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Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

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Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#291

Post by rhombocombus »

ben509 wrote: post #274
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…

"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…

I simply can't get behind the idea that having someone whiteboard an algorithm is analogous to either their programming skill or their ability to work within a company. I spend a minuscule fraction of my time writing algorithms in my daily practice, most of my time is spent integrating disparate technologies, data wrangling, and working across teams to get the information I need to make our product. Clearly there needs to be some vetting of someone's skill, but problem solving and troubleshooting are way more valued skills in my group than the ability to write a fibonacci sequence on the whiteboard. I have had far better success asking questions around diagnostic process and troubleshooting to find talented devs than I ever did using whiteboard like tests.

Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#292

Post by everdev »

suzzer99 wrote: post #128
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 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…

> companies like Google and Facebook can afford to miss out on those devs. But smaller companies should be looking for diamonds in the rough

I'd say it's the opposite. Big companies can afford to take a shot on someone and miss without materially impacting the business.

If I'm hiring developer #2 at my 5 person startup, I want someone confident and cool under pressure who has done something similar to what I'm building so many times in real life that the coding test is a cake walk.

A dev hire on a small engineering team (Once I get to 15-20+ devs, I'm much more likely to relax my criteria and look for a diamond in the rough.

Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#293

Post by javajosh »

tempsolution wrote: post #185
mikelanza wrote: post #75

I take a completely different approach to hiring, and I've gotten fantastic results. Instead of throwing tricky algorithm questions at a candidates, I scour their detailed employment records for the most relevant experience for the first project. In other words, I'm looking for relevant experience rather than top-of-the-head algorithmic brilliance. In the interview, I pose our project problem, and the candidate who g…

Yeah this is the M.I.T. and Harvard "process". Hire success, instead of fostering success. Works well for small companies. If you need to hire 10.000 to 30.000 people a year, this approach is absolutely useless. Also just because someone can't come up with the coolest solution for your project, doesn't mean they aren't good developers. This is even more biased than algorithmic interviews, because algorithmic intervie…

He said "impressive proposal", not "coolest solution".

To me, "impressive proposal" means "articulation of a workable plan", the components of which are relatively small, actionable, and take into accounts requirements, and that demonstrates a good understanding of risk. In fact I'd argue that the ability to do this kind of top-level break-down well is one of the best indicators of seniority. The downside is that to do it well requires knowledge of a very specific process, architecture, and technology stack. That is, if you're good at breaking down problems use stateful Erlang and OpenBSD running on bare-metal with web clients, you might have an issue breaking down using stateless C# on Azure with Android native clients. Some combinations are more compatible than others, of course, but any senior dev in one stack is going to have to recapitulate the learning curve of another stack before they can regain this superpower! (We may like to think that only architecture matters, but it is relatively rare that an architecture rendered in one stack is actually isomorphic to the same architecture rendered in another!)

Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#294

Post by mrguyorama »

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…

Meanwhile employers can ask you to complete "psychological evaluations" just fine

Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#295

Post by HelloNurse »

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…

There are people who overestimate their ability. For example, I've worked with a very junior programmer (too junior for a good whiteboarding performance) who took extensive notes about everything, appeared to learn quickly, was probably convinced that he was learning, but performed poorly because he failed to think enough.

I saw him do SQL joins on the wrong column, cause accidents in source control, lose changes because he wasn't looking at the file and folder names on screen, and so on. Hard to realize for him, and hard to guess in an interview.

Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#296

Post by stuxnet79 »

everdev wrote: post #292
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…

> companies like Google and Facebook can afford to miss out on those devs. But smaller companies should be looking for diamonds in the rough I'd say it's the opposite. Big companies can afford to take a shot on someone and miss without materially impacting the business. If I'm hiring developer #2 at my 5 person startup, I want someone confident and cool under pressure who has done something similar to what I'm buildi…

I agree. Hiring has both a non-trivial time and money cost. The very same companies that would benefit from finding diamonds in the rough usually don't have the resources to find these devs in the first place. The modern coding interview is designed for the processes and needs of larger tech cos with large amounts of resources. Cargo cult at your own discretion.

Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#297

Post by cr0sh »

JudgeWapner wrote: post #143
umvi wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people self-label themselves "senior developers" after 5 years of experience. However, it also refers to developers at risk of ageism (i.e. over the age of 40 or 50)

I know this sounds conspiratorial, but I think the leetcode tests are there to keep older people out. Because the whole "leetcode culture" stereotype of the junior/senior bachelor's CS student "grinding leetcode to land his Big-N job" means that younger grads are going to have seen these problems before and know how to rattle back the solutions without even thinking. Whereas an older dev is more likely to have a fami…

> They are more likely to have not seen the problem before and have to run the gauntlet with no practice.

The other possibility is that they have seen the problem before, fixed it, but didn't know it was called "calculating the Big-O bullshit of reversing linked lists while merge sorting"...

I have 25+ years of experience; in a month I will turn 46. I don't have a CS degree, nor even a BS. I'm one of those devs who started basically fresh out of high school, and made a career out of it. I'm not even sure that is possible to do any longer.

What I don't have is all of that CS knowledge and terminology. That isn't to say that I could solve all of those problems, or that I have encountered them, or come up with the correct or practical solutions. To be fair, I am always learning something new (and I like it that way). Also, to the "example" you give, I'd have to look up how to reverse a linked list and what a merge sort exactly was. Hopefully, there's some kind of standard library for both in the language I was using, but if I had to do it from scratch, right now off the top of my head, I couldn't do it.

But I would know how to figure out and ask the right questions on how to do it, and go from there.

And that's really one of the best skills as a developer to have, imho. There have been times where I have had a problem, tried to google for it - thinking it was a common issue - found that it was a common issue, with people asking the questions - but either no solutions, or worse:

https://xkcd.com/979/

...and so, by breaking the problem down, figuring out the answer to those questions (with either more googling, or implementing a custom solution), then pulling all those parts back into one coherent answer for the initial problem - that greater issue can be solved.

Then I find a forum or something and post the solution there, so that future coders can at least have one good reference point, for as long as the forum exists. Nowadays, I'd probably put it on my github repo or something.

Ultimately - there are a lot of "senior devs" (both in age and ability) who are currently in my place; people who didn't go the tradition educational route; people who were coding in their bedrooms on 8-bit home computers in assembler and BASIC because that's all we had at the time. We may or may not have run across those CS-level problems. If we did, we didn't know their names (much like not knowing the names for certain "patterns" - yet another similar thing) - but we still may have implemented solutions for them anyhow.

Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#298

Post by mrguyorama »

matthewbauer wrote: post #32
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…

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.

This was also back when companies were actually willing to train people. Using a test like that, they could try to hire people who had "potential" and then give them a career where they could grow, improve, and bring value to IBM

That doesn't mesh so well with the modern era of employers hating spending a dime on training, even if it would save them a dollar, and employees wanting to jump ship every other year for that sweet sweet 10% compensation bump

Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#299

Post by thorwasdfasdf »

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…

Someone who's been writing code professionally at a software company (especially google or twitter), definitely has at least a moderate if not high level of proficiency in software engineering.

if these highly competent people can't answer your questions, you really need to take a second look at your Questions.

Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#300

Post by lucretian »

umvi wrote: post #41
Drakim wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Hard to work with" is a pretty big minus on somebody's skillset, you don't need to hide it under "culture fit".

I mean, it's just a hunch though. I've only spent an hour or two with the person, I don't know actually know if they would be hard to work with. Candidate one gives off slightly anti-social vibes but is brilliant, candidate two jokes around with me during the interview and is smart as well, but less so than candidate one. Am I justified in going with candidate two on a hunch?

what about the risk that candidate #2 has schmoozed their way up the ladder, and really isn't as smart as they seem?
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