I failed an interview last week.

I don’t like to think of interviews as pass/fails. Most of the time having a company decide not to go forward is not a failure. It’s just misalignment.

But in this case, it was a failure, because the feedback indicated the interviewer had taken a negative impression to something I thought wholly positive.

It was an example on the skill of having hard conversations.

Looking back, perhaps I shouldn’t have used the most difficult conversation I’ve had in my career as the example.

It was a time I had taken a particularly tactless and brutish approach.

So I am SHOCKED the takeaway my interviewer received was I was tactless and brutish.

Hard Problems, Hard Conversations

The example I had given was a “wheels-about-to-come-off” moment unless we did some “cowboy shit.”

Both of those are technical terms.

That’s not so bad in itself, except we had to do this across the company.

In essence, our Technical Debt went to Collections (still writing that article).

I was on point to navigate us through. In this case, kicking and screaming.

Things became difficult when we started discussing this with the team managing the most critical service in the company.

That team did not do cowboy shit.