Ask HN: How long does it take to hire a good developer? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: How long does it take to hire a good developer?

#21

Post by stevekemp » Wed, Mar 31, 2021, 5:04 AM UTC

There are probably a lot of variables here, for example when I lived in Edinburgh there was a local company that always had job-openings for Perl programmers. I could have applied for it, but never did because their salary was 50% less than anything else local.

Whenever I hear companies struggle with hiring at least a lot of the time the reason is that there are better jobs available in the same city for more money.

Whenever I've been between jobs I've just googled "Sysadmin $location", and tend to find a new position within 2-4 weeks. But if there are five adverts and two of them have low salaries I ignore them.

Re: Ask HN: How long does it take to hire a good developer?

#22

Post by killtimeatwork » Wed, Mar 31, 2021, 10:25 AM UTC

muzani wrote: post #19

killtimeatwork wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why do you need to ask them technical questions when you can ask for their college results? Unfortunately, college results are not the most reliable. A in Algorithms class from a world-class CS university means something very different than the same A from some completely no-name Uni where teaching standards are very low and cheating is widespread and accepted. What's worse, even the people from top uni could be ch…

> what's the point of grades anyway To get a good job :p This argument applies for every other field, but you don't see civil engineers doing interviews past a week, and even with substandard hires, building are built just fine. About 20 years ago, it was also common sense that a CS degree from Caltech means more than a 3 month Rails bootcamp, but now they're all treated the same.

>> what's the point of grades anyway > To get a good job :p

That's the thing - in my country (Poland) nobody looks at grades anyway. The only exceptions are American companies that have offices there. Everybody else cares very much about the kind of University you graduated from (I think they mostly treat it as a proxy for general IQ and work ethic - best Polish schools for CS have admission rate of 7-10%), but don't care about grades.

> About 20 years ago, it was also common sense that a CS degree from Caltech means more than a 3 month Rails bootcamp, but now they're all treated the same.

Maybe because coding just got easier? I have a junior guy on my team that barely comprehends how computers work under the hood. However, he's still quite productive in an advanced/esoteric functional programming language. He just needs a little guidance by a senior to debug some less obvious issues or to review his designs to make sure they're not a performance catastrophe. Meanwhile, 20 years ago he'd just add a ton of segfaults to a C++ codebase and be fired...

Re: Ask HN: How long does it take to hire a good developer?

#23

Post by austincheney » Wed, Mar 31, 2021, 11:41 AM UTC

Good developer is highly subjective and often disappointing. When people say that they typically mean specifically targeted candidate. How long it takes to find that person typically comes down to:

* specificity of targeting

* commonality of targeted skills in the market place

* competition for such candidates

Confusing something good for those factors is half the reason many companies stop reading resumes and make poor hiring decisions. A poor hiring decision is not just someone unqualified but also people who are well qualified yet not what you expect or need.

In my case as a JavaScript developer many companies knowingly ship the same kinds of crappy software over and over because they leverage their hiring risks away from writing software to tooling popular tools/frameworks.

Re: Ask HN: How long does it take to hire a good developer?

#24

Post by dave_sid » Wed, Mar 31, 2021, 11:52 AM UTC

Same as it takes to hire a bad developer.

Re: Ask HN: How long does it take to hire a good developer?

#25

Post by toast0 » Wed, Mar 31, 2021, 10:16 PM UTC

lmarcos wrote: post #7

I'm not sure if this is an "American thing", but in (Western) Europe usually a candidate that holds a degree in engineering or has a couple of years of experience is enough to be considered a competent developer. Sure, there are tech interviews and the like, but in all my years of experience and companies I have worked for, most if not all of the colleagues I have worked with were normal developers (which for 99% of…

I've worked with people who have a degree and a couple years of holding a developer job without actually being able to do software development. It's not pleasant.

When I do a technical interview, I'm mostly looking for basic skills: from a brief description of the problem with example input, ask any questions and describe the output and show what the output would be. Then write code that does what you described; any language is fine as long as it's consistent on the board. My problem is reversable, so if we have time, I ask them to write the code to go the other way.

The problem itself isn't hard, the biggest issue people have is being consistent; even after we spent a good portion of time coming up with an example output, some people do something totally different. Very ocassionally, I get someone who has real trouble with a basic for loop. Sometimes, people are having a bad day and you can tell, which is unfortunate. If they're local, you can try to get them rescheduled, but if they were flown in, that's kind of their one shot for a while.