At this stage in my career when I still get this type of bullshit from someone I just find it ridiculous.
I'm just left thinking, "Did you read my cover letter? Where I told you how I worked on a 3 million CLOC air flight cockpit software that runs in actual planes; so if there are bugs real people would die? How about the part where I discussed being the software lead on financial derivatives trading software; where bugs could lead to millions or even billions of dollars be lost? Did you see that software library I maintain in my free time that has over 1 million installs? And you still aren't sure I'm qualified? Well no sense wasting any more of your time; I'm clearly not qualified then."
Ironically what I would consider the two best interviews of my career went like this respectively.
1) I was called in for a technical interview. The VP of the IT department sat down with me and asked me to tell him about my work experience. I gave him an overview and then he started delving in deeper and deeper on the subjects that I said I had experience in to see what my level of knowledge was. This went on for about 1 1/2 hours at which point he stopped me and said, "Ok, how much money do you need?" I gave him a number to which he replied, "We could do that. Hold on a minute." The VP then went and brought in his top developer (turns out he's also the hiring director) and then we basically repeated the whole thing, but dove into even more technical details. That lasted somewhere between 2 and 3 hours. At the end of it this he says, "I can have an offer letter ready for you tomorrow. When can you start."
2) Preface - I was referred by someone already working with this company.
I get a phone call from the company CEO (small start-up). He asks me a few questions about my background, some soft skill type of questions, nothing real technical. After 20 or 30 minutes of conversation that is basically just a "can we get along with each other" check the CEO says, "Ok, I'll need you to do a technical interview with our team lead." A couple days later I get a call from the team lead.
The conversation goes basically like this.
Him, "Ok, so here's the deal. Steve says your really fucking smart and Steve is really fucking smart so it's probably true. Elijah (CEO) thinks we need to do technical interviews, but really they're all just bullshit anyway. If it turns out you can't do the job we'll fire you in less than three months; if you actually know what you're doing we won't. So do you want the job or not?"
Me, "Yeah"
It was a contract to perm position. I asked my now manager, why was this a contract to perm position? Was it because they wanted to see if the person was a good fit or were they under a budget constraint that might stop me from coming on permanently? He said the former.
I had to create the department from scratch with basically nothing but "database developers" who were just learning C# and no infrastructure. I laid out a 6 month plan. Six months in, i was able to negotiate a higher pay than I could have originally since it was my first official lead role and make extra money by being able to bill hourly. It was a major win.
When I was single without the skill set, network, or health benefits from my spouse, I would have never left a full time position for a contract to perm.
Even if there was, no one would trust it. Case in point: ABET will accredit CS programs like they do other engineering programs; not many schools bother because companies don't give a shit about it.
> You can have a CS degree without really being much of a programmer.
You can get a BSEE without being much of an engineer, too. BSEE new grads definitely get tested by hiring companies to make sure they know their shit, but it is nothing like what this industry does.
Last one I had was to implement QuickSort. Had a -huge- argument with the interviewer who insisted there was an off-by-one error and it would never work. Needless to say, he was thoroughly wrong once it was coded up and I didn't get the job. :)
> It was such a turn off
It's pretty much an automatic "no" for me now too.
After the contract was over, I was able to negotiate a higher pay to convert to perm than the job I declined offered even with the signing bonus.
In my experience, the best type of coding tests are based on creating a skeleton program with failing unit tests already written and pair program with the candidate and see how they code and make the unit tests pass.
Currently I have two phases in my unit test based interview.
Phase 1: simpler tests and requirements that they have to make pass.
Phase 2: more complicated requirements and a second set of unit tests they have to make pass without breaking the first set.
To me, that mirrors how we actually work - get an MVP out the door relatively fast and add features later on ensuring you don't get regressions.
The whiteboard interview was to write out algorithm for a merge sort. I thought it was the silliest thing in the world. I had already accepted a position to basically create a development department, and he wants me to write a sort algorithm? Once he described how it worked, I wrote it without much difficulty but that was a turn off and I got an offer that was permanent (as opposed to contract to perm for the offer I accepted), making more money, with a signing bonus.
It was such a turn off, I declined the offer for a chance to build a department that would not expose developers to this foolishness and thought that the interview process tells you a lot about the company.
A year later. I'm glad I made the choice I did.
On the other hand, I've done quite a few pair programming type of interviews where there was a skeleton of a program with a lot of failing unit tests you had to make pass. I enjoy those.
Is there a DoctorRank or SecurityGuardRank or WaiterRank?*
Doctors have to go to school 8+ years and do a 2-4 year residency before they can practice without supervision. Lawyers have to go to school 7 years and pass an exam. Software Engineers only have to watch a couple of YouTube videos and they can call themselves "programmers". Doctors can't say they are qualified because they have been doing brain surgery since 6th grade in their bedroom.