Sr Engineering Manager, Csaba, answers all your job search questions
We collected 9 answers from the community and asked them to Csaba, Sr Engineering Manager at Contentful, and he shares his perspective as a hiring manager.
Hi friends! Last week, Csaba reached out to me for a collaboration. I often share insights from the recruiter’s perspective, but in the hiring process, the hiring manager who leads the team is the final decision maker. Csaba kindly offered to share his advice as a hiring manager with 15+ years of experience in software development, and you can find his LinkedIn here.
We collected questions from our readers and Csaba shared his answers (shoutout to Nico, Joseph, Jacques 🙌). If you’d like to like to ask more questions, check out his newsletter Leadership Garden and reach out to him on Twitter!
Caveat
Csaba: The following answers are all based on my experience in startups. They don’t necessarily apply for other kinds of companies (e.g. bigger corps), and are definitely NOT universal truths :)
Q: Did you ever decide not to hire an otherwise good candidate because they didn’t seem to stay long enough in their previous jobs?
Csaba: No, never. There are a lot of individual life/work situations out there, who am I to decide whether we’d be a good match just by this data? Such candidates might get rejected earlier, though, and never make it to a step in the process when I can see them and decide. What I’m looking for in an interview loop boils down to two basic questions, basically ‘matchmaking’:
Do I think that the role/company/culture/etc. make a good place for the candidate?
Do I think the candidate is what we’re looking for at this time for this role in this specific stage of the company/team?
(Un)surprisingly it’s question 1, not 2 that relates more to tenure! Can this role provide something for the candidate that they’ve been missing which resulted in them trying to find it elsewhere?
Annie: Sadly I’ve not worked with Csaba, but I’ve seen some inexperienced hiring managers or recruiters who made decisions based on past tenure. Their argument is that if someone changes jobs so quickly, they’ll leave us for better offers soon too. This happens more with junior positions where there are more than enough applications, rarely with hard-to-fill senior positions. Think supply and demand!
Q: What tenure are you looking for from previous employments?
Csaba: Tenure is just a conversation starter for me. If I see lots of job hopping (or only short tenure) I simply ask the candidate to tell me what made them change jobs. I do get tons of valuable signals from these conversations plus a much better understanding of what the candidate is looking for. So, to answer plainly: I’m not looking for any specific tenure.
Q: What qualities do you look for in a junior outside of tech?
Csaba: It’s actually mostly outside of tech! I’m not looking for great tech skills and experience, since, well, they are juniors. I do look for tech affinity, which translates into a problem solving mindset. Besides this the biggest decisive traits are demonstrated learning (both the willingness and the capability to do so), an open mind, communication skills, being a good team player (which does not mean ‘taking one for the team!’) and being open to feedback. I hire juniors mostly for potential, and seniors mostly for performance.
Q: What are some things outside of a traditional cv and cover letter that you have seen and liked?
Csaba: I’m a sucker for portfolios. Whether it’s a site, or simply a well-maintained GitHub profile doesn’t matter. Portfolios (a big word for a simple “I did these things, look at them”) are a great way to both showcase actual skills AND, more importantly for juniors, an experimenting, learning mindset. For example, as a junior, building a simple thing in 3 different languages/frameworks is wonderful! When I see this I can’t wait to discuss their experience, what they liked and disliked, how they’d compare these frameworks/languages, etc.
Q: Do you have any tips on negotiating salaries?
Csaba: See Annie’s earlier newsletter on this :)
I can talk about how these things go in the types of companies I worked at. Might be completely different elsewhere! From my side as a hiring manager how the process goes is that once we we say ‘yes’ to a candidate, I sit down with a recruiter, look at the following things:
What salary the candidate already asked for
Our calibration of the candidate vs. our engineering leveling system salary ranges
Is it a match?
My driving principle here is fairness. My job is to hire engineers, not to save money for the company. The existing ranges are there to make sure the company is conscious about what it’s willing to spend on certain kinds of engineers.
There are 4 potential situations here regarding the candidate’s salary req.
It’s a good match - after the interviews we think the candidate is a mid-level-2, and the salary they are asking for is actually at the middle of that range. Perfect, send out the offer.
It’s somewhat above the calibration in the range - let’s negotiate
It’s completely over the range - this is a tough one, because I won’t be unfair to the folks already in the company getting paid in the range
It’s actually below the calibrated value. It’s good news, the candidate gets on offer with more than what they asked for. (happened recently)
Annie: You can also find helpful information in Understand your startup compensation.
Q: How do you identify a good engineering culture?
Csaba: This is a tough one, because of two things: one, ‘good engineering culture’ is a subjective term, two, most interview loops are not designed with a good candidate experience in mind, leaving very little room and options to really understand what you’d be signing up for. I’ve been talking to a few companies in the past 6+ months and in two cases I stopped the process before the offer because I just couldn’t get good enough signals of how the engineering and leadership culture was there.
In most interview loops you get a few times 10 minutes to ask questions, and that’s it. You can still make good use of this time, but usually it’s just not enough. Let me share a few of my usual questions for reverse-interviewing your interviewers on culture:
Can you tell me about the last time you dealt with technical debt?
How are technical decisions made in your team? Who’s responsible for what, and who needs to approve things? How is it done across the engineering organization?
How is the engineering department organized and why? How has it changed historically, and why? Do you think it’s working well for you?
How and how often do promotions happen?
Tell me about the last time you got constructive feedback from your peers. How about from your manager?
What is a VP/CTOs role in the company? How do you interact with them?
Could you walk me through how an idea is born and then becomes a project? Who does what in this process?
How do you measure your performance?
How do you measure your projects’ success?
Can you tell me about the last time your team missed a goal?
How have you grown in this company?
How do you support juniors in this company?
Do you have a mentorship framework?
In some cases you get to spend more time with the future team (e.g. a team lunch) or others, which can be great to observe culture, including power dynamics, which is a great signal of culture.
Photo by LinkedIn Sales Solutions on Unsplash
Was this helpful? Don’t hesitate to reach out to Csaba for more tips. If you’d like to see more Hiring Manager Q&As with leaders in other fields, let me know and I’ll reach out to them ✍️
Thank you, Csaba! Much appreciated!