Technical Interviews Through a Staff Engineer's Lens
The job market is broken, and bad hiring practices helped break it. It's time to take accountability and fix the landscape.
I read the article above on LinkedIn today and it really made me think about the goal technical interviews. I've done 6 in the past couple weeks and all have made me rethink my title as a Senior (am I a a senior or junior now?) Software Engineer. Also, sparked this article.
Can You Tell?
Technical interviews are less about proving what you know and more about demonstrating how you think.
From a Staff Engineer's perspective, the signal isn't in perfect answers—it's in clarity, structure, and decision-making under uncertainty. At this level, expectations shift beyond syntax and frameworks. Interviewers are evaluating how you approach ambiguous problems, communicate trade-offs, and design systems that scale across teams and time.
Strong candidates narrate their thinking. They break problems down, ask clarifying questions, and make intentional choices. Whether discussing app architecture, performance optimization, or cross-platform trade-offs, they anchor decisions in real-world constraints—user experience, maintainability, and business impact.
Coding still matters, but it's rarely about cleverness. Clean, readable solutions with clear reasoning outweigh complex, fragile ones. Edge cases, testing strategy, and incremental improvements signal maturity far more than speed alone.
System design is where seniority becomes obvious. Staff-level engineers think in terms of ecosystems, not features. They consider offline support, observability, release strategies, and how mobile integrates with backend services and product goals. They anticipate failure modes and design with resilience in mind.
Equally important is communication. At this level, you're expected to influence—aligning teams, articulating trade-offs, and driving decisions. Interviews reflect this.
Can you explain complex ideas simply?
Can you challenge assumptions constructively?
The candidates who stand out aren't the ones who try to impress—they're the ones who make it easy to trust their judgment.
That's the bar... and that's the bar we need to put back.