The Long Way to Lead

The numbers

The search took about two years. Somewhere between sixty and seventy interviews. At one point, because of how companies block their interview loops, I had almost ten interviews in one week.

I got ghosted more times than I can count. You do the phone screen, you do the technical, you do the panel, and then nothing. No email. No call. Just silence until you figure out on your own that it's over.

Two years of that will make you doubt things about yourself that have nothing to do with the job.

The résumé that kept getting opened

Somewhere in the middle of all this, I added a feature to the app I was building for my own search: it showed me when someone opened my résumé.

Most of what I saw was noise. Post a link somewhere and it gets scanned by bots, and that looks like a read. But once you learn to filter that out, patterns show up.

One company kept coming back. Over and over, for days. Someone would open it, then half an hour later open it again. I couldn't tell if it was one person re-reading or the link getting passed around the office. Either way, they were paying attention.

When I went to that interview, the first round was easy. It felt like the person already knew me. The coding round wasn't bad. By the third round, the first interviewer had already given me a heads-up on what to expect and what to talk about.

I got the offer.

Later, after I'd started, my hiring manager told me he'd read every word on my résumé and my website before we ever spoke. Not the five or six skills a normal résumé has room for. The full list. Every course I'd taken, because I'd logged all of them. He said I basically had the job before I walked in.

That's the part I want you to sit with. Two years of studying is what made me able to do the job. But what got me in the door was that everything I'd done was written down somewhere he could read it.

The second search

That job ended after a management change. I'll leave it at that.

The second search took about two and a half months. Not two years.

Part of that was the retraining. But a big part was that everything I'd accomplished at that job, the quarterly highlights, the test coverage I'd driven from zero to nearly thirty percent, was already logged as I went. Updating my résumé was pulling items out of a list.

I interviewed for a software engineer role and got the offer. Then they asked if I'd also interview for lead data engineer, a supervisor position. I said yes, as long as the first offer stayed on the table. It did. I got the second one too. More money, and the step into leading a team that I'd been trying to make for a long time.

That's where I am now. I think of it as my forever job.

What I'd tell you

The long search and the short search were the same person with the same skills. The difference was what I'd written down, and where.

That's the story. Starting next post, the practical part: what I'd actually do, step by step, if I were starting today.