Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

Crap like this is why I won't interview with a few larger companies and are a major turn off when smaller ones pull this garbage. I'm one of the people that when you try to quiz me my mind blanks. I hate whiteboard programming and prefer solutioning instead. If you want to see code I have a github I can send you. Or you can send me a programming challenge I can complete on my own time. Things like this have actually led me to basically tell at least one large company to cease and desist all recruitment efforts with me.

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 Google ask what the sleep command is in JavaScript. A senior engineer from Twitter didn't know how to use arrays ("We don't really use arrays in Scala").

I don't disagree that many companies do interviews wrong. But there's also a huge number of "senior" engineers who simply shouldn't be senior in the first place. Perhaps it's a result of companies handing out promotions to keep folks around rather than to recognize talent.

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?"

There are many levels.

When you first get out of college you can write a 500 line program, and you get dropped you into a million line program. You get assigned a senior engineer to help you over the hump this takes a few years while you learn things that "everybody knows" but are not taught in school. Hopefully you get the first part of this over as an intern, but there is still more to learn.

Once you get over that hump you can do okay on your own. You can be assigned to write code and you rarely need help (you will always need help, but this point not often). You are still learning, but overall you get things done.

Senior engineer is you have been around for a enough years for a few of the following. Different companies value different things, and I've surely forgot something. I know engineers who never made the senior level because they refused to do something on this list even though if forced they were proven to do well.

You start to teach the other junior engineers how to be better engineers.

You start to see the larger picture of the whole system and how it should be changed for the better.

You start to see how the work individual developers do fits together and get involved with planning on how it is done (breakdown and ordering) so that the project finishes on time.

You become a specialist in something that is important to your company. This can be company specific, or a generic skill that applies elsewhere. (note that if the company doesn't realize how important the area is you won't be rewarded - preventing a problem the company never knew they had won't help)

It's a sad fact that interviewing sucks for both sides. Nobody trains us to conduct interviews, so we all just wing it.

I hate wasting time on candidates that can't answer rudimentary programming questions and I hate being in interviews where I'm asked questions which I feel are silly or irrelevant. I can't even trust my results sometimes because there's always that feeling that perhaps a candidate missed a question because I was a poor communicator.

Listening in on interviews with my team mates has really opened my eyes to the random nature of hiring. I'm certain I would not have passed the bar if interviewed by Team Member B instead of Team Member A.