August 24, 2010 Career, Success 21 comments
Career Plan For Software Engineer. Do You Have One?
I’m confident that every smart human should have a plan for life, part of which is a career plan. Most of us spend more than half of our lives working. Did you ever think about that? We spend hours working on some projects, solving some problems, interacting with colleagues, creating and modifying things. Are you dedicated to what you do? If no, I have a question for you: Why do you work on xyz? Really! You may say that you could possibly work with more pleasure on another job. If that is your answer, why don’t you plan to change your job?
If you are dedicated to your work, I would assume you want to grow. Right? Do you have an idea on how you should proceed to reach your goals? Do you know exact steps to take and your knowledge gaps to overcome? No? How then can you be sure that you will grow to more respectful position, a position in which you are recognized and admired?
I always ask people about what motivates them and what they would recommend me to do to motivate others. Answers I get are different in formulation, but they all have the same core elements behind: possibility of career growth, recognizing, achievements, possibility to chief. Main question to you is this:
What do you do to reach your professional and life goals? Do you have a plan?
If you are not sure about what you do or what you should do, it is exact time to build your career plan.
Career plan
Career plan is list of positions and actions you should take in time to reach your short- and long-term career goals.
How to build your career plan?
First of all, building a plan is a great exercise and a process of establishing steps you should perform. The process itself allows you to have a critical view on your current career situation. You should know where you are right now, where you want to be and what are your abilities/skills. Answers for those questions are prerequisites for building a good career plan. If you have no clear vision on where you want to be, don’t be upset. Work on that. Try to write a few words that describe you after you as if you already reached your goals. How you see yourself in future might change, but at least you have some kick-off list. For me the list is something like “MVP, Consultant, Architect, Author, Community developer”. Also thinking out loud: “own company, another country, being manager, etc”
After you have some preliminary plan, you can refine it by removing less important items and by adding some additional ones. Also you can rethink some things and then rethink again and rethink few more times. In the end you will have some kind of more or less good plan. But do not expect it to be you final plan. I would say that you should always take a look on it and consider if anything requires improving.
Benefits of having a career plan
- Clear vision of the path you want to take.
- Possibility to track your progress to avoid getting stuck.
- Something you can use when you are trying to establish your life priorities.
- A way to communicate with your management on your career and get feedback.
- Extra confidence in your life.
You are now different!
After creating your personal career plan you will be different from your co-workers, who just continue to work blindly. There are people who work just to get enough money for a living. This cannot be considered as success, clearly not for me and hopefully not for you. Some other people probably think that simply working hard will lead them to success. Hey guys, just don’t think so! Yes, you are right that hard work is needed and respected, but there are definitely other things you have to add to bake a cake!
Once you have established where you want to be it is time to understand the path.
The Path
Positions path
Normally positions for Software Engineer start with these three:
- Junior Developer
- Intermediate Developer
- Senior Developer
This is the most general part of a path I see in all software companies. What do we have after that? It really deviates from company to company, but generally speaking this depends on the factor of your interaction with other people, with technology and with the company.
The more you interact with people the more you become leader of team, say Team/Tech Leader. The term might differ, but I like the “Technical Team Leader” one. Even more, if you would like to take more responsibilities you can switch to managing positions and become a Project Manager right after being Tech Leader or Senior Developer.
The less you interact with people the more you become an expert (it is even possible to have such position officially in tech industry). Expert is the person with whom others consult and get advise from.
The more you interact with a company the more you become CEO, but depending on your company’s size you might have few more steps here. Of course, position’s title can differ as you climb the career ladder.
Summarizing, your further steps are in one of the following areas:
- Technical Team Leader – a balanced position that has something from technical and management worlds
- Expert – way to consulting and architect positions
- CEO – way to management positions and eventually CEO
Goals in the Path
Why did I say “positions path”? Because this is not whole representation of the path. A good path should also go through you own personal ambitions related to your job to lead you to the established goals. What do I mean by this? Since I want to be recognizable community developer and known over the world, I should commit a lot of efforts in maintaining this blog, in speaking at events, etc. This has no explicit impact on my career growth, but believe me it has huge and tremendous indirect impact. Also, I would love to write a book and I’m planning on it. I still do not have a clear idea on what that book will be about. I only imagine something either on tech or on success. What matters is that I’ve planned it and I’m proud of it. Some remark goes here. I mentioned about this to my friend and he was laughing at me because I want to write a book and planned it but I do not know what about. I can express my arguments against it here, but would love to hear from you. [Edit 2015-Sep-16: I’ve released a free e-book on design patterns in my native language in 2012.]
My personalized “Developer’s RoadMap to Success”
My company as one of the leading outsourcing companies in Ukraine is trying to make employees happier with helping them in their careers. They create more positions and they also establish processes that allow employees see where they can move. (I hear you scepticism here…)
It is well known that one of the biggest motivation engines is visibility of a career growth. Since I’m considered to be a perspective employee (at least my employer thinks so), me with my company almost finished building my personalized Career Plan. It is the path with steps I should take to move from one position to another.
Of course, the company doesn’t care about my non-career goals even if they are dedicated to my personal improvement. It is the reason why the company has only included official positions in my career path. Highest position they’ve planned for me is to be one of the tech chiefs of one of the divisions. Highest position means a lot of interaction with clients and huge responsibilities in developing and advising on solutions. But it doesn’t include any of my desires to become community developer and stuff I would like to do to achieve my other goals.
So here I will present my own Personal Career Plan that also includes a lot of other things. I would recommend you to build something similar. On the left you can see path I built combined with some positions, certificates (officially needed for those positions). On the right side you can see my table of “Where do I want to be in a year“. List of “where I want to be” is really powerful tool if you keep doing it year after year. (here is list for 2010 & here is list for 2011) [Edit 2015-Sep-16: To see complete list of year plans click here.]
You must be thinking now: “Boy, hold-on, hold-on! It is way too optimistic path. Are you kidding?“. I would answer “Shut-up! I know my path and will do my best to stick to it. And, btw, where is your plan?”
Even I realize there is some overestimation of my possibilities/skills/efforts I would love think I can do all of this. Thinking in such a way is movement to The Success!
[Edited 2011-Jan-10: grammar fixed and few links added]
[Edited 2016-Jan-20: some grammar fixed]
2016 Follow Up?
As this post receives a lot of traffic, I decided to fix some grammar. I’m not changing the story though. I want to keep it the same so I can compare my old plan with my current achievements. Probably it is something you would like to know as well. Therefore I’m planning to write a follow up post in coming months.
2021 Update
Just for fun, here is my 2021 career update: I’m a Senior Software Engineer at Google working in Vancouver, Canada. Before Google I worked for Amazon as SDE3. I don’t know if this is an indication of any success or progress. I definitely had greater plans for myself in 2010. My ambitions subsided significantly and I tend to appreciate diversity of life much more than before. I feel like I probably need a new plan.
Book Review: The Brand You
August 23, 2010 Book Reviews, Success No comments
I read this book on the fly. Couple of hours and done. Book is written in very specific way, that allows to read it quickly. It spreads very interesting ideas.
One of the main concepts is that you are General Director of your life and your name’s company and that is real place where you must do the best. You should have something like a new title of your current position in Company-You, like “Catalyzer of progress”.
Book just throws into you lot of gripping mottos that make you double think if you do the right things and if in right way.
Book’s author is “COOL” and he wants you to be “COOL” as well. You should make yourself a “dude with power” and then sell yourself with high price.
For some reason book is also concerned about building professional network. Intent is to be aware of the best people around you, so this could help you move forward. Few weeks ago I started looking around for cool people to have lunch with them. During lunch I’m trying to familiarize with that person and understand what does he thinks about the job. Mainly I talk with Software Developers. To some extent this helps me be known and get interesting information from them. Probably it worth to consider meeting with people of other professions.
Regarding what it talks about your job, ideas are great and are very applicable to my current position and current team work. I would love if we use following motto: “Work with what you have, and make it awesome‘. There is no room for complains, there is only room for getting it done.
Be the best!
Windows Communication Foundation – Getting Started – Developer’s Meeting
August 19, 2010 DevMeeting, Presentation, Success, WCF 1 comment
Hello, today I performed presentation on Windows Communication Foundation and it went extremely well. People were interested in topic and it smelled in the air.
Why am I happy with this meeting?
People were listening very-very attentively! It is the best gift to the speaker. Many thanks to today’s attendees! You made this presentation awesome!
What was the agenda?
For today I planned to have “Getting Started” session, where I decided to talk in general what is WCF and then proceed to basic concepts of it, like ABC.
In DEMO 1 (Damn it! Let’s write some code!) I created ever simplest WCF library and simple Contract that exposed todo list functionality. Then I brifly showed configuration and we started wcftestclient.
In DEMO 2 (Damn it! Let’s configure it!) I talked a lot about endpoints and how we can configure them. After I created a lot of them it was highlighted that changing the way how our service works by configuring and not changing the code is the key feature of WCF. WCF is indeed unified framework that allows us has one logic, but different exposing to the real world.
In DEMO 3 (Damn it! Let’s use & host it!) I created very simple console application that was able to send todo item to the service. It went with some exceptions thrown into console, but people liked it and besides after that I created SuperTodoServiceClient and it worked well. Also we voted were do we want to host our service for the long time. Most decided to host it under IIS. Till the actual hosting all went well, but then suddenly it didn’t work under IIS. Reason was very simple – since my machine has brand new OS, IIS was not configured properly.
What’s next?
Also I’m planning to have another meeting on the WCF. This time it will be “Advanced”. In that session I would like to show some real-world examples. Also I’m going to prepare to the 70-503 exam (on WCF), so I might get some interesting topics from the training kit to show on the meeting.
Presentation
More and more I start disliking ppt files. But anyway to have some visual appearance of presentation I created ppt file (maybe finished with it at 5:30 am so don’t kill me if it is “poor”). Btw, having ppt has some plus – I can put my blog’s logo and URL :)
View more presentations from Andriy Buday.
Guys, looking forward to hear from you! Will appreciate any of your comments.
Book Review: It’s Not Luck
August 15, 2010 Book Reviews, Success No comments
So far I read another book on business and management. Now it is called “It’s Not Luck”, and is written by the author of “The Goal”.
Honestly, I liked this book, less than “The Goal”, because now I knew what to expect. I knew that all of the problems will be solved and that the hero will be promoted to the general director of Uni-Co.
The main and huge difference is that in this book author represent to us new way of thinking to resolve issues.
I will try to summarize it here from my perspective and my understanding.
So, first of all you have some conflict. You write it down with good formulation – that is the main thing you need to resolve. After, you should build some tree of dependent reasons-effects. To do that you need to write them all down and dive into intensive thinking to find out all of the dependencies. Book, states that in most cases reason of the main problem is just one of the reasons, you listed. If you commit lot of effort in building your dependencies tree, your reason will be obvious, so after that, you can proceed with building your plan to resolve that. Plan is path from root reason to the main problem, you should solve.
Book is very gripping and is written in way that gives us touches of both personal and business examples. I liked it, and maybe will try to use some of the technics to solve problems in my life.
Friday the 13th – Knowledge Evaluation
August 14, 2010 Career, Success 6 comments
As I promised, here is post on Knowledge Evaluation for the Senior level.
Definition of a Senior Level Developer
In most of the sources, Senior level is defined as level on which person is responsible for building complex components with minimal guidance and being unsupervised. Also person is an expert in language and has experience in business areas. I personally like definitions, where they additionally indicate person’s interest in software and bringing business value to the client.
So, who is Senior Developer?
Senior Developer is guy, who can and likes to code on any level of complexity, therefor he is able to build certain project parts, taking responsibility for the work being done. He can and likes to mentor and teach other members of the team; keeping his skills up to date and bringing this knowledge to the team he is leading by example.
For me being Senior Developer isn’t just label, that is indicated somewhere in the company by HR. It isn’t only list of responsibilities/duties I will be stick to. It is significant breakthrough in my career, that blesses me to move on. Moreover it is another step to self-actualize myself by accomplishing my life goals. Again, it is part of my RoadMap (I feel, that I need some post on it, but cannot till map is rolled in one or few places.)
Knowledge Evaluation
Except of taking into account my performance, company should always evaluate my knowledge to proceed with promotion.
My theoretical knowledge of programing and language isn’t under question
For some reason, my evaluators were not concerned about my theoretical knowledge of the core programming and language. That is why I got only few questions about database access, code quality and few other. Btw, for Med evaluation, most of the questions were exactly on core .net and surrounding things.
Non-coding aspects played more evident role in evaluation
Our meeting was about to find out if I’m able successfully communicate and work with team/client, if I’m competent in mentoring/coaching more junior staff, also how would I proceed with project management, like evaluating requirements, managing risks, doing proposals, and providing estimates on difficult matters. Of course there were some questions on configuration management and product deployment and brief go through surrounding project developing stuff.
Personal outcome
For me it was good time and my personal outcome for myself is that complete understanding of engineering management and requirements will come only with facing more real world situations, since simple theoretical knowledge isn’t enough.
Feedback
They did not give me official feedback yet, but I feel confident about positive one.
How will I proceed with new position?
First of all I will do all possible to not disappoint my management. Also I will work hard on keeping my brand up to people expectations and higher. Of course I will continue doing more than it is expected from me.
Any congratulations and comments are welcome!
English classes in outsourcing company
Since each software company wants to develop into huge one and be evident player in the IT industry, managers work on improving skills of the personal. For not English speaking country, as Ukraine, it is quite critical for the employees to know English well. That is why many companies are investing money on creating English courses.
Half of the English courses, I’m attending are left and I would like to provide some feedback that can be useful for my teacher, for people who are attending courses, and for anyone else who is working in outsourcing software company in non-English speaking country.
I’ve been attending regular Upper-Intermediate course for about 4 months and I see many advantages of it, but classes do not bring as much value for my work, as I’m expecting to get.
Difficulties
Why don’t classes bring enough value for my everyday work?
First and the major reason is that subject of our studies is completely unrelated to matters we are encountering during daily work. For example one of the latest chapters of our student’s book was “Literature”. For me it was the worst chapter in that book. I’m not keen on literature, so maybe that is the reason why I was so much bored with that chapter. Maybe, but if we take a look at this from other side asking ourselves question “Which value does chapter about literature can bring to software guys?” my statement about that being worst chapter doesn’t look ridiculous. Except of some out of the common situations, like dinner with client or library software solution, literature topics bring small value. I do not say that it is bad to have such topics; I say that to some extent it is waste of time which could be consumed by learning other more interesting stuff.
Gap between engineers and English teachers
More over I think that I understand why this gap exists – because people who created study books are from another life area than software guys are. They are academic guys, they write articles and some fiction stories. On another hand we have software engineers who develop programs and discuss them, who look bit prosy for others, but we know what we know.
For example, I often watch different programming video. Guru speak about new frameworks coming soon, about mature approaches to building software, they show best practices and design patterns. Surprisingly I understand absolutely everything from their speech (maybe 1-2 words per minute missed). Why? Because they operate with words and terms I’m using in everyday work and because I’m interested to hear things they say. On one of the lessons we had listening practice, where guy talked about the train in Asia, and how some lady brought insects on plate for eating and about wooden sticks and bla-bla… Question is: why on earth I need this?
Advantages, Improvements, Thoughts…
Is everything so much bad?
No, of course, no! Main point of my previous paragraph is that classes are not 100% concentrated on needs of software engineers.
These classes bring lot for my general understanding of English Language. I now feel more confident in using perfect tenses and different grammar. Classes are great revision of the grammar, that you learnt at some time and then have forgotten.
On my previous Performance Appraisal I got remark from client, that my English has improved. I should thank my company for giving me opportunity to learn English.
Improvements to regular courses that I see are:
Have brief review of the upcoming topics and find out if people are interested in them. If not maybe it worth to provide one-two lessons that do not belong to regular course, like one lesson of “listening & speaking” one lesson for grammar one for video, after that proceed with further chapters. Get feedback from people. Btw: I really appreciate, that my teacher asked for feedback. You rock! I know that feedback is the most reinforcing way of improvements.
Course I’m attending is comprehensive (learnt this word at classes :)) set of activities, but I would really like to see more speaking. Make people speak more, and provide feedback on that only after person finished. I would like to see it more regulated. Make everyone speak.
Make some friendly-competitive environment. I’m kind of person who would like to win some rewards, like “Best presentations deliverer”. For now I would win only “Most Thursday lessons missed” – 9AM is too early for owl.
Have some home activities that differs from usual, like ask for watching some film and provide review for the students. Or simply let people introduce and explain their duties in company. That should be interesting.
Additional learning is needed
As per me it is required to work on English by your own and simultaneously attend classes. How does it work?
English teachers are the best in their understanding of grammar. Particularly my teacher can explain tenses just terrifically. Your everyday work doesn’t require complex grammar to be used, but nothing restricts you from doing that. Simply start listening to your clients more attentively and catch the smallest matters they say. Write more clean and sophisticated letters. Now you have theoretical knowledge, go and use.
My list of activities I do for learning English:
- Attending English classes and catching grammar at daily work
- Using theoretical knowledge in your daily work. Why not write two-three words to build more complex and correct sentences that can emphasize your e-mail.
- Reading huge dozen of articles. I read technical only, and tech books in original.
- Watching tech video. I just love watching it.
- Watch with beer and friend movies you have already seen translated.
- Watch without beer movies for the first time. Even if you understand little; low of average works – the more films you watch the more words you intuitively understand.
- Find someone who will likely be talking with you in English during the day. I’m happy that I have colleague, who talks to me in English. We have fun.
- Write something. I write blog posts, that is also asset to my learning.
Conclusion
English classes are definitely needed for the software company. And I really enjoy attending them, but hate that they suck time that I need for my sleep and dislike that they are not software-related, but I try to understand this. I see some improvements, biggest part of them are applicable to our courses, but not necessary near to wishes of other students. As always everything depends on your desire to work, so I have my own list of activities I do for learning English.
Please let me know your thoughts about said above.
Abiliton PRO Certified
August 7, 2010 Certification, Success 4 comments
Yesterday my company officially started new certification model, called Abiliton PRO. It was announced much earlier, but rewarding first portion of best company’s people happened only yesterday.
What is Abiliton?
Abiliton™ is a strategic methodology for software development lifecycle management, invented by SoftServe. Abiliton is a fully optimized approach to software development that incorporates a
superior framework of services and solutions to deliver maximum value
with each and every project. It is focused on selecting and employing the most talented and bright professionals, this way company can ensure clients that projects will be done in time and with best quality that can be provided.
Who are Abiliton PRO People?
It is clear that success of any software company depends on its employees and their growth. By rewarding the best of them company emphasizes knowledge and working capabilities of the employees in any area.
What does Abiliton PRO certificate require?
It is some set of requirements, which include your performance and knowledge. Performance is measured by regular Performance Appraisals, which include different areas to be evaluated, starting from your communication with client or within team, your result orientation, etc. finishing with applying your knowledge to daily work, like how are you in applying OOD or do you write high quality code. Knowledge, except of internal knowledge evaluations and performance appraisal, is ensured by external certificate. For example, Microsoft’s or Sun’s, or any else that are applicable to your position. This means that even Project Managers have there external certifications.
The rewarding event
President of company started his speech emphasizing why we gathered and what is the intent of rewarding. Also other guys congratulated us, after that we had some drink.
Here is me holding my certificate:
And close look at certificate itself:
Currently this certificate is requirement to get promotion. They say that they create more clear path for growing. Yes, and no. Many co-workers are complaining about that, and I understand them. Now it is required to commit extra effort in getting external certificates, but hey, guys, that is not so much difficult.
Honestly, I love to be recognized, and that is also part of my year goal and another mile stone on Developer’s RoadMap To Success. Why shouldn’t I love this? Everyone wants to be recognized and I would like to see people around who show desire to grow.
Developers Meetings Survery – RESULTS
August 6, 2010 Coaching, DevMeeting, Presentation, Success 2 comments
Few days ago I started survey about improvements to Developers Meetings inside of my team, but I also announced it to anyone who can be interested in this via twitter and blog.
Top areas of interest are:
- *Foundations like WCF, WPF, WWF and huge parts of .NET development like WinPhone
- Design Patterns either Gof, Enterprise or not commonly known
- Core .NET (concurrency, memory, security)
- New features coming in .NET
More details:
Top voted topics are:
- Enterprise Design Patterns
- WCF
- Gof Design Patterns with live code
- Estimation
- Refactoring
- TDD
My thoughts on top topics:
Because I’m not expert in Enterprise Design Pattern, it would take time for me to have some presentation on it. Either I will ask one of my colleges, who already read “Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture“.
I just scheduled Developers Meeting on WCF for my team, and I see this to be “getting started” meeting where I’m going to talk about main concepts and basic usages. I’m going to implement some funny example.
Regarding GoF Design Patters with live code, that should be very easy for me. I already have a whole bunch of different examples on my blog, so I can use them and talk on them. I expect to have junior stuff on those meetings. I would like to train my capabilities in coaching.
Estimation should be meeting where I would like to talk around Fowler’s estimation deadly sins.
Refactoring could be divided in many meetings, like core refactorings but with live code and also “refactoring to patterns”
TDD – no slides. I remember when we had presentation on TDD for devs and it was with slides. I think that is the worst way to explain TDD. Yeah, might be that it is good to show flow diagram, but I vote for code.
Details:
Improvements section:
What is the most interesting about improvements is that people would like to see more real code. Hm, this should mean that either people are tired because of my simple “hello world” examples, or either they are very interesting in how we can use those things withing complex project, and maybe they are right, because “hello world” examples could be found easily over internet.
Details on improvements:
Also as you can see we’ve got 3 comments on improvements. First one says to view presentations before meeting. I would agree with this, but maybe I will work on more detailed agendas, which will be sent exactly before meeting. Please let me know if this is ok.
I’m really looking forward to provide lot of interesting information to my co-workers and work along with them to build solid and very knowledgeable base for our growth.
Will appreciate if you would share your thoughts on this results and thank you very much for participating in survey!
Exam 70-505: TS: Windows Forms Application Development – PASSED
August 1, 2010 Career, Certification, Success No comments
I already wrote some posts on certification, where I mentioned why do I need certification and which value does it bring to me. After those posts I almost have nothing to add.
But maybe few things…
How 70-505 differs from 70-536? Questions in 505 are not so wide and after passing 536 + reading training kit it is much easier to pass this one.
How did I prepare? As I mentioned in one of my blog posts, I read training kit on 505 exam. Reading was boring. Taking into account that I already have strength experience working with WinForms it was ridiculous to read about some things like adding controls or something like that. But anyway I found some stuff interested for me. Also I did some research over internet on how other passed this exam. Not enough information exist about this one. Maybe because it is not very popular.
Also I worked on training tests, including demo test on MeasureUp.
Passing Exam
As you see preparation looks very similar to what I had for my 536 exam but I was still worrying about passing exam, since I already failed it. That time I even did not read training kit and was sure in passing exam.
As I was afraid to fail it once again, while testing I was really concentrated on questions and. I PASSED EXAM with score 1000, this means that I answered correctly on all 40 questions. It was really surprising and is pleasure for me.
You can see my transcript using this information:
https://mcp.microsoft.com/authenticate/validatemcp.aspx
Transcript ID: 904316
Access Code: andriybuday
Effect on Career
In post It is time to get Microsoft Certification, I wrote that certification is important for my career growth. Actually in few words my company has schema that defines conditions to be eligible for promoting to the next level.
Here is my current status:
As you can see, I satisfy all conditions for being Senior.
I have just perfect Performance and it was noticed by my managers, also I worked in my company near 2.5 years (looks like this condition is bonus for me, since now it should be 3+ years), also my English is now evaluated as Upper-Intermediate, I did dozen of presentations, and finally I got that certification.
So what is left? – Knowledge Evaluation.
Knowledge Evaluation is meeting when guru guys bombard me with questions to ensure that I’m competent in areas, which are already defined somewhere in requirements. So my next step is to find out my weak areas and get better with them, so I will have more balanced knowledge. I now feel that in some areas I’m competent but some are still very weak, because I do not have experience working with them. You can expect that soon you will see posts on themes I do not know well, but I try hard to figure out them for myself and for you. Hope they will be interested for you!
Please let me know your thoughts on this post.
Interview
July 25, 2010 Career, Success No comments
I’m not going to write comprehensive article on how to successfully pass Interview. I would like to share some recent thoughts on it. Might be that in one year term you will see another article with same title.
First of all, and as per me, interviewers ask mainly those things that they know well
So if you are candidate for junior position, range of questions that interviewer has could be dramatically wide for you. But once again, if you are junior, he will ask you basics in which he is guru. This means that slight inaccuracy in your definition will just highlight that you are new incomer. This shouldn’t make you sad.
If you are candidate for mediate position, you already are competent in some areas. This means that two things might happen, either your interviewer is competent in them also or either not. In first variant you will need to prove that you are really competent, and after you are done with that, probably general questions will go smoothly. In second variant it doesn’t matter how good you are in those things, everything will depend on other questions. But anyway try to highlight your strength areas.
Regarding senior positions I have almost nothing to say, because I’m still intermediate developer. I think that in this case company finds some resources that are super-competent and everything looks like in med variant, just on another level, or maybe they take candidate basing on his general applicability to this position.
For Junior
Try to show that are able to learn everything, that you are passionate about learning new technologies and can think out of the box. (One friend gave me this hint.) Generally they take juniors for their growth capabilities. That is like investment.
For intermediate
Be confident in things you know and ready for the questions you don’t know answers. Show readiness to solve problems and be honest when answering.
Interview and candidate attitude to work
Also I think that while interviewing someone company lost one very-very important thing – his/her attitude to work. That is something that could not be easily evaluated during interview. I assume that there are guys with good knowledge, but for some reason they are not interested in career growth or orientation for the results. These guys still could pass interview and then bring less value to company, then it was expected. I do not say they do little work, but this is like you’ve got good looking sport car with engine from motorbike. On one blog I read very interesting article motto of which is “Don’t hire for knowledge, hire for attitude!”
Remember that you are also interviewing
Ask about the processes they have and use. Don’t forget general questions about work conditions, like timing schedule, conditioners, vacations, and so on.
Ask deeply about the project, they are going to have you working on. For example, ask if they are doing Agile, if they write Unit Tests for their projects, which kind of duties they want you to execute and if you will have chance to do more. If it is possible ask them to see some source code. I believe that if you are good in programming you will see with whom you gonna work.
The most important for me is to know if they are looking forward to see your professional growth and if they will be glad to promote you because of that. If they really want you to grow and do not expect you to be working horse on one project, this might be good company.
Did I have one recently?
I think that you are very interesting if I have had some interview(s) in recent time. Yes, I had, but I’m not constantly looking for new job, I just accept invitations if they could bring me some value. I would say if they ask for interview, go and see where you stand in current labor market. You will see if you are losing technology tendency at your work or if you are banally losing money, because indeed you worth much more.
I’m not throwing you to send resumes and go to dozen interviews, but I recommend having one interview at least once a year, just to know if you need to pay more attention on learning something or improving something.
I am not afraid to say above, even if my current employer will read this blog post or if company who asked me for interview will read this. Why? Because if I stay, this means that current company satisfies me with conditions it gives me and this should make it happy that resources are not going away. If I move, this means that another company finds me more valuable than current, and this means only one – I was losing something at my work.
Guys, that all is about how much you cost. And I know answer for this question:
You cost exactly as much as you are getting right now!
Just think about that for a while, and you will get deep meaning of it.
