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Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

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Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#151

Post by silentsea90 »

bastawhiz wrote: post #64

I reject senior software engineers all the time. I give interviews on whatever language you're most comfortable in, I'm not interested in time or space complexity, I just care about how well you can use your tools and debug. I'm continually astounded at the number of people who can't sort a list (with their language's standard library), clone an array, or do basic string manipulation. I've had a staff engineer at Goo…

Memorizing the method for sleep in javascript is the least of a staff engineer's concerns at Google. Besides, with something as easy to google and aided by the IDE, do you REALLY care? What matters is that the guy is able to design and structure a solution, google whatever he needs and build it. At his level, he'd guide a team working on such projects and be concerned with high level design, working with management and managing large $$$ projects.

Do your engineers work out of a cave with no internet and code on cave walls?

Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#152

Post by suzzer99 »

wahlrus wrote: post #89
bastawhiz wrote: post #64

I reject senior software engineers all the time. I give interviews on whatever language you're most comfortable in, I'm not interested in time or space complexity, I just care about how well you can use your tools and debug. I'm continually astounded at the number of people who can't sort a list (with their language's standard library), clone an array, or do basic string manipulation. I've had a staff engineer at Goo…

Lol. At my job, I code in several different languages. Sometimes, a new project requires me to to learn to write in a new language. It's not a big deal... Programming is pretty general, so new syntax doesn't slow me down too much. But I can't tell you what the sleep command is any of these languages. I look it up every single time :P

Same here. Also using sleep for anything other than debug is code smell.

Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#153

Post by neogodless »

throwaway082729 wrote: post #101

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 t…

Presumably you would only hire people for a very high level, very well compensated role, and those individuals would plan on staying for a decade or more?

I'm not saying your process wouldn't be effective, but it is asking for a very big commitment for one interview for one position at one company. (And that same commitment would have to come from your company and all the interviewers involved!)

Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#154

Post by jvagner »

maaaats wrote: post #107
kaesar14 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And hence, some weight in the skills/judgement of the interviewer.

Which is also why there are usually multiple stages in an interview process, or at least, you pass a candidate to 3 or more team members to interview the candidate.

In my experience, it's hard to find good candidates, but not that hard to figure out which of the candidates will be a good fit, and a strong contributor, to a team. I've also hired mostly for team sizes of 10-20 developers, not 200.

Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#155

Post by geebee »

bastawhiz wrote: post #64

I reject senior software engineers all the time. I give interviews on whatever language you're most comfortable in, I'm not interested in time or space complexity, I just care about how well you can use your tools and debug. I'm continually astounded at the number of people who can't sort a list (with their language's standard library), clone an array, or do basic string manipulation. I've had a staff engineer at Goo…

I can write fizzbuzz and while I don’t code in JavaScript I could take a guess at sleep from ruby, python and java. I’ve interviewed lately so I’m trained up and could print all paths in a binary tree or all permutations of a set, or detect cycles in a linked list. It’s not all rote, I can adapt and apply these techniques. I have done so at work.

But I couldn’t find all matching sub trees within a binary tree at the whiteboard in an hour (45 min really). I haven’t done a formal survey, but my extensive experience and discussions with a lot of devs tells me that this really isn’t about fizzbuzz or other simple things.

It’s time to stop pretending this is about weeding out people who can’t code. Companies by their own admission set a very high false negative rate.

Then they claim there is a shortage and successfully lobby the government to create a shadow immigration system putting tech companies in charge of who gets to work in the US and the conditions under which they are allowed to remain.

Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#156

Post by theWheez »

maehwasu wrote: post #122
otabdeveloper1 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely untrue. Whiteboard problems absolutely do work. The vast majority of applicants cannot code at all. And I mean that literally: they're at a loss at how to write a function that adds two numbers or counts the number of elements in a list. Worse is that these guys can be employed as developers (even 'senior' ones!) for years and years in 'serious' enterprises. How, you ask? By using copy-paste and cleverly n…

+1. I’ve interviewed senior guys, with medium to high salaries, who couldn’t do fizzbuzz. What’s worse, a lot of them were fully confident in awful solutions, and didn’t even want to test them. Talented people frustrated at the process just don’t get how bad bad coders are. I would never have believed it myself until I experienced it.

This is incredible to me. How can one get to senior or middle software engineering positions without the ability to write such trivial code?

Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#157

Post by mimixco »

jerf wrote: post #135
mimixco wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not knowing what to do or what others did can be an advantage. Einstein developed his theory of relatively by simply discarding all the known theories about how physics worked. In my own experience at IBM, I solved a bug that had been repeatedly opened over a series of 9 years by simply asking the question, "Is this number a hex or a decimal?"

"Einstein developed his theory of relatively by simply discarding all the known theories about how physics worked." That's ludicrous nonsense. The primary breakthrough of the theory of relatively was taking what the math had been telling physicists about the universe for years seriously . In hindsight, everything necessary was there before Einstein, it just was very deeply assumed not to be reasonable. Relativity bui…

Yes, he knew them and discarded them. Adam Frank's excellent About Time does a good job of telling the story.

Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#158

Post by silentsea90 »

5trokerac3 wrote: post #45

What ever happened to using a portfolio and references? If a candidate is 10+ years in the business and they don't have a long list of products built and people who can verify the quality of those products, then what information is a fizz-buzz going to give you? Most egregious example: I interviewed at a household name company, whose entire web stack was built upon a technology I created, and they still gave me a whi…

Sorry to hear that buddy :(

Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#159

Post by ausjke »

I'm a senior developer myself.

I have seen too many very senior engineers in the company that is more of a testing engineer nowadays, they do well in analyzing the issue at certain level, document them etc, but they're unable to fix anything that is deep and really complicated in a new code base that is huge(e.g. linux kernel, android framework), each meeting I kept hearing "I know exactly where the problem is..." but after many weeks there is still no fix, or the fix broke more things that it fixed.

A few weeks later a junior guy(not fresh-out though) came in and dove in and dug in then fixed it in a few days.

Senior developer means a lot only if you keep learning, keep coding, resharpen all your skill daily, and stay current. Otherwise, the title is a big negative to many companies, as the performance to price ration is totally unjustified.

Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#160

Post by suzzer99 »

lwansbrough wrote: post #63

I straight up refuse coding challenges. I code in the open on GitHub quite often and have built plenty of very high quality (and complex) web applications which I can go into intricate detail about. If your company can’t figure out I’m a good hire without having me jump through your hoops then your process is trash and I have no interest in working for you. In fact, I’ve been thinking how I would approach interviewin…

The best interview I had, we worked through a real world project - a like button widget to allow 3rd party sites to embed. We talked about the DB choice, the front end structure, etc. It was great.

Unfortunately that was the company that was all 25-year-olds and had a terrible commute, and when they heard my previous salary all interest dried up. But all interviews should be like that imo.

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