When hiring senior engineers, you’re not buying, you’re selling • Hacker News Board

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

#691

Post by asdffdsa » Fri, Jan 25, 2019, 12:10 AM UTC

throwawaymath wrote: post #519

treypitt wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they understand their friend's work deeply, doesn't that imply they've done something comparable themselves?

No, let me give a specific example. Imagine you're interviewing a candidate and they're talking through how to design an analytics service. They begin talking about e.g. database architecture, and how this type of data is most appropriate for a star schema. They start talking about the tradeoffs of row versus column orientation. They mention they'll need to do indexing for performance and talk about the index space v…

How do you suggest getting into designing and working with distributed systems without job experience? Maybe virtualizing a data center on a home server?

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

#692

Post by flavious » Fri, Jan 25, 2019, 4:49 PM UTC

Nursie wrote: post #377

Sorry, I see this at the end and I can't really take the article seriously any more - > I have more than 7 years of experience in Software Development, Product Management and Project Management 7 years is enough now, to be making industry recommendations about difficulty hiring senior staff? I'm not saying you can't get a good idea of part of the industry in that time, but it seems a bit of a stretch to claim sweepin…

Who knows, maybe he has valuable things to share. It's like that with any book. It also depends on the readership.

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

#693

Post by flavious » Fri, Jan 25, 2019, 4:53 PM UTC

clanrebornwow wrote: post #259

We just started hiring remotely. We've 1:4 ratio of local:remote.

Define "We".

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

#694

Post by sarabande » Tue, Jan 29, 2019, 12:48 PM UTC

gregrata wrote: post #17

sarabande wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. In my experience, senior engineers are even better at glibly skirting what specific contributions they made at a company were, or what their true technical skillset is. They need to be tested. The fact that a lot of time senior engineers will get pulled in to interview from other companies because someone knows someone and has worked with them for a long time only exacerbates this problem.

> because someone knows someone and has worked with them for a long time only And this is the #1 thing that gets a near auto-hire from me. I'm not saying don't interview them, but most interviews don't really tell you what it's going to be like working with someone. On the other hand, WORKING with someone (for a long time) 100% tells you what it's like working with someone. If someone has worked a long time with some…

Someone I've worked with before and whose work quality I respect may get an "auto-hire" from me, but that doesn't necessarily translate to a "auto-hire" from the team that is going to be working with them. I'm fine introducing good candidates I know if into a recruiting process, but not forcing them through just because I know them. In that sense, I want them to be able to demonstrate their abilities in an interview to the rest of the team, as well.