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Comment by pontus | Hacker News Reader

"When you're junior, coachability is what gets you hired. How quickly can we train you to be effective?

When you're medium, technical chops get you hired. Can you do useful work right now and quickly fill gaps in knowledge?

When you're senior, your experience and opinions get you hired."

Thought this was pretty good. Hard to make that mental transition over time since we all start on one end. The default behavior is to continue interviewing the same way as your career progresses.

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Not necessary, interviewed for a Sr Engineer role where I clearly impressed the CTO, but didn't do that great on a stupid coding exercise. And that was not even a requirement for the job, and I told them that was not my strongpoint. I'd done my homework on the company, they had bottlenecks, which I suggested a solution for, and they were pretty blown away. But like other folks here pointed out, all companies want are folks who can crack the coding exercise, everything else is a hogwash.

So, you didn’t get the job because you didn’t pass their l33t coding challenge?

And they hired some freshman, because he did? But who ended up writing amateurish software code that always broke.

I think my instinct for this and my relative lack of interview experience have been at odds. When I’m already on the job, I have no doubt that my experience and opinions show my value. I don’t even worry anymore about demonstrating value: it comes out of every action I take, and if it’s not manifest in the interaction I can either demonstrate it with outcomes or retrospectives. But that translates poorly to an interview environment where the person on the viewing side of a whiteboard might not even have the instinct to hear “this is a problem I would solve by choosing a technology that already addresses it” or even “this is something I would google because it’s not the core problem I’m solving, just a detail”.

Ive found that good interviewers / potential colleagues recognize this and I've found success in calling that sort of thing out and having a short conversation about it.

I’ve mostly gotten jobs by recommendation, and mostly not had good interviewers. (Not excited to be starting a job hunt right now)

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