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Comment by RcouF1uZ4gsC | Hacker News Reader

>But don’t think that you can walk into another job based on market demand and the number of years on your resume.

The issue is that there are a lot of programmers who have a lot of years and who consider themselves senior who have very little programming ability. If you have been with a “senior” developer who had no idea how to program but was always telling other people what to do, because he was senior, you know the danger of hiring one of these.

The other thing about this is preparation. It is no secret how these companies are screening and interviewing. A truly senior developer who really wants the job, with a few weeks of practice for an hour every night can considerably improve their chances.

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> A truly senior developer who really wants the job, with a few weeks of practice for an hour every night can considerably improve their chances.

Thing is, very good people always have a plethora of options. So a company that tries to make a talented developer jump through somewhat silly hoops, is often going to miss out on that person. Google for example will say, 'we're ok with a lot of false positives' but they are also missing out on outright brilliant people who can make an outsized impact.

The FAANG companies can get away with it to a degree, because their compensation is so high. But there are a bunch of companies out there copying these hiring processes when they can't pay anywhere near what those companies pay, nor offer anything else compelling enough to make up for that.

So on one hand, yes, if you want to get paid the big bucks to work at one of the FAANG companies, you play ball their way and jump through the hoops. But that strategy is not going to work very well for the vast majority of other companies.

I've received offers to interview with Google, Facebook, Amazon and others... I turn them all down. The key is to find a job you like and make money on the side.

The sad part about this is that the filtering doesn't prevent getting sub standard candidates through the door. For example, I've been rejected by the Google interview process...but then shortly afterwords went to I/O expecting to find loads of insanely smart people working at their sand boxes and office hours that could run circles around my abilities and teach me things. There are some that know their stuff, but a lot who's apparent knowledge etc. was very under-whelming to the point of me knowing more than they did about the subject. Over time I've come to realize that part of the hiring process at these companies is political and that the filtering is still not preventing bad candidates from making it inside the company.

> A truly senior developer who really wants the job, with a few weeks of practice for an hour every night can considerably improve their chances.

But why would I want to spend that time? There's a lot of companies out there looking for experienced people. I have better things to do than to cram things I'll not actually need. I'm lacking time, not tasks and ideas.

Yes, I really want to give up my evenings for weeks to practice to impress people who clearly do not give a shit about what my job actually entails, by doing stupid crap tests that have nothing to do with the actual job.

I'd be damned tempted to walk out of an interview if they expected me to do trivial programming exercises.

Definitely. I've run into devs with ">10 years of experience" who's coding abilities were closer to that of new grads or 1-2 years of experience.

I'm curious on how HN would filter developers like this. I've been a fan of take home exams, but I know that doesn't work for everyone.

One technique I've used for 8+ years now is an in-person programming problem. The general guidelines are:

1. It is a problem representative of the work the person will normally do in the job (we use an extract of our actual data for it) 2. We provide clear guidelines and criteria for success. 3. They are allowed to implement a solution in any language they choose, using any tools they choose (we ask everyone to bring a laptop with their preferred dev environment, but we do provide one with some common tools for them if they can't). 4. They are allowed to use Google and open-source libraries to help them with the solution (we want to see how they really solve a problem) 5. We are there to interact with them and answer domain specific questions, as well as to offer advice if they are stumbling on something to help them move forward.

I've really, really gotten a lot of good mileage out of this. The range of skills that I've encountered over the years has really surprised me. The problem is pretty straight-forward, and usually involves parsing some JSON, looking at the data, and matching disparate sets of the data together. The basic O(n^2) solution can be done in about 20 lines of code and there is some nuance to the datasets that require them to think through the problem and not what they have memorized in their head. I've had programmers with years of experience from places like LinkedIn take 20 minutes just trying to read a file in from the file system, and I've had people who are self-taught developers crank through a really good solution in the same time. I like being able to see how people are writing code, how quickly they are able to lookup information they might need, and listen to the types of questions they have when trying to solve the problem.

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