Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs • Hacker News Board

Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#301

Post by mrmcht » Wed, May 15, 2019, 5:39 PM UTC

reificator wrote: post #167

suzzer99 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Culture fit does make a lot of sense though. I interviewed at a company where everyone was a gamer. Would I have fit in? Probably not. Another company everyone looked about 25 or younger. I don't blame them for not wanting to hire someone pushing 50. They just don't know if they're going to get the cool 50-year-old or the grumpy old troll who won't listen to anyone. Of course they can never come out and say that for…

> Culture fit does make a lot of sense though. I interviewed at a company where everyone was a gamer. Would I have fit in? Probably not. Another company everyone looked about 25 or younger. I play video games. I have all of the last two generations of consoles, a smattering of older consoles I've managed to hold onto over the years (lost most of them for one reason or another) and a half-decent gaming PC where I pref…

Well that's exactly the point of the culture fit.

You should be a good fit for the company, and the company should be a good fit for you. It goes both ways.

Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#302

Post by beat » Wed, May 15, 2019, 5:41 PM UTC

suzzer99 wrote: post #258

beat wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 technolog…

> It also takes a good architect to interview an architect

And that's the underlying problem behind this coding-test nonsense. You don't ask an architect candidate to implement a binary tree in an interview because it's relevant - you ask that question because you don't know how to ask questions that are relevant. For anything but actual low/mid level coders, these coding tests are just evidence of a failure to interview effectively.

As an aside, I don't find most architects to be "flim-flam men". They are usually quite hardworking and competent, although their job is frought with risk. They're often asked to do the impossible, and they have to do the best they can with it.

Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#303

Post by dba7dba » Wed, May 15, 2019, 5:41 PM UTC

I find it ironic that the upper echelons of startups reject: racism sexism any other discriminations

But something else was brought in to replace them all. And it's called culture-fitism and ageism.

Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#304

Post by beat » Wed, May 15, 2019, 5:45 PM UTC

joshuamorton wrote: post #239

beat wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

FWIW, I'd refuse to work for a lead or architect who wasn't tested on their ability to write code (and in my current position, my manager, their manager, their manager, and their manager all have significant work as SWEs that I can see, or passed coding interviews). The thing that I find when conducting interviews is that people who have trouble writing a concrete solution to a problem often have trouble formalizing…

When I'm interviewing experienced people, I usually gauge technical skill by picking something out of their resume and digging into it with questions. If they don't really understand what happened technically, it's immediately apparent (this is also how you catch inflated resumes). And if they do, I can just keep asking more questions to get a better sense of it.

This is far more real-world than a coding test, imho. Coding happens on the micro level, but understanding happens on the macro level.

Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#305

Post by d1zzy » Wed, May 15, 2019, 5:46 PM UTC

munchbunny wrote: post #284

baron_harkonnen wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bitterne…

Saying that "you're not payed for that" is risky. Yes, you're technically right but when you will be at your new fancy job you may need to do MANY things that you aren't technically being payed to do, so that you can deliver. That IMO is one of the essential skills a senior developer has, not that they can do things a junior developer can't, but that they have a breath of knowledge and skills that make them good junior developers at many things they aren't specialized for and are able to make use of them to get the job done. In that light, picking on "one little thing" such as the interview process using something you may not be used to or like or ever need to do when actually hired (whiteboard coding), seems wrong.

Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#306

Post by o_nate » Wed, May 15, 2019, 5:46 PM UTC

debaserab2 wrote: post #212

kstenerud wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've written in so many languages that I wouldn't be able to answer how to sleep in language X off the top of my head. Is it time.Sleep()? delay()? wait_for()? nsleep()? timer().delayUntil()? something else? No clue, but I know how to find out. You're not hiring me for my encyclopedic knowledge; you're hiring me because I get the job done quickly and effectively, using a proper design and clean, tested code.

Not to mention, there is no sleep command (I assume he meant setTimeout, which has very different functionality than a typical language's sleep command) in javascript, which kind of makes me question the credibility of someone insisting on gatekeeping the senior developer title so hard.

Maybe that was the OPs point? The paradigm of Javascript is incompatible with having a sleep() command, and an experienced Javascript programmer should know that?

Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#307

Post by potta_coffee » Wed, May 15, 2019, 5:46 PM UTC

atemerev wrote: post #90

ixtli wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An extremely underrated point: Hire. Generalists.

1) there are not even enough generalists, good generalists are expensive, and bad generalists... you don’t want them. 2) as a generalist, I am quite OK with hiring specialists, if they are really good at what they do. I am a “full-stack”, which means that while I can do both frontend and backend, I can’t shoot React and CSS like a machine gun, nor can I squeeze the last bits of performance from JVM. I hire specialist…

I think this can really depend on the size of the business. At a small company, you probably can't afford a specialist for each area of responsibility. At a big company, you probably can't afford _not_ to have a specialist.

Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#308

Post by anarazel » Wed, May 15, 2019, 5:47 PM UTC

atemerev wrote: post #99

beat wrote: post #81

Data point: A friend of mine with 20+ years of experience in programming and security (she's been a code-level security analyst for the past decade plus) was asked in an interview the other day to implement a binary tree. Why the fuck is someone asking a lead-level expert with over two decades of experience a first-year CS question? Because that's the process? It's a total failure. Asking senior people to do basic th…

Why don’t learn this thing for once? It is not difficult, and everybody will benefit from doing that at least once, even the most senior and accoladed engineers.

Well, sure, inverting a binary tree isn't hard to learn. But there's countless interview questions, not just that one. A lot are more tricky - and not everyone is good at coming up with such solutions from first principles under interview pressure.

While I'm reasonably good at these style of questions, I'd be very unsurprised if there were a few that'd just catch me cold, even today. And I'm probably working in a field that's a lot more day-to-day data structure heavy than most (RDBMS internals).

Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#309

Post by purple_ducks » Wed, May 15, 2019, 5:52 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…

Wow. So you base your hire decisions on pop quiz answers?

Have you worked in the industry for longer than 2 years?

> ask what the sleep command is in JavaScript.

> We don't really use arrays in Scala

These all seem like genuine things. In more complex companies, people may use more exotic data structures and/or have abstractions around data access.

Silly comment overall.

Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#310

Post by chad_strategic » Wed, May 15, 2019, 5:54 PM UTC

I finally have gotten the courage to leave interviews when they throw code test as me, end the call or just leave. Sometimes I believe that the person doing the interview (Senior Dev) just likes to quiz people on technical knowledge and then when the interviewee doesn't know, they like to tell them and explain it to them. I get the feeling at times it gives the interviewer an ego boost. I think I have been trained to explore every job opportunity, just like I have been trained to eat all the food on my plate.

Best example, I have ever had I was interviewing for job about 6 years ago with a start up. The guy that was interviewing me has a CS masters degree strong tech stack background, probably lacked personality. He asked me what polymorphous was and at the time I didn't know. I just told him that I didn't know. Then he went on to explain it to me. Which I really didn't care about learning about. It was clear I wasn't going to get the job and that was fine, it didn't hurt my feelings. However, I learned to code because I have a background in finance, stocks, and options, before I became a coder. I have built stock algorithms that are profitable, regardless if they don't use all the right classes or OOP. So when this gentleman told me that I wasn't good enough for the job, he followed up with, I really like what you are doing with stocks and your stock algorithm, maybe we could meet for coffee sometime and you could tell me how your algorithm works, etc.

So I'm not good enough for your job, but but you want to learn about my algorithm. (the company went out of business 1 year later.) Pound sand.

The problem that I face is I don't want to be a Senior Dev. I have enough side projects and work life balance that I'm not trying to hit the CTO career mark, unless maybe with a start up. Some one mentioned that that they where like a studio musician. They aren't going be the rock star, but they do well with the band, etc. That's probably me, I'm more interested in my side projects. But professional enough to work at a day job.

Whiteboards, interviews, take homes I'm not seeing this get much better anytime soon.