Earlier this month, I [mentioned](/blog/changing-jobs-during-the-great-resignation/) the importance of behavioral interviews for engineering managers. This next series of blog posts is going to tackle behavioral interview questions. ## Getting started Because behavioral interviews tackle human interactions, and humans are complex, you can expect a lot of variety in this bucket of questions. Before we explain the aspects of each behavioral question, it's wise to start with foundational preparation for all behavioral questions. ### The STAR method **The most important thing to remember about beh ..read more

The last time I contributed to this blog was exactly 7 months ago. There is a reason it has been so long: I changed jobs. Here's why. ## I got stuck No good can come from putting your old company on blast. Suffice it to say I was not growing anymore and I needed a change. Once I knew it was time to leave, I needed a plan to get to my next destination. ## Prep before the prep This was the longest job I had ever held so I was extremely out of practice on interviewing as the interviewee. As an engineering manager, you have a very unique perspective because you understand how hiring decisions get ..read more

Last Friday I was completely drained. I didn't have the best day at work, I was sleep deprived, and I wasn't in the best mood. So I decided to start messaging people and thanking them. I went on a gratitude spree. **Gratitude has an infinite ROI**. It is [well established](https://theconversation.com/express-gratitude-not-because-you-will-benefit-from-it-but-others-might-134887) that gratitude improves your mental health and wellbeing. If you're sharing your gratitude for others, your genuine feelings will build trust and rapport. There is literally no downside to honest, heartfelt gratitude ..read more

I did a recent AMA on Clubhouse and there were a lot of awesome, hard-hitting questions on the panel. So for the next several weeks, I'm going to write out my thoughts to each of the questions and how I answered them. > How do you build teams and how do you differentiate from building a team from 0 to 1 vs. 1 to 100? Full transparency: I've never hired a first engineer for a company. But I _have_ hired the first engineer for a team. Hiring the first engineer is helpful if you **other teams they can join.** Even if that team is building something completely different, just having a sense of ..read more

> This article is part of the [Systems Design Series](/tag/systems-design/) following the book [_Designing Data-Intensive Applications_](https://dataintensive.net/) by Martin Kleppmann. If you missed the [previous article](/blog/replication/), check that out first. This chapter is another central tenant of distributed systems: partitioning. Also known as sharding, we will explore how to split up large data sets into logical chunks. ## Strategies for partitioning If _replication_ is about copying all data to different databases and datacenters, then _partitioning_ is about slicing up that da ..read more

I did an AMA on Clubhouse a little while ago and there were a lot of awesome, hard-hitting questions on the panel. So for this last installment, I'm going to write out my thoughts to a the questions and how I answered them. The last question from the panel was: > How do you decide when and how to leave your company and be confident that you’re making the right decision? As I've mentioned in a previous article, you don't just wake up one day and say to yourself "I think I'll [leave my job](/blog/how-to-do-an-exit-interview) today!" It's a long, painful process. It's the culmination of a lot ..read more

> This article is part of the [Systems Design Series](/tag/systems-design/) following the book [_Designing Data-Intensive Applications_](https://dataintensive.net/) by Martin Kleppmann. If you missed the [previous article](/blog/fault-tolerance/), check that out first. This chapter, and the last one we will cover in this book series, covers consistency and consensus. It focuses on the CAP theorem. We will explore all levels of consistency guarantees. ## Consistency guarantee levels There are three grades of consistency guarantees: * **Weak:** Reads may or may not see writes. Often seen in r ..read more

I handwrite every single email I send to candidates. Every. Single. One. Of course it doesn't scale. Of course it is time consuming. Of course rejection sucks and I'll probably get rejected by 99% of the people I reach out to. If hiring is your _most important_ activity, then why would you ever put in a "copy and paste"-level of effort for people that could provide MILLIONS of dollars of value for your organization? Have you ever received an email that was copy pasted? Have you received an email where they used the wrong name (or reversed your first name with your last name)? I can answer yes ..read more

> This article is part of the [Systems Design Series](/tag/systems-design/) following the book [_Designing Data-Intensive Applications_](https://dataintensive.net/) by Martin Kleppmann. If you missed the [previous article](/blog/partitioning/), check that out first. The self-proclaimed pessimistic chapter of the book, chapter 8 covers fault tolerance in distributed systems. Let us briefly introduce why things break in an internet-scale system: * **Commodity machines break.** Since internet applications are about [scaling out instead of up](/blog/replication/), each node in the cluster is ch ..read more

> This article is part of the [Systems Design Series](/tag/systems-design/) following the book [_Designing Data-Intensive Applications_](https://dataintensive.net/) by Martin Kleppmann. If you missed the [previous article](/blog/storage-and-retrieval/), check that out first. This chapter is the real introduction to distributed systems. We are shifting into the second part of the book here. You will notice that I intentionally skipped chapter 4 based on a suggested curriculum I outlined in the [first post of this series](/blog/scalability-reliability-maintainability/). ## Horizontal versus v ..read more