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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

#421

Post by bgirard »

fogetti wrote: post #371

[Sarcasm on]I think the most shocking of this is that an engineer with 7 years is already a senior these days. I even heard more shocking things like people with 3-5 years are already seniors. So what about people with 15 years? How shall we call them? Super senior? How about 30? Call them mega-giga-super-senior? And 40? Principal-giga-senior?[Sarcasm off] Having said that, I actually agree with everything the articl…

Senior is typically one or two promotions above the entry level. After that the titles resemble something like this:

Staff

Senior Staff

Principal

Senior Principal

Distinguished

Fellow

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

#422

Post by BrissyCoder »

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…

Totally agree. I suck at interviewing and freeze up on the spot. Even on-site coding tests I'm not great at. Give me the time to sit back in my own comfortable environment and I'm confident I can solve 95% coding problems (and reasonably quickly).

I've been involved in a lot of hiring and I always advocate a choice of a couple of fairly in-depth (maybe 4-6 hours) take-home coding problems. I think people should be paid for their time on these as well.

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

#423

Post by BrissyCoder »

austincheney wrote: post #177
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 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…

I don't know how much experience you have as a professional developer but I can barely remember the problems I solved last week let only any interesting ones I've solved in the past 10 years.

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

#424

Post by C1sc0cat »

treypitt wrote: post #415
fipple wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?”…

Maybe this is unique to sports? Do other fields exist where a BB-esque expert is totally incapable of practicing? The greatest movie critics probably can't direct or write for crap, but they're not commenting on how the movie was produced, just its output

You obviously haven't seen Mark Kermodes series on the BBC where he covers exactly this.

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

#425

Post by fogetti »

make3 wrote: post #408
subwindow wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

the ability to prepare for an interview is likely correlated to the ability to do the required work, so that point is moot.

It's not correlated at all. I can ask you questions about implementing a b-tree and then give you a job to fix CSS. Which is the case in most jobs and job interviews.

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

#426

Post by wyclif »

Annatar wrote: post #375
tyre wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hear what you're saying, but I think you're maybe creating a straw man argument here. A smooth talking engineer isn't one who sounds like a used car salesperson or is just hyped about the latest trendy framework. There are people who can talk through challenging problems at their former companies and how the problems were solved. They can tell you everything you'd want to hear because it's true. Except…they didn't…

"Principal engineer"? Do you actually have an engineering degree? Have you formal education in engineering? What is system engineering? It's not just you; the entire IT industry is suffering from systemic curriculum vitae bloat. That's why the working conditions are so bad in the professional sense.

The subject of what constitutes an engineer or what entitles a professional to the "engineer" title has been discussed ad nauseum here on HN.

Spoiler: "engineer" as a title for someone who does computer programming and software development without a license is perfectly fine and acceptable in the USA. In Canada, however, it's probably not.

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

#427

Post by fogetti »

foo101 wrote: post #304
drb91 wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Algorithmic ability has no correlation to the ability to write maintainable code, though. This is not true in my experience. I usually see a strong correlation between algorithmic ability and writing maintainable code. At various organizations I have worked for, I have seen that the ones with strong algorithm skills also happen to be critical thinkers who put a lot of emphasis on simple, elegant, and robust design…

I haven't seen this ever. Algorithmic skills have never been correlating with productivity or maintainable code in any of those 7 companies I worked in.

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

#428

Post by Kiro »

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…

Sounds like the problem lies within your organisation. My guess is that you lack someone who can actually evaluate a candidate properly based on conversion and need to resort to other means.

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

#429

Post by C1sc0cat »

dleslie wrote: post #383
ummonk wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Also the UK the first 2 years are effectively at will

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

#430

Post by Vinnl »

franciscop wrote: post #148
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 have recently gone through interviews in few companies, and in almost all of them I've been skipped the first small technical test. I have a strong online profile [0][1][2] so I was very glad not to have to spend several hours doing some simple fizzbuzz. Don't get me wrong, you could say that I even enjoy doing these small puzzles, but with a fulltime job and trying to select several companies I just didn't want to…

> spend several hours doing some simple fizzbuzz

When I see people mentioning fizzbuzz, it's always to filter out people who really can't program. If you just give me ten minutes to solve a fizzbuzz-like problem, that should be plenty of time for me to solve it given that I do know how to program, and just that single test would be enough to filter out those who don't. I don't see why it would have to take several hours.

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