The IT market is currently wild and bad. People searching for a place to work in for YEARS, companies that make rounds of redundancies almost for fun, open positions that stay open forever. And ghosting at every level. In this situation, my previous employer decided to make myself redundant. Nice. Well, I dodged that situation in 2021, it should have happened, sooner or later.
Last time I moved it took to me 2 weeks to find a new job. Thanks to a great recruiter for a great recruiting firm (Megan), but anyway 2 weeks. This time, with a redundancy package, I had 3-4 months before losing money. And so I started big: one recruiter from Meta contacted me, and I decided to invest one month to prepare the interview for a staff (or more) position, because, ehy, I was so “lucky” to pass the first stage and being called to the final loop (6 interviews, that became 5 one week before they were happening).

I failed, but I have nothing to blame: the process was clear, the details were clear, the exercises were exactly what I should have expected… And let’s be honest, I agree with the reasons that made me fail: I am slow at typing. 2 interviews were coding test: 2 exercises each from the leetcode website to do in 45 minutes. By memory, they check comprehension, communication, solution and verification. In both the interviews I passed all points except verification because I didn’t finish the second exercises in both coding interviews, therefore I didn’t speak about verifying the solutions.
The feedback was also great: no comment for the behavioral interview, just a small comment for one of the design interviews, but N/A for the verification value in the two coding exercise. Some friends told me to try again with a language that was quicker to code with, like Python (I used Java) but I think it is too much effort for a very limited chance to pass it: I AM DEFINITELY SLOW at typing, even human readable messages.
I spoke about this experience because if you are a great company, and you invested in your process, you are delivering a great result in this area, and that is obvious. We can discuss how important is a fast coder as a Staff engineer, but they want that, it is clear from the beginning. But, and here we start defining the problem, it is NOT just by making very long interview processes, and not investing in making it fair, that you are bringing values to your company!!!

I did tens and tens of interviews, and I sent hundreds of CV, if not thousands. I don’t blame the CV screening, made with AI. I think we should be ok with that. Find a template, write following a couple of suggestions (put results in terms of numbers, be original, try to adapt the CV to the company, use AI for the cover letter, but have a read and remove what looks too much generated and not aligned with you) and accept that the company of your dreams may say no. You can try contacting directly a recruiter… be original. But be also prepared to the NO.
The initial recruiter screening is also quite standard: the recruiter wants to see that you are motivated and that you are actually a possible fit. He wants to find a fit, he won’t reject you if he does not have a reason. And probably, possible reasons are salary, another candidate got the job, there is a misalignment for some reason with the role, … I mean, there are a lot of candidates nowadays, no reason to get disappointed by the initial screening.

What is really disappointing is everything else!!! I know myself. I know that I am a great software engineer and a great manager. And I am aware that sometimes everyone (me included) just makes a mistake in a technical interview. I may have done AT LEAST 30 full interview loops and I had just 2 issues during a technical stage: I completely forgot of the HAVING keyword in SQL, so I wrote a not great query once (and by the way, this for the company that hired me), and I had a bad feedback for an interview, were the interviewer said that my solution was a bit complicated, but in that case I disagree, I gave an easier solution, but then he asked “choose one” and I thought that, given that I told him the trade offs, it was much more interesting to keep speaking about the complex one because it would have given me the possibility to “shine”.
All the other failures were related to some sort of “expected answer” from the interviewer, especially in contexts that are not directly related to my job. Let me give some examples.

EXAMPLE N.1: I did an interview for a company that I loved. It was relaxed during out of office hours, but challenging for the techs. I did the recruiter screening, then an interview with a Lead Engineer (kind of behavioral and way of working) and I was totally aligned with their expectations, a coding interview with two people and they thought I was great, then I did a online interview with the Head of HR and the next day a face to face in their offices with an architect and the initial lead engineer for the design interview. The design interview went on for about one hour and an half, but it was a success, great feedback. The problem has been the HR: she asked me quite a few questions for about an hour, and she was very positive with my answers, the last 5 minutes she asked me “what is the next behavioral skill that you are going to learn?” and the question confused me. I told her that I usually try to learn based on feedback, that I had a book to read, that I got a feedback lately but there was not too much to “learn” from that. I asked examples, and she said something like “strategic thinking” or “emotional intelligence”… (I am not sure right now). My answer was not great, I can accept it, BUT… why don’t we raise the number of interviews to 39 and we asked that all the interviewers got perfect answers to all of their questions? What is proving that question??? That is proving that HR in my past career has NEVER asked me to learn anything like that, and you have studied psychology while I studied computer science. It is like if, for hiring an HR, the candidate should pass a technical stage with me asking them how to model a hierarchy and the Liskov Substitution Principle.
And yes, I am aware that SOME skills are useful if you manage people, I know that a question like “tell me about a lack that you have” also assesses if you are able to identify lacks, but how that question is proving the the other 5 hours of interview and all the great feedback are meaningless?!?

EXAMPLE N.2: I did an interview for a company in which 2 ex colleagues are working for 8 years. I think that is a great sign that the company does not do any unjustified redundancy round and that the culture is probably great. Also, tech was great, structure of the company looked great, the company has a lot of impact on their customers, so you can have real feedback on your products… and there were a couple of gorgeous benefits. I started the interview on July 3rd. First round the hiring manager, and yes, I was enthusiast. Then pair programming, one hour, and after design, one hour and an half, both passed. Then the behavioral (they called it Product and Leadership) interview, and here we started with strong delays – it was end of July, it has been moved mid of August. One hour. Passed. But then silence: I wrote, there were some delays for holidays and… I needed to do an extra interview because “there were concerns on a comment about the last interview“. The comment was “The candidate has a “going with the flow” approach to prioritisation and planning, but also demonstrated a good level of critical thinking. They seem customer-focused, as shown by their desire to improve user experience and reduce customer contacts. They also have some understanding of how to develop and use success metrics. The interviewer found them to be a very pleasant person to talk to”. Well, I prepared on that aspect, but during the final interview they asked me “If you were the only person deciding for a team, how would you find the initiatives for your team in the ideal case?“. I had literally just spoken about the ICE/RICE framework for prioritization, and I thought they were asking me how to seek for opportunities for a team, so I spoke about checking metrics, introducing products, copying ideas from competitors, … I have been rejected because they wanted me to just speak about metrics, because they work with north star metrics and metrics are the only thing that matters.
AGAIN, how this answer affect my skills in doing the job? I can easily adapt to your way of working, I also told you that I make data informed decisions in one million contexts. I may think that you said bullshit, because if I work in a company, an external company comes to me and say that they can reduce frauds from our 3% to their 1%, I may have no problem with our 3% (the metric) but decide to go anyway for your 1% because price is lower than the gain, in that case metrics validated the decision, but they were not the source of the initiative, because the 3% alone would have not made me work on lowering frauds. But the real question anyway is: WHO CARES?!? Also, sorry to say that, but why are you hiring people that should already come with the same approach that your company has? I proved 1000 times in the process that I am obsessed with metrics, if you want me to use them for the roadmap, and if I join I WILL ALSO WORK WITH A DEDICATED PM, what is the point? Is it not better if you hire people with different ways of working, as long as they can adapt?!?

EXAMPLE N.3: The feedback of the 5 rounds of interview from this company, in my opinion, tells everything:
“What they liked:

  • Gathered requirements, both functional and non-functional before assessing the design
  • Produced a synchronous design based on a service that calls out to each system in term to render a response to the user
  • Was able to describe a second design that would be more fitting for high scale / real time events which was async
  • Was able to compare and contrast the two designs…
  • Was able to explain how the two different systems might fail and the impact on customers
  • Was able to explain how he’d choose between one design and the other (mainly down to the existing infrastructure, delivery timelines and product desire around expansion and the future).
  • Was able to explain how he’d structure the delivery plan, who he’d involved (other teams, stakeholders, his team etc)
  • Good explanation of the different types of testing, when/where he’d used them such as functional, end-to-end, integration and unit.
  • Explained how and why he’d introduced metrics about the systems

Areas for improvement: The team felt some of your answers lacked depth when it come to the [BEHAVIORAL] interview. The team felt you need to be more concise with your answers and with more substance they feel this would be key to a Staff role here at [COMPANY NAME]“.
Basically they told me that I speak too much during an interview and that I have no depth with my answers. And that only in their behavioral interview. I was not lacking depth during the design, or during the coding, or during the other stage. MAYBE if you ask me a theoretical question and I give a generic answer, IF YOU WANT MORE DEPTH YOU SHOULD ASK IT!!! Because hey, a Staff at your company give substantial answers when he has concrete problems to solve, like during the design. But if you ask super generic questions like “How do you approach solving problems?” guess what? I may give a super generic answer, and it will be also super verbose, because I will try to cover any single detail that I may think you want me to say, until you noddle.

This is what I meant with the Netflix effect: because the hiring process is flooded with candidates, the recruiters live this pathological situation of trying to find the perfect fit without focusing on the required skills, but just on the lack of negative comments. As when we go through 100 movies in Netflix searching for the best fit for the night and then we chose the one with the best description, even if the value is poor or the genre of the movie is not what we were searching for. That makes the process more based on chances, luck and rhetoric than on required skills and attitude. And indeed I had an interview with a company that hired one of my ex colleagues: we had the same role in the past and whoever worked with both of us would say that I was a better colleague, and delivering MUCH MORE value for the company. And I was much better in technology. That is EXACTLY the reason why I chose to have an interview for that company: if they took him, they will take me as well (I had already done a lot of interviews, I was starting to freak out). But this person is better in selling smoke – and indeed he was hired while I was rejected, for exactly the same role.
The process that these companies are following is not at all close to be the best to find the best fit for their roles: a lot of interviews just bring a lot of opportunity to have people just feeling that the person is not right. This also penalizes people who are opinionated and people that are not good at lying, and promote people who are good at rhetoric and selling smoke. And penalizes candidates who faced the wrong interviewer, because yes, some interviewers are just bad at asking questions, and some of the above examples should have been fixed by rephrasing the question, if we all agree that misunderstanding on a question should not make a great candidate being discarded as a false negative.
Companies should not think that they are like Meta just because they do a lot of rounds of interview per candidate, without investing in the hiring process. Start selecting the questions that you may want to ask in advance, start agreeing that you are driving the interview through the question that you ask, and if you want some kind of answer, you need to seek for that, start accepting that just because a person is not working as you are doing before he joins, it does not mean that he cannot learn and bring fresh air in your processes. And start forming your interviewers so that they know what and how to ask questions during interviews.

I want to make this crystal clear: five hours of interviews should make you sure that the candidate is great at doing that work, not that the candidate is great at giving the answers that you want. 30 full interviews loops in 4 months and only one arguable rejection from the tech side means that I am right: nobody argue on my technical skills, but you found “better candidates” because they know how to answer what is the next behavioral skill they want to learn, because they say the word “metrics” 5 times instead of 2 or because in a couple of questions they see you nodding at the first answer and they stop speaking, while I continued and looked talkative.
And your processes ignore at all skills like being proactive, energetic and the impact on motivation and mood that some personalities, like mine, have on the other team members. Even the meta recruiter told me that she never gave a rejection to a person having a great reaction like mine before. It was not her fault if I failed, or if their process is like that, so I was super fun with her – are you sure that your best fit has such a great impact on people? Are you taking care of that in your interview process? Do you, recruiter, know that a tech leader who knows how to make the 4-5 people he is leading being motivated, generates more value for the company that a person who is already aligned to your Product way of working and who is simply not a motivator?

Anyway, in the last weeks I got 3 offers. I chose one of them. My search is ended. But I feel empathy for the stress that most of the people experience because of the job search.
When I was the interviewer, a team player, an honest person and a proactive member was more important than a person who was already 100% aligned to our way of working. And that’s how I built great teams.
And I am totally aware of some strategies of recruitment like delaying less interesting candidates to speed up those who look better fit, and I know that some of those feedback should be simply read as “sorry, our best fit has accepted the role, so now we say to you whatever, like that you were not jumping the rope while we were interviewing you” but, besides being a useless lack of honesty (why don’t you tell me “sorry, the position has been covered with another candidate“?), the three examples I gave are definitely not in that area. I hope those companies have covered their position with one of those “great leaders” that I am seeing around, and I am sure that some of those companies did that, because the percentage of great leaders that I met in my life is very low.

Stay tuned!

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