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

I absolute agree with you.

I have no idea where the idea that having someone come on site for 6+ hours wasting a dozen peoples time became the norm as opposed to talking to someone for 1 or 2 hours and truly speaking with them to understand what they know.

You're completely right, if you can't talk shop and not know when someone is bullshitting you shouldn't be the one interviewing.

How would this even fly in other industries? Are you telling me that someone can bluff their way discussing the intricacies of surgery to other surgeons without looking like a moron? Or discussing particle physics with a researcher and stand on equal footing? I honestly want to hear a conversation where a liar with no programming skills is able to convince a Senior level Software Engineer that they are on equal skill sets.

The best interview experience I had, where I eventually worked for the company, was having an hour conversation with the Engineering Manager who I would be working under then being ask basic programming Qs based on our conversation we had. Everyone in the company was interviewed the same way. IMO the resulting team was very professional and skilled on various levels from various backgrounds. I actually felt like a human at that job and not a person hired because of x thing.

I'll never forget I had an interview where they asked me a question about finding anagrams. At that moment in my life, I've never heard of an anagram or knew what it was. The Interviewer then explaining what it was to me made me feel very humiliated. I completely bombed every question because I had the audacity to not know about this thing where the interviewers knew about thing therefore I should know thing as well. I immediately understood how cultural biases can effect candidates getting jobs. I can only imagine how worst it is for people not from traditional backgrounds in this industry.

I agree in full with this article. I too have been freelancing for > 4 years, handling whole startups' software needs myself, and am faced with the exact same gauntlet of perplexing steps. My experience parallels the author's perfectly. Now we just get asymmetrical experiences on 1) number of highly qualified candidates for a job and 2) job creators' belief that not enough qualified candidates are available for the job.

They don't know how much they are willing to offer. You wouldn't get much out of a salary answer like this:

"Each interviewer grades you as 1 to 5. We sum that up, then multiply by $10,000."

Even knowing the number of interviewers wouldn't help you very much. You'd need to know how well the interviewers would score you, which won't be determined until after the interview.

The problem is symmetric, and observations will match expectations if you can treat it as such.

Put yourself in the place of the interviewer, who needs to decide on the person they will work with for the next two years. Software Engineering is already hard, and your interviewers are overworked. They are assessing whether you will be able to pull your weight. Their livelihoods are in this at least as much as yours, if not more. Interviewing is no different from cases where you have limited information to decide on a critical issue, like buying a house, choosing a surgeon, voting for town mayor. You have to separate the important flaws from the minor ones, assess the risk, and pick the candidate that is the best investment.

When you are in a technical interview, you are rarely assessed for some generic software engineer ideal, but for skills that the hiring team have in mind. The chances are very low that there will be a match with all positions you apply to, unless you are also very selective about where you apply to on your end.

Well I don't create the rules. Think of someone who does Judo for 20 years and still only wears a yellow belt. It seems like this person has no skill. The first impression is already negative, if one has a 20 something and a 50 something competing(!) for the same position.

Also the lowest level of each money-making hierarchy is usually where the unacceptable stuff happens. In IT it's this huge amount of new languages, new frameworks, new patterns that a 50 year old usually can't get into that easily anymore, to some degree because he knows it's just a hype that will be over soon. Even being 32 years old I get that feeling quite often already.

And let's say you really want to just code. Why didn't you spend the last 25 years of your career building a network and now simply do consulting work for $300+/h instead of working as employee for less than half?

Now that I said all of it, I have to say that I actually even agree with it. Everybody should have a plan how he builds and spends his career. And "I do the same thing for 30 years" is neither a plan nor a smart thing to do in IT. You could call it the disadvantage of individualism. You're free to do what you want, but that also means you are responsible yourself to find a way that works with the reality you face.