Don't send technical pre-screens to candidates before you talk to them. You're not Google. I'm not going to waste my time on something before I know anything about the company, the team, or the job itself.
I haven't really seen this interviewing for jobs on the west coast, but there's a lot of shops in Chicago (fintech) that seem to be under the impression that anyone applying for an engineering job is desperate.
Large number of recent grads are flooding the application channels. Half of them have skill level that probably shouldn’t be accepted anywhere.
At the same time established veterans are highly sought after and never really needed to ‘apply’.
As a result a massive proportion of application pipeline is filled with noise. And most of them are somewhat desperate for a job. Giving the illusion that qualified people are also desperate.
Both groups barely understand the other. One is like "Lol I can write my email address on toilet paper and have a 500k/year job by Monday!", the other is "Ive applied at 150 companies and 149 of them didn't even reply back, the last 1 did to tell me there was a typo in my resume!".
But both groups have the same title (plus or minus seniority levels), work on the same projects in the same teams and follow the same career track.
I wonder how long until software engineering becomes more like other fields. The nurse, the general practitioner and the brain surgeon are not applying at the same job or even have the same backgrounds. The hvac technician and the engineer aren't either. Maybe the person who builds forms and the person who engineers a distributed system being on the same career track is the wrong model. It sets the wrong expectations. It can stunt career growth.
This sound like poor design at work. Nobody should be writing CRUD all day, it should be as easy as a new entry in a yaml/json file.
It is all software engineering but the difference in output can be enormous.
Not to different from factory automation. A lot of stuff done by hand COULD be done by robots. Its just cheaper to do it by hand.
Sometimes it feels like everyone wants to engineer a distributed system. And in the process people are losing the ability to recognize what parts of a system actually need to be engineered as a distributed system.
You can build 1 million forms within a team of 5, or you can run a distributed system of 10 machines that runs as fast as 1.
The only difference is between bad engineering and good engineering. Good engineering gets rid of repetitive work, bad engineering breeds them.
If your team needs a lot of junior engineers to do trivial stuff, that's probably bad architectural design.
It's a regular occurrence that non-software domain experts conflate all kinds of software development. Need a scalable CRUD app? Grab any ol' IT person. Need some safety critical code modified? Get that instrumentation engineer to cobble something up. After all, it's just software /s
This happened to me last week, and it wasn't a blind application. It was a recruiter who came to me about a job. I told them I wasn't interested in doing a technical screen for a job and company I knew nothing about, and in the past few months I've been soliciting interviews, not a single company I talked to tried that without a quick 15 minute phone call to see if everyone agreed that would be a good next step. It saves time and money for everyone.
That's what I mean by talking to a candidate before the screen. Going through a recruiter isn't sufficient for most of the information I would like before deciding to apply for the job.