Things I Learned from a Job Hunt for a Senior Engineering Role

Re:Things I Learned from a Job Hunt for a Senior Engineering... by cjg on Wednesday April 25, 2018 @09:10AM (#16921188)

But yet he "clearly knew his stuff".

Perhaps he really was a very talented developer but your coding exercise was too stressful for him. Shame you missed out on hiring him.

This is not a story to show why we should do coding exercises. It is a story to show why they sometimes don't test the right thing.

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Re:Things I Learned from a Job Hunt for a Senior Engineering... by edanm on Wednesday April 25, 2018 @09:52AM (#16921484)

Your interpretation does theoretically fit with the facts. But so do a few other (in my mind more plausible) stories, like:

1. He knows how to do extremely specialized things in an existing environment, but can't do things outside of that environment.

2. He was presenting work that he had only a partial hand in creating.

3. He is amazing at e.g. C++, but cannot learn even rudimentary new things in Javascript.

...

Some of these stories make him a terrible programmer. Some of them make him an OK programmer for other positions, but weren't relevant for us. None of the stories make him a particularly great programmer.

"Perhaps he really was a very talented developer but your coding exercise was too stressful for him"

Yes, it's possible. A lot of things are possible. But I'm sorry - if someone can't copy-paste a 3 line program from the internet and get it to work, in their own field, for 2 hours, then... I don't know how I could ever design a test on which they won't fail. Including the actual job.

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