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For hiring teams
Know what to ask, and how to level what you hear
Most engineers learn to interview by being thrown onto a panel. The Missing Cipher gives interviewers a shared picture of what Junior, Mid, and Senior engineers actually do, and the questions to find out where a candidate fits.
How to level an engineer
Years of experience won't tell you
Hiring managers would much prefer to use years of experience. It's easier. It's also almost entirely meaningless.
| Junior | 1-2 jobs, 0-2 years. |
|---|---|
| Mid | 2-4 jobs, 3-5 years. |
| Senior | 3-6 jobs, 4-10 years. |
“Years of experience say nothing about what you did in those years.”
You could have done a variety of tasks or the same ones over and over. You could have stretched yourself to learn new skills, or stayed in a rut. The numbers are made up, but they seem realistic. Remember that when you see them in a job description.
Level by how work reaches them instead
The book defines each level by what an engineer does, starting with how their work gets to them. Every chapter has a leveling table like this one for its skill, from system design to incident response.
Junior
Junior Software Engineers are assigned tickets. These tickets are simple bugs and lower-priority features that do not require multiple steps.
Mid
Mid-Level Software Engineers pick tickets. These include more complex bugs that can involve multiple services. The requested features may be multistep, and the tickets may not include all the information.
Senior
Senior Software Engineers pick projects from context. They break them down into tickets and create roadmaps.
From the Interview Questions sections
Questions that show you how someone works
Chapters 2 through 14 each end with interview questions for that chapter's skill, so you can build a loop around the role you're hiring for. Here are six of them. Candidates can use them to practice, too.
Tell me about a time when priorities kept changing while your team was in the middle of delivering. How did you handle it?
Your API’s response times climb as traffic grows. How do you diagnose it, and what do you reach for first?
Describe a time you shipped something “good enough” instead of perfect. How did you decide where to draw the line?
Tell me about an alert you inherited that wasn’t working. What did you do with it?
Tell me about a time you tried to influence a technical or organizational decision and didn’t get the outcome you wanted. How did you handle it? How would you have done it differently?
We are launching in a new country. What would you research before changing any infrastructure?
Copies for your panel
Get your whole interview loop on the same page
When every interviewer uses the same leveling language, you spend less time debating and more time hiring the right person.
Interview panel plus coaching
Bundle copies with coaching sessions with Michelle and save on both. Use them to calibrate your panel, or give candidates and new interviewers mock system design and behavioral interviews.
Want to plan ahead? Tell me about your hiring team