Definitely shows their expertise in the space. Strongly agree with all of this, one of the most important things for me as a candidate is to feel appreciated as a person, not just "headcount". Being thoughtful and considerate is a very rare thing in a hiring process.
Convincing engineers to join your team
11–20 of 165 posts
Re: Convincing engineers to join your team
#12During the recruiting process, I expect a company to be putting its best foot forward. If things seem disorganized at that stage, then I assume that day-to-day operations at the company are even more disorganized. Additionally, it always makes a big difference to me if people high up in the organization (even if they aren't technical) are involved in the interview process. If a founder or C-level employee spends some…
Honestly, the interview process is no guarantee of anything behind door number one. I've learned that the hard way.
If a company is putting their best foot forward, and they've contrived an act, but can't back it up? What then?
There's no accounting for willful deception, and sometimes you are straight lied to.
Re: Convincing engineers to join your team
#13Hear that everyone? "As a startup it's hard to compete with Facebook and Google compensation packages, especially for senior engineers" Also, Oracle apparently had a lot of success building out their bare metal (now cloud infrastructure) team by making uncharacteristically (for them) good offers. You can hire good people, if you're willing to pay them. Bullshit doesn't work anymore.
Yeah, I don’t understand why pay is so depressed. Often times, junior engineers get paid like 60-120k.
I would say senior engineers usually output double, if not more, than a junior engineer. Why doesn’t pay scale with productivity?
Like, maybe I'm seriously missing something. Maybe Junior engineers at other orgs are ridiculously productivity? Maybe the expectation for senior engineers is ridiculously undproductive. Maybe the risk-reward of hiring senior engineers (and them getting hit by a bus) levels it out?
If the efficiency / dollar doesn't scale, then what's wrong?
Re: Convincing engineers to join your team
#14> ... the final step is presenting them an offer to join your team and convincing them to accept it. I think more effort could be made to sell before the candidate decides to interview. The best candidates have to be sold on the opportunity before they invest their time into an interview process because they have so many opportunities available. Widen the funnel at the mouth. Anecdotally I have had many experiences w…
Yeah, companies that use TripleByte all do this. There's a phone pitch phase of the interviewing once you've been accepted to TripleByte where you take ~20 minute phone calls where the point of the call is for the company to figure out your goals/interests and pitch you. It's an extremely good way to filter out companies that will probably not be worth the time to go on-site with; by the end of the call you are usually extremely excited about the opportunity or have saved yourself a lot of time cutting off the process there.
Re: Convincing engineers to join your team
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have you tried offering other things? Like work from home, work remotely, more interesting work, various education ranging from various courses, conferences up to paid tuition at an university (and then actually giving people the time to do it)?. And please don't say you have snacks, have better working environments not snacks. As a startup you mostly expect people to work 10+h a day. It's not always about the money,…
> Have you tried offering other things? as much as employers don't want to pay you more wages, they seem even _less_ inclined to offer anything that isn't wages. respect? pfff. sooner get another 4% out of most employers. install some sound dampening anything to make the working environment nicer? madness, instead the marketing folks will pick some new colors for the walls. fire the toxic asshole who fucks up all the…
I've yet to find an employer that would give me more PTO instead of a pay raise. They'd rather pay an extra 10k between a pay raise and corresponding 401k matching increase, but they won't even consider giving me 5 extra vacation days so I'll have the time to enjoy stuff with the money I already have.
Re: Convincing engineers to join your team
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have you tried offering other things? Like work from home, work remotely, more interesting work, various education ranging from various courses, conferences up to paid tuition at an university (and then actually giving people the time to do it)?. And please don't say you have snacks, have better working environments not snacks. As a startup you mostly expect people to work 10+h a day. It's not always about the money,…
> Have you tried offering other things? as much as employers don't want to pay you more wages, they seem even _less_ inclined to offer anything that isn't wages. respect? pfff. sooner get another 4% out of most employers. install some sound dampening anything to make the working environment nicer? madness, instead the marketing folks will pick some new colors for the walls. fire the toxic asshole who fucks up all the…
Jesus, this is too real. I'm experiencing this 100% right now.
Re: Convincing engineers to join your team
#17Oh wait let me guess, non stop spamming every social media outlet they use! Am I right guys?
Re: Convincing engineers to join your team
#18Hear that everyone? "As a startup it's hard to compete with Facebook and Google compensation packages, especially for senior engineers" Also, Oracle apparently had a lot of success building out their bare metal (now cloud infrastructure) team by making uncharacteristically (for them) good offers. You can hire good people, if you're willing to pay them. Bullshit doesn't work anymore.
So are you saying that non-salary benefits are bullshit?
Besides work flexibility, culture, purpose, and equity, how is a new venture supposed to compete with an entrenched monopolist that is essentially printing money (see: Alphabet)? Sure, equity is a multiplier that can return a huge amount of money with huge risk, but even equity+salary can't come near total comp offered by these juggernauts. I mean, these companies generate mountains of profits after paying crazy salaries and perks.
How can a startup compete for talent against these behemoths?
Re: Convincing engineers to join your team
#19What's with the standard of doing a full day interview? Who does this work for other than fresh graduates? I don't want to spend a whole day (which I have to request off from my current employer) answering probably-silly technical puzzles as the first round interview (the 25 minute phone call doesn't really count since it sounds like just a pitch).
Does a full day of whiteboarding really get you better candidates than say, a single hour technical interview or 1 or 2 hour homework? I'd rather do half a dozen video chat interviews spread out over a month than give a whole day just for the possibility of a new job. I'd prefer a single technical interview or homework over that by a mile.
If you tell me your interview process is a 25 minute call followed by a whole day of technical interviews, I'll tell you to take a hike.
Re: Convincing engineers to join your team
#20Hear that everyone? "As a startup it's hard to compete with Facebook and Google compensation packages, especially for senior engineers" Also, Oracle apparently had a lot of success building out their bare metal (now cloud infrastructure) team by making uncharacteristically (for them) good offers. You can hire good people, if you're willing to pay them. Bullshit doesn't work anymore.
Yeah, I don’t understand why pay is so depressed. Often times, junior engineers get paid like 60-120k. I would say senior engineers usually output double, if not more, than a junior engineer. Why doesn’t pay scale with productivity? Like, maybe I'm seriously missing something. Maybe Junior engineers at other orgs are ridiculously productivity? Maybe the expectation for senior engineers is ridiculously undproductive.…
What you're missing is that pay is not based entirely on merit, productivity or any objective measure. A significant fraction of pay is based on social status in the org, and programmers are on the lowest bar as far as that goes.