đââïž Hi there, Iâm Austen, a former Senior Engineering Manager and Hiring Committee Chair at Meta where I did over 1,000 interviews and trained 100s of interviewers, setting interview structures and picking questions. 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.
Performance review season is here. Whether your company does annual reviews in January or has multiple cycles throughout the year, this is the perfect time to update your Story Catalog.
You may have a job right now and arenât actively interviewing, but do yourself a favor: take what youâve written about your accomplishments, especially the technical details and results numbers, and save them to your Story Catalog for later use. Your future self will thank you when youâre preparing for interviews six months or two years from now.
Why Performance Review Season Is Perfect for This
When you write your self-review, youâre already doing the hard work of:
Documenting what you shipped
Quantifying your impact with metrics
Identifying technical challenges you overcame
Reflecting on your growth and learnings
This is exactly the raw material you need for behavioral interview stories. The difference is that right now, the details are fresh. You remember the numbers. You remember the technical decisions and tradeoffs. You remember who was involved and what obstacles you faced.
Two years from now? Youâll struggle to remember the numbers, how long things took. etc.
Tag Your Accomplishments with Signal Areas
As you document your stories, tag them with the eight signal areas that companies evaluate: scope, ownership, ambiguity, perseverance, conflict resolution, growth, communication, and leadership.
This makes it easy to quickly find relevant stories when an interviewer asks âTell me about a time you navigated ambiguityâ or âDescribe a situation where you had to resolve conflict.â
Iâve recently been bitten by the Obsidian bug and Iâm loving it for taking notes about accomplishments. Obsidianâs tagging and interconnected link system has been really effective for some of my mentees who use it to build their Story Catalogs.
BONUS: Book Overflow Podcastâs Review of Mastering Behavioral Interviews
I was stoked to see that Book Overflow, the best technical book review podcast out there, chose to review Mastering Behavioral Interviews! If you havenât subscribed to their channel, do it. Carter and Nathan provide insightful conversations about technical books and in-depth discussions with the authors themselves.
Check out their video review here.
They do a great job covering what the book is about and how to apply it.
Some highlights from their discussion:
The âI vs. Weâ problem: They dig into one of the most uncomfortable parts of interviewing: you need to say âI did thisâ instead of âwe did this,â even if that feels unnatural. The interviewer needs to know exactly what YOU contributed.
The eight signal areas: They appreciated having a framework that works across different companies with different values. Aligning your stories with the signal areas is a helpful station on the way to mapping them to specific companyâs values.
The CARL framework: They found the Context-Action-Result-Learning structure more intuitive than STAR, especially for breaking down larger projects into mini-CARLs with a table of contents approach.
The Big Three questions: Tell me about yourself, your favorite project, and a conflict resolution story. Carter and Nathan emphasized that you should absolutely have these locked in before any interview.
Silicon Valley mythos: This generated some interesting discussion about how you need to frame stories to match expectations. Nathan called it âthe elaborate mating dance of some Amazonian [pun possibly unintended, lol] songbird.â They get that it can feel performative, but understanding the game is valuable even if you find it frustrating.
They also pointed out something I appreciated: yes, some of the techniques in the book are obvious communication stuff, but most people (even senior folks) leave out key details or donât organize their stories with a clear structure. Having frameworks to lean on is especially useful when you get knocked off balance in an interview.
Iâm going to be on the podcast soon for a longer conversation, so keep an eye out for that episode!
Help Me Out with an Amazon Review
If youâve read the book, the single most helpful thing you can do right now is leave a review on Amazon. Reviews help other engineers find the book when theyâre preparing for interviews, and your feedback helps me understand whatâs working and what could be better in future editions.
Thanks for reading, and good luck with those performance reviews!