The Outcome 

This past month a wonderful client of ours –a senior female software engineer, sent an email to us titled “The Outcome.” As you can imagine, we opened it immediately. Below you’ll find this really lovely reflection she sent over letting us know how she landed in her job search after graduating from our practice. We love working with engineers, and this client was no exception. Coaching such a bright client was super fun inside the practice and I was so pleased when she agreed to let us share her comments publicly. They’ve been edited to remove identifying information. Now you readers can also learn from her insights as well. Here we go:

“Hi Laura,

You and Olivia expressed an interest in where I ultimately would end up, and I thought I’d send along an update. This might also be an interesting case study for you with respect to how your career coaching applies to the tech industry.

My preparation for interviews involved doing the following:

• Career consultation package with you
• Reading Steven Skiena’s The Algorithm Design Manual
• Doing an enormous amount of http://leetcode.com
• Studying this website: https://github.com/donnemartin/system-design-primer

These components cover the three main components of a senior-level engineering interview: Behavioral, Algorithmic, and Systems Design.

I went through six interview loops in total.

1. Company 1 (Edutech, $18.8M revenue) – Software Engineer (Tech Lead). Almost entirely behavioral, with a very small amount of technical (1 hour). Outcome: Offer received.
2. Company 2 (EComm, $242BN revenue) – Engineering Manager. This was almost entirely behavioral manager questions, with a small amount of focus on product/project management and systems design. Outcome: They decided that I didn’t have enough manager experience, and offered me a downleveled Software Engineer position.
3. Company 3 (SaaS, $2.2BN revenue) – Principal Software Engineer. This was mostly behavioral questions, with maybe two hours of technical. Outcome: Offer received.
4. Company 4 (Software, Enterprise Video) – Engineering Manager. Outcome: Offer received.
5. Company 5 (Software, Sales Enablement) – Principal Software Engineer. Outcome: Offer received.
6. Company 6 (Cloud Software, Post IPO) – Lead Software Engineer. Outcome: Pending result.

Net result: 4/6 offers, 1 downlevel offer, 1 pending.

Some reflections:

• The back half of interviews was very intensively technical, and I spent a lot of effort trying to get in behavioral answers to implied questions, to some success. I got offers from all of them except for Company 6, who still haven’t finished their process yet.
• The career coaching lessons with your team were the key thing that differentiated me in terms of seniority and desirability — all the companies that provided an offer (except for Company 2) are lobbying very hard to hire me. At Company 4 I was able to uplevel the position from Software Engineer to Engineering Manager, and having really good answers for the recruiter screen caused the recruiter at Company 3 to uplevel me to Principal before the interviews even started.
• Wow, every company interviews differently. At Company 6 for example, the interview sessions were 45 minutes, and all of them were technical. This left no room to ask questions, give STAR answers, or anything.
• Company 2 was absolutely the toughest behavioral, because all of the questions are almost entirely asked context-free. I didn’t entirely understand the mechanics behind this process (i.e., that your information is recorded and given to a hiring committee that may not contain any of your interviewers), and I think I would have approached this a bit differently if I’d known that.
• I didn’t think that titling and leveling were going to be a big deal to me going in, but in the end, they were pretty key to my final decision-making once all the cards were on the table. In particular, Companies 1 and 2 ended up being the lowest in terms of career growth, and that was enough for me to decline their offers.
• FAANG is well-known to have the best compensation in the tech industry, but it turns out that there’s a certain class of medium-sized tech companies that has FAANG-level pay.
• STAR answers don’t work when the interviewer interrupts you or is adversarial. I at one point was telling a story about how I earned trust in a gradual way when I was working with a specific team, and the interviewer interrupted me to ask: “Then why are you leaving? Aren’t you breaking their trust by applying for this job?” This question seemed to be unanswerable on the face of it.

One thing that I didn’t appreciate going into this process was what exactly the technical path looks like in comparison to the manager path. Specifically, high-level senior engineers (Principal level or higher) still have to employ many of the manager-type soft skills without specifically having direct reports, and are still seen as “technical leaders.” 

A lot of the career coaching lessons your team trains us in align very well here I think.

In retrospect think I wish I had read the book The Manager’s Path (https://smile.amazon.com/Managers-Path-Leaders-Navigating-Growth/dp/1491973897) to prepare better for the interviews, and also to have a better idea of the different paths for technical leadership and how exactly they map to job titles.

The other thing I’m thinking about:

Women often tend to head into the management role on the tech side, and there are not a lot of visible woman principal engineers. So there’s a social responsibility side to this as well, where stepping into a senior IC role could give me a lot of influence in terms of being a model for young women engineers to follow.

Okay, so where I am now. It’s not 100% over yet, but currently I have a very exciting verbal offer on the table from Company 3 to be a Principal Engineer, and I’m planning to take it.

This would, for the record, make the return on investment for career coaching very high for me! 

All signs look good.

Hopefully that was interesting and insightful. Thanks for all your help.

Your Client,

X”