Rango's Dog House

Conducting technical interviews all week. Twenty in the last few weeks. My unsolicited advice:

Don’t put it on top of your resume if you’re not prepared to talk about it. In detail. I’ve had multiple candidates fail to meet our hiring criteria because they were misrepresenting their skills.

I feel for every one of these folks because I’ve been in their position too many times. I want them to succeed. We will be peers.

It’s not a hard interview process with me. I’m friendly and try to make each candidate feel at ease. I appear on camera with them so they don’t feel like they’re being watched. Everybody gets the same questions for a specific skill set, and they are not that hard. I let them know it’s okay not to know the answers, they’re just talking points. But if it’s a skill you know we should be able to have a conversation about it, even if you don’t know the answer.

Even with those disclaimers, a surprising number of people are vague about what they did, and during discussion resort to a kind of confabulation talking in generalizations, until the big reveal where they admit they only had minimal exposure to it, in passing. Thereby making the entire interview a waste of time.

I understand the need to put your top skills on the top of your resume. I do the same. Everybody should. Applicant tracking systems scan and sort your resume before a human ever sees them. But gaming the system by surfacing skills you don’t truly own in order to target an interview that requires them is disingenuous.

I also understand that skills can be learned. I once had a manager ask me during an interview if I knew Python and I responded “no”. His response was “you will soon” and I got the job. He was right. I still use it today but primarily as a scripting tool because you can’t get away from it in cloud computing.

In that case, I was coding for the Azure Machine Language AI translation SDK. I coded in three languages I knew well, then translated to Python with the help of Copilot AI. That code was then reviewed by senior staff and went through a committee before committing to the main trunk, because it was their official SDK.

The skill I was learning was not just Python, it was the domain knowledge of the SDK API, and that took more time to learn. The learning process was built into the billing and scheduling because that was internal knowledge specific to their business. I had plenty of time to soak up Python on the way.

In this case we’re interested in candidates with three specific skillsets. They don’t need to be rock stars, they just need to be good enough to play in the band, on three different instruments, on day one.

The customer demands are so exhaustingly complex that the new skills they will be learning are tribal knowledge related to the job. It’s an enormous enterprise. Our employer bills them out to a customer who expects them to have the skills they are paying for on the first day. They’ll pay for a developer to learn their tribal knowledge because it is vast and can’t be learned anywhere else. But not to learn the languages on their resume.

This concludes my TED talk. Note that these are my personal views and experiences, and do not reflect the position of my employer.

My resume can be found here on my blog:

https://rangothedog.com/2013/09/17/matthew-meadows-resume/