A very interesting and educative topic!
I will share some of my personal experience as someone who has only about 5 years of experience.
I started my career in a small company from Moldova. The interview process was just a 15 minute talk, where mostly the owner would tell me about his ideas of a new project that I would participate in developing, after that he accepted to hire me with the salary I wanted. I asked him later why he would not make a proper technical interview, he responded that the interview would not show anything he needed, for him it was easier to ask one of the teachers from university for feedback.
It was one of the most interesting experience from my career. That project idea he had, I was assigned to lead and make it happen, it taught me a lot of hard lessons and mistakes that I think even people working tens of years could not anticipate. After working for about 3 years I had quite an impressive technological stack and development experience with very limited resources, however my soft skills did not improve that much, because we worked with a small team.
A while later sadly the company almost went under because one of the clients bailed out on a project where we used elixir, it’s the same thing mentioned on this thread about the fear of client that he will not be able to find new developers who will maintain the elixir solution if we were to quit.
After that the lack of soft skills bit me very hard, after about 3 months of interviews for an elixir position, I had to give up and ended up being hired at a small company in my country to work in golang. The sad thing is that the interview process was easy because I was recommended by a former colleague, however the mentor I was assigned was just pressuring me constantly, even though I made it clear before that I had no production experience in golang.
Almost a month passed and I received an elixir offer at a startup and I accepted it because I couldn’t take being watched every hour by the mentor. Sadly that job would not last, once again because of my bad soft skills. The CEO came from VS ecosystem, having worked in slow moving industries, had no prior experience with either elixir or CI/CD practices. I was tasked to design and build their backend in elixir. It was all going smoothly until he was insisting on using some questionable practices, that I would start to argue and give him arguments on why it was wrong, and the mistake I did was to not let go and let him see the result for himself. I made an enemy out of him, so I had to leave the company shortly after.
Now the biggest thing that bite me in the ass was the period after that, I had a very rich resume for my years of experience and I thought that would help me land a job easier, that was not the case.
In my country recruiters get intimidated if they see more than 2 technologies in resume, especially when they see elixir, that they and their engineers never heard about. After a lot of painful interviews and tasks, I was able to realize that the resume should be more or less tailored to the position they require, because I would always fail at the interview with the recruiter or never get contacted, because they needed someone with X years of experience in their stack, most of them don’t care about other things. The other realization I made was that soft skills are much more important, as the technical interview is mediocre usually (at least for positions I applied for).
Now after about 6 months without a job, I was hired, however I will either focus more on soft skills from this point on or try to move slowly to a different industry.
