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

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

#671

Post by rkangel »

mgkimsal wrote: post #489
aprdm wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a good post. Have been in the UK startup environment it was crazy how many companies got funding but didn't had a strong senior in their software department. Because of this their hiring process was aimed to hire more "strong juniors" even tho they didn't realize it. A strong senior is a person who completely changes how you are even approaching the problem or someone who shows you problems you hadn't seen be…

There's times when i think i'm coming across as the bullshitter. "Tell me of an accomplishment you're proud of". I struggle with this one, but I've given this example years ago. Worked at a company which did nightly data imports. Things worked until 'companyx' became a cEient, and the imports were huge. They would take 18-20 hours. Then longer. eventually they were touching the 24 hour mark - unacceptable. Client's d…

This could be an example of the start of a competency based interviewing question. These questions usually start similar to "tell me about a time when". You ask for an example of them displaying some trait you care about, and then dig in to the details of what happened, why they did what they did etc.

CBI is a fairly effective technique for general interviewing, because you uncover how people actually behave rather than how they like to think they behave. Most of the gold is in the follow up digging questions, which should separate the bullshit answer from a real one.

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

#672

Post by austincheney »

handyman5 wrote: post #664
austincheney wrote: post #653

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here are some I thought of off the top of my head. These are based upon things I actually encountered. What if I were to provide a solution that executes much faster, requires less documentation, passes test automation, and is a quarter of the code but ignores the framework or standard code style? The standard DOM methods perform thousands of times faster than other options for interacting with markup. I can prove th…

A couple of these questions would be at least yellow flags for me as an interviewer or hiring manager, as they indicate a strong bias for throwing away existing systems ("ignores the framework", "rewrite the build", "original code"). There's a great quote from Lou Montulli[1]: > I laughed heartily as I got questions from one of my former employees about FTP code the he was rewriting. It had taken 3 years of tuning to…

That is why I would ask those questions... to excuse myself out of your organization. I have found it painful to be at organizations who repeatedly and intentionally make really bad decisions so that their developers deliberately don't have to solve problems (invented here syndrome). If that is what I were looking for I wouldn't have developed the skills that I have.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invented_here

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

#673

Post by pc86 »

diN0bot wrote: post #531
readingnews wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

and don’t forget the reverse problem mentioned originally: false negatives. you can have someone who is a whiz at practical and specific solutions, who thinks critically and analytically and just gets an enormous amount done WELL. And empowers those around them to boot! they have the reverse problem to speaking about other peolle’s work as their own. instead, they speak of their own work as teamwork. this effects man…

The problem with hiring is that a false positive is much more damaging than a false negative. Getting the group of people together to vet a candidate is expensive; recruiters are expensive; for the candidates, taking the time off is typically pulling from a very limited bucket of just a few weeks every year; flying people in to interview is expensive; and ultimately, to go through all that and hire someone bad makes you go through the whole process again. If it takes you a few months to figure out it's not going to work, it's unlikely anyone desirable from your original candidate pool is still available.

False negatives are expected, and honestly probably good overall and in aggregate, because it decreases the odds of a false positive. One of my first bosses that involved me in the hiring process told me one day that the point of interviewing is not to find reasons to say yes, it's to find a reason to say no.

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

#674

Post by codezero »

paulie_a wrote: post #658
paulie_a wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Downvote if you want but according to Bloomberg 4 hours ago that's the official stat.

Downvote facts. I don't care about the fake worthless internet points. It is just pathetic that people downvote actual facts without having an actual rebuttal or intellectual counterargument. Nope just be a coward and downvote because I don't like it.

Not sure why you got downvoted, but I’m also not sure what point you are trying to convey. Facts are facts like 1 + 1 = 2, but it’s unclear what that fact brings to the conversation.

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

#675

Post by vonmoltke »

fizwhiz wrote: post #364
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…

Who cares if you're downleveled? The compensation bands are wide enough that they overlap. This usually means that even though you expected level N, you can get your target comp at level N-1 if you negotiate.

That was not my experience. Google was pretty inflexible and offered me (with 16 years of experience) well under $300k for an L4 position.

A month later Twitter offered me 35% more than Google's best and final offer for a more senior position. I didn't even have to negotiate or mention the rejected Google offer.

Oh, I should add that, in my case, the downlevelling was up front. The recruiter wouldn't even put me in for an L5 interview.

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

#676

Post by edhowzerblack »

One thing that employers should keep in mind is that the candidates they would like connect with probably already have jobs. Many people I know simply do not reply to recruiters if they are adequately paid and reasonably happy in their current job. The reason why is simple. If they did, they would simply be volunteering to spend a bunch of time doing take-home projects and coding exercises for free without even knowing if the company administering said technical assessments would pay them more or offer them a more fulfilling job!

So it's not just that you're selling (as opposed to buying) because the candidate is "senior", you're selling because you're trying to lure someone away from a job they already have. Asking someone how much they're making now so that you can offer them the same salary or a measly ten percent more and then giving a homework assignment is not exactly enticing someone to switch jobs!

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

#677

Post by fizwhiz »

vonmoltke wrote: post #675
fizwhiz wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who cares if you're downleveled? The compensation bands are wide enough that they overlap. This usually means that even though you expected level N, you can get your target comp at level N-1 if you negotiate.

That was not my experience. Google was pretty inflexible and offered me (with 16 years of experience) well under $300k for an L4 position. A month later Twitter offered me 35% more than Google's best and final offer for a more senior position. I didn't even have to negotiate or mention the rejected Google offer. Oh, I should add that, in my case, the downlevelling was up front. The recruiter wouldn't even put me in f…

I don't know the details of your experience (were all 16yrs of experience as a SWE demonstrating a deep technical expertise?), but Google puts engineers with even 2-3years of experience on an L4-interview loop.

If you knew that you were being slotted for L4 upfront why did you even bother interviewing? I've seen L4s rack up multiple job offers from different companies and use that as leverage to negotiate; they've all been offered $300k+ or more. Not all experience/education is the same but you gotta know how to play the game.

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

#678

Post by bartread »

lugg wrote: post #663
bartread wrote: post #537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who's talking about shipping "shit"? You are overreading by a very wide margin. I also don't appreciate being called lazy, and especially by somebody who knows nothing about my business or my team. Please try to keep your tone civil in future.

I'm not overreading, you said you prefer shipping sub optimal solutions. Sounds like to me. I didn't call you lazy, I said that shipping in the name of delivery focus was lazy, or at least your argument about idealism was. Fact is, shipping quality is the far more optimal solution and always will be. Making the trade off and adding technical debt is never a worthy trade long term. The only people who gain from it are…

> I'm not overreading, you said you prefer shipping sub optimal solutions. Sounds like to me.

I was talking about prioritisation. I am very wary (or perhaps jaded) with people who want to fix everything all at once with no regard to the wider effects on the business of doing so.

I didn't mention anything about quality with respect to what we do choose to deliver, although I can assure you that user experience - of which quality is a key facet - is our utmost concern.

I thought my intent was clear, but sorry if not, and hence my comment about overreading. I wrote very little from which you (and you're not the only one) appear to have extrapolated quite a long way.

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

#679

Post by gwbas1c »

dublo7 wrote: post #534
gwbas1c wrote: post #532

As a happily employed person who occasionally interviews for another job, I find coding samples a turn-off. Why? Two reasons: - If the coding sample is in a language (or large framework) that I will learn on the job, I don't think I will have any success. Something that's a 20-minute job for one person could be a 5 hour "learning exercise" for me. - If the sample is something like a bugfix or enhancement where I have…

My pet peeve is getting a coding assignment with a bug or syntax error or misplaced curly bracket that turns the coding exercise into a trick question. The compiler or editor would catch all that stuff so don't expect me to do it by hand unless you're paying me to work in notepad.

A good coding exercise has the candidate demonstrate that the candidate knows how to program a computer.

Stuff like that just means it's time to walk away from the interview.

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

#680

Post by tptaqek »

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 don’t ever want to work with you.
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