
Ask HN: What makes a software engineer unhireable? - kotrunga
Engineers on my team were briefly talking about what makes a software engineer &quot;unhireable&quot;. Not things like felonies or legal things, but more in terms of what experience they have &#x2F; don&#x27;t have and what they were doing before.<p>Is there anything in your mind that would stop you from hiring a software engineer? What are red flags to you? Again, about the skillset or experience(s), not any legal issues.
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ccajas
From my own experience here's one big way to become unhireable:

Being a senior engineer in years only, but not in skills. You become a laggard
in learning new skills, and adopting good programming practices. This is the
classic "1 years of experience for X years" problem. The harsh reality is that
many good companies avoid these types of people. They assume that you are not
proactive with your career. So it's easy to get trapped in a feedback loop
where your sub-par experience can only land you offers with companies that
provide more sub-par programmer experiences.

~~~
Spoom
I've seen this. It usually results in the candidate performing at a junior
level in an interview -- and generally we're not going to bother giving them a
junior level offer when they already have a senior level title at their
current job. It doesn't surprise me that some companies try to avoid wasting
their time.

~~~
ccajas
For what it's worth, I've never been a senior developer although I have been
working for 10 years. I've gotten the title of mid-level software engineer or
simply "software engineer". The situation is a bit more complex for me, since
my salary when I was a junior level was well below the local average for a
junior, and right now as a mid-level it's a bit better, but still only make
slightly below an average junior.

As far as disqualifying seniors for junior jobs, depends on the companies
they're moving from and to. A mid-level or senior-level job at a small company
with only 3 developers doesn't necessarily qualify me to be a mid-level or
senior-level job at a large established software company. So I'm fine with
being downleveled in position when changing to those companies. And because of
my salary situation, I'm 100% sure it will result in a pay raise regardless of
the title. It's happened with some colleagues before, when they left the place
I worked at. One left a 55k/year job with a technical lead role to a 70k/year
job as a mid-level role.

~~~
Spoom
It's not just that the pay is a problem (although it usually is). It's also
that if someone has been in a role for a long time and has not bothered to
level up their skills enough that they could pass at least our Mid bar, we
question if they have enough initiative to move beyond a Junior role once
they're here -- and we don't want people to be Juniors forever.

------
mchannon
It's hard to suss out attitude, incuriosity, and/or inflexibility in the
timeframe of an interview track. There's only so far those will hold a
candidate back before they simply don't complete the interview of their own
accord.

Red flags you're likely to encounter if you conduct interviews in the dozens
are:

1\. Don't know how to say they don't know. Have had candidates call up two
screens and google the answers for questions they don't know, all while
they're interviewing. (The eyes would give them away). The correct answer was
"I don't know", not "let me google that for you".

2\. Simple incompetence. They may be able to recite, rote, everything in the
Android SDK documentation, but be unable to properly write a for loop. Almost
makes you want to hire these people because the former is so rare to find,
but, no.

3\. Unrealistic expectations as to start date. Have had some great interviews
where everything was perfect, but they wanted a year to travel before they
would start (nothing against people from Europe, but, sigh..). I doubt that
company even survived the full year.

4\. Bait and switch. Apparently some devs contract out their end of the hiring
process, paying "experts" a couple hundred bucks to interview under their
name, get them the job, then on day 1, the interviewers and rank-and-file
developers none the wiser, show up as a different person with the same name,
without the requisite possibility to pass the interview or succeed in the
workplace. They nod, smile, take on assignments, join the team at lunch, try
maybe, but fail to deliver, and can glom on to the high-paying job for months
before corporate axes them, never realizing the scam they were taken for.

Having been on both sides of the interview process far more than most, I
firmly believe that the majority of the dysfunction in hiring software
engineers is on the company side. Corporate monopsony breeds systemic
incompetence in hiring.

~~~
tytytytytytytyt
> show up as a different person with the same name

They don't interview with people who will see them on the first day and
realize it's a different person, like their manager or teammates?

~~~
Fins
We had a "DBA" show up like that./ He didn't even seem too concerned that he
looked nothing like the guy we interviewed over Skype.

~~~
shortoncash
This is absolutely hilarious and I did not realize this was a thing.

~~~
Fins
After some checking, apparently it _is_ a thing. THere's a whole industry of
people doing interviews from remote locations.

It was quite funny to see when we complained to the recruiting agency how they
had to call him back to "sign some more papers before he can get paid".
Apparently he did not realize that we are a small enough shop that people who
interviewed him might remember that and start feeling suspicious when the guy
who showed up looked nothing like any of the ones we did talk to before; it
helped that one of the admins took a screenshot of his Skype image, too.

But the scariest thing is that he didn't even feel bad about it -- he told the
agency "what? I need a job". That he did not know a database from a hole in
the ground wasn't going to stop him.

------
jason_slack
Right now, for me, I think my age. I have interviewed for several development
positions these past 3 months and no offers. One of them I had 4 interviews
and they still picked someone else. What I am finding is that I am
interviewing with a lot of young people, just finishing with college.

I had one job offer where I was told by the CEO that he really wanted to hire
someone out of college but if I was willing to work for $29,000 a year he
would give me the job.

~~~
bradhe
What geo are you in? There’s no CEO on the planet worth a damn that expects to
find someone to work for $30k/yr unless you’re WAY out there in, like, the
Midwest or something—-and even that’s a god damn stretch.

~~~
King-Aaron
> There’s no CEO on the planet

FYI other countries exist on this planet outside of the United States. In
Australia a fresh-from-uni undergrad _could_ expect to make 30k on their first
posting.

~~~
digianarchist
My first job out of university was about $30k and that’s in the South East of
England.

------
xstartup
1\. Not showing me the way you solve a problem.

2\. Having a strong belief that most non-programmers are dumb, including
marketing/sales/customer service. This shows up when you interact with those
folks. All the guys I've fired in my company are for this reason and never for
their failure to not being able to implement an LSM based k/v store.

3\. Asking for vacation with reason ("there is nothing to do at the moment"),
then after returning from vacation telling us that the service got hacked
because "I did not have enough time to fix that particular issue"

4\. Failing to understand how the company makes money and our expectations.
Some devs love their craft and take home big salaries but in office, they are
busy painting us as a con show. Some part of your income comes from the effort
of that sales guy/gal, how is your work purer than her? Why paint him as a
shady gal in the office?

5\. I doubled compensation of some developers, they came back with a request
to switch them from fulltime to parttime.

This is based on early experience as a founder.

~~~
jmheinkle
How is this comment by a startup founder who has made devastatingly good
points being downvotes?

------
user1324345
Not being able to get 100% of the small edge cases the first time on complex
algorithms problems.

\--every large tech company

~~~
NTDF9
This.

You can be a gold standard human who invented a distributed database. But at a
large company, you're not going to be hired if you can't solve some string
subsequence problem.

~~~
cbluth
a million times this.

------
cimmanom
A few examples from actual interviewing experience:

\- Treating anyone (be it the interviewer, the janitor, the intern, or people
from a different background whom you've never met) as below you

\- Treating the interview as a power struggle

\- Failing to solve a fizzbuzz within half an hour despite claiming 15 years
of software development experience ("well, I've mostly been managing people
lately")

\- From a developer with 18 months experience applying to a mid-level
position: "I expect to have at least three people reporting to me within 12
months" [Even more ridiculous when you take into account that we're a tiny,
slow-growing team that's unlikely to add 3 people total within 12 months.]

\- More than 3 years out of school, never held a job for >9 months.

\- "And then I told them we should put development on hold until we rewrite
all seven services in $new_shiny"

\- Shows up to the interview drunk or high

------
evonsdesigns
I once asked in a WebEx interview if the candidate had paired programming
experience. The response I received was the Google definition of paired
programming. After clarifying that I wanted the candidate to talk about their
experience, and they continued reciting the Google definition, and the
interview ended there.

------
modbait
Lack of humility. Over the course of a long career, you will (must) discover
that many of the things you learned early on aren't so, or at least don't
apply in some situations. Most tech problems are actually complex design
problems, and one must be humble to have a chance of choosing a good solution.

------
chipuni
Incuriosity.

If someone thinks: I have learned enough, and I don't need to learn more, I
would never hire that person.

------
jerven
More than 2 years working and not knowing or having used any version control.

------
segmondy
Deep character flaws that lead to Toxicity!

Negative people that are always saying "it can't be done", "refusal to
experiment and try new things", "blaming", "refusing ownership", "whiners",
"people that seem to be happy when a failure happens", "folks that reject
collaboration and wish to be left alone, you know, the lone superstar
programmer"

------
davidthewatson
There's one thing that leads me to a no every time: if you use an acronym on
your resume and you can't at least explain the abbreviation, I'm done. This is
a specific case of a more general principle, but don't use words that you
can't even define.

------
psyc
I've selected one candidate over another for some impression they were
marginally more impressive, but the only reason I have ever given a hard no
was arrogance.

~~~
noir_lord
Arrogance would do it for me as well.

I've worked with arrogant devs before (and anecdotally they've written some of
the worst code I've ever seen - usually because they complicate the hell out
of things because they think they are smarter than they are) and I loathed it.

Be confident in your abilities but don't be a dick about it and always accept
the strong possibility that the other person may be right.

I saw a phrase I liked on here a while ago, "strong opinions weakly held" that
summed it up nicely.

------
justherefortart
Attitude and being inflexible.

I'm probably guilty of both O:-)

------
j45
Attitude.

Skills and knowledge can be developed.

------
sneak
My personal opinions follow:

Windows on a non-gaming, non-CAD box.

PHP.

Gentoo.

MCSE.

Being a hubristic jerk (common with sysadmin types)

People who homebrew crypto.

“Just install linux on a cheap PC and...” types. These people also usually
vastly undervalue their time or overestimate the number of hours in the day
available to do 90s sysadmin bullshit.

People who don’t realize that more running software is usually a liability.

People who treat other people as idiots for being yet ignorant of something -
there is an xkcd about this one.

Joke ones that I wish were true:

emacs

javascript

android

~~~
bashninja
I don't mean to be combative, but I think Gentoo and PHP both have their
place. I can guess why you would think those things would make an engineer
unhireable, but that didn't always mean trouble. I would assume the real
problem would be when an engineer limits his/herself to those things and can't
work outside them. An engineer that only knows how to work with PHP or refuses
to use anything other than Gentoo can be a large problem.

~~~
sneak
I started with Gentoo and PHP. I know them both better than most. I have
several commercial products that went into production written in PHP and
deployed on Gentoo systems.

It was dumb then, but I was 20. It’s still dumb now, 15 years later. Those
people had no business hiring me then but they were even dumber about
technology than I was at 20.

