That sounds like a situation that a lot of developers find themselves in. Do you have any recommendations for people in similar situations?
How did you end up getting your next job?
I was in that situation once and the main reason that I was able to make the next move was because I was working on a side project which gave me the experience.
We are an on-line product distribution platform that helps connect on-line retailers to more consumers. We help our clients get a better return on investment with their chosen channels and increase profitability.
We have always been profitable and grown organically over the last 5 years. Recently we closed a series A investment round which is enabling us to ramp up growth. So this is a very exciting time to join the team as we grow and build out the product.
I understand and can relate to your situation. I also dislike the gotcha algorithmic questions.
However, I strongly believe that there should be some form of technical element to the interview process. I have participated in a few interview processes where a task was given to do in my own time which related to the job. These were no more than a couple of hours and were very simple tasks. I find this type of technical test much better than the algorithmic ones. Examples of ones I know about; scraping a website for specific values, creating a basic web proxy, rendering data into a chart on a webpage, programmatically mapping out points on google maps.
I am currently recruiting for .NET developers and I get everyone to code up a task that relates to the job. There are no gotchas or edge cases, it is just a very simplified version of something that they will have to deal with in the job.
I find this extremely useful as quick feed back into the style/competency of the candidate and you can quite easily see where they are coming from. I also use the result of the task as a discussion point during the on site interview process. Having a concrete example to discuss has proven very useful as it leaves no room for ambiguities or misinterpretation. I personally would be very hesitant to join a company that had no step involving anything technical.
Regarding your "you-will-be-fired-after-three-months-for-failure-to-perform", it is standard over here in the UK that you go through a probation period. This can be anything from 3 months to 6 months and during that time either party can end the employment with a shorter notice period. I am not sure where you are based but at least in the UK you will find companies doing exactly what you are describing.
2x .NET C# full stack developers.
1x API integration developer.
We are an on-line product distribution platform that helps connect on-line retailers to more consumers. We help our clients get a better return on investment with their chosen channels and increase profitability.
We have recently closed our first round of funding and want to use that to help us grow quicker than we have been doing organically over the last 5 years. We have always been profitable and have a proven revenue model, so this funding is purely to help us expand at a faster pace.
We are hiring for a multitude of roles but I am specificity looking here for a couple of .NET C# developers who have experience with ASP.MVC and are very comfortable spending a lot of time in JavaScript.
My current company does this also. The team is slightly smaller with 6 but we are in the process of taking on a couple more developers and the peer review process will still remain. The CTO like yourself reviews all code commits as a final sign off once the change has been through a more thorough peer review. So it is possible to do 100% peer reviews.
Your point 10 highlights exactly how I feel about it.
I would love to know where you have seen juniors get £45k. From the developers and companies I know in London this is very much not the case. As other people have mentioned, 18-30K would be more "normal".
