[ruh-roh]

This is interesting - I have been passively monitoring LinkedIn and a few others for senior engineering management roles for the last year or so (VPE, DoE). I am not really looking, I have only pursued a couple of them, but my feed/inbox is noteworthy. Many of the "openings" have been out there for multiple months, some a year+. A good handful are tweaked slightly every few weeks to appear new.

I can understand fishing for individually contributing junior-to-senior developers, but for senior management roles? Would a company really troll waters to find a senior leader that they don't really need? "Hey, look what I found, let's find a spot for him/her!"

My theory has been either (1) those companies are super picky, which is understandable given the impact of those roles, or (2) they don't really know what they want, and they are using the interviewing process to figure it out. But regardless of 1v2, those companies likely have people fulfilling those management responsibilities today that they have otherwise deemed unqualified, or are very-senior C-level folks that are too busy to do it well.

[hnfong]

If I were a C-level executive planning to extend business to a new area, and none of my reports are quite up to the job, I'd probably be looking to hire a senior manager to fill that spot.

But if I can't find the right person in a couple months time, I have a choice -- do I put some unqualified person there to do the job, or do I wait? I think there are strong arguments to wait, especially if the project is not time sensitive or a huge priority.

Or maybe to replace a person who has left. There's a gap and perhaps a not-quite-qualified (or a qualified-but-too-busy) person is temporarily taking care of things while the company tries to hire. There's a choice here too -- do you hire the least-bad person after say 3 months, or do you wait? Given the impact of bad hires at this level, I think I'd definitely wait.