And I need to know what the work exactly entails, and what is expected of me. Many interview questions are disjoint with what the job actually requires.

>Prove to me you can

I can show you my past experience, and I can do technical exercises. What I can't do is devote a ridiculous amount of time and effort to poor questions.

As someone who has hired a lot of devs over the years (almost exclusively for our offshore team in India, but sometimes in the EU), I can tell you that the number of candidates who embellish and down right lie about their capabilities and past experience is shocking.

Truth is, I hate both sides of the interview divide, as interviewer and interviewee - it's a horrible, inefficient, flawed process regardless which side you're on, and nobody has the answers.

People outside of India often embellish or exaggerate too though, even if not close to the degree that I've experienced in India (disclaimer: this is my own opinion based on my own experiences over 10 years or so. Obviously India has a lot of great, honest Engineers, our organisation never sees them though, largely because we don't pay well enough).

The reference knows the candidate and likely feels a much closer connection with them than they do with you. Assuming the candidate isn't an asshole, they will want to help them out by giving them a good recommendation. If the candidate was let go due to downsizing or such, the reference may even feel pressure to help the candidate find a new job.

So it's a great data point to have and as you say, it can help weed out the straight up liars.

But any 2 given candidates with 5 years at Acme Inc are not interchangeable. Some candidates are just better at programming (or some subset of it) than others, and I think employers try to find ways to predict that at interviews.

Wow, what an incredibly tone deaf response.

>Some companies simply do not understand how to properly engage in employee selection.

Maybe changing this prospective is the point of the "incessant whining."

>I need to know you can do the work, prove to me you can, I will then hire you and pay you to work.

I'd have to know how you are testing, but I'd bet dollars to doughnuts your method has no way of predicting output in any meaningful way.

>What a cluster it's all becoming on the software engineering side.

Absolutely. I would say it's endangering the overall quality of the industry. The saying goes, if you are a bad manager or a bad company the first people to leave are the A and B players. The people that will never leave are the C and D players. I suspect people who do all this trivia don't even know what an A or B player looks like.

It's really not though. Here's the bottom line: You want money from a company. The company doesn't owe you jack. shit. If they fucking whiteboard, and you want money from them, then do the whiteboard. Later, when you are employed by them, try to suggest they improve their process. If you have better options, take them.

> Maybe changing this prospective is the point of the "incessant whining."

Sure. But is that the companies #1 priority, or do they have other things to do, like make money and stay in business that take precedent? Anyways, the way you do this is from within or providing feedback and having conversations with recruiters -- you know, human interaction. This job board is the ultimate culmination of millennial passive-aggressive behavior.

> This job board is the ultimate culmination of millennial passive-aggressive behavior.

This job board just enables more people to pursue a course of action that you're already suggesting they do!

I am frustrated at times just as much as any other engineer by playing "monkey-see-monkey-do" in front of an audience in order to receive employment and I have indeed passed up job offers because I was turned off by the interview process (but again, that was my choice) but if you take a step back, look at the overall job market, and what other workers have to go through to get a job, we really do have it made, and this seems like a minor nuisance at best.

No, this is how change is driven. How do you think change happens? Getting a big committee together and getting buy in from all interested parties? That's not how it works. But maybe this is how it works, maybe this job board attracts a bunch of candidates who are tired of the status quo, and other candidates start telling the companies on other job boards that, sorry, but they're more interested in the companies that list on this particular job board, and those companies then see that the talent pool they're drawing from is smaller than it needs to be, and they decide they want to draw from the larger pool, so they change their practices, and then that snowballs, well maybe now you have industry-wide change.

I don't personally see this having much of an impact, but I think the people who started this are doing exactly what you're saying they should be doing, except that you're pillorying them for it because they aren't doing it through some impossible broad consensus approach.

> what other workers have to go through to get a job, we really do have it made, and this seems like a minor nuisance at best

It is true that we have it made, but I do not think it is true that we have it made in this sense. We have it made because our skills are very highly in demand and because of that, we are treated well and paid handsomely once we get a job. It is true that we should never ignore, down-play, or fail to appreciate this privilege, but that doesn't imply that we should not discuss or advocate for improvements where needed.

Where we don't have it made is in the predictability of employment once competence has been demonstrated. Other professions and trades usually have long-and-tedious up-front competence proving phases, but then they have a credential that will be respected by future employers when they have open positions. We are fairly unique in forcing people with long and distinguished careers to continually re-prove themselves. Our employers have open positions, but it takes a lot of pointless and duplicated busy-work for a competent person to slot into them.

I think what it comes down to is that our process is relatively mediocre, good, or even great for inexperienced unproven new entrants to the job market, but rather sub-par for experienced and proven folks. And that's why you see people looking for a better way.

Do mechanical engineers draw up a design for a valve or something at every job they apply for?

Another example it's related to is the XKCD standards comic. Rather than improve existing standards, the committee breaks off with dissenters, forms a new committee, and now you get "Situation: There are now 16 competing standards"

edit: Better Solution? Talk to recruiters? Let them know you won't consider places that force you to play "dance monkey". The letting them know part is key. More broadly: maybe unionize?

And the company wants to make money from me. In my market, there are a lot more open positions for senior devs than senior devs that are actively looking for jobs. I

You need that money more than they need you. There really are few exceptions to this rule -- AI being one of them.

Again I wish it wasn't like this, but it's the reality for the overwhelmingly majority of software developers in this country.

1. That you are in an area of the country with a lot of opportunities

2. That you kept your eye on the market and made sure that your skill set in demand

3. That you kept your resume updated

4. That you kept your network of recruiters, former coworkers, and references fresh.

If you have limited savings like the vast majority of Americans -- time is your enemy

With the unemployment rate of software developers being extremely low, the chances are that someone looking for a job that you are interviewing, already has a job. When I said my turn around from looking for a job to getting a job is about three weeks, I didn't mean to imply that I was a special snowflake.

A company I was working for went through a few rounds of layoffs before everyone was let go -- this was in 2011. Without fail, every developer and even L2 support person had another comparable job within a month.

If a company makes the hiring process too long, more than likely if you are in the right market and you are just a regular old "Full Stack Developer", by the time you go through the process, you've already received a couple of offers

Besides, if I'm looking for a job and I am unemployed, the time I am taking to do homework, I can be meeting with recruiters, preparing for interviews, brushing up on my skillset, etc...

I agree with your bottom line as well. Both are true! It's a negotiation, and it isn't zero-sum. Working is good for both the employee and the company. Neither is in a universally stronger negotiating position.

I'm not annoyed by bad interview processes and strong preference for false-negatives, I'm annoyed by that in conjunction with the claim that there is a shortage of competent workers. There is some lower-hanging fruit to take care of before that claim makes sense, and improving recruiting processes is among the lowest hanging (along with raising wages, obviously).

Unfortunately, unless the sides are favored to the labor market (in our cases it is not, and even if it was, there is always outsourcing), this equation is not equal.

Both are true, but it is an extremely unbalanced equation. At the end of the day, the company has the money and you have the skills. Unfortunately only one of those helps you pay the bills -- unless you can figure out a way to pay your rent in exchange for your skills.

> prove to me you can (do the work)

A take home exercise only proves they can get the work done elsewhere. It doesn't prove that they actually did it.

I could present you two options:

1) I just hire you after a 30 minute chat. 50% you don't work out, and we fire you after 30 days.

2) We have a longer interview. We whiteboard. We take home test. We whiteboard some more. 90% chance that you don't get fired after 30 days.

Which would you prefer? As a business owner, I am happy to just try people I don't know well - IFF they are willing to accept that there is a very good chance they are fired within the first 30 days.

There is such a huge range in developers. The haves vs the have-nots can be a 100x different productivity difference. I really want to try to tease that difference out. It is really really hard.

That is how it works in other fields. One of our managers asked his friend that owns a body shop how he finds good employees. He basically has a chat with them, feels them out, then hires them. If they don't work out he hires someone else. Perhaps it shouldn't be as stigmatic as "firing" after 30 days but you have instead hired someone on a 30 day contract with option to hire permanently. If they don't work out, that option is not exercised and that person is free to go try somewhere else. I can tell pretty quickly from chatting with a developer if they are a total fraud. I can't tell really quickly who will become a great dev, I just know when someone has the chops to have potential.

That's the way it used to be done and I think we should go back to doing that. Read the resume, ask some questions about the resume, 30 minutes to an hour full interview, done.

You get hired on, put on a probationary period, if they don't work out, fire them.

Personally, that's my preference. If I don't think I can do the job I'll know after a 30 minute chat.

In other words, I think there is far more than 50% chance that things work out after 30 days and far less than 50% chance that I impress 6 interviewers.

Interesting idea. If you fire fast enough it may not actually cost that much more money to a business to hire a bit more as long as you fire the bad ones fast.

But a 400% increase in that you find some sort of excuse not to hire me and I won't even get hired in the first place. Your percentages only make #2 more attractive if there's a more-or-less equal chance of being hired both ways.

I suspect many people would rather do 10 interviews and then get 1 job they keep for a year+ compared to 2 interviews and a 50% chance the job that hire them, fires them in 30 days. But I could be wrong, mostly basing on what I would want.

Why did the industry seem to forget this?

I would not leave a w2 job for a contract job. Nor would any good developer I know.

This is why the industry "forgets" it. It's not that attractive to a good candidate.

Wow, 8 jobs last year? Busy life?

If you want to do that by way of an open source portfolio, sure. But not everyone has open source contributions, so then I would need some other process for acquiring a work sample.

I have seen many people here say you should hire people on a contract basis for a few days/a week. I don't know what it's like doing that in the US, but for the UK market that sounds like a ton of administrative overhead for both parties to take on in order to establish if they are even a good fit.

In my experience, anyone we've hired WITH open source contributions has been 10x better than those without.

I like the format, but it obviously has other downsides, such as a higher up-front investment from the candidate.

That being said I found the format enjoyable last time I went through it. It was less stressful during the interview itself, and I felt more confident walking in. I would recommend it to companies who are considering it.