The common thing I see is there is an implicit bias from interviewer, who always wants to hire someone like himself/herself. I also hear comments from the candidate that - as an interviewee if I interview the interviewer, he might fail too. If the interviewer stays unbiased, we may see better results.
Things I Learned from a Job Hunt for a Senior Engineering Role
61–70 of 766 posts
Re: Things I Learned from a Job Hunt for a Senior Engineering Role
#62sounds like a naive candidate to me. surprising (but not shocking) for someone with so much experience. if he’s 50 yo, assuming same career since graduation, his first mistake is applying for senior roles. senior is 5-7 years experience. he should be applying for staff roles at minimum and up to principal. i guess you’re not supposed to slam posts here but this article is more of the same old same ole. i would like t…
In my experience, getting hired for those "post-senior" roles is even more ridiculous than for senior roles. You often run into biased, judgmental, and insecure directors and vice presidents who seem to be terrified that you know more than them. I say this as a 37-year-old with nearly 20 years of experience. Sometimes, people don't want to believe that you know what you're doing.
yes, it is very, very challenging. please keep in mind it’s not that you have to have technical chops, which you certainly won’t even be entertained if you don’t, you also have to be a very good culture fit.
Re: Things I Learned from a Job Hunt for a Senior Engineering Role
#63- Companies are less willing to hire than I’ve ever seen
Is this true for other people ?
Re: Things I Learned from a Job Hunt for a Senior Engineering Role
#64I just can't wrap my head around how prevalent this sort of thing seems to be - even as we hear, every day, that there aren't enough programmers to be found, anywhere, even when you expand the search to include the whole world.
Re: Things I Learned from a Job Hunt for a Senior Engineering Role
#65There was a great article called “Adventures in the low social status of software engineers” by Michael O Church, who seems to have mostly deleted his blog content to preserve his career prospects (telling the truth publicly makes you unsuitable for upper management roles).
This was not a popular article because it was getting at a very uncomfortable truth for many people: Software engineers are still (despite industry propaganda) treated as replaceable cogs.
In this article, he walks through the importance of signalling and the different treatment the same candidate receives when positioned as one role (engineering) versus another (management).
The engineering positioned candidate received a derisive gauntlet of demeaning brow-beating during their interview process. When the same candidate is positioned as a manager, he gets back slaps and fist bumps combined with a much higher salary offering.
As a former software engineer and now manager, I assure you this is true. I quit engineering because I went through several interviewing processes where I was treated like a drooling imbecile. It wasn’t just me, friends of mine who have produced projects used by ten millions of developers (really) received similar treatment!
The solution is not to tolerate being treated like this.
Unfortunately, too many engineers lack the EQ to detect when they are being stepped on. Sales people, who are entirely focused on social status and dominance would never tolerate this treatment.
An even worse truth: Maybe software engineers have become completely disposable cogs and this poor treatment is a warning sign that it is time to consider a career change.
If I were a software engineer still, I wouldn’t accept these interview processes. I would only work for companies who treat me and my background with respect.
Re: Things I Learned from a Job Hunt for a Senior Engineering Role
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
A few years ago I was approached about a new opportunity, and through the course of the interviews I was given a generic fizzbuzz-like coding challenge and I completely bombed it. I got flustered, I got stuck on something trivial, and I ended up running out of time with not much to show for it. It was in a language that I had been using for 5+ years at that point, using a framework that I had just finished architecti…
Some of the most important skills programmers should have--in my opinion, more important than writing code--are reading code, debugging, adjusting to the project management strategy of the company, and interacting in functional ways with the team.
I agree, and yet i've never seen an interview that asks questions about a block of realistic code (not some bullshit minified, uncommented function).
Partly because it's not exactly easy to get enough context and understanding about a codebase in an interview to be able to accurately debug something, but also because again it comes back to what you are familiar with. 6 years ago I would be damn good at debugging and optimizing MySQL queries, today I'd probably struggle to get a moderately complicated one to work without a lot of looking things up and trial/error (I mostly work in postgresql now!).
That's why I like to ask about their past experience. Tell me your war stories, tell me what you did to figure out that bug that was causing the elusive crash, tell me about your struggles getting webpack setup, talk about how you initially planned to do X but then after issue Y decided to pivot to Z because it was simpler/easier/faster/whatever, explain how you accidentally put a quadratic-complex function into the hot-path of your application that one time and when you found out it was a problem.
Just talking about stuff like that can often show where a developer is in their career, what they are good at, how they go about solving problems, etc... And it's almost impossible to cheat/fake it.
Re: Things I Learned from a Job Hunt for a Senior Engineering Role
#67I've been involved in hiring senior engineers for a while now, and here's a few counterpoints: 1) Ruby is hard to get a job in, so you are off to a rough start. 2) A lot of people with lots of experience actually can't code for crap. Do you know how many python developers I see that don't know the difference between a tuple and list? Like, how could you be a real dev if you never even wondered why sometimes you use […
> 4) That said, you should know how to write code that isn't super slow and with a data model that isn't insane. You should also know how to articulate that, since as a Senior dev, you WILL be mentoring junior devs, and communication is not optional.
I agree, but this should be a clear point. You shouldn't be overengineering something unless you really have to.
Re: Things I Learned from a Job Hunt for a Senior Engineering Role
#68Number 2: No One Believes Anyone Can Actually Code It's surprising to see the number of people who interview for lead technical roles that cannot code, or whose work is exceptionally sloppy. Incompetence is more commonplace than the author believes, even at the highest level.
I feel like this is a myth, what do you estimate the figure is? I think under 10%, maybe under 5%. I have significant experience interviewing senior, junior, and mid-range candidates. 99% of my candidates can code, as in iterate over collections, write case statements, and call functions. I've only had one junior candidate who couldn't code at all. Sloppiness is rampant, but sloppy code that gets things done is what my company wants (not me personally).
Re: Things I Learned from a Job Hunt for a Senior Engineering Role
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
Seriously. I've sat on the hiring side. I've seen impressive resumes. I've had reasonable discussions with people. And then I give them a very, very trivial coding exercise (a take home, they're free to Google, do it on their own computer, in their own IDE, in their professed preferred language), in a time frame that while constrained is still plenty...and the result is -terrible-. I can try and come up with reasons…
It's weird, I've heard plenty of stories about this kind of thing but when I sat on the hiring side and interviewed for intermediate roles (couldn't even afford senior) I didn't come across anybody who was stumped and simply couldn't code. There were people who were bad at (possibly some because they were under pressure), it but nobody who couldn't do it at all. I wasn't giving out a trivial question either.
Same here. I have given an interview to exactly one person who would fall into this category, though most have been bad coders.
Re: Things I Learned from a Job Hunt for a Senior Engineering Role
#70I've been involved in hiring senior engineers for a while now, and here's a few counterpoints: 1) Ruby is hard to get a job in, so you are off to a rough start. 2) A lot of people with lots of experience actually can't code for crap. Do you know how many python developers I see that don't know the difference between a tuple and list? Like, how could you be a real dev if you never even wondered why sometimes you use […
> 1) Ruby is hard to get a job in, so you are off to a rough start.
Huh? Enterprise level companies are desperate for Ruby engineers to maintain large Rails apps and there still is a good amount of startups doing new work with it.