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Exercises to craft an employer brand that makes engineers want to work for you

blog.interviewing.io

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Re: Exercises to craft an employer brand that makes engineers want to work for you

#21

Post by linuxftw »

dbcurtis wrote: post #12
asark wrote: post #5

1) Remote. 2) Money. 3) Demonstrate that you have half a clue how to run a project. 4) BONUS ROUND: No hours-long puzzle-question-memorization interview bullshit if you're not paying FAANG money and providing FAANG levels of résumé prestige.

Does F still have resume prestige? I predicted more than 10 years ago that someday having worked at Facebook would be the resume stain that you wear for life. Has it not yet come to pass that having worked at Facebook is a red flag? Sure, you are probably smart. But anybody that lists Facebook on their resume is going to find a lot of their interview time with me going to probing their ethics.

Probing their ethics? Have you worked for any large corporations? They all do unethical stuff. It all depends on your views specifically.

I find copyright and patents to be unethical. Probably not many people I could hire if I employed a similar tactic.

Re: Exercises to craft an employer brand that makes engineers want to work for you

#22

Post by newfangle »

dkersten wrote: post #14
newfangle wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Im sorry but 30 to 35 hours a week, especially at a startup is just not tenable for any company except a small lifestyle company Also i have to laugh at the fact that you "just" want to work at a company thats honest and then you throw in the 30 to 35 hour work week requirement

> Im sorry but 30 to 35 hours a week, especially at a startup is just not tenable for any company except a small lifestyle company You're right, its still too much. If you want the best engineers to do their best work, I'd put 30 hours as the upper limit.

And im sure that when they work 30 hours they are cutting 30 minutes off of their lunch break and spending less time in the bathroom and on reddit.

Re: Exercises to craft an employer brand that makes engineers want to work for you

#23

Post by eropple »

newfangle wrote: post #16
toomuchtodo wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work at an enterprise less than 40 hours a week. I hear from recruiters 3-4 times a week. I don't care about your mission or your culture, just pay me, I do the work, and then go home. If someone is of the opinion these sorts of orgs don't exist, I put forth that they might not have looked hard enough, and would encourage further exploration to better understand the employment landscape. If you're a startup and exp…

No not under market rate, if your goal is to work 30 to 35 hours a week under market rate all power to you but if you expect to be getting paid $400k total compensation or more you better be giving me at least 40 hours of work that i expect from a senior engineer. 5 to 10 hours is a full day of work.

You realize that a vanishingly tiny slice of developers make $400K a year, yes? Yeah, sure, a few companies pay that kind of money to a subset of their people. Nobody else does.

And that's fine. I'd have a hard time not sawing off a hand before working at three and maybe four of the "FAANG" group. And I like having a life, so I'll leave money on the table all day long.

Re: Exercises to craft an employer brand that makes engineers want to work for you

#24

Post by lol768 »

newfangle wrote: post #16
toomuchtodo wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work at an enterprise less than 40 hours a week. I hear from recruiters 3-4 times a week. I don't care about your mission or your culture, just pay me, I do the work, and then go home. If someone is of the opinion these sorts of orgs don't exist, I put forth that they might not have looked hard enough, and would encourage further exploration to better understand the employment landscape. If you're a startup and exp…

No not under market rate, if your goal is to work 30 to 35 hours a week under market rate all power to you but if you expect to be getting paid $400k total compensation or more you better be giving me at least 40 hours of work that i expect from a senior engineer. 5 to 10 hours is a full day of work.

I take it you're in the US? Is there a marked difference between engineer productivity in the US vs countries within the EU?

Re: Exercises to craft an employer brand that makes engineers want to work for you

#25

Post by [deleted] »

burntoutcase wrote: post #8
avgDev wrote: post #6

Honestly, I just want to work for a company that is honest, it does not have to be the most exciting work, as long as hours are flexible and at least some remote work is offered. I'm tired of recruiters try to hype up the company. If employer said, "Our product is not exciting but we offer great benefits, you just have to put in 30-35 hours a week, come to few meetings and meet reasonable deadlines that we agreed upo…

Tech companies aren't willing provide any of that, so they try to sell you on the shit you don't care about instead because it's cheaper.

[deleted]

Re: Exercises to craft an employer brand that makes engineers want to work for you

#26

Post by Phlarp »

dbcurtis wrote: post #12
asark wrote: post #5

1) Remote. 2) Money. 3) Demonstrate that you have half a clue how to run a project. 4) BONUS ROUND: No hours-long puzzle-question-memorization interview bullshit if you're not paying FAANG money and providing FAANG levels of résumé prestige.

Does F still have resume prestige? I predicted more than 10 years ago that someday having worked at Facebook would be the resume stain that you wear for life. Has it not yet come to pass that having worked at Facebook is a red flag? Sure, you are probably smart. But anybody that lists Facebook on their resume is going to find a lot of their interview time with me going to probing their ethics.

I would agree the resume prestige has diminished from what it once was, but I think it's a little far to suggest that any rank and file ENGINEER would have compromised ethics just from choosing to work there. Facebook uses cutting edge tech and pays really well, I would never hold it against an engineer young or old for accepting a position that very likely offered more compensation than they've ever had before.

If you are interviewing Facebook execs or management it would seem reasonable to question their ethics.

Re: Exercises to craft an employer brand that makes engineers want to work for you

#27

Post by granshaw »

Seeing a pattern here on Engineers just calling it as it is, and wanting employers to do so too.

It ain't gonna happen - its the same thing as in PR-speak where a company will deny wrongdoing, speak in platitudes, etc, even when everyone and their dog knows what the real story is.

Engineers will just need to do their own due dilligence and find out through other avenues what the culture and working conditions are really like - I think this is just the reality of corporate culture. There are very real and tangible benefits of being employed and having a stable month-to-month paycheck, instead of striking out on your own, and the sooner everyone just accepts these annoyances and moves on with life, the sooner they can concentrate on the things that really matter.

Basically, don't hate the players, hate the game.

Re: Exercises to craft an employer brand that makes engineers want to work for you

#28

Post by munchbunny »

jaden wrote: post #3

> we found that brand strength didn’t matter at all when it came to either whether the candidate wanted to move forward or how excited the candidate was to work at the company This quote came as a surprise.

I think their follow-up thesis this is accurate:

Maybe the most realistic thing we can say is that while brand likely matters a lot for getting candidates in the door, once they’re in, no matter how well-branded you are, they’re yours to lose.

When I was interviewing, that was entirely true. Visibility and branding matters for initial contact. After that, I turned down interviews for all sorts of reasons. Interviewers that lacked social skills, interviews that asked for too much work, interviews where once I met the team I decided it wasn't a good product, and in one particularly egregious case a recruiter who initially asked for a resume then didn't respond until a month later with a two sentence message that the position got filled but was there another one I wanted to apply for?*

Based on my experiences job searching, if it weren't for all sorts of perverse incentives and bad actors who would mess up a name-and-shame blacklist, I'd wholly support such a list.

Re: Exercises to craft an employer brand that makes engineers want to work for you

#29

Post by toomuchtodo »

newfangle wrote: post #22
dkersten wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Im sorry but 30 to 35 hours a week, especially at a startup is just not tenable for any company except a small lifestyle company You're right, its still too much. If you want the best engineers to do their best work, I'd put 30 hours as the upper limit.

And im sure that when they work 30 hours they are cutting 30 minutes off of their lunch break and spending less time in the bathroom and on reddit.

You feel you're paying X for 40 hours a week, when a lot of engineers are of the opinion you should only be getting 30 hours for X. Some companies will offer you X for 30 hours, and the rest of companies will have to compete against that (for now) or deal with it when regulation enforces it through labor law (eventually), similar to how unions brought us the weekend [1].

[1] https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/sep...

Re: Exercises to craft an employer brand that makes engineers want to work for you

#30

Post by iaabtpbtpnn »

granshaw wrote: post #27

Seeing a pattern here on Engineers just calling it as it is, and wanting employers to do so too. It ain't gonna happen - its the same thing as in PR-speak where a company will deny wrongdoing, speak in platitudes, etc, even when everyone and their dog knows what the real story is. Engineers will just need to do their own due dilligence and find out through other avenues what the culture and working conditions are rea…

Sure, most companies won't tell it like it is because their management is so wrapped up in their own fiction that the cognitive dissonance would be too great. But if a newer company is legitimately thinking about "crafting an employer brand" that appeals to engineers, and you've got lots of engineers who want this, isn't there an opportunity for disruption here? There must be a few shops that haven't contracted the MBA virus yet.
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