Your interview process for senior engineers is wrong

You know what makes senior engineers valuable. Your interview process tests for something completely different.

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Your senior engineer interviews are probably testing the wrong things.

Think about the last senior hire who didn’t work out. I’d bet it wasn’t because they couldn’t implement a binary search tree. It was something harder to pin down - they couldn’t navigate the existing codebase, struggled to explain technical tradeoffs to stakeholders, or made decisions in isolation that created problems downstream.

And yet, when you designed your interview loop, you probably spent 80% of the time on algorithmic problems and coding exercises. You’re hoping to catch the skills that actually determine success in the role in a 45-minute “behaviou…