Week 43, 2024 - Interviews and Narratives
These days were dominated by various potential work discussions, one of which led to my biggest learning of the week. While preparing for these interviews, I realized that the topic of discovering potential issues at a new employer was somewhat missing in my EM Hiring series, and this led to a new article: How to Spot Red Flags when Interviewing for an Engineering Manager Position.
A different kind of interview: I had a discussion with Yassine Kachchani, the CEO of Gemography in the latest issue of his Executive Engineering newsletter. We covered topics like hiring under pressure, spotting future leaders in tech, and AI use for Engineering Leaders - you can read the full interview here.
📋 What I learned this week
KISS - Keep It Simple, Stupid. I hopelessly overcomplicated an assignment, thinking that my first approach was too obvious and that there must be a hidden twist I needed to discover. Well, take-home assignments are not (always) trick questions; they would have loved to hear the obvious approach, and this threw me so off guard that I fumbled the rest of the interview in panic and confusion.
I love meetups, and I also love non-engineering ones because I can learn about an area less familiar. This week, I checked out a product meetup, where I learned a great early-stage startup question from Yu-Kuan Lin, a VP of Product from Diligent: Who has hacked a workaround before your product came? This is awesome because the frustration these people felt was so strong that they spent time and energy to hack together something to solve it — and you can tap into this frustration when you are searching for your Product-Market Fit. Getting insights from these people and their problems can be worth magnitudes more than trying to sell for them, so approach with curiosity.
Asking your users can be hard if you’re in B2B and they are busy C-level managers. A smart trick from Yu-Kuan is to get into the habit of answering support tickets from time to time, and once solving a problem, following up with an ask for a quick call about the user’s opinion on the product. This technique got him valuable time with surprisingly high-level executives — most users like to talk with Product folks because they can influence the direction of the tool they are using.
Random thought: That cliché question “What is your biggest weakness?“ is probably the most misunderstood one. Interview preparation articles advise how to choose a good one (even though I haven't heard this question asked anymore). However, I don’t think this is about what you answer. It’s more about self-reflection, transparency, and a growth mindset. A good answer should be open about real weaknesses, but also explaining your actions towards improving them, or how you use your strengths to mitigate their impact can do a lot more for you. This shows magnitudes more maturity than a tongue-in-cheek "I'm a perfectionist" answer.
And while I'm on random thoughts, one for hiring managers: interacting with candidates from a no-reply address paints a command and control culture and a hierarchical organization with rigid communication barriers. Whenever I could, I set up the applicant tracking system to send out emails from my address to anyone who passed the CV review round, so they have a chance to answer back. (Usually, there are way too many spam applications to allow this for all stages.) Going through hundreds of candidates in the last decade or so, I think I can count on two hands how many times someone replied to one of these emails, and the most effort I had to put in was giving quick and candid feedback to their interviews. This resulted in gratitude from people we finally decided not to hire — great for long-term employer branding and, in general, being a good human being.
🤔 Articles that made me think
Did Automattic commit open source theft?
Gergely Orosz’s deep dive into the recent WordPress mess. One could argue that it’s understandable that Automattic is trying to protect its premium business while spending money on the core open-source WordPress offering, and I’m sure there are two sides to every story. But there’s no angle from which taking control over a plugin of your competitor, keeping its URL slug and current users, and calling it a “fork” looks defendable. One thing is sure, this fight hurts the community and the long-term future of the most popular CMS.
Dear CTO: it's not 2015 anymore
Don’t let the harsh words and exaggerated stereotypes put you off from this thought-provoking piece, because you’d miss the point of it. Which is: at most companies, Engineering does not provide sufficient visibility into what they do and why, partly because nobody cared much, partly because the domain is inherently complex, and partly because they were busy trying to hire and retain engineers in a crazy job market. Now, with the market’s turn, comes scrutiny, and suddenly Engineering leaders have increasingly difficult questions to answer: what exactly are you doing and how exactly does it provide tangible business value?
The solution lies in understanding corporate politics: to be successful, you need to own your narrative. In my latest role leading Platform teams, one of the most impactful changes I implemented was tying our roadmap directly to the product strategy, explaining how the work of our organization enables business goals. This shift improved everything - leadership gained clarity on our strategic value, while engineers found a deeper purpose in their day-to-day work. We had a consistent, clear, easy-to-explain narrative.
That’s it for today’s shorter-than-usual newsletter, be comfortable with something imperfect this weekend,
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