Month: July 2020

1. Your resume sucks
2. You don’t have a portfolio
3. You’re not getting a referral
4. You don’t know how to tell a story
5. Your technical skills aren’t up to par

Phew! If you made it this far give yourself a nice pat on the back. That was a lot of information to digest!

This last part is the hardest to implement yet most straightforward. At some point you’re going to have to prove that you have the chops to do the job. Unfortunately what that means depends on the size / style of the company.

There isn’t a one size fits all interview for every company. Most interview styles will fall into one of the following buckets:

• Algorithmic / Whiteboarding

• Take home projects

• Pair programming

Algorithmic

This is pretty straightforward. There are a billion+ resources on how to prepare for one of these interviews, so I won’t belabor the point very much. Chances are if you have an interview with a large tech firm they will share these resources with you as well. Google “Coding Interviews” and you’ll see recommendations for a litany of books.

Take home projects

This style of interview generally gets mixed reviews. I hate them. They generally mean that you have to do a lot of extra coding work outside of normal work hours.
If I can, I tend to avoid these like the plague as they are hard to prepare for. They also interrupt your normal work schedule and need a significant time investment.
For Algorithmic interviews you go through many screens before going to an onsite. That usually means 1-2 hours max before having to spend a full day interviewing. By juxtaposition a take home project can take up to 10+ hours. So you’re committing to the same time spent on a full interview loop. IMO this style of interviewing is a nightmare, and the opportunity cost is way too high.

Pair programming

This is a pretty loose designation. Pair programming can crop up in many forms. It all depends on the style of interview the team wants to deliver to you, but when they work our they are fun. The most standout interview I ever had of this sort was one where I was presented with a prompt in a language I was not familiar with. We spent the interview debugging, and solving problems in the codebase as if we worked together, and I loved every moment of it.

At the end we talked through the steps needed to take to fix the problem (it involved using a Heap data-structure / priority queue). The whole experience felt very collaborative, and even though I didn’t get the job in the end it left a very positive impression.

Yes We’re Talking About Practice…

Practice, practice, practice. That’s what most of this boils down to. In an upcoming post I’ll list some of my resources for problem solving practice (not just interview preparation).

1. Your resume sucks
2. You don’t have a portfolio
3. You’re not getting a referral
4. You don’t know how to tell a story
5. Your technical skills aren’t up to par

This part segues well from part 1 (https://alexdajani.com/top-5-reasons-youre-not-getting-hired-part-1/). Most people do not know how to craft a narrative about themselves. They either underestimate their accomplishments, or state their accomplishments in vague, lazy terms.

Two Phases of Writing Your Narrative

Phase 1: How You Got into Software Engineering

I’m leading with this because a lot of people I speak to have nontraditional backgrounds. This is an important part of your identity, and your narrative matters. So share it!

You don’t have to be too complicated at this stage. Have a clear vision in mind of how you charted your path. Were you completely nontechnical before? Came from a different STEM background? What did you do to get your skills up to par? These things matter!

Example:

“Originally I started my career out as a lion tamer. After many years of near death experiences I realized I was ready to make a career change. I started by auditing programming courses at my local Community College and I was hooked! I loved the excitement of writing code and seeing my work come to life. I started my career by building small websites for my fellow circus performers, and eventually worked my way to an entry level position at Ringling Bros. Corporate.” etc.

Phase 2: Your Projects in Greater Depth

For your resume we highlighted the usefulness of the CAR model (Context Action Result) to turn something like this:

• “Rewrote an e-commerce app with React and Javascript”

Into something more like this:

• Worked for major e-commerce company and built a new application that surfaced to 30+ different locales
• The application was refactored from BackboneJS to React to improve improve usability and decrease application load time by ~40%”

The second example makes for a couple of good bullet points on a resume and gives us a better picture of the A-Z journey. But, it does not tell us about everything in between.

Your next step in this process is to take all the projects you worked on and step through the decisions you made. Why did you choose the technologies you used? How many people was this product surfaced to. What were some of the challenges you faced. What about interactions with coworkers?

A good interviewer will be looking to gauge your depth. They will figure out if you made major decisions while working on your project.

Don’t worry if you are early into your career, or if these are small projects. There is value to at every level. What matters is that you’ve siphoned all the information possible from your projects, and that you have a clear picture of why you made the decisions you did.

For both of these examples I would highly suggest you write these narratives out, tweak, and refine them.

1. Your resume sucks
2. You don’t have a portfolio
3. You’re not getting a referral
4. You don’t know how to tell a story
5. Your technical skills aren’t up to par

How it feels to never hear back from recruiters

Note: This should be categorized as more general career advice. I know things are particularly hard in the Covid-19 era. Finding a job will be hampered by factors well outside of your control. With that said here are the things that ARE in your control:

There are many tiers to the job hunt process:

• Getting interviews with recruiters
• Getting past the recruiter screen stage
• Getting passed the initial technical screen
• Getting past the onsite

If you are failing at getting a new job, you are failing at one of these steps. But I would classify the first steps as the most frustrating, especially to new candidates trying to make a career switch. My experience in this domain is in Software Engineering but I would posit that most of my suggestions would be applicable to other careers.

The reason this part of the process is so difficult is because there isn’t a very strong feedback loop. If you fail a technical screen or an onsite interview, you can generally pinpoint where you went wrong. But if no one will even give you the time of day you can’t rely on feedback.

My hope is to help cut some of the guesswork and give you a solid path forward.
1 Rule for even getting to TALK to a recruiter:

Referrals Referrals Referrals

Getting referrals outweighs almost everything else you could do. That goes for inexperienced and experienced candidates alike. Recruiters are lazy (sorry recruiter friends!). They have to sift through a ton of qualified candidates to find ones to put in their pipeline.

That means that when you apply you go to the bottom of the stack. Unless you happen to meet some identifiable criteria like a name brand CS program or company. It’s not fair but it’s natural human behavior to sort based on qualities like prestige (think Ivy League Schools or FAANG companies).

If you’re a self taught engineer from a no-name college (or without a formal education) how do you circumvent this then? By trying to expand your network and ask people who work at a given company for a referral before you apply there.
It sounds obvious, but most people are so afraid of rejection that they would rather lazily send out a million resumes into the ether than contact someone and have a conversation with them on somewhere like (god forbid) LinkedIn.
However, if you apply through a referral recruiters will often bump you to the top of their pile, at least for a reachout. Why? Because:

• They trust that the companies’ employee has more data on your experience than they do
• Referrals are a form of social proof
• Retention rates go WAY up for referred candidates.

Fortunately I’ve found that far more random people you reach out to for a referral are likely to get back to you AND refer you than a recruiter is to just accept your cold resume. Plus there is nothing stopping you from submitting your resume if you don’t get referred… just be prepared for your resume to be sucked into the ether.