You're Not Interviewing for the Job. You're Auditioning for the Job Title

It's been 10 years since I did an interview and I think I would rather retire and grow rare lizards than jump through the interview hoops at a new company. I am 90% sure I couldn't pass the interview for my current position but I'm the one who designed the whole thing. -staff level backend engineer

I was 14 years in a job at senior level and got laid off.

And yeah, it's pretty much as bad as you describe.

In the past 10 years and I was already 40 years old in 2014, I’ve interviewed:

- at a company where they launched a new division in a satellite office in another city to separate the team from the old guard to create a “tiger team” of experienced developers. I was the second hire. I just spoke to the manager as an experienced professional and we talked about how I solved real world problems

- a new to the company director who needed a lead software engineer to integrate systems of acquisitions that the PE owner was buying.

- the new to the company CTO after the founders found product market fit and wanted to bring technology leadership into the company from a third party consulting company. I was eventually tasked with making everything cloud native, scalable, resilient etc. I was his second technical hire. Our customers were large health care companies where one new contract could bring in 10K new users and even more ETL integrations. He knew I didn’t have any practical AWS experience. He later told me I seemed like a smart guy and I could figure it out.

- AWS itself in the ProServe division - 5 round behavioral interview where I walked through my implementations.

- (2024) third party cloud consulting company in a staff role. They asked how would I architect something and I made sure I hit all of the “pillars” of AWS Well Architected and talked through 12 Factor Apps.

I’m 51 and I stay interview ready. My resume and my career documents are updated quarterly and I keep my network warm.

I believe right now if I were looking for a job, someone would hire me quickly if not for a permanent position, at least I could hustle up on a contract.

Yep. I didn't even "pass" some of the coding challenges despite hiring, firing, and writing coding challenges myself!

What I often saw was many of those jobs were sitting on the market for months and months just getting relisted every few weeks. The ones that actually led to interviews, I had one dipshit proudly tell me about his 2-hour commute five days a week. Another told me they wanted to vomit-out mini-MVPs and were replacing the new guy who wasn't doing it fast enough. Just an ocean of fake jobs and awful jobs lol.

I had a coding challenge where if you didn’t implement what was essentially a Set in the exact way that they expected, you couldn’t proceed since the evaluation assumed you’d match their ordering (which was arbitrary). One of those automated test things and there was no way to contact a human and say, your process is broken. I’m eagerly counting down the days until I can retire. Between broken hiring processes and the rise of LLM coding, I’m left wondering if this is how I want to spend my precious time.

I've been interviewing the last few months after having had the same leadership role for 7+ years and never really having interviewed before. Your point about maintaining interview-readiness is something everyone should tattoo on their arm. I wish I had kept a log of accomplishments, projects with associated tradeoffs, anecdotes, etc. I've been polishing my interview responses and sometimes I remember something I had done that would have been great to bring up in an interview but I hadn't thought about in years.

Greatly enjoying working on my own software for now!

The cynical mind would assume that would be an excellent way for a corporation to rig the hiring process by preventing American qualified applicants from progressing and therefore making a claim that foreign labor must definitely be imported at a fraction of the salary and under visa-indenturement who … wouldn’t you know … magically happen to know the answers and pass the very arbitrary coding challenge somehow.

The only way this gets solved is by making any and all H-1B hires require the hiring corporation pay a 200% tax in addition to all other employment related taxes for the absolutely necessary and critical H-1B talent.

And to add on - not directed at you more to other people where this isn’t crystal clear - neither you nor I said to be “interview ready” means “grinding leetcode so you can reverse a btree on the whiteboard”.

You and I are both basically referring to being able to describe accomplishments, challenges, and results in STAR format.

Any tips for doing that and making money?

I haven't interviewed for a job in many years, but on a whim, I decided to pursue a new role. I made it to the final interview with senior executives and was expectedly grilled about my qualifications. During the interview, I described several projects I worked on from start to finish, covering all stages such as gathering requirements and architecture. However, I received feedback that it seemed I had taken on too much responsibility, making them unsure of how much I actually contributed. Yes, totally agreed.

Do you think you’re a productive and valuable employee with marketable skills?

If the answer was yes, why do you think we’re in a situation where you need to dedicate that much of your own free time, sans compensation, just to make yourself attractive to companies so you can at best fall back on temporary employment?

I do not mean to attack you personally, but your comment is incredibly black pilling and dystopian to me. It’s seems like every year we are going to be asked to do more, get culled if we don’t, and half of the commentary from our community is about how you can avoid the yearly culling by working even harder.

How are employers supposed to know you're productive and valuable if you won't even maintain a decent resume?

Honestly you come off as whiny and entitled, everyone has to present themselves through a CV. If you want to stand out you need to put some work into it.

I work as a consultant/contractor, so I am actively encouraged to polish my resume during work hours. You could look into the same if you also want to be paid to polish your resume. I don't see why other kinds of employers would want you to work on it, the only thing you could use it for would be to leave them.

> If the answer was yes, why do you think we’re in a situation where you need to dedicate that much of your own free time, sans compensation, just to make yourself attractive to companies so you can at best fall back on temporary employment?

Do you think good products just sell themselves? Do you think marketing departments exist because companies love to waste money? There's your answer.

It is the natural result of an industry where:

- There are low barriers to entry (education is not required, profession licences is not a thing, etc.)

- A strong culture of "job hopping" has emerged, which means companies are continuously interviewing candidates, and candidates are continuously looking for jobs.

- A big willingness to sacrifice the false positives, for the sake of keeping out the false negatives. Basically companies will increase the threshold/bar to keep out the "fakers" and bad hires, even if it means rejecting legitimate hires. The mantra that it is very expensive to hire the wrong people rings throughout the industry, and has for the past decades.

- Candidates are willing to play the game. Some people are willing to grind leetcode questions for months, years, if it means they get a shot at big tech companies. Smaller companies cargo cult.

Do you understand that what you're saying is that in order to be hired, you not only need all the skills needed to do the job, but also all the skills of a full-fledged marketing department, regardless of whether the job requires any of that?

Some of us think that's top-shelf bullshit.

Yes. Because knowing the job and showing people you know the job are two complementary skillsets. Spends some time working with technically-illiterate managers and clients and you'll see. Don't do it and you'll be left hanging wondering why people can't see your brilliance and competence.

I'm sorry you don't live in the world you'd like to live in but that's life. Been at this game for 25 years and it has never been different.

Thanks for mentioning star method. Didn't know about it yet.

Who said anything about working harder?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45089377

The company gets a simple deal from me. They put the amount of money in my account they agreed to every month and in return they get 40-45 hours a week from me and all of my experience and skills.

They want me to fly out to a customer’s site or sit on a zoom call to close a deal? They got me. They want me to lead a large cloud implementation? No problem. They want a 50+ page management consulting style assessment with pretty diagrams? Say the word. They have a customer with an empty AWS account and they want someone who can do AWS architecture from the “DevOps” [sic] perspective and development? Say the word.

What they don’t get from me is burnout, time away from my wife and exercise in the evening, weekends or on call work. They get 40-45 hours of work from me.

It doesn’t take that much time to write down a summary of what you accomplished every quarter and keep an updated resume and in my case go on LinkedIn and post a banal “thought leadership” bullshit post once a quarter to keep me on the top of people’s mind if things go sideways at my current employer.

I would much rather be in my position where interviewing means some behavioral questions and talking to people than having to grind leetcode and reverse a btree on the whiteboard.

Look up the concept of “luck surface area”.

https://modelthinkers.com/mental-model/surface-area-of-luck

It’s about doing the work and telling people you do the work. It was never my intention to land in BigTech at 46. I was actively opposed to it because I didn’t want to move from my big house in the burbs and we were fine. I had spent the last seven years at startups leading projects and “transformations”, learning AWS and updating my LinkedIn profile. AWS reached out to me in 2020 (as has GCP since I left but I rather get an anal probe with a cactus than go to BigTech again and I’m damn sure not going into an office) and I said why not interview?

While I was there, I was building a network with coworkers and clients, learning how strategic consulting works on the highest level, contributing to an official very popular open source “AWS Solution” in its niche. Releasing my own open source solutions in their official repository, did a couple of blog post that are still on their website, etc.

When Amazon started Amazoning, I waited for my severance offer and had multiple job offers within two weeks with a $40k+ severance in the bank just by reaching out to my industry contacts I had made.

It may be bullshit. I might think gravity is bullshit. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to jump off of a 25 story building out of defiance. I play the game because I have an addiction to food and shelter.

Or just establish the H-1B salary by some third party through evaluating what similar positions pay in the most expensive areas of the US and making each sponsoring company pay whatever it costs to get that data.

Why did you design it that way then? Actually asking, not taking the piss.

That was just the stated feedback. They just didn't like you, and found a reason not to. This effect is well studied.

The better you understand this, the more it won't make a difference, sadly. At least you can get through the rest of the week though.

There is a difference between knowing how to find and use the ordered list of complexities for big O notation, and knowing these by heart. The difference is irrelevant when you design or code, but it’s important for interviews and exams.

> Just an ocean of fake jobs and awful jobs lol.

Oof. Is that true of the "who's hiring" posts here on HN?

While I have never been encouraged to work on my resume on the job, I have been paid to post to the company’s blog and various “thought leadership” posts to LinkedIn and at a previous company open source work.

While it was marketing for them, it also helped build my visibility

Respectfully, You are not putting in 40--45 hours a week if you are

>I’m 51 and I stay interview ready. My resume and my career documents are updated quarterly and I keep my network warm.

All of the extra bits of work you have to do outside of the 40-45 to stay "interview ready" count as work, youre just not getting paid.

Speak to other professional fields about the requirements they have for getting a job. Even in ones where there is an expectation of continuing education like for doctors, that is usually covered both in time and money by the employers of said doctors, not just something they are expected to moonlight on.

The other professions are even more agahst when they hear things like having to go through 10 round interviews or being grilled on the same set of college basics that dont get used in the day job, as a part of every single interview

At some point since the dotcom bubble, employers figured out a way to convince software engineers that since a bunch of nerds who were interested in this skillset as a hobby were doing it in their free time, the rest of us should be doing that too

Maintaining a resume is burying the lede. Being "interview ready" in software means maintaining a separate set of skills that are rarely used in the day to day.

When companies are asking for people to reverse red black trees and then turn around and expect their employees to hook up wordpress sites, or build generic REST based CRUD apps, they are implicitly putting the burden of training on the employees.

I posit that the software field is one of the worst fields when it comes to this

How much extra time do you think it takes to summarize what you did at the end of a project? I do that anyway on the job during working hours to prepare for performance reviews and put it in our performance tracking system.

The banal “thought leadership” posts I’ve done on LinkedIn was also done during working hours. It’s encouraged at my level as marketing for the company and it also helps me.

I work remotely, do you really think I don’t do all this during working hours?

> Speak to other professional fields about the requirements they have for getting a job. Even in ones where there is an expectation of continuing education like for doctors, that is usually covered both in time and money by the employers of said doctors, not just something they are expected to moonlight on.

We get $1000 per completed professional AWS certification and a few others the first time and renewal and have time to study between projects. Even when I didn’t work in consulting and working in product companies - the last one as the lead architect - I took time during working hours to study.

You did see where I said I haven’t done a side project outside of work for my entire 30 year career?

> The other professions are even more agahst when they hear things like having to go through 10 round interviews or being grilled on the same set of college basics that dont get used in the day job, as a part of every single interview

My interview at AWS was one full day and five rounds of behavioral questions. But all of my other interviews were two rounds and then an offer. The last two companies I worked for before AWS, it was talking to the director and CTO about business outcomes and strategy and my previous experience. Do you really think high up people in their 40s are going to ask another 49 year old to balance an AVL tree?

I explicitly said “being interview ready” for me was not doing coding interviews on the whiteboard. It was being able to talk about my past accomplishments and how I would benefit the company.

Yes I am self aware enough to realize that I have been able to avoid that because I was 50 years old when I interviewed last year, with industry experience, connections and AWS ProServe.

But on the other hand, cry me a river that younger developers must prepare for coding interviews for a few months and make $160k+ straight out of school. A former intern I mentored when they were an intern and when they came back is now 25 years old and making over $200K as an SA at AWS.

I am not at all bitter. I am happy for all of the up and coming fresh college grads I met when I was there.

Well then congratulations, you seem to have progressed high up enough in your career to not have to deal with that.

I have literally never had an interview process with a company consist of less than 4-5 hours of interview rounds or an equivalent sized take home project. Roughly 50-60 interview cycles over 12 years. That includes companies where I was referred in by the hiring manager.

I have never been asked to reverse a red black tree. Maybe they all do that in SV but in my corner of the world I haven't seen nor heard about anyone doing that. I've been asked to write a class to store Car objects and get them by plate number and some stuff like that. I've been asked to write a simple tax calculator with the specific tax rules and brackets provided.

I thought these were perfectly reasonable tasks, certainly within my capabilities. To me, being "interview ready" is simply being competent at my job. Nobody's expecting me to memorize obscure algorithms that I could just look up if I needed them. They're just asking me to demonstrate that I can solve a simple task by programming. That's totally fair, I wouldn't want to work with the people who went through 3 years of university (and even years of actual work afterwards) without learning how to solve these kinds of basic tasks.

I don't even remember what a red black tree is, I think they were covered in our DSA class but not much. Despite that I think I could give a pretty solid go at reversing one, given an implementation and maybe a summary of how it works. I wouldn't mind getting that task, sounds like a fun challenge. Maybe I'd complete it in 30 minutes, maybe I wouldn't, in either case I'm sure I'd be able to show that I'm pretty good at programming. That's all I've ever needed for my interviews. Haven't done an interview that hasn't resulted in a job offer.

Meanwhile I see all you people on the internet complaining that interviews are so unfair and require this "interview prep", so I'm left to conclude that either employers in my country are way less selective than they are in yours, or you're only applying to the most selective employers, or you're simply exaggerating the difficulty of the interviews. If you want to work at Google earning $500k then you're going to have to be exceptional. For everyone else there's plenty of very lucrative jobs that aren't nearly as hard to get. And if you can't even get those then maybe you're just not particularly good?

I’m not young or new to the industry. Not every place is this bad but it’s still highly common to get asked questions that seek to test out how many algorithms you’ve memorized.

This is not 500k/yr jobs but 150-250k year jobs where companies try to ape the practices of mag7 but fail at it because they are unwilling to implement fundamental aspects of those processes.

I also(until this current economy, lol) didn’t really ever have a problem crossing this barrier and getting jobs. But I still hate the extra effort needed and the extra hours of my personal life I have to sacrifice to brush up on or keep up to date on skills that the employers have, in my experience, never once had me use or even worse, blocked my efforts on working on tasks that would make use of the skill.

I grin and bear it because the moneys worth it but I think it’s inefficient posturing done to filter out social classes at this point, like how unpaid internships are used in the finance field

Sorry I meant the systems we built not the interview itself.

To be fair, $150k is still a very good salary. That's like 3 times as much as most other people make. So it seems to me like we're still talking about fairly high-tier jobs, where I live most developers make less than $100k. The only devs I know who make north of $150k are self-employed contractors which comes with a lot of downsides.

I can see how it might be frustrating to have to maintain a separate set of skills just for interviews. I just haven't experienced that myself.

There's many awful things, but HN who's hiring isn't one of them IMO. Because HN has maintained an image of being for "smart in the know" people and discussions despite being huge, connections fostered here tend to start off with a stronger weight than completely cold interactions, there's some minor level of inherent trust there.

I can't remember the last time someone didn't reply to me from here, but then again I choose my applications very carefully. You also get to meet a truly diverse set of people and opportunities rather than "more of the same".

Tell me about it. I'm in the 9th circle of interview hell and if I wrote a blog post about my recent experiences it would die as a [flagged] post because it seems too made up.

I just today spoke with a recruiter for a position that is 3 steps back in my career, but asking for more skills than I have.

The compensation is also going back about 5-6 years in nominal payment, not even accounting for inflation. It’s titled and compensated like what looks to me a 3-6 year in their career senior engineer working at a successful but not mag7 level company like a DraftKings.

They won’t even move to the first stage of the interview process until their CTO has personally read and approved it.

At this point I’m more mystified as to why everyone’s wasting their time like this on filtering. I can’t see a rational situation where it’s worth executive time to bother filtering for a role that’s so minor to the organization, but that’s the circus we’re in now so I guess I’ll jump through the hoops

High col area, was paying 3 grand per month before utilities for 1000 sq ft and rats. Surroundings are fun at least. 150k is well off still but not secure from financial problems after being out of work for even a few weeks.

Like I said, the moneys worth going through the hoops but it’s aggravating to go through them when I don’t think they are benefiting anyone, even the employer.

I also felt this way when I was on the other side of the table doing hiring mind you.

I'm betting on Steam's "early access" personally.