The Dunning-Krueger Effect for "Rockstar" Developers

Just got off another technical interview panel with a “Rockstar” developer - this is the second self proclaimed “rockstar” and I have been deeply disappointed by and embarrassed for both of these candidates.

The first one a month ago came in and said that the reason they were applying to this Fortune 50 company after a long list of non-profit and public benefit companies and charities was because they “didn’t want to work to make the 1% rich and feed into the corporate machine” which okay, sure, I get that. They then proceeded to work on the coding task laid before them which we allow them to do in any language they know or even pseudocode - they chose JavaScript and then proceeded to forget how to define a class in JavaScript and generally made an embarrassment of themselves all while complaining that the problem we gave them wasn’t in one of the “Cracking the Coding Interview” books. Said candidate then refused to pair debug a system level problem because they couldn’t use their IDE to run a source level debugger and refused to complete the task. They then demonstrated no idea about how to SSH into a Linux machine, let alone how to perform the Linux administration task we asked despite Linux administration being a requirement - they told us in the debrief that they assumed that meant that they knew what Amazon EC2 was. They bombed every part of the interview and despite being told “no” still calls HR once a week to see if we changed out mind yet.

The second candidate listed that they were a “rockstar with over 15 years of programming and Linux administration experience!” yet bombed hard on the coding question and couldn’t explain why you might choose to make some fields in a class non-mutable or why you might not want to store numeric attributes as a string. They also said there was no way to pair debug without an IDE source level debugger but tried anyway and failed miserably to do so. They gave at least some possible answers in the Linux space but still couldn’t figure out the whole SSH thing.

How do people buy into the rockstar meme to the point where they put it on their resume and expect to be taken seriously?

I think that what bothers me here is the misplaced level of confidence. “Oh, you can’t find the source of a bug in a Java program without using the Eclipse Java debugger!” “Oh, that question wasn’t in my prep material, ask me another one!” “Oh, I have a lot of experience with Linux system administration because I ask devops to spin up an already configured VM for me!”

Yeah, it’s definitely that level of misplaced confidence that grind my gears.

As for why they can’t use an IDE debugger - the debugging question is testing three things - how they work with a partner, how they work when they’re not in hands on in front of the machine having the problem (our software is often deployed in places without an Internet connection and where remote technicians are calling in with problems so we have to walk them through the process over the phone), and where some of the interacting components are owned by other teams and therefore we can’t change them without the help of other teams. They’re intentional limitations based on some of the legitimate constraints on the team they’re applying to join, so I think they’re fair game as an exercise in an interview.

For what it’s worth we’ve had quite a few developers handle the debugging task well and a few that even found the root cause and proposed a fix - we’re just looking for good diagnostic skills, really - so it’s not the problem wholly to blame for this.

sounds like a really nice interview process you have.

these guys really put “rockstar” on their resume? what the fuck

Yes, they put “rockstar” on their resume and that’s not an immediate red flag to HR.

the trick is never taking anyone seriously

I’ve completely detached from it at this point, after that shitshow of an interview.

I’ve got another one tomorrow and I think I’ll just drink enough ‘fe so I can block it out of my mind.

all of the rockstar developers I know have imposter syndrome instead of dunning krueger

HR moved it right up against my lunch break, so I guess I’m taking a half hour for lunch then.

Fucking HR pricks.

Maybe this interview won’t be so bad - it’s someone fresh out of college with no prior work experience and they even wrote a formal cover letter.

grill them on zoomer memes

They graduated toward the top of their class from their university and rated themselves a four out of five in their Java experience (where one is “wrote a few programs in it” and five is “can give a big conference talk about it”), but couldn’t tell us the difference between an array, ArrayList, and a HashMap in Java.

They had heard of a HashMap but never used it before.

This is a graduate of a four year university computer science program and they don’t know what a HashMap is, or when you’d use it.

We asked them to do an exercise with key/value pairs and they implemented it in Java with a linear search through parallel arrays.

They rated themselves highly in Python as well. I wonder if they ever used a Python dict before.

They nailed the troubleshooting task though.

python my dict

are they not working summer jobs/internships?

They listed no professional programming experience - no internships, research experience, or summer jobs. They said they were looking for a job while they got their masters.

The only other job they listed on their resume was at a factory.

This is the most junior software engineer position we have that isn’t an internship, and it is entry level.

do kids even know what phreaking was anymore

Blue boxing but it’s the blue Among Us character throwing switches in Electrical

From: MasterOfMagic at 2022-03-10 03:14:12
Blue boxing but it’s the blue Among Us character throwing switches in Electrical

From: MasterOfMagic at 2022-03-10 00:31:07
They graduated toward the top of their class from their university and rated themselves a four out of five in their Java experience (where one is “wrote a few programs in it” and five is “can give a big conference talk about it”), but couldn’t tell us the difference between an array, ArrayList, and a HashMap in Java.

They had heard of a HashMap but never used it before.

man what the fuck

From: cosban at 2022-03-10 21:47:46

From: MasterOfMagic at 2022-03-10 00:31:07
They graduated toward the top of their class from their university and rated themselves a four out of five in their Java experience (where one is “wrote a few programs in it” and five is “can give a big conference talk about it”), but couldn’t tell us the difference between an array, ArrayList, and a HashMap in Java.

They had heard of a HashMap but never used it before.

man what the fuck

They were the first candidate I’ve interviewed for these positions to send me a personal thank you note to my public work email address. It didn’t help their evaluation, but it was nice.

From: cosban at 2022-03-10 21:47:46

From: MasterOfMagic at 2022-03-10 00:31:07
They graduated toward the top of their class from their university and rated themselves a four out of five in their Java experience (where one is “wrote a few programs in it” and five is “can give a big conference talk about it”), but couldn’t tell us the difference between an array, ArrayList, and a HashMap in Java.

They had heard of a HashMap but never used it before.

man what the fuck