The challenge I have interviewing people for very senior engineering roles is how to tell the difference between somebody who was
nearby when some interesting work got done, and somebody who
made something interesting happen. What I’m looking for in a principal engineer is someone who turns good teams into great teams; who steers the organization away from disastrous mistakes; who enables the business to accomplish things that, without them, would not have been done.
It’s something that comes hard to senior developers, because we’re all aware that every result is a team win. So when you’re asked about a project you worked on, you’ll tell the story all in first person plural: ‘we had to solve this problem, so we decided to use this approach’.
When telling that story in an interview for a principal engineer role, make sure you clarify your role. What was expected of you, and how did you knock it out of the park? What parts of the problem did you have to take personal ownership of? Which decisions did you have to go to the mat for, and why were you right? Convince me you are a differentiating factor in successful projects and we’re going to be interested in hiring you.
As an interviewer I try to dig towards these things but it is hard and honestly I need some help from the candidate - and at this seniority level I don’t think that’s unreasonable (the candidate should know how interviews work because they’ll have been in the interview chair themselves, right?)
It’s something that comes hard to senior developers, because we’re all aware that every result is a team win. So when you’re asked about a project you worked on, you’ll tell the story all in first person plural: ‘we had to solve this problem, so we decided to use this approach’.
When telling that story in an interview for a principal engineer role, make sure you clarify your role. What was expected of you, and how did you knock it out of the park? What parts of the problem did you have to take personal ownership of? Which decisions did you have to go to the mat for, and why were you right? Convince me you are a differentiating factor in successful projects and we’re going to be interested in hiring you.
As an interviewer I try to dig towards these things but it is hard and honestly I need some help from the candidate - and at this seniority level I don’t think that’s unreasonable (the candidate should know how interviews work because they’ll have been in the interview chair themselves, right?)