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

Hiring Developers: You're Doing It Wrong

devinterviews.pen.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 230 posts

Re: Hiring Developers: You're Doing It Wrong

#181

Post by leon_ »

sp_ wrote: post #22

I worked for a German startup too and our main problem was not vetting interviewees but finding people who want to interview at all. In the five year history of the company I think only one single person was hired who was not already friends with someone at the company. Other people just never applied. I remember manning the booth at one of those college campus events and it was very lonely. I probably talked to thre…

Ah Germany - where I just gave up applying for jobs.

"Oh, yeah, I see - you've got 10 years of experience. But what's that? You don't have a diploma? Nor a 'Ausbildung'? Sorry, in this case I just won't look at your prior work - no matter how cool it might be. Have a gut day, sir! No job for you."

Re: Hiring Developers: You're Doing It Wrong

#182

Post by andrewem »

staunch wrote: post #70
swampthing wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To each their own - if your only goal is to minimize missing qualified people, then I would agree that you should offer FT offers to everyone. If you have a stronger goal of minimizing the number of unqualified people you hire, then that's a different issue. Personally, I'd rather work at a company that falls into the latter category.

Yup. "No false positives" is my goal. I've experienced what happens when a company gets bloated and teams get diluted with bozos. Even one person can poison a team. Firing people is bad for a team too. I'm determined to avoid that to a great extent. I know of no other way than actually working with a person to determine whether I want to keep working with them. I don't think most people even question how ridiculous i…

Does not giving someone a full-time offer after the short-term contract hurt the team like firing someone? I could imagine it going either way. Perhaps it's better because those not in their contract period don't start thinking "it could happen to me at any time."

Re: Hiring Developers: You're Doing It Wrong

#183

Post by roel_v »

haploid wrote: post #161
roel_v wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, that's because no sane prospect (or rather, a prospect you'd want to hire) would go along with it. A reasonably competent developer has several options to choose from - it's just not rational to spend 10+ hours on each job opening; you wouldn't be able to coordinate and assess 5 or so offers in a reasonable time (when looking for a new job, people will apply at various places, compare the offers and take the b…

We did this for our most recent front-end hire, actually. We gave him a two-day project to complete for us, and compensated him with what we thought to be a fair stipend for his time. He completed the project, we hired him, he cleaned up the project, and we actually put it into production a week after his hiring date. Everything worked out fine, and the developer in question is quite competent, sane, and rational.

Yeah but you paid him for it, that's a different situation.

Re: Hiring Developers: You're Doing It Wrong

#184

Post by MikeCampo »

roel_v wrote: post #151
InclinedPlane wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$2k to find a good hire is nothing. Signing bonuses, referral bonuses, and interview related expenses (air travel, taxis, hotels) are often on that scale or larger. Also, your numbers are way off the mark, you're not going to bring in 15 people for such an interview, you'd be extraordinarily lucky if you even managed to have 15 people that looked good enough to go that far, but even if you did you'd screen it down to…

Uh, what? I was talking about a $2000 cost to the job seeker. It may not be that much for professional, but it's nothing to sneeze at either (I've seen people making a multiple of 120k fret over much less than 2k). The GP was talking about doing the 'screening test' for everybody who passed a first qualification stage. I don't know where you work, but having 15 'might qualified from a cursory glance at CV' applicants…

Agree with roel_v. There is no way I'm going to spend a week working on a screening project unless I'm extremely confident in my chances. And usually when you're really confident you already have a friend in the company. If the company paid for the effort that would be a different story, but advertising that could cost them quite a lot.

Re: Hiring Developers: You're Doing It Wrong

#185

Post by BrandonM »

haploid wrote: post #161
roel_v wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, that's because no sane prospect (or rather, a prospect you'd want to hire) would go along with it. A reasonably competent developer has several options to choose from - it's just not rational to spend 10+ hours on each job opening; you wouldn't be able to coordinate and assess 5 or so offers in a reasonable time (when looking for a new job, people will apply at various places, compare the offers and take the b…

We did this for our most recent front-end hire, actually. We gave him a two-day project to complete for us, and compensated him with what we thought to be a fair stipend for his time. He completed the project, we hired him, he cleaned up the project, and we actually put it into production a week after his hiring date. Everything worked out fine, and the developer in question is quite competent, sane, and rational.

It makes sense if you basically call it a freelancing job with an option to hire. If it's an unpaid interview, though, it just seems unfair and likely to turn away some of the best candidates.

Re: Hiring Developers: You're Doing It Wrong

#186

Post by jacques_chester »

grammaton wrote: post #150
jacques_chester wrote: post #31

My previous employer ( http://thefrontiergroup.com.au ) had a process where candidates would come and spend a day onsite. You'd be paid for the day. The process was to work together with a senior coder on problems of escalating difficulty. Starting with 1.upto 10 do |i| { print i } "What does this do?" And ending with "Here's a legacy application we maintain. Add a new widget to the dashboard. Think aloud." During th…

> 1.upto 10 do |i| { print i } My answer would be "bombs with syntax error," assuming this isn't something that just looks like Ruby.

Well now we know why I was sacked!

Re: Hiring Developers: You're Doing It Wrong

#187

Post by jacques_chester »

rfrey wrote: post #158
jacques_chester wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've wondered about that myself. I wanted to stay, I liked it there. But it's like many relationships in life, if both parties don't want it, it won't pan out. Edit: I also had to take time off for studies and I suspect they really wanted all-hands-on-deck.

If a person is fired from a company, and that person doesn't really know why, it is not a plaudit for that company or the managers involved.

In their defence, they were new to having to manage people they didn't already know -- which is probably why they went back to hiring people they already knew.

Re: Hiring Developers: You're Doing It Wrong

#188

Post by biafra »

sausagefeet wrote: post #140
currywurst wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have heard this anecdote from many of my friends as well. So my advice would be : any devs frustrated with jobs in their country head over to Germany ! It's a beautiful place with a comfortable work culture ...

I am planning on moving to Germany in the next year. Any resources for finding a job in Berlin?

It depends. What are you looking for?

Get yourself a xing.de profile. Headhunters find me there all the time.

If you are looking for an iOS or Android job: Apply at Neofonie Mobile, we're hiring :-)

From my experience (Lot's of Java backend stuff). A lot of companies in Berlin are looking exactly for Java backend developers. Some are looking for Grails, Rails or Python developers.

On the other hand: There are many Hackerspaces and meet ups in Berlin to find like minded people:

http://www.c-base.org/ (Android Round Table, Lisp, Wifi-Hacking)

https://berlin.ccc.de/ (CCC-Stuff :-))

http://berlinwebweek.de/ (various stuff, some about business, some about hacking)

Re: Hiring Developers: You're Doing It Wrong

#189

Post by Udo »

mattm wrote: post #100
tripa wrote: post #86

What does 'I only went "full Trump" once on an employee.' mean?

I'm assuming it means outright firing someone.

Yes, it does. Sorry, it's a bad allusion to an even worse reality TV show.

What it means is that letting people go happens. Usually, when people were underperforming or showing other signs of problems, I just talked with them to clear up what the matter was. Sometimes, they had personal problems, or other temporary and resolvable issues. Sometimes, they were unhappy and needed to be somewhere else.

I remember one guy, an intern with horrible attitude, who said to me in confidence: "I regret this so much. I always wanted to become a baker, but my parents wanted me to have a real job." I kid you not!

The point is, it has been my experience that even layoffs can be borderline mutual. But this once, the latest screw-up in a long line of screw-ups... it was so monumental and malicious even. Worst of all was I felt kind of powerless, having this adversarial force on my team. Like a Trojan horse that wasn't even making an effort to disguise itself. I fired the guy on the spot. Of course, you can't do that in Germany, so eventually I paid through the nose for it following the lawsuit. But in that split second it was worth it just to have this guy off the floor immediately.

Re: Hiring Developers: You're Doing It Wrong

#190

Post by MichaelGG »

bugsy wrote: post #80
MichaelGG wrote: post #33

Writing code is just another type of conversation. Sure, you're going to ask many questions. Having a candidate code a bit in front of you, going back and forth, provides a lot of info. As far as "CS puzzles" - binary search, trees, linked lists, hashtables, etc: None of those should be puzzles. If you're giving interviews that people can "memorize" an answer to, then the problem is how you're doing the interview. A…

Do you actually find people that expect candidates to implement quicksort? I've certainly implemented it, but there's no way I have it memorized, it's not an obvious algorithm at all. I'd be flabbergasted to be asked to implement it from memory with no warning. It seems clear to me that one would be testing for if the person happened to have looked at the algorithm recently, not if they were competent.

I used quicksort as an example of something that one could conceivably memorize in Haskell (only 80 chars) with no clue to the functionality.

I was referring to any sort of "memorization" - just talking and watching someone code should make it clear if they just recently read an article about an algorithm, or if they actually understand it.

Post reply on HN