full day on-site is better than a 4hr take-home
Ask HN: Having trouble getting senior applicants, wondering what to do about it
101–110 of 794 posts
Re: Ask HN: Having trouble getting senior applicants, wondering what to do about it
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lol, take home technical assignment. Why would I ever? I'd much rather have a comfortable conversation with someone who has worked with me in the past. I'm never, ever doing a 4 hour assignment for you.
I think "senior" has at least two types. There's the FAANG-alum seniors who are used to and will put up with full-day or even multi-day interviews full of leetcode shit or "gotcha" edge-case quizzes about language features you trained yourself to avoid a decade ago or take-home assignments ("4 hours" sure except the other candidate put in 12 hours and lied about it, so...) for that sweet, sweet crazy-high comp. Unles…
> ("4 hours" sure except the other candidate put in 12 hours and lied about it, so...)
Recently went through this. Got an email at 2pm saying "please run through this exercise". Looked at the doc, then decided to hit it. I submitted everything back before 6pm. It was around 2.5 hours, and I took a short break in the middle. I screen-captured my whole session (not sent in) but to have a little souvenir of the exercise. There's really not much way I could have 'cheated' on the time because there was only 4 hrs tops between sending the email and submitted my results.
Their estimate was 'we expect this to take 2-3 hours', and they weren't all that wrong. I could see someone less experienced taking more than 2 hours just on one of the bad queries - unless you've seen the pattern(s) before it's hard to recognize and refactor quickly.
Re: Ask HN: Having trouble getting senior applicants, wondering what to do about it
#103> Take-home technical assignment (~4h) or similar at candidate's choosing If I can get a similarly-paying job at a place that doesn't do this, I'll skip you. Many seniors ( actual seniors, not 3-years-of-experience seniors) have a network and can say "hey I'm looking" and instantly have multiple options that won't have them do more than talk to the team and manager for an hour or two. If that.
Absolutely agree. People with 10+ years, a good network and decent resume pop their head up above the parapet and get instantly mobbed with offers. They're on the market 2 weeks, tops. No-one good is going to do a takehome just so the hiring team can rub their beards and feel superior while they pick over the code. That approach worked a few years ago, in today's recruitment bear market you don't pick the candidates,…
I agree 100% and imo is the proper approach in such a market. I was trying to explain this to people that the market has changed and the hiring pipelines must be simplified and significantly shortened and i kept getting the opposite outcome, more rounds and more time to make an offer to good candidates and eventually "we cannot find anyone, keep looking".
Companies keep their traditional pipelines with average time to hire time of 2+ months and think they will find and hire loyal people in this rapid market where people accept offers on top of others or with just a couple days or weeks in their new position. And they keep filtering others because "no culture fit", "not sure about this line of code in the take home assignment" and other nonsense.
Re: Ask HN: Having trouble getting senior applicants, wondering what to do about it
#104Are you hiring a DevOps engineer, or a software engineer? While there's overlap, these are fundamentally different things. Focus your job description on either: 1. A software engineer who can (and is willing) to do some DevOps work. 2. A DevOps engineer who can (and is willing ) do some software development.
Definitely #1, and the ad is fairly up-front with that.
To echo what a few other comments have said, seeing "DevOps" as part of the responsibilities for a role is an immediate turn off to me. I want nothing to do with DevOps. It isn't interesting work (to me) and there are currently a lot of opportunities to do interesting work. DevOps also isn't challenging work (to me), it is simply frustrating work because I do not want to learn it, I just want to complete my dev task and move on to the next.
Re: Ask HN: Having trouble getting senior applicants, wondering what to do about it
#105I have the interest and skills to work in a position like you described. If you’re interested, I’d be happy to give your process a shot and give feedback. Feel free to reach out, here’s my LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/qwertyq
Re: Ask HN: Having trouble getting senior applicants, wondering what to do about it
#106> Take-home technical assignment (~4h) or similar at candidate's choosing If I can get a similarly-paying job at a place that doesn't do this, I'll skip you. Many seniors ( actual seniors, not 3-years-of-experience seniors) have a network and can say "hey I'm looking" and instantly have multiple options that won't have them do more than talk to the team and manager for an hour or two. If that.
Absolutely agree. People with 10+ years, a good network and decent resume pop their head up above the parapet and get instantly mobbed with offers. They're on the market 2 weeks, tops. No-one good is going to do a takehome just so the hiring team can rub their beards and feel superior while they pick over the code. That approach worked a few years ago, in today's recruitment bear market you don't pick the candidates,…
> We're moving to 1-stage interviews, offer on the same day. Higher risk but we have no choice
Anecdotally, I've seen people actually been put off by this. Perhaps make it 2 interviews just to not seem desperate. It's not my own reaction, but I could see why people might think "They're really desperate, there must be something wrong there"
Re: Ask HN: Having trouble getting senior applicants, wondering what to do about it
#107You are paying a market rate for the 4 hour technical assignment of course? Wait, you don't want to commit that kind of resources to someone who's not an employee yet? Well it works the same way for them.
Re: Ask HN: Having trouble getting senior applicants, wondering what to do about it
#108Having just spent 3 weeks on 4x hour long interviews and completing a day long coding problem along with a "code while I watch" to get to the point that "we're tabling this for a few months" I suspect many of us senior types are just tabling the job seeking process ourselves until we seem to be in actual demand.
Sometimes companies pay for the time it takes to complete a take-home project. I think it’s a good idea, especially now given all the hiring freezes and especially for a remote position where the applicant has no idea how many other applicants (around the country/world) they might be competing against.
Agreed; if you have to have the 4 hour assignment, paying a market wage for a senior dev for those 4 hours, at least shows that you are serious about filling the position.
Re: Ask HN: Having trouble getting senior applicants, wondering what to do about it
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lol, take home technical assignment. Why would I ever? I'd much rather have a comfortable conversation with someone who has worked with me in the past. I'm never, ever doing a 4 hour assignment for you.
People say this and I have yet to find a company that doesn't do some kind of technical assessment. But I have seen multiple coworkers with 10-20 years of experience as software engineers with glowing recommendations get fired because they couldn't write software. So I'm a little happier to have some bar for myself and coworkers to clear. > I'm never, ever doing a 4 hour assignment for you. Boo hoo, you need to spend…
If I'm interviewing at multiple companies and they all do that, that's 4 hours per company I want to check out. And let's be honest, most of these I've been asked to do weren't reasonable to do, and do well, and double check, in four hours, despite the claim. Eight hours is more reasonable to do them properly, usually.
If I interview at three places, that's three days of unpaid work (or 6+ evenings after I've already worked a full day at my normal job), and if I'm already making "multiples of the median American family's income" elsewhere, then it becomes less attractive to put up with that, especially if other companies aren't asking for it.
Like I just can't find the energy to put up with Amazon's 2.5 hour span of unbroken time take-home test, no matter how desperate they make themselves sound or how often they contact me (which is almost every week at this point). When I last considered it, I was already having trouble juggling just finding holes in the day to manage about 30 interviews I ended up doing, across about 8 companies. I had no energy to study for, and then do, that exam on top of it (I did do three 45-60 minute exams, across three evenings, for three other companies, though).
Re: Ask HN: Having trouble getting senior applicants, wondering what to do about it
#1101. Post the comp levels if not available on something like levels.fyi. If the comp is above average, sell on it.
2. Make it a paid technical assignment. I don't think your process is unreasonable except some may object to the assignment. If you make it paid it is much less objectionable.