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Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

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Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#321

Post by suzzer99 »

beat wrote: post #304
joshuamorton wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

Yeah this is much better.

This guy has the right approach imo: https://www.karllhughes.com/posts/rethinking-hiring

Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#322

Post by alexandercrohde »

Ancalagon wrote: post #318
alexandercrohde wrote: post #20

At this point it seems like a tired HN discussion. 1. Everybody agrees interviews and tests have some signal, some noise. 2. Some interviews are systematically biased toward skills that aren't a good sample of what work is. But people just want to whine about it rather than propose a better solution. 3. Nobody can agree on what the important skills are for engineering anyways. Which is natural, since it varies situat…

Actually I would say there are plenty of counterpoints in this thread to your second and third points.

shrug Seems dubious to me...

Likeliest scenario people say a bunch of vague phrases like "communication skill" and "culture fit" and "diligence" at each other, forget they had this conversation, and thread continues to happen every 2 weeks for the next 10 years (I guarantee this conversation has happened no less than 100 times here already).

Hypothetically not-meaningless form of collaboration that would never happen on HN -- people form a google doc and come up with concrete questions that they upvote/downvote to come up with a great engineering interview, and each new discussion adds to the list.

Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#323

Post by HillaryBriss »

suzzer99 wrote: post #180
dantheman wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can offer a coding test - give them a computer, a piece of paper, etc. Let them sit a room by themselves, give them up to an hour to do a 15 minute problem. There are lots of ways to destress the coding interview, but the ability to code has to be tested.

Yeah but then inevitably the company starts grading on a curve. Did the dev nail every single possible mistake or bug? Did they add any extra flourishes? So you're not just testing for basic competence anymore. You're testing for devs who are really good at timed coding challenges - just like with challenges where it's tough to get the right answer in the allotted time. Companies don't get excited about a dev who jus…

> inevitably the company starts grading on a curve

which explains the paradox of too many developers chasing too few jobs versus all these companies complaining that they cannot find enough good developers

Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#324

Post by justfor1comment »

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…

This is reasonable from your vantage point. But why should that talented person work for your fledgling startup? Wouldn't he or she have more options on the table?

Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#325

Post by HillaryBriss »

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…

yes. also factor in the probability of receiving a huge number of qualified applicants: for Google it is as close to 1 as it is for any company. for the startup it's far lower. Google does not need to take these risks.

Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#326

Post by ben509 »

rhombocombus wrote: post #291
ben509 wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 nee…

> 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.

It's not an analog. It's the actual skill up close. They should be explaining their thoughts as they go, and you're asking why they do A instead of B.

> I spend a minuscule fraction of my time writing algorithms in my daily practice

A good problem isn't simply an algorithm, but also tests how they break a problem down, how they compose a solution, how they think through engineering tradeoffs, and how they communicate all this to you.

Consider the difference between an artist and an amateur painter. That the artist has practiced brush strokes is not surprising, anyone can practice painting a lot. What really matters is the artist can take the image in their mind and composing it into a complete scene and then express it all that through their medium of choice.

> but problem solving and troubleshooting are way more valued skills in my group

Is that a good thing? If your group wrote better code, wouldn't they have less troubleshooting to do?

Yes, that's a tautology, but I've worked on code that was kludges on top of kludges. And while kludges can be inevitable, if they persist, it indicates the person doesn't have the mastery to see a better way to express a problem. That's a skill deficit.

When I'm analyzing someone's ability to code, I'm presenting it as a problem to solve. We solve problems by restating them in such a way that the solution falls naturally from the question.

The candidates who can do this well will put together well structured, coherent code, and my team will spend more time delivering features and less time troubleshooting.

Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#327

Post by karlhughes »

suzzer99 wrote: post #321
beat wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

Yeah this is much better. This guy has the right approach imo: https://www.karllhughes.com/posts/rethinking-hiring

Thanks for sharing! I read this post and thought the same thing.

I'm honestly nervous that next time I have to go out and interview, I'll be in the same shoes as OP. Despite many years of managing software for small companies, I have no desire to go back and re-learn Leetcode just to get a job.

Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#328

Post by justfor1comment »

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…

May be the company you hire for has a mediocre reputation. So that people with average programming skills don't mind applying. People are generally good at self sorting. At some level they must be thinking they can get this job and end up being surprised that all the rounds are not behavioral rounds.

Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#329

Post by Ancalagon »

alexandercrohde wrote: post #322
Ancalagon wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually I would say there are plenty of counterpoints in this thread to your second and third points.

shrug Seems dubious to me... Likeliest scenario people say a bunch of vague phrases like "communication skill" and "culture fit" and "diligence" at each other, forget they had this conversation, and thread continues to happen every 2 weeks for the next 10 years (I guarantee this conversation has happened no less than 100 times here already). Hypothetically not-meaningless form of collaboration that would never happen…

Well I mean even that suggestion you just made for a collaborative google doc is excellent and is the kind of counter point I was talking about.

The main contention developers seem to have (in my mind) isn't necessarily all whiteboarding interviews. Its the ones with ridiculous problem complexity and timelimits of under an hour that require inordinate amounts of study every time someone begins their job search (Dynamic programming in 45 min comes to mind). I think there are plenty of good alternatives in this thread: take-home assignments, paying developers to study and take these exams, github code reviews, even just restricting the problem space of a whiteboard interview to less complicated problems are all good suggestions.

The other point I was trying to make was that generally the skills you want to test for in an interview are those applicable to the job. Others in this thread have argued that these whiteboarding problems do in fact test some important subset of the skills needed by most developers. Others have pointed out that at some point though, its gotten ridiculous, and knowing how to sort and array in O(nlogn) is not really applicable to all the jobs interviewing for that knowledge, and it would be a better use of everybody's time to instead test for some other subset of knowledge (SQL use, CRUD application construction, etc.)

Finally I just wanted to point out I am an interviewer at my current company. I do take a lot of these conversations to heart. I have tried to experiment with the interviews I give to make them better for the candidate, and better for the company. Anyways, just pointing out I do think these conversations have an impact :)

Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#330

Post by ThrustVectoring »

suzzer99 wrote: post #142
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 somehow still works for pretty much every other profession, and worked fine for programming until a few years ago when everyone decided timed programming challenges were the way to go. I wish all jobs could just hire devs for short contracts then convert the keepers to full time. I'd be more than happy in that scenario because I know they'll want to convert me and now it's up to me.

The big problem with this is that the short contract does not guarantee continuity of health insurance coverage, and this is a dealbreaker for a lot of folks. The pool of applicants who would accept these offers excludes the top-performing folks who have much better alternatives than contract-to-hire.
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