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

Eh, not in my experience. I've often seen it as an excuse to treat people poorly. As in "You're being paid a lot to put up with BS" and "Highly compensated shouldn't have excuses or whine." It also seems to correlate well with their trying to solve all legitimate work headaches with money.

I've been on the reviewer side of a handful of "choose your own language"-style take-homes recently and found that it's really not good for the candidate if they actually end up using something that wouldn't have been the interview committee's first or second choice. There have been cases where choosing a less-trendy-but-still-totally-viable toolkit has effectively disqualified a candidate, with several committee members not even considering it necessary to look at the code. This is very unfair and lame but an unfortunate reality. I asked that the test be changed to constrain the options at least to a list that wouldn't be immediately disqualifying.

You could advise the candidate ahead of the interview something along the lines of "you'll be asked to write a code sample in either Ruby or Python -- you'll have full access to Google, but you may want to brush up on the basics of these languages if you haven't used them recently".

This does two things: first, it prevents the issue you have, where you're essentially not sure if you're correctly scoring the samples produced. Secondly, it really requires you to constrain the problem to things that someone who has barely used language X or Y can do within 45 minutes.

1 acre is not at all unrealistic. I work at a well known tech company and live in an area where you can afford acre (and multiacre) lots. While owning a 1 acre lot with house is certainly not the norm in the company, it is also not at all noteworthy. No one gets surprised when they hear someone owns one. It's seen very much as a preference thing. Some people like apartments, some townhouses, some houses, and some larger lots.

And yes, they're mostly "tech types".

More realistically, in most parts of the country, a tech job will get you a 2000+ sq ft house built no earlier than the 90's. And in many of those places, a short commute to boot. Now I know SV folks often talk about how they don't need a house that big or one that "new"[0], the reality is once you're outside and can afford one, you won't find a good reason to buy a 1960's house, or a 1200 sq ft one. The preferences of SV folks are really post hoc rationalizations.

[0] Many of my coworkers reject houses built in the 90's - it's too old for them.

Especially if you’re married, I know a lot of developers whose spouses income goes straight into savings, investments, etc. but it’s another example of HN Silicon valley thinking that software engineering starts and stops at four companies. Married dual income couples especially can make out like bandits in any of those cities.

I live in one of those cities and depending on how you classify me,I’m either somewhere above the median or well over the 75% percentile. Our nice big, new (comparatively) cheap house in the burbs is less than 20% of our take home pay. How much do you think we put aside in savings?

Because assortive mating is a thing - it’s statistically likely that two college educated people will end up getting married and I’m trying to keep this as generic as possible. If one was a software developer making $135K a year in one of those cities and the other was almost any college educated professional making $65K a year. The net of the lower paying spouse could pay off your nice house in the burbs in ten years or less.

I don’t know of any couple who is in that situation (and I know a few) who would think about moving to the west coast just for one spouse to make $300K when their combined income is already above $200K in a much less expensive area.

I was co-owner of a startup at the time, the guy I interviewed called me up and said you did really good but I think you really don't want to work here - my wife said 'Wow, that guy was really smart' considering how some things went later it might have been better if I'd said no I really really do