I've been looking for jobs recently. Have a background building pretty robust Node/React apps. At the 4 places that have given me an interview. I've been told that I don't meet their needs. The reason for this. I'm unable to solve their pet coder wars function challenge. Being a self taught programmer, not having a 'learned' background has proven to be a hindrance. Because I don't have the traditional algorithmic chops. In the time I've been working as a programmer I've had the need to use recursion one maybe two times. 3 of the 4 interviews have required me to over use recursion because iteration is to 'easy'.
Apparently my ability to answer some random function that in no way shows my ability to do day to day engineering work disqualifies me from employment. Yet these same companies are posting month in and month out looking for engineers and complaining that they are unable to find viable employees.
I'm in a similar boat -- my educational background is hardware engineering, but, I've been a Linux nerd/SRE for the last 20 years. I found a great position that would be perfectly in line with what I'm doing now -- specifically managing teams of SRE's for a startup in NYC that would allow me to work remotely, but, during their "technical" interview, I was asked to "humanize" a number using any language that I chose.
Knowing that ruby has a humanize gem (and python's humanize module doesn't get as granular as they wanted their example to be), I mentioned this to the interviewer, saying, "Hey -- why would I want my development team to spend an hour re-inventing the wheel when it can already be done with a code import?" -- while showing him the gem, and providing a sample code.
Suffice to say, he wasn't interested in that, he wanted to see how I'd implement something like that...
...so, I provided my code...which was as clunky as it could be in 30 minutes -- and then was almost certain that I lost this specific position because I didn't interpret my numbers from right to left vs left to right.
Seriously -- if you've booked a hotel room in the US, there's a 50% chance you've booked it on infrastructure that I've designed and implemented from the ground up. I've led teams of 20+ SRE's around the world in a 40 billion dollar company. My references speak for themselves. The reality is that they're going to still be looking for a SRE manager position in three months, and I won't be looking anymore because I would have found something that I'm interested in (and isn't me doing a containerization of a Windows-based ERP system in 96 hours).
On the other hand, imagine if you asked a programmer to write some novel code and they said "sorry, I can't. There was no Ruby gem or SO answer for this so I don't know how"
I agree. But these tests do nothing to validate that I can be a useful programmer on a team. Nothing about those types of questions prove that I’m unable to build a viable web app. I’m not applying to be a embedded programmer just continuing to do what I’ve done for years.
It sounds as though you have some basis of where you need to improve, I would continue to look for jobs but also try to improve in those areas (recursion and algorithms).
I spent the last year looking for jobs and it's definitely a weird market right now. I got offered a position that another company told me I lacked the relevant experience for.
You would be surprised by how a company may value your talents. It seems like the companies you've interviewed for don't require the talents that you have which is a good indicator that you probably would not want to work for those companies.
Keep looking for the company that values your talents and shares your values, but make sure to learn more in the areas that you have identified as needing improvement.
You may want to try applying for roles as a system development engineer. You still write a lot of code, but the role is less focused on algorithmic stuff. You should ensure during the interview you acquire a deep understanding of what the company expects you to do, and express to them what you'd like to do. IMO the sysdev role varies too far between permanent oncall and software developer, so you'd want to make sure you are embedded into the software side.
Apparently my ability to answer some random function that in no way shows my ability to do day to day engineering work disqualifies me from employment. Yet these same companies are posting month in and month out looking for engineers and complaining that they are unable to find viable employees.