Why Senior Developers Can’t Get a Job

First, about how I was interviewed for work 5 months ago. A friend advised me, and a lot of time has passed since I answered the recruiter. I was amazed how much the whole process has changed over the past 5 years.

After the initial call, I was sent to a third-party site (HackerRank) so that I would solve three small problems in 1 hour. For me it was the first such experience. The first two tasks were simple, but the third was more difficult. When the time came to an end, my decision did not pass all the tests, but only about 8 out of 10 needed.

Already at this stage, it turned out that I was filtered out from the list of potential candidates. There is a silver lining, as a little later I became seriously ill and, if I had passed the interview successfully, I simply couldn’t get to the place of work normally. The experience gained, however, made me think seriously. I decided to prepare for the future and did one task from that site every week .

Challenges Everywhere

My good friend is currently looking for his next job as a Ph.D. in Computer Science with over ten years of practical experience. Almost every time he is asked to solve some problems - in person or on a third-party site. He acquired Cracking the Coding Interview (in Russia, the book was published as a “Programmer’s Career” - approx. Transl.) To keep pace with the labor market, but developing any skill takes time. A few excellent jobs have already passed.

The problem surfaced in a discussion on Megamaker (a closed English-speaking community for developers and startups - approx. Transl.) And one of the participants shared a sore point:

Soon I will be 45 and I left my startup (where CTO was) in December. Since then, I have failed at least 10 tests and interviews with a programmer. I have been writing code for almost 20 years, including the creation of firmware (I am an electronics engineer by training) and full-scale distributed web applications with IoT integration. From scratch, I created software for large specialized production facilities around the world. However, I just can’t get a job as a programmer, because I constantly fail these test tasks.

And this Max Howell tweet went to the masses a few years ago. This is both funny and sad, and at the same time true.

Fact: for many Senior Developers, when they start looking for another job, the next job interview may be an unpleasant surprise.

Developers Hate Tasks

Some programmers answer ...

I usually end the interview when they offer me something like that.

or

The ability to solve this problem will not say anything about me. Can I chat with clients? Can I deploy a working web application? Can I google everything I need? Can I learn on the fly? That's what matters, not the ability to write bubble sort.

The counterargument is that puzzles are needed to quickly weed out clearly weak candidates. Although, of course, an experienced developer may not want to solve them if he has a wagon of offers.

I also think that these problems will not say anything about the candidate’s ability to cope with this work. The wording is often lame, but there is insufficient information (or an unambiguous conclusion cannot be drawn about its sufficiency). In most cases, the problems actually belong to the world of mathematics. So, by the way, the presence of specialized education will be an advantage.

Recruiters are almost guaranteed to wrap candidates who could become key in the company. So for example, when Daniel Buchmüller was not accepted on Netflix ...

Companies Love Tasks

To understand where the problems came from, you need to understand how the world around us has changed: the proportion of workers remotely is constantly growing, and international teams are becoming the norm.

But with the growth of the pool of remote developers, the number of applications that need to be processed in order to find a suitable employee is growing. Can you imagine a job with 500 responses to one vacancy?

In addition, I heard about interviews where the candidate did not know how to program at all (could not write a program like hello world). Nobody wants to spend time on dozens of such interviews.

And tasks as a means of primary screening solve both problems. The company is satisfied with the risk of losing a couple of cool candidates for the sake of significantly accelerating the entire process. Now with an almost unlimited pool of applicants, they can afford it. Dry statistics show that the conveyor will produce more good specialists per unit of time.

Therefore, I believe that the tasks in the interviews are serious and for a long time, and their role will only grow.

The need for programmers is greater than ever, and even more so in Senior Developers. Just do not expect that years of experience will buy you a carefree job placement. Get ready to solve test problems while time is running out.