21–30 of 52 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Only if you limit yourself to a particular kind of company, I think? I've worked as a dev for decades, but not for proper, actual tech companies... mostly a mixture of small biz and nonprofits. No two orgs were alike, even though my job at each one was very similar.
I didn't say the jobs were alike, I said the job listings were alike.
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I would hate to work for a company that treats me as commodity labor, bidding for my time but none of my values or interests. That's not to say salary should be secret (dear god, no), but how cool a company is IS an important metric in and of itself.
> That's not to say salary should be secret (dear god, no), but how cool a company is IS an important metric in and of itself. If only I had $1 for each time I saw a company showing off foosball tables, game consoles in the hallway, picnics, team get-togethers, people laughing and being cheerful.... And in the end it's the same cubic hellhole where people are no better than anonymous cogs in the machine.
Most effective way I've found of keeping out the noise is to put a few screening questions in place. Easy ones, maybe even a three line code sample (something that's almost fun to write).
I liked the idea originally, but the only people who I've encountered that give one, require candidates to run the technical gauntlet in the in-person interviews anyway, so then I feel like it was a total waste of time.
If you're afraid of people cheating, fine, just don't do it.
You know how a cool job description is written? Salary and equity first, very short list of mandatory technologies second, nice to have third, and nothing about how cool the company is. If the first three items attract someone then they're going to google the place and figure that out.
I think it shouldn't be about "how cool the company" is, but you should know what is the character of the company. We're not trying to be "cool", we want to hire people who will come here and do their best work, and want to see the impact they can have (we're in health tech).
That's not for everybody. People probably went to work for places like Uber because they thought it was "cool" to work there. or facebook or google. How many people get really excited about BNPL tech, where here in Australia, that's big thing. Those people may be more motivated by the $$.
There are missionaries and mercenaries, and I disagree that every company needs to only ire missionaries.
4 pieces of anecdotical data: 1. I stopped writing good job descriptions when hiring because HR always killed it: they cut mine to half and add their crap all over. I had open positions for SQL DBAs for 9 months, all candidates were developers in the best case and BI in the worst 2. From time to time I receive calls on LinkedIn with X years of experience required, where X was even 15. When I asked about it (I had mor…
Do you think the latter two categories of people could learn the job in nine months?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would hate to work for a company that treats me as commodity labor, bidding for my time but none of my values or interests. That's not to say salary should be secret (dear god, no), but how cool a company is IS an important metric in and of itself.
> That's not to say salary should be secret (dear god, no), but how cool a company is IS an important metric in and of itself. If only I had $1 for each time I saw a company showing off foosball tables, game consoles in the hallway, picnics, team get-togethers, people laughing and being cheerful.... And in the end it's the same cubic hellhole where people are no better than anonymous cogs in the machine.
Most effective way I've found of keeping out the noise is to put a few screening questions in place. Easy ones, maybe even a three line code sample (something that's almost fun to write).
This has worked with roughly 60 to 70% of the candidates I have interview since I implemented this rule.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> That's not to say salary should be secret (dear god, no), but how cool a company is IS an important metric in and of itself. If only I had $1 for each time I saw a company showing off foosball tables, game consoles in the hallway, picnics, team get-togethers, people laughing and being cheerful.... And in the end it's the same cubic hellhole where people are no better than anonymous cogs in the machine.
If the company describes itself as "cool" because they have pool tables, that's a great thing. It's signal that thats what "cool" is to them. Sounds like a job description that talked about not working in a cubicle hellhole would resonate with you more.
No, not really. It just means that HR had a PR budget to sell themselves as cool, and they bought a game as a prop.
My point is that this blend of signaling is pure bait-and-switch. The mods operandi is that they sell this false idea that they are all about fun and games but in the end it's just a low-paying cubicle hellhole with crunch time as the baseline.
Most effective way I've found of keeping out the noise is to put a few screening questions in place. Easy ones, maybe even a three line code sample (something that's almost fun to write).
I ask candidates to list three blog posts that they recently read and enjoyed. Seems to be an easy way to filter out non-serious candidates and script kiddies. This has worked with roughly 60 to 70% of the candidates I have interview since I implemented this rule.
I spend some time on HN and other places reading about stuff related to my field or about software in general. If you asked me that question, I would have zero chance recalling the last things I read. And it would raise a big red flag about whether you know what you're doing.
Just because you're filtering some people out, doesn't mean that your filter is good.
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Ive lived in the top two tech city in EU (edit: Europe as of now) London and Berlin and there were always ranges in job specs, now I'm in Amsterdam and it's the only city that doesn't seem to like that (along with coding turning on the brain, i would say)
A few days ago I was contacted by a British company for a remote job, no salary disclosed. I heard that in UK it is disclosed, but I cannot confirm.