• 2 Posts
  • 23 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 26th, 2023

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  • As a hiring manager, I can understand why you didn’t get the job. I agree that it’s not a “good” question, sure, but when you’re hiring for a job where the demand is high because a lot is on the line, the last thing you’re going to do is hire someone who says their skills are “6.5/10” after almost a decade of experience. They wanted to hear how confident you were in your ability to solve problems with .NET. They didn’t want to hear “aCtUaLlY, nO oNe Is PeRfEcT.” They likely hired the person who said “gee, I feel like my skills are 10/10 after all these years of experience of problem solving. So far there hasn’t been a problem I couldn’t solve with .NET!” That gives the hiring manager way more confidence than something along the lines of “6.5/10 after almost a decade, but hire me because no one is perfect.” (I am over simplifying what you said, because this is potentially how they remembered you.)

    Unfortunately, interviews for developer jobs can be a bit of a crap shoot.





  • I feel your pain. I once worked at a place that hired an “expert” as a senior dev who asked me on the first day, “what is this import on the first line of this code??? I’ve never seen this before. 🤔” They were unfamiliar with the concept of packages and importing them… Senior dev, hired specifically because they were an expert in a specific language…

    They’d call me upwards of 12 times a day for help with the most basic of tasks with anything technical, to include how to install the basic runtime to be able to run code in that language.

    (I’m speaking quasi cryptically on purpose.)
















  • Here’s a few from me:

    • How many separate projects are developers working on at any given time? (Because I want to know if they expect developers to be context switching all the time.)

    • Is anyone sitting there with a stop watching checking what time I get into work in the morning? (Because I’m not hourly and don’t expect to be treated as such.)

    • Describe the work-life balance.

    • Are you agile? Not agile? Scrum teams?

    • What might an average day look like for me? Walk me through from when I sign in and log off for the day.

    • How do you perform automated testing here? (if they don’t, I’m concerned)

    • Do you enforce code formatting?

    • How do you deploy your code? (if it’s not a CICD pipeline, I’m concerned)

    • How involved in DevOps are developers? (Will o be expected to work on CICD code? Infrastructure as Code?)

    • What version control system do you use? (Of the answer is nothing, the interview is over. I will not work there. If it’s something other than Git, I’m not excited about it.)

    • Is Docker used here? (Docker makes me very productive, I’m concerned if Docker is a tool I’m not allowed to use.)

    • Are there any other programming languages I’ll be using other than <advertised language for the position here>?

    • Are SOLID principles common practice here? Or rejected as unnecessary? (I love SOLID and think it’s useful much more than not. If SOLID is frowned upon, I probably won’t be happy there.)

    • Can I choose what sort of machine I get to work on? (If I can’t work on MacOS, it could be a deal breaker… I love MacOS for development, sue me! 🤷‍♂️)


  • You need to understand very soon that you can no longer have projects assigned to you. Everything your management asks you to do is actually something that they want you to ensure gets finished- you are not supposed to do it yourself. Delegate, follow up, and guide someone else to do it.

    The moment you take a project on by yourself, you’ve become a huge bottleneck for your entire team’s productivity. Your team needs your guidance and help, and you can’t offer that if you’re designing, coding, and debugging a project on your own.

    98% of coding for you should be paired programming from here on out, where you are not the developer at the keyboard. You are providing suggestions and guidance so that experience can transfer to your junior team members.

    Edit: You are not just a “tech lead,” you are a manager if you have direct reports.