Convincing engineers to join your team • Hacker News Board

Re: Convincing engineers to join your team

#101

Post by echevil » Thu, Aug 30, 2018, 9:07 PM UTC

readittwice wrote: post #95

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..

That sounds right. But for bigger companies, they can also come up with a much bigger pool of questions and choose from there

Re: Convincing engineers to join your team

#102

Post by redisman » Thu, Aug 30, 2018, 9:10 PM UTC

thaumasiotes wrote: post #58

wycy wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it's not necessarily one day off work, it's one day off work for every potential job.

But that's only a downside for people who might fail your interview and/or be looking for alternative employment. Why would you care about inconveniencing some disloyal guy who you don't want to hire? ;)

Really? Interviewing for a job is being "disloyal"?

Re: Convincing engineers to join your team

#103

Post by vonmoltke » Thu, Aug 30, 2018, 9:11 PM UTC

TinyBig wrote: post #87

The industry standard onsite interview to offer rate seems astonishingly low at 20%. Is this symptomatic of poor filtering early in the pipeline?

No, it's symptomatic of paranoid hiring processes, arbitrarily high bars, and interviewers who have no business interviewing people.

Re: Convincing engineers to join your team

#104

Post by redisman » Thu, Aug 30, 2018, 9:12 PM UTC

TinyBig wrote: post #87

The industry standard onsite interview to offer rate seems astonishingly low at 20%. Is this symptomatic of poor filtering early in the pipeline?

It just means that popular companies can very much cherry-pick and inconvenience plenty of engineers. There is no shortage of people for them.

Re: Convincing engineers to join your team

#105

Post by tootie » Thu, Aug 30, 2018, 9:19 PM UTC

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.

By medium I just mean, stuff beyond CS 101. So for Java, I'd ask about standard lib or basic language-specific features or tools. What's the difference between a List, Set and Map? What does the final keyword do? What does it mean for a class to be thread safe? What do you use for dependency management? What's the difference between a checked and unchecked exception?

For JavaScript I can ask about let vs const? What are arrow functions good for? Maybe specific framework stuff if they say they know react.

For general web stuff, I can ask about response codes. What's the difference between 400 and 500 level? What's a CDN for? What is HTTPS?

You can ask basics about version control or CI. Sometimes I'll do process questions about agile.

I try to stick to what they claim on their resume (and what I know about) and can tell pretty quickly if they are actually what they say they are based on how quickly, confidently and succinctly they answer.

Re: Convincing engineers to join your team

#106

Post by Itaxpica » Thu, Aug 30, 2018, 9:19 PM UTC

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.

Not the OP, but for iOS developers I've asked: "What's one thing you would change about Objective-C (this was pre-Swift), and what's one thing you would change about Cocoa [the framework that iOS apps are developed with]?" It's the kind of question that there are a lot of good answers to, any experienced iOS developer will be able to answer off-the-cuff, and it gives a good sense of the kind of work that they've done and how (plus it gets across if they know the difference between a language and a framework, which is useful).

Re: Convincing engineers to join your team

#107

Post by aphextron » Thu, Aug 30, 2018, 9:31 PM UTC

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…

>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 basically what I've found all Triplebyte challenges to be like. It's a bit off-putting at first to be asked to do a "quiz" before anyone will even speak to you, but honestly I've realized it's better for everyone involved than doing the traditional "recruiter runaround" which can introduce bias and be highly inefficient.

Re: Convincing engineers to join your team

#108

Post by logfromblammo » Thu, Aug 30, 2018, 9:34 PM UTC

paulie_a wrote: post #80

dfabulich wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 have never had a full day interview, if it's more than 4 hours for a serious onsite I won't waste my time. They clearly don't appreciate other people's time and are quite frankly wasting theirs. The decision was probably already made before the second cup of coffee anyways. I absolutely agree with refusing to interview and meet the teammates. All you have to do is rub someone the wrong way for whatever reason, hell…

I had a company want to do a full day interview, but I had to cut it short and beg off at 1 PM, because they had already blasted past my hotel check-out time, and were in danger of encroaching on the departure time of my return flight--that they booked for me. It was the worst interview experience I have ever had. They declined to arrange for a rental vehicle, so someone from the company had to drive me to and from the hotel, with airport ground transport handled by a shuttle van. Later, they ghosted me, and even tried to stick me with the hotel bill.

The one benefit was the lesson on how to recognize some early warning signs when interviewing.

To name and shame: Tyler Technologies, Eagle Division.

Re: Convincing engineers to join your team

#109

Post by logfromblammo » Thu, Aug 30, 2018, 9:41 PM UTC

shady-lady wrote: post #73

jedberg wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not at all (at least not in my case). I already know how much I can afford to pay for someone doing that work I'm hoping to hire you to do. I want to make sure you're interested in that work before I tell you that number, only because I don't want that number to be what pushes you over. Sure, maybe you'll lie and say yes to get the number from me. That's a risk I have to take. But if you say no, at least we didn't bo…

> I want to make sure you're interested in that work Is the work something so unique that it's not roughly the same as work in multiple other companies? Is the work going to be such that it's going to continue to be interesting even after the newness/novelty of such work has worn off?

If I get paid enough, I can always take acting/improv lessons and just feign the enthusiasm, treating it like a side-hustle on top of the regular work.

Re: Convincing engineers to join your team

#110

Post by throwaway8610 » Thu, Aug 30, 2018, 9:55 PM UTC

throwawaymath wrote: post #97

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…

I interviewed as an iOS Developer. Took the initial screening quiz and did "exceptionally well" and was scheduled for an online interview with one of their interviewers. Online interview consisted of making some rather straightforward additions to a very basic core application and getting the features up and running and manually tested. After that it was another series of questions. During the interview the interviewer took several short breaks to record feedback in their system. A few days later I received the decision that they would not be moving forward with my application. Feedback was fairly generic and vague imo with no real suggestions on how to improve other than to practice small coding problems and other suggestions oddly didn't coincide with any of the actual code part I was asked to implement or the questions of the quiz. Nothing was mentioned about my strengths eventhough they claim what they look for is a candidates strengths. I guess I just don't have any? Overall I think the process was on par with other technical coding interviews I've had and the feedback was equally useless.