Back on the market: what my first interviews actually tested
After ten years inside company infrastructure, I found myself unemployed, rebuilding confidence with courses — and then discovering that interviews test something else entirely.
In April I became unemployed. I won't pretend it didn't shake me — my self-confidence was lower than I'd like to admit for someone with over a decade in data engineering.
My first instinct was to recap everything. I subscribed to Dataquest and worked through the fundamentals again, added computer science courses on edX, and a few more on Coursera. It felt productive. Every finished module was a small proof that I still knew what I was doing.
Then came the first interview
Three weeks in, I had my first "technical interview" — and the quotes are deliberate. I had prepared to write code, to reason through data problems, to show what I'd just spent three weeks sharpening. Instead, it was almost entirely spoken.
Nothing I had practised on a keyboard mattered. What mattered was how well I could talk about what I know: structure an answer on the spot, pick the right level of detail, sound confident about things I've done a hundred times but never had to narrate. It was a presentation exercise wearing a technical-interview costume.
That's not a complaint about the format — spoken interviews are how most screening works, and communication is a real skill. But it was a genuine surprise how little overlap there was between what I'd been preparing and what was actually tested.
What I took from it
- Courses rebuild knowledge, not interview performance. They were still worth it for my confidence, but they prepared me for a different exam.
- Practise narrating your experience out loud. "Tell me about a pipeline you built" is a harder question than actually building the pipeline, if you've never rehearsed the answer.
- The gap between doing and presenting is the thing to work on. Ten years of hands-on work counts for little in a screening call if you can't compress it into two clear minutes.
I'm writing this down partly for anyone in the same spot, and partly for myself — because I suspect the way I present my experience is going to matter more in this search than any certificate I collect. More on what I'm doing about that soon.