9 ms·

Brief thoughts on getting hired as a senior coder

30 points by rspivak 7y ago

hans1729 7y ago
>#1) [...] it took /a lot/ of applications [...] I don’t have the actual numbers ..ok? >#2) Tech interviews are just stupid broken [...] ..ok? >I was /never/ offered feedback. Not once! [...] This sucks. You're talking senior positions. A senior, just going by semantics, should be very aware of his standing, and what recruiters want to see for the specific position he wants to be his job. If you have questions, ask the recruiter, that's appreciated. Why should they spend money on the time it takes? For the luls? When you don't even ask for it? You tried senior and you didn't make it. Either you didn't know about important criteria, or you didn't meet them, in both cases you're just not there yet. >#4) Recruiters are absolutely useless, unless they are good, and then they are gold. Not much to be said here, general recruiter model seems to be throw all your jobs at every applicant, see if any bite. Throw all your applicants at any job, see if it anyone gets hired. Keep commissions if it works. the entire paragraph is hot air >#5) Not publishing salary information sucks. Asking someone what they expect to make without publishing salary information double sucks. If you don't know your value, you're not worth the value they'd be willing to pay if you did. It's not rocket science... >#6) Weed out the jerks early [...] CTO wrote back and said verbatim, “I honestly wouldn’t have written you back, because the code you sent over is terrible. But my team liked some other things about your resume so I want to give you a second chance to impress me. Can you send over some different code?” [...] And he wrote back and said basically oh I’m sorry, I thought I was clear, I have 50 resumes on my desk from the best CS schools in the country, you went to a boot camp, you /are/ lucky if I decide to interview you. And I was like, no thanks! Can you imagine for working for that guy if that’s how he treats candidates? guy was honest with you, gave you feedback you did't want to hear (heh, #4) and made sure that you would't waste even more of his time (due to complete lack of context-awareness with respect to the position and concurrence), while still giving you a chance, because some people in his team were interested. bruh. this is the best imaginable case. get a grip
- Bahamut 7y ago
  I too wanted to comment on some of the points, as this just isn't a well written article and reads more like the rants of someone who isn't ready emotionally, letting the frustrations boil over into not evaluating the scenarios properly.
  - hans1729 7y ago
    Emotional is the right word, yeah. At first I thought "ah, guess you gotta write a medium-article when you get a job these days, good for the resume eh", but this lad really got me more sugar: >#8) Last one — always trust your intuition and get in there and really talk to people. [...] The job I took — on paper not nec a match for me and glassdoor reviews were also not encouraging to me. But every time I talked to the engineering manager I was like hmmm, I kinda feel like this is a good fit for me. I’m not sure why yet, but my spidey senses say lots of green flags. "Ok, so I have no numbers on applications, but its 20+. I have very high criteria, I'm selective asf. No one talks back to me, they're all super rude. But now I've got a job. Ok, it doesn't meet my criteria, and yeah, bad rep on glassdor, but my spidey senses say we're cool. #alwaysfollowyourintuition" this should become a copypasta
- littlecranky67 7y ago
  Agreed. If you read the article carefully, the author holds no degree in CS but rather went to a bootcamp. I don't know how much this qualifies you for a senior position, depends a lot on experience.
  - undecisive 7y ago
    It looks like bootcamps started getting popular around 2012. Assuming this guy has been in industry for the past 6 years, that's probably enough experience to start considering Senior level coder roles in the current climate.
    - throwresumeaway 7y ago
      Looks like this is his resume http://estiens.github.io http://estiens.github.io, doesn't look like a senior "coder" to me.
meesles 7y ago
The point about feedback is spot-on. It's chronic across hiring because hiring teams are trying to find their candidates and save time/money. What people forget about is the social capital you gain/lose. If 50 people come through your process and you give no feedback, they'll tell their friends about your weak hiring practices and that alone will cost you candidates. If you've already put in many hours to interview someone, taking 30 minutes to explain some areas of improvement or why it wasn't a good fit is a very valuable thing to do for your business in the long-run.
- reikonomusha 7y ago
  Is it demonstrated that the company actually gets a return, or is it the case that 5–10% of candidates will feel happy to receive feedback, and 90–95% will feel like it’s a chance to rebut and defend themselves, leading to a situation to deal with?
  - llamataboot 7y ago
    I think that if a candidate has made it through your entire process, that you already should have a good read on them and trust them essentially. If you decide not to hire them and they write you a note thanking you for the process, offering you some feedback on your interview process (positive and improvements) and ask if there's anything they could focus on over the next year or two that would make them a stronger candidate, that it's pretty clear they aren't going to fight with you. And yes, I do think you lose the opportunity for someone to reapply to another open position (or refer their friends) which is a shame, because presumably you thought this person was a /strong candidate/, they just didn't quite work out at the end for some reason.
- scarejunba 7y ago
  > If you've already put in many hours to interview someone, taking 30 minutes to explain some areas of improvement or why it wasn't a good fit is a very valuable thing to do for your business in the long-run. Which examples demonstrate this?
bitwize 7y ago
Never expect feedback. Never expect to even hear from the company once they decide they're not interested. Any communication is a gift, because any information they give about how they arrive at their decision could potentially expose the company to liability. This is the reality in $CURRENT_YEAR and it needs to be dealt with, not bristled at.
- mieseratte 7y ago
  > This is the reality in $CURRENT_YEAR and it needs to be dealt with, not bristled at. I see no reason to not bristle at piss-poor social conventions. Sending a "Thank you for your time. We will not be moving forward with you at this time." doesn't expose you to a single iota of risk. Though if there is a silver lining, a company not deigning to extend a simple courtesy is a strong signal that they are a shitty group to do business with so it's likely for the best.
- deathanatos 7y ago
  I think it's fine to bristle at a company that just goes dark on you; that's still rude (that is, "Any communication is a gift", no, not really). A curt "Thanks, but at this time we're not going to move forward." is all it takes to not waste everyone's time. But yeah, real feedback is never going to happen for the reasons you mention.
- Goronmon 7y ago
  I don't think being unprofessional in professional situations should ever not be bristled at.
- llamataboot 7y ago
  This may be the current reality, but I still think it is a bad one. The feedback could be generic and mostly offered as as a platitude. ("We just felt a few other candidates were stronger in XYZ") If, as an industry, we are going to drag people through 40-60 hour long processes for hiring (which I think is largely unnecessary and a waste of money and energy), we can also learn how to end those relationships (because at that point it is a relationship) with human kindness.
peteypao 7y ago
> I sent over some horrible code in a language I can barely write that I was really proud of and explained why. Why would you ever do that? The whole point of sending over code is so that they assess whether you can write understandable code. I don't know what you have to benefit from this. > I sent over some different code, it was a 5 line code change that halved the average response time of an API. But I also said you know, I’m not interested in auditioning for you. Either we’re a good match or we’re not, but I’m not particularly interested in being “grateful for the opportunity to apply”, frankly I think you should be grateful that I took a few hours out of my day to explore whether we want to build something together… Why would you even? Just why?
- sandino 7y ago
  All of section (6) smacks of ... some kind of attitude problem. Yes, the system if frequently broken (but more often slow and stilted) but still -- the moment you start intentionally playing head games with people -- it's like, why bother? Hard to have sympathy with this guy, as a result.
- Cthulhu_ 7y ago
  That second quote is basically saying "I don't actually want to work for you"; even if the code was good, that would've been a rejection from me. The OP sounds like they're not looking for a job, but looking for people to kiss the ground they walk on and give them money.
  - wolco 7y ago
    This is what the process is like hiring those 10x programmers. Everyone says they want them but it took a year for him to find a fit.
  - bdcravens 7y ago
    While I personally respect humility over arrogance, developers are often seen as disposable resources; this seems to be a bit of response to that.
  - llamataboot 7y ago
wolco 7y ago
There is a randomness to it. Applying for remote positions I found I could get rejected this month reapply and make it through the process next month with same cover letter/resume. There is an oversupply of developers generally and an under supply who know your exact stack.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
blueadept111 7y ago
Anyone who seriously expects detailed feedback from a failed job interview doesn't sound very "senior" to me. I'm pushing 50 after a lifetime in tech and I stopped expecting feedback about 30 years ago. Also, as someone who's sat on both sides of the interview table many times, I wouldn't hire this junior dev who thinks he's a senior, if only because he goes out of his way to inject snark into the interview process and seems to think that the world owes him something at every step. Red flags left and right.
- collyw 7y ago
  Its kind of crap not to expect any feedback when he points out: "Each of those four wire-to-wire interview processes took between 40 and 60 hours"
- xeromal 7y ago
  Agreed, the few times I've gotten feedback it almost felt odd. I did appreciate it though. The only feedback I wish I would get is yes or no. I hate being lost in the ether.
- RangerScience 7y ago
  I "expect" it, but realize it won't generally happen. That this shitty situation is the norm doesn't mean it isn't still shitty, and the lack of feedback - or even the common straight up ghosting - is one of the reasons I want to start charging for my time when interviewing. Basically - pay me with money, or information, but respect me and my time enough that you won't waste the investment with silence. Note: I got feedback from everyone I did an in-person with (3, this time around)
- phyzome 7y ago
  I once got some great feedback via the HR person, and gave them some good feedback as well. (I think I might have initiated, maybe that made the difference?) But yeah, it's extremely rare, and I think partly for liability reasons.
docker_up 7y ago
Frankly, he doesn't sound like someone I would like to work with. The attitude he exudes in his blog post reeks of entitlement and probably likes to argue a lot instead of having discussions. As someone else put it, he sounds far too emotional and definitely not level-headed, especially after his response to the CTO, admittedly who was also a jerk. More level-headed people would just ignore the email and not respond, but it sounds like he wanted to get his last word in, which is an annoying trait in someone to work with.
jpm_sd 7y ago
I think one of the reasons technical interviewing has become so cumbersome is because companies are very reluctant to fire employees who are not working out. Thus, they have to make sure it's an absolutely perfect match up front. Wouldn't it save time and cost overall to hire fast and fire fast? Make it very clear that your first two weeks are a vetting period and your first 6 months are still probation?
- AnimalMuppet 7y ago
  Legally, you'd probably have to structure that as "contract to hire". Otherwise, "fire fast" is probably going to open you up to lawsuits. (You may win those lawsuits. They're still expensive.)
  - myvoiceismypass 7y ago
    This model (fire fast) works pretty well for Netflix, though I personally never got used to it during my time there.
  - jpm_sd 7y ago
    What is required beyond "your at-will employment has been terminated"? What are the grounds for your hypothetical lawsuit?
    - AnimalMuppet 7y ago
      It's easy to file a lawsuit. You have to claim something mildly plausible that the court recognizes as possibly legally valid. At that point, the company has to burn lawyer time in order to fight the case. Even if they win, it cost them. (It cost the ex-employee, too, but the company doesn't care about that. They only care that it cost the company.) Maybe I'm cynical from watching SCO v IBM (still not over, after 16 years, even though SCO never really had a case), but my perception is that you can file a lawsuit without a case. You just have to, in your initial filing, give the appearance that there might be a case.
mcv 7y ago
> #3) I was /never/ offered feedback. Not once! > CTO wrote back and said verbatim, “I honestly wouldn’t have written you back, because the code you sent over is terrible. But my team liked some other things about your resume so I want to give you a second chance to impress me. Can you send over some different code?” So you did get feedback, but only from the company you decided to be a jerk to.
TrackerFF 7y ago
I think the root of the technical interviewing issue is distrust. For some reason, too many programmers seem to have a inherent distrust in other programmers; a kind of "guilty until proven otherwise" mentality, where everyone else is a hack / fraud in disguise. Whenever I see people defend the current practice, they tend to back it up with anecdotes like "I once had a technical manager who couldn't code his way out of a wet paper bag","We once got this fresh CS grad that couldn't even write basic control statements, ridiculous!", "I have a co-worker that can't code". I'm not sure why this field is more affected than any other I've been in. Other than "tech", I've been in regular business, and in electrical engineering (at big global corporations) - and the technical grilling is absolutely nothing like what you see in coding-focused tech. I think technical interviews have their place, and are legit, but not when they're being used the wrong way. Some guy breathing down your neck while expecting a 100% correct recital of some esoteric data-structure or algorithm, for the sake of correctness, seems like a terribly flawed way to go on about things - yet it's something you can expect to experience in this industry. Reminds me more of quizzing than interviewing. So yeah, that's my observations on the current atmosphere. There are good companies with good practices out there, but sadly a ton of low-effort stuff that probably hurts both parties in the long run.
- jpm_sd 7y ago
  I'm an EE who has worked with and interviewed a lot of SWEs. Software is a uniquely "fake it till you make it"-compatible career path. There is an oversupply of people who look pretty good on paper but execute poorly.
yibg 7y ago
He does have some correct observations. Information asymmetry, getting ghosted, the ungodly time needed to go through interviews are all real problems. Too bad the points are poorly formed and the whole article is just a rant. Also, funny what is considered (or at least how one considers themselves) senior now. 15 years in and I think of myself as mid level.
larrik 7y ago
I hire exclusively "Senior" devs, and our process is tough to get through. I found the author's details online. Here's my thoughts: > "Senior Coder" His education and experience puts him on verge of Senior, but I'd go in expecting not a lot, and probably focus on throwing shit from right field at him and seeing how he react and learn on the fly. The blog post strongly implies he'd just angrily hang up (which is actually rare!) Also, "Coder"? I can see he went from design to PHP to Ruby (via a bootcamp), so I can see why he uses 'Coder' here. I don't want 'Coders', though. I want people who can deliver well architected full stack solutions while being able to mentor junior devs in the process. The article and experience leaves me pretty low expectations of that. The simple fact is that it's WAY WAY worse to hire a bad fit than it is to let TEN great devs walk away.
- ryandrake 7y ago
  > The simple fact is that it's WAY WAY worse to hire a bad fit than it is to let TEN great devs walk away. This simple statement sums up so much of what is broken about tech hiring. Everyone prides themselves on how they take smart risks and how entrepreneurial they are, and how they “fail fast” and “explore.” Yet when it comes to hiring, all of a sudden it’s “OMG we have to be super conservative! We can’t fire people and one bad hire could ruin us! We must reject 99% of candidates because Risk.” What happened to being bold and risk-taking?
  - larrik 7y ago
    In theory that sounds great. But, good/great devs only want to work with good/great devs. You get a bad fit in there that manages to stick around, and your good/great devs start to leave. Then you end up with either only lesser devs or a bunch of devs that hate each other.
RangerScience 7y ago
Where I'm at, the next time I do a job search, I want to charge for my time. I've got enough public work on Github (or, expect to soon, as this art project progresses!) that you can review that. If you want something just for you, pay me. That way I know you value it, as well, because otherwise it's nearly free for you. A few interesting things happened this interview cycle: 1) I actually did get feedback, at least from the companies I had an in-person with. I think I managed that by enthusiasm and friendliness during the interviews. But, a bunch more didn't give me any feedback and barely told me that they weren't progressing, which sucks. AngelList itself was actually one of them. Penultimate communication was "we really liked your takehome", next communication was nothing, but when prompted they said "actually no" and nothing more. :/ 2) I was asked to write a lockable node tree as part of a remote screen-share tech screen. I wasn't too excited about the job, so I felt like taking a risk and pulled out a line I'd wanted to pull out for awhile: "If this is the kind of work I'd be doing, I don't want this job. How about we switch to something more like what I'd actually be doing?". Still wrote the code, and did get a call-back, but by then I'd found something. 3) During an in-person tech screen, they asked me to implement something I'd already done as part of a different tech-screen, so I just pulled that up and we went from there. It was fantastic. That one ended interestingly; I get "we really like you and would want to hire you for a position we don't currently have but we don't have that position yet" rather more frequently than seems reasonable.
msluyter 7y ago
Regarding the issue of feedback, IANAL, but I would have to guess that this would open the company to liability/lawsuits. Incredibly vague feedback might not be (directly) actionable, but regularly offering feedback raises the possibility that the person offering it says something -- inadvertently, or perhaps because they are in fact biased/jerks -- that implicates a company in discriminatory hiring practices. Even if feedback in a single case isn't actionable, one can imagine that in aggregate it could be. If during discovery lawyers can find certain themes/patterns in the feedback offered to rejected interviewees, they might be able to use that as evidence. Perhaps I'm paranoid, but my wife's a lawyer.... Aside from that, in simple economic terms, offering feedback makes no sense. After all, if it helps rejected candidate, you're basically helping to improve someone who may end up working for your competition. And if it doesn't, you're wasting time. I'm not saying "in economic terms" is the right/only way to guide behavior, but if you want to understand the behavior of most companies, it's something to keep in mind.
AnimalMuppet 7y ago
40-60 hours for an interview process? Do people really do that? For my current position, I had a half-hour phone interview, then a 2 hour in-person interview. My previous job was about the same. For out of town interviews, I've had to fly out the evening before, then a whole day process, so maybe 30 hours total even if you count the time I spent asleep in a hotel. I have never had a process take more of my time than that.
- yibg 7y ago
  40-60 seems excessive / exaggerated. Maybe it’s due to long take home exercises? My experience has typically been 1-2 hours of phone, followed by anywhere from 4 - 6 hours onsite potentially split across 2 sessions. If we include travel and subsequent negotiations, and initial application and research maybe 10 hours total?
candybar 7y ago
So I do agree with most here that you shouldn't care one way or another about getting feedback and the author seems to be overreacting somewhat, I do want to share that for each of my last 3 rejections from startups, I did receive politely worded feedback as to why I was rejected. So again, while I do agree that the author is overreacting in the sense that it's not helpful to emotionally react this way, I don't think his expectations are necessarily out of line - it's possible to treat candidates better and the more candidates expect to be treated well, the better the industry will be. On top of this, the criticism regarding how the author is self-unaware (I don't entirely disagree) seems especially misguided because often how self-unaware people become self-aware is through constructive feedback. With that in mind, since the author seems to be here, the one piece of feedback I have is that: "I sent over some different code, it was a 5 line code change that halved the average response time of an API." I don't know if the author was at this point interested in the job or not (if this was a joke, please disregard) but some clever 5-liner is extremely unlikely to impress anyone looking for a senior engineer and is impossible to evaluate in isolation. Also most of the work involved in "halving the response time" - again, assuming a reasonably complex system - is identifying where the bottleneck is, not writing the simple fix to address the issue that was discovered. You're expected to write substantially more code than that even in a 30-minute technical screen. When people are looking for code samples (again for a senior engineer), they are looking to see the ability to design and organize larger chunks of a system, make trade-offs between different architectures and ability maintain good code hygiene over a larger sample and so on - providing a 5-liner raises more questions than it answers.

30 points by rspivak 7y ago

>#1) [...] it took /a lot/ of applications [...] I don’t have the actual numbers ..ok? >#2) Tech interviews are just stupid broken [...] ..ok? >I was /never/ offered feedback. Not once! [...] This sucks. You're talking senior positions. A senior, just going by semantics, should be very aware of his standing, and what recruiters want to see for the specific position he wants to be his job. If you have questions, ask the recruiter, that's appreciated. Why should they spend money on the time it takes? For the luls? When you don't even ask for it? You tried senior and you didn't make it. Either you didn't know about important criteria, or you didn't meet them, in both cases you're just not there yet. >#4) Recruiters are absolutely useless, unless they are good, and then they are gold. Not much to be said here, general recruiter model seems to be throw all your jobs at every applicant, see if any bite. Throw all your applicants at any job, see if it anyone gets hired. Keep commissions if it works. the entire paragraph is hot air >#5) Not publishing salary information sucks. Asking someone what they expect to make without publishing salary information double sucks. If you don't know your value, you're not worth the value they'd be willing to pay if you did. It's not rocket science... >#6) Weed out the jerks early [...] CTO wrote back and said verbatim, “I honestly wouldn’t have written you back, because the code you sent over is terrible. But my team liked some other things about your resume so I want to give you a second chance to impress me. Can you send over some different code?” [...] And he wrote back and said basically oh I’m sorry, I thought I was clear, I have 50 resumes on my desk from the best CS schools in the country, you went to a boot camp, you /are/ lucky if I decide to interview you. And I was like, no thanks! Can you imagine for working for that guy if that’s how he treats candidates? guy was honest with you, gave you feedback you did't want to hear (heh, #4) and made sure that you would't waste even more of his time (due to complete lack of context-awareness with respect to the position and concurrence), while still giving you a chance, because some people in his team were interested. bruh. this is the best imaginable case. get a grip

Bahamut 7y ago
I too wanted to comment on some of the points, as this just isn't a well written article and reads more like the rants of someone who isn't ready emotionally, letting the frustrations boil over into not evaluating the scenarios properly.
- hans1729 7y ago
  Emotional is the right word, yeah. At first I thought "ah, guess you gotta write a medium-article when you get a job these days, good for the resume eh", but this lad really got me more sugar: >#8) Last one — always trust your intuition and get in there and really talk to people. [...] The job I took — on paper not nec a match for me and glassdoor reviews were also not encouraging to me. But every time I talked to the engineering manager I was like hmmm, I kinda feel like this is a good fit for me. I’m not sure why yet, but my spidey senses say lots of green flags. "Ok, so I have no numbers on applications, but its 20+. I have very high criteria, I'm selective asf. No one talks back to me, they're all super rude. But now I've got a job. Ok, it doesn't meet my criteria, and yeah, bad rep on glassdor, but my spidey senses say we're cool. #alwaysfollowyourintuition" this should become a copypasta
littlecranky67 7y ago
Agreed. If you read the article carefully, the author holds no degree in CS but rather went to a bootcamp. I don't know how much this qualifies you for a senior position, depends a lot on experience.
- undecisive 7y ago
  It looks like bootcamps started getting popular around 2012. Assuming this guy has been in industry for the past 6 years, that's probably enough experience to start considering Senior level coder roles in the current climate.
  - throwresumeaway 7y ago
    Looks like this is his resume http://estiens.github.io http://estiens.github.io, doesn't look like a senior "coder" to me.

meesles 7y ago

The point about feedback is spot-on. It's chronic across hiring because hiring teams are trying to find their candidates and save time/money. What people forget about is the social capital you gain/lose. If 50 people come through your process and you give no feedback, they'll tell their friends about your weak hiring practices and that alone will cost you candidates. If you've already put in many hours to interview someone, taking 30 minutes to explain some areas of improvement or why it wasn't a good fit is a very valuable thing to do for your business in the long-run.

reikonomusha 7y ago
Is it demonstrated that the company actually gets a return, or is it the case that 5–10% of candidates will feel happy to receive feedback, and 90–95% will feel like it’s a chance to rebut and defend themselves, leading to a situation to deal with?
- llamataboot 7y ago
  I think that if a candidate has made it through your entire process, that you already should have a good read on them and trust them essentially. If you decide not to hire them and they write you a note thanking you for the process, offering you some feedback on your interview process (positive and improvements) and ask if there's anything they could focus on over the next year or two that would make them a stronger candidate, that it's pretty clear they aren't going to fight with you. And yes, I do think you lose the opportunity for someone to reapply to another open position (or refer their friends) which is a shame, because presumably you thought this person was a /strong candidate/, they just didn't quite work out at the end for some reason.
scarejunba 7y ago
> If you've already put in many hours to interview someone, taking 30 minutes to explain some areas of improvement or why it wasn't a good fit is a very valuable thing to do for your business in the long-run. Which examples demonstrate this?

bitwize 7y ago

Never expect feedback. Never expect to even hear from the company once they decide they're not interested. Any communication is a gift, because any information they give about how they arrive at their decision could potentially expose the company to liability. This is the reality in $CURRENT_YEAR and it needs to be dealt with, not bristled at.

mieseratte 7y ago
> This is the reality in $CURRENT_YEAR and it needs to be dealt with, not bristled at. I see no reason to not bristle at piss-poor social conventions. Sending a "Thank you for your time. We will not be moving forward with you at this time." doesn't expose you to a single iota of risk. Though if there is a silver lining, a company not deigning to extend a simple courtesy is a strong signal that they are a shitty group to do business with so it's likely for the best.
deathanatos 7y ago
I think it's fine to bristle at a company that just goes dark on you; that's still rude (that is, "Any communication is a gift", no, not really). A curt "Thanks, but at this time we're not going to move forward." is all it takes to not waste everyone's time. But yeah, real feedback is never going to happen for the reasons you mention.
Goronmon 7y ago
I don't think being unprofessional in professional situations should ever not be bristled at.
llamataboot 7y ago
This may be the current reality, but I still think it is a bad one. The feedback could be generic and mostly offered as as a platitude. ("We just felt a few other candidates were stronger in XYZ") If, as an industry, we are going to drag people through 40-60 hour long processes for hiring (which I think is largely unnecessary and a waste of money and energy), we can also learn how to end those relationships (because at that point it is a relationship) with human kindness.

peteypao 7y ago

> I sent over some horrible code in a language I can barely write that I was really proud of and explained why. Why would you ever do that? The whole point of sending over code is so that they assess whether you can write understandable code. I don't know what you have to benefit from this. > I sent over some different code, it was a 5 line code change that halved the average response time of an API. But I also said you know, I’m not interested in auditioning for you. Either we’re a good match or we’re not, but I’m not particularly interested in being “grateful for the opportunity to apply”, frankly I think you should be grateful that I took a few hours out of my day to explore whether we want to build something together… Why would you even? Just why?

sandino 7y ago
All of section (6) smacks of ... some kind of attitude problem. Yes, the system if frequently broken (but more often slow and stilted) but still -- the moment you start intentionally playing head games with people -- it's like, why bother? Hard to have sympathy with this guy, as a result.
Cthulhu_ 7y ago
That second quote is basically saying "I don't actually want to work for you"; even if the code was good, that would've been a rejection from me. The OP sounds like they're not looking for a job, but looking for people to kiss the ground they walk on and give them money.
- wolco 7y ago
  This is what the process is like hiring those 10x programmers. Everyone says they want them but it took a year for him to find a fit.
- bdcravens 7y ago
  While I personally respect humility over arrogance, developers are often seen as disposable resources; this seems to be a bit of response to that.
- llamataboot 7y ago

wolco 7y ago

There is a randomness to it. Applying for remote positions I found I could get rejected this month reapply and make it through the process next month with same cover letter/resume. There is an oversupply of developers generally and an under supply who know your exact stack.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

blueadept111 7y ago

Anyone who seriously expects detailed feedback from a failed job interview doesn't sound very "senior" to me. I'm pushing 50 after a lifetime in tech and I stopped expecting feedback about 30 years ago. Also, as someone who's sat on both sides of the interview table many times, I wouldn't hire this junior dev who thinks he's a senior, if only because he goes out of his way to inject snark into the interview process and seems to think that the world owes him something at every step. Red flags left and right.

collyw 7y ago
Its kind of crap not to expect any feedback when he points out: "Each of those four wire-to-wire interview processes took between 40 and 60 hours"
xeromal 7y ago
Agreed, the few times I've gotten feedback it almost felt odd. I did appreciate it though. The only feedback I wish I would get is yes or no. I hate being lost in the ether.
RangerScience 7y ago
I "expect" it, but realize it won't generally happen. That this shitty situation is the norm doesn't mean it isn't still shitty, and the lack of feedback - or even the common straight up ghosting - is one of the reasons I want to start charging for my time when interviewing. Basically - pay me with money, or information, but respect me and my time enough that you won't waste the investment with silence. Note: I got feedback from everyone I did an in-person with (3, this time around)
phyzome 7y ago
I once got some great feedback via the HR person, and gave them some good feedback as well. (I think I might have initiated, maybe that made the difference?) But yeah, it's extremely rare, and I think partly for liability reasons.

docker_up 7y ago

Frankly, he doesn't sound like someone I would like to work with. The attitude he exudes in his blog post reeks of entitlement and probably likes to argue a lot instead of having discussions. As someone else put it, he sounds far too emotional and definitely not level-headed, especially after his response to the CTO, admittedly who was also a jerk. More level-headed people would just ignore the email and not respond, but it sounds like he wanted to get his last word in, which is an annoying trait in someone to work with.

jpm_sd 7y ago

I think one of the reasons technical interviewing has become so cumbersome is because companies are very reluctant to fire employees who are not working out. Thus, they have to make sure it's an absolutely perfect match up front. Wouldn't it save time and cost overall to hire fast and fire fast? Make it very clear that your first two weeks are a vetting period and your first 6 months are still probation?

AnimalMuppet 7y ago
Legally, you'd probably have to structure that as "contract to hire". Otherwise, "fire fast" is probably going to open you up to lawsuits. (You may win those lawsuits. They're still expensive.)
- myvoiceismypass 7y ago
  This model (fire fast) works pretty well for Netflix, though I personally never got used to it during my time there.
- jpm_sd 7y ago
  What is required beyond "your at-will employment has been terminated"? What are the grounds for your hypothetical lawsuit?
  - AnimalMuppet 7y ago
    It's easy to file a lawsuit. You have to claim something mildly plausible that the court recognizes as possibly legally valid. At that point, the company has to burn lawyer time in order to fight the case. Even if they win, it cost them. (It cost the ex-employee, too, but the company doesn't care about that. They only care that it cost the company.) Maybe I'm cynical from watching SCO v IBM (still not over, after 16 years, even though SCO never really had a case), but my perception is that you can file a lawsuit without a case. You just have to, in your initial filing, give the appearance that there might be a case.

mcv 7y ago

> #3) I was /never/ offered feedback. Not once! > CTO wrote back and said verbatim, “I honestly wouldn’t have written you back, because the code you sent over is terrible. But my team liked some other things about your resume so I want to give you a second chance to impress me. Can you send over some different code?” So you did get feedback, but only from the company you decided to be a jerk to.

TrackerFF 7y ago

I think the root of the technical interviewing issue is distrust. For some reason, too many programmers seem to have a inherent distrust in other programmers; a kind of "guilty until proven otherwise" mentality, where everyone else is a hack / fraud in disguise. Whenever I see people defend the current practice, they tend to back it up with anecdotes like "I once had a technical manager who couldn't code his way out of a wet paper bag","We once got this fresh CS grad that couldn't even write basic control statements, ridiculous!", "I have a co-worker that can't code". I'm not sure why this field is more affected than any other I've been in. Other than "tech", I've been in regular business, and in electrical engineering (at big global corporations) - and the technical grilling is absolutely nothing like what you see in coding-focused tech. I think technical interviews have their place, and are legit, but not when they're being used the wrong way. Some guy breathing down your neck while expecting a 100% correct recital of some esoteric data-structure or algorithm, for the sake of correctness, seems like a terribly flawed way to go on about things - yet it's something you can expect to experience in this industry. Reminds me more of quizzing than interviewing. So yeah, that's my observations on the current atmosphere. There are good companies with good practices out there, but sadly a ton of low-effort stuff that probably hurts both parties in the long run.

jpm_sd 7y ago
I'm an EE who has worked with and interviewed a lot of SWEs. Software is a uniquely "fake it till you make it"-compatible career path. There is an oversupply of people who look pretty good on paper but execute poorly.

yibg 7y ago

He does have some correct observations. Information asymmetry, getting ghosted, the ungodly time needed to go through interviews are all real problems. Too bad the points are poorly formed and the whole article is just a rant. Also, funny what is considered (or at least how one considers themselves) senior now. 15 years in and I think of myself as mid level.

larrik 7y ago

I hire exclusively "Senior" devs, and our process is tough to get through. I found the author's details online. Here's my thoughts: > "Senior Coder" His education and experience puts him on verge of Senior, but I'd go in expecting not a lot, and probably focus on throwing shit from right field at him and seeing how he react and learn on the fly. The blog post strongly implies he'd just angrily hang up (which is actually rare!) Also, "Coder"? I can see he went from design to PHP to Ruby (via a bootcamp), so I can see why he uses 'Coder' here. I don't want 'Coders', though. I want people who can deliver well architected full stack solutions while being able to mentor junior devs in the process. The article and experience leaves me pretty low expectations of that. The simple fact is that it's WAY WAY worse to hire a bad fit than it is to let TEN great devs walk away.

ryandrake 7y ago
> The simple fact is that it's WAY WAY worse to hire a bad fit than it is to let TEN great devs walk away. This simple statement sums up so much of what is broken about tech hiring. Everyone prides themselves on how they take smart risks and how entrepreneurial they are, and how they “fail fast” and “explore.” Yet when it comes to hiring, all of a sudden it’s “OMG we have to be super conservative! We can’t fire people and one bad hire could ruin us! We must reject 99% of candidates because Risk.” What happened to being bold and risk-taking?
- larrik 7y ago
  In theory that sounds great. But, good/great devs only want to work with good/great devs. You get a bad fit in there that manages to stick around, and your good/great devs start to leave. Then you end up with either only lesser devs or a bunch of devs that hate each other.

RangerScience 7y ago

Where I'm at, the next time I do a job search, I want to charge for my time. I've got enough public work on Github (or, expect to soon, as this art project progresses!) that you can review that. If you want something just for you, pay me. That way I know you value it, as well, because otherwise it's nearly free for you. A few interesting things happened this interview cycle: 1) I actually did get feedback, at least from the companies I had an in-person with. I think I managed that by enthusiasm and friendliness during the interviews. But, a bunch more didn't give me any feedback and barely told me that they weren't progressing, which sucks. AngelList itself was actually one of them. Penultimate communication was "we really liked your takehome", next communication was nothing, but when prompted they said "actually no" and nothing more. :/ 2) I was asked to write a lockable node tree as part of a remote screen-share tech screen. I wasn't too excited about the job, so I felt like taking a risk and pulled out a line I'd wanted to pull out for awhile: "If this is the kind of work I'd be doing, I don't want this job. How about we switch to something more like what I'd actually be doing?". Still wrote the code, and did get a call-back, but by then I'd found something. 3) During an in-person tech screen, they asked me to implement something I'd already done as part of a different tech-screen, so I just pulled that up and we went from there. It was fantastic. That one ended interestingly; I get "we really like you and would want to hire you for a position we don't currently have but we don't have that position yet" rather more frequently than seems reasonable.

msluyter 7y ago

Regarding the issue of feedback, IANAL, but I would have to guess that this would open the company to liability/lawsuits. Incredibly vague feedback might not be (directly) actionable, but regularly offering feedback raises the possibility that the person offering it says something -- inadvertently, or perhaps because they are in fact biased/jerks -- that implicates a company in discriminatory hiring practices. Even if feedback in a single case isn't actionable, one can imagine that in aggregate it could be. If during discovery lawyers can find certain themes/patterns in the feedback offered to rejected interviewees, they might be able to use that as evidence. Perhaps I'm paranoid, but my wife's a lawyer.... Aside from that, in simple economic terms, offering feedback makes no sense. After all, if it helps rejected candidate, you're basically helping to improve someone who may end up working for your competition. And if it doesn't, you're wasting time. I'm not saying "in economic terms" is the right/only way to guide behavior, but if you want to understand the behavior of most companies, it's something to keep in mind.

AnimalMuppet 7y ago

40-60 hours for an interview process? Do people really do that? For my current position, I had a half-hour phone interview, then a 2 hour in-person interview. My previous job was about the same. For out of town interviews, I've had to fly out the evening before, then a whole day process, so maybe 30 hours total even if you count the time I spent asleep in a hotel. I have never had a process take more of my time than that.

yibg 7y ago
40-60 seems excessive / exaggerated. Maybe it’s due to long take home exercises? My experience has typically been 1-2 hours of phone, followed by anywhere from 4 - 6 hours onsite potentially split across 2 sessions. If we include travel and subsequent negotiations, and initial application and research maybe 10 hours total?

candybar 7y ago

So I do agree with most here that you shouldn't care one way or another about getting feedback and the author seems to be overreacting somewhat, I do want to share that for each of my last 3 rejections from startups, I did receive politely worded feedback as to why I was rejected. So again, while I do agree that the author is overreacting in the sense that it's not helpful to emotionally react this way, I don't think his expectations are necessarily out of line - it's possible to treat candidates better and the more candidates expect to be treated well, the better the industry will be. On top of this, the criticism regarding how the author is self-unaware (I don't entirely disagree) seems especially misguided because often how self-unaware people become self-aware is through constructive feedback. With that in mind, since the author seems to be here, the one piece of feedback I have is that: "I sent over some different code, it was a 5 line code change that halved the average response time of an API." I don't know if the author was at this point interested in the job or not (if this was a joke, please disregard) but some clever 5-liner is extremely unlikely to impress anyone looking for a senior engineer and is impossible to evaluate in isolation. Also most of the work involved in "halving the response time" - again, assuming a reasonably complex system - is identifying where the bottleneck is, not writing the simple fix to address the issue that was discovered. You're expected to write substantially more code than that even in a 30-minute technical screen. When people are looking for code samples (again for a senior engineer), they are looking to see the ability to design and organize larger chunks of a system, make trade-offs between different architectures and ability maintain good code hygiene over a larger sample and so on - providing a 5-liner raises more questions than it answers.