A popular icebreaker in San Francisco these days is “How would you spend your life if AGI meant nobody needed to work?” For me, I think a surprisingly big part of the answer is a dorky-sounding kind of folk dance called contra dancing. I started trying to answer that question by thinking: what are the things I do atelically—because I enjoy them for their own sake, not in pursuit of some longer-term goal? For me, a lot of that has to do with things that are (1) physically joyful, and (2) help me feel connected to other people. My pitch for contra dancing is that among physically joyful and connecting activities, it’s one of the ones where it’s easiest to get to the point where it’s fun, and therefore one of the best to start out with. Many other forms of dance require weeks of lessons before you’re even encouraged to do it socially at all. By contrast, the format of contra dancing means that you can go to a half-hour beginner lesson before your first dance, and there’s a good chance you will be having a lot of fun by the end of the evening. What’s more, the fact that it’s so easy to start having fun shapes its community and priorities, such that it has among the best vibes of any activity I do. I first encountered contra in middle school. My mom ran an intentional community, and we had a housemate move in named Bree. Bree was obsessed with this thing called “contra dancing,” and every week she would try to convince me and our other housemates to come with her. Which I absolutely refused. I was an extremely uncool middle schooler, and that meant I was terrified of doing anything that even whiffed of uncoolness, lest I give my classmates another reason to judge me. I was also deeply awkward; I’d never even been to a school dance and barely talked to girls. But Bree was persistent, and one of our other housemates got hooked, and eventually I was intrigued. By then, though, I was dug in as a contra hater, and I was scared that if I admitted I had changed my mind, my housemates would make fun of me. So I kept refusing. Finally, my housemate Thomas, who was even more of a skeptic than I was, told Bree that he would only go if I went, presumably so that she would stop bugging him and bug me instead. Aha—my golden opportunity! I could pass off my change of heart as a prank on Thomas. “Okay, sure! It’s a deal!” Bree and I showed up at the Concord Scout House one Thursday evening and jumped into the next dance. It was an unusually complex square dance, and I got confused—in fact, so confused that my entire square ended up giving up halfway through.1 I was mortified. Not only was I doing a deeply uncool activity, I was the least cool person there, ruining it for all the slightly less uncool people with my incompetence and lameness. Except that the other dancers didn’t seem to see it that way. Instead of resenting me or making fun of me, they said things like “Gosh, that one was really tricky!” and “Sorry, that’s really not what it’s usually like!” and “Please don’t give up, try a few more dances! Want to dance with me?” I tried some more dances, I didn’t cause any more collapses, and by the end of the night I was overflowing with exhilaration and joy. I went back the next week, and the week after that. I went to the twelve-hour Snow Ball and then the weekend-long Flurry Festival. I got to feel cool for the first time in my life when people started being excited to dance with me, and even cooler when some of them asked me on dates. It was a huge part of my life for a while, and although I’m now dancing at maybe a quarter of my peak intensity, it’s still one of my most joyful and treasured things I do. This happens to about one in ten people I take contra dancing: something clicks and it becomes a big part of their life. So what exactly is contra dancing? When people ask me this I often feel stuck, because describing the mechanics of a contra dance doesn’t really capture its essence or why it’s fun, but without understanding the mechanics, the essence doesn’t really make sense. So I’ll try both. But you have to promise to read through to the essence part, and not just bounce off if the mechanics sound silly. Mechanically: you show up to the dance hall. You ask someone to dance, or they ask you. You join a long line (“set”) of other couples and take hands in a four-person group with one adjacent (“neighbor”) couple. A caller stands at the top of the dance hall and does a “walk-through” of the dance you’re about to do, calling out a series of figures (“circle left three places,” “do-si-do your neighbor,” etc.) At the end, you’ve moved up or down the line, and you’re ready to do the same thing with some new neighbors coming at you. Next to the caller is a live band. (They probably sound a bit like this.) The pianist plays four potatoes and the fiddler launches into a reel. The caller calls out the figures for the first few times through the dance, then drops out as the dancers get into flow. It looks a bit like this video, although I don’t know how much this will transmit the vibe, since contra is a lot more fun to do than it is to watch: Bonus: you can see high school me in this dance! I'm in the dark red T-shirt at the very right of the frame at the beginning. To me, the essence of contra dancing is about flow, joy, and community. You can’t really tell from watching, but a lot of what makes for good contra dancing is learning how to trade momentum back and forth (“share weight”) with other dancers so that each figure flows seamlessly into the next one. When you get this right, it feels amazing. Subtle changes in how your partner holds your hand cue you into the next figure. The dance becomes effortless. You can turn your brain off and just do what the giant dancing super-organism invites you to do. It’s also physically joyful. The core figure of contra dancing is called the swing, in which you and your partner take a waltz-like hold and pivot around a shared center. Done right, it feels like a cross between flying and a world-class hug. Even outside of the swing, the shared weight, smooth momentum, and twirling “flourishes” will make you feel weightless, graceful and deeply connected to the music and the other dancers. Lots of kinds of dance feel flowy and exhilarating when done well. What makes contra different is how easy it is to get there. Most forms of dance require weeks of lessons before they get fun. In contra, all you need to do is show up for one beginner lesson half an hour before the dance starts.2 Of course, there’s plenty to learn after that—improving your swing technique, learning how to share weight, and where to put flourishes for the best joy and flow—but all of that is for getting you from a 8/10 to an 11/10 on the fun scale; getting to an 8 is pretty straightforward. So contra makes it easy to have a baseline level of fun dancing with anyone. And because it’s a group dance, you end up feeling connected to your entire set, not just your partner. I think those two things are behind my other favorite part of contra dancing, which is how friendly and welcoming the community is. Many kinds of dance are a bit snooty—the experienced dancers look down on newbies and try to avoid dancing with them. By contrast, my experience at my first dance, where I caused my square to crash and burn and was met with apologies and “I hope you’ll give it another shot,” is typical for contra. A lot of contras explicitly ask experienced dancers to dance with newcomers. It’s just hard to be snooty when you’re having so much fun! You want to share it with everyone.3 As draft reader Chloe put it: “I think in many ways, your story of your first dance is the heart of it—you can’t do it wrong. Or even if you do, it somehow leads to more love.” In my opinion, this makes contra dancing one of the best entry points to dance: Each dance is walked through, so you don’t have to worry about deciding what to do. You can get to an 8/10 fun level, where practice becomes rewarding instead of a chore, really quickly. The community is incredibly welcoming, which makes it a lot less stressful to be a beginner. While it’s structured enough to be beginner-friendly, there’s also enough room for improvisation and technique to give it a lot of depth. This makes it a great on-ramp to other dances and movement practices. When I started contra dancing I had a lot of fear and blocks about improvised dancing (for example, I didn’t feel comfortable dancing at standard American high school/wedding style dances), but recently I tried out fusion and contact improv and had fun at both. It’s pretty common for people to use contra as a gateway into more difficult forms of dance. Most importantly, though, it’s just incredibly joyful on its own! It’s the only activity I know of where I’ve had multiple friends mention that every time they go, their cheeks hurt from smiling so much. Beyond just fun, multiple draft readers independently commented that contra dance is a precise opposite of many things that bother them about… the rest of life: Much of my life happens on a screen in motionless silence; contra is as three-dimensional, movement- and sound-filled as you can get. The default mood of a lot of spaces is a sort of ironic detachment.4 The default mood of contra dancing is earnest joy. In everyday life it’s easy to end up atomized and isolated. At a contra, everyone does the same steps and makes the dance together; it’s deeply communal. In a lot of social contexts (especially in San Francisco), I often feel like I’m being “sized up” for how interesting or important I am. At most contras, people are just happy I’m there. Many things I do (work, choral music, blogging…) reward excellence above almost everything. Contra welcomes imperfection: we’d rather have an amateur live band than recorded professionals, and don’t believe in more than half an hour of organized teaching. This makes it a grounding and nourishing antitode to a lot of everyday stressors. When I was so drawn to it in middle school, I don’t think it was just about the fun: on some deep level it was very good for me. If I’ve gotten you excited enough to try contra, here’s what you should do: Go to try contra dot com to find dances near you. If there are multiple dances, I recommend trying to figure out which one is the largest (larger dances tend to have more energy and better vibes), although that might be tricky to figure out from the websites. Make a note of where and when the dance is, including the beginner lesson. Remember to show up beforehand for that! Dress code wise: contra dancing is generally light cardio; wear something you are happy to be active in.5 Most people dress pretty casually; many women (and some men!) wear skirts, especially skirts that do fun things when you twirl. Look at the dance site to see if they say anything about footwear; some dances request that you wear soft-soled shoes with clean soles to avoid damaging floors. Bring a water bottle! There are fountains at most dances but it helps to be able to hydrate more quickly since the breaks between dances are short. If you go to a dance and like it, the easiest way to go from 8/10 fun to 9.5/10 is to find someone with a really good swing and ask them how you can improve your technique. (If you’re not sure, look for someone who’s fast and smooth.) They will be tickled that you asked!6 If you have a friend who contra dances, try going with them! They will be thrilled to bring you and it’ll be even more fun for both of you.7 Have fun! I hope you smile so much your cheeks hurt. Thanks to Jeff Kaufman, Alex Allain, Chloe Lubinski, and Jessie Brown for commenting on a draft of this post. Further reading/listening/other consumption: My playlist of favorite contra dance music (because every dance has live music, contra has a thriving music scene that punches way above its weight!) Jeff Kaufman, Contra Dance as a Model For Post-AI Culture try contra dot com This is at least a 1-in-10,000 event; I’ve never seen it happen again in over 20 years of regular dancing. In fact, you can probably get away without even that! Another benefit of this is that contra is much more intergenerational than most forms of dance. I have dance friends in their twenties and seventies! At least for me, when I overuse ironic detachment it has subtle but far-reaching effects on how I see and engage with the world. It’s an easy way to amuse people, but ends up masking or numbing out a lot of more “real” responses. I’ve found it really interesting and a bit psychoactive to play what I call “the ironic detachment game,” in which I am banned from responding to anything in an ironically detached way. I personally sweat a lot and usually bring multiple shirts to change into, although most other dancers I know don’t need to do this. Teaching a swing is a separate skill from just having a good swing, so you may want to ask a few different people. I recently started a mission to get my friends into contra dancing (hence also this post)! It’s going great and it’s made it way more fun for me!

This post was adapted from an internal doc I wrote at Wave. Welcome to being a manager! Your time-management problem just got a lot harder. As an IC, you can often get away with a very simple time-management strategy: Decide what your one most important thing is. Work on it until it’s done. GOTO 1 As a team lead, this isn’t going to work, because much more of your work is interrupt-driven or gets blocked for long periods of time. One-on-ones! Code reviews! Design reviews! Prioritization meetings! Project check-ins! All of these are subject to an external schedule rather than being the type of thing that you can push on in a single focused block until it’s done. Being a team lead means three big changes for your time management: You no longer have a single most important thing. You’ll have to learn how to juggle competing priorities. Your most important responsibility is for your team’s output, not your personal output. That means that individual engineering work goes last in your list of potential most important things. You’ll need to start spending some of your time on a manager’s schedule: There are two types of schedule, which I’ll call the manager’s schedule and the maker’s schedule. The manager’s schedule is for bosses. It’s embodied in the traditional appointment book, with each day cut into one hour intervals. You can block off several hours for a single task if you need to, but by default you change what you’re doing every hour. Most powerful people are on the manager’s schedule. It’s the schedule of command. But there’s another way of using time that’s common among people who make things, like programmers and writers. They generally prefer to use time in units of half a day at least. You can’t write or program well in units of an hour. That’s barely enough time to get started. Here’s some advice on how to cope with those changes. Have accurate expectations of yourself Your responsibilities to your team will take time, and even more importantly, attention. That means you’ll be a lot less productive on IC work than you have been in the past—especially at first while you’re finding your legs. Additionally, your time will be less predictable week-to-week as you might have to spend an unknown amount of time responding to “inbound” work. For the first few months, you should treat any individual engineering work that you get done as a bonus. Even after that, you should expect to have something like 10-20% less individual output per engineer you manage, depending on how experienced you are, they are, etc., and with substantial week-to-week variance. To mitigate this, my rule for myself has been to make sure that my IC work is important but not urgent—i.e. that nobody will be sad and no plans will be derailed if I end up having to spend the next week firefighting instead of pushing it forward. For honing my intuitions about how much I can actually expect to accomplish, I’ve found time tracking very useful (see How time tracking helped me be a better manager and I apparently got 50% better at my job last month). Prioritize ruthlessly A corollary of the above is that it becomes very important for you to prioritize what to work on, both on an hour-to-hour cadence and on a larger timescale. It’s not possible to write down a full algorithm for prioritizing in a blog post—that’s why they pay us the big bucks—but here are some heuristics for which things are most worth prioritizing: Deadlines where something bad happens if you miss them. (e.g. performance improvements in advance of a holiday rush.) Note that the badness of missing deadlines varies wildly. Make a habit of asking “what is the reason for this deadline?” for any deadline-driven project. Work that increases your or your team’s future bandwidth. This can include hiring, addressing tech / process debt, automating toil, mentoring people, reducing pager burden, etc. A useful way of thinking about it is to rank this kind of work based on the “payback period,” or how long it takes before the time saved by the improvement exceeds the time invested in making it. One-on-ones. Try very hard not to cancel these, unless you’re on vacation—the other 39.5 hours a week they’re focused on what you need from them, so please don’t disdain the 0.5 hours you spend focused on what they need from you. If you cancel too many, expect your reports to feel less safe bringing up tricky things, and to have more issues “blow up” because they didn’t get addressed early. Unemploy your future self One of the most important types of “work that increases your or your team’s future bandwidth” is delegating things. This is something entire books have been written about, but here’s how to avoid a few common delegation pitfalls for new team leads: Negotiate how hands-on to be. Effective delegation means finding the right balance between micromanaging, and throwing your report to the wolves. The stereotype is that new managers often micromanage, but at Wave, I’ve noticed that new managers often err on the side of undermanaging, or being too hands-off, perhaps out of a desire to signal that they trust their reports. If you’re unsure, it’s good to have an explicit conversation with the person you’re delegating to about how much support they want. E.g. “do you want to do the design for this feature yourself, have me do the high-level and fill in the details, or have me write the entire design doc?” Calibrate to your team members’ task-relevant maturity, or how capable they are of independently doing a particular type of task. A senior engineer should be able to design most features independently (with review), but give the same design task to a junior engineer and they’ll probably flail around and make no progress. You should be maintaining a mental map of each of your team members’ strengths and weaknesses—and updating it over time as you help them improve. Delegate ahead of future growth. Your team’s workload is going to increase over time, so even if you don’t feel like you have too much work to do right now, you probably will in the future, unless you currently feel underutilized. You should aim for a workload where in the steady state, you feel like you have some slack capacity. Delegate “stretch projects” to help your team level up. Getting enough slack might require you to delegate work that no one else on your team can currently do. Take your mental strengths-and-weaknesses map, ask yourself what the most important growth directions for each of those team members are, and figure out how to give them work that stretches them in that direction. Note that these delegations will probably require more frequent monitoring, since your reports will have less task-relevant maturity on their stretch projects! A five-step “help, I’m overwhelmed” checklist Despite your best efforts to follow the above advice, there will probably come a time when you feel very stressed about the amount of work on your plate. When that time comes, here’s what to do: Schedule time with your manager, for the soonest slot you can, to triage your todo list. (If the primary stakeholder for your scariest todos is your PM, schedule with them instead.) Make a list of everything that’s on your plate currently. Yes, everything, even that code review that’s been sitting in your backlog for the last 3 months. At the meeting you scheduled in step 1, figure out how to delegate everything in that list you can delegate, then stack-rank the remainder. Realistically (see Have accurate expectations of yourself) decide how far down the list you’re going to get. Remember to leave yourself some slack for whatever comes up! For things below the cutoff, decide that you’re not going to do them, and notify everyone who cares that you probably won’t get to it. Carve out focused time If you’re not careful, it’s easy to fill your entire calendar with meetings, Slack, etc. and have no time for deep work. With careful planning, you can avoid this by “batching” all your distractions to particular times of day. There are lots of tactical tips for doing this; I catalogued some that work for me in Tools for keeping focused. One tech-lead-specific one that I’ll add is batching meetings: I schedule all my meetings back-to-back on Tuesdays and Thursdays to leave the rest of the week as free as possible for deep work. Appendix: further reading Rest in Motion How time tracking helped me be a better manager Time management: the leadership meta-problem. Tools for keeping focused Attention is your scarcest resource I apparently got 50% better at my job last month The Top Idea in Your Mind Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule My weekly review habit

This is an adaptation of an internal doc I wrote for Anthropic. I’ve been noticing recently that often, a big blocker to teams staying effective as they grow is trust. “Alice doesn’t trust Bob” makes Alice sound like the bad guy, but it’s often completely appropriate for people not to trust each other in some areas: One might have an active reason to expect someone to be bad at something. For example, recently I didn’t fully trust two of my managers to set their teams’ roadmaps… because they’d joined about a week ago and had barely gotten their laptops working. (Two months later, they’re doing great!) One might just not have data. For example, I haven’t seen most of my direct reports deal with an underperforming team member yet, and this is a common blind spot for many managers, so I shouldn’t assume that they will reliably be effective at this without support. In general, if Alice is Bob’s manager and is an authority on, say, prioritizing research directions, Bob is probably actively trying to build a good mental “Alice simulator” so that he can prioritize autonomously without checking in all the time. But his simulator might not be good yet, or Alice might not have verified that it’s good enough. Trust comes from common knowledge of shared mental models, and that takes investment from both sides to build. If low trust is sometimes appropriate, what’s the problem? It’s that trust is what lets collaboration scale. If I have a colleague I don’t trust to (say) make good software design decisions, I’ll have to review their designs much more carefully and ask them to make more thorough plans in advance. If I have a report that I don’t fully trust to handle underperforming team members, I’ll have to manage them more granularly, digging into the details to understand what’s going on and forming my own views about what should happen, and checking on the situation repeatedly to make sure it’s heading in the right direction. That’s a lot more work both for me, but also for my teammates who have to spend a bunch more time making their work “inspectable” in this way. The benefits here are most obvious when work gets intense. For example, Anthropic had a recent crunch time during which one of our teams was under intense pressure to quickly debug a very tricky issue. We were able to work on this dramatically more efficiently because the team (including most of the folks who joined the debugging effort from elsewhere) had high trust in each other’s competence; at peak we had probably ~25 people working on related tasks, but we were mostly able to split them into independent workstreams where people just trusted the other stuff would get done. In similar situations with a lower-mutual-trust team, I’ve seen things collapse into endless FUD and arguments about technical direction, leading to much slower forward progress. Trust also becomes more important as the number of stakeholders increases. It’s totally manageable for me to closely supervise a report dealing with an underperformer; it’s a lot more costly and high-friction if, say, 5 senior managers need to do deep dives on a product decision. In an extreme case, I once saw an engineering team with a tight deadline choose to build something they thought was unnecessary, because getting the sign-off to cut scope would have taken longer than doing the work. From the perspective of the organization as an information-processing entity, given the people and relationships that existed at the time, that might well have been the right call; but it does suggest that if they worked to build enough trust to make that kind of decision efficient enough to be worth it, they’d probably move much faster overall. As you work with people for longer you’ll naturally have more experience with each other and build more trust. So on most teams, these kinds of things work themselves out over time. But if you’re going through hypergrowth, then unless you’re very proactive about this, any given time most of your colleagues will have some sort of trust deficit. Symptoms I sometimes notice that can indicate a buildup of trust deficits: Too many decisions needing to be escalated Too many decisions requiring deep involvement from many stakeholders People having lots of FUD about whether projects they’re not involved in are on track Leaders frequently needing to do “deep dives” on individual topics Leaders needing to spending most of their time working “in the system” (problem-solving specific issues) rather than “on the system” (unblocking future growth) Hiring more people doesn’t make you (much) less busy It’s easy to notice these and think that the solution is for people to “just trust each other more.” There are some situations and personalities where that’s the right advice. But often it’s reasonable not to trust someone yet! In that case, a better tactic is to be more proactive about building trust. In a large, fast-growing company you’ll probably never get to the utopian ideal of full pairwise trust between everyone—it takes too long to build. But on the margin, more effort still helps a lot. Some ways to invest more effort in trusting others that I’ve seen work well: Share your most important mental models broadly. At Anthropic, Dario gives biweekly-ish “informal vision updates” (hour-long talks on important updates to parts of company strategy) that I think of as the canonical example of this. Just about everyone at Anthropic is trying to build an internal “Dario simulator” who they can consult when the real one is too busy (i.e. ~always). For high level strategy, these updates do an amazing job of that. Put in time. In addition to one-way broadcasts, trust-building benefits a lot from one-on-one bidirectional communication so that you can get feedback on how well the other person is building the right models. This is one of the reasons I schedule lots of recurring 1:1s with peers in addition to my team. Offsites are also very helpful here. Try people out. If you’re unsure whether someone on your team will be great at something, try giving them a trial task and monitoring how it’s going more closely than you would by default, to catch issues early. This is a great way to invest in your long-term ability to delegate things. Give feedback. It’s easy to feel like something is “too minor” to give feedback on and let it slide, especially when there’s always too much to do. But I’ve never regretted erring on the side of giving feedback, and often regretted deciding to “deal with it” or keep quiet. One pro-tip here: if you feel anxious about giving someone negative feedback, consider whether you’ve given them enough positive feedback—which is a helpful buffer against people interpreting negative feedback as “you’re not doing well overall.” Inspection forums, i.e., recurring meetings where leadership monitors the status of many projects by setting goals and tracking progress against them. The above tactics are mostly 1:1 or one-to-all, but sometimes you want to work with a small group and this is an efficient way of doing that. To help other people trust you: Accept that you start out with incomplete trust. When someone, say, tries to monitor my work more closely than I think is warranted, my initial reaction is to be defensive and ask them to trust me more. It takes effort to put myself into their shoes and remind myself that they probably don’t have a good enough model of me to trust me yet. Overcommunicate status. This helps in two ways: first, it gives stakeholders more confidence that if something goes off the rails they’ll know quickly. And second, it gives them more data and helps them build a higher-fidelity model of how you operate. Proactively own up when something isn’t going well. Arguably a special case of overcommunicating, but one that’s especially important to get right: if you can be relied on to ask for help when you need it, it’s a lot less risky for people to “try you out” on stuff at the edge of what they trust you on. Related reading: Inspection and the limits of trust

This is an adaptation of an internal doc I wrote for Wave. I used to think that behavioral interviews were basically useless, because it was too easy for candidates to bullshit them and too hard for me to tell what was a good answer. I’d end up grading every candidate as an “okay, I guess” because I was never sure what bar I should hold them to. I still think most behavioral interviews are like that, but after grinding out way too many of them, I now think it’s possible to escape that trap. Here are my tips and tricks for doing so! Confidence level: doing this stuff worked better than not doing it, but I still feel like I could be a lot better at behavioral interviews, so please suggest improvements and/or do your own thing :) Before the interview Budget 2+ hours to build That’s how long I usually take to design and prepare a new type of interview. If I spend a couple hours thinking about what questions and follow-ups to ask, I’m much more likely to get a strong signal about which candidates performed well. It might sounds ridiculous to spend 2 hours building a 1-hour interview that you’ll only give 4 times. But it’s worth it! Your most limited resource is time with candidates, so if you can spend more of your own time to use candidates’ time better, that’s worth it. Think ahead about follow-ups and rubric I spend most of those 2 hours trying to answer the following question: “what answers to these questions would distinguish a great candidate from a mediocre one, and how can I dig for that?” I find that if I wait until after the interview to evaluate candidates, I rarely have conviction about them, and fall back to grading them a “weak hire” or “weak no-hire.” To avoid this, write yourself a rubric of all the things you care about assessing, and what follow-up questions you’ll ask to assess those things. This will help you deliver the interview consistently, but most importantly, you’ll ask much better follow-up questions if you’ve thought about them beforehand. See the appendix for an example rubric. Focus on a small number of skills I usually focus on 1-3 related skills or traits. To get a strong signal from a behavioral interview question I usually need around 15 minutes, which only leaves time to discuss a small number of scenarios. For example, for a head of technical recruiting, I decided to focus my interview on the cluster of related traits of being great at communication, representing our culture to candidates, and holding a high bar for job candidate experience. You should coordinate with the rest of the folks on your interview loop to make sure that, collectively, you cover all the most important traits for the role. During the interview Kicking off My formula for kicking off a behavioral question is “Tell me about a recent time when [X situation happened]. Just give me some brief high-level context on the situation, what the problem was,1 and how you addressed it. You can keep it high-level and I’ll ask follow-up questions afterward.” I usually ask for a recent time to avoid having them pick the one time that paints them in the best possible light. The second sentence (context/problem/solution) is important for helping the candidate keep their initial answer focused—otherwise, they are more likely to ramble for a long time and leave less time for you to… Dig into details Almost everyone will answer the initial behavioral interview prompt with something that sounds vaguely like it makes sense, even if they don’t actually usually behave in the ways you’re looking for. To figure out whether they’re real or BSing you, the best way is to get them to tell you a lot of details about the situation—the more you get them to tell you, the harder it will be to BS all the details. General follow-ups you can use to get more detail: Ask for a timeline—how quickly people operate can be very informative. (Example: I asked someone how they dealt with an underperforming direct report and they gave a compelling story, but when I asked for the timeline, it seemed that weeks had elapsed between noticing the problem and doing anything about it.) “And then what happened?” / “What was the outcome?” (Example: I asked this to a tech recruiter for the “underperforming report” question and they admitted they had to fire the person, which they hadn’t previously mentioned—that’s a yellow flag on honesty.) Ask how big of an effect something had and how they know. (Example: I had a head of technical recruiting tell me “I did X and our outbound response rate improved;” when I asked how much, he said from 11% to 15%, but the sample size was small enough that that could have been random chance!) “Is there anything you wish you’d done differently?” (Sometimes people respond to this with non-actionable takeaways like “I wish I’d thought of that idea earlier” but having no plan or mechanism that could possibly cause them to think about the idea earlier the next time.) Evaluating candidates Make yourself a rubric One of the worst mistakes you can make in a behavioral interview is to wing it: to ask whatever follow-up questions pop into your head, and then at the end try to answer the question, “did I like this person?” If you do that, you’re much more likely to be a “weak yes” or “weak no” on every candidate, and to miss asking the follow-up questions that could have given you stronger signal. Instead, you should know what you’re looking for, and what directions to probe in, before you start the interview. The best way to do this is to build a scoring rubric, where you decide what you’re going to look for and what a good vs. bad answer looks like. See the appendix for an example. General things to watch out for Of course, most of your rubric should be based on the details of what traits you’re trying to evaluate! But here are some failure modes that are common to most behavioral interviews: Vague platitudes: some people have a tendency to fall back on vague generalities in behavioral interviews. “In recruiting, it’s all about communication!” “No org structure is perfect!” If they don’t follow this up with a more specific, precise or nuanced claim, they may not be a strong first-principles thinker. Communication bandwidth: if you find that you’re struggling to understand what the person is saying or get on the same page as them, this is a bad sign about your ability to discuss nuanced topics in the future if you work together. Self-improvement mindset: if the person responds to “what would you do differently” with “nothing,” or with non-actionable vague platitudes, it’s a sign they may not be great at figuring out how to get better at things over time. Being embarrassingly honest: if probing for more details causes you to learn that the thing went less well than the original impression you got, the candidate probably is trying to “spin” this at least a little bit. High standards: if they say there’s nothing they wish they’d done differently, this may also be lack of embarrassing honesty, or not holding themselves to a high standard. (Personally, even for any project that went exceptionally well I can think of lots of individual things I could have done better!) Scapegoating: if you ask about solving a problem, do they take responsibility for contributing to the problem? it’s common for people to imply/say that problems were all caused by other people and solved by them (eg “this hiring manager wanted to do it their way, but I knew they were wrong, but couldn’t convince them…”). Sometimes this is true, but usually problems aren’t a single person’s fault! Appendix: example rubric and follow-ups Here’s an example rubric and set of follow-up questions for a Head of Technical Recruiting. Question: “tell me about a time when your report wasn’t doing a good job.” moving quickly to detect and address the issue ask for a timeline of events  bad answer = lots of slop in time between “when problem started” / “when you discovered” / “when you addressed” setting clear expectations with their report and being embarrassingly honest ask what the conversation with their report was like making their reports feel psychologically safe ask how they thought their report felt after the tough convo bad answer = not sure, or saying things in a non-supportive / non-generous way being effective at discovering the root problem ask a mini postmortem / “five whys”  bad answer = not having deep understanding of root dynamics, only symptoms do they understand whether what they did worked ask for concrete metrics on how things were going before and after they intervened bad answer = not having metrics, having metrics that moved only a small amount (and not realizing this is a failure), etc. learning and updating over time ask them what they could have done differently next time bad answer = vague platitudes or “nothing” For behaviors that involve addressing problems—reword “problem” as something else as appropriate.