This entire post is why I quit the interview circuit as a person with ample prior relevant work experience.
This gaslighting bullshit has to go. People are given vague and contradictory guidelines for the chance at an interview.
"Well we really like the UI and it passed all unit tests and didn't crash and wouldn't crash and follows typical MVC practices, but we didn't like the system design, and for this particular position we score heavily on system design even though the requirements said not to prematurely optimize and not to spend more than 4 hours on it"
But I thought it was scored by a double blind committee so what exactly are other candidates doing from scratch in 4 hours--- oh..... they're just like me but recycling code from other similar interviews two months ago and adding to it until they get a $500k compensation package
> This entire post is why I quit the interview circuit as a person with ample prior relevant work experience.
It is really bad. Removing yourself from it is probably a very healthy choice.
There's so much folklore, cult of personality, etc. behind all of this.
Hiring is REALLY hard. So exec's order a ramp up of head count. It falls on to managers to start the process. They either don't want to do it (why would they want to?), or they don't know how to do it...they are not technical, or technical enough, they don't have "hiring" skills, etc...
So the burden is typically dumped onto the rank & file "senior engineers" to do the dirty work. They don't know how to hire either. They don't like doing things in a "manual" way. Easy solution! Give them a coding test!
(this is tangentially related to the above fine comment :) I believe it went more like this.. The first time I saw this style of test, it was an engineering hiring group from Microsoft, testing for advanced math skills for some audio work in collaboration (?) with Apple. It was onsite at Apple (a long time ago). The first thing the interviewer said is "we want you to solve this problem right now" .. I said, I have a lot of code examples ready that are representative of my best work, and he was pushy and slightly nervous, and said "no we do not want to see that, this is the problem" .. I agreed, and I believe I did solve it awkwardly, but they refused to look at anything except the in-person test for that interview. It really surprised me, as at that time, I had never heard of this way of doing things. There was no whiteboard, it was a desk.
Sometime later, I believe Google famously used this testing method, on people from The Five university programs, of course. Google probably spun it more like a grad school situation, but I do not know that. Later, every EXEC wanted to copy Google, or wanted to learn bullying like Microsoft.
It is so obvious to me that this sort of test is partially a command-and-control exercise, giving the control role to the hiring group. Please recall there was/is a real tug-of-war between excellent engineers and companies at various points in the recent past.
You pulled out one small statement and ran with it. The problem is it's out of context with the rest of what I said. Also, there is far more history than what you just outlined which falls into "folklore" and "cult of personality."
You're statements alone have great truth to them, I'm just not clear how it differs from mine and why it's a rebuttal to them. Oh-well :-)
This reply makes far less sense now that mistrial9 edited/updated their original statement without attributing that fact :-\ It's been toned down for sure.
It wasn't healthy. It was competing against others that have much greater selective pressures to excel. You can see it on Blind how people from China and India talk about practicing and solving hundreds of leetcode questions to get better, and I'm just casually able to work anywhere at any time and won't be uprooted if I fail. It takes me 45 minutes to solve one problem, and if I don't really understand the concept then it takes me hours to brush up on that concept. I don't have time for that, and the "average good enough" scores in interviews are getting finer and finer.
Finance is easier and pays more. Any of us here could take the test for a FINRA license in a single week. And then use our coding skills and capital to automate most of that.
Market economics at work. As long as there's far more (minimally) qualified applicants for a position than than there is capacity to usefully screen those applicants, you get less useful screening used prior to that to bring it to an acceptable level of work.
Affecting the screening process is hard, as an applicant. You really either have to game the system or just be that much better.
Affecting what you apply for to maximize your likelihood to not be screened out is probably much more useful, but also much less likely to be universally applicable. You can apply for in-person local jobs, but there may not be many good ones around you. You can market to one of your less common skills, or learn some new less common skills, but those may not be in demand locally or require a lot of work.
I think the problem is that in our industry you have many companies where you have 24yo, managers, or even folks under 26 with Director of Engineering titles, and they don't have either the experience or knowledge to sift through good candidates as they just don't have much real life experience.
Whenever i used to interview (years ago), 90% of older engineers were polite, more reasonable, and you could talk on and higher level... and in general they respect your time, as many understand that it is wasteful to just do stupid coding challenges just for the sake of it (especially if they have kids)
While 90% of the more junior developers are still too young to know what to look for in a good candidate. Unfortunately we are in a industry where often a 24 yo with 2 years of experience, and barely any real life experience, get to evaluate the performance of a 30+ yo, with 10+ years of experience.
This just doesn't happen in other professions such as Law or Medicine.
> I think the problem is that in our industry you have many companies where you have 24yo, managers, or even folks under 26 with Director of Engineering titles, and they don't have either the experience or knowledge to sift through good candidates as they just don't have much real life experience.
This is just pure age discrimination in comment form. I've seen incompetent developers at all age levels and similarly brilliant developers at all age levels.
Age and years of experience does not exclude developers from mediocrity.
I have seen countless 10+ YoE candidates with awful practices and performance.
Implying you need to be 26 or over to be a good director is ageism.
I said life experience matters... especially when managing people. It is the same in many areas of life.
A good developer at 23, is probably much better at 30, after some real life experience in shipping many products.
A crappy developer at 23, may become better at 30, or maybe still be crappy at 30....
I'd take a good 23 yo, over a crappy 30yo, but i'd take a good 30 yo over a good 23. The good 30 will have the maturity that comes from shipping long multiple years projects, and have both successes and failures in their belt and learned from them.
So, I think experience (up to 10-15 years) makes an already good developer better....
There is no "you can only go up" trajectory to development experience.
A 30 year old might be half the developer they were at 23, due to burnout/disillusionment/less time. Developers can flounder after previously being excellent. I've seen it.
Something I've also seen a lot is developers getting promoted to levels they cannot handle, and imploding as a result (it's hard to recover from this).
Some people could not lead a project with 30 years of experience. Some people could lead a project with 0 years of experience.
Not true in my experience, if you're a poor communicator you cannot be a good developer in a team environment.
Developers are not the sum of their raw coding ability. If you are a savant genius at coding but a poor communicator, you will be a terrible addition to any large organization.
Such mavericks might be effective in startup environments, but try joining a large org and start tearing up code without communicating effectively, you will be out within a month.
I'd even go as far as to say raw coding ability isn't even a developer's most important skill.
I'm a full-time developer and coding isn't even 50% of my job.
Disagree. Interviewing is about communication. All good developers communicate effectively. If you can't communicate, you're useless to a large organisation.
oh I have long accepted that and thought I was going to really blow things out of the water with my take-home interview projects.
turns out my UI ideas are phenomenal, but the mere familiarity and habitual object oriented programming isn't enough if your first thought isn't to use events and presenters and cram that into a 4 hour coding stream of consciousness.
this one large prominent company didn't even tell me that they preferred it on github, as a way to further gauge how long it took and commit practices. the recruiter just said you could zip it up over email, and then the submission page on the activity website said submit the git link. but "could" meant, not recommended and creating it a git repository now wouldn't show the utility of the git protocol with one single giant commit at the end. "don't prematurely optimize but show us your best" meant show us your best. gaslight gaslight gaslight.
oh but $500K compensation packages are supposed to be hard to get and full of pretentious antipatterns, you should be happy you routinely get call backs in less than 48 hours and are considered for these levels!
This gaslighting bullshit has to go. People are given vague and contradictory guidelines for the chance at an interview.
"Well we really like the UI and it passed all unit tests and didn't crash and wouldn't crash and follows typical MVC practices, but we didn't like the system design, and for this particular position we score heavily on system design even though the requirements said not to prematurely optimize and not to spend more than 4 hours on it"
But I thought it was scored by a double blind committee so what exactly are other candidates doing from scratch in 4 hours--- oh..... they're just like me but recycling code from other similar interviews two months ago and adding to it until they get a $500k compensation package
This is still happening.