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Maybe not the right place, maybe better for Sunday, but I'm not in a great mood. What is up with senior software engineering hiring? All the job postings seem to be premised on the idea that you don't learn any transferable skills in your career, only domain-specific ones. If you want a senior position doing X, you'd better have been doing X for multiple years already. I get that makes sense for principal-level jobs where the whole point is to hire a world expert on X, but a senior still has to ramp up as part of a team anyway. Surely this state of affairs is really suboptimal, given (I hear) how hard it is to find good people. Where are the companies hiring smart senior SWEs who have been doing X to do Y and just figuring on an extra bit of ramp-up?
Everywhere. FAANGs and FAANG-wannabes use leetcode-style exercises. Other companies just poach, I was hired by my current employer for being orthoxerox, not being a world-class expert in data lakes (because I knew practically nothing about data lakes).
But this doesn't work with random candidates. If I get scheduled an interview with an external candidate that is reportedly a very good Rust programmer that is willing to give Spark on Scala a try, I immediately have a few questions:
FAANGs solve this by having a lot of slack. When you can hire 100 senior SWEs each day, you can afford to shuffle them around for a few months and then fire 50 that didn't get up to speed.
Poaching solves this by giving you a long-term view of a candidate: you need people that are curious and get shit done, knowing someone for five years is the best way to find out if they are both.
TLDR: use your network. Keep in touch with wordcels that have left your company for greener pastures and ask them if they have an opportunity for a cool guy like you.
So is "you know someone who works there" pretty much the only way to signal general competence? I suppose the question, then, is: how does anyone get hired any other way even if their resume ticks all the boxes? If a resume doing X well doesn't signal general competence enough to be hired to do Y absent having someone on the inside who can vouch for you... then why would it be a sufficient signal to get hired to do X? (Maybe the answer is, it isn't, which is why the whole search process is terrible on both sides?)
Not going into too much detail to avoid self-doxxing but I was hired directly into a senior role from academia with no industry experience... I did have a personal recommendation then, and I guess I didn't give enough credit to how important that was for getting my foot in the door.
Having lots of different experiences without looking like you're job hopping (so 3+ years per job) is another one I can think of. But then you still need to get past the initial HR filter that screens for buzzwords.
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