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Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

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Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#101

Post by throwaway082729 »

Interviewing is broken. Whiteboard tests with a bunch of algorithm and data structures questions are meaningless and have no relevance to reality. If I ran engineering, this is what I'd have candidates do.

1. Initial video conf meeting to make sure he/she can communicate well. Talk about the role. Have a technical discussion covering candidate's past experiences to evaluate whether they really did what they claimed to have done. Discuss a technical subject that the candidate is passionate about. If satisfied, go to Step 2

2. If the candidate is a strong referral, go to Step 3. Otherwise, do a technical phone interview where the candidate solves a simple problem (more complex than FizzBuzz but not the standard algo/DS/string manipulation question)

3. Onsite Interview. Session 1 - write a simple service (todo list, twitter clone, etc) - 2 hours. 4. Session 2 - Ask the candidate to do a code review where the code in question has bugs and is poorly designed. 5. Session 3 - Candidate does a presentation of some technical topic to the team or at least a few people in the team. 6. Session 4 - Lunch 7. Session 5 - System Design exercise focusing on testing candidate's depth

Train interviewers to provide objective feedback. Calibrate scores for each question ahead of time. Interviewers should be calibrated as well. Ideally, same pool of interviewers for each question.

Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#102

Post by Townley »

I'm a senior developer, and my wife is a corporate recruiter (at another company). The frustration both parties experience with the hiring process is palpable, and leads to some of our most eye-opening dinner table conversations.

On the developer side, whiteboards feel like having to study for the SATs again, which is doubly frustrating at the senior level because you know better than before how little these questions correlate to qualification. Irrelevant, spam-esque LinkedIn messages from recruiters confirm how sloppy the whole process feels. And you spend the whole time thinking, there just HAS to be a better way.

On the recruiter side, they have to wade through a horrifyingly-unmanageable torrent of unqualified resumes with the help of bad tools. When a great candidate fails their test and can't move forward through the process, the recruiter is almost as frustrated with the process as the applicant (management, I'm told, remains unwavering in their commitment to "establishing a baseline"). Even worse are the candidates who are filtered out from the process by Applicant Tracking Systems because their resume lists "8+ years of experience with a wide variety of NoSQL databases" and not "MongoDB"

I think both parties recognize the inefficiencies in the process. Where we've landed is the following:

- Developers need to learn to play the game. Understand how much of a black hole "Easy Apply" buttons can be and not rely on them, optimize their resumes for the role (including anticipation of boolean searches based on the job posting), and make meaningful connections with their local tech communities so recruiters know where to find them.

- Recruiters need to advocate for flexibility and transparency in the process. Workflows involving "shoving as many people into the funnel as possible and use an ATS to sort through the noise" are untenable. Reconsider systems that treat whiteboards or tests as requirements and not just data points. Offer up relevant information earlier, with the hope that good applicants will use that info, and their honesty, to help you figure out if they're a good fit.

Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#105

Post by village-idiot »

thomascgalvin wrote: post #58
aserafini wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

‘Culture fit’ (without clearly specifying what that means) is such an enormous backdoor for all manner of bias and personal prejudice I’m surprised the concept is even legal.

I've seen "culture fit" used in an attempt to reject female candidates because the interviewer didn't want to stop telling dick jokes around the office. Fortunately, the management chain caught this and ... corrected the issue.

Turns out culture fit was the problem, just not for the candidates.

Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#106

Post by on_and_off »

ixtli wrote: post #9

We need to admit that the interview process isn't about determining the relative qualifications of the applications in the pool, because we all know that 3 hours and whiteboard can't tell anything you need to know about whether or not that person will perform over the years. We need to acknowledge that we perform this pantomime in order to satisfy layers of management that are unable to accept that you can't hire for…

>First of all, I want engineers that are good at working with others

Yes ! The worst engineers I have had to work with were sometimes pretty skilled technically, but their ego or shitty personality was preventing them from being somebody the team could benefit from.

I would have thought that it is why we have cultural fit interviews though.

Personally I would sooner drop whiteboards than cultural fit interviews, but the later probably need way more training for the interviewer than what I got.

Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#107

Post by maaaats »

kaesar14 wrote: post #53
umvi wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, it's just a hunch though. I've only spent an hour or two with the person, I don't know actually know if they would be hard to work with. Candidate one gives off slightly anti-social vibes but is brilliant, candidate two jokes around with me during the interview and is smart as well, but less so than candidate one. Am I justified in going with candidate two on a hunch?

In your position, I’d take candidate 2. Displaying a reasonable level of competence and ability to work in a group is so much more crucial for a small company!

But now you did the mistake of assuming a lot of stuff, with very little data. Why can you say that person 2 is better at working in a group? Maybe person 1 was just very nervous, or is a type that takes a few days to warm up to new people. Maybe person 1 just crack jokes all day and is actually detrimental to the productivity. Impossible to tell from this one que alone.

Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#108

Post by chrshawkes »

GVIrish wrote: post #48
RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #8

>But don’t think that you can walk into another job based on market demand and the number of years on your resume. The issue is that there are a lot of programmers who have a lot of years and who consider themselves senior who have very little programming ability. If you have been with a “senior” developer who had no idea how to program but was always telling other people what to do, because he was senior, you know t…

> A truly senior developer who really wants the job, with a few weeks of practice for an hour every night can considerably improve their chances. Thing is, very good people always have a plethora of options. So a company that tries to make a talented developer jump through somewhat silly hoops, is often going to miss out on that person. Google for example will say, 'we're ok with a lot of false positives' but they ar…

I've received offers to interview with Google, Facebook, Amazon and others... I turn them all down. The key is to find a job you like and make money on the side.

Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#109

Post by anarazel »

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #8

>But don’t think that you can walk into another job based on market demand and the number of years on your resume. The issue is that there are a lot of programmers who have a lot of years and who consider themselves senior who have very little programming ability. If you have been with a “senior” developer who had no idea how to program but was always telling other people what to do, because he was senior, you know t…

> A truly senior developer who really wants the job, with a few weeks of practice for an hour every night can considerably improve their chances.

But why would I want to spend that time? There's a lot of companies out there looking for experienced people. I have better things to do than to cram things I'll not actually need. I'm lacking time, not tasks and ideas.

Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#110

Post by neilv »

michaelbuckbee wrote: post #10

So there are multiple things that are true with people applying for development roles: 1. These "dev gate" programming challenges are filtering out senior devs, talented devs, creative devs etc. people who would be great at the role. 2. There are people applying for these roles who can't knock out a decent Fizzbuzz solution (in any amount of time). 3. For many roles, there's a flood of applicants Any solutions to thi…

I used to just look at someone's resume and then start asking them, in a collegial engineer fashion, about technical questions that come to mind about things they've worked on, and go from there, perhaps in speculative directions. But that's not good, now that everyone is concerned about real or perceived IP taint.

There's now a better way, now that a lot of people have open source contributions. Look at their open source contributions, especially if they're involved in public discussions as well as in code. Then you can followup and ask them about those.

Open source behavior is not necessarily quite the same as workplace behavior, especially if their participation was unpaid, and they had limited time, and the team dynamics were different, but there can be a lot of overlap.

(Simple example, using someone famous: if you did not know anything about Linus Torvalds, and didn't trust his resume and references, you could learn from looking at his open source participation that he knows how to code, has managed ambitious projects with cat-herding, is knowledgable and conscientious, historically has a very frank manner that some might find discouraging, and has recently reflected on manner and is modifying it. If that isn't enough, start discussing a technical topic with him that doesn't seem to involve proprietary IP.)

One engineer taking a quick glance at open source participation, and then asking questions about that, is arguably more useful than the engineer spending the same amount of time asking some contrived question and sitting in a stuffy room while the candidate does a theatre performance under conditions that aren't representative of real work.

Also, before considering dumping many hours of take-home makework programming on someone, it's respectful to first take a look at their open source. (Especially with a person who does open source on the side. There's an extra frustration with takehome, which is that they probably have backlogs of unpaid open source things they'd like to spend time on, and the takehome is hours of similar work in free time, but gets thrown away.)

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