Started asking who's on the interview panel in advance and it's the highest-leverage thing I do now
One line to the recruiter after scheduling: "Could you let me know who I'll be speaking with?" Almost nobody says no. Half the time they send LinkedIn links unprompted.
Then ten minutes each. Not to flatter anyone in the call — I've never once mentioned that I looked them up. It's to work out what the round actually is. An infra person is going to take you somewhere completely different than the PM will, and knowing that beforehand changes how you budget your time in a 45 minute slot.
Twice now someone on the panel had given a conference talk on the exact system I got asked to design.
Side benefit: it gives you a real question for the end instead of the generic one about team culture.
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AnonymousAnon Mild counterpoint from someone who overdid this: I read a blog post by one of my interviewers and then couldn't stop thinking about it during the call, and it made me stiff and weirdly eager to steer toward his topic. It works, but there's a line where prep turns into overthinking. Ten minutes each is about right. An hour each is not.
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AnonymousAnon Stealing this. The part I hadn't thought about is that it tells you what kind of round it is — I've walked into slots with no idea whether it was going to be coding or architecture and burned the first ten minutes just working that out.