* I am currently employed with great benefits. If I am going to throw that away there needs to be something of value in exchange: leadership position, architecture, or some other increase of responsibilities. I wasn’t seeing this.
* If your primary platform or language is JavaScript everybody wants a tool jockey. They claim to want somebody full stack. But when you really press for details the really want somebody to do react on the front end and play around with their cloud provider. The services piece in the middle is where things get strained in a full stack interview. If tools are the direction of work I have already lost interest. Why would I want to give up stable employment with great benefits to wire tools together? I would rather just stare out the window.
* The idea of a senior engineer is incredibly convoluted. It sounds like people want somebody who can mentor in a vacuum. You can only mentor so much about dicking around with tools. If you try to mentor past that and the culture is just go dick around with tools you are either mentoring too much or not enough. Either way you are a horrible senior incompatible to the new organization. Worse is when they ask you to guide and train junior developers without leadership support. Really if that should work beyond vague hints you need a title. Excellent juniors have a passion for learning but many juniors aren’t excellent, just want a paycheck, and feel insecure when challenged.
From going through the exact same conversation several times in a row I get the impression many employers kind of know what they want to build, kind of guess at what they need, and completely guess at what qualifies as execution planning but cannot put any of that together into a single vision.