This weekend I was involved in an FB conversation about Live Coding and why seniors don’t like it
It all started from me reading article that really got me thinking about the state of senior IT professionals. Adam the person who made this article shared some points that seniors don’t like. I’ll also share them to give you an overview of what I think people with experience in IT are scared of
They take a ton of prep time to nail- that’s true. You should prepare for a job interview but this was always like this. Kids in school learn that to get better grades you need to study hard. So what? You want 6k euros a month but don’t want to spend time studying?They push senior engineers to work differently- I can tell you one thing. If you are a good specialist in the field you constantly should pull yourself from comport zone and get used to it.They don’t really test what you’ll want them to do once hired- The employer decides how he wants to test your skills. You might not like it but this is how it is. I heard a lot of times that algorithms that you write on codility are not something you will write on daily basis. That’s true but there is a reason for your recruiter to ask you to make such an assignment. He wants to see how you think, how you perform under pressure, and if you will give up. I think the last thing that is most important, you might not like the requested live codding assignment but never give up.They send a bad message- this one is aboutwhen you stress coding interviews in your hiring process, you make senior engineers second guess the role for which you’re hiring.I can’t even imagine a real senior developer that gets upset due to a code assignment to make.
To conclude I really think that the current state of IT professionals is a mess. People think they deserve a lot of money without proper skills and because the culture of developers moved from skilled professionals into script kiddies everyone is senior now
Last thing. I am a senior myself but when I compare myself to people I worked with that had senior level I know which skills lack. I know how much knowledge is lacking and what I need to improve to be a better developer. If I take live codding I try to show my best skills. Many times I failed on some really basic things but I never gave up and most importantly I took lessons from my mistakes to not repeat them