Microsoft Azure CTO Headhunted for SDE II Position at Amazon | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft Azure CTO Headhunted for SDE II Position at Amazon

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44 pointsjohntiger144 comments

In 2016 I was VP and CTO for the hybrid cloud team at VMware, and previously Senior Technology Evangelist at AWS.

I interviewed with Digital Ocean in NY. One of the founders set my first interview with a young woman. She had perhaps 2-3 years of experience as a writer, before joining DO.

Halfway through the interview, I started to understand that she was going to be my... boss, if I got the job. And I also understood that they were interviewing me for a position well below my then-current pay grade.

I was angry. Such a waste of time, and such idiocy. After politely completing the interview, I (also politely) wrote an email to such founder, expressing my concerns and my doubts. Never heard back.

At that point I thought: F*ck DO. They don't deserve me or my time.

No one would care about this, but I'm still happy to share this here. This is the type of damage you do when you as a company are careless about how you treat prospective hires.

I've been on the other side of that interview, 2-3 years out of univeristy and asked to interview someone with 10-15 years experience, it was pretty awful. Before that I just interviewed either students (interns) or graduates and asked them basic coding questions.

There's a pretty high chance that the young women was just as unhappy about the situation as you were.

Reading your comment, my first thought was "how entitled??", but I see that this meeting was set up by the DO founders? Aoutch.

It is not entitled in any case! Interview bait/switch can be frustrating and a waste of precious time.

Thanks for sharing. I don't have such good credentials, but I've had my time wasted as well. Now without a written position description and salary I don't agree to the meetings. Seems like a great filter as at least half of the recruiters don't answer

In fairness, all they were looking out for was themselves, as most companies do in most interviews. If it was someone with say 5 years of experience, rather than yourself, it'd be the same deal so don't take it personally. Waste of your time definitely, and they should be clear on what the role is up front, but it's typical of some recruitment process where the folks doing the actual leg-work to hire new staff don't have much of a clue what's required beyond maybe a half-page job spec.

Ah, the holy grail, the top of the pile, you’ve reached it. Not getting the respect you „deserved” must have been the most insulting experience of your life.

Suggested headline: "Azure CTO gets automated junk mail, just like everyone else."

The justification for that headline is that he wasn't really "headhunted." He was scraped by a LinkedIn crawler and emailed by a mass mailer. It's unlikely a "headhunter" (or recruiter) so much as viewed his profile.

That context is obvious from the post, and it's interesting (and amusing) regardless.

Posts can be interesting and amusing without being dishonest. These are not mutually exclusive.

Odd that the Azure CTO also writes thrillers about cybersecurity: http://www.markrussinovich.com/

So I went down the rabbit hole of going to the website. Guess what happens when you click the book link? "Your server is running PHP version 5.6.40 but WordPress 6.3.2 requires at least 7.0.0" [0]. Not sure how this fell through.

[0]http://www.markrussinovich.com/books/rogue-code/ [1]https://imgur.com/a/YYJJ9xD

Oh he keeps a diary then :-)

He was a household name among Windows programmers in the 2000-x.

Building on that fame, I guess.

No HTTPS either! It's been a while since I encountered one of those in the wild.

Why would you post a link to reddit which is itself a link to Twitter?

I was hoping the Twitter link would go somewhere else etc. for a few hops

idk i just came across it and thought it was funny

I think they meant, why not link straight to the Twitter URL.

Or even better, a nitter url. This is like combining my two least favorite platforms.

I worked for Tapchief about 4 years ago and we had an army of recruiters just scouring through LinkedIn and Upwork who look for interesting profiles and try to convert them to this platform.

What I learnt there was that there exists a market for chrome extensions that will help you send template messages and even blanket responses to all and every person in a certain search criteria. You can scrape the pages from search results and even extract contact details like email etc, if present in your profile. Before chatGPT, the quality of these messages were abysmal. But they've gotten better recently.

I think Amazon hires smart enough engineers to build bots that can authenticate on your behalf and do this for you. Your job as a recruiter then becomes to only filter through the responses.

I would also like to take this opportunity and blame LinkedIn search for giving absurd results. Because this whole process is dependent on finding profiles on their platform.

> Because this whole process is dependent on finding profiles on their platform.

The other issue is stale resumes, at least in my experience. I've been in the industry for over a decade, and been in big-name tech companies for nine years. My profile makes it clear that I'm a senior engineer.

But I got an e-mail from a recruiter recently about a desktop support position. Turns out, they have a resume from about a year after I made the move from small business sysadmin to AWS support engineer (these days, my resume includes things like "senior SRE" and "devops engineer at a quantitative hedge fund"). They didn't really bother to verify whether their copy of my resume was at all recent.

Not in the same league as this CTO, but as a (somewhat) senior hire interviewing for a well known business messaging company, the team I was supposed to be interviewing for never showed up in the interview itself. A completely different Snr. Director showed up from another team, basically saying, and I'm paraphrasing, "I've no idea why they set up this interview since my team has already filled any open roles". Got stonewalled then by the recruiters after that, which seemed like either a setup or a massive mix up.

I'm sure many companies would still make him leet code, because "what has he done lately?"

OK, but there's some evil truth here...

I'm not a "CTO of Anything" type. But I consider myself adept in what programming I do for a living. Leet code is truthfully somewhat beneath me, but yet I'm still scared applying for jobs that would have me need to solve leet code puzzles.

Why is that? I think it's because, yes admittedly, I'm probably rusty on all the low-level concepts that leet code exemplifies. And so I hesitate applying for that cool looking job at some edgy tech corp or flashy startup, both likely to the detriment of myself and their talent pool.

I could study and hone my leet code skilz, but to what end? There's basically zero times when I'd need to invent a novel new sorting algorithm or data structure. If I'm not borrowing or using concepts, libraries or algorithms from others, I'm likely going at it the wrong way, falling prey to NIH.

I'm concerned as a mid-career person the effect of leet code on job recruitment opportunities for us "older" folks. I can out program most any entry-to-mid level software engineer, but that doesn't mean they wouldn't beat me competing on some leet code algorithm.

CTO of a division like that is a completely different job than an SDE II, so you bet he's going to get a leet code interview.

Yeah he better be able to invert a binary tree, else how do we know he can code?

You can’t imagine what we see on a job. People with 20 years experience in programming, perfectly able to talk about it, and then they fail at writing a String.indexOf() manually (requires 2 for and an if).

I'm that guy.

After getting laid off, I did legitimately fail some basic programming tests. Some combo of nerves and rustiness, I expect.

I've found that practicing leetcode-like problems was necessary and sufficient for fixing that.

Same! I remember failing a coding interview because I forgot how to write a for-loop despite using them almost every day. It’s crazy how nerves affect you.

Yeah I've failed 'reverse a string' before, despite graduating with close to a 4.00 GPA and getting a 99 in my DS/A course from a Canadian school (Waterloo/UofT). Especially early on in your career, the transition from solving algorithms questions on an exam to leetcode-style is quite a jump, especially under time pressure

It's tough. I've also seen what you describe, and it's kind of mind-boggling. The only red-ish flag seems to be overly long tenure at a single place. But at some point in the career progression, it doesn't matter.

I think the difference is this. Some people I've worked with were excellent coders but have now moved on to e.g. director roles. If you asked them to write code, they'll flat out say that they haven't coded in years. They know it isn't important for their role, and it isn't the value they provide. The bullshitters will never admit they can't do something.

Would long tenure at e.g. Meta or Google also be seen as a red flag? I've heard other people say that the opposite (job hopping every 1-2 years) is a red flag.

The average tenure at Google is apparently 1.1[0] years, so it's at the very least not typical to stay for very long.

0 - https://stackoverflow.blog/2022/04/19/whats-the-average-tenu...

Tenure isn't a good way to measure how long people stay. Median tenure (which this is reported to be) is even worse. All a median tenure of 1.1 years days is that about half the workforce was hired in the last 13 months, but it could be either due to the number of employees growing rapidly, due to people leaving the company, or some mix. We can't tell which just from these numbers.

As a thought experiment, consider a company that nobody ever leaves, growing by 20% per year. They'd double in size in about 4 years, so the median tenure in steady state is also 4 years. But that doesn't mean that people only stay for 4 years; the turnover in the thought experiment is literally 0%.

Also, the numbers the article (podcast?) is claiming are not supported even by their own immediate source. The reference they have for average tenure for software developers being 4.2 years doesn't actually say that. The article actually says that it's 4.2 years for all employees and that sofware developers are about 2 years. It also has such a different number for Google (2.3 years) than the number they chose to originally quote that the methodology just can't be the same. I would guess that the second source is using mean, not median.

Umm, do these companies factor average tenure to tweak vesting schedule and finetune how much stock they fork over to employees?

Having experience isn't an indicator of knowing how to do basic things, because companies hire just about anyone.

Were you asking them in a language they were familiar with? They also might have gotten nerves and thought about using some fancy DP algorithm and gotten stuck in that rabbithole. I've personally definitely had my fair share of unbelievable brain farts

I was in IT for about a decade, up until 20 years ago. Then I switched to an entirely different field and I'm now in a senior role. I still get spammed with occasionally with e-mails for low-level IT and software development jobs.

(2021)

I still get headhunted for backend engineering jobs, and I haven't done that in 13 years. It's not even on my resume ... but I guess you can see it on Linkedin, so why not.

From 2005 until 2010 I worked as a .Net developer. I still get headhunters wanting me to apply for senior .Net/C# positions, it makes no sense.

Yes. We all get spam. Even the best of us.

It’s kinda funny how, as an IC anyways, recruiters are supposedly only supposed to be a sign of good things (or at worst neutral) yet everyone around me has such an aversion to interacting with them in practice. Real “defeat from the jaws of victory” vibes with most interactions

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