Everybody says that their job is critical, their code is high quality, their children are the smartest and their toys are the best. Reality begs to differ.
Let's just look at the data. If a bit under 1% of all not-previously-known applicants get hired, the system is provably broken and not worth the time of a not-previously-known applicant.
I'm sure there are a metric gigaton of examples already documented on this site explaining why this is bad for Tech, the Economy, our Society.
Want to know why there are so few young(er) people getting into the industry who are competent and instead you're inundated with frauds who can't write FizzBuzz? Here's your answer.
At this point, they've already invested their resources (and also you, yours).
If employed, then it's easy to point out that that's your cost in a vacation/PTO/"sick" day.
If not, point out that you are not currently working at mickydee so your time is worth more than minimum wage. If they stick at that, make out a reasonable guess at their cost of this process and point out that a day of your time is not a massive additional fraction. If they stick at that, ask if this means you are on the "short list", and how many others are on it. If they stick at that, then you have useful information about what they think you are worth and are likely to offer.
This part of the essay makes me feel moved by the author's situation.
> I am sitting down after a long walk outdoors. It should have been relaxing, but I was processing - processing another interview pipeline that has fallen through. I'm in my 6th month of unemployment, despite job hunting 40 - 60 hours a week, starting literally the day I was laid off - because the company needed to make cuts and remote workers were top of the list.
That sounds really tough, and I'm sorry the author finds themselves in this situation. Six months sounds grueling.
I think the interview process is likely to be completely overhauled in the age of AI. I don't really know what will happen. I used to be in favor of the standard code-at-a-whiteboard approach, but nowadays the actual work is even further from that. But I haven't seen an AI-aware interview process yet that seems like an improvement.
At any rate, these systematic changes are likely to come too late for the author. Hang in there. Maybe it's time to consider a bigger change, like moving cities and looking for in-person work. I like working remotely but it's harder to get a remote job, and the in-person stuff does have upsides. Good luck out there.
Another piece on the subject that starts out great but then fizzles out.
I think the solution that is alluded to is to let several qualified folks work as contractors for a bit. But companies are unfortunately set in their ways, refuse to think, and continue their incredibly expensive charade. Because google does it, or some other nonsense. As Joel told them to, but most of these folks are not old enough to know Joel or what exactly he advocated. Like “agile” metastasized into something pernicious as directed by B and C players, so have interviews.
The solution is simple. — make prospective employers pay for the time of the people they’re interviewing.
We can argue the rate and which industries it should apply to, but if companies had to pay even a moderate amount out to even just some people to interview them you’ll fix this problem almost overnight.
I agree with your basic premise that prospective employers should have a financial disincentive from wasting candidates' time. The problem is that charlatans and scammers could just keep applying to every possible employer and in about 3 weeks the entire industry would collapse.
The solution needs to be a bit more robust than that. Simple is great but not when it doesn't work.[1]
One of the best contract stipulations I've ever come across was that Company would agree to take on Recruiter's Candidate for 2 weeks of probation, and if it turned out that the Candidate was so bad that they needed to be fired immediately, Recruiter had to pay Company for those 2 weeks. So Recruiter was on the hook for double, unless they passed the penalty on to the Candidate. (Which I'm not sure was/is legal.)
I can see how tweaking that just a bit and applying it to the probationary period can protect the employer. Now the FizzBuzz failure has a very real risk if they lie, cheat and steal to get hired. But how do you protect the candidate from having days of their time wasted with interviews and such without turning the company into a cash cow for scammers?
Most employers can afford to be very inefficient at interviewing as long as they get a usable body in the door eventually. How can that be structured so that both parties have an incentive to make the process efficient?
Companies are sometimes too selective and too indecisive.
Many candidates can't code well.
I screen candidates all the time. I regularly meet Sr. Java Engineers who are not aware of the classes that exist in the standard collections framework and can't pick the right one for the job. People who claim to be "performance experts" who can't explain how a HashMap performs an addition in amortized constant time. I get it -- this is not required knowledge for all roles. But don't call yourself an expert and use some judgement as to the kinds of roles you apply for.
> I discussing this with a friend who is an surgeon, he said he has never had to prove his technical skills in an interview. Why? Medical candidates have licensure, continuing education requirements, a case history, and (potentially) litigation history ... In contrast, Software Engineering has largely ignored certifications, has no uniform system for gauging continuous learning, and the vast majority of candidates' professional work is closed source.
Every time someone brings up the possibility of licensing or certification to software engineering, the response is collective shrieks of outrage and insistence that It Couldn't Possibly Work For Us, as if we're so fucking special. I've seen this since the Slashdot days twenty years ago. And so, we got this instead.
There are a lot of problems in the industry which can be blamed on corporate culture and clueless management, but I think this is one case where we pretty clearly did it to ourselves.
Okay, but how would it work? In particular, if AI is such a problem in the interview world now, how would it not be an even worse problem in the "taking tests for certifications" world?
Show ID to get in the door. Match your ID to the voter roll, for that precinct only. 100% paper ballots, counted by hand at the end of the night, before they leave the premises, permanently recorded and witnessed at that moment. No exceptions, no irregularities tolerated. Anything else, somebody goes to jail right now.
Does that sound far-fetched? It's not too different from what I did to get my last IT certification. There are valid criticisms of the certification racket, but one thing is for sure -- people are not showing up to Pearson testing centers who can't write FizzBuzz and walking out with a cert 40 minutes later....
Can we not trust degrees and work experience? That's 99% of doctors too? I mean this whole zero trust thing about people’s backgrounds is getting really fucking tiresome.
It’s also funny because we seem to trust and select doctors by google reviews and assume they have a valid diploma and license to consult us for our lives, but we have to grill some poor software engineer previously working in faang with another 10 leetcode interviews to be ‘sure’ he’s a good fit. lol
No, we can't. Degrees are what we are using already, and they are demonstrably failing. Plus, degrees from other countries might as well be pure fiction. Nobody knows what they actually represent.
Work experience? I once interviewed a guy who claimed to have Technology XYZ experience. He made it all the way to the final interview before I got to talk to him.
"So you worked with XYZ, yeah?"
"Oh yes!"
"That's cool. It just so happens that I did a training class with some of your coworkers in a different department a year or two ago. XYZ is used in the Billing Dept. That seems strange to me. You were in Web. So you had access to customer data?"
"Well....no."
They hired the guy anyway, over my objections, and a few weeks later he hosed up my biggest disaster recovery server during an OS upgrade.
It's one reason I am actually going to continue pursuing the 'physical engineering' side of my career rather than the software development (software 'engineering' side of it).
I studied CS at UCL years ago but worked mostly in teams with electrical, chemical, and mechanical engineers and on projects relating to various things in relation to various different industries as different as pharmaceutical and ship building. During that time I got qualified as a CAD engineer among other things I was required to by my employer(s).
Now, when I look at software jobs and the way software developers are being interviewed...I just can't. You would never ask eg a mechanical engineer in an interview 'so, you say you know SolidWorks? Ok, design me a sphere with a chamfered cylinder extruded from the centre of the top. It should be chamfered at a 46 degree angle to a plane passing through the centre of the sphere. Also, sweep a five pointed star around the sphere at the point that is midway above the plane and the top of the sphere'.
This is effectively what Leetcode tests etc are asking. It is a waste of everyone's time because they will either do it and think 'ok, that was weird' or they will refuse and think the company is insane.
There should just be accepted certifications for software development AND THEY SHOULD BE HARD. They should be very much failable and you should expect good people still to fail once or twice (like engineering or medical exams). Then just ignore the Leetcode stuff. It serves no-one.
Then all it really comes down to is frameworks etc and if someone is familiar with that particular framework or not. Just let people qualify out of this stupid algorithmic vetting process because it's utterly daft in the context of most jobs.
> What an incredible waste - of the candidate's time, of the company's time. Oh, and they didn't offer him the job.
Perhaps the job's criticality justified that extra diligence?
Everybody says that their job is critical, their code is high quality, their children are the smartest and their toys are the best. Reality begs to differ.
Let's just look at the data. If a bit under 1% of all not-previously-known applicants get hired, the system is provably broken and not worth the time of a not-previously-known applicant.
I'm sure there are a metric gigaton of examples already documented on this site explaining why this is bad for Tech, the Economy, our Society.
Want to know why there are so few young(er) people getting into the industry who are competent and instead you're inundated with frauds who can't write FizzBuzz? Here's your answer.
Agree. When someone leaves a company, rarely is the impact that tangible, besides the emotions or perceived feelings of loss. We're all replaceable.
Seems like the answer is:
What will you pay me for a day of my time?
At this point, they've already invested their resources (and also you, yours).
If employed, then it's easy to point out that that's your cost in a vacation/PTO/"sick" day.
If not, point out that you are not currently working at mickydee so your time is worth more than minimum wage. If they stick at that, make out a reasonable guess at their cost of this process and point out that a day of your time is not a massive additional fraction. If they stick at that, ask if this means you are on the "short list", and how many others are on it. If they stick at that, then you have useful information about what they think you are worth and are likely to offer.
This does assume some flexibility, and leverage.
This part of the essay makes me feel moved by the author's situation.
> I am sitting down after a long walk outdoors. It should have been relaxing, but I was processing - processing another interview pipeline that has fallen through. I'm in my 6th month of unemployment, despite job hunting 40 - 60 hours a week, starting literally the day I was laid off - because the company needed to make cuts and remote workers were top of the list.
That sounds really tough, and I'm sorry the author finds themselves in this situation. Six months sounds grueling.
I think the interview process is likely to be completely overhauled in the age of AI. I don't really know what will happen. I used to be in favor of the standard code-at-a-whiteboard approach, but nowadays the actual work is even further from that. But I haven't seen an AI-aware interview process yet that seems like an improvement.
At any rate, these systematic changes are likely to come too late for the author. Hang in there. Maybe it's time to consider a bigger change, like moving cities and looking for in-person work. I like working remotely but it's harder to get a remote job, and the in-person stuff does have upsides. Good luck out there.
Another piece on the subject that starts out great but then fizzles out.
I think the solution that is alluded to is to let several qualified folks work as contractors for a bit. But companies are unfortunately set in their ways, refuse to think, and continue their incredibly expensive charade. Because google does it, or some other nonsense. As Joel told them to, but most of these folks are not old enough to know Joel or what exactly he advocated. Like “agile” metastasized into something pernicious as directed by B and C players, so have interviews.
The solution is simple. — make prospective employers pay for the time of the people they’re interviewing.
We can argue the rate and which industries it should apply to, but if companies had to pay even a moderate amount out to even just some people to interview them you’ll fix this problem almost overnight.
I agree with your basic premise that prospective employers should have a financial disincentive from wasting candidates' time. The problem is that charlatans and scammers could just keep applying to every possible employer and in about 3 weeks the entire industry would collapse.
The solution needs to be a bit more robust than that. Simple is great but not when it doesn't work.[1]
One of the best contract stipulations I've ever come across was that Company would agree to take on Recruiter's Candidate for 2 weeks of probation, and if it turned out that the Candidate was so bad that they needed to be fired immediately, Recruiter had to pay Company for those 2 weeks. So Recruiter was on the hook for double, unless they passed the penalty on to the Candidate. (Which I'm not sure was/is legal.)
I can see how tweaking that just a bit and applying it to the probationary period can protect the employer. Now the FizzBuzz failure has a very real risk if they lie, cheat and steal to get hired. But how do you protect the candidate from having days of their time wasted with interviews and such without turning the company into a cash cow for scammers?
Most employers can afford to be very inefficient at interviewing as long as they get a usable body in the door eventually. How can that be structured so that both parties have an incentive to make the process efficient?
1. https://www.azquotes.com/quote/360631
The problem is on both sides.
Companies are sometimes too selective and too indecisive.
Many candidates can't code well.
I screen candidates all the time. I regularly meet Sr. Java Engineers who are not aware of the classes that exist in the standard collections framework and can't pick the right one for the job. People who claim to be "performance experts" who can't explain how a HashMap performs an addition in amortized constant time. I get it -- this is not required knowledge for all roles. But don't call yourself an expert and use some judgement as to the kinds of roles you apply for.
> I discussing this with a friend who is an surgeon, he said he has never had to prove his technical skills in an interview. Why? Medical candidates have licensure, continuing education requirements, a case history, and (potentially) litigation history ... In contrast, Software Engineering has largely ignored certifications, has no uniform system for gauging continuous learning, and the vast majority of candidates' professional work is closed source.
Every time someone brings up the possibility of licensing or certification to software engineering, the response is collective shrieks of outrage and insistence that It Couldn't Possibly Work For Us, as if we're so fucking special. I've seen this since the Slashdot days twenty years ago. And so, we got this instead.
There are a lot of problems in the industry which can be blamed on corporate culture and clueless management, but I think this is one case where we pretty clearly did it to ourselves.
Okay, but how would it work? In particular, if AI is such a problem in the interview world now, how would it not be an even worse problem in the "taking tests for certifications" world?
The same way we solve election fraud:
Show ID to get in the door. Match your ID to the voter roll, for that precinct only. 100% paper ballots, counted by hand at the end of the night, before they leave the premises, permanently recorded and witnessed at that moment. No exceptions, no irregularities tolerated. Anything else, somebody goes to jail right now.
Does that sound far-fetched? It's not too different from what I did to get my last IT certification. There are valid criticisms of the certification racket, but one thing is for sure -- people are not showing up to Pearson testing centers who can't write FizzBuzz and walking out with a cert 40 minutes later....
Face to face tests of coding ability could work.
Can we not trust degrees and work experience? That's 99% of doctors too? I mean this whole zero trust thing about people’s backgrounds is getting really fucking tiresome.
It’s also funny because we seem to trust and select doctors by google reviews and assume they have a valid diploma and license to consult us for our lives, but we have to grill some poor software engineer previously working in faang with another 10 leetcode interviews to be ‘sure’ he’s a good fit. lol
No, we can't. Degrees are what we are using already, and they are demonstrably failing. Plus, degrees from other countries might as well be pure fiction. Nobody knows what they actually represent.
Work experience? I once interviewed a guy who claimed to have Technology XYZ experience. He made it all the way to the final interview before I got to talk to him.
"So you worked with XYZ, yeah?"
"Oh yes!"
"That's cool. It just so happens that I did a training class with some of your coworkers in a different department a year or two ago. XYZ is used in the Billing Dept. That seems strange to me. You were in Web. So you had access to customer data?"
"Well....no."
They hired the guy anyway, over my objections, and a few weeks later he hosed up my biggest disaster recovery server during an OS upgrade.
It's one reason I am actually going to continue pursuing the 'physical engineering' side of my career rather than the software development (software 'engineering' side of it).
I studied CS at UCL years ago but worked mostly in teams with electrical, chemical, and mechanical engineers and on projects relating to various things in relation to various different industries as different as pharmaceutical and ship building. During that time I got qualified as a CAD engineer among other things I was required to by my employer(s).
Now, when I look at software jobs and the way software developers are being interviewed...I just can't. You would never ask eg a mechanical engineer in an interview 'so, you say you know SolidWorks? Ok, design me a sphere with a chamfered cylinder extruded from the centre of the top. It should be chamfered at a 46 degree angle to a plane passing through the centre of the sphere. Also, sweep a five pointed star around the sphere at the point that is midway above the plane and the top of the sphere'.
This is effectively what Leetcode tests etc are asking. It is a waste of everyone's time because they will either do it and think 'ok, that was weird' or they will refuse and think the company is insane.
There should just be accepted certifications for software development AND THEY SHOULD BE HARD. They should be very much failable and you should expect good people still to fail once or twice (like engineering or medical exams). Then just ignore the Leetcode stuff. It serves no-one.
Then all it really comes down to is frameworks etc and if someone is familiar with that particular framework or not. Just let people qualify out of this stupid algorithmic vetting process because it's utterly daft in the context of most jobs.