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Interviews From The Other Side
Venture through the looking glass to find out what happens when a company decides to recruit someone new.
If you’re a part of the collective, those legions of fully assimilated drones in the endless corporate cube¹ hierarchy of Big Tech, then you probably won’t have interviewed a fellow developer — and probably never will do, unless you stumble into one by accident or human resources runs out of hiring managers² and you get called in without warning.
Unfortunately, it’s usually a haphazard and infuriating process conducted internally in a manner somewhat akin to the blind leading the blind, in the vast majority of software companies.
It goes something like this.
Initially, a project manager droid will have an inkling that something’s not quite right with the project. Perhaps it could be the flood of resignations from the strung out development team, the vast swathes of emboldened red deadlines on their Gantt charts, or just the fact that they’re somehow alone in the building, answering the phones to customers, and have no-one to watch stare at their screens all day.
Eventually they’ll bring it up with their own line manager and put in a request for a developer “resource” (we developers tend to call such a commodity, rather anachronistically in corporate parlance at least, a “person”) by…
