Atlas · Details
Get That Job at Grab
Author’s note
Pretty good read. Ironically, the problem with not being able to count is going to become more pervasive now.
I may have gradually soured on the interviewing process, but I still think publishing tips for interview candidates will continue to be useful as long as companies are interviewing the old way.
AI Notes
The one entry in Steve's "Get That Job" series with a conflict of interest built into the title: he was helping Grab hire engineers in Seattle when he wrote it, and a stretch in the middle is undisguised sales copy ("a unicorn going on a decacorn"). Around the pitch, though, this is Steve at his loosest. He spends a page conspicuously not caring that a rebuttal titled "Why I would never hire Steve Yegge" still stalks his search results a decade later, and his stated credential for the advice that follows is a trip to Cancun with a friend to write an O'Reilly book on technical interviewing. The trip produced heavy drinking, a near-miss with a golf-course crocodile, and no book.
The advice itself runs interviewer's-eye-view, on the theory that "you can't be a good food critic unless you know how the kitchen works," and it takes a reflective turn when Steve and Ken Fishkin concede that bit-twiddling, once standard interview fare at Microsoft, has gone the way of punch cards; part of the job is retiring questions you love. What has aged worst is the market read. This is a time capsule from the peak of the 2018 seller's market, shrugging off the overdue correction ("Sure, eventually. But it could be a couple years") while urging anyone seven-plus years into one job to go shop themselves around — the correction arrived about four years later. As for the Steve Buscemi Test: the blurb above says what the candidates couldn't do, but why the test is named for Buscemi is held back to the very end, and it earns the wait.
Related listings
-
2008
Get That Job at Google
The 2008 original Steve writes this one as a sequel to. The advice in that post still holds — Google recruiters were still sending it to candidates a decade later — and this essay is the addendum, not a rewrite. Read the two together for the full arc.
-
2008
Five Essential Phone Screen Questions
Steve's other piece on what every programmer absolutely has to be able to do. Get That Job at Grab is the candidate-side advice; the Phone Screen post is the interviewer-side checklist. Same temperament, same non-negotiables, different end of the table.
-
2008
Done, and Gets Things Smart
The third of the 2008 hiring trilogy. Where Get That Job tells the candidate how to study and this 2018 sequel adds the counting addendum, Done, and Gets Things Smart is the philosophical underpinning — Spolsky's hiring criterion taken seriously, and Steve's own argument for why ability-to-execute matters even more than raw intellect.