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Things I Learned from a Job Hunt for a Senior Engineering Role

• notacoward 8y ago
  Maybe the difference in people's experience with candidates who can't code is that some types of programming are full of BSers and others aren't. In nearly 30 years I've never encountered a candidate who flat-out couldn't code. If you see a lot of that in your specialty, maybe you should ask yourself what it is about that specialty that leads to a different experience.
  • modbait 8y ago
    That's been my experience as well. In addition, people are generally pretty honest about where they're at, skill-wise. That said, I have seen several people who were open about lacking the basic requirements for a position get hired anyway. So, I wouldn't assume that seeing someone incompetent in a position means they lied to get there.
    • ropeadopepope 8y ago
      What field do you work in?
      • modbait 8y ago
        General Linux programming, in a variety of fields.
  • ropeadopepope 8y ago
    What field do you work in?
    • notacoward 8y ago
      I've worked in various kinds of infrastructure - kernels, networking, various kinds of clustering, and for a long time now storage. I've met people who write lousy code, I've met people who struggle to think even one millimeter above the code right in front of them, I've met people who can't debug worth a damn, but I haven't had any candidates who simply couldn't code.
• golergka 8y ago
  > When did an entire industry of people get pre-judged as lying? That's the kind of thing that happens when people lie. Everybody who's ever hired engineers knows from experience that a simple Fizzbuzz test is still, unfortunately, a very usable candidate filter. A lot of candidates with years of real work experience simply cannot write code. How else can we find this out?
  • LandR 8y ago
    > A lot of candidates with years of real work experience simply cannot write code. How else can we find this out? So true, sadly.
    • warrenm 8y ago
      That's because 95% of software development IS NOT CODING It's thinking, puzzling, chewing over problems, solving political infighting between customers, management, and the frameworks in use
  • bg4 8y ago
    It's also the reason why so many systems, at so many companies, are complete, utter shit.
    • arca_vorago 8y ago
      I agree but I don't think it's fair to put it all on the incompetence of devs/engineers... in many cases it's mismanagement and the real problem is devs/engineers don't know how to talk to management to get to them see why $badpractice is bad. So because the devs don't have MBA's, and the MBA's don't talk well to technicals there is a huge culture gap in the average fortune 1000 workplace. I've seen the inside of companies where the cost cutting was so excessive the infrastructure was near crumbling... just due to sheer mismanagement. You want to know how many stories I've heard about a sysadmin requesting horizontal and structured cabling done by professionals and been denied? How many stories about IT departments not even having an actual budget and only getting approve/deny requests? So half of the infrastructure around companies is just cobbled together by some underpayed one man miracle show who if he is super lucky gets a full time t1 assist. At the end of the day, the buck should stop somewhere... and it does. With management. In the meantime, I think it's time for sysadmins/engineers/devs to start getting MBA's and going for CIO/CTO positions and start to push a shift.
• WrtCdEvrydy 8y ago
  Weird thing. JobHound Sign Up Works, but the login link takes out of outside the page.
  • joekrill 8y ago
    Worked for me. Not sure what outside page you are referring to. Although there was a weird problem when I tried to logout. It didn't really seem to work right but eventually I got redirected to the login page again after clicking around a bit.
• opportune 8y ago
  So the author is complaining about coding tests and being doubted for knowing how to code... yet converted 15 technicals into only 2 onsites.
  • noahc 8y ago
    I understand your suspicion, however, I find it odd that the author couldn't code AND recorded a video discussing his code. It seems like he'd hide it away if he couldn't code.
  • positr0n 8y ago
    Could just be age discrimination. I've worked with more than a few people who are very suspicious of people over 40 who are "still just coders," saying that it shows the candidate lacks ambition or they must not be that good since they never advanced to a more senior role like very-senior-principle engineer or management.
    • maxxxxx 8y ago
      This is such a weird industry. Most current devs will be still coders when they are over 40. Only a few can make it to management or high level lead engineer roles. There are not that many openings for that kind of role. I used to work as mechanical engineer and there it was totally normal to have engineers who were 60 years old.
    • s2g 8y ago
      > since they never advanced to a more senior role like very-senior-principle engineer or management Not everyone makes principal, and you shouldn't go into management if you aren't suited for it. Oh but if you don't do either of those things by 40 then you suck and don't deserve to get hired. Speaking of sucking, I should probably figure out what I'm gonna do once I'm unemployable. hm.
  • EpicEng 8y ago
    He mentions many other issues which he believes led to a stall in the process.
• pg_bot 8y ago
  Number 2: No One Believes Anyone Can Actually Code It's surprising to see the number of people who interview for lead technical roles that cannot code, or whose work is exceptionally sloppy. Incompetence is more commonplace than the author believes, even at the highest level.
  • enraged_camel 8y ago
    Not all technical roles require coding skill. Unless you meant “lead software engineering role” in which case yes, you are right.
    • pg_bot 8y ago
      Yes, that is what I meant.
    • ataturk 8y ago
      Most of my day as a lead was on the phone putting out fires, not coding. I hated it and the politics and blame shifting that came with it.
  • solaris999 8y ago
    This was the one that really stood out to me. MOOCs, bootcamps etc are wildly popular now and vary massively in quality. It's very easy for candidates to look good on paper but not actually know the technical side as well as they should. More importantly, software engineering is one of the few jobs where you can get a (somewhat) quantitative measure on prospective performance so it's natural to take advantage of that. I'm not saying that All Coding Tests Are Good, but they do provide a modicum of certainty in a very uncertain environment.
  • lostcolony 8y ago
    Seriously. I've sat on the hiring side. I've seen impressive resumes. I've had reasonable discussions with people. And then I give them a very, very trivial coding exercise (a take home, they're free to Google, do it on their own computer, in their own IDE, in their professed preferred language), in a time frame that while constrained is still plenty...and the result is -terrible-. I can try and come up with reasons why that might be the case, why a simple OO modeling problem + a couple of trivial algorithmic problems (like, take an ascii string, return me a dict mapping characters to character counts) would trip someone up...but that isn't sufficient justification for me to want to continue to an onsite. And that's the people who get past the verbal screen. Plenty drop out at that point. "I see you spent two years as a Senior DBA. Can you tell me what the acryonym ACID stands for?" "No, I'm not familiar with that" "Okay. Well, the 'C' stands for consistency. Can you tell me what one means when we talk about data being consistent in the database?" "It means when you write something it stays written (or some other made up twaddle)" "I see." That said, I agree that coding tests that are completely unrelated to the job, and are geared toward college grads rather than long term developers (i.e., "Implement a (data structure)" or "Remember/discover an algorithm that was a PhD thesis 30 years ago to solve a contrived problem in a theoretically optimal way" rather than "Solve a real problem of a kind similar to what we'd expect you to do here") are dumb.
• LandR 8y ago
  > Number 1: It Takes Longer than Ever to Get Hired Last twice I've looked for a developer job, I got offered a position and was hired within 2 weeks. > No one believes that anyone can actually code. Quite rightly, most devs can't code. > Extensive homework is now normal. Not been my experience, I've done some homework assignments but none were ever more than 1 hours work (and then even the standard of the tests were so low they were really 15 mins work..) > You’ll never really know why you weren’t hired. This bothers me too. > Outsourced hiring “services” are very much in vogue I hate this. Almost all recruiting I see is done via recruiters who are at best case flakey and worst case self serving liars who will try to pressure you into going to interviews you don't want to go and to take job offers you don't want to take. Sometimes flat out lying to you about the role only for you to find out at the interview. I had one interview that I went to expecting it to be C#, the interview was all Javascript (which I don't do at all). Or the recruiter will tell you that you have to decide right now this minute, when you don't. I had one job offer where the recruiter said you've been offered the job but you have to tell them now if you are accepting it. It was funny how after telling the recruiter that I want to think about it over the weekend and if that's not an option than I would like to decline the offer, well now all of a sudden the company were completely willing to let me think over it for a couple of days... I hate recruiters.
  • tboyd47 8y ago
    All my best jobs were found via recruiters. Different strokes, I guess.
    • Ocerge 8y ago
      I found my current gig by using a recruiter I was referred to by a respected coworker, and it's by far the best job I've ever had (out of 5 or so). Super small sample size I know, but if you can find a recruiter that you can trust/isn't just pimping you out for a payday and nothing else, you can skip a ton of bullshit.
      • tboyd47 8y ago
        There's a huge variation in recruiter quality and it's pretty easy to tell the good ones from the bad. Just spend a couple of weeks taking calls and emails and following leads and you learn quick.
• logfromblammo 8y ago
  Every time I see another iteration of this kind of article, it screams out to me that we need some kind of worker's cartel that can enforce an embargo on companies that don't meet some minimal standard. Part of the problem is that companies keep getting more applicants than they can handle, no matter how hostile their interview process becomes.
  • dbasedweeb 8y ago
    Every time I see another iteration of this kind of article, it screams out to me that we need some kind of worker's cartel that can enforce an embargo on companies that don't meet some minimal standard. Like... a union? A combination of aggressive union busting, anti-union ideology of many in tech, and aggressive offshoring/H1B hiring acts to keep that in check. The moment you try to raise the issue you’re either fired, or some “genius” who reads Ayn Rand like the Bible tells you to pull yourself up by your bootstraps.
  • tboyd47 8y ago
    I agree, but the problem is that unions notoriously favor the older, entrenched generations of a profession over the newcomers. Talk to people from NYC (a place with still much union influence) and you see a stark difference between the old folks and the younger folks in how they view workers' unions. Software development is already so heavily dependent on enthusiastic young people that I don't see how a union could get enough traction without completely reinventing the idea of a union in people's minds.
    • s73v3r_ 8y ago
      "but the problem is that unions notoriously favor the older, entrenched generations of a profession over the newcomers." There's nothing specific about a union that does this. The union is an extension of the will of it's members.
      • tboyd47 8y ago
        Union membership rates are highest among workers aged 45-64. It may be a self-fulfilling prophecy to say that unions are for the older generation, but I think there would be either non-participation or real resistance from the younger generations of programmers, if only for the perception people have about them.
• ianhowson 8y ago
  > Number 10: You’ll Never Really Know Why You Weren’t Hired Add to the hurdles: * Salary negotiation * Contract review/negotiation * Reference check * Background check * Getting a work visa There's still lots of work to do once you complete the onsite interview!
• kenoyer130 8y ago
  Number 1: I think this is due to specializing in Ruby on Rails which is falling out of favor? Or your city location? I know in my location the average job hunt is 2 weeks. Number 2: As someone that interviews people alot, this is cuz MANY people who apply CANNOT code, no matter what their resume says. We have had people leave and never come back during our console app on site test (read in a text file and print out its contents with some minor formatting). This is resumes with 10 years plus experience in the language supposedly. And the computer has whatever IDE they prefer and full internet access! Number 3: I agree that CS type questions are pointless unless you are doing stuff like that on the job. We have stopped using those. Number 4: We now require an onsite 2 hour code project (designed to fit in that time frame) Number 5: True Number 6: We use headhunters to weed people out but that is about it. For one position the head hunter roughly run 15 people applying for each 1 possible person to pass to us for the next step. Again, most fail a mind boggling simple phone interview process for people who claim 10 plus years experience in coding. Not knowing what the static keyword means in C# when they say they are skilled in C# for instance. Number 7: Don't have an opinion on this Number 8: Again this seems to be your physical location. At ours there is roughly 3 open positions for each matching person. Number 9: Our company does not discriminate on age and are desperate for qualified people with experience. Many times a candidate regardless of age is stuck in one tech (winforms, MVC, Ruby on Rails (:P)) and we more discrimate on someone who is not showing growth in their tech skillset. For example, are you learning the basics of a cloud stack such as AWS/Google/Azure? At the end of the interview, I would recommend asking "are there any concerns or issues you would have with hiring me for this position?" and LISTEN to their feedback. I am sure there are some bad companies but for the most part it feels like you are not interviewing well for whatever reason. Maybe you are coming off as defensive or hostile when questioned? I would also reach back to the company and ask why they did not choose you. Most companies are way to busy to tell each person why they were passed over, but if you show an interest they will usually respond. Anyway good post and good luck to you!
  • jiveturkey 8y ago
    > At the end of the interview, I would recommend asking "are there any concerns or issues you would have with hiring me for this position?" and LISTEN to their feedback. At the end of each interviewer. Asking the HR person at the end of it all is a waste of time for 2 reasons: 1. they won’t know yet 2. they won’t tell you but the tech interviewer almost certainly isn’t trained to keep his mouth shut and also generally isn’t expecting this question. caught off guard, you can usually get a close to honest response. you do have to interpret a little because people generally don’t want to hurt other people’s feelings right to their face. apply modern day party invite response rules: yes: maybe maybe: no no: fuck no
• jiveturkey 8y ago
  sounds like a naive candidate to me. surprising (but not shocking) for someone with so much experience. if he’s 50 yo, assuming same career since graduation, his first mistake is applying for senior roles. senior is 5-7 years experience. he should be applying for staff roles at minimum and up to principal. i guess you’re not supposed to slam posts here but this article is more of the same old same ole. i would like to see an article from the hiring manager POV.
  • nathanaldensr 8y ago
    In my experience, getting hired for those "post-senior" roles is even more ridiculous than for senior roles. You often run into biased, judgmental, and insecure directors and vice presidents who seem to be terrified that you know more than them. I say this as a 37-year-old with nearly 20 years of experience. Sometimes, people don't want to believe that you know what you're doing.
    • jiveturkey 8y ago
      yes, it is very, very challenging. please keep in mind it’s not that you have to have technical chops, which you certainly won’t even be entertained if you don’t, you also have to be a very good culture fit.
• sjclemmy 8y ago
  Check out the jobhound link and check out the screenshots: “I got 5 out of 6 right but was given a 62%. Damnit!” Haha.
• newssucker 8y ago
  From the article "The general thing that I saw from everyone that I talked to is that no one actually believes that anyone can code. At every stage in the interview process, you’re going to need to prove that your resume isn’t a lie and that you can actually do what you say you can. I find this ludicrous because it is like interviewing an attorney and then saying to him “Please prove that you can cite a Supreme Court precedent”. When did an entire industry of people get pre-judged as lying? Don’t we exist in a country where the default assumption is innocence not guilt?" This is, IMHO, due to the fact that for years new grads would apply to jobs, and the new job required: 7 years programming in X? YES, 4 years writing scripts in Y? ABSOLUTELY, etc, etc. These new grads all had the attitude of "I will learn that on the job, no one has 7 years in X". And now we have a world of companies that don't think anyone can code. Don't know where they got that idea.
  • dragonwriter 8y ago
    > I find this ludicrous because it is like interviewing an attorney and then saying to him “Please prove that you can cite a Supreme Court precedent”. They don't need to do that for lawyers because the bar exam handles that (and, for those with traditional legal education, the highly-standardized law school curriculum.) The programming “profession” has neither of those features.
  • ummonk 8y ago
    >7 years programming in X? YES, 4 years writing scripts in Y? To be fair, there are a lot of job listings where X hasn't even been around for 7 years.
• larrik 8y ago
  I've been involved in hiring senior engineers for a while now, and here's a few counterpoints: 1) Ruby is hard to get a job in, so you are off to a rough start. 2) A lot of people with lots of experience actually can't code for crap. Do you know how many python developers I see that don't know the difference between a tuple and list? Like, how could you be a real dev if you never even wondered why sometimes you use [] and sometimes you use ()? 3) These tests and interviews aren't intended for you to get some certain score. Usually we make them way hard to find out what you do to handle that. 4) That said, you should know how to write code that isn't super slow and with a data model that isn't insane. You should also know how to articulate that, since as a Senior dev, you WILL be mentoring junior devs, and communication is not optional. 5) Every company's process is different because every company is different. Heck, my process is often different per applicant.
  • lifeisstillgood 8y ago
    I think the main point from a candidate perspective is that long, unusual or difficult interview processes are fine as long as we have already decided we really want to work for you (that is you are Trello or SpaceX or some amazing startup we love) otherwise, just as you are faced with picking a rose from a faceless mass of candidates so are we faced with picking a decent place to work from a faceless mass of mission statements and "100%code coverage" blog posts (if we can find any) And 2) yes I can believe it - that's what fizzbuzz and its ilk are for. The number of companies offering hackerrank/codility tests and justifying it as we only hire the very best has left the lake woebegone test way behind. There has to be some middle ground - where someone can pass a basic capability test to weed out the crap without demanding several hours of coding. I mean I spent two evenings recently polishing up a "Oyster card system for TFL" as a hurdle for a government department I have been angling to get in for a year. A no-name corporations wanting CRUD development can take a running jump if it thinks my evenings come cheap. (amazingly at the turn of the century I used to use "has listed Python on CV" as a marker of "worth an interview" - it was rare enough and indicated an interest outside of corporate mainstream. Maybe Erlang today??) Edit: So my compromise suggestion is for companies to say "We have an OSS project (or even recommend one of the bigger ones). Take any of these 5 bugs and supply a pull-request" At least then the evenings work is not totally wasted and you get to see an important skill - how fast can they come up to speed on an unfamiliar codebase?
• geebee 8y ago
  Thank you for writing this post. It was informative. A few comments from a fellow software developer who is approaching 50... I don't think the coding test isn't there because people think you're lying, it's there because we have no industry wide, respected entrance exam. Actuarial interviews don't (to my knowledge) contain a whiteboard vector calculus exam, but this isn't because people just sort of believe actuaries, it's because you have to pass a rigorous exam on these topics to become an actuary. I sometimes wish we had something like this in our field (not necessarily a legal requirement, just something that is widely recognized as legit). I'd be happy to put the time in and really study for a proper exam, but I'm not as interested in doing this over and over for companies that may administer and conduct these exams frivolously and in secret. Also - I actually do agree that it's bad if someone can't write fizz buzz, but every interview exam I've taken has been vastly more difficult than fizz buzz. It's "find all subsets of a set of integers that is divisible by the sum of a different subset of integers". At a whiteboard, in 45 minutes. These aren't impossible problems, but they're much tougher than fizzbuzz. I am saddened, angry, and relieved to hear of your problems with homework. The response you got back makes me realize that the two times I've done a homework assignment were probably pretty typical. I won't do this anymore, and I do accept that this will limit my career options. It does anger me, though, when the companies who do this complain about a shortage of engineers. True story: I did an on line exam and take home homework assignment, waited over a month (crickets chirping) to hear back, pinged the recruiter politely now and then, and finally got a one liner "we've decided not to continue at this time.' A few weeks later, an article with came out with a picture of the CEO of this company standing next to President Obama, who nodded gravely as the CEO talked about the desperate shortage of software developers.
  • octorian 8y ago
    > ...who nodded gravely as the CEO talked about the desperate shortage of software developers. This comment is exactly why reading about "interview gymnastics" like this really pisses me off. Its also why I wonder how many big tech companies are somehow able to hire so many people... With processes like these, you'd think that they either have a "secret backdoor" or never managed to actually hire more than a dozen or so.
• ChuckMcM 8y ago
  I find the coding thing interesting as well, in part because there is coding and there is coding. I suspect it is the difference between "coding ability" and "coding fluency." In the former a candidate can apply known patterns of a give language to a problem and with just a few searches on StackOverflow get it working. A person who has code fluency can create the algorithm in the language of your choice, pretty much on the spot. In the music world you meet people who can play a song on the keyboard that is note perfect, but they can't transpose it into a different key. Its the difference between playing the keyboard and using the keyboard to express a musical concept. Can you speak a language if all you have done is memorize an extensive phrase book? Yes, are you fluent? No. The number of candidates who really understand the nature of coding and so they can quickly adapt to any idiomatic language is still quite small in my experience.
  • cableshaft 8y ago
    > A person who has code fluency can create the algorithm in the language of your choice, pretty much on the spot. I've professionally used each for a year or more C#, Python, Javascript, Objective-C, Java, PHP, Visual Basic, and ActionScript over the years. But if you asked me to write a function in anything but the first three languages, I will almost undoubtedly stumble a bit in producing them (hell, I still have to look up syntax for Python periodically). That doesn't mean I couldn't pick them back up in a future job very quickly again (each job I worked for I was usually contributing to their code base in a few days, never longer than a week), it just means I don't have them fresh in my head and I can't store absolutely everything in my head forever. But you'd still probably think I was incompetent. I've certainly given that impression before when I had an onsite scheduled by a recruiter and given less than 24 hours notice for an Objective-C job, a language I hadn't touched or thought about in over a year, and was handed a laptop by a Junior Programmer and was told "Code up an app for me." while another interviewer sat quietly across the table from me and stared at me the whole time while I refreshed on a years worth of XCode changes and forgotten syntax in real time. After that wonderful performance they didn't give much weight to the two employees in their department that worked under me at a previous startup I was Lead Programmer for and vouched for my skills.
    • 8y ago
• brandall10 8y ago
  Been coding professionally since '99 - C/C++/C# until 2012, then Rails/React/Angular over the past 6 years. I guesstimate I've been on some 50 interviews. If anything I feel that things have gotten better, although this may be a difference between my former enterprise Windows-stack life vs. open source tech life. The main differences I see are: - Take homes are more prevalent... but I recall only one which has taken more than a half day, and that was fair as I was relatively new to Rails at the time. I actually like doing these for jobs I'm interested in as they give me an opportunity to flex my skills. - There's about a 50% chance that you get a CTCI type interview vs. a more pragmatic, what-you-experience-on-the-job type domain modeling, write out in code in Rails (or whatever framework being used) type of pairing. When I'm on the hiring side I focus on the latter and feel it's quite effective. When I was starting out you almost always got the CTCI type. I typically red-flag potential employers who don't sufficiently validate the skillset of potential hires. I've worked with plenty of people who were terrible, it's one of the reasons I transitioned to Rails.
  • zumu 8y ago
    > I typically red-flag potential employers who doesn't sufficiently validate the skillset of potential hires. I'm beginning to take this to heart.
    • jenscow 8y ago
      It's a positive signal of the quality of code + team. I sometimes ask if the rest of the team have taken this test (I was once told I was the first, and I'm the replacement)
  • nerraga 8y ago
    Can you elaborate you that last statement? Are Rails developers less terrible than the C/C#/C++ people with whom you’ve worked? If so, what are your thoughts on why that may be?
    • deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
• AndrewKemendo 8y ago
  I guess I don't understand why companies do this process. When I was hiring Senior engineers for Computer Vision and 3D rendering jobs my process was thus: 1. Post job and simultaneously search for engineers we thought were a good fit technically 2. Reach out to people I thought were qualified based on their specific previous work that was related to the job I was hiring for 3. Review submitted applications for relevant experience 4. If we thought it was a technical fit, we would do a <30 minute team phone call with some basic work history questions, description of role/salary and work logistics (remote, dev environment etc...) 5. If we were satisfied with that, send them a <10 hour total, paid, production project at an agreed upon hourly rate. If the candidate didn't have the required IDE etc...it would basically be pair programming 6. Review code, speed and communication 7. Send a hire/no hire decision immediately From first contact through Steps 4-7 it would ideally take less than a week, depending on the candidate's schedule. We were only burned on this process twice. Once the guy kept trying to negotiate salary up over two weeks so that he could get a higher price somewhere else. The second time, the guy did well with initial production, but over time he ended up using local college interns to write his code, who got other jobs and his commit speed fell off of a cliff. Since we are a remote team, trust was paramount, and we trusted quickly by default. Nobody ever had complaints about the hiring process and we had a higher than average success rate for hiring fantastic developers and getting quality code into production quickly. We never asked current salary because it wasn't relevant. I knew what I could pay and that's what was offered. If they asked for more and were worth it, then I would try and find money to make it happen, but generally it wasn't an option. I would do it the same in the future.
  • matwood 8y ago
    > The second time, the guy did well with initial production, but over time he ended up using local college interns to write his code, who got other jobs and his commit speed fell off of a cliff. Sounds like you should have moved him to management.
  • warrenm 8y ago
    >We never asked current salary because it wasn't relevant. I knew what I could pay and that's what was offered. If they asked for more and were worth it, then I would try and find money to make it happen, but generally it wasn't an option. Thank you! Some honesty and forthrightness for a change. (It's something I put in a blog post (https://antipaucity.com/2013/03/25/what-to-offer-to-be-the-best-possible-employer-ever/#.Wt-MtdPwbgo https://antipaucity.com/2013/03/25/what-to-offer-to-be-the-b...) 5+ years ago ...yet have only seen done once in my career)
• Humdeee 8y ago
  > As a hiring manager, I’ve given homework assignments to weed out candidates from the pack but I always kept it reasonable, just a few hours in length. "Just" a few hours has always, always been an underestimation when I've tried these. I've been burned a handful of times now; both from my time and from my belief that it would amount to something. I'm reminded of one instance where follow up emails kept coming after submission: "Add in this now." "Okay, now this." "Handle this." I consider myself an average engineer. I'm not interested in increasing my sample size to try and average out variance any longer. I'm looking outside to one of the first sunny, warm days we've had here in months. I can't think of anything more I'd rather not do than some arbitrary company hiring project. I simply pass on these now and politely pull out from consideration.
  • warrenm 8y ago
    >I can't think of anything more I'd rather not do than some arbitrary company hiring project. I simply pass on these now and politely pull out from consideration. Yep. If you're gonna throw crap at me like that NOW ...it's only going to get worse LATER
• gain_sky 8y ago
  This article is weird. His resume looks impressive and it looks like he has done some solid work but from the article he sounds like he feels entitled because of it. Also I find it annoying how little he mentions about the kind of companies hes applying to or even what country he's in (apart from one reference to a company in California so I guess we can assume he's in the USA). > If an HR person says to me “Oh and we administer a coding test” then my first response is “I’ve taken a bunch of those, which one do you use?”. If I was hiring and a candidate said that to me on the phone I probably wouldn't invite them for an in-person interview.
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• matt_s 8y ago
  > No one believes that anyone can actually code. Is it just our industry where you have to prove you aren't a complete impostor every time? Basically we treat every applicant like they are Frank Abagnale [0]. A senior role should be focused on more overall system and performance aspects of the software, using good practices. What does writing out a solution for fizzbuzz (or equivalent) prove during an interview? If they do it easily do you suspect they memorized it (our base assumption seems to be they are an impostor right)? If they fail, do they fail the interview? In the real world if you had a database call in some recursive loop that would be bad for performance. The number of times I jump to using recursion in a solution is near zero. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Abagnale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Abagnale
  • zeroxfe 8y ago
    > Is it just our industry where you have to prove you aren't a complete impostor every time? Basically we treat every applicant like they are Frank Abagnale [0]. The problem is that a large majority of candidates lie on their resumes. This means that hiring managers have to work harder to qualify a good candidate -- which often ends up turning into a process that hurts and annoys those that are actually qualified.
    • cema 8y ago
      Quote: a large majority of candidates lie on their resumes Is it really true? I do not think it has been my experience (some, but not the majority).
      • jldugger 8y ago
        I've definitely seen candidates stretch the truth. Like Jenkins babysitters who list every technology the Jenkins server uses in builds as a skill. So they list Chef as bold item on their resume, but can't explain what a Chef server is, or how a file resource differs from a cookbook_file resource.
      • munchbunny 8y ago
        I've definitely seen people stretching the truth to various degrees. I do it too, because you're in for unnecessary difficulty getting past the recruiter screen if you don't do _some_ spinning. The key is to only stretch it to the extent that you can explain your background in detail to the hiring manager and be able to openly admit where you don't know much if those areas come up. Generally speaking a hiring manager you actually want to work for understands that experience is heavily dependent on what your last role needed, and skills can be picked up as long as you have enough of the bare minimum covered.
• ryanpcmcquen 8y ago
  Number 7: Companies Really Want to Know Your Salary; Don’t tell Them So true. Do not tell them!
  • kp1234321 8y ago
    It's now illegal for companies to ask this in California.
    • warrenm 8y ago
      It's not illegal to ask in most places ...but it's stupid to answer :)
• mightybyte 8y ago
  The "No One Believes Anyone Can Actually Code" point is right on the money by my anecdotal experience. Just a few weeks ago I was asked to implement FizzBuzz in an interview for the first time in my 15 years of engineering! This was despite having a large amount of verifiable open source Haskell projects.
  • time0ut 8y ago
    I usually ask a trivial problem like this. Not really to see if they can code (I have had one or two people fail here though), but more to serve as a conversation topic. Why did you do this? How would you do that? etc...
    • diminoten 8y ago
      But I don't want to talk about FizzBuzz! It's boring! There's a "right" answer, and not a lot/any real choice or nuance. Ask me about your current problems, problems the person filling the position would need to have opinions about. If nothing else, maybe I could crack a tough issue for you that would have material value. I've given FizzBuzz, and I've done FizzBuzz. It's hard to do it/get it and not feel like there's some degree of insult involved.
      • imron 8y ago
        > and not a lot/any real choice or nuance. Exactly! And people still get it wrong. It's a low-pass filter to weed out programmers who can't even do FizzBuzz, because despite their lack of coding prowess their résumé will still look similar to yours. > and not feel like there's some degree of insult involved. That's just reading far too much in to it.
      • pixeloution 8y ago
        I can't talk to you about my team's current problems, and neither should anyone else. If I do and you offer up a solution I'm in real trouble ... because that's a lawsuit waiting to happen. Try to remember, this is the country where a range check function resulted in a lawsuit: private static void rangeCheck(int arrayLen, int fromIndex, int toIndex { if (fromIndex > toIndex) throw new IllegalArgumentException("fromIndex(" + fromIndex + ") > toIndex(" + toIndex+")"); if (fromIndex < 0) throw new ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException(fromIndex); if (toIndex > arrayLen) throw new ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException(toIndex); }
• the_arun 8y ago
  The common thing I see is there is an implicit bias from interviewer, who always wants to hire someone like himself/herself. I also hear comments from the candidate that - as an interviewee if I interview the interviewer, he might fail too. If the interviewer stays unbiased, we may see better results.
  • AndyNemmity 8y ago
    Absolutely true, but it isn't something that can be fixed. The interviewer interviewing the interviewee is hilariously true. No interviewer could answer questions about my domain expertise. Just like I could never answer questions about theirs. But they are in control and I am not, so there's no fighting it, just indifferent resignation to the situation, and attempting to sort through it.
• lifeisstillgood 8y ago
  - Companies are less willing to hire than I’ve ever seen Is this true for other people ?
  • munchbunny 8y ago
    This has definitely been my experience. I think it's backlash from the past few years of being too willing to hire.
  • magduf 8y ago
    It's definitely not my experience in the DC area. There's certainly a lot of pickiness, but I had no trouble getting multiple offers here recently, the main problem was that some of them didn't want to pay much. I ended up going with a company that's on a hiring spree and beat my asking price by a good bit.
• commandlinefan 8y ago
  I just can't wrap my head around how prevalent this sort of thing seems to be - even as we hear, every day, that there aren't enough programmers to be found, anywhere, even when you expand the search to include the whole world.
• contrarian1 8y ago
  There was a great article called “Adventures in the low social status of software engineers” by Michael O Church, who seems to have mostly deleted his blog content to preserve his career prospects (telling the truth publicly makes you unsuitable for upper management roles). This was not a popular article because it was getting at a very uncomfortable truth for many people: Software engineers are still (despite industry propaganda) treated as replaceable cogs. In this article, he walks through the importance of signalling and the different treatment the same candidate receives when positioned as one role (engineering) versus another (management). The engineering positioned candidate received a derisive gauntlet of demeaning brow-beating during their interview process. When the same candidate is positioned as a manager, he gets back slaps and fist bumps combined with a much higher salary offering. As a former software engineer and now manager, I assure you this is true. I quit engineering because I went through several interviewing processes where I was treated like a drooling imbecile. It wasn’t just me, friends of mine who have produced projects used by ten millions of developers (really) received similar treatment! The solution is not to tolerate being treated like this. Unfortunately, too many engineers lack the EQ to detect when they are being stepped on. Sales people, who are entirely focused on social status and dominance would never tolerate this treatment. An even worse truth: Maybe software engineers have become completely disposable cogs and this poor treatment is a warning sign that it is time to consider a career change. If I were a software engineer still, I wouldn’t accept these interview processes. I would only work for companies who treat me and my background with respect.
• vemv 8y ago
  The process described in Point 1 is the most important takeaway. Probably HR departments have all adopted this process following some best-practice which surely arose in the last few years. Maybe there is some blog post (from HR specialist) explaining it in detail?
  • nebgnahz 8y ago
    I would love to read one from HR's perspective! Post if you see one.
  • jcberk 8y ago
    HR views recruiting as a funnel process, similar to sales. There are a set of screening steps testing different skills, and at each step you lose a fraction of candidates, until you get down to the set who accept offers. E.g. https://www.jobvite.com/recruiting-process/7-benchmark-metrics-to-help-you-master-your-recruiting-funnel/ https://www.jobvite.com/recruiting-process/7-benchmark-metri... https://www.glassdoor.com/employers/blog/4-tips-for-hiring-the-elusive-software-engineer-infographic/ https://www.glassdoor.com/employers/blog/4-tips-for-hiring-t... That's a reasonable model, but it works best if all your filtering steps are effective tests for the things you care about. Getting that right is demonstrably hard, between some hiring managers who don't know or don't communicate what they're looking for, some recruiters who don't understand what they're looking for or how to recognize it, and some job-seekers who don't communicate or demonstrate their skills through the hiring process. And so everyone sees and resents flaws in the funnel.
• rambossa 8y ago
  Side note/rant: I hate the Cracking the Coding Interview style... studying for these type of interviews is annoying. Trying to find a good video on youtube, where they aren't just naively coding up the bruteForce->optimal possible solutions, especially is irritating. It is literally a landscape of college kids with thousands of viewers who treat these interviews like the SAT. Even the author of the book produces videos with very little insight or meaningful content. "Find all the subsets in a set that add up to sum" -- "Okay for this we will use the sliding window technique and here is how it is done" -- WTF is this. I get that they want to see problem-solving skills, but this is on a different level requiring the interviewee to have studied and knowledge of the technique, otherwise we are basically trying to develop efficient algorithms from scratch and in little time. --This makes sense for college interviewees who have only studied the past 4 years, but for a professional with experience why is this adequate??
  • annexrichmond 8y ago
    and then some interviewers have the nerve to ask, "have you seen this question before?"
    • warrenm 8y ago
      As bad as coding interviews are, at least they're better than riddle/lateral-thinking questions
      • Apocryphon 8y ago
        Those are at least a little fun, though.
  • pm90 8y ago
    They are not just testing your analytical skills but also, I believe, your ability to self-study for something, even as "annoying" as algorithmic coding problems. I kinda agree with you that it doesn't make sense much of the time if you have to specifically prepare for the coding interview; stuff you may never use in your job. But its not a lot of stuff: I bit the bullet and spent some time solving those questions and now can make past mostly any screen. Its really not that hard, especially if you have a CS degree. Probably would take 1 week of dedicated effort to get better at it.
• bcg1 8y ago
  Recently referred a friend for an opening at the company where I work. He didn't even get an interview because someone from HR has decided that all developers should have a four year degree (he only has an associates degree despite 15+ years experience). Maybe this would be fine for entry level positions, but it is straight up age discrimination for senior level ones (since there are still talented people in the workforce who went to school when CS programs were much less common). One theory I have is that HR depts are pushing back against the upward trend of developer salaries; if they create an onerous process that tries to make candidates feel inadequate, it might make it more likely that they can land a low ball offer with whoever is desperate enough to stick it out. Also, if the HR department itself is incompetent and not capable of attracting talent, they can always point to their tests etc to "prove" that there are just no qualified candidates in the workforce. Also, what is with all the coding tests etc? That stuff is obviously useless. Why don't hiring managers just ask candidates to read some code that is similar to what they will be working on, and observe how they approach stepping through it and how quick they can understand it? That is far more similar to what real work looks like most of the time.
• southphillyman 8y ago
  Interesting perspective, not sure what to make out of it. Maybe the author is having trouble due to location, or skillset, or maybe.... it's really just his age. Recruiters are constantly contacting me and ex coworkers regularly ask me for references so I just assume(d) the market is still red hot. Last time out (3 yrs ago) I took about a month to land several offers and I didn't really do the whole CTCI preparation or anything. I even received an offer from a company whose take home code challenge I completely ignored because I didn't feel like being bothered. This time around I think I will do the full CTCI and leetcode regimen a I do agree it gets harder the more senior you are as the compensation and expectation raise.
• toblender 8y ago
  I'm starting to notice this trend as well. I felt it was much easier to land a job in tech 2.5 years ago when I was last looking. Maybe we are reaching a point of too many engineers and not enough jobs?
• partycoder 8y ago
  Competitive programming is interesting, but it is very different from what you get to do at work. "Cracking the coding interview" and similar books are really about competitive programming, which is what you get to do at contests like ICPC and such.
• sixstringtheory 8y ago
  I’d love to go into a technical interview where the homework beforehand is: “pick any of our blog posts and study it for discussion” and then you talk about it during the interview. You can drill down as much as you want on any dimension of whatever topic you choose. I think the choice of topic and how well the interviewee can discuss it would both be good, and distinguishable, signals.
  • warrenm 8y ago
    Not only this, but it shows you're actually paying attention to the company
• twodave 8y ago
  Imagine a world without dishonesty and deception. That is the only place where interviewing for a software development job would be more or less straight-forward. Too many people either flat out lie on their resumes or overstate their achievements and involvement in order to get a higher-paying job. So those who are hiring are left to separate the honest from the dishonest. The only way to do this objectively is by adding complexity to the interview and testing for the claims made by the applicant. If you think it's hard finding a job, try hiring 10 programmers in a short time, and let me know how it goes for you. Try bringing on a candidate who spins his wheels for months (while you pay him) and who you then have to fire. It's expensive. Companies are entitled to protect themselves.
  • mixmastamyk 8y ago
    > Companies are entitled to protect themselves. But they don’t do it effectively, only wasting everyone’s time instead. I.e. Protection has a significant cost as well.
• mixmastamyk 8y ago
  Nailed it. Despite the “shortage” (haha) Been underemployed for quite a while due to the these ugly practices. It’s very frustrating to have misguided folks in control of what you are allowed to work on and hellbent on wasting time. One interview was for a Java Spring position, advice says study! But study what? I studied spring but interview was dozens of database questions instead. Could be CS, lang, framework, db, metrics, platform, OS level. No one knows all of these subjects completely. Companies are so skittish that I recently could only get a two-week trial at low pay after crushing a call/homework. Hopefully they won’t be offended when I show up without sockhat and beard. :p
• AnimalMuppet 8y ago
  > 1. The job search takes much, much longer than it used to. Senior positions take longer than junior. There may be other factors in any individual case, but just as a general rule, the more experience you have, the longer it takes to get hired. This may relate to... > 9. Age discrimination really exists. In my experience, I haven't seen it. What I have seen is salary discrimination. I'm a pretty expensive guy. I've got 30 years of experience, I'm way more productive than younger people, and I want to be paid accordingly. A lot of companies don't want to pay that.
  • cacrawford 8y ago
    I'm a 50+ year-old senior developer who finished a job search last year. Yes, it took longer, but would've taken days if only I was willing to take a small pay cut. We are expensive for the senior level; and while I think myself and many others my age are absolutely worth it for the wealth of experience we provide, I can understand why some employers back off if you're not a perfect fit.
  • emodendroket 8y ago
    > Senior positions take longer than junior. There may be other factors in any individual case, but just as a general rule, the more experience you have, the longer it takes to get hired. This may relate to... I recently read a thread on Reddit with people making the exact opposite complaint -- that senior developers just didn't understand how hard it is to find a junior position now.
    • rejschaap 8y ago
      People with very little experience have trouble finding jobs because companies don't want to train people. People with a lot of experience have trouble finding jobs because there aren't a lot of jobs that require that much experience. Because of title inflation the people with average experience match up best with the title senior.
• kearneyandy 8y ago
  "I got all the way to the end, nailed everything perfectly and then never found out why I didn’t get it" "I saw this repeatedly on jobs that I got all the way to the end point on." "Total Jobs Where You Got an Onsite Interview: 2" Interesting points, although I would probably want to see more data before drawing the same conclusions.
  • warrenm 8y ago
    You should never expect to find out why you didn't get hired somewhere. But the answer is always one of the following: - someone else was a better fit (tech, culture, attitude, etc) - you're actually truly incompetent - the interviewers are morons 99% of the time, it's that someone else was a better fit.
    • modbait 8y ago
      Unless you're astoundingly good, if companies are interviewing around N candidates for each position, you should expect a hit rate of around 1/N. Doing significantly better pretty much requires all three of those to be simultaneously false.
      • warrenm 8y ago
        Indeed - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16916575 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16916575
• jandrewrogers 8y ago
  To take a more nuanced view, I think there is an important distinction, frequently lost, between "can't code" -- which is all too common in practice -- and "can't easily code a stream-of-consciousness solution to a synthetic problem unrelated to anything I've ever built". Or its close cousin "can't easily code a toy solution to your toy problem since I've only worked on massively scalable versions of the same problem". Something I keep in mind when interviewing candidates is that there is that good understanding of the general design of algorithms does not imply that they should be able to throw together an implementation of an arbitrary algorithm with minimal effort unless they've needed to do it in the recent past. Expecting people to spending many days practicing the implementation of arbitrary and often irrelevant algorithms is unreasonably in my opinion. I am more interested in figuring out if they could given adequate time. A valuable practice, which surprisingly few tech companies do, is to ask candidates about diverse and orthogonal problem domains, or alternatively, allow the candidate to pick from a diverse set of problem domains. In the former case, you often find that candidates have difficulty writing even simple solutions for some problems but on others they instantly and fluidly can code up a good solution. Because they've had to do it in recent memory and still have the "muscle memory" from doing it previously. You often see bipolar results across the problem set this way. For senior engineers with deep domain expertise in an area, there is an additional trap in that they use more sophisticated and often very different algorithms in their day to day lives than are applicable to the toy problem domains. Graph algorithms are a good example of this, and they are popular in interviews. The representations most engineers know (e.g. adjacency list or matrix) don't scale but the extremely high scale algorithms operate on a different set of principles that aren't trivial to code and aren't relevant to non-parallel cases; coding up an adjacency list graph traversal algorithm is going to be very unnatural to a software engineer used to doing the same on trillions of edges in real-time. It would be crazy not to hire an engineer on this basis but I've seen it happen, ironically because their expertise caused them to show poorly on the coding exercise. Interviewing for technical skills is intrinsically difficult but I think that as an industry we are much worse at it than we could be. For all the claims of companies that they only hire the "top 10%" or whatever of engineers, the interview process is often optimized to the benefit of the median engineer.
  • hermitdev 8y ago
• pnathan 8y ago
  I suspect OP is in a space both professionally and physically where the job market is poor and a ton of cruddy candidates show up. I relate though, although I'm in Seattle area, which is a great place - I interview really badly. I strongly agree that hoops are getting added. However, I have found that great companies do compete on hiring process. Microsoft remains the Gold Standard for me in how fast they turnaround their hiring when it gets going. > The job search takes much, much longer than it used to. No. I'm picky and I don't practice stupid questions. It's always taken a long time for me. If you hit the right company and have the right skills, it'll be under two weeks for a hire though. > No one believes that anyone can actually code. Yes. > Coding Tests Can Trip Up Even Good Engineers Yep. Probably 10% of the time I have a "frick, I blanked" moment. > Extensive homework is now normal. Nope. Find better companies? > Every company’s “process” is different Every company believes they are snowflakes. > Outsourced hiring “services” are very much in vogue Yes, but I think this relates to competitive hiring spaces with lots of poor candidates. > Companies Really Want to Know Your Salary; Don’t tell Them Sigh. > Interviews Matter Much, Much More to You Than to the Company Yep. > Age discrimination really exists. I'm definitely not looking as young as I used to and it worries me. > You’ll never really know why you weren’t hired. That's because they don't want to be sued.
  • warrenm 8y ago
    >>You’ll never really know why you weren’t hired. >That's because they don't want to be sued. Because it takes far too much time to tell everyone who isn't hired than the few who are.
  • warrenm 8y ago
    > Every company believes they are snowflakes. And yet...on average, companies are "average"
    • ljw1001 8y ago
      If only. Many companies hiring this way are Paul Graham's "mosquitos" whose role in the tech ecosystem is to have a one in 10 (or 100) chance of making it big, and are largely running on a cocktail of delusions and hype.
• deedubaya 8y ago
  Technical hiring is very much broken. I took a stab at improving it, but found that tech has a very extensive workforce built around it being broken that doesn't want it to change. Sure, they want tools that help perpetuate the junk show they've built up, but not to make the process quicker/more effective on both ends. Most that I talked to openly disliked that idea.
• pascalxus 8y ago
  It's official. We now definitely have a vast oversupply of engineering talent available in the marketplace. This post is a great report and a must read of all engineers.
  • deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  • alacombe 8y ago
    Not necessarily, if there is one constant in the jobs I've been in is that even if we've got the funds we're pretty much constantly under staffed (ie. overloaded). HR is the broken link.
• web007 8y ago
  This feels spot on. Having been on both sides of the table, I understand why these are true, but still don't like a lot of these interactions. The worst one is ghosting, there's no reason for an interviewer to leave you hanging, at least they should be following up to say "You're still in contention but..." and do the same regularly every few days until they can make a decision. The only thing missing from your writeup is the observation that the hiring process usually reflects the organization. If your interview and followups were chaos / overly-complicated / streamlined, the company is probably chaotic / bureaucratic / well-organized, too. Also: @fuzzygroup built my job tracking idea! It's fantastic to see that my laziness has paid off, and I want to hear more about how JobHound works out for you. Please post a follow-up in a few days / weeks / months of what you've learned or what you wish you'd done differently.
• wufufufu 8y ago
  I've seen senior candidates fail coding interviews, get hired anyway, but then do OK on the job as far as I can tell. I believe it's more likely for new college grads with a few internships to pass coding interviews than senior candidates.
• nebgnahz 8y ago
  > 1. The job search takes much, much longer than it used to. This is so true (also in Bay Area). I am still in the process of job hunting. The first onsite was in mid March. I thought my last onsite would be last Friday, but no, a few more are still being scheduled (I probably have to withdraw some applications). Also the negotiation with HR easily takes weeks. Despite I have offers from some companies, I just couldn't get to the actual compensation numbers. (I call this "HR Tai Chi"). > 3. Coding Tests Can Trip Up Even Good Engineers I have found that the interaction with the interviewers matters more here. If you can solve all tests, then fine. But often times you may get blanked or just stuck somewhere in your solution, and a good interviewer will be able to guide you through and work out the problems collaboratively. I wish companies would spend time educating and training interviewers. (I have had bad times in my interviews where the "obvious" solution just didn't come up during the interview, however much the interviewer hinted). > 5. Every company’s “process” is different Yes, the good part of this difference is that "some are pleasant", and obviously "some are annoying". But you get to experience the company culture and how much they value engineers by their difference.
  • ropeadopepope 8y ago
    > This is so true (also in Bay Area). I am still in the process of job hunting. The first onsite was in mid March. I thought my last onsite would be last Friday, but no, a few more are still being scheduled (I probably have to withdraw some applications). My first job in the Bay Area in 2007 consisted of a single 3 hour in person interview. That's it. I got a phone call telling me the good news on my train ride back to SF. It was my 5th interview and they all consisted of pretty much the same protocol. And yet, some of the top comments on this post say that hiring hasn't changed all that much. o_O
• hitekker 8y ago
  One thing I’d add: don’t ever check the box that says "Yes, I'm disabled" when applying to a company. Ever. Unlike declaring race or veteran status, admitting past or present disability can only hurt your chances at getting an offer. Some employers may appreciate the honesty, most of them will automatically and quietly hold it against you at every step of the hiring process. And they'll get away with it. Easily. The laws "protecting" disabled candidates are essentially toothless, since "illegal" reasons for rejection are often not written down or, at least, hidden from you and the goverment's. [1] https://www.monster.com/career-advice/article/disclose-disability-on-resume https://www.monster.com/career-advice/article/disclose-disab... [2] https://medium.com/@mshannabrooks/this-is-the-lie-i-tell-on-every-job-application-b4111631ddd8 https://medium.com/@mshannabrooks/this-is-the-lie-i-tell-on-...
  • CM30 8y ago
    I'm not sure I'd agree with that. Found I had better results when interviewing when I mention being on the autistic spectrum beforehand. Possibly because otherwise the chances that I'd struggle in the interview were extremely high. Then again, maybe it's different in the UK here compared to the US as well.
• hfdgiutdryg 8y ago
  Every time I read this sort of thing on HN it brings on a wave of depression. I love software, but I hate the modern software industry.
• bulatb 8y ago
  A: The talent shortage is just awful. Nobody can code. B: How do you know? A: They can't pass our test. B: How do you know it works? A: Because if they could code, they'd pass. Sometimes they pass, and even some of those can't code. B: So nobody can pass your test. A: That's right. B: And even if they do, it doesn't mean they're good. A: Yep. B: It sounds like you've got neither recall nor precision. Don't you think the test could be wrong? A: Nope! Everyone just sucks.
  • debt 8y ago
    "A: Nope! Everyone just sucks." I do think this attitude genuinely limits many startups. Software engineers will always be the first to take up hobbies like fixing old motorcycles or building a house from scratch, yet they view mediocre engineers as things that can't be fixed up in the same way. A mediocre engineer is actually a really good bargain. Obviously a great engineer who doesn't know it is ideal but I'd toss them in with the mediocre engineers for that reason.
    • amyjess 8y ago
      Sounds like a good opportunity for mid-size companies to play Moneyball.
  • gaius 8y ago
    It sounds like you've got neither recall nor precision If you are looking for rare positives, you’d use F1 score ;-)
  • komali2 8y ago
    The "can they code test" for us has always been some variation of "fizz buzz." Anybody should be able to do that. It's not a bad test, especially because of how well documented it is. I agree there are terrible tests (why on earth would you have someone implement a search or sort? that's like rolling your own crypto, don't do it, don't bother learning how to do it unless it's your passion), but at the very least a simple programming test can indicate that the person can sit down at a fresh debian/windows/OSX install, and knows enough about their given language to be editing, compiling, and running code. This isn't even deploying, just able to have a functional dev environment and be able to create software. A lot of compsci kids come out of school having worked in specialize VMs or only doing matlab stuff or, well, I don't know what they're getting up to over there but they aren't quite sure what the magic invocations are to get their Java thing running (do I need eclipse? err....) or C (how do I compile...?) or even sometimes Javascript stuff (how come it doesn't work when I double-click the html file?). A simple fizzbuzz is a great filter for this sort of thing.
• gimmeDatCheddar 8y ago
  Welcome to a job market where there are hundreds of other qualified candidates competing for the same job. This is why government officials and company spokespersons peddled nonsense about there being a shortage in tech - it was to saturate the market with so much labor that they could start doing this and eventually paying less since they can just hire someone 5% better at 75% less pay.
• ph0rque 8y ago
  This is almost totally off-topic, but this sentence caught my eye: > I built it because after I had applied for about 15 jobs, I had no idea where I was in the process and I couldn’t give my wife a decent answer about my progress because I simply had no idea. The real reason why people do things is often like this! It was a very hard lesson for me to learn, but very enlightening when I learned it.
• komali2 8y ago
  >Total Jobs Applied For: 82 >Total Jobs Where You Got an HR Interview 25 >Total Jobs Where You Got a Technical Interview: 15 >Total Jobs Where You Got an Onsite Interview: 2 >Total Job Offers: 1 From a recruitment standpoint, this guy's "sales funnel" is remarkably efficient. I'm more used to seeing a ration of 100 applications > 10-15 phone calls > 5 onsites/technicals > 1 offer. Needless to say he blew the initial phone call / interview numbers out of the water, though it did eventually narrow down to about the expected number of offers. I don't like the current state of recruitment and job hunting. In fact, I have literally never met anybody that did. Recruiters whose living depends on it, our managers, the engineering managers we pitched to, our candidates, fucking nobody is happy with it. Nobody has solved it though so now that we can all it agree that it sucks, it would be irrational to sit around and complain about how it sucks instead of adapting (and fixing it when you're not trying to figure out how to get health insurance before yours runs out and you gotta spend 400 on COBRA): It's a number's game. You must send a fuckload of resumes because sometimes a resume for the perfect job will fall off the recruiter's desk or get lost in their email, or get lost in their spam folder, or the recruiter just won't understand what they're looking at, or there's a candidate slated for the position already, or somebody didn't like the formatting of your resume and got frustrated and threw it away. Or 50 other reasons. That same randomness applies to each of the up to 10 steps (usually 3-5) before you get an offer. They couldn't get you scheduled for an interview in time. You came in and somebody thought your shirt was stupid or too casual. You came in and somebody thought you were dressed too well and a tryhard. They gave you a dumb algorithm that had nothing to do with a job and it created salty feelings on both sides. I mean, there's just so many variables. So in this system, your best bet is to increase the resolution as high as you can. That gives you realistic access to the greatest number of opportunities you'll actually like, and the luxury (or burden, I suppose) of choice. Until someone fixes this systems. Lord alive, somebody please fix this fucking system. The best progress I've seen on this front has been by coding test websites that hyper-tailor your profile to companies with specific needs, i.e. completely useless for every other job in the world. Beyond that your best bet is to just align yourself with a god-tier recruiter that actually cares about their relationship with you and their candidates (the established ones that don't have a manager breathing down their neck to randomly spam out resumes cause their numbers aren't high enough).
  • 8y ago
• falcolas 8y ago
  I have a theory of why most of these changes in the job hunt came about: people became afraid of firing. I further theorize that this is an indirect consequence of primarily technical folks filling management roles. How does a fear of firing impact hiring procedures? If you are afraid of firing, you're afraid that you won't be able to get rid of a toxic individual; that a single individual will act as a poison to the morale of your entire workforce. Thus, you want to make damned sure you don't make a bad hire in the first place - even when it means you leave a position open for a really long time. This fear of firing has gotten so bad that FAANG-alike companies directly espouse how bad the impact of a bad hire is, how they would rather give up on 99 good candidates than hire one bad candidate. But that's bullshit. That's letting the fear of interpersonal interactions drive business decisions. The impact a bad hire can have on a work force is pretty minimal when caught and addressed quickly; it can even provide an overall boost to morale to know that the company is willing to address real problems in an adult way. Even a perfect initial hire can turn toxic after a few years: what will you do then, if not fire them? Do you have 10 positions and 10 potential candidates? Hire all 10 folks, and fire the one bad person; your company will be better off for the decision. Much better off than it would be if you instead overwork your existing team because you haven't found your unicorn hires yet.
  • glangdale 8y ago
    Don't know why you're getting downvoted. Much of the language I get from bigco people about why they are so selective is exactly this; it's almost a confession that once in, they are very bad at managing performance.
    • falcolas 8y ago
      The downvotes are probably because I've implicitly called out individuals who believe in - have perhaps even published materials encouraging - the "missing out on 99 good hires is better than making one bad hire" philosophy. I've also explicitly called out the FAANG hiring practices, which are frequently held up as the best practices in the industry by those doing the hiring. After all, who wants to be even partially responsible for hiring "that guy" when you can not or will not fire them later? But, here's my point: I've been part of the process that hired "that guy". I was also consulted on the decision to fire "that guy" a month later. I was wholly on board with the action in both cases; and in the process we got two other great employees that we never would have hired if we were afraid of taking chances.
• AndrewStephens 8y ago
  I have been interviewing senior engineers extensively for the last few months while also interviewing at other companies so I have seen the process from both sides. Different companies handle interviews in their own way but I know exactly why interviewers ask the questions they do. Coding tests are an important part of the interview, you would be surprised how many senior software engineers have been in de facto management or very specialized positions for 7 years and no longer know how to code. We are not asking anyone to implement a red-black tree off the top of their heads, just very simple stuff. I think this is important but anything more than a 20 minute question will not help further gauge a candidate. We tend to not put too much weight on the coding test since some very good people have trouble thinking on their feet under pressure. We also recently started also asking for a simple homework assignment that tests basic data structures and general C++ knowledge. It should take between 2-4 hours. Personally I hate homework and resisted introducing it but a well designed exercise is great for separating out the wheat from the chaff and allows a really great candidate to show some flair with a clever algorithm or even just nicely formatted code. I would now recommend it. I was asked to do an assignments during my job search and typically spent 3-4 hours on them. I've heard of companies asking for days worth of work - that is completely unfair. Finally, you would be surprised at how much outright fraud goes on, particularly with junior candidates lying on their resumes. We have had people on Skype interviews blatantly cheating to the extent that one candidate was just moving their mouth while someone else off-camera was speaking for them. "Mr Ed" did not get the job. I ranted about the interview process last year[0] but now I am a little more mellow now. [0] https://sheep.horse/2016/10/so_you_want_me_to_hire_you_as_a_c++_developer.html https://sheep.horse/2016/10/so_you_want_me_to_hire_you_as_a_...
• exelius 8y ago
  Yeah, the entire HR process at most companies is so incredibly broken for technical candidates. One of the problems IMO is that HR doesn’t know shit about tech, and dev managers don’t know shit about HR. A dev manager who needs a person tells HR “I want to interview 10 people for this open job req” — which is likely just some bullets vaguely describing job responsibilities. HR, having very little idea what any of the bullets on the list mean, do their best to filter resumes. Because they’ve had to do this a lot in the past, they engaged an outside firm to issue coding tests to make sure they don’t pass on shitty candidates to the dev manager (they got dinged last year on their review for that!) So hence all the bullshit before you even get to the guy who posted the job. Part of the problem is that the dev manager just expects to be able to throw this over the fence to HR. One way I’ve solved this in my teams? I don’t expect HR to do resume screens. Sure, I have them do a basic screen for candidates who don’t even mention development anywhere on their resume, but I really don’t expect HR to be able to detect bullshit. The key is to treat hiring a new team member like any other task you have to deal with. But the days when engineers can sit heads-down and code are all but over; because the situation described in the article above is what you get when you try to do that.
  • slgeorge 8y ago
    > "HR doesn’t know shit about tech, and dev managers don’t know shit about HR" This is the cause of a significant amount of waste, friction and general anger for both sides in my experience. Technologists are well-known for their TLA's, and HR teams have their own obfuscating discipline-specific terminology, assumptions and values. The incentives for external recruiters are obviously a problem and even for internal recruiters they are mostly measured on seats filled rather than long-term retention or the candidates performance. Hiring managers themselves are often extremely poor at describing or even understanding what it is they are trying to hire. They often struggle to provide clear and actionable feedback that can change the search. Figuring out that collaboration is definitely worth while!
    • exelius 8y ago
      Right to all of these; which is why you have to make it the hiring manager’s job to be very involved with the process. HR should be involved for governance purposes, but the manager and the team need to be involved with hiring new team members. Part of the problem is that no matter how careful you are, it seems whenever you bring in 10 candidates to interview, 1 is obviously overqualified and has higher salary expectations than you can offer, 2 are about right (but likely also have other offers), and the other 7 are varying shades of “sorry, not right now...” to “why did we even let you in the building?” It’s entirely normal to interview 10 candidates, make 2 offers, and get no accepts. That’s a huge waste of time on everyone’s behalf. But I have yet to see anyone find a way to significantly improve on this process, because as the OP states, everyone figures out to just start googling the answers to the questions.
• komali2 8y ago
  >When did an entire industry of people get pre-judged as lying? Don’t we exist in a country where the default assumption is innocence not guilt? Well... a ton of graduates can't code. Interviewers are constantly struggling with people that can't fizz buzz. Hence fizz buzz's existence. You don't see it until you post and are responsible for a job ad, which is never for most engineers, and once every year or two for those that do have to get involved in the process. Lord forbid it's an entry level, you'll get tons of great-on-paper compsci kids that never actually pinned down a programming language and aren't even sure how to hello world out of a c# application (pro-tip, just fucking use python or javascript lol). For frontend, bootcamp kids usually come out on top in this scene, because the camps are specifically prepared for exactly this problem (considering it's their niche - the very reason they exist). (I've commented on another aspect of the article, but it was long enough that I felt I should break this thought into another comment)
• amyjess 8y ago
  One thing I've observed is that the more experience I build, the less the in-person interview matters. By the time I get past the coding test and the phone interviews, I'm as good as hired, and the in-person interview is just a formality.
• laichzeit0 8y ago
  Don't people get job offers anymore from someone they used to know that moved to another company and then like "hey I know this really great guy who works at XYZ, we should definitely get him here"? That is literally how every job I've moved to happened, except for the very first one right after being a student. That's the only job I ever remember having to "interview" for. The rest were just through established social connections by working in the tech industry. Surely if you have skills and work hard and other people know about this, they would be knocking at your door? It's just weird to me that people go job hunting by "cold-calling" some random job advertisement where they don't know the company or anyone that works there. If I were hiring people, I'd go for people I personally have worked with, or been recommended by someone that I work with, waaaaay before hiring some random person that showed up at an interview.
  • spyspy 8y ago
    Not all of my friends work for places I want to work, and any reasonably sized company is going to throw you through the ringer anyway in the name of "consistency."
  • watty 8y ago
    Sure, I'd guess the majority of engineering roles above junior are through networking of some sort. "Surely if you have skills"... well, what % of programmers out there fit this description? It's even weirder to think that every software developer has enough skills to have people knocking at their door. In my situation I moved to a new city for family reasons with zero connections. I had a stable job working remote but put some feelers out and found a better job in my city by randomly applying. It's actually weird you find it weird.
  • Clubber 8y ago
    I've gotten all my jobs that way since 1999. Based on the current trends of tech hiring, I would never bother with a company that does what's mentioned in this article. Question 1: What's the interview process look like? Anything other than 1 hour phone / in person interview would get rejected.
  • eastbayjake 8y ago
• RomanPushkin 8y ago
  Interesting read. So here is what I've learned if you wanna keep on writing code and stay competitive: * You'll be discriminated the older you get. Make yourself ready: * Career and big names is important. Companies wanna hire ex-googlers. Have Google on your resume. It's better to work in BigCorp for 10 years rather than being contractor for 10 years. * Improve your interview skills. For engineer it's theoretical computer science knowledge and cracking code challenges on a whiteboard within limited time. * Have a big thing on your resume. Source code, GitHub, whatever it is.
  • fuzzygroup 8y ago
    Hi, You will absolutely be discriminated against the older you get. Your observation on being a contractor for too long is likely on point (I was).
    • alacombe 8y ago
      Once a contractor, always a contractor. Especially if you remote. You'll get the condescending "can you work 9 to 5 in a cubicle ?".
• galkk 8y ago
  It might be lucky occasion, but in my limited experience, I found that European companies provide pretty good and detailed feedback about interview performance. In particular, Skyscanner feedback was outstanding (I've been referred through one of Who's hiring thread) for both skype screening and onsite.
• sateesh 8y ago
  In my opinion the interview process for senior position should not be solely focused on the technical aspects and coding alone. Coding is indeed a necessary requirement, but as one gains experience it is important he/she can not only code but mentor junior devs, instill good development practices in the team, can effectively take a high level spec (say from Product management) and break it into tasks facilitating an iterative development, and can communicate well. Though it is a technical role, as one gains experience these aspects become all the more crucial
• pjdemers 8y ago
  I'm not sure his lack of job search success is technical. I see several jobs at VP/CTO level on his resume. As a hiring manager, I would pass on him as a senior engineer, unless I was planning on promoting him fast. For guru-level hands-on engineers, I want people who chose to make that their career.
• pkteison 8y ago
  I have interviewed a lot of people with great resumes who literally could not fizzbuzz, or even write a simple for loop. And then if they can write the for loop, most fail when it's a nested for loop. And I don't mean got the syntax wrong - I mean just can't even start, on the simplest of tasks. I hate that I have to question whether candidates can code, but as near as I can tell, a lot of them truly can't. It leads to an interview process that I'm embarrassed to need to use, but it seems reckless to skip it. I've worked with people who really can't code, and don't want to be back in that situation again. I'd love to have a better interview process, and I'd love to spend more time talking about higher level concepts, but most of the process seems to be stuck just verifying that the things on your resume are really things you did, and not just things you were on the team for but didn't actually do, or outright fabrications.
  • gnulinux 8y ago
    After college, I was interviewing with the company I eventually ended up with. This was the second technical interview (and we eventually had a third). The very first question I was asked was to write a function that prints out a triangle like: . .. ... .... At the time I thought this was an attack to my honor. I literally felt terrible, and thought the interviewer was mocking me, for some reason. I also thought maybe I couldn't make my resume clear. Anyway, this was only a few moments, since questions gradually became harder. Needless to say, after this interview I was really curious why would they ask me such a simple question, which is nothing more than 2 lines of python code. But then I started learning about this mythical men, who have good resumes but can't even write for loops. I guess I was naive and assumed everyone with a degree in CS would be competent.
    • dte22 8y ago
      no offset for the triangle, not too bad
      • deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
    • 8y ago
• expertentipp 8y ago
  The numbers from „who am i” overlap with my last job search for a senior dev role, even though I’m good 15 years younger. In the EU an additional obstacle is that in radius of 400 km they start speaking completely different language not knowing which significantly limits one’s options. Now, I’m happily sitting at this one position at the end of the pipeline and have to relearn everything and most of it will be useless in 5 years. These Angular/react/redux/etc „communities” still think they are cool by reinventing and rewriting from scratch a wheel. What about creating an up to date, consistent, search engine crawlable documentation - it’s not cool enough for you, eh?
• nly 8y ago
  Tests can be a great leveler if you have a subpar degree or limited experience on your CV. A number of years ago I was insta-rejected by e-mail within 24 hours of submitting my CV for a role. I was cocky enough to reply to that rejection email with a 'give me a shot'-type response, offhandedly tossed an online coding test, nailed it, then invited to interview, and later offered the job. I never took it, but it was a huge boon for my confidence.
• paul7986 8y ago
  Loved to see a Hacker News Poll How long did it take to find your last job and break it down by demographics.
• raarts 8y ago
  > Coding Tests Can Trip Up Even Good Engineers I recently took the first one ever in my career (in my late fifties). People tell me they think I'm an excellent programmer, but I did awfully bad. Why? - it was my first time - in daily life I switch between many languages, devops, meetings, and research. It always takes me some time to ramp up, especially on syntax: coming from Elixir, switching to Javascript: how does JS access object members again? I usually need an hour or two to get up to speed again. - the tasks are very much outside the normal realm. If in real life I need to map some multi-dimension array, I first look for libraries and such, and if not, approach this as writing a library function: take my time to do it well. Even though I could rationally understand the reasoning, it still felt demeaning, given my resume. Also, because I underperformed, it's easy for them to jump to the wrong conclusions.
  • alacombe 8y ago
    Welcome to the club...
    • raarts 8y ago
      Also, I never heard from them again.
• miesman 8y ago
  I'm over 50 (55) like the author of the article. As it is often said over and over again, the best way to find a job/gig is networking. That's how I found my current job. Having people on the inside pulling for you cuts though the BS. It took about a week for me last time.
• shinryuu 8y ago
  amazing!
• alexhutcheson 8y ago
  > Number 7: Companies Really Want to Know Your Salary; Don’t tell Them This can easily result in wasting your time interviewing for companies that will never be willing to meet your salary expectations. Unfortunately, a lot of companies aren't up-front about how much they're willing to offer, so I'm not sure what the solution is.
  • tropo 8y ago
    They don't know how much they are willing to offer. You wouldn't get much out of a salary answer like this: "Each interviewer grades you as 1 to 5. We sum that up, then multiply by $10,000." Even knowing the number of interviewers wouldn't help you very much. You'd need to know how well the interviewers would score you, which won't be determined until after the interview.
• augbog 8y ago
  One thing that grinds my gears is study guides are pretty much useless in the tech industry. They all say the same thing -- literally everything. Leetcode, HackerRank, or very very broad topics like algorithms, data structures, etc. The worst ones I think are actually frontend engineer interviews because it's a coin flip if they are asking you fundamentals or very focused topics in frontend. I've actually been meaning to make a Youtube series on how to succeed in the frontend interview (which also implicitly sets expectation of what a frontend engineer interview looks like) but haven't gotten a chance.
• happyruss 8y ago
  nice article. I came to similar conclusions on my blog as well, searching for a dev job in boulder: http://www.gunkyfunky.com/blog/my-boulder-tech-job-search-journey http://www.gunkyfunky.com/blog/my-boulder-tech-job-search-jo...
• taco_emoji 8y ago
  > Number 6: Outsourced Hiring Assessment Services Are Very Much in Vogue I ran into this a few years ago. I bombed hard when they asked me some specific terminology question about the stages of the ASP.NET request lifecycle. I believe I just said "I have no idea" and the call was over shortly after that. It was frustrating--why are they hiring based on esoteric trivia instead of general programming skill? This assessment would've filtered out an enthusiastic, genius-level Java programmer! And is that sort of question actually effective at measuring ASP.NET expertise? I work with ASP.NET every day, and memorizing that information would offer me zero benefit since A) I rarely need it, and B) I can look it up whenever I do need it. It's doubly frustrating to think there's someone out there who believes I'm a weak engineer based on this misguided quiz.
  • amorphid 8y ago
    I've done 99.999% of my development on a Mac. I took a coding quiz a few years ago that asked me where I could find the "ruby" executable on Windows.
    • alacombe 8y ago
      "In the PATH."
• bsder 8y ago
  > When I was recruiting, in years past, my HR department always strongly warned me against administering coding tests on the grounds of legal issues / fairness. Now that these are outsourced, I suspect that HR departments aren’t concerned at all about legal issues since they come from a vendor not themselves. This kind of crap needs to stop. I think that some level of legal liability needs to pass through outsourcing companies and land on the company that uses them. I also suspect that if legal liability started passing through outsourced companies, you would see outsourcing collapse very quickly as companies begin to see outsourcing as riskier than an actual employee. Unfortunately, I'm not sure that we have the legal precedents to pull this off without new laws.
• dfjliasjg 8y ago
  When did an entire industry of people get pre-judged as lying? Don’t we exist in a country where the default assumption is innocence not guilt? Fucking LOL. I demand tests not to see whether you can write a for loop, my wife has an art degree and can do that. I demand tests to see if you bothered to comment your code, use version control, use tests, and actually put in some custom logic instead of boilerplate CRUD. There are so many people who fail those basic tasks, its unreal. Plus, programmers SUCK at interviews, so why even bother giving it any weight? Show me talent in the homework and I'll hire you.
  • ngngngng 8y ago
    Maybe it's still enough of an employers market for you to get away with this, but I have enough interviews that I don't have to put up with long homework assignments or horribly buggy leetcode tests. The company I most want to work at usually ends up being the one that doesn't use these annoying interview methods.
• emodendroket 8y ago
  This is pretty different from my own recent experience.
• blunte 8y ago
  Once you get to the age where they will discriminate (40+, in general), you're probably better off running your own company or at least doing high value consulting. And by high value, I mean _value_ (could be money, could be freedom of schedule, technologies, etc.) The last two corporate jobs I had, the companies found me. The few clients I've had as a consultant came to me. Being visible and having a little network is important, and of course having the current popular technologies is important. But really, doing homework, doing dances, building PoCs, and all that other bullshit is... just bullshit. If a company is going to make you jump through tons of hoops or begin taking advantage of you before you've even gotten the job, they can just fuck off and hire the kind of person they deserve (who will probably fit better into their organization anyway!) Keep in mind, even if the company has some really awesome people, you're still just useful while you fit. If their budget changes, or god forbid they're a public company and are beholden to the almighty quarterly earnings per share report, then you can be gone a week after you're hired with little more than a "oh we're really sorry". That last bit is one really awesome reason to work in countries that still have some sense of labor power. I think Germany is really good on this, but my experience in Netherlands was... profitable in that regard. Once you have a permanent contract, firing you typically means handing you enough cash to sustain you for many months. I'm not sure what the potential exit compensation is if you're fired due to poor performance, but if they're just downsizing you'll get a nice goodbye check. The only way companies will ever change their behavior is if the workers stop bowing and begging. This is your life; and if you're truly investing your creativity and giving your all, it should only be for a company halfway worthy. Most companies are not, and you can tell from the interview process. Hell, if you look at enough job reqs you can start to tell just from the req.
• znpy 8y ago
  This writing seems to confirm something I've been suspecting for a while: the STEM shortage is a myth. Think about it: how can companies be this picky if there really is a STEM shortage? On a sidenote: I recently understood why meetups, events and networking is important: to interact as little as possible with HR. I've recently a particularly bad experience where the HR person called me very early in the morning (without asking if it's a good time to talk) and then proceed with a third-degree interrogatory with all kind of questions, even reaching the point to interrupt me while I was articulating/motivating my answer in order to make another question. That was so rude I got very angry after that call. That is not the way to handle a phone interview, that is not the way to handle a conversation of any kind.
  • ng12 8y ago
    > how can companies be this picky if there really is a STEM shortage? Honestly I think it's because mediocre engineers are more trouble than they're worth. We're collectively not good enough at building software to adopt a "warm body" approach.
• erikb 8y ago
  Can't fully agree in quite a few points. I understand how the author got that feeling tho. Doing interviews is always eating away at one's confidence, no matter who you are. 1. no one believes anyone can actually code - I experience quite the opposite. People expect others to be able to code just because they are currently employed as software developer. That's not true at all. Sooo many people can't. 2. Coding interviews are not about findign the solution but about showing some skills, showing how you handle things under pressure, your ability to explain what you do etc. 3. homework assignments are not done in professional environments. 4. interviews matter more to you: I agree and really hate this. You need to give 120% before you even get to the point where you can choose what you want. And at this point you suddenly have 90% of the power and often not enough energy anymore to make anything good out of it. 5. And yes it's even part of the job of the company to NOT let you know why you weren't hired. Still, I think you often know after the interview how it seemed. Good feeling = chance, no good feeling = no chance, weird feeling = usually weird job as well. PS: One side note. A senior coding position might feel age discriminatory because senior is for talented ~28 year olds to mediocre ~40 year olds. A 50 year old should be architect/manager or not switch jobs.
  • amorphid 8y ago
    >> 1. no one believes anyone can actually code - I experience quite the opposite. People expect others to be able to code just because they are currently employed as software developer. That's not true at all. Sooo many people can't. It's fair to assess someone's ability to code. It's also fair to for the interviewee to expect the interviewer to demonstrate an ability to review code. >> 2. Coding interviews are not about findign the solution but about showing some skills, showing how you handle things under pressure, your ability to explain what you do etc. Until I have something better to go on, I assume the interview process is a good proxy for what it'd be like to work with you. If I think you're hazing me, even if I 100% ace your interview, I simply won't want to work with you. >> PS: One side note. A senior coding position might feel age discriminatory because senior is for talented ~28 year olds to mediocre ~40 year olds. A 50 year old should be architect/manager or not switch jobs. Is that a serious comment?
  • EnFinlay 8y ago
• funkdobiest 8y ago
  Wow, This really hits home. Senior Engineer here currently seeking a job. I had a really interesting test project - https://gist.github.com/cmerrick/d0d8812f1c31e625adfd3333263fb8ff https://gist.github.com/cmerrick/d0d8812f1c31e625adfd3333263... that was given after the first interview. I liked it way better than a test. I will say the majority of interviews have been fairly high level when discussing prior work and projects. Hopefully it will happen soon.
• nopacience 8y ago
  "That’s almost two months start to finish! And today that job remains on the company’s web site – they still haven’t hired anyone." That probably shows HR is just "working" and doing interviews. Not necessarily to hire anyone.. they might just be gathering data. Maybe harvesting the people available on the market. Checking if you are up to doing homework and not getting paid. Checking what your salary is. Telling you make some ranking challenges. Building a profile about you. Your profile might get a price-tag and shared on the HR black market. I suspect there are even black lists by segment shared on some HR black markets. Then, there is also a big mafia/network that makes people only hire friends, recommended or known persons.
• maxk42 8y ago
  I'll throw it out there that I think coding boot camps are partly responsible for this situation. Yes, there were several very reputable ones, but there were also a lot of shady joints operating as little more than diploma mills. They were churning out thousands of unqualified candidates and as a senior developer in charge of hiring it suddenly became apparent that the quality of these candidates was much lower than I was used to. When they couldn't get jobs easily they may have began seeking employment at lower wages and it looks like the wages have definitely been dropping industry-wide in my location.
• TheBaku 8y ago
  "Track your overall job hunt metrics - how many jobs you applied for, what percent got to interviews, what percent got to second interviews and so on" Oh please dont show me that. Im afraid
• rs999gti 8y ago
  > 2. No one believes that anyone can actually code. >When did an entire industry of people get pre-judged as lying? Don’t we exist in a country where the default assumption is innocence not guilt? The coding tests and whiteboard sessions are necessary because there are no standards in the software development industry. There is no license, no standardized test, no nothing for me to judge if you're a liar or the greatest thing to show up for an interview. There is no professional developer license like a professional engineer license and exam, which helps me distinguish between you being a beginner or a senior/lead developer. Without professional standards, all developers will continue to need to show who they are and what they can do.
• mooreds 8y ago
  Wow, I recently went through this experience and totally agree with all of the points. My only addition would be to ask someone on the inside for feedback, if at all possible. That was the only way I was able to get any tips that helped me improve. Also, I interviewed with a company called Jumpcloud in Boulder. The interview process itself left some things to be desired but I'm writing to give them a huge shout out that they actually gave me real, concrete feedback on how my homework assignment wasn't up to snuff. Thank you Jumpcloud!
  • mkoryak 8y ago
    +1 on feedback. Last time I was interviewing, the first place I interviewed was at a company where I knew the director of engineering from a previous role. I went there to have an informal talk with him and some devs. Later when I sent my resume I was rejected right away. Luckily for me he told me that I came across like a know-it-all crappy dev. He told me why I came across like that and I realized that he was right. It probably saved me a ton of grief in later interviews because I knew what things I needed to do and not do.
• poulsbohemian 8y ago
  This topic of interviewing and hiring practices has become a regular weekly showing here on HN, so I wrote my own thoughts on it: https://www.jeffstrickler.com/best-way-to-hire-software-developers/ https://www.jeffstrickler.com/best-way-to-hire-software-deve...
• austincheney 8y ago
  I took a look at the list and I have to say the job outlooks must vary considerably by primary skill. I would say that if, in the current market, finding a senior development job is a challenge you are doing something horribly wrong. In my case I am a senior JavaScript developer who doesn't like the straightjacket stupidity that is popular large monolithic frameworks. The demand for this skill is stupid ridiculous. If you want a new job simply put your resume online in one of those job boards like CareerBuilder or Monster. Within 2 weeks the recruiters will discover it and I expect to get 6-8 responses eagerly pushing me into interviews once my availability is "discovered". After those initial responses I might get another 10 or so serious asks for my time. Most people who do web work, in my experience, actually cannot code. If you are a strong coder the interviews are largely a meet and greet, because you probably have a strong answer for everything in your comfort zone and immediately shut down questions about areas where you are weak. You have to consider that web jobs are generally considered low barrier to entry and so half the people that apply are grossly under-qualified and many that are qualified are just learning to code and incredibly far away from "senior" level. As a senior, an actual senior, expect to enter the job jumping potholes and dodging landmines from the incompetent code already in place. This doesn't mean that I think highly of myself, but rather many companies don't know how to develop or hire strong web developers yet, in the meantime, they still expect work to get done somehow like a mistake mosaic. As far as salary goes I have generally made more time I have gone somewhere else. Because the demand for senior web developers is ridiculous stupid many employers suspect if you are interviewing with them then you are probably actively interviewing with 3 or 4 other prospective employers, and so if they believe you are a competent senior there is a rushed hurry to get a hiring decision back to you as soon as possibly, often in the same day you interviewed. With that rush comes high salary offerings, which I guess is an effort to outbid the suspected competition. If you are interviewing in the corporate world and actually are at the senior level age is irrelevant and the preference skews a bit older. Nobody is going to believe you are actually an awesome senior developer if you are under 24 years old unless you are a brilliant child prodigy who has been inventing new software techniques for the last 8 years. I am on my way out of my thirties and my age has not hindered any demand for me. As far as interviews go what has done me well is honesty. This means telling prospective employers things that might make them throw up in their mouths. I don't like large blunted frameworks and so I prefer to get much of the nonsense out of the way early on. If the disdain for the safety scissors is a deal breaker then don't waste my time and I won't waste yours. Since the demand for seniors is ridiculously stupid I am fortunate to be less afraid of being so blunt and immediately honest.
• joyeuse6701 8y ago
  Coding interviews hide subjectivity behind the veneer of objectivity. They are the worst type of interview. Maybe I'll make a 'fair coding interview'. The candidate and interviewer get a random coding problem they must solve together. We'll see how the candidate and interviewer feel about each other after the shared trauma.
• rajacombinator 8y ago
  For a senior position, if resume + talking for a few minutes can’t verify that the person is potentially qualified, it means you suck at interviewing people. From there it should be a discussion to learn about thought process, architecture experience, and people skills.
• Zaheer 8y ago
  I recently also built a tool in the job hunt space for engineers feeling very similar frustrations. One of the most frustrating aspects for me was how blurry the various career ladders translate across companies. Some people may end up with a very different scope of work than they originally thought if they weren't familiar with the leveling system of the company they applied for. To this end I ended up building http://www.levels.fyi http://www.levels.fyi with a friend - do let us know if you have any feedback!
• royalghost 8y ago
  I recently did an onsite interview for a company which asked me to do a homework assignment and make some code changes on the fly. The task was the most stupid I never heard of, to call a controller method from another class from a console. They called it "reusable." After a week, the recruiter called me and told me that I am not selected due to my lack of skills in object oriented. This is the most ridiculous feedback I ever received.
• ggregoire 8y ago
  What about the people who can pass the whiteboard/fizzbuzzs tests, but are complete lazy asses who work 2 hours a day once hired? How do you detect these profiles?
  • modbait 8y ago
    As a partial solution, carefully describe the reality of the work they'll be doing. For example, "We're building a bespoke web server using our own in-house programming language based on COBOL. The project has already been cancelled, but for political reasons, we need to produce another million lines of code on it over the next nine months." Etc. In the face of such frankness, many lazy asses may decide to exclude themselves. ;-)
• dbg31415 8y ago
  > Age discrimination really exists. Avoid age discrimination by screeners by limiting your resume to the last 10 years and taking the dates off when you graduated. The last 5-7 years is more than enough in most cases... when I look at a resume with jobs going back to the 90s... it's just painful. Nobody cares what you were doing past your last job. Add 1-2 more jobs before that if you really want to give me background, but as someone who goes through a lot of resumes I wish they were capped at 1-page, and 3 past jobs.
• nickthemagicman 8y ago
  Job Hound is seriously cool! If enough people start using it a database could be built on companies hiring practices, what percentage of applicants is accepted/rejected, coding test type, and all kinds of other potential big data about companies. That data would be super valuable to us as a tech community applying to jobs. Also, love the browser integration that populates the forms! If you get enough help to work on it/funding a mobile app would be killer. Could you show the job description on the page after clicking on the bookmarklet? And also on the show job page? At first I thought it wasn't populating and it's super useful info because if a job is removed it's nice to have visible! Awesome job!
• danbmil99 8y ago
  Actually now that I think of it, if I'm being cynical, the process described in the article is precisely what I would come up with if I wanted to be biased against older experienced people without admitting that was my motive. 8 hours of homework for the person with the kids who won't have time for it, check Tests optimized for people with young, facile minds who are recently used to cramming random data into their heads spitting it back out, check Complete disregard for domain level knowledge, specialization, or the value of experience, check.
  • danbmil99 8y ago
    This process doesn't filter for competence. It filters for people with fanatical enthusiasm to jump through hoops. It filters for people who will be young, impressionable, and prone to being exploited.
• lkrubner 8y ago
  I try to write up each job interview I do, if it goes badly. Here are two writes up, the first at Adaptly.com and the second at JustWorks.com: Embarrassing code I wrote under stress at a job interview (at Adaptly) http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/embarrassing-code-i-wrote-under-stress-at-a-job-interview http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/embarrassing-code-i-w... The JustWorks job interview http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/the-justworks-job-interview http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/the-justworks-job-int... I agree the job finding process has gotten slower and slower. Personal connections are becoming more and more important. The industry is not as open as it was 20 years ago.
  • orangecat 8y ago
    Embarrassing code I wrote under stress at a job interview (at Adaptly) I've done about 100 interviews at a large tech company. You did fine. Maybe not the best but far from the worst, and definitely in the upper half. The guy who is interviewing me has mostly stopped watching, because he’s already decided there is no chance in hell that they will be hiring me. He is looking at his phone. More likely he was bored because he's done this dozens of times and always ends up twiddling his thumbs while the candidate deals with silly syntax errors. (Incidentally this is a point in favor of whiteboards, so that you both can focus on the actual logic rather than fighting the compiler). I think they want someone who can write something like this in 5 minutes If an interview session is 30 minutes, the anticipated outcome is not that you solve the problem in 5 minutes and spend 25 minutes chatting about the weather. I guarantee that many if not most candidates don't get to the point you did of having a working solution. Even if they say “Please feel free to ask questions” if you phrase the question the wrong way, or ask a question outside the bounds of what they were expecting, it becomes a mark against you. I obviously can't prove the lack of a subconscious effect, but I've never criticized a candidate for any question that they asked. Confirming something that was in the problem description is neutral, asking about something that wasn't (e.g. "is the input case-sensitive?") is a positive.
• toadi 8y ago
  Actually weird differences in culture. I'm from Belgium and this is a contracting environment. You just hire engineers on contracting basis. Easy to fire them if they're not doing a good job. The reason why we like it is because it pays much better then being an employee. Because it is so easy to cut bad engineers the hiring process is much easier. As long as it pays well I don't mind the insecurity of working on this basis... Another upside of working like this is I can leave toxic environments quite easy too :)
• jetsnoc 8y ago
  > no one actually believes that anyone can code. [..] When did an entire industry of people get pre-judged as lying? I've been hiring recently for a senior developer and I have had a dozen or more candidates not be able to explain composition and inheritance or the differences between an Object Oriented or Functional language. One person started describing how to define functions and another couldn't really explain inheritance. For my company, candidates lying on their resume is our experience. A number of people ARE lying on their resume. we've front-loaded a lot of the "we don't trust your resume" in to the screening process and the first 30-minute screen because so many people list the dogs breakfast on their resume, but really can't do those things. I think a lot of times, someone else on the project team may have hacked on that type of thing and so they list it on their resume. There aren't a lot of good answers -- besides validating those skillsets -- since people can list anything that they want on their resume. I would love for someone to have an accreditation or certification program that was widely used so that we could know someone could do the work and most importantly do the work well since the implementation and the patterns they will be choosing will be with our company for years to come.
  • spirodonfl 8y ago
    I agree with the idea of a certification program. Even a full-on curriculum. At the end, you walk away with something approved by the industry in general as something of value. Something that indicates "This person knows how to, bare minimum, fizzbuzz" or regex fizzbuzz with your choice of wording. I'm trying to get opinions from developers (myself being one) on what kinds of things that kind of program would have to include. I'd love to hear some ideas if you have any.
• nythrowaway 8y ago
  I don’t understand why getting a degree in cs at a good peogram isn’t good enough for the proof you can code. I had to write a ray tracer in graphics, calculate recurrence relations and code them in advanced algorithms analyzing all sorts of run times, wrote a compiler. My friends in top law firms hire from top law schools and don’t ask technical questions to candidates. If they make it through top law schools they have an extremely high success rate as employees. Should be same for our field.
• Myrmornis 8y ago
  > no one actually believes that anyone can code....When did an entire industry of people get pre-judged as lying? Unless the author has never attempted to hire programmers, I don't understand this attitude at all. It's extremely common to find resumés vastly exaggerating the applicants skills in programming languages and technologies.
• mathgladiator 8y ago
  I think this and many of the comments illustrates part of the gap. If you are in the big tech companies doing infrastructure work (and to some degree, product work), then you need a very firm grasp of the basics because you will have to revisit them. The reason one has to revisit them in these companies is because scale will demand taking different evolutionary passes that are not needed in most other companies. What this does is create a barrier between jobs that pay crazy and the rest of the market that just need to cobble together a product. I actually experienced this many years ago when I assembled a hacker news meetup in the midwest. I felt rather isolated because most people were assembling some ruby website or some product while I wanted to build next generation infrastructure and write my own database. Now, the problem here is that ex-big-tech workers will bring the same processes from big companies to smaller scale. Small companies need to pick their battles, and they need to decide to educate and wield weaker engineers; most will not because that is expensive.
• Guthur 8y ago
  The main reason I don't believe people can code from a CV is that in app many cases they can't. Many candidates are being completely desingeneous with their experience claims. Quite often it's obvious when you see a laundry list of languages and technology stacks. I have had candidates come in claiming to have extensive experience with hadoop, spark and Scala and then don't even know what a hash map is let alone their characteristics. I had one candidate struggle to even write a single function in their language of choice and mean even just the basic declaration and then to my face still claim that they are suitable for an in depth technical role. It's very frustrating.
• kkotak 8y ago
  I could've written this exact post myself as I'm going through the process right now. So thank you for taking time to share and building the hound! Kudos. As for the presently en Vogue hiring process for senior tech roles, I'd put a deserved blame on companies like Google, where this bookish and silly way of hiring was first codified by the founders and early employees who were fresh grads/drop outs from schools - and that's all they knew about how to judge who's better in class. And as more and more of people who went through that process leave and start their own companies, they follow the same process - thinking that's the best of breed way to hire. As for age discrimination - it's very much alive and well - specifically in the SF Bay area. Which is a shame.
• stratigos 8y ago
  I agree in full with this article. I too have been freelancing for > 4 years, handling whole startups' software needs myself, and am faced with the exact same gauntlet of perplexing steps. My experience parallels the author's perfectly. Now we just get asymmetrical experiences on 1) number of highly qualified candidates for a job and 2) job creators' belief that not enough qualified candidates are available for the job.
• utopkara 8y ago
  The problem is symmetric, and observations will match expectations if you can treat it as such. Put yourself in the place of the interviewer, who needs to decide on the person they will work with for the next two years. Software Engineering is already hard, and your interviewers are overworked. They are assessing whether you will be able to pull your weight. Their livelihoods are in this at least as much as yours, if not more. Interviewing is no different from cases where you have limited information to decide on a critical issue, like buying a house, choosing a surgeon, voting for town mayor. You have to separate the important flaws from the minor ones, assess the risk, and pick the candidate that is the best investment. When you are in a technical interview, you are rarely assessed for some generic software engineer ideal, but for skills that the hiring team have in mind. The chances are very low that there will be a match with all positions you apply to, unless you are also very selective about where you apply to on your end.
• bojo 8y ago
  I absolutely detest homework assignments, so much so that I don't use them when I hire people for my team. It's a waste of the applicant's time, and as other people have pointed out it is narrowly focused, sometimes not applicable to the entire skill set the applicant can bring to the table, and is typically trainable level material anyways. I highly prefer to engage the person about their previous projects. Through building good rapport it's easy to determine what they've done and where their passion is focused. If they can't tell me the details of building an X app with Y interfaces and Z databases, then I can figure out they are a bullshitter with only 15-30 minutes of total time wasted. If we can get past that step then we can start talking about more interesting things, like optimizations, scaling out, and our favorite unrelated technology stack and its merits. It's shocking to me that companies feel they need to do more than this these days. To be fair I work in an At-will state, so if by chance someone does sneak through the process we have a 3-6 month probation period where we make sure they can really do what they say they can. To date this has never been a problem.
• hashfunktion 8y ago
  Senior level dev here (6+ years). My last job search was brutal. I aced my interviews but still got a lot of rejections. The feedback included * the team thinks you’re a great engineer, but you didn’t show enough excitement about the company * we think you’re a solid engineer but not quite at the senior level yet, it’s ok though, we reject 98% of our candidates * we do a lot of code story telling at our team (I kid you not) and you weren’t a great story teller about your code * the team didn’t get the sense you enjoy pairing and we pair a lot here I actually think the real reason was poor personality match but companies don’t like being honest about that so they make up nonsensical excuses.
  • brynjolf 8y ago
    Code telling? What is that? I'm sorry about the job but that sounds hilarious.
    • hashfunktion 8y ago
      It was stupid. They gave me a project to do and during the onsite I had to walk through the code in the project. I thought I was pretty thorough given the time constraint. I figured it was just a bad personality-fit and they had to make up something so they said "not a good code story teller".
• sigi45 8y ago
  While i do hate some hirigin practices, i will obey to get that one cool/great job :|. I do like programming / what i'm doing anyway and it is not that far fetched to expect someone to write code or know what ACID means exactly. It is more like 'sharpening your skills' and i like doing it. I do hate homework. At least google and other companies do that together with you and investing equal amount of time for it. When i get a homework, there is often not much effort on the other side. What i do is always ask for feedback because of that time i spend on the homework.
• ntnn 8y ago
  > Number 2: No One Believes Anyone Can Actually Code It's about the level and structure of your code. They don't think you _can't_ code, they want to know how _well_ you code. When I'm interviewing people I let them solve a simple problem as well - it doesn't need to work, it doesn't need to be perfect. I just want to know where the interviewee stands. Case in point - I've had a young-un just out of school in for an interview and his code was clean, commented and had structure. On the other hand I've had an older bloke in with roughly ten years of experience as a programmer. His code was an absolute mess from start to finish with K&R-style initialization etc.pp. That is why I want to see how they approach and what code they produce - someone may have been writing code since they were born, but if they never went through a review their code will likely be bad. > Number 3: Coding Tests Can Trip Up Even Good Engineers That is true, hence a coding test should not be measured on the completion but rather on the approach the interviewee took. > Number 10: You’ll Never Really Know Why You Weren’t Hired True and bad. I dislike companies who don't give the applicants feedback - or even worse false feedback. Much like in a review - if all you hear is 'no, wrong, bad, ...' you won't improve. You need explanations to single out the issues you can work on (primarily in the short term).
• futurechan 8y ago
  Well, my company is hiring. I've been a part of the interview process repeatedly, and I feel it is straightforward and fair.
• CM30 8y ago
  I think the issue here (and the one that's causing all this pain and confusion) is that the level of expertise needed for an engineering role depends significantly on the company in question. For instance, a company like Google (or the other ones in the same league) need someone with a lot of programming experience and knowledge of various algorithms, whereas your small agency or company with a web development team might need someone who can install/maintain the CMS and upgrade the plugins every now and again. What's more, the two companies aren't necessarily paying a different wage for said work, so it's entirely possible that someone with far less coding experience is getting paid a small fortune and someone with lots of experience is on the brink of poverty. The problems we see in interviews (assuming people are lying, awkward technical tests, etc) all come from this mismatch, and people either not understanding what they're capable of or confusing things deliberately. A senior engineer at a small company might be classed as a junior at a large one, and when question time comes, that causes issues. And I'm not sure what the solution is there. I mean, the needs for each company are different, and there's always certainly a place where a developer of any standard could find a job. If they can do what their employer wants, does it matter if they don't know fizzbuzz or can't write a multiplication table? Probably not. The real question is likely about how you distinguish between what a junior/midweight/senior developer/engineer is, in a market where those roles could apply to virtually anyone in the industry.
• JJMcJ 8y ago
  I can remember older times when many jobs didn't even give tech screens. Your skills were verified by the reference checks.
• rjk2008 8y ago
  In our department we have made a concerted effort to eliminate "ah-ha" type questions. We focus instead on questions that start with a straightforward problem and lead to a series of deeper design-oriented questions. We also, sadly, have found that a large portion of our interviewing time is devoted to "fraud detection" as many candidates simply cannot do the things that their resumes indicate they should be able to do.
• mogget 8y ago
  @fuzzygroup: First, this is awesome. It's a great example of channeling annoyance at Badness. As someone said, "Better to light a candle than curse the darkness". I tend to agree with a lot of your points. Re: JobHound, can you clarify your thoughts on what sort of privacy users should expect? Obviously a lot the value to those fully in the hunt will be using it to efficiently navigate public sites, but there are also private opportunities and some that might be sensitive. Any thoughts? Obviously easy to work around by separating job sets, but thought it might be valuable to others, too. Thanks again!
• StillBored 8y ago
  Just to add to this a couple days late.. All this focus on coding in interviews is actually completely misplaced. Early in my career I had no problem writing anything you asked, but reading other people's code, and having a deep understanding was something completely different. Now 25 years later, I can still code, and given greenfield development, or just larger pieces of work that by itself is somewhat isolated, I can make features appear in a shocking short time. Similarly debugging my own code, even once its reached into the hundreds of thousands of lines is usually better done by thinking about what in the code base would case the given behavior. OTOH, the skill that really matters is the ability to debug problems in a code base written by a team I wasn't originally part of. That is still really hard, I'm fairly reasonable at it, but it probably takes me longer to understand someone else's code that it would have taken me to write it. This also means my bug fixes tend to take a few days if the bug is in an unfamiliar piece of code. But, it also means that I can usually come up with a fairly trivial fix (frequently just a couple lines of code). Vs a lot of code reviews i've been on (which is similarly hard piece of software engineering) where there is a ton of noise and some 1/2 fix that fixes a particular case but fails to solve the general problem. All that was a long winded way of saying that I suspect that software engineering is in levels, there is the first level where you learn to code, and there is the second level where you learn to understand all the different ways other people code, and then there is the third, where you can analyze the latter alongside a problem to determine not only does the solution solve the problem, but is it covering all the edge cases. A 10x programmer is frequently someone who avoids the second case, and fakes the third case by only reviewing code which touches subsystems they wrote. Interviewing solely for coding skills rather than coding skills + ones ability to read analyze other people's code is missing the most important and hardest part of quality software engineering.