- Throwaway account because I'm pretty easily identifiable XD

- Backstory: I resigned from a great job at a great company a few months ago (was just kinda tired and wanted a change).

- I have recently dipped my toes back into the water, interviewing at a few places that I think I'd be a good fit for (from the outside looking in).

- I don't take the "kill spray" approach to interviewing. I do genuinely make an attempt to submit a thoughtful application to a company where I think the fit (for both parties) is real.

- I'd say I've had about 3 interviews reach the initial stages of a system design/architecture interview.

   - This is actually a big deal for me because unlike a lot of others, I choose to not pursue interviews that require LeetCode/HackerRank/etc (I have several years of experience at companies you've heard of, and have thousands of lines of public OSS code in various languages).

- However, my interview experiences are ... awful.

- During a system design interview a week or two ago, the interview did not lead the interview. Don't get me wrong, having been on both sides of this interview, I understand the point of them - you have to show tradeoffs, start small, scale up, talk about alternatives, etc. However, the interview did not lead the conversation whatsoever. I'm asking the interviewer "I'm happy to talk about XYZ or happy to talk about scaling this up if you prefer" - the interviewer just kinda shrugs.

- This isn't a one-off thing. I've noticed that generally the interviews are horrible :'( -- arbitrary interview loop sizes (4? 5? 6?) - hard pass. Arbitrary success metrics because "I just want to see how you think" - um no.

- I hope I don't sound like too much of a baby HN, but I'm literally on the edge and am thinking maybe after just 7 years of software (during the golden easy money years) maybe it's time to switch to something else? I simply cannot continue to subject myself to these extremely ambiguous, grey interviews where it seems determining my ability to write production software is the _last_ thing on the list they're checking for.

- It would be helpful to get a kick in the ass from someone, or to get some perspective because I simply don't understand how I can get new job, if I can't even find an interview loop I actually want to do.

- Mind you, the worst interviews I'm referring to above tend to be from medium to large size companies. For smaller companies/startups I've noticed the interviews are still pretty fair and decent.

- Any advice is greatly appreciated.

user:	Souzana
created:	December 27, 2019
karma:	20