Author: Melih O.

I didn’t know what to ask when I was coming out of school of potential employers. Having been in the job world for a few years now (going on three which is one part amazing, one part soul destroying), I think I’ve got a set of questions that I think college students need to ask. As my younger brother is on the verge of graduating, these might be useful to him, but hopefully they are useful in general to anyone who runs into them.

The questions are:

1. What is the company culture like?
2. Who will my mentor(s) be?
3. How will this company make me better in 3 years? in 5 years?
4. What motivates you to stay at the company?
5. How much time is dedicated to experimentation, execution and process?

The questions serve the following roles:

1. What is the company culture like?
   As far as I can tell, culture is the single biggest prohibiting factor at a company. Having a great culture can’t make a company, but having a poor culture will sink a company. I don’t know if anyone will openly admit that things are wonderful or horrible in an interview, but deep dive into their answer. Are people motivated to work? Do people go above and beyond the call of duty? I think what the college student wants to find out is if they are around a group of people who are motivated by the same things that they are. The company should also be trying to figure this out about the student, but not all companies put in the effort to have culture be part of the interview process.
2. Who will my mentor(s) be?
   I think that this question is the biggest one that I missed. In the formative years of one’s career, don’t go through and try to figure it all out on your own. It only leads to failure and frustration.Having a strong mentor figure early in one’s career can really help establish how successful years 5 – 10 will be, and those years can only be successful if the foundations for success have been set in years 1 – 4.The thing to  really learn here is how cross-functional a group of individuals there are for one to learn from. Don’t just expect that your boss will be your mentor. Ask someone from marketing, product or sales to be your mentor when your job function is in fact an engineer. Understand where you want to be, and find someone in that role to help you understand the path between you and them. In fact, it’s probably better if your boss isn’t your mentor because it’s scary to be honest with your boss about your relationship with them. I got really lucky in that I felt that, after a hurdle or two of the opposite, Yang and I could really be honest with each other about everything, and it led to a really great relationship. That said, I would say that I look to Yang as a mentor more now than I did when he was my boss, as an example.
3. How will this company make me better in 3 years? in 5 years?
   I actually think that this one is more important for the applicant than for the answer. The applicant should sit down and think about where they want to be in 3-5 years, and understand what it takes to get there. If they don’t know, then ask. I think introspection is a big part of having a successful interview. If you don’t know what you want, then you can’t gauge if you’re succeeding in getting it or not.
4. What motivates you to stay at the company?
   I’m curious to understand why the person that I’m interviewing is still at the company. In the Valley especially, anyone who has a modicum of skill can jump ship, and find a new job pretty immediately. Especially at the junior engineer level, where folks are probably underpaying you, and just throwing some stock at you to make you feel better about yourself.

   So find out why this person hasn’t jumped ship, and found the next big thing. What about the current company inspires them to stick it out, and make this the basket in which they put their proverbial eggs? If the answer is that it’s a job, then you’re probably in trouble.

5. How much time is dedicated to experimentation, execution and process?
   This is a big one for me, because I really feel as if I burned myself badly here. If you’re a hacker, or you just like building things, and there’s no room for experimentation, then it’s the wrong company for you. If you’re unorganized, and you can’t find your elbow from your shoulder, and there’s no process, then this is the wrong company for you.

   Again, introspection comes into play, as you have to really understand what makes you tick, but if you’re confident that what makes you tick is someone giving you a spec, and you drilling the hell out of it, then find a company where execution and process are more highly valued than experimentation. It just makes everything easier from getting motivated to being the person who is excited about what they do, selling the company and being a good advocate.

Those are my five questions that I wish I had known to ask before starting a job out of school. They may not be immediately relevant to everyone, but I do think that some piece of each one is relevant to understanding whether a job that you’re interviewing for is really one that you want. It’s the rest of your life, 8 hours a day, 5 days a week… do something you love.

I had a really great three-day weekend. Micky and I did a lot to get the nursery started. The walls are white, with one aqua colored wall. We moved a bunch of stuff in storage with the help of One Big Man, One Big Truck, and moved a couch and trunk out of storage and into the baby’s room. My red couch escapes!

I got to play some soccer this weekend, worked out today and hacked on some stuff that I’m really starting to get excited about (hopefully more on that coming soon).

The big win this weekend though was getting to do dinner with Saket. We’re at very similar places in our careers, and in a lot of ways our lives (Saket isn’t married with a kid on the way, but in general). I noticed on Saturday night that Saket and I meet in social situations a lot. We have to “share” each other per se. Saturday we just guy bonded, and it was really excellent.

It was a really awesome chance to reflect on myself while reflecting in Saket’s experiences. We talked about the naivety of college kids (which will be my next post), management styles under which we’ve worked, the frustration of the current political system and the situation in the Middle East.

I miss having conversations like that, and I feel as if I’ve lost them in some sense since leaving school. The problem is that it’s all we did in school, so relatively it’s a complete loss. The late night IHOP, going to Waqaar’s house and smoking hookah, being in Watauga Hall and up til 2am talking. I realized Saturday night that those moments and conversations are really important to me.

Now, I feel as if people do things in bigger contexts. Dinner parties with lots of people. Going to the games. It just feels big. The intimacy of one-on-one time with a friend is lost. I don’t know why that is. Are we too busy? Are we just trying to multi-task friendships as well? I hate to sit down and actually answer those questions because I don’t think I’ll like the answers.

But this weekend, I got it back, and all was well again. Even if the wall is aqua and not orange.

So the proverbial tomorrow of blog writing has finally arrived, and here is the last of my three part series on motivation. I can finally speak to the final piece, the keystone as it were, of the motivation puzzle in my mind. Simply put, it comes down to validation.

From dictionary.com:

val·i·date

–verb (used with object), -dat·ed, -dat·ing.

1. to make valid; substantiate; confirm: Time validated oursuspicions.
2. to give legal force to; legalize.
3. to give official sanction, confirmation, or approval to, as elected officials, election procedures, documents, etc.: to validate a passport.

It’s as simple as a good job from someone who notices what you’ve done, or a feeling before you go to bed that you’re the man. There isn’t a single formula across which validation works for everyone, but it is something that everyone needs.

The really interesting bit is that for some it’s an internal validation that they’ve accomplished something. I think there’s a real luck to this kind of person because they can find something that they love, and be happy doing it, and that’s the extent of the validation loop. The effort, blood, sweat and tears are all summed up in that feeling at the end of the day that they’re proud of themselves. End of story.

I think though that the more relevant case for me is an external validation. Not necessarily in words, but in body language. I want to see in your eyes that you get it. I want to hear your heart beat a little bit louder because you’re excited. I want to see the chill across your skin when you realize what a game changer I’m sharing with you. It’s that instant moment of, yup, we just did that, that makes the journey so sweet at the end.

You want to motivate me… give me the chance to blow your mind.

My younger brother called me today to let me know about his LSAT score. He studied pretty much non-stop from mid-May through mid-October for this test. It’s on the margin where test scores make a difference, and based on a chart of law school acceptance scores found here, the difference between #1 and #10 is pretty significant. The results are really great for both him and our family in that he’s opened the doors to any school he wants to go to with his test result.

Really, the win there more than anything else is that there’s something to being surrounded by the kind of people who appreciate and  live on the margin between #1 and #10. Being surrounded by people like that is a very strong form of motivation. It was this section that I found the most appealing from Newcomb’s blog post.

Super A = a(a), a=a, super B=c(c), b=c and c=0 – Various sources but probably mostly Peter Thiel and a little bit of Luke Nosek.

There really is something to being surrounded by the all-stars of your trade. The question I have though is how to do so outside of the crowding that happens at large companies that seem to swallow talent. My friend Jordan O’Mara told me the other day that he’s the worst on his team, which he considers one of the best inside of Red Hat corporate. Fantastic! He’s going to learn like crazy, and he’s going to be a LOT better for it. That said, there has to be a way to get that talent out of the door, and into the proverbial garage.

Having thought about this all day, I think the answer is quite simple actually.

Create, or be part of creating, something that is in and of itself such a cutting edge idea that you become the attraction to the top-level talent.

I think that’s the key indicator that there is a lack of truly great ideas coming out of the Valley of late. The fact that everyone wants to go to Facebook instead of building their own says something. The great ideas are missing.

And so I’ve come down to the idea that there needs to be a great idea, a sense of control to the journey and a community of the best with which to make it all happen. There’s a lot of motivation in all of that, but I still think it’s missing something big. That I’ll speak to tomorrow.