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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

#221

Post by kronin »

peanutz454 wrote: post #176
taf2 wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 thi…

But are architects supposed to write code? The example you give is embarrassingly simple and anyone should be (expected to be) able to write code for it. But aren't architects designing architecture. I don't think the architect or anyone in his team at my previous organization's IT dept could write code, but he could design system architecture.

How can you design something that needs to be implemented in code if you yourself can't write code?

If you can't produce in the trenches, what makes you qualified to dictate what those that are in the trenches are doing?

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

#222

Post by LaserToy »

techslave wrote: post #203
LaserToy wrote: post #186

Context: 15 years of experience, multiple public talks (including AWS reInvent), own chunk of infra serving hundreds millions users. Got a message from yet another self driving startup. Agreed to do a phone screen out of curiosity. Interviewer is 6 months out of school and his first question - why do you want to work for us. My answer - I actually don’t, I didn’t even know you exist and it is your job to convince me.…

ha. i would have hung up. but then i’m pretty gruff.

I was very close to do it and I did a poor job hiding my annoyance. It didn’t stop there. The coding challenge was standard bs done in a glitchy online tool. Yet another clone of coderpad which implemented poorly. I asked the interviewer why did he pick this specific question and how does it correlate to what they do - answer was not encouraging. As you guessed, I didn’t pass he interview :).

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

#223

Post by bradleyjg »

LaserToy wrote: post #215
bradleyjg wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Are yo saying most of candidates commit fraud? Do you have any data on it or just following common sense nonsense?

> Are yo saying most of candidates commit fraud?

Nope.

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

#224

Post by mlthoughts2018 »

WrtCdEvrydy wrote: post #143
ilikehurdles wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> it’s not even something I can open source if they don’t like it What? Of course you should... make sure you create a repo with the company name and people can create issues to collaborate on a better ToDo sample code.

You’ll get hit with a DMCA takedown notice if you do that.. most companies protect interview questions they ask and solutions to them quite severely.

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

#225

Post by xapata »

burlesona wrote: post #95
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.

I understand what you’re saying but I think you’re underestimating how many people like city life. I work in SF and most of the people here are here specifically because they DONT want to live on ten acres in some rural place, they love that the city is walkable and dense and interesting. For most folks the issue of living in condos or apartments it’s an issue at all until they reach a certain family size. At that po…

> Actually for many people they feel trapped because they’d like a LITTLE more space, ie. the Victorian townhome, but they specifically DO NOT want a car or a yard and do not want to leave the historic, walkable city. At that point you’re really screwed because outside of SF there is basically nothing else walkable west of the Mississippi. So there’s nowhere to go.

There are a few other big cities on the west coast, and many of them have towns or small cities nearby that have walkable centers.

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

#226

Post by brightball »

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…

You’re assuming the friendly conversation doesn’t have a structure that shows viable experience. Get somebody to geek out in detail about something they worked on and you’ll be able to tell very quickly if this person legitimately knows their stuff or not. You also have to be able to translate and validate this type of conversation though.

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

#227

Post by woolvalley »

humanrebar wrote: post #184
albertgoeswoof wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

And even if they did make those promises and honored them, you're taking a risk that they won't. And it's not like you get the FAANG salary back if they can't follow through on working hours, the tech stack, or whatever other consideration is important.

Work from anywhere is a fairly powerful lever. You can reduce taxes and cost of living extensively and still be able to save the same amount of money in the bank and have the same amount discretionary income. I estimate something from a %30-%40 'discount'.

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

#228

Post by wool_gather »

bradleyjg wrote: post #206
wool_gather wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That seems like a good idea, but does somewhat detract from the notion that once a candidate does the work-sample he is done with the technical part of the process.

True, it deviates from tptacek's recommendations; about scoring and identical questions for everyone as well.

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

#229

Post by xapata »

burlesona wrote: post #157
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.

Well, go ahead and list your examples, then. There’s a big difference between places where you can walk (technically that’s almost anywhere) and a city that was built for walking (ie was large before cars). On the east coast these are much more common, for obvious reasons. Places like Charleston and Savannah have a very similar feel to San Francisco. Some of New Orleans. Most of the center cities in the northeast. A…

> not owning a car would make life extraordinarily difficult.

I find that if you live within a couple blocks from a nice grocery store, life without a car can be quite pleasant.

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

#230

Post by woolvalley »

humanrebar wrote: post #187
vonmoltke wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What if Google or Facebook offer you $300k no risk, with a relatively standard work life balance. If. People here sometimes make it seem like a senior engineer can just walk into a FAANG, chat with the receptionist, and walk out with a $300k offer. While it is certainly not the hardest thing in the world, these companies are still pretty selective and only employ about 10% of the total seniors in the market. More l…

Downleveling? I can guess what that means but some clarity would be appreciated. With sources if possible.

Your a sr (eng III) and they give you a eng II offer. Internal promotions at google are way too much work relative to the rest of the market.
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