The following is an absolutely true story, names changed to protect the innocent guilty.
Background
The job description provided appeared promising: an 11-month contract position with a major US retailer for a project responsible for (finally) replacing long-lived mainframe functionality. The job description made it abundantly clear that candidates must be senior engineers or above, with the professional experience required for a fairly complex project. No junior or mid-level engineers need apply.
Required
- Senior-level development experience in Java and Kotlin
- Senior-level experience with Messaging platforms (like Kafka) and exposure to microservices based architecture, including consumer and producer implementations
- Senior-level experience in building and supporting REST APIs
- Good database experience with Oracle Exadata, PostgreSQL, MongoDB and Cassandra
- Ability to ramp up quickly on an existing system and contribute with minimal guidance
- Strong team collaboration and communication skills
- Ability to work closely and collaborate effectively with the TII team
To even be considered for a position, the positions’s Required bullet points are the initial hurdle candidates must clear, no matter how unrealistic they may appear. Fortunately, a quick review of the skills, experiences, backgrounds, etc., mapped to mine, so at first blush I seem to be a match. Of course, you never know.
Anyway, it’s a contract, no harm in accepting an interview request, right? Hmmm….
Interview
The interview had an inauspicious start as Jake, the senior engineer expected to drive the interview, joined five minutes late. Claimed his internet flaked out. Said he needed more time to get set up, mentions opening documents. Jake told the other interviewer, an obviously-more-junior engineer (whose name I didn’t catch) to start the interview. Whatever it takes to get things moving, I have a hard stop in 40 minutes.
Without the introductions or context-setting typical in a first interview, the junior engineer asked me to start by introducing myself, what have I been doing, background, etc. Typical interview meet-and-greet. For five minutes I presented an overview of my professional career, specifically aligning my experiences with the job description requirements to show how I (likely) met/exceeded the position requirements. I finished my overview and expected to deep-dive into one or more areas to confirm that I’m not talking smack.
Jake is still MIA ten minutes into our allotted time and the junior engineer, blatantly flailing on next steps, proposes moving to the hands-on exercise. Jake unmutes, grunts his agreement, and immediately re-mutes. Obviously he’s multi-tasking and is attempting to ghost the interview. Perhaps something higher priority has popped up. Rude, but whatever, let’s keep things moving. The junior engineer opens up IntelliJ and starts to explain that she’ll hand over control to me for me to do the exercise.
The problem: a unit test fails due to an incorrectly-formatted log message emitted by the class under test. Fix it.
My spoken response: Really? This is your hands-on exercise? One that could be solved by a junior engineer, if not a tech-savvy junior high student? Flabbergasted, I decide to end the interview, stating that I was no longer interested in the position, and politely thanked them for their time before hanging up.
Final Thoughts
The analogy I shared with the recruiter was interviewing an experienced CPA and showing unbalanced T-accounts which needed the T-accounts to be balanced. Except you wouldn’t ask her to do so, that would be embarrassing and insulting and just plain idiotic. Obviously, the same rules of engagement don’t exist in technology.
The recruiter had not been told that the interview included coding, much less something that inappropriate for the role (much less the candidate). We brainstormed to try and explain why they would present something so simple or trivial, much less to an experienced engineer, but reached no suitable conclusions.
Needless to say, I no longer consider this retailer to be worthy of my skills, whether full-time or contracting. Days later, I am still dumbfounded; indeed, this retailer has (had?) a strong technical reputation but that assumption needs to be question. Simply boggles the mind.
Image Credits
- “Argonne’s AUTONOMIE software” by Argonne National Laboratory is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.
