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Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

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Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#251

Post by suzzer99 »

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…

For sure I wasn't the software developer I once was when I was interviewing. I'd been in an architect role at a gargantuan company and mostly POCing things for a few years. Then I went on a 7 month road trip where the majority of my brain was dedicated to learning Spanish.

However I can confidently say that it only took a few weeks of being thrown back in the mix to shake the rust off and get going again.

If I was an employer and could extend contracts at fairly low risk, I'd give devs with a strong resume and a demonstrable open-source library a chance - despite them being a bit shaky on the whiteboard.

Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#252

Post by erik_seaberg »

pathseeker wrote: post #203
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…

It happens if you don't do phone screens. People lie on their resumes.

This. I can't trust your résumé at all, but it does tell me what you think should be reasonable to ask.

Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#253

Post by b_t_s »

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 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."

I'm genuinely curious how you manage to find all these folks. I've been on the interview team at my company for a several years now(mostly in house, some first pass phone screens) and I've never encountered a single person who was literally unable to code a trivial problem. The last time I met a "programmer" who couldn't code was first semester university, and I thought most of them quickly flunked out/changed majors. I wonder if there is something about your company/recruiting process that is particularly attractive to them, or if our prescreen(which I'm admittedly no expert on) is just particularly good at filtering them out, or if there's some other explanation.

Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#255

Post by davengh »

cheerlessbog wrote: post #51
skybrian wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Saying they "can't tell you anything" is one-bit thinking. Yes, there is a lot that interviews don't tell you, but they are still a useful signal.

I find them useful if you use a real world problem from your product, and the whiteboard is just a tool to help you collaborate as they brainstorm and discuss possible solutions with you. That reduces the pressure and you also get a read on their collaboration skills. The ideal would be pair programming for an afternoon.

When I interview candidates for the company I work for I describe a key part of our system in general terms (20 possible elements, at least one active but any combination, items are single/set/hierarchy) then ask them to talk me through issues they can see writing generic code to handle data management and computations given these conditions. They don't have to write code, but they do have to be able to think logically and express themselves clearly. Some describe pretty much what we do, some get creative, and some are completely at a loss. Some pseudocode to help describe what they're thinking, most don't.

Even if their "solution" is incomplete I look at if they get the gist right.

Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#256

Post by __jal »

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…

Sounds like you don't phone screen.

I've screened people like you describe, but the only time I've interviewed them face-to-face was when they didn't have a technical phone screen for whatever reason.

FWIW, one of the ways I screen companies when I'm looking is whiteboard problems. I refuse them and move on. In my experience, only HugeCos and places with problems use them. I'm sure that's not true, but I have a necessarily small sample-size, and skipping over firms that do it has worked well for me so far, and there are plenty of fish in the sea. (I do in fact suck at writing on whiteboards, I just don't consider it a skill worth developing to pursue jobs I probably don't want.)

Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#257

Post by raincom »

suzzer99 wrote: post #180
dantheman wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can offer a coding test - give them a computer, a piece of paper, etc. Let them sit a room by themselves, give them up to an hour to do a 15 minute problem. There are lots of ways to destress the coding interview, but the ability to code has to be tested.

Yeah but then inevitably the company starts grading on a curve. Did the dev nail every single possible mistake or bug? Did they add any extra flourishes? So you're not just testing for basic competence anymore. You're testing for devs who are really good at timed coding challenges - just like with challenges where it's tough to get the right answer in the allotted time. Companies don't get excited about a dev who jus…

That's what FB does these days: how fast can one code, how bug free, etc.

Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#258

Post by suzzer99 »

beat wrote: post #174
dantheman wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can offer a coding test - give them a computer, a piece of paper, etc. Let them sit a room by themselves, give them up to an hour to do a 15 minute problem. There are lots of ways to destress the coding interview, but the ability to code has to be tested.

What if the job doesn't really involve coding? That's true of rather a lot of senior/lead level software engineering jobs. Security analysts, devops engineers, architects, and others may never write code at all as part of their jobs. As a senior devops engineer, I write a lot of trivial Groovy code for Jenkins pipelines. But the interesting part isn't the code, which for the most part a monkey could do. It's redesign…

One problem I have is at my level it's really more about architecting than coding. Although coding is still important.

(And by the way I realize in a lot of companies, 'architect' is a completely bogus term for someone who's more of a flim-flam man than actual doer. So just substitute "staff engineer" or whatever you call it.)

But the main parts of my job I have to get right are picking the right approaches technology-wise, and setting up frameworks and patterns to make devs' lives easier in building out the actual features. You can't test that stuff on a whiteboard imo. You have to just talk it through and try to get a sense of how the potential architect/lead thinks about problems.

It also takes a good architect to interview an architect imo. There's plenty of great devs who just haven't acquired that level of scope yet - not of thinking not just about how easily it is for you to get something done - but how easily it will be to maintain as a team, within the greater ecosystem, over the life of the product.

Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#259

Post by cr0sh »

ddebernardy wrote: post #244
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…

From what I gather, what is most shocking of all is that candidate still fail this test, despite it being so common, despite there being an several github repos devoted to it, as well as other pages and articles about it (somewhere out there was a page or a repo or something I encountered that had it written in almost every programming language out there, include whitespace and brainf*ck).

Even when given as a "take home" challenge, they can't even copy-pasta an example off the internet...

Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#260

Post by ApolloFortyNine »

thorwasdfasdf wrote: post #182
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…

> 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…

It's generally a lack of problem solving skills in my experience. The main coding question I ask is actually a short word problem (less than 4 sentences for the entire problem statement).

Without giving away the question I ask, I can tell you the solution is a for loop and an if statement. If I told them exactly what they needed to solve the problem, I'm sure most could write the code (though honestly some would have still failed). It's a question I would think could fit as one of 5 on an intro to programming class final, yet I've had candidates with 10+ years of experience fail it. I even had one such candidate argue with me over asking a coding question when his resume shows so much experience at different roles.

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