Great tips worth following.

There’s one thing I’d like to add. First I’ll start with a disclaimer: I interview many candidates, and I also hear this from many other interviewers, but all companies are different and I don’t have any data to back how widespread my point is. But even if it’s not an official criteria for your target company, it’ll always help ;)

The more senior the position, the more important communication skills become. It’s always important, even for interns or beginners. But as we climb the ladder, we have to share our analysis, our recommendations more and more often, and/or they become more and more complex and therefore we need to make them easy to digest.

So the recommendation I’d like to add to this list is this: Make sure you are articulate, you express yourself clearly and demonstrate you are thoughtful, able to explain complex things clearly. And it’s a skill which requires practices. Some are more gifted than others, but we all have to train. Some talk too much without transmitting a lot of information, or with many breaks in their train of thought. Some don’t talk enough and the interviewers will wonder if the candidate will cause communication challenges if they join the team.

In all the tasks presented in the list, try to keep this in mind. Truth be told, when I interview candidates, the pure skills give fewer points than the potential for growth and their articulated communication skills. Potential for growth can be demonstrated by curiosity, past initiatives to learn/try things, and anything that proves they haven’t yet reached a plateau. And the analytical communication skills is usually obvious when you ask them to present a past project/task/challenge and during any problem solving or system design task... as I wrote, communication is involved in pretty much all the tasks we’ll have to perform in our day to day job.

I wrote a lot for a single point, because I believe this one is truly very important at any seniority level. Thanks again for this great list (I wished I had such things decades ago when I started ;) and I hope my small addition will be helpful.