The way you interview changes as you go through your career. If you're grinding leetcode 10 years in, something's wrong.
The main thing you have to remember is that you're selling a service, not asking for a job. This is true at every stage of your career. But the service you offer changes.
Senior, the title that ranges from “can barely do the work” to 👇 pic.twitter.com/I9GtKaWyxI
— Swizec Teller (@Swizec) August 3, 2024
What you sell at different stages
Most hiring managers have a specific role in mind when they hire you. Something they want to get done, but can't because everyone's busy. It's different at very large companies where HR is always hiring and then managers pick from an internal pool of vetted candidates.
But what they're looking for at each level is roughly the same:
- Juniors learn fast and can provide an extra pair of hands to the team. They need guidance from a senior or lead and increase their thinking-to-coding ratio. Interviews look for enthusiasm, smarts, and writing valid code.
- Mid-levels can take on bigger tasks and need less guidance. They're a great sounding board in architectural discussions and can own parts of projects. Interviews look for experience with the company's stack and ability to translate business requirements into code.
- Seniors can own the implementation of well-defined projects. They free leadership of thinking about implementation details so they can focus on strategy. Good partner to product. Interviews look for coding chops, ability to break down projects into tasks, and battle tested opinions on implementation patterns.
- Senior+ can own business goals and make them happen either independently or with a small team. Works with leadership to define strategy and can highlight future challenges based on experience. Works with product or stakeholders to translate goals into projects. Interviews look for opinions, battle scars, and communication skills. Stack doesn't matter because that's an implementation detail. (they're all kinda the same)
You'll notice a trend here. The further you go in your career, the bigger your area of responsibility. Juniors can write and test code whereas senior+ folk can own entire business goals or areas of the product.
The interview impedance mismatch
During my recent bout of interviews I had an interesting experience where a startup said "Nah, Swiz is not the senior engineer for us" ... then offered to make an intro for a friend's CTO opening. That didn't work out but it made me realize I'm having the wrong conversations.
Around the senior career stage things get funky and poorly defined. Many with the senior title are barely above mid-level and at large companies may be used to huge levels of support from the rest of the org. While others have been doing this for decades across many different stacks and companies and too much support will bore them to death.
It's easy to walk into an interview with mismatched expectations.
You want autonomy and ownership, they want a code monkey. You just want to code in peace, they want a director-level leader. Both jobs advertise as "senior engineer". 🙃
Ask questions and make sure you're interviewing for the job you want. If you share opinions borne of hard-earned experience and your interviewers bristle, that is a sign. If they ask questions you're not that interested in answering, that too is a sign.
How to take charge and be the senior+ expert
This is a technique I stole from SPiN Selling, the best sales book I've read because it focuses on being helpful instead of sleazy.
Here's the algorithm:
- Identify pain points
- Sketch out solutions
- Make suggestions
Interviews where I used this approach always worked best. Ask lots of questions, explore their problem space, make suggestions that solve problems they have right now.
You can do this even in a purely technical interview solving a contrived example. The example is there to give you something concrete to talk about. Good interviews don't have a specific solution in mind.
My favorite is to extrapolate from the given example to how the company's systems are structured and ask questions about challenges they're facing. If you're doing an event-driven-architecture system design challenge, you can ask the interviewer about common problems they've likely experienced and chat about how those were solved. Then share your own experiences and solutions from building similar systems.
What about nerves?
Remember: An interview is just a meeting. You have these all the time.
As an experienced engineer you can jump from heads-down coding to a quick architectural discussion interrupted by a quick firefight followed by helping a few juniors with a weird issue then back to your coding task. Interviews almost feel easy compared to a regular day at the office!
And don't put too much weight on any one interview. You'll have a bunch until you find a fit. It's a probabilistic sales process. There's drop-off at every step of the funnel.
Cheers,
~Swizec
Continue reading about Interviewing tips for experienced engineers
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