Please, Don’t Reach Me to Offer a Job!

Instead, offer me to work on the biggest challenge that your team or your company is having and why your company needs someone like me to work on that challenge.

I love to work in a place that really needs me the most and my contributions will really matter.

This is how I usually landed on a unique role in my career.

In the mid of 2018, I feel like I’m ready to take another challenge in my career path and I decided to move on from my previous job. While holding that though, I remember that I’ve seen a glimpse of an email that is actually an aggregator email from one of the job sites, and I saw a role that is really interesting to me, which was the “Video Engineer” role on the mailing list.

I keep asking my self what kind of role is that? Most of us probably familiar with “Backend Engineer”, “Frontend Engineer” or probably “Full Stack Engineer” role, but a “Video Engineer” role? That’s new! At least for me!

So initially I hesitated to apply for that position, first of all, I don’t have any background related to the work on the relevant field and the industry, and secondly, the stack of technology that the company is using is totally different than the stack of technology that I’m familiar with.

Long story short, my first interview for the job happens in November 2018. I’m really impressed with the whole interview process which was started with the interview with the head of the department, not the fancy coding or algorithm test.

I even made a video on my YouTube channel (Indonesian language) explaining that interview is one of the best software engineer interviews that I’ve been through. This video is one of the videos that gets the top five most viewed videos on my channel.

For the non-Indonesian speaker, the summary from that video is about me telling the story about the whole process of “one of the best software engineer interviews in my experience” and also explaining about what kind of interview process that I really like and hates, i.e.:

I would definitely skip the whole interview process if the first thing on the interview process is doing an online coding test (with a time limit). I won’t be bothered to do it and make my self failed.

I would prefer it if the coding test is building a small project with or without a time limit, not in hours, probably the kind of project that will give us some time to do our own research and give us the best opportunities to prove our self and allow us to give our best result or output to be submitted.

I often reject an offer from a big (“enterprise”) company because I always have a thought that they don’t really need me. They could just easily find someone else to do the kind of job that they required.

My preferred company culture is probably a start-up or small to mid-size company. I love the bootstrapping process where all the ideas generated, no complex approval process, and hierarchy, and the most important of all, we all have a mission to survive and make things work or get the jobs done. With all the storms and thunder and the “almost-dying-experience”, that really thrills me.

If I ever decided to leave the job, the only reason is that I probably thought that my contribution to that company does not really matter anymore and I feel that they can survive without me. Because as I mentioned earlier:

I love to work in a place that really needs me the most and my contributions will really matter …

:-)