There has to be a better way. I really think TripleByte was on to something. No other profession has such a convoluted interviewing system. Imagine if doctors were expected to perform surgeries in X minutes in order to prove they were qualified for the job? Imagine if a lawyer had to prove they graduated from law school by defending a random felon in a court setting.
No other profession in existence expects candidates to dance on command the way we are expected to. Why do I have to prove over and over and over and over again that I can solve fizz-buzz or some other, similar brain teaser whose solution I more or less memorized. Why can't employers look at the plethora of code-related stuff with my name attacked to it that's out there on the Internet, ask me a few questions, and conclude that yep, he in fact knows what he is doing and probably did in fact work at these places he has listed on his resume.
This comes up a lot and the reason doctors and lawyers don’t have to do their version of FizzBuzz is that they have strong, organized professional organizations managing their professions and providing a credential that assures some base-level skill. If we had the equivalent of the Bar Exam, we’d only have to take it once and then skip 75% of every interview.
Jokes aside, any software engineer would be wise to get one or two cloud certs. Certifications are big in the IT realm (e.g. A+), and while they've historically been a joke in the SWE realm, virtually all SWE job postings I see these days want the candidate to have AWS or Azure experience, and a cert proves that. Yeah the AWS Cloud Practitioner cert is easy, but something like Azure's AZ-204 takes MANY hours of studying/real-world experience to earn.
Well, I have a PhD, a pretty large github protofolio, a long list of realizations, code running on most tech devices on this planet (and also at least one device in space, as I've learnt recently), and I'm still asked to complete exercises that are only one step above FizzBuzz.
So... what you write may be true, but it seems to me that many employers are not ready to accept proofs of "base-level skill".
The problem has always been with companies. They'll pass on people like me, then whine about a tech labor shortage and want H1-B workers. I'm convinced I can do anything an H1-B visa-holder can*, but Google would have to be in dire straits before they even spend time interviewing me. Twitter is about there, I think, but it sounds like such an awful place to work now, so it's a catch 22.
*except be willing to work 50 or 60-hour weeks for 20% below market rate
Just to be clear since you replied to my comment, coding demonstrations are almost never a part of my interview process. That's not the part I was complaining about. Once I have narrowed down the potential applicants to a few, I do 15-30m interviews where we talk about things on their resume (e.g. "how did you solve X problem at Y job?") or list of skills (e.g. "how would you do task A with tech B?"), and their reason for applying. So far, I've only needed to have one round of interviews like that, because I usually get that one candidate that is best suited for the job.
The part I was complaining about is narrowing down the pool in the first place, the pre-screening, the part you mention:
> Why can't employers look at the plethora of code-related stuff with my name attacked to it that's out there on the Internet [...]
You wish (and I wish). The answer is because everything that can be gamed will eventually be. Each time I'm hiring it gets worse. Examples:
- GitHub profiles are still a decent filtering system, but people have learned how to game that with hello world-esque repositories in the area of interest. So you have to take a really close look at the actual content of the repositories themselves. Sometimes they have complicated file structures, lots of files, commits etc., then you have to actually look at the code and find it's just a "baby's first app" copied from some tutorial on how to game GitHub repos for the interview. They also plaster their GitHub bio with all these stickers and icons and programming languages copied from some templates on how to make your GitHub look attractive.
- Resumes are getting to be worse, a certain class of people say they worked for 5 different Fortune 500 companies, thankfully they all use the same template so you can filter them out. Others just keep lying over and over or embellishing their experience so hard it's basically a lie. If you're trained at it, you can filter them out because you notice patterns, similarities etc. but if you're hiring for something that you don't have experience in then it's getting harder and harder to distinguish. Sadly it's caused me to automatically assuming someone from certain countries are BSing it if their resume sets off my BS meter in any way.
- I used to use Discord communities related to something I was hiring for with a #jobs channel (for example, Flutter), but those "gamers" have figured that out too, and now when you post there, you get a bunch of BS applicants. You can sometimes tell because they don't really bother setting a profile pic or anything for their Discord, so you know they probably just joined to game the system.
All in all, when the application process is over, I am ending up feeling more and more irritated at the amount of time I have wasted filtering and filtering and filtering.
> they don't really bother setting a profile pic or anything for their Discord
I dont have a Discord profile pic or personal info filled in in principle. Ive also disabled the exhibitionist “I am playing this now” feature. That makes me a scammer right?
Well, that's the thing, because you haven't done that, I am now biased to believe you wouldn't be a good applicant regardless of your skills. In the end, the applications gaming has made things worse for everyone, but especially the outliers. And because there's only so much time one can spend screening applicants, the biases will negatively impact genuine candidates as well. The only way out of this I've found so far (aside from the obvious one of networking) is to use paid job posting sites, although that gets to be quite pricey
Leetcode is incredibly easy (just time-consuming) to game, yet it's colloquially regarded as the gold standard for interviewing.
I know someone who plays that GitHub profile game where they, at first glance, appear to be a contributor to ~20 teams' projects. I can tell you inside of a minute though, that his profile is bullshit. I think it's a great idea to ask the candidate about their public GitHub projects (I also think it's a great idea to ask candidates about their past jobs and make the interview as much like a two-way conversation as possible).
What if there were a system where, for each applicant, it were to A) automatically verify the dates of employment with past employers (perfect for a call center in the third world), B) web scrape any linked SO/GitHub/Medium profiles and evaluate "novelty"/legitimacy, and C) look for certifications (ideally there's a central authority like what doctors and lawyers have - Merit[0] is a startup building something like this)? Surely if something like TripleByte can mint money (at least for a time) when they're MANUALLY vetting candidates, there's a market for an automated/semi-automated system of vetting that still delivers a lot of value by, instead of finding the wheat in the chaff, simply removing all the straw from the chaff and leaving the wheat-finding to individual companies (who tended to do that anyway, even with TripleByte).
No other profession in existence expects candidates to dance on command the way we are expected to. Why do I have to prove over and over and over and over again that I can solve fizz-buzz or some other, similar brain teaser whose solution I more or less memorized. Why can't employers look at the plethora of code-related stuff with my name attacked to it that's out there on the Internet, ask me a few questions, and conclude that yep, he in fact knows what he is doing and probably did in fact work at these places he has listed on his resume.