I have almost 8 years of experience, am currently a tech lead in the company im at (a big known music and video streaming platform), i live and breathe tech...

and someone i interviewed for (in a 4 year old fintech startup) wants to put me in a mid level position because he "felt i lacked depth". apart from his feelings he failed to make me understand how I'm not senior enough for him.

so how do i become deep? what is this depth he speaks of?

@donkulator fintech bros are scammers making bullshit jobs for entitled assholes earning millions just by placing a phonecall. They want to attack your self-esteem so they can low-ball you.

Their opinion doesn't matter. You're the tech lead. You have nothing to proof.

To be fair, we are looking for a team of seniors and I'm doing tech interviews. While all the CVs look impressive and overwhelming, most of the candidates crumble during my interviews. Which are not that needy tbh...

I'm looking for someone at least close to my lvl, preferably higher. All the seniors I've spoken to but one looked no better than mid-mids.

Problem is, they excell in their current stack. And we need people who could pick up any modern mainstream devsecops stack.

Ffs, I even said 'no' to a currently senior tech lead, bcz he had 0 knowledge of core, really core principles and tools...

So you may be a sr or principal in your scope. But for other stacks you may be a noob

shhh don't listen

he's projecting

I find it a lot

dude who can't even write a numbered list properly, tells me he finds my code confusing... then tells me in all seriousness that I need to sign up to html weekly newsletters. I was even applying for a backend position so that didn't even make any sense... near the end because I was so confused and asking questions about his suggestions he actually lost his shit and told me this and that and how I was junior. am I? I've written stuff you wouldn't even believe that's far more complicated than the codebase you couldn't understand so I believe he was quite mistaken 🤷

if my shit works it clearly works. your opinions be damned!

may they find peace for their woes 😁

@antigermanist fintech pays a lot tho

they're status-chasers

if you can withstand criticism and still feel high status then you belong, cuz that's their environment. and that also comes with the big bucks. cuz that status impression gets them money, both in their own climate, but industry and with their investors

everything is just a battle of wills

@netikras i mean thats fair, its just that i do so many side projects (that i did tell them about) I explored to many tech stacks, I experimented a lot...

i dont like saying im a great dev coz i always feel i still have a long way to go. but i have been continuously improving exponentially in the past 8 yrs compared to people i see around me who just dont have anything ti do with tech after 6pm...

even when i asked for feedback he just kept saying i "felt" u lacked depth, i "felt" u should strike me like more of an expert in everything... but he failed to mention one question that i answered wrongly

its just weird... i wish i got feedback on what i did wrong to make him not think im senior level... i asked for feedback and got feelings

@sleek Now that I understand -- flaky feedback with nothing concrete to work on sucks ass.

Ask for elaboration perhaps? What in particular to improve in?

Either they are sugarcoating bcz they don't want to hurt your feelings and prefer to stay vague for politcorrectness purposes, or they are looking for an excuse to not take you.

Or they are confusing your with someone else :D

Either way, I believe everyone deserves a decent feedback. And a straightforward one if they ask for it.

@jestdotty tell you what. Find me one of these fintech job. Be the buffer between me and them. We split the pay different 5050

@antigermanist lol what you want me to give you a fintech job and you'll give me half your salary as I do nothing?

@jestdotty you'll do something you'll tell me wtf they want from me and take the hit if it doesn't work

Don’t let him get you upset, he’s just lowballing you. As long as your 8 years of experience isn’t just with CRUD apps and you’ve actually developed a lot of skills in your career, and you make sure you communicate that through your resume and (at to the best of your ability) your interview. If you do all that and they still offer you a position that isn’t very good, it’s because they don’t want to pay you. Plain and simple. The industry is full of misbehaving people like this, it can be cutthroat. Trust nobody.

@netikras two things of note: I get the same thing during interviews. Stray away from the “basic” questions (that have obviously been studied) and you get a completely blank stare, even when they should be at that level where they can answer it.

However, I’m also on the other end frequently. Last time, I had to go BACK to answer “what are the pillars of OOP” (the first question) because I was so nervous. So, it can be sucky either way.

@AlgoRythm good one! I thought it's srp, ioc, lsp and whatever is the fourth. Then I looked it up. Fuck 😁

almost all my interview questions are practical, discussion style, aimed at solving actual problems [eg "in grafana you see lots of container restarts. Container memory usage is at 30%, cpu is at 60%, no errors/messages in app logs, load average 5 is at 1040 on an octacore server. K8s events say app did not respond to liveness probe. Explain to me what's off in this picture and how would you approach the issue, what else do you need to troubleshoot further. What's the diff btwn load_avg and cpu%?"]. Ofc I also include some theoretical ones, which are a must for practice, eg "what's the diff btwn tcp and udp? Btwn a router and a switch? What's nat?" and similars.
For programming -- "explain how aop works. What are proxy classes? Slf4j vs log4j - which is a better logger [see the catch?]?"

I prefer a pragmatic approach. Not everyone does though..

@retoor cc: