A Life Engineered · A Life Engineered · Transcript & summary by WhipScribe
A former Amazon bar raiser gives concrete scripts for five standard interview questions in ten minutes.
Tap a chapter to open that moment in the transcript; the link to it is copied for you.
“You wanna add an imperfect success because it sounds far more believable than a perfect result.” Steve Huynh · at 6:03 — open in the transcript →
“The cardinal sin is to break that frame and to undermine what's going on by rejecting the premise.” Steve Huynh · at 10:10 — open in the transcript →
Steve Huynh, who sat in on nearly a thousand interviews as a principal engineer and bar raiser at Amazon, argues that hiring is an artificial game and that candidates win it by staying in character. His idea of lying is mostly selection and framing rather than invention: answer a pleasantry with a pleasantry, choose which true facts to tell, and shape a story so it lands. The one sin he names is breaking the frame, because an interviewer who no longer knows how to play their part simply moves on to the next candidate.
Most of the episode is method. For self-introductions he recommends three true traits that the company is already selecting for, in place of a resume recap or an overshare. For questions about your role on a big project, he suggests starting at the widest scope and narrowing to your own piece while leaning on the word I, which he demonstrates with a capacity-planning role on Microsoft Azure. For a biggest-accomplishment answer he gives a structure of a goal, three obstacles in sequence and an imperfect result, citing Jeff Bezos's view that hitting 100% of annual goals means the goals were too timid.
The ethical question gets the most candid treatment near the end. Huynh admits he won a high-school scholarship by naming Thomas Edison as his inspiration, because the semi-truck maker funding it valued industrious people, even though he had no real hero. He defends that kind of answer by noting that employers also present a flattering version of themselves, while warning against compromising core values. His advice for explaining why you want the job is to research three things you truly care about and pick the overlap with what the company wants.
Steve Huynh, a former Amazon principal engineer and bar raiser, says no answer to 'tell me about yourself' can be complete, so every answer is a lie by omission and the job is choosing well. He advises picking three true items that paint a picture of you and that are also traits the company is selecting for, rather than restating your resume or oversharing personal history.
Steve Huynh recommends moving from the biggest scope you can claim down to your own scope while using the word I as much as possible. His Azure example starts with being on the launch team, narrows to a team doing capacity planning and procurement, then names a personal contribution: a system that verified procured hardware was ready to assign to customers. He says this top-down framing leaves ambiguity in the right places without overstating your role.
Steve Huynh recalls that during Amazon's annual planning some teams bragged about hitting 100% of their goals, and Jeff Bezos pointed out that this meant the goals were not ambitious enough. In Huynh's account, hitting 70 to 80% was the sweet spot, which means failing at 20 to 30% of what a team set out to do. Huynh uses this to argue that a flawless interview story is less credible than one with a believable shortfall.
Steve Huynh's recipe is to open with the big achievement you set out to make, then list three of the biggest obstacles in sequential order and how you overcame each, using a 'but then a new challenge popped up' transition. He ends the story with the result framed as an imperfect success. He says the impact should be large but not too large, and that it is acceptable to reshape the timeline so the interviewer gets the essence rather than a technically exact chronology.
Steve Huynh says the question underneath 'why do you want to work here' is whether you would be enthusiastic and a good fit for the team, so needing a job or wanting perks like free food misses it. Before the interview he suggests researching three things about the job you genuinely care about, such as the industry or a specific technology, then choosing the ones that overlap most with what the company wants, and delivering them with some enthusiasm.
Steve Huynh tells how, in high school, he applied for a large college scholarship from the semi-truck manufacturer his mother worked for, with an essay on who his biggest inspiration was. Reasoning that a truck maker would value industrious people who made a big impact, he chose Thomas Edison, even though he had no real biggest inspiration. A friend, Brian, honestly answered Jesus Christ. Huynh won the scholarship and uses the story to argue that answers should fit what the people judging you want to hear.
Steve Huynh says 'how are you doing today' is a pleasantry, not a request for a diagnostic report, so the right answer is 'I'm doing great', said slightly upbeat with a smile, even on a bad day. Volunteering poor sleep, a headache or nerves has no upside, he argues, and breaks the frame of the interview, leaving the interviewer unsure how to play their part and inclined not to hire.
Our own transcript of the public episode, with a timestamp about every 90 seconds. Tap a timestamp or the link button on a paragraph to copy a link that opens this page there.
0:00As a principal engineer and bar raiser at Amazon, I did nearly a thousand interviews. And I can confidently say you're going to have to lie in some way to get hired at a top company. Specifically, there are five interview scenarios where lying significantly increases your chances of landing an offer. The interview process isn't fair. It's an absurd and artificial construct, but it's a game we all have to play if we want to have a job. So let me show you how to play it ethically. The first scenario is often the one that comes first in an interview. How are you doing today? It might seem stupid that you'd need to lie in response. How could you possibly answer this incorrectly? The interviewer isn't asking for a full diagnostic report of your week.
0:39It's a pleasantry. If I turned up for an interview and when they asked me about my day, I told the interviewer that I'd slept awful, my kids were kicking me last night, I have a terrible headache, and I'm nervous AF, that might be the truthful answer, but what would I gain from volunteering that? As a recruiter or interviewer, I'd be thinking, wow, this guy doesn't get it. Instead, I'd be better off saying, I'm doing great, even if I'm not. It's not just the words, though. How you say it is important. Thanks for taking the time to interview with us. How are you doing today? I'm doing great. You want to answer slightly upbeat with a bit of a smile. Why do we need to answer this way though? Because if you answer too truthfully and act stilted,
1:24there's no upside and only downside you should never break the frame of the interview you're looking for a job they have a job and they need to interview you if you don't play along with this game and undermine the frame they're going to think to themselves this is strange now i don't know how to play my part let's not hire him so when you get asked how you're doing, act the part. You're a highly competent person that gets it and it's ready to get to work. The second scenario where most people answer incorrectly is, tell me about yourself. The issue here is it's actually impossible to answer the question 100% truthfully because you're a complex and complicated person. It would probably take hours for you to genuinely, comprehensively tell them
2:05about yourself. This means that no matter what, you're going to have to lie by omission. You have to decide what to include, what you present to them, and what you leave out about yourself. Let's get started. Can you tell me a little bit about yourself? Very well. Where do I begin? My father was a relentlessly self-improving boulangerie owner from Belgium with low-grade narcolepsy and a penchant for buggery. My mother was a 15-year-old French prostitute named Chloe with webbed feet. My father would womanize, he would drink, he would make outrageous claims like he invented the question mark. I remember a time I asked someone to introduce themselves and it went off the rails. He started jumping around all over the place.
2:48He was a perfectionist. He could type 150 words per minute and he wrote non-erotic Harry Potter fan fiction. I was like, thanks for specifying it's non-erotic. When people ask you to introduce yourself, use it as an opportunity to let people know what you're all about. You wanna pick items that are representative of you. And because we're staying in character, we want those items to relate back to why you're a good fit for the role. Don't use the time to restate what's on your resume, and definitely don't use it to overshare. An easy way to do this is to come up with a list of three items that paint a picture of who you are, but also have the characteristic that they're traits that the company is selecting for. Whatever you say should still be true, but you're just
3:29choosing the items that show yourself in a flattering light. The third scenario where you'll need to lie is when an interviewer asks a follow-up question like, what was your specific contribution on that project? The issue is that our contributions are complex. There's simply no time to give a detailed breakdown of who did what, because you're going to have to introduce a lot of context and a bunch of small detail. Also, since there's no way for an interviewer to confirm these details, there's a tendency to want to exaggerate your contributions. I once interviewed a candidate from Microsoft. He mentioned that he'd worked on the team that launched Azure. That's Microsoft's cloud platform. So, of course, I asked him what his specific contribution to that big launch was.
4:08Good Lord, what was your contribution to Azure? I was responsible for the entire Azure launch. At this time of year? Yes. At this time of day? Yes. In this part of the country? Yes. Localized entirely within your kitchen? Yes. May I see day? Yes. In this part of the country? Yes. Localized entirely within your kitchen? Yes. May I see it? No. Of course, the claim was ridiculous. The truth was that he actually worked on a part of Azure, but the temptation to exaggerate was too tempting. Had he slightly exaggerated his contribution, there would be no way for me to verify. So how do we stay true to what we did without spending hours on describing exactly who did what, without being hyperbolic, but put yourself in the best position to get hired?
4:52The best way to do this is to go from the biggest scope you can to your scope, while you try to use the word I as much as possible. For the Azure example, I would say something like, I was part of the Azure launch team. My team was responsible for a capacity planning and procurement. It's important that we don't run out of compute in the short-term and in the long-term. I did a lot of things since we had to be scrappy for launch, but my main contribution was building a system that automatically verified that the physical hardware that we procured was ready to be assigned to customers. By giving top-down context and doing your best to use I statements, you leave ambiguity in the right places to be assigned to customers. By giving top-down context and doing your best to use I statements,
5:26you leave ambiguity in the right places to allow yourself to take credit for big achievements without overstating your contribution. The fourth interview scenario is when you're asked, tell me about your biggest accomplishment. There are so many different ways to answer this question. Is it the thing that I'm the most proud of? Is it the thing that had the biggest impact? Is it the thing that I'm the most proud of? Is it the thing that had the biggest impact? Is it the thing that touched the most amount of people? It's also similar to the last point. We don't wanna go off the deep end. And after I crafted the perfect regular expression, everybody stood up and clapped. The right way to lie here is to keep the size
5:59of your impact large, but not too large, and definitely not too small. You wanna add an imperfect success because it sounds far more believable than a perfect result. act large, but not too large, and definitely not too small. You wanna add an imperfect success because it sounds far more believable than a perfect result. When we do annual planning at Amazon, some teams would brag that they hit 100% of their annual goals. Makes sense. 100% seems good, and it's a bigger number than 80% or 90%. So at surface level, it sounds like a greater achievement. But I remember Jeff Bezos raising the point that if you hit 100% of your goals annually, then it means that your goals weren't ambitious enough 70 to 80 percent
6:30was actually the sweet spot put another way success is that you want to fail 20 to 30 percent of what you set out to achieve the point here is that so many people answer the question what was your biggest accomplishment by trying to make every number as large as possible and trying to paint everything in a positive light. But that will backfire if everything is too perfect. Similar to how 100% goal completion means that you weren't thinking about success in the right way, a perfect story about your biggest accomplishment doesn't communicate whether you'd be a good hire because a too perfect story actually undermines your credibility. So how do you lie in the right way? To tell a good story, to make the hero as likable as possible,
7:10we need obstacles and challenges to overcome. To make it believable, we need to have a great result without a perfect ending. In other words, we need to highlight the journey, not just the destination. You need to be okay with telling the story a bit differently than the exact timeline of events. Don't worry though, because we just want to give the interviewer the essence of what happened, not a strict technically correct timeline of everything that did happen. Here's the recipe. Start with the big achievement that you wanted to make. Then, in sequential order, list three of the biggest obstacles or challenges you faced and what you did to overcome them. After you overcome each challenge, say, but then this new challenge popped up.
7:49To wrap it up, talk about the results with an imperfect success at the end. That brings us to interview scenario five. Why do you want to work here? I learned this in high school when I was applying for a very large scholarship for college. The scholarship was given by the company that my mom worked for that manufactured semi-trucks. My friend Brian's dad also worked at the same company and was also applying for the scholarship. To apply, we had to write an essay on the prompt, Who is your biggest inspiration? Brian said, Jesus Christ, which was an honest answer. But I really wanted the scholarship, so I thought about who would read the essay and what they wanted to hear. I knew that they built semi trucks
8:28and so they would value industrious people that made a big impact on the world. I chose Thomas Edison because that answer aligned with those values. Spoiler alert, Thomas Edison wasn't my biggest inspiration because I didn't have a biggest inspiration. So yeah, you can call me a liar, but I did get the scholarship. If you want something, you should think about what answer would please the people judging you. What answer fits that frame? Do the ends justify the means here? This was a difficult question I wrestled with for a long time. One thing that we forget is that companies lie to us too. The company is telling you the version of itself that makes you want to work there. They don't show you the annoying or toxic parts of the job.
9:09There's a spectrum to honesty. You shouldn't compromise your values, but you need to understand questions like, why do you wanna work here? Or trying to gauge what it would be like to work with you. The frame of the question is they want to work with people that are enthusiastic and say they're a good fit for the team. Telling people you need a job or that you really want the perks like free food, don't answer the question underneath the question. So before your interview, research three things about the job that you genuinely care about. Maybe you wanna work in the industry or work with a specific type of technology. Then pick the ones with the strongest overlap between what the company wants from a candidate
9:45and what you're truly looking to get from the job. Then when you answer the question, sprinkle in a little bit of enthusiasm. Companies want to work with people that are excited to work on the team. You're now ready to lie the right way for your next interview. I think it's really important to not see this type of lying as being good or bad, but rather see it like a performance. Like a play. We're playing a character and we're trying to make that character likable. The cardinal sin is to break that frame and to undermine what's going on by rejecting the premise. I'm lying to you right now because I'm not really talking to you. I'm talking to a camera and reading from a teleprompter so you could find a video on the internet and watch it. It's a game I have to play to get the outcome that I want. I didn't make the rules.
10:30Okay, I'm done talking about lying. Or am I? Once you get the job, you probably want to be seen as a high performer and get promoted. So watch this video next.