When hiring senior engineers, you’re not buying, you’re selling • Hacker News Board

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

#591

Post by notatcomputer68 » Mon, Jan 21, 2019, 6:45 PM UTC

mancerayder wrote: post #571

kayoone wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 be…

It's good to see a full gamut of opinions on here. I'll say that mentalities like yours are why I'm a contractor in the first place -- you should be grateful for the opportunity, etc and so forth. No. I exchange my time for your money. If that's entitlement to you, we come from opposite worlds. I'm not the guy who says he should be compensated for take-home tests above. I am however a senior engineer. I'm spurning an…

They cost money for both parties though so in that sense it's fair.

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

#592

Post by lsc » Mon, Jan 21, 2019, 6:45 PM UTC

cloogshicer wrote: post #479

lsc wrote: post #216

Isn't it just... mostly money? I mean, if you want to hire someone good, who presumably has a good job, you have to pay better than what they are getting now. I think this is probably especially true in Europe; I mean, as far as I know, people get like a 2x-4x raise moving to silicon valley from europe. If you pay more than your local competitors, you will largely have your pick of the candidates. I mean, yes, things…

Like I said elsewhere in this discussion, I disagree. Of course, salary is very important, but I (and many people I know) would easily choose (and have chosen) a lower salary for any combination of these perks: - Work fewer hours - Work from anywhere - Work in a specific location - Work in a certain environment - Work in a specific kind of organization - Work with specific technologies - etc. People are very differen…

I think #1 is mostly a pay issue. If two companies pay the same and one expects more hours, they don't pay the same.

(note, I'd also take a small hourly cut to work fewer hours a week, but as far as I can tell, the paycut I would need to take to do that is so large that I'm better off working a few years on and then taking six months or a year off and eating the tax and career disadvantages of that)

For most people in my area, #2 and #3 are also mostly pay issues. Like #1, it's not entirely pay, but the most common reason I've heard for people wanting to work places other than here (I'm in silicon valley, as you'd expect from someone trying to maximize salary) is that it's less expensive to live almost anywhere else in the world.

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

#593

Post by davidfischer » Mon, Jan 21, 2019, 6:48 PM UTC

While the definition of senior engineer is a bit squishy, I agree completely that as some one gets more senior they increasingly choose the company rather than the other way around.

I'm soft-launching a product to help companies recruit and I've done about a dozen customer development interviews with hiring managers (5 person companies through FAANGs) in the last two weeks. One thing I heard constantly was that referrals are their best source of candidates and that for roles with 7+ years of relevant experience they actually don't believe good candidates will come in by just randomly applying on their website/LinkedIn/etc. I had an engineering manager tell me "a senior engineer actively searching for a job is a negative signal of candidate quality" as opposed to going through somebody in their network or connecting with somebody at the company first. I had another manager tell me for the senior roles he's hiring for he only considers candidates explicitly sourced by his internal recruiter who searches LinkedIn for the specific skillset or people who are referrals for the specific job. This isn't some CTO level position; this is just a role for a ~10 years of experience individual contributor. Applications from the website go straight to the trash can. The implication was people with those skills aren't looking for jobs.

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

#594

Post by mancerayder » Mon, Jan 21, 2019, 6:51 PM UTC

notatcomputer68 wrote: post #591

mancerayder wrote: post #571

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's good to see a full gamut of opinions on here. I'll say that mentalities like yours are why I'm a contractor in the first place -- you should be grateful for the opportunity, etc and so forth. No. I exchange my time for your money. If that's entitlement to you, we come from opposite worlds. I'm not the guy who says he should be compensated for take-home tests above. I am however a senior engineer. I'm spurning an…

They cost money for both parties though so in that sense it's fair.

I agree with the statement "they cost money for both parties" but I disagree with "in that sense it's fair."

Individual consultant: loses 5 hours of interview time (and commute time) or take-home exam. Let's call it $800 for the sake of argument.

Company: loses 5 hours of interview time, plus the time it takes to "quiz" the exam.

Individual loses money that he / she uses to pay their mortgage.

Company loses profit because the time spent interviewing the candidate could have been spent working on feature Y of the application. So shareholders / VC's lose.

So you're saying it's fair that the individual contributor who loses half a day's pay in your interview process is equivalent (you DID use the word "fair" so that's an equivalence argument you made) to a company's loss of a few hours out of the many thousands of man-hours they rely upon? It's a .0001% of their profit, assuming the employers don't work a few hours more to make up for the lost time, because they will (they're salaried!)

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

#595

Post by vonmoltke » Mon, Jan 21, 2019, 6:51 PM UTC

readingnews wrote: post #468

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…

> Those are the "smooth talkers" of the engineering world. Those are the people you can't catch just through a verbal interview. I agree with this. I was a hiring manager, and there are those that can really talk technical, in detail. You really think they know what they are doing, how to solve complex problems, how to come up with solutions. You put a keyboard in front of them (or pencil and paper), and they go "uhh…

> I think until you have interviewed a LOT of people, it can be hard to quickly spot this.

What is your threshold for "a lot"? I have given a few dozen interviews. I always ask at least a couple background questions. The number who even have a polished delivery for that part at all are a minority, and the couple that tried to bullshit me we're painfully transparent. Maybe I just haven't done enough yet.

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

#596

Post by purple_ducks » Mon, Jan 21, 2019, 6:53 PM UTC

WWLink wrote: post #580

sheikheddy wrote: post #544

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, I feel like I'm the sort of person this comment is calling out. What advice would you give me so I can be the real McCoy? The only solution I can think of is to keep writing as much code as I can, so I can get real experience instead of just hot air.

Turn off your internet when doing work. Buy a stack of Postgre books. Memorize them. Never, ever, ever use stack overflow. EVER. Don't use google. Memorize everything. That's what that asshole is looking for. :) Though to be fair, if you come up with that strategy and can't do -anything- at a sql console, I'm going to ask how you normally interface with the database, because that's like a Linux expert not knowing how…

Most humans use a GUI when they can(with their connections stored and autocomplete and a few other nice-ities. Of course if you only ever use MySql or Postgres through command line, congrats - you know how to do basic connections(I assume using -h makes you an imposter)

As for the Linux/tar piece, I've used Linux on desktop for a few years(both Ubuntu & Fedora) & have used Suse and CentOS for servers for much longer.

I can tell you tar means tape archive. I can tell you I mostly use it with gunzip to compress it. I still google/reverse terminal search what flags to use with it both when archiving it and unarchiving it. I could probably remember some flags if I spent enough time thinking - why would my brain waste that much effort though?

I don't work as a backup administrator. I have better things to worry about knowing/having present at the forefront of my (admittedly human sized) memory.

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

#597

Post by dunpeal » Mon, Jan 21, 2019, 6:53 PM UTC

mattsfrey wrote: post #566

dunpeal wrote: post #557

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you get senior candidates to spend any time and effort on submitting "work samples"? I'm a senior engineer. Last time I interviewed, I received multiple offers from brand-name employers. None of them required any work samples, just hard technical interviews. A few times I saw a small unknown company that piqued my interest. I talked to them. Occasionally one would require me to do some sort of a task. Why woul…

This seems extremely off to me - from my POV who the hell has time to study algorithms and implementing data structures every time they need to find a job? Trying to make sure I can whiteboard a random CS problem from a massive set of potentials on the fly in front of observers is drastically more involved and requires much more time that serves no other purpose than facilitating interviewing, versus just spending an…

Not sure what you're arguing.

I'm fine going through tough technical interviews.

I'm not fine spending 3-5+ hours on some trivial coding task that can be gamed and was issued to me by folks who may not have even thoroughly checked my resume.

Given the current supply/demand curve, and the fact that top employers like FAANGs do not require this sort of time and effort (and for a good reason), I don't have to jump through that hoop.

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

#598

Post by watwut » Mon, Jan 21, 2019, 6:57 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #572

darkpicnic wrote: post #533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be honest, I don't think your questions were good enough to filter out the smooth talkers. I was in a senior position at a successful agency and was hired before they changed their interview style to match the eye-rolling "technical interview" that is now gold standard. I repeatedly argued they were getting too many false negatives and only a certain kind of developer with this style, but they believed "if Google…

I gave an example of one of our erstwhile technical interview questions below. Batting around interview questions is a hacker sport and I've met dozens of developers who delighted in relaying and evangelizing their preferred questions. I'll admit, candidly, that "what's your favorite tech stack and what don't you like about it" --- a question you can literally just look up blog posts on, and a question I feel I could…

Aren't you two hiring for completely different position? One is looking for web system developer and the other is looking for the kind of coder that will write exploits and smaller tools. In one position you expect the senior to have general idea about wide range of relevant technologies, because you expect senior to choose between them occasionally (plus hiring manager knows that stuff too). Second position does not require it at all.

Plenty of people can do both or can change from one to another. But it still seems to be that the interview focus should be different as both positions require somewhat different focus.

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

#599

Post by ChuckNorris89 » Mon, Jan 21, 2019, 6:57 PM UTC

cloogshicer wrote: post #66

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #9

The author is from Austria. As a dev who moved there 4 years ago I noticed it's probably some archaic Germanic cultural trait for any job postings to be very employer focused, acting like they're doing you a favor by hiring you and not caring about what the employee might want, even for senior roles. Maybe a local is reading this and can explain why this is still a thing.

Author here, true, software jobs are a bit extra weird around here. I think it's because companies are run more "traditionally" here. Meaning that the people running the company are usually managers. They have a business background and don't understand what most engineers want and how they think. Even many self-proclaimed "startups" (which are often just consulting shops) are run this way. The cause for this might be…

If the people running the companies have business backgrounds surely they understand the principles of supply and demand, no?

They want FAANG like employees but only if they work for peanuts. Then they cry to the press they can't find skilled engineers.

The same way I also can't find Ferraris, with a budget for a Hyundai.

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

#600

Post by vonmoltke » Mon, Jan 21, 2019, 7:03 PM UTC

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.

> What is system engineering?

https://www.incose.org/systems-engineering