To the SWEetie That Got Away
When you lose your dream engineer because your interviewing process failed both your company and the candidate.
Based on a true story, and one of many inspirations to why I’ve been exploring how to improve the technical recruiting process.
To the performance engineer who got away:
When you applied to our company, everything was a hectic mess, as startups often go. Our frontend codebase only had 4 total tests in our test suite and our backend codebase had around 10% test coverage. The week I joined, the website went down several times and people were complaining on Twitter that our website took too long to load.
We were all overworked, but the tickets kept piling up. We just received a new round of funding, so we started hiring people left and right, spurring a massive growth spurt. At some point, I was even giving three or four engineering interviews a day, at the expense of my work as an individual contributor.
Given everything that was going on, we were so ecstatic to receive your resume. A colleague passed it to us and we thought “Wow, a full stack developer with lots of experience optimizing performance? Where do we sign up?!” You seemed to be a great fit, so we excitedly invited you to our onsite interview. We did our typical technical interviews with you, but despite a five star resume with over a decade of engineering experience, you didn’t do as well as we’d hope. Unexpectedly, you didn’t meet our rubric for the algorithmic questions or the practical product-building questions. What happened?
Your experience is what happened. You spent your last decade focusing on web performance. You spent most of your time consulting with product engineering teams, helping them do everything from simplifying SQL queries, to optimizing what APIs asked for and returned, to finding ways to reduce JS bundle sizes by up to thirtyfold. In that time, your title had remained “Staff Full Stack Engineer”, but in reality, you didn’t spend your time writing algorithms or building product features.
Our home page at the time took over 5 seconds to load on average. You read that right, not 500 milliseconds, 5 whole seconds. Of all the skills we needed at the time, performance expertise should have probably been the top of the list. Days of debriefs and internal arguments later, we decided to ask you to come back and give us a presentation on your work. We rightfully thought that perhaps we didn’t give you the interview you deserved, and didn’t give you the opportunity to shine and show us your talents and expertise.
Unfortunately by the time we figured that out, we found out you had moved on. You had already accepted an offer to be a performance engineer for another company. A big, famous company that people use every day that could give you more in salary and benefits than we could ever hope to match. I heard they even gave you a fun hat.
Your expertise was exactly what we needed, but our interview experience did not give you an opportunity to show your best self and demonstrate your hard-earned knowledge.
Instead, your experience with us was akin to a student who got an A on every project and homework in the semester, but didn’t memorize one of the equations needed for one of only three final exam questions. None of the coursework had used that equation since the first couple weeks of class, so the chapter it was from wasn’t studied as carefully as the rest of the material. So, the student ends up with a 67% on the final exam, averaging their entire class grade to a 75% — a grade one could hardly get ecstatic about.
Similarly, our interview questions didn’t touch on your specialities but instead quizzed you on things you hadn’t touched since the start of your decade-long career. There was very limited time in our tight schedule of narrow technical questions to even ask you about performance. We were too small a company to have a specialized performance role, but perhaps you could have flourished as a mid-level full stack engineer with an expert-level knowledge in performance.
I guess we’ll never know now. You’ve moved on to greater things.
