When hiring senior engineers, you’re not buying, you’re selling
hiringengineersbook.com
hiringengineersbook.com
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/
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.
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 someone else and is willing and wanting to do so again, then hire them.
My experience is, most interviews suck trying to figure out how someone is going to do on the job. Working with someone a long time and wanting to work with them should weight heavier than anything else
I wrote a book about this :) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07FJ6N8P1
Not sure how that's not clear...
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.
White boarding is to coding what Foosball is to soccer
> DSA/ECDSA is terribly easy to mess up
It’s kinda unfortunate that most crypto seems to be this way…
Spoiler alert: work-sample tests are the only practical and generally tolerated one to use (for software engineers) that is actually correlated with job performance.
@tptacek: how do you feel about people who have large amounts of open source work that is easily reviewed? This obviously doesn’t add new data to your company’s test but is definitely some kind of work sample, albeit not necessarily in a similar environment to the one being hired for.
If they want to turn the onsite into one big work sample, by all means, that sounds very effective (and something I’ve seen work well). But in my experience, you’re going to deter qualified candidates by forcing them to do take-home assignments.
Surely most people would prefer this to whiteboard tasks?
Then I was hired under probation, as everyone there was, and the understanding was that I could be easily dismissed if it was clear that I wasn't working out.
Thus, probationary periods can be a time of training and growth for the new employee.
Yes, above a certain size, companies typically have some formal procedures. But typically those are a fig leaf.
In many labour markets, there's a legal 90-day probation or equivalent. You bet your boots some people get dismissed at 80 days. Or the job was contract-to-hire, and the contract doesn't "get renewed".
But on top of that, literally every company I've worked at or any of my friends have worked at (including lotsa startups, two of FAANG, and some in-betweens) will terminate when they want to terminate. In most non-European labour markets that I'm aware of, there's a penalty for doing so, and the company just pays that penalty and gets on with it.
Sometimes there's more security than that, I've heard (but not experienced). And sometimes the company puts in large effort to cultivate the underperforming employee first (had that happen to me once; they tried and I tried but it didn't work out). But the overwhelming majority of cases of my first-hand and second-hand experience, dleslie's summary is about the whole story:
> The real interview is always the work you do
I suppose you do sort of feel a little stressed during the trial period but I've never seen anyone fail it and it applies at every company, so there's no escaping it anyway. When it was introduced some people got quite upset but I can't really say I think it's had a bad effect.
I guess from the companies perspective if they realize they made a grave mistake they can back out of the hire, but they are still very careful and rigorous in the hiring process just like always. It also allows the candidate to bail if they realize the company wasn't what it said it was. It goes both ways. Again, in practice it seems mostly harmless.
Perhaps the US wouldn't do so well with a similar policy maybe even just due to the crazy healthcare situation going on over there. I couldnt say.
I'm not sure what you mean by "it applies at every company". Getting hired and then fired a week later is virtually unheard of. This is not a fear I have, at all.
But if you told me it's probationary, that is totally a fear I'd have, I'd get paranoid, so I'd rather work somewhere else. You're basically telling me it's not a real offer in my eyes, and I should not expect stability.
> Again, in practice it seems mostly harmless.
It's extremely harmful in a place with poor labor protections that is the US, for reasons that I don't feel like expanding on and that you can educate yourself on if you wish.
Not everyone likes it or agrees with it, and I can only comment on the software industry here and not other industries but it's not the end of the world and the sky doesn't at all fall. When they introduced it a lot of people tried to make arguments like it would be abused etc and as far as I can tell there hasn't really been any drama. YMMV depending on country.
What clicked was I was finishing their sentences and knew precisely what they were asking. It was an incredibly rewarding experience which led to a same day offer.
It's rare that people fail probation; so long as you apply for work you are actually capable of doing...
Myself and a co-worker were once let go for "performance reasons" at 10 months - just after project completion (successful). It was beyond my probationary period, and no issues where raised in the 2 performance reviews.
Their notice period was just 1 month. We were effectively cheap contractors.
My advice now is to treat offers with a low notice period (of them telling you) as a red flag. The norm is 3 months, after probation.
Ideally you would be given guidance on what they will judging you on.
But there's a right way to do it: give work sample challenges and then, at least for the most part, end the technical qualification part of your process there. You spend 4-6 hours at home instead of spending 4-6 hours in front of a whiteboard doing dumb coding challenges.
If I was looking for a job right now, I'd probably refuse to interview anywhere that gave me take-home problems that couldn't promise that a strong result on those problems would take me all the way through technical qualification. But a company that could offer me take-home problems and conclusively make the technical part of the decision on whether to hire me based on those problem would be a strong prospect.
My best guess is that there aren't going to be many companies that will give you definitive statements about what their process will be after challenges who are lying about how they digest work-sample responses. But I don't know and am prepared to be wrong about that.
Work sample test fraud is one of those things that sounds like a huge deal on message boards, but when you game through what would be involved in doing it in real life, it makes very little sense.
Talk to them about the code they wrote.
Have a conversation, as if they were already your co-worker, with the exercise as the subject. Go through it, ask them -- non-adversarially -- why they did X, what they thought about requirement 2, how they could get better test coverage for Z. If you see something that seems to be a mistake, talk about it. If you see something awesome, discuss it. I can't imagine someone incompetent being able to bullshit their way through detailed discussion of code they were supposed to have written.
And this provides valuable info about how this person thinks and communicates about the work you want them to do.
Nope.
I'm not sure why you felt the need to come out guns blazing.
This is why take-home problems are almost completely irrelevant except for filtering out good candidates. Eventually those problems optimize for perfection which help out those who 'cheat' at the process and people that otherwise put in earnest efforts are rewarded with denials. This is something I've experienced before in my job search where I would put in an honest effort and get 90% of the problem solved, but get denied because my solution wasn't flawless.
So allow me to call bullshit on your own claims that this is the right way of determining technical qualifications.
It's possible that the company stated the take-home work in terms of non-negotiable deliverables, and their baseline for allowing a candidate to move forward is 100% of those, and they prioritize candidates who take initiative and do more work beyond the base requirements.
... not that I would agree with such a process (it biases towards people with more free time, like people with fewer dependents and people who are currently out of a job / underemployed), but it's very possible that this is what you faced.
Not all companies handle it like this. I had a take-home exercise as part of an interview last year. I hit a real snag on a fairly small part, I couldn't figure it out, and I ended up leaving a bug in my submission because I simply ran out of time. Very frustrating.
It was raised at the interview; I admitted that I knew it was there, and that I hadn't been able to figure it out. We discussed possible causes: it actually turned into a pretty interesting, though minor, technical conversation. The interviewer eventually told me that he had figured it out after a little investigation (and I expressed my gratitude for the explanation!)
I ended up getting an enthusiastic offer from them.
I really like it so far. The part I'm battling on it is if the current coding part selects against Java developers. Part of the code we want right now requires a unit test with dependency injection to match an interface. So many of our Java candidates simply can't set up a running unit test. They are used to layers of framework already set up in the IDE and just clicking on stuff. They have full access to Google. Maybe it is good we are filtering out these candidates, but I'm not sure. Still thinking on it.
Yes, it does. And let me put it this way: I've used C# and Java at most of my jobs, those theoretically would be my comfort languages, yes?
I do not use those languages on interviews. I often just use C++ (!), or Rust (free unit tests!) if the company tools allow for it, or worst case I'd learn some Python basics. C#/Java are very awkward and boilerplatey in such a small time frame as 45 minutes.
I've been on the reviewer side of a handful of "choose your own language"-style take-homes recently and found that it's really not good for the candidate if they actually end up using something that wouldn't have been the interview committee's first or second choice. There have been cases where choosing a less-trendy-but-still-totally-viable toolkit has effectively disqualified a candidate, with several committee members not even considering it necessary to look at the code. This is very unfair and lame but an unfortunate reality. I asked that the test be changed to constrain the options at least to a list that wouldn't be immediately disqualifying.
You could advise the candidate ahead of the interview something along the lines of "you'll be asked to write a code sample in either Ruby or Python -- you'll have full access to Google, but you may want to brush up on the basics of these languages if you haven't used them recently".
This does two things: first, it prevents the issue you have, where you're essentially not sure if you're correctly scoring the samples produced. Secondly, it really requires you to constrain the problem to things that someone who has barely used language X or Y can do within 45 minutes.
Ah, but there's the rub. Candidates are trying to please the interview panel. If you don't provide guidance, the odds that they'll just use whatever they think the interviewers most prefer are just as good, if not better, than the odds that they'll actually use whatever makes them most comfortable.
You said yourself that since some candidates pick a language that you don't know well, you can't really tell if the failure of a large number of those candidates is reflective of a bad test or just a mismatched candidate pool. IMO, if you're going to stick to the "pick any language" thing, you should at least find out and ensure that any language the candidate picks will have a fair shot.
> it can even be a better interview because we get more insight on how the candidate communicates and their ability to walk someone else through their solution.
You can still get the candidate to communicate and explain his choices if you give an option: "either Ruby or Python" or "either JavaScript or Visual Basic", etc. The problem with having this happen in a language that the interviewers don't know reasonably well is that they are much more vulnerable to the smooth talker who can present incorrect information confidently, and they won't have enough background/anchoring in the subject matter to know the difference.
> A potential other bonus is less biases leak through from an interviewer on "that is a strange way to do that in language X."
I would say that if you're worried that interviewers will load in biases toward their preferred shortcuts etc in a specific language, that you should be equally worried that some good candidates are being excluded for choosing the "wrong" language in an any-language-goes test.
Above, you mentioned that there'd be a positive response if a candidate used "Rust, Scala, or a lisp dialect" -- these are all relatively trendy. What if the candidate used nim, Pony, or some other language that hasn't pulled in to the hype superstation yet? What if the candidate used a language that's not-so-trendy anymore, like Visual Basic, Cobol, or bash? What if the candidate used a programming language of their own design, and brought a copy of the compiler with them on a flash drive?
I'm asking because I've seen this in practice. Candidates for a devops position who chose to use bash to implement the very simple take-home task they were given were laughed off by several other members of the interview committee, despite being potentially high-value senior people -- they were at least senior enough that they're more comfortable performing sysadmin-style tasks in a shell, rather than using a massive CM framework or an awkward amalgamation of Python scripts running os.spawn.
It feels like this type of thing happens a lot, in the same sense that very often, "unlimited PTO" just means "guess whatever amount of PTO is acceptable around here and hope you get it right".
I tend to give candidates a simple project already to go, with junit and hamcrest, possibly mockito already available, and ask them to go from there using a provided IDE (which I attempt to get set up as near as they prefer to work as I can). This generally works out fine. I certainly don't feel the boiler-platiness of the language gets in the way, mostly because the IDE is generally capable of doing most of the lifting with that respect anyway, but also because over the timescale of an interview question, we're generally only talking about a couple of classes at most.
For 20% of Java candidates, they do it just fine. Heck, a few echew the IDE and are fine working completely from the terminal (these tend to be particularly very solid at coding). Still wrestling with the idea.
The folks that already work with us (who wrote Java in a former role) see no problem with setting up a project nor do the folks that we hired recently (seeing as they likely passed that technical interview). But that all could be bias.
Maybe you are right. Maybe the next candidate or five in Java will get a base project and we can see how it goes.
In general, if I'm asking them to code on my (or the company's) hardware, I'd start from an existing project, if only because I wouldn't expect them to be familiar with the installed tools (oh, you use maven? I'm a gradle user ... etc.) On their own laptop, I'd expect them to be more comfortable.
I'm doing a remote interview on Wednesday. That'll be on the candidates machine (because screen-sharing is easy, getting them inside the corporate network, not happening), and they've been told they'll need an IDE ready to go. I'll expect a project set up and ready to go before the call even starts.
What round is this?
Also, how much of their day-to-day work is going to be setting up new projects? I sometimes feel a better test is to be thrown into an existing code base and asked to make a change. It's far more indicative of the sort of work somebody is likely to actually be doing.
I think Java depends much more heavily on powerful tooling to do the heavy lifting, and my experience of using that tooling when I haven't had a chance to configure it in advance has been pretty miserable.
If it's remote, I'll ask them to share their screen with me with a project set up and ready to go, having emailed them a copy of the interface we're going to implement about 30 minutes before the interview.
What exactly do you mean by this?
I was co-owner of a startup at the time, the guy I interviewed called me up and said you did really good but I think you really don't want to work here - my wife said 'Wow, that guy was really smart' considering how some things went later it might have been better if I'd said no I really really do
Then they said my work sample was amazing, and they’d like to do an on-site Q&A about it, but when I arrived the engineer hadn’t even seen my work, and proceeded to just quiz me on obscure JS trivia.
Which I promptly failed.
They then rejected me even though they were happy about my work :/
Six hour take home tests is fine, but I want $1350 for that in advance as a consultation fee, and if I hit 6 hrs and it's not done yet they can keep paying until I am done or we can just end it, no refunds.
The idea that I should spend six hours doing free programming for random companies that say they are desperate to find anyone qualified is absolutely absurd and insulting. No one should put up with that, particularly anyone with an established and verifiable career.
It's employment, not marriage, guys, lighten up with your strenuous and time-draining processes. We senior employees aren't as, is the word excitable, as the entry-levels about joining your workforce.
The elitism of some engineers is mind boggling, instead of being grateful working in an industry that has so much demand that you can easily find a job at anytime, you complain about the process being insulting to your oh-so-important persona.
If i really want to work for a certain company because what they are doing excites me, then yes, i'd do a 6 hour take home test where I can probably also learn a thing or two and I am willing to bet a lot of other developers would too. As an interviewer, someone charging >$1000 for a take home test would be an immediate red flag and our mindsets probably don't match up.
If this works fine for you, kudos.
I'm not the guy who says he should be compensated for take-home tests above. I am however a senior engineer. I'm spurning any long interview processes because they cost money. I don't think it's entitlement, but if that's what you want to call it, so be it. It's called hours worked, hours paid, and in the West it's been a concept since at least the 18th century.
Individual consultant: loses 5 hours of interview time (and commute time) or take-home exam. Let's call it $800 for the sake of argument.
Company: loses 5 hours of interview time, plus the time it takes to "quiz" the exam.
Individual loses money that he / she uses to pay their mortgage.
Company loses profit because the time spent interviewing the candidate could have been spent working on feature Y of the application. So shareholders / VC's lose.
So you're saying it's fair that the individual contributor who loses half a day's pay in your interview process is equivalent (you DID use the word "fair" so that's an equivalence argument you made) to a company's loss of a few hours out of the many thousands of man-hours they rely upon? It's a .0001% of their profit, assuming the employers don't work a few hours more to make up for the lost time, because they will (they're salaried!)
But I have 0 tolerance policy towards puzzle whiteboarding tests. It is total waste of time.
As a new immigrant, my wife had trouble finding work as a designer until she was given a take home work sample test. After that, the company that gave her the test hired her quickly and she has been doing well with them ever since.
I’m currently doing the gauntlet thing myself, but none of the interviews I’ve done have asked any technical questions pertaining to the role that they actually want to hire me for. It’s all generic stuff that frankly I would have done better on 20 years ago.
Why do you think they are incentivized to get studied? If anything, power dynamics in large hierarchical organizations keep away any studying done that can threaten the power. Sometimes studies do happen though, but large organization can never apply the results to anything on their scale. They are more worried where to even get such massive stream of professionals to hire.
Also have you got any examples of this research that actually proves this correlation I haven't heard of any and I would have as I have spent decades semi involved in IR (industrial relations) in the UK
Large companies are not "highly incentivized" to optimize they're hiring process. Once a certain throughput is achieved, there's very little reason to revisit it, because if they revisit it, "they're lowering the bar", or not "optimizing for recall" or whatever.
Mindlessly copying large companies isn't all that useful. Microsoft famously loved brain teasers. Can't get the fox, chicken, and grain to the other side of of the river? You must not be able to code either. Google, loved asking your SAT scores because, "obviously" someone that got some arbitrary score on a standardized test, a minimum of 6 years ago, certainly means something today.
Large companies aren't immune from bullshit. In fact, they have the habit of metastasizing bullshit, because of "Well, X does it, so it must be good." X only does it, because they had a stupid idea, became successful because of completely unrelated means, and then fooled themselves into thinking their process was good, "Well, I've been hitting candidates with ball-pein hammer for years, and I'm successful, so screw you."
Interestingly enough, eventually both Microsoft and Google abandoned these interview questions, because eventually, they realized that one had nothing to do with the other, but only after years doing it, and others copying them.
The problem is that requiring IQ tests for employment introduces liability that employers do not want.
Neither IQ nor SAT scores correlate with job performance. SAT scores were requested at Google for years. Explicit aptitude tests have been used in the past, and continue to be used. They are quite legal, as long as they are used for their intend use.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/theemploymentbeat/2014/03/07/em...
https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/tools-and-samples/too...
https://www.businessinsider.com/why-your-iq-strongly-influen...
SAT is an IQ test:
https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2011/12/04/why-should-...
The TL;DNR: Nuh-uh!
https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2011/12/04/why-should-...
In the future, you really shouldn't link to dueling articles in an opinion section. It makes this all too easy.
I hire based on take-home problems. But then again I don't have candidates whiteboard.
I give candidates time to produce something in the comfort of their own environment that goes beyond solving puzzles on the fly and is actually a reflection of the work people will do day-to-day.
100% this.I find whiteboarding to be the actual scourge, as it involves unrealistic pressure in an unrealistic scenario. It reminds me of tests that inadvertently just test whether people are good test-takers versus assessing their command of the actual subject matter.
I believe hiring devs who are also good at whiteboarding have a bias--even blindspot--where candidate whiteboarding is concerned. They oddly believe it to be a prerequisite for a job that infrequently or never requires it.
As such, they may miss out on good devs who simply thrive in an environment more akin to reality.
In the case you describe, you've already done the more "valuable" dev work of thoughtful analysis/design, and you are merely presenting that work.
That's far different from being forced to devise that design at the whiteboard, singlehandedly, with onlookers.
That's not to say that devs don't hash out designs collaboratively via whiteboard (yet a different application). That certainly happens and is useful. But, you're likely to find that--even in those situations--team members have considered the problem offline prior to the collaboration.
For more senior people this kind of test might even be more appropriate, because they are not always working on exactly the same type of thing in recent memory but in their own time will come up with a good solution quickly. However, for more senior people this type of test should certainly not be one of the first steps of the interview process.
You should ideally have much shorter and simpler technical tests during the first interviews to try to weed them out while also giving them exposure to what kind of environment they can expect to be working in, but also tell them this kind of task will be coming and why you are doing it. Once they're more committed to actually wanting the position they will be more likely not mind spending their personal time doing this kind of work exercise, or you could even offer to pay for their time on it to show you are not the kind of company that expects them to do work for free.
If you don't do this, you'll only come across more senior people who are desperate enough to jump through these hoops, which is rare and you better know for sure why they are desperate.
In "The Last Starfighter", the recruiter/hiring manager Centauri is constantly accused of using "the Excalibur test" with derision, and which he denies. While I've never seen it explicitly defined, I'd imagine an on-the-spot work sample test to be what it means. "Pull this sword out of this stone and you get the job."
What proponents of the Excalibur test fail to realize is that their methods often spoil the data. Treat me with enough derision and pressure off the bat and I guarantee I'll fail your test even though I do fine at other companies.
While I have no interest in being interrogated with high-stress puzzle solving, it is not the interview process itself that causes my disinterest; it is the understanding, from experience, that how a company treats its potential candidates is often reflective of its general culture.
Having gone through the process recently I avoided companies with puzzle solving hiring procedures because I was confident that I could find well paid, interesting, work without jumping though those hoops. As you get more senior there are more people you have met and worked with with employment opportunities. It gets easier to find work by asking around and finding someone who will hire you based on recommendations or having worked together before.
I also submitted one of those exercises for a different employer — that one took me about 6 hours but of course they estimate it at “about two”. I submitted it a week ago. They acknowledged receiving it immediately. And that was the last time I heard from this employer.
I’ll follow up tomorrow, but I’m kind of ticked as I was pretty happy with my code, and it’s not even something I can open source if they don’t like it. I also just got an offer elsewhere and I bet mentioning that fact will expedite their process more than me putting in effort into dancing around like a monkey.
Anyway, I’m done ranting, and I’m done doing take homes. I used to be a fan, but only because I preferred them to whiteboard algorithm puzzle questions.
What? Of course you should... make sure you create a repo with the company name and people can create issues to collaborate on a better ToDo sample code.
Source: I once had a dragged out legal dispute with a company that used a GitHub DMCA takedown to tell me to remove a public repo in which I solved their takehome challenge (I had signed no NDA or otherwise any type of agreement of any kind prior to solving it).
There's a big difference between making someone jump through countless, one-sided hoops and asking for a little effort. The challenge IME is finding the balance.
If only more companies realized who they are able to hire is a function of how they hire. And it starts with the job / opportunity / role description.
As a side note, it seems to me, all this friction in hiring (senior level talent) makes a good case for developing and promoting from within. I realize it's not that simple. None the less, taking a known and grooming that person isn't rocket science either.
For example, there's the simple pattern of ignoring employee careers and expectations until, after the least patient ones have left, suddenly there's a lack of personnel, and the best remaining people are needed in their current dead-end role.
Avoiding biases is hard and painful work, which goes well with being resolute and non compromising. When this accidentally bleeds through to others, because you’re human and you forgot to throttle back, it can seem blunt and disrespectful. But it’s often not meant that way, at all.
I think it’s fair to give him benefit of the doubt, here. From what little I know, Thomas is a man with great respect for data. :)
* Selection bias? Whatever, it’s a bias. Apply the “pick one to sound smart” rule. :)
Confirmation bias! :p
As an engineer, I love work-sample tests. And I also like the insight you had, that a test should test code-reading as well as code-writing.
Some people complain about the amount of time that they take, but if you're good at what you do then you should only need to complete one work-sample. Whereas you could easily need to attend many interviews that accurately assess your skill. Some companies even have many-stage interview processes, and these definitely take longer than creating a work sample.
Package that up in a self-contained Vagrant image / Docker image / whatever with all of the skeleton required to run a full answer to completion. Then, take out the full answer. Consider leaving a reduced test suite so that candidates can see if they're making progress in a positive direction.
Now write the rubric by which you'll assess candidate answers. Generally, you'll want to pick ~5 areas which are important for you and write prose describing what 0 points through 4 or 5 points are worth in each of those areas. Then, determine what a passing score is, perhaps by calibrating through running it with existing engineers at the company. And then (this is the brutally difficult part): convince your organization that the rubric now makes hiring decisions.
Then, create a way for people to submit these into your hiring process. This might be as simple as "Create a private gist of this file and email me the link" through something with material tooling developed.
(This answer may or may not be exactly the same as Thomas' answer, but we were co-founders at a company which was quite related to this problem.)
It’s amazing how often hiring processes are built and not tested.
I’ve found that the highest correlation to performance in senior engineers is raw algorithmic skill and willingness to say “I don’t know” when you don’t know.
This is not true of hiring devops or sre’s. For those positions, you want the gopher archetype. This is the person who loves hunting down weird behavior and doesn’t give up when debugging. Let’s be real, debugging is you versus the machine and you’re eventually going to win if you can just be honest and patient.
Hiring senior engineers is really hard, I wish everyone luck.
Being good at alghorithms only is great if you work in a very isolated area.
Someone who is both bright and persistent can move mountains. But it often has a big social downside. People don't like change. Being bright, persistent and also socially savvy enough to sidestep drama is practically a unicorn.
Friday demo day (to sales and cust success and everyone else): "hey everyone, know that thing customer X keep complaining about that we've never been able to solve? It's been super tricky. Just wanted to announce that James here figured it out and it's fixed forever. James you're a hero."
More important than persistence IMHO is to know when to be persistent and when not, and those two qualities by OP seem to be quite related to it: "raw algorithmic skill" (to know whether something is optimizable or not) and willingness to say “I don’t know” when you don’t know" (seek help, get the right person for the job, etc).
Edit: I know because I was like that in the beginning; it was okay to learn e.g. micro optimizations when learning programming for fun at university, but it'd have been a big issue if I had not been able to correct it.
This is not true in my experience. I usually see a strong correlation between algorithmic ability and writing maintainable code. At various organizations I have worked for, I have seen that the ones with strong algorithm skills also happen to be critical thinkers who put a lot of emphasis on simple, elegant, and robust design and code.
So I am very surprised to know that this correlation I observe may not be true in general. How did you come to this conclusion?
The correlation between emphasis on simple, elegant design and code and algorithmic chops is indeed uncanny.
And I'd add "clarity of articulation" to that -- being able to express your thoughts and the problem/solution structure clearly and succinctly is a great indicator as well. Huge overlap with both code maintainability and algo quality.
i’m L7.
I'm assuming you're not talking about spinal cord problems, which is the main search result.
[1] https://levelsfyi.com/google-levels-salary/amp/
EDIT: found a better source
If saying “I don’t know” and being good at algorithms was enough, you could hire straight to L7 easily or could promote to in a year. Neither of these things happen.
> raw algorithmic skill
It's been ages that I've been asked anything remotely algorithmic. My interviews are mostly about frameworks, how you fit in a team and whether you know / can be "agile".
Not even a Fizzbuzz, much less so quicksort or more special algorithms.
> and willingness to say “I don’t know”
That never got me anything in any interview/company. To be fair, I found a few smart and cool friends because of this, but they themselves don't look as if they've found a good job either.
Being hired (valued?) as a senior engineer is really hard.
I don't think the number of jobs requiring fairly deep systems or algorithmic knowledge has gone down, but the ratio has.
I say a lot of things in the form “I’m a little out of my depth in this subject, but my best understanding is that the behavior should be such-and-such; does that sound right to you?”
Neither one is something you want to be selecting for. Some of the best engineers I've worked with haven't had a proper CS education. I've known extremely strong engineers with Neuroscience, Mathematics, Physics and Public Policy degrees. I've got a business degree.
Unless you're working in certain extremely hard (and extremely rare) areas you do _not_ need to filter for algorithmic skill. Most ML doesn't count. Neither does Data Science. In 99% of engineering jobs it's more important to be diligent, rigorous, and organized. (Of course, filtering for those is another issue altogether)
Companies need to understand that not only are they mis-selecting, but they're broadcasting that they're doing so to all the candidates that go through that process.
Approaching candidates with textbook-style algo or data structure questions merely informs that they're going to be working with an educated but overall somewhat junior lot. That's not necessarily always a deal killer, but it's probably not the image that these interviews are hoping to project.
For well-qualified candidates not applying at an industry headliner like AppAmaGooBookSoft, the interview process quickly inverts itself, and it becomes more about the company selling the candidate on their offer than the candidate selling the company on their skillset. Tread carefully.
Probably true. But perhaps that could be accounted for in the assessment process. After all graduates from Neuroscience, Maths and Physics degrees have got to be some to smartest people around.
Raw algo quizzing skill isn't necessarily the same thing, though you'd think it was somewhat related because when you're learning to code up "find longest continuous run" you also need to change things around for a bit.
Difference is in real life there's never an end. The algo quiz leaves you at some optimum eventually due to being quite a small thing.
> A lot of coding is simply banging your head against the wall, search SO over and over, changing things around, until it does what you want.
It doesn't look like programming to me. Yes, sometimes we miss something, so our code doesn't do exactly what we want it to do, but when we realize it we just fix the code. This view of coding resembles an improved way to write Shakespeare with monkeys.
I don't find myself in these situations nearly as often as I did back when I was a junior engineer. But damn, I'm sure I looked busier (and more stressed out) back then.
Do you have any evidence for such a bold claim or is this just speculation?
I bet there's scope to twist it beyond all sensible bounds, and compare the ability of the 99% to the 1%.
I suspect there's top level classical, jazz, and session musicians - who're the industry equivalent of 10x programmers. (And all the other stereotypes probably exist too, I bet there are occasional untrained but gifted musicians who can produce 10x output, but who're amazingly difficult to collaborate with compared to degree level music theory trained musicians... And I bet there are "10 year" musicians with one years experience repeated ten times over.)
The other interesting point there is that probably 99% (or more for, five, perhaps six nines) of "programming" doesn't actually require that much hard-core CS theory. You can get paid well playing covers in bars with a good ear and not being able to read a single note from a chart, just by listening to the originals and copying them over and over in your bedroom. Same as you can make a decent living building basic CRUD websites/apps without having written your own compiler that can compile itself or defended a phd that advances humanities start of the art understanding of something fundamental.
Btw years ago I did work with a top session guitarist (top 10 hits) who after an accident taught himself to program from his hospital bed.
For me it's been really obvious in interviews whether someone knows what they're doing or not. But probably I've just been lucky in this so far.
Looking forward to reading your post about it. Haven't read it yet, but if it's not in the post, could you give a few examples of what people said, that turned out to be bullshit? And the other way around, too? Not questioning you, just genuinely curious.
Happy to answer any other questions you might have about our erstwhile process at Matasano (which is more or less our current process at Latacora).
Thanks for the offer! I'll read your post some time tomorrow and might send you a PM, if that's ok.
Testing a candidate is actually very candidate-dependent, I found out; however, it is a lot less hard when you let the candidate pick their own approach (and you supplement it subtly). I found it easier than most interviewers who tend to do scripted, one-size fits all tests.
I always ask candidates to talk about what they’ve done (I’m in data science, so university projects typically can be relevant for day-work; standard CS might not be so lucky). If there are omissions, ellipses, I might prod a bit.
The best candidates can easily juggle between business objective, method, architectural and technical choice, how they scaled a release into marginal improvements from prototypes to a full-fledged platform. It typically takes me one question, two follow-up and 10 minutes to know they are strong. From there, I can shelter them from more technical tests, or at least apologise for the process; ask if they are comfortable with white-boarding, etc.
The worst candidates are not that different: they can sweet-talk their way, but might not be able to scale up or down abstraction. You can prod from them if they are comfortable receiving feedback (based on how they react to you re-framing the question), their learning style (based on how excited when I ask details about specific implementation).
If you are uncertain, which remains most candidates, I like to put them in front of what I have been working on recently. It gets Legal a little nervous (it really shouldn’t) but it puts them in a rare but effective situation: I might not know as much as they do. I probably have had more time to explore, but no idea that they suggest, I can dismiss: either I had the same or it’s new to me and worth trying. I’m not the most structured worker, so I often have a bug, something that could be improved but it’s a priority, some high-level conceptual concern, etc. I make sure that they go for something that excites them or the problem that I’ve identified earlier.
I rarely need more than an hour to have a clear idea, including data preparation.
I don't agree with this. I think the issue here is that your interviewers aren't going deep enough in the conversation. If you ask someone to tell you about some interesting technical project they worked on and they give a good high level answer, push a level deeper. Still get a good answer? Push another level deeper. Repeat. At some point one of two things will happen: The candidate is capable of talking about the project intelligently at a lower level than the interviewer or the reverse. If the first happens, re-think whom is doing the technical interview, if the later happens, you've found their level of competence.
How do you hire people who are more technical in a subject area than your current staff, if your test bottoms out at the depth of the current interviewer in the room?
I'm not sure I get this question - I'm not talking about a white-boarding exercise. I'm just talking to the candidate about a technical project they have worked on in the past, the pain points, how they resolved them, etc. If that results in the candidate being flustered it's not a good sign on numerous axes.
> How do you hire people who are more technical in a subject area than your current staff, if your test bottoms out at the depth of the current interviewer in the room?
That is a _very_ different hiring situation. If you have no one in the company that is equipped to properly technically interview the candidate they obviously you can not properly technically interview the candidate. You'd likely have to leverage the connections of the management team to find the right person to lead up unknown territory.
I generally think software developers (I count myself among them) know far, far less about psychological assessment than they think they do.
Are you hiring sales reps or engineers? Why are you asking for an engineer to sell you on their past project(s)?
Interviews by their nature are about judgment, and knowing you're being judged by a complete stranger who holds the power over this potential path of your future is enough to get anybody flustered, especially a brainiac that just wants to work in relative peace behind their desk.
I don't ask them to sell me, I ask them to dive into the technical issues they faced and how they solved them. It tells me a lot more about how they will handle similar issues in the future than scribbling DFS on a white-board would.
I don't understand what you're calibrating for...
In practice, though, what really seems to happen is that technical interviews are split between whiteboard-grade programming puzzles and "friendly deep discussions" about technical problems that both (a) can be prepped for with rote memorization and (b) are extremely game-able by people with strong interviewing skills (for instance: the skill to respond to questions with questions, or to redirect the course of a line of questioning back to safe ground for the candidate).
It's not like we were asking candidates "hey, how did you enjoy your last software security job?". We were doing something closer to "here's a piece of code with a heap overflow in it; talk us through how you'd write an exploit". It didn't work: there were people who could answer those questions indistinguishably from an exploit developer who nevertheless couldn't write a 1995-era stack overflow exploit if their life depended on it.
I'm a little confused by this statement. Is your issue that they aren't _capable_ of writing the code or that their job performance isn't there once hired? i.e. Are the technical chops not there or is the work ethic not there? It seems like you are describing the later to me, or we are talking about different levels of conversation.
More specifically, you make so many small executive decisions when coding. Naming, how functions and classes are designed, which file/module this goes in, is this already tested, oh I found an unrelated bug, do I make a ticket, a new PR, or include it in this one, etc etc etc. The only thing I've seen that can answer those questions is homework--maybe previous work, but homework is better.
But I think you're remiss if you're not asking your senior engineering candidates how they make those decisions, not because the answers to relatively trivial questions are important, but because you should know--and they should be able to articulate--how they make those decisions, and they should know the pros and cons of their approach and other approaches.
Do you think the problem was that they couldn't write that particular kind of code, or was it the more general problem of not being able to code well in general?
Something about this example is not registering for me. I can't imagine how this situation is possible. Going from a detailed, step-by-step description to a code implementation is a trivial rote task in my mind. I must be missing something.
There's definitely tons of senior devs out there that care way more about linting and unit testing than they do about writing the code that implements the spec.
This guy couldn't deliver a single project and would spend days debugging issues before he asked for help and I or someone else on the team would solve it in a couple of hours or less. I have no idea why this happens, but I've seen it twice.
With a deep enough interview process you’ll find people who know what they are doing. But it won’t tell you anything about their practical coding skills; it won’t matter if you are hiring an architect, but if it’s for a main developer you’ll want a decent level of productivity, proficiency with the tools, application of best practices and reviewing skills.
Those aspects are a lot easier to understand with actual code produced.
There are also the opposite. Folks who are not great at verbalizing programming principles, but do deliver solid code in reality.
In summary, hiring is hell...
The people I talk about aren't even deliberately fake. They really think they're awesome. They can say all the right things. They're charismatic and sound real smart. They have great anecdotes, dripping with wisdom.
It's just that their work is mediocre at best.
I guess you don't have to be good at fooling people when you believe it yourself.
(cf. Theranos)
But, well, I don't want to fail, so I don't get myself in such projects anymore.
However, I've walked away from interview processes that require a work sample that'll take more than a few hours or require lots of domain knowledge to get started. It just isn't worth my time, especially as a barrier to entry before talking to anyone.
Things I am happy to do to see if I'm a good fit:
- Pair with a developer on the team. I learn just as much about the team I'd be joining as the hiring company does about me. - Talking through code that I've written, talking through how I came to the implementation and how I might refactor/enhance further. You can't really bullshit this without the interviewer being a nit.
Things I'll do as a 1099: - Fix a real bug - Refactor real code - Do a project that isn't trivial, start to finish
However, later in the process they all had a more technical test with people. If there was no technical test at all I'd feel the companies didn't know what they were doing and hiring people who didn't know how to code, but if there was too much BS initially I'd feel that they also didn't know that they were doing in the way that they were missing senior devs with many options because they were making it difficult. This just seemed the perfect balance.
When I see people mentioning fizzbuzz, it's always to filter out people who really can't program. If you just give me ten minutes to solve a fizzbuzz-like problem, that should be plenty of time for me to solve it given that I do know how to program, and just that single test would be enough to filter out those who don't. I don't see why it would have to take several hours.
Multiply that by the number of companies you are interviewing and that can easily be 8-15h in total. I'm glad I didn't have to do that.
a = [1,2,4,8,9];
And asked if he could write a loop and print out the values of each element. He embarrassingly could not.
I always ask this question and then talk and then have everyone solve a problem a simplistic one but it always involves an Http request and some loops...
I like to see how people type too... if you can’t type it’s usually easy to tell if you spend most of your time with a computer or not...
If you can't produce in the trenches, what makes you qualified to dictate what those that are in the trenches are doing?
I know a few architects (as in for buildings and civil structures) who wouldn't be able to pour a foundation, frame a wall, or run plumbing properly. They're working at a different level of abstraction and are concerned with different problems.
Or to put it another way, if you can code does that mean you should be able to design a CPU, even a very basic one? After all, how can you write a program if you don't understand how it works at the instruction, transistor, etc level?
Building codes change. Architects are required to design buildings according to the new codes. There is no such thing in software.
When I first started in industry, storing plaintext passwords in the database was what everyone did. We have moved on from that. I've worked on j2ee web apps, where the EJB tier absolutely had to be on a separate server or servers. Times have moved on from there. I've met very few "software architects" that have kept current without writing code at least 5-10% of their job.
In my company my 'enterprise architect' oversees at least 40 applications in my space in various languages and platforms (and he works in other spaces too so I can't give an exact number). I need him to give a good direction on what apps are needed, how apps talk to each other and certain detailed design. He also pitches to management and the business to defend how/why we do certain things.
Last thing he would be required to do is remember to write basic code (though I would hope he can do a swag).
You'd be surprised, but this is what computer engineering actually is. From p-n junctions and transistors and all the way to distributed systems.
Architects that don't understand how to do the fundamentals of implementing the designs they make tend to make unrealistic designs, that are expensive to implement and may look pretty, but function poorly for the owners and occupants.
This applies to architects of buildings, architects of software, and architects of hardware. Probably to most high level design and supervision type positions.
Edit to add: many of the best architects of buildings are able to do amazing things specifically because they've studied the fundamentals and are able to do innovative things with materials. Of course, time will tell it the innovation worked out well or not.
waaaaat? That is completely utterly 100% unreasonable. Unless you mean that you expect every adult member of society to do those things?
And I'm not saying that everyone needs to do everyone's jobs. But you shoupd be able yo do at least a bumbling job of the layers of abstraction you work on top of if you want to make a decision in how those things should work.
Civil Architect is to Builder as Software Engineer is to Datacenter Technician. Software architect is to software engineer as partner at an architecture firm is to architect, or something.
You don't expect a plumber[0] or a building constructor[1] or a civil engineer[2] to become an architect[3], they're different degrees or certifications. A software architect is normally considered a software engineer who works at a grander scope of design. That doesn't map correctly.
[0]: http://dlca.vi.gov/businesslicense/steps/mppcrequirements/
[1]: https://bc.gatech.edu/master-science-building-construction-a...
I disagree. When nobody's looking I type pretty fast, but when the whole interviewee team is looking at my screen I suddenly forget all the shortcuts and mistype a lot due to anxiety.
It comes down to interest. A good senior got that way because they like solving challenging problems. They are not interested in trendy framework bullshit. In other words talk about the problems and potential solutions. Are things in place to make the job easier? Seniors don’t need easier and this is a huge turnoff.
When I hear companies try to sell me with frameworks and process I know they are blowing smoke. At the very least they are boring and at worst you will be working with incompetent people who are as self-diluted as the company. I agree that filtering candidates is a good idea though.
The reason why some companies cannot figure this out is because they don’t value the problems at hand. They need bodies to put fingers on keyboards and are willing to pay more for people who don’t completely suck. Experience and competence are not the same as excellence but considering the candidate pool I can see why companies compromise on quality.
There are people who can talk through challenging problems at their former companies and how the problems were solved. They can tell you everything you'd want to hear because it's true. Except…they didn't implement it. Maybe they are best friends with the person who did and understand in detail about the tradeoffs and the neat hacks and the insights learned along the way, but couldn't build it themselves.
Those are the "smooth talkers" of the engineering world. Those are the people you can't catch just through a verbal interview.
On a related note:
> If you can’t tell the difference between a smooth talker and strong technical competence you are probably interested in the wrong qualities. I have interviewed enough now to see why some companies cannot figure it out. Ask yourself if you really actually want a senior or a strong junior.
My dude.
Look at who you're replying to.
What is system engineering?
It's not just you; the entire IT industry is suffering from systemic curriculum vitae bloat. That's why the working conditions are so bad in the professional sense.
Spoiler: "engineer" as a title for someone who does computer programming and software development without a license is perfectly fine and acceptable in the USA. In Canada, however, it's probably not.
A certain level of quality is expected, not labeling one selfs as engineers after 1 month bootcamp.
Good point. In many countries getting a degree in engineering takes way, way more effort than in computer science.
Then it takes 10-15 years of work to be called "senior engineer".
> "Principal engineer"
"Look at who you're replying to." meant "tptacek" or "tyre"? Or both - a general advice?
Look at it this way. I was able to understand all of the maths proofs taught at my degree, but I could not have come up with them myself.
Imagine putting a math problem in front of someone and asking them to solve it. They correctly identify it as a system of linear equations. They volunteer that they would solve it using x algorithm which has a time complexity of y.
Then you ask them to actually solve it, and they can't even make the first movement towards doing so. They mentioned LU decomposition, but they can't even do Gaussian elimination on paper. They don't know what elementary row operations are. They can't obtain an augmented matrix or put it into (reduced) row echelon form. They don't know anything about linear independence or the rank of a matrix. You put an inconsistent system in front of them and they keep banging away at it, determined to find a solution...etc.
That's what it's like interviewing one of these senior engineers. It's surreal - they confidently pattern match the problem using limited heuristics, and they toss away low hanging fruit to demonstrate knowledge. But when you ask them to do something practical and specific, they either refuse and zoom out into abstract-land again, or they hopelessly fail.
Basically, they volunteer technical challenges they're aware of while simultaneously telling you what the high level solution is. But then you put a terminal in front of them and ask them to set up Postgres in a star schema with some dummy data, and then to write a query joining the two tables they were talking about before. Despite Postgres being on their resume, they'll completely flounder and not even know they need semicolons to terminate commands. Their joins won't just be wildly inefficient, they'll be syntactically incorrect and refuse to run. They won't be able to create, insert, select, truncate, drop, etc. They don't know how to create an index and can't mention any of the options for indexing, let alone the default provided by Postgres.
Keep in mind this example is just meant to be illustrative. Thinking through how to fix the scenario might not generalize to all the ways this can manifest. The kernel of how this arises is a person like so:
1. They read a lot about technical solutions at a high level. They can follow that if you have problem A then you need, roughly, solution B.
2. They have no contextual flexibility or practical foundation for understanding their solutions. They might have read Designing Data Intensive Applications, but they can't actually code and have never administered a database. To the extent they understood the book, they only internalized low hanging fruit.
3. They are charismatic, or ar least comfortable talking about technical topics. They will try to lead the conversation as much as possible, which is where you see them volunteering technical challenges and then offering solutions. But if you force them to answer heavy technical questions which drill deep into a specific area, they'll probably try to zoom back out.
That's what that asshole is looking for. :)
Though to be fair, if you come up with that strategy and can't do -anything- at a sql console, I'm going to ask how you normally interface with the database, because that's like a Linux expert not knowing how to use tar or ls or something.
As for the Linux/tar piece, I've used Linux on desktop for a few years(both Ubuntu & Fedora) & have used Suse and CentOS for servers for much longer.
I can tell you tar means tape archive. I can tell you I mostly use it with gunzip to compress it. I still google/reverse terminal search what flags to use with it both when archiving it and unarchiving it. I could probably remember some flags if I spent enough time thinking - why would my brain waste that much effort though?
I don't work as a backup administrator. I have better things to worry about knowing/having present at the forefront of my (admittedly human sized) memory.
Do you suppose you could have made this point without calling me a name?
If you can explain how to design a system and you can do it, but don't know the exact commands off the top of your head, my comment isn't describing you. I don't expect people to e.g. know awk like the back of their hand, or to write perfectly compiling code on their first try.
But even if you don't have perfect recall of the commands, it should be pretty clear whether or not you've ever opened an editor and done basic implementation. If the GUI is your thing that's fine. But your knowledge must have some practical foundation which demonstrates you can actually walk the walk.
edit: yeah upon re-reading you’re talking about completely obvious lack of practical experience... fair point
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 versus query speed tradeoff. They say they'll do joins on the x and y tables.
Is this demonstrating deep understanding though?
Basically it's like someone else said. They read a book and know a lot of answers, but they can't do the most basic implementation of a solution.
No, it seems about on about the same level as being able to paraphrase the abstract of a paper about the system. I would not take it as showing that someone has read past the first page. A high-level overview just isn't enough for that. You have to ask your own probing questions too. Limiting the conversation to the particular problems they bring up is essentially taking them at their word when they claim to be skilled. I've seen lots of occasions where trying to drill down for a bit more detail on some part of what they talked about consistently came up empty (without going anywhere near sitting down at a computer to write a fizzbuzz equivalent).
Even though the whole thing could be very simple. Another thing is, they will come up with reasons that the issues with the user story/task for code/solution is due to environment or some other reasons like tools, framework, scalability and "bs".
I agree with this. I was a hiring manager, and there are those that can really talk technical, in detail. You really think they know what they are doing, how to solve complex problems, how to come up with solutions. You put a keyboard in front of them (or pencil and paper), and they go "uhh, errr, ummm." and fail miserably.
I think until you have interviewed a LOT of people, it can be hard to quickly spot this. Some people are masters at telling you how someone else solved the problem as if they solved it, but they can not solve it themselves.
you can have someone who is a whiz at practical and specific solutions, who thinks critically and analytically and just gets an enormous amount done WELL. And empowers those around them to boot!
they have the reverse problem to speaking about other peolle’s work as their own. instead, they speak of their own work as teamwork.
this effects many great people. also women and poc are particularly likely to do this because they have been socialized to not speak too highly of themselves. “model minority” etc.
if you as an interviewer are already skeptical of what someone says, you will increase false negatives with people who you are asking to verbally “prove” their work and yet have cultural memories of being penalized for “bragging”. they’ll describe a solution and downplay it as challenging or hard because women aren’t likes le when they’re the smartest person in the room, etc.
an interview process should seek to understand many skills: practical, implementation, execution, problem solving, design, high level, communication skills.
a varied process that focuses on a few specific skills, one at a time, is likely to convey the most accurate signal.
False negatives are expected, and honestly probably good overall and in aggregate, because it decreases the odds of a false positive. One of my first bosses that involved me in the hiring process told me one day that the point of interviewing is not to find reasons to say yes, it's to find a reason to say no.
I've seen people that were entirely qualified for the position be rejected at the company I work for because they made some totally understandable mistake - I'm talking about people that took the time off to take a 5-hour on-site coding assignment, and made a mistake but would have had a passing (and possibly good) grade on an academic evaluation.
And now we have 5 open positions and nobody hired for them.
What is your threshold for "a lot"? I have given a few dozen interviews. I always ask at least a couple background questions. The number who even have a polished delivery for that part at all are a minority, and the couple that tried to bullshit me we're painfully transparent. Maybe I just haven't done enough yet.
If you feel that they're talking about a problem someone else solved, ask them that directly. (Did you work with others? etc) If they're lacking on the technical details either it's been a long time ago or they didn't do it.
I would think they and their colleagues discussed alternatives together, collaboratively in for example a Slack chat — so an interviewee can give you good replies about the thought process and alternative solutions that were considered and discarded. I would assume. Or maybe the interviewee him/herself came up with ideas, that his/her colleagues realized weren't going to work, and explained why, for him/her. Then s/he might be really good at describing the thought process.
Because of this their hiring process was aimed to hire more "strong juniors" even tho they didn't realize it. A strong senior is a person who completely changes how you are even approaching the problem or someone who shows you problems you hadn't seen before. They often see tech in the context of business as well.
As you said, usually, they can't be bothered about learning the new framework of the month or new backend language of the month, but, they have a set of battle proven tools to solve tech problems for businesses.
P.S: I do find it hard to distinguish between bullshit talkers and people who actually get stuff done in the interview process.
I think this is overstated. Disruption for the sake of it is often not that helpful in the context of the business (although, in fairness, you do go on to state they often see tech in that context).
I much prefer people who are delivery focused to those who are overly idealistic or want to change everything out of the gate: a good senior understands priorities and knows when to make a trade-off to live with a sub-optimal situation or solution in one area in order to deliver greater value elsewhere.
That said, nobody is talking about disruption, just wisdom.
It just so happens, sometimes that wisdom will tell you that shipping shit out the door in the name of delivery focus is going to cost you more than its worth in the long run. Calling them overly idealistic to justify your laziness just makes you look bad.
I'd say a truly good senior can tell the difference between a startup and a mature company and adapt accordingly. It takes one set of skills to ship shit out the door as quick as possible and an entirely different set of skills to come in and clean up the mess the kids left behind.
This is why you are selling. Not buying. Because nobody wants to clean up your delivery focused mess.
Because hiring a senior to ignore the problem is a good way to waste a lot of cash.
I also don't appreciate being called lazy, and especially by somebody who knows nothing about my business or my team.
Please try to keep your tone civil in future.
I didn't call you lazy, I said that shipping in the name of delivery focus was lazy, or at least your argument about idealism was.
Fact is, shipping quality is the far more optimal solution and always will be. Making the trade off and adding technical debt is never a worthy trade long term. The only people who gain from it are you and your team. The rest of the company eventually grinds to a halt and begins taking more and more shortcuts around the code which just reinforces everything in a viscous cycle.
You might find this useful: https://youtu.be/DngAZyWMGR0
I was talking about prioritisation. I am very wary (or perhaps jaded) with people who want to fix everything all at once with no regard to the wider effects on the business of doing so.
I didn't mention anything about quality with respect to what we do choose to deliver, although I can assure you that user experience - of which quality is a key facet - is our utmost concern.
I thought my intent was clear, but sorry if not, and hence my comment about overreading. I wrote very little from which you (and you're not the only one) appear to have extrapolated quite a long way.
Do you have problems to solve or not? Often the problem isn't really a problem, except that your current 'solution' is making it so.
I've untied a lot of gordian knots in my career. It really is a thing.
And if you don't have big problems to solve, why do you want a senior developer then? Just hire a junior and keep on going as usual.
Delivery focus is good, till you realise that it's often just delivering status quo for years on end.
Worked at a company which did nightly data imports. Things worked until 'companyx' became a cEient, and the imports were huge. They would take 18-20 hours. Then longer. eventually they were touching the 24 hour mark - unacceptable. Client's data would be more than a day behind. Granted it was a moderate amount of data, but shouldn't take that long.
I was 'new' there - only started a month before - and the rest of the team who'd put this together had been there a year or more. I reviewed what was in place, took a couple of days, and got it down to an hour. Then worked with the existing team and we got it down to under 30 minutes with some tweaking.
I do see some eyes rolling when I tell that, as I know it can sound terribly self-aggrandizing. However, I had a decade of experience at this point, and the rest of the team was just out of college; they'd never faced this problem before. I basically just took the data and imported in small chunks in to in-memory tables (to avoid hitting the disk), and copied those to disk every X rows, and dropped indexes until everything was done. It wasn't rocket science, but did take someone who had a deeper understanding of DB mechanics.
As I'm telling this, I always realize they have no way of verifying this, and essentially I'm just another bullshitter. The more believable I sound, there's an equally high chance I'm either really good, or just a really good bullshitter, and nearly every time, the person I'm talking to has no idea how to tell the difference. It's worse as you get older, because the younger folks just think you're waxing nostaligic about the 'good old days'.
You can't just say "I did X in Y by using Z": you need to begin by explaining that once upon a time there used to be a thing called Y, and on that thing it used to be very hard to achieve X, but in those ancient days there was also a tool called Z, etc.
CBI is a fairly effective technique for general interviewing, because you uncover how people actually behave rather than how they like to think they behave. Most of the gold is in the follow up digging questions, which should separate the bullshit answer from a real one.
What? I feel like you have a very narrow-minded idea of what sr engineers want.
Laziness: The quality that makes you go to great effort to reduce overall energy expenditure. It makes you write labor-saving programs that other people will find useful and document what you wrote so you don't have to answer so many questions about it.
Impatience: The anger you feel when the computer is being lazy. This makes you write programs that don't just react to your needs, but actually anticipate them. Or at least pretend to.
Hubris: The quality that makes you write (and maintain) programs that other people won't want to say bad things about.
(That quoite's originally from Programming Perl 1st edition in 1991, the explanations I think didn't show up until edition 2 in '96 or so...)
What? It requires a special craft to design simpler components. Most of the people don't even see it. This is where your senior skills will shine when you'll make it work like a charm as compared to the previous state.
If you don't see the friction or can't reduce it then please take the first exit out.
The primary difference between simple and easy are decisions. A good senior will spend more energy on considerations for appropriate decisions than the actual work.
For e.g. - for production deployment, I could either put the entire office upside down. Fires across the departments. Broken applications. Rollbacks. Or, I can automate all of our QA test cases and have a one-click deployment. No huss or fuss. I'm sure after having this experience, someone will definitely say - well, this was easy.
Anyway, good discussion.
This is surprisingly often not understood, even by people I showed the video. And I am not sure why. But I do think it's necessary in out field to start understanding this much more deeply, especially for senior engineers.
I like to state it as complex vs. difficult.
Finding a bug in ten thousand lines of crappy VB code code is 'difficult', but not fun.
Writing an space/time efficient implementation of level set topology optimization is complex.
Senior developers usually love complex problems, but hate merely difficult problems.
To be fair it is environment dependent more than anything else. Forget competence, charisma, intelligence, and everything else about the candidate that could bias their selection and instead look at processes and code already in place the new candidate is jumping into. Does the environment strongly favor original ideas/solutions or does it dictate the narrow acceptance in the most narrow of boundaries?
I have been on both ends of this as well. It is common in software for shops to define success in extraordinarily shallow terms such as whether you are using spaces versus tabs and indenting properly. Another example I experienced last year is whether you should write a giant monster configuration or a small function that receives a single argument. The reasons why shops coat themselves in blankets of code style and configuration is because they typically don't trust their developers and instead strive for a normalized baseline. They are looking for wonderful solutions, but rather task completion.
The lack of conformance isn't necessarily an indication of lower capability, but it is an indication of incompatibility. Competence and conformance are wildly out of sync when the candidate is misjudged relative to the work available. That is completely an assignment failure opposed to a candidate failure. Having gone through this myself it has taught me to ask very probing questions, as a candidate, during the interview. If, as a senior, I can determine I will not be a good fit I will happily disqualify myself.
> A coach like Bill Belichick might have a fantastic, detailed answer demonstrating a thorough understanding of every aspect of football past and present, but he could never make the throw himself.
Would you really hire a coach to be your quarterback? Is that a thought you would really entertain? Even if that coach could do that job he/she would be more valuable doing other work. I would consider this a solid example of interviewer/assignment failure.
Like what questions? I'm assuming the work you're looking for is more along the lines of "wonderful solutions" as opposed to "task completion" - is it as simple as asking, "How anal are you guys about code syntax and whatnot?" and, "How hard are your problems actually?"
Or is it more subtle than that?
What if I were to provide a solution that executes much faster, requires less documentation, passes test automation, and is a quarter of the code but ignores the framework or standard code style?
The standard DOM methods perform thousands of times faster than other options for interacting with markup. I can prove this with numbers. Code like that is not popular. Will I be allowed to write unpopular objectively superior code?
If I can reduce the application build from 5 minutes to 5 seconds will you let me rewrite the build from Java to Typescript?
A/B testing is a powerful way to determine preferential user behavior and a measured increase in conversion. Will I be allowed to write inward facing experiments to test developer behavior?
What if I provide a function as a solution the makes use of scope and nested functions but offers no support for inheritance?
Is it better to complete a task in 1 hour with original code plus tests or extend existing components with risk of regression and 4 days of effort?
There's a great quote from Lou Montulli[1]:
> I laughed heartily as I got questions from one of my former employees about FTP code the he was rewriting. It had taken 3 years of tuning to get code that could read the 60 different types of FTP servers, those 5000 lines of code may have looked ugly, but at least they worked.
Those frameworks and existing components most likely have a lot of hard-won experience embedded in them, and I would be uncomfortable hiring someone who did not appear to understand or appreciate that.
See also: Chesterton's fence[2].
[1]: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/05/26/20000526/
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton%27s_fence
And I was not being condescending BTW.
> The greatest movie critics probably can't direct or write for crap
They may know a lot about how a film is made. It does not follow that they could sit in the director's chair, or write a decent screenplay. (And yet, they could still be great at critiquing films!)
This is a valid point. Just knowing how something is made doesn't necessarily mean you know how to make it. It's the difference between a designer and an implementer. Or architect and builder.
That analogy highlights what’s irritating me about this post and this entire thread discussion - there are 1,696 players in the NFL, each with an average salary of $1.9 million. When people talk about hiring “senior engineers”, they behave as thought they’re auditioning an NFL quarterback - the 1 out of 100,000,000 people who can actually perform at that level. For a salary of, on average, about $100,000. When you start out - offering comparatively little but looking for Tom Brady, you’ll pass over pretty much everybody, because the person you’re looking for won’t just not interview with you, they probably don’t exist. After a few months, you’ll relax your standards, and after a few more, you’ll relax them even more and end up hiring a comparative retard like myself - somebody with only a mere 25 years of hands-on development experience and a bachelor’s and master’s degree in CS along with a couple of publications. But if I presented in the first few rounds of interviews, back when you were looking for the guy who could derive the tortoise and the hare algorithm in 30 seconds in front of five people in a boardroom, you would have passed.
Most of interviews I've done to candidates ended up in discussing technology trends and googling around for cool open source projects, libraries and so. This, to me, is a good indicator - as long as you bring them up when discussing relevant problems, this means you thought about a problem and researched prior art to avoid re-inventing the wheel.
Also we tend to end up discussing pro and cons of any given technology and so on. This at the end is a key indicator you're talking to a passionate developer. And passion usually makes someone good at programming.
When it comes to soft skills, usually having such a kind of discussion you can figure out also someones behaviour in most work scenarios (to me, having a good "discussion" mode means you're likely to be fit for team work).
That last one is a real problem-solving strategy, I can't tell you exactly how to balance a Red-Black tree but I know what a Red-Black tree is and where to look up the algorithm for balancing it and I think that's good enough.
One of the master skills for interviewing is "don't choke." Often good people will make mistakes under the pressure of interviewing and will drop out.
When it comes to a practical session there is the same issue that some good people will choke. Just the sample of who chokes in which environment when is different.
Issues like this turn up in all cases where people try to measure merit. For instance, it is known that some low-SES (socioeconomic status) people will choke on standardized tests like the SAT or IQ tests. It is also known that some high-SES people are as dumb as posts and will have that revealed by standardized tests which are harder to bribe or bullshit.
The hostility towards testing is explained by the combination of those two groups: primarily the Emperor doesn't want you to see they have no clothes, but people have sympathy for poor people.
Exactly this.
Too many companies are availability focused instead of ability focused.
The reason? When your processes and engineering are weak, you need people available 24/7 to put out fires.
When I interview for a position, I'm interviewing them as much as they are me.
One of the biggest asymmetries in the whole hiring process, is that of course every company will tell you they have the best development processes, frameworks and code to work on. They may even believe it because they don't know better.
Then you take the job and are stuck fighting fires on a big ball of mud codebase that takes over your life.
If you want to standout as a candidate, try and probe and really find out how good their 'culture is.' Interview them back.
One of the best questions for getting to the real answer is: "What are your expectations for availability?" If they expect availability from you after hours, then their stack is likely unstable because the need availability to keep it running.
If you are lucky enough when you are senior and good at what you do, you don't have to put up with that.
I often tell them about a the third of the way through the interview: "I'm not an availability guy, I'm an ability guy." They often are surprised by the statement. And the discussion that follows it usually tells me whether I want to work for them or not.
It's a great 15 minute question that I find often correlates highly with the people that get offers.
I can't imagine this being an effective qualifier for any but the most junior of devs.
100% of those that couldn't do it are not qualified candidates.
Some of those that could do it are good candidates.
When you bring in someone that has a nice looking CV and experience and recommendations and you ask them a very basic question and they can't respond at all, it is a safe disqualifier. It also doesn't take six hours.
OP stated nearly the inverse: that 90% of those who can do it are qualified candidates.
That is, your numbers are only valid if I accept the premise that I'm rejecting. I don't believe that 90% of people who can answer such a basic question are qualified.
Looks like you edited your comment. In any case, that's a non-statement, as some is quite different from nearly all (i.e. 90%).
I’ve had a majority of candidates with five-year experience as a data scientist not be able to load a csv file using np.read_csv() The problem wasn’t that it didn’t work (the csv intentionally had a minor quirk that demanded that one uses a non-default option) but the reaction to it not working, or, in a majority of cases, the inability to search (on Google) for “what function allow me to import a csv file into a table” was incredibly telling. From there, you can have a conversation about what they did and it often leads to a more honest portrait of their previous functions. Sometimes, that led to offering them a more suitable position.
If I were hiring a VP of engineering or CTO, my only goal in administering such a basic test would be to see whether they are offended and prepare to politely leave the interview. Not kidding here.
Sure, CTO duties can run a broad spectrum, depending on company size, etc. It could essentially mean "dev lead with a small team", all the way up to public company CTO with a good command of financials, managing budgets, large multi-level teams, etc. But, at either end and anywhere along that continuum, I would want to skip to probing higher-order thinking around architecture, strategy, people-management, etc.
So, if I've brought in people who I believe are adept at skills like these, I'd expect them to be confused and perhaps even insulted when I pull out a fizzbuzy integer summation problem.
Gives me better signal than solve a problem on whiteboard question.
I'm not saying you're wrong, especially since we hear about this kind of thing all the time, but I just don't see anything about coding that would seem to make it uniquely conducive to this sort of deception.
I have interviewed candidates who: * Have impressive products that they "designed and implemented. * Co-authored a book. * Founded and ran a {programming-language} user group.
In all 3 cases, the candidates came across very well when talking at the surface level. Digging deeper, they (in the first example) overqualified their contribution, and none of the 3 could write the simplest of code.
There is a reason why coding tests exist.
You may think you filtered out people who failed your test, but you have no indication that that’s the case – you could just as easily have filtered out people who don’t like tests or people who don’t test well
I trust you’ve found some decent hires, but I’d suspect you passed on many as well
And, I don’t know about your work environment, but I’d prefer someone who can have a friendly conversation and do good work... I’m surprised you bothered giving your work-sample test to people who didn’t pass the earlier test
I've ranted about this before on HN, but that's very much illegal in my neck of the woods. As soon as someone does useful work for you, they're an employee. YMMV but you can't expect new candidates to do actual work until you've hired them.
There are plenty of programming assignments, exercises or questions you can have them do instead.
Of course, the net result is that self-employed contracting is on the rise. Especially the kind where people are self-employed only in name, but really work for a single employer. The only difference is that they send an invoice at the end of the month, and the employer can terminate the contract at any point (depending on the terms in the contract, of course).
Hiring is hard. Especially so when hiring the wrong person can cost you two months' wages.
Ouch. That does make it really hard, impossible even, to make sure you get a good fit.
The process you tried was to spend loads of time on carefully designed interview questions which then get used to filter out candidates.
The OP was not suggesting this approach, but instead suggested engaging in a friendly conversation about technical interests and recent projects.
I can see why the first approach might fail, only because it isn't that difficult to memorize several answers for well know questions and topics.
However, to hold a conversation on a particular topic would require a greater depth of knowledge, so I can see how this would be much harder to fake.
I suspect the second approach is a lot like how police catch people out who are lying. As number of lies grow it just gets harder and harder for the individual to keep all the lies consistent and coherent.
Being a good dev is about being thoughtful in assessing a problem and designing/implementing a solution. This vs standing up in front a group of people and hastily trying to devise a solution to a random challenge.
It's fine if you don't want to hire that person, but I'm really annoyed that they often immediately get labeled a bullshit artist in a lot of these threads.
Considering how many shitty positions there are, it's honestly surprising we don't reflexively go "oh, you never learned to do X well because you haven't been with a good company that can teach you to do X well".
And many things from the article check out in regards to that.
I've been involved in a lot of hiring and I always advocate a choice of a couple of fairly in-depth (maybe 4-6 hours) take-home coding problems. I think people should be paid for their time on these as well.
If you practice at home, after work, try with other companies before applying the ones you really wants and you will improve your interview skills by a lot.
We could talk all day, but I could not pick Magnus Carlsen over any other professional chess player in conversation. Worse. I can't even differentiate someone below my level from grandmaster level if they are huge chess enthusiasts.
If you want to find programmers who are better than you or rank people close to your level, only the actual work shows the differences. I can recognize someone who is better programmer than me only from the code they write.
Then I was put in a position to hire backend devs and, even though I couldn't entirely change the format of the interview, I came up with questions I believe could filter out the BS artists/not-yet-good-enough from the talent. And it worked.
Example questions that are truly hard to BS:
1. I want to build a new service that crawls the internet for used bikes and presents them for sale. Roughly sketch out the architecture you would use and how all the parts fit together.
- Why this question is good: it is impossible to successfully answer this question if you don't have experience building systems. Even if you try to BS it, your answer will come off shallow and break under any sort of probing. It also reveals how the dev's mind works when approaching problems.
2. Name your favorite tech stack. What is your favorite thing about it and what is your least favorite thing about it?
- Why this question is good: any dev knows that every tech decision comes with good things and terrible things. I love Python, but GIL, circular imports, shitty deployment/package management, 2.x vs 3.x nonsense all suck. If you haven't been in the trenches, you can't answer this _specifically_... you can only answer it _broadly_. And it's very apparent right away to interviewer.
I had about 4 - 5 of these questions. None of them required a single line of code to be written.
Ask them why they prefer one framework to another.
Ask them how they view testing
Walk through with them on a simple whiteboard problem and ask them where they would write test cases.
Watch for the amount of detail they give you. That will give you an indication of what kind of a developer and how deeply they go into problems.
If their answer involves "well I searched around stackoverflow a lot and asked there" that's a no go for me.
Really? You mean you could memorize a blog post for random languages, go into an interview and answer a question and not completely fall apart from follow up question 1, 2, n?...
You make it sound like I'm asking this question, getting a monologue response and just moving on. These questions facilitate a dialogue between interviewer and interviewee, which quickly reveals your deeper understanding of a subject.
Now, I think your above approach (lookup, memorize, pretend) works great for the kind of technical interview questions that I've been refuting this whole time.
Finally, I don't think my questions are perfect, nor do I think the interview process in general is that great. I think the best way to find talent is to do a trial run for 1 - 2 weeks and see how good they are at taking fuzzy problems and breaking them down into actionable steps, then executing. This is regrettably hard to do for most people and companies.
How do you get people to do a trial run for a week or two?
Most people start looking for the next job when they are already doing their current one. So how can we ask them to do a trial run for a week or two?
Also what about the remuneration(what kind should be given if at all for this period) and does this work for freshers and absolute newbies too?
Except even if you could get someone to do that it doesn't filter for the right candidates. Someone who can quickly get up to speed in a foreign domain is not the same skill as being able to build great systems/code/etc in a domain you're familiar with. The day to day of a programmer after the first X months if the latter and not the former.
To me, this is the crux of why I agree with you, rather than the questions themselves. Anyone can rehearse an answer to any question, but a dialogue needs to be created in order to actually find out anything about a prospective hire's competencies.
To be useful, an interview needs to be a conversation, not a monologue.
Plenty of people can do both or can change from one to another. But it still seems to be that the interview focus should be different as both positions require somewhat different focus.
I don't mind interview having also part where code is written at all. Be it dummy feature or breadth/depth first search or fizzbuzz or any other simple reasonably sized assignment. But in case of senior as in partly decision maker with not much direct supervision in the long term, you need those other capabilities too.
I always sigh in relief when a company I'm interviewing with asks me something like that vs something like "implement x algorithm to solve y niche computer science problem you probably learned in college at some point".
I'm a senior engineer. Last time I interviewed, I received multiple offers from brand-name employers. None of them required any work samples, just hard technical interviews.
A few times I saw a small unknown company that piqued my interest. I talked to them. Occasionally one would require me to do some sort of a task.
Why would I do it?
I don't need to do any of that for the top employers in the market. Why would I spend hours of my time, and precious coding time, especially on some small company I never heard of before?
I haven't done that in years, and doubt I'll ever do it again. The only way you could get me to do it is if I was desperate for a job.
By requiring this sort of time and effort from candidates, you are screening out the best ones, those who can get multiple offers from great employers without jumping hoops for you.
I'm fine going through tough technical interviews.
I'm not fine spending 3-5+ hours on some trivial coding task that can be gamed and was issued to me by folks who may not have even thoroughly checked my resume.
Given the current supply/demand curve, and the fact that top employers like FAANGs do not require this sort of time and effort (and for a good reason), I don't have to jump through that hoop.
Almost any work on compilers will involve good working familiarity with graphs
Work with concurrency will tend to involve linked data structures, like treiber stacks, or modeling computations as directed acyclic graphs of data dependencies
Working in a memory constrained environment tends to involve data structures and algorithms tailored to that domain, etc.
Now it's totally true that many algorithms questions just reduce to brain teasers, or are so esoteric and interview-specialized (Find out if this linked list has a cycle in O(1) space!) that they only serve to stoke the egos of the interviewer. But I wouldn't say that using algorithms or implementing a data structure is a skill that only exists to facilitate interviewing - and being able to explain your thought process as you work is really important when making contributions to other teams' code. I try to focus my interview questions on miniature versions of problems I've actually had to solve in the course of my job. For example, the futex state machine I wrote here:
https://android-review.googlesource.com/c/platform/art/+/810...
If you subtract the interrupt and timeout handling, you have a real problem with a simple, approachable (for someone with some concurrency knowledge) solution, and you only need to know about two futex calls which have simple behavior and are easy to explain in limited time. I wouldn't ask this question of someone looking for a web development position; but then again, I don't interview those candidates because I know nothing about web development. But it's a nice question for someone who listed concurrency on their resume.
Also, "an hour of my time programming a solution to a problem" is likely not an actual work-sample/take-home - it's likely a replacement for a phone-screen that doesn't require an engineer to conduct, thus can be given to many more people to keep the top of the funnel large. The only time I've done a real take-home in less than 10 hours, it was rejected for not being polished enough.
Because you were competing with folks who were unemployed and probably invested 30+ hours in it.
I'm having hard time parsing this. First sentence suggests that I should be permissive in the scoring part, and rely on the interview to weed out candidates if we had too many. So interview becomes important. The second sentence says that interviews will stop being important. Can you clarify?
I think this is probably especially true in Europe; I mean, as far as I know, people get like a 2x-4x raise moving to silicon valley from europe. If you pay more than your local competitors, you will largely have your pick of the candidates.
I mean, yes, things other than money matter a lot, too. But as an employee? I think that's really, really hard to judge from the interview. The money is pretty easy to judge, and as far as I can tell, total comp is a good 'honest signal' that I'm going to be treated in other ways. How much money they offer is a better indicator that I'll be treated well, in my experience, than anything anyone can say at an interview.
I think as workers, we're not doing ourselves any favors by pretending that an employer can get the best people without paying the best rates.
* Very few recruiters outreach mentions any kind of compensation expectation. Why would I bother with hours of chat, screening and interview loops if I know only a handful companies offer the same kind of compensation I'm used to receive?
* The bar of a Senior position is quite high, so high that most Senior engineers would not pass it, it requires months and months of preparation. I would do that only if I was absolute sure I wanted to leave my current job.
* I would be willing to receive a little less if a company could offer something that I don't have like a better commute, work on something I'm more passionated about, etc... However, most companies think that working from home is good enough to justify a 50% lower compensation.
The only exception that I can think that compensation is not the main point is if you are trying to hire someone so successful and rich that money doesn't really matter for them. But my guess is that this kind of people are even more rare than senior people.
Like, for me; I'd be so happy to take a 20% (hourly) pay cut and work half-time for 40% of my current total pay and go to school the rest of the time. But as far as I can tell, the hourly paycut would be more like 50+% just on the hourly, so I'd be looking at like a quarter the total comp, and the prestige cut (and thus hit to future earnings) would be huge, as I'd have to go work for a startup/small company.
I guess this will make more sense if marginal tax rates go back up.
So you're not really interested
More upside if it goes well and you're already not in need of money?
The new art?
Shouldn't people usually have some kind of business idea before diving head first?
If that same person moves to the US, they are just a cog in a huge machine, and will be unable to afford to buy a house. Not to mention that getting the visa to go there would be very difficult.
Not to mention that when you work for a small corp, you spend all of your time on dubious products changes for the sake of a product manager looking good for an interview panel.
In developing markets there is no such 'bullshit', to be frank. The company delivers a good product to the international market or it dies. If you can find a talented Westerner to lead the team and product design, even better. This kind of leanness is exhilarating to work for as long as the company approach, payments and bonuses are transparent.
One factor to keep in mind here, though, is that the cost of living there is so insane that even a multiplier on pay could go with a total quality of life decrease.
Eh, not in my experience. I've often seen it as an excuse to treat people poorly. As in "You're being paid a lot to put up with BS" and "Highly compensated shouldn't have excuses or whine." It also seems to correlate well with their trying to solve all legitimate work headaches with money.
So, when I see a top rate advertised, I immediately ask myself: what is so wrong with this company that people don't want to work there? Usually it's fairly obvious when you meet people that used to work there (they'll have a grudge). Usually it's a combination of mismanagement, bad culture, and corporate stupidity. It happens. Big companies can get away with that for surprisingly long.
When hiring, what I look for is very simple. I try to sell the gig and look for positive response to the sales pitch. Does the person have the skills I need? A few simple questions can get you a good hint there. Red flags would be bullshitting when they don't know something or plain ignorance for stuff they ought to know. Beyond that, it's about fast decision making based on imperfect knowledge. I'm well aware that most interview processes are completely ineffective so I don't waste too much time on that. Either they obviously know their shit or they obviously don't.
So, I simply put myself in the frame of mind that I've already decided to hire the person and start talking about what they'll do, how they'll do it, etc. It's classic sales strategy and it works; I've hired some great people this way.
In silicon valley, the difference between what a FAANG company pays and what almost everyone else pays is... pretty big. Like maybe not double? but certainly half again as much. I mean, you could say they are competing for different people, I suppose, but when a recruiter tells me that they "pay competitively" - that means drastically different things for different companies, even if I am limiting myself to companies within 10 miles of santa clara.
> I noticed a pattern in Berlin where I'm based where the less attractive jobs indeed come with higher salaries. When the work is shit and they bleed engineers faster than they can hire them there's nothing else they can do than up their rates.
Huh. That's really interesting, 'cause my experience (In the US, mostly in silicon valley) is the opposite. There were times in my life where I actively sought out harder and even more dangerous work for more money; but even casting aside any concern over who I worked for, even if I was willing to go work in a war zone, for my skills? the pay was better sitting on an expensive chair in a safe office in mountain view.
Even within silicon valley, the smaller companies and the "scrappy" startups or small companies seemed to me to be a whole lot higher stress... which for parts of my life? sure, I'll take extra stress for extra money, but no, those companies pay a lot less. Which, again, is fine in certain parts of my life; I'm not educated, so I needed to get a lot of experience before I was given a shot at a job in one of the FAANG companies. And it was... really a very different sort of experience; I was 20 last time I had a job where I felt that junior compared to my colleagues, (and I had a hell of a job when I was 20).
I've seen something similar around layoffs; I've been through several layoffs but have yet to get a pink slip myself. and I've always found myself dissapointed that I wasn't laid off; those in the first round get nice severance, a retraining bonus, and a chance to get another job before too many other people are laid off. Those of us who "dodge the axe" end up having to do twice the work with almost no hope of a raise and with co-workers who are afraid of getting laid off in the next round.
- Work fewer hours
- Work from anywhere
- Work in a specific location
- Work in a certain environment
- Work in a specific kind of organization
- Work with specific technologies
- etc.
People are very different and have very different wishes and needs. Salary isn't always priority #1.
- the product is SW
- great colleagues
- challenging problems
- cool technology
- having users
- good salary
- good tools
- max 40 hours a week
- minimal bureaucracy
- working remote when needed
https://henrikwarne.com/2013/03/26/what-do-programmers-want/
(note, I'd also take a small hourly cut to work fewer hours a week, but as far as I can tell, the paycut I would need to take to do that is so large that I'm better off working a few years on and then taking six months or a year off and eating the tax and career disadvantages of that)
For most people in my area, #2 and #3 are also mostly pay issues. Like #1, it's not entirely pay, but the most common reason I've heard for people wanting to work places other than here (I'm in silicon valley, as you'd expect from someone trying to maximize salary) is that it's less expensive to live almost anywhere else in the world.
- Work fewer hours
- Work from anywhere
- Work in a specific location
- Work in a certain environment
- Work in a specific kind of organization
- Work with specific technologies
- etc.
People are very different and have very different wishes and needs. Salary isn't always priority #1.
Notably, I got what most software developers would describe as "fewer hours". We tracked time and got paid for actual hours worked. (still do) Since the company would be paying more, we were/are seldom asked to work beyond 40 hours per week. Much of this comes naturally with government contracting. You must track time, and you must pay employees for their time.
Being onsite is a positive. I'm never expected to work at home. Work is work, and go home I can focus on my family or hobbies or sleep.
The YC startup I worked for got acquired recently. I was employee #38. I've still made more in RSUs working at a big tech company than I would have made had I stayed the full four years and vested all my options. In fact I got a bigger RSU award this year than what I got from my stock in the acquisition.
Startups would be well-advised to hire fewer people, get rid of under-performers quickly, and reserve an extra slice in the cap table for really high performers. If someone comes along that creates entire new features on their own initiative (features still featured prominently in your marketing) then may I suggest you continue to award that person either their initial grant or half (depending on how much it was) on a yearly basis? Even if that means you skip an extra hire that year you'll still come out ahead, both by keeping your high performer happy and by saving the extra salary.
(I want to be clear: The founders were well within their rights to deny my requests for more options and I hold no ill will toward them. It was their business, not mine, and they were free to run it however they wanted.)
See if you can prove me wrong: find a 10-acre lot within a half hour commute, with a large single-family home, that is affordable to a senior engineer. Alternately, make it 1 acre, but within a 5-minute commute.
That seems excessive. You certainly don't need to live on a multi-acre lot to have a good life.
I work at a FAANG and most of my colleagues own single-family homes and have no problem paying their mortgages. Of course they aren't on 10-acre lots -- we aren't in the middle of nowhere, we are in a city.
I work in SF and most of the people here are here specifically because they DONT want to live on ten acres in some rural place, they love that the city is walkable and dense and interesting.
For most folks the issue of living in condos or apartments it’s an issue at all until they reach a certain family size. At that point, most of the people in the city would be thrilled to live in a 3-4 bedroom townhome in the city — but THAT is where SF gets really difficult, because those cost $4 million or more these days.
Actually for many people they feel trapped because they’d like a LITTLE more space, ie. the Victorian townhome, but they specifically DO NOT want a car or a yard and do not want to leave the historic, walkable city. At that point you’re really screwed because outside of SF there is basically nothing else walkable west of the Mississippi. So there’s nowhere to go.
If somehow magically you could build a 1900s Victorian townhome city about 30’ away by train I think you’d find a couple million urban Californians wanted to move there.
But of course the sprawl all around the job centers, and the regulatory environment, both make that impossible.
Oh well.
outside of SF there is basically nothing else walkable west of the Mississippi
Where can you live outside of SF that you don't need a car and can live a normal adult lifestyle?
Even if you are already at a FAANG in Silicon Valley, you will likely get your salary adjusted down by the standard amount if you move somewhere else. You'd actually have more luck avoiding a pay cut at a startup because they almost always have less rigorous HR policies than FAANGs.
Car-ownership-hostile != "walkable". Using Lyft/Uber isn't "walking".
Anyway, as to your question: parts of Sacramento, Auburn, Carson City, Eugene, Bend, and Boise all qualify, and that'slimiting to cities I know firsthand. Other cities that I hear this from others include Salem, SLC, ...
Much depends on what you consider to be "normal adult lifestyle". If one's definition of that includes walking through waste and needles to the Folsom St. Fair, SF probably does have a monopoly there.
And, given where I live, my medical, grocery, and a significant chunk of my social needs are truly within walking distance. The only one that isn't is work, and that would be accessible via public transit if I was willing to compromise on commute times a bit (or if I changed employers/offices).
Carson City has 4 bus routes serving 150 square miles, San Francisco has close to 100 serving less than 50. Those aren't remotely comparable.
Disliking public transit is fine,
The parent comment asserted walkability. If your environment is walkable, that means you don't need transit/carshare for everyday needs.
Carson City has 4 bus routes
Carson City has a walk score of 34 (although apparently there's a 4 block area in downtown that gets up to the mid 70s). SF has an average of 86. My apartment scores 99. Like I said, there isn't a genuine comparison to be had.
Not because you live within walking distance of work, which almost nobody does. That definition of "walkable" would be so tiny to render it almost meaningless.
Muni and Bart do make it possible to get around most of SF
BART cuts one diagonal swath through the SF core only, and it doesn't even connect directly to Caltrain in SF county. It's hardly the Underground.
L transferring to the KT? It doesn't even require a bus.
>BART cuts one diagonal swath through the SF core only, and it doesn't even connect directly to Caltrain in SF county. It's hardly the Underground.
Indeed, I'm not suggesting transit in SF (or the bay area as a whole) is perfect. Far from it. But compared to anywhere else west of the Mississippi (and most of the places east of it), there's nowhere better.
Things that I do within two blocks of the flat I live in:
- get groceries
- go to a bakery
- go to one of three coffee shops
- go to one of ten or so restaurants
- go to a comic book store
- go to a game store
- go to a pub
- get my hair cut
- go to the dentist
My two kids, both under school age, at this point can safely walk with me to any of these activities, and, except for the dentist, they often do and quite enjoy it.
I could walk a bit further, but usually bike, and occasionally take transit, to my office, and to literally everything else in my life except the following:
- Trips out of town
- An occasional visit to a Lowes on the other side of town
That’s the bar I’m aiming for.
Note 1, I’m not talking about Manhattan. There’s almost nothing over three stories for several dozen blocks around me, this is all just really ordinary small/medium scale stuff from circa 1900.
And note 2, you asked how many people “really live like that,” and as best I can tell in San Francisco the answer is somewhere between 50 and 90% of the ~million residents. (I don’t know how good every neighborhood is, and I think some are less convenient than mine, but mine is pretty ordinary for SF.)
There’s a big difference between places where you can walk (technically that’s almost anywhere) and a city that was built for walking (ie was large before cars).
On the east coast these are much more common, for obvious reasons. Places like Charleston and Savannah have a very similar feel to San Francisco. Some of New Orleans. Most of the center cities in the northeast. A lot of Chicago.
But the common thread here is age of the city and how well it has held on to its historic core. Out west there’s just not much old enough to qualify. Sure, there are some nice small towns here and there with historic main street areas. Portland, Seattle, and Boise have a neighborhood or two. But just ask the question “would you live here without a car?,” and then look at what percentage of the population does. Outside of those aforementioned bits of the country, not owning a car would make life extraordinarily difficult.
I find that if you live within a couple blocks from a nice grocery store, life without a car can be quite pleasant.
There are a few other big cities on the west coast, and many of them have towns or small cities nearby that have walkable centers.
Seattle is walkable enough for me. It's not a binary variable.
My life is very simple and I’ve never lived in an apartment bigger than 600 square feet. The idea of 10 acres is insane to me.
I like walking to the grocery store (or bar, or restaurants, etc). I like biking to work. I live within walking distance of literally 6 parks, so it's not like I'm starved for green or open space.
I don't understand your point of view to the exact same degree that you don't understand mine.
But yes, a senior engineer can likely afford a large single family home relatively close to work (many of my co-workers do).
A coworker of mine bought 11 acres. (That's one more than 10. These lots go to 11...) He has sheep and goats and chickens, and he can shoot his AR-15 in his yard. Interestingly, he grew up in San Francisco. His current lifestyle is ridiculously incompatible with his city of origin.
I settled for a little 0.4 acre lot with a modest 3500 square foot house. (1619 square meter lot, 325 square meter house) By settling for that, I got to live within a mile of the beach and within a mile of work, and I paid off the mortgage in 8 years without trying terribly hard.
So that's close. I suspect you'd normally have to commute about 15 or 20 minutes to get a whole acre, and they go for $220,000 to $500,000. There is a house on 1.3 acre (like a football field) selling for $320,000 that is 11 minutes away, but the house was built in 1957. If you don't mind paying a couple million, you can be 5 minutes away with a modern waterfront home on an acre or two.
So this is non-urban life. It's mostly not even rural; we have an airport with about 7 passenger jet flights arriving per day. Senior developers live in nice houses, paid-off unless they really go nuts. They can have waterfront access, or room for a horse, or room to shoot and raise sheep. They can get McMansions. They can live within walking distance of work.
I just can't see giving that up. Sure, cable cars are cool and all, but that doesn't compensate for what I'd have to give up.
I can’t help but be a bit jealous, but it was really interesting to hear how different things can be.
1 acre is not at all unrealistic. I work at a well known tech company and live in an area where you can afford acre (and multiacre) lots. While owning a 1 acre lot with house is certainly not the norm in the company, it is also not at all noteworthy. No one gets surprised when they hear someone owns one. It's seen very much as a preference thing. Some people like apartments, some townhouses, some houses, and some larger lots.
And yes, they're mostly "tech types".
More realistically, in most parts of the country, a tech job will get you a 2000+ sq ft house built no earlier than the 90's. And in many of those places, a short commute to boot. Now I know SV folks often talk about how they don't need a house that big or one that "new"[0], the reality is once you're outside and can afford one, you won't find a good reason to buy a 1960's house, or a 1200 sq ft one. The preferences of SV folks are really post hoc rationalizations.
[0] Many of my coworkers reject houses built in the 90's - it's too old for them.
Wait what? What city are you talking about that has a tech hub or commercial center within a 5 minute commute of 1 acre homes?
We have sort of a specialist tech hub here, featuring stuff like radar and cyberwar. Lots of these companies are hiring. (mine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18819736)
You can get more than ten acres if you are willing to commute a bit. I think 2.5 acres is the minimum lot size if you go south about 14 minutes from one of my workplace's buildings, or 22 minutes from the one I'm in.
It is a small farm. Senior engineers can afford to live on hobby farms. Some of them expect to do so. It's not just here either; I've known people who did that in relatively rural parts of Massachusetts and Virginia too.
I recall somebody on HackerNews proposing an interesting explanation for how people react. The available jobs get dismissed because you'd have to seriously consider moving (which is annoying) if you admitted that employment in these locations is viable.
If. People here sometimes make it seem like a senior engineer can just walk into a FAANG, chat with the receptionist, and walk out with a $300k offer. While it is certainly not the hardest thing in the world, these companies are still pretty selective and only employ about 10% of the total seniors in the market. More likely than not you are not getting that kind of offer. This isn't even taking into account downleveling, which Google in particular is notorious for.
Sources: I know people in person who got these kinds of offers.
A month later Twitter offered me 35% more than Google's best and final offer for a more senior position. I didn't even have to negotiate or mention the rejected Google offer.
Oh, I should add that, in my case, the downlevelling was up front. The recruiter wouldn't even put me in for an L5 interview.
If you knew that you were being slotted for L4 upfront why did you even bother interviewing? I've seen L4s rack up multiple job offers from different companies and use that as leverage to negotiate; they've all been offered $300k+ or more. Not all experience/education is the same but you gotta know how to play the game.
It's all engineering, and the majority (10+) was pure software engineering.
> If you knew that you were being slotted for L4 upfront why did you even bother interviewing?
I didn't find out until late in the process, I thought I was going to get a better offer than I did, and I was trying to correct the mistake I had just made by accepting the job I was then in. I only realized my mistake after the offer came in and I considered what dropping back to L4 would mean.
> I've seen L4s rack up multiple job offers from different companies and use that as leverage to negotiate; they've all been offered $300k+ or more.
That would have been nice, but I barely had time to keep up with one company process at a time without arousing suspicion. I was close with Facebook, but I decided before the actual interview that I wasn't going to take L4 at any price. Facebook rejected me anyway, so it wouldn't have mattered in the end.
Keep in mind that you spend roughly half of your waking hours at work. It's important to do what you love during that time. I'm personally not a fan of spending my life to make tiny increases in some ad placement algorithm.
And the stock grants won't begin to compare.
If you're counting stock separately, $180k salary isn't well, well below Amazon. That's the max they pay, and only in Seattle and the Bay Area.
All of these cities have a better salary/cost of living trade off than SV.
Total compensation of $300k or more is pretty standard for the public companies. Check levels.fyi to see examples.
The benefits are also much better than I’ve seen elsewhere.
I moved to SF from Raleigh because even after cost of living I earn significantly more (ie. put a lot more in savings every year)
Housing here is definitely not as nice as other parts of the country, but if you work hard for a few years here you can leave and pay cash for a nice house in most of the rest of the country.
That’s why engineers keep putting up with the drawbacks and moving here.
Especially if you’re married, I know a lot of developers whose spouses income goes straight into savings, investments, etc. but it’s another example of HN Silicon valley thinking that software engineering starts and stops at four companies. Married dual income couples especially can make out like bandits in any of those cities.
I live in one of those cities and depending on how you classify me,I’m either somewhere above the median or well over the 75% percentile. Our nice big, new (comparatively) cheap house in the burbs is less than 20% of our take home pay. How much do you think we put aside in savings?
Because assortive mating is a thing - it’s statistically likely that two college educated people will end up getting married and I’m trying to keep this as generic as possible. If one was a software developer making $135K a year in one of those cities and the other was almost any college educated professional making $65K a year. The net of the lower paying spouse could pay off your nice house in the burbs in ten years or less.
I don’t know of any couple who is in that situation (and I know a few) who would think about moving to the west coast just for one spouse to make $300K when their combined income is already above $200K in a much less expensive area.
On the other hand, if you can't get one of those top positions in the Bay you're probably looking at closer to $150k-$200k in a senior position, which makes a $100k or so low CoL position look awfully nice.
This gap widens as you go up the salary scale. I don't think I've ever seen even $300k in a low CoL area, whereas in the expensive areas 7 figures is possible (although quite rare).
That’s easily affordable with one income, with a family making the median software developer wage. Any competent developer can pick up the phone, call a few local recruiters and have three or four offers in three weeks. Of course the pickings get slimmer the further to the right of the bell curve you go. But I do know developers who have been a lot more aggressive about their career a lot longer than I have and usually takes them two or three months to get jobs over the 80th percentile.
I picked $135K because that’s a pretty easy mark to hit if you have any negotiating skill, keep your eye on the market, and keep a warm network.
$160K+ is doable as an architect or an overpriced consultant working for a consulting company.
Which is to say - the finances are only one part of it! Living in a large city is qualitatively different from living in a small city which is different from living in a rural area. If you have a strong preference, giving up the best financial situation to live the life you want is super reasonable. I know plenty of people who could live more comfortably in a cheaper area, but some people just want to be in a big city. I'm sure the reverse is true as well.
None of the cities I listed are in what you would consider rural America. Yes we live in the burbs, but if living in the city were the lifestyle we wanted, we could buy a smaller condo for about the same price and I could still have access to the same job market.
(1) the salary / equity combination I’m talking about is not just FAANG, it’s basically every large SF tech company. I don’t work for a FAANG but the deal is almost as good.
(2) I specifically moved with my wife and kids to SF to make it easier for my wife to stop working — she wanted to focus on the kids for a few years. One income here was worth more than double what I could earn in Raleigh and this is the first job I had in my career that offered comprehensive medical for the whole family, not just me.
We live in about the same amount of space as we had in Raleigh, it just costs more.
Lastly, while I would prefer to have a little more space for a less absurd mortgage, I’m not interested in living in any suburb. So when you compare housing in the central city of Raleigh (or Austin) versus SF, the comparison is less unfavorable.
So, sure, if I was willing to live in the suburbs I could have more house. But I’d rather deal with less space than is ideal than have to live in the burbs. No judgment intended, it’s just not the lifestyle I want, in the same way it sounds like city life isn’t the lifestyle you want.
I am always telling people that you reach a point where you have enough money to live the life you want. That point is different for everyone and it also depends on where you are in your life.
If I made twice as much money where I live now. It wouldn’t have an immediate effect on our life. Even now when I get a raise it just goes to “increasing my net worth”. It doesn’t really change too much of anything.
We could retire earlier. But my hobbies are computers and working out and traveling. I dont see myself fully retiring, maybe just doing consulting/contracting part of the year. As far as health insurance, my wife specifically took a job with the school board so we could get benefits whether I am consulting, contracting, or working salaried and we are guaranteed coverage for the rest of our life after she has been working ten years. I work with someone whose wife gave up her demanding job that she didn’t like to work in the school cafeteria for the same reasons.
Recruiters and consulting companies are baffled why I don’t accept an opportunity to be a high price consultant and I am sticking with this small company I work for when I could easily be making 25%-50% more. But living in a low cost of living area gives you that optionality.
Heck, there is a 50/50 chance I could get a job with Amazon working as an in house AWS consultant without moving (but with traveling). I’m just not interested in large companies. I worked at one at the time Fortune 10 (non tech) company for two years and I said never again.
Got a message from yet another self driving startup. Agreed to do a phone screen out of curiosity. Interviewer is 6 months out of school and his first question - why do you want to work for us. My answer - I actually don’t, I didn’t even know you exist and it is your job to convince me. Thoughts - i’m wasting my time.
These are my definitions, at a startup a senior engineer is one that is broad enough in their experience to have gone deeply into one area and at least lightly into several others. They understand what technical debt it and when to use it, and when to avoid it. What is more, they can communicate what needs to be done to a more junior engineer.
In a mid-size private company a senior engineer knows all of the forces that are being applied to their area of expertise, they know what the cost constraints are on the solution, they know what the time constraints are. They understand the area fully and can review other's work and participate productively in design reviews and product planning sessions. They can be an axis of excellence by leading by example and surfacing things that need to be fixed early.
At a large publicly traded company a senior engineer is one who can relate the business to the engineering effort to insure that they are doing the engineering that is needed and more importantly they are not doing engineering that is not needed. To paraphrase, "With great resources comes great re-invention." Large well funded engineering teams tend to re-invent the wheel because they can, not because they need to. And as a result can become mired in self inflicted complexity. It is the role of the senior engineers to see to it that it doesn't happen.
Very different jobs.
At a start up, even if you have your first customers, you want to deliver a product or more features as quickly as possible starting from scratch. Possibly, you also want to be able to pivot totally if the first idea does not stick.
It is great if you can do well in both environment, but usually, this is different skill set, and I would even say personal inclination. You'll likely have a hard time to convince a start up engineer to work on COBOL code base on a mainframe.
Maybe a local is reading this and can explain why this is still a thing.
The cause for this might be that it's culturally pretty unusual to start a company around here. I'd say people are extremely risk-averse and starting a company is almost frowned upon.
They want FAANG like employees but only if they work for peanuts. Then they cry to the press they can't find skilled engineers.
The same way I also can't find Ferraris, with a budget for a Hyundai.
I live in Germany and the only companies I can work for are international ones (US-based).
At least I know how they work, what they expect, and generally speaking, it's the way I like to work.
Never, ever work for companies like Deutsche Post, Telekom etc.
Some will say things like "Front-end web development using a framework such as ExtJS, React, Vue, or Angular". Neat - which one? I'm happy to work with 1 or maybe 2 of those. Do you mean that you actually use React but you're fine with people who come from some other framework? Or do you mean that you are converting a legacy app from Ext.JS to React so you're hoping the candidate has used both?
Sometimes they'll bury the actual framework in the "Nice to Have" section but it's pretty common for it to be left vague. I think what they're trying to do is widen the pool of applicants, but that strategy seems suboptimal for attracting folks who want to work with a specific tech stack.
I think the unintended consequence of leaving it broad is that you might lose people who are specialized in the very framework you use.
In my own case, I'm pretty biased toward React, having written a book & been blogging about it for a few years. I definitely pass over job listings that leave the framework open to interpretation. The cost of finding out what they actually use is too high, unless the job looks exceptional in some way.
- Be clear about what's required and what isn't
- What the exact stack is that you'll be using in the role
Either way, I purposely avoid those type of job postings. I don't want to waste so much as 10 minutes on a phone screening to find out that even though you mention Ember or React that what you really want is someone with Angular 1 experience.
I declined the offer.
One thing I will say is that for many employers, a "no" now doesn't mean a "no" forever.
1. ALWAYS hire the best you can. Hire people smarter than you. Hire the smartest people in the world!
2. It's always impossible to hire! We can never hire anyone!
Yeah. Ya think?
What I try to do is actually the opposite of their advice.
I don't look for the perfect hire. I look for people who are often overlooked but COULD become the perfect hire.
Just get them in at an affordable salary and build them into your best engineers.
They will be amazingly loyal (since you gave them chance when they needed it) and you can train them to become PART of the team.
You DO need senior people for this strategy though. They need mentors.
Sometimes it's also about expectations, role, office location, other bonuses, etc. When in 2019 you don't let people do home office... Byebye...
This is really annoying as companies try to keep the employees in the dark regarding the market rates hoping to catch someone gullible who doesn't know them, and often they do.
One of my experiences was a recruiter for a startup (which plans to be leader in XYZ) reaching out for me on LinkedIn. Since I found the general domain quite interesting, I responded. From there on we have a short chat, but instead of getting really insightful information on the job I get forwarded to a bunch of URLs which aim to describe things. I get that it's convenient for the company to save time - but I don't want to spend hours reading through things.
Then there is an interview loop. 2 of the interviewers are apparently fairly junior, and spend the whole interview asking the typical graduate coding problems. One of them even wasn't sophisticated with having things 80% solved - it needed to be 100% - even though that meant the whole timeslot was used up. In the end of those in-person interviews I learned nothing about the job because there was no time left.
The main thing I learned was that there are people there who can be pedantic on interviews and can solve basic coding problems. If anything that gives me a negative impression. I want to work together with people who know interesting technologies, know how to write well-structured code, etc. The interview might give the impression that they don't know these things, because all they ask for is how to solve a leetcode problem.
After that the company asks for another interview loop at a different place - which obviously would mean spending even more time on this. At that point I'm giving up.
Imagine being asked this question in a technical interview:
> When do you decide to use frontend validation?
(yes, this is based on questions I've been asked IRL)
The problem that I have with this type of question, even though it can be answered and seems reasonable, is that it's not even how engineers tend to think most of the time. It's about a solution looking for a problem.
When I'm faced with this kind of question, I often stumble to come up with a hypothetical need for the solution being proposed. It's not that I can't come up with an answer, but I end up lacking eloquence and saying "ummm, well, okay, so..." a lot while using my imagination. It would be like handing a hammer to someone and asking them to find things to nail with it.
In essence, it's backwards from how I would tackle most problems.
Here's the sort of question I would rather be asked:
> Let's say that we've built out a web form that the user can submit, and there are a lot of inputs they have to fill in. They can only know if they made a mistake once they've hit "submit", due to backend validation. How could you improve this experience for the user?
I find this preferable because it's a lot more realistic and natural. Instead of looking for problems to fit the solution, I have a problem and need to come up with a solution. To extend my hammer analogy, this is like providing the pieces of a wood table and allowing the candidate to show how they would assemble that table. Anyone can memorize terms like "frontend validation" and what sort of problems they are associated with, but it demonstrates more skill to be given a problem and know where to go from there.
My guess is that there's a lot of good engineers out there, even senior ones, who get weeded out in the hiring process because they're being asked not to approach problems like engineers but like they're contestants on Jeopardy.
You _always_ need backend validation. Never trust the client. You can then layer on frontend validation where it's needed to make a better UX.
You are definitely correct, however.
I'm soft-launching a product to help companies recruit and I've done about a dozen customer development interviews with hiring managers (5 person companies through FAANGs) in the last two weeks. One thing I heard constantly was that referrals are their best source of candidates and that for roles with 7+ years of relevant experience they actually don't believe good candidates will come in by just randomly applying on their website/LinkedIn/etc. I had an engineering manager tell me "a senior engineer actively searching for a job is a negative signal of candidate quality" as opposed to going through somebody in their network or connecting with somebody at the company first. I had another manager tell me for the senior roles he's hiring for he only considers candidates explicitly sourced by his internal recruiter who searches LinkedIn for the specific skillset or people who are referrals for the specific job. This isn't some CTO level position; this is just a role for a ~10 years of experience individual contributor. Applications from the website go straight to the trash can. The implication was people with those skills aren't looking for jobs.
(Bear with me, gonna anxiety dump a bit here ;) feel free to skip to the end where I have a pertinent question...=) )
Background: I've worked as a high-level contributor both at the management and engineering levels for the last decade of my career. Decently respected software dev/leader/whatever, lots of big and small projects and teams, all successfully delivered. People like working with me! I've had friends ask me to come work with them. And I like my friends. They are great people.
However, I'm also known to be really picky about the things that I want to be doing with my time and my career. I'm really protective of it overall, so when I have the opportunities to "do things" with friends or whatnot I have generally said no, for a variety of reasons. They are great people and wonderful developers (legitimately wonderful, brilliant human beings) but in many cases they work for environments or domain spaces that wouldn't really be "my thing". Sometimes I've just pursued my own stuff for a while, since I have had that ability...but what you're saying above sounds like that has been hurting me.
At the end of December, I was in a work situation where the entirety of the technical team was laid off, including myself. I figured at the time, given my general "level" and experience I'd be all right when applying for work.
While I haven't applied to lots of jobs since then, I did apply to a few that seemed like a great personal fit on paper, and that I knew based on my experience I should probably at least get an initial interview.
No dice. 0% response rate. I was shocked! I mean, it's been a while since I've been doing the interview dance, but 0? So I had my CV looked over by people ranging from C-level guys to other software devs of varying levels and no one could figure out why I wasn't at least getting into initial discussions. "It's not you, it has to be them", I got told. But really after a few of these things happening, you stop thinking that "it's them". That can't be, right?
I made a comment to one person that I felt far more desirable to companies when I had much less experience/professional success than after I had more significant accomplishments under my belt.
I hate mysteries - and I hate the not knowing. It's one thing for me to go through an interview process and not be a fit, if such a thing were to happen; it's another for me to never even get to the interview process and not understand why!
So while reading the above is kind of dejecting, thank you for writing it...I guess it provides some illumination for me on what might be going on.
Now rather than hop into my shower and softly weep - do any of your engineering manager friends spoken about above have any advice for people who may have that experience but just happen to be picky about what they want to do, don't want to move themselves to the USA, and don't always jump at referral from friend X?
As one becomes more senior the hiring manager expects a candidate to do their due diligence and ask some questions beforehand rather than hopping right into the application process. For a referral, that has already happened somewhat as the candidate already presumably talked to the the referrer about working at that company. You don't have to be a referral but a hiring manager expects you to do this due diligence. You don't necessarily need to go through a friend and you don't have to work with your friends. However, having an acquaintance at the company even in a different team is a massive help.
Think of it from the company's perspective for a second. They don't want somebody who just "wants a job". Money is always a factor but if somebody takes a job solely for money then they'll jump ship the moment somebody offers more. Companies want somebody interested in their space who wants to work there. You mentioned that you purposefully pursued some roles that looked like they'd be good fit for you. That's smart! Make sure the hiring manager knows it. By just clicking apply on the website, that may not be communicated clearly.
Here's two concrete pieces of advice:
- Before going in the front door and applying for roles, reach out to the hiring manager and ask them some more details about the role and what working for the company/team is like. If you know somebody at the company who can put you in touch (even if it isn't the same team), that's better, but even if you don't that's ok. They will talk to you and if they don't you probably don't want to work there anyway. LinkedIn is useful for this.
- If you're applying for a local job, try to meet the hiring manager or somebody else at the company in person if possible. Don't stalk them but to give you an example, I know that a CEO for a local security startup runs the local OWASP meetup and I told a person interested in working in security to go to the meetup and talk to him if she was serious about working there. I've been a hiring manager before and I looked way more closely at any candidate I talked to in person. Don't sound desperate but show them that you're interested and serious enough to go out of your way to talk to them. I had a couple candidates who I didn't know reach out to me via Meetup.com for roles posted to the company website and I had no problem meeting them for coffee.
On a related tangent, I help organize a local meetup and I get asked the question "how do I land my first dev job" a lot. I've helped half a dozen people land their 1st or 2nd tech job. Assuming they already have tech talent, I essentially offer them the above advice. It works at that level but it works for senior roles too! As a hiring manager, you want to talk to qualified people about your open role.
Good luck!
Edit: formatting only
- The #2 source of candidates was almost universally meetups in my customer development interviews. Meeting people in person works! You don't have to be a referral although it does help.
- It's pretty easy at a small company to figure out who the hiring manager is and contact them via LinkedIn/Meetup/etc. At a big company, this can be hard or impossible but you are much more likely to know somebody at a big company who can put you in touch. Absolute worst case, reach out to the big company recruiter on LinkedIn asking for some details on a specific role and they might put you in touch directly or they'll get your questions answered some way. The recruiter 100% will talk to you. They are paid good money to find qualified people like you.
- While I said earlier it isn't a numbers game and you should only apply to roles/companies where you're a fit, to some degree it is a numbers game. Sometimes jobs are posted to a company website and the role isn't really available. Maybe they already have a candidate in mind. If you apply to ~3-4 jobs and don't hear anything, that isn't super uncommon. However, most people feel obligated to actually give you a direct answer if you contacted them directly.
That's totally true. I also choose the environment where I will be working and what conditions will be.
I prefer working remotely and have flexible working hours. It keeps me motivated.
"Your job posting probably sucks". I agree with it too. Because some recruiters write me that their company offers free alcohol in their office for stressful situations. I told them it looks unprofessional and seems that they just drink at their office. She said to me that people hate boring descriptions and I'm wrong.
But you know that more people like a healthy lifestyle. Especially in Silicon Valley. Do you agree?
So, if you sell your company, find more information about a candidate (their interests, lifestyle, values). Instagram, Facebook, Twitter show you who a person is. It helps you to write the best offer to a candidate.
Currently, I'm using three ways to find a job: FB groups, Networking, and Freelance Marketplaces. I used to get projects on Upwork but right now I check job boards. BTW, if you want to save your time searching for projects, I found a service on Reddit comments that aggregates freelance projects from job boards (https://periodix.net/). I like it because it doesn't sell me bad projects.
It’s one thing to take an algorithms course, and it’s another to excel at competitive programming, and still another to use those skills on the spot in an interview. Surely like any other admissions process, one can train for technical interviews in a group setting.
I think the middle and smaller companies need to change their processes more. If they just copy what the large companies do without understanding they don't have the same ability to attract candidates and pay high salaries they will just lose good people that they actually really need.
I think both algorithmic questions and work samples have an important role.
Algorithmic questions are presented with a time lot, you get an idea of how the candidate thinks through problems. These questions I think reflect general intelligence.
Work samples reflect effort and experience, which is also important.
People like to complain about one or the other like they're entitled to a job. It's hard to hire senior engineers because there aren't very many good ones, a mediocre engineer who hangs on for 5-10 years is now a "senior engineer."
You're not special. If you want a high paying job of your choosing you have to earn it. Only a vocal whiny minority is heavily complaining online. If you think you're highly competent and the problem is with all of these companies, in whose best interest it is to hire good people, you should think again.
I'm a senior engineer at one of the top tech companies. I hold the opinion the interview processed is heavily biased towards college grads or kids who are fresh on algorithms.
I think this helps us hire mostly kids who are book smart but aren't necessarily great (or even "good") employees... I'll do some hand waving here and define good as some combination of being driven and motivated, being able to work independently, and actually caring about what they're doing.
The question is then - well, how do we do this better? Honestly, I'm not sure. Hiring quality workers is a difficult problem. Technical interviews allow you to somewhat measure one of the key aspects of your hire. That being said, some people aren't made to stand in front of a white board and get judged. They don't handle that situation really well, and just because of that, they'll make mistakes that they might not otherwise make.
Absolutely. I'm at FAANG, been here almost a decade. I've met many fellow engineers who lack basic problem solving skills, curiosity to learn more about the environment they're developing in (e.g. Linux), and diligence to do a good job. School doesn't teach you those things, nor does conventional whiteboard interviewing select for these qualities.
I spent way too much time/energy on my last team covering for other people who were more senior than me.
The questions being asked aren't extremely challenging, they can be trained for. Willingness to learn new things (even if useless) and put in the effort to pass interviews is a positive signal imo.
On that note, it seems like HN has assumed the only work that exists is writing CRUD apps and not worrying about performance. There are many roles where you do need to have a strong understanding of performance and algorithms, and those are the difference between a smooth rollout and crashes in the middle of the night.
Does that mean its the candidates fault when they can't find a job?
I am running a tech recruitment agency and this month I had TWO engineers who refused to take offers because the companies (two different ones) basically grilled them too much in the processes and showed off an insufficient company culture. I know both firms rather well and their environment is actually good. Seems like firms who aren't yet having a brand name like Google but who are sufficiently good tend to be arrogant enough to scare of engineers but not good enough to make them accept an offer.
The arrogance of some firms might seem irrational but it can be explained by "catastrophe avoidance". Most of the time, hiring a bad engineer is really much much worse than rejecting a good candidate - that is especially true in Europe, where it is hard to fire people. Also, every job description is a set of tasks that is supposed to be done by a person who'd better be REPLACEABLE. If you wait sufficiently long, YOU WILL FIND SOMEONE ELSE WHO FITS ALSO OR BETTER. Due to the nature of the employer-employee relationship, firms will still be "the ones on top".
I am in a good place right now, and I get head-hunted a lot. Sometimes I answer the calls thinking "why not see what's out there?".
I can't be more annoyed when the guys in front of me just assume there is nothing else I want in life than to get into their company.
There is so much more to technical hiring that a leader has to know about and consider. If anyone would like to read a different perspective, I recently finished a long blog series (~60 pages if it were a book) that tries to consider a more complete human approach:
https://medium.com/@productivitypinata/i-got-99-problems-and...
Looking forward to reading your post!
There were no breaks. When I went to urinate, it took time out from their quiz. Someone stood outside the door.
Interviewing is mentally exhausting: a couple of hours in I started to flag from lack of food. By the end of the 5 hours, after eating and regaining my abilities, I thought that an environment that didn't give me a moment to eat during the courting phase, wouldn't care that much for my welfare once I'd actually signed on.
After a couple of days they got back, assuming I was still interested, and told me feedback which consisted of "really knows his stuff, but is often a poor communicator". Yes, so is everyone when they're presenting for 5 hours.
From my perspective as a job seeker, it's pretty obvious that recruiters really just don't care. And the weird mental games being played on applicants with increasingly stupid and inflated requirements only means you're going to have fewer applicants.
They don't understand: I don't need your job, your recruiter called me, so what is it $COMPANY_NAME has to offer me that's better than my current senior level gig?
So it's not just that you're selling (as opposed to buying) because the candidate is "senior", you're selling because you're trying to lure someone away from a job they already have. Asking someone how much they're making now so that you can offer them the same salary or a measly ten percent more and then giving a homework assignment is not exactly enticing someone to switch jobs!
Why? Two reasons:
- If the coding sample is in a language (or large framework) that I will learn on the job, I don't think I will have any success. Something that's a 20-minute job for one person could be a 5 hour "learning exercise" for me.
- If the sample is something like a bugfix or enhancement where I have to go through the whole process, the time commitment is just too large. I have to come up to speed with new frameworks, conventions, idioms, layouts, designs, which is time consuming. Then, the review process itself may be time consuming, or slow to get feedback if company engineers don't see my work as a priority.
I prefer coding samples that require very little ramp-up and process. Let me use a language that I'm familiar with. (If I will learn a language on the job, let's agree on a language that I and the evaluating engineer are comfortable with.) The coding exercise should be fun, without assuming knowledge of extensive frameworks or processes.
In general, good coding assignments look like a high school coding competition, or a topcoder question.
[Edit]: What I've really liked, in the past, was a company that did a very basic coding sample instead of a phone screening. It took me about 90 minutes to write, and was rather fun.
What I had to do was write a small program that navigated a maze. Navigation occurred by loading parts of the maze through a web service. Other than that, there were no requirements for language, framework, process, ect.
In short, I didn't have to onboard myself, or have extensive domain knowledge, in order to do the exercise.
I find coding exercises that require extensive domain knowledge are only useful when screening subject experts. IE, we're hiring someone who has extensive knowledge in language X with framework Y and design patterns Z. Sometimes teams need domain experts, other times they need experienced engineers who learn the tools on the job.
[Edit 2] The statement "When hiring senior engineers, the company doesn’t choose the candidate, the candidate chooses the company." is very important when choosing a skillset. Part of what sells a job to me is the opportunity to work on a new language, framework, ect. This is why coding assignments that require extensive domain knowledge are, ultimately, a turn-off.
Stuff like that just means it's time to walk away from the interview.
I think the proces of hiring or applying works best when it's a conversation between equals. Both the employer and applicant have something of value to offer, and both expect something of equal value in return.
Many employers and applicants act like the other side should be happy to talk to them (they're granting them a favor). If you really think the other side has more to gain from talking to you than yourself, why did you decide to have the conversation in the first place?
Sure, markets are not perfect, so the most popular employer in a city and the best engineer with nowhere-to-find expertise might both be able to act as a buyer. For the rest of us: We're buying, and we're selling.
What startups need is engineers who can show up to work, understand requirements, point out potential shortcomings, write code on an approximate timeline and be willing to fix their mistakes. As it turns out, you don't always need a senior engineer to do that. You certainly don't need a 10x rockstar ninja engineer.
Where I've seen startups struggle in the past is fostering a culture of mentorship. When you're hiring fresh grads or people early in their careers, your employees will want someone to give them honest and personalized advice. It's pretty hard for people that are early in their careers to fill that role, so you may need some senior engineers to do that.
Overall, I think this article is a bit fanciful in the expectations it makes around recruiting. Sharing stuff like internal processes, team size etc are definitely helpful to the candidate but are costly to the employer. This information may be confidential or provide a competitive advance. They may also vary by team will definitely vary over time. Overall I think it's unrealistic to expect the company to be very forthcoming about this type of thing until they make the offer.
The interviewing stuff also seems to come from a good place but represents wishful thinking. Companies (even startups) hold significant leverage in 99% of interview situations and therefore are strongly inclined to err on the side of false negative. Their thought process goes like this: "sure, you may be amazing but because you're not willing to jump through my arbitrary hoops (6 hour coding exercise, 3 rounds of onsites, etc) I'm willing to hold out for someone who is equally as good."
I'm not saying any of this is good for the candidate, but it's unrealistic to expect companies to start to treat senior candidates any better given the way the labor market is set up. In fact, I'd expect this kind of treatment to get worse as the bumper crop of younger engineers trained in the late 2000s starts to level up in experience.
The point it gets across is very very clear and useful though.
EDIT: Well...fuck. Don't know how I missed that. He actually says it's to hide the poster.
Not revealing the employer (without going through the work of unblurring as the HN detectives have already done) was just an added bonus.
With that in mind, focusing on the bits highlighted here doesn't make sense. Attract smart/experienced/motivated candidates and your boring hiring process or your flawed onboarding process doesn't matter as much.
If something about this was too flashy, please let me know.
> 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 sweeping knowledge of the whole space.
Having said that, I actually agree with everything the article says.
Staff
Senior Staff
Principal
Senior Principal
Distinguished
Fellow
At best, somebody might have a "tech lead" title but it's not what people hire for.
_Typically_, companies hire for grad, junior, software engineer and senior software engineer.
Maybe principal once in a blue moon.
Another buddy with longterm CTO experience had 150 applications with a 2% hit-rate.
On the "better" AngelList CTO/Senior jobs we can clearly see that there's already 50-100 other applications submitted.
So is this really that big of an issue as presented?
they could have a 1,000 perfect candidates lining out the door willing to work for peanuts.
At that point they would adjust their expectation from "peanut" to "half a peanut" and they would still moan about "skill shortage".
* Candidate applies * Within 24 hours, the candidate has a personal reply from our in-house recruiter. That E-mail explains the entire interview process in detail and sets up a brief 15-20 min phone screen with the candidate if they're okay with said process.
1) The phone screen is mostly nothing more than a brief "psychopath test" (is this person nice to talk to or are they rude or condescending?). The recruiter talks to them about their own goals, aspirations - if we approached them, we skip the "why do you want to work here" part otherwise we ask them what appealed to them.
2) The candidate is given a take-home assignment (which has no time limit but has been vetted against internal staff to take no more than really about an hour), with a note attached that says "Hey, you're likely a great and talented candidate and I'm well aware that you may be thinking that this is a waste of your valuable time. What I can assure you is that a) I'm only doing this because our industry is a sewer ;), with no real standardized screenings b) As discussed in the first E-mail, there are no further technical "screenings" coming forward - if we go to the next phase, we'll just discuss your approach to the assignment for a bit and then it's "getting to know you" time. Internally, this technical assignment is not one where two reviewers can have different "reads"; there are things we're explicitly looking for to determine overall "level", mainly with readability, approach, things like that (as just one example, a senior level candidate will know about unit testing and show something along those lines in their solution).
3) Someone reviews the submission. We reply within 48 hours.
3a) If the candidate is a no fly we don't go forward, and tell them so. If the candidate asks why, I tell them explicitly what the assignment was looking for, provide links to get acquainted with those and encourage them to reapply at a later date (we hired someone who did exactly this - those are the kind of passionate ones you want to be working with).
3b) Candidate is a go-forward; the next step of the interview is simply a discussion about "The Alliance" (Reid Hoffman, great book, at least the first half) of what they'd like to do with their career and whether the company can harmonize that into something both parties are happy with, and a getting to know the candidate a bit deeply. I told candidates explicitly at this point not to stress, as this wasn't an interrogation but simply us understanding that - to tie this back to the original posting - they were interviewing us as much as we were interviewing them.
Our hire quality sharply increased after that. I left the company a year and a half ago but that process is still in place, relatively unaltered. In fact, one person left the company, went to another company and basically "stole" that interviewing approach because he thought it was so good for finding people but also treating them with respect (which is critically important and all too rare).
TL-DR; our industry, particularly around hiring, really sucks and it's an absolute crapshoot on both sides of the equation. It's sad and really depressing; I try not to spend too much time thinking about it and more time trying to mitigate it in my small corners of the world. =) I wish it were different.
It is incredibly hard to talk clearly about complex projects you’ve solved before in the specific tradeoff circumstances of some past project or job. Someone who can do that with great clarity is extremely hard to find and valuable.
I saw one comment that said something along the lines of hearing a candidate talk fluently about tech details (at a very specific implementation level) of past work, but then put them in front of a keyboard and they go “hmm urr uhh” or whatever.
This is frustratingly dumb. First of all, senior engineers should spend way, way more of their time thinking and directing architecture choices or prioritization than writing code, _especially_ in early stage projects or companies.
Second, I’m absolutely certain that the coding question you’re asking to generate this himming and hawing is some Cracking the Coding Interview bullshit trivia question that this senior engineer hasn’t thought about in 20 years since their algorithms class in college because they were too busy actually solving real business problems for people (including a few rare problems that involved detailed deep dives into novel or complex algorithmic solutions).
We harass and haze people with bullshit trivia, then turn around and don’t even ask them what problems they have really, actually solved before, or invent reasons to rationalize that if they solved a lot of problems before, they’re just some sort of smooth talker and somehow the only proof is if they memorized Floyd’s cycle detection algorithm or some other ludicrous bullshit.
What a deeply humanity-hostile industry it is!
what other industry has hiring rituals premised on assuming The Candidate is a shape shifting imposter and then testing The Candidate using various Gom Jabbars to verify The Candidate is a human who can code? do attorneys and doctors and professors device elaborate exams and gotcha questions to spring upon The Candidate because The Candidate might be a total fraud? to be honest, this implicit assumption that The Candidate is an outright liar and con-man and that we have to "catch" them in their lies before we let them into The Club has been an enormous turn off for me in this entire industry. and i'm saying that both as The Senior Engineer put in charge of hiring developers as well as being The Candidate dozens of times and having to go through multiple Voight-Kampf tests to prove "yes, i can code."
why don't attorneys and doctors have the same problems we do? they pay more, so the incentives are there for The Candidate to rote memorize a bunch of text books and talk impressively while being unable to perform The Work themselves. is the problem that anyone can call themselves a Software Engineer and there is no way to prove it? is the problem inherent to the nature of software itself, in that the problems we solve and the solutions we apply are constantly changing ephemeral logical abstractions which cannot be repeated because every context has a totally different set of constraints, so it always reduces to Apples vs Oranges? is the problem inherent to the nature of Nerds and Autists and the personality types who tend to become software engineers? is being a Coder the Nerd's version of The Jock's hazing rituals? are we Nerds just as big of bullies and assholes as The Jocks, bullying our own and shaming each other against meaningless goal posts? we often hear now about how our Industry lacks "diversity" and how we need to be more "inclusive" to women and blacks. well how do you think women and black people feel about our bizarre and harsh hiring rituals of hazing and shaming and accusing of being The Imposter and your Interview test is to prove to us that you are not? i think we as an industry need to tone down our bullying hiring rituals if we hope to ever stop being an elite club of oppressors.
just last week i got rejected as The Candidate because i didn't have 10 years of React experience. "sorry, you're not senior enough", even though i had twice the number of years of raw dev experience than the punk kid over ten years younger than me who was in charge of hiring. i have seen this happen to me a dozen times, where i am rejected because i know too much about a Domain, and can go into gory technical detail about internals and implementations, which intimidates The Juniors who know one Javascript framework and think they are Seniors and who don't want a Real Senior around who might take their promotion slot away from them.
i don't even think in terms of "Junior" and "Senior" anymore. those are not useful buckets to divide the vast world of software development. instead, i think in terms of "what rad shit have you coded and what gets you excited about code and what kinds of things do you wish you could code or what do you code for fun on nights and weekends?" sadly, the vast majority of "professional coders" draw a blank at that question and they have zero answer, because for them coding is just a job. they never even knew it was For The Love of the Game. general interest and curiosity seems to be a better litmus test, because "interest is aptitude", and if you're the kind of brain who takes things apart for fun to figure out how they work and then try to put the system back together, then that proves you're a left-brain thinking INT(J/P) type of mind who is naturally suited for software engineering. the rest can be taught or learned on The Job as needed to fill in the gaps.
* Candidate applies * Within 24 hours, the candidate has a personal reply from our in-house recruiter. That E-mail explains the entire interview process and sets up a brief 15-20 min phone screen with the candidate.
1) The phone screen is mostly nothing more than a brief "psychopath test" (is this person nice to talk to or are they rude or condescending?). The recruiter talks to them about their own goals, aspirations - if we approached them, we skip the "why do you want to work here" part otherwise we ask them what appealed to them.
2) The candidate is given a take-home assignment (which has no time limit but has been vetted against internal staff to take no more than really about an hour), with a note attached that says "Hey, you're likely a great and talented candidate and I'm well aware that you may be thinking that this is a waste of your valuable time. What I can assure you is that a) I'm only doing this because our industry is a sewer ;), with no real standardized screenings b) As discussed in the first E-mail, there are no further technical "screenings" coming forward - if we go to the next phase, we'll just discuss your approach to the assignment for a bit and then it's "getting to know you" time.
Internally, this technical assignment is not one where two reviewers can have different "reads"; there are things we're explicitly looking for to determine overall "level", mainly with readability, approach, things like that (as just one example, a senior level candidate will know about unit testing and show something along those lines in their solution).
3) Someone reviews the submission. We reply within 48 hours.
3a) If the candidate is a no fly we don't go forward, and tell them so. If the candidate asks why, I tell them explicitly what the assignment was looking for, provide links to get acquainted with those and encourage them to reapply at a later date (we hired someone who did exactly this - those are the kind of passionate ones you want to be working with).
3b) Candidate is a go-forward;
the next step of the interview is simply a discussion about "The Alliance" (Reid Hoffman, great book, at least the first half) of what they'd like to do with their career and whether the company can harmonize that into something both parties are happy with, and a getting to know the candidate a bit deeply. I told candidates explicitly at this point not to stress, as this wasn't an interrogation but simply us understanding that - to tie this back to the original posting - they were interviewing us as much as we were interviewing them.
Our hire quality sharply increased after that. I left the company a year and a half ago but that process is still in place, relatively unaltered. In fact, one person left the company, went to another company and basically "stole" that interviewing approach because he thought it was so good for finding people but also treating them with respect (which is critically important).
TL-DR; our industry, particularly around hiring, really sucks and it's an absolute crapshoot on both sides of the equation. It's sad and really depressing; I try not to spend too much time thinking about it and more time trying to mitigate it in my small corners of the world. =) I wish it were different.