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Ask HN: Having trouble getting senior applicants, wondering what to do about it

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Re: Ask HN: Having trouble getting senior applicants, wondering what to do about it

#511

Post by wizofaus »

marktangotango wrote: post #494
wizofaus wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The thing with 4hr technical assignments is that you're saying no to anyone with kids" Is 4 hours the amount of time the candidate is being given to complete it, or roughly how long the employer expects it will take? In the past I've generally come up with tests I know can be done in an hour or so (2 tops), but allowed 24 hours, exactly because not everyone is going to be in a position they can dedicate those 2 hour…

Take home test as the first step in an interview process is the ultimate evil in this. I've spent hours then got ghosted. I will never do it again. This is a "run like hell" signal imo.

I've heard that before, and if we felt there was a significant risk we were putting off good devs from applying, I'd reverse that decision. But I like to think we made our tests a fun & interesting enough challenge that applicants were happy to spend the time doing them.

Re: Ask HN: Having trouble getting senior applicants, wondering what to do about it

#512

Post by dgoldstein0 »

mdavis6890 wrote: post #434
colordrops wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you value apple equity vs cash? I recently got a decent offer with a total comp higher than my current all cash salary, but rejected it as it seems that equity even in Apple is not a sure bet at the moment. Even with the generous offer that was greater than my current salary that they gave me a few months ago, it would still be worth less than my current job after the recent market dip. I asked for more equ…

Public company stock should be valued near it's current market value, minus a bit to account for volatility. I would think 90-95% is about right.

I think this really depends if you want to come up with it's expected value, or you care about e.g. the p50 or p25 or worse scenarios. Worst case is probably too negative most of the time, but occasionally you might choose to join a company that then implodes or has some really nasty problem surface that tanks the stock value. It really just depends on how risk-averse you want to be as to what metric personally makes the most sense.

Re: Ask HN: Having trouble getting senior applicants, wondering what to do about it

#513

Post by InefficientRed »

s0rce wrote: post #326
jiggawatts wrote: post #314

POST THE SALARY. Senior people are senior because of their work experience, which they gain from steady employment. Almost by definition you are looking to entice busy, employed people away from their current jobs. They don’t have the time or inclination to trawl through job ad after job ad. Where your competition will ask for 15 years of experience and then only after hours of calls and meetings reluctantly make an…

I've tried to advocate for this at my organization and been told that we don't want people primarily motivated by money...

This is one place where growing up in a midwestern megachurch serves me well. Just like my childhood megachurch pastor, I mostly believe in what you pay me to believe. Actual believers are marks.

If my employer said this to me, I'd think: "Wait... am I the mark?"

Re: Ask HN: Having trouble getting senior applicants, wondering what to do about it

#514

Post by lbrito »

jen20 wrote: post #502
lbrito wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we were talking about math theorems, yes. In real world situations like this though it is customary to equate "extremely rare" with "not existent"

How many interviews have you taken to determine that one is an outlier? I haven’t had a “formal” interview in some years now, but of the 5 job interviews I’ve had in the last decade, zero had a take home component and one had leetcode style questions. Since I’m 0 for 5 on take homes, and 1 for 5 on leetcode I can only surmise based on your logic that neither actually exist.

I've taken at least a couple dozen interviews, maybe more. I create trello boards to keep track of them when I do job searches.

Re: Ask HN: Having trouble getting senior applicants, wondering what to do about it

#515

Post by throwaway81523 »

jitix wrote: post #100
AndyNemmity wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lol, take home technical assignment. Why would I ever? I'd much rather have a comfortable conversation with someone who has worked with me in the past. I'm never, ever doing a 4 hour assignment for you.

But isn't the alternative to take home assignment leetcoding on whiteboards? Last time I was interviewing in the US market was in 2017 and it was literally just these two options. And the assignments tended to be long - like a week long. (tbh there were a few companies that pre-offered and just wanted one general discussion round with the team but they felt shady and desperate, and one was a literal consultancy) Coul…

I'm "senior" at least in the sense of having been around long enough to be called an old fart. My last two iterations involved:

1) a 2 hour conversation with one of the founders, followed by a 2 week tryout (paid consulting), followed by a job offer that I accepted. This was through a HN Who Is Hiring post.

2) a round of multi-hour onsite interviews involving white boards, live coding, pairing, etc., but no take-homes. This was through Triplebyte, which organized everything.

There were a couple of other discussions involving take-homes (one of them in good faith on the company's part, the other a little more doubtful) and those two experiences convinced me to not do them any more.

I guess I could imagine a take-home project if it was (through discussion) something that interested me and that I thought would be useful and I could keep the code afterwards, to re-use for other purposes.

Re: Ask HN: Having trouble getting senior applicants, wondering what to do about it

#517

Post by 10x-dev »

InefficientRed wrote: post #507

The key question is WHERE in the process you lose applicants. Do you lose candidates at the 4h assignment stage? If so, that is probably the issue. Otherwise, look elsewhere. 1. Title inflation. Many here are making glib comments about "not actually senior". Great! Call it a "Principal" role and see if that helps. You can always promote any existing Principals to Senior Principal or Staff or God or whatever the new b…

500K is total comp right?

Re: Ask HN: Having trouble getting senior applicants, wondering what to do about it

#518

Post by gwbas1c »

I recently posted this on my blog about why it's so hard to get an experience software engineer to respond to a recruiter: https://andrewrondeau.herokuapp.com/why_software_engineers_d...

But there are a few things that I didn't put in that article:

In my case, with 20 years experience, it's critical that I am not hired as a possession, or a trophy member of a team. It always works out poorly when someone pulls me onto a team because of my pedigree but tries to manage me like a junior developer, or someone who needs a lot of hand holding.

What's critical is that I will have a high degree of control in my job. This ranges from control of my day-to-day workflow, control of my development environment, and control of the architecture of the thing I am working on. I also seek to have some amount of control over the work of more junior developers.

Without that kind of control coming in the door, I really won't bother applying, because every time I've started a new job with an existing team, I've always had to fight to clean up messes. These messes will usually make a project fail, yet for various reasons management needs a lot of convincing to fix the messes.

Re: Ask HN: Having trouble getting senior applicants, wondering what to do about it

#519

Post by lmm »

peter422 wrote: post #497
pclmulqdq wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody would give you preferred stock, which is why you need to demand an absolutely absurd premium on the amount of common stock that they offer. Also, it generally doesn't need a new class of shares, just a vote by the board. Edit: Just to clarify, if you want to hire a mercenary, you can't do it expecting that they will take the same value of your stock that your true believer investors took without any of the gua…

This just doesn’t make sense though. A company is going to have some standard bands of compensation, and if you demand something way outside of the bands based on your own feelings of stock value, they aren’t going to hire you no matter how great you are. Part of the reason companies can give generous stock grants are precisely because they are the lowest tier of stock. This also is a stupid thing to bargain: if the…

> A company is going to have some standard bands of compensation, and if you demand something way outside of the bands...

If you're joining early enough to get enough equity to matter, you're early enough that they don't have standard bands. You can absolutely negotiate.

> if the company keeps growing, preferred and common will be worth the exact same thing.

Only if it ends in an IPO. An acquisition, even a "successful" one, can easily end up with the preferences kicking in.

Re: Ask HN: Having trouble getting senior applicants, wondering what to do about it

#520

Post by moneywoes »

usrn wrote: post #424
pjungwir wrote: post #211

Post the salary range. From what I can tell DevOps is the hardest thing to hire for right now, and it commands the highest salaries. It's tough to find someone who can code and troubleshoot code problems, but also has all the skills of a sys/net/cloud/k8s admin, and is willing to put up with the higher stress of that role. Most qualified people have already done their best to get a job they're happy with. Personally…

This. I think I'm still technically in the "junior" category (coming up on four years of experience not counting internships) but I'm pretty much financially independent at this point. I only really stay employed for luxuries, funding for side projects, and the very good health insurance (and the whole "having responsibilities orders your life" thing but I know well how easy coasting is.) I have to imagine senior SWE…

How did you make so much that quickly?
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