I’ve Been fortunate enough since my first job to always find a place that wants me and sells themselves. Once in a while i ran into companies that tried the testing and other bs and i either just left or told them it would’nt happen and they accepted. Stuff like being allowed to use Linux in a Windows only organisation or not be locked in for x months was something i could talk through.
When hiring senior engineers, you’re not buying, you’re selling
381–390 of 694 posts
Re: When hiring senior engineers, you’re not buying, you’re selling
#382Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're so goddamn right! I live in Germany and the only companies I can work for are international ones (US-based). At least I know how they work, what they expect, and generally speaking, it's the way I like to work. Never, ever work for companies like Deutsche Post, Telekom etc.
Interesting. Any idea what the experience is like working at T-Mobile in the US?
No, I can't help you here. I would say, though, that it's different for German companies outside the country.
Re: When hiring senior engineers, you’re not buying, you’re selling
#383Earlier quoted context omitted.
The best interview I had was a few hours of friendly conversation about the details of my resume. Then I was hired under probation, as everyone there was, and the understanding was that I could be easily dismissed if it was clear that I wasn't working out.
There is no way in hell I'd ever sign up for that. To be expected to quit your current job on the hope that the probationary period works out is insane.
Much of the States is at will employment, and probation is standard practice where I am.
It's rare that people fail probation; so long as you apply for work you are actually capable of doing...
Re: When hiring senior engineers, you’re not buying, you’re selling
#384Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 :/
In addition to covering all interview expenses such as travel food and lodging, candidates need to be paid for their time interviewing by the companies interviewing them. Six hour take home tests is fine, but I want $1350 for that in advance as a consultation fee, and if I hit 6 hrs and it's not done yet they can keep paying until I am done or we can just end it, no refunds. The idea that I should spend six hours doi…
why are you even interviewing for these "random companies desperate to find anyone qualified" if you are so disgusted by them?
The elitism of some engineers is mind boggling, instead of being grateful working in an industry that has so much demand that you can easily find a job at anytime, you complain about the process being insulting to your oh-so-important persona.
If i really want to work for a certain company because what they are doing excites me, then yes, i'd do a 6 hour take home test where I can probably also learn a thing or two and I am willing to bet a lot of other developers would too. As an interviewer, someone charging >$1000 for a take home test would be an immediate red flag and our mindsets probably don't match up.
If this works fine for you, kudos.
Re: When hiring senior engineers, you’re not buying, you’re selling
#385Earlier 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…
If you're asking questions related to "raw algorithmic skill" you're filtering for people who either: 1) Have had a computer science education and happen to remember the algorithm at hand. This is also a function of recency so senior engineers are less likely to remember any given algorithm. 2) Study algorithms so they can do well at job interviews. Neither one is something you want to be selecting for. Some of the b…
Spot on. The reasons are exactly right too; seniority and "ability to recall obscure minutia from college years" are inversely correlated, for obvious reasons.
Companies need to understand that not only are they mis-selecting, but they're broadcasting that they're doing so to all the candidates that go through that process.
Approaching candidates with textbook-style algo or data structure questions merely informs that they're going to be working with an educated but overall somewhat junior lot. That's not necessarily always a deal killer, but it's probably not the image that these interviews are hoping to project.
For well-qualified candidates not applying at an industry headliner like AppAmaGooBookSoft, the interview process quickly inverts itself, and it becomes more about the company selling the candidate on their offer than the candidate selling the company on their skillset. Tread carefully.
Re: When hiring senior engineers, you’re not buying, you’re selling
#386Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unfortunately, often (and maybe more so because I live in Europe) it's also the other way round: > raw algorithmic skill It's been ages that I've been asked anything remotely algorithmic. My interviews are mostly about frameworks, how you fit in a team and whether you know / can be "agile". Not even a Fizzbuzz, much less so quicksort or more special algorithms. > and willingness to say “I don’t know” That never got m…
It really depends on your domain. If you're into low level hacking and distributed systems, there is a lot more algorithmic work. There is demand for software that's cheap to scale and/or low latency. Some fields are bottlenecked by hardware (machine learning, realtime rendering, etc.) and so benefit from better software. Some production systems still need a large amount of optimization to satisfy economic and produc…
I’ve had trouble finding those systems or algorithmic jobs too, like the grandparent, where some kind of engineering quality matters, be it performance or correctness or something. Everyone wants to hire a “full-stack engineer” to write application code that a junior dev could write, but they want someone senior anyway.
Re: When hiring senior engineers, you’re not buying, you’re selling
#387Earlier quoted context omitted.
I disagree. If you can’t tell the difference between a smooth talker and strong technical competence you are probably interested in the wrong qualities. I have interviewed enough now to see why some companies cannot figure it out. Ask yourself if you really actually want a senior or a strong junior. It comes down to interest. A good senior got that way because they like solving challenging problems. They are not inte…
No. The difference between talking (very intelligently) and doing is huge, and a sports analogy might be illustrative. If you ask detailed questions about football to hire a NFL quarterback, your most intelligent responses will probably be from a coach. “How should you change the position of your right shoulder if you see that a fast edge rusher is approaching you from the left side and you have two open receivers?”…
> The difference between talking (very intelligently) and doing is huge
To be fair it is environment dependent more than anything else. Forget competence, charisma, intelligence, and everything else about the candidate that could bias their selection and instead look at processes and code already in place the new candidate is jumping into. Does the environment strongly favor original ideas/solutions or does it dictate the narrow acceptance in the most narrow of boundaries?
I have been on both ends of this as well. It is common in software for shops to define success in extraordinarily shallow terms such as whether you are using spaces versus tabs and indenting properly. Another example I experienced last year is whether you should write a giant monster configuration or a small function that receives a single argument. The reasons why shops coat themselves in blankets of code style and configuration is because they typically don't trust their developers and instead strive for a normalized baseline. They are looking for wonderful solutions, but rather task completion.
The lack of conformance isn't necessarily an indication of lower capability, but it is an indication of incompatibility. Competence and conformance are wildly out of sync when the candidate is misjudged relative to the work available. That is completely an assignment failure opposed to a candidate failure. Having gone through this myself it has taught me to ask very probing questions, as a candidate, during the interview. If, as a senior, I can determine I will not be a good fit I will happily disqualify myself.
> A coach like Bill Belichick might have a fantastic, detailed answer demonstrating a thorough understanding of every aspect of football past and present, but he could never make the throw himself.
Would you really hire a coach to be your quarterback? Is that a thought you would really entertain? Even if that coach could do that job he/she would be more valuable doing other work. I would consider this a solid example of interviewer/assignment failure.
Re: When hiring senior engineers, you’re not buying, you’re selling
#388Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, you are right, is mostly money. But there is other stuff that at the end adds up, specially if you are a Senior Engineer in a FAANG company: * Very few recruiters outreach mentions any kind of compensation expectation. Why would I bother with hours of chat, screening and interview loops if I know only a handful companies offer the same kind of compensation I'm used to receive? * The bar of a Senior position is q…
I've paid off my mortgage and am now more open to working on something more altruistic than selling ads for slightly less pay. The problem is I can't find any interesting without a large paycut.
> The problem is I can't find any interesting without a large paycut.
So you're not really interested
Re: When hiring senior engineers, you’re not buying, you’re selling
#389Hands 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.
Stop looking at only the bay area. Google has offices in Pittsburgh, Kirkland, Austin, and Boulder. If you are willing to work at one of those locations, you can get pretty close to getting everything you want.
Re: When hiring senior engineers, you’re not buying, you’re selling
#390A 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 don’t know what your work-sample looks like, but unless it’s time actually working with your team on a real project, it gave you no indication of whether or not someone was “capable of delivering” You may think you filtered out people who failed your test, but you have no indication that that’s the case – you could just as easily have filtered out people who don’t like tests or people who don’t test well I trust yo…
> but unless it’s time actually working with your team on a real project..
I've ranted about this before on HN, but that's very much illegal in my neck of the woods. As soon as someone does useful work for you, they're an employee. YMMV but you can't expect new candidates to do actual work until you've hired them.
There are plenty of programming assignments, exercises or questions you can have them do instead.