How to succeed at your Antithesis interview

Introduction

This is a document that explains exactly how our interview process works, what we’re looking for, and how to convince us that you should work here. It may seem odd to publish this, since many companies try to keep their interview practices and rubrics secret, but we think that’s silly for four different reasons:

1. You are also interviewing us and deciding whether you want to work here. We think that explaining what our interviews are like and what we’re looking for will tell you a lot about how we operate, and help you make a good decision. It’s a win for both sides if somebody reads this and decides that they aren’t a good fit before everybody wastes a bunch of time.
2. One reason for noise in the interview process is that interviews are an intrinsically stressful event with a large power imbalance. Some people are naturally unflappable and have ice in their veins, and some don’t. But we don’t think this quality is required to succeed at Antithesis, so we want to level the playing field a bit by telling you exactly what to expect so the nervous people are less nervous.
3. Being transparent about our interview process forces us to design it to be difficult to game just by knowing how it works. It pushes us away from “security by obscurity,” which is important because interview processes inevitably leak.
4. Moreover, we think to the extent that you can “test prep” for our interviews, that’s actually a good thing! Some qualities that are predictive of success here are conscientiousness and long-term planning. If you put a lot of work into prepping for our interview, that’s a sign that you really want this job, which is a positive indicator too. We’re fine with people having an edge if they choose to, so long as all candidates are offered that choice.

What we’re looking for

All Antithesis employees, across every job role, need to have a set of bare minimum qualities. How these qualities express themselves may differ from role to role, but everybody who works here needs to have them, and our interview processes are heavily oriented towards assessing them.

Ability to go deep

We believe that the world is made out of details. In order to do our jobs well, we need to be able to grasp those details, and if that requires that we go many, many levels of abstraction below what we’re used to, then that’s what we do.

• Our engineers are fearless, and will patch the kernel or read the CPU manual if they need to (yes, this actually happens).
• Our salespeople will learn everything there is to know about a company in order to understand what value we can bring.
• Our managers are required to get their hands dirty with the same kind of work their reports do, whether that’s writing code, closing deals, or building financial models.

We all talk a lot (we love to talk), but we are intensely distrustful of people who only talk. A lot of the interview is aimed at answering this question: do you profoundly understand the lowest-level details of your craft, and will you follow them down as deep as you need to go?

Flexible and adaptable

We’re trying to do something that has never been done before, and that means there are a lot of surprises along the way. We value people who are able to put up with neck-snapping changes in the plan, because the reality is that the plan is going to change sometimes. Sometimes the plan for your particular job will change. Many a time we have asked one of our employees to leap into the breach and handle something that isn’t their job because that’s what the company needs right now.

The more senior your role, the more likely this is to happen to you. We especially value people who can tell us when the plan ought to change for a reason that the rest of us aren’t seeing. This correlates with intellectual curiosity and humility, so we value those things too. A lot of your interview will be trying to figure out how good you are at spotting beneficial changes to the plan, and how willing you are to roll with them when somebody else spots them first.

Make everyone around you better

The thing we’re doing is too hard for us to all work independently, so we collaborate deliberately and intensely. What that means is that the value you contribute through your individual efforts is usually dwarfed by the effect that you have on everybody around you. Part of your interview is not trying to assess your individual performance, but the experience that we will have being your coworkers. We get at that by actually trying to work with you during the interview (for example, asking you a question that we ourselves don’t know the answer to and then puzzling it out together).

If during our collaboration sessions you accept good ideas with grace and push back on bad ideas with polite firmness, we will like that. If you’re either a pushover or a jerk, you will not pass the interview. We also probe this by seeing how you talk about your career and experience. If you speak glowingly about your former coworkers and give them credit for your victories while taking responsibility for your defeats, we will like that because that’s also how we treat each other.

Great at communicating

Because we don’t work alone, your ability to clearly and concisely and respectfully communicate with your coworkers is one of your most important attributes. That includes things that some people don’t normally think of as communication.
For example: recognizing when you are stuck, and asking for help.
Or for another example: having the situational awareness and understanding the “why” behind your tasks well enough to know when to communicate that the situation has changed.

We will try very hard to assess this throughout the interview, even for purely “technical” roles in engineering or bag-carrying roles in sales. We’re going to ask you to explain what your previous companies all did, and will pay very close attention to whether you were able to get it across. We will also try explaining things to you and then see if you get them.

Metacognition

“Metacognition” is a fancy term for “thinking about thinking” or, more prosaically, being able to take a step back and assess whether your approach is working. This is a cheap way for almost anybody to boost their level of intelligence and effectiveness. It also encompasses generic problem-solving techniques that work across many domains. For example: drawing a picture, or working out a simple case, or brainstorming several alternatives and evaluating them instead of going with the first thing you thought of.

These skills are most important for engineers, but they’re actually important for everybody, and people at the top of every field have them (whether they know it or not). In your interview, we’re looking for evidence that doing these things is second nature to you, and this is one case where the (mild) stress of the interview setting works in our favor. If&nbps;you remember to take a step back and evaluate your plan in a high-pressure situation, you’ll probably be able to do it when things get intense at work as well.

How we assess you

Interviews for different roles obviously look very different, but when you zoom out and look at it from the meta level, there are a few common things we do across all of them.

1. Ask about things you’ve done

We do this for almost every role. We ask engineering candidates to talk us through a challenging project they’ve worked on in the past. We ask sales candidates to give us a pitch for a product made by a past employer. Some companies do this because they want to find out if your background and experience are impressive. But that’s not why we’re asking, because if you’re talking to us at all it means somebody already looked at your resume and thought it was impressive. We’re asking you because we want to get signal on a few things:

• Do you deeply understand all the details of the thing you listed on your resume? Can you instantly recall them, or reconstruct them from other things you know? That level of familiarity and comfort comes only from prolonged engagement and “going deep.”
• Can you communicate what you did to other people in an effective way? Can you also communicate the “why”? Did you develop and maintain the situational awareness around how your little piece of whatever it is fit into the bigger picture?
• What past project or role have you chosen to highlight? This tells us a lot about your “taste” and what you think is important.
• How do you talk about the role of your coworkers in whatever it was you did?

2. Show us what it’s like to work with you

Part of pretty much every interview is a “work sample.” For a sales person, this will probably involve asking you to pitch Antithesis or qualify a prospect. For a marketing candidate, it will be working with us to brainstorm positioning for an unannounced feature. For an engineer, it will be designing and implementing a new software system together. Once again, we’re looking for a few things:

• What is it like to work with you? To make this signal as good as can be, we’re often going to ask you questions that we ourselves don’t know the answer to, so we can struggle through them together and see what it’s like to struggle alongside you.
• How do you deal with new demands or requirements, or with curveballs and sudden changes of plans?
• Do you ask clarifying questions and really pin down what it is that we want, or do you charge in ahead and make a bunch of assumptions? Are you good at explaining to us why it is that you’re doing what you’re doing? Are you good at giving and receiving feedback on what you’ve done?
• What “meta-skills” can you bring to bear on the problem in the heat of the moment? How do you unstick yourself when you’re stuck?

3. Take you out to lunch

Some companies say that your behavior at lunch is not part of the interview and will not be taken into account in the scoring. Almost all of them are lying. We’ll be direct about it: obviously we’re evaluating you while your mouth is full of food. We aren’t evaluating your table manners or what you order, but our employees spend an awful lot of time together, and we want to make sure that their new coworkers are people that it’s nice to spend time with.

We want to hear about your hobbies, we don’t care what they are, but we want to know if you go deep on them. Our company includes self-taught concert musicians, semi-professional athletes, and people who make their own medieval armor. We only have one day to figure out whether to make a massive investment in you, so we’re looking for every scrap of signal we can get, and lunch is a great one.

Conclusion

This guide is necessarily extremely inadequate and vague, because it is written for every job role. We can (and hopefully in the future will) write much more detailed guides for individual functions. But in the meantime, you can just ask the recruiter or hiring manager for details on what the interview will look like, and point to this document if they’re confused by why you’re asking. Most of our hiring managers will not be confused, they will be impressed, because it means you did a little bit of homework and want to win your interview, and we like people who do their homework and want to win.

Lastly, if you have a horrible experience in your interview, or feel that it was not conducted according to these principles, please let us know at: interview-feedback@antithesis.com We are always struggling to improve, and frequently make mistakes.