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When hiring senior engineers, you’re not buying, you’re selling

hiringengineersbook.com

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Re: When hiring senior engineers, you’re not buying, you’re selling

#11

Post by saagarjha »

tptacek wrote: post #3

A lot of this post seems pretty reasonable. But: In my experience, it’s fairly easy to judge technical skill. A friendly conversation about technical interests and recent projects can often be enough. Bullshit. Sounding credible in technical interviews is a skill, not the same skill as actually being a good programmer, and might even (statistically, in the large) be close to orthogonal to it. We found this out the ha…

Off topic, but:

> DSA/ECDSA is terribly easy to mess up

It’s kinda unfortunate that most crypto seems to be this way…

Re: When hiring senior engineers, you’re not buying, you’re selling

#13

Post by ryanworl »

tptacek wrote: post #3

A lot of this post seems pretty reasonable. But: In my experience, it’s fairly easy to judge technical skill. A friendly conversation about technical interests and recent projects can often be enough. Bullshit. Sounding credible in technical interviews is a skill, not the same skill as actually being a good programmer, and might even (statistically, in the large) be close to orthogonal to it. We found this out the ha…

It does always amaze me that literally what you learn in HR 101 in an undergraduate management curriculum is controversial. The r^2 of a ton of different methods for predicting job performance is something large companies are highly incentivized to get studied by academics (and they do).

Spoiler alert: work-sample tests are the only practical and generally tolerated one to use (for software engineers) that is actually correlated with job performance.

@tptacek: how do you feel about people who have large amounts of open source work that is easily reviewed? This obviously doesn’t add new data to your company’s test but is definitely some kind of work sample, albeit not necessarily in a similar environment to the one being hired for.

Re: When hiring senior engineers, you’re not buying, you’re selling

#14

Post by dceddia »

I agree with a lot of the points here. One specific pet peeve of mine is job listings that refuse to nail down which specific technologies they're using.

Some will say things like "Front-end web development using a framework such as ExtJS, React, Vue, or Angular". Neat - which one? I'm happy to work with 1 or maybe 2 of those. Do you mean that you actually use React but you're fine with people who come from some other framework? Or do you mean that you are converting a legacy app from Ext.JS to React so you're hoping the candidate has used both?

Sometimes they'll bury the actual framework in the "Nice to Have" section but it's pretty common for it to be left vague. I think what they're trying to do is widen the pool of applicants, but that strategy seems suboptimal for attracting folks who want to work with a specific tech stack.

Re: When hiring senior engineers, you’re not buying, you’re selling

#16

Post by [deleted] »

patientplatypus wrote: post #10
tptacek wrote: post #3

A lot of this post seems pretty reasonable. But: In my experience, it’s fairly easy to judge technical skill. A friendly conversation about technical interests and recent projects can often be enough. Bullshit. Sounding credible in technical interviews is a skill, not the same skill as actually being a good programmer, and might even (statistically, in the large) be close to orthogonal to it. We found this out the ha…

This is the only correct answer. White boarding is to coding what Foosball is to soccer. In my last in-person interview they asked me a bunch of trivia that was a simple google search away - so of course, why would I bother memorizing those things? I got a dear john letter back saying I wasn't smart enough or some such, and it's like "oh great, being called an idiot by an idiot". And that's most of my interviews if I…

[deleted]

Re: When hiring senior engineers, you’re not buying, you’re selling

#17

Post by gregrata »

sarabande wrote: post #7
tptacek wrote: post #3

A lot of this post seems pretty reasonable. But: In my experience, it’s fairly easy to judge technical skill. A friendly conversation about technical interests and recent projects can often be enough. Bullshit. Sounding credible in technical interviews is a skill, not the same skill as actually being a good programmer, and might even (statistically, in the large) be close to orthogonal to it. We found this out the ha…

Agreed. In my experience, senior engineers are even better at glibly skirting what specific contributions they made at a company were, or what their true technical skillset is. They need to be tested. The fact that a lot of time senior engineers will get pulled in to interview from other companies because someone knows someone and has worked with them for a long time only exacerbates this problem.

> because someone knows someone and has worked with them for a long time only

And this is the #1 thing that gets a near auto-hire from me. I'm not saying don't interview them, but most interviews don't really tell you what it's going to be like working with someone. On the other hand, WORKING with someone (for a long time) 100% tells you what it's like working with someone.

If someone has worked a long time with someone else and is willing and wanting to do so again, then hire them.

My experience is, most interviews suck trying to figure out how someone is going to do on the job. Working with someone a long time and wanting to work with them should weight heavier than anything else

Re: When hiring senior engineers, you’re not buying, you’re selling

#18

Post by ChuckNorris89 »

snarfy wrote: post #6

The words 'pay' and 'salary' do not appear in the article. They want senior engineers at intern prices.

Since the Author is from Austria, it's not common here to specify the actual salary but the minimum allowed by law according to a collective agreement which is always a laughable sum for a dev.

This is really annoying as companies try to keep the employees in the dark regarding the market rates hoping to catch someone gullible who doesn't know them, and often they do.

Re: When hiring senior engineers, you’re not buying, you’re selling

#19

Post by gregrata »

gregrata wrote: post #17
sarabande wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. In my experience, senior engineers are even better at glibly skirting what specific contributions they made at a company were, or what their true technical skillset is. They need to be tested. The fact that a lot of time senior engineers will get pulled in to interview from other companies because someone knows someone and has worked with them for a long time only exacerbates this problem.

> because someone knows someone and has worked with them for a long time only And this is the #1 thing that gets a near auto-hire from me. I'm not saying don't interview them, but most interviews don't really tell you what it's going to be like working with someone. On the other hand, WORKING with someone (for a long time) 100% tells you what it's like working with someone. If someone has worked a long time with some…

And yeah, I have strong opinions on this - I've been on both sides of the table for a long time, and don't think the average interview is a good indicator of how they'll do in the job.

I wrote a book about this :) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07FJ6N8P1

Re: When hiring senior engineers, you’re not buying, you’re selling

#20

Post by jcims »

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #9

The author is from Austria. As a dev who moved there 4 years ago I noticed it's probably some archaic Germanic cultural trait for any job postings to be very employer focused, acting like they're doing you a favor by hiring you and not caring about what the employee might want, even for senior roles. Maybe a local is reading this and can explain why this is still a thing.

That’s how German companies treat their customers, why would you expect any better for their employees?
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