I once bombed an interview so badly that the engineering team basically wrote me off. That massive interview fail ended up changing my entire career, even though in the moment it felt more like it ENDED my career.
I was working at a company called Openwave when a few of my coworkers left to start what became Zimbra. They tried to recruit me. I said no, because I wanted to finish vesting my stock.
In hindsight, that decision probably cost me millions of dollars.
A year later, Zimbra was 15–20 people and doing well. They called again. I went in to interview as the “web guy.”
The engineers grilled me. I was a decent manager but not a rock-star coder. I walked out feeling like I’d face-planted.
Inside the company, the feedback was basically, “We can’t hire this guy. He can’t code at the level we need.” The founders, on the other hand, still wanted me on the team.
So they did something smart: instead of forcing me into the wrong box, they created a different role.
I joined as a developer relations person. My job was to live on the forums, answer technical questions from email admins, file bugs, and go to conferences to talk about Zimbra. I was like a human chatbot for our forums before actual chatbots existed.
I answered thousands of posts. I outworked everyone. I learned the product inside out.
Within about a year, I was managing the same engineers who had voted “no” on hiring me.
Here’s the lesson:
- Your value is not defined by one interview.
- Titles matter less than proximity to the customer and the product.
- If you’re willing to do the unglamorous work that nobody else wants to do, you can earn authority even in a room full of people smarter than you.
If someone offers you a role that looks like “support” or “community” and you’re early in your career, don’t dismiss it. Taking that job was my gateway to running big product and engineering teams later on and I'm forever grateful for the Zimbra team for ignoring my faceplant.