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Before we begin:
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In This Issue:
The warm intro trap and why it backfired on a senior dev
Why banks hit senior engineers with junior level questions
The contractor to FTE penalty
What 10 years of Python can’t compensate for
How to recover after bombing an interview you should’ve owned
A reader, let’s call him Marcus, wrote in this week.
Senior Python developer with twelve years of experience. Laid off six weeks ago when his last company cut folks in their tech department. He’s based outside Charlotte. Married, two kids, mortgage, etc.
He got a shot at a job at a regional bank where he used to contract for almost three years. His old manager vouched for him hard to the new hiring manager with a strong reference and a warm intro.
Then the interview happened.
The new manager spent forty five minutes asking him computer science fundamentals. Big O complexity of dictionary lookups. When to use a linked list versus an array. How a hash collision gets resolved. Binary search tree traversal. Needless to say stuff he hasn’t touched in a long time.
He bombed it. Not catastrophically, but enough to make the positive internal reference irrelevant.
He wrote in asking what happened. He had the reference, experience, and the history at the company. How did he still flame out on questions a CS sophomore could answer?
Let me tell you what happened. And let me tell you why this is going to keep happening to senior engineers in 2026 until you all wise up.
The warm intro is a starting line, not a finish line
