Someone who is senior is more likely to be a parent, and 4h+ spare time, may be a stretch.
Ask HN: Having trouble getting senior applicants, wondering what to do about it
361–370 of 794 posts
Re: Ask HN: Having trouble getting senior applicants, wondering what to do about it
#362Earlier 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…
Anecdotally, as someone with three kids I'd much rather do a take-home 4 hour assignment than the usual round of interviews since I can work the former into my schedule however I like.
I recently did a 6 hour take-home, but was given an expectation of around 2 weeks to accomplish it, with flexibility for more if I needed it. I thought it was pretty fair compared to a never-ending round of tech interviews.
Re: Ask HN: Having trouble getting senior applicants, wondering what to do about it
#363Earlier quoted context omitted.
What do you get from a whiteboard/take home assignment that you can't get from a conversation where you grill them about their answers?
Conversations allow smooth talkers to run a snow job on you. Having a work sample test provides a best-in-class hiring filter.
I’ve interviewed people for the type of role that the submitter is looking for. I can guarantee you that I could see through a “smooth talker”. In fact, I can smell someone who just memorized stuff from ACloudGuru a mile away.
Re: Ask HN: Having trouble getting senior applicants, wondering what to do about it
#364Lots of great comments here; My thoughts on this as other Seniors have pointed out (and I am a Senior myself) 1- I have not looked for a job since 2014, every job since came through my network. Then the interviews were basically friendly meet&greets but super informal, not a single coding test or take home assignment - note than I always started as Tech lead/Architect. I put in the hours and took pride in my work, ha…
> Then the interviews were basically friendly meet&greets but super informal, not a single coding test or take home assignment I have 20 years experience and this is completely alien to my experience. I've gotten lots of job referrals over the years, but all it did was get my foot in the door. From there, it was the standard interview process with whiteboarding and take home tests. What am I missing here?
Heh. The most amusing referral I had, which I didn't ask for, caused me to get a surprise email from HR saying "we have received an internal recommendation from X about your interest in our position of mechanical engineer; to proceed with your application, please send your CV to...". I had to write back and say "I'm not a mechanical engineer, I wasn't applying for that role or any other role, and I didn't ask for a referral. However, here's a list of great relevant experience your robotics software division might be interested in, on the offchance."
Two weeks later I got another surprise email from HR again, saying "this is to let you know we have rejected your application for a web developer role..."
Needless to say, it's not a company I'm interested in actually applying to.
Re: Ask HN: Having trouble getting senior applicants, wondering what to do about it
#365If you're passively waiting for resumes to walk themselves over to your recruiters then the candidates you'd like to source are probably instead talking to the engineering managers who took the time to introduce themselves and their firms. The candidate profile you're looking for can write their own ticket; if you don't have a compelling answer to why that ticket should say "I'd love to work at a fairly typical run-of-the-mill mid-size enterprise software vendor" you need to spend some shoeleather convincing people of that.
I'd also recommend radically more effort in producing artifacts which some would classify as "top of funnel" or "engineering brand" so that you have some hook to start conversations with and some differentiation with all the other prospective employers of senior engineers.
Re: Ask HN: Having trouble getting senior applicants, wondering what to do about it
#366Post the salary range. From what I can tell DevOps is the hardest thing to hire for right now, and it commands the highest salaries. It's tough to find someone who can code and troubleshoot code problems, but also has all the skills of a sys/net/cloud/k8s admin, and is willing to put up with the higher stress of that role. Most qualified people have already done their best to get a job they're happy with. Personally…
As someone from Colorado, the no-salary listings are basically a disqualifier since it demonstrates that the company is willing to break the law to try to take advantage of you.
Re: Ask HN: Having trouble getting senior applicants, wondering what to do about it
#367"Take-home technical assignment (~4h)" I've got 20 plus years of tech, I've been out of college since 1997 and you want to give a 4 hour homework assignment. If get you want to get a feel for someone's ability but this is more easily done by stating a problem during one of the interviews and asking the person "How would you approach this?" Listing for how they anticipate problems and tradeoffs.
Yeah, but as a counterpoint: your years of experience are not indicative of your skill, just that you can meet some arbitrarily low bar for a long time. The take-home technical assignment is to determine what, if anything, you actually learned in your 20+ years in tech. A depressingly large number of people with that level of experience have not learned anything meaningful.
We do 2 hour interview. 1 hr of interactive coding with a sr/lead engineer, 1 with the hiring manager.
We want to see them solve a problem, sure, but what's even more valuable is seeing how they approach problems, can they explain what they're doing, do they ask good questions, etc. Much more predictive than just looking at the final output and seeing if it passes a few unit tests.
I would never hire an engineer without them writing actual code that gets compiled and run. It's the single most predictive thing we do in our hiring process. But, we also want to be respectful of people's time, hence limiting the coding session to an hour.
Re: Ask HN: Having trouble getting senior applicants, wondering what to do about it
#368Earlier quoted context omitted.
> They're on the market 2 weeks, tops. My last search lasted 9 days from when I put out the signal to having interviewed (for 3 companies) and negotiated an offer and submitted my resignation and 2 weeks notice.
> My last search lasted 9 days i think you did disservice to yourself by optimizing for minimizing downtime between jobs. You should've played the field longer and gone for the highest bidder. I am 100% sure you are not getting paid your worth because no FAANG type company finishes the process in 1 week.
That is condescending: you are jumping to a conclusion and implying that the person you are answering makes stupid rash decisions. Without a lot more context you can’t know how sensible their decision is. Even with that context, why should your opinion be listened to, and who are you anyway to tell someone else how to run their life?
Re: Ask HN: Having trouble getting senior applicants, wondering what to do about it
#369Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Is it DevOps or not? These words do mean things and matter. I'm surprised at this comment, in my experience, that word has almost no meaning at all. It can mean anything from "Engineering teams are responsible for everything, including development and operations" to "We have a third DevOps silo inbetween our developer and operarions silos".
It does have, in my opinion, quite clear meaning as a term, otherwise it wouldn't exist as a term. Obviously it means setting up & maintaining application-ecosystem infrastructure: Servers/Containers/VMs, CICD, monitoring, logging, integration/production testing, permissions, and various automated jobs/workflows <-- that sort of stuff. So that developers can just focus on programming.
What you described is the "Ops" in "DevOps". A decade ago the people doing "Dev" work were different from the people doing "Ops" work. But then the "anyone can do anything and everyone should work on everything" trend arrived, and they invented the concept of "DevOps", meaning that the same people would now do both "Dev" and "Ops" work.
Note that this description is entirely antithetical to your description "So that developers can just focus on programming".
You're not entirely wrong; this term has certainly degraded to the point of meaningless, where many companies now have teams that they call "DevOps teams", despite the fact that those teams only do Ops work. It's like we've come a full circle back to where different people do Dev and Ops work, but for some reason we call it with a term that means the literal opposite of that.
Re: Ask HN: Having trouble getting senior applicants, wondering what to do about it
#370Earlier 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…
FAANG type interviews are all day affairs with 5+hr of interview and breaks in between. Senior or not. I don't see anyone getting hired in 1 hr.
I had a 1hr chat with the hiring manager (and two others on the call) representing my current client for a 12 month contract.
The project was both new to them and myself so a combination of experience (as per my CV) and gut feeling on both sides lead to a signing.