There is no ideal solution. I don’t mind the 30 minute multiple choice basic competency tests (much), but they are usually just theoretical enough and outside the scope of the “muscles” I exercise daily, that I tend to return mediocre “acceptable” scores that, taken without nuance or used in actually ranking me with others, doesn’t accurately measure my real-world abilities relative to anyone else or to any sort of standard. Beyond a certain point one intuits the path forward, whether it comes from raw experience or practical application of “book learning”. Unless you have done a lot of teaching or blogging on a topic, it’s probably hard for a lot of perfectly excellent developers to break down and explain their process than to write and demonstrate working code and survive a code review.
If a company is sincerely interested in me as a finalist I don’t mind spending an hour or so meeting the team and, in a small company, executive leadership so that my potential colleagues have some input into the process and so that leadership is comfortable that I am a “team player” by their particular definition.
Beyond that though I find it a waste of my time if they aren’t sure what they want or are looking for post-hoc rationalizations for decisions I can tell they’ve already come to.
In a hypothetical situation where I found myself without current employment I could get by fine for months without an income (indeed at this point I’d file early social security), but paradoxically I would also have a lot more time and energy for the interview process and might put up with more nonsense to get at least a bridge position to conserve my resources. However I’d also have the option to invest that life force in a deep-dive into an area of interest or participation in an open source project or something. Guess which i think would be more helpful to me in the long run?
As to the question of years of service counting for something, I think that it actually counts for a great deal. It could conceal that I can’t program my way out of a paper bag, but if I have had interesting assignments and good references and am clearly not an asshole it is far more likely that I have some super valuable mature skills to add to any team. At this point in my career, asking me to dance for my dinner like a trained seal is leading with disrespect that I will not abide, sorry.
There’s also the whole question of education. If I had gotten a CS degree I’d have gotten my BS in about 1979 and it probably would have involved keypunching and COBOL and other things of absolutely no relevance today. As it was, I was an autodidact at a time of low-hanging fruit and was too busy making money to get a degree.
Thankfully, this is ONE area where the industry is generally in good shape. Job listings generally say, “BS or equivalent work experience” and I daresay that unless i were in my 20s or perhaps 30s no one would even inquire about my degree or grades because there’s a general understanding that things are moving so fast that you’re no good if you aren’t constantly learning anyway. In 38 years I have been asked exactly twice by a client or employer where I matriculated and by then the answer (“nowhere”) was even more impressive because I had already done months of excellent work for them. It’s not quite the same as my early days when the general ethos was “if you’re not as terrified of computers as me you must be a genius, here is a wheelbarrow full of money, please write software for me.” But it is quite reasonable.
