Double horrible there… I would actually spam them for feedback. That’s their job in the process.
You might have dodged a bullet there though - if they think they are too good to give feedback, they don’t sound like a good employer.
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It would maybe “soften the blow” if that were true, but this company seemed to have a very good reputation within the Elixir community, with awards for “best startup” etc.
Welcome to the club then…
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Quite so. I was hired into my current gig literally because they liked a couple of my jokes. I can’t have done more than middling on their technical questions, which were the usual out-of-phase, borderline irrelevant ones. But I left 'em laughing.
I was basically just myself. At some point in the interview I commented that I undersstand the perspective of the business and always had my previous client’s back. Hence they understood that when I requested resources, it wasn’t because I was caught up in some sort of “technical masturbation”. When asked what my biggest regret there was, I said it was being “addicted to the crack cocaine of high pay” and letting my smaller, less lucrative clients fade away over the years.
After conferring among themselves for about 10 minutes they hired me on the spot. He said I was the first person he’d interviewed who had used the words “masturbation” and “cocaine” in a single meeting and somehow it not only didn’t come off as weird, but as the exactly right metaphors. In other words, he was entertained. He said my interview was destined to become “the stuff of legend”.
So it’s possible on occasion to use this quality of the interview that you so aptly pointed out in your favor. Read the room, figure out what they’re actually fishing for, and give it to them. It’s rather like test-taking way back in high school; I remember realizing one day that I had to give the answer they WANTED TO HEAR, which was not necessarily the correct or best answer.
In fact this once backfired on me in high school, once I was on to it. I was annoyed with an assignment where everyone in our English class had to enter that year’s American Legion Essay Contest. The subject was something along the lines of “Why America is the greatest country ever”. So I gave them the most contrived, jingoistic bullshit parody of an essay that I could conceive of. You could practically hear the marching bands playing as you read it.
It placed third in the state, much to my humiliation.
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Yeah “dream jobs” are unicorns. I had one for a dozen years, that not only met your stated criteria for such a gig, but payed super well. Then the 20 person company was acquired by a 20,000 person company who only wanted to harvest the customers and the data and shut down operations. So now I am presiding part-time over the winding down of years of hard but enjoyable work while I work a full time gig that meets at least ONE of the criteria you mention – great co-workers. But it’s the most ghastly code I’ve ever worked on, bar none, plus it’s a very huge and difficult problem domain and pays about half what my “dream job” did (albeit still somewhat better than market rates). And the company is meeting-happy – 2.5 hour meetings are not at all unusual.
So dream jobs have that downside … eventually you must return to Real Life and it’s rather a bucket of cold water.
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I think it’s fine to state what you have deep experience with in a way that doesn’t come off as bragging (or humble-bragging). If you come off as competent and centered instead of vainglorious, it should not present a problem for any interviewer (except maybe one who feels threatened by the fact that you might outshine them).
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Agreed, and that’s just the issue: a smile + a phrase like “hey, how hard can it be?” and boom, there’s one team that told me that I am an insufferably overconfident prick.
People and their bias. What can you do. 
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Honest question, how did you manage to move forward with this “other” job? I can get past the code and it being a challenging domain but cutting your income in half on top of all of that would kill me inside. I know you said it’s still a bit better than market rates but are you actively looking for another gig while still being employed, or going to stick this one out?
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That would be down to context, body language, perceptions … personally, I don’t recall a client or employer that was not convinced on an organizational gut level that their technical challenges were unique and particularly difficult, and even Never Seen Before, so their personnel tend to be invested in this at least publicly. So if you come in saying this sea-monster they’re heroically wrestling with can’t be that big of a deal, it could come off wrong.
In this life what’s real doesn’t matter. What counts is what Other People PERCEIVE. So I try (and don’t always succeed) in not giving them an excuse to form a bad first impression. First impressions are devilishly durable, even with massive contrary evidence soon after. That is a proven scientific fact, and well-studied.
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I have taken care over the years not to confuse things like what I get paid or my job title or my feelings or other things which are largely out of my control and/or bullshit, with who I actually am. I also have minimized fixed costs and personal debt because I knew this day would come sooner or later. There are no mortgage or car payments at this point in my life.
This cuts both ways, of course. Back in the 1980s I bid on a custom accounting system for a small-ish manufacturing firm. I lost out to Anderson Consulting at more than twice my then-hourly rate (this was before scandal took them down). I asked the prospect why they chose Anderson and they said that I was so much cheaper I did not seem credible. I immediately raised my rates 50%, lost two of my worst clients and picked up three really good new ones.
So I realized a long time ago that pay and titles and status are just bullshit perceptions, and that low-balling your rates is usually self-defeating in the long run.
By the time I came to this Dream Client, my going rate was about where Anderson once was and they paid it without flinching, and except for a brief rough patch cash-flow wise, did not throttle my hours; I frequently exceeded 40 in a week, particularly when there was a big “push” of some kind.
I did not raise my rates for about eight years. They were a startup. But as soon as they started turning a consistent profit, I went up by another third, where i was for about the final three years I guess. But this was a very specific narrow vertical that probably a dozen people in the US work in, for perhaps four or five companies in this particular space.
Now I am just back to the same rate I commanded after that increase way back in the 1980s which I suppose should depress me but you have to consider that I am being marked up by a 3rd party (not sure how much, but it didn’t used to be uncommon to be marked up to clients by 100%). If I want the higher bucks I have to put my direct consulting shingle back out or find a new niche (which is, in part, why I’m exploring Elixir).
In short, it’s tempting when you get a really high-paying gig to assume that now you’ve “arrived” somehow and established some kind of proven floor to your income. In reality you just got lucky for a season.
So it goes.
And yes, while I’m not on a push, I am open to better opportunities. I just did a first-round interview and 30 minute online test for a job with a smaller company on the Left Coast with a stated pay range about midway back up to where I was with the Dream Client. This was mainly because I forgot I still had an active profile on Hired.com. I am content where I am for the moment because my skill set has become a little stale and I’m leveling back up on some tech that I have had the luxury of ignoring for over a decade, like JavaScript and client-side in general.
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Ah, no. I meant only a part the homework coding challenge – sorry for not making it clear! I wouldn’t dream of outright saying “hey, your projects are mega easy”. That would be severely misguided and overconfident indeed! Not to mention “speaking without having a clue”. I am not that dumb yet. 
I only casually remarked it – once – at the second technical interview, during which I had to make some modification to the homework, live, on a screen-sharing call. This was supposed to test my abilities to change code in the face of evolving requirements and IMO I did well (not excellent but objectively I’d give myself a 80% because I stuttered at 1-2 points and didn’t arrive at the best changes there quickly). But when I remarked “oh, that’s easy” for one of the requested changes, apparently that rubbed some of the interviewing team the wrong way, severely.
I find it weird to this day, even if that interview was like ~10 months ago.
(I hope my current employer doesn’t think this comment is aimed at them; we had a very similar process with them but they were much more positive and careful in their judgement of my personality.)
Oh, absolutely. Beautifully put. I am completely with you but I still struggle to practice this in a way that minimizes (or even eliminates) the possibility of being misunderstood for overconfident. I do very well in that department for, say, 75-80% of the time, but can’t bring myself to address the rest of the cases.
As I get older I just find myself not interested in people (and employers) who rush to judge. This could become a career impediment but the pull from my soul is too strong.
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I hear you. I actually consider not giving a fig what people think beyond a certain point to be an advantage – even a superpower. The young – my former self included – tend to be obsessed with comparing themselves with others and judging themselves for where they think they “should” be in life because others are “already” accomplishing this or that, or assuming that if people think something negative about you, it is apt to be somehow justified. And also, of not at all seeing other’s insecurities and challenges.
You can’t know the smallness of soul that some asshat interviewer suffers from, what it’s like for them in the dark watches of the night. That they use their ephemeral place of power over you in the interview process to make themselves feel better about themselves, their job, or the quality of their own work, is truly their problem and not yours. Being clear on that allows you not to take things personally and gives you the strength to have healthy boundaries such that the annoyance of the process doesn’t end up being actually abusive to you.
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Damn. I definitely wouldn’t want to work in a place where people are so quick to flip on a candidate and make negative snap judgements. That would indicate a super-sensitive team environment that’s rife for awkward disagreements. I hate multi-tasking, and constantly self-monitoring and self-censoring is one more task I’d rather not constantly attend to 
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Having coding interviews and take-home assignments are what’s broken in our industry. I mean just read this thread, amazing people with various skill failing due to some assumption of the interviewer. And don’t let me start on unpaid labour and excessively long “rounds”.
How can we change it? I don’t believe I can change it alone but I am doing two things for it.
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As a candidate I refused to do a coding interview or take-home test for all positions that were offered to me including big names.
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As an interviewer I never wanted a coding interview or take-home test done. Guess what? Turned out especially good for candidates that didn’t look that strong. And would not help with tech. strong candidates you might have other beef later.
If it is in your power (like you already have a job, and not running out of money), refuse these practices. If there are enough people like me, we would do it!
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Being an interviewer from time to time, I know how it is at the other side of the table. The company I work for (so I) asks for an assignment -when the applicant can’t show us any code (we love open sourced personal projects!)-. The code itself is secondary though, we focus more on intent, thought flow and documentation (or simply clear code).
For senior level (or clearly medior) solicitors we skip it though. There is no need to let them things that make them feel monkeys jumping through hoops.
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For some people, it’s not straightforward to present a kind of linear flow of thought, so this kind of paired session cannot capture the whole potential of a candidate. I remember a post of David Chelimsky, from RSpec fame when he said that it’s pretty common for him to start editing an idea, and after a series of attempts deleting and editing, finally come out with some working solution.
These days I participated in a process with several steps, which of some requiring code pairing sessions. I finished one of them, in a short time-box of 1 hour, but I felt that the interviewer didn’t expect my final solution. As this problem involves what I consider low-level OTP stuff, I asked if it was common to make this kind of thing there, when they said that no, it was pretty rare to make this kind of thing.
I wrote a blog post with an alternative solution, more close to what I felt they are expecting, and to take at least something positive after engaging 5 hours of my time into the process, but in general even not believing in this kind of process I’m still submitting myself to it, just because it’s a way to get better opportunities, I tend to be really pragmatic, but sometimes is hard to manage my self-esteem face this kind of situation.
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We don’t expect a linear flow of thought, we do however check for some essential parts that are essential in our line of work (and the candidate should know…otherwise it would show lack of even the tiniest bit of interest in the company).
In the end the interviewer has limited time to evaluate a candidate. That is why having a codebase to show is really valuable! It gives interviewers a better impression in less time.
There might be bad interviewers out there, but let’s not act like they all are stubborn and only pick “what fits their mindset” 
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Though that might be the sentiment understandably expressed when people have bad experiences, I don’t think it’s the real sting here, which is that regardless of intent, interviews are a poor selection process. I think that’s now as established as that rigidly open plan offices don’t conduce to work requiring concentration. That both are still dominant may partly be due to stubbornness. Everyone’s naturally a bit stubborn about wanting to exercise skills they believe they’ve mastered - there will be vi users long after natural language or mind/computer interfaces (or whatever) render keyboards obsolete. Just as I still like to write with a fountain pen.
But the more important factor is that no-one confidently knows how to do it better. It’s not really a personal failing or ‘stubborn’ to stick to a failed process when no better one has yet been discovered. You have to do something. Personally I think it’s an insoluble problem, inherent to our so-called ‘economy’ (actually a phantom, but that’s not a story for here).
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That’s the $1M question though: how do you decide somebody is medior / senior? There’s basically as many answers as there are software companies.
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This requires you to:
- Have a good financial runway, e.g. be able to coast on savings for 6+ months, which not many can do.
- Have a very good network where a new job is 4-5 phone calls away. Not many have that either.
- Have a very good open-source portfolio. Achievable but most working programmers neglect this to their detriment. I am not big on doing high-quality work for free since I am not well but I can see that this is a very good signal to companies so I’ll eventually build a portfolio. But again, not many do that.
The reasons many programmers subject themselves to long processes and/or homework assignments mostly boil down to:
- Being open to prove your worth is a good signal to the company that you might be a good hire, i.e. you don’t “play games” or appeal to your experience in terms of number of years;
- Hope that way to build good will (and a network) so the companies could call them in future again even if the current process goes nowhere;
- You are being desperate – let’s not deny it, happened to many of us at one point.
IMO the first two rarely materialize: being open to a homework assignment is not a positive sign for you that makes you stand apart at all; it’s a baseline expectation so the value of that definitely disappeared over time (but I do remember a time when it wasn’t so). And hoping to build good will / network is, in my experience, literally never happening by doing interviews. I’ve had 3 companies re-call me during the last 3 years and it was only to repeat their older requirements which I already told them I will not work under.
Building a network happens 100% outside of potential work relation. Not during an interview process. Took me a while to understand that.
TL;DR: I mostly agree but the programmer has to have prepared their own homework (points 1 to 3 at the start), otherwise they find themselves at the mercy of 20-year old HRs with zero clue how to recruit programmers.
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