- 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.
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.
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.
>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
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 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.
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