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Things I Learned from a Job Hunt for a Senior Engineering Role

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Re: Things I Learned from a Job Hunt for a Senior Engineering Role

#311

Post by twodave »

haskellandchill wrote: post #68
pg_bot wrote: post #6

Number 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…

Well, this may be a location and tech-dependent problem, but specifically hiring .NET positions in Jacksonville, FL I would say maybe 10% of the hundreds of people I've interviewed can code. Recent graduates, 10 years of experience, everything in-between. It makes no difference.

Re: Things I Learned from a Job Hunt for a Senior Engineering Role

#312

Post by Clubber »

eire1130 wrote: post #217
mightybyte wrote: post #59

The "No One Believes Anyone Can Actually Code" point is right on the money by my anecdotal experience. Just a few weeks ago I was asked to implement FizzBuzz in an interview for the first time in my 15 years of engineering! This was despite having a large amount of verifiable open source Haskell projects.

I'll be honest, if anyone asked me to write a FizzBuzz style test, I would just walk out on the spot.

I'm sure they'll chalk it up to you being incompetent.

Re: Things I Learned from a Job Hunt for a Senior Engineering Role

#313

Post by pkteison »

I have interviewed a lot of people with great resumes who literally could not fizzbuzz, or even write a simple for loop. And then if they can write the for loop, most fail when it's a nested for loop. And I don't mean got the syntax wrong - I mean just can't even start, on the simplest of tasks.

I hate that I have to question whether candidates can code, but as near as I can tell, a lot of them truly can't. It leads to an interview process that I'm embarrassed to need to use, but it seems reckless to skip it. I've worked with people who really can't code, and don't want to be back in that situation again. I'd love to have a better interview process, and I'd love to spend more time talking about higher level concepts, but most of the process seems to be stuck just verifying that the things on your resume are really things you did, and not just things you were on the team for but didn't actually do, or outright fabrications.

Re: Things I Learned from a Job Hunt for a Senior Engineering Role

#314

Post by expertentipp »

The numbers from „who am i” overlap with my last job search for a senior dev role, even though I’m good 15 years younger. In the EU an additional obstacle is that in radius of 400 km they start speaking completely different language not knowing which significantly limits one’s options. Now, I’m happily sitting at this one position at the end of the pipeline and have to relearn everything and most of it will be useless in 5 years. These Angular/react/redux/etc „communities” still think they are cool by reinventing and rewriting from scratch a wheel. What about creating an up to date, consistent, search engine crawlable documentation - it’s not cool enough for you, eh?

Re: Things I Learned from a Job Hunt for a Senior Engineering Role

#315

Post by nly »

Tests can be a great leveler if you have a subpar degree or limited experience on your CV.

A number of years ago I was insta-rejected by e-mail within 24 hours of submitting my CV for a role. I was cocky enough to reply to that rejection email with a 'give me a shot'-type response, offhandedly tossed an online coding test, nailed it, then invited to interview, and later offered the job.

I never took it, but it was a huge boon for my confidence.

Re: Things I Learned from a Job Hunt for a Senior Engineering Role

#317

Post by mindhash »

jcadam wrote: post #274
phaedrus wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I once got knocked out of the running by a whiteboard-coding interview question that went something like "How would you find all triples from a list of a million integers, where the first two numbers add up to the third?" I said, "Hmmm that sounds like an O(N^3) problem." Interviewer: "Can you think of any way to do it in smaller big-O?" Me: "Not off the top of my head, no." For some reason that company insisted on o…

Had the same thing happen to me. Simple problem: find out if two strings are anagrams of each other. My immediate solution: Sort the two strings and then compare them: (defn anagrams? [x y] (= (sort x) (sort y))) or some such. I was fortunate in that they didn't make me implement the sort (because it's been a long time for me) :) "Ok, what's the efficiency of that solution?" "Well, assuming the library sort functions…

on a tangent, one way could be assign a number code to each alphabet. Add the numbers that occur in the strings. IF the sum matches, they are anagrams.

Re: Things I Learned from a Job Hunt for a Senior Engineering Role

#318

Post by twodave »

spamizbad wrote: post #133
haskellandchill wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

We set our in-house recruiter up with a coderpad question that screens candidates with a simple question: "Write a function that counts the number of vowels in a string" Candidates are allowed to run it multiple times and just have to produce a correct result within 10 minutes. It's not a trick question -- the test case in place makes sure you pay attention to case. Success rate for mid to senior devs? Only 60%.

This isn't bad. I've used one similar:

"Write a function that reverses the words in a (string) sentence"

i.e. (x) => x.split(' ').reverse().join(' ');

Re: Things I Learned from a Job Hunt for a Senior Engineering Role

#319

Post by raarts »

> Coding Tests Can Trip Up Even Good Engineers

I recently took the first one ever in my career (in my late fifties). People tell me they think I'm an excellent programmer, but I did awfully bad. Why?

- it was my first time

- in daily life I switch between many languages, devops, meetings, and research. It always takes me some time to ramp up, especially on syntax: coming from Elixir, switching to Javascript: how does JS access object members again? I usually need an hour or two to get up to speed again.

- the tasks are very much outside the normal realm. If in real life I need to map some multi-dimension array, I first look for libraries and such, and if not, approach this as writing a library function: take my time to do it well.

Even though I could rationally understand the reasoning, it still felt demeaning, given my resume. Also, because I underperformed, it's easy for them to jump to the wrong conclusions.

Re: Things I Learned from a Job Hunt for a Senior Engineering Role

#320

Post by collyw »

pkteison wrote: post #313

I have interviewed a lot of people with great resumes who literally could not fizzbuzz, or even write a simple for loop. And then if they can write the for loop, most fail when it's a nested for loop. And I don't mean got the syntax wrong - I mean just can't even start, on the simplest of tasks. I hate that I have to question whether candidates can code, but as near as I can tell, a lot of them truly can't. It leads…

I have heard about these mythical people but never met one. Usually ten minutes of questions and you can see who is full of crap on their CV, but I have yet to meet someone who can't code at all.
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