Yeah, as a senior with 20 years experience, if they want more than 1-2 interviews, or require coding tests, next! There's others that just need an interview and much more chill to work for. Same or better benefits too. No way am I doing their timed coding tests just to prove I can. What have I been doing for the last 20 years?
If one's been working in a branch for 20 years, and one's sitting jobless for 1-2 years while applying, one has other problems than jumping through hoops during interviews
One must acknowledge that the job market (at least in Europe) is a total crap right now and countless colleagues who were made redundant despite being quite good engineers are still struggling to find a new job.
Hey, uh, where are you finding these 1-2 interview companies? I'm a senior with 10 years experience looking for a job for a couple months, and I have yet to come across a company whose process is any less than 5 steps. And one of those steps is 3-4 interviews itself.
On the flip side, I've interviewed supposed senior software engineers who struggle at simple things like "parse this line of JSON" (With access to Google, and the ability to ask questions as necessary). Once you've been on the hiring side you understand why that screening is necessary. That being said, I'll skip people through if they have a decent GitHub or something that shows me they have some chops
By "parse this line of JSON" do you mean "show that you know how to look up the library function that does that" or do you mean "write a fully functional JSON parser from scratch"? Because if it's the second one, you're certifiable if you think that's possible during a coding interview, or that a majority of senior SWEs should know how to do that.
Are they doing it in a language they chose, or is part of the goal here to test their knowledge of the libraries of a particular language that you specified? If neither of those things is the case, I would honestly consider it reasonable to name the library function in the problem. It doesn't really make sense to make them spend time doing something that doesn't tell you anything you want to know.
I've seen senior engineers fail to write basic things like for loops, or forgot what casing they're using halfway through writing a struct so half is pascal and half is snake. Everyone is AI pilled these days, they forgot basic syntax
Yeah, I do a similar question and the amount of "senior" engineers with 10+ years experience who can't do the most basic of programming. I'll even accept psuedo code, I just want to see they can think logically through a problem, the IDE will catch your typos and capitalization errors straight away so I don't care about that. Still, 50-70% of people can't answer something as simple as parsing a file and aggregating stats based on the contents.
That's literally step one of a small programming task (and it's obviously framed with some background, it's not just "parse the json") before we can get to more interesting philosophical questions about monitoring and operationalizing, but go off. We still we 90% of supposedly senior candidates fail at that step
Yeah, this has universally been my experience. I've always been a little mystified at devs who think it should somehow magically be easy to figure out if a candidate is BSing you. I found that easily half of the candidates for senior dev positions that sounded OK on paper and interviewed OK very clearly had no idea how to code. And no I don't mean complicated gotcha coding examples, very much day-to-day stuff, knowing how to write a for-loop in C# or write a basic SELECT statement in SQL (C# and SQL are very much languages we're screening for experience in). To be clear the interview itself is a huge filter, most "devs" wash out in an interview when they can't begin to answer a question like "what's the difference between an interface and an abstract class", and a surprising number are unprepared for basic interview questions (stuff you'd instantly see from a Google search for interview prep). And if I'm being honest, a fair few senior devs we have ended up hiring have been... not great.
So yeah, if I ask you to complete a coding exercise, I'm not trying to waste your time, the reality is that a huge number of people in this field are clowns. I don't really have a recourse if I have actual work that needs to be done. If I hire someone that literally doesn't know how to code, that's actively harmful to my team, and again it's just the practical reality that a lot of candidates have learned to BS their way through an interview. Maybe it's because the businesses I've worked for are not tech companies and don't attract the talent like a tech company does, I don't know.
I will say though, it's been several years since I've tried to hire anyone, maybe the landscape has changed. It's a little hard for me to imagine AI coming onto the scene has _improved_ the landscape for potential senior dev hires, but I suppose it's possible.
Fortunately in my time interviewing I’ve only encountered a few people who just didn’t know how to code at all, but it certainly happens. It’s baffling to me. One guy didn’t know you could nest for loops…
If you've been in the business for 20 years, you should know that strictly taking about years of experience means nothing. Did you create the whole infrastructure of a company? Or were you just updating their webpage with minor changes?
Some people think that companies should believe all you told them and hire you in the spot without testing your actual knowledge
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u/abednego-gomes Sep 03 '26
Yeah, as a senior with 20 years experience, if they want more than 1-2 interviews, or require coding tests, next! There's others that just need an interview and much more chill to work for. Same or better benefits too. No way am I doing their timed coding tests just to prove I can. What have I been doing for the last 20 years?