EM unable to clear interviews - help!
This may be an unusual ask coming from an Engineering Manager who is supposed to know their stuff. I have been an EM at a large ($120B+) software company (using a temp account) for 5 years now and recently started exploring EM / Sr. EM opportunities at a few companies, including some of the FAANG. I feel I have been doing well in all rounds, but clearly there's something amiss as I have been getting rejected everywhere. To be clear, I have been outright rejected only once. In all other cases, I was offered different teams / roles (first level Mgr / IC) from what I interviewed for. Interviewed at Amazon, Dropbox, Uber, Autodesk. Two more biggies coming up, and I am feeling hopeless. I am pretty sure it's my behavioral rounds and not the technical ones that are hurting me. What could I be doing wrong? Are there mock interviews for Managers like for engineers?
Karma biting back?
If you’re getting offered different roles, it’s because you didn’t meet the bar of the role you’re applying for.
Working at eBay I felt pretty hopeless after having a bunch of rejections. I took a lot of notes after each interview and studied my weaknesses to improve. I finally got two offers from really good companies and it is really hard to decide.
Just a question. At your current company, can you list down the typical daily routine and time-table of any of the engineers you manage? Or can you tell all the tasks that any of your engineers did yesterday along with the time duration of each task?
Sounds like the guy likes to keep a tab on the Engineers and micromanage. How will above information help OP? Specifically all task any of Engineers did, along with duration
Micromanagers don't generally know that they micromanage. The first step to solving any problem is to identify it, and answering the above questions will help in identifying it. Ideally a good manager should not be able to answer these questions.
I’ll address the situation for interviewing for Sr.EM and being down leveled to EM. EM - manages Engineers and the dev team Sr. EM - manages managers and potentially a small product team as well (depending on the org) So Sr.EMs tend to be single facet owners for a product - again depending on the company The major differences tend to be around people management (which a lot of dev managers aren’t good with ) , hiring strategy and track record, building teams etc. Another thing is if your management/leadership is scalable or can you only run one team yourself ? This is the most important distinction for the 2. And also relevant experience. Happy to help. DM for more if you need.
How was your experience at Dropbox ? Will be good to get some insights