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Comment by b20000 | Hacker News Reader

b20000

This is also why you should not agree to do coding interviews.

I feel like in the last years the level of arrogance of developers has reached a peak - somehow the market being full of opportunities, people seem to forget that there are others out there getting paid way less, doing critical things for society and going through way more stressful situations than the pain of not knowing what new shiny language to chose for your next microservice.

As having a developer background that switched more towards management now, how do you expect companies to hire? From what I see take at home tasks are not ok, making everyone loose their minds, technical interviews are also not ok, then what? The attitude of developers now is: 30 minute interview in which the company needs to offer 100% salary increase compared to previous job, pay the developer a full day as he took 30 minutes for you and then just hire him based on his CV in which he lists all possible technologies in the world that he read about once in an article or wrote a to-do app 3 years ago.

I don't have a general solution, but one thing this industry may consider is licensing. If we are going to be job hopping every couple years due to the way raises are done now, we should at least make it more efficient.

> how do you expect companies to hire?

At least in my case, if I have 25+ years of employment history on my resume doing the same thing that I'm interviewing for (and this can be verified), the interview process should be a lot simpler.

Does this work at any of the big companies? I'm coming up on something like 15 years of experience. I have a leetcode account and I've dabbled, but to be honest I'm just not that interested in playing that game, even for difference in comp it would likely bring.

That said, I am not all that averse to a respectful-of-my-time take home or having a discussion about a particular piece of code with a bit of prep, etc.

I've seen programmers far better than me get chewed up and spit out by the FAANG interview process because they hadn't prepped their leetcode skills enough. Anyway, I'm sure we could debate the interview process to death, but my original question stands: Can you just straight up say no to a coding interview at any FAANG or FAANG-like companies and actually get to an offer without having massive online reputation points?

Only if you know a VP or above. This isn’t a hurdle that can easily be overcome.

> Does this work at any of the big companies?

I've had coding interviews at big companies but always on their premises, with the interviewer there talking to me while I code. So I'm ok with that. They've never asked me to do a take home. I did a few of those for smaller companies before realizing that it's better to refuse.

Or, you simply ensure you get salary bands relayed up front before continuing.

Personally, I refuse to work for companies that don't explicitly evaluate programming ability when interviewing engineers.

I want to know that the people I'll be working with are at least baseline competent in that regard.

That’s OK if you’re a junior engineer with less than ten years experience but I would feel insulted if you question my credibility.

I’ve interviewed more than a few 10+ years of claimed experience engineers who couldn’t write a function to sum a list/array of integers.

There are incompetent charlatans that you’re competing against and if you’re not willing to engage to demonstrate that you’re not, some will (not entirely unreasonably) assume that you might be one.

This 100%. Some years back I joined a company with a significant amount of low-quality engineers. In hindsight, the interview process was a breeze.

That's when I realized what should have been obvious: the less rigorous the interview, the less effective it is at keeping out unqualified folks.

coding interviews do not test what matters.

I've found there's zero correlation between interview difficulty and compensation.

that is because most positions in our industry underpay anyways

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