Let’s talk about interviews.\u00a0 Or, for the purpose of this story, two interviews and what we can learn from them.<\/p>\n
The first pair of people I was to talk to were the Director and another PM.\u00a0 The Director and I talked about general experience, management philosophy, how he ran his department.\u00a0 Through all this the other PM was silent.\u00a0 At the end of that interview, which was very short, maybe 40 minutes, the Director asked the other PM if there were any other questions and the answer was no.<\/p>\n
Two red flags went up from this first interview:<\/p>\n
The second interview was with a senior architect.<\/p>\n
That interview opened with the senior architect stating: “I really don’t know what to ask someone interviewing for this position”.\u00a0 And then he just sort of looked at me quietly.<\/p>\n
Well, crap.\u00a0 That’s not going to work.\u00a0 So, I launched in to a discussion about the kinds of questions he should consider asking of a PM that he might be working with.\u00a0 I gave him the questions, I gave him the answers.<\/p>\n
I ran the interview and controlled it from start to finish.<\/p>\n
At one point he said “You know, if I didn’t know better, I’d say you were in Sales!”\u00a0 I don’t think he meant it badly, but what was the alternative?\u00a0 In the absence of any real questions or discussion, I was not going to sit there for 10 minutes and shoot the breeze.\u00a0 So, I took over the interview and made sure that I had a chance to talk about what I could do, my skills, my value to the process, how I run an organization.\u00a0 We discussed some technical tidbits, but not a lot since it had been made clear to me that the Developers develop and the PMs manage the projects and the tasks.<\/p>\n
Red Flag #3: If you have to run the interview as the interviewee, be worried.\u00a0 What this tells you is one and possibly two things.<\/p>\n
First, it tells you that the people interviewing really haven’t prepped and\/or thought much about interviewing someone who might come on the team.\u00a0 Second, given that I’d been told that they’d already interviewed several people and had more to interview, it likely implied that they were not using a consistent team of interviewers.<\/p>\n
I’ve found that very useful to have a core group of interviewers to speak with candidates.\u00a0 Yes, it’s a commitment, but without it you’re comparing apples and oranges in terms of feedback when you’re hearing Joe talk about his impression of Candidate #1 and Sam talks about his impressions of Candidate #2.\u00a0 Limit the variables, limit the interview team.<\/p>\n
Another thing which works well is to establish areas to interview within.\u00a0 Perhaps one team member does team fit and another does technical fit and another quizzes on projects past.\u00a0 You should have the same folks talking to candidates about the same things.\u00a0 Importantly, this eliminates overlaps which are wasteful of time and resources, but it also makes sure that someone<\/strong> has the responsibility to speak to them about the areas that are important to you to place the right person in a given job.<\/p>\n Finally, I was supposed to talk to the VP of the group.\u00a0 But he was out and would I be willing to come back another time to speak with him.<\/p>\n Sure, things come up, and yes, I am looking for a job, but ideally try and work hard to be respectful of your interviewees time.<\/p>\n In the end, I came back and met with the VP.\u00a0 The meeting went fine until the discussion of compensation came up.\u00a0 I was asked what my last salary wasand I was up front but made sure to let him know that it was important to me to look at the total compensation package and that I was looking for an opportunity to work in a different domain than I had in the past.<\/p>\n The VP replied that their budget was more in the range of about 70% of what I made in my last job.\u00a0 Well, crap.<\/p>\n So, depending on your count, that’s somewhere between three and five red flags from that interview.<\/p>\n In a perfect world one might take those and say “Hmmm, my gut is telling me that there’s something not great going on here.\u00a0 Perhaps this isn’t the place for me.”<\/p>\n And that’s fantastic if you have the luxury to trust your gut and walk away from a job offer.\u00a0 But, as was pointed out to me, even 70% of my last job is significantly more than I was making on unemployment.\u00a0 And I could always continue to look for a better fit.<\/p>\n In the end, it became clear that that job was not a good fit and there was a parting of the ways.\u00a0 So, gut was right, but I did work for several months, which is good.\u00a0 But, on the negative side, there was a parting of the ways, which has not happened to me in 20 years as a professional.<\/p>\n That whole experience reminds me of a story one of my mentors told me about when he interviewed for a position at a company where he and I worked together.\u00a0 After meeting with the interview team, he was offered the job.\u00a0 But, before he would take it, he asked to talk with additional people about the job and the company.\u00a0 He really saw the interview process as a two way street.\u00a0 Not only was the company interviewing him for fit, but he took seriously the idea that he was interviewing the company to see if it was someplace he wanted to be.\u00a0 I really respected that approach.\u00a0 I also didn’t feel like I had that opportunity in this case.\u00a0 I needed a job and that puts the balance of power on the side of the company in a way which makes it hard to be objective.<\/p>\n The second interview started with me waiting in the lobby of the company.\u00a0 One of the managers chatted with me while one of the other managers was trying to clear a conference room for us to talk.<\/p>\n As I was chatting with the first manager, the folks in the conference room began to exit.\u00a0 Engineers wearing jeans and t-shirts and the last guy out … had bare feet and a ponytalk.\u00a0 Ah, my people!<\/p>\n That first interview portion was with all three of the current managers for that company.\u00a0 Everyone talked, everyone asked questions, everyone participated.\u00a0 I got smiles and handshakes all around and they seemed genuinely interested in talking with me.\u00a0 What was supposed to be 45 minutes turned in to an hour before they decided to hand me over to the VP and HR.\u00a0 Again, smiles and handshakes.<\/p>\n Next I spoke with the VP and HR.\u00a0 A bit more on management philosophy, what works and doesn’t work in engineering organizations.\u00a0 I got an overview of the company, how they run things, where their business comes from and a general sense of the values of the company.\u00a0 HR talked about all the usual HR subjects and was very helpful, very nice and a pleasure to talk with.\u00a0 Again, roughly 45 minutes turned in to an hour and we parted with handshakes and smiles all around.<\/p>\n Finally I spoke with the owner of the company.<\/p>\n So, for this interview for this job I spoke with the entire<\/strong> management team, HR and the owners.\u00a0 That’s an example of folks who are interested and involved with who they are bringing in to the company.<\/p>\n We talked some more about the opportunity, what the position would entail, opportunities for growth, necessity to be technical.\u00a0 All the things I would want to be clear on before I consider whether this is someplace I’d like to work.<\/p>\n But here are the kinds of details that jumped out at me from this discussion, in addition to all the meat and potatoes subjects: The owner has a bookshelf behind him.\u00a0 In the book shelf were two kinds of books: Technical and Science Fiction.<\/p>\n Not management philosophy, not How to Build and Sell a Business or How to Get Rich.\u00a0 Technical and Science Fiction.\u00a0 And Good<\/strong> Science Fiction (which means Science Fiction that I like).<\/p>\n So, let’s walk through the second interview:<\/p>\n Now, had both of these interviews happened at a time where they overlapped, it would have been a no-brainer which was the right fit for me.\u00a0 Unfortunately that wasn’t the case, but this second one was certainly worth waiting for.<\/p>\n For the first time in probably a decade, I’m excited and looking forward to starting a job.\u00a0 Excited about the challenges and the opportunities.\u00a0 Excited about the people I’ll be working with.<\/p>\n I think I found my tribe.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Let’s talk about interviews.\u00a0 Or, for the purpose of this story, two interviews and what we can learn from them. Interview 1: Red Flags and You The first interview was for a job somewhat outside my area of expertise, but I saw it as a subset of what I do […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-155","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-writing"],"featured_image_src":null,"author_info":{"display_name":"darrin","author_link":"https:\/\/mossor.org\/blog\/author\/darrin\/"},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mossor.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mossor.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mossor.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mossor.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mossor.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=155"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mossor.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mossor.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=155"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mossor.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=155"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mossor.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=155"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Interview 2: Finding My Tribe<\/h3>\n
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