IMHO this happens because some companies prefer to define seniority based on some specific technical knowledge they deem important (even if it’s completely unrelated to the work) instead of considering the candidate’s soft skills, career experience, and what that person can actually bring to the table. Of course, technical knowledge is important, however, jobs where you have to be super-specialized, are really rare and require a very specific skill-set.
This kinda behavior leads to some very weird biases like, for example:
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Once I got rejected on a job interview in an agency because I didn’t remember how to calculate a password complexity given some constraints… The question was framed along the lines of “how long a machine with a processing capacity of X would take to brute-force a password constructed with a given subset of chars”.
The interesting part is that they were trying to hire someone to maintain some sort of integration they had with WordPress, and the fact that I had (at the time) 6+ years of experience with web development didn’t contribute at all to my case, go figure. The cherry on top was talking to the other candidate afterward and learning that he was actually studying that discipline at college (he was in the second semester or something like that) but he didn’t actually have any experience working in the field.
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Another time I got on the phone with a recruiter that was in deep **** needing a senior developer. I explained that I didn’t have the time to meet with them that day, but they insisted on their urgency. I moved an important appointment that I had and traveled to another city to meet with them for the interview. After an hour-long talk with the CEO, I went to talk to the CTO for another hour where he asked me a lot of technical questions. After that, even though the knew I was on a tight schedule, the CTO wanted me to do some sort of generic knowledge pop quiz he had prepared and after I explained I didn’t have enough time that day to do that, he explained that he couldn’t continue with my interview process because he needed a “holistic view” of my skills.
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On another situation I was called to do an interview where I was the only one that passed all the interview steps but got rejected in the end because I didn’t have any certificates (even with a lot of experience). They had this policy where senior developers had to have an X amount of certificates to be considered “seniors”.
The lesson I take from those experiences is that most of the people hiring are not qualified to hire people. They are not even (most of the time) qualified to deal with people in the first place. On the technical side though, beyond having unreasonable expectations, I’d say these companies don’t want to invest resources in hiring people that are good problem solvers, have decent people skills, or have at least some level of critical thinking… Unless of course, if you manage to prove in some sort of tribalistic rite of passage that you are in fact worthy.
PS.: People in our field need to learn how to be more like humans and less like computers.
