Onsite EM Manager accused me of being a jobhopper, advice?
Won't name the company but recently had onsite with a company, 2 coding rounds, 1 system design and 1 EM round (company does team match so this is not hiring manager per se).
Unexpectedly, he spent the *whole* interview accusing me of being a jobhopper repeatedly and didn't want to discuss about my projects/work/achievements. This was in stark contrast to pretty much every other interview I've given.
Here were the couple latest positions in question:
MSFT - 1.5 years
Place 2 - 2.5 years (Would have stayed but was leading the only web/mobile team at the company and due to the nature of the product and SLT ties with 3rd party vendor we relied on, they decided to invest heavily in the 3rd party's new whitelabel solution and reorg everyone back into the parent business which had no opportunities for me). I was offered another role in the legacy business but decided to move to MSFT
Place 3 - 4 months (Put in place oncall after 2 weeks of joining, rotations was 2 weeks on 2 weeks off only for the FE workers, also transitioning to microservices which meant all service errors flowed through UI and caused pages. On the order of 13 pages an hour, 24 hours a day each oncall week. This was mainly due to a single service that consumed Twilio and had unhandled errors. As the team wasn't getting paged and there wasn't significant revenue loss, they refused to address it. I tried to silence those alarms and push for the issue to be addressed and for broader rotation of oncall so teams develop empathy for each other but I had no power/agency to do so and was met everytime with rejection)
Place 4 - 1 year (Tech subsidiary started by major RE developer to build a system/app that complements all their other services and acts as an acquisition funnel. Owner was not respectful of personal late nights and such, but more importantly would come up with extremely large feature requests with unreasonable timelines on the team as they did not understand the development lifecycles. Myself, the founding PO, and manager had many many late night discussions with the founder to help develop that understanding and try to communicate the costs involved for randomization and erratic requests and timelines. Ultimately it fell on deaf ears and I felt like a pawn in charge of creating a sweatshop environment so I left.
Place 5 - 1 year (Acquired and dissolved by acquirer)
In every case I had great relationships with my team and manager. I've had many prior colleagues choose to work with me again elsewhere and that has been the highest praise. In every case (even in the 4 month position) I've delivered the product/charter I was hired on and set out to do and left amicably with great relationships.
This interviewer EM did bring up that MSFT is a massive corporation with teams working on everything and anything and I could always transfer, which was a valid point.
Overall, despite my best efforts and explanation (and some things being out of my control), the EM just kept saying jobhopper jobhopper and ended the interview 10 minutes early. For the record he joined this company just 1 year ago and his LinkedIn does not show him as less of a jobhopper if mine is considered as such.
TLDR: EM during onsite only focused on what he felt was me being a jobhopper and nothing else, I don't feel it was a good assessment of me for the role. Would love any advice from the Blind community on how to/how I could have handled this situation.
No TC as this info is already too identifiable, but have an offer around 400k and expect more come next week. YOE ~10 non-FAANG.
comments
if I was the recruiter for that job, I would avoid using that interviewer again for future interviews
If this was the HM I'd just pass on the opportunity but since it's team match this EM wouldn't have been my manager anyway, upsetting.
And honestly, was money your motivation to move at any point? For example MSFT?
There are positive and negative aspects for both options.
It is your life, your decisions. If the people interviewing you do not value your experience, it might be a red flag for you joining them, rather than the other way around.
Overall I don't think this EM's opinion is representative of the whole company not valuing my experience so I don't want to brush with broad strokes, much like I hope they can afford som benefit of doubt vs painting me simply as a "jobhopper" and discounting what I can offer or circumstance.
There's a team matching process as well so the way I see it, the only people who matter are the hiring managers who I speak with if I get there. Only caveat is this company (not AMZN) has a "bar raiser" and this EM might have been it, in which case if he feels that strongly about me being a jobhopper, the performance in my other interviews probably won't prevent a rejection.
Maybe ask him what is the bigger concern to him? That there are things you haven't experienced because you haven't spent enough time in any one company to reach that level of depth? Or that if hired here, you wont stay?
Then highlight the opportunity you're interviewing for and why it's a good match for you. "I'm not a bad person" isn't going to make them want to hire you. "Im actually going to stick around in my next role because x" might.
I did touch on these points a bit but it definitely caught me off guard and I'm sure it could have been done better.
If you join you should do your best, but the company also needs to do their part.
If this was your last interview that is mostly the person who is responsible for making yes/no hiring decision. They can see feedback from previous interviews and may be you passed everything else, but wants to make sure you have long term plans/ if the right team fit.
You can try to address this concern, defending this is probably not very easy. Remember you are being interviewed, they are deciding if they want hire you.
It is not illegal to ask why you worked so many jobs. One of the requirements for promos to principal level is ‘drive and deliver significant work over a period of time’ - like two years etc. your experience seems to suggest you are lacking this
I did pick up on this concern and did mention I would like to stay longer within the team and my interest in the company, though I'm sure I could have handled it better, was caught off guard a bit, didn't expect that topic to span the whole duration.
This company does have a bar raiser (though not Amazon) so I do imagine this person was playing such a role as well.