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Hiring Developers: You're Doing It Wrong

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Re: Hiring Developers: You're Doing It Wrong

#131

Post by ams6110 »

tptacek wrote: post #48
ams6110 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if it's the same everywhere, but a 90-day "probationary" period is absolutely commonplace in the USA. Not sure I see much difference.

Virtually all employment in the US is at will, meaning you are continually on "probation". The difference between a contractor and an FT is that the contractor is 1099'd, pays both halves of FICA taxes, and isn't provided health insurance; more importantly, when the employer is as overt about the issue as "not hiring you full time", there's no implied social contract or norm ensuring you'll even end up getting the jo…

Agreed, but most states as well as federal laws also prohibit discrimination, and companies of any size/sophistication have HR policies to be sure they avoid being vulnerable to discrimination lawsuits in todays litigious climate. Probably fairly safe to fire a 20 - 30 year old white male for "any reason" but firing a minority or female or older person has to be done more carefully, following all established policy. With an explicit 90 probationary period there is more freedom in that initial window of time.

Also if you work 40 hours a week at the employer's place of business, are provided with all the tools you need to work, are paid directly by the employer, and are told what hours to work and how to do the task, the IRS will consider you an employee. Maybe if its only for 90 days you can get away with calling the person a contractor, but I think you're walking a fine line.

Re: Hiring Developers: You're Doing It Wrong

#132

Post by perlgeek »

bugsy wrote: post #42

The spare time issue is an interesting one. One one side we have companies saying that they look for programmers who are working on projects after they get off work and on weekends. On the other side we have companies having employees sign a contract claiming that everything they do 24/7 belongs to the company. Often both sides are the same company. It's not an issue for me only because I work for my own firm, someth…

Since this is a story from a German company... such a 24/7 clause can't be enforced in .de, it's void.

The company can claim inventions you made during work hours, and can forbid you to compete with them directly in your free time. That's it.

Re: Hiring Developers: You're Doing It Wrong

#133

Post by eagleEye »

currywurst wrote: post #28
sp_ wrote: post #22

I worked for a German startup too and our main problem was not vetting interviewees but finding people who want to interview at all. In the five year history of the company I think only one single person was hired who was not already friends with someone at the company. Other people just never applied. I remember manning the booth at one of those college campus events and it was very lonely. I probably talked to thre…

I have heard this anecdote from many of my friends as well. So my advice would be : any devs frustrated with jobs in their country head over to Germany ! It's a beautiful place with a comfortable work culture ...

I'm a student and I'm thinking about taking a year off from college (a CS degree) and explore the world of startups.

US is out of option leaving with some European country. I've heard Germany has a very vibrant software industry.

Can you please give a little more information about heading over to Germany?

Re: Hiring Developers: You're Doing It Wrong

#134

Post by robeastham »

jasonwatkinspdx wrote: post #18

The only hiring process I have found to work for developers is to sit down and work on real code together. This gets to the heart of the matter, and you very quickly feel out someone's knowledge, ability, and most importantly, how well they collaborate on a problem. Because in a startup you will need collaboration, and likely under the highest stress moments you've seen in your life. I also feel like this gives appli…

I agree, there is no substitute for working on a real problem together outside of the pressures of an interview room. This'll really give you an insight as to how a candidate is likely to perform within your team.

I'd have to disagree that all resumes are nearly useless though. We need some way of screening people and I think we just need to improve the resume format. Perhaps by making a tech resume more structured and uniform across candidates things could be improved. I built MightyCV with the aim of doing this - it's a resume platform with hackers in mind. I'd like to see MightyCV become a service that shepherds candidates towards producing a resume that is actually useful to tech recruiters. A MightyCV allows you to hook into the API's for HN, Github and Stackoverflow. When integration is activated this means recruiters get a useful at-a-glance overview of what people have actually been up to in the community. I'm toying with the idea of using an aggregation of these metrics to produce an overall MightyCV score. I'd then like to create a MightyCV map that resume owners could choose to place themselves on. Candidates electing to be included on the map would only appear if they had attained a certain score. It'd be a little like how down-vote privileges work here on HN, i.e. you have to earn your way on to the MightyCV map. I guess if I set the score threshold high enough then this map could become a good source of resumes within our sector that weren't entirely useless.

Also I liked the OP's suggested list of questions too:

- What's the last project you worked on at your former employer? - Tell me about some of your favorite projects. - What projects are you working on in your spare time? - What online hacker communities do you participate in? - Tell me about some (programming/technical) issues that you feel passionately about.

I'm going to give some thought to how I could incorporate these questions into MightyCV. I might even consider making them compulsory for all MightyCV owners. What do people think? Is forcing people to include something in their resume a bad idea?

Anyway, if you've read this far you might be interested in seeing what a MightyCV looks like. Here's mine: http://robeastham.mightycv.com (For those paying attention I don't think my theoretical MightyCV score would be high enough to get me on the MightyCV map at the moment. Answering SO questions is on my list of things to do in April).

If you like the look of it and want your own MightyCV then sign up for the private beta. There is a beta code and link in the first entry for experience within my resume. There are a couple of bugs I'm ironing out at the moment, mainly associated with the LinkedIn profile importer, but otherwise it's fairly robust. If you try it, I really hope you like it.

Re: Hiring Developers: You're Doing It Wrong

#135

Post by mcherm »

roel_v wrote: post #122
SkyMarshal wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if you could give them access to a custom subdomain of a test site and tell them to build a web app, anything they want, and upload it. Give a suitable time limit, a day to a week, depending on how much you want to see and whether they already are a full-time employee or student. Then screen based on what people came up with. That's a bit more involved than the lighter-weight solution in the same vein - remo…

Right, that's because no sane prospect (or rather, a prospect you'd want to hire) would go along with it. A reasonably competent developer has several options to choose from - it's just not rational to spend 10+ hours on each job opening; you wouldn't be able to coordinate and assess 5 or so offers in a reasonable time (when looking for a new job, people will apply at various places, compare the offers and take the b…

As a SCREENING mechanism 10 hours might be too much for the candidate to spend. But once past the initial screening, if there is serious consideration of an actual job offer, it is quite reasonable. The company will spend a good deal more than that on every candidate brought in for interviews (if you add up the time of everyone at the company). If the applicant is considering tens of different offers then they're Doing It Wrong(TM) -- they should pick the 4 best and choose amongst those. If they're considering 4 offers and can't spend 10 hrs on each, then why on earth not?

Re: Hiring Developers: You're Doing It Wrong

#136

Post by kaiwetzel »

bugsy wrote: post #80
MichaelGG wrote: post #33

Writing code is just another type of conversation. Sure, you're going to ask many questions. Having a candidate code a bit in front of you, going back and forth, provides a lot of info. As far as "CS puzzles" - binary search, trees, linked lists, hashtables, etc: None of those should be puzzles. If you're giving interviews that people can "memorize" an answer to, then the problem is how you're doing the interview. A…

Do you actually find people that expect candidates to implement quicksort? I've certainly implemented it, but there's no way I have it memorized, it's not an obvious algorithm at all. I'd be flabbergasted to be asked to implement it from memory with no warning. It seems clear to me that one would be testing for if the person happened to have looked at the algorithm recently, not if they were competent.

In college ("computer science part A",using Haskell) we played out the various sorting algorithms we learned in class, with students holding up a number (to determine sorting order). Neat to actually experiencing the slowness of bubblesort vs. mergesort/quicksort ;) We repeated the performance in front of a local mall - I can't recommend trying something like that in a crowded place from that experience.

I think expecting recent CS graduates to implement a basic sorting algorithm or binary search, etc. (say, in a garbage collected language they know well) is reasonable, for people with actual work experience I think it makes less sense and the focus should be on more recent experience if relevant to the job.

Re: Hiring Developers: You're Doing It Wrong

#137

Post by larsberg »

"we ended up hiring the candidate with the smoothest answers"

I mentioned this in another thread, but the point of coding questions is to see how they think about code, whether they understand how to walk through it (have a machine model), if they can pick out and evaluate edge cases, and how they can work with hints from you on how to improve their answer. Hiring based on ability to answer a particular problem is probably only a slightly better indicator of ultimate job success than height.

Re: Hiring Developers: You're Doing It Wrong

#138

Post by EarthLaunch »

mcherm wrote: post #135
roel_v wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, that's because no sane prospect (or rather, a prospect you'd want to hire) would go along with it. A reasonably competent developer has several options to choose from - it's just not rational to spend 10+ hours on each job opening; you wouldn't be able to coordinate and assess 5 or so offers in a reasonable time (when looking for a new job, people will apply at various places, compare the offers and take the b…

As a SCREENING mechanism 10 hours might be too much for the candidate to spend. But once past the initial screening, if there is serious consideration of an actual job offer, it is quite reasonable. The company will spend a good deal more than that on every candidate brought in for interviews (if you add up the time of everyone at the company). If the applicant is considering tens of different offers then they're Doi…

Asking someone to spend 10 unpaid hours on a test is a great filter - for developers to see that a company doesn't value their time.

Re: Hiring Developers: You're Doing It Wrong

#139

Post by roel_v »

mcherm wrote: post #135
roel_v wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, that's because no sane prospect (or rather, a prospect you'd want to hire) would go along with it. A reasonably competent developer has several options to choose from - it's just not rational to spend 10+ hours on each job opening; you wouldn't be able to coordinate and assess 5 or so offers in a reasonable time (when looking for a new job, people will apply at various places, compare the offers and take the b…

As a SCREENING mechanism 10 hours might be too much for the candidate to spend. But once past the initial screening, if there is serious consideration of an actual job offer, it is quite reasonable. The company will spend a good deal more than that on every candidate brought in for interviews (if you add up the time of everyone at the company). If the applicant is considering tens of different offers then they're Doi…

Because it's 40 hours wasted. 40 hours = one full working week = for (I think) the type of professional we're talking about $2000.

I guess we can differ in opinion on what is 'reasonable' but I say that requiring what you're proposing is too much for me personally to take any such employer serious.

(on the part of the 'past initial screening', the employee can't know or verify this. If there are 50 applicants, and there are 15 selected in the 'initial screening', is it reasonable to ask for 150 hours of unpaid labor from these people? I posit it's not.)

Re: Hiring Developers: You're Doing It Wrong

#140

Post by sausagefeet »

currywurst wrote: post #28
sp_ wrote: post #22

I worked for a German startup too and our main problem was not vetting interviewees but finding people who want to interview at all. In the five year history of the company I think only one single person was hired who was not already friends with someone at the company. Other people just never applied. I remember manning the booth at one of those college campus events and it was very lonely. I probably talked to thre…

I have heard this anecdote from many of my friends as well. So my advice would be : any devs frustrated with jobs in their country head over to Germany ! It's a beautiful place with a comfortable work culture ...

I am planning on moving to Germany in the next year. Any resources for finding a job in Berlin?
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