I remember once I was interviewing for a senior position where the ask was something like "design a general purpose system for a REST layer on top of an ORM."
I had just finished implementing an OSS solution that did exactly that, including some upstream changes we made to improve the system, so I walked through exactly what we did, challenges we faced, etc.
I walked out of the interview feeling as though the interviewers and I didn't speak the same language; they might've said the same. Not only did I not get the job, I never got another communication from the company.
To me, senior level interviewing, especially at smaller companies, is fraught. A full 1/3rd of the companies I've interviewed at would not have been a good "culture fit," and I'm a picky interviewer. I expect, like coding tests etc, these interviews are not aligned with the real travails of the position - growing talent, managing time, triaging, and ensuring stability/capability.
The interviewer usually can only rise to the level of themselves, especially when assessing skills.
System design is hard, necessary skills can only be earned, and then there are many avenue down to bad system design masquerading as good that people who implemented it just don't realize.
It takes a combination of humility and a degree of the skill in question to recognize the interviewee is more proficient at the said skill, and many are lacking in either or both.
I’ve got an interview coming up for a senior role on a UX engineering team (design system, component libraries, etc). The interview is just the standard set of backend system design and leetcode problems.
It’s a pretty big red flag to me that the skills being evaluated are so tangential to the actual job. It doesn’t give me any confidence that the people I will be working with have the skillset I consider important, or that the team and I will approach problems in a compatible way.
I suspect your fears are well-placed. Whoever is hiring this team has no idea how to hire for those roles and that suggests that those roles might not be valued within the larger company. Though sometimes the hiring manager has just lucked out and hired a great team so far. Still, will that team be listened to? Will that team be respected?
I had just finished implementing an OSS solution that did exactly that, including some upstream changes we made to improve the system, so I walked through exactly what we did, challenges we faced, etc.
I walked out of the interview feeling as though the interviewers and I didn't speak the same language; they might've said the same. Not only did I not get the job, I never got another communication from the company.
To me, senior level interviewing, especially at smaller companies, is fraught. A full 1/3rd of the companies I've interviewed at would not have been a good "culture fit," and I'm a picky interviewer. I expect, like coding tests etc, these interviews are not aligned with the real travails of the position - growing talent, managing time, triaging, and ensuring stability/capability.