I'm on your team. up front technical "gotcha" style evaluations feel like they don't respect where I'm coming from, nor my track record of work - and are a cue that the job is not the place I want to be at.

I've gotten nearly 100% of the jobs I've gotten in the past 15 years through friends. Interview process real easy after the informal "backchannel" reference check has happened. Just hi, how you doing, when can you start.

same thing, same thing

better spend more time maintaining those connections

i myself never really practiced algorithms, so in an interview they’ll see me as a weak learner

however the reality is complete opposite - i have spent thousands of hours on piano and guitar and speak 3 languages

i have the opposite of learning disability and learn stuff quicker than many of your algorithm-knowing employees can

Side effect of this is probably making much less than your counterparts. If you can ace a leetcode style interview, you are much more likely to have competing offers (or retention offers later on) that allow you to make MUCH more. It’s a horrible system but just something I noticed before I got really good at them.

leaving aside the FAANG outposts in my town, I'm doing pretty good.

i’m self-employed

I've been starting to refuse 4 hour technicals myself and they all immediately drop me. I don't have your seniority but I have some. As well as a powerful online presence across Github and LinkedIn. At what level of seniority did you start doing this and what is your success rate?

There's not really a seniority level where this happens.

The outrage around the technical interviews shows a lack of understanding for the situation companies face when hiring.

The reality is that something closer to 99% of the pool are applying for jobs they're not qualified for (not the same as saying 99% of developers aren't qualified - there's extreme survivorship bias in the pool).

At company X we would hire ~1/400 applicants who applied, and about ~1/20 referrals. At a smaller company I worked for we hired perhaps 1/200.

The thing is, many of these applicants have five to ten years experience (some at FAANG), but can't code at all. It's simply not possible to trust anything on a CV without verifying it. How do you verify this at scale? A pair programming exercise.

Now the training of most interviewers is often poor, but it's far better to go down this route than the HN alternative: hiring without technical screening.

they drop me too, but those companies are not worth working at to begin with

they’re not interested in hiring employees, their interest is to get candidates through the loop and to see you fail

this is fine when you’re applying to FAANG, but a terminal sickness when the company is barely known

rather than spending weeks on interviewing, i’d suggest making a open-source contribution or reading a book

the companies, especially startups have a bigger problem than you - they need to show the growth so they can attract more investors. Therefor, if they’re not getting people, they have harder time growing. If they see you as a potential candidate, but you refuse, they’ll bend their back over backwards

Never thought about it like this before. Adopted immediately.