To try and avoid having interview candidate start every interview with the same "tell me your background" boilerplate, we get every interviewer in the room with the candidate at the beginning of the interview for a few minutes, so everyone can introduce themselves and the candidate can walk through their background.

Recently we had a minority candidate with a unique name come for an onsite interview. One person in the loop, who also has an untraditional name, asked "what's the worst butchering of your name you've ever heard?" Seems like an innocuous enough question, and it's possible the candidate didn't think twice about it.

But it stuck with me because of a paper I saw recently, and because we may have unknowingly implicitly activated a social identity. Cue the research:

Recent studies have documented that performance in a domain is hindered when individuals feel that a sociocultural group to which they belong is negatively stereotyped in that domain. We report that implicit activation of a social identity can facilitate as well as impede performance on a quantitative task. When a particular social identity was made salient at an implicit level, performance was altered in the direction predicted by the stereotype associated with the identity. Common cultural stereotypes hold that Asians have superior quantitative skills compared with other ethnic groups and that women have inferior quantitative skills compared with men. We found that Asian-American women performed better on a mathematics test when their ethnic identity was activated, but worse when their gender identity was activated, compared with a control group who had neither identity activated. Cross-cultural investigation indicated that it was the stereotype, and not the identity per se, that influenced performance.

The full paper is available here.

In the study, the researchers gave female Asian-American undergrads a math test. However, some were primed to think about the fact that they were women (via questions about whether they lived in a single-sex or coed dorm, and why they would prefer a coed or single-sex floor), and some were primed to think about the fact that they were Asian (via questions about whether their parents/grandparents spoke English, and how many generations they had lived in America). The female-primed group answered 43% of questions correctly, the neutral (no priming questions) answered 49% correctly, and the Asian-primed group answered 53% of questions correctly. That's a pretty large difference! The original study was replicated in 2014 and the same effects were found (on people who are aware of the stereotypes).

So back to our interview! It's possible that by asking a well-intentioned icebreaker question about the candidate's name, we were actually priming their racial identity, and leading them to do worse in an interview. We accidentally emphasized the difference between the candidate and ourselves (white people with names like "Kevin"). We talked about it afterwards, and shared around a link to the paper above, in the hopes that we are giving every candidate the same playing field.

This stuff is hard to get right, you have to think about it, and you have to be aware of the research. We're not perfect, but we know these effects exist and we're trying hard to fight them.

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Last week two other Twilio engineers and I went to the Columbia engineering career fair. We had a great time and talked to a lot of really smart people. However I was surprised at some of the naive mistakes students made when we were talking. We're there to try to hire students and students are there to try and get internships and jobs, so we desperately want it to work out. As a student, here are some things to avoid when you are talking to a recruiter.

• Are you hiring full time software engineers? I am looking for a full time position, here is my resume - This question demonstrates a high degree of naïveté. First, the market for programming talent is absolutely on fire right now and everyone is looking for talented people. It's also safe to assume we are at the career fair because we are trying to recruit people for full time positions.

  Second, especially as a small company, we are looking for people who are passionate about what we are doing. It's good to talk about cool things you've done, but at some level you have to express interest in what we are doing, or tie your skills back to how they'd fit in at our company.

  Maybe fifteen people asked me this "are you hiring" question during the fair and most of them were ESL students. I know these students are very bright, and I understand it can be nerve wracking for them to speak to recruiters, but it was very difficult for us to get a read on whether someone would be a good fit, based on how the conversations went. For us, that translates to a "no phone screen".

• I love programming Java - This is a red flag for us. There is nothing wrong with Java per se, but it's a language that's hard to get excited about. It's also the language students have been using for class, which tells us that you might not do that much programming/learning outside of class (another red flag).

  The other big problem is Java probably has the worst signal to noise ratio of any language on students' resumes nowadays; a higher ratio of students with, say, Haskell experience are good candidates than students who mention Java. Two people who have covered this topic in much better detail than me are Paul Graham and Yaron Minsky.

  The one exception to this rule is if you have experience with advanced Java programs like Hadoop or Asterisk (we are a telecom company and use Asterisk extensively). In this case definitely tell us about your Java experience.

• You're wearing a suit At some career fairs almost everyone is wearing suits so it's not a big deal if you are also wearing one. That said, I went out of my way to talk to people wearing jeans because a) it indicated they're not interested in jobs where they'd like to see you wearing a suit, and b) it indicated they were confident enough in yourself and your skill set to ignore the vast numbers of people wearing suits. So at least if you are looking for a job at a small tech company, don't be afraid to wear something more comfortable.

• I don't really know what I want to do - Like the suits, you are young and it's fine if you don't know what you want to do yet. The problem is that we have three specific teams and while we are talking, I am trying to figure out which team you would be the best fit for. Sometimes this can be hard and good people will fall through because we don't know where to put you. It really helps if you express a strong preference that matches the skills on your resume, then I know what team to have you interview with and have a sense you'll be happy.

  If you are not sure, one good strategy is to rotate - tell one company you'd like to do frontend work, tell the next you'd like to work on mobile and tell the third company you'd like to work on big data. Next summer (or in your spare time) you can try out something different.

• Here's my resume, looking forward to a phone screen - Even if you are an exceptional candidate, this will not get you a phone screen at most small companies. Here is the deal. The Google, Facebook and LinkedIn recruiters have little say in whether you get an interview or not. They are there to hand out pens, collect resumes and answer basic questions about internships/full time opportunities. You'll be encouraged to apply online.

  When you talk to smaller companies at career fairs, the engineers you are talking to are actively evaluating you and making decisions about whether to advance you through the screening process. The stakes are much higher and you should consider it like a culture fit interview. You should do your research, try out the company's product, read through blog posts to figure out what sort of stack they use, etc. Then when you are talking, be sure to bring up parts of your experience that match up. For example, green flags for us are when students mention experience at hackathons, experience using Twilio in the past, or experience with HTTP/API's/writing web applications. So don't expect you can just drop a resume and get an interview - at a small company that won't fly.

Hopefully these help somewhat. Two things to keep in mind are, these are things we look for as a small Internet company - if you want to work at an Internet giant, or in a different industry, my advice would be much different. Second, I might have sounded critical above, but we all really want you to do well - we love talking to great people, and it makes interviewing and screening much more pleasant. Third, we're hiring! I hope you found this article helpful, and I hope you check us out - twilio.com/jobs.

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I was fascinated by this article in Esquire about Teller, half of the magic duo Penn and Teller, because of its description of how Teller thinks about his craft. I especially liked this story:

When Teller was in high school, [a teacher] read a short story to those few students before him, including an enraptured Teller: "Enoch Soames," by Max Beerbohm, written in 1916.

In the story, Beerbohm relates the tragic tale of Soames, a dim, hopeless writer with delusions of future grandeur. In the 1890s, Beerbohm recounts, Soames made a deal with the devil: In exchange for his soul, Soames would be magically transported one hundred years into the future — to precisely 2:10 P.M. on June 3, 1997 — into the Round Reading Room at the British Museum. There, he could look at the shelves and through the catalogs and marvel at his inevitable success. When Soames makes his trip, however, he learns that time has almost erased him before the devil has had the chance. He is listed only as a fictional character in a short story by Max Beerbohm.

Thirty-four-and-a-half years after that snowy reading by his satanic-looking teacher... Teller flew to England ahead of June 3, 1997.

As it turned out, there were about a dozen people in the Round Reading Room that afternoon... And at ten past two, they gasped when they saw a man appear mysteriously out of the stacks, looking confused as he scanned empty catalogs and asked unhelpful librarians about his absence from the files. The man looked just like the Soames of Teller's teenage imagination, "a stooping, shambling person, rather tall, very pale, with longish and brownish hair," and he was dressed in precise costume, a soft black hat and a gray waterproof cape. The man did everything Enoch Soames did in Max Beerbohm's short story, floating around the pin-drop-quiet room before he once again disappeared into the shelves.

And all the while, Teller watched with a small smile on his face. He didn't tell anyone that he might have looked through hundreds of pages in casting books before he had found the perfect actor. He didn't tell anyone that he might have visited Angels & Bermans, where he had found just the right soft black hat and gone through countless gray waterproof capes. He didn't tell anyone that he might have had an inside friend who helped him stash the actor and his costume behind a hidden door in the stacks. Even when Teller later wrote about that magical afternoon for The Atlantic, he didn't confess his role. He never has.

"Taking credit for it that day would be a terrible thing — a terrible, terrible thing," Teller says. "That's answering the question that you must not answer."

Now, again, his voice leaves him. That afternoon took something close to actual sorcery, following years of anticipation and planning. But more than anything, it required a man whose love for magic is so deep he can turn deception into something beautiful.

Years of preparation for something only twelve people would see. Read Teller's account of the day in 1997, or the full profile of Teller in Esquire

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I finally got my Simple invite. Simple is an online banking startup that wants to make the experience of using banks much, much better. As far as I can tell they are delivering on that experience - their site and iPhone app are a joy to use. They also focus on the whole experience - the ATM card that came in the mail was delivered in a beautiful package, and the signup process, which requires gathering a ton of private information about you, was painless.

That said, I realized shortly after signing up that I'm going to be sticking with Ally Bank for one simple reason: they refund ATM fees. I used to hate ATM's. The option I had with ATM's was either a) look up the nearest in-network ATM online, then walk three blocks, all the while wondering why I are doing this to save a measly $3; or b) go to the liquor store ATM and hate myself for spending money to get at my money.

ATM fee refunds turned an experience I hated into something I can brag about ("It doesn't matter, I get the money back at the end of the month"). I get about $120 in ATM refunds every year, as well as the time and stress savings trying to find an in-network ATM saved, easily worth two or three percentage points of interest. I don't know how it makes business sense for Ally to pay for my ATM fees, but it's their killer feature.

I appreciate what Simple is doing and wish them the best. If you are still saddled with a card from a bank with physical branches, switching to Simple is one of the best things you could do. However at the moment Ally's ATM fee refunds (a better ATM user experience) over Simple's awesome website and iPhone app (a better web experience).

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