51–60 of 694 posts
The blurred out job posting image is not very well blurred out. I could probably work out what it says if I spent some (tedious) time on it. The point it gets across is very very clear and useful though.
Hands down, the number one problem in hiring and retaining senior engineers is being able to match the compensation level. FAANG-type companies have a huge difference to practically everyone else. Startups, especially, can’t match the salary, and few make up for it in equity comparable to the risk level engineers take on by accepting the job. Senior engineers typically know better, and so you end up with mid or even…
- Work fewer hours
- Work from anywhere
- Work in a specific location
- Work in a certain environment
- Work in a specific kind of organization
- Work with specific technologies
- etc.
People are very different and have very different wishes and needs. Salary isn't always priority #1.
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…
I don't agree with this. I think the issue here is that your interviewers aren't going deep enough in the conversation. If you ask someone to tell you about some interesting technical project they worked on and they give a good high level answer, push a level deeper. Still get a good answer? Push another level deeper. Repeat. At some point one of two things will happen: The candidate is capable of talking about the project intelligently at a lower level than the interviewer or the reverse. If the first happens, re-think whom is doing the technical interview, if the later happens, you've found their level of competence.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 actuall…
Hr isn't exactly known for rigorous scientific research and I don't recall it being hr that introduced this trend of hazing candidates. Also have you got any examples of this research that actually proves this correlation I haven't heard of any and I would have as I have spent decades semi involved in IR (industrial relations) in the UK
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 actuall…
> highly incentivized to get studied by academics (and they do) Why do you think they are incentivized to get studied? If anything, power dynamics in large hierarchical organizations keep away any studying done that can threaten the power. Sometimes studies do happen though, but large organization can never apply the results to anything on their scale. They are more worried where to even get such massive stream of pr…
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…
> 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. I don't agree with this. I think the issue here is that your interviewers aren't going deep enough in the conversation. If you ask someone to tell you about some interesting technical project they worked on and they give a…
How do you hire people who are more technical in a subject area than your current staff, if your test bottoms out at the depth of the current interviewer in the room?
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…
When a guy tells you his experience, and you call bullshit, it's hard to tell whether you doubt his sincerity about having the experience at all or whether the experience itself was not representative of your reality. Either way, you're telling us not how it is, but how you are, and that's simply not useful. In "The Last Starfighter", the recruiter/hiring manager Centauri is constantly accused of using "the Excalibur…
> When hiring senior engineers, the company doesn’t choose the candidate, the candidate chooses the company. Does that mean its the candidates fault when they can't find a job?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But it’s not generally tolerated. You end up optimizing for sub-prime candidates because those are the only ones desperate enough to take 4-6 hours out of their free time for a company that hasn’t even bothered interviewing you, yet. If they want to turn the onsite into one big work sample, by all means, that sounds very effective (and something I’ve seen work well). But in my experience, you’re going to deter qualif…
Again: this is true of "work sample" tests in their mainstream implementation in our industry (spend 6 hours jumping through a hoop for the privilege of running a standard, nondeterministic interview gauntlet), and those hiring processes are a scourge. But there's a right way to do it: give work sample challenges and then, at least for the most part, end the technical qualification part of your process there . You sp…