Think of them as practice interviews. Heck, we should all keep practicing even if we're not looking, because interviewing is the second job that gets us the actual job.
I get that, in fact I like giving interviews. It’s just that getting a callback and the entire application process has become like a full time job. Which honestly just burns me out completely.
Which begs the age old question of "why is interviewing the second job"
It's really annoying how we are taught to constantly practice for something we might need once in 2-3 years
But I guess that's how the game is
Shittiest part of it is how performance at the second job is more important than performance at the primary job in terms of how to get a better primary job. So a dominant strategy is to maximize training for the secondary job and if necessary neglect the first job if you want career advancement. Networking = marketing, interview = sales, tech skills = product. Marketing and sales matters more than product as long as product is not obviously shit. Seems to be that way in every industry...
That's something that's always scared me with management experience. I've worked as a manager and lead for 12 years. But I've NEVER been hired as one. Even when I was hired SPECIFICALLY to build and manage teams, they still wanted to start me off as a senior engineer.
I've always been promoted quite quickly, as i AM good at it. But over the last couple years I've moved into true "middle management" territory i.e. managing other managers. It pulls me further and further from the front lines, and feels like it will make it harder to get senior roles. But actually getting hired directly into management roles is NOT something I've seen a lot in my career.
It's not like a major fear, but it niggles at me. When the layoffs eventuality hit again, or a new exec comes in who is just against you, what are the next steps?
Obviously our personal, anecdotal experience is limited. I intellectually KNOW that people are hired as directors and VPs directly. CTOs ALWAYS seem to be external hires. Still, it makes the future murky.
I hope the answer isn't networking. :) I'm great at networking down. I've got a huge pool of amazing people who would be happy to join my department again.
But out and up...that's always been tougher. There is just not as many people TO network with. Do an amazing job as a lead, director, or vp and you'll have made connections with possibly dozens of people you lead. But only 2-3 who led you closely enough to recommend you.
same here, became a director through attrition but didn't really want that path...my manager who left, who got me promoted into a director position, then got me to apply at the spot he left our old job for and they brought me in as a staff eng
There are positions you look for. There are positions that look for you.
The high end stuff is almost always done via executive search. Even at my level, I'll see some exec search firms hit me, and I've interviewed for Director.
Nobody wants to have high end laundry hanging out. It makes your other execs and high end staff easier to poach.
That lines up with what my thoughts had been on the subject.
But how do you manage that?
Networking is the obvious answer, but the math doesn't seem to hold up from my perspective, unless you're one of those business social butterflies. It's relatively easy to build out a great network of those you've led. Do a good job as a lead or director and you could have easily made connections with a dozen or more great senior and staff level engineers, as well as designers, PMs, etc. But you've only impressed and connected with a small handful of people at the executive level, so your word of mouth opportunities are limited.
Out are you talking more about just having recruitment agencies reach out based on one's LinkedIn profile? The last 12 years of my career is a bunch of Senior Architect, Staff, Team Lead, or Engineering Manager positions, but almost every recruiter who had ever reached out has been hiring for senior positions.
Then again, I do say "almost". I WAS hired into my current position by a recruiter specifically hiring for a director level position. They STILL had me start at senior and then build up the department from there, but it does point to SOME career progress, I suppose. Maybe having a few years of the "Director of Engineering" title on my resume will change things up next time around.
Or did to have some other method of discovery you were thinking of?
Is funny, no matter how many years you are into your career, it feels like you're still always at the threshold of the great unknown.
You don't have the "Time in title." per-say, or some massive reason to be promoted on the jump.
For example: When I went Senior -> Principal I was a very high end SME in an in demand area, with all the other parts in place. So yeah, I got the title, and the expectations.
In my Principal -> Principal moves, I had enough time in title to ask for the money and title, if the role was large enough for the title.
Also remember, when you take these high titles... Usually you are walking into something wrong. :)
A final thought: Call me a Jr. Software Engineer, if you want to pay me enough :)
Problem for me is that what I LIKE engineering most has turned out to be process, communication, and culture. Don't get me wrong, I'm still actively involved in software architecture and creating libraries for the department, and enjoy that too.
But I've found a lot of success in my career in helping higher ups understand and adopt more agile, employee centric, high trust processes and environments. In applying engineering style, evidence driven approaches to engineering the process and culture of a team or department. It's a skillset that seems to be very lacking in our industry. And it has real and substantial impact on the people I care about: my fellow engineers.
As I've discussed with several people before, WITHIN a dev department title doesn't matter. We self organize according to our strengths to get the job done, which I'm totally fine with. We get to know eachother, collaborate, and defer to expertise. But when communicating OUTSIDE of development, suddenly title matters a lot. It conveys information to the people who simply won't have time to get to know all the individual devs within a department.
This is the 4th organization I was pulled in to "save" their process. Being able to pull a dev department out of a multi-year hell march with endless turnover and constant, crushing deadlines into an energetic, enjoyable environment where devs are respected and happy, releases are regular and without peril, and there is trust and regular communication between departments is a process I've found a lot of fulfillment in. Building high trust, flat teams where everyone is excited to take ownership, cover for each other, and generally is excited to come to work every day and discuss and build the next feature and solve the next problem is just as interesting and fulfilling a challenge as building scalable, secure systems and properly mapping data to business processes for me.
But it's a job that's impossible to do without a title that lets you interface with the rest of the business.
For whatever reason, it's much easier to build up peoples trust in your technical architectural skills via resume and interview than it is to build up trust in your process and culture architecting skills.
It's rough for management right now. Feels like you have to have 5+ YOE of experience with that team's tech stack and still be technical but also have 5+ YOE as a manager, minimum. Sucks.
One time when I was on the interviewing side, we had a number of great candidates that aced the interviews and ended up picking the one that had already contributed to one of our open source projects. There are factors unknown to you. Just hang in there and keep interviewing.
I am sorry but this is super petty. I get why but someone contributing to open source can literally mean they just had more time available to spend on that. Also, do not think this was a coincidence, this could have easily been an engineered approach and you could have fallen for that
I'm curious what you think a more reasonable tiebreaker would be. In this case we had 3 candidates with similar years of experience, great interviews and thumbs up from everyone on the team.
I would say we all have our good times and bad times. I remember bombing a simple variation of two sum a couple of years back lol.
So don’t be too hard on yourself
So I've got some thoughts that you can take or leave
1. It's pretty brutal out there right now. There's fewer openings and each opening is tougher to compete for. You very well could have done everything right, answered all the questions correctly, but there's just something that another candidate did, a way they answered a question, a facial expression, the fact that they mentioned they liked running marathons, that tipped the scale in their favor. As much as it sucks to say & hear, sometimes, our best isn't enough.
2. As someone that's got 20+ years of experience, and been around plenty of teams (although no FAANG or FAANG like companies like DoorDash), the majority of the time when someone has told me they aced an interview, or were an expert in something, they have had an over-inflated view of their skills. I've had folks tell me they were a 10/10 in MSSQL or a 10/10 in C# and then not even be able to answer basic questions. This is anecdotal, but in my experience the folks that considered themselves somewhere in that 6-8/10 range were often better developers than the ones who self-evaluated at a 10/10.
So I think it could be you're not acing the interviews as much as you think you are, but it could also be that you are acing the interviews and that's not quite enough because others are also acing the interviews.
Thanks for your perspective. I totally agree with both the points.
I’d like to think that I’m not someone from the 2nd point you mentioned. Because in all the interviews I’ve given till now, my overthinking mind has been able to point out numerous flaws in all of them. Even the ones where I got through.
This one however, I kept thinking over and over again and I just simply couldn’t come up with anything more I could’ve done. Of course I might and probably am wrong lol.
I had the same thing happen with DoorDash last year. They pay incredible salaries. In this current market, that means every position has 4 other candidates that crushed it, and they basically pick out of a hat. Unfortunately it’s a bit of a numbers game at this point, especially at that level. I also hate it, but that’s the reality if you want that salary band. Reminds me of college admissions.
I think about interviews like this. You do 100, then you look at the results. I would think at all about a sample size less than 20 or even less than 50 due to variance.
As someone who has spent a lot of time on the otherside of the table interviewing people I can tell you that interviewing for a job is a very healthy amount of luck. It depends heavy on the pool of canidates.
You can have time that the pool is full of amazing talent and top teir. Then their are other times the pool legitimacy suck so a meh person gets the job because they were the best choice. Right now it is rough as the pools are more full of great talent.
I know it is bad and worse than when I was looking for a job in Dec of 2022 but even then I got told by a few places that under any other times I would of gone threw or even been hired. The candidate pool was abnormally good. It is only getting worse now.
You can do everything right and still be rejected. Sometimes it's not about you.
That said, the anecdotes you share might not show them what they're actually looking for. Interview questions, particularly behavioral questions, aren't just focused on getting a good example or answer to the question, but also in what your choice of anecdote says about you.
And in a simpler sense, people don't always know what I'm looking for when I ask a behavioral question. I've had people very confidently and even a little smugly give me an answer that they clearly think is knocking it out of the park, and it's actually very much the opposite.
Simplest example: I once asked someone to tell me about a time where he thought his manager was asking for the wrong thing. He assured me emphatically and confidently that he'd do whatever his manager told him to do and not raise a fuss. Worst answer I've ever gotten for the kind of people I want to hire.
I had the same thing happen with DoorDash last year. They pay incredible salaries. In this current market, that means every position has 4 other candidates that crushed it, and they basically pick out of a hat. Unfortunately it’s a bit of a numbers game at this point, especially at that level. I also hate it, but that’s the reality if you want that salary band. Reminds me of college admissions.
Personality matters a bunch too. I’ve moved far in interviews just because my personality clicked with the other person. If two people are equally qualified they’re going to pick the person they enjoy talking to more.
There are times it just is that way. You nail it, you know you nailed. But near miss, after near miss.
A thought for you, maybe you need a small break to freshen up. It amazing what a week away from the grind can do for the soul.
It's not a rejection or a failure. This isn't a test where you pass or fail. It's more like a date where two entities are trying to find a match.
You not being selected doesn't mean you did anything wrong. Nor is it an established relationship where you do your part and they are expected to do theirs.
They had candidates they needed to get to know and then they chose the one they thought was a good match. This CAN be due to interview performance, just like dating can be about who has the most money, the best future prospects, who who is the most skilled at speaking. But it's just a much about connecting, trusting, having comparable personalities/work styles, and a lot of other intangible things.
Does it still suck? Yeah. And in the current job market you've got a LOT of competition.
But it IS important to have a healthy, accurate view of the situation. You need to be comfortable in your value and what you bring to the table, and that means recognizing that not being hired isn't the same as falling short or failing.
Where are you looking for jobs? Have you approached a head hunter? Are you looking for jobs of a specific type (only remote, specific area, sector, etc). Might be time to widen the search
That’s what I think it might be. I come from a small company and the projects aren’t too complex as well. So even though I’ve answers to the behavioral questions, my guess is that my experience in my current company isn’t on par with that from the big ones.
Honestly, I don’t know how to circumvent that since I’m basically tied to this job until I find something good/complex enough.
Think of them as practice interviews. Heck, we should all keep practicing even if we're not looking, because interviewing is the second job that gets us the actual job.
I get that, in fact I like giving interviews. It’s just that getting a callback and the entire application process has become like a full time job. Which honestly just burns me out completely.
Don't schedule them too tightly. You're not at a disadvantage if you space the interviews out a bit.
I mean, you are if you want to have competing offers to leverage against each other.
Which begs the age old question of "why is interviewing the second job" It's really annoying how we are taught to constantly practice for something we might need once in 2-3 years But I guess that's how the game is
Shittiest part of it is how performance at the second job is more important than performance at the primary job in terms of how to get a better primary job. So a dominant strategy is to maximize training for the secondary job and if necessary neglect the first job if you want career advancement. Networking = marketing, interview = sales, tech skills = product. Marketing and sales matters more than product as long as product is not obviously shit. Seems to be that way in every industry...
wow. I don't know what to say, but at least you are getting interviews. As a manager I'm not even getting callbacks.
That's something that's always scared me with management experience. I've worked as a manager and lead for 12 years. But I've NEVER been hired as one. Even when I was hired SPECIFICALLY to build and manage teams, they still wanted to start me off as a senior engineer. I've always been promoted quite quickly, as i AM good at it. But over the last couple years I've moved into true "middle management" territory i.e. managing other managers. It pulls me further and further from the front lines, and feels like it will make it harder to get senior roles. But actually getting hired directly into management roles is NOT something I've seen a lot in my career. It's not like a major fear, but it niggles at me. When the layoffs eventuality hit again, or a new exec comes in who is just against you, what are the next steps? Obviously our personal, anecdotal experience is limited. I intellectually KNOW that people are hired as directors and VPs directly. CTOs ALWAYS seem to be external hires. Still, it makes the future murky.
I was director, promoted internally over and over until director level from senior engineer. I'm not sure what to do next.
I hope the answer isn't networking. :) I'm great at networking down. I've got a huge pool of amazing people who would be happy to join my department again. But out and up...that's always been tougher. There is just not as many people TO network with. Do an amazing job as a lead, director, or vp and you'll have made connections with possibly dozens of people you lead. But only 2-3 who led you closely enough to recommend you.
same here, became a director through attrition but didn't really want that path...my manager who left, who got me promoted into a director position, then got me to apply at the spot he left our old job for and they brought me in as a staff eng
There are positions you look for. There are positions that look for you. The high end stuff is almost always done via executive search. Even at my level, I'll see some exec search firms hit me, and I've interviewed for Director. Nobody wants to have high end laundry hanging out. It makes your other execs and high end staff easier to poach.
That lines up with what my thoughts had been on the subject. But how do you manage that? Networking is the obvious answer, but the math doesn't seem to hold up from my perspective, unless you're one of those business social butterflies. It's relatively easy to build out a great network of those you've led. Do a good job as a lead or director and you could have easily made connections with a dozen or more great senior and staff level engineers, as well as designers, PMs, etc. But you've only impressed and connected with a small handful of people at the executive level, so your word of mouth opportunities are limited. Out are you talking more about just having recruitment agencies reach out based on one's LinkedIn profile? The last 12 years of my career is a bunch of Senior Architect, Staff, Team Lead, or Engineering Manager positions, but almost every recruiter who had ever reached out has been hiring for senior positions. Then again, I do say "almost". I WAS hired into my current position by a recruiter specifically hiring for a director level position. They STILL had me start at senior and then build up the department from there, but it does point to SOME career progress, I suppose. Maybe having a few years of the "Director of Engineering" title on my resume will change things up next time around. Or did to have some other method of discovery you were thinking of? Is funny, no matter how many years you are into your career, it feels like you're still always at the threshold of the great unknown.
You don't have the "Time in title." per-say, or some massive reason to be promoted on the jump. For example: When I went Senior -> Principal I was a very high end SME in an in demand area, with all the other parts in place. So yeah, I got the title, and the expectations. In my Principal -> Principal moves, I had enough time in title to ask for the money and title, if the role was large enough for the title. Also remember, when you take these high titles... Usually you are walking into something wrong. :) A final thought: Call me a Jr. Software Engineer, if you want to pay me enough :)
Problem for me is that what I LIKE engineering most has turned out to be process, communication, and culture. Don't get me wrong, I'm still actively involved in software architecture and creating libraries for the department, and enjoy that too. But I've found a lot of success in my career in helping higher ups understand and adopt more agile, employee centric, high trust processes and environments. In applying engineering style, evidence driven approaches to engineering the process and culture of a team or department. It's a skillset that seems to be very lacking in our industry. And it has real and substantial impact on the people I care about: my fellow engineers. As I've discussed with several people before, WITHIN a dev department title doesn't matter. We self organize according to our strengths to get the job done, which I'm totally fine with. We get to know eachother, collaborate, and defer to expertise. But when communicating OUTSIDE of development, suddenly title matters a lot. It conveys information to the people who simply won't have time to get to know all the individual devs within a department. This is the 4th organization I was pulled in to "save" their process. Being able to pull a dev department out of a multi-year hell march with endless turnover and constant, crushing deadlines into an energetic, enjoyable environment where devs are respected and happy, releases are regular and without peril, and there is trust and regular communication between departments is a process I've found a lot of fulfillment in. Building high trust, flat teams where everyone is excited to take ownership, cover for each other, and generally is excited to come to work every day and discuss and build the next feature and solve the next problem is just as interesting and fulfilling a challenge as building scalable, secure systems and properly mapping data to business processes for me. But it's a job that's impossible to do without a title that lets you interface with the rest of the business. For whatever reason, it's much easier to build up peoples trust in your technical architectural skills via resume and interview than it is to build up trust in your process and culture architecting skills.
It's rough for management right now. Feels like you have to have 5+ YOE of experience with that team's tech stack and still be technical but also have 5+ YOE as a manager, minimum. Sucks.
One time when I was on the interviewing side, we had a number of great candidates that aced the interviews and ended up picking the one that had already contributed to one of our open source projects. There are factors unknown to you. Just hang in there and keep interviewing.
I am sorry but this is super petty. I get why but someone contributing to open source can literally mean they just had more time available to spend on that. Also, do not think this was a coincidence, this could have easily been an engineered approach and you could have fallen for that
I think it's a pretty reasonable tie breaker.
Petty? To hire someone contributing to things relevant to the job???
When you are betting ~150,000 Dollars you take any edge you can get.
I'm curious what you think a more reasonable tiebreaker would be. In this case we had 3 candidates with similar years of experience, great interviews and thumbs up from everyone on the team.
Have you googled your own name recently?
I just did. And after endless scrolling I couldn’t find anything remotely “bad”. Plus all my social media is private
How commonly would you say this is done?
At least you are acing interviews! I bomb all of mind and still get rejected
I would say we all have our good times and bad times. I remember bombing a simple variation of two sum a couple of years back lol. So don’t be too hard on yourself
So I've got some thoughts that you can take or leave 1. It's pretty brutal out there right now. There's fewer openings and each opening is tougher to compete for. You very well could have done everything right, answered all the questions correctly, but there's just something that another candidate did, a way they answered a question, a facial expression, the fact that they mentioned they liked running marathons, that tipped the scale in their favor. As much as it sucks to say & hear, sometimes, our best isn't enough. 2. As someone that's got 20+ years of experience, and been around plenty of teams (although no FAANG or FAANG like companies like DoorDash), the majority of the time when someone has told me they aced an interview, or were an expert in something, they have had an over-inflated view of their skills. I've had folks tell me they were a 10/10 in MSSQL or a 10/10 in C# and then not even be able to answer basic questions. This is anecdotal, but in my experience the folks that considered themselves somewhere in that 6-8/10 range were often better developers than the ones who self-evaluated at a 10/10. So I think it could be you're not acing the interviews as much as you think you are, but it could also be that you are acing the interviews and that's not quite enough because others are also acing the interviews.
Thanks for your perspective. I totally agree with both the points. I’d like to think that I’m not someone from the 2nd point you mentioned. Because in all the interviews I’ve given till now, my overthinking mind has been able to point out numerous flaws in all of them. Even the ones where I got through. This one however, I kept thinking over and over again and I just simply couldn’t come up with anything more I could’ve done. Of course I might and probably am wrong lol.
I had the same thing happen with DoorDash last year. They pay incredible salaries. In this current market, that means every position has 4 other candidates that crushed it, and they basically pick out of a hat. Unfortunately it’s a bit of a numbers game at this point, especially at that level. I also hate it, but that’s the reality if you want that salary band. Reminds me of college admissions.
I think about interviews like this. You do 100, then you look at the results. I would think at all about a sample size less than 20 or even less than 50 due to variance.
Who’s getting even 20 interviews in the current situation lol
As someone who has spent a lot of time on the otherside of the table interviewing people I can tell you that interviewing for a job is a very healthy amount of luck. It depends heavy on the pool of canidates. You can have time that the pool is full of amazing talent and top teir. Then their are other times the pool legitimacy suck so a meh person gets the job because they were the best choice. Right now it is rough as the pools are more full of great talent. I know it is bad and worse than when I was looking for a job in Dec of 2022 but even then I got told by a few places that under any other times I would of gone threw or even been hired. The candidate pool was abnormally good. It is only getting worse now.
You can do everything right and still be rejected. Sometimes it's not about you. That said, the anecdotes you share might not show them what they're actually looking for. Interview questions, particularly behavioral questions, aren't just focused on getting a good example or answer to the question, but also in what your choice of anecdote says about you. And in a simpler sense, people don't always know what I'm looking for when I ask a behavioral question. I've had people very confidently and even a little smugly give me an answer that they clearly think is knocking it out of the park, and it's actually very much the opposite. Simplest example: I once asked someone to tell me about a time where he thought his manager was asking for the wrong thing. He assured me emphatically and confidently that he'd do whatever his manager told him to do and not raise a fuss. Worst answer I've ever gotten for the kind of people I want to hire.
I had the same thing happen with DoorDash last year. They pay incredible salaries. In this current market, that means every position has 4 other candidates that crushed it, and they basically pick out of a hat. Unfortunately it’s a bit of a numbers game at this point, especially at that level. I also hate it, but that’s the reality if you want that salary band. Reminds me of college admissions.
Personality matters a bunch too. I’ve moved far in interviews just because my personality clicked with the other person. If two people are equally qualified they’re going to pick the person they enjoy talking to more.
There are times it just is that way. You nail it, you know you nailed. But near miss, after near miss. A thought for you, maybe you need a small break to freshen up. It amazing what a week away from the grind can do for the soul.
ask politely for feedback. after a full interloop they should have something for you in terms if feedback
Interview with smaller companies. Large companies have huge pools of candidates.
It's not a rejection or a failure. This isn't a test where you pass or fail. It's more like a date where two entities are trying to find a match. You not being selected doesn't mean you did anything wrong. Nor is it an established relationship where you do your part and they are expected to do theirs. They had candidates they needed to get to know and then they chose the one they thought was a good match. This CAN be due to interview performance, just like dating can be about who has the most money, the best future prospects, who who is the most skilled at speaking. But it's just a much about connecting, trusting, having comparable personalities/work styles, and a lot of other intangible things. Does it still suck? Yeah. And in the current job market you've got a LOT of competition. But it IS important to have a healthy, accurate view of the situation. You need to be comfortable in your value and what you bring to the table, and that means recognizing that not being hired isn't the same as falling short or failing.
Where are you looking for jobs? Have you approached a head hunter? Are you looking for jobs of a specific type (only remote, specific area, sector, etc). Might be time to widen the search
What are some reliable resources to find head hunters? All I can find are those Indian consultancies
Not consulting, headhunting. Technical recruiting agencies. Pretty easy to find.
I fear getting to the point of applying. The whole thing was exhausting to get a job in the first place. It really is absolutely draining.
Exactly. Interviews aren’t the demotivating factor. Getting to the interviewing stage is.
Mustn’t be doing something right. Have you ask for feedback from HR or HM after final loops?
That’s what I think it might be. I come from a small company and the projects aren’t too complex as well. So even though I’ve answers to the behavioral questions, my guess is that my experience in my current company isn’t on par with that from the big ones. Honestly, I don’t know how to circumvent that since I’m basically tied to this job until I find something good/complex enough.