Want to hire the best programmers? Offer growth • Hacker News Board

Re: Want to hire the best programmers? Offer growth

#311

Post by conanbatt » Wed, Jul 24, 2019, 2:38 AM UTC

erikpukinskis wrote: post #296

XMPPwocky wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this a more effective tactic, in expectation, than working a well-paid job at an established company and then going to Vegas every year to bet a decent chunk of your salary?

Way better than Vegas. But you can invest 2+ years and get nothing. If you can repeat the process several times, each time picking better bets, then you stand a good chance to win big. Maybe 50/50 chance of hitting a million dollar win over 12 years and 5 contracts. Assuming you leave some sinking ships and some consecutive years really pulling hard at promising companies. But you should probably also be investing in…

Some day what employees actually make with stocks will be public and doubt will be dissipated all ways. MAybe a company like Forge can do it.

Re: Want to hire the best programmers? Offer growth

#312

Post by lugg » Wed, Jul 24, 2019, 2:38 AM UTC

yangez wrote: post #310

> We’re arbitrarily defining “great” candidates as those scoring between 95th and 98th percentile on our technical interview, and “the best” candidates as those scoring at 98th percentile or above. This is an important qualifier. I'd argue that the most technical candidates are not necessarily the ones who offer the most value to companies. In fact, I would argue that "notably de-emphasizing ambition" will cancel out…

1., 2. Sounds like a pain in the arse to manage while I work at maintaining my work-life balance.

You're presenting a false dichotomy. There is also

3. Technically superior whose top priority of learning things got them where they are. Maintaining work life balance is just one of the many tools this person has learned over the years to be consistently effective over the long term instead of running into burnout.

Re: Want to hire the best programmers? Offer growth

#313

Post by jcbrand » Wed, Jul 24, 2019, 2:39 AM UTC

yangez wrote: post #310

> We’re arbitrarily defining “great” candidates as those scoring between 95th and 98th percentile on our technical interview, and “the best” candidates as those scoring at 98th percentile or above. This is an important qualifier. I'd argue that the most technical candidates are not necessarily the ones who offer the most value to companies. In fact, I would argue that "notably de-emphasizing ambition" will cancel out…

I'd choose the first and I don't consider "moving fast and learning tons" very compelling.

That might just mean that the 2nd person would try to shoehorn projects into new frameworks and discount working solutions for shiny new (and cutting edge) tech. All in the name of "moving fast and learning tons".

Re: Want to hire the best programmers? Offer growth

#314

Post by conanbatt » Wed, Jul 24, 2019, 2:41 AM UTC

matt-snider wrote: post #242

chadash wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Partially because I enjoy learning and growing my technical skills, partially because I want to move into more leadership roles, but a huge part of it is because I know that if I'm good, I will be paid a massive premium for it." And it's one of the unfair things in life that jobs that pay more often get other benefits as well. Making $40k/year? Chances are you get 2 weeks vacation, inflexible work hours, inferior…

20 days is the legal minimum in Germany. I think a lot of other countries have similar rules. It's kind of sad that in the US and Canada, 4 weeks vacation is special, and 2 weeks vacation is legal.

I think the exact opposite way. I wish there were no legally paid time off ever. Just pay people when they work and not when they don't.

Re: Want to hire the best programmers? Offer growth

#315

Post by sagichmal » Wed, Jul 24, 2019, 2:41 AM UTC

logifail wrote: post #86

chadash wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Partially because I enjoy learning and growing my technical skills, partially because I want to move into more leadership roles, but a huge part of it is because I know that if I'm good, I will be paid a massive premium for it." And it's one of the unfair things in life that jobs that pay more often get other benefits as well. Making $40k/year? Chances are you get 2 weeks vacation, inflexible work hours, inferior…

> when someone pays you more, they respect you more The counter-example to that could be that once you're senior enough, you are never 100% on vacation. If enough goes wrong, you will get called back to work.

> once you're senior enough, you are never 100% on vacation

This has not been my experience either personally or by proxy to my more-senior colleagues. But it may be I have found myself in a particular niche which is non-representative.

Re: Want to hire the best programmers? Offer growth

#316

Post by RussianCow » Wed, Jul 24, 2019, 2:56 AM UTC

viscanti wrote: post #283

bigiain wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're somewhat more generous than I am. I'd have told my wife to just block that number, and waited until I got back from vacation to explain that it'll happen to anyone else who calls my wife for anything other than an existential emergency as well.

He also knew he was on-call and went somewhere where he didn't have reception. It sounds like he knew that might be an issue so gave his wife's number as a backup. That's basically training the person who has to escalate to use his wife's number as it's the one he responded on. I don't think he's being generous at all, it seems like an obvious outcome of being on call and not responding on his own phone.

This is accurate, although to be fair to myself, I didn't know I would be on call until after the plans were made. With that said, I take issue with this being an "obvious outcome" and the notion that I was "training" our staff to use my wife's number. I was explicit with the company (at least I thought) about the need to use her number only being applicable for that weekend; the fact that some people tried to use it when I was on call again in the future is on them. Mistakes happen, and everything worked out just fine, but I don't see how that part was my fault.

Re: Want to hire the best programmers? Offer growth

#317

Post by pier25 » Wed, Jul 24, 2019, 3:15 AM UTC

swalsh wrote: post #138

My wife is a traditional "professional". When she has a 1:1 with her boss, her boss gives her advice on how to move up. They talk about what she needs to do for a promotion etc. I've never personally experienced that. If I talk about growth, my bosses always think i'm talking about what new kinds of technologies I want to work with. I've been writing code professionally for nearly 14 years, it's still interesting, bu…

What would be the next step? Being a manager?

Re: Want to hire the best programmers? Offer growth

#318

Post by bigiain » Wed, Jul 24, 2019, 3:28 AM UTC

viscanti wrote: post #283

bigiain wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're somewhat more generous than I am. I'd have told my wife to just block that number, and waited until I got back from vacation to explain that it'll happen to anyone else who calls my wife for anything other than an existential emergency as well.

He also knew he was on-call and went somewhere where he didn't have reception. It sounds like he knew that might be an issue so gave his wife's number as a backup. That's basically training the person who has to escalate to use his wife's number as it's the one he responded on. I don't think he's being generous at all, it seems like an obvious outcome of being on call and not responding on his own phone.

Yeah - that's fair. I was responding more to natefox's parent comment, where he was on vacation rather than RussianCow's on-call scenario.

I should have worded myself more clearly...

Re: Want to hire the best programmers? Offer growth

#319

Post by perl4ever » Wed, Jul 24, 2019, 3:34 AM UTC

ddelt wrote: post #262

bostik wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am going to hazard a guess: you have not been exposed to some of the nuttier regulations within this space. The regulatory demands in financial technology, and especially in those industries where both the regulators as well as majority of the players may not be technically literate, are effectively the anti-thesis of robust and reliable engineering. When the industry regulations demand that for every potentially d…

Everyone who has not worked in the heavily regulated finance industry should read the above post, because this person speaks the truth.

As someone who has never worked in the finance industry, I feel like one shouldn't lose sight of the fact that the point of it all is to not have millions of dollars just vanish at random as often happens with Bitcoin. Making software engineers happy is not the point.

Re: Want to hire the best programmers? Offer growth

#320

Post by titanomachy » Wed, Jul 24, 2019, 3:38 AM UTC

meowface wrote: post #222

xtracto wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is because it is SEO spam. TripleByte regularly posts these here in HackerNews to promote their hiring platform. People seem to like it nonetheless

It is SEO spam, and TripleByte does seem to use a lot of "growth hacks" or something, because I see their ads on pretty much any platform that I see ads for (like on mobile apps, where I don't have any easy-to-use ad blockers), and they're mentioned on HN at a surprisingly high rate. But (I think?) I've seen people here genuinely recommend them, and I also don't think YC would work with and promote a company they did…

They do advertise very aggressively, to the point where I think they risk damaging their reputation. But I guess they've done the analysis and decided it's worth it.

I went through their process and got lots of practice interviewing. Even though I didn't take any of the offers I got through them I was able to use one to negotiate a much higher salary at the job I did take. Their recruiters and interviewers treated me respectfully and professionally.

So I'd recommend it, especially if you're very good and/or smart but not an attractive candidate by conventional standards. If you have 5 years at Microsoft or something then you probably don't need them, since you can interview wherever you want at that point.