> And a few angry senior engineers out there saying "Why do I have to keep writing fizzbuzz? Its like I have to prove over and over again that I can program at all!".
You didn't address this part of the problem. This friction is one of the reasons the job market is so distorted.
Oh sorry I wasn't clear. The reason is that successfully completing a simple programming exercise puts you in the top 15% or so of resumes that get sent in for most programming roles.
When you apply for a company, they have to assume you aren't very good, because most people who apply aren't very good. (Because people with strong skills get snapped up, and people with weak skills spam their resume everywhere they can.). Figuring out who's worth spending time interviewing is a hard problem in itself. And there's no silver bullet here - people lie about their work experience all the time. There are so many user accounts on github with copies or forks of random people's code, with basically no changes. I suspect they exist support lies on resumes.
I don't think it distorts the market, but it is annoying. A recruiter I talked to a few years ago said she thinks its crazy we don't use an agency model for programmers like actors do. The idea there is that good programmers pay a small percentage of their salary to a manager, who's job is to find you the best roles that suit your skills and negotiate pay on your behalf and so on. She tried to set up a business doing just that but she couldn't get enough clients to make it work. Good programmers balked at the idea of paying a few % of our salary to someone in an ongoing way, to look after our career. Having to prove your skills in each and every interview, and form those social connections on your own? Thats a choice we make.
> (Because people with strong skills get snapped up, and people with weak skills spam their resume everywhere they can.)
It's extremely saddening how prevalent this prejudice is.
But what if I am still looking for work and companies literally don't reply to my applying to them? I might be the next John Carmack but if nobody gives me a chance (for reasons outside of my control and unrelated to my proficiency) then according to you I suck. :(
It's very broken to assume that skilled people get snapped up immediately so whoever is available must be mediocre (or bad).
> It's extremely saddening how prevalent this prejudice is.
Prejudice?
Look, companies wouldn't be advertising for roles if they didn't think qualified candidates (like you?) are out there. But its a numbers game; of course there are more unqualified people looking for work than qualified people at any given moment. Qualified people don't get snapped up immediately; but they aren't usually actively looking for work for long. And they often are picky about which places they apply to - for good reason. A highly qualified candidate might apply for 3 roles, get 2 offers and accept 1 of them. A weak candidate might apply for 50 roles. If those are the only two people sending out resumes - (or in general the pool has 50% strong candidates and 50% weak candidates), still only 6% of resumes will come from strong candidates.
Thats not none. And I really hear you about how frustrating it must be for companies to not even bother to reply - I mean, thats pretty rude. But ... what behaviour do you expect? What would you do with a pile of 100 resumes if you expected only 6 of them will be strong candidates? Should they bring all 100 people in for interviews, just in case there's a young John Carmack amongst them who has terrible resume writing skills? (I've interviewed 2 people who fit that description out of the 400 or so I interviewed in the last year. They definitely exist. But finding those people is prohibitively expensive for most companies.)
Flawed? Yes. Biased? A little. Prejudiced? That seems like a stretch. Can you think of a better system? That conversation seems more interesting than just complaining about it.
What I extract from your reply is what I am actively trying to teach myself: DON'T. TAKE. ANYTHING. PERSONALLY.
Yeah?
BTW I am not exactly young -- 40 y/o with 18 years of professional experience (not claiming anything about quality). I was just objecting to your general premise that if somebody isn't snatched immediately then they must be mediocre because I've witnessed programmers times better than me (whose sole efforts turned entire companies around) slag around jobless for 6 months and not being able to move beyond 2nd interview even if EVERYBODY told them they like their expertise and demeanour and that they are a good cultural fit.
But you are very likely correct that it's a numbers game and that various circumstances prevent companies to actually actively look for the gems.
So again, I do my best not to take anything personally.
Some programmers are really good at what they do but they just suck at playing the game. Or more likely they suck at it worse than the average hiring manager.
As for confidence, I should learn to fake it already I guess. I am a realistic down to earth guy who doesn't deny when he doesn't know something -- nobody can know everything. But that's likely not the point; more likely it's about projecting an image of "nothing can give me a true pause"?
A 10 means "The interview process is fine. It judges people fairly and objectively, and works well for both candidates and companies".
A 1 on the scale means "The whole interview process does a disservice to almost everyone it touches, and reflects badly on our industry as a whole"
Where do you think we are?
Personally I think we're at about a 7. Which is to say, I agree with you. I've interviewed people like that and it breaks my heart every time to hear their stories. But I think there's a silent majority for whom the interview process works as intended.
- About 0.5% of people I've interviewed had amazing skills but were unable to explain those skills on a resume, and wouldn't be able to get their foot in the door at most companies they applied to
- At a guess there's probably another ~3% or so of candidates who just for one reason or another don't come across well. They don't look or sound like they know what they're talking about, or something else is going on for them. But they actually have great technical skills when you get down to it. I suspect those people struggle to find work in most normal hiring processes.
- (I have other criticisms too - like how we don't give people feedback after interviews)
But thats ... I mean, it matters, but I think the cohort of "unappreciated gems in the rough" has to be in the small single digit percentages. There's a lot of blog posts complaining about hiring in general that hit the front page of HN, but I don't think they're fair representation of the state of software engineering hiring across the board. Great people getting looked over are the exception. The awful truth is that most people, most of time are judged fairly in job interviews based on their skills. Its just that programming is really hard and almost everyone in the world is terrible at it. Its so hard to learn that you can go into massive debt and spend years studying it in school, and still be mostly unemployable out the other end. In fact I suspect most people fresh out of school struggle to find work, because they just aren't very good yet.
So no wonder these posts get upvoted on HN. People have a really good reason to feel angry and let down by the system. The story that you're a gem and you're being passed over by the soulless corporations is a much easier pill to swallow than the idea that you're being looked over because you aren't very good at programming. And your degree means nothing, and from here it'll take you years to get good at programming, if you ever manage it. And nobody wants to take the time to teach you on the job. And nobody thought to tell you any of this while you were in school.
I don't know who's fault it is - if anyone's. Companies are doing whats in their best interest. Schools are doing their best to teach CS to everyone who wants to learn it. People think going to school to learn programming means they can find useful work out the other end. I'd like to think that most do, eventually. But there's a chasm in the middle that nobody talks about. A chasm between knowledge and programming jobs. Many people never find their way out of that gap. We don't even tell people its there.
Where is the evidence for any of this? Like, truly, I hear this line about how there is approximately nobody who is competent, and I honestly think it is BS. What evidence is the claim based on? Is it that you've seen how well people do in interviews and noticed that only a small number of them perform well? How would you falsify the hypothesis that those people are fully capable of being excellent employees and are just not good at playing this particular interview game?
I think people with your mindset have just repeated this over and over again to the point that we all take it as axiomatic. It also strokes our ego ("I can do something that basically nobody can even learn how to do!") so it's easy to maintain the farce.
This is the second time in this thread that I've seen the claim that the anger is driven by people who feel let down by the system. That's not me, the system has worked really well for me. But I still think it is a hall of mirrors that could be serious improvement. Not a 7, more like a 3 or 4, and held back by both people who think it works really well and people who think it's a bad solution but that there isn't really a better one (which I'm more sympathetic to).
FWIW, I appreciate you sharing this perspective. I concur, more or less, with your position here after having interviewed many hundreds of people over my career. I've found internships were the best way to identify who was quality out of a class. It seemed of every 100 new grads I interacted with maybe 3 or 4 were skilled and engaged in learning more. But there are also some standouts and I really wish more companies did internships with larger cohorts and allowed their senior folks time to mentor. Some of my best experiences in my career were mentoring interns and I made some solid life-long relationships that way as well.
I've often posited among friends in the industry that it's partly due to apathy and mismatched expectations. College students go into CS because they expect a good paying job, not because of any specific aptitude or interest. CS isn't the study of software engineering, nor of the act of programming. They graduate, with no appreciable skill, and no real desire to learn, and can't find work. We can argue about fairness until we're blue in the face, but the reality of the situation is that motivated students who are actually interested in learning have vast free resources available to them to learn and free resources available to them to demonstrate their competence. Anyone not taking advantage of these resources is going to be subpar compared to others in the labor market.
Pretty much anyone who went to college in the last 20 years should have been able to anecdotally identify the stand-outs in their classes, and in general on the other side of the pipeline those are the only folks having an easy time getting hired. I dropped out of college, even though I was one of the stand-outs, because I wasn't learning anything I hadn't already taught myself. I've had less difficulty in my career than some of my former classmates I keep up with and my salary is multiples of theirs when they are employed, we're all the same age and they're technically more credentialed. It comes down to the fact that most people are just not very good at programming or at systems design. In fact, I'm not a good programmer, my skill-set is very much in the arena of systems design.
> I've often posited among friends in the industry that it's partly due to apathy and mismatched expectations. College students go into CS because they expect a good paying job, not because of any specific aptitude or interest.
This is not unique to CS. I feel this is the general mindset among most people who go to college: "I get a degree and get a job" and is the reason for so many young people coming out of college with a 4 year degree and no job.
Just getting a degree doesn't mean you are smart, curious, or driven. I have friends who got liberal arts degrees who are smart, curious, and driven and went on to have great careers and friends with business degrees who don't care and are unsurprisingly "underemployed" by their degree, but not by their personality and the way they live their life.
Or what if I’m being picky? I made a mistake of expediency in accepting my current job, and it’s not the first time. Several people I trust have been trying to talk me into applying to more places and turning them down if I don’t see what I’m looking for on their end. But they tend to overbook and one of the first things to go is your opportunity to ask questions.
Which is, really, as good a way to learn about someone as most of the techniques we try. You only have ten or fifteen minutes to ask the company questions. What did you hunk was worthwhile to expend that time on?
I think it depends on the context. To be picky, you could just send out a lot of resumes, and I as a prospective employer wouldn't have any clue how many you've sent, as long as you are still at your old company the whole time.
However if you have a good emergency fund, your old company folds, and you are being picky, people start to suspect you are unemployable after a bit.
> When you apply for a company, they have to assume you aren't very good, because most people who apply aren't very good.
Is this a problem for other professionals? Why not? When an accountant with a successful career spanning 15 years applies to a new job, does the company "have to" assume that know exactly nothing?
It does distort the market. It trades off against the desire to switch jobs, which distorts the availability of job switchers. When I get an email from a recruiter, I'm not just thinking "would that job be better for me?", I'm also thinking "am I willing to practice and perform the whiteboard code ritual right now?".
> A recruiter I talked to a few years ago said she thinks its crazy we don't use an agency model for programmers like actors do. The idea there is that good programmers pay a small percentage of their salary to a manager, who's job is to find you the best roles that suit your skills and negotiate pay on your behalf and so on.
Such things do exist (at least in some form) but I haven't had a good experience. Same old story: like everyone else, they're looking for seniors, turning down juniors, and complaining about shortage of talent.
This is the issue I have faced, and probably why I am leaving this whole mess behind. I still love engineering, but it's time to move to a mentor/consulting role. I've been in this game for over 10 years, and just can't be arsed to do any more testing. I once had someone ask me what a "cookie" was...
Storytime: I used to work at a huge Japanese multinational (you can probably guess which one), and I rose through the ranks pretty quickly. After two years (which given their turnaround, made me pretty ancient), I left the firm for greener pastures.
A few years later, they started a new sub-division, and a personal contact recommended me. It was a decent pay bump, and despite the negative press, I didn't mind working there, during my tenure. I figured I'd be a shoo-in. It was for a non-technical role (PM), but they wanted someone with a tech background, which I had. They then wanted to give me an online engineering test just as a formality. It was a quick test, and I solved it with little issue.
Fast forward 2 weeks and I get a rejection email, saying that my code wasn't up to snuff, and they'd be moving on. It took everything in me to not write back saying, "Hey, go to your main service and log-in. Ok yeah, so the interface and client backend to your SSO and the user management services that millions of your users interact with each day -- I wrote all of that. Oh yeah, your absurdly complicated coupon system -- I wrote a lot if not all of that too."
Another observation: I don't think there is a single company I've successfully working at in the past, where I could pass their interview process today (including my current company). Companies are being extraordinarily picky now, and the interview bar just keeps going up and up.
Companies keep complaining that they can't find talent, while their interviewers are asking candidates to implement red-black trees on a whiteboard in 5 minutes.
"It took everything in me to not write back saying..."
Sometimes it is worth writing back. Because people often don't realize there are flaws in the process they are using. Either they will ignore the feedback and it's business as usual or they will take it and work towards improving the system.
You didn't address this part of the problem. This friction is one of the reasons the job market is so distorted.