Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

glenmccallum.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

351–360 of 384 posts

Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#351

Post by wuliwong »

Tade0 wrote: post #129
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…

There exist automated processes[0] that efficiently reject such candidates - no need to bother staff with doing the same manually. [0] https://www.codility.com/

It's funny, the worst engineer I ever hired did great on our Codility tests. Maybe he just cheated, he actually scored higher than myself. Just a little anecdote but we no longer use Codility at my company. :)

Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#352

Post by mimixco »

mrguyorama wrote: post #298
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.

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 th…

Good point. The first thing they did after hire was send everyone away to a 6 week "boot camp" which was invaluable. Who does that anymore?

Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#353

Post by malvosenior »

wuliwong wrote: post #349
malvosenior wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is such a great response and I've had similar experiences. As you become more senior you also get more managerial responsibilities which can eat into your time/energy budget to stay up to date on tech not directly related to your job. You may also get more life responsibilities as you age (family...) that further erode your technical edge. Good on you for having the introspective skills and awareness to identify…

I don't understand how this is a problem? If OP is a Senior Dev and interviewing for another Senior Dev role, wouldn't you assume that this new role is probably going to require similar skills to perform similar managerial type responsibilities? I mean, sure go ahead and prepare for interviewing, brush up on whatever you think will help. But if a company has a policy of consistently rejecting candidates based on test…

A lot of time people will move to a new job for a more senior position than their current job. Being a Sr. Engineer at a Series A funded startup can be very different than being a Sr. Engineer at Facebook (not always, but often). I would expect a higher bar at a larger engineering organization.

If someone is effectively testing for these more difficult subject matters then it's quite possible that they themselves and other co-workers are competent in them (as they passed the same test).

Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#354

Post by magduf »

cr0sh wrote: post #232
theWheez wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is incredible to me. How can one get to senior or middle software engineering positions without the ability to write such trivial code?

It does seem incredible, but it happens. One place I worked at, the company hired a developer who claimed to have a CompSci masters. He was completely unable to code anything. I thought it strange. I started to ask him some basic questions that any actual CompSci degree holder should be able to answer (and I don't have a degree in CompSci at all - everything I know I've learned on my own, from other sources, for the…

I once worked in a place where they wanted to hire a few contractors to help out, and I had to help phone-interview a few. I remember one guy whose resume claimed he was an expert in C++, so I simply asked him to tell me what a "class" was in C++. He couldn't answer.

Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#355

Post by mimixco »

jerf wrote: post #246
mimixco wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, he knew them and discarded them. Adam Frank's excellent About Time does a good job of telling the story.

If you took out the bits of relativity that were developed by others, you'd be left with not very much. Relativity without the Lorentz transform... I'm not even sure how one would resolve that. As I said, the vast majority of the insight was just taking what the math was already saying seriously. Einstein put it into a final form, and this is important and valid work, but it's not like he invented all the mathematica…

I'm no astrophysicist, though Frank is. The two concepts I'm referring to as being "discarded" were Newton's idea that motion (ie: time and space) exist in a fixed frame of reference. I think it's fair to say Einstein tossed that out wholeheartedly. The other idea Frank mentions that Einstein threw away was the idea of an æther that filled the voids in the universe. According to Frank, Einstein didn't like this idea so he just worked without it.

Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#356

Post by [deleted] »

wahlrus wrote: post #89
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…

Lol. At my job, I code in several different languages. Sometimes, a new project requires me to to learn to write in a new language. It's not a big deal... Programming is pretty general, so new syntax doesn't slow me down too much. But I can't tell you what the sleep command is any of these languages. I look it up every single time :P

[deleted]

Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#357

Post by pragmatic »

My boss had a very simple test he does.

1) create a very small web API 2) CLI the frontend spa of your choice Just toy examples with some in memory data and filtering Time boxed to an hour.

No crazy puzzles. Just demonstrate you can do the basics. See how far you can get, discuss as you go...

High failure rate. Even when I'd basically prep the candidates in the phone screen.

I'd basically tell them what they had to do. Still didn't prepare.

I've been burned on the take home projects and super crazy timed algo puzzle tests with the terrible instructions. I try to take the stress out of it as much as I can.

Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#358

Post by throwaway082729 »

neogodless wrote: post #153
throwaway082729 wrote: post #101

Interviewing is broken. Whiteboard tests with a bunch of algorithm and data structures questions are meaningless and have no relevance to reality. If I ran engineering, this is what I'd have candidates do. 1. Initial video conf meeting to make sure he/she can communicate well. Talk about the role. Have a technical discussion covering candidate's past experiences to evaluate whether they really did what they claimed t…

Presumably you would only hire people for a very high level, very well compensated role, and those individuals would plan on staying for a decade or more? I'm not saying your process wouldn't be effective, but it is asking for a very big commitment for one interview for one position at one company. (And that same commitment would have to come from your company and all the interviewers involved!)

Not sure why I understand why this is a big commitment. The first two steps (manager call and a tech interview) are already happening. I'm changing the onsite to exclude whiteboard programming and do real hands-on keyboard programming plus code reviews and presentation which are all things that an engineer is expected to do.

Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#359

Post by jaredklewis »

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…

All interviewing techniques are broadly disliked. A quick summary of complaints found on HN every time we discuss this (about once a week):

- Whiteboarding: algorithmic knowledge not relevant to daily tasks, we have google, obtuse coding environment

- Take home exams: companies have less incentive to respect time of candidate, favors candidates with lots of time to spend interviewing

- Small consulting gigs: not practical for programmers with existing jobs, draws out job search

- Informal conversations, reading resumes: not stringent, susceptible to talented bullshitters

To be 100% clear, none of the above is my opinion, I am simply restating what is regularly posted at this online watering whole.

A discussion of the failings of white-boarding without the context of alternatives is meaningless because interviewing techniques are search functions that all have precision/recall tradeoffs. That there are negatives to white-boarding is a given.

For example, consider that white boarding interviews are short (3 hours). This naturally limits the company's ability to evaluate candidates (less precision), BUT it saves time for the candidate and company (more recall).

So what happens here at HN every week is you get five people all bad mouthing a different interviewing technique, but we never get any closer to a consensus on a technique that would please even a simple majority of programmers (let alone everyone).

TLDR; you don't like white boarding, so what about making a compelling case for something else?

Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

#360

Post by averros »

chrisseaton wrote: post #74
mimixco wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not knowing what to do or what others did can be an advantage. Einstein developed his theory of relatively by simply discarding all the known theories about how physics worked. In my own experience at IBM, I solved a bug that had been repeatedly opened over a series of 9 years by simply asking the question, "Is this number a hex or a decimal?"

> by simply discarding all the known theories about how physics worked But he wasn't ignorant of them. He knew the existing work. He was extremely well read in physics and maths. He wasn't a generalist! If you get a group of random generalists to build your compiler, or your graphics engine, or your cryptography stack, they aren't going to know what they don't know, and it'd take them decades to come up to speed.

As somebody who wrote all of the above (and a lot more) I call B.S. on this one.

The amount of unique stuff in each subfield is not that great, and if you have a wide and solid base in different subfields, picking up the unique ideas and techniques isn't that hard or time consuming.

But after a generalist has it, he is a lot more productive and creative because he often applies stuff from other subfields to come up with better/novel solution to the problem at hand - something a specialist cannot do.

Post reply on HN