Brian Eats Ramen

I’ve been doing some Skype interviews with some group members who mentioned in a survey that were interested in chatting with me to help figure out what sort of product / course I might be able to offer (some call them “Customer Interviews”, or the more ominous sounding “Idea Extractions”).

It sounds like there are basically two segments of Coding for Interviews customers who have slightly different needs:

1. People preparing for interviews in the next month, the “sprinters”. This group is largely soon-to-graduate students from various schools (Brown, MIT, CMU, etc.). Product-wise they are interested in an online course / info package, most likely a one-time purchase, tips on interviewing, negotiating, “which topics do I need to review and what problems should I work through”. I need to talk more with people from this group to determine their price range. One analogue would be the $49-$99 One Month Rails course, but the argument could be made that poor college students are less willing to pay money on something than people who want to learn rails to start a business, but another argument could be made that it’s worth investing some money in prepping for interviews because the payoff could be in the $10,000 range for your job, and (this is a bit of a logical stretch) compounded over your career something like $100,000-$200,000.
2. People who just like to keep on top of stuff and prepare over time, the “marathoners”. This group is a lot of software engineers (the list has members who work at Google, Amazon, Adobe, Twitter, Microsoft, Apple, DreamWorks, Square, CERN, Symantec, Pivotal Labs, Qualcomm, Raytheon, Samsung). Product-wise they are interested in a system to just stay fresh and remind them to practice (which the current newsletter fulfills well). They would be willing to spend between $5-35/month on premium periodic content, a model more akin to the $8/month Practicing Ruby or something like the $9/month RailsCasts)

The three fine individuals I chatted with (they had responded to my survey a few months ago indicating interest in a Skype call) were interested enough in a course-style product to actually PayPal me $25 to pre-order whatever-the-heck I ended up making (which will, of course, be refunded if the course does not get made). I was very nervous bringing that offer up but once they said “heck yes!” it made the validation feel a lot more real.

Customer interviews have been great—1) they’re motivational, 2) they help you prioritize your work, and 3) they make for much closer relationships with your group members. I would feel perfectly ready to chat with a group member the next time I’m wondering about something. Once you get over the hump of chatting with someone for the first time it gets easier and more enjoyable.

The other thing I did this past week was send out quick heads ups to CS department academic advisors and staff who might want to share programming interview resources with students and may occasionally email out to CS jobs@ mailing lists. I posted a quick task on oDesk.com to check top CS departments and produce a list of contacts—for $20 they delivered a spreadsheet of ~100 CS department contacts formatted like so:

Putting aside a couple of minutes over the next few days I sent quick hellos from GMail (assisted by Tout) and added a personal school-related note:

Subject: Weekly programming interview practice questions

I realized this might interest CS students this time of year. Each week I send a real programming interview question and CS topic overview email to some engineering friends for practice.

http://codingforinterviews.com/

It’s been a great way to space out your exposure to the types of questions and topics that get asked over and over at engineering interviews. Especially if you can’t make any resume workshops or mock interviews.

Best,
Brian

At first I was a bit nervous—what would they think? Would the professors be upset that I emailed about something non-academic?

I sent a few and waited for some Happy Gilmore “you sucks” to come in…

After the first “this looks great, thank you!” response my palms stopped sweating. Then a few more later it was clear this was a good choice, receiving 100% positive responses and thank yous from faculty, staff and students (and ~500 new members over the past three days).

Lo,