Re:Leveling Up in Job Interviews for Software Engineers (2022)
by scarface_74 on Saturday July 01, 2023 @09:03AM
(#36549659)
My work history
1. I got the job based on a previous internship that itself was based on talking to people in the career office in college. (1996)
2. I talked to someone at a local recruiting agency and went to the office and met them in person (1999)
3. I found an interesting looking job on CareerBuilder for a startup and reached out to the internal recruiter via email and we started having a discussion (2008)
4. When that company was folding, a couple of recruiters reached out to all of us and I was hired four days after I was laid off (2012)
5. I reached out to an in house recruiter on LinkedIn where the manager was looking to start a “tiger team” of experienced developers (2014)
6. I had plenty of recruiter i knew by now. I responded to every local legitimate recruiter who reached out to me. I told them what type of job I was looking for (a tech lead position at a smaller company) and just waited for the right opportunity. I found it in 2016.
7. The same for my next job, I was looking to work for a company that was doing new “cloud initiatives. I asked all of my recruiting contacts to be on the lookout. The recruiter I met in 2012 that I had stayed in contact with knew a guy who was the newly minted CTO of a startup that was trying to bring development in house and be “cloud native”. Before they were using a contracting agency. (2018)
8. A recruiter from Amazon Retail reached out to me about a software development position. I really wasn’t interested in relocating, working as a software developer for any large company or ever being on call. I kept talking to her and she recommended I apply for a position at AWS ProServe. But even then, she shepherded me through the process and made sure my application got looked at by the right people.
I didn’t just blindly hope for a keyword match (2020)
And btw, in my entire career, I’ve done exactly two coding tests and both of those were FizzBuzz level sanity checks.
1. I got the job based on a previous internship that itself was based on talking to people in the career office in college. (1996)
2. I talked to someone at a local recruiting agency and went to the office and met them in person (1999)
3. I found an interesting looking job on CareerBuilder for a startup and reached out to the internal recruiter via email and we started having a discussion (2008)
4. When that company was folding, a couple of recruiters reached out to all of us and I was hired four days after I was laid off (2012)
5. I reached out to an in house recruiter on LinkedIn where the manager was looking to start a “tiger team” of experienced developers (2014)
6. I had plenty of recruiter i knew by now. I responded to every local legitimate recruiter who reached out to me. I told them what type of job I was looking for (a tech lead position at a smaller company) and just waited for the right opportunity. I found it in 2016.
7. The same for my next job, I was looking to work for a company that was doing new “cloud initiatives. I asked all of my recruiting contacts to be on the lookout. The recruiter I met in 2012 that I had stayed in contact with knew a guy who was the newly minted CTO of a startup that was trying to bring development in house and be “cloud native”. Before they were using a contracting agency. (2018)
8. A recruiter from Amazon Retail reached out to me about a software development position. I really wasn’t interested in relocating, working as a software developer for any large company or ever being on call. I kept talking to her and she recommended I apply for a position at AWS ProServe. But even then, she shepherded me through the process and made sure my application got looked at by the right people.
I didn’t just blindly hope for a keyword match (2020)
And btw, in my entire career, I’ve done exactly two coding tests and both of those were FizzBuzz level sanity checks.