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Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

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Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#671

Post by yownie »

b0p1x wrote: post #510
yownie wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hiring IS broken, unfortunately everyone isn't realizing it simultaneously, so half of us end up speaking about it to the other half who are already employed and feel the need to justify their employment. Since these discussions never happen out of CS / IT circles they very rarely propogate upwards to changing company practices unless the CTO/CEO happens to read HN. You're just further contributing to the rigged scen…

I run a small company and I absolutely refuse to have an HR department. We're still small enough that this is fairly easy to work around. My recent hires are all just people I met at events. I'm told by people outside the company that they're all very happy workers. We do not do technical interviews. We talk casually about past work and what people want to achieve. After hiring we usually find out they have a differe…

If you've got a good mix of developers at various levels of skill I'd say you're doing it correctly then. The problem is the corporate mandates that 100% of employees be ninja/guru/cowboys. It's this mindset that keeps everyone else running around interviewing needlessly.

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#672

Post by hunterloftis »

ecdavis wrote: post #658
hunterloftis wrote: post #618

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A full time career that doesn't pay enough to buy a home. And they say software developers are overpaid. The average salary for a "software developer" job posting in my city (Charlotte, NC) is $101k. The average income in Charlotte is $53k. The median home value is $167k. 60% of the value of a home in a year is pretty good. I've also lived in Sydney, Mannheim, San Francisco, and Seattle, and I noticed similar econo…

I don't know when you lived in those cities, but things have evidently changed. I've lived in Sydney and Seattle. Median home price in Sydney is currently ~AUD$1 million and median home price in the Seattle area has reached ~USD$0.5 million. Average developer salaries in those cities are certainly not 60% of the value of a home. http://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/mar/10/australias-m... http://www.seattletimes.c…

I didn't mean to imply that in each city, a software developer makes more than half of the price of a home in a year. What I am asserting is that, in contrast to the previous post, software developers can afford homes in these (very expensive) cities and they can do so at a much higher rate than the average resident.

An average software developer earns about $85,000 in Sydney, so you're right, they're priced out of the central city's market. Senior software engineers make $100-150k, so even they make only up to 15% of a median downtown home.

I lived in Macquarie Park, a suburb of Sydney (which is ~20 minutes by public transit from the center of the city). The median price for a house there is $619k. That's well within reach for a senior engineer, although admittedly more of a stretch for an average developer.

Software engineer salaries in Seattle average $111k. As you've said, the median home price there is about $500k, which is very much attainable for someone earning six figures. The average income in Seattle is $37k, showing that (just like in Charlotte) software developers make about 3x as much as the average resident, and are in fact one of the few groups not yet priced out of central housing.

https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/sydney-software-engineer-...

https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/sydney-senior-software-en...

https://www.investsmart.com.au/property/nsw/2113/macquarie-p...

http://www.indeed.com/salary?q1=software+engineer&l1=seattle...

http://www.deptofnumbers.com/income/washington/seattle/

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#673

Post by bnastic »

ljw1001 wrote: post #563
serge2k wrote: post #541

Earlier quoted context omitted.

or they already learned it because they worked hard during school and they work hard to keep themselves current. I think the concerns people have about the efficacy of this interview style is valid, but extending it to the point where you start to make claims about how people who can pass them aren't as good is ridiculous.

there's nothing 'current' about BFS. It hasn't changed. You'll never write one to meet a real, work-related need. It's just a memory test that puts recent grads at an advantage.

Yes, people will write them; the fact that you do not means nothing. Software field is large, do not project your experience onto the rest of the industry.

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#674

Post by ktRolster »

p4wnc6 wrote: post #666
ktRolster wrote: post #663

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I said "just hire them" I meant "do some obvious stuff, like talk about their experience, ask a high-level question and expect a discussiony answer, not short, commoditized trivia, and if based on that stuff it seems reasonable, then just hire them and don't obsess over cramming more dumb trivia filters into the process." There's a big difference between the words "just hire them" and what you meant by those wor…

I disagree. It's pretty obvious that no one would mean to literally hire someone with zero screening of any kind. It's unreasonable to read "just hire them" to mean something that extreme.

I disagree. It's pretty obvious

ok. It wasn't obvious to me lol

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#675

Post by cheshire137 »

b0p1x wrote: post #510
yownie wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hiring IS broken, unfortunately everyone isn't realizing it simultaneously, so half of us end up speaking about it to the other half who are already employed and feel the need to justify their employment. Since these discussions never happen out of CS / IT circles they very rarely propogate upwards to changing company practices unless the CTO/CEO happens to read HN. You're just further contributing to the rigged scen…

I run a small company and I absolutely refuse to have an HR department. We're still small enough that this is fairly easy to work around. My recent hires are all just people I met at events. I'm told by people outside the company that they're all very happy workers. We do not do technical interviews. We talk casually about past work and what people want to achieve. After hiring we usually find out they have a differe…

I'm confused. I think of HR as human resources, that is, the folks who manage benefits and paychecks and insurance struggles. How is that related to interviewing new engineers?

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#676

Post by lallysingh »

bpchaps wrote: post #650
lallysingh wrote: post #639

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try re-reading the first paragraph as if you were the recipient of your message. And where do you think it's no hassle for me? I spend somewhere around 4 hours every week on interviews, for years now. Job hunting is a big deal. It's real work, and literally everyone who's doing an interview has been interviewed, almost certainly in the same process. I studied up before my interviews, and I worked to manage my energy…

The reason I can't put my finger on your reply is that you immediately applied everything I said to yourself and blew it up into a lengthy reply. If you're one of the "good" interviewers, then none of what I said applies to you - that simple. Yet, even if that's the case, I still can't help but notice that your reply then, and now, feels like personal projection of some kind.

Yeah man, that's a nice troll attempt there. Stay hungry.

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#677

Post by abustamam »

I have a job at a startup as a software engineer. I waded through dozens of interviews like Sahat's. "Do whiteboard problems," "solve this benign algorithm problem."

The two job offers I did end up getting went something like this:

1. "Show me a project you worked on. Tell us about it. Tell us about future features. Okay, implement one of those features right now."

2. approaching me after an event I spoke at "Hey, are you by chance looking for a job? We'd love to have you with us." at "interview" "tell me about your past experience, some projects you worked on, and how you learn new things."

I feel like both of these "interviews" tackle two very important things as a software engineer--can you use what you currently know to add a new feature? And if you don't currently know it, do you know how to find it out?

I didn't know a lick about React, SVG, animation, databases, lodash, es6, or trees, before I started working at my current job. But because they were able to see how quickly I could learn new things, I started as a contractor (to "test the waters" so to speak) and impressed them by proving them right.

And I think that's exactly what companies should strive for--hiring people who can pick things up quickly. Of course, consulting firms may not have this luxury, because they need to deliver now now now, but for SaaS companies, I don't see why this method wouldn't work.

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#678

Post by bpchaps »

lallysingh wrote: post #676
bpchaps wrote: post #650

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason I can't put my finger on your reply is that you immediately applied everything I said to yourself and blew it up into a lengthy reply. If you're one of the "good" interviewers, then none of what I said applies to you - that simple. Yet, even if that's the case, I still can't help but notice that your reply then, and now, feels like personal projection of some kind.

Yeah man, that's a nice troll attempt there. Stay hungry.

What? I'm not being a troll.

Your post was unwarrantingly personal similar and reeked of projection. Like I said - you're not relevant to my original argument if you're truly good at it and actually spend the time to care. Others don't. You're not who I'm talking about. Christ, you're taking this more personally than you should be....

Also, for what it's worth. Since you used your real name here, I looked you up on linkedin (sorry). The interview process there was the absolute worst and most impersonal series of interviews I've ever experienced in my life. I absolutely refuse to work for them after this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11451431

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#679

Post by eric-hu »

lj3 wrote: post #469
eric-hu wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, quite the opposite. It's an old trick for job searching. It doesn't originate in tech. It's one reason why people go to networking events in their industry. My impression of what reaching out means today is a chat over coffee, lunch, or less preferably a phone call.

What frequently gets looked over is who you're reaching out to. It doesn't do you any good to reach out to a rank and file developer. You need to reach out to (is seduce a better word?) somebody with hiring authority in order to bypass the ridiculousness.

Personally, I don't mind going through an interview process. I actually find it strange if a company makes an offer without much of a technical interview, which has happened before.

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#680

Post by p4wnc6 »

ktRolster wrote: post #674
p4wnc6 wrote: post #666

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. It's pretty obvious that no one would mean to literally hire someone with zero screening of any kind. It's unreasonable to read "just hire them" to mean something that extreme.

I disagree. It's pretty obvious ok. It wasn't obvious to me lol

It surprises me greatly that you wouldn't account for some base level of vetting of any candidate, and place my comment in the context of much of the rest of the thread, which is clearly about whether or not commoditized trivia testing is a useful way of vetting candidates.

It greatly surprises me that anyone enough in touch with tech to even be reading Hacker News in the first place would choose to read my comment that way.

I'm not saying you're wrong or trying to defend my writing. I'm just saying there's no way in a million lifetimes that I would have anticipated even the most remote possibility of someone taking it that way, and even after reading that you saw it that way, my prior is still so heavily weighted towards the obviousness from context that I still wouldn't ever expect this and doubt that if I make similar comments in the future, they will adequately account for someone reading it in the manner in which you did. It's just too unlikely of a perspective.

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