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Convincing engineers to join your team

triplebyte.com

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Re: Convincing engineers to join your team

#131

Post by muzani »

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…

Expectations can be very far apart. In Kuala Lumpur, the average salary for 5-10 years of experience is about $15,000 annual.

That's... way too low for me. 80% of interviewers will offer this range, but it takes several days of interviewing before they'll mention numbers. I really don't want to waste anyone's time on an offer I can't take, so it's good to filter that early on.

Re: Convincing engineers to join your team

#132

Post by muzani »

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.

The paragraph right after that explains how startups can get ahead. I work with a lot of startups just for the learning opportunity and career progression. Even with the high probability of startup deaths, you can hit real manager experience, at the age of 30 and move on to manager jobs with big corporations.

Re: Convincing engineers to join your team

#133

Post by maerF0x0 »

jiveturkey wrote: post #39
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…

Wow, well the feeling is mutual, I wouldn't want to hire you! :) A day is nothing for someone looking to leave a current position. Take a day off of work, what's the problem? Seriously. You're leaving anyway. And then it's not like you can't just walk out on the interview at any time (say after the 2nd silly whiteboarding session) if you feel they are wasting your time. The most important part of interviewing is the…

> Take a day off of work, what's the problem?

The problem is that to get a good offer you need 2-3 competing offers. Assuming a 20% onsite success rate (from the article), thats 10-15 days... Most of us only get 10-15 PTO days a year, and wouldn't want to spend them in something harder than a regular day of work.

Re: Convincing engineers to join your team

#134

Post by tptacek »

JamesBarney wrote: post #129
tptacek wrote: post #118

Broken record, but here's our hiring process: 1. An initial call, handled by a principal ("founder"), with the objective of explaining the role and the company and arming the candidate with as much detail about the hiring process as is practicable. 2. A followup in email shortly thereafter confirming interest and locking down schedule. 3. 1-3 work-sample challenges (our current set, for the role we're hiring now, is…

Whats your target length(in hrs of effort) for a work sample? And secondly how do you deal with someone farming out the work to someone else?

Add up the time you'd spend interviewing on site and doing pointless phone interviews and that's the amount of time we allocate to ourselves for work-sample tests.

In 10 years of doing this, I've never caught anyone cheating, and as I've remarked elsewhere and often, the quality of the hires we made once we switched to work-sample testing (a thing we did to raise the bar for our hiring, after our standard interview loop passed some people who were better talkers than appsec people) went drastically up. While I was at Matasano, we didn't let a single person go who had gone through our work-sample process.

That said, if you're worried about cheating, build a small, non-confrontational interview into your process where you just talk about how they approached the challenges.

Re: Convincing engineers to join your team

#135

Post by anandsuresh »

maerF0x0 wrote: post #130

> Have your recruiter keep a list of reasons why candidates said they wouldn't move forward So companies want this kind of feedback, but won't provide it?

True that! IMHO this has been a trend that I've observed where interview feedback is something that doesn't exist. More often than not, even when requested, I've never received any kind of feedback from companies. Despite the the abundance of companies like Hired, TripleByte, LinkedIn and others, recruitment still remains a black-art!

Re: Convincing engineers to join your team

#136

Post by timr »

OmarIsmail wrote: post #83
timr wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

That's fair(er), but after you've gone through a service like Triplebyte, you're supposed to be screened. Extra screening steps beyond the onsite are excessive.

The promise of something like Triplebyte (for the candidate) is that I do one round of technical interview, and then proceed directly to my favorite companies for culture fit and personal evaluation. But every company believes that they're the special snowflake who deserves extra screening.

Re: Convincing engineers to join your team

#137

Post by JamesBarney »

tptacek wrote: post #134
JamesBarney wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whats your target length(in hrs of effort) for a work sample? And secondly how do you deal with someone farming out the work to someone else?

Add up the time you'd spend interviewing on site and doing pointless phone interviews and that's the amount of time we allocate to ourselves for work-sample tests. In 10 years of doing this, I've never caught anyone cheating, and as I've remarked elsewhere and often, the quality of the hires we made once we switched to work-sample testing (a thing we did to raise the bar for our hiring, after our standard interview l…

Thanks for answering, I was curious about the time because I know large tech companies will fly people in for day long interviews. But I've only been on the receiving end of a couple of interviews(funnily enough the last one was by sctb before he left for ycombinator) and they were all less than 3 hrs of my time from resume to offer. And I was worried a longer process might turn off candidates unless we have strong brand recognition, or an extremely competitive salary.

Re: Convincing engineers to join your team

#138

Post by torgian »

mrfusion wrote: post #90
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.

And you probably don’t want to work for a company that does that anyway

Re: Convincing engineers to join your team

#139

Post by mmt »

throwaway9412 wrote: post #28
wyattk wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> So are you saying that non-salary benefits are bullshit? I'm saying the reasons startups typically give to justify their low salaries are largely bullshit and not persuasive. > How can a startup compete for talent against these behemoths? Outside of paying more, they really can't compete head-to-head with the behemoths. They should really focus on hiring junior people who can't or won't work for Google/Facebook. Ca…

> They should really focus on hiring junior people who can't or won't work for Google/Facebook.

This is also antithetical to (some) startups' way of thinking, which is that they must hire only senior/"top" engineers because that's the only way to get a product out fast enough.

Similarly, mentorship (something TFA does advocate) is seen as too much of a time/resource sink, a luxury only behemoths can afford.

This attitude makes some sense at seed stage, but after a few dozen senior engineers on staff, it loses credibility.

Re: Convincing engineers to join your team

#140

Post by JSDave »

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…

Pay the 10x developers 3x to join your company. A lot of startups are just groups of very skilled engineers who have identified each other and left a behemoth together to work for themselves.

It's very hard to give 15+% raises at behemoths so there's always people who are very underpaid for what they do.

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