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Serving 250k developers with one support engineer

blog.railway.app

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Re: Serving 250k developers with one support engineer

#31

Post by PragmaticPulp »

ipaddr wrote: post #22

I checked out the open positions. There were more positions open than total employees. Are those real positions you are looking to fill or always open positions that rarely result in an actual job? I asked this because the interview process has this step where you ask the candidates to do a project and than go over it with someone. One of these little projects is design our api or build a github issue viewer frontend…

Listing multiple possible openings for a limited headcount is common, but not necessarily nefarious. A company may be open to a junior, mid, or senior developer but have different expectations, compensation, and requirements for each of those titles. Posting different job listings allows you to cast a wider net without having to dilute the job descriptions too much.

> do you invest 10+ hours in a process where a job may not exist in the first place

The company isn’t going to spend the time walking someone through the hiring process if they don’t have any intention of hiring someone.

10 hours of interviewing is barely more than a single workday. It wasn’t long ago that interview processes required several rounds of phone screenings, interviews, and maybe testing before you were expected to come on-site for an entire day of in-person interviews - or more! I don’t think it’s unreasonable for a company to expect candidates to invest some time into going through an interview process. The phenomenon of hiring people into high paying jobs after a couple hours of casual interviews was largely an artifact of the recent tech bubble. It’s also part of the reason we’re seeing mass layoffs, IMO, as a lot of these companies hired so fast that they couldn’t reasonable screen everyone. It turned it “hire now, fire later if it doesn’t work out” when cash was plentiful.

Re: Serving 250k developers with one support engineer

#33

Post by throwaway5Am1k »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #31
ipaddr wrote: post #22

I checked out the open positions. There were more positions open than total employees. Are those real positions you are looking to fill or always open positions that rarely result in an actual job? I asked this because the interview process has this step where you ask the candidates to do a project and than go over it with someone. One of these little projects is design our api or build a github issue viewer frontend…

Listing multiple possible openings for a limited headcount is common, but not necessarily nefarious. A company may be open to a junior, mid, or senior developer but have different expectations, compensation, and requirements for each of those titles. Posting different job listings allows you to cast a wider net without having to dilute the job descriptions too much. > do you invest 10+ hours in a process where a job…

This is such a hack response.

>not necessarily nefarious

It might not be nefarious, but if companies are putting out "feelers", and I'm investing ~30 hours per company, and half the companies I'm applying to are like this, then there's a huge waste of time (mine and theirs). I've started calling out this bullshit: "is there a job here, or is this a position to gauge the market?"

>10 hours of interviewing is barely more than a single workday.

It's never 10 hours. It's 5+ interviews, plus a take-home test (that can take ~10-20 hours), plus scheduling, prep, etc. It's never 10 hours. Stop validating shitty behaviour.

>I don’t think it’s unreasonable for a company to expect candidates to invest some time into going through an interview process.

I wouldn't mind, if there was a job on the other end. I can't even list the number of times I've gone through the whole interview process (at big companies!) and have been ghosted at the very end. I wish they'd stop wasting my time.

>The phenomenon of hiring people into high paying jobs after a couple hours of casual interviews was largely an artifact of the recent tech bubble.

That's how it's been most of history. 10-30 hours of interviews for a single job is a relatively new phenomenon.

>It’s also part of the reason we’re seeing mass layoffs

This is so false. We're in layoffs because we overhired, not because the interview process is too easy.

Re: Serving 250k developers with one support engineer

#34

Post by speakfreely »

trevor-e wrote: post #30
urbandw311er wrote: post #20

Not sure this is something I’d be bragging about. What happens when you do eventually have a major outage and need to rapidly provide reassurance and tailored support to hundreds of people. Like when Atlassian deleted thousands of JIRA tickets by mistake and seemed completely unprepared to scale up their support.

Is that something you can reasonably prepare for as a company? Like just keep a bunch of extra support people on payroll in case there's a catastrophic event?

It's about not optimizing for a single variable. If you're trying to reduce headcount (and payroll cost) as a single goal, your business becomes a brittle shell subject to disruption by any number of circumstances. Investing in some redundancy is responsible to your shareholders and respectful to your customers.

Re: Serving 250k developers with one support engineer

#35

Post by Hermitian909 »

throwaway5Am1k wrote: post #33
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Listing multiple possible openings for a limited headcount is common, but not necessarily nefarious. A company may be open to a junior, mid, or senior developer but have different expectations, compensation, and requirements for each of those titles. Posting different job listings allows you to cast a wider net without having to dilute the job descriptions too much. > do you invest 10+ hours in a process where a job…

This is such a hack response. >not necessarily nefarious It might not be nefarious, but if companies are putting out "feelers", and I'm investing ~30 hours per company, and half the companies I'm applying to are like this, then there's a huge waste of time (mine and theirs). I've started calling out this bullshit: "is there a job here, or is this a position to gauge the market?" >10 hours of interviewing is barely mo…

> I'm investing ~30 hours per company

I just want to say that this is a much higher number than necessary. If you've got skills there's just no reason to ever accept more than 90-120 minutes total before the on-site. That's plenty to receive multiple top-of-market offers (or not top-of-market) even in the current market. Any company pushing trying to make an interview take this long on your side is not worth working at.

Re: Serving 250k developers with one support engineer

#36

Post by b112 »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #31
ipaddr wrote: post #22

I checked out the open positions. There were more positions open than total employees. Are those real positions you are looking to fill or always open positions that rarely result in an actual job? I asked this because the interview process has this step where you ask the candidates to do a project and than go over it with someone. One of these little projects is design our api or build a github issue viewer frontend…

Listing multiple possible openings for a limited headcount is common, but not necessarily nefarious. A company may be open to a junior, mid, or senior developer but have different expectations, compensation, and requirements for each of those titles. Posting different job listings allows you to cast a wider net without having to dilute the job descriptions too much. > do you invest 10+ hours in a process where a job…

The company isn’t going to spend the time walking someone through the hiring process if they don’t have any intention of hiring someone.

Oh, the logical fallacy of appealing to logic.

I have personally seen companies post, interview, with no intention of hiring. No guff!

Case 1:

* "Just in case" they get a contract to provide thing X, they "want to be ready" to go.

Case 2:

* Forced to look at internal staff first, knowing full well they would not hire external, but going through the motions for appearance sake

Beyond the above two, I have heard:

* A government department interviewing, offering, and then the union hears of it, and challenges the new hire

* A company interviewing a dozen people, ready to hire, and a stakeholder suddenly thinking "let's contract this out instead"

* A company doing 3rd round, time consuming (for them and the candidates) interviews, after an offer, while waiting for the response. And I mean, scheduling and doing, not "already scheduled and doing".

Re: Serving 250k developers with one support engineer

#37

Post by zitterbewegung »

throwaway5Am1k wrote: post #33
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Listing multiple possible openings for a limited headcount is common, but not necessarily nefarious. A company may be open to a junior, mid, or senior developer but have different expectations, compensation, and requirements for each of those titles. Posting different job listings allows you to cast a wider net without having to dilute the job descriptions too much. > do you invest 10+ hours in a process where a job…

This is such a hack response. >not necessarily nefarious It might not be nefarious, but if companies are putting out "feelers", and I'm investing ~30 hours per company, and half the companies I'm applying to are like this, then there's a huge waste of time (mine and theirs). I've started calling out this bullshit: "is there a job here, or is this a position to gauge the market?" >10 hours of interviewing is barely mo…

Playing devil's advocate if you don't want to do the take home test then they just filtered you out and actually is serving their desires on who they want to hire.

Re: Serving 250k developers with one support engineer

#38

Post by peter_l_downs »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #5
ndneighbor wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

heyo Angelo (author) here- This is actually the original blogpost that we used to make our first hire! > You will be working with our existing Support Engineer, Angelo - to build out processes, formalize policies, and build out integrations between systems to make it so that we can track and record issues. I accidentally left that one open... but the Ashby interface is so confusing I don't know where to toggle the vi…

FYI, not disclosing at least minimum pay means applicants should assume pay will be below average. Also, it says “remote - anywhere” at the top, and if you are hiring remote in California, Colorado, New York City, or Washington state, employers are legally required to advertise pay range on job listings and possibly other compensation details. > At Railway, we provide best in class benefits. Great salary, full health…

> FYI, not disclosing at least minimum pay means applicants should assume pay will be below average.

I don't think this is true.

Re: Serving 250k developers with one support engineer

#39

Post by [deleted] »

throwaway5Am1k wrote: post #33
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Listing multiple possible openings for a limited headcount is common, but not necessarily nefarious. A company may be open to a junior, mid, or senior developer but have different expectations, compensation, and requirements for each of those titles. Posting different job listings allows you to cast a wider net without having to dilute the job descriptions too much. > do you invest 10+ hours in a process where a job…

This is such a hack response. >not necessarily nefarious It might not be nefarious, but if companies are putting out "feelers", and I'm investing ~30 hours per company, and half the companies I'm applying to are like this, then there's a huge waste of time (mine and theirs). I've started calling out this bullshit: "is there a job here, or is this a position to gauge the market?" >10 hours of interviewing is barely mo…

[deleted]

Re: Serving 250k developers with one support engineer

#40

Post by stanleydrew »

zitterbewegung wrote: post #37
throwaway5Am1k wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is such a hack response. >not necessarily nefarious It might not be nefarious, but if companies are putting out "feelers", and I'm investing ~30 hours per company, and half the companies I'm applying to are like this, then there's a huge waste of time (mine and theirs). I've started calling out this bullshit: "is there a job here, or is this a position to gauge the market?" >10 hours of interviewing is barely mo…

Playing devil's advocate if you don't want to do the take home test then they just filtered you out and actually is serving their desires on who they want to hire.

Yeah this. There's often a presumption like "I'm a very talented software engineer and everyone should want to hire me and thus companies shouldn't design a hiring process that I personally find annoying."

Hiring is a matching process. If a company with an annoying hiring process is a bad match for you, that's fine.

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