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Ask HN: Having trouble getting senior applicants, wondering what to do about it

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Re: Ask HN: Having trouble getting senior applicants, wondering what to do about it

#281
post #238
post #78

The 4hr take-home test implies you're not after experienced "seniors", but rather those self-titled seniors with 3yrs under their belt. Four hours of focus time is A LOT for a candidate with family responsibilities and heavily restricts your recruitment pool. No parent is going to give up a precious weekend afternoon for an unpaid assignment. That plus the lack of salary range will put 95% of "good" candidates off. I…

> Four hours of focus time is A LOT for a candidate with family responsibilities and heavily restricts your recruitment pool. 4 hours is probably OK for a single role. However if you're interviewing at 10 different companies it adds up to a lot more.

It is just not okay. Because I may have kids/wife/elders, because I have a job, because I value my spare time, or just because I enjoy the birds in the park more.

As a senior I don't do homework. I have a conversation with someone if I fit AND if they fit to me. They can test me and I will test the them during that conversation

Re: Ask HN: Having trouble getting senior applicants, wondering what to do about it

#282
post #70
post #21

> 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.

Yep, the only way I'll send a blind resume and think about jumping through hoops is if it's a super interesting company I want to work for. Otherwise, I just asked my friends and network and skip all the hiring BS.

I've found some companies are so process bound that they'll go the full set of interview, test, coding rounds even for a personal referral.

I have over 20 years of experience, and then they wonder why I start laughing when they start asking the newbie basic questions. It get even more absurd when they start asking about stuff that no one does more than once or twice a year except in very "edge case" type jobs. I'm a sysadmin, not a full time software developer, but I still get the dweebs who want me to do a leetcode b-tree sort with whatever fancy algorithm they read about last weekend in the hot language du jour.

Re: Ask HN: Having trouble getting senior applicants, wondering what to do about it

#283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing with 4hr technical assignments is that you're saying no to anyone with kids, which I'm going to venture applies to more senior people than juniors. I used to do these assignment. Now I simply don't sorry. My schedule is 6:30 AM wake up with youngest daughter, to let wife sleep in (she takes care of her all night) 9:00 AM hand off youngest daughter to wife, who takes both girls the rest of the day. I go to m…

Seems like a good way to weed out people that are constantly taking time off to deal with kid issues.

Yes, then they can focus on hiring those who*:

1. want to work from home to take their new bearded dragon to the vet.

2. have their moms contact me about work load.

3. pre-emptively book a sick day for Monday because they "plan to get really messed up this weekend".

People with kids are the worst employees!

* These have all happened to me in the past year.

Re: Ask HN: Having trouble getting senior applicants, wondering what to do about it

#284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a "senior" (I was 55 when I started looking), and I didn't have a "network," because I was a manager, and wanted to get back into technical stuff (I'm very good at technical stuff, but I was paid to manage). I had a network of pretty heavy-duty people, but they all knew me as a manager, and I didn't want to put them on the spot for technical stuff, since that wasn't how they knew me. That basically meant that I h…

I'm super happy that you found such a fulfilling role! Was wondering if you could elaborate on this a bit: > I set up a small company, so I could buy toys, and started following my own muse.

The Great Rift Valley Software Company[0] is a small corporation that allowed me to use a bit of my retirement money without tax penalties.

[0] https://riftvalleysoftware.com

Re: Ask HN: Having trouble getting senior applicants, wondering what to do about it

#285
`- Take-home technical assignment (~4h) or similar at candidate's choosing`

This. Get rid of this. Everybody that reads this, get rid of it if you have such a step in your interview process.

Do a 1 hour maximum live challenge instead, or skip it entirely if the candidate has any public code you review and good enough.

This is what I've done in the current company and we've managed to hire some extremely good senior candidates because of it.

Re: Ask HN: Having trouble getting senior applicants, wondering what to do about it

#286

> - Take-home technical assignment (~4h) or similar at candidate's choosing > - Presentation of technical assignment to the team Are these two jokes? What makes you think you're worth somebody wasting their time with such stuff? How about you actually interview them properly 1:1 and stop wasting the candidates time?

This! The utterly lack of respect is disgusting. The company is in need! What if the candidate asks the company to provide an 8 hours presentations about their processes, people, events, dancing capabilities is the CEO?

Re: Ask HN: Having trouble getting senior applicants, wondering what to do about it

#287
post #133

This is a tip for everyone struggling to find someone to hire; look in a different pool of candidates and be willing to accommodate them. For example, you can find a lot of very skilled developers that are disabled. I know a lot of people that have been coding professionally for 10+ years, have popularish open source projects, been lead devs at startups etc; yet feel stuck in their current jobs or even struggle to ge…

How exactly do you do that? I work for a company also struggling to find good senior developers and since the team is 100% remote, it's not like we'd have any idea if they were disabled or not...

First, I would post a detailed list of your benefits package. This package should include 100% fully paid for health insurance that requires zero additional money from the employee except for perhaps prescription co-pays (not to exceed $20/ea or something).

You should also have a generous time off package and generous/unlimited sick days allowance. In Europe, this is already the norm. If I'm sick for 2 weeks in bed, I still would get paid. Obviously I need a doctor's note after a 2 or 3 days, but that shouldn't be an issue if they really are that ill.

Finally, really take a hard look at your expectations for when work will be completed. If you have a team of 10 devs and 2 of them really only work on average 10 months a year due to their disability, can you justify that to management and still meet your deadlines? Preferably, you work in a field where the deadlines are all made up and you can build in generous buffers.

This is true in industries like gamedev already. The game is sometimes done months in advance of the launch (or should be, ideally) and then marketing takes over while the team transitions to writing DLC or working on the next project.

It's laudable that you'd want to take on hiring people with disabilities but you must be realistic with what you are getting yourself into, especially if those disabilities are chronic in nature and require frequent visits to a doctor.

In return for providing all of these benefits, you will gain some of the most loyal, hardworking, and compassionate team members and all around great human beings. I have friends with such disabilities and it's not a secret who the good companies are to work for. By providing excellent benefits like these, you'll also attract a lot of other great talent and perhaps make new business partnerships because of the network influence of your engineering team. It's well worth it, in my opinion.

Re: Ask HN: Having trouble getting senior applicants, wondering what to do about it

#288
post #30

Earlier 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…

> 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

As a current FAANG employee, I didn’t put up with that bullshit from anyone including FAANG companies.

Re: Ask HN: Having trouble getting senior applicants, wondering what to do about it

#289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a "senior" (I was 55 when I started looking), and I didn't have a "network," because I was a manager, and wanted to get back into technical stuff (I'm very good at technical stuff, but I was paid to manage). I had a network of pretty heavy-duty people, but they all knew me as a manager, and I didn't want to put them on the spot for technical stuff, since that wasn't how they knew me. That basically meant that I h…

awesome story, what kind of non profit do you work with exactly?

We are a small 501(c)(3), creating an app that is aimed at a particular demographic. It is an amalgam of a simple social media graph, and a location-based event database.

It's not really device control, but it does involve a fairly robust iOS app, talking to multiple servers, and synthesizing relationships.

I won't go into a whole bunch of detail in public. Like I said, it serves a fairly narrow demographic, and won't really make a huge splash.

I've been writing software for this demographic for decades.

I can always chat about it offline.

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