A Principal Engineer Made it to a Final Onsite - His Technical Performance Caught Everyone by Surprise
It could be professional or personal but there are moments in our lives where we can find ourselves in? predicaments that can be difficult to get out of. This is the story about a Principal Software Engineer whose company, while not having layoffs, did suspend all engineering projects and for close to 12 months, he had not coded in any significant volume at all.? Let's call him Baihu.?
10+ year software engineer and great pedigree but upon working with him and getting to know him, he disclosed that he was really concerned about having become rusty because he had not coded in close to a year. And while his employer was not hinting at any layoffs, the fact that so many projects had been shut down was the main reason he wanted to start looking around for a new job.?
Baihu is a super nice guy and he was very transparent with his compensation. Before telling me his numbers, he gave me some nice insight into how the past five years have gone for him and let me paste his words for you here,?
So Mark, I'm not afraid to admit that since 2019, I've been chasing the money. I began getting opportunities to interview for senior software engineer roles so the packages I was getting offered in '20 and '21 were something I had never experienced before. I have to admit that I jumped on them every time they were presented to me.?
So right now, I'm sitting at 190k base and a guaranteed 10% bonus but every single project we've been working on has been halted. My team and I are just sitting in maintenance mode and I can already feel that I'm getting very rusty. I would like to find something immediately.?
We took Baihu's words to heart and started an aggressive job search for him. From his educational background and the companies he had worked at, we immediately processed him as an industry elite software engineer. I looked at him in the same light as a football coach would about Deion Sanders coming back from a slight ankle twist. A tad rusty but can get up to speed in no time. We found a company that was interested in Baihu and while he could have done a little better on the initial technical assessment, they moved him to a final onsite. We were all ready excited because the company told us that if Baihu could pass their bar, offering a base in the 190's and a 15% annual bonus would not be a problem at all.?
The onsite went well but afterwards, I caught up with the company's VP of Talent and here is what she had to say,?
Everyone really loved Baihu and he would be a great culture match here. And his fundamentals are solid as well but ouch, this hurts to say but he stumbled technically. The role he was interviewing for was L-5 but he performed at L-2. We do believe he can nicely ramp up over time but it goes without saying that we cannot match his base of 190k. That is completely out of the ballpark. Our best and final offer would be 160k base and 10% bonus. But again, from a work standpoint, he would be back in the game and getting his hands deep in the code.?
I called up Baihu to break the news to him and he immediately let me know that as much as he wanted to leave his current employer, he could not accept this package. He mentioned that even though he wasn't working on any engineering projects at the time, since he was not immediately at risk of being laid off, he could not take this kind of cut to go to another company. We spoke for a few minutes more and I told him that I would definitely keep in touch on my end and let him know of any other opportunities that came my way.?
The landscape has changed dramatically for software engineers who are currently on active job searches. Like Baihu told me at the top of this post, back in 2020, financial packages he had never seen before were being put right in front of him. But over the course of the past year, his current employer halted all engineering projects and his role was pretty much reduced to maintenance of the existing applications. Concerns started to mount that he was going to get laid off so he starts an active job search and yet, at an onsite, his technical performance ranks him at L-2, three levels below the role he was interviewing for.?
The main point I'm trying to make here is that it doesn't matter if you're currently unemployed or still working, the absolute #1 requirement is to never let your skills get rusty. Baihu is a solid developer and also just a really cool guy but even though he performed well enough to secure an offer with a company, look at the result?? A salary that was 30k less than his current base pay. And it was all because of where his performance ranked relative to this company's engineering organization.?
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The last thing I'd want anyone to experience is completing a very challenging interviewing process only to receive an offer that is a significant step back in compensation as well as title. Three years ago, you could stumble on a couple of code tests yet still receive an attractive offer. And this was primarily because the labor markets were out of control and entirely in the favor of software engineers. But with well over 100k IT professionals still out of work, the tables have completely turned and technical assessments are being reviewed with a great deal more scrutiny. Again, Baihu was probably a tad rusty but this kind end result, from an emotional standpoint, had to have been pretty demoralizing moment for him.?
So if things are shaky at your current company, I don't blame you at all if your first concern is getting laid off. But before immediately jumping into an active job search, can you take inventory of your engineering skills and how you might do on some technical assessments? And if you feel like you haven't been too deep in the code the past 6-9 months, can you take some on-line courses or perhaps develop some of your own projects? Hopefully the first couple of rounds go well but it all really comes down to the final on-site. Do everything possible to sharpen your coding chops so that what happened to Baihu doesn't happen to you.??
Thanks,?
Mark Cunningham
Technical Recruiter
512-699-5719
Senior Software Engineering Manager at Startpage
10 个月I’ll echo what other technical folks are saying here. I think the blame for this outcome seems to be that company - not Baihu. I wonder what the coding challenge was of course. But a principle typically is very good at delivering complex projects and thinking at higher levels. They don’t necessarily have every leet code / data structures and algo problem at the top of their memory recall. If I were hiring for a principle or a manager level - I would try and guage their abilities by coaxing out a few of their complex projects. How did they deal with stakeholder push back, how did they deal with scaling issues, how did they get a project past the finish line in hard times etc. Then of course I’d need the know-how myself to dig deep into the details to gather how this person really knows the tech they’re working with. A typical coding challenge gives you an inaccurate reading on how effective this candidate really would be when given less time constraints than they have in an interview setting.
Senior Product Analyst / Business Analyst
11 个月Ugh. Same thing happened to me in 2008. I had 8 opportunities that never closed and the day after Christmas I received a call and I got a job. Nobody complains about 2009. Unless...
转型的全球技术领先| QA主任| |质量保证总监副总裁| CTO
11 个月This happens at the C-level too. Too much golfing and not enough continuous learning.
Software/Systems Architect
11 个月unfortunately I find myself in this exact predicament. For the last 10 years my jobs have pretty much focused primarily on a few languages, and efforts to push them into other more modern languages were met with extremely high resistance, so I never had the opportunity to work with the newer stuff except experimentally. Now looking for my next role, I'm finding myself left pretty far behind and needing to spend a lot of energy trying to catch up. But while I can catch up, it doesn't exactly solve my problem. Most employers want prior experience. For example, 5+ years React, with proven projects. There's no way anyone can make up for that, unless they spend months building their own real-world projects.
Data Dude
11 个月If he's idle, why? If he's getting rusty, it's because he hasn't been finding scope. Actual Principles are going to come in, see what's missing, and implement a plan to fill in the gaps without needing direction to do so. I couldn't imagine being at a place where there wasn't infinite things to work on, I allways have a long list of important things to work on. He wasn't identifying what's important. On the flipside, $190K is close to L2 compensation, I think they lowered him to L1. At least on Mag7 scales.