Ask HN: Having trouble getting senior applicants, wondering what to do about it • Hacker News Board

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

#461

Post by peter422 » Tue, Jun 21, 2022, 1:20 AM UTC

pclmulqdq wrote: post #454

peter422 wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Help who? I’m specifically talking about an employee getting standard common stock. If liquidation preferences are coming into play, you’ve already lost as a common shareholder. But you should never be in that situation to begin with. If a company is struggling or growing slowly, quit and join one that isn’t.

Liquidation preferences advantage you compared to common stockholders in any situation that isn't an IPO. In a slightly disappointing acquisition (the most common outcome for a "successful" startup), it saves your butt. If you have double-dipping shares or a higher liquidation preference, you are going to make a lot of money in a bad acquisition situation. Liquidation preferences are cheap insurance against bad outco…

There is not a single respectable startup in existence that will give a random employee options or stock with liquidation preferences. For 99.9% of startups that would involve making a new class of shares for you, which ain’t gonna happen.

Investor is of course completely different for many reasons and I’m not speaking to that. And anyways unless you are leading the round, which you aren’t, you are just getting whatever preferences the lead is getting anyways.

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

#462

Post by peter422 » Tue, Jun 21, 2022, 1:24 AM UTC

joshribakoff wrote: post #418

peter422 wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Some companies do tender offers (stock buyback) to give employees liquidity, but unfortunately the c suite and investors (those who typically have a more favorable liquidity preference) can cause the tender offer to be oversubscribed if they enter more sell orders than there are buy orders. Usually this means common stock owners do not get to participate. Preferred stock can also be converted to common, but not the o…

Tender offers will only happen when somebody wants to buy stock, which means they think the stock price is lower than it will be in the future, which means they expect the company to grow or keep growing.

The companies where liquidation preferences are going to screw you are not going to be having tender offers, because by definition nobody wants to buy the stock! If they did want to buy the stock at above the current price then liquidation preferences aren’t coming into play.

(Note: I’m sure there are examples where a company did have a tender offer at some decent price before falling off a cliff and having a bad exit where the common stock was wiped out… but that is not common at all)

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

#463

Post by beachy » Tue, Jun 21, 2022, 1:25 AM UTC

dominotw wrote: post #334

scruple wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They're on the market 2 weeks, tops. My last search lasted 9 days from when I put out the signal to having interviewed (for 3 companies) and negotiated an offer and submitted my resignation and 2 weeks notice.

> My last search lasted 9 days i think you did disservice to yourself by optimizing for minimizing downtime between jobs. You should've played the field longer and gone for the highest bidder. I am 100% sure you are not getting paid your worth because no FAANG type company finishes the process in 1 week.

I am 100% sure there is no way you can actually be 100% sure about that.

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

#464

Post by Wowfunhappy » Tue, Jun 21, 2022, 1:26 AM UTC

rtpg wrote: post #414

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To the OP: if you believe your comp bands are competitive, why not share in the posting itself? Leaving that out makes it clear that the post was made in good faith. If I thought the submission was just a job ad in disguise, I might have flagged it.

I think the GP is saying "Why don't you put your salary band into the job ad", rather than "why didn't you link the job ad itself here". Which is 100% valid! Beyond being mandatory in more and more jurisdictions, having the salary range be posted has made me more likely to apply. Extremely confidence inspiring when it actually is market rate. I know recruiters/C suite people think they can jedi mind trick people into…

Ah, thanks, that does make more sense!

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

#465

Post by ratherbefuddled » Tue, Jun 21, 2022, 1:28 AM UTC

Some thoughts:

* Pay _much_ more.

* Post the salary in the ad.

* Get rid of half of your hiring process.

- The recruiter call is likely worthless, engineering managers can tell in about 3 minutes if a CV/resume is worth an interview.

- Instead of 4h homework and a presentation, do an hour of pairing with a team member.

* Come up with some other benefits - 4 day week, full remote, options/sharesave etc.

* Reward your team for using their network to get candidates.

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

#466

Post by sbmthakur » Tue, Jun 21, 2022, 1:28 AM UTC

Take-home technical assignment sounds too broad. What kind of questions are these?

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

#467

Post by throwaway81523 » Tue, Jun 21, 2022, 1:28 AM UTC

lbrito wrote: post #460

throwaway81523 wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The take home is a no go because its goal is make me invest my time with no corresponding investment of the other person's time. From a game theory perspective that makes my time disposable to them. I'm used to full day interview rounds and in principle I don't mind doing a 4 hour programming exercise, but only if one of the company's own engineers is there in the room with me talking to me while I work. That way we…

I don't think your premise is accurate because you don't have insight into how much, if any, time the company invests in reviewing take homes. As a reviewer, I sure spent considerable time reviewing take homes. As an applicant I got extremely thoughtful and detailed reviews. Conversely, I've interviewed at least as many times in code challenges with unhelpful, absent-minded interviewers. To me it boils down to sync V…

> As a reviewer, I sure spent considerable time reviewing take homes.

You mean like 4 hours reviewing? I'll believe you, but it surprises me. Anyway I can only go by what I can see. If you've already got a candidate you mostly like, you might solicit more take homes hoping to get one that blows you away, and take only a minute each to spot that none of them do.

> As an applicant I got extremely thoughtful and detailed reviews.

That's cool to hear. I myself have never gotten any kind of feedback to a take-home, beyond "hey, you did that really well, let's move forward to a live interview", or alternatively, dropping communication.

I do understand that sync is more hassle for you than async, but that is part of what makes it an honest signal.

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

#468

Post by jlokier » Tue, Jun 21, 2022, 1:30 AM UTC

baobabKoodaa wrote: post #369

hellohowareu wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does have, in my opinion, quite clear meaning as a term, otherwise it wouldn't exist as a term. Obviously it means setting up & maintaining application-ecosystem infrastructure: Servers/Containers/VMs, CICD, monitoring, logging, integration/production testing, permissions, and various automated jobs/workflows <-- that sort of stuff. So that developers can just focus on programming.

What you described is the "Ops" in "DevOps". A decade ago the people doing "Dev" work were different from the people doing "Ops" work. But then the "anyone can do anything and everyone should work on everything" trend arrived, and they invented the concept of "DevOps", meaning that the same people would now do both "Dev" and "Ops" work. Note that this description is entirely antithetical to your description "So that…

To be fair, there's "ops to support production" and "ops to support development".

"Devops" means the latter at some companies, so it makes a kind of sense that those people don't do any dev work themselves.

But I agree with you, that's the exact opposite of the meaning "devops" has in other places, which is the meaning it was coined with.

That was the innovative approach of merging dev and ops teams to be the same people, and things like production CD, to explicitly prevent developers from just focusing on programming (which was considered detrimental when there's an outside world depending on it).

Like Agile and XP, it was a fresh new approach...

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

#469

Post by imron » Tue, Jun 21, 2022, 1:32 AM UTC

mooreds wrote: post #353

Some ideas to help you stand out: * Post the salary in the ad. At least a range. * Pay folks for their take home assignment time. A few years ago, we paid senior folks $500. It is a token, not a contract, but it shows you care. * If it is the people that make it great, profile them so that potential hires can see their awesomeness. Help them grow their profile (speaking, writing, OSS) if they want. * Are you properly…

> Have a shorter hiring process. Maybe cut out the recruiter screen?

The downside of this is that you'll spend a greater amount of time interviewing people who are not appropriate for the role.

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

#470

Post by bstpierre » Tue, Jun 21, 2022, 1:33 AM UTC

apeace wrote: post #254

If you're having this problem, your first step is to get the recruiter out of the process. Start screening all resumes yourself. I've had some bad experiences with recruiters, both in-house and otherwise, and I feel they usually get screenings wrong. But there's an even more important reason for you to take over this process now: you don't know where your dropoff is. You need to get familiar with what's going on. Are…

> You said "benefits and salary are good", but literally the only reason to not list these things in a posting is if they're not actually that good.

The other reason I have seen a reluctance to put salary in a job posting is that some companies may not want their current employees to know how much the new hires are getting.