During my quest for a new position, I’ve been talking with multiple recruiters and hiring managers and answering tons of questions about my career, management situations, codings skills, Linux internals… but there was one question that really struck me and it’s still resonating in my head: Can you handle stressful situations?
Yes, of course, I can. It’s something I’ve handled several times… I said.
Wrong! To put things in context, the position was (is) Infrastructure Lead Engineering Manager and several different departments asking you for resources you didn’t have. How to prioritize, whose department to content first… If this was just a one-time problem, meh, just deal with it. But if this is something recurrent, then it’s the company the one that has a real problem. We are not error-prone. The more times we face this kind of situations, the more opportunities we’ll have to screw things up. This is a scalability and lack of resources problem, and it’s something we shouldn’t allow to happen, for our own health and for the company correct performance. So the next time something like this happens, simply refuse to play the game and tackle the root of the problem.