When I was thinking about leaving Google, and interviewing at lots of companies, I tried to ask at least one interviewer per company about unit tests. Google’s culture was very pro-unit test - it was basically impossible to get a PR approved without unit tests, there was a ton of internal documentation and education about how to write unit tests (even in the bathroom. Seriously), etc. etc. - and I thought that I could probably learn some important information about a company’s engineering culture by asking this question. During one of my interviews, the interviewer said, “well, we really don’t have that many unit tests. We have really good monitoring and generally the code coverage of people using our product is better than the code coverage we’d get by adding unit tests, so we’ve built a system where we can see things go wrong very quickly and fix them very quickly.”

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As I’ve mentioned before, my co-worker Tim & I teach an interview training class at Etsy. The 2nd most important thing we teach (after “respect the candidate”) is the concept of “mapping the potato” – discovering the boundary between what a candidate knows and doesn’t know, along many many different vectors.

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Despite being a nerd, I was never all that into reading science fiction and fantasy when I was growing up. Here’s a confession: I’ve never finished a single book by Tolkien or Asimov, though I tried many times in middle school and high school.

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Many years ago, when I was new to interviewing, I did a lunch interview at Google in Kirkland with a guy I’ll call Andrew.

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This article was largely inspired by Jessica Nordell’s post on Medium. And HUGE thanks to Lara Hogan for talking this through with me and giving me some really great feedback and ideas before I published it.

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