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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

#111

Post by warent »

mbell wrote: post #106
warent wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If that results in the candidate being flustered it's not a good sign on numerous axes. 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 braini…

> Are you hiring sales reps or engineers? Why are you asking for an engineer to sell you on their past project(s)? I don't ask them to sell me, I ask them to dive into the technical issues they faced and how they solved them. It tells me a lot more about how they will handle similar issues in the future than scribbling DFS on a white-board would.

Just to clarify, when you say "how they would handle similar issues" do you mean talking to a hiring manager about a past project during an interview setting?

I don't understand what you're calibrating for...

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

#112

Post by BurningFrog »

mbell wrote: post #53
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…

> 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…

If you've never been around real bullshit artists it's hard to imagine, but there are people who can talk the talk so well and say all the right things, and yet their actual programming is terrible.

There are also the opposite. Folks who are not great at verbalizing programming principles, but do deliver solid code in reality.

In summary, hiring is hell...

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

#113

Post by mk89 »

whiskyant wrote: post #15
snarfy wrote: post #6

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

Pay as much as FAANG and trust me, you'll get your senior engineers.

I have to disagree. Money is not always all.

Sometimes it's also about expectations, role, office location, other bonuses, etc. When in 2019 you don't let people do home office... Byebye...

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

#114

Post by Aeolun »

notjesse wrote: post #26
ryanworl wrote: post #13

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…

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…

Hah, I had a sample test that I had to do after first being met on-site, which I thought was great.

Then they said my work sample was amazing, and they’d like to do an on-site Q&A about it, but when I arrived the engineer hadn’t even seen my work, and proceeded to just quiz me on obscure JS trivia.

Which I promptly failed.

They then rejected me even though they were happy about my work :/

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

#115

Post by codezero »

ilikehurdles wrote: post #94
dleslie wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I was referred to a company that eventually handed me “6 hour” (likely much more to complete sufficiently enough to advance) take home project a few weeks ago and I still can’t bring myself to start it. I read their Glassdoor reviews and the number of folks are reporting either being ghosted or getting a negative response minutes after submitting, after putting days of effort into this exercise, is disturbing. It see…

Heads up, tomorrow is a holiday many places in the US, just do you expect at least a day of delay.

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

#116

Post by dleslie »

joshuamorton wrote: post #108
dleslie wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've had this condition at every job thus far. The real interview is always the work you do.

This is only true in the most extreme case. Many companies have formal procedures around firing people for performance issues. Short of hr violations or literally refusing to do anything, I can't imagine someone being fired before 6 months.

Probationary periods are industry standard here in British Columbia.

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

#117

Post by Vekz »

csnewb wrote: post #104

That's hilarious and so true. Last year I interviewed for a senior back-end engineering position at a well known mid-sized company in the Bay Area. They put me through 2 technical phone screens and a 6 hour onsite interview, grilling me in detail about system design, domain knowledge, personal experience, and of course doing endless exercises of writing solutions to algorithmic problems on a whiteboard. I really felt…

There's a whole metagame of HR metrics within companies. KPI's are set to interview X amount of candidates or extend Y offers. Arbitrary hiring is a common goal after a fundraise. Not every HR team sets thoughtful efficient goals or gets reviewed for waste. This can lead to perpetual interview pipelines and fake work to keep the Hiring team employed. This is equivalent to software engineers building knowledge moats for job security.

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

#119

Post by fzeroracer »

tptacek wrote: post #50
notjesse wrote: post #26

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…

The extremely obvious problem with this is that there's no way of preventing someone from completely blowing a hole in your interview process by simply paying for or hiring another developer to do the take-home problem for them. At that point they've gotten past the technical requirements and now only need the soft skills to execute on it once the rest of the interview process continues.

This is why take-home problems are almost completely irrelevant except for filtering out good candidates. Eventually those problems optimize for perfection which help out those who 'cheat' at the process and people that otherwise put in earnest efforts are rewarded with denials. This is something I've experienced before in my job search where I would put in an honest effort and get 90% of the problem solved, but get denied because my solution wasn't flawless.

So allow me to call bullshit on your own claims that this is the right way of determining technical qualifications.

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

#120

Post by joshuamorton »

dleslie wrote: post #116
joshuamorton wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is only true in the most extreme case. Many companies have formal procedures around firing people for performance issues. Short of hr violations or literally refusing to do anything, I can't imagine someone being fired before 6 months.

Probationary periods are industry standard here in British Columbia.

Fair enough. It's to some extent a cultural thing (there's no need for explicit probation in the US since most employment is at will), but I too wouldn't necessarily like a probationary period, even though I don't foresee it actually being an issue.
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