Cold start prep for a Engineering Manager Interviews

I heard this question about half-a-dozen times in the past two months - I am an engineering manager who hasn’t interviewed in a while.? What should I do to upgrade myself and make myself interview ready?

This question applies to a frontline manager, or a director role in small-mid sized companies. When folks ask this question, they are primarily looking for guidance on what technical concepts they need to prepare, and how to get themselves interview ready.

My answer is usually a variation that covers the following concepts

First, Networking

No, I am not talking about TCP/IP and Ethernet. I am talking about upgrading your professional network.

a/ If you have a LinkedIn profile, go ahead and update it. If you don’t have one, create it. Start adding people that you are working with now and all the people that you have worked with in the past. Focus on building as wide a network as possible.

LinkedIn will help you find jobs, as recruiters use this platform to look for candidates for the roles they are trying to fill. You will also be albe to reach out to your network and seek guidance or referrals.

b/ you should look for other networking opportunities like local meet-up groups and or virtual/online meet-up groups that are relevant. These groups provide a strong peer group you can lean on when you need some support. Check out SDE Skills, a group focused on programming interview skills for software engineers. They have a discord group with 11k+ members. If you are local to Seattle, checkout the LinkedIn group called Coffee Catchups, a local gathering for folks discussing topics in the tech space.

Second, self-reflection

Do some self-reflection to discover your strengths and your interests.

There is this concept of Ikigai, which covers 4 circles, Passion, Vocation, Profession and Mission. I use a simplistic version of this with only three circles - Passion (What you love), Vocation (What you are good at) and Profession (What you can be paid for).

Next, think about what you have done over your entire career. Starting with now, walking backwards in time, capture your experience in blocks of 3 month periods, for the past 1-2 years, and then in 1 year periods fro a few years prior and then coarser and coarser. You may have one block covering your first 5-10 years of experience.

For each time period, write a block of text that captures a. what was the amazing result that you delivered in that particular period. b. what did I learn in that particular period. If have access to your performance appraisal documents from your job, use that to jog your memory.

Third, target-list

The third part is to make a short list of companies, roles and profiles that you may be interested in.

Start with a no-compromise strategy, and if things do not move fast enough, then you can start relaxing your constraints. This approach generally tends to get you a good balance of getting good results fast. Use the reflection from step two to build a list of roles and companies you want to explore.

Finally, prepare

For engineering managers, I often talk about the 3p3c framework. Review your strengths and interests along those lines. The 3p stands for people, product and process. The 3c stands for 3 communication modes - with people you support, with people who are your peers and with people who you report to.

Depending on your assessment, you may want to explore alternate roles like Technical Program Manager, or Staff Software Engineer or Principal Architect.?

You will most likely have to prepare for topics around system design of large scale systems and leetcode style coding interviews. I am hearing that many of the smaller companies are looking for “hands-on” directors and VPs. This often translates to a director who can write code - not sure if they will expect a portion of your day job to be writing code.