The simple answer is every senior developer will hang up the phone, walk out, or tell you to F-yourself when you ask them to take a coding test while those who only have those 50 free Vista-Print business cards saying “Senior Dev” will take the test. There is no higher level insult one can level against an actual senior developer. We have decades of code in production, tens of thousands of lines of code floating around online, and many of us have written books that won awards. The fact you are too lazy to look at any of it is not our problem.
Many of us have OpenSource projects where we are the sole developer. Did you bother to look?
Coding tests are used by shit-holes
No matter how nice the campus looks, how much they pay, what they claim to offer for stock options, if there is a coding test, the place is a shit-hole. You have to be a senior IT worker to know this. Have to have waded into a few of those shit-holes so you recognize the smell. It’s not something you could ever go nose blind to.
These are companies who want to believe shitty little trickery problems from places like Leetcode actually measure anything. About the only realistic measure they provide is how big a liability this developer will be. They are doing shit in memory that should not be done there. Vast majority of these developers never learned squat about relational databases, indexed files, or system sort verbs. They will write a “cool routine” assuming they have limitless quantities of RAM only to find out in production they don’t.
What you have to realize is that everyone who went through that hiring process produces the same shitty designs. They don’t know any better.
Hiring practices and myths
There is a huge myth in the AGILE world that a coding test is a legitimate interview method. It’s not. Having someone develop a Roman numeral calculator or solve The Towers of Hanoi doesn’t find a skilled programmer. In fact, if they ask you to create a Roman numeral calculator start with the code at the above link. You can add the GUI to it along with some Doxygen comments.
Writing intricate little routines does not solve big problems. I don’t care how cool you think your little function is, we are writing an entire order processing system and you just stored order data locally in JSON instead of in the ERP database! Oh that’s right! You’re AGILE so nothing has to actually work.
Senior developers earned their living creating things that actually worked and were measured against an SDLC by independent QA who tested using the SDLC. We have been out of diapers a long time and aren’t yet old enough to be back in them again.
You who take the coding tests are still wearing them.
