Big Tech Contract Position Offer
I received an offer from a Big Tech company for a contract Data Eng role. Whoot!
While I'm happy to have gotten the offer, I'm nervous about it being a contract role and in particular I'm nervous about the nature of the team.
My mentor told me to reverse-interview the hiring manager:
His message to me was:
Ask: I’d like to get a better sense of what I’ll be working on and how that work fits in with the rest of the team - I’m curious what lead to the need to open up this role?
Then based on what they say, you usually follow up with where do you see this position and work fit in after the initial 6 months.
So he says to ask the hiring manager about:
- what work I'll be doing
- how the role opened up
- possibility of extending or converting to FTE
I'll add my own question which is how much am I working solo vs. with others? In my convo with the hiring manager, he indicated that this role is to maintain Paid Marketing Pipelines which the team he manages is not focusing on. He said there's a lot of work to be done cleaning up tech debt, which involves migrating SQL pipelines scheduled with Airflow to dbt. That sounds like bread and butter Data Engineering, although it's definitely not the cool and shiny work.
I have 5 questions, 2 here and 3 in the first comment because of the character limit:
- Any other quick thoughts about what to ask about? There are lot of great questions here, the Masterclass on Choosing a great EM, and questions like this one and this one. I plan on going through those, but if there's anything I should def ask about, it'd be great to know!
- In talking to the Hiring Manager, should I negotiate before or after Reverse Interviewing? My mentor says to negotiate after learning more about the role which seems intuitive to me as I want to make sure I want to accept it before negotiating. But Gergely Orosz says very much the opposite here. What gives?
Discussion
(6 comments)- 2
4 months agoFounder of Expanded Skills • Former Head of EngineeringOn question #2, I'm not quite convinced of Gergely's reasoning for doing this before reverse interviewing. To be fair, I think the key point of that article is to do some form of reverse interviewing vs. none at all.
"Negotiate your offer to the final offer, before reverse interviewing. Get the money out of the way. This is especially true if you have multiple offers on the table. Negotiation has a bit of back-and-forth, and in this phase you want to still sell yourself, and make it clear how much value you'll bring if only they can move a bit more up on the offer."The reverse interview should give you more specific reasons for how your skills bring value to them, which is a key part of negotiating for better pay.
Question #3: It is totally reasonable to ask and even get a head start on relationship building.
Question #4: I don't think it's necessary to report it as such. I'd mention it only when someone asks.
Question #5: I wouldn't ask a friend to do too much investigation, but rather ask him what his opinion is on things such as:
- the state and direction your project is headed
- if they treat contractors differently
- interactions with your manager, others on your team, and key stakeholders
- 0
3 months agoData Engineer [OP]Financial CompanyThanks Casey!
- 2
3 months agoTech Lead @ Robinhood, Meta, Course HeroI think your mentor is correct about the negotiation angle: Negotiating before the interview is fully over just seems weird to me.
On top of that, your mentor is just sort of right about everything. I don't have much to add on top of all the existing topics you're already asking about. The path to FTE is the juiciest one of course, but the quality/scope of work is also very important alongside the quality of the team.
In general, I'm wary about contracting positions, even at FAANG-level companies, but I've seen several success stories. A lot of the conversion process is out of your control, but there's usually some amount of it that is in your control. Focus on that and give yourself the best shot at converting to FTE by following all the Taro advice:
- Do incredible, high-quality work
- Build up relationships and earn trust
- Learn how create scope when what's on your plate isn't sufficiently exciting (this is likely as a contractor)
Careers are long. If this contracting position doesn't work, you can switch to a different role. I can't say how tough the market will be at that point if that were to happen, but Taro will be on your side 😊
- 03 months agoData Engineer [OP]Financial Company
Thanks Alex!
- 04 months agoData Engineer [OP]Financial Company
3 more questions:
- In addition to the Manager, I'd like to talk to an engineer on my manager's team and a stakeholder I'll be serving. Since I didn't have the chance to talk to either in my interview process, this is a reasonable ask, right?
- Do I need to report on my resume and LinkedIn that this is a contract role?
- I have a friend who works at the company on front-end and he's told me he's happy to ask around/dig for info about the team. While information is good, I'm concerned that I might be getting too much information, as I'd be leveraging: a) the hiring manager and anyone else on the team I speak with as part of my "official" correspondence with the company; b) my friend who would be asking around on my behalf; c) current or former employees who I reach out to on LinkedIn. Is this a case of trying to do too much? Should I limit my approaches here?
If you've read this far, thanks for bearing with me! I know I have a lot of questions, but I appreciate the answers and learn from them
- 13 months agoTech Lead @ Robinhood, Meta, Course Hero
In addition to the Manager, I'd like to talk to an engineer on my manager's team and a stakeholder I'll be serving. Since I didn't have the chance to talk to either in my interview process, this is a reasonable ask, right?
Might as well ask. It's a reasonable question IMHO, so there's no real cost (the worst thing they can do is say "No"). Keep expectations low though as it's generally quite rare for IC engineers to talk to interview candidates.
Do I need to report on my resume and LinkedIn that this is a contract role?
Yes. The dynamic is fundamentally different between FTE and contractors. If people think you're FTE and find out later that you're a contractor through probing, that's probably grounds to kick you out of the interview loop immediately.
I have a friend who works at the company on front-end and he's told me he's happy to ask around/dig for info about the team.
If they can do it more discreetly without sticking out like a sore thumb (read through their launches, commits, project docs), that seems like a good source of information.
After that, I wouldn't do much more. You don't want to directly/indirectly ask half the company what the team is like, haha. That could definitely come across as annoying.
