Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs

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 things like that is insulting. Don't you have anything better to ask?

I have over 8 years experience as a developer and applied for a Senior .Net Developer role. I have plenty of experience in the technology stack and worked as lead developer on some high profile projects in my current role which have been successful. I'm no rock star but I get stuff done and I work well with others.

The company liked my CV and cover letter and send out a HackerRank link for me to work on. My first thought was "sh*t" as I struggle with these things but also how impersonal it was. The everything was weighted on the HackerRack test. At least speak with the candidate and get a feel for them. Even a phone call.

Hiring as they say is one of the hardest things you can do. It's time consuming and costly so I think they have these tests as away to cull the herd so to speak but it's obviously not ideal. Basecamp have a podcast called rework and one of their episodes called "Hazing not Hiring" deals with this. It's really interesting.

For me, I'm going to try to work on a side project and use this as another part of my application. Almost like a portfolio. Hopefully this will be enough going forward.

Interviews used to take about 6-8 hours of my week, and I was usually completely destroyed by the context switch. I remember many days when a deadline was very close, and I absolutely did not want to do the interview, but had to.

In general some days I was in good mood, some in bad mood and even though I tried to make the interview as objective as possible, I am absolutely sure I failed. Keep in mind, one interview has 5 interviewers and guess what they had bad days too.

From those 500 interviews, I was certain for about ~5 cases, for the rest I could not say if it was my fault, or the candidate's fault that the interview went south, in that case I pretty much voted as the majority was voting.

I still feel very bad about people's livelihood being decided in such shitty process, there is absolutely no way that in 1 hour I can find out if someone is good. I knew that, my managers knew that, their managers knew that, and yet we kept going..

I feel that adding more time/people to the process only increases the variance, adding more structure to the process only increases the bias (like we get people who can pass interviews, but not do their job).

But I can't tell you what the sleep command is any of these languages. I look it up every single time :P