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When hiring senior engineers, you’re not buying, you’re selling

hiringengineersbook.com

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Re: When hiring senior engineers, you’re not buying, you’re selling

#61

Post by nothrabannosir »

mchannon wrote: post #29
tptacek wrote: post #3

A lot of this post seems pretty reasonable. But: In my experience, it’s fairly easy to judge technical skill. A friendly conversation about technical interests and recent projects can often be enough. Bullshit. Sounding credible in technical interviews is a skill, not the same skill as actually being a good programmer, and might even (statistically, in the large) be close to orthogonal to it. We found this out the ha…

When a guy tells you his experience, and you call bullshit, it's hard to tell whether you doubt his sincerity about having the experience at all or whether the experience itself was not representative of your reality. Either way, you're telling us not how it is, but how you are, and that's simply not useful. In "The Last Starfighter", the recruiter/hiring manager Centauri is constantly accused of using "the Excalibur…

He’s implying the author fell victim to a cognitive bias.* he’s not doubting their honesty , he’s just being harsh on the lack of discipline when it comes to battling your own brain’s tendency to lie to you.

Avoiding biases is hard and painful work, which goes well with being resolute and non compromising. When this accidentally bleeds through to others, because you’re human and you forgot to throttle back, it can seem blunt and disrespectful. But it’s often not meant that way, at all.

I think it’s fair to give him benefit of the doubt, here. From what little I know, Thomas is a man with great respect for data. :)

* Selection bias? Whatever, it’s a bias. Apply the “pick one to sound smart” rule. :)

Re: When hiring senior engineers, you’re not buying, you’re selling

#62

Post by tptacek »

mbell wrote: post #53
tptacek wrote: post #3

A lot of this post seems pretty reasonable. But: In my experience, it’s fairly easy to judge technical skill. A friendly conversation about technical interests and recent projects can often be enough. Bullshit. Sounding credible in technical interviews is a skill, not the same skill as actually being a good programmer, and might even (statistically, in the large) be close to orthogonal to it. We found this out the ha…

> Bullshit. Sounding credible in technical interviews is a skill, not the same skill as actually being a good programmer, and might even (statistically, in the large) be close to orthogonal to it. I don't agree with this. I think the issue here is that your interviewers aren't going deep enough in the conversation. If you ask someone to tell you about some interesting technical project they worked on and they give a…

Strongest possible disagree. There are people who can talk all the way down to the point where they're basically dictating code to you, who nevertheless cannot deliver on a real project. There's a difference between knowing, intellectually, how to solve a problem with code, and actually being able to deliver working code.

In practice, though, what really seems to happen is that technical interviews are split between whiteboard-grade programming puzzles and "friendly deep discussions" about technical problems that both (a) can be prepped for with rote memorization and (b) are extremely game-able by people with strong interviewing skills (for instance: the skill to respond to questions with questions, or to redirect the course of a line of questioning back to safe ground for the candidate).

It's not like we were asking candidates "hey, how did you enjoy your last software security job?". We were doing something closer to "here's a piece of code with a heap overflow in it; talk us through how you'd write an exploit". It didn't work: there were people who could answer those questions indistinguishably from an exploit developer who nevertheless couldn't write a 1995-era stack overflow exploit if their life depended on it.

Re: When hiring senior engineers, you’re not buying, you’re selling

#63

Post by notjesse »

ryanworl wrote: post #37
notjesse wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it’s not generally tolerated. You end up optimizing for sub-prime candidates because those are the only ones desperate enough to take 4-6 hours out of their free time for a company that hasn’t even bothered interviewing you, yet. If they want to turn the onsite into one big work sample, by all means, that sounds very effective (and something I’ve seen work well). But in my experience, you’re going to deter qualif…

I don’t have an opinion on whether or not it is done synchronously or asynchronously and I hope I didn’t imply work-sample = take home test.

Gotcha, yes that makes more sense. I find a lot of unicorns are already doing this sort of interview, anyway. While I have never observed studies, it seems to provide better signals than white-boarding.

Re: When hiring senior engineers, you’re not buying, you’re selling

#64

Post by burfog »

doctorless wrote: post #39

Hands down, the number one problem in hiring and retaining senior engineers is being able to match the compensation level. FAANG-type companies have a huge difference to practically everyone else. Startups, especially, can’t match the salary, and few make up for it in equity comparable to the risk level engineers take on by accepting the job. Senior engineers typically know better, and so you end up with mid or even…

The difference being that the FAANG-type companies don't pay well enough to make up for the cost of living. Senior engineers seldom want to live in tiny apartments.

See if you can prove me wrong: find a 10-acre lot within a half hour commute, with a large single-family home, that is affordable to a senior engineer. Alternately, make it 1 acre, but within a 5-minute commute.

Re: When hiring senior engineers, you’re not buying, you’re selling

#65

Post by tptacek »

notjesse wrote: post #60
tptacek wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again: this is true of "work sample" tests in their mainstream implementation in our industry (spend 6 hours jumping through a hoop for the privilege of running a standard, nondeterministic interview gauntlet), and those hiring processes are a scourge. But there's a right way to do it: give work sample challenges and then, at least for the most part, end the technical qualification part of your process there . You sp…

I agree with that. Sounds like a good process. Although, I am too cynical to believe any company that tells me this will be the only technical part. Too often do recruiters lie/misrepresent the recruitment process. Some seem to operate on the sunk cost fallacy, where you just see it through because what's one more round after already doing several?

I understand your cynicism but: who's got two thumbs and can offer an existence proof that there are companies that really do hire this way? :)

My best guess is that there aren't going to be many companies that will give you definitive statements about what their process will be after challenges who are lying about how they digest work-sample responses. But I don't know and am prepared to be wrong about that.

Re: When hiring senior engineers, you’re not buying, you’re selling

#66

Post by cloogshicer »

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #9

The author is from Austria. As a dev who moved there 4 years ago I noticed it's probably some archaic Germanic cultural trait for any job postings to be very employer focused, acting like they're doing you a favor by hiring you and not caring about what the employee might want, even for senior roles. Maybe a local is reading this and can explain why this is still a thing.

Author here, true, software jobs are a bit extra weird around here. I think it's because companies are run more "traditionally" here. Meaning that the people running the company are usually managers. They have a business background and don't understand what most engineers want and how they think. Even many self-proclaimed "startups" (which are often just consulting shops) are run this way.

The cause for this might be that it's culturally pretty unusual to start a company around here. I'd say people are extremely risk-averse and starting a company is almost frowned upon.

Re: When hiring senior engineers, you’re not buying, you’re selling

#67

Post by hrktb »

mbell wrote: post #53
tptacek wrote: post #3

A lot of this post seems pretty reasonable. But: In my experience, it’s fairly easy to judge technical skill. A friendly conversation about technical interests and recent projects can often be enough. Bullshit. Sounding credible in technical interviews is a skill, not the same skill as actually being a good programmer, and might even (statistically, in the large) be close to orthogonal to it. We found this out the ha…

> Bullshit. Sounding credible in technical interviews is a skill, not the same skill as actually being a good programmer, and might even (statistically, in the large) be close to orthogonal to it. I don't agree with this. I think the issue here is that your interviewers aren't going deep enough in the conversation. If you ask someone to tell you about some interesting technical project they worked on and they give a…

I think what the OP is hitting is the difference between being able to explain something and being good at it.

With a deep enough interview process you’ll find people who know what they are doing. But it won’t tell you anything about their practical coding skills; it won’t matter if you are hiring an architect, but if it’s for a main developer you’ll want a decent level of productivity, proficiency with the tools, application of best practices and reviewing skills.

Those aspects are a lot easier to understand with actual code produced.

Re: When hiring senior engineers, you’re not buying, you’re selling

#68

Post by mbell »

akerl_ wrote: post #57
mbell wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Bullshit. Sounding credible in technical interviews is a skill, not the same skill as actually being a good programmer, and might even (statistically, in the large) be close to orthogonal to it. I don't agree with this. I think the issue here is that your interviewers aren't going deep enough in the conversation. If you ask someone to tell you about some interesting technical project they worked on and they give a…

What happens to every candidate who gets flustered by the questioning and seems to bow out earlier than their technical depth? How do you hire people who are more technical in a subject area than your current staff, if your test bottoms out at the depth of the current interviewer in the room?

> What happens to every candidate who gets flustered by the questioning and seems to bow out earlier than their technical depth?

I'm not sure I get this question - I'm not talking about a white-boarding exercise. I'm just talking to the candidate about a technical project they have worked on in the past, the pain points, how they resolved them, etc. If that results in the candidate being flustered it's not a good sign on numerous axes.

> How do you hire people who are more technical in a subject area than your current staff, if your test bottoms out at the depth of the current interviewer in the room?

That is a _very_ different hiring situation. If you have no one in the company that is equipped to properly technically interview the candidate they obviously you can not properly technically interview the candidate. You'd likely have to leverage the connections of the management team to find the right person to lead up unknown territory.

Re: When hiring senior engineers, you’re not buying, you’re selling

#69

Post by cloogshicer »

scarejunba wrote: post #23
p1necone wrote: post #2

The blurred out job posting image is not very well blurred out. I could probably work out what it says if I spent some (tedious) time on it. The point it gets across is very very clear and useful though.

It's not blurred out to hide who it is. It's blurred out so we don't get stuck in the details. It's a UX technique. EDIT: Well...fuck. Don't know how I missed that. He actually says it's to hide the poster.

Author here, you were right though, that was the actual intention. I even cheated a bit on the highlights. I just wanted to get my point across and not get lost in details.

Not revealing the employer (without going through the work of unblurring as the HN detectives have already done) was just an added bonus.

Re: When hiring senior engineers, you’re not buying, you’re selling

#70

Post by GoToRO »

tptacek wrote: post #3

A lot of this post seems pretty reasonable. But: In my experience, it’s fairly easy to judge technical skill. A friendly conversation about technical interests and recent projects can often be enough. Bullshit. Sounding credible in technical interviews is a skill, not the same skill as actually being a good programmer, and might even (statistically, in the large) be close to orthogonal to it. We found this out the ha…

"if another engineer is doing the interviewing,..."
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