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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

#191

Post by Apocryphon »

hellllllllooo wrote: post #181
Apocryphon wrote: post #140

All of these recurring interview threads makes me wonder: why are there only two interview preparation-focused boot camps right now? (Outco and Interview Kickstart) It’s one thing to take an algorithms course, and it’s another to excel at competitive programming, and still another to use those skills on the spot in an interview. Surely like any other admissions process, one can train for technical interviews in a gro…

The point that is being made by the original post is that the process is bad in many companies especially when hiring senior engineers who have a proven track record and have other options. These engineers don't want to spend time and money learning how to crack the coding interview in some bootcamp. They can find work and are put off by the process some companies use and such companies are missing out on good people…

They definitely aren’t, but I wonder if their existence will force big tech employers to realize their interviewing process is being gamed and is even more of a sham.

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

#192

Post by drewmol »

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.

I'm not sure how much this is considered but in my state, which is an at-will employment state, being unable to preform job tasks due to lacking the knowledge or technical skill is explicitly defined as NOT a demonstration of cause for termination that would absolve the employer of their financial responsibility toward unemployment compensation.

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

#193

Post by BigJono »

vonmoltke wrote: post #164
tptacek wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 li…

I mean, I've seen very technically proficient devs fail to deliver because there's too many cooks in the kitchen, or because they drown themselves in tooling or bikeshed their project to death. Maybe something like that happened?

There's definitely tons of senior devs out there that care way more about linting and unit testing than they do about writing the code that implements the spec.

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

#194

Post by solveit »

drb91 wrote: post #161
josh2600 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No causation, I'd believe any day. But correlation? I'd want to see a statistically rigorous test done before I'd believe that. Correlations are everywhere and pretty much all good traits are correlated with each other. Hell, even vocabulary size and reflex speed is correlated. And this is probably why even terrible methods for selection usually kind of work.

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

#195

Post by pascalxus »

ajcodez wrote: post #118

If you pay low to mid six figures remote then you’re back to buying talent instead of selling opportunities.

Yup, and with remote, you can buy from the entire country, maybe even the whole world! talk about a huge candidate pool. compare that to hiring locally: where you're limited to 30 miles (4 times more than 15 squared), or maybe even 15 miles, if the infrastructure is really terrible.

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

#196

Post by Nimitz14 »

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...

Programmers in a company work with other programmers. If they cannot explain some work they've done then they are useless. Or would you hire a programmer who does not speak English?

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

#197

Post by techslave »

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…

i dunno. the machine has beaten me more more times than i care to admit. some problems are hard.

i’m L7.

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

#198

Post by wool_gather »

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.

To my mind, the simplest and most straightforward way to combat any fraud is also beneficial because it gives you even more information about the candidate:

Talk to them about the code they wrote.

Have a conversation, as if they were already your co-worker, with the exercise as the subject. Go through it, ask them -- non-adversarially -- why they did X, what they thought about requirement 2, how they could get better test coverage for Z. If you see something that seems to be a mistake, talk about it. If you see something awesome, discuss it. I can't imagine someone incompetent being able to bullshit their way through detailed discussion of code they were supposed to have written.

And this provides valuable info about how this person thinks and communicates about the work you want them to do.

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

#199

Post by EpicEng »

vonmoltke wrote: post #164
tptacek wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 li…

Happened to me. I hired someone onto my team who did great during the interview. The questions weren't puzzles, but live coding sessions. He got all the way to the point at which he had written a semi-functional web server.

This guy couldn't deliver a single project and would spend days debugging issues before he asked for help and I or someone else on the team would solve it in a couple of hours or less. I have no idea why this happens, but I've seen it twice.

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

#200

Post by humanrebar »

crazygringo wrote: post #150
masonic wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

outside of SF there is basically nothing else walkable west of the Mississippi What a sad perception.

So where is it? Where can you live outside of SF that you don't need a car and can live a normal adult lifestyle?

Plenty if you can cycle and get paid over $300k. If you had to, you could buy several walkable-to-work lots and join them into one big one in some cities. Or Uber literally everywhere.
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