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Why is recruiting developers so difficult?

polyfill.work

201–210 of 233 posts

Re: Why is recruiting developers so difficult?

#201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's my thought too. I don't think this person has done much hiring so they don't understand the problem set. I haven't solved how to tell if someone can code without some kind of coding exercise. If I could, I wouldn't do it.

I've at least gotten rid of l33tcode, 8 hour technical interviews, whiteboard BS, in-person high-pressure timed coding exercises, brain teasers, etc.. All the worst stuff. I thought that was good enough. Apparently asking for an hour of someone's time to get a great job is too much these days.

Re: Why is recruiting developers so difficult?

#202

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…

Like I said in my other post, your unwillingness to invest any time into getting hired tells me a lot about you. Let me tell you a story about how I got hired for a job I really wanted.

They had a take home. Ridiculously simple. Build a 4 endpoint CRUD API for bear sightings. Took about 20 minutes in Python Flask. Sent it in, immediately moved to the next round which was two weeks away.

You know what I did in those two weeks? I rebuilt the same API in Node, Typescript, Rust, Go, C++, Ruby, Django, Sanic, and I think a few more.

Then I deployed it on App Engine, Lambda, EC2, Google VM, Kubernetes, Elastic Beanstalk, ECS, and my local home dual Xeon server. (while keeping the compute size of all of the cloud offerings as equal as possible)

Then I benchmarked them all. Turns out how you deployed it made little difference but the language made a huge difference. Sanic came in 2nd place while Rust was far and away the winner.

Then I wrote a 10 page report including my methods, code, charts, and tables showing the results.

Two weeks later when I arrived at my onsite interview, I was scheduled to meet with 8 people for 8 hours to talk BS l33tcode questions. You know what I did? Explained what I had spent my time doing. They loved it.

I got a very nice offer that day and worked there for 3 years.

Sometimes the amount of effort you show a company how much you want to work there is what can land you the job.

I didn't ask to be paid for that time and I was employed elsewhere. I did this in the evenings and weekends during what would otherwise be social media downtime.....and it was fun. I explored new technologies, learned several new languages, and expanded my abilities as a developer. I don't regret that time investment one bit.

And you're saying you can't take one hour to do a take home?

That DOES tell me a lot about you.

edit: To be clear, this didn't take away from any of my other activities. I still ate out, spent time with friends, went out, etc.. This just took away from useless social media time and turned it into something productive. I also had a lot of fun not only exploring everything but also knowing I'd have a lock on a well compensated position and be in control of my interviews instead of their potentially being disinterested in just another candidate. It was time very well spent. I don't nearly expect this kind of investment from any of our applicants but if someone demonstrated they wanted to work for me that much you'd bet I'd hire them.

edit 2: I was also told later that numerous applicants struggled with this take home assignment despite it being literal CS 101 level stuff. That's why getting a sense of it someone can code is so important.

Re: Why is recruiting developers so difficult?

#203
post #9

Number one reason: You're not offering me enough good reasons to leave my current job. I don't think HR and software recruiting has really caught up to the reality that many developers by their mid-30's are sitting on a million+ in assets and good ones can rake in 200K+ easy. Further we usually find equilibrium with our roles wherever we are even if we have gripes with how things are because most devs are pragmatic p…

Don't write off a company just because they have an unlimited PTO policy. Check out the culture first, some actually respect it. Especially in smaller companies, it's sometimes just easier to judge people based on their output rather than the number of days their butt is behind a keyboard.

I was at a company with such a policy and I was fired for taking too much time off due to a family emergency.

Re: Why is recruiting developers so difficult?

#204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Like I said in my other post, your unwillingness to invest any time into getting hired tells me a lot about you. Let me tell you a story about how I got hired for a job I really wanted. They had a take home. Ridiculously simple. Build a 4 endpoint CRUD API for bear sightings. Took about 20 minutes in Python Flask. Sent it in, immediately moved to the next round which was two weeks away. You know what I did in those t…

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Re: Why is recruiting developers so difficult?

#205
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I/we do things significantly different than any other company I've worked for. Working fully remote makes it easier since you don't see people getting up from their desks or not coming into work. Our developers have no set hours, can work any hours they want, and are only expected to get the work assigned to them during a sprint done, no more, no less. I brought this style of work to our workplace and it's been…

I’m curious how you handle overly optimistic estimates with this approach? Quality expectations make a lot of sense, but “on time” is famously hard in software. How do you decide whether the developer was slow or the deadline was unrealistic? And similarly, how do you protect developers from feeling that they have to throw out work-life balance to hit deadlines/sprints that turn out to be unrealistic?

Good question. We generally overestimate to make sure people are given lots of time to complete a task. We also are not strict on deadlines. Didn’t make it this sprint but put forth your best effort in 40 hours a week? No worries at all. Good job. We’ll finish it in the next sprint. We never expect anyone to sacrifice work/life balance to further the company, a luxury of hiring only the best developers who keep my managers happy working reasonable hours. A lot of it is my managing their expectations as well. So far it’s working well.

Re: Why is recruiting developers so difficult?

#206
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If someone asks for it, we pay for their time. And we offer to get a sense of how they can code however they want. Take home, virtual pair coding, in-officce pair coding or coding exercises, whatever you want. We just need to see you code in a timeboxed way so we can see how you solve problems and see the results to make sure you write readable, maintainable code.

Almost everyone picks take home. Like, over 95%. I'm not sure why people here are complaining about it except that the accounts that are were made 2021+ so maybe it's a generational thing.

Re: Why is recruiting developers so difficult?

#207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We very infrequently get asked to reimburse for time but we do limit how much when we do. We usually give various challenges as take homes which people find fun and engaging, projects that I myself have spent hours or even days trying to solve in my spare time. We want them to be fun. We rarely get complaints. We're happy to accomodate if you'd rather do it in person or over zoom. It's really up to the applicant.

I can appreciate that and obviously what you're doing is working out for you :) Guess I'm prob the odd one out here -- unless the job was incredible (like pair programming with J Carmack) I wouldn't be able to commit to any meaningful unpaid take home as I can spend that time programming for profit rather than solving challenges for a company that may or may not work out.

That's fine and up to you. Our interview process is extremely streamlined and requires 1/2 - 1/5 the time of most engineering interview processes. We do require someone to show they are capable of doing the work. How would you prefer to do that so I can take your feedback into account?

Re: Why is recruiting developers so difficult?

#208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Glassdoor notoriously undershoots and is off by quite a bit. I’d not use that as a resource at all.

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Re: Why is recruiting developers so difficult?

#210
post #84
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wrote banking software that took a company's valuation from $400 million to $6 billion when it went public. That's not a special ability?

There's probably a bunch of other people could have writeen it just as well or better and it wouldn't have made a difference to the valuation of the company anyway.

You can throw up what-ifs and counterfactuals all day long - gsibble was the one who wrote the software.
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