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Convincing engineers to join your team

triplebyte.com

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Re: Convincing engineers to join your team

#81

Post by tootie »

My phone screen technique is more old school but I think works well. I pick their top language or domain (web or mobile or whatever) and ask 10 trivia questions. Medium difficulty questions I'd expect a programmer with any experience to answer. I look for maybe 70% correct and I look for quick answers. You know it or you don't. And I set that expectation up front so they can give me a few "I don't know"s with no penalty.

This is my sanity check and I think it's faster and more accurate than a FizzBuzz and doesn't require screenshare.

Re: Convincing engineers to join your team

#82

Post by wpietri »

timr wrote: post #74
OmarIsmail wrote: post #56

This is a great post and founders/hiring managers/junior recruiters are advised to listen to them. After a continual refinement of our own process over many years we've landed on almost this exact process near completely independently. This is a standard for a reason. You will save yourself A LOT of headaches if you incorporate this feedback into your own hiring processes. I also highly recommend Marco Rodgers' advic…

"For people that are "too good for this process" - well, in my experience those are the ones that aren't a good fit for most organizations." My experience is that most companies are asking for too much and being downright rude in the way that they do it. Especially from more senior people who have options. I turned down a number of companies at (or just after) the phone screen stage during my last job search. Usually…

For me it depends a lot on the details of that process. I want to work with really good people, so I'm ok with a process that takes time and/or work as long as a) I think the added process is likely to get better results, and b) it's handled in a way that's respectful of the time and energy of all concerned.

A good example for me is interviews. I'm totally happy to do a full day on site, exhausting as it is. But only if I feel like they have gained new insight in each round. A few months back I did like 8 individual interviews during a 1-day startup visit, and easily half the time was answering the same questions repeatedly. The could have just had people pair up and saved me time while getting better results themselves. It gave me the impression they didn't have their act together.

Take-home work is in the same category. If it's the kind of thing that makes me say, "Oooh, I want to work with people who pass this," then it's great. But if it mainly seems to be testing my ability to put up with nonsense, that's a big negative sign.

Re: Convincing engineers to join your team

#83

Post by OmarIsmail »

timr wrote: post #74
OmarIsmail wrote: post #56

This is a great post and founders/hiring managers/junior recruiters are advised to listen to them. After a continual refinement of our own process over many years we've landed on almost this exact process near completely independently. This is a standard for a reason. You will save yourself A LOT of headaches if you incorporate this feedback into your own hiring processes. I also highly recommend Marco Rodgers' advic…

"For people that are "too good for this process" - well, in my experience those are the ones that aren't a good fit for most organizations." My experience is that most companies are asking for too much and being downright rude in the way that they do it. Especially from more senior people who have options. I turned down a number of companies at (or just after) the phone screen stage during my last job search. Usually…

I'm talking about people who don't want to go through the standard process outlined in this blog post. Specifically: 1 or 2 phone calls to establish high level alignment and technical fit, and then a full day onsite.

Re: Convincing engineers to join your team

#84

Post by ashelmire »

dfabulich wrote: post #25
ashelmire wrote: post #19

What'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 tha…

A full day interview is standard. You grant that it's standard, right in the first sentence of your post. But you'll tell anyone who offers you a standard interview to take a hike? This is symptomatic of a broader problem with HN comment threads on "how to interview" articles: for any given approach to interviewing, the top comment will be a middle-brow dismissal saying, "I would never interview at a place that inter…

I should rephrase. I think a full-day interview for a startup is probably going to be a waste of time. After I've already passed a pair of phone interviews for a company with very high comp like Google, Apple, etc? I'd do a full day. For a startup? Meh.

As another poster mentioned, there is no silver bullet. Companies should be flexible and not feel bound to doing it exactly the same way that the big companies do (and even those could be more flexible, but who am I to tell them how to operate) - your startup does not offer the same things or have the same needs, you should not interview the same way. After all, we're expected to be flexible too (take time off work, do phone interviews, hour long onsite interviews, multiple interviews, homework, and/or day long onsites - apparently we're supposed to be happy to do any of those for multiple companies at a time!).

Re: Convincing engineers to join your team

#85

Post by pk3469 »

OmarIsmail wrote: post #56

This is a great post and founders/hiring managers/junior recruiters are advised to listen to them. After a continual refinement of our own process over many years we've landed on almost this exact process near completely independently. This is a standard for a reason. You will save yourself A LOT of headaches if you incorporate this feedback into your own hiring processes. I also highly recommend Marco Rodgers' advic…

> For people that are "too good for this process" - well, in my experience those are the ones that aren't a good fit for most organizations

If the process is patronizing, good people will simply opt out and pick another of the many options available to them. The more senior the applicant or the higher the demand for the particular role, the more people you will lose.

If your hiring process is unilateral or asymmetric in terms of time investment, you are almost certainly not going to get the best talent.

Re: Convincing engineers to join your team

#86

Post by vonmoltke »

jiveturkey wrote: post #53
jtreminio wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most developers won't just apply and interview at a single job. I usually interview with 3 or 4 companies when job hunting, and I would hate to have to spend a day at each.

I'll grant you that. I filter companies at the phone screen. Do you always go for an in-person if invited? I don't. I make sure to take at 15min of phone screen time for my own questions. (I don't do tech phone screens with recruiters -- complete waste of time. Competent companies have a tech phone screen with an engineer, who you can ask questions of.) And I don't parallelize my job search. I do them serially, in pr…

> I get it that most people spray and pray, but for well qualified people this is the wrong approach.

Now that I am in New York, I don't generally even need to apply. I just wait for the recruiters to hit me up. When I do apply, I almost always get a response. I can be as selective as I want.

When I lived in Dallas (with only two years less experience than I have now) I might as well have been invisible. I took every onsite I got because I got so few phone screens to begin with. I couldn't afford to be selective.

As an aside, for an industry that claims there is a critical talent shortage this one sure has a bad habit of ignoring talent that isn't already local.

Re: Convincing engineers to join your team

#88

Post by NonEUCitizen »

wyattk wrote: post #18
throwaway9412 wrote: post #4

Hear 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 compan…

The startup should raise more money from its VCs to compete with the behemoths.

Re: Convincing engineers to join your team

#89

Post by throwaway8610 »

merlincorey wrote: post #79
throwaway8610 wrote: post #51

Has anyone been able to reapply to Triplebyte after an initial rejection? Somewhat relevant question as this is an article by Triplebyte and Harj who I understand is a YC partner. They say you can reapply after 4 months but I can't find how to do that when I login and emails to their support line go unanswered.

When I was going through Triplebyte, I asked a lot of questions. According to the recruiter I was working with, it could be 4-6 months between "refreshes". I would say to keep trying to get in touch with them - everyone I interacted with on the Triplebyte team was nothing but helpful. If you washed out of the process at the initial testing stage, make sure to let them know that you have been working on your skills an…

Thanks. I'm just going by their website that indicates 4 months but I'm actually at 5 months. I've tried emailing support@triplebyte.com but have not gotten any response. My first time around I made it to the online in-person interview and thought I did fairly well but got rejected after that point with some rather vague, generic reason and feedback. I just want to know if I should just cut my losses at this point so wondering if anyone has had any success at being able to just reapply.

Re: Convincing engineers to join your team

#90

Post by mrfusion »

ninetax wrote: post #6

> ... 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…

An easy step to widen the mouth is to get rid of the web forms that make you retype your resume into your boxes.

No one who isn’t desperate is going to do that.

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