Often the hiring manager will have the person to be hired somewhere in his report chain. So if a person can't effectively communicate and can't properly respond to a "I only have 2 minutes, shoot", then I am getting a future liability into the company that will slow down all future communications.

I much rather prefer someone who needs 3 seconds to triage a question and tell me: "This is X, I know this, here is the solution" or "This is Y, I don't know it, but I will get back to you within 24h".

I do absolutely not want a "Well let's think jointly about this for a couple of minutes". There is no jointly with your boss. Let's do a some math of a 1:12 manager to direct report ratio. That means for every hour you have, your boss only has 5 minutes. And if you talk to your boss' boss, they have 25 seconds for every of your hours.

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wk_end 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I absolutely do want to work with people who want to think jointly about interesting questions for a couple of minutes. Give me your long-winded (thoughtful!) answers. Let me see how you think. Let me see how well I (and others) can think through things with you. That's what the point of an interview is, IMO. And I've been gainfully employed in tech for 15 years now with that attitude, often in environments with other like-minded folks, often involved in the hiring decisions that have led me to work with those other like-minded folks.

So in the same interest of helping post-grad job seekers, do what you've gotta do to get yourself paid, but maybe don't presume that vibe_that_works speaks for every hiring manager.

	▲	tayo42 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		This thread is why job searching sucks. Every one making hiring decisions has conflicting advice and requirements.

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hypfer 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That does sound like a bad org tho, sorry to say that.

Not to disagree of course that time is limited, but in my experience, optimizing it this harshly leads to poor results, because eventually, you just get leapfrogged by reality.

Hyper-optimized systems are brittle and can't really adapt to the market changing.

But yeah, I guess they still need developers. Just doesn't sound like a fun job :D

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vibe_that_works 6 hours ago | parent [-]

Just trying to fix the misunderstanding: I am not saying that you will have a literal 25 seconds meeting with your boss's boss. I am just making a math argument taking typical orgchart ratios.

So let me take this a step further. You want to meet your boss' boss for 10 minutes to present them something. 10 minutes of his time are an equivalent of more than 20 hours of your time. So if your initial idea was to "take maybe 1-2h" to prepare for this -> You are underprepared by at least one order of magnitude.

	▲	ImprobableTruth 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		This is a very strange mindset. Even if you want to treat everything as sort of billable hours this doesn't really make sense because the average boss's boss's isn't paid anywhere near 144x. If a SWE spends 100 hours to save their boss's boss one hour, they're wasting a ton of money.
	▲	hypfer 6 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I mean I am no expert, but to me it sounds like the org you're describing seems to lean away from the "engineering" side of things and into the "org for the sake of org". Which might not be ideal, because "orging for the sake of org" to my understanding consumes significant resources not going into building products/marketshare/shareholder value. But then again, I'm no hiring manager in such a structure, so this is probably just an uninformed take.

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awkwardpotato 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> I do absolutely not want a "Well let's think jointly about this for a couple of minutes".

But why?

Most of my most fulfilling experiences in tech have come out sitting down and hashing out a problem with someone else (including with managers/leaders).

It sounds like a miserable org if I am not expected/allowed to have an actual back and forth conversation with my boss. If I'm employed to be on a team working on an aligned common goal, why would I not use that collective skill and experience to my fullest advantage?

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sublinear 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> There is no jointly with your boss

You're describing a coding sweatshop. What is the point of any discussion at all then? If the "boss" can't carve out enough time, that's their own problem. Letting that stress propagate to the team is plain bad leadership.

I know you might think some of these candidates don't have other much better choices to find work, but they absolutely do.