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All that's required to get 10 years of experience is the ability to get your foot in the door and not do so badly that they actually fire you. It is absolutely

All that's required to get 10 years of experience is the ability to get your foot in the door and not do so badly that they actually fire you. It is absolutely not a guarantee of any real competence. At my last job I did a bunch of interviewing, and the very worst candidates we had were engineers with years of experience working at badly run companies. If management is bad enough, a company can't hold on to good engineers. As a result, they end up with just the engineers who can't go elsewhere. Since these companies are filled with bad engineers, there's no culture of learning, and an engineer who isn't really motivated can go years learning basically nothing. Experience is great, but it's totally possible to go a decade without learning much.

meggar 9y ago
Your opinion is based on the assumption that your interview process yielded an accurate assessment of competence.
- nolemurs 9y ago
  Well, sure. We're not talking sophisticated things here though. The exercises that I've formed this opinion from were closer to fizz-buzz than to data structures or algorithms questions. If it takes you 20 minutes to code something about as hard as fizz-buzz (on a computer, with internet access), and the code you have at the end is terrible, I feel pretty confident saying you're not an effective engineer.
  - linkregister 9y ago
    Yet the Google and Facebook interview questions are decidedly not trivial fizzbuzz problems. They're more on the order of the second midterm of a 300-level algorithms class. This is not stuff that most 10-year engineers have in their heads. I'm not commenting on your company's interview process; I'm merely affirming the earlier poster's claim that there is a serious issue with the Google interview process and its cargo-cult-followed successors (Facebook, et. al.).
ubernostrum 9y ago
I really really really want everyone who conducts interviews to read this: http://blog.interviewing.io/you-cant-fix-diversity-in-tech-without-fixing-the-technical-interview/ http://blog.interviewing.io/you-cant-fix-diversity-in-tech-w... It's based on a decent sample size, and challenges a lot of assumptions about the consistency and quality of tech interviewing practices. In particular, the person you're talking about, who says they pass only about "50%" of interviews, is telling. Quote from article: As you can see, roughly 25% of interviewees are consistent in their performance, but the rest are all over the place. And over a third of people with a high mean (>=3) technical performance bombed at least one interview. This is not a problem of terrible horrible no-good very-bad "fake programmer" candidates who somehow held onto jobs for years. This is a problem of interviewers who are fundamentally incompetent to conduct interviews and evaluate candidates.

meggar 9y ago

Your opinion is based on the assumption that your interview process yielded an accurate assessment of competence.

nolemurs 9y ago
Well, sure. We're not talking sophisticated things here though. The exercises that I've formed this opinion from were closer to fizz-buzz than to data structures or algorithms questions. If it takes you 20 minutes to code something about as hard as fizz-buzz (on a computer, with internet access), and the code you have at the end is terrible, I feel pretty confident saying you're not an effective engineer.
- linkregister 9y ago
  Yet the Google and Facebook interview questions are decidedly not trivial fizzbuzz problems. They're more on the order of the second midterm of a 300-level algorithms class. This is not stuff that most 10-year engineers have in their heads. I'm not commenting on your company's interview process; I'm merely affirming the earlier poster's claim that there is a serious issue with the Google interview process and its cargo-cult-followed successors (Facebook, et. al.).

ubernostrum 9y ago

I really really really want everyone who conducts interviews to read this: http://blog.interviewing.io/you-cant-fix-diversity-in-tech-without-fixing-the-technical-interview/ http://blog.interviewing.io/you-cant-fix-diversity-in-tech-w... It's based on a decent sample size, and challenges a lot of assumptions about the consistency and quality of tech interviewing practices. In particular, the person you're talking about, who says they pass only about "50%" of interviews, is telling. Quote from article: As you can see, roughly 25% of interviewees are consistent in their performance, but the rest are all over the place. And over a third of people with a high mean (>=3) technical performance bombed at least one interview. This is not a problem of terrible horrible no-good very-bad "fake programmer" candidates who somehow held onto jobs for years. This is a problem of interviewers who are fundamentally incompetent to conduct interviews and evaluate candidates.