I was recently interviewed for a position on a team in Seattle. I was pretty excited up until I met the hiring manager. He started the interview by asking me what position I was interviewing for and then asked if I would be willing to accept a lower position. He straight up asked me if I would be okay accepting a senior position while interviewing for a principal position.

This got worse: he even asked me what salary range the recruiter had quoted me. This person then went on to open his laptop and told me he needed to check if the budget allowed for it during the interview!

I am not sure how I kept calm through this; I guess it's because it was an interview and I was stunned. This guy then asked me how I would write a directory enumeration, but did not understand the difference between enumeration and read, and kept on being aggressive with his questioning. Most of the rest was about how I would test it and how I would deal with a tester. I could clearly figure that this guy didn't have a developer background.

I must say that this was the worst interview I have had, and I hope this doesn't repeat. The rest of the interviews were as professional as they could have been, so I didn't bother much about it until I heard a "no" from the recruiter.

You can imagine that I was very curious about this nightmare of a human's background. Lo and behold, I found a long stretch of short stints as a tester in a bunch of Seattle companies.

I know Bay Area companies hire these 'people managers' who have no technical knowledge regarding the product, but want to be a cross between project managers and technical leads. This is a horrible outcome for both the company, since they are highly unsuited for the job, both technically and as managers, and the managers themselves, since that is no way to progress in your career. They make technical decisions because they are a lead while demoralizing technically smarter people because they are reporting to them, all the while knowing that they are a better fit for the job than you are.

Every company, small or big, ends up making bad hiring decisions. I think the people manager positions with barely any technical background are definitely avoidable though.

What I wrote above: Will you accept a senior position while interviewing for a principal position?