(haha, that's a fun username, kamehame... okay I'll show myself out O:) )

I am right in the middle of interviewing right now (I'm open for any interdisciplinary business/dev/get things done role).

IMO when you interview you're always on the spot and always being judged. I've done it the other way. I am the type of person who likes to just drift away and associatively talk about things (hmm... the very astute reader could've inferred this given what I said in "1. Personal" :P). It has never done me any favors when I did this in a job interview.

The issue you run into is (quote from the article):

> "So, yeah, like, we're like working on this thing, but then my cofounder quit, and now we have this customer who's really loving the product but then we hit a bug with Docker because it uses React in the Kubernetes and now, you know, I'd like to know if you reimburse travel cost when I do the interview and stuff"

It's better to make the mistake of being too formal at an informal moment than the other way around. And honestly, I have been surprised to what extent I should not have been informal in the first place.

Moreover, people will somehow signal to what extent you're being too formal. I can tell from their body language. However, when I'm too informal I can't actually tell to what extent I'm too informal.

It's futile to keep trying to force fit an interview to a natural conversation. It simply is not.

"Tell me about yourself" is simply not the kind of thing normal people ask each other for breaking the ice. It's a stressful question that puts people on the spot and forces them to 'create' a first impression.

Same here. If I heard this in an interview I'd feel like I'm being fed a presentation deck instead of an honest answer.

Now, I do think that one should do a little bit of homework to give a somewhat structured answer to "Tell me about yourself", but there is such a thing as too perfect, at which point it becomes jarring.

Do interviewers really want an honest answer, or just enough to label you? And if you don't want canned responses, maybe not ask such open-ended and really a bit weird questions. Be more specific. I have no idea what the interviewer want out of a question like that. Small-talk or just get warmed up with me saying my name and where I'm from? Or my life-story so far? What if I don't define myself as what I do for a living, would it be weird omitting the fact that I'm a programmer and instead tell about my hobbies? Should I divulge information about myself that you aren't allowed to ask (discrimination etc), but that I feel is me?

Nothing about behavioral interviews are honest. Any person who has practiced interviewing knows canned answers to the popular ones and any person who has interviewed enough has canned questions.

Interesting, since it is the honest answer. It's just condensed by trying to cut out superfluous info.

And as another person argued correctly, I probably didn't fully succeed at that.

Just because an answer is structured, doesn't mean it's dishonest.

Have you tried Amazon interview questions? They expect you to follow the STAR method.

Twice, other than that no. In most behavioral programming interviews I haven't been structured in my answers as being structured came a bit later when I was also applying for consultancies. I was a lot tougher to follow when I wasn't structured.

When I was structured I did use a variation the STAR method when they expected me to. Having a method like that makes things quicker to go through, as long as you make it your own and own it. I adapted the framework a bit by swapping the T (Task) for P (Problem) as it sense to me why you'd need to emphasize the task as opposed to the problem you'd be trying to solve. In rare cases I also adapted it to the SPARAR method, since the result made the problem smaller but didn't fully solve it yet.

I prefer to structure things on the fly though without a pre-defined framework.

“Tell me about yourself” is lazy, unnatural conversation. “Tell me about <thing you did on your cv>” is way better, especially if it hints at some other interests.

This.

How would I describe myself? Three words: hardworking, alpha male, jackhammer, merciless, insatiable.

Whether is sounds forced or comes across as someone who has well structured thinking will depend on the delivery.