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Ask HN: Having trouble getting senior applicants, wondering what to do about it

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Re: Ask HN: Having trouble getting senior applicants, wondering what to do about it

#371
I’m a devops engineer. I sometimes write code (like interfacing with the k8s apis and gluing stuff together).

Some considerations:

1. No salary = you don’t pay well.

If you paid well you’d be listing that first in the job posting.

2. Also the four hours assignment… when it comes to devops kind of stuff, chances are it’s impossible, or impossible to do in 4 hours.

If I have to spin up infrastructure to do your assignment, I have to pay out of pocket.

If there’s a service I haven’t used before then I must spend additional time to go though the documentation, do some trial and error (on my time, out of my pocket).

Chances are very high there could be a tool I haven’t used before, and that would mean I could just fail because I don’t know that tool (but I could learn it easily on the job, if I hadn’t a four hour limit).

So yeah the four hour assignment is completely moronic and unless the scope is cristal clear and laser focused (eg: only aws and only ec2+s3) i’d skip you too.

Re: Ask HN: Having trouble getting senior applicants, wondering what to do about it

#372

Me and many other people I know will not do take-home assignments. Top paying (FAANG) companies do not require them.

But they do sometimes interview the crap out of you, speaking from personal recent experience.

Re: Ask HN: Having trouble getting senior applicants, wondering what to do about it

#373
post #326

POST THE SALARY. Senior people are senior because of their work experience, which they gain from steady employment. Almost by definition you are looking to entice busy, employed people away from their current jobs. They don’t have the time or inclination to trawl through job ad after job ad. Where your competition will ask for 15 years of experience and then only after hours of calls and meetings reluctantly make an…

I've tried to advocate for this at my organization and been told that we don't want people primarily motivated by money...

Colorado, USA now forces companies to post salary bands on job listings. It's quite refreshing and obviates this excuse.

Re: Ask HN: Having trouble getting senior applicants, wondering what to do about it

#375
post #84
post #21

> Take-home technical assignment (~4h) or similar at candidate's choosing If I can get a similarly-paying job at a place that doesn't do this, I'll skip you. Many seniors ( actual seniors, not 3-years-of-experience seniors) have a network and can say "hey I'm looking" and instantly have multiple options that won't have them do more than talk to the team and manager for an hour or two. If that.

> Many seniors (actual seniors, not 3-years-of-experience seniors) have a network and can say "hey I'm looking" and instantly have multiple options that won't have them do more than talk to the team and manager for an hour or two. If that. Just wanted to back this up a little bit. This is exactly what happened to me on my last job search. I'm currently in between jobs, starting the new gig after the 4th of July holid…

+1. I literally have not had to interview for a job, not for real anyway, since college. I got hired in 1996 right out of college helping a friend move wherein the hiring manager let me know there was another job there. We'd all come out of the same computer science department. By 1999 I was managing the system administration team (dev ops wasn't a thing then) at company 1.

In 2000, the same person that hired me at company 1 had joined to a startup in CA. I got hired by him again. I did a basic tech screen via phone, got an offer, the company paid for my move to CA. I was there from 2000-2007 through that company splitting in two and the half I stayed with eventually getting acquired by a Fortune 500, company 3. No interview as part of the acquisition. I also moved in 2004 back to the east coast, again paid for by company 2. I started working mostly from home for company 2 about a year later, which persisted with company 3.

In 2009, some of the folks I worked with at company 2/3 founded a startup in CA. Got hired again, this is now company 4, with another pro-forma interview. I worked from home for company 4 from 2009-2013. That company then got acquired by my current employer, company 5. No interview as part of the acquisition. Continued to work from home. My current employer has changed hands twice now, but still calls itself the same as when I was acquired.

When I'm ready to go, I have a network of people I've worked with at a variety of tech companies. Company 5 is dysfunctional and filled with mediocre talent, but everyone is so cordial, pay and benefits are good, so I haven't really had reason to leave other than the frustration of dealing with some bureaucracy and creaky legacy systems. I've mostly been insulated from that because I've been responsible for a fairly self-contained system.

Now I'm inheriting other people's crap as folks move on, but you know, last week I deleted over 10,000 lines of unused or unneeded code and that was actually pretty satisfying.

Re: Ask HN: Having trouble getting senior applicants, wondering what to do about it

#376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdotally, as someone with three kids I'd much rather do a take-home 4 hour assignment than the usual round of interviews since I can work the former into my schedule however I like.

I recently did a 6 hour take-home, but was given an expectation of around 2 weeks to accomplish it, with flexibility for more if I needed it. I thought it was pretty fair compared to a never-ending round of tech interviews.

My experience with that is:

0) time doing the project is tracked, sometimes via the expectation that you commit to the git repository from start to finish. dinging you for "points" for going over the time allotment

and that the other candidates are:

1) doing way extra things that took way more than 6 hours

2) are not doing those extra things from scratch because they've been playing this game for a while

and that

3) the company still has inaccurate ideas of what a candidate should be expected to present in the 6 hours

4) is judging you on completely random things that they did not mention. "you didn't use this design pattern" "we don't like MVVP anymore, we're back on MVP. here's this other acronym."

waste of time

Re: Ask HN: Having trouble getting senior applicants, wondering what to do about it

#377
> though the work requires a reasonably deep understanding of the underlying platforms which a lot of people seem to dislike.

Would it have taken 6 months to train someone instead of wait for someone to “hit the ground running”?

This is actually rhetorical for other hiring managers and recruiters

Re: Ask HN: Having trouble getting senior applicants, wondering what to do about it

#378
post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As something of a counterpoint, a literal 4-hour assignment isn't that bad--especially as an alternative to a day of interviews. If they give you the assignment and it's immediately obvious that it's actually a 20+ hour assignment, you can always just walk. When I worked for a technology analyst company, we would ask for writing samples--which most potential hires would already have. But, if someone didn't, they'd ha…

> As something of a counterpoint, a literal 4-hour assignment isn't that bad--especially as an alternative to a day of interviews. As a counter counterpoint, that only makes sense if the candidate is applying to a single place. If the candidate has lined up 4 interviews, they're not going to get 16 hours in the week to complete them. The fifth place that has no 4 hour interviews will get the candidate.

Exactly this - it is incredibly disrespectful to peoples time, it's impossible to do a few interviews like this.

If you have kids, your partner may have to take time off too, it's just not workable.

I say no to these, and to tests these days.

Re: Ask HN: Having trouble getting senior applicants, wondering what to do about it

#379
You have thousands of senior devs reading this thread right now and you still haven't linked the company / job ad. If you missed this opportunity, you're probably making a lot of other silly mistakes in your recruitment process.

My suggestions:

1) Post the job ad here ASAP

2) Ask feedback from your candidates to figure out what other mistakes you are making in recruitment

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