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Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

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Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#221

Post by maehwasu »

aetherson wrote: post #139
maehwasu wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+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.

I used to give a whiteboard coding interview (for a QA engineer position) that started with "swap the values of two integer variables. Yes, you can use a temporary variable," then went on to find the highest element in an array, then implement any kind of sort for an array, then implement depth-first-search. People who would ace the entire interview would look at me funny when I asked the first question, and I just s…

In my experience, the sweet spot is anything that involves recursion or pointers, preferably in combination. You get some false negatives, but not tons if you don’t disqualify non-elegant solutions.

Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#222

Post by beat »

I think a big part of the discussion that's being missed here is that a lot of senior-level engineering jobs aren't about coding. They work at higher levels, and are often communication-intensive.

I work in DevOps. If I'm interviewing someone, I'm going to ask "Explain the difference between continuous integration, continuous delivery, and continuous deployment". A junior person who can answer that well gets a big thumbs-up from me. A senior who can't answer it will probably be rejected out of hand.

In neither case is implementing Towers of Hanoi on a whiteboard useful for the job.

Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#223

Post by rurp »

jerf wrote: post #119
ixtli wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah that's fair. Im just frustrated with how low-bandwidth those things are. I definitely get a bit of a sense of how a person thinks by watching them do those CS 201-style problems, which isn't nothing.

If the CS 201-style problems annoy you, then... stop doing them? I don't ask algorithm questions, and I wouldn't even dream of asking brain teasers. I ask questions like "Here's a pile of text that claims to be CSV, let's explore how you'd generate an HTML report out of it", and branch out from there depending on how the interview goes. I've got all sorts of directions I can go from there, from screwing up the input…

This specific question is new to me but I like it a lot. I have found that the most useful interview questions are technical but more conversational than a white board, more about how to approach and solve a realistic problem. I think your method is a good high-signal approach.

Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#224

Post by monster_group »

imroot wrote: post #144

I'm in a similar boat -- my educational background is hardware engineering, but, I've been a Linux nerd/SRE for the last 20 years. Ask me to test an 3x10 LED array? Can do it in my sleep, without even looking things up. Ask me to do a B-Tree? I'm pulling up documentation. Ask me to do a deployment in AWS, GCE, or Azure, and I've got the code to make the API calls without the help of boto...but ask me to do the same i…

>> I've got a technical interview on Thursday, and they use Hackerrank for their coding platform. I'm seriously hoping that they have something that's specific to SRE tasks...

If you want to do well on the interview, you should brush up on recursion, binary trees and hashtables. If they are using HackerRank, it is almost guaranteed that the questions will be algorithmic rather than SRE based.

Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#225

Post by kod »

lgleason wrote: post #162

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.

Expect to be run through the ringer.

I've been rejected by companies who were using open source code I wrote.

Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#226

Post by spamizbad »

We do live coding exercises as part of our hiring process, but we generally shy away from Algorithm problems and instead ask them to solve problems like:

* Count the number of vowels in a string

* Transform a dictionary that's key'd on file name, with the value as the file owner into a new dictionary with owners as the keys and their value as a list of files.

* Deduplicate an array while preserving order in linear O(N) time

* Solve a simple problem using a closure (You can even google what a closure is)

We go out of our way to make sure the interview is conversational; we talk to candidates like they're our colleagues. Too often, technical interviews seem like interrogations and I absolutely hate that.

Candidates can code on their own laptops, ask us questions, and even google stuff. The only rule is no googling for the problem directly, but if you need to look up if some datatype has method X or forgot its signature it's not counted against you.

The point of this is to just to do a basic smoke-test of the candidates programming skills. They don't need to get them all correct, but they should be able to solve at least 1 or 2. If they can't, then we politely end the interview.

The rest of the interview is talking about coding, projects they've worked on, challenging and interesting problems, wish lists, and for more senior people architecture/planning, and a mock code review: we give them some bad code and ask them to give feedback. The entire process takes about 3 hours.

Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#229

Post by malvosenior »

umvi wrote: post #27
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.

So if I make a startup, I should be forced to hire some brilliant programmer whose personality I clash with over over a slightly less brilliant programmer who I can tell will become a fast friend just because the former has demonstrated more technological prowess?

Yes, as a manager you shouldn't become friends with your reports anyway. It happens but it always complicates things. If for no other reason then you have a perception issue with your other reports that you don't have a relationship with. Did your friend get a promotion because they're good or your friend? Did they not get the promotion because they're your friend and you're worried about optics?

This doesn't even touch even more difficult situations like when your friend messes up and needs to be dealt with in a professional but non-personal manner.

So yeah, hire the better coder.

Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#230

Post by 0x8BADF00D »

theWheez wrote: post #156
maehwasu wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+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?

TechLead said it best IMO. If a developer cannot understand basic concepts like recursion, then they are in the wrong industry.
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