165 karma · joined June 16, 2016
This. That's the idea of an interview, to see if there is the right chemistry. It's like going on a date: the description/photos could be awesome but you quickly learn you don't even like having coffee together with that person. That is the point of a face-to-face meeting.
As for the background and the pedigree, plenty of the information can be provided and made ready for study without the need for an interview. The interview time should not be wasted on things you cannot assess in that short a time anyway.
Also, many are simply not comfortable with the situation and too stressed to be engaged in any kind of intellectual activity.
That's not to mention that most cannot do thinking and verbally document the process at the same time. It's either or.
You may be asking about things because you genuinely need to learn/understand something, in which case doctors are often eager to explain their stuff.
Or you may be asking questions trying to figure out if they know their craft, have run into difficult cases or complications to assess their level of expertise. That's a different story.
I once made a mistake of doing the latter, though I did it because I was facing an op and was quite disconcerted perhaps even frightened. At some moment the doctor looked at me with a special look and told me to go consider what I learned today and decide if I was ready for the whole thing. Then I knew I asked too much and all the wrong questions. Given that he was a very experienced specialist, was the chief doctor of that establishment and overall well recommended, the mistake was mine.
But in the end it all worked out rather nicely with no grudge-holding.
When a professional comes in, he expects to be treated like one. Most people learned to solve basic coding problems when they were at the university like 15 or 20 years ago. Today, 20 years later you should be discussing other things. Otherwise, you're basically starting a dialogue implying the guy slacked off for 20 years inviting him to prove otherwise. It's just no way for two grown-up professionals to approach things.
On a side note, try this: make a appointment with a highly reputable dentist (like weeks or months in advance) then go and try asking him some basic questions implying he might not know his stuff. You'll be shown the door in about two minutes, and possibly you'll get a lifetime ban in that establishment.
Why should software developers accept to be treated differently? And yes, there are lots of incompetent dentists and doctors of all kinds. Why do they have more respect for themselves than software specialists?
This personal preference should have been communicated right after the first contact and before going on the first date, polite and firmly. That way nobody's time would have been wasted.
It's something I would do these days, given the current industry obsession with these weird rituals. A simple pragmatic and a [constructive] dialog about the needs of the company, my skills and whether there is a potential mutual interest - yes, white board coding, puzzle questions, technical interviews and take home tests - no. Whoever is not okay with this arrangement may move along.
All good jobs that I had were offered without technical tests and they came with nice and smart people. Every time there was some technical grilling involved, the people were arrogant and condescending, and I wouldn't have wanted to work with them anyway.
And anyway, this form of hiring protocol mostly seems to be practiced in the US job market, as well as by those countries trying to closely mimic their US counterparts. I've noticed that phenomenon in Eastern Europeans too. The Western European companies have massively different hiring practices.
For one thing the author is right. These broken hiring techniques force people to leave the mundane job market as quickly as possible, switching to looking for work through other channels. Perhaps this situation contributes to the visible lack of talent that some are observing. Apparently, the talent prefers a more personal and a more civilized approach that the generic job market is not offering.
I'm not sure if you can or should forcefully push that change through though. Not everybody is cut out to be a senior engineer, team leader or entrepreneur. I'm saying it with no negative implication, mind you. People have various abilities and should value them. A great software engineer pushed into a senior role might just not have the right personality type and will be miserable at it, even if he/she was great at coding things. At best just leave it there, do your job well and let this change eventually arrive to you when you're ready for it.
Myself, I went through that change a few years ago when I reached a ceiling as an employed worker and went on to do my own projects. That was the time when I gained a lot of new technical skills and also underwent a serious personal transformation, that last part changing me in many interesting and subtle ways.
One other thing that made me a better communicator happened to be writing. Some years ago I started a programming blog, at least that was the initial idea. Technical writing did not work out for me and I then went on to write a series of essays, both programming-related and not so much. This has had a profound effect on my communication abilities more than anything else that I've done in my time. It's something you may consider trying as well, if you have an inclination towards this line of work.
Whatever you do or don't do, eventually you'll get there if you're supposed to be there, based on your abilities, personality and individual inclinations. Then along the way you'll figure out what you should do next to support that transformation of yours.
It's the number one reason why people generally attempt to "strike out on their own" - lack of recognition and perspectives as an employed worker.
In Asian cultures the common expectation for a worker is to be loyal to its company, know its place in the hierarchy and diligently follow the procedures. An independent thinker with many creative ideas and innovation proposals will unlikely to be welcome. Failure at something is generally a point of embarrassment that needs to be covered up or at least not advertised.
In Western cultures independence, experimentation and failure are seen as normal elements of the life process. There have been many inventors and entrepreneurs in the Western history exactly thanks to those liberal perceptions. Failure is not tragedy but useful experience. You learn a valuable lesson that will help avoid mistakes in the future and ultimately achieve success in what you do.
In reality of course it's not as black and white. There are both types of people living in all countries, and many people are somewhere in between on that axis. Also, even among Western countries there are those which are more Western and more adventurous than the rest and some are less Western and more risk-averse. There is the full spectrum out there.
Back to the software industry, I'd say somebody with an experience of failure is way more valuable than a person who never did anything wrong. Humans learn more from failure than from success. If you do something and succeed right away then you'll never know why you succeeded - because you did everything right or just because of the right set of circumstances, fortunate timing and some good luck. Meaning you won't know what components are crucial for success. When you fail you learn what elements are responsible or have contributed to the failure. You may not know yet what ingredients you need to have to succeed but at least you know which obstacles you need to remove to not fail.
In general, experienced people do value failure and can appreciate the usefulness of someone with that kind of background. They should not have any problems hiring that person because they recognize the knowledge that comes with it.
I too have had some failures in my professional life and I'm not ashamed to admit them. Each of them taught me a valuable lesson. On a personal note, I would be more inclined to hire somebody who was bald enough to attempt something big, failed and learned from it than someone who just drifted from one safe employment to the other never actually interacting with the real world in the wild.
TL;DR: Don't worry about it and go for it.
Most recruiters and agencies are utterly incompetent. It's the fact that practically everyone involved in IT knows. That's why companies avoid dealing with recruiters in general, being unable to spot the good ones (and I certainly wish to believe they exist). But even if you run into a good professional recruiter, you are still going to be suffering from the second problem.
Which is developing on the other side of the fence. Software engineers too are painfully aware of the recruiter tactics and many good developers have long banned them. Recruiters might try to approach them but people won't even pick up the phone.
That means that even the good recruiters (if you ever find them) will only have a very narrow and scarce pool of good people to offer you. Much narrower than it might have been if things in the hiring industry were different.
What I'm saying is that you should not necessarily look at the recruiters as your salvation. There might be great people near you who effectively avoid the recruiters' radars. You really should look into finding means to discover and contact people directly.
It's not the thing that everyone is happy to admit but the reality is that hiring key people in software industry is manual labor which can't really be outsourced or automated. Recruiters in general are not involved in any of the industry, therefore they have no knowledge of what drives the businesses, what problems they are facing and how skilled individuals fit into the picture. Therefore, their only usefulness is to place the workers of lowest ranks where they don't play an important role. Everyone believes that recruiters are placing top people in top companies and playing an important role in the economy, that's the general story of their place in the universe that they like to spread and maintain, but the reality is that they mostly place low-level grunt workers who have no advanced skills and therefore do not require vetting by a competent specialist.
The only difference might be if a recruiter would be coming from a specific industry having spent there an appreciable number of years and having learned all the ins and outs. Then they would be able to fully understand the client needs and find the right people to satisfy the requirements. But then it would really be just a different form of "specialists hiring specialists", specifically "former specialists hiring specialists".
Your best bet under these circumstances is to dedicate some time to conducting PR activities like talking about your company, hanging out in the places where good developers hang out, unobtrusively advertising yourself to them and directly approaching certain people that you spot who you believe might be persuaded to come on board. Once more, it's long, tedious, manual labor but it's just the way things are.
Having said that, I do recognize the value that recruiters might provide to the industry if they changed their ways. There really is a place for them in the economy and they could in principle significantly ease the lives of both companies and candidates. But for now, they only seem to be making everyone's lives harder.
In your professional evolution you start with simple tasks, learning to accomplish them, first under supervision, then alone. Then you get larger assignments and learn to work without hand-holding. Finally you learn to solve all kinds of problems in your field of expertise with your chosen technology and you get entrusted with making the right decisions and doing the good job of it.
But then at some point it stops mattering what work to do, in what part of the technology stack it is located, or even what technology stack this is. It becomes a matter of simply learning what you need to know to perform the work, doing it, closing this issue and moving on. That's what seniority means (or should mean to provide a base of reference).
This is viewed from the technical side of things of course, and I believe this is what the question implied. Good communication abilities and developed soft skills are essential too but those transform a developer into somebody else to whom the title of a senior developer no longer applies. They're no longer just a developer but a higher-level product.
Here's a thing that many (if not most) people working in IT don't realize. Practical software development is actually a creative profession. It's not pure science, it's not plain engineering (even if it has the elements of both), it's mostly a design discipline where outcome directly correlates with the skills and the personality of the human(s) involved. People who enter this field are often enthusiasts, tinkerers, inventors, in a sense artists. They like to create things with their own hands, things that do something interesting, meaningful and useful, and when they succeed then they get happy all around and their life becomes full of meaning and purpose. It happens to be true for most creative professions, you cannot just practice it as a routine, as a job, it has to be giving your life a meaning and the sense of accomplishment.
However, doing software development as a job does not help you advance on that path. You may have had a formally successful career, as you say you started as a simple programmer, moved up and eventually you reached a leadership position, but apparently that did not fill your life with meaning. I have no doubt that in your time you've completed multiple projects, implemented numerous features, solved important problems of your customers and so on. But the trouble is, those were all someone else's goals and other people's objectives. Despite that in the process you probably contributed many useful ideas and had personal input which directed and influenced the work, you only did the bidding of others. You solved the problems and built the things with which you cannot personally identify. Now you look back at your career and you recognize that for a lot of effort you've put in you have no tangible achievements made by your hands that you can be proud of. You need to see something for the work of your life, your legacy if you will, something to leave for the posterity, for the world, but you see nothing of that sort. And that's the root of the problem.
Here's what you say:
>> It just seems meaningless to continue working.
>> Life has seemed to lost meaning and interest.
It feels like yours is exactly the kind of problem I'm talking about. I might of course be wrong about you, this is not the ultimate diagnosis of any kind, but from what little information you've given us, I think this might be it. It would be helpful if you gave us more context and more details about your situation, otherwise it's not easy to figure out what you're going through.
As to what might be the remedy, it all depends. If you really love software engineering and feel it's your calling in life, then you should start looking for ways to use your skills and competences to do something that in your mind would be meaningful. It might be a side project or even a small startup of your own. You have not mentioned any of those therefore I assume you have none. You might consider one now. But it must not be a dummy project to simply have a project of your own or to dive into a new technology to have a sense of novelty. Those won't help. It's not about tools or the process (both of which you've mastered), it's all about the personal achievements (which you supposedly lack). You should think of something which would contribute in some useful way to the society, to solving real problems of real people, to making their lives easier, not about adding more forms and more rules to some boring enterprise software or fixing bugs in some opensource project. You need to go higher and it must be all yours, the entire pie not just some crumbs of it.
You may also want to explore another career path. If you have an inclination towards some other line of work, perhaps design or photography, you may consider giving it a go as an experiment and seeing how it works out for you. Personally, I've discovered that writing provides a quality diversion for me and is turning into a real passion. You too may have some buried talents which might benefit from your technical background. It's possible to use your knowledge of software engineering to give a major boost to your other abilities and make a difference on that alternative path.
I hope this helps you in your search for answers. Of course I might be mistaken about your condition and there might be something else that is happening with you. You are well advised to seek counselling assistance to help you out of the woods. Good luck and hold on. Don't take any radical actions before figuring out exactly what's been going on with you, or you may acquire additional troubles to your misfortune. Wait till the sky clears and only then begin considering where to go next.