<story><title>Red flags I saw while doing technical interviews</title><url>http://blog.interviewing.io/6-red-flags-i-saw-while-doing-60-technical-interviews-in-30-days/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>vlovich123</author><text>Of the big tech companies, I&amp;#x27;ve worked at Facebook, Google, &amp;amp; Apple. I&amp;#x27;ve still not quite cracked what&amp;#x27;s different about Apple culturally that they seem to be more immune to this problem. The only main difference I can spot is I don&amp;#x27;t recall ever encountering a PM at Apple. To do planning engineers would propose improvements, new features, etc. These were bubbled up. Then executives would be responsible for building a theme around those developments &amp;amp; how that fit larger company-wide themes for iOS. On the other hand, I don&amp;#x27;t know if that was an Apple-wide thing or iOS-specific (at the time it was hard to distinguish since the entire company was largely organized around iOS&amp;#x2F;MacOS).&lt;p&gt;Another difference is that design is top-down at Apple. Any UI redesign was driven by Johnny&amp;#x27;s team which was responsible for a holistic and consistent across-the-board implementation. I don&amp;#x27;t believe you were allowed to deviate from the design language. This one I have less visibility into as I worked on technology pieces rather than things that had a user-facing component.</text></item><item><author>StillBored</author><text>Role clarity is a huge one in my book. I&amp;#x27;ve turned down numerous offers because when I asked what the specifics of my day to day job were going to be, the answers weren&amp;#x27;t clear.&lt;p&gt;From the secret FAANG that likes to pretend what they are doing is defense contractor level top secret, and even after your hired you might not know what your actually working on, to the big companies where its clear the hiring manager only has a vague idea what to do with someone because they are simply building an empire.&lt;p&gt;At least some of them are more upfront and say stupid things like &amp;quot;you get to define your role&amp;quot;. Which is fine, if it comes with a grand vision, or your selling them on one, but frequently the grand vision is little more than &amp;quot;evolve our huge product, and justify it&amp;quot;. Which is frequently just make work, and you won&amp;#x27;t be provided resources to actually implement a vision. And you can see this stuff in the public  releases of products. Its the split personality of the windows control panel, where someone decided the current one wasn&amp;#x27;t good for a touch environment, but only had the manpower&amp;#x2F;political will to fix like the 5 most common things people want to change. So the results are garbage, and are the functional equivalent of 1&amp;#x2F;2 a wing glued to a car because someone wants an airplane but they only had a car.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>_heimdall</author><text>I worked at Microsoft for a few years and later as a contractor at AT&amp;amp;T for about 2 years.  I saw the 2 extremes as far as PMs go.&lt;p&gt;My PMs at Microsoft were all good at tracking tasks&amp;#x2F;projects and managing blocking issues.  At a minimum they saved me a lot of headache having to answer why a task was late when I was blocked by a dependency.  They also had quite a few technical PMs, my brother was actually a PM there before I started after getting his Bachelors and Masters from MIT.&lt;p&gt;AT&amp;amp;T&amp;#x27;s PMs were a totally different story.  Not only did the PM team outnumber our dev and test teams, most of them were tasked with being product owners for insanely small features.  Consider having a PM literally responsible for how a light switch works in home automation, that&amp;#x27;s the level they broke it down to.  Some of the PMs lacked skill or experience, but all were expected to do very little of value and were considered to be successful if they were in meetings nonstop to take notes and give them to the next team in line.&lt;p&gt;PMs can be vital parts of a tech business, but only when they are given real responsibility and expected to create value rather than countless piles of noted and calendar invites.</text></comment>
<story><title>Red flags I saw while doing technical interviews</title><url>http://blog.interviewing.io/6-red-flags-i-saw-while-doing-60-technical-interviews-in-30-days/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>vlovich123</author><text>Of the big tech companies, I&amp;#x27;ve worked at Facebook, Google, &amp;amp; Apple. I&amp;#x27;ve still not quite cracked what&amp;#x27;s different about Apple culturally that they seem to be more immune to this problem. The only main difference I can spot is I don&amp;#x27;t recall ever encountering a PM at Apple. To do planning engineers would propose improvements, new features, etc. These were bubbled up. Then executives would be responsible for building a theme around those developments &amp;amp; how that fit larger company-wide themes for iOS. On the other hand, I don&amp;#x27;t know if that was an Apple-wide thing or iOS-specific (at the time it was hard to distinguish since the entire company was largely organized around iOS&amp;#x2F;MacOS).&lt;p&gt;Another difference is that design is top-down at Apple. Any UI redesign was driven by Johnny&amp;#x27;s team which was responsible for a holistic and consistent across-the-board implementation. I don&amp;#x27;t believe you were allowed to deviate from the design language. This one I have less visibility into as I worked on technology pieces rather than things that had a user-facing component.</text></item><item><author>StillBored</author><text>Role clarity is a huge one in my book. I&amp;#x27;ve turned down numerous offers because when I asked what the specifics of my day to day job were going to be, the answers weren&amp;#x27;t clear.&lt;p&gt;From the secret FAANG that likes to pretend what they are doing is defense contractor level top secret, and even after your hired you might not know what your actually working on, to the big companies where its clear the hiring manager only has a vague idea what to do with someone because they are simply building an empire.&lt;p&gt;At least some of them are more upfront and say stupid things like &amp;quot;you get to define your role&amp;quot;. Which is fine, if it comes with a grand vision, or your selling them on one, but frequently the grand vision is little more than &amp;quot;evolve our huge product, and justify it&amp;quot;. Which is frequently just make work, and you won&amp;#x27;t be provided resources to actually implement a vision. And you can see this stuff in the public  releases of products. Its the split personality of the windows control panel, where someone decided the current one wasn&amp;#x27;t good for a touch environment, but only had the manpower&amp;#x2F;political will to fix like the 5 most common things people want to change. So the results are garbage, and are the functional equivalent of 1&amp;#x2F;2 a wing glued to a car because someone wants an airplane but they only had a car.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>screye</author><text>Yep, I have noticed this about project managers too.&lt;p&gt;I have worked with some amazing project managers, but almost all of them were more hybrid-somethings than purely business-degree folks. Usually designer-PMs or SWE&amp;#x2F;DS-PMs who drive the vision for the product at large. They make sure everyone in the loop buys into the same idea, is on the same page and stays in sync.&lt;p&gt;However, to do it effectively, the PM must have deep insights into the product. even better if the make-or-break aspect of the product is their specialty. A PM who facilitates communication without insights of their own is being treated like an expensive secretary by the company, and IMO, hurts the development of both the product and the individual.&lt;p&gt;I maintain that an amazing PM has scope to make a far larger impact than an amazing SWE. On the other hand, an average PM actively slows down progress, when an average SWE meets expectations and still gets their work done.</text></comment>