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I interviewed a guy with quite a few years of experience, university studies from a first world country, very long CV with stuff that he did, most of it relevant to the job, and 5-6 certifications, 2 of which relevant to the job, which would qualify him as an expert (as he himself declared in the CV), of a higher qualification than mine, but less experience.

Welp, if we're gonna hire someone with a higher salary, from whom I am to learn, I better come up with an interesting, but simple to understand problem, relevant to the position, that I would solve in 30 minutes, and give him 2h (surprise factor, unpreparedness, nervousness should be considered).

40 minutes in and I understand that there is lots of doing, lots of code, but the guy has no idea what he's doing.
I simplify the problem, remove the complicated bit. Turning it into a "business case description" of an entry level problem.
...
Same shit. In 20 minutes, zero progress. At this point the solution should be exactly 4 short lines of code. He gives me 50 that produce a completely wrong result, and he has no idea why.

I simplify further. I explicitly express the problem as the entry-level problem that it is - to count the number of interactions on the website in a specific day. That's it.
10 minutes more pass. I don't know why I'm wasting my time. Maybe I just want to be polite. Maybe I want to eliminate all doubt that it's not something else.
Nope.
He couldn't even react to my explanation of why he got the wrong result, and that all he had to do is move some stuff around.

Certifications, experts, universities.

What the fuck people? Can't we be simpler, and instead be knowledgeable? The time it took him to write that list of certifications, he could've learned how to solve this problem from any introductory course.

Comments
  • 9
    Well not very uncommon. There are Lots of people with shiny kick-ass resume but no real skills.
  • 4
  • 1
    And yet my skill is waisted because i went to a tech school and only got a associate degree in networking. Shame.
  • 1
    Scarily, most supposedly qualified developers can actually code for shit.
  • 1
    @arpit1997 and there are ppl with real skills that can't get a good job cuz they don't have shiny kick-ass resumes... Or the experience forgot county because it's outside of work...
  • 0
    On the other hand, imagine how extremely valuable one can be if there is a kick ass shiny resume AND the actual skills as well. I always think that if you are a really good dev then why not also get the formal education as well? Shouldn't be that hard then, right? It'll make you stand out and extremely valuable.

    I do feel that no matter how good you code there's much more to it than coding. That's why in todays market more and more is done in the field of sofware engineering. But shiny kick ass resume without any real skills nor experience is not worth anything.
  • 0
    @CodeMasterAlex because formal education don't teach you to code well but that's what companies look for... With technical interviews... Basically "how well do you know Checking the Coding Interview... Your actual skills and experience don't matter... Just how well and fast you can solve these problems... that actually have nothing to do with what you'll be doing on the job..."
  • 0
    I wonder what was the question can you please share it.
    It's seems quite interesting

    But in this case i see that his cv is full of lies and in my opinion Experience is priceless
  • 0
    @Mba3gar with a list of visitors and visit timestamps, to find the visitors that had more than 10 sessions within any 7 day interval.
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