Biggest Job Lies #4: “We Only Want What’s Best For You” (DF#105)

Ryan Maruyama [00:00:00]:

Aloha folks, and welcome back to degree free where we teach you how to get hired without a college degree. We are your hosts, Ryan and Hannah Mariama. It is great to have you back. Welcome back. Welcome back to the podcast. As always, folks Ryan and I are stoked to have you with us today. Yes. We are very excited to have you today. This week is gonna be a quicker episode. I just have a couple of things that I wanted to talk about this week, so let's just dive right into it. The 1st thing that I wanted to talk about. I was thinking about a series that we did a while back. It was called the biggest job lies. We've went through 3 of the biggest job lies already, and I'll put links to those episodes in the show notes. degreefree.coforward/ podcast, and you can find the links to the other 3 episodes when I was thinking about other job lies that I've heard over my time working throughout my career, didn't matter what industry, didn't matter what job. One of the things that I used to hate hearing and I hate hearing is we only

Hannah Maruyama [00:01:22]:

want what's best for you. Yeah. That's right up there with we're a family here. Yeah. You've probably

Ryan Maruyama [00:01:28]:

heard this before. You'll usually hear this, when they're talking about something difficult to bring up. They'll usually say this, and whoever they is, it's your boss, Usually, your boss. You're either direct report boss, your supervisor, or your boss's boss. It's a way for them to Blunt whatever it is that's coming out of their mouth next. We only want what's best for you, so we're gonna let you go. Yep. It's always cushioning something you don't wanna hear. Yeah. We only want what's best for you, so you're gonna have to stay on longer so that you can learn your job better

Hannah Maruyama [00:02:09]:

whenever it is. Yeah. We only want what's best for you, so we're not gonna promote you yet. Exactly. And I don't think that a lot of bosses

Ryan Maruyama [00:02:16]:

say this to be malicious. It's just that they're really terrible at delivering bad news. or what they believe is going to be considered

Hannah Maruyama [00:02:26]:

bad news. It's obviously not true. It's not True. Yeah. They do not only want one's best for you. They're a company. It's their job to make money. That is their primary concern. Yes. the company

Ryan Maruyama [00:02:38]:

does what's best for the company, and you do what's best for you. It's never more obvious than when you are negotiating for your salary. When you're negotiating for your salary, 99.9% of the time you are going to be asking for a higher price, and they're gonna be asking for a lower price because they want what's best for the company. and you want what's best for you. What's best for you is making more money. What's best for them is getting you at a lower price. So it's made apparent there, and that translates throughout your entire career and throughout the entire company. Now what I wanted to say here was something that I didn't think about. until I spoke to Julia Pollock, the chief economist at ZipRecruiter. And I will link to that episode in the show notes as well, degree free dotco/podcast. And you can go back and listen to that episode. It was a really good one. We started talking about this a little bit. about how companies don't care about you, and she pushed back. And she said, it might be true that companies don't care about you. But it's probably not true that people within those companies don't care about you. That's absolutely true. And that kinda blew my mind. It's so simple when you think about it. Not for those listening, you're like, yeah. No. No shit, Sherlock. Right? But for me, that blew my mind because it I always thought, okay, people within the company, my bosses don't give a rip about me. because they are on the company's side, which, yes, in their role, they have to be or most likely they are. It doesn't mean that there's no empathy or sympathy coming from them. It's just that they are in that role and you're in your role and they have to do what they have to do. Yeah. Their job is to administrate within the best nurtures of the company, but they may be in your corner. Exactly. And you can think back to your own experience. I'm sure that you've had bosses that you knew cared about you. even though they were your boss and even though they had to be the hammer when you messed up or they couldn't give you that raise because it wasn't in the budget, things like that. But that didn't mean that they didn't care about you. That being said, At the end of the day, the company has to do what's right for the company. They will not do what's best for you because what's best for you is when it comes time to cut people for you to not get cut. But the fact of the matter is If they can't make payroll and they are struggling and you're in a position that needs to be cut, the highest likelihood is that you are going to be cut. And if they don't cut you -- They're gonna have to cut other people. Yeah. Exactly. They're gonna have to cut other people, or eventually, they're just not gonna be able to make payroll. and they're just gonna fold. Right. So either the company doesn't exist because they can't make their payroll, they can't pay their bills, or they get rid of a few people. And you might be one of those people. there's not much to know here other than when you hear that. Just know that bad news is probably coming at the end of that sentence or the next sentence after that. So brace yourself and just know that you need to do what's best for you. So for example, if a company is trying to make you quit and this does happen. It doesn't happen that reputable companies. It doesn't happen with reputable teams, but it has happened and it does happen to people. If a company or a boss is trying to make you quit, because they don't wanna pay your severance. They don't wanna pay unemployment insurance. They don't want their rates to go up. And they say, oh, well, I just want what's best for you. Here's these other roles. so on and so forth, go ahead and apply to them,

Hannah Maruyama [00:06:14]:

but you can quit your job now. Just remember that they do not want what's best to hear you in that situation. To and what's best for them? Exactly. They're worried about paying their own bills. They're worried about making sure that they can keep the lights on. So before we get into the next topic, if you wanna learn more about how to get hired without a degree, degree free news, Ryan and I think is cool that you're gonna wanna know about. You are gonna wanna go over to degree free dotcoforward/newsletter to sign up and get our free weekly newsletter delivered right to your inbox. Yep. Absolutely.

Ryan Maruyama [00:06:44]:

the next thing that I wanna talk about is inspired by a question that we got in our first cohort of the career change crash course. where we help you get a job without a college degree where teach you how to be an effective job seeker. You can learn all about that at degreefree.coforward/career you can sign up there. What reminded me about this question was actually a slate article that I read from a couple of months ago as well. It's pretty funny. The headline is, like, want a job? Cool. Here's 17 interviews or whatever. Wow. If that isn't the temperature of what's going on right now. Yeah. The it's That was pretty funny. And it's slate. So I'm not sure of the sources or anything, but it's It was a funny article. Guarantee, there's people that have had 17 interviews. Oh, yeah. Yeah. In the article, there's actually a guy that had 29 interviews. use. What? Yeah. So it was For what kind of job? I think it was engineering. I'm not sure. But still, that's like -- Still, that's -- -- that's so -- That's outrageous. -- so many. unless you're building rocket ships, maybe. I could see that. Yes. So the question that we got asked in the career change crash course, it was somebody trying to land their first job in the tech industry in their first tech role, and that's very wide ranging. But the question is how many interviews can you expect when getting hired for a tech role. So to give the answer up front, it depends, but Expect at least 3. Usually, 3. This is highly, highly dependent on what roles you're applying for. Generally speaking, the more technical the role, the more interviews. Generally speaking, the more senior the role, the more interviews as well. Before I go and detail what the 3 interviews look like, what I'm counting as interviews.

Hannah Maruyama [00:08:41]:

Other people, for some reason, don't consider them interviews. I feel like anytime you're scheduled to meet with someone have to meet with. It's an interview. Exactly.

Ryan Maruyama [00:08:49]:

That's what I'm counting as an interview. But a lot of people in the, you know, career space, and I'm using career for those that aren't watching on YouTube. I'm using career in quotes here. They're in the careers with their say, oh,

Hannah Maruyama [00:09:00]:

the 15 minute call, the first one that you do with the recruiter, whether that recruiter's internal or external, that's not really an interview. Except for if you do badly at it, they're not gonna move you forward, and you have to schedule with them. So it is. Exactly. Yeah. It's so ridiculous. I've heard that too, and I'm like, it's an interview because if you don't do well at it, they're not gonna move you ahead. Exactly.

Ryan Maruyama [00:09:22]:

So I am counting interviews as any time that you are interfacing with somebody either on a phone call or on a video call. So so Anytime you're doing it -- We're in person. -- in real time. Right. Exactly. Phone call, video call, or in person. Emails, chats that doesn't count. Yeah. Not an interview. That's not what I'm counting as interviews. Mhmm. But anytime that you're hopping on the phone with somebody, anytime that you're doing a video call, that is one interview. Okay. So I just wanted to clear that out. That's what I'm talking about, and that's what I am defining as an interview. So Generally speaking, if you are asking this question, you probably haven't held a tech role before, and I'm not talking about technical. I'm talking a technology role before. You haven't worked in a tech company, or it's been a while since you've interviewed, so you just wanna know what the landscape is. It's going to look usually like 3 interviews. The interviews, once again, generally speaking, and this is going to differ depending on your experience, depending on the role, all of those disclaimers. But the first interview is going to be what they call a quote unquote vibe check. That is usually with an internal or external recruiter. Those are the people that are doing the initial reach out to you and what they're doing on this 5 check is there just literally making sure that you vibe, once again, for those not watching on YouTube, I'm using air quotes. that you vibe with the team, with the company culture, and with everything that's going on there. I hate those.

Hannah Maruyama [00:11:01]:

Yeah. I hate that too because then it gives HR this power to if if they don't like your vibe. Yeah. Exactly. Then they're not gonna move you forward. And, also, I've said this before, but HR, especially now, a lot of them are women, and usually they're a little bit on the younger side. So what you're telling me is if a thirty six year old man who's an engineer doesn't vibe with this twenty five year old chick, then he doesn't get moved forward in the interview process. How ridiculous. Right. Companies are actually screening people that way. That's crazy.

Ryan Maruyama [00:11:30]:

Yeah. Exactly. But they are. So you have to get past the gatekeeper there. A lot of times, that person is not going to be technical, especially for you if you're listening to this podcast. and you are asking this question. It's not gonna be, like, a technical recruiter. You're just gonna be talking to this person and there's basically, you're gonna try to be upbeat. try to talk about teamwork and talk talk about how you can bring value to the company and bring value to that team. because if they don't like you, they're not gonna move your head. Yes. They are the gatekeeper, and you need to get past them and then get on to the next person. If it's not an internal external recruiter at this first one, it could be your direct report. And that should tell you a little bit about the team size, about the company size. Usually, if it's your direct report in the first one, the company or the team that you're working on is much much smaller. If you are talking to a recruiter in the first round, there's 1 of 2 options 1, the small company that you are applying to hired a recruiting agency. 2, it's a large company and they have a lot of red tape that you have to go through. But those are the 2 paths if you are talking to a recruiter first thing. The second interview is usually with your direct report. That is gonna be a one on one where you speak to the person that you are gonna be directly reporting to, your supervisor, your manager, your boss, and you're gonna go through the normal things that you go through in an interview, tell me about yourself, worst question ever, or it's not even a question. Right? Yeah. It's a statement. Why do you wanna work for this company? Those types of things. That is what you can expect in the second interview. Sometimes, depending on the depending on the company. Once again, those second interviews can be panel interviews as well. If it's a panel interview at that second one, It's usually a panel of the team that you are going to be working with and not necessarily the bosses. Mhmm. So it's going to be your manager and then the coworkers that you are going to have. If you're gonna be in a team of 5 people, You're gonna be 1 of 5. It's gonna be your boss and then the 3 other people to make 5. In the panel interview as well, it's gonna be very similar, like I said, There's going to be a lot of tell me about yourself. It might get into technical details about the role or behavioral questions depending on the roles that you are applying for. Once again, it's a little hard to nail all of this down because when you say I wanna work in tech, I wanna work in the tech industry. That's such a wide There there's an infinite amount of jobs in there, and there's an infinite amount of interview questions and interview prep that you have to do if you're just saying, tech. But it gets a lot easier when you're saying customer success, engineering, marketing, so on and so forth. This whole segment is just to give you an idea if you've never applied for a tech role before. The 3rd is gonna be a panel interview. Usually, at this point, the panel is going to be made up of your bosses. Your coworkers are now out of it, and you are talking to your direct report and then your direct reports report. So your boss's boss. And then maybe your boss's bosses boss or boss's boss adjacent. Sorry. That's getting confusing. I know what you mean. But I think you I think that's kind of clear. Yeah. So that is the 3rd interview. If you're lucky, that is also the interview where you figure out whether or not you have the job and you do a lot of your negotiations where they are saying, okay. I like you. You're the 1. Let's talk numbers. Then you talk a little bit of numbers so that you figure out a range, and you can kind of hammer that down. I'd say kind of. because it might not be up to them completely. It might be a budget that HR has to deal with. And so an HR representative will call you later with your official offer, but because of their budgeting and their department, they can narrow down the range. So, hopefully, at the end of that interview, you get a really good idea that you have landed this job or you're at least going to get an offer, a formal offer in writing. As we've talked about before, you should definitely get everything in writing, and formal offer is made. Okay. Now that is a very, very high level view of how many interviews you can expect when getting hired for role. But like I said, this changes wildly between companies and roles that you're applying for. For example, go back and listen to my conversation with Drake Porter who is a senior product manager at Meta. It's episode 63. And I know that off the top of my head because I've listened to that so many times. Yeah. You and I both have. It's a great episode. Yes. And I'm hoping to get him back on the podcast. So if you want to hear from Drake again. If you have any questions that you'd like answered from Drake, drop your questions in the comments, go to YouTube, and let us know what you'd like to know from Drake, but he details the entire meta interview process that he went through when he was getting hired. And he went through 8 interviews,

Hannah Maruyama [00:16:50]:

I believe. Yeah. That's what he said. Granted, he

Ryan Maruyama [00:16:54]:

did a redo of one of them, so I think it would have been 7, but still. 8 interviews. That's a lot of interviews, but also he's a senior product manager. So I'm not gonna bore you with all the details of each interview. Just go back and listen to that episode. I'll put links in the show notes, degree free dotc04/ podcast. You can listen to all of it there, but they go through a lot of the thinking and the soft skills that a product manager needs, and they want to see your thought process. Like I said before, that slate article inspired me to think back from a couple of months ago from the career change crash course because there's a person that interviewed

Hannah Maruyama [00:17:38]:

twenty nine times without knowing whether or not they got the job. just that's so insane. That's you're employing that person at that point, but you're just but for free. Exactly.

Ryan Maruyama [00:17:47]:

Exactly. And even if it's for a more technical role, like an engineer or even like a c suite executive, I get that you have to, like, wine and dine them and you have to figure out who they are. So maybe for a c Suite executive, I can see it making more sense. But really, that's a lot of time on both the candidates part and the company's part. It's a lot of risk. I'm not talking about risk. I'm just talking about time. Yeah. If you've interfaced with somebody twenty nine times and you figured that it takes half an hour for each one or even 15 minutes, that's a lot of time. That's hours of time to figure out whether or not this candidate makes sense. Okay. I do want to address that It is really high leverage for companies to hire because there are studies out there that show that new hires take about 6 months to become productive in their work environment. So for 6 months, the company is paying your salary at a loss of productivity. And at 6 months, you're fully trained and you know what's going on. Usually. So it makes sense that they are trying to make sure you are the correct hire for this role. But 29 interviews is crazy. Honestly, 8 interviews is kind of a lot as well. Yeah. That's excessive to me. Yeah. The last thing that I wanna talk about here is Talking about smaller teams in smaller companies versus larger teams and larger companies. Once again, painting with broad strokes, The larger the company, the more interviews

Hannah Maruyama [00:19:24]:

you'll have. Yeah. Unless they have it really dialed in. Exactly. Because

Ryan Maruyama [00:19:29]:

there's just more red tape, they're more established. They have established departments and established procedures to go And a lot of those procedures are made up because they want to have the interview process be as unbiased as possible or at least that's what they say. I'm not making a value judgment on that, but that's what they say. So they have to go through 8 interviews before they hire you to make sure that it's unbiased and make sure that you are the correct candidate for it. Whereas a lot of smaller companies or smaller teams within larger companies depending on it how much leeway that smaller team gets or has, the interviews are gonna be a lot less. Yeah. For my startup that I work for now, I had one call -- Yes. -- and then an offer. Yes. Exactly. So the interview process can also tell you a lot about the company as well. You can start to make inferences. If you don't already know whether or not this company is big or small, and you're trying to piece it all together. If you only have one interview, you're probably working at a smaller company. If your first interview is with your direct report or it's with the founder of the company or or something like that. Somebody much higher than where you're gonna be. Small company. It's probably a smaller company. That just gives you a lot of context clues of the things that they care about, the things that you can talk about in your interview. This is getting a little bit in the weeds, and we go over all of these types of stuff in the career change crash course where we can kind of take all these context clues and use them. So you can go to degree free dotc04/careerchange to learn more about that. But generally speaking, if you see on your calendar invite that you are meeting with the CEO or the founder, and you are applying for a mid level role. Okay. Well, then you might be this number 3 guy. You might meet the number 4 person in the company. And so the things that you're gonna talk about are going to be different on a smaller company than it is in a larger company because in larger companies, your role might be just do this one thing. boom boom boom boom boom boom all day, and you're bringing efficiency to that role. Whereas in smaller companies, you are gonna be wearing more hats, your job isn't as defined. You're constantly putting out fires, and so you can focus and talk about those types of things instead. Whereas if you were going to interview at a bigger company, you might wanna just stick within your job roles and say, I'm gonna bring efficiency here where it's needed, where I'm getting hired for. The last thing I'll say about that is that with smaller companies, The reason why there are less interviews is because they don't have a defined hiring process yet because they are busy actually providing the product, providing the service instead of hiring people. They don't have a defined process for hiring, like, how large company with dedicated resources that have an HR department, they can focus on having a defined process, whereas a startup with 1 to 4 people They're all doing work. They don't have a structured oh, let's do a 8 part interview where we do this task this task. This task. This task. It's just like, I'm gonna call this person, and we are going to figure out whether or not you're a good fit within three interviews. Sometimes, like, in your case, one interview. Mhmm. The fortunate and unfortunate byproduct of this remote working revolution is that a lot more people are being able to stay at home and work remotely and earn a living, be with their family, spend more time, workless, have more quote unquote work life balance. So that's really good. That's the plus side of the remote work. The downside on the interview portion of it, is that it's never been easier to have interviews. So the amount of interviews that are being held for companies is skyrocketing because it is so easy. All it is now is a calendar invite. You just get sent a calendar invite where you're meeting with all these different people and then you just have a Zoom meeting or a Google Meet meeting, and you talk about why you're a good fit for this role and whatever whatever whatever. Whereas if it was in person, they would have you do less interviews because they have to go into the office. They're doing other things in the office. And then you, honestly, They don't wanna make you come into the office seven times. But if it's remote so, yeah, he just gotta hop on his computer. Right? So it's fine. It becomes minimized. Yep. Exactly. And that has a large portion to do with this massive increase in the number of interviews. but that's kind of the byproduct of the world that we're living in. It's great remote work has never been more possible It has never been more prevalent, and it's never been more accessible. The downside of that, you're gonna have to live with some of them, and it is that We've never seen more interviews either. And that's pretty much it for the Suki's episode. Like I said, that last segment there was inspired by a question that we got in our career change crash course. If you wanna learn how to get a job without a college degree, if you wanna learn how to be an effective job seeker, how to achieve your career goals, go to degree free dotcoforward/careerchange, and you can learn all about the course and can sign up there.

Hannah Maruyama [00:25:04]:

We'll see you there. Absolutely.

Ryan Maruyama [00:25:06]:

And last thing before you go, if you haven't already, connect with Hannah and myself on LinkedIn. We will put Links to our LinkedIn in the show notes, degree free dotcoforward/ podcast. And that's pretty much it. Until next time, guys. Aloha