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Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

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Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#161

Post by chrisseaton »

mimixco wrote: post #157
jerf wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

> Yes, he knew them and discarded them.

That's the sign of an expert, not a generalist.

Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#162

Post by lgleason »

An open question. I'm currently writing a book on TDD for a publisher with a good reputation. Out of curiosity, should I expect to still be run through the interview ringer, or does that hold enough clout to demonstrate competency and possibly the ability to be successful at my job. I'm curious to hear peoples opinions on this.

Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#163

Post by commandlinefan »

HRJ7 wrote: post #82

Is there a market for a licensing body for this stuff? If you believe what you read on Blind, the top companies all test the same material: leetcode, CTCI, design system primer, Designing Data-Intensive Applications, etc. Why can't I prove that I passed this screen once, then take a piece of paper to each of my FANG interviews and skip the technical part. Then maybe retake it every 5 years if I'm interviewing.

I think we’re in the minority around here, but I’d like to see something like a bar exam for professional developers, too. The immediate benefit is that I don’t have to waste time proving that I know how to program a computer over and over again and you don’t have to waste time checking, but it would also be incredibly helpful to know that my coworkers have also passed it, so I know what I can assume they already understand, and what I might need to explain. Of course, I've always been a good test-taker, so maybe I'm biased.

Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#164

Post by suzzer99 »

alkonaut wrote: post #52

A senior developer should have a CV, maybe some hobby code, some references, a commercial product they can describe or point at. Giving them programming puzzles is a waste of time. I get that they can be useful to filter out some bad recently-graduated-from-a-bootcamp developers. The antipattern here isn't that there are puzzles. The antipattern is using some external screening service using the same process for all…

This. I think it's just laziness to not even consider publicly -available hobby code. I get that some people don't have time to create hobby code. But if it's there, I don't see why programming trivia and timed programming challenges should take precedence.

Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#166

Post by Frost1x »

ixtli wrote: post #14
dtagames wrote: post #3

This is seriously f'd up. When I was hired by IBM years ago, they also had a test called the IPAT (Initial Programming Aptitude Test) but, guess what?, there was no programming in it! Instead, the test was designed to see if one had the basic reasoning and logic skills which would be necessary to solve a wide variety of programming-related problems -- not one stupid, specific problem in a particular language. That's…

An extremely underrated point: Hire. Generalists.

As a generalist, I can't agree more.

Most opportunities look for some high degree of specificity. For contract work or a pre-defined task, that makes sense but for companies that need a rich talent pool, I don't know why there appears to be little opportunity for generalists.

Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#167

Post by reificator »

suzzer99 wrote: post #137
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.

Culture fit does make a lot of sense though. I interviewed at a company where everyone was a gamer. Would I have fit in? Probably not. Another company everyone looked about 25 or younger. I don't blame them for not wanting to hire someone pushing 50. They just don't know if they're going to get the cool 50-year-old or the grumpy old troll who won't listen to anyone. Of course they can never come out and say that for…

> Culture fit does make a lot of sense though. I interviewed at a company where everyone was a gamer. Would I have fit in? Probably not. Another company everyone looked about 25 or younger.

I play video games. I have all of the last two generations of consoles, a smattering of older consoles I've managed to hold onto over the years (lost most of them for one reason or another) and a half-decent gaming PC where I prefer to play games if possible. On top of that I've done game development on the side, and have run multiple gaming communities for approximately a decade now.

If I went to go interview with a company and they talked about how they were all "gamers", I'd be running for the hills.

You know what I want to do at work? Work.

You know what I want to talk about at work? Not video games.

You know what I want for non-monetary compensation? Not a weekly autochess tournament or PUBG squad night.

You know what kind of people I want to be surrounded with? Not a bunch of clones who all have the same beliefs and values and (lack of) experiences.

Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#168

Post by billconan »

whiteboard interviewers like to ask dynamic programming, I really don't understand it. I have asked around and have never seen a single programmer used dynamic programming at work once.

Other skills, such as multi-thread programming, debugging skills, get less coverage. Many whiteboard coders who know how to solve dynamic programming on a whiteboard, don't know how to use mutex and semaphore.

I think the whiteboard interview process is broken.

Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#169

Post by commandlinefan »

beat wrote: post #81

Data point: A friend of mine with 20+ years of experience in programming and security (she's been a code-level security analyst for the past decade plus) was asked in an interview the other day to implement a binary tree. Why the fuck is someone asking a lead-level expert with over two decades of experience a first-year CS question? Because that's the process? It's a total failure. Asking senior people to do basic th…

Well, did she actually not know, or was she offended by the simplicity of the question? I graduated in ’95, and I still remember how to implement a binary tree, so it’s not like it’s something that’s so irrelevant you’ll forget a few years after graduation like, say, polynomial long division.

Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#170

Post by mixmastamyk »

mywittyname wrote: post #70
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…

It's a sad fact that interviewing sucks for both sides. Nobody trains us to conduct interviews, so we all just wing it. I hate wasting time on candidates that can't answer rudimentary programming questions and I hate being in interviews where I'm asked questions which I feel are silly or irrelevant. I can't even trust my results sometimes because there's always that feeling that perhaps a candidate missed a question…

> I can't even trust my results sometimes because there's always that feeling that perhaps a candidate missed a question because I was a poor communicator.

This sentence shows a level of awareness sadly uncommon, that I don't believe I've encountered in... thousands of interviews.

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