I have 20y+ experience in startups, unicorn, large companies, big data analytics, full stack applications, and system design.
I am not asked to interview with whiteboard coding when someone wants to hire me from a referral. They are glorified meet and greets.
This is what having a network of people who have worked with you before, and have seen your productivity does. You don't interview the same way other people do, people want you for you, because they know that it doesn't matter what the technology is, you're going to provide a crazy level of value, and they want that level of value in their situation.
Before my current job, my last three jobs (2014, 2016, and 2018) were as a bog standard “enterprise” Senior software engineer/team lead/de facto “architect” who was hired to help the company mature. I got my job by talking to the manager, director, CTO based on my network and discussing my past successes and how I would go about helping then with their real world problems.
I am 99% sure if and when I leave my current job in the cloud consulting department at BigTech and probably go back to smaller companies I won’t be asked to do a “take home test”. My network is stronger now than it was before I came.
I'm senior. Got something I haven't seen? That and some stalking on LinkedIn or emailing and asking for a resume or just to say "hi", seems to be working for some recruiters out there.
OP is hiring for a devops role and has to mention k8s in their pleading. Anybody who mentions k8s to me as something I need to know immediately wins a quizzing regarding what their assets are and what are they doing with it which is so unique that they'd need my expertise; that's usually the end of it. To be clear: I am senior enough to know that doing k8s safely would be THE job, so not making it THE job means you don't meet my quality standards. Other people need my help more than you do, and I don't care what you pay.
1) a 2 hour conversation with one of the founders, followed by a 2 week tryout (paid consulting), followed by a job offer that I accepted. This was through a HN Who Is Hiring post.
2) a round of multi-hour onsite interviews involving white boards, live coding, pairing, etc., but no take-homes. This was through Triplebyte, which organized everything.
There were a couple of other discussions involving take-homes (one of them in good faith on the company's part, the other a little more doubtful) and those two experiences convinced me to not do them any more.
I guess I could imagine a take-home project if it was (through discussion) something that interested me and that I thought would be useful and I could keep the code afterwards, to re-use for other purposes.
But if you are a medium size enterprise company that isn’t paying that type of compensation, you can’t.
Could someone articulate what's the norm now for non-FAANG pure-tech companies? I might go back to the open market next year after grad school since I don't have much of a network in Canada.
(I have decent 10y+ experience at startups and a unicorn, in both big data analytics and full stack applications and I'm good at system design, take home assignments and even live coding but really suck at physical white boarding complex algorithms with someone literally watching over me)