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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

#381

Post by JPatRedCarpet »

I'm going to speak from a place of an engineer / hiring manager that's been in startups for the past ~12 years and recently bootstrapped an engineering recruiting with a friend.

- As others said, you should post your salary. You'll likely need to be competitive in the markets you're hiring for. If you're open to folks within the US as fully remote, you'll likely want to be targeting the 50-75th percentile of salaries for the YoE you're looking for.

- The take home of 4 hours is quite a lot of time end-end. I'd consider slimming this down to 2 hours if you can OR allowing candidates to have several days where they can work on it at anytime vs being timed.

- It is extremely hard to stand out as an individual company nowadays. There are a truly amazing amount of startups, mid-size, enterprise, and beyond, companies hiring engineers of all levels. Without a way to tap into a market which you may serve organically and leverage those users into potential candidates, it's just going to be tough to stand out.

- You likely will need to spend time sourcing yourself and investigating a variety of avenues where you either a) spend your time sourcing / using a tool that helps (such as triplebyte / AngeList AList) or b) bring on an external recruiter. I would suggest bringing on someone that is actually technical and has a history in engineering, which is likely tough to find.

- Feel free to email me if you'd like to just chat more about this bit (external recruiting). We're happy to help, email in profile so-as not to simply self-promote within the comments. As a simple plug, we specialize in providing mid-funnel engineers for hard-to-hire roles and are happy to take over the first third of most engineering hiring processes.

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

#382

Post by ghaff »

vorpalhex wrote: post #358
ghaff wrote: 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…

> 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 have to create one. I have a github/gitlab full of code. You want to check it? Go for it. Happy to provide a portfolio on demand. Make me write an api client..? No, get lost.

A lot of people do not have a public portfolio however. Whether for writing or for code. (For perfectly valid reasons.)

Of course, portfolios are a perfectly reasonable expectation in a lot of professions including the trades.

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

#383

Post by updateavailable »

You're doing it backwards. Tell me why you're worth working for. Sell me on it. We should be giving you the take-home exam.

You're a self-described "run of the mill" software vendor. That sounds like a workplace that is zero fun. Strike one. Good candidates who can help you are in it for the adventure. We're not in it for your average benefits and wet mop process. Strike two. You're pretentious declaring that your run-of-the-mill job "requires a reasonably deep understanding of the underlying platform" presuming that we software engineers with decades of problem-solving experience can't learn it in an afternoon. Strike three.

It seems to me as though you're going through the motions to check a box but don't really want to fill the position.

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

#384

Post by reikonomusha »

TameAntelope wrote: post #338
dancocos wrote: post #37

"Take-home technical assignment (~4h)" I've got 20 plus years of tech, I've been out of college since 1997 and you want to give a 4 hour homework assignment. If get you want to get a feel for someone's ability but this is more easily done by stating a problem during one of the interviews and asking the person "How would you approach this?" Listing for how they anticipate problems and tradeoffs.

Yeah, but as a counterpoint: your years of experience are not indicative of your skill, just that you can meet some arbitrarily low bar for a long time. The take-home technical assignment is to determine what, if anything, you actually learned in your 20+ years in tech. A depressingly large number of people with that level of experience have not learned anything meaningful.

As someone who has been a hiring manager for the last decade, I'm absolutely befuddled by the "tenure => competence" assumption.

Tenure doesn't weed out mediocrity by any stretch. In fact, the more tenure someone has, often the more difficult it is to determine from their resume alone whether they know anything.

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

#385

Post by mkhpalm »

Get rid of the take home work and and presentation. If you want senior or staff engineers their resume and a series of human conversations with whoever the stakeholders are should tell everybody everything they need to know. Your process seems more like you're looking for new grads with little or no experience. Almost as if you're ignoring all their past experience and wanting them to start all over again.

In short: Most mid to upper level engineers don't have copious amounts of free time to spend on maybes. There are too many better options for them out there.

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

#386

Post by jelling »

imhoguy wrote: post #210

It is beauty competition. Disclaimer: I am biased gray-hair contractor who's milking own network. "fairly typical run-of-the-mill mid-size enterprise software vendor" - read: boring, maintenance, legacy, but that is ok, I work on such stuff when it pays decent daily rate; "fully-remote SWEs in the "DevOps" software space (Linux, containers, k8s, yadda yadda)", "higher percentage non-code" - sysadmin, jira queue, SEVs…

I feel similar but just want to add that letting people do a ~20 hour probation week could be useful for both parties here. Meaning they can keep their same job, but you're going to pay them to do 1-2 weeks at 20 hours per week. This doesn't sound like a sensitive IP situation, either.

Also, if you can't get someone up and delivering value in 20 hours that's good data about your internal setup. My goal is a minor commit on day 1. And if you can't spec out value that could be delivered in that time frame you probably have weak requirements.

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

#387

Post by pclmulqdq »

peter422 wrote: post #312
rahimnathwani wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PSA: For those who don't fully understand the second paragraph above, be sure to google 'liquidation preference' before you're next evaluating an offer that includes equity or options in a private company.

But also know that if liquidation preferences are coming into play for the company’s exit, it’s almost certainly a giant failure and any late joining employees aren’t getting anything significant. If the startup is not growing extremely fast, the stock will likely not be worth very much regardless of how “clean” the terms are on the preferred stock. If you expect stock to be a big part of your compensation then leave…

It's not a giant failure if liquidation preferences are in play. Liquidation preferences help in literally every scenario that is not an IPO. It is very common that a startup exits in an acquisition, and usually when that happens, small common shareholders get a lot less than the "value" of their stock. The liquidation preference protects you (or pays out a bonus) in that case.

It has a huge effect on the EV of a startup investment, and that's why VCs and founders use them.

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

#388

Post by __d »

corrral wrote: 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.

Second the network thing. I've done two interviews in the last 25 years. Mostly it's a 30 minute call or coffee with the group leader just to make them feel ok about the decision they've already made to hire you.

Same when hiring: I'd much rather hire someone who I've seen work before than go through a whole interview process, and still feel like it's a crapshoot at the end when making an offer.

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

#389

Post by js2 »

PainfullyNormal wrote: post #89
svillar wrote: post #80

Lots of great comments here; My thoughts on this as other Seniors have pointed out (and I am a Senior myself) 1- I have not looked for a job since 2014, every job since came through my network. Then the interviews were basically friendly meet&greets but super informal, not a single coding test or take home assignment - note than I always started as Tech lead/Architect. I put in the hours and took pride in my work, ha…

> Then the interviews were basically friendly meet&greets but super informal, not a single coding test or take home assignment I have 20 years experience and this is completely alien to my experience. I've gotten lots of job referrals over the years, but all it did was get my foot in the door. From there, it was the standard interview process with whiteboarding and take home tests. What am I missing here?

I have 26 years experience and mine matches svillar in not having anything other than pro-forma interviews literally since my first job from college.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31817596

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

#390

Post by mrkurt »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #244

I am going to add one thing that I haven't heard here. You probably need to raise the cash in your offer by a lot. Most mid-size companies think that they can get away with offering equity at a ridiculous valuation and attract people who aren't true believers. Most people aren't true believers in miscellaneous DevOps that doesn't involve a lot of code. I have spoken to a few series-C and D companies that wanted to gi…

You're either undervaluing common stock or vastly overvaluing preferred stock. Probably the latter?

If you join with options for preferred stock (assuming anyone is going to do such a thing), you're probably getting a 1x liquidation preference. But preferred stock has a higher fair market value than common stock. So the strike price will be higher. Probably close to the liquidation preference.

Which means, you're asking for something that will net you $0 if the liquidation preference kicks in. And you'll earn less in the upside case because your exercise price would be higher.

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