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Hiring Software Engineers

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7 pointskwindla12 comments

Great roadmap for startups to follow. Much of the writing about hiring software engineers comes from larger companies, and in my experience don't seem like reasonable processes for small companies.

Two questions: 1) Do you think the large coding assignment eliminates good candidates? I'd be concerned that after one phone interview, good candidates might not be invested enough to spend that kind of time.

2) What are your thoughts on behavioral / situational interviews? We've been doing one where we ask deeper questions about the candidate's previous roles, what they liked and didn't, what they think good vs bad teams and process look like, etc. Do you think these are valuable, and if so are you doing them during the in-person interview stage?

My experience is that the programming exercise never deterred a candidate I really wanted to interview. That might be a little surprising, but I always work very hard to make sure there's a good conversation in the initial phone screen, so I think that helps a lot. Also, programmers (myself included) always underestimate how much time it will take to write a given piece of code, so maybe that helps, too!

I do think it's valuable to talk about previous experience in the ways you suggest -- what do good teams/processes look like, etc. I usually try to do that in a pretty casual way, during the in-person interview, and have those conversations bleed over into the lunch/dinner discussion, too. Basically, I'm interested in learning about how a person thinks about their work. And introspection about team dynamics is definitely part of that.

You might not have that experience, but I've seen otherwise. A company I worked for hosted an on-site two hour coding exercise (they gave you a computer, some boilerplate code, and a several tasks that were complete when you passed their unit tests) that was outlined during the phone interview so candidates knew what to expect.

But while I worked the boss would regularly complain about people refusing to do the onsite exam, people cancelling last minute, people refusing the exam once they were shown what they were about to do, people excusing themselves in the middle of the exam and ditching, etc.

These are people with 5-10 years of experience on their resumes given to him by recruiters.

I personally thought the test was a little overwhelming (not hard, just too much considering the intense pressure of an interview) but I managed to get through it, and so did everyone else he had hired up to that point. He churned through a lot of people, though.

I don't think I would do an assignment that takes me several evenings. That's what probation is for. But I am probably not a good candidate anyway.

The "We expect you to do this work for free to prove your worth to the company" interview model tells a lot about the company, in my opinion. If they'll ask you to do it once, they'll ask it a thousand times.

Would "keep track of your hours, we'll pay you $rate/hour for the exercise" during the phone screen be better signaling?

I've never asked someone to do 1,000 non-trivial programming tasks before hiring them. :-)

You have clearly missed my point. :-)

That's a terrific JavaScript exercise, and sounds like a lot of fun. My only concern about the process would be the in-person interview. I recently flew from LA to the East coast for an all-day interview session, and the experience was miserable. My flight was delayed for hours, I got into my hotel at 1AM, I was sleep-deprived, jet-lagged, and exhausted for the entire process, and then I had to rush to catch my flight back as soon as I wrapped up. The flights averaged out at 6 hours in each direction, so I spent 12 hours in the air within a 24-hour period. Not fun, but a great way to ensure your candidate is at his/her weakest during the interviews. :)

Ouch. Yeah, that's a really good point about travel being both a big commitment/energy-drain on your end, and a bad travel experience making it really hard to interview well.

I have, in the past, flown someone who is coming cross-country out for the weekend, covered the hotel costs for the whole time, done something non-structured on Saturday or Sunday, then done the interview on Monday. And a few times people have brought family members. (We didn't pay for the family travel, I don't think, but I don't remember for sure.)

Nice! That's really considerate of you. I'm sure your candidates appreciate the extra time and I bet the Monday conversations are of higher quality, too.

When I was at Shutterstock I got a resume that followed everything to a T, including a lovely code sample. A bit of googling revealed that it had been copied line-for-line from an IBM blog. That one went down in the books :-)

During the in-person interviews, I like to focus on getting folks talking about something they are excited about. It can be hard to get comfortable in an interview for some folks, and it's paid off a good handful of times for me to make significant effort getting there. Especially with candidates who downplay their own experiences, who can easily be overlooked.

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