Had me fill out a pre-interview questionnaire, then participated in a virtual in person.
From the outset, it was pretty clear that the hiring manager was struggling to handle the technical side of the house so they're trying to hire folks who are able to better handle the job requirements. It sounds like their code quality is a mess, and when you get to the end of this review you'll probably understand why.
The initial half of the interview went well in terms of leadership, communication, etc. The odd turn came on the technical side of things. They asked a number of questions that are pretty irrelevant in terms of whether an engineering manager can do what they're asking. It's like they Googled "technical interview questions" 5 minutes before the interview. Other questions felt rather nebulous as I couldn't figure out what they were trying to suss out. If were them, I would have dug deep by asking me specifics based on real world issues SkyTouch has seen in their own system and how I would mitigate them and/or asked me delve more deeply into projects on my resume.
Overall, the technical interview portion seemed poorly structured and not at all well thought out. They made little attempt to correlate anything on my resume with what they are doing, but that's likely because they spent little to no time looking at my resume. They certainly didn't read the answers to pre-interview questionnaire they sent me, as they asked me some of the same questions during the interview pretty much verbatim.
The follow up interview was supposed to be in-person where you'd architect a solution and talk through it in detail, which is very much in my wheel house. I was looking forward to being able to really demonstrate what I can do in that regard, but was never given the chance.
The strangest thing is that I would have been managing not only a small team, but also a LEGION of contractors. The number sort of blew my mind. One thing I know well is that if a company is highly reliant on contractors, rather than investing in and retaining FTE's, it's almost certainly not a well run technical organization. Contractors have no vested interest in the success of your business, only the success of receiving yet another paycheck.
It's no wonder throughout the interview that they seemed obsessed with reiterating how important it is that the person they hire needs to spend a lot of time performing code reviews. Managers shouldn't have to spend any time doing code reviews -- if you're hiring the right people and putting the right processes in place. Contractors will do the absolute minimum and only up to the point of what they're told. Real "owners" are FTE's who take pride in their work, to the point that none of this is an issue you even have to lose a minute's sleep over.
I could have helped institute such changes, but it is what it is. On to the next.
