Ask HN: What are interviewers looking for in senior engineers and team teads?

#1

Post by pqw » Fri, Sep 11, 2020, 1:10 PM UTC

After a lot of interviews this is still a mystery to me. Acing the technical part, but people lose interest randomly. Having a great friendly chat, but still saying no. And whey they do make a hire, usually it's someone sub-par, but for some reason they liked something random about him.

What is it exactly? What makes a senior or team lead an on-the-spot hire?

Re: Ask HN: What are interviewers looking for in senior engineers and team teads?

#2

Post by znpy » Fri, Sep 11, 2020, 1:52 PM UTC

From my experience, someone can be said to be a "senior" engineer when he/she is proficient enough to be inserted into a team, brought up to speed via an onboarding process and then is almost immediately productive, in a more-or-less independent fashion, ideally bringing new know-how to the team.

But then again, it's not all about tech.

Re: Ask HN: What are interviewers looking for in senior engineers and team teads?

#3

Post by pqw » Sat, Sep 12, 2020, 5:22 AM UTC

znpy wrote: post #2

From my experience, someone can be said to be a "senior" engineer when he/she is proficient enough to be inserted into a team, brought up to speed via an onboarding process and then is almost immediately productive, in a more-or-less independent fashion, ideally bringing new know-how to the team. But then again, it's not all about tech.

The question is how one senior is chosen over others.