Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs • Hacker News Board

Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#261

Post by opportune » Wed, May 15, 2019, 4:56 PM UTC

bastawhiz wrote: post #64

I 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…

I wouldn't want to work somewhere that was interviewing me based on programming language trivia

Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#262

Post by falsedan » Wed, May 15, 2019, 4:57 PM UTC

cr0sh wrote: post #232

theWheez wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is incredible to me. How can one get to senior or middle software engineering positions without the ability to write such trivial code?

It does seem incredible, but it happens. One place I worked at, the company hired a developer who claimed to have a CompSci masters. He was completely unable to code anything. I thought it strange. I started to ask him some basic questions that any actual CompSci degree holder should be able to answer (and I don't have a degree in CompSci at all - everything I know I've learned on my own, from other sources, for the…

shit, I'd have to look up NAND gates. also: that's EE, not CS.

Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#263

Post by kasey_junk » Wed, May 15, 2019, 4:57 PM UTC

lwansbrough wrote: post #187

kasey_junk wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are _tons_ of very good engineers who have spent the majority of their careers in extremely restrictive IP environments and cannot talk about the projects they are working/worked on recently without violating contracts. Further, there are _tons_ of very good engineers that cannot do 'a bit of show and tell' easily. They basically shut down. Doing the process you outline will optimize for talkers, and the indust…

> There are _tons_ of very good engineers who have spent the majority of their careers in extremely restrictive IP environments Don't take those jobs if you want to be hireable I guess? You'd have to be joking to think a HackerRank quiz is going to help you glean any information about their expertise. Such expertise, by the way, is something I'd like to know about. Figure out a way to talk about it. Tell me the situa…

You misunderstand. There is a very common class of engineers that have no problem describing and explaining their work to their peers.

They do have a problem with doing it in an adversarial and stressful situation like an interview. I've seen it happen to engineers I _know_ are good.

Also, over years of actually engineering hiring pipelines for software engineers, I've seen no evidence that its easy to weed out the good talkers. Quite the opposite I think it's one of he hardest things about designing these pipelines.

> Don't take those jobs if you want to be hireable I guess?

My point about this is not on behalf of the person being hired, its the person doing the hiring. Your process creates false negatives. False negatives in hiring pipelines is nearly as expensive as false positives.

Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#264

Post by erik_seaberg » Wed, May 15, 2019, 4:58 PM UTC

maehwasu wrote: post #122

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…

+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.

Are there a lot of senior people who don't interview? Fortunately most of my candidates have been at least marginal, but the first couple of useless ones years ago were all it took to convince me that we can't ever skip coding questions.

Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#265

Post by jboggan » Wed, May 15, 2019, 4:58 PM UTC

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…

I've come across them repeatedly and in some cases they have formed the majority of candidates that got to a phone screen. It's a result of our industry having many high paying jobs in relative physical comfort with no hard gatekeepers. Can you imagine what interviewing for a first year law associate's position at a BigLaw firm or a radiology residency would be like if there were no law and med schools and no board certifications?

Considering the rate of false positives in any software engineering interview process there is every incentive for the underqualified and unqualified to "fake it 'til they make it". It's also difficult to tell the difference between someone failing upwards and someone aggressively managing their career by switching positions with lateral raises in this hot job market, hence the need to distrust the skill of even senior developers and force this rigmarole on every level of engineering talent.

Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#266

Post by alkonaut » Wed, May 15, 2019, 4:58 PM UTC

chadash wrote: post #100

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…

The problem is that if you don't have any screening, then you get a flood of candidates, and it takes someone's full time job to sift through them. HR needs to be well trained on what to look for, but they are often a necessary gatekeeper in my experience on the hiring side. The goal is to keep the number of qualified candidates who get filtered out at a reasonable level. (I completely get that this is unfair. If you…

When I get a lot of responses it has been ~100. I have found it pretty easy to read all resumes and pick 10 or so candidates to interview. Compared to the amount of time the interviews take, the sifting through resumes is pretty quick work I think. If there were 500 or 1000 resumes the situation would be different, but then I’d perhaps use a HR/recruiter person to just give me the 100 that meet the requirements. No phone screen or coding challenge needed.

Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#267

Post by morenoh149 » Wed, May 15, 2019, 4:59 PM UTC

bastawhiz wrote: post #64

I 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…

I call shenanigans on this comment. Weeding out folks for not knowing how to sleep in a particular language or array syntax in another is not warranted. I think the response that Scala doesn't have arrays is totally legitimate. You should have asked them what was the project/problem they were most proud of and suss out the details of that.

Moreover, keep in mind that for some orgs a Senior dev is actually someone that does more systems design, i.e. an architect. Make sure you ask them those sorts of questions before discounting their abilities. You don't want to be having an architect refactoring your frontend, that's a silly way to spend your money.

Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#268

Post by y-c-o-m-b » Wed, May 15, 2019, 5:00 PM UTC

cr0sh wrote: post #141

In a little over a month, I'll be turning 46. I've been doing software development professionally since I was 18. I have no formal education in it, except for a couple classes taken at a CC for C++. Between hearing things like this, the way the internet is going, the way cell phones are becoming more closed up and walled in...just everything about the way the world is going... ...I honestly am beginning to think my b…

> I honestly am beginning to think my best course of action would be to (somehow) change jobs entirely, move out to the middle of nowhere on 40 acres, drop off the internet

In my mid-30s and this feeling is only growing stronger. I don't even have a demanding job, I never work more than 40 hours and I get to implement the latest and greatest (.NET Core, Vue).

In the last 6 months I've applied to several remote jobs. I always do well on the sample projects they give me and I have a good personality during the interviews... cracking a few jokes to lighten things up a bit. However because remote jobs are so damn competitive they always focus on one stupid question I didn't answer exactly the way they expected or something I slightly missed and I end up getting rejected. "We're looking for someone with more experience" - I have over a decade of experience, I've demonstrated as much and I can solve pretty much any business problem.

All of it just makes me feel defeated despite the massive progress I've made in my career, all the awards, back to back promotions... all feels meaningless anymore.

Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#269

Post by kaesar14 » Wed, May 15, 2019, 5:01 PM UTC

ixtli wrote: post #98

kaesar14 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see, yes, stereotyping based on some perceived “flaw” like accent is absolutely wrong and needs anti-bias training to remedy. It is tough though. I want people I interview for my company and team to get along with everyone, and trying to make that evaluation in a short amount of time can often result in immense bias. In the end, interviewing is fucking hard.

No question. Personally I think the first and most important step is getting everyone in our industry to admit that they have deeply internalized biases that they're not likely to be fully aware of and that they have a real effect on important decisions. Once you've acknowledged that you can start to check yourself.

Agreed, and it's up to the organization to remedy those biases with multiple rounds of interviews, and most importantly, making sure those multiple rounds consist of interviewers with different inherent biases and tendencies.

Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#270

Post by jb3689 » Wed, May 15, 2019, 5:03 PM UTC

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…

> We call it "culture fit" but we're really just trying to vet their personalities

I've seen this end up in teams that lack diversity several times. My last company was big on interviewing for fit. Then a year goes by and you realize most of the people you've hired are a clone of everyone else. I had a co-worker that once argued that you can't judge people based on personality in an interview and I tend to agree with that now