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3 Things Not To Do Before An Interview
A brief guide to not looking dodgy, underhand, or downright subversive to a potential employer.
Though I feel a gentle warmth inside myself¹ when I hear that someone I’m interviewing has read some of my previous articles here on Medium I do feel a little aggrieved if they should they call them my “blog” as they’re so much more than that. Well, at least to me anyway.
Think catharsis, think legacy, think please would a major publication offer me a column writing about the Grand Game for mega stacks so I can go and live, and sometimes even write, on a Rock Royalty balcony in the Hard Rock Hotel full time. Please, DMs are open, etc.
Though I would actually think it a little odd if they said they’d “read every single one” of them. Besides the fact that it would take some considerable time, I do feel that they might know just a little bit too much about me, had perhaps trained an LLM on the prose and put in some interview practice with my simulacrum in advance even.
I think I’d feel violated, or something, I guess that’s another thing we’ll have to think about as we descend into the general banality of an LLM guided near future — until we make a breakthrough into something actually worthwhile² anyway.
Generally, though, it’s quite encouraging that someone has checked me out, even though it’s on LinkedIn, and perhaps even dipped into what I do for a living, what I’ve done for a living, and perhaps even gotten an insight into the kind of person I am and whether they’d want to work with me.
That they turn up for interview after that is commendable.
It’s also encouraging if they’ve done some research about the company, what it does, and perhaps even know a little bit about the industry it exists within in general.
It shows initiative, preparedness, and curiosity — all of which are great things to have if you’re considering working in the Grand Game of Software Engineering, at least for any length of time.
But, there are things that you really shouldn’t do before an interview, things that either look a bit creepy, a bit odd, or just come across as frankly bizarre which would either frighten the interviewers and put them on the defensive or compel HR into dragging…
