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Convincing engineers to join your team

triplebyte.com

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Re: Convincing engineers to join your team

#91

Post by drstewart »

baumy wrote: post #77
jedberg wrote: post #62

> A complaint we hear from Triplebyte candidates is being asked how likely they would be to accept an offer before knowing the actual offer details. The reality is that compensation details are a large factor in where people decide to work and you can't expect someone to know if they want to work for you without giving them that data. The numerical salary shouldn't be the deciding factor. I want to know if you're int…

I exclusively work for whoever is willing to pay me the most, at the least inconvenience to my current living situation. I would feel pretty comfortable wagering that I'm in the large majority there. I may be off base here so apologies if so, but reading between the lines a bit I'm assuming that you are an early hire or possibly a founder of some startup. Very few people, probably nobody, will be as invested in your…

I'd rather work at somewhere with a 0.9x salary with a healthy culture and work life balance and a product I'm excited about than a place with none of those that pays 1.1x salary.

I don't think I'm in the minority of that either. That's not to say salary doesn't matter -- it's very important because given two places I'm equally interested in, I'll pretty much exclusively choose based on compensation.

Re: Convincing engineers to join your team

#92

Post by OmarIsmail »

pk3469 wrote: post #85
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…

I'm not talking about a "process" in the abstract. I'm talking about the specific process that was outlined in the Triplebyte post. 1 or 2 phone calls. 1 onsite.

Re: Convincing engineers to join your team

#93

Post by ssully »

tootie wrote: post #81

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 pena…

Could you provide a few example questions you would do? Just curious what medium difficulty questions look like to you.

Re: Convincing engineers to join your team

#94

Post by borramakot »

drstewart wrote: post #91
baumy wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I exclusively work for whoever is willing to pay me the most, at the least inconvenience to my current living situation. I would feel pretty comfortable wagering that I'm in the large majority there. I may be off base here so apologies if so, but reading between the lines a bit I'm assuming that you are an early hire or possibly a founder of some startup. Very few people, probably nobody, will be as invested in your…

I'd rather work at somewhere with a 0.9x salary with a healthy culture and work life balance and a product I'm excited about than a place with none of those that pays 1.1x salary. I don't think I'm in the minority of that either. That's not to say salary doesn't matter -- it's very important because given two places I'm equally interested in, I'll pretty much exclusively choose based on compensation.

That seems reasonable, but the compensation ranges I've been seeing aren't 0.9-1.1 x a reference salary, they seem to range from 0.3x (crappy consulting) -3x (HFT) the compensation of a mid-range FAANG position. With that kind of variation, it's very possible that compensation differences could overwhelm a normal sized difference in culture quality.

Re: Convincing engineers to join your team

#95

Post by readittwice »

tootie wrote: post #81

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 pena…

I think that's a great way of interviewing! But don't you fear this only works for smaller companies? Imagine some company like Google or Facebook would do that: I would expect people to just start learning answers by heart..

Re: Convincing engineers to join your team

#96

Post by gumby »

ssully wrote: post #93
tootie wrote: post #81

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 pena…

Could you provide a few example questions you would do? Just curious what medium difficulty questions look like to you.

"What do you think are the top strengths and top weaknesses of ?"

Doesn't matter what the specific answers are, much less if you even like language X or not. Instead it says: does the person really have an understanding of the language; do they have enough experience to say "well I really do like X, but I do often wish it had feature y of language Z". or "yes, I have a lot of JS experience since that's the job and I sure know how to sling it, but I far prefer Lisp which I found made me more productive than any other. Why? Well because at XXX I was able to do YYY...."

Re: Convincing engineers to join your team

#97

Post by throwawaymath »

tootie wrote: post #81

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 pena…

> 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.

I like that system. I recently took the TripleByte technical quiz and I liked that "I Don't Know" was an acceptable answer for most of the questions. When paired with the timer (or in your case, looking for a fast answer) it seems like a system that encourages honesty and "moving along" so you don't waste time on questions that you will probably do poorly on anyway.

As an aside, does anyone happen to know what the "levels" of performance on the TripleByte technical quiz are? When I took it (and I realize this will sound like a humblebrag), I was told I did "exceptionally well" and could be paired with "approximately 27 top tech companies", but I didn't feel I did all that well on it at all.

I ask because they say they only invite the "top few percent" of quiz takers to continue, but all I typically see when I search this online is other people mentioning they also did "exceptionally well." Anyone have feedback on the process?

Re: Convincing engineers to join your team

#98

Post by echevil »

tootie wrote: post #81

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 pena…

I also think this could be very effective first round of screening. The questions don't have to be all trivia though. Something that is simple for legit developers in that domain to answer should also work. Time they take to answer also correlates well with experience.

Re: Convincing engineers to join your team

#99

Post by gumby »

nrb wrote: post #14
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…

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 usual…

...and saves the company the effort of interviewing someone who turns out not to be interested in the opportunity.

A good recruiter can sell the company properly. They are as rare as hen's teeth though.

Re: Convincing engineers to join your team

#100

Post by vonmoltke »

jonny_eh wrote: post #35
wolco wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would a serious candidate waste the entire day? The candidates that stay may be the disparate ones.

I consider myself a strong engineer and I've only ever done full day interviews, at least for companies bigger than 30 people. What am I doing wrong?

I also consider myself a strong engineer, and I have only ever done full-day interviews at Google and Amazon.
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