Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

hiringengineersbook.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 694 posts

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

#161

Post by drb91 »

josh2600 wrote: post #34
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…

Just to add some thoughts here: I’ve interviewed people who were google L7+ (IC) a couple of times who weren’t very good engineers, at least on the work sample stuff. I’ve found that the highest correlation to performance in senior engineers is raw algorithmic skill and willingness to say “I don’t know” when you don’t know. This is not true of hiring devops or sre’s. For those positions, you want the gopher archetype…

Algorithmic ability has no correlation to the ability to write maintainable code, though. Most time at work is not spent demonstrating ability to regurgitate algorithms.

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

#162

Post by scarface74 »

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…

There are other places in the US that are hiring senior developers outside of Silicon Valley and the FAANG companies. There are major metropolitan areas in the US where you can start a company, get good senior engineers and not have to pay the wages that FAANG companies pay.

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

#163

Post by souprock »

albertgoeswoof wrote: post #121
cloogshicer wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You can get those with a startup. I sort of did, for some definition of "certain environment" and "specific technologies" and so on. I still do actually, post-startup.

Notably, I got what most software developers would describe as "fewer hours". We tracked time and got paid for actual hours worked. (still do) Since the company would be paying more, we were/are seldom asked to work beyond 40 hours per week. Much of this comes naturally with government contracting. You must track time, and you must pay employees for their time.

Being onsite is a positive. I'm never expected to work at home. Work is work, and go home I can focus on my family or hobbies or sleep.

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

#164

Post by vonmoltke »

tptacek wrote: post #62
mbell wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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…

> It's not like we were asking candidates "hey, how did you enjoy your last software security job?". We were doing something closer to "here's a piece of code with a heap overflow in it; talk us through how you'd write an exploit". It didn't work: there were people who could answer those questions indistinguishably from an exploit developer who nevertheless couldn't write a 1995-era stack overflow exploit if their life depended on it.

Something about this example is not registering for me. I can't imagine how this situation is possible. Going from a detailed, step-by-step description to a code implementation is a trivial rote task in my mind. I must be missing something.

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

#165

Post by burlesona »

landryraccoon wrote: post #151
burfog wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Alternately, make it 1 acre, but within a 5-minute commute. Wait what? What city are you talking about that has a tech hub or commercial center within a 5 minute commute of 1 acre homes?

Forget about a tech hub, what city with jobs at all. Ten acres is more like a small farm than a house, by definition at that lot size almost nothing can be within five minutes, lol.

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

#166

Post by taf2 »

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…

I recall an interview I was brought into early in my career to talk with someone being brought into be a senior architect... in my mind this meant this dude must be crazy smart right. Everyone in room had all basically made up thier minds and loved the guy. I gave a variable like

a = [1,2,4,8,9];

And asked if he could write a loop and print out the values of each element. He embarrassingly could not.

I always ask this question and then talk and then have everyone solve a problem a simplistic one but it always involves an Http request and some loops...

I like to see how people type too... if you can’t type it’s usually easy to tell if you spend most of your time with a computer or not...

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

#167

Post by draw_down »

scarface74 wrote: post #162
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…

There are other places in the US that are hiring senior developers outside of Silicon Valley and the FAANG companies. There are major metropolitan areas in the US where you can start a company, get good senior engineers and not have to pay the wages that FAANG companies pay.

Well, feel free to name names then if that’s the case.

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

#168

Post by tptacek »

bradleyjg wrote: post #110
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…

You ever see or suspect fraud in a take home? I can't imagine it doesn't happen giving that cheating is so prevalent in colleges.

If I was doing this at Google, I would spend a lot of time thinking about test fraud. At a 40-50 person company? Not so much. We do simple follow-up things that raise the amount of effort you'd have to put in to fraudulently submitting work sample tests, and we know pretty exactly how we'd randomize our work sample tests to make it hard to cheat (at least, hard to cheat without doing something we'd be interested in anyways) --- but it's just not worth it right now.

Work sample test fraud is one of those things that sounds like a huge deal on message boards, but when you game through what would be involved in doing it in real life, it makes very little sense.

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

#169

Post by dhjsnana83 »

There is a lot of complaining about hiring processes these days.

I think both algorithmic questions and work samples have an important role.

Algorithmic questions are presented with a time lot, you get an idea of how the candidate thinks through problems. These questions I think reflect general intelligence.

Work samples reflect effort and experience, which is also important.

People like to complain about one or the other like they're entitled to a job. It's hard to hire senior engineers because there aren't very many good ones, a mediocre engineer who hangs on for 5-10 years is now a "senior engineer."

You're not special. If you want a high paying job of your choosing you have to earn it. Only a vocal whiny minority is heavily complaining online. If you think you're highly competent and the problem is with all of these companies, in whose best interest it is to hire good people, you should think again.

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

#170

Post by philliphaydon »

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.

10 acre is a lot of land. 435600 square feet intact. When I lived in NZ our home was on 9000 square feet. And that was a lot of space... I would think a fairer example is living in a landed home instead of an apartment. I’ve spent the last 11 years in apartments and just had a baby, now wanting to move back to NZ to have a landed home and back yard...
Post reply on HN