When hiring senior engineers, you’re not buying, you’re selling
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When hiring senior engineers, you’re not buying, you’re selling
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Re: When hiring senior engineers, you’re not buying, you’re selling
#2The 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.
Re: When hiring senior engineers, you’re not buying, you’re selling
#3A 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 hard way. At Matasano, we started our work-sample hiring process[1] as a way of filtering out the smooth-talkers. Before work-sample tests, we'd spent loads of time on carefully designed interview questions; interview design was something close to a hobby for some of us.
Of course, it was only after we started doing work-sample challenges that we discovered that not only were a lot of excellent-seeming candidates actually not capable of delivering, but an even greater fraction of the candidates our "friendly conversations" were selecting out were in fact perfectly capable. It was a bad deal all around.
Whatever you do, don't fast-path "senior" developers. Everyone should run the same process for the same job. Not only do you risk hiring people who won't work out, but you're also depriving yourself of the most important data you need to iterate on your hiring process.
[1]: https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2015/03/06/the-hiring-post/
Re: When hiring senior engineers, you’re not buying, you’re selling
#4The sheer amount of recruiters and interview requests that act they’re doing you a huge favor for the opportunity is rediculous. My conclusion is they truly do only want to hire people who don’t know what their skills are worth.
Re: When hiring senior engineers, you’re not buying, you’re selling
#5The 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.
Agreed, but there's no risk if someone were to un-blur this image. That a random big company has a generic job posting is almost a given.
Re: When hiring senior engineers, you’re not buying, you’re selling
#6The words 'pay' and 'salary' do not appear in the article. They want senior engineers at intern prices.
Re: When hiring senior engineers, you’re not buying, you’re selling
#7A 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…
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.
Re: When hiring senior engineers, you’re not buying, you’re selling
#8The words 'pay' and 'salary' do not appear in the article. They want senior engineers at intern prices.
Given that they don't mention anything to do with pay (as you say) how do you know that these people are only paying intern prices?
Re: When hiring senior engineers, you’re not buying, you’re selling
#9The 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.
Re: When hiring senior engineers, you’re not buying, you’re selling
#10A 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…
This is the only correct answer. White boarding is to coding what Foosball is to soccer.
In my last in-person interview they asked me a bunch of trivia that was a simple google search away - so of course, why would I bother memorizing those things? I got a dear john letter back saying I wasn't smart enough or some such, and it's like "oh great, being called an idiot by an idiot". And that's most of my interviews if I can get past head hunters that don't even bother to do their homework. Do you know "go long"? How would you solve this "cash-ay" problem? Yuck.
Sometimes I just wish people had some common sense and were reasonable and could think. But by and large people just do not give a crap to be good at their job because people by and large are just lazy and suck. Call me a pessimist but man are there some stinkers out there.