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Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

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Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#271

Post by kaesar14 »

debaserab2 wrote: post #189
maaaats wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But now you did the mistake of assuming a lot of stuff, with very little data. Why can you say that person 2 is better at working in a group? Maybe person 1 was just very nervous, or is a type that takes a few days to warm up to new people. Maybe person 1 just crack jokes all day and is actually detrimental to the productivity. Impossible to tell from this one que alone.

You're always left with an imperfect amount of information after an interview. I don't think that means you should discount how well someone fits into a conversation given how important solid communication is.

Pretty much this. Yes, technical skill is important, but to some degree, the proficiency to do our jobs can mostly be taught given a proven background and some proven competency during the interview. Good communication skills? That's something taught over a lifetime.

Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#272

Post by falsedan »

cr0sh wrote: post #259
ddebernardy wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> include whitespace and brainfuck

make part of the test a reverse question where the interviewers have to work out what language your solution is in

  1:v!`*5*54p2*62*77,*5v   >v>:#1+:2^
  >:3%|>:5%|> 1#^_^
  v"z"v>v2,"-z2
  "",8**,B5"*
  iF,622#"::4
  "",,3*^^>^>^>,8#^6#*

Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#273

Post by vidarh »

pathseeker wrote: post #208
aetherson wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>then implement any kind of sort for an array, then implement depth-first-search. How have you not grokked how useless those questions actually are when it comes to knowledge about writing software? Those are both trivia in the same category as "implement the TCP acking mechanism".

Not my experience, as long as you're prepared to accept that people may need some prompting, and won't necessarily find the optimal solutions.

Someone who knows the 'trivia' may remember how to implement quicksort without actually being any good.

But someone with even a little bit of understanding and some prodding to not worry about efficiency will be able to come up with some sort of solution, even if bubblesort. If people appear truly petrified, it's easy to give them a chance by breaking down the problem and see if they can reason about it. E.g.whay if you start with a two element array? Then how about 3? How do you generalise that?

Someone with both the trivia and the smarts will give you a good solution and be able to muse about tradeoffs of different implementation methods, pivot selection and the like.

It's usually fairly simple to find out if people understand the solution they offer up and can reason about it, and that's often a lot more important than whether they come up with a great solution.

Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#274

Post by ben509 »

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 need a function to add two numbers together."

Innumeracy is the norm: I'd guess > 85% of people don't understand the concept of a function.

And they probably can code if they were working independently. Or they've done some classes, wathced some videos and think they understand it.

But when you add the pressure of an interview, your unpracticed skills fall apart. Also, you have to think on your feet to fill in the blanks in a question.

That's how it should be, because we're not hiring hobbyists; candidates need to be able to demonstrate that they're pros, and able to do so under the pressure of an interview.

I've done my share of phone screens who were flatly unqualified as developers. (Thankfully we've never had someone completely clueless land an in-person interview. That's also a disservice to the candidate as we should provide better guidance through the phone screen.)

Some of them are junior, possibly they lie on their resume and simply keep applying to job after job. That's the 99% that Joel wrote about[1].

You also occasionally get guys who were in management or similar roles and are looking to transition to being engineers. And I think these may have a similar problem to the senior engineers: they have lost the skill (or never had it) and are finding out the hard way.

[1]: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/01/27/news-58/

Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#275

Post by algoreithm »

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…

FTFY:

Absolutely untrue in my experience, I can't speak for other people. To imply that this is absolutely untrue in the global space would require that I have interviewed everyone.

Whiteboard problems absolutely do work in my interviews. Again, use of the word absolute indicates that I've never interviewed without a whiteboard. Given the high number of candidates I've interviewed, this might indicate a flaw in the interview process.

The vast majority of applicants I select for interviews 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 should consider the possibility that I'm selecting the wrong people for interviews.

Worse is that these guys can be employed as developers (even 'senior' ones!) for years and years in 'serious' enterprises. Clearly other companies are making the same mistakes I am making in their candidate selection process.

How, you ask? By using copy-paste and cleverly navigating their enterprise processes and dodging responsibility.

Maybe this is what you mean by 'being good at working with others', but it's definitely not what I want in a software developer.

Source: I've interviewed a great deal of poorly selected people for lots of positions over the years.

Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#276

Post by lowercased »

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…

a series of easy-medium-hard to gauge where someone is at might be that 'sweet spot' - there's not one question that would cover enough, although I think fizzbuzz tries to.

Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#277

Post by thomascgalvin »

ido wrote: post #124
thomascgalvin wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

About your last comment - c# was explicitly made similar to java (at least at first, it diverged in time but the basics are close to being a superset of java). My first job using c# was in 2010, and I have been programming in java since 2002 at that point. I was productive pretty much since the first day & not because I'm a genius - c# is that similar to java... I suspect that if you'd have hired a php or a python ex…

Oh absolutely. I used to joke that you could convert C# to Java by replacing "string" with "String" and changing the extension.

But really, most of the C-family of languages are similar enough that you can kind of hack your way through pretty quickly, and become mostly-productive in a few weeks.

The family of Go, Java, C#, Python, Kotlin, Javascript, etc etc are all similar enough in theory that "working code" is as close as Googling the right syntax.

Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#278

Post by thomascgalvin »

morenoh149 wrote: post #242
thomascgalvin wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I agree; that requirement was pushed down on me from on high. I think we're starting to loosen up about it, though.

Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#279

Post by vidarh »

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?

I think some just have outdated skills and don't know how in the environments they're faced with.

Sometimes people move between senior eng. and management positions and back depending on organization sizes. I certainly have had engineering manager positions where I went several years without needing to code for my job. If I'd stayed longer and not coded for fun, and then gone on to the type of positions I did next, which were much more hands on, and using different labguages I can imagine I might have found it hard.

Thankfully I've always enjoyed programming on side projects too, so staying up to date has never felt like a chore.

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