> Another point, your specific background may not matter for L6 roles. I want to know if you can build the sort of thing you will be building in the role you're interviewing for. I don't care if you're good at building something else
Why would you narrow your pool so much, especially when specific experience is usually not what defines higher engineering levels but rather architecture, leadership and communication skills?
If someone is actually skilled in system design they would be able to come into a new domain, understand the constraints and design a system within those constraints.
People seem to superficially pattern match on experience that looks similar, but doesn't really have that much overlap a lot of the time.
My thinking is that most things are far more specific than we realize, so why not mostly forget about specific domain knowledge and focus on applicable high level skills? Domain knowledge is a nice bonus, but you're almost certainly going to have to learn things on the job regardless.
Why would you narrow your pool so much, especially when specific experience is usually not what defines higher engineering levels but rather architecture, leadership and communication skills?
If someone is actually skilled in system design they would be able to come into a new domain, understand the constraints and design a system within those constraints.
People seem to superficially pattern match on experience that looks similar, but doesn't really have that much overlap a lot of the time.
My thinking is that most things are far more specific than we realize, so why not mostly forget about specific domain knowledge and focus on applicable high level skills? Domain knowledge is a nice bonus, but you're almost certainly going to have to learn things on the job regardless.