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Convincing engineers to join your team

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Re: Convincing engineers to join your team

#151

Post by wolco »

tormeh wrote: post #142
wolco wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are tons of engineering rockstars (brad pitt types). Pick your favourite framework there are usually a handful of stars around it. Am I Brad Pitt? I'm not in that league. But you don't have to be to avoid the unpaid nonsense of hanging around all day. If that's the hiring process it shows that the company is unsure of themselves and are afraid to make a mistake. Companies like google are so big they need this k…

Why? Hiring is the single most important thing a company does. It makes sense to invest resources in it. Every company that doesn't is gambling that every candidate that can get through a short interview is about equal.

Not hiring is a huge gamble as well. Waiting an extra few months can force other employees to quit if the workload is being put on there plate.

If you are asking too much of candidates many will dropout as they get hired somewhere elsewhere quickier. The longer you take the quality of the pool gets reduced.

Hiring is important. Keep employees are probaby more immportant. Sales are in my opinion the most important. Taking a gamble can lead to 10/10 candidate hire. Chances are low it will lead to a 1/10 candidate. The longer they play it safe the lower average peak in the candidate pool.

If the process takes 3 months you will be lucky to get a b level guy unless your company is special (google/apple/hot startup). The A level guys will move on.

Someone with three offers in hand will not waste an unpaid day unless you can offer something special.

Re: Convincing engineers to join your team

#152

Post by Kludgist »

jakobegger wrote: post #145

Very valuable advise! When I hired my first employees, I focussed too much on compensation. I ran the numbers and offered as much as I could afford. I was really disappointed when great candidates declined my offers, and went with other companies that didn't even pay more (I asked). Now I understand that I just failed to excite them. You really need to tell people how awesome the work is, good engineers will always h…

Both are certainly important. A few years ago, received offers from two places. One had employees that were excited about the work, the culture was great, the job had a combination of data science and programming that was right up my alley and we talked in-depth about real problems.

The other office was just depressing. I mean, it was literally kind of dark and bare. They seemed evasive about what day to day work was like -- something about "dashboards." No one seemed happy to be there. It was a satellite to the main office in New York.

When I got the offers, the second job offered $25k more than the first job. I did a little bit of moral handwringing, but... you know, I was getting married the next week, we wanted to buy a house, and an extra $2k a month can make up for a LOT of shitty work environment. I took the second job, got a $5k raise each year, and haven't regretted my decision at all.

Re: Convincing engineers to join your team

#153

Post by tuxidomasx »

I often hear or read about how there is a developer/software engineer shortage. And the rising salaries seem to reflect that-- supply and demand and all that...

Yet it seems that there are hundreds of applicants vying for each position.

How is this possible? Are there really that many lesser-skilled people trying to finagle their way in as software developers? Is the shortage one of _skilled_ engineers, while the deluge of applicants is a result of posers and imposters trying to get a slice of the pie?

Re: Convincing engineers to join your team

#154

Post by logfromblammo »

bsder wrote: post #116
logfromblammo wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

I will say that as someone generally on the hiring side of the equation, I do find that hotel chains and rental agencies drive me CRAZY . No matter how hard I try and how many times I do it, there is ALWAYS some idiotic hiccup that prevents me from paying for the candidate's room, car, etc. up front. I can give those companies all the credit cards and forms in the world, and somebody in the pipeline will screw it up…

In this case, it was not the hotel that screwed up.

At the time, I was living in Madison, WI, and they booked my flight out of Milwaukee. With a connection in Madison. No, I couldn't just board the flight in Madison. No, they wouldn't pay for my mileage between Madison and Milwaukee, or for airport parking. The flight out of Milwaukee was cheaper, you see.

The service you are suggesting already exists. It is called a travel agency. Some even specialize in corporate travel. My spouse used to work for one. They lost a lot of business to self-booking sites like Travelocity and Expedia. As a result, some office peons in small and medium businesses are being tasked with booking travel sometimes, and they have no skill or training in handling the idiotic hiccups that will always happen when dealing with the airlines, hotel chains, and vehicle rental chains. Larger businesses tend to have their own travel agents, or contract to a travel agency, especially if their own employees need to travel frequently. If a company cannot provide you with an acceptable travel experience as a candidate, they won't do it as an employee, either.

To contrast, the next travel-required interview booked a reasonable flight, a full-sized rental car, a paid-for hotel, and sent me a per diem check without having to submit any expense receipts. The on-site interview was about 90 minutes, without whiteboarding or coding exercises or pop quizzes or brain teasers, and then they followed up on it and extended an offer. Which I accepted.

Re: Convincing engineers to join your team

#155

Post by tptacek »

lukebaker wrote: post #148
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…

What happens prior to step #1 from a candidate's perspective? How do candidates express interest and do 100% of the folks who express interest get a call?

They send us email. I get on the phone with them.

The way this "scaled" at Matasano was that we gradually got smarter with our outreach, so that instead of constantly circulating wide appeals to the whole developer community, we staged events (Cryptopals, Microcorruption) that targeted a specific community of enthusiasts with whom those phone calls were likely to be valuable to us.

But in the beginning, we just posted on the HN hiring threads; it's a fine starting place. That's what we're doing now. I'll do a couple phone calls a day at this point.

Re: Convincing engineers to join your team

#156

Post by tptacek »

JamesBarney wrote: post #137
tptacek wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

It absolutely does turn off some people. And, what's worse/better: we refuse to alter the process for anyone; there are no fast-paths through our process. Running someone we're almost certain is "overqualified" through our challenges helps true up the challenges and the scoring rubric.

I'm sure we lose people who can generally talk their way through any interview. And a lot of those people are good at delivery! But we gain so many more candidates we never would have been able to engage before that we come out way ahead in the bargain.

Re: Convincing engineers to join your team

#157

Post by mmt »

muzani wrote: post #147
mmt wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That particular one, "career progression" only seems to apply to those who consider it a progression to move into management. That seems to be a minority opinion among engineers, but, more importantly, there are far fewer management roles than engineering ones, especially at a startup.

I was going to say that there's career progression towards being a 10x programmer too. But that's a much more debatable topic. You get more flexibility to take on multiple roles. More pressure driving you forward. Much, much less bureaucracy to worry about. No more 2 month discussions over code that takes 2 weeks to write. The downside is that you could get tied up putting out fires, being unfocused. And there's litt…

Indeed, all of this are debatable, and the article only specifically mentions "rise up through the ranks", which means management.

Of course, even that's a questionable proposition. It calls out the youth of a Chief Product Officer at Facebook, which may well be cherry-picking/selection-bias.

As I've researched the managers at startups I consider working for, I routinely see on LinkedIn profiles that a high "rank" at a startup turns into a much lower one when an individual moves to a much larger company, though it does tend to go back up once that individual returns to startup work.

Re: Convincing engineers to join your team

#158

Post by Apocryphon »

humanrebar wrote: post #127
tropo wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can verify their ID. You can show them around the office. You won't discriminate against dial-up modem users. You get the candidate to show that they are serious (flights, hotel, etc.) and you show them that you are serious by paying for it.

Video conference software always stinks for whatever reason.

You could always conduct half of those interviews by video and do the rest on-site.

Re: Convincing engineers to join your team

#159

Post by tootie »

muzani wrote: post #128
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 a lot of companies do this, but it ends up being weird stuff that doesn't happen in the real world like bit shift operators in Java. It would be excellent if it was all relevant stuff. I took one for a job, about 30 questions. I was really surprised that I got about 93% on it, purely guessing. The person who made the test later told me that if you have enough experience, you'd probably know things like "findV…

Yeah, I hate that. Other folks were asking about truthiness cases in JavaScript which is just so arcane that I'd never expect someone to know all the cases by heart.

Re: Convincing engineers to join your team

#160

Post by torgian »

I’ve had many interviews such as “all day interviews” to ones that were only an hour or two at a time in America.

The current position I’ve accepted is a German owned company that has a Japanese branch. Small company. Pay is low when compared to compensation I could get in America.

BUT, the interview process was simple. Skype video call with a few people at the same time. Met two of the owners while vacationing in Japan. Got an offer and accepted it.

Despite the low pay, I accepted it because it is completely remote. The work is fulfilling (right now my project involves data that can help farmers). I’m learning a lot of new stuff.

It’s actually because of all three that I might stay long term. Remote, fulfilling work, and learning new things checked all the boxes despite the low pay.

Stuff like that matters. Many companies don’t understand this.

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