Interview question: your first 90 days as tech lead

I was asked to prepare a presentation on my first quarter as tech lead and I GOT THE OFFER!
Here's how I did it, and how you can go about delivering a similar presentation.

#programming #tech #softwaredevelopment #cmake #cpp

Buy my book!

[marius]

Great to see how well you handled this task, good informative video! Thanks!

[EduardoFernandes-yv]

I'm applying to a tech lead role. Got the interview tomorrow. Great insights Rafał, thanks!

[RockRiffManiac]

Interesting video! Hope to nail a tech lead interview just like this in the future (current SDE 2 at AWS). Thanks for the content!

[james-brgm]

The 100 devs in a year target is pretty mad. You need a team (if not multiple) solely focused on that if they really want to achieve it with a clear idea on what they'll be working on so really you need various teams ownership defined before you even start so you can hire other team leads for each and then go from there. After they're all hired it will also be an onboarding nightmare. Normally I get devs in the team involved in the hiring process it helps ensure the new recruits are up to standard so in this case that would be taking away most if not all of their time on normal project work. Basically the hiring would need to be the project for the year if this was their number 1 priority. You can try and automate this and they probably should but I've seen too many horror stories where really great devs have been missed because of it.

[HenriqueMDerosa]

These were all great things. Keep doing great content! :D

[catfishfortesque-smythe]

TLDR: Apply for lots of jobs, when you finally get one, make a YouTube video pretending you are an interview expert. I've been in the industry 32 years, worked my way up through the ranks, sometime as Lead, Architect, CTO and finally running my own software company, and and there is no "magic method" for interviews; you can only prepare for a limited number of contingencies, and then it is a matter of luck and whether your personality matches with that of the interviewers on the day. Once you are past the interview, 90% of the time the actual role you will perform, will have no relation to what you were measured against during the interview. What the industry really needs, is advice to people doing the recruiting, on how to structure a proper interview process. Not advice to candidates that can be good for one scenario, and complete wrong for 99 others.

[Dmitri_Ivanovich]

It's hard to believe you got an offer after presenting this surface-level mumbo-jumbo. And the CEO was impressed by the urgent/important quadrant thing? I feel like in management world that would be an equivalent to mentioning DRY to developers and expecting they would be impressed, while in fact they'd probably just roll their eyes. Good on you on getting hired, but I feel like recruiting process is just broken.

[thfreakinacage]

It comes across to me that the whole job is a sales pitch, because so much of this just seems so obvious to me that I wouldn't even say it, yet you've got slides for it. Like the quality risk when hiring that many new developers. Well yeah, I would have thought that be obvious. But you're saying here to say it anyway. So is that what we're after? Assume nothing is obvious and tell the people "above" you absolutely everything?