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Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

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Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#281

Post by bob_doggo »

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…

My first thought upon reading this was: "If you don't want to quit your job, then just stay."

So, is it you are working on a project, and when the project is finnished there is no work left, or do you think thay you will get fired, or what am I missing here?

Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#282

Post by andrewla »

Franciscouzo wrote: post #202
matthewbauer wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems much worse than programming tests IMO. If I have a bachelor's degree, and you're asking me to retake the SAT, you're just insulting my qualifications. At least programming tests have some legitimate rationale. Let's not pretend IBM has any fucking idea what they are doing.

Intelligence Is the Best Predictor of Job Performance https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1467-8721.ep107... Thought in the US you will run into problems due to Griggs v. Duke Power Co.

I don't know if people have generally been following Taleb's critique of IQ and other intelligence measures, but there are three tracks to it.

One is purely statistical -- that if you offer any metric of success, and try to correlate it with any measure of intelligence, even if the two are actually uncorrelated, then having dead people in the sample (that is, people who score 0 on both) will increase the quality of the correlation. Applicable because when you eliminate people who score low on IQ tests and low on performance tests from the sample, the correlations tend to disappear in these studies.

The second is more intuitive, that intelligence is multifaceted and attempts to project it into a low-dimensional space will mask the inherent complexity, but will be capable of identifying individuals that score low across many dimensions. That leads to the condition in the first issue.

The third is probably the most controversial; that IQ tests in particular do not measure generalized intelligence, but measure how well you can do "drone work", so for places where performance can be objectively measured, it will tend to be in tasks that do not require creativity or initiative in unpredictable directions because those are not easily measured, so thus reflective of the same sorts of tasks that IQ tests measure.

Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#283

Post by thomascgalvin »

suzzer99 wrote: post #145
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…

I have a degree in physics and 20 years of programming. Just out of curiosity, would I be weeded out in the first 25%?

After you've been coding for a few years, I think your degree is largely irrelevant. A guy with 20 years of programming knowledge has far, far more than a degree.

Similarly, a candidate could have graduated top of their class from the most prestigious university in the world, but if they've never been able to hold a job for more than six months, that tells me something.

Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#284

Post by munchbunny »

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…

I don't think any good senior devs are under the illusion (privately) that they're rusty at whiteboard interviews. I'm certain my college grad self fresh out of practicing for the ACM contests could have run circles around my recent job search self when it comes to algorithm stuff. I had to practice and then pass a ton of whiteboard rounds to get my current senior developer job, so I'm not saying this out of bitterness.

However, and I think this is the crux of the problem, you're not paying senior developers for that. I've never had to actually do any algorithm slinging on this job. The fanciest it usually gets is chaining some maps and filters.

On the other hand, I have had to do "rocket surgery" on critical path legacy code, write business logic in a maximally predictable and readable way, figure out how to land a non-backwards compatible change with no downtime, convince other teams to help with an initiative my team is leading, design an internal API, etc.

Doing that stuff requires experience, rigor, resourcefulness, and I'm sure you can come up with more "senior" traits. My personal complaint about whiteboard interviews, even systems design interviews, is that they only indirectly measure those traits.

Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#285

Post by falsedan »

traek wrote: post #201
suzzer99 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a degree in physics and 20 years of programming. Just out of curiosity, would I be weeded out in the first 25%?

> any resumes that don't have some sort of CS or programming on them > I have a degree in physics and 20 years of programming Depends, do you mention your 20 years of programming on your resume?

with the communication skills I've seen so far, probably not

Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#286

Post by fma »

mywittyname wrote: post #24
dtagames wrote: post #3

This is seriously f'd up. When I was hired by IBM years ago, they also had a test called the IPAT (Initial Programming Aptitude Test) but, guess what?, there was no programming in it! Instead, the test was designed to see if one had the basic reasoning and logic skills which would be necessary to solve a wide variety of programming-related problems -- not one stupid, specific problem in a particular language. That's…

So basically, an IQ test. I believe these run into legal grey areas because they have to be obviously relevant to the job in question, which likely leads to the tests getting progressively more domain-specific as time goes on. Programming does seem to be a field in which general intelligence is a big predictor of success. Whereas a field like management probably personality and general intelligence are more equally w…

My previous company issued the Wondelic Test (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wonderlic_test) for everyone. I don't know the details but there was a minimum for different positions. There was also a personality portion and they were looking mostly for "A" type personalities, and a small subset of others. I don't have the "A" type personality, but I'd like to think the IQ portion made up for it LOL.

Legality...not sure.

Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#287

Post by thorwasdfasdf »

one of the bad reasons for bad hiring practices I've seen is that hiring managers throw engineers into interviewing situations a bit too unprepared, often times with very little interview training/experience.

There needs to be a interview training/mentoring period where you have engineers sit in on interviews to learn how and what questions to ask but without actually having veto/accept power. this allows them to get experience without screwing up the whole interview process.

Most inexperience engineer interviewers think you get the best candidates by having the highest reject rate, and that's simply not true. Only interviewing experience and training can improve this.

Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#288

Post by billconan »

mesaframe wrote: post #234
billconan wrote: post #168

whiteboard interviewers like to ask dynamic programming, I really don't understand it. I have asked around and have never seen a single programmer used dynamic programming at work once. Other skills, such as multi-thread programming, debugging skills, get less coverage. Many whiteboard coders who know how to solve dynamic programming on a whiteboard, don't know how to use mutex and semaphore. I think the whiteboard i…

People do use dynamic programming. But, yeah debugging skills should be given more coverage. A lot of people I've seen programming struggle or don't know how to debug code.

sure, I know fast Fourier transform and reinforcement learning use dynamic programming. but those don't represent most people's daily work. checking http://oj.leetcode.com/problems/ , you will see that the problem selection is very biased and academic focused.

it's like recruiting warriors based on gymnastics skills. I think it makes more sense to look for street fighters.

Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#289

Post by jamiepenney »

b_t_s wrote: post #253
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…

"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 w…

I've performed close to 400 screening interviews now for a range of companies. There's a good chunk of people that struggle to write a solution that correctly compiled to an "aggregate this data" style problem. People with the "correct" CV that have made it through the HR filter. It's a real problem.

Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#290

Post by mixmastamyk »

commandlinefan wrote: post #146
chadash wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been on both sides of this. As an applicant, sometimes it's a crapshoot in terms of getting lucky that they asked me the right question. On the other hand, as a hiring manager or interviewer, I see lots and lots of candidates who can't write out a fizzbuzz solution, and it wastes a lot of my time (I'm a sucker and will take a lot of time guiding interviewees to the right solution, even on a simple problem when I…

> they shouldn't have to solve puzzle problems with "gotcha" solutions. I’ve never come across this myself, but I always figured that sort of interviewing would correct itself over time - if you ask questions that nobody is going to know the answer to, eventually when three years have gone by and you still haven’t hired anybody, you’re going to have to adjust your tactics.

You would think that. But there's that saying about how "the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent." It's true.

I've seen many places sit on job reqs for a year or two after I applied and would have done quite well. Sure, I may have needed to study a week or two. Then they'd have a solution ~11 months earlier.

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