351–360 of 497 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So, the developer is overconfident. Have you tried coaching this person into understanding this? I feel that is part of good management.
That's not what they bargained for when they hired a senior person. Basic coding questions would have filtered him.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> My resume speaks for itself. At the time of this writing, I am working with someone who has 10+ years of experience, including former positions as a lead developer. I was involved in the interview process and made the recommendation to hire, as they were able to answer a lot of domain-specific questions very well and had a good knowledge of the ecosystem. Fast-forward three months, and I am spending hours per day s…
Entrepreneurial engineer here... If I ever hire an engineer for my business -- I hope it'd be someone I've already worked with and know -- but if it had to be someone random, I'd pursue this method: 1) Solicit Resumes 2) Pick N candidates 3) Phone screen to make sure they aren't complete assholes 4) Stack rank & pop top candidate 5) Pay them to develop a feature on contract 6) If satisfied, repeat step 5 until ready…
It will be very rare to find a good candidate willing to quit a well-paying job to go on contract for you.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is what we've resigned ourselves to, but it's very expensive. We're building crud apps, not doing cutting edge research, so I assumed we would be able to find someone that is already up to speed on the language and frameworks. You also have to factor in the cost of senior developer time spent coaching, the lost productivity, and the code quality suffering in the meantime.
> We're building crud apps Perhaps you shouldn't be using complicated faddish framework then?
Interviewing people is hard. Most people suck at it. I've interviewed over 100 people in my life, and I've been interviewed about ten times. I know I still suck at it. The code test is one of the more annoying facets of interviews. On the hiring side, it's an efficient way to screen and vet candidates for basic skills. It's relatively low cost to the employer to have a recruiter issue the test. If you come up with yo…
> My resume speaks for itself. At the time of this writing, I am working with someone who has 10+ years of experience, including former positions as a lead developer. I was involved in the interview process and made the recommendation to hire, as they were able to answer a lot of domain-specific questions very well and had a good knowledge of the ecosystem. Fast-forward three months, and I am spending hours per day s…
This is a very hard thing to really make a part of your thinking process, in particular because nobody wants to come to terms with the fact that they might be in the latter group.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Judging by your posts in this thread, have you considered the problem might be that you (and many other companies) hire people based on their ability to answer theoretical questions (which also happens to be while under a lot of pressure), rather than their ability to code? I'd like to think there are plenty of candidates that have open source projects that showcase their coding skills, or that have made impressive s…
It's not really a theoretical question though. It's a very concrete example of the most common operation you would need to perform in a front end developer role. And none of the applicants we've seen have side projects or code on github. If you know of a method to ascertain someone's ability to code in a professional environment in a one hour interview, I'm all ears!
I believe you'd have much better results if you ascertained the applicants technical ability before the interview, and instead spent the interview getting to know the person, to see if (s)he had a positive and friendly personality. If none of your applicants have side-projects or code on GitHub then perhaps you're searching the wrong places, and/or failing to properly promote the position (especially if some of your developers are earning 2xxK). I'm sure if you posted the position in HN's 'Who's Hiring' and included a 100+k salary, then you'd get flooded by talented developers that have open source code/impressive side-projects. And if somebody with an impressive resume doesn't have that, then you can just request a small take-home assignment that's related to the work you do. If you'd like to avoid getting flooded with resumes', then you could also just reach out to the developers you find interesting on GitHub.. considering your salary range then I imagine you'd have a very high interest rate.
I am preparing myself for a week of onsite interviews as we speak. Of course I hate them, but what other choice do I have? The biggest problem is that the questions are so random and span almost anything. Will I get asked: a pthread question? implement mergesort or quicksort? implement a Read/Write lock? implement a smart pointer? a bit manipulation question? topological search? dynamic programming? graph question? b…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not really a theoretical question though. It's a very concrete example of the most common operation you would need to perform in a front end developer role. And none of the applicants we've seen have side projects or code on github. If you know of a method to ascertain someone's ability to code in a professional environment in a one hour interview, I'm all ears!
Honestly you don't seem to be a well put together environment and it feels like you expect to hire experts in some random framework instead of good software engineers. I'm not surprised you're only getting code monkeys who have used your framework in passing or have done basic pixel dev applying that don't meet your bar.
> Honestly you don't seem to be a well put together environment
That is a pretty bold and unfriendly statement to make based on very little information.
> you expect to hire experts in some random framework
We're hiring front-end developers to work on a react and redux application, which is kind of a de-facto standard for single page applications these days. We have an app with a highly dynamic UI that requires immediate user feedback and must work offline. I don't think we're misapplying the technology.
> I'm not surprised you're only getting code monkeys who have used your framework in passing
Again, we're interviewing people with several years of professional experience using react and redux listed on their resumes. We're also not tailoring the interview process to only react and redux specific questions, but if someone claims to have been paid to write react apps for three years, I'm going to ask them some questions about writing react apps.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But, at least in California, don't employment laws make the firing process kind of slow and expensive?
California is an at-will work state, which means that either the employee or the company may terminate employment at any time, with or without cause or prior notice.
The net effect it has is that firings are uncommon, and people hang around until the next round of layoffs, when a reason will be found to lay them off.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This seems good on the surface, but I can't imagine top tier talent at a FANG or equivalent ever leaving their job to do this. I feel this filter will only leave behind those who are currently contractors that are interested in maybe going full time, and the unemployed/employed who are desperate enough to go along with such a scheme. Foregoing the typical crappy interview process is one thing, but working, even for m…
> top tier talent at... Must be looking to get out for some reason. Doing a small side-project shouldn't be a big impediment. > I would avoid ever getting myself put into that position. Extreme risk-averse behavior can cause problems on the other side. Easy enough to give a small-project a try and cut out early when red-flags are actually encountered. Just the cost of doing business, IMHO.
If you are doing well at a company, I am not sure how you make this seem like a good value proposition, especially in this tech job market. Another way to put it, with a personal spin- I don't work at an actual FANG, but a company that arguably pays better, and their would have to be a very large upside at the other end of this process to make it worth going through. Things would have to be very bad for me to give me up my deep in the six figure job to spend a month interviewing at some place unless it had some legendary track record.
This is all theoretical though and not really worth arguing over. I'd like to see OP try this out and report back the results, good or bad. I could be wrong, but I would be willing to wager that you get a lot more resumes just out of a bootcamp as opposed to people with proven track records currently at prestigious companies.