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Aug 2024
1h 26m

Improve Your Chances In Your Engineering...

JONATHAN CUTRELL
About this episode

I'm joined today by Brian Pulliam. I've personally engaged Brian as a career coach. In this discussion we'll talk a bit about coaching, and about how you can set yourself up to become a much better candidate in your job search as an engineering leader.

Values Exercise Live:

  • Jonathan and Brian perform a live exercise, transforming company core values into interview questions.
  • Discussing the importance of aligning your experiences with the values that a company holds.
    • "I'm going to do this live right now with you, actually. I think it'll be a cool exercise..."

Advanced Interview Techniques:

  • How to handle unexpected questions by paraphrasing.
  • Preparing for common interview questions derived from company values.
    • "You should convert every single one of those core values into a question that starts with tell me about a time when you demonstrated X."

Finding a Way to Succeed:

  • The importance of creative problem solving in leadership.
  • Examples of finding efficient solutions to technical problems without writing code.
    • "With zero lines of code...the ops team just reconfigured a job to run more often."

Effective Storytelling in Interviews:

  • How to use stories to demonstrate competencies and cultural fit.
  • The role of storytelling in making a lasting impression on interviewers.
    • "Stories move the world...people write $50 million dollar checks to startup founders based on stories."

Building a Culture of Excellence:

  • Strategies for fostering a high-performance team environment.
  • Reflections on leadership and creating positive workplace dynamics.
    • "We provide stable, fast, low friction developer experiences for all engineering teams at Zillow."

🙏 Today's Episode is Brought To you by: Unblocked

Your developers know how to write code. What they’re missing is the context to know what code to write. Unblocked gives engineering teams the answers they need to get their jobs done – without having to wait on or interrupt their teammates. Get started for free at getunblocked.com.

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