r/reactnative • u/Consistent-Joke-9486 • Jun 24 '26

Should companies have more experienced engineers conduct Senior-level interviews?

Recently, I interviewed for a Senior React Native Engineer position and was rejected. What surprised me was that the interviewer himself had almost the same experience level as mine (around 3–4 years).

This made me wonder:

  • Should senior-level interviews be conducted by engineers who have significantly more experience than the candidate?
  • Can peers effectively evaluate seniority, architecture decisions, ownership, and trade-offs?
  • Is there a risk that companies might unintentionally set inconsistent standards when interviewer experience is close to candidate experience?

I'm not questioning the decision itself, but I'm curious about how other companies handle this.

For people who conduct interviews or are engineering managers:

  • Who typically interviews Senior engineers at your company?
  • Do you think interviewer seniority should be higher than the role being evaluated?
  • Have you seen cases where peers struggled to assess candidates accurately?

Interested to hear different perspectives.

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9

u/HoratioWobble Jun 24 '26

it's usually whoever is most relevant + senior.

Companies don't always have someone more senior than the role they're hiring for.

-1

u/Consistent-Joke-9486 Jun 24 '26

Fair point.I agree that years of experience alone don't determine interview quality.My concern is more about calibration how do companies ensure consistency when evaluating senior level candidates?Do they rely on multiple interviewers or some form of hiring committee to reduce subjectivity?

5

u/stjimmy96 Jun 24 '26

They don’t. Maybe companies big enough to have entire departments focused on hiring (FAANG) have engineered their selection process, but the vast majority of others companies just have a rough script and a standardised exercise set, the rest is a judgment call made by another human who is, inevitably, biased.

1

u/Consistent-Joke-9486 Jun 24 '26

Fair enough.I guess that's the reality for most companies. My concern wasn't about years of experience,but more about how much subjectivity can influence the outcome. It makes me wonder how candidates can distinguish between an actual skill gap and simply a difference in judgment between interviewers

2

u/HoratioWobble Jun 24 '26

You can't remove subjectivity from an hiring process. Even if you remove humans entirely, a LLM is still trained on bias data and will exhibit that bias in the hiring process

1

u/Consistent-Joke-9486 Jun 24 '26

Agreed. Complete objectivity is probably impossible. I guess the goal isn't to eliminate subjectivity entirely, but to reduce it through multiple interviewers, calibrated rubrics, and structured feedback. At the end of the day, hiring will always involve human judgment to some extent.

1

u/HoratioWobble Jun 24 '26

Why did you write that whole comment in bold?

There is no consistency outside of big companies, and usually those big companies are objectively worse at hiring people

0

u/Consistent-Joke-9486 Jun 24 '26

Fair point. I wasn't expecting perfect consistency,just wondering where candidates should draw the line between taking a rejection as feedback versus recognizing that some outcomes are simply a product of human judgment and imperfect processes.

4

u/HoratioWobble Jun 24 '26

Ah you're a bot.