Don’t forget getting the interview.
I’ve got the right column on lock. I’ve never had an interview that wasn’t followed by an offer. But I was still stuck in a dead-end job for years trying to get an interview.
Once I finally got an interview adjacent to my field, I was promoted within 6 months, then poached by another organization a year after that and had quadrupled my income in under 2 years.
But it took forever to get that process started.
Add another column labelled “knowing the right people” with the bar so large the other two are blips.
Also just being liked by the interviewer. For my current job I had an interview of about 90min, and basically just had a rather one-sided chat with the two guys. They seemed to like me, just let me talk and the next day I had the contract draft in my email.
I certainly did not excel at anything during the interview.
So true! Out of the five jobs I got over my career, three were from referrals.
I came here to say that. Who you know makes the other two criteria become irrelevant.
At my work they openly mention that 80% of their hires are from referrals. And I’m not talking about a little unknown company. They have more than 10,000 employees. I’m one of the 20%.
However, I only got my first job because I knew a VP at that company.
Same
So true. At the same time, this happens because a lot of hiring managers don’t know intimately what the job actually does, so they resort to cookie-cutter interview techniques.
Interview: “reverse this binary tree with an algorithmic efficiency of O(1)”
Job: “The marketing team would like you to indent this button by 10 pixels”
All of this. When I tell people I meet that we don’t do coding tests, we instead do tiny assignments, they often get quite excited. It also seems to be way, way more effective
production code: “hehe this is running at polynomial scaling”
I’d rather present it as a non-overlapping Venn diagram. It’s not the level, those are different skills completely
At some point you’ll need to know the basic syntax of some programing language.
