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Why is recruiting developers so difficult?

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Re: Why is recruiting developers so difficult?

#211

Post by kube-system »

karamanolev wrote: post #193
rlewkov wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The tech company I currently work for has unlimited PTO. I've never had an issue, even once, when I said I'm going to take XYZ days off and have gotten pushback. It probably happens but I haven't seen it.

You never mention if you took 15-20-25 days per year or let's say 40. I'd say that if you're taking up to 25 days per year, then there's no point in unlimited PTO - that's such a standard number that it's better to just put it there. If you took more than 30, then I'd love to hear specific numbers. Saying that you took 30-40 days in a year and didn't get pushback means a lot more in terms of a good "unlimited PTO pol…

I take a "standard" amount of PTO but it still makes sense to have unlimited PTO because:

1. Some people take more and some people take less, and that's fine. Not everyone has the same life circumstances.

2. If you set an allotment, you should track it. Why waste time counting calendar days against a PTO budget if nobody cares? If you start tracking towards a limit that people don't actually care about, then you create opportunities for people to be treated unfairly, or you demonstrate that your organizations rules aren't actually worth following.

Re: Why is recruiting developers so difficult?

#212

Post by yupper32 »

gsibble wrote: post #202
yupper32 wrote: post #178

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…

So do you have applicants write a 4 endpoint API with flask, or do you have them implement an elevator system which you describe as very hard? I've actually given that question in an hour long interview. But guess what? They get to stop at an hour, instead of guessing how much work they need to do to move on. You and I know that someone could probably make a career working on that system.

When you commit your time and set actual deadlines (such as 1 hour), they don't think they need to write a multi-elevator system with floor input outside the elevator and account for load and time of day or write it in 8 languages and write a 10 page report on the whole thing. They just spend an hour with me and we go through the problem and see how far we get.

You could be spamming that question out to hundreds applicants for all I know. Show you care and spend the time with me. I get several interview requests per day, I'm not wasting my time unless I think a company respects me. I'm in a nice position where I don't need to show I can be exploited by doing a ton of unpaid overtime work.

Re: Why is recruiting developers so difficult?

#213

Post by intelVISA »

gsibble wrote: post #207
intelVISA wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

That really is the $1m question huh, wish I knew tbh. Even ignoring the unpaid work aspect the other Catch-22 is sure, you might filter a few "only good on paper" candidates but if you're hiring "top talent" what is a 5min Flask API going to prove?

For a coding eval like that to be useful beyond jr level it'd need to be decently complex which usually takes a while to develop. Maybe an open ended (upfront no expectation of completion) kinda "see how far you can get in 1hr on this complex thing" could be a fair middle ground as laying some good groundwork is a pretty solid insight into their coding process.

Re: Why is recruiting developers so difficult?

#214

Post by yupper32 »

jenscow wrote: post #184
yupper32 wrote: post #178

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.

Take home tests are never just an hour. They're open ended traps designed to find out who is willing to put in unpaid overtime. The OP themselves admitted to expanding the scope of a take home test they were given by around 10x because they felt it would give them an edge.

This is what a ton of candidates end up doing, knowing that others are going to as well. Especially when the take home test could be sent to a massive number of people.

Spend a few hours with me and watch me code. Show you care. I'm not rejecting the idea of spending time coding for an interview.

Re: Why is recruiting developers so difficult?

#215

Post by lifeisstillgood »

blibble wrote: post #209
ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How exactly?

works for a company that pays its engineers reasonably well? $200k (TC) is not that high in London for an engineer with 10 years experience

So that's 160k pa total. I'm in London myself

I would be surprised to see someone whose job is coding getting that.

There may be crypto paying silly amounts or lucky start ups.

Either that or I need to brush up my CV

Re: Why is recruiting developers so difficult?

#216

Post by gsibble »

yupper32 wrote: post #214
jenscow wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Take home tests are never just an hour. They're open ended traps designed to find out who is willing to put in unpaid overtime. The OP themselves admitted to expanding the scope of a take home test they were given by around 10x because they felt it would give them an edge. This is what a ton of candidates end up doing, knowing that others are going to as well. Especially when the take home test could be sent to a mas…

I'm happy to sit down with you and watch you code if you'd prefer that. Most of our candidates prefer take homes. We're willing to work with our candidates to let them show their skills however they please. I'm not 100% for take homes, it's just the preference we've seen. And we never give take homes that are actual work, god forbid.

Re: Why is recruiting developers so difficult?

#217

Post by gsibble »

yupper32 wrote: post #212
gsibble wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

So do you have applicants write a 4 endpoint API with flask, or do you have them implement an elevator system which you describe as very hard? I've actually given that question in an hour long interview. But guess what? They get to stop at an hour, instead of guessing how much work they need to do to move on. You and I know that someone could probably make a career working on that system. When you commit your time an…

I think you're making a lot of assumptions about how we conduct our interviews that are way off the mark. First off, my description above was about my going through an interview process, not about how we conduct our interviews (the 4 endpoint API). The elevator system we ask people to see how far they can get in an hour so we can see their problem solving abilities and readable code abilities. That's it.

We're also willing to do zoom pair programming, in person coding exercises, etc.. We let our candidates decide. They overwhelmingly decide take homes. Not sure why you specifically are so against it but that has not been our experience. We want a pleasant experience for our interviewers and frequently bend over backwards for talented individuals to accommodate however they'd like to demonstrate their skills. We don't expect a lot of work (almost never more than an hour), just enough to show your abilities, with our focus being on problem solving and writing maintainable code. We just want to know you can perform up to what your resume says you can since so many resumes are works of fiction.

We also only give coding exercises as the final step in our interviewing process. We do not "spam" it out as we recognize it's asking for a time investment. About 80% pass and get an offer. We do not abuse people's time and respect that it's definitely asking for them to commit to doing a little bit of work.

Again, you seem to be making a lot of assumptions that are potentially true of other companies that do not respect people's time but do not apply to us.

Re: Why is recruiting developers so difficult?

#218

Post by gsibble »

intelVISA wrote: post #213
gsibble wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

That really is the $1m question huh, wish I knew tbh. Even ignoring the unpaid work aspect the other Catch-22 is sure, you might filter a few "only good on paper" candidates but if you're hiring "top talent" what is a 5min Flask API going to prove? For a coding eval like that to be useful beyond jr level it'd need to be decently complex which usually takes a while to develop. Maybe an open ended (upfront no expectati…

Indeed. That's why our most common coding challenge is this: https://github.com/mshang/python-elevator-challenge

We ask you to see how far you can get in an hour and then review your code. We're looking for how you approach the problem and if you can write readable, maintainable code. You can learn a lot from how someone approaches this. We've seen dozens of different approaches, and in fact learned a lot ourselves from the different answers. Some are incredibly impressive. Some are just a bunch of if statements that lead nowhere. It's a great way of separating wheat from chaff quickly.

edit: The flask API was an interview I took, not one I gave. I considered it a very poor take home since it was ridiculously simple and didn't prove any actual skill, but as I said, less than 40% of their applicants were able to pass even such a simple question. They had very poor screening processes. It was also step 2 in their interview process right after a screening call and they spammed it to hundreds of people while our coding exercise is our final step after we've screened you past several people and had several hours to get to know you and are already pretty sure you're a good fit.

Re: Why is recruiting developers so difficult?

#219

Post by JJMcJ »

gsibble wrote: post #103
JJMcJ wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> fire those that don't perform up to expectations quickly What's the compensation for that risk? "We'll fire you in six weeks if you don't work out, so please leave your current job where you're well established and have about a 0.5% chance of getting fired this year." Something like guaranteed six months severance, or a $100K reporting to work bonus with no clawbacks. At the C-level, these kinds of guarantees happe…

Honestly, we've never encountered this problem. I've never poached someone that didn't work out. Usually, if I poach, I have to pay a premium so I'm fairly sure they can do the job.

That's the hiring side of the issue.

What's the assurance for the person you are recruiting?

Re: Why is recruiting developers so difficult?

#220

Post by rjh29 »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #215
blibble wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

works for a company that pays its engineers reasonably well? $200k (TC) is not that high in London for an engineer with 10 years experience

So that's 160k pa total. I'm in London myself I would be surprised to see someone whose job is coding getting that. There may be crypto paying silly amounts or lucky start ups. Either that or I need to brush up my CV

I'm in London and I'm on 400k/year.

See how easy it is to just lie on the internet? :P

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