this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2023
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Honestly just changing the interview process would be enough to get more people into the business.
Literally yesterday I did a code challenge to track the distance, speed, maintenance schedules, and predict collisions of forklifts in a warehouse. The job I was applying for was a pretty average SRE roll.. System design, IaC, CI/CD pipelines, PromQL, etc.. How is the code challenge representative of the job in any way?
I feel like I need to learn leetcode algorithm patterns just for the interviews.. I never need them for the actual jobs I get hired for.
I've always wondered if the solution to the hiring fiasco in IT is to have official licenses similar to the way engineers and lawyers have formal credentials.
Most companies do dumb shit like this because is hard to know if you are actually qualified or if you are blowing smoke. Everyone has had that one guy on the team who barely has a clue how to even set up his ide let alone code.
The problem with this would be the same as it is with all licenses and certs. The tests don't match real world practice. The other option is adopting the trades approach and combine that with licensing. Apprentice, journeyman etc.
I remember failing an interview once because they wanted me to know all sorts of obscure c++ tricks. The kind of stuff that most people skipped over when they read about it because it has almost no use case. Had travelled 200 miles for that interview too.
No idea who they wanted.. someone who had a photographic memory to memorise a textbook, maybe?
We tend to give practical tests when interviewing.. 'go away and write this thing'. We're not testing whether they write it, or how they found the solution.. google is there to be used.. but the questions they ask about the (deliberately) interpertable spec and what the code looks like.
That's what happens when a company asks their "Rockstar" developer to write them a few interview questions. Whatever thing they just learned recently they would delve into in great depth. I just learned about binary packing! Guess what's going to be on the test.
A lot of good developers don't even pseudocode all that well on the whiteboard.
Of course you also end up with a lot of people that have hearsay knowledge. How would you optimize this communication stack? Oh I'd go web sockets and then switch over to UDP after the connection initializes. They have a conversation with you about how "they" did it at their last company and it solved all the problems. Then 3 months into the project you find out that they have no idea how to pull it off and they were just repeating what they heard in a scrum.
Like certifications?
Yea, but more formal and less "sell you a boot camp study course" style.
I understand thst even the (law) bar has those courses but it's also a pretty good filter. Law degree + passing the bar is a solid bare minimum. Then adopt a similar approach to trades where you are an apprentice for x years under a master/mentor before you become a journeyman.
The industry has sort of already adopted it but it's not standardized and it's not trustworthy. Calling yourself a senior software engineer means almost nothing. It's the same as "vice president" in financial companies.
I think the trades approach is the way to go. It makes sense as far as training goes imo. And jesus christ anything needs to be done at this point.
Leetcode style interviews are good for showing off that you're a smart and flexible employee who can solve novel problems.
The issue is that most companies don't have any novel problems and they just need quiet competence... But want the best/smartest w/e
I'm just happy that the “rockstar developer” era died.
Pre-COVID I needed a low - mid level help desk person.
My screening questions were:
What are the steps for troubleshooting not being able to print.
Excluding out of paper or out of toner / ink which are states clearly displayed to the user, What is the most likely cause for not being able to print.
If a user puts a ticket in that they're getting BSoD but they missed what the message was. How do you find out what that message was.
I wasn't even looking for right answers I was just looking for some signal that they had seen the problems before or had a reasonable thought process of how to proceed.
I had around 150 applicants, six of them said anything at all that would make me think they had seen a printer or blue screen of death situation before.