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Why is recruiting developers so difficult?

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Re: Why is recruiting developers so difficult?

#181

Post by piinecone »

t6jvcereio wrote: post #151

> For example, if I want to hire someone with 10+ years of experience who’s going to work on a complicated go api, I’ll get resumes from candidates who have Well yeah. C++ developers with 15+ years experience don't want anything to do with go (for good reasons) and you probably can't afford them anyway.

I am the author of this blog post and also a C++ developer with more than 15 years of experience, who hires people like myself, and writes go when it makes sense.

> For example, if I want to hire someone ...

It's just a contrived example to demonstrate the (mostly) poor matching I see at the point of attracting developers.

Re: Why is recruiting developers so difficult?

#182

Post by akvadrako »

gsibble wrote: post #56
sys_64738 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You lost me at "with a take home". I'm not interested in your silly games.

Ok. What would you suggest instead? I need to know you can, you know, actually code.

Paid take home assignments are the best in my experience.

Re: Why is recruiting developers so difficult?

#183

Post by jenscow »

sys_64738 wrote: post #174
jenscow wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

I once was in an interview and the interviewer said "We're going to play a game." I got up and left. Fizzbuzz is a dumb and useless game and if an interviewer uses that as the benchmark for hiring then they waste the interviewee's time.

5 minutes.

Is your time is so precious, that you'd waste however long it to you to prepare and turn up to an interview, because the interviewer wants to double check you're not one of the many applicants who struggle at a simple coding problem?

Re: Why is recruiting developers so difficult?

#184

Post by jenscow »

yupper32 wrote: post #178
gsibble wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What red flags did you see? That we pay top of market? That we work to have a low stress environment? That we put life before work instead of work before life? That we prioritize having the best benefits on the market, including platinum health care with $0 employee contribution and full mental health coverage for therapy and medication not covered through insurance? That we don't overload our top performers by givin…

Those are a lot of words that could be empty. It's easy for me to see the red flags: 1. Mentioning firing in the very first post when talking about hiring. 2. Take home interview tests, showing you don't value your potential employee's time. 3. And this is an interesting one: accusing someone of having a poor work ethic when you don't know them and they didn't show any sign of it. This is a big red flag because it po…

To me, its the outright refusal to spend an hour doing something you claim to be adept at, because you've failed to understand the other person's problem despite it being explained multiple times.

Maybe you just haven't hired or worked with someone who can't code yet.

It's not the liars that are being filtered out (they're easy to detect), but its those who genuinely believe they are good developers.

Re: Why is recruiting developers so difficult?

#185

Post by silisili »

ipaddr wrote: post #154
silisili wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Converting ints to strings isn't a 'skill'. It's a simple task to see if they are well versed enough in Go to get started. And no the question isn't 'convert a number to a string', it's a small function tasked with doing something along those lines. I don't get why you feel that's insulting. If I were applying for a job speaking French, was asked to translate a simple sentence, and couldn't...I wouldn't expect to be…

If you were applying to be a doctor would the interviewer giving you an orange and a dull knife and asking you to cutout a seed without spilling any juice on the table be helpful as a hiring filter? Because that is what you are doing. Just hire a few people part time and the one(s) that can deliver offer full time roles.

This analogy doesn't hold water.

It's more like hiring for a podiatrist, the candidate claiming to be a podiatrist for 5 years, then not being able to answer what to do for a sprained ankle... because they can just google it.

Re: Why is recruiting developers so difficult?

#186

Post by ChuckNorris89 »

time_to_smile wrote: post #161
ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GP definitely lives in a SV/US bubble. Here in Europe I know devs in high CoL areas having less than a thousand Euros left at the end of the month. Having millions in assets is fantasy for us unless you won some crypto/stock gambles.

> SV/US bubble It's not SV, it's the US. 200k is easily achievable for a senior engineer anywhere in the US with the rise in wfh. But what percent of software engineering jobs are in the US? It's not really a bubble if it's the majority of software positions. Reminds me of Dijkstra's "On the fact that the Atlantic Ocean has two sides" followed by Alan Kay's rebuttal "On the fact that most software is written on one s…

I was talking about the millions in assets part. And 200k for EU citizens is definitely not easily achievable. The median is far far below that.

Re: Why is recruiting developers so difficult?

#187

Post by imustbeevil »

time_to_smile wrote: post #161
ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GP definitely lives in a SV/US bubble. Here in Europe I know devs in high CoL areas having less than a thousand Euros left at the end of the month. Having millions in assets is fantasy for us unless you won some crypto/stock gambles.

> SV/US bubble It's not SV, it's the US. 200k is easily achievable for a senior engineer anywhere in the US with the rise in wfh. But what percent of software engineering jobs are in the US? It's not really a bubble if it's the majority of software positions. Reminds me of Dijkstra's "On the fact that the Atlantic Ocean has two sides" followed by Alan Kay's rebuttal "On the fact that most software is written on one s…

Median total compensation for a senior software engineer in the US is $138K on glassdoor, and I'd wager even that is a bit inflated.

There is no reality where most engineers expect to be paid 200K+. I really don't understand technical people perpetuating this idea when you can find data pretty much anywhere that indicates otherwise. There is just no reason to inflate this number.

Re: Why is recruiting developers so difficult?

#188

Post by Double_a_92 »

silisili wrote: post #125
Double_a_92 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That skill has nothing specifically to do with Go. Most languages have some "ParseInt" function or so. And of all the languages I use for daily work I could not 100% tell you what that function is exactly called. By doing that you are wasting a potentially good developper because they didn't happen to remember some languages exact syntax. It's also just straight up insulting. If someone worked for x years in a relate…

Converting ints to strings isn't a 'skill'. It's a simple task to see if they are well versed enough in Go to get started. And no the question isn't 'convert a number to a string', it's a small function tasked with doing something along those lines. I don't get why you feel that's insulting. If I were applying for a job speaking French, was asked to translate a simple sentence, and couldn't...I wouldn't expect to be…

It's insulting because you automatically assume the candidate is a fraud. What if the candidate asked to see your financial bookkeeping to make sure that you always pay salary on time? Would that be cool with you? They just want to make sure that your company isn't a fraud and does actually pay their staff... right?

Re: Why is recruiting developers so difficult?

#189

Post by Double_a_92 »

silisili wrote: post #185
ipaddr wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you were applying to be a doctor would the interviewer giving you an orange and a dull knife and asking you to cutout a seed without spilling any juice on the table be helpful as a hiring filter? Because that is what you are doing. Just hire a few people part time and the one(s) that can deliver offer full time roles.

This analogy doesn't hold water. It's more like hiring for a podiatrist, the candidate claiming to be a podiatrist for 5 years, then not being able to answer what to do for a sprained ankle... because they can just google it.

It's more like asking them to list all the chemical components of some pain meds that they might prescribe for a sprained ankle.

Also would you really ask a doctor such a (as I already said) insultingly trivial question during an interview?

Re: Why is recruiting developers so difficult?

#190

Post by karamanolev »

ketzo wrote: post #52
karamanolev wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> some actually respect it I'm yet to see one or hear from a friend who works in one. I admit there might exist one somewhere, but by and large, they don't. Unlimited PTO = culture of overworking, at least for me. And small companies with unlimited PTO, 3-5 engineer teams (and some other staff, obviously) seem to be the worst offenders. The bigger the company, the higher the chance unlimited PTO might actually work.…

I used to work at Workday, who has an “unlimited PTO” policy, and they were fantastic about it. A few months into the pandemic, my manager sent me a message saying that he was worried I wasn’t taking enough PTO, and suggested I do a 3- or 4-day weekend in the next couple of weeks, even if I wasn’t going anywhere. This happened to a few other coworkers, too. It can be a trap, but it isn’t always. And this isn’t some l…

That's a positive thing to hear and thanks for sharing! What I'm worried is, if 90% of unlimited PTO policies are complete shams (number taken from my informed RNG), how do you tell them apart? You can't afford to start at 10 companies and remain in the 1 that has a good policy... On words, they are all about work-life-balance (they don't tell you the balance is 90% work). And I'm not talking about being ridiculously lazy, I'm talking about employers openly setting expectations that you work at least 5x10-11h as a software engineer and demanding that.
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