Although I absolutely hate it, I interview every 1 or 2 years and use it as negotiation for refreshers. The only time I ever got a reasonable pay bump was by showing I had alternative offers. On the other hand, you have to also be willing to leave.
Python (or really any dynamic programming language) makes interviews a lot easier, however I have started asking more in-depth questions to make sure they actually understand Python and have done a little bit of research into the language and implementation.
I have noticed some colleges have been teaching more to the interview, so their grads can crush some problems in Python but fail when you ask them to implement a helper they were using. I am not talking about implementing a heap either, I am talking about merging objects.
I chose a startup over a better Big Company offer (although no where near the difference in pay), and deeply regret it. Understandably the grass is always greener on the other side, etc., however here are a few things to consider:
1. Really stupid things can happen, even with established startups. We lost our 401k and may possibly lose our healthcare (although that is looking more promising) when our HR/Ops manager went on extended leave and their replacement is still struggling with the basics. This isn't due to a lack of funds, but rather the new person being disorganized and ignoring emails from Zenefits. When I joined we were a well oiled machine, but we were dependent on one person, and things fell apart quite quickly after they took leave.
2. People are still people. No matter how much say you have, your startup will make a bad hire, most likely many. This happens at all companies, but startups particularly struggle with finding decent candidates at early to mid stages. The difference is, that with a startup having a bad employee can make work significantly worse without any proper recourse. Even if you hire great people, you may find that the startup you joined is culturally different 6 months to a year later. Things change fast, and for many things go from great to awful within the span of 3 months.
3. When it comes to bad hires and politics, the most common complaint at large companies is that the only people who get promoted are those that are friends with the manager, etc. That is an issue no doubt, but at startups everyone is expected to be friends, and the role between boss and friend is even more blurred. We have a legitimately bad employee (caught her twice rebasing her PRs after reviews, so changes could not be tracked between commits, in which she responded to review comments by adding carriage returns so github showed that the code changed and therefore hid the comments), but there is no proper path to reporting this, and bringing up these issues are extremely taboo on my team, especially because she is now close friends with our boss (they meetup during vacations). Sure, this happens at large companies, but I cannot move teams or even refer to a standard to we can stop this from happening. Honestly, it hurts the most because the whole point of a startup is that you care about the product and team, so when this happens it just becomes a low paid job since you lose the culture of trust.
There is a lot of good that comes with startups, but I will be honest, unless you are starting your own, or are young and are looking to be best friends/party with your coworkers and make your job a lifestyle, it usually is not worth it.
edit I wanted to add one more point: The startup I was at previously gave me 1% of shares. Things were not working out well, and our CEO sold for an acquisition hire in which he made ~$1.5 million, and I would have made ~$36k after vesting for 3 more years. Literally, with the acquisition hire signing bonus and new salary, I would have made less than I do now from just switching jobs than if I stayed.
However isn’t the point that references are people who have worked with you and (hopefully) managed you. By calling a backdoor reference, you may not be calling a strong relationship and getting hearsay. For all the recruiter knows, they could be calling a coworker that asked the candidate out on a date and was rejected.
The whole point of references is that given the opportunity to put your best foot forward, can you find people to vouch for you. It may fall short, but so will calling a tenuous relationship.
I did quite well at my previous job (my boss has been a reference twice, in addition to my employee who took over my position when I left), but had a another specific manager been asked, I would have received an awful review, unrelated to my job, but because he hated my boss and therefore hated me and my team. We rarely worked together, and he has little idea of my accomplishments, but it wouldn’t be crazy to ask a director at my previous company for that backdoor reference.
Basically my issue is that I don’t believe that backdoor references are in any way more effective than regular references, but are tremendously unethical, and could lead to false negatives.
Backdoor references are very unethical in my opinion. Beyond the fact that you are telling a third party about someone’s job search without the searcher’s consent, you can also get a very biased opinion.
My wife was fired from a job at a well known University in the area. She had 2 bosses in a year, one of them twice after coming back from prolonged mental health leave. Within a month of coming back my wife’s boss had a long term relationship end which lead to my wife being blamed for everything and anything, and was then subsequently fired.
On the other hand, my wife has excelled at her current job. She has been promoted 4 times at this point to a director level position and is extremely well respected. If they were to call her previous boss (who has had multiple people promoted over her in the past 2.5 years), the review would be awful and not reflective of my wife’s work.
You know what would have caught this without any effort what-so-ever? Calling the company and verifying dates of employment. It is part of every job application, and is expected.