Tell me about a time where you had to motivate your team
- Situation: on Voices, had to meet tight deadline for a customer
- Task: Recognized that it was gonna be tight so I wanted to make sure I could do what I could to unlock the potential of the team.
- Action: In meetings and discussions, I would always connect that specific conversation to our mission of increasing civic engagement.
Result: the team was able to see the bigger picture and make the deadline
Tell me about a time where you picked yourself up from a failure
Situation: realized that nobody wanted to use Carbon Wallet
Task: figure out what to do next
Action: Examine the cold hard facts that it wasn’t working and accept the defeat and then start fresh the next day.
Result: Started pivoting, talking to mentors, doing more user interviews, starting from zero again
What do you think makes a good leader and manager?
- Empathy: leaders cannot only be technical, they have to know how to work with humans
- Mission focused: i think mission mindset is so important because it unlocks everything else and provides a decision making framework that the rest of the team can align on. ie at reddit people were not mission focused so people had hard times aligning with each other
- Growth mindset: always iterating, fail fast
Why are you interested in working at Artyc?
Climate is my north star, and I need to see our entire economy become electrified this decade. Artyc has the opportunity to play a massive role in that process. Not only electrification, we can stop using refrigerants which are deeply harmful.
Also prefer startups
What do you love about working at a startup?
Everyone is mission focused, this is where real innovation happens. I will learn more quickly here than at a big company. More fun, more ups and downs.
What are some of Artyc’s big use cases?
Agriculture and Medical
What are some of your strengths?
- empathy
- mission focus
- growth mindset
What are some of your weaknesses?
- not great at having hard conversations. I have had strong feelings about something and have been slow or hesitant to initiate those conversations. ie When i was co-founder dating, I intuitively felt that it wasnt going to work after 2 weeks but I didn’t pull the trigger until a couple weeks after that.
- solve by scheduling time for conversations like that in advance
Tell me about a time you failed at work. What did you learn from it?
- Situation: working at Dubsmash as a midlevel engineer
- Task: build out a complex feature before this deadline
- Action: I tried and failed, did raise the alarm early
- Result: Senior engineer stepped in to help me and get job done
- learning: important to raise that flag early, important to really invest and cultivate that team relationship.
Tell me about a time you disagreed with a coworker / manager / decision
- Situation: co-founder dating someone that had momentum
- Task: co-founder tells me that they want to offer advisory-equity to somebody that I don’t know
- Action: Spent some time asking myself how i felt about this, expressed my concerns with their decision, but also offered that I trust you to make the right decision. I didn’t wanna set an ultimatum, bc i think thats unhealthy for 99% of things
- Result: co-founder heard my concerns and ultimately agreed. Also important to recognize that
- believer in disagreeing but committing and then reviewing results later
Are you taking a breath before answering?
Tell me about a time you had to work or make a decision quickly / under a tight deadline
Situation: Sign on to do some freelance work, build app from scratch
Task: PM says “we need the app by some date”, how will you build it?
Action: Decide to build using my strongest tool, SwiftUI
Result: make the deadline
Most impressive accomplishment?
Voices
Hardest technical challenge
Situation: working on DinnerTok
Task: Build a UI where the user can scroll a feed left and right. Difficult bc if you build it in the wrong way then the LeftRight scroll might eat touch gestures from the UpDown scroll.
Action: Build a proof of concept to (in)validate ideas quickly, found a CollectionView layout that did not present gesture issues
Result: Shipped the feature on time and everyone loved it
Hardest bug solved
Situation: working on DinnerTok
Task: Seeing bug where a video in the feed would start over when a network request occurs.
Action: first try to reproduce, done. begin running tests as fast as possible to narrow down the cause. So i start enabling/disabling components. Disabling one component reveals that the bug stops. So i research that component to understand whats happening and swap it for another component
Result: we fixed it
Technical strengths?
- debugging, enjoy a good detective hunt
- wiring up a reactive chain of events, very satisfying
- empathy, writing code that is readable by other people
Technical weakness?
my tech stack is primarily iOS which has a translation gap to full stack
Tell me about a time where you had to make technical tradeoffs
Situation: need to build dinnertok
Task: Decide how to build dinnertok
Action: debate between UIKit (slow, old, and proven) or SwiftUI (new and unproven but fast). Thought long and hard about the pros and cons, did some research about what SwiftUI was capable of and not capable of.
Result: made the decision to go with SwiftUI becuase it would be faster and speed was more important to the PM
