[throwaway20382]

I have 15 years experience, run large production sites, our company sold for near a billion dollars to a foreign company recently, and they are doing layoffs based on "order by salary desc" . My days are numbered. I do SRE mainly, but I code all day and run teams.

Company 1: Terrible over-engineered music firm (no users). Full 7 rounds, exams (which were easy shit), but "VP" ghosted me, he was a former twitter guy, seems like he wants to hire a twitter guy.

Company 2: Credit card company. Full 5 rounds. Four hours of exams. The recruiter feedback from team was "too much of a people manager", then ghosted. Someone lied and said I was non technical - yet i passed the technical exams. I used the term "we" too much explaining projects.

Company 3 (automatic): Finished the exam in LUA for a openresty opensource project (didn't even know lua). Everything worked nicely. I was told he didn't like how i laid out the lua.

Company 4: "Not enough of a people manager."

Company 5,6,7,...: Recuriters make me do calls and exams then ghosted. I don't think they have jobs - just recruiting cause that is what they do.

Exams:

1) using openrusty to create a application load balancer in lua

2) using python to create a url shortener

3) using php, complex input file, then output file (sorting, hasing, parsing)

4) using ruby, connect to an oracle db then do complex queries (outer joins etc). Just for hazing sake, they named the tables keywords eg: "join".

I will say the take home tests at these companies are fun. I have a family and I am very nervous.

[kyleyeats]

On a positive note, you seem to have greatly narrowed the range for how much of a people manager to be.

[bm3719]

> Finished the exam in LUA for a openresty opensource project (didn't even know lua). Everything worked nicely. I was told he didn't like how i laid out the lua.

I like take-home tests too, but am reluctant to do them in languages I don't have a lot of recent experience in. Not that I can't ramp up enough to get them working, but when someone who writes that language every day looks at the code of a guy who just read a few tutorials, he's going to be irked by lots of little things. Not the impression you want to give going forward. Only exception is if I can solve the problem in a more academic language, e.g. Scheme, or something else they don't use there.

That's probably a deal-breaker at places that want to hire a developer with X years of experience in some specific language. So if I found that was the case, I'd probably just pass on it, as it's obviously not me they're looking for. Whether they realize/intend it or not, they're filtering for someone who has said language and tooling pre-loaded into their brain.

[holografix]

Multi hour take home exams are such a shit show. I haven’t done one in a very long time.

How clearly was the marking criteria or rubric communicated to you?

If you’re getting frustrated and have the financial capacity for it, maybe consider a break during December?

[pylua]

Maybe your lua was a bit too good. Not liking the way something is laid out is very subjective.