I had an interview just a couple months ago where I was expected to write code into what was essentially notepad. They barely asked any questions, just wanted me to rawdog code.
I’ve been a developer for almost thirty years. You don’t write code that way. Plus, my experience comes in understanding architecture, writing maintainable code, knowledge of how to create APIs, understanding the tradeoffs of different designs and configurations. I don’t perform well on hacker rank tests because I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I’ve had to write some kind of fancy algorithm. Most business software is just CRUD (create, read, update, delete data), user interface and orchestration of external service calls. So knowing something like users prefer to minimize the number of mouse clicks required to perform an action is more important to know than being able to code a radio button from memory.
Yeah I’m a little defensive about this because I rock every part of a job interview except certain types of technical interviews, but I still code circles around most of my team mates once I understand the code (and often long before I actually understand how everything connects).
So anyway that was pretty much the whole interview because I couldn’t write Java code from memory to manipulate arrays, which might sound bad even to other kinds of developers, but I rarely have to do anything like that even in complex business software and on the occasions I do I just google that shit (or have AI help). Memorizing basic shit I never do has just never been my way. I’m focused on much bigger picture ideas.
And I was so pissed I wrote a very nicely worded letter to HR explaining that I knew I’d blown the interview but in the interest of helping them find better candidates in the future, I offered a number of subject areas they might want senior developers to understand. And I 100% threw that interviewer under the bus, but I understood I was committing a faux pas and burning that bridge but fucking what a waste of time for me and other high level developers.
Anyway, the wild part was that the HR person got back to me and said I had passed the interview and they were going to send me on to the next interview. What? Because no, however much I might rage against the way the interview was conducted, the only information they had to assess my suitability was that I couldn’t demonstrate the most basic technical expectations.
I turned them down because if that’s their interview process I was 100% going to be working with a bunch of poorly written spaghetti code in dire need of a full rewrite but everyone would be too busy spending weeks trying to implement the most simple features because of the poor code quality and so there would never be time for actually fixing the code.
On the other side of the table, I did a phone interview with a guy who was googling the answers to every question we asked. Things like explain the difference between an interface and a class. Or what the static and final keywords mean. Like if you don’t know that well enough to even have a clumsy way of explaining it in your own words, how are you going to communicate with other developers? Can’t you even guess what final might mean?
Anyway, we knew ten minutes into that thirty minute interview that was a hard pass.
No idea. He was trying to cover it up but we could hear the typing during the long silence after our questions and then he’d spout the textbook answer without the ability to answer follow-up’s.
I had an interview just a couple months ago where I was expected to write code into what was essentially notepad. They barely asked any questions, just wanted me to rawdog code.
I’ve been a developer for almost thirty years. You don’t write code that way. Plus, my experience comes in understanding architecture, writing maintainable code, knowledge of how to create APIs, understanding the tradeoffs of different designs and configurations. I don’t perform well on hacker rank tests because I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I’ve had to write some kind of fancy algorithm. Most business software is just CRUD (create, read, update, delete data), user interface and orchestration of external service calls. So knowing something like users prefer to minimize the number of mouse clicks required to perform an action is more important to know than being able to code a radio button from memory.
Yeah I’m a little defensive about this because I rock every part of a job interview except certain types of technical interviews, but I still code circles around most of my team mates once I understand the code (and often long before I actually understand how everything connects).
So anyway that was pretty much the whole interview because I couldn’t write Java code from memory to manipulate arrays, which might sound bad even to other kinds of developers, but I rarely have to do anything like that even in complex business software and on the occasions I do I just google that shit (or have AI help). Memorizing basic shit I never do has just never been my way. I’m focused on much bigger picture ideas.
And I was so pissed I wrote a very nicely worded letter to HR explaining that I knew I’d blown the interview but in the interest of helping them find better candidates in the future, I offered a number of subject areas they might want senior developers to understand. And I 100% threw that interviewer under the bus, but I understood I was committing a faux pas and burning that bridge but fucking what a waste of time for me and other high level developers.
Anyway, the wild part was that the HR person got back to me and said I had passed the interview and they were going to send me on to the next interview. What? Because no, however much I might rage against the way the interview was conducted, the only information they had to assess my suitability was that I couldn’t demonstrate the most basic technical expectations.
I turned them down because if that’s their interview process I was 100% going to be working with a bunch of poorly written spaghetti code in dire need of a full rewrite but everyone would be too busy spending weeks trying to implement the most simple features because of the poor code quality and so there would never be time for actually fixing the code.
On the other side of the table, I did a phone interview with a guy who was googling the answers to every question we asked. Things like explain the difference between an interface and a class. Or what the static and final keywords mean. Like if you don’t know that well enough to even have a clumsy way of explaining it in your own words, how are you going to communicate with other developers? Can’t you even guess what final might mean?
Anyway, we knew ten minutes into that thirty minute interview that was a hard pass.
Lord almighty how did he think he could get away with googling it??
No idea. He was trying to cover it up but we could hear the typing during the long silence after our questions and then he’d spout the textbook answer without the ability to answer follow-up’s.
Oh yegads that’s bad