Improve The Developer Hiring Process 

Remember, this is just my own opinion from my own experiences. If you disagree, that is absolutely fine. I think with the current methods that a lot of big companies use, many great developers that have a ton of potential are passed over. I don't plan on interviewing any time soon, but I would like to try and change anything that I can for others. Thanks for watching!

I'm a DevOps Engineer and I do interviews for every developer we hire at my company. Obviously interviewing a junior vs senior position goes a little bit differently, but here's a gist of the angles I try to hit when interviewing. I rarely ask any type of "given this scenario, how do you solve it?" or anything like that. In mid or senior level roles I tend to try and craft questions based on the applicant's resume. If I see something like "created deployment pipeline with GitHub actions" I will try and craft a question based on that, or if I can't build a question, I'll simply ask them for some insight on some challenges they faced with it and let them just talk about it. I've found that people talking through challenges they've faced already can give a really good indicator of their ability to work through a problem and be able to do the research needed. The interview for a Junior developer I've really approached as if they have no technical knowledge(and have even hired people who had literally 0 concept of programming knowledge or anything). I try to make those more of a conversation than an interview, and try to gauge their interest in learning more and finding their soft skills. In these I'm really looking for someone who I think can manage self-learning with direction and input from senior devs or a mentor. I think this differs from a lot of other companies in the industry and definitely isn't the norm, but so far, at least for my company. It has largely produced at least what I would consider incredible results. We've hired juniors that we thought had really great soft skills and the ability to learn, and in pretty much every case they've very quickly(within 6 months or less) become a really valuable contributor, maybe we just got lucky, but I'd like to think we just effectively found people who would've otherwise been skipped over. I'm a big fan of hiring juniors and helping to grow their skillset, but unfortunately, across the industry, and even at my company, there seems to be a really strong desire to bring in senior level positions. I think at my company we do a good job of not mis-representing what a junior level position is, but I definitely see a lot of stuff labeled "Junior" that is just miles beyond what I'd expect a junior position to be able to do.

After my first coding interview I was so devastated and stressed out and thought to myself I'd know nothing. Turns out it's the shitty hiring process, that put people on the spot with unreasonable challenges and not my actual skills! Spot on video again, Brad.

You're an inspiration to many, including myself. You have helped far more people than you can even imagine. Thank you.

I have been a self taught programmer and usually scared to apply for nay dev jobs. So, i have been building my own projects and trying to monetise them and am hoping to start hiring other devs soon to help with the workload. And I will use the advice given in this video. Thanks

I'm so glad you've brought this up. I'm still trying to get my 1st dev position and the hiring process is brutal. Along with imposter syndrome, I have long had test anxiety and it has made it incredibly difficult to get through the technical testing portion. Once the execution style interview is over, I'm able to solve the problem usually without issue bc I've relaxed. This testing doesn't always provide you a clear view of the candidate in front of you, no more than standardized testing tells you how smart a child is or isn't.

I graduated from bachelor’s in CS which was heavy into JAVA and OOP. I was naive enough to apply for interviews in web development since I made small projects while I was in college. The first interview was a disaster and the second went “fine” but no follow up whatsoever. Have spent over a year doing courses and practicing the projects on my own from scratch. Your React course was very helpful since I like your teaching approach of learning by doing. Currently working as IT but my focus is to become a developer. Hopefully I’ll be ready to apply in the near future.

I have a background in humanities and had been working as a theater directing assistant, when I lost my job due to the pandemic. I started teaching myself programming in the age of 30, became really obsessed with it and found a job as Junior Dev last summer. I just got my promotion this month; leading a small team now with responsibility for new employees, the interviewing process etc. and I couldn't agree more with the points you make about the hiring process! Thank you for everything and all the best! 🙏

This video is basically the exact complaint I've had about interviewing for the last 5-10 years. It's gotten harder and harder to get hired for the same job title due to the interview process becoming so irrelevant. It's this issue that has prevented me from even attempting to interview at some bigger companies that have expressed interest in me, as I knew what their interview process entailed. I don't have a CS degree, but I've been doing web dev for 24 years and it would be great if interviewers would try to validate my skills and experience and not whether or not I can solve some hypothetical, brain-busting problem that would normally take a full day of analysis in just 2 minutes, with no mistakes.

100% agree. I started as a bookkeeper, and now we are creating and selling our software. "Working" means "learning", always... those who stopped will fail

Hey Brad, I took your ReactJS course last December. I learnt a lot from it.Now I got front end job at a startup. I want to thank you at this moment of happiness. Thank you Brad❤️.

You're 100% spot on. Thank you for trying to spread awareness on this issue.

Once again, you have hit the nail on the head. I love it! You manage to outline a problem I'm facing right now and you've even come up with a solution. I hope this reaches more hiring agencies and recruiters. Thanks again for the great content!

Brad spitting facts as always. Totally agreed. Myself going through this phase currently can totally relate and would like to give a heads up for the proposal definitely. Hope the big companies pay heed towards the actual skills rather than some random algorithm solving by cramming.

Hi Brad, Thank you for the video. It is so true regarding the technical interviews. I am a Front-End Dev, with +2years of experience and I had some ridiculous interviews along the way. For example one of the interviews, online video chat, that I had, they were actually looking at my eyes and insisting in a rude way, to not change my point of view... I told them that I have 2 monitors and I'm looking on MDN for a refresh...I mean wth, I can't memorize all of the JS methods and stuff. SO yeah... 100% on spot this video of what kind of people are out there. If you don't feel comfortable during the interview, my suggestion is to stay away from that company, because probably the bosses are toxic and so on. Stay safe and keep your head up!

This is actually how I got hired, they interviewed me like your proposal, asked me to open a portfolio project, wanted me to explain it and lastly asked real life scenarios that can be solved by css flex box and absolute positioning to achieve some specific result. I got 9 rejections that includes problem solving and live coding etc, I suck at those.

I truly support your opinion Brad, not only because I'm currently being affected by the situation but also doesn't make sense to entry level hiring. Trust me, years back, I was thinking that I have to know all the technologies in my head before I'll be able to build a website or app but from what I've seen over the years from your lecturers, guidance and courses that teach developers how to be developers it's never that way. Just as you mentioned in this video, everything is in documentations, stackoverflow and tutorials. All these hard computer science coding challenges makes no sense to me. I'm not trying to brag here, but I'm very good at designing frontend applications and I always and consistently have the passion for building apps and working with a great team. What if I'm not coming from a computer science degree course but happened to love and learn web development and can do great?. I believe entry developers should be given the opportunity to to have the job by building projects with minimal requirements related to the job as a take home project and can very well defend that project in a presentation - everything relating to how he/she did the work. Take the hard coding challenges out of the process. To me I don't think it's the best way to know if someone is a better developer. Thanks Brad for bringing this up and I hope employers can take a thought about this. 🙏

I am glad to know that someone shares my views . thanks for taking the time to do this.

I watched the whole video. I have to say that I feel kind of relieved now cause I also looked through these same job hiring annoucements and it was really overwhelming and I felt discouraged. Thanks a bunch!

You nailed it! Finally someone with the authority to expose this ridiculous problem. 👏👏👏

Very valuable content. You hit the target on everything you said. Brad, you are the best of the best! 💯👌😊

We need more videos like this and less videos like “how I passed the google interview by memorizing algorithm questions” I could rant on this for days ….. I’ve been a dev since 2005. I’ve been on the hiring side and the interviewee side and I’ve noticed over the past few years more and more interview processes are becoming like a parody RU-vid day in the life of or how to crack the interview. Last December was hiring for a role on my team and I was only half involved because I had other things I needed to do. My choice was for this person who was not the most savvy, but seemed eager and was a good communicator. The rest of the team went with the “smartest and most talented” who could step in right away and contribute. Sometimes that works and its fine, but this person we are not in the process of trying to move them and/or let them go. Why? Because they can’t do anything without hand holding and take no initiative whatsoever. There is so much more to hiring than if someone can go to algo expert and run through the questions. Especially since the majority of the time you are not in anyway shape or form solving issues like that. Its more likely that you as a web developer could be spending days interfacing with a delivery team over why builds in your open shift pipeline randomly start failing or some things like that. And problems like that take communication and motivation to resolve them If you want to get technical, I have come around to this solution. have a predefined app that has a few obvious bugs. Let them work on it at home given like 24 - 48 hours or something like that. See if they can fix the bugs, maybe write a test, refactor a function etc. aka....doing what they will be doing everyday.

I love your content so much been a 6 month grind for me... html -> css -> javascript -> Ajax/Async -> fetch api and on from there! really looking for a career change in time. Thanks Traversy!

I got my first official Job in tech through an assessment, I had messed up so many interviews previously because of anxiety and imposter syndrome. The company sent back an assessment and a deadline and I was able to complete and impressed the recruiters with my solution. The hiring process needs to improved.

Thank you Brad. Been following your videos from Nigeria since the lockdown you have been of great help to me

Man! This is so good to hear bro. I feel like I'm useless and probably will never land a job as a web developer. I turning 30 this year and haven't worked and have yet to work on the field. These job postings are ridiculous, they want you to learn 10 languages and be fluently in all of them. I'm happy you understand us developers, because you're a developer yourself. Right now I am working on personal projects and trying to do freelance, developing websites for small business around my neighborhood. Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts on this, I thought I was alone thinking that these requirements were reasonable, but it turns out most of them are not. Thann you so much bro, you have lifted me up, and encouraged me to keep coding and not give up.

I work for a large company as a Senior Engineer. The company was having issues hiring good developers. So I talked management into opening the process up to all the Engineers on the train to improve. The team came up with a bunch of technical interviews involving tasks similar, but smaller in scope, to what a developer on our train would be asked to do. The questions could include creating new frontend components, solving a defect, using restful services or updating an existing service. One that I like in particular is where we give the prospect a link to api documentation for Node services we made specifically for interviews. They are asked to use a specific frontend framework, usually Angular, as well as the provided services to meet a given acceptance criteria. We encourage the prospect to ask the developer assigned to the interview any questions at anytime. They are allowed to use google if they forget syntax or some algorithm. Once completed they are asked to explain the decisions they made, problems they encountered and possible ways to improve their solution. We have hired amazing developers since implementing these.

I’m going through this right now, and it’s ridiculous! Well said! And thank you. 🙏

Since I started working, again for the Web development industry, I didn't visit much your channel. But I always come back. And not by coincidence, I find this video. They are paying me as a junior when I'm doing SSR stuff. I don',t receive much help from my two co-workers, because "it's easy, come on". I don't give up and keep learning and working, for me and for all the people who tried and sadly gave up. Thank you again, Brad

Brad, thank you so much for coming forward and saying this! This is exactly how the management team that I now work alongside went about bringing me onboard to their small startup, without a degree or previous work experience, solely based on evaluating me as an individual... someone who never had a chance in the industry beforehand because of the limitations of not having work experience or a college degree to be considered to gain that work experience. I now work as a project manager and junior dev on a team of about 6 active team members with around 30 active clients and continue to grow as each month passes. I have been an active part of this team for a year next month and can truly say that I believe I have finally found my career all thanks to others who thought exactly how you do about what a developer needs to succeed. Its not even a joke one of the traits we look for in a developer is the ability to google. Anyway, we internally have opted to move away from how the industry looks at requirements for developers. We often talk about how far removed our dev hiring process is compared to our competitors and how development agencies' hiring processes don't even remotely evaluate a dev's job readiness. To be completely honest, we kind of thought we were on our own little island in this way of thinking but, I will say that I am happy to know that we are in good company alongside you. Let's hope that this way of evaluating developers catches on more and more so that the people who have the passion, ability and drive to do the job correctly are hired into the positions that they deserve. Again, thank you for using your platform to spread awareness about this.

I love this approach to the hiring process. You are the best coach I know and I learn a lot from you. I wish you the best. please create more videos such as this and share your experience and give us advice.❤️❤️🙏

I hope some companies learn something form this video, good job Brad! :)

You always give me hope !! Thank you

i totally agree with you. its getting harder by the day for junior devs to find jobs. from the ridiculous job requirements to the recruitment process.

My man woke up and decided to spit truth! I often struggle on the spot, great video!

In my experience the theoretical knowledge requirement and expectations are usually ridiculously high. They often expect you to know quite a lot of things and to be ready to answer any kind of question. Also I struggle to code when I am being watched. I start losing my focus and get anxious especially when they start asking or giving me increasingly more difficult questions or tasks. I agree with the topics in the video. The interview process needs to change because it can be very difficult to get a job especially as junior developer.

You really touch a good point. I totally agree with you.

Your contribution to the web dev community is invaluable, because you are kind, but honest!

You are totally right, I think the hiring process for developers should be completely changed as soon as possible. Thanks king, for another great video!

You are an amazing teacher sir ..... we really appreciate you..... and we can't disagree to your opinion because i have never seen a great teacher like you in my life as i am 20 now .....

Information is free. Been able to search and utilize it effectively is the real deal. I agree with you 100%

Another big issue is it has become common for companies to just ghost people. I've had a few companies not even respond to say "Sorry, you didn't get the job" after you've spent time going through sometimes multiple steps of interviewing. I thought it was just maybe my luck, but I've heard multiple others say the same thing. Now those are companies you probably wouldn't want to work for, but it's insane that someone in a professional setting would operate like that in such an inconsiderate manner. I wasn't crushed to not get those jobs but it would have been downright cruel to just be ghosted for a job I really wanted.

One of my answers for learning modern web development was Traversy Media and I got the job in spite of it . LOVE YOU BRAD! still learning from you!

I wanted to express my gratitude for your view on this topic. I am in IT since 2004 and can be considered self-taught, since my master degree is in the field of telecommunications. Over the years process of hiring become really inadequate to say the least. Like it become an industry of itself for reasons I can not truly comprehend. In all those years in this industry, I almost never have to write any code even far-related to those taught by "specialized" books/sites. I am with you on this. Best regards

Hey Brad, I'm a huge fan, totally self taught for about 10 months now, I have a really nice portfolio and did a bunch of original projects, I've applied to like 40 jobs, only like 10 of my applications were even looked at and basically all of those were rejected right away.

99 % true, as you said, most of the interviews happening like this way. it should really improve this way. also you can post it on linkedin and some social sites where companies hiring.

Thank you for this. I've "made it" at this point, in no small part from your encouragement, for which I'm eternally grateful. However, I faced enormous obstacles in landing that first true developer role, in large part do to the reasons you list here.

It was very inspiring and I'm totally agree with you, thanks Brad

THIS is the video that everyone should need to know and face. The developer tech hiring process is horrible and broken. It seems like all companies want to be FAANG/MAANG companies with their interviews. You do NOT need to do that for Entry level, Junior, or Associates positions for new devs with 0 years experience straight out of college. No one gives anyone a chance anymore and everyone is expected to know everything and have it mastered. That is just plain unreasonable. The WHOLE tech hiring industry NEEDS to change. So many great hardworking developers never get a chance and get hired because they fail the technical interviews.

Sir the things which you have just said in this video are very great and I am agree with your thoughts..

Hey Brad, I agree with your assessment. I came across an article that advocates for live projects. So you create maybe a 1.5hr block for the interview, where you ask them to bring you up to speed with their favorite project. You, the interviewer, get a chance to see how they handle complexity, how consistent their coding patterns are, and the quality of their real-world solutions. Then, when you’ve got a good sense of their implied ability, offer up a new feature that you want them to integrate into their project, and give them full freedom to look things up and do whatever they have to do to implement said feature. It’s not about completing it, but rather about seeing the quality of the candidate. Over time, you can tell if someone knows what they’re doing or not. Then if they do well, you either hire them, or continue to another interview (say you need a bigger filter because you have a large number of candidates or something). The thing with being a software developer is that you won’t make progress because you know how to implement a binary search or something. You’ll get ahead because you can manage complexity with real-world projects and deliver on time, on cost, and on performance. Anyone can memorize an algorithm or data structure. Not everyone can build a feature from scratch in real-time. We should be surfacing candidates that do this well.

This video is on the point. This is same complain I have about the current interview model.

Thanks alot for this productive video Brad, this is the biggest problem in my life that I'm struggling with. i'ts about 3 months that I'm looking for job and they ask for too much required for junior developer.

thank you Brad for clarifying these issues 🙏

I absolutely agree! I have 10+ years of experience creating distributed systems, and companies still ask me random leetcode algo questions to get the job! dude my whole experience and skills are totally different! and it keeps getting more insane and irrelevant!

I'm really grateful that you did this. It's ridiculous already how there are so many tests involved that are not coding related, from so many IQ tests, abstract reasoning tests, etc before asking data structures and algorithms questions, and then having applicants code on a whiteboard, on top of asking trick questions to humiliate the junior developer and even asking if they can work for free for months to be trained, and even being asked to know what's more in the domain of a more senior developer, not a junior's level, only because they know many inexperienced developers would take any opportunity to get a job. I am in another profession and code only as a hobby, but I've seen this too much in companies I've worked at. It's even worse in many developing countries where they're not paid properly and are mislabeled as IT people. Reaching out to hundreds of employers to get one interview is not easy. The position is certainly broken. And it may not be fixed anytime soon. Good luck to aspiring developers.

A lot of companies do not want to hire a Junior dev. I always ask myself this question: if The companies do not hire them how can they have an experience? I'm totally agree with you.

this was very good Brad, thank you

This man speaking facts. I'm currently job hunting and the job posts I've seen so far have so many unrealistic requirements like you need to have over 5 year exp for a entry level posotion, like how am I supposed to have 5+ years exp if I just finished school

Love it great afvice for companies, Thanks Brad

It is as if watching my own thoughts being said aloud. 100% agree. In my country no one wants to speak to if you don't have a degree and will be treated as a subhuman.

THANK YOU for this video. You hit every ludicrous nail in the industry on the head. Any in-house recruiters, hiring managers or dev team interviewers watching this? I sure hope so. 😂

Bless you Brad. I totally agree with you.

This is great! Well stated. Thanks!

Great pointers, gives me a whole new perspective on future interviews. (Completed “2022 web-dev” on Udemy. And about complete “50 projects in 50 days” Thank you Brad.

As usual, you are an amazing mentor 🙂

I recently found my first job as a self-taught developer, and in my experience a lot of companies are actually moving towards the kind of process that you’re suggesting here. There was a lot of talking about my background and projects, some walking people through stuff I’ve built, and some take homes that felt fairly relevant to the job. There was also the recruiter that hung up on me when she found out that freeCodeCamp isn’t a “real” bootcamp, but I guess some companies are still stuck in the past. (I'm in Europe, so I can't comment on the American market)

I've just finished a Laravel boot camp and I'm on fire 🔥 right now but whenever I read a job description or a freelancing project requirements I snap back to reality. The journey has just begun 😊

This is really amazing 🙌 Companies should learn from this. His explanation is basically simple: Give the candidate a take home project to work on for N days. When the candidate submits the project, tell him or her to explain everything they did on the project and why they did that, also ask the candidate to explain the challenges they faced on the project and how they approached solving the challenges. I mean you can tell a lot about a persons skillset, abilities and approach to real world problems by discussing about the project you gave them.

Great video Brad. I agree with alot the points you've made. I graduated with a bachelors in CS and I've been struggling for years to find a position. I start making projects and code but get discouraged because I look at job listings and they have this laundry list of requirements and skills that anyone who hasn't worked in a professional environment may not have come across. Its really annoying lol. The amount of stuff a junior level developer would have to learn to get any of those jobs, they might as well be senior developers by the time they eventually learn all that stuff to get that dumb job posting. Its also really difficult to find motivation because you feel like you are getting the hang of something but then you look at all these postings requirements and you feel like pursuing this field isn't for you. trying to learn all those skills is really discouraging for a single person. You could try to get a group of people but that can be volatile as well.

My girlfriend and I are both devs and we just had this discussion. I was asked to build a full stack app within 10 days for a company with a DB and shopping cart from a mock up. Brad, this app took me all weekend and I didn’t even finish the CSS mock-up. I promised her and myself I will not be doing anything like that again. If it’s not a simple whiteboard algorithm, I’m good.

Agreed 1000%, I really wish to work for someone like you bro.

Awesome as always.

You are a great mentor and thanks for sharing your insights which is a fact actually

Thank you for this!

Continental employee here. They use the exact process you described to hire me in Hungary. And it's a pretty large company. I think this problem is mostly relevant in the United States.

Alway Like this guy. He has got too much sense. Thanks for reading my mind

Thanks for that! Hope some companies will listen...

Finally someone is talking about it. I am a fresh graduate and i have been going through a lot of these job listings and even for the entry level job they require 2+ years of experience and also want us to know everthing. I have even gone through some internship applications and even they wanted 1 year of experience. It's like a cycle like i need a job to get experience but the job requires me to have experience already.

I fully agree and feel exactly the same in these situations

I completely agree with companies not testing our research ability because being put on the spot for coding challenges and making a simple syntax error can really throw people off. That was my toughest obstacle as a self-taught developer and it took me almost 2 years to finally overcome those coding challenges.

I know I can handle the junior front-end (or full-stack) developer role, but I wasn't invited for videocall interview even once for my 3 months of searching a job... Videos like this always give me hope and keep me going, even if I feel down and wanna to give up. Thanks for videos like this.

Thank you, Im applying for web/graphic designer and front end positions and a great deal of the postings are unreasonable. And I have a compsci bachelors degree, and its like it doesnt exist when I apply

Hey Brad ,am huge fan. In your mern series the return dispatch(reset) causes an infinite loop in the useEffect when the server returns an error. you can check this by intentionally returning an error in the backend getGoals. I hope you see this one.

Oh yeah just what i needed thanks brad

I totally agree about every words you said

I totally agree, brad. The current hiring process promotes algorithms memorization over real world skills. I actually find this a great waste of my “learning time” and energy that could be used for something more useful like mastering a framework or complex applications.

Amazing video 🙏

The same is true in tech jobs in general. I have repeated just about every word for decades about job descriptions in the tech industry. They are written to push away the passionate about learning tech person and only hire the paper tech who might be someone they can control instead of someone who can do the actual job itself. Loving to learn anything in tech is a natural feeling that is necessary to have in order to succeed into the future because of how the whole landscape continually is evolving very quickly.

Great, I strongly agree with you..

Totally agree, well said.

Your voice is so radio man... love it..

Dropping some fire 🔥🔥🔥🔥

Great video! I agree, the hiring process could be greatly improved. However, to do so, companies would need to start investing more resources into the hiring process. As you mention, this would actually lead to better outcomes for the company (better hires), but many companies just aren't that enlightened (unfortunately). Another pet peeve of mine is the first interview a HR person, who is clueless about the technologies. And they focus on the frameworks you know rather than the more important issue of the candidate's understanding of JavaScript. As you advocated in another video, I think developers frustrated in the hiring process should start thinking of themselves as an independent developer and starting projects independent of their main job (if they have one).

So much truth you speaking

Hey Brad, really enjoyed your video! I recently landed my first dev job but it has been a very frustrating journey. Although I completely agree with your point of view, if you look at it from a company perspective, how can they assess every single take home task they give to candidates? It would require a lot of man power I think.

I am currently hiring interns mostly CS undergrads. I generally ask them basic questions from the courses they have taken. For non CS, I ask questions on the stack they used. If they don’t know anything then I give them some time to Google and find the answer. I look carefully when they are googling answers as it helps evaluate how much help they would need during job if hired.

This year, I started handling phone screens for a more devOps-y role. Its been a great learning experience. It’s hard to figure if someone is a great fit in a short period of time

Thanks brad👍

Totally agree with this. It’s been quite awhile now so things may be different but when I had interviews at Microsoft they were so stressful I would be physically ill for days after. The interviewers had huge egos and took great pleasure in making the interview almost impossible to pass. I loved working there but decided I would not go through that process anymore.