Mirror? Link seems down as well as the archive.
Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs
191–200 of 384 posts
Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs
#192[flagged]
Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs
#193>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.
Yes, I really want to give up my evenings for weeks to practice to impress people who clearly do not give a shit about what my job actually entails, by doing stupid crap tests that have nothing to do with the actual job.
I'd be damned tempted to walk out of an interview if they expected me to do trivial programming exercises.
Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs
#194We 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…
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…
> The vast majority of applicants cannot code at all.
I've been interviewing devs for years, and this is not my experience at all. The vast majority of applicants that I've interviewed can code, although they tend to be minimally competent at it.
Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs
#195I agree with the basic sentiment of the article, but the question that always pops in my mind is, based on your real life work experience, what kind of (simplified) question would you ask in a 60 minute interview to gauge someone's ability to write, say, a distributed service? It goes without saying that 60 minutes is too short a time to ask someone to solve a real life business problem, but real life business proble…
A simple question can weed out the bozos, but a hard/tricky question won't select for the exceptional. The reason being that most folks can't solve a hard problem they've never seen with a gun to their head and no time for research.
A hard problem with no practice is effectively impossible unless lucky enough to have faced the exact same on in the last month. Selecting for the lucky at that point.
Lets dispense with the fantasy we can select the "best" in an hour, and move toward short contracts instead.
Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs
#196Can someone describe what is a 'senior'? This might be controversial but I see senior title promotions being thrown around just for retention reasons, could it be possible that once you start looking for another 'senior' role at another company they have different expectations of that title? Not to mention you can obtain a 'senior' title by mastering your team's code base and who knows if that knowledge is transferab…
Depends on where you go. In the Big Tech cos, you usually have this hierarchy:
1) Junior Engineer - can write basic code, but usually needs help for bigger projects or navigating a code base.
2) Engineer - Is pretty independent and can whip together what they need based on a design.
3) Senior Engineer - Can take a problem and build a design for it, can lead a team of lower-level engineers to properly implement the design.
There are higher levels like staff and principal engineer, these ones typically are the same as senior engineers but are at larger scopes.
At levels 3 and higher, you tend to write more English than code. You're there to decide what code gets written, rather than the specifics on how it gets written. That's what levels 1 and 2 do, they'll take your designs and implement them.
Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs
#197>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…
The sad part about this is that the filtering doesn't prevent getting sub standard candidates through the door. For example, I've been rejected by the Google interview process...but then shortly afterwords went to I/O expecting to find loads of insanely smart people working at their sand boxes and office hours that could run circles around my abilities and teach me things. There are some that know their stuff, but a lot who's apparent knowledge etc. was very under-whelming to the point of me knowing more than they did about the subject. Over time I've come to realize that part of the hiring process at these companies is political and that the filtering is still not preventing bad candidates from making it inside the company.
Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs
#198I 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…
When the next recession hits, this will be even more of a problem.
I think Software Development has a problem in that there is no space for a middle-ground career path. I typically compare myself to a studio musician. I'm never going to be a Rock Star, but you can plug me into any band and we'll make a good recording. That's why I like contract work... nobody cares about my age or history, I can just hit my marks and do what I love. I'm not Senior, but I don't know if I really ever want to be either.
Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs
#199Data 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.
She was offended by it, as were a lot of her friends (all industry people with similar experience levels).
Imagine if someone asked you to conjugate verbs or graph sentences to demonstrate your English skills. Would you do well at it, even if you're a native speaker? After all, you learned that stuff in elementary school.
Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs
#200We 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…
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…
You're probably using a different definition of "whiteboard problem" than is common for what is used a places like Google/Facebook/etc.
I agree with you 100% if "whiteboard problem" means, sit with them while they type up a function in an IDE that does something common (e.g. validates a string, implements some error handling, do a failure backoff, etc).
I disagree if it means, ask them to implement an algorithm on a whiteboard to steer a robot through a maze in a time with optimal algorithmic complexity. This is completely useless and the people that can do this have little overlap with people that can implement easy to read/debug code worthy of production and maintenance.