81–90 of 694 posts
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.
The sheer amount of recruiters and interview requests that act they’re doing you a huge favor for the opportunity is rediculous. My conclusion is they truly do only want to hire people who don’t know what their skills are worth.
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Strongest possible disagree. There are people who can talk all the way down to the point where they're basically dictating code to you, who nevertheless cannot deliver on a real project. There's a difference between knowing, intellectually, how to solve a problem with code, and actually being able to deliver working code . In practice, though, what really seems to happen is that technical interviews are split between…
> Strongest possible disagree. There are people who can talk all the way down to the point where they're basically dictating code to you, who nevertheless cannot deliver on a real project. There's a difference between knowing, intellectually, how to solve a problem with code, and actually being able to deliver working code. I'm a little confused by this statement. Is your issue that they aren't _capable_ of writing t…
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What happens to every candidate who gets flustered by the questioning and seems to bow out earlier than their technical depth? 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?
> What happens to every candidate who gets flustered by the questioning and seems to bow out earlier than their technical depth? I'm not sure I get this question - I'm not talking about a white-boarding exercise. I'm just talking to the candidate about a technical project they have worked on in the past, the pain points, how they resolved them, etc. If that results in the candidate being flustered it's not a good sig…
Are you hiring sales reps or engineers? Why are you asking for an engineer to sell you on their past project(s)?
Interviews by their nature are about judgment, and knowing you're being judged by a complete stranger who holds the power over this potential path of your future is enough to get anybody flustered, especially a brainiac that just wants to work in relative peace behind their desk.
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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…
I won't apply at, or respond to recruiters representing, those companies that have a reputation for a long and/or torturous hiring process. While I have no interest in being interrogated with high-stress puzzle solving, it is not the interview process itself that causes my disinterest; it is the understanding, from experience, that how a company treats its potential candidates is often reflective of its general cultu…
Having gone through the process recently I avoided companies with puzzle solving hiring procedures because I was confident that I could find well paid, interesting, work without jumping though those hoops. As you get more senior there are more people you have met and worked with with employment opportunities. It gets easier to find work by asking around and finding someone who will hire you based on recommendations or having worked together before.
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The best interview I ever had was a 2-hour onsite work sample, followed by 1/2 an hour discussing what I'd come up with. I was offered the job the next day. Surely most people would prefer this to whiteboard tasks?
The best interview I had was a few hours of friendly conversation about the details of my resume. Then I was hired under probation, as everyone there was, and the understanding was that I could be easily dismissed if it was clear that I wasn't working out.
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…
Hi, author here, thanks for your feedback. I think you might be right, thinking about rewriting that paragraph a bit. For me it's been really obvious in interviews whether someone knows what they're doing or not. But probably I've just been lucky in this so far. Looking forward to reading your post about it. Haven't read it yet, but if it's not in the post, could you give a few examples of what people said, that turn…
Happy to answer any other questions you might have about our erstwhile process at Matasano (which is more or less our current process at Latacora).
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Hi, author here, thanks for your feedback. I think you might be right, thinking about rewriting that paragraph a bit. For me it's been really obvious in interviews whether someone knows what they're doing or not. But probably I've just been lucky in this so far. Looking forward to reading your post about it. Haven't read it yet, but if it's not in the post, could you give a few examples of what people said, that turn…
I'm really not comfortable talking about specific patterns of questions and answers that turned out not to be predictive, because I feel like they'd be traceable (or at least appear, to the people involved, traceable) to particular candidates. Happy to answer any other questions you might have about our erstwhile process at Matasano (which is more or less our current process at Latacora).
Thanks for the offer! I'll read your post some time tomorrow and might send you a PM, if that's ok.
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I won't apply at, or respond to recruiters representing, those companies that have a reputation for a long and/or torturous hiring process. While I have no interest in being interrogated with high-stress puzzle solving, it is not the interview process itself that causes my disinterest; it is the understanding, from experience, that how a company treats its potential candidates is often reflective of its general cultu…
This also applies to when you're actually interviewing. I once went through three rounds and they wanted a fourth. No is such a powerful and unexpected word. That they're still talking to you means they're interested but that they haven't offered you the job means they're not 100% sure. This one scenario I said No they came back with an offer. But it was rejected.
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…
The difference being that the FAANG-type companies don't pay well enough to make up for the cost of living. Senior engineers seldom want to live in tiny apartments. See if you can prove me wrong: find a 10-acre lot within a half hour commute, with a large single-family home, that is affordable to a senior engineer. Alternately, make it 1 acre, but within a 5-minute commute.
That seems excessive. You certainly don't need to live on a multi-acre lot to have a good life.
I work at a FAANG and most of my colleagues own single-family homes and have no problem paying their mortgages. Of course they aren't on 10-acre lots -- we aren't in the middle of nowhere, we are in a city.