I'm SR in my current role, 7+ years experience, tech lead for 7+ people...
I can't get an offer to save my life. I've gone through final round about 10 times now and always get either ghosted or "we decided on another person over you" then the role stays open for months. Had Disney offer to create a new role for me and then rescind when I agreed. Or my personal favorite, hiring freeze right after final interview and "we're frozen, can't do anything."
My latest ended with "we hired someone else for the role, but we just opened this role. Do you like it? We'd only need 1 interview from you since you aced the other ones." 3 weeks later and I can't get a reply from them to even schedule that interview...
I don't know if I'm just missing the mark somewhere or what, as all feedback I can get is "you're great we just like someone better." Well, except for the one who rejected me because "we didn't get a strong feeling of how you work with design at your current role." When I explained step by step our cycle for dev/design team ups, user testing and the feedback loop between dev/design.
Any developer with a "mediocre but solid portfolio" would know if they bombed a tech screen. Frankly I think even somebody with zero experience knows if they've bombed an interview. So I've no reason to doubt OP there.
I'm choosing to trust OP here - after all this is HN and we assume best intentions.
If you're not passing tech screens, why are
you assuming this means lack of demand on
employer side?
Well, perhaps not so much "lack of demand" as much as "supply exceeding demand."
If you have e.g. 50 applicants who've passed the tech screen you might only seriously pursue 5-10 of them.
OP here, thank you. I've given many tech interviews from the hiring side and know what bombing looks like. In my case as a candidate it's less bombing and more a bad feeling after struggling with trivia questions or a time crunch. Of course I don't know exactly how it's perceived on their side, only that they get back to me later saying they don't want to proceed. However between the various parts of my portfolio it should be obvious I can deliver high-quality code and complete reasonably complex projects, so all this extra stuff shouldn't be necessary if just need someone who can do that.
To be honest I'm not sure you really know what you claim to know about hiring.
On the hiring side, the condition for extending an offer is not "didn't bomb the interview", but rather, being the best applicant that passes the hiring bar (the bar may or may not be reasonable).
Perhaps other candidates were indeed better in some of the cases. Perhaps the interviewers thought they saw some red flags. Or even some other stupid reason. For all I know about hiring processes essentially the planets have to align and maybe a company would make an offer to some random candidate that they believe is the most suitable.
Also, I'm not sure I agree even in principle that an interviewer could obviously see from a portfolio that a candidate could write high quality code in reasonably complex projects. Unless the code available to inspect on github, claims about past work on a CV (or during interviews) don't really mean much. It's not so much about "lying" but rather that it's hard to get an accurate picture from a couple brief descriptions. I've had similar misunderstandings from colleagues reporting their work progress during stand ups (eg. Bob says he completed tasks X and Y. Turns out they didn't work for the difficult case of interacting with Z, which he wasn't aware of and would take another two weeks to complete). The other thing is that when people talk about past work, I get no information about how much support their team or company gave them, how much credit should be given to their colleagues, and how robust the project would be upon stresses, etc.
There's also the well-known Dunning–Kruger effect.
As for github, nobody actually spends significant time reading a candidate's code in github, that's what the interview is for.
I'm not sure if you're saying I'm lying, all I can say is I've spent plenty of time interviewing on the hiring side. If you don't believe me then what are we even talking about?
I agree that tech interviews are first about meeting a minimum standard and second about being one of the best choices among other applicants who also met that standard. I originally said I was "rejected after the tech screen" which matches your take, it's other posters who responded with "not passing" or "bombing." So you are disagreeing with them, not me.
As for "obvious," you implied that public code on GitHub or elsewhere would make it obvious. The fact that no one bothers to look doesn't change that, it just proves my point that employers aren't desperate to hire, otherwise they would make that effort.
It's also interesting to consider how much of a boost a candidate gets from having FAANG or other high-status items on their resume. Simply saying "JavaScript developer at Google" is demonstrably a stronger signal than "JavaScript developer at No-Name Corp" even though all your points about brief descriptions and team support theoretically hold true in both cases. Or, if the candidate went to a famous school, that would extend a halo effect even to the No-Name Corp entry. Quality is apparently more obvious in these cases, so your explanation isn't the whole story.
For the record I'm not saying you're lying (and I don't think you are). It's kind of analogous to what I said about self-reported past experience in the sense that I would expect (maybe expectation misplaced?) that somebody who has plenty of experience on the hiring side would better understand what happens on that side of the process.
I think your claim that employers are "not desperate" is probably true to some extent, but if you're screening for say 30 candidates, the cost-benefit analysis of spending an hour each looking at their github profiles might not work out unless in the "most desperate" of cases (and if they're desperate to the point where if they can't hire a superstar they'd go out of business, then you wouldn't want to work there anyway).
TBH my belief is that some FAANG or famous school is a better signal than self-reported experience on a CV. You might disagree (and there are reasonable arguments on that side), but at least whether one worked at a particular company or went to a particular school is an objective fact, while things like "built a well-received service with millions of users" can mean very different things. The supposedly rigorous hiring/admission process of FAANG and famous schools can be a useful thing to know because the hiring process could be quite similar, and thus a useful predictor whether a candidate is likely to do well on the hiring game at hand (not necessarily a good employee, that's another question).
I don't think work quality is obvious for those halo effects you mentioned. There's just some fuzzy correlation (about being in FAANG and interviewing performance) that lazy interviewers/managers tend to mistakenly conflate with employment suitability. There are many reasons why hiring tends to be broken, which I'm not going into because it would be a book length thesis in itself, I'm just saying there's no way code quality of your past work would be "obvious" unless somebody actually spent a couple hours reviewing your code. Nobody would do that unless there's some other signal indicating that that might be the case (and in 99% of the cases they wouldn't do it even if the signals are there).
So my point is that if you proceeded with the assumption that it should be obvious to employers that you're employable... maybe that's not a great assumption. I definitely agree that most of the time companies aren't "desperate" to hire -- and TBH you don't want your future employers to be so desperate. If you're not getting offers (and you want to), maybe you'd have to spend a bit more effort advertising yourself instead of relying on potential employers' desperation.
TBH my belief is that some FAANG or famous school is a
better signal than self-reported experience on a CV
Regardless of actual merit, it's definitely true in practice.
Just like the old "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" adage, hiring the MIT or FAANG candidate is going to be pretty safe in the eyes of your manager.
So my point is that if you proceeded with the assumption
that it should be obvious to employers that you're
employable... maybe that's not a great assumption
Are you saying that OP isn't trying hard enough to sell/present themselves?
Or are you saying that engineers without fancy schools or FAANG-level experience just aren't very hireable?
> Are you saying that OP isn't trying hard enough to sell/present themselves?
It seemed from their wording "various parts of my portfolio it should be obvious I can deliver high-quality code and complete reasonably complex projects" that they might be assuming his positive qualities are obvious to interviewers. That's all I was trying to say.
It depends on whether the OP is failing tech screens or whether it's the companies/interviewers that are failing the screens. I was on the job hunt earlier this year and, while I'm by no means perfect, I had a lot of tech screens fall apart because the interviewer was awkward, pushy, or arrogant; or the demand placed upon knowledge or skill assessment was unreasonable. My impression is that if hiring really mattered to these companies that they would refine their hiring process rather than leaving it up to whichever dev who has nothing else to do that day.
