Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Hiring a developer as a small indie studio in 2025

ballardgames.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 114 posts

Re: Hiring a developer as a small indie studio in 2025

#101

Post by alfalfasprout »

chihuahua wrote: post #91
zahlman wrote: post #81

> If we see potential, the first step is always asking the candidate upfront for their expected salary, availability, and whether they want full-time or part-time. Since we are focused on efficiency, we need to respect people’s time as much as our own. Most candidates appreciate it; for example, it immediately filtered out a very qualified candidate whose salary ask was 4 times our budget. I feel like the "respectful…

In fact, for companies of 15 or more employees, this is legally required in job postings in Washington state, where the company from the article is based.

annoyingly in WA/CA where salary ranges are required, liquid RSU comp is not (and that's often the majority of the comp).

Re: Hiring a developer as a small indie studio in 2025

#102

Post by creer »

roenxi wrote: post #35

The perspective here is subtly baised - look at the diagram down the bottom and realise that they were always only going to hire 1 person, so all the reasons that they give for not hiring the person are, in fact, not reasons that the person filtered out wasn't hired. They are processes to rank the applicants. If there were more candidates they'd add more reasons not to hire most of them, if there were less candidates…

> companies are in some sense bluffing with the "Didn't Qualify" category.

This is to the point that it's not "bluffing" but simply "how the world works." What's unfortunate is that many new grads (and some veterans) live with the impression that they need to meet (or lie about) all these "requirements". When the real world never operated like that.

Still, some job ads are written to show both "essentials" and "nice to have".

Re: Hiring a developer as a small indie studio in 2025

#103

Post by creer »

> always asking the candidate upfront for their expected salary [etc - to respect and save everyone time]

Isn't that a dark pattern (in addition to being a time saver for everyone)? It's a damned if you do and damned if you don't kind of thing.

This is an adversarial question in a process which needs to be ruthless against the time-wasting applications, but also needs to be cooperative with future co-workers.

If you are open to a broad range of salary in exchange for perhaps working at a super exciting place, then there is no good answer. Even "I'm open to a broad range of salary if that's needed to work at a super exciting place" is not a great answer.

Leaving it to the legal requirement of posting an expected salary range and negotiating from there might be a better way.

Re: Hiring a developer as a small indie studio in 2025

#104

Post by creer »

The article includes actual numbers of the filtering funnel! Excellent!

"Late applications" though: Wouldn't it be very wasteful though, to dismiss a third of candidates simply because late application when the posting was live just two days? As admitted, the hiring process is time consuming. It seems wasteful then to filter on "available during the 2 day posting window"! That availability was not a serious job requirement.

Re: Hiring a developer as a small indie studio in 2025

#106

Post by zeroCalories »

preciousoo wrote: post #100
amundskm wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless they are paying for the 1 hour of work then yes. If the company wants to know if someone can do something then look at their github or bring them in for an interview. Do not do work for free.

The take home assignment is to create a web service that changes the color of a cube, hardly anything cutting edge. Do you expect to be paid for coding interviews too?

Personally, I don't mind burning some time to interview for free. But I expect the company to also burn the time of their own engineers as well. It displays a degree of commitment and seriousness from them about this meeting. I'm never going to let them yank my chain and dance for them when all they've done is send an email. But I'm also not desperate for work, so it's a good filter for me to know what kinda dogshit work culture you've got.

Re: Hiring a developer as a small indie studio in 2025

#107

Post by floor2 »

creer wrote: post #102
roenxi wrote: post #35

The perspective here is subtly baised - look at the diagram down the bottom and realise that they were always only going to hire 1 person, so all the reasons that they give for not hiring the person are, in fact, not reasons that the person filtered out wasn't hired. They are processes to rank the applicants. If there were more candidates they'd add more reasons not to hire most of them, if there were less candidates…

> companies are in some sense bluffing with the "Didn't Qualify" category. This is to the point that it's not "bluffing" but simply "how the world works." What's unfortunate is that many new grads (and some veterans) live with the impression that they need to meet (or lie about) all these "requirements". When the real world never operated like that. Still, some job ads are written to show both "essentials" and "nice…

Often, there's a recruiter or HR person (or piece of software) that's doing an initial screening against those "requirements" though, often with zero understanding or context.

Recruiters hiring for a Java role will pass on a candidate with 10 years of C# experience, or other similar tech-stack-swapping scenarios where the skill set is 95% transferable because they don't know anything about the actual technologies or understand the work.

And of course, the lack of honest feedback makes the whole system inscrutable. Did you get ghosted because the job was fake? Because your resume lacked some key words? Because they had a referral? Because they preferred more diverse applicants? Because they never even looked at your resume? Because you have too many years of experience? Too few? Who knows!

Re: Hiring a developer as a small indie studio in 2025

#108

Post by pvillano »

This aligns closely with the hiring practices I learned in Industrial and Organizational Psychology. The only thing missing is to have structured interviews to reduce interviewer bias.

The best predictors of job performance are a simulation of the job and past performance. This is not new research or a secret.

Re: Hiring a developer as a small indie studio in 2025

#109

Post by BobaFloutist »

TZubiri wrote: post #88
FinnKuhn wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because they hope that someone gives them a number that is lower than the salary they had in mind.

A more generous interpretation is that they want to find out what the market salary is. How are they supposed to know what the market price is if they say their salary range first?

You could say the same for candidates.

Re: Hiring a developer as a small indie studio in 2025

#110

Post by FinnKuhn »

TZubiri wrote: post #88
FinnKuhn wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because they hope that someone gives them a number that is lower than the salary they had in mind.

A more generous interpretation is that they want to find out what the market salary is. How are they supposed to know what the market price is if they say their salary range first?

Normally I would agree, but they obviously already have a budget planned for this role as they turned candidates down for being "outside of budget", so I assume they are aware of the range a market salary should be in.
Post reply on HN