what is this? it's the second time I see a post like this. It's really simple - senior people don't want to deal with your 8 step recruiting process or your leetcode challenges. they've been around for many years. just get on with it and hire them, then if they don't do a good job, fire them. you are not in europe, so firing is cheap.
Ask HN: Having trouble getting senior applicants, wondering what to do about it
771–780 of 794 posts
Re: Ask HN: Having trouble getting senior applicants, wondering what to do about it
#772> 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.
Nice! More gatekeeping in the tech world. "actual seniors" vs "seniors"
Re: Ask HN: Having trouble getting senior applicants, wondering what to do about it
#773I have those skills. I joined LinkedIn 2 weeks ago and in that time have been bombarded by recruiters. I've had maybe 30-40 message me directly. I was looking but now I'm sitting tight in my current job. I'd consider moving for unlimited time off, full remote and twice the salary most offer (starting around £250k basic) because I know my current job and it's cushy. And yeah, I'd direct you to my GH instead of doing t…
Are you fully remote right now? I get messages for jobs like this in finance a lot, but they're all mostly London based it seems.
Yes I am, and a reasonable number of SRE jobs I'm being contacted about are fully remote. Not sure if that's just within the UK or worldwide, which is what I want. Now I don't have to go into the office I don't see any difference between being at my place vs Ibiza, etc.
Re: Ask HN: Having trouble getting senior applicants, wondering what to do about it
#774> 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.
> 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. Just wanted to back this up a little bit. This is exactly what happened to me on my last job search. I'm currently in between jobs, starting the new gig after the 4th of July holid…
This will not work at FAANG or similar top tier companies. Hiring like this introduces biases. I'd not like to work at a place like this.
Re: Ask HN: Having trouble getting senior applicants, wondering what to do about it
#775Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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. Just wanted to back this up a little bit. This is exactly what happened to me on my last job search. I'm currently in between jobs, starting the new gig after the 4th of July holid…
really hope they cut out this referral stuff. These guys have turned all of silicon valley into incestuous bro-land. This needs to be made illegal.
Not sure why you are being downvoted. I share your concern. I'm a minority and moved to the US some years ago. I don't think I share the same college connect or social connect that people have. This puts me at a disadvantage for these referral only hires.
Referrals are good source of attracting people, they can be used for additional data points.
I'd love to see what the break down of demographics of people hired using this practice.
Re: Ask HN: Having trouble getting senior applicants, wondering what to do about it
#776> 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.
I'm a "senior" (I was 55 when I started looking), and I didn't have a "network," because I was a manager, and wanted to get back into technical stuff (I'm very good at technical stuff, but I was paid to manage). I had a network of pretty heavy-duty people, but they all knew me as a manager, and I didn't want to put them on the spot for technical stuff, since that wasn't how they knew me. That basically meant that I h…
Happy for you, but this is an oddly cynical take. Just because you are 55, you don't get special treatment. If you're interviewing for Staff or Senior Staff positions (assuming that's the role, with your years of experience), it would be discrimination if someone else was subjected to a different interview process than yours.
Re: Ask HN: Having trouble getting senior applicants, wondering what to do about it
#777> 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.
I have kids and I can find 4 hours for an assignment. It's painful but for the right company, I'd do it (I did and I'm glad).
However, if I don't find the ballpark of the salary on Glassdoor, which is information you DON'T control (this is an hint at showing the salary), I won't even consider your company. What's worse than wasting 4 hours and then seeing an offer that's lower than your current pay?
Re: Ask HN: Having trouble getting senior applicants, wondering what to do about it
#778Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you point to these jobs that pay 500k+?
I'm currently a Staff 2 at VMware making that much doing DevOps for multiple SaaS services.
Not directly connected to the discussion but I was wondering what kind of lifestyle can be with such salary. Is it like from 9am to 5pm or you work much more than that time? Do you in genearal think that you are overworking or not? Is your working environment stressful?
Thank you.
Re: Ask HN: Having trouble getting senior applicants, wondering what to do about it
#779Earlier 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…
"A decade ago"
Attaching a time horizon on things which evolve causes many things to lose meaningful perspective relative to the discussion at hand.
The fact that things evolve does not negate my opinion that DevOps is a meaningful term.
Heck, I am currently watching the "That DevOps Guy" youtube channel (~50k subscribers) in order to learn about Helm Charts (related to kubernetes).
Clearly, people use the term DevOps to meaningfully communicate today. 10 years ago? This is a post from 2022, not 2012. So, you're referring to a discussion from 10 years ago... Yeah I don't know that its very relevant in a discussion of "DevOps actually does mean something [implied in today's age]"
a little over a hundred years ago a barber was a surgeon ("Up until the 19th century barbers were generally referred to as barber-surgeons, and they were called upon to perform a wide variety of tasks. They treated and extracted teeth, branded slaves, created ritual tattoos or scars, cut out gallstones and hangnails, set fractures, gave enemas, and lanced abscesses." [1] )
and a farmer was a soldier (WW1, US Civil War, & previously)
[1] https://brainblogger.com/2011/05/06/from-haircuts-to-hangnai...
Re: Ask HN: Having trouble getting senior applicants, wondering what to do about it
#780It's likely the take home assignment. At this point in my career I'm not doing one. Maybe if you pay me.
Who determined that the technical assignment takes ~4hr in the first place? If a company tells me it'll take 4 hours I take that with a grain of salt.