The Software Developer's Career Handbook

Chapter 4. The Sanity Check

The amount of infrastructure sitting between you and your next gig is impressive.

Ironically, this infrastructure was purchased and configured to get you as close to this job as quickly as possible, but it doesn’t. Corporate job sites are usually outsourced affairs because HR departments traditionally have neither the budgets nor the expertise to build the system they’d actually use. They shouldn’t; it’s not the core competency.

With half-baked solutions manned by contract recruiters, it’s almost a miracle when an email shows up with a recruiter wanting to set up a phone screen. Someone, somewhere in the organization has successfully mapped you to an open position. This is a really big deal because, in my experience, the chance that you’ll get this job has improved logarithmically. It’s not 50/50, but it’s vastly better than when you were a random résumé sitting on a desk.

There’s a sense of relief when you have an actual conversation with a human being, and as soon as you hang up the phone with the recruiter, you’re going to call your best friend and say, “Hey, I got an interview with The Company!”

No, you didn’t. You got a phone screen, and a phone screen has little to do with an interview. While your situation isn’t as tenuous as the 30 seconds you have to make an impression with your résumé, you’re still not in the building, and nothing real is happening until you’re in the building.

Here’s the precise mental process I use as I walk through the ...