Comment by raw_anon_1111
5 days ago
These are typical questions I ask when I’m interviewing a senior developer:
“Tell me about a project you’re most proud of?” Then I’m going to start asking questions about your decision making process, how you dealt with complexity and ambiguity, etc.
If all you did was pull well defined tickets off the Jira board, you’re not going to be able to answer that question well and you aren’t the type of person I’m going to delegate a very ambiguous assignment where you have to make good architectural and organizational decisions and have to deal with “the business” to disambiguate.
The next question would be “Looking at your resume, I see you have $x years of experience, if you could go back to one of your earlier projects, what choices would you have made differently knowing what you know now?”
If you haven’t led any major initiative, what are you going to say? “I would have pulled more tickets off the board?”
I interviewed someone from AWS at my last job, he thought he was a shoo in especially after he looked on LinkedIn and saw that I was from AWS. I guess he thought he was going to be reversing a binary tree.
No matter what I asked, he couldn’t describe anything he had done of note except be on a team who did stuff. I asked him had he led any features, presented any “six pagers” internally, blog posts on the AWS site, presentations - he had done nothing.
I passed over him for a guy at an unknown company who could talk about where he “took ownership”. That’s one of the Amazon BS Leadership Principals.
Hell I had a public footprint at AWS after only 3.5 years I had been there as a mid level L5 employee.
I do all my interviewing in a very similar way, but I don't use that to "level" an employee: I want most of the engineers in my team to have this mindset, and the only difference between seniority levels should be in the size/scope of the initiative they led and took ownership of, and obviously, the level of exposure to wrong things they had a chance to do and learn from. I will sometimes take someone where I believe they were not put in a position to do this, and who I believe I can support to develop this mindset.
I know I've done all of this since day 1 of my professional software engineer career (and well, before that too). I've also been "side-moted" to a Tech Lead after 2 years of starting my career in a strong tech company too.