| As a hiring manager, the common theme I see in your post is a condescension toward everyone you interview with. You project an unwavering belief that you know how to run other people’s companies and hiring processes better than they do. If this is projected at all during your interview, the companies aren’t going to be eager to hire you. (And to be honest, they’d be right) For example: > Sometimes you get the job and when you start rolling questions and ideas, you get a "talk to the hand" followed by "that's now what you're here for". Why hire a senior person as a poster, if you're not willing to be challenged and listen to different ideas? Nobody is asking you to agree, just play ball with convincing arguments. Too much of an ask, I guess. There’s nothing wrong with asking for clarification about reasoning, but when someone is constantly challenging every decision made by management then it becomes an impediment to getting things done. If you want to be the person calling the shots, you should probably be applying for management positions. If you want to take an IC engineer position but constantly argue with the work, the company will eventually need to isolate you with a patient manager or remove you from the team in order to keep everyone aligned. > Sometimes they talk so much about fit fit fit, but they don't even bother with a personality or IQ test (which as a former hiring manager, I find very valuable because it allows you to balance the team, not because you see how high/low people score) I’m kind of stunned that you think coding challenges and tech interviews are useless, but you insist that companies use IQ and personality tests to hire coders. Personality and IQ tests have been widely panned by the tech industry because they have very little signal but very high noise. If you expect companies to give you IQ and personality tests, you’re going to be disappointed. More broadly: If you expect every manager to reflect exactly how you would choose to run things, you may be trying to act as a “backseat driver” manager without taking the responsibility of actual being a manager. > It's just maniac managers creating work for them to manage with tech they don't understand. It’s clear you have a strong lack of respect for everyone you’ve interviewed with, from your description of “shitty challenges” to “maniac managers” being disappointed that they aren’t giving you IQ tests. It may not be obvious, but this level of anger tends to show through during interviews even if you try to hide it. Experienced hiring managers are going to pick up on it and flag you as a likely difficult employee to manage. To be blunt: If you find yourself interviewing at and working for a significant number of companies and finding intractable problems with all of them, it’s time to consider that maybe your own perspectives are the common denominator problem. Part of working a job is accepting that other people are making decisions and setting the direction. Providing constructive input and feedback is good, but you need to also have a good attitude about disagreeing and committing to go in the same direction as the team. |
If we take it at face value that he is experienced then we can say he is running up against culture fit problems.
And honestly I can relate to him because I have found most companies to be overly structured and resistant to change. In my opinion it comes down to personality types. The OP is not the standard developer architype and has trouble operating in an environment others find comfortable.
Rather than dismissing this as a problem with the candidate we should consider that it can be a problem with the environment.
My contention: Large organisations are a horrible environment for individuals high in creativity (big 5 personality trait). They very strongly tend to be populated by people who are low in creativity.
Experienced people who are high in creativity need to find leadership positions in companies breaking new ground - startups. They either need to find a position where they call the shots in a startup, or they need to create a startup themselves.
A person very high in creativity is designed to be working at the edge and if they find themselves working in the middle, doing maintenance, then they are going to be unhappy and misunderstood by others who are fundamentally different from them.
My advice to the OP is to get out of large companies and to go as small as possible, go take some risks on some new technology and architectures.