An interview is just a test. Like any tests there are false positives and false negatives. There is a trade off between having more false positives/negatives and generally when it comes to hiring, a false positive is much more expensive than a false negative so many interview processes will end up rejecting good developers.
An interview can’t tell the company whether or not you are a good developer or a bad one. It can only say you can demonstrate certain skills to a certain level under interview conditions which means you are pretty likely to be a good developer.
It’s tough when you get rejections but because of the above factors, unfortunately it’s not enough to be a good developer to pass interviews a lot of the time. You also have to be good at interviewing. The good news is like any skill it can be practiced and if you’re already a good developer it shouldn’t really take much effort to become good at interviewing but it does require practice.
That’s my take anyway. Keep your head up, practice interviewing and you’ll be alright.
Whenever I speak with students/new grads about interviewing I actually specifically advise them that an interview is not a test. Yes, you need to have a certain level of base skills, but beyond that, an interview is much more like a date than a test. I say this because you can do everything right and still be rejected. It doesn’t mean that you did anything wrong or there’s anything with wrong with you, but rather there just wasn’t a match between you and the company you were interviewing with at that point in time. There are so many factors entirely outside of your control that determine if you’re given an offer or are rejected to the point that I find it really tough to consider it a “test” in the academic sense where you need to score a certain value to pass or fail it.
Likewise, it’s incredibly common for students/new grads to focus heavily on the technical skills while completely ignoring the soft skills. The best thing you can do in an interview is make the interviewer like you and want to work with you. It’s amazing how many people will overlook subpar technical skills either consciously or subconsciously if they feel comfortable with you (the amount of borderline incompetent people I’ve seen hired that are otherwise smooth talkers is astounding). It seems like the author of the linked to article here might be falling into that trap too. He writes about his technical experience heavily but does not touch on the soft skills at all, even questioning at one point that he may simply be bad at interviewing which is a strong sign to me that he’s not presenting himself well in the interview.
This is something that transcends software engineering. If you’re a sociable and likeable person you’ll go far further in life than the person that is quietly a genius but doesn’t work well with others. I wish more people folks in this industry would focus on that side of the coin instead of simply saying “grind Leetcode more to get more offers.”
Very true and completely agree with your post. I didn’t mean a test in the exam sense more like a COVID test in terms of test design.
I actually think in some ways it’s a good thing to overlook the technical side to a degree as well because technical skills are generally a lot easier to teach than the people skills. Assuming the fundamentals are there at least.
I actually think in some ways it’s a good thing to overlook the technical side to a degree as well because technical skills are generally a lot easier to teach than the people skills. Assuming the fundamentals are there at least.
At one of my favourite places to work, the owner had a sticky note on the side of his monitor that read “Hire for attitude, train for skill, reward for excellence.”
During one of our training sessions (I was teaching him Excel), I noticed that the sticky note was a different colour. I asked him about it and he said he rewrites it every Monday on a different colour so that it’s always visible and always fresh in his mind because it’s too easy to forget, even though he thought it was the secret to running a successful business.
The most successful interview I had I’d had a few shots ahead of time, and got into a (respectful) argument with the CTO about the pros/cons of their implementation of agile as I saw it.
Like, not to roast our man here, but he comes off as a competent Eeyore, even while writing from the safest of places, where he can take the time to craft whatever image he wants.
'I’m a bad programmer" then later lists extra curriculars that dwarfs my skills
I don’t think the issue is him; it’s the economy. Companies are probably not really looking to increase their workforce but still conducting interviews just in case they find a “Rockstar”
plus, potential employers have to find a reason to either hire or not hire you; not having a degree is a reason and it means that you have to impress them so much that, that fact doesn’t even occur to them if that’s your situation.
The programmer job market is weird, because organizations that value programmers aren’t organizations that are constantly having to hire new developers after losing the ones they had.
So the average organization that has an open position for a programmer is an absolute shitshow of a place to work.
I mention this as explanation why so many hiring practices that don’t work well are still so prevalent.
Painful read, as it resonates with me. I think I’m pretty hot shit but was humbled by the interview processes a few years back.
But in a different vein, found myself laughing at this reply in the comments:
Peter Lindberg
9 months ago
This reminds me about the time I almost got fired. I was at work, playing an intense round of table tennis, when the CEO burst out of his office. “This is it everybody!” he yelled, running over to the Big Wheel. He gave the wheel a spin, and then hurriedly explained “I’ve got a linked list and I need to know if it contains a cycle!”
I watched the wheel slow to a stop and panic set in as I realized the pointer was on my name. All eyes were on me as the whole team rushed into the Coding Room. I opened our communal laptop and started up notepad, which was the only application it was capable of running. The CIO loved to brag how he had cut 1% of costs by eliminating laptop and IDE purchases.
Everyone watched intently as I started to implement a linked list in C, which I needed to do before starting on the actual problem. I was pretty sure I knew how to solve this problem, so I started banging out some code. Then I hit a mental block. Someone behind me said meekly “couldn’t we just google this?” The crowd had barely begun to gasp and murmur at this suggestion when the CEO shouted “No! That’s not how we do it!”
I began to sweat. “How much time do I have left?” I said. “Five minutes!” was the panicked reply from one of my teammates. Suddenly I remembered the final part of the solution and frantically began to type again. “What happens if he runs out of time?” someone whispered. “Nobody knows… But do you really want to find out?” someone else said. I knew I’d be fired at the very least.
“Done!” I said confidently, and the CEO peered over my shoulder at the screen. After a few seconds, his eyes narrowed. “Ssssyntax error” he hissed. My heart raced as I scanned the code for the error. I found it just in time! A missing semicolon. Everyone sighed in relief and resumed their ping-pong and foosball games. I chuckled to myself and thought “this is why they pay us the big bucks!”
We’re not actually sure what the company’s product is. Whatever it is though, it relies exclusively on things like sorting and searching algorithms, and somehow doesn’t need data storage, infrastructure, networking, apis, or any of that amateur stuff.
Dude shouldn’t worry. Kids will understand that he has or had a boring job with not much to talk about… and still be the greatest dad in the world. Kids don’t care about the job of their parents.
His language list is a bit specific imo. For good or bad many corporate applications are c# and Java. If web add JavaScript in there and if data or cloud add Python. All things being even between two candidates if your language skillset matches a project you’d be more likely to get hired. Wondering if this guy can broaden his languages to include one or two of the top 5 languages.
Unfortunately are not all about programming skills alone, working within flexibility of learning new skills, team politics and team structure can play a lot for candidate selection.
The main thing I’d say is don’t give up but use some of your free time to maybe diversify your skillset and apply for some other positions in those areas.
If he’s getting to the first round of technical interviews then it’s likely not a languages issue. That’s the round that many companies put you in front of a mid-level dev who arrogantly asks you a code-kata question and refuses to answer questions. It may be that he’s not inherently good at solving the toy box problems on the spot. That’s the issue I tend to have in these rounds.
Though I guess it could be a languages issue if the mid level dev doesn’t know the language you’re doing the problem in and marks you down for that.
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Looks like he’s still posting https://mohaboelez.medium.com/
An interview is just a test. Like any tests there are false positives and false negatives. There is a trade off between having more false positives/negatives and generally when it comes to hiring, a false positive is much more expensive than a false negative so many interview processes will end up rejecting good developers.
An interview can’t tell the company whether or not you are a good developer or a bad one. It can only say you can demonstrate certain skills to a certain level under interview conditions which means you are pretty likely to be a good developer.
It’s tough when you get rejections but because of the above factors, unfortunately it’s not enough to be a good developer to pass interviews a lot of the time. You also have to be good at interviewing. The good news is like any skill it can be practiced and if you’re already a good developer it shouldn’t really take much effort to become good at interviewing but it does require practice.
That’s my take anyway. Keep your head up, practice interviewing and you’ll be alright.
Whenever I speak with students/new grads about interviewing I actually specifically advise them that an interview is not a test. Yes, you need to have a certain level of base skills, but beyond that, an interview is much more like a date than a test. I say this because you can do everything right and still be rejected. It doesn’t mean that you did anything wrong or there’s anything with wrong with you, but rather there just wasn’t a match between you and the company you were interviewing with at that point in time. There are so many factors entirely outside of your control that determine if you’re given an offer or are rejected to the point that I find it really tough to consider it a “test” in the academic sense where you need to score a certain value to pass or fail it.
Likewise, it’s incredibly common for students/new grads to focus heavily on the technical skills while completely ignoring the soft skills. The best thing you can do in an interview is make the interviewer like you and want to work with you. It’s amazing how many people will overlook subpar technical skills either consciously or subconsciously if they feel comfortable with you (the amount of borderline incompetent people I’ve seen hired that are otherwise smooth talkers is astounding). It seems like the author of the linked to article here might be falling into that trap too. He writes about his technical experience heavily but does not touch on the soft skills at all, even questioning at one point that he may simply be bad at interviewing which is a strong sign to me that he’s not presenting himself well in the interview.
This is something that transcends software engineering. If you’re a sociable and likeable person you’ll go far further in life than the person that is quietly a genius but doesn’t work well with others. I wish more people folks in this industry would focus on that side of the coin instead of simply saying “grind Leetcode more to get more offers.”
Very true and completely agree with your post. I didn’t mean a test in the exam sense more like a COVID test in terms of test design.
I actually think in some ways it’s a good thing to overlook the technical side to a degree as well because technical skills are generally a lot easier to teach than the people skills. Assuming the fundamentals are there at least.
At one of my favourite places to work, the owner had a sticky note on the side of his monitor that read “Hire for attitude, train for skill, reward for excellence.”
During one of our training sessions (I was teaching him Excel), I noticed that the sticky note was a different colour. I asked him about it and he said he rewrites it every Monday on a different colour so that it’s always visible and always fresh in his mind because it’s too easy to forget, even though he thought it was the secret to running a successful business.
The most successful interview I had I’d had a few shots ahead of time, and got into a (respectful) argument with the CTO about the pros/cons of their implementation of agile as I saw it.
Like, not to roast our man here, but he comes off as a competent Eeyore, even while writing from the safest of places, where he can take the time to craft whatever image he wants.
'I’m a bad programmer" then later lists extra curriculars that dwarfs my skills
I don’t think the issue is him; it’s the economy. Companies are probably not really looking to increase their workforce but still conducting interviews just in case they find a “Rockstar”
plus, potential employers have to find a reason to either hire or not hire you; not having a degree is a reason and it means that you have to impress them so much that, that fact doesn’t even occur to them if that’s your situation.
If you want to be a Rockstar programmer start here: codewithrockstar.com
This is one of my all-time favorite languages. But every time I bring out my code samples at a place looking for rockstar programmers, they shut down.
Did you bring background instrumentals to support the singing?
The programmer job market is weird, because organizations that value programmers aren’t organizations that are constantly having to hire new developers after losing the ones they had.
So the average organization that has an open position for a programmer is an absolute shitshow of a place to work.
I mention this as explanation why so many hiring practices that don’t work well are still so prevalent.
Painful read, as it resonates with me. I think I’m pretty hot shit but was humbled by the interview processes a few years back.
But in a different vein, found myself laughing at this reply in the comments:
What TF did I just read? You live in Hell.
this sounds like a nightmare to me, so i wonder what i’m missing?
i also didn’t find the article painful; it was refreshing to learn that someone else is walking in these shoes when it feels like so many aren’t.
The joke is basically “what if an actual software engineering job were like a standard job interview”.
Coding a linked list in C in Notepad and only one syntax error? This guy’s worth the money!
This is fucking awesome
Dude shouldn’t worry. Kids will understand that he has or had a boring job with not much to talk about… and still be the greatest dad in the world. Kids don’t care about the job of their parents.
Ducking Medium again. No I don’t want an account with you. The article can’t be that interesting.
His language list is a bit specific imo. For good or bad many corporate applications are c# and Java. If web add JavaScript in there and if data or cloud add Python. All things being even between two candidates if your language skillset matches a project you’d be more likely to get hired. Wondering if this guy can broaden his languages to include one or two of the top 5 languages.
Unfortunately are not all about programming skills alone, working within flexibility of learning new skills, team politics and team structure can play a lot for candidate selection.
The main thing I’d say is don’t give up but use some of your free time to maybe diversify your skillset and apply for some other positions in those areas.
If he’s getting to the first round of technical interviews then it’s likely not a languages issue. That’s the round that many companies put you in front of a mid-level dev who arrogantly asks you a code-kata question and refuses to answer questions. It may be that he’s not inherently good at solving the toy box problems on the spot. That’s the issue I tend to have in these rounds.
Though I guess it could be a languages issue if the mid level dev doesn’t know the language you’re doing the problem in and marks you down for that.