Interviewing

I left LinkedIn on March 5. In the 9 months since, I’ve been more focused on my mental and physical health, spending more time with my family, and reading and learning. With the new year approaching and the kids back to in-person learning, it feels like a natural time to find a new challenge, so I’ve been wading in to the interview pool. Here are some collected thoughts.

Remoteness

Onsite vs remote-first vs “hybrid”. Several companies I’ve spoken to are committed to getting back to the office and shared their plans with me; since they’re not in the Raleigh-Durham area that’s a non-starter. Other companies, like Coinbase, Twitter, Square, and Shopify, committed early in the pandemic to shift their culture to be remote-first. Then other companies are doing “hybrid”, where you’re in the office 2-3 days a week and then work-from-home (WFH) the rest of the week. Let’s look at each of these a bit more.

Remote-first

The company may still maintain offices, but the culture is oriented around equal standing regardless of where you’re working. Some of you I talk to regularly may have heard me refer to remote-ness being “wired in” to the culture. Promoting the structure and keeping employees happy and productive means managers really have to step up, but overall there can be significant benefits. As a hiring manager, I now have at least a nation-wide (possibly international) pool of candidates to choose from, instead of just those people I can convince to move to the Bay Area (or wherever). As an employee, I have more flexibility in where and how I want to live.

Some drawbacks are that it’s more challenging for HR and payroll. Just within the US there’s a complex matrix of laws, regulations, and tax districts (federal, state, county, town) that need to be adhered to; even more if you have international employees. As mentioned above, the manager’s role may change and be more demanding for certain types of managers given the need for increased empathy and outreach.

Onsite

This is how most companies were pre-COVID. Work happens in company offices, and while some teams may have an employee working in a ‘virtual office’ (their home), it’s the expectation that people commute to an office most days.

Hybrid

As mentioned, this has employees coming into the office a few days a week and then WFH the rest of the week. With one company I was talking to, they’re starting back office visits in hybrid mode in January, with the goal of full onsite not long after. During hybrid mode they require full vaccinations, plus employees will have to present clear COVID tests from that morning to security before entering.

With hybrid mode, the company has once again restricted their recruiting radius to those people who will move within commuting distance of an office, while only providing partial benefits in terms of improved collaboration. It’s truly great to see teammates in person again, but if you want to have a team meeting, you still need to grab a conference room and get on Zoom so the folks remote that day can join as equal participants. So then why did we drive in, besides a change of venue?

I’m not sure what problems hybrid is solving for the long term.

Applications

I’m being pretty selective in the companies and roles I apply for.

I applied for roles at Atlassian and SingleStore that looked interesting and that I felt I was well-qualified for. There was no recruiter follow-up or even a rejection, just dead air.

Shopify looked interesting and have embraced remote culture but they require all engineers to code, even up to Senior Director level. I can write scripts in bash and Python but shouldn’t be checking in production code or bothering my team with code reviews. This philosophy also seems to discount my systems engineering and networking experience, but I can respect they have a clear vision of what they want their culture to be, and their recruiting org is aligned on that.

Truebill (who was in the news today) rejected my engineering manager application a few days after I applied. I was never contacted by a recruiter. Maybe they had a lot of applicants or someone already in the pipeline.

I enjoyed talking to recruiters from both Roblox and Duolingo, and there are interesting manager roles there, but those companies are in the middle of shifting back to the office (San Mateo and Pittsburgh/NYC, respectively), so that’s a no-go.

There are other recruiter reach-outs, but they’re either not interesting to me, can’t match salary expectations, require a move, aren’t a good match for skills, or the recruiter and the hiring manager aren’t in sync.

After being on the candidate side of things, I’d say there are two key things I can do when I’m a hiring manager again. First, be decisive. I tended not to quickly pass on candidates who were clearly not good fits for the job as written (e.g. I’m looking for a devops person and the applicant has been doing embedded C++ for the last 8 years), just in case I didn’t come across stronger applicants later. But in reality that applicant might have awesome skills but not for this job. Second, be responsive. If it’s a no-go, respond quickly. If it’s a maybe, schedule the first interview soon. Debrief soon afterward and then decide whether it’s a pass or they’re moving forward to another phone screen or on-site. And so on through the rest of the process. It’s not just because we’re possibly competing with other companies for this candidate. It’s because this person is excited, possibly anxious and nervous, and would be best served by coming to a conclusion sooner than later.

I’ll probably surf around LinkedIn during the holiday break and see if there are any job postings that pique my interest. I also have an exploratory call scheduled the first week in January with a senior exec at a company I’m really interested in, so I have that to look forward to. In the meantime, if you’re in my network and see something I might be interested, let me know!

Finally, I’m deeply appreciative of the friends (and sometimes strangers) who have responded to my Twitter DM’s and LinkedIn inMails as I figure out what I want to do next. Thanks again!