Guide to scaling engineering organizations • Hacker News Board

Re: Guide to scaling engineering organizations

#41

Post by nosrednAhsoJ » Wed, Dec 05, 2018, 4:38 PM UTC

PopeDotNinja wrote: post #31

hoorayimhelping wrote: post #28

These are all great points and there are some good nuggets in this article but I feel like it misses the main issue with recruiting. The shortcoming in my experience, is hardly ever in the process, it's in the people who work in recruiting. When setting up pipelines, most of the people I worked with knew what we had to do - the points in this article are pretty obvious. What isn't obvious is how to find the right peo…

> I've only worked with a handful of recruiters that were actually worth anything I learned how to hire & train recruiters to work for me pretty effectively for certain pieces of recruiting. To you, what makes a recruiter good and/or not good? Maybe I can share some thoughts on how to improve the not good parts!

I found that investing time in educating the recruiter on what you look for, and the why behind that criteria is key. A primary source of that investment is quick, direct feedback to the recruiter on why someone you just turned away is not a good fit. Helping them figure out how to deliver well-qualified candidates to you is not magic. It takes LOTS of effort.

Once you develop that working relationship with a recruiter, never let go! I have a handful of recruiters that I work with because they quickly absorb the feedback I give and I never see another candidate with that missing requirement again. If a recruiter shows they can't adjust/learn from your feedback, find one that does.

Re: Guide to scaling engineering organizations

#42

Post by fbr » Wed, Dec 05, 2018, 4:44 PM UTC

Some additional great resources related to hiring:

How to hire your first engineer - https://blog.ycombinator.com/how-to-hire-your-first-engineer...

Convincing Engineer to join your team and a basic structure for the process - https://blog.ycombinator.com/convincing-engineers-to-join-yo...

General thoughts about hiring - http://blog.samaltman.com/how-to-hire

The book "Who" gives a good idea about a good process. Hard to apply when you are not looking for a "generalist" - https://www.amazon.com/Who-Geoff-Smart/dp/0345504194/

Some of the manager tools podcasts episodes - https://www.manager-tools.com/map-universe/hiring-0

Edit: formatting

Re: Guide to scaling engineering organizations

#43

Post by scarejunba » Wed, Dec 05, 2018, 4:45 PM UTC

Nice post, guys.

Would you mind saying what you mean by 'lurking'? In all my life on the Internet, it's a positive thing when joining a community. You're invisible to everyone and just read. Why should people not do this? It seems harmless to be in read-only mode.

Re: Guide to scaling engineering organizations

#44

Post by ummonk » Wed, Dec 05, 2018, 4:52 PM UTC

mandeepj wrote: post #30

ppeetteerr wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard somewhere that companies like Stripe would rather have false negatives than false positives in hiring.

> Stripe would rather have false negatives than false positives in hiring That's the case with Amazon and Google also.

I was under the impression that for junior hires amazon has a low hiring bar but is aggressive in firing afterwards.

Re: Guide to scaling engineering organizations

#45

Post by ummonk » Wed, Dec 05, 2018, 4:57 PM UTC

ppeetteerr wrote: post #23

patio11 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(I work at Stripe and, while I don’t do engineering interviews, have strong views on the topic, which may or may not be equivalent to our views. I believe the following is substantially accurate regarding factual representations.) We don’t do whiteboard interviews for coding. If we have a coding interview, candidates can do it on their choice of their machine or a loaner machine from us with one of a few environments…

Thanks for clarifying mate. It's nice to hear your company is changing the status quo.

This actually seems to be the norm at most startups. Coding exercises on laptop, and design and behavioral interviews.

I’ve mostly seen algorithm / data structure questions at megacorps, which are probably too big with too much inertia to quickly reform their processes.

Re: Guide to scaling engineering organizations

#46

Post by ppeetteerr » Wed, Dec 05, 2018, 4:59 PM UTC

rizzom5000 wrote: post #36

ppeetteerr wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've worked in companies that struggle to hire any candidate, let alone top candidates. Stripe is amongst the top employers. The vast majority of smaller shops (banks, b2b software companies, agencies) just need to staff up and would rather hire and fire than miss out on a good candidate.

Maybe, but hire and fire is also a great way to show the team that you don't know what you're doing as a hiring manager; not to mention how firing a team member, who may be incompetent but still well-liked, affects morale. Then, there is the problem where you fail to fire when you should. To me, this is just not a good way to build an effective team.

No one is saying you should hire and fire a ton of people, only that rejecting good candidates for most companies is not possible given how difficult it is to find them. Talk to any recruiter and they will tell you that finding good (not great, just good) candidates is often a struggle.

Re: Guide to scaling engineering organizations

#47

Post by rjayatilleka » Wed, Dec 05, 2018, 5:01 PM UTC

Fede_V wrote: post #40

ainiriand wrote: post #38

Some time ago I went to the Dublin open house because they were opening news teams here and one of the positions was backed api engineer. Considering that I've been doing the same for almost 10 years and that I got personally invited to the event I decided to apply to the role. They rejected me even before having a personal interview. I wonder what is happening behind the scenes but it was very demoralizing. Was anyt…

In my experience, it's incredibly difficult to get a strong positive signal from a CV. You can definitely find red flags (my favorite example: people describing themselves as experts deep learning with 1 year of experience and zero publications) - but, after removing the obviously unqualified, the next steps have very low accuracy. Honestly, it might have just been a sourcer/recruiter fuck up. If you can at all, ask…

Even worse, at some big companies, recruiters will ignore direct referrals and ask you to submit the resume internally through their req system. But then resumes get lost anyway.

Good recruiters accept internal referrals directly.

Re: Guide to scaling engineering organizations

#48

Post by wtmt » Wed, Dec 05, 2018, 5:12 PM UTC

fbr wrote: post #42

Some additional great resources related to hiring: How to hire your first engineer - https://blog.ycombinator.com/how-to-hire-your-first-engineer... Convincing Engineer to join your team and a basic structure for the process - https://blog.ycombinator.com/convincing-engineers-to-join-yo... General thoughts about hiring - http://blog.samaltman.com/how-to-hire The book "Who" gives a good idea about a good process. Hard…

Thanks for those links. If you see this soon, could you please edit your comment and remove the code block formatting for the five bullet points and instead use a blank line between each point to add newlines? [1] It’s difficult to read on a smaller screen and requires horizontal scrolling back and forth.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc

Re: Guide to scaling engineering organizations

#49

Post by hoorayimhelping » Wed, Dec 05, 2018, 5:19 PM UTC

PopeDotNinja wrote: post #31

hoorayimhelping wrote: post #28

These are all great points and there are some good nuggets in this article but I feel like it misses the main issue with recruiting. The shortcoming in my experience, is hardly ever in the process, it's in the people who work in recruiting. When setting up pipelines, most of the people I worked with knew what we had to do - the points in this article are pretty obvious. What isn't obvious is how to find the right peo…

> I've only worked with a handful of recruiters that were actually worth anything I learned how to hire & train recruiters to work for me pretty effectively for certain pieces of recruiting. To you, what makes a recruiter good and/or not good? Maybe I can share some thoughts on how to improve the not good parts!

Thanks for the response! Collaborating with a recruiter is really enjoyable for me at places I've worked at that had mature recruiting pipelines. I could usually count on them to work with me on what the team needed and then take care of filling our funnel.

I was talking more about the building a recruiting pipeline to help us scale product/engineering. Generally, a good recruiter is one who saves the org time, and a bad one costs us time. The costs could come from having to iterate our process and get aligned on candidates, or it (usually) could come from having to reject a lot of candidates that might seem good but have some kind of systemic issue). Sometimes a recruiter can only seem to pull in C+ or B talent, and after a while you start to get convinced that's your bar for greatness because you're not even seeing solid candidates anymore.

How can I tell if a recruiter is any good when I'm interviewing / vetting them? It's kind of hard to tell without them getting some candidates in front of us. I can look at their past, but how much of that might be attributed to the company they were working for? When you recruit for a sexy company, it's probably really easy to build teams cause good talent seeks you out. Our company isn't sexy and well-known yet, so how can I tell if a recruiter will be able to get the talent we're looking for?

Re: Guide to scaling engineering organizations

#50

Post by all2 » Wed, Dec 05, 2018, 5:26 PM UTC

PopeDotNinja wrote: post #31

hoorayimhelping wrote: post #28

These are all great points and there are some good nuggets in this article but I feel like it misses the main issue with recruiting. The shortcoming in my experience, is hardly ever in the process, it's in the people who work in recruiting. When setting up pipelines, most of the people I worked with knew what we had to do - the points in this article are pretty obvious. What isn't obvious is how to find the right peo…

> I've only worked with a handful of recruiters that were actually worth anything I learned how to hire & train recruiters to work for me pretty effectively for certain pieces of recruiting. To you, what makes a recruiter good and/or not good? Maybe I can share some thoughts on how to improve the not good parts!

> I learned how to hire & train recruiters to work for me pretty effectively for certain pieces of recruiting.

Care to share more about this process? Or link out to a blog post or something?