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Ask HN: Is it possible to get pigeonholed to certain company sizes/cultures?

• tony-allan 8y ago
  Yes. It happens all the time and has certainly happened to me. I don’t have a simple answer. It isn’t just small to big companies. I also had an problem moving from enterprise to a smaller web related company. In that case, I went back to college part-time and retrained. Hard work but it turned out ok. I also did a series of government projects, which I really enjoyed, without thinking too much about it and then had a hard time moving away from that. The truth is that whatever you do, someone is going to pigeonhole you. It is just human nature. I try hard to build skills in what I want to do next and then try to work on projects that use those skills. One other thing I did was to present papers at user group conferences – often about what I wanted to do in my next project!
• flatfilefan 8y ago
  Try asking for feedback on the rejections. Did you?
  • amazonavocado 8y ago
    Yes. Most companies don't want to provide feedback due to liability reasons. Only big exceptions are TripleByte and Enova. They told me that I come across as too "junior" in giving explanations despite my years of experience. The smaller companies are probably holding me back in career growth.
    • patio11 8y ago
      They told me that I come across as too "junior" in giving explanations despite my years of experience. This is a really useful factoid for you. You should at least try reviewing one of your past performances for "opportunities to have sounded like a senior engineer" and then, during your next performance, dial that signal to parody levels. If how to do this is not obvious to you, a trick: explicitly verbalize more of your reasons for not doing obvious alternate approaches. Bonus points if you can make those reasons sound like they were won by working on systems operating at scale.
    • jabgrabdthrow 8y ago
      Did they say “you come across as too junior despite your years of experience” or “you come across as too junior”, despite your years of experience?
    • timv 8y ago
      Disclaimer: You've only given us a few paragraphs to draw on, so we need to fill in the gaps and make some assumptions. You'll need to test whether those assumptions actually fit with who you are. From your intro, my guess was that this would be a senior/junior mis-match. With 10 years of experience, employers will think of you as someone who should be a senior engineer, and they are likely to be evaluation you based on that expectation. That might be your expectation too - you didn't really say what sort of roles you were applying for, but if you're applying to "senior engineer" roles, then each company will have an implicit set of expectations about what a senior engineer can do. Some of those expectation might be made explicit in the role description, but many won't be. The role might talk about "mentoring junior developers" but there's an implicit expectation about the content of that mentoring - you have to know certain things in order to be able to teach others about them. Those expectations will vary by company, and even by hiring manager. Some interviewers will think "A senior Java engineer must know spring+hibernate", but if you've spent your career working in the Hadoop ecosystem, then that's not likely to be true. Or "A senior engineer must understand the trade-offs of unit-testing vs integration-testing" (and be able to give the answer that they want to hear) but that's a question that is more relevant for certain project types, and not every engineer is going to have an opinion on that. A likely problem here is that your 10 years of experience haven't given you the right set of skills to be able to answer their interview questions in ways that satisfy their (probably unreliable) interview filter. Maybe you really don't have those skills, or maybe you have them in some form, but not in a way that matches the interviewer's expectations. Some time ago, when I was hiring into a medium/large bank, my expectations for a 10+ year engineer would be that you could be given a loosely defined problem, work your way through the details to understand the real task to be solved, design a solution (typically changes to be made to an existing system), implement and unit test that solution, assist in developing a system testing plan, assit in implementation, and understand the implications for support/operations. Each of those steps has a bunch of further detail that varies greatly by workplace, and interviews have "right answers" that assume you've done this enough times under similar enough conditions to be able to reach the same conclusions as they've reached. As an anecdotal example. I remember hiring for a particular role, and one of the questions proposed a scenario where a particular business function was currently being driven from a spreadsheet, but they had outgrown that, and wanted to automate more of the workflow, and wanted to run a project to build a web-based internal system for that. How would you approach that? One of the candidates said something along the lines of "If they have a working spreadsheet, then I wouldn't want to change that. There's lots of risk in reimplementing it, so I would look at tools that could be used to put a web front end on top of the spreadsheet, and automate it that way." That was the wrong answer. It was a valid answer, and they explained why they wanted to take that approach, and "because risks" is somewhat reasonable, that team was not big on risk-taking. But whatever that candidate's experiences had been, they had led him to propose a solution that didn't fit with our expectations, and made what we considered to be the wrong trade-offs (and he persisted with that proposal even when we prompted him to go in a different direction). It's quite possible that some other company would say "Yes, that's exactly what we wanted to hear, you're hired!", but he wasn't the right person for us. So - what's the solution? You might try angling for a less senior role. It's hard when you have seemingly relevant engineering experience, to pitch yourself as a mid-level engineer, but you might need to find a way to do it. Then the expectations are lowered, you can get in the door, find out where your previous experience was leading you astray, and then be promoted to a senior role (or switch to a new company, now that you have the skills you need for the interview). You might need to trim your resume in the process so that you only mention the last 5 years of experience, and don't look too senior. Alternatively, it might just be an interviewing issue. You might just need to translate what you do know from "small company" to "big company". Try something like https://interviewing.io/ https://interviewing.io/ and learn how to explain the skills you do have, in terms that big companies like. -- edit: s/prompted/promoted
• flente 8y ago
  If you got a phone screen from Amazon, et al, it means they saw your resume and thought your experience looked interesting. You were not filtered on the basis on your work history. When these companies rejected you, it was almost certainly because of your interview performance, not your experience. The good news is that you can practice for interviews. There are many resources online. Good luck!
  • amazonavocado 8y ago
    The feeling I get is that if my resume is good enough to get into the interviews, then it must be something about my presentation that has been conditioned from me due to working in smaller places. Like it could be something about the small company jobs might be making me talk differently about my job experience. And that could be turning off the big company hiring managers. Kind of a like a farm guy trying to make small talk with someone who's only lived in a big city, it will be noticeable. It makes it harder for both people to find common ground. Does that make sense?
    • jerf 8y ago
      That seems like a realistic interpretation to me, but nothing in particular about what you've written here is leaping out at me as an explanation, not that such a small sample would be terribly reliable anyhow. You may want to see if you can find someone to meet in person to discuss this matter. Such things may only come out in person. Someone who has been in an interviewing position at a larger corporation would be ideal. You may have to troll some meetups or something for this, which isn't exactly a waste of time when it comes to trying to get a job anyhow, so it's efficient.
    • itronitron 8y ago
      That makes perfect sense, I think hiring managers and recruiters at large companies will want to hear that you are specifically looking to work in larger organizations. I also recommend spending time with employees of large organizations so that you can get a feel for how they communicate.
    • Bahamut 8y ago
• asanwal 8y ago
  Would you say you have a specialization or are you more of a generalist? Bigger orgs often tend to want specialists while early stage cos love generalists who can do a bit of everything. Also, scale invites challenges that someone in companies of < 20 will not have encountered. Hard to know without more specifics but sometimes comes down to the “different wars need different generals” mantra.
• DataJunkie 8y ago
  Yes it can happen both ways: pigeonholed to small or large companies, but I don't believe you're stuck with it. You might have a personal marketing problem, or you might have an interviewing problem. Small companies can be great. I tend to think "startup" when I hear small company, but I think the same rules may apply. Your tech stack is probably more fluid and you can learn new technologies more easily. These are great skills to have. But... if you are not clear about what type of work you want to do and how your skills apply to that work, it is easy to turn off a larger company because they can't fit you into a role (a "box"). A good recruiter will try to shop you around the company a bit, but there's a limit as to how much time they are willing to spend doing that. Story: I recently had a set of interviews for a large company (the recruiting process was a mess and a joke) where I was bounced from place to place and nobody (myself included) could figure out where I fit in the company. I feel that company was very tight lipped or unsure about the roles they were hiring for, so I had no better answer than "I'd be happy in either position" to which one of the hiring managers said I would be a better fit for a startup. I came into the process very wishy-washy about what I wanted. Considering this didn't happen with any of the other companies I applied to, I blame this company. Everything was secretive and somewhat adversarial. I ended up at a much larger company with a much better reputation. Point: If you are not clear about what you want, you may get stuck in the small company loop. The good news is that you are getting phone interviews at larger companies. Before you take an interview, research the company and its culture, don't just rely on what you know about the company. Focus on what you have accomplished at your companies, and not the tech stack you use. I've heard a lot of candidates tell me about the complexities of the open-source stack they've worked with, and that's great, but I want to know how they will help us in our mission. Those types of nitty-gritty answers would better fit smaller companies, in my opinion (unless I am specifically asking about how they did something). Also, larger companies have a pretty standard interview process. Data structures/algorithms and coding phone interviews. You need to practice, practice, practice on Leetcode or some other platform and even re-read an algorithms book. Smaller companies tend to be more holistic and use take-home projects, have you participate in a hackathon, whatever, but to get into a larger company, you need to learn how to play the interview game rather than just being a great coder (irony intended).
  • amazonavocado 8y ago
• captain_perl 8y ago
  In the first part of my career, I was usually told I was their second choice. But their number one pick chose another offer and I got that Fortune 500 job. So perseverance works. Now a couple decades later, I have the problem that nobody believes anybody can be that good on the short offline tests. So I have to schedule skype interviews where the interviewers can see me and and verify that I know far more than they do. The second problem is actually the more difficult problem to have, but there's a certain sense of accomplishment. I'll deal with it. :)
  • bbcbasic 8y ago
    Ooooooh that sounds slightly like a humblebrag
• mkozlows 8y ago
  Whenever you're making a transition from one type of company to another, the hiring manager is going to be very concerned about whether you understand the kind of transition you're making, and are able to bridge that gap. If you've been in an enterprise environment and are interviewing at a smaller company, they're going to be concerned that you're a hidebound cog who just sits there and waits for someone to tell them what to do (in triplicate), so they'll be looking for signs that you have initiative, that you don't think of things as "someone else's department," that you have the flexibility to roll with things that deviate from a strict process; if you've been at small companies and you're interviewing at larger ones, they're going to be concerned that you've just been ignoring all best practices and doing stuff with bubblegum and baling wire in a half-assed way. My suspicion is that in those interviews, you didn't really allay those fears. Maybe you seemed impatient with process, maybe you came off like a cowboy, maybe you said things like "yeah, I know you're not supposed to make live code changes on production servers, but sometimes that's just the most effective way to get things done, you know?" Or... maybe the company size thing is totally unrelated, and you just didn't wow them, who knows. But it's not at all impossible to go between different types of companies, you just need to be aware of what's going to be different between them, and how you can be an asset to that type of company.
• bsdpython 8y ago
  If you have a bunch of companies on your resume that no one has heard of then it doesn't help. If you are getting interviews though then there are other factors at play that I think you are dismissing. Are you fluent in in-demand skills? Do you do side projects? Did you do interview prep, especially coding exercises? What would you say are your biggest strengths?
• fouc 8y ago
  You probably need some capability of working with a team. I'm going to assume you're a developer. Imagine working with a team of 5 to 10 developers. Plus a team of QAs. Plus a team of Ops. Plus a team of DBAs. There's usually a process like working on code in a feature branch, passing it on for code review and then merging the feature branch into a development branch, where the QAs will deploy it to a staging server to check your changes (unless they deploy off the feature branch alone), and then eventually the development branch is merged to master for deploy to production. So basically people aren't merging code to master or development out of the blue. People aren't typically sshing into production servers and changing code on the fly. Developers probably don't even get any access. And so on. Anyways, not sure if you're already familiar with all that or if it gives you new insights into how working for a larger company might be different.
• enjoyitasus 8y ago
  Yes
  • amazonavocado 8y ago
    Elaborate? What are some examples of this? More importantly I want to know if you read the content of my post, and what are your thoughts on that content and your personal reflection of it.
• gedy 8y ago
  I've interviewed people with your background and company sizes, and one general thing I've noticed is they are pretty good at their company stack and tools, capable of doing lots of things, can talk in depth about their previous work, and were successful in their jobs. However, the drawback is bigger companies frequently want someone with experience to be a master of a few things, and less a generalist. Not defending it, but I've rarely seen a corporate hiring manager excited to hire an experienced dev based on them coming across as: "Oh I can learn anything! What do you need?"
• patio11 8y ago
  A master's degree will not materially improve your employment prospects but will cost a lot of money and years of opportunity cost. You should devote approximately one week to reading about how to interview better and practicing and then get as many interviews as you can at companies which are large enough to offer a competitive benefits suite. If I were in your situation I'd optimize for brand-name ones first, since the last name on your resume dominates people's impression of it. ("Worked for ten years at university IT departments and small software companies then Yelp" rounds to "ex-Yelp employee" according to basically every recruiter I've ever spoken to, and there are a lot of companies which round to Yelp.) Even if one thought that one was below the supposed bar for large companies, they're sufficiently imprecise regarding interviewing that you have at least a 20% chance of an offer given ability to get onto a phone screen and pass the local version of FizzBuzz. Make it your mission to get failed out of their interview loop twenty times; it's virtually impossible. P.S. One does not have to change one's personality to present differently for twenty minutes on a phone call if one believes that one's perceived personality is causing the phone rejections.
  • taurath 8y ago
    1 week isn’t enough for big companies. The person is 10 years out of college - 1-2 months would work a lot better.
  • amazonavocado 8y ago
    >A master's degree will not materially improve your employment prospects but will cost a lot of money and years of opportunity cost. I don't like "don't do it" advice without any compelling reasons. It is better for me to try and fail than to regret not having tried it. I am going to seek people who will support my desired path. What if I wanted to work at NASA or Intel? Getting an internship from one of these companies is hard enough. But not impossible, and worthwhile building valuable connections from your internship for referrals to a full-time job. But going to work there with no formal CS background, no inside referrals, with a non-STEM degree, with tenuous experience is much, much harder. So there is my argument for wanting a higher education. At least I stated my argument.
    • 8y ago
• paulsutter 8y ago
  Try getting a contract role with the type of company you’d like to join, then perform awesomely and be a great person to work with. If it’s a fit you’ll get converted to full time. Just be sure to target companies that are very actively hiring
• Spooky23 8y ago
  Try consulting. It might be a transition that will give you the right mix of chaos and “get it done” while exposing you to bigco lingo and thought patterns.
• gwbas1c 8y ago
  Hopefully I don't get downvoted, but here goes: I've had the same job starting at a small startup, through growth and acquisitions, and I've been involved in hiring through the entire process. Here's the dirty secret: startups try to be selective; but they're really desperate to hire. This is because startups are so mismanaged and risky that they have a lot of trouble getting someone competent to interview. When we were small, most people we interviewed were either incompetent or incapable of the challenge. Anyone competent got an offer. As part of a mature organization, hiring is different. Most candidates can do the job, and actually want to work for us. (Unlike a startup, we now have good management and won't go out of business tomorrow.) Thus, we're more concerned with behavior. My "competency test" interview has now evolved to more of a "tell me what I want to hear" interview. It's very effective, because almost all hires do the job well without wanting to perform useless refactoring because I didn't pick their favorite framework or brace style. It's also effective because I know I can communicate about higher level design topics. I suggest, at a certain level, to just concentrate on telling your interviewers what they want to hear. This doesn't mean lying, or misrepresenting yourself. It just means that you need to understand who is in charge and play along with the same game everyone else is playing. I'm also very clear about that when I interview a candidate. I now say something like: "This is a short interview and I try to ask questions that fit into the time. Some of the coding questions aren't real situations. The goal is to have a conversation about code, so if something is akward, just play along and do your best."
  • amazonavocado 8y ago
    >startups try to be selective; but they're really desperate to hire That is a paradox I am still trying to figure out LOL. Ostensibly, startups are huge on culture fit. But also at the same time they want someone who knows a certain stack in and out, and can't attract those people all the time. So startups and large companies are selective, in different ways? And that is really gonna be a game changer for me, in turning my interview strategy into something that satisfies subjective needs. I guess it's because so many candidates, as you say, can do the job because they perform well on an objective basis that larger companies have to reach into other less objective criteria to filter them out?
• PopeDotNinja 8y ago
  Generally speaking, getting a job is about being & sounding like someone the interviewer(s) can relate with. Let's say you work at a big company in an environment that does not prioritize testing. You are heading into an interview at a smaller startup that LOVES testing. When one of the startup interviewers asks you how you feel about testing, they want you to answer the question in a way that makes it sound like you'd be enthusiastic & competent at testing "all the things". If you say "I don't have time to write tests at work", you're almost certainly not going to get the job. If you say "I love testing, I write tests whenever I can, a certain employer I may or may not currently work for makes it hard to me to increase test coverage, and that's a factor in why I'm taking the time to interview with you", you're going to almost certainly get the interviewer's attention in a good way. The other part of selling yourself is that you, as far as this employer is concerned at least, really need to love testing. Get it? So what does it take for you to look & sound like the person who would get the job at Amazon, Cloudflare, or Coinbase? What does it take to be like what you sound need to sound like? Can you get that experience at work by taking initiative? For the experience you can't get at work, what can you do to get it outside of work? Do you need to buckle down and tear through Cracking The Coding Interview & LeetCode exercises? Do you need to work on a personal project that showcases the skills you can't develop at work? Figure those things out as best you can, push yourself super hard, and you'll get one of those shiny jobs that breaks you out of your current career paradigm. Also, don't overlook the value of being really good at something people really need. That's a basic supply and demand thing. If you're a badass VB6 developer or MUMPS developer, those are simply not a hot skillset for almost any employer these days.
  • amazonavocado 8y ago
    Then my goal, ostensibly, is to find a large company with interviewer(s) that are like and sound like me. Instead of trying to blend in, I will try the other approach. Try to find my "soul company" within the major big companies, so I don't need to artificialize myself. There are many big companies to choose from so it's very likely I just haven't found one who has a lot of people like me.
• a-saleh 8y ago
  I would give you this advice: Try to follow up with people that interviewed you, you might actually learn why you didn't make the cut. This might be harder with large companies, but even during the interview, a question like 'If this doesn't work out, I plan to apply again in 6 months or so, anything I should do in the meantime to have better chance of success' might tell you something you didn't already know. Second, I heard that if you go through interviews, the chances to get a job can be quite low, I heard stories that went along the lines 100 applications -> 10 phone screens -> 1 onsite interview. It might be easier going around meetups, open-houses or conferences and talking to people, you might learn about open positions that would fill sooner than they get to a public job-board :) Last job I got came from a conversation with a former high-school friend over a beer.
• pnathan 8y ago
  I do not believe this is a thing. I've seen a lot of migration between company sizes. I would, however, believe that you are presenting in such a way as to not harmonize with the expectations of the interviewer. I've done a fair bit of interviewing on both sides of the table, with reasonable success - at least, I am mostly happy with it. I am happy to talk to you 1:1 - email in profile.