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Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

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Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#241

Post by malvosenior »

baron_harkonnen wrote: post #215
suzzer99 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is there are a lot of people who are still good coders who suck at white-boarding for one reason or another. I became one of them due a combination of age, rustiness and an escalation of nervousness after failing a couple whiteboards out of the gate. Of course once I did land a job it took about a week to shake off the rustiness, and the company that hired me is thrilled. The point is that companies like…

There's also a lot of senior devs who think they are a false negative who are not. I speak from personal experience. I failed my first FAANG style interview both because I had not prepared nor understood how white board interviews really work and because a huge subset of my skill had gotten rusty over the years. But when I first failed I was really upset and very quickly wrote off the entire process as a ridiculous t…

This is such a great response and I've had similar experiences. As you become more senior you also get more managerial responsibilities which can eat into your time/energy budget to stay up to date on tech not directly related to your job. You may also get more life responsibilities as you age (family...) that further erode your technical edge.

Good on you for having the introspective skills and awareness to identify the problem and do something about it.

Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#242

Post by morenoh149 »

thomascgalvin wrote: post #77
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 think my team has gotten pretty good at this. We address the "flood of applicants" by tossing out any resumes that don't have some sort of CS or programming on them (about 25%), and favoring, in order, people who have held a programming job, people who have done programming internships, and people who have taken CS classes. A decent GitHub profile will bump you up in the two later categories. Next is a five minute…

filtering for cs is short sighted imo. You're going to see less and less folks holding a cs degree as more folks wisen up to the trap of student debt in the us.

Instead put folks on trials and keep the good performers.

Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#243

Post by cletus »

Another day, another "coding interviews are broken" post on HN, the same old replies. So here's mine.

- A vast number of people masquerade as "programmers", "engineers" or "developers" who couldn't code their way out of a paper bag. If you don't believe me, you haven't conducted interviews.

- This was the key motivation behind FizzBuzz. Passing it doesn't mean you're a great programmer. Failing it means you're almost certainly not. So the ability to turn a super simple "algorithm" into code in [language of your choice] is an incredibly useful negative filter.

- Interviewers and companies fall into the trap of thinking "this problem is too simple; let's make it harder". In doing so you devalue the negative filter and gain NOTHING as a positive filter. Worse it can turn into a gamble as to whether you happen to know the particular trick for that problem. Tortoise and hare or O(log n) bit reversing fall into this category;

- Taking a problem and being able to reframe it in terms of standard data structures and algorithms like recognizing it's a particular graph problem is an incredibly useful skill. These don't always need to be turned into code.

I'll say it again: the biggest problem is people try to make whiteboard problems "hard" making them a useless signal.

I'll add:

- I'm dead against "take home" tests. I don't have time for that. This seems like a great way of getting mediocre candidates. Like, what makes you think if someone can't do it they won't "cheat"?

- Talking about robust systems design isn't done often enough;

Here's another thing I've pondered: how much of coding interviews and the notion of "cultural fit" is really thinly-veiled discrimination? I expect quite a lot and I expect this to blow up at some point.

Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#244

Post by ddebernardy »

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…

I presume you haven't submitted candidates to a fizzbuzz test. Try it. The test is well known and out there in the wild. It's almost part of programmer culture. Yet it is absolutely shocking how many candidates that apply to jobs that involve programming will fail that simple test or some minor variation of it. Almost as shockingly, they will also fail to spot their bug after producing a solution that doesn't work as expected.

Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#245

Post by vidarh »

rootusrootus wrote: post #204
thorwasdfasdf wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Seriously, Where are you finding these candidates? seriously. I've worked at a number of mid-sized companies, and interviewed dozens of candidates, and I have never, ever, ever come across a candidate that couldn't write code on this level: "write a function that adds two numbers…

Crappy head hunters. I have some outside firms who have sent me good people very reliably, and then once in a while HR will make me try another company who probably gave us a cheap quote, and I'll get a series of terrible candidates from them. I've even been given outright frauds -- people who paid someone else to phone screen for them.

Cut and paste answers to initial screening questions was my favorite. How I knew they were cut and pasted? I got paranoid after some suspicious answers and started doing searches for random lines from the answers.

The included such brilliant things as cut and pasting an answer from a forum that was followed by a dozen comments of people explaining how wrong that answer was, and someone who answered what should have needed a short sentence with two pages from an Oracle manual giving an answer that did not apply to the question. .

It's not that we expected everyone to be honest about not using Google - it didn't matter, it was an initial screening question. But we did expect them to at least bother to restate the answer in their own words if they looked it up. And get it right..

Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#246

Post by jerf »

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.

If you took out the bits of relativity that were developed by others, you'd be left with not very much. Relativity without the Lorentz transform... I'm not even sure how one would resolve that. As I said, the vast majority of the insight was just taking what the math was already saying seriously. Einstein put it into a final form, and this is important and valid work, but it's not like he invented all the mathematical tools from scratch.

Either you've misinterpreted Adam Frank's work, or it isn't excellent.

I'll counter-cite Reflections on Relativity, which contains a lot of deep analysis of the mathematical history of relativity both before and after Einstein: https://mathpages.com/rr/rrtoc.htm which makes it quite clear both what he did, and did not do.

Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#248

Post by kod »

commandlinefan wrote: post #163
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 und…

I've passed the bar exam.

It is not a good indicator of competence.

Most people pay a third party (after having paid for law school) to cram the information into their head in a short period of time.

RHCE for example isn't great, but having passed both I think it's actually better than the bar exam, since they at least hand you a live broken server.

Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#249

Post by cr0sh »

pathseeker wrote: post #200
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…

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…

> 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.

From an interviewing perspective, asking someone to "solve" this kind of problem on a whiteboard would be interesting to see.

One thing I'd tell them is to not worry about the code; that is, if they just want to write the process in pseudocode or something like that - as long as the logic can be followed, that would be ok. In other words, give them the leeway to not worry about proper coding, knowledge of functions, etc - but instead let them concentrate on the problem.

I wouldn't expect anyone to solve such a question - but it would give a good insight into how they go about solving a problem. Do they ask questions? What happens when they get stuck? Can they explain their reasoning? And so forth.

Let them do what they can, give them 30 minutes or so; if they look lost, ask them some questions, see how they respond, etc.

I think such a question could be very valuable - if presented in the right way.

Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#250

Post by ApolloFortyNine »

otabdeveloper1 wrote: post #117
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…

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 number of people I've had fail simple questions (not binary node problems, I mean problems where the optimal solution is basically a for loop with an if statement) is absolutely insane. I would say at least 50% of applicants fail to solve the coding question, and this is interviewing for a 100k+ US job in medium sized city (so low cost of living, and good salary for the area).

We have 'hard' questions in our pool we can ask (where optimization actually comes into play) but I've found that the easy questions weed out so many candidates it's not worth it. There's no room for debate if someone tries to write 15+ if statements rather than creating a loop and one if statement.

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