🙋♂️ Hi there, I’m Austen, a former Senior Engineering Manager and Hiring Committee Chair at Meta, and behavioral interview enthusiast. September coaching slots are open now and starting to fill — if you have a loop coming this fall, book a session before the calendar fills up. Grab a copy of my best-selling book Mastering Behavioral Interviews to get a complete prep system and learn how to land the roles that really matter.
P.S. I stole this summer coaching post update idea from Ben Erez. Check out his content if you’re prepping for Big Tech roles.
“Premature optimization is the root of all evil,” and while Don Knuth, writing in 1974, surely didn’t mean the hyperoptimization we apply to our lives in this AI-pilled age, he was surely right. If you live in a tech hub, you know everyone around you is anxious about accomplishing more with their agents and dominated by a fear of being left behind. Like a gas, work expands to fill whatever container we put it in, and it’s exhausting.
Nothing has broken that spell for me like our recent trip to Ethiopia to visit my wife’s family. Life is slower here: the taxi may or may not come inside the two-hour window the driver gave you. If he does come, you’re likely to get stuck in a traffic jam produced entirely by drivers refusing to yield to each other. You wait constantly, even for simple things. At the National Palace, it took thirty minutes for our guide to negotiate an entrance fee, something that would take thirty seconds of computer-assisted purchasing in America.
Of course, slower life isn’t always bad. Coffee here is made from scratch, the beans roasted right in front of you, and it’s the best coffee I’ve ever had. It doesn’t make me anxious and I don’t experience an emotional crash at the end of the day.
And there can be real joy in doing things the slow way. I’ve often connected more with manual equipment or that which requires regular maintenance. I once scoured Facebook Marketplace for an old Coleman white gas lantern and hand-pump camp stove.
My latest manual interest is a Fujifilm X-E2 I picked up second hand with a cheap 40mm-equivalent f/2.8, joining the retro camera trend about a decade late. Setting aperture and shutter speed on physical dials has made me better at the exposure triangle and the lightweight body and prime lens make for a more focused and simpler shooting experience than my Canon R8 with its heavy zoom lens.
Take Time for Your Behavioral Prep—and Start Earlier
Like with the manual camera, sometimes you get better at things by doing them slowly. And that turns out to be true of behavioral interview prep too.
I keep getting clients who come to me with an interview in a week, or even tomorrow. There are things we can do together like cleaning up existing stories or brainstorming some framing with the hiring manager, etc. But if we run into fundamental challenges—like missing appropriately scoped stories—there’s just not enough time to make up for it. This is especially true for candidates targeting frontier labs with demanding culture expectations.
The candidates who do best have been working on their behavioral prep for a month or more, because remembering and emotionally processing your career, or developing a personal philosophy about AI safety, just takes time.
Try not to cram for behavioral interviews. Take it slow by starting to journal—or even go for a walk—and think about the hardest things you’ve done. And of course, check out my other content for detailed, step-by-step approaches to prepare.
July 2026 Coaching Notes
I conducted 32 sessions in July, mostly with senior ICs and managers preparing for FAANG and frontier lab loops. Here are some notes.
Give every big story a table of contents. When you go to tell a story, especially a long one, the temptation is just to dive in and give a long timeline-oriented description, leaving the job of extracting the most relevant parts to the interviewer. While sticking it to the interviewer might seem appealing, that’s not a great strategy to get hired. After brief context, list three or four dimensions where the signal lives, like the architecture decisions, the conflict, the rollout, the follow-on work, or whatever, then work through them one by one, steering the conversation in a partnership with the interviewer.
Front-load the results, scope, and stakes. Assume you will get cut off before the end of your story. Lead with the business impact and the scale. Despite when the Results are supposed to be shared in STAR or CARL, don’t save them for the end.
Stop shrinking your scope. People introduce a year-long platform they led as “just the personalization piece,” or flatten a real win into “I built a Claude skill” instead of “I raised my team’s velocity.” The scope you name is the scope you’ll get judged at.
Narrate the thinking since thinking is an action too. At Staff+ or Director levels, they’re hiring you to think. Be sure to list the alternatives you considered at each decision point and why you chose the one you chose. Several candidates this month made excellent calls but forgot to tell me about the reasoning.
AI questions are standard now, and most people have gaps. Interviewers are probing five areas — work, trust, iteration, growth, scaling. The “how can you trust the output” and “how do you stay current” buckets are the ones most often empty. Look out for a deeper explanation of this in an article in September.
Slow down. For senior rounds, answering within two seconds usually works against you. Anthropic’s culture round in particular is watching you while you reason through a difficult situation, and a fast answer seems overly rehearsed. Back to, “Premature optimization...”
September coaching slots are filling. If you expect to interview in the next few months, grab some coaching time now. Or pick up my best-selling book Mastering Behavioral Interviews for the complete prep system.