Engineering Interview Tips from SpaceX, Tesla, Disney and more!

what's up you guys welcome back to the channel and today instead of a code tutorial i'm going to talk to you about how i got a job offer from some of the coolest companies in the world for engineers in my opinion including disney spacex tesla i'm going to talk about the hiring process with these different companies some general tips for job hunting and explain kind of best practices for how to get your resume in front of people and get it noticed and then also explain why i chose the route that i did in my job hunt [Music] all right so if you are new here welcome to the channel i usually use le master tech to do code tutorials and teach programming and stem concepts but recently my video on top five things you need to know about controls engineering has been getting a lot of attention and positive feedback so i wanted to put together a quick video on the recent job hunt that i had and talk about some of my biggest recommendations for how to get the attention of your dream companies so i'll start by saying in around august of 2021 i got so fed up with my constant 50 to 60 hour work weeks of my previous employer that was a control systems integrator that i was doing project-based work that always ended in travel and i was constantly doing on-site commissioning trips that would turn into 70 80 hour work weeks if something got uh you know out of control so i got really tired of that kind of work cycle and i decided i was going to update my resume and just see what was out there for me i wasn't in the most urgent rush to leave since i had a lot of friends where i was working at that time but i knew i didn't want to stay there long term and as with probably most job hunts in the modern era it just started online with me looking up example resumes that i thought were good examples and cruising around linkedin looking at job listings for controls engineer automation engineer or even systems engineer and just seeing what was out there but it immediately became clear that that type of search was just showing me way too many results to have any sort of meaningful way of weeding out good options from bad options so i decided i was going to have two almost independent job hunts one was going to be focusing on salary benefits improving the work life balance but two was going to be just shooting for the moon and going after the coolest roles i could apply for at the most legendary companies with listings i wasn't even vaguely qualified for all the way to listings that were pretty good fit um so i'm not going to talk too much about job hunt number one until the end of my story because frankly evaluating what company has the best 401k offer relocation package is way less exciting than a company that builds rockets or electric supercars or the most amazing theme parks in the world but most of the tips we'll be talking about apply to any company not just these big tech giants they're just the ones you might want to get noticed by the most so tip one in step one is the resume and getting noticed so while i was reading up on how to get attention from companies that get thousands of applicants for every role they post constantly based on sheer name recognition i saw one piece of advice over and over make a resume specific to that job in that company don't just sling one resume and put it all over to every corner of the internet based on one generic set of information about yourself you shouldn't be surprised that no one calls you back or you get automated rejection emails when that's your approach if you really want a specific job your resume should make it look like you've been training your entire life for that job not a generic set of experiences and skills that maybe somewhat overlap with the role but you want every single thing that you've worked on or learned about in school or done projects and hobbies on that are in the requirements of that role on your resume and even if they're skills that you're pretty proud of if they don't overlap with the description of that job don't spend a lot of the space on your resume talking about those the vast majority of the roles have really detailed listings on the specific qualifications of an ideal candidate on their job listing and even further than that a lot of the companies use tools to sort resumes based on how many of the keywords a recruiter can put in that your that your resume has on it so if you look at a job listing and it lists seven or eight different ideal things that you would be that you would be qualified for if you did those and you can get five or six of those keywords on your resume you're already putting your chance uh higher than a lot of resumes who are just generically throwing it all over now i want to be clear you need to follow this pattern of one resume per job and making it specifically tailored to that job without lying which brings me to step two step two tip two is honesty and enthusiasm in every step of the process you can absolutely focus on parts of your career that have been less less prominent relatively small compared to certain skills or you can talk about skills you haven't used as often in your past work or you have but they're not quite as honed as they would be and you can make a big deal out of those skills but anything you say on your resume that you're able to do or have had experience with in the past needs to be fundamentally true there's a big difference between padding and tailoring your resume to a specific company in a specific job versus straight up lying and trust me the massive companies are gonna find out if you're making things up for example the role that i was applying for at tesla and ultimately got an offer for was controls and instrumentation engineer and i could tell just from the listing it was super hands-on they work closely with their maintenance department it's a hardware focused role where you essentially need to be able to service hardware and write plc code so my ability to write sql reports and do data analytics and write python code was going to be way less useful than my ability to design and wire and build controls panels for i o for automation devices therefore my tesla resume just discussed all the controls panels that i had built experience with cad software like autocad that i had and my ability to write up technical scopes and loop check and wire controls io in panels at my previous job that was maybe 10 to 20 percent of the actual role of what i did at the company but on my resume that was almost 80 percent of the information on there because i could tell those were the skills they were listening for they were looking for so when it came to interview time and they asked me about my previous job i didn't lie to them i said you know hardware is a smaller component of most of our projects than software but i was always very focused on developing those skills i love to learn on the job i really it's something i've always wanted to expand my knowledge on so i did get exposed to it sometimes just saying that's something i've really want to expand my knowledge on i'm a fast learner i love new challenges i love to learn on the job and knowing the basic concepts they're talking about is enough so you don't have to lie about being an expert be honest about your level of expertise with the different things you put on your resume now on the flip side when i was interviewing with disney it was almost the opposite the role was so software and data analytics that me knowing all this stuff about plcs and automation hardware really wasn't going to benefit me in any way so that resume looks like i'm a different candidate but it's not a lie i just focused on different skills that i had in different experiences that i'd had in my previous job if i had just listed the same set of things for both those roles i don't think i would have gotten a call for either because i would have made some generic resume that tried to cover the fact that i can do this and i can do that and i can do a little of this and i can do a little of that tailor it to that job make yourself look as good as you can without lying if someone asks you about your experience and you've had zero experience with something tell them it's something you haven't had a lot of experience up to that point about do not lie because if you say like oh yeah i'm very experienced in that i see that all the time that might have been a question to see okay how much have you done with this and if you say a lot they might know even more than you and they might ask a specific question like oh okay so if i were gonna do an inner join in a sequel table and i didn't have a column that was in the group by would you know what that meant and now you're sitting there because you lied about having a bunch of sql experience and you have to tell them not only no i don't know what you just asked me but now you've been caught in a lie as well that is the perfect way to bomb an entire candidacy so you can be enthusiastic you can cater yourself as an ideal candidate without ever having to be dishonest so step three tip three is seal the deal with your people skills and with the exception of a very few totally software oriented jobs the single greatest skill you can have to make up for a potential lack of technical expertise that a recruiter is looking for would be extremely compelling people skills now in the world of engineering and stem there's always a few jobs that should and will be off limits to someone who is just too under qualified i should not be a rocket engineer designing the main mechanism for takeoff at a space company i'm not qualified for that i didn't study that i don't have experience in that field but there are a ton of jobs that are willing to bend the technical parameters required if the entire interviewing team is in love with the candidate's personality okay there are a ton of jobs where your immediate role is not necessarily going to be life or death your immediate role might be something that you're gonna have to do a lot of work to breach this learning curve that you're behind but if you convince everyone that you're good enough to tackle that challenge that doesn't make the job off limits to you now of course people skills and natural easy going fun conversation is not necessarily the first thing you think of when you picture a group of typical engineers and that is true people skills may seem like an intangible thing but it's a hundred percent something you can absolutely work on improving my biggest piece of advice on how is just actually putting yourself out there this applies in personal life and in the work world because again this is a challenge for a naturally introverted engineer who would rather spend time writing code developing software even playing video games and just chatting through like an xbox live party rather than being around people but throw your resume all over the place to jobs that you don't even want just to practice having screening interview calls and to practice hearing the details of a job and convincing a recruiter or an interviewer why you'd be a good fit and then on the social side of things go to a few events that you don't really want to go to and have conversations with people maybe they're not your first choice of people to talk to but they're gonna make you better at social skills have good conversations with people you feel like you don't have that much in common with i'd been applying casually while not actually looking for a new job for almost a year before i legitimately started job hunting and in hindsight i'm so grateful i had recent practice going through the process really important part of the job hunt is when someone asks you about your hobbies and your passions outside of work the level of enthusiasm that you tell them uh about your hobbies with still tells the interviewer what sort of energy you're bringing to everything in your life so when someone asks you about a challenging project you had in the past and what you did to overcome it the way you tell that story should radiate so much pride through overcoming and adversity being faced with a problem and finding the solution to solve it that the interviewer who a lot of times is going to be your future manager especially in late stage interviewers a lot of the times it's who will be your manager is interviewing you they see what kind of a problem solver self-starter go-getter they would be getting if they hired you and this mingles a little bit with tip two because i want to repeat you really do need to still be honest and be yourself through this process so if you are naturally introverted and you are just a little bit more refined of a person i'm not saying you have to become their best friend you don't want to fake your way into a job where you don't last three months because you faked enthusiasm and your entire personality for the sake of a job it's better to find a job that you're actually qualified for and you'd actually be a good fit for than to fake your way into a dream job that then calls you out within three months and then you're looking for a new job um but many times especially pre-covered the final stages or sometimes the whole process of interviewing were in person and are in person and things you might not think about like your body language your posture your resting facial expression how you examine your surroundings when you're not talking to someone how you carry yourself how much eye contact uh you make and and just what kind of handshake you give how you walk around a site might contribute in a big way to how the interviewers feel about their time with you so make sure your body language is sending a positive image while you're there too if you really need to seal the deal you need to be engaged and enthusiastic about everything they show you when tough questions or challenges come up that you don't have the perfect answer to the best thing you can do is honestly tell an interviewer you don't know but then ask them follow-up questions about how you would solve a problem like that make it clear you'd look forward to learning how to deal quickly with scenarios like that by the time you make it to some sort of panel interview or especially like a paid trip on site where they have you travel cross state lines stay in a hotel pay for your meals the company has put you on a very short list of people they've decided they would be willing to hire barring any surprising red flags or complications that pop up this means the job is more or less yours to lose from that point on and your human interactions and people skills are going to bridge that gap so based on all this what actually happened in my process i had a terrific time interviewing with tesla spacex and disney those three companies as well as a robotics company carnegie robotics in pittsburgh and an automation company bright machines in austin were these overwhelmingly positive technical interview experiences the jobs all kind of excited me in different ways the benefits the job duties the compensations and the locations varied wildly but what they all had in common was the actual interview and hiring process you got to start by getting noticed by a screener or a technical recruiter your first call about the job sometimes is going to be 10 to 15 minutes long a technical recruiter calls you hey i got your resume i got your application it seems like you might be a pretty good fit tell me about yourself let me tell you about the role are you interested in going forth with this they're looking for personality cues from the very beginning and sometimes they're checking to see if you were honest on your resume and then from that they all go to a pretty detailed technical screening process where you're speaking with people who either do the same job as you or the jobs right next door to the kind of job that you'd have a lot of the times your manager will get involved even by that phase and they're weeding out what do you know what don't you know what kind of a problem solver are you do you like to learn on the job how well would you adapt to our company culture things like that and then the final stages always seem to be a very intense usually multi-person panel interview sometimes it lasts a few hours sometimes it involves a site trip where you actually walk through the site um but in the end that final step is them looking for a red flag so i was almost more stressed in the initial technical screenings than in the final multi-hour panel review because i knew i hadn't lied i knew i was honest on my resume i knew from the listing that even if i wasn't a perfect fit i was a good enough fit that i could make it work when i was on site with them spacex was probably the coolest one they won't hire unless you've seen the site because of how intense and on-site the nature of the work is so they flew me to brownsville texas and for two days i was doing on-site interviews and walk-throughs with the team there seeing a rocket ship manufacturing facility that was just still to this day one of the coolest days of my life ultimately this is why i saved it for the end because it's not that exciting a customer that i had been servicing when i was a controls integrator at my previous company reached out and said they were looking for a controls engineer internally their offer was substantially more uh money and the best benefits than anyone else had offered and it was the most remote my work-life balance was going to be the best and so this is something i haven't really talked about up to this point but you need to make sure you're aware of what you're doing to your personal life when you take a job the spacex and tesla companies to their credit were extremely forward about the fact they don't have a standard 40 hour work workweek while they are grinding to hit deadlines you work however many hours you need to work until the work is done i had just left a company like that i was actively looking for a reduction in stress in my life so if you're the kind of person who's willing to grind and put those kinds of hours in for the dream job go after it i wanted to improve my relationships with my friends my family my wife and so i ended up taking this job and so far it's honestly tremendous it's a really great work-life balance i don't work more than 40 hours a week unless there's very rare circumstances i don't have to travel that much the work is largely remote so overall just something to keep in mind while you're looking at all these names of companies who are interviewing you and you feel lucky to even have an interview don't forget you're the one who should be in control here after you have a first job any job hunt you do after that you should feel like you are in charge and making the decision you shouldn't feel like you owe the companies anything so if you get an offer from your dream company and something in the back of your mind says hang on maybe this isn't right maybe this isn't what i want don't stop your job hunt right there keep looking maybe you'll be surprised just like i was surprised when something comes out of left field that you didn't even consider as a possibility okay so i hope you enjoyed this video i hope you agree with most of the advice that i gave and found it useful and potentially applicable in your own life i just want to say thank you to everyone who has supported the channel thanks for 600 subscribers which we just passed this week that feels unbelievable to me if you like this video be sure to leave a like on it don't forget to subscribe to lemaster tech for tons more great content coming out every week if you love the page and you want to become a super supporter of le master tech feel free to check out my patreon link in the description below be sure to let me know in the comments what you think of this video and what you'd like to see more of in the future as always thank you for watching and until next time bye you