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My spiciest take on tech hiring

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Re: My spiciest take on tech hiring

#41

Post by AIorNot »

that doesn't sound so spicy at the moment

- I'm a 20+ year tech veteran with an award winning engineering background and a solid 20 year career in major (albeit Non-FAANGM companies) and I recently went through 5 interviews only to be told the remaining 3 interviews and 1 final onsite (which I need to fly in for) will be postponed to next month..

In the past 9 months that I've been looking full time roles, its been a series, 3-4 rounds of initial interviews, take home projects, etc so far to no avail...

Each time I'm afraid that some sharp 25-35 year old will get the job..

It really sucks that longevity, skill, wisdom and experience is valued so little by tech culture..

Re: My spiciest take on tech hiring

#42

Post by tomalaci »

I usually just do a small pair programming session for a simple problem that can be expanded with various tweaks (even fizzbuzz can work for it, I usually have some business problem related components).

During that session, which lasts about an hour, I usually have pretty good idea if the person would work out or not for the team. Works pretty well for a lot of fakers too (usually consultants that have crazy padded resumes).

Of course, if your hiring is more beurocratic where your technical teams aren't really involved in hiring (or don't want to be) then don't be surprised if you get pretty much randomly skilled persons (or fakers).

Re: My spiciest take on tech hiring

#43

Post by busterarm »

geetee wrote: post #38
busterarm wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's weirder than that. For Meta's interview, how well you do on preparing specifically for their interview and trying to max out the specific metrics that they're judging you on isn't just tied to whether you get an offer or not but where in the scale they pay you. They care a lot less about what you've done and where you are in your career, mainly because most of the what and how of the job is fairly unique to Meta…

Is it overachieving or seeing a shortcut to retirement?

Every long-term Meta employee that I know has had their lifestyle grow to match their means and isn't any closer to their retirement than when they started. And in my circles we're talking people who've been there mostly in the 5-12 year range.

In truth I really know just one retired FAANG engineer who put 12 years in at Microsoft until he was put on a team with a bad manager who had it out for him and stack ranked him out of the company. He's been happily working on side projects in the few years since that and sitting on his millions. It also doesn't hurt that his wife is also a Microsoft employee and is still there.

Also I don't know if you've seen Meta offers in the last year or so since their layoffs but they've been absolutely lowballing the shit out of everyone they can justify doing so to.

Re: My spiciest take on tech hiring

#44

Post by raincole »

corimaith wrote: post #26

IMO, any strategy or attempt to filter out the "right" candidates can always be gamed that a change of culture is inevitable. Iron Law of Bureaucracy. You can delay it, but it will happen. Just look at Google today despite their massive investments in the hiring process. I think if you really want to preserve your culture long term, you need to start looking to exporting your culture outwards into general society rat…

Isn't Google the exact example of "exporting your culture outwards"...?

It popularized algorithmatic puzzles via Google Code Jam way before LeetCode was a thing. I might be completely mistaken, but Google seems to be the one company that popularized free food among SV companies.

And they have a slogan that became a meme, while not necessarily in a positive way.

Re: My spiciest take on tech hiring

#45

Post by The_Colonel »

CommieBobDole wrote: post #11

This is a mayonnaise-spicy take as far as I'm concerned, in the sense that I agree with it entirely. Once you've read someone's resume you should have a pretty good idea whether or not you want to hire them. The interview should confirm that they can discuss their relevant experience and address any potential concerns that you might have without raising red flags. Beyond that, if they have deep flaws that you didn't…

> Once you've read someone's resume you should have a pretty good idea whether or not you want to hire them.

I disagree. The experience in resume is basically a name-dropping, it doesn't tell you much about how much they know / what are their abilities.

As an interviewer, what interests me is whether they have non-surface knowledge about something. I'm looking for a T-shape - getting a broad, but surface level knowledge is not that difficult (often just reading some tutorial suffices), but not everybody can get deep into the topic. So a major part of the interview for me is going through their resume and probing whether this is their deep topic and how deep can they go.

Re: My spiciest take on tech hiring

#46

Post by nertzy »

throwaway42668 wrote: post #5
cageface wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you do this on-site? If not how are you sure they did the work?

Just have people pair with people doing actual work. It's better signal for the candidate, for the existing team, and for the organization.

This is the only correct answer. I interviewed dozens of people this way over more than a decade. Hiring was never difficult to get right.

Bonus: we self-selected for people who don’t like to pair. We paired 100% of the time.

Re: My spiciest take on tech hiring

#47

Post by ilaksh »

busterarm wrote: post #23
sublinear wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. If your organization has the resources for it, go contract-to-hire. 3 to 6 month contractor and then make your decision bringing them on as a full employee.

In practice this almost never happens. Most contract to hire roles don't appropriately pay you like you're a contractor (really should be at least 3x salary) and get worse/desperate candidates who will take an unsecure job with no benefits for 3-6 months. Real human beings with real responsibilities are usually looking for fulltime work or they're running their own business and charging you for services.

I would like to be running my own business.. have a few times in the past.. but usually run out of money before the next SaaS attempt or whatever is ready and have to find a contract on short notice.

I guess I'm not a real human being.

Re: My spiciest take on tech hiring

#48

Post by busterarm »

ramesh31 wrote: post #37
busterarm wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a great experience with work-sample testing once until I had to work with the founder's wife who was an absolute nightmare to work with and was forced to sit in on zoom calls with the investors just because they wanted to be face to face with who they were paying for. It was only then that I realized that my performance didn't mean shit and I was playing an optics game. The problem isn't the process. It's just…

Rule #1: Never work for the person who cuts your checks.

This works early in your career but for a long while now in my jobs I've only had a couple of people above me on the org chart..

Re: My spiciest take on tech hiring

#50

Post by kgeist »

That's how we do it:

- 30 minutes of basic theoretical questions: SOLID, design patterns, DDD, clean architecture etc. just to get an overview of what they know and what their experience is, and if we'll have to assign them some courses later

- 30 minutes of a practical task: they're given a very bad piece of code (1 screen), and their task is to review it. Things like: SQL injection, lack of transactions (data consistency), lack of locks, bad variable names, bad program structure etc. The review is interactive where the interviewer can give tips. Usually it gives a pretty accurate picture of their actual experience/skills, and weeds out 99% unfit candidates.

If all is well, there's then 1 hour interview with CTO to check the soft skills: motivation, corporate culture fit, they also negotiate the salary (based on the previous interview)

We don't do leetcode and don't ask to write a test project.

Observations:

- many candidates who are good at theoretical questions completely fail the code review: i.e. they simply memorized it without deep understanding

- there are candidates who are not good at theory but pretty good at spotting most problems during the code review. For us, it's usually OK. It's often good self-taught engineers.

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