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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

#121

Post by albertgoeswoof »

cloogshicer wrote: post #52
doctorless wrote: post #39

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…

I disagree a bit here. Of course, salary is very important, but I (and many people I know) would easily choose (and have chosen) a lower salary for any combination of these perks: - 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 wishe…

But you don’t get any of those with a startup. They want you there onsite working long hours doing one specific thing

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

#122

Post by esoterica »

burfog wrote: post #64
doctorless wrote: post #39

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.

If you want a 10 acre lot then your lifestyle is simply incompatible with city living. It has nothing to do with money or cost of living; even the billionaires in San Francisco don't have 10 acre lots.

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

#123

Post by delinka »

koolba wrote: post #89
sys_64738 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Did you counter or flatly reject and it ended there?

I read that as "rejected by the candidate." Hey said "no," they offered, he said "no" a second time.

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

#124

Post by matthewowen »

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…

"senior engineer for team y" is a position that's constantly been hired for at most growth companies. The fact that they're still hiring for it probably doesn't mean much.

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

#125

Post by ChuckMcM »

I think the article is reasonable but it suffers from the imprecision of "senior" as many things do. What is a 'senior' engineer in a startup, or at a mid-size private company, or a large public company? All of those companies have "senior engineers" but they aren't easily swapped out for each other.

These are my definitions, at a startup a senior engineer is one that is broad enough in their experience to have gone deeply into one area and at least lightly into several others. They understand what technical debt it and when to use it, and when to avoid it. What is more, they can communicate what needs to be done to a more junior engineer.

In a mid-size private company a senior engineer knows all of the forces that are being applied to their area of expertise, they know what the cost constraints are on the solution, they know what the time constraints are. They understand the area fully and can review other's work and participate productively in design reviews and product planning sessions. They can be an axis of excellence by leading by example and surfacing things that need to be fixed early.

At a large publicly traded company a senior engineer is one who can relate the business to the engineering effort to insure that they are doing the engineering that is needed and more importantly they are not doing engineering that is not needed. To paraphrase, "With great resources comes great re-invention." Large well funded engineering teams tend to re-invent the wheel because they can, not because they need to. And as a result can become mired in self inflicted complexity. It is the role of the senior engineers to see to it that it doesn't happen.

Very different jobs.

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

#126

Post by Game_Ender »

gnulinux wrote: post #96
doctorless wrote: post #39

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…

I find this "salary first" a little bullshit too. For the most part it's true, but it's not strictly true. If Amazon offers me $180k but I need to work like a slave, but a startup offers $150k but is very chill, I'm gonna choose the startup.

What if Google or Facebook offer you $300k no risk, with a relatively standard work life balance. Then you have to really carefully weigh the startup equity package and how much you enjoy the respective work environments.

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

#127

Post by dleslie »

joshuamorton wrote: post #120
dleslie wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

When done well it's great for everyone. A healthy employer wants you to succeed, after all your success is their success.

Thus, probationary periods can be a time of training and growth for the new employee.

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

#128

Post by jkaplowitz »

fzeroracer wrote: post #119
tptacek wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 problem…

I'd couple the take-home with a substantive discussion following submission. Harder for a fraudster to talk about how they came up with or tested their solution and how they'd improve it in a real production version.

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

#129

Post by mbell »

warent wrote: post #111
mbell wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

I'm a bit unclear on your question. I'm assuming a technical person with relevant knowledge performs the technical interview, if that is what you mean.

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

#130

Post by fma »

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…

It's also possible someone quit. LinkedIn has/had a feature where you can find people who used to work at company X. I interviewed somewhere and got an offer. The work was up my alley, and the interview was a difficult but fair interview. But it felt it was a bit too "fast-paced" for my taste. I used that LinkedIn feature and saw most engineers stayed about a year there.

I declined the offer.

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