Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs
glenmccallum.com
Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs
1–10 of 384 posts
Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs
#2Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs
#3This is seriously f'd up. When I was hired by IBM years ago, they also had a test called the IPAT (Initial Programming Aptitude Test) but, guess what?, there was no programming in it! Instead, the test was designed to see if one had the basic reasoning and logic skills which would be necessary to solve a wide variety of programming-related problems -- not one stupid, specific problem in a particular language. That's just asinine.
Making sure that developers have the "needle in a haystack" solution that you're looking for almost guarantees that you'll weed out the most talented folks -- the ones who are programming generalists that can reason about and solve any kind of programming problem.
Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs
#4This is kind of a funny article. It starts off by describing the problem that is created by these interviews, and then sort of waves its hand saying that companies like them and they are here to say. It's probably more of a blog post than a journalism article, but it would be more interesting if they either got to the depths of why they are failing some people and considered some alternatives that might work for both companies and people who are more senior.
Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs
#5[deleted]
Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs
#6I am sure all these methods were validated as significant predictors of job success using longitudinal data, right? It's not like the bad old days where managers and HR people would just ask questions they thought were relevant to the job (or flip a coin).
https://www.forbes.com/sites/work-in-progress/2015/05/21/why...
Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs
#7[deleted]
Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs
#8>But don’t think that you can walk into another job based on market demand and the number of years on your resume.
The issue is that there are a lot of programmers who have a lot of years and who consider themselves senior who have very little programming ability. If you have been with a “senior” developer who had no idea how to program but was always telling other people what to do, because he was senior, you know the danger of hiring one of these.
The other thing about this is preparation. It is no secret how these companies are screening and interviewing. A truly senior developer who really wants the job, with a few weeks of practice for an hour every night can considerably improve their chances.
Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs
#9We 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 these positions as you would a traditional sales position.
Further, I think it needs to be said that at smaller companies (read: startups) whats really happening is that applicants are being evaluated for whether or not they're cool enough to join the club. We call it "culture fit" but we're really just trying to vet their personalities.
EDIT: To be clear I do think people's personalities need to be evaluated, especially with smaller teams. I just think we should drop the pretense that "implementing" a depth first tree search on a whiteboard tells us anything other than that they could summon that algorithm at that moment in time with that amount of coffee and whether or not they had a pleasant morning. First of all, I want engineers that are good at working with others, and second of all it takes months to truly evaluate an engineers ability to do their job. We gain nothing by pretending this isn't the case.
Re: Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs
#10So there are multiple things that are true with people applying for development roles:
1. These "dev gate" programming challenges are filtering out senior devs, talented devs, creative devs etc. people who would be great at the role.
2. There are people applying for these roles who can't knock out a decent Fizzbuzz solution (in any amount of time).
3. For many roles, there's a flood of applicants
Any solutions to this need must address all three of these things simultaneously which seems astoundingly difficult.