Ask HN: How do you get hired for a senior role without "experience"? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: How do you get hired for a senior role without "experience"?

#11

Post by diminium » Fri, Sep 20, 2013, 1:19 PM UTC

donavanm wrote: post #8

Demonstration is the best path forward. Show, dont tell, your abilities. The rest of my comment assumes this is based on a real life issue. Youre interviewing at the wrong place, with people you shouldnt work with. When leveling a candidate two things matter, technical knowledge & leadership. Ive literally never heard anyone suggest leveling a candidate based on work history. Experience might affect comp, or indicate…

Can you expand on what you believe is the best way to show your abilities? How do you get pass the gatekeepers? How do you make sure your getting leveled at the right level during the process?

Yes, there are actually people with real life issues who actually face this scenario.

Re: Ask HN: How do you get hired for a senior role without "experience"?

#12

Post by contitego » Fri, Sep 20, 2013, 6:33 PM UTC

"You have no "experience". Whatever history you had of how you gained your knowledge is gone. Your past is unknown to this new group of people and nothing you say about it makes any sense to them.'"

This question makes no sense to me, nor does your history of posting questions on here.

Based on reading your past questions, looks like you were not a good interviewee and/or lacking in real technical skills.

Communication is the biggest key to getting any position. You need to be able to sell yourself and your abilities. Can you explain what the basics of OOP, MVC, SQL, etc? An inability to communicate these terms, invalidates your technical skills. If you can not explain what an does MVC, how can you implement this pattern into a web app?

You could not articulate common terms that were used in programming during your interview process. At other times, you write about how you can barely program anything outside of a simple app/CRUD, then a bit later are bitching about how simple these tasks are.

Focus on learning how to communicate the terms better. Every profession as certain terms and ideas that they use. Nursing has them, engineering has them, and teaching has them. Programming certainly has them. Sit down and learn the terms.

Re: Ask HN: How do you get hired for a senior role without "experience"?

#13

Post by donavanm » Sat, Sep 21, 2013, 7:53 AM UTC

diminium wrote: post #11

donavanm wrote: post #8

Demonstration is the best path forward. Show, dont tell, your abilities. The rest of my comment assumes this is based on a real life issue. Youre interviewing at the wrong place, with people you shouldnt work with. When leveling a candidate two things matter, technical knowledge & leadership. Ive literally never heard anyone suggest leveling a candidate based on work history. Experience might affect comp, or indicate…

Can you expand on what you believe is the best way to show your abilities? How do you get pass the gatekeepers? How do you make sure your getting leveled at the right level during the process? Yes, there are actually people with real life issues who actually face this scenario.

"Gatekeepers" are usually HR, recruiters, or some sort of sourcing agency. Unfortunately resume buzzword bingo is a fundamental of that type of low quality screening. You can get high quality contacts through other methods. Open source contributions, "published" papers, public presentations, and mailing list comments all provide very good signal for recruiting candidates. Old fashioned networking through peers, user groups, and conventions can not be beat. Those types of contacts usually lead to an internal referral, which is one of the best indicators for hiring.

By "show your abilities" i was thinking of during the interview. When someone asks you how to implement a linked list (ugh) ask questions, use code comments, note edge cases and optimizations, heck write a quick test case to go with it. You can also accomplish via the open source contribution route noted above. A key point is demonstrating knowledge of a problem domain instead of asserting it.

WRT "correct" leveling its very hard to get right. Frankly you, as the candidate, will have a difficult time succeeding with an assertion of "im quite senior". Besides the aforementioned technical ability leadership is incredibly important for senior positions. Its your job to increase the value of your coworkers. A very powerful technique is conveying information through the questions you ask. Asking abiut mentoring opportunities and team growth are positive signals, for example. Ask questions if have concerns during the process. "What types of problems will i be solving" or "how will my work affect customers" might give you insight in to how youre viewed.

Re: Ask HN: How do you get hired for a senior role without "experience"?

#14

Post by ulisesrmzroche » Thu, Sep 26, 2013, 3:15 PM UTC

How do websites sink in the ocean? Makes no sense. Link them to stuff you've worked on. Also, a lot of companies do contract-to-hire and there's the whole technical interview gauntlet. That's usually how people gauge ability.

Just seems like an impossible scenario.