Comments by "SsjC" (@ssjcosty) on "A Life Engineered" channel.

Lots of good information here, thanks! I have 14 years of experience as an engineer, of which 5 as a senior, 1 as a software architect, and overall during these periods the last 2 years I've been a tech lead. My last 6 years have all been at a well known tech company too. That said, if I got a question like "Tell me about a time you strongly disagreed with your team" I probably wouldn't know what to say as I feel that in all my experience I have NEVER seriously disagreed with any of my teammates - in all the teams I've been I always had a surprisingly good rapport with my teammates and the things we did disagree on were small and inconsequential, hardly worth mentioning. However I have disagreed with engineering managers and even our head of engineering, and in some of those disagreements I was able to make a compelling case and get what I and the team wanted, whereas in other situation my opinions were acknowledged but the course of action set. I left the company recently and I've been interviewing. I found that I am very bad at interviewing, because I was often stumped by behavioural questions such as that one - where my immediate answer was "never disagreed", or I just couldn't tell them of a time I did X because I just couldn't remember specifics. To the point where somebody told me they thought I was a beginner. Cool, but if I'm such a beginner then how was it that I have all these achievements - managed to lead teams, run critical projects, deal with stakeholders and deliver things that were loved by our customers? Well it's because I wasn't prepared for these types of interview questions. Now I am prepared, I have identified a set of stories that I can tell these people, but now I feel like this is also disingenuous, because anyone can prepare and give good sounding stories during an interview, yet that doesn't mean they will actually be good at doing the job.
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@j.metzger1730 That's if the interviewer is paying attention. I've found that the best interviews have been those that felt like conversations rather than interrogations. I've had conversations about projects and systems I've worked on, and I also asked about some of the interviewer's projects and gave my thoughts on some of their issues. These discussions do go into details, but that's good because that can further clarify the extent of your expertise. At the other end, the worst interview I had was one that had the interviewer asking rapid fire questions about specific theoretical models, design patterns, and acronyms, scoring me on how many I got right and how many I got wrong, with no discussion around any of these topics. That interview stage could have been replaced by an online form.
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Good advice. The problem with leaving to get a Principal role at a different company is that the interview process is often quite difficult as they usually expect you to have had those responsibilities before - they ask you to tell them about a time when you did influence multiple teams etc. But I guess you can get another Senior role in a company where they do have Principals, and then work your way up to the role - that can take a few more years though.
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Very useful, thanks! I have been downleveled and downright rejected after a few interviews, but there the problem wasn't that I didn't have the skills or the experience, it was that I hadn't really prepared for the interviews (with practised answers etc.).
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Another problem with this is that it's focused too much at being a good communicator. You may have been a stellar senior engineer for many years, but if you have anxiety or you're bad at crafting narratives, or you're on the autism spectrum, then these kinds of interviews may be unsuitable for accurately assessing your skills.
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I'm currently in the same position as you were. I've been a Senior then Software Architect, and I am currently going for Lead roles, but I'm struggling to answer behavioural and management questions, and on occasion I even struggle on coding and system design tests, due to not enough interview prep.
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The U-shaped story example takes much longer time than the STAR-shaped one though... Some interviewers become very impatient when an answer to a question takes too long. What would you recommend here?
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@unk511 Yes, I did get a job. This was about 1.5 years ago. I went through an interview preparation course, and so I ended up writing a big document with answers to various standard questions - a mix of questions that were in the course, but also questions that I was getting during interviews. This prep was very valuable, because I was able to think about each of these situations and summarise it so that my answers didn't take more than 1 minute for any given question. I also spent some time learning or remembering various topics, especially on systems design. Yeah I do systems design for work, but I'm never in a position where I have to hash out a system diagram in a few minutes, so I went through some books on systems design for interviews. I still maintain that interviewing well is a very different skill than what you actually need during a tech job, however it seems to be a necessary evil. It's why when I interview people I always try to approach them in ways that I wish I'd be approached.
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