Balancing different technical approaches when teams have genuinely conflicting needs.

• Creating solutions that affect how several teams work together.

• Making architectural decisions that have to work across diverse contexts.

• Getting teams to agree when the technically optimal solution differs for each team.

Principal Level: You handle fundamental trade-offs between competing organizational needs or solve problems where no clear solution exists. The complexity at this level often involves novel problems that lack established patterns or precedents. You might balance technical excellence against delivery speed at organizational scale; work within organizational constraints while maintaining technical integrity; create approaches for entire classes of problems the company hasn’t solved before; or make decisions that affect company strategy and require executive buy-in.

What Each Level Looks Like

Here’s how the same types of accomplishments look across each level. These aren’t templates. They’re meant to help you develop a sense for the difference between a mid-level story and a senior one. Compare adjacent levels and notice what actually changes as you move up and down.

Researching What Companies Really Value

You’ll never have perfect information about what a specific company values, but a little focused research will often reveal surprising insights that most other candidates will miss. The difference between having even partial intelligence and going in blind can be whether or not you emphasize the right things in your stories.

Start With Your Recruiter

Most candidates treat recruiters as gatekeepers to avoid, but if you do this, you will waste your best source of insider information. Recruiters want you to succeed, because their performance is based on the number of accepted offers received by the candidates they put forward. They have prep materials, they know the interviewers’ focus areas, and they understand what they are looking for.

Ask your recruiter directly: “What should I know about this company’s current challenges?” Or “What competencies matter most for this role?” Or “Can you share any interview prep materials?” Many recruiters have documents about interview format, team priorities, or even the specific behavioral competencies they evaluate. The questions that are used as examples in the prep materials have a high likelihood of being asked in the interviews.

Mine Publicly Available Information

When companies repeat certain words when describing job opportunities, they’re telling you what matters. For example, a job posting that mentions “fast-paced” several times signals something different than one emphasizing compliance. Those words are there for a reason.

Where to dig:

• Engineering blogs: How do they describe their wins? What problems do they celebrate solving?

• Tech talks and conferences: What topics do their engineers present? Speed of delivery? Scale? Innovation?

• Open source contributions: What they choose to open source reveals their priorities. If they open source developer tools, this suggests they value community. If they are happy to make internal tools public, this shows transparency.

• Technical documentation: The existence of public API docs or technical guides (and the quality thereof) shows how they support both users and their own teams.

• Status pages and postmortems: Companies that publish detailed postmortems demonstrate that they value learning from failure. A company that shares their incident response processes likely has a strong operational culture.

Even companies without engineering blogs will leave traces. Product release patterns tell you about their development pace. Technology choices show their priorities: newer frameworks suggest a focus on innovation, whereas relying on proven technologies indicates they prefer stability.

Look for Patterns in Discussions

Glassdoor, Blind, and Reddit contain gold buried amongst rubble. Ignore the rubble (e.g., individual rants). Instead, look for patterns across multiple posts. If five different people mention “lots of process” or “no work-life balance” or “amazing learning culture,” that’s a pattern you will want to know about.

Pay attention to what people complain about and what they praise. Complaints about “too many meetings” may suggest the company has a collaborative, consensus-driven culture, or, alternatively, that productivity within the company is inhibited by an excessive number of meetings. Praise for “autonomy” indicates they trust their people to make decisions without checking in. Both types of comments reveal what behaviors the companies will reward.

Talk to Current Employees

If you know someone at the company, ask them directly what behaviors get rewarded and, conversely, what behaviors will cause people to struggle. Skip surface-level queries about culture, and ask specific questions:

• “When someone gets promoted here, what do they do to earn it?”

• “What behaviors get negative feedback?”

• “How does the team make decisions when there’s disagreement?”

• “What surprised you most about working here?”

Current employees will tell you truths the company website never would. Perhaps they’ll tell you that at their company, “customer obsession” really means checking usage data before writing code, or that “ownership” means being available to resolve production issues at two o’clock in the morning.

What You’re Really Looking For

All this research serves one purpose: understanding what stories will resonate at your interview. Think of it as finding the real intersection between your experience and what they care about.

If research reveals they prize speed over perfection, then emphasize stories that tell how you shipped quickly and iterated. If they value technical depth, highlight examples of diving deep to understand root causes. If they care about collaboration, make sure your story focuses on cross-team work rather than solo accomplishments.

The research will also help you decide whether this company is the right place for you. If everything you learn suggests they value the kinds of behaviors you don’t naturally demonstrate or don’t want to develop, then perhaps you don’t need to pursue that particular role.

Putting It All Together

Companies aren’t just evaluating whether you can do the job. They’re also assessing whether you’ll thrive in their specific environment and at what level you’ll be most effective. These two dimensions determine not just whether you will get an offer, but also whether that offer will position you for success.

Understanding fit helps you know which of your experiences will connect most with what the company values. This small company needs someone who ships fast and figures things out alone. That enterprise needs someone who navigates processes and builds consensus. Neither is inherently better than the other. They’re simply different environments that reward different approaches.

Understanding levels helps you position your stories appropriately. The same project can demonstrate entry-level execution, mid-level ownership, or senior-level leadership depending on your actual contribution and how you frame it. Get this wrong and you will either get rejected for overreaching or down-leveled for not properly communicating your capabilities.

The payoff is immediate. You’ll pick better stories, focus on the right details, and make it easier for interviewers to see what you can do. You’ll make better decisions about which roles actually match who you are and what you want to do. The goal isn’t to get any offer. The goal is to get the right offer at the right level at the right company to ensure your success.

Takeaways

Gergely, again. Thanks to Steve for both sharing his learnings, as an interviewer, and for sharing nearly a full chapter from his whole book. The book goes a lot deeper than the above sample chapter. A few of the ones I found helpful:

• High-signal storytelling (Chapter 3): a framework for explaining your work in a way that “sticks” with the interviewer

• 9 competencies with many examples and stories throughout the book: ones like “delivery” (Chapter 6), “earning trust and dealing with conflict” (Chapter 8) and “Strategic leadership and thinking big (Chapter 13)”

• Examples of what interviewers typically see as key signals, yellow flags and red flags

If you would like to have a fresh resource to prepare for behavioural interviews at tech companies, the full book offers far more explanations, tactics and exercises to do so:

Steve also writes a newsletter titled A Life Engineered: you can sign up to it here.

It’s helpful to understand how and why companies hire, and what they look for. To us engineers, hiring processes often look illogical from the outside. We’ll ask things like:

• “Why does the interview process not resemble day-to-day work?”

• “I already have open source code I wrote: why does the company need to do a coding interview to confirm what is clear: that I need to code?”

• “Why did I get a rejection, even though I did well on all of the interviews?”

It feels to me that there are similarities between hiring and dating: both parties show up with goals and expectations in their head, which are often not communicated. Sometimes there’s a match; sometimes there is not. This phase of a relationship is often about “selling:” as a candidate on the job market, it’s about selling yourself, and convincing the company that you would be a fit for what they are looking for.

Doing your research on the company is underrated, and not all that many candidates do so, in my observation. When I was a hiring manager at Uber, roughly half of the people who got on the call with me did not do any research about the company, and perhaps 1 out of 10 candidates did any research on the team they interviewed for – when we had public blog posts about our work, on the company blog! So those showing up prepared helped them stand out in the “motivation” dimension, from the get go.

It all starts with being able to pass the “technical” interviews – but it’s a mistake to sleep on the “behavioural parts.” To state the obvious: candidates who do not do well on the technical interview rounds will not get offers. But I’ve personally had to say to several candidates who did great on the technical side of things, but turned out to be misaligned with what we were looking for, as confirmed on the behavioral rounds.

And I do believe you can uplevel in doing better on these behavioral rounds: starting with researching what the company’s culture is like, practicing how to present yourself better, and putting yourself in the shoes of the interviewers, understanding what they are looking for.

I know plenty of software engineers who refuse to do any preparation for interviews, staying “if the company doesn’t want me as I am, they don’t deserve me anyway.” This is a valid strategy, and can work for highly in-demand professionals, the same way as showing up to a first date in sweatpants and slippers can still work out for highly attractive and desirable people. For the rest of us not as incredibly in-demand for a position we’re applying for: it’s probably worth putting in additional effort, in hopes for better outcomes during interviews.