The hidden costs of engineering time in technical interviewing
blog.interviewing.io
blog.interviewing.io
"It is a funnel, you look at the stages, and at the end there is a great engineer that is usually working for a long period for the company.
Each level has expenses and conversions. Go an optimize keeping in mind the constraints."
But what I noticed is that is all about your company specifics and how you overcome the trade off...
For example the average new startup in unsexy industry has problems to get any body in the funnel. Getting somebody that know how to write some code can be a challenge... interview is more about persuading them to accept the job.
Great "sexy" companies have ton of people applying and would do everything they ask them to do. The problem for the company is to efficiently select those people.
When you have enough candidates, somebody may think: "We can save time and make accurate evaluations by giving a screening test offline to evaluate most of the relevant skills of the person!". Unfortunately the test takes on average 10 hours to finish.
Result: mediocre candidates desperate for a job try so hard to get everything done, but the great engineer has plenty of options and does not want to spend 10h on a test. In the end all great people that you would like to hire quit in the process.
If an organization was good at firing fast, would people be willing to take a job there? Would you be able to truly assess an engineer within a month in a way you wouldn't in an hour?
The first two weeks are usually a wash. But you might be able to get more signal in that second two weeks?
Does that same equation hold true if it's contract to hire? Would you take such a job?
For people who already have full-time jobs it seems like a much worse deal, though. I certainly wouldn't take it, at least - it makes very little sense to give up the certainty of my current job in exchange for being maybe unemployed in a month.
Most internships are for hiring, not the labour the company gets from them. They function as three month long interviews but unlike a short term contract leading to hire it’s expected that they won’t immediately convert into a job as students return to university for another year. They’re also far more opaque to other employers on a cv. If someone did internships at three different companies over their degree they could have wanted to see many different companies or they could have performed below expectations at all three places. If you see their cv you won’t know.
I suppose it diverges more if you consider internships prior to the final one due to the weird optionality on following intern seasons, but I think that's a minority of internships due to the hiring goal (once you start looking at 2+ year lead-times before a potential full-time start date it becomes much harder to justify).
It's an interesting question. Having worked for organisations that fire fast, and those that don't, in general I tend to see it as a positive cultural indicator [1] - albeit one that needs some digging to verify - but I can understand that it might unsettle some applicants.
In fact nowadays I favour it strongly enough that next time I'm the one going through the interview process I'll probably investigate. I may even ask outright although, again, "What does somebody have to do to get fired around here?" is a question open to some misinterpretation.
[1] Working with difficult or unproductive people for long periods can be hugely draining on a team, not to mention hugely damaging commercially. Left unchecked it can even destroy your business.
People in places where they fire easily and often are too insecure. That means taboos over things that should be discussion and fear of disagreement.
So, we as an industry default to "no" instead of "yes."
Screening tests and "case studies"/homework that takes 10-20 hours of time are abundant to weed out anyone who might be a pain to manage. They don't want independent thinkers or challengers who think out of the box, they just want 'doers' who will follow every twist and turn of senior management 'vision'.
As a non-German or non-EU, they then offer you a craptastic package of maybe 40-60k EUR before taxes (local Germans will get anywhere from 60-90k for a similar position). If you say no, congrats, they've succeeded in weeding out the next group of annoyances: anyone who wants to be compensated fairly.
The result is startups get the exact kind of workers they love - the kind that is easily exploited both in terms of work quantity and financially.
European startups like to whine about "shortage of talent" but what they're really complaining about is the lack of total naive locals and foreign talent willing to move to be exploited. Also startups in Europe usually DO NOT adhere to the "EU work life balance" that is parroted around the internet. You get worked like you're in America, minus the American salaries.
I can't say I've had the same experience working for start ups in London, in fact I've had the opposite - competitive pay (probably about 20% less than working in tier 1/2 banks but above market in industry), good benefits (incl. private health, gym etc.), fair work life balance (incl. holiday days and WFH policies) and rewarding work with intelligent colleagues. Non-EU/UK workers that I've worked with have the same experience as far as I can tell (perhaps even more positive, considering that some of them require visa sponsorships).
I can't say that I've found the attitude of the companies in London or Amsterdam to be materially different from what was described. That doesn't mean that it is the whole of Europe, but I'm willing to doubt that it is an isolated cultural thing.
Given that we both have wildly differing experiences with London, I'm willing to grant that London might have unique and positive offers now (my experience is from at least 3-4 years ago) or that I have at the time completely missed the healthy companies.
I think social / cultural differences actually is not enough to differentiate European start-ups. If nothing else, there is a tremendous (deliberate?) effort to follow American standards of management and GTD. However, at the same time, Venture Capital and management overall seem to be a bit more risk averse in Europe than USA.
But thats just my opinion of what is the common denominator here in Europe.
(Something else that would help is paying employees a lot more than $500 for making an in-house referral. I know of cases where locally where in-house referrals could have happened but by referring through a chosen recruiter got the referred a $1000 referral fee instead of his company's $500 referral fee... but that's a separate rant.)
why would a company take the word of biased party ( recruting companies) about the ability of a candidate?
It's not idle theory... I've seen this work.
But this is actually a good idea. Not sure why a service like this doesn't exist.
* employee is disregarding an official process, to enrich themselves at a cost to the organization
* employee might be involved, officially or unofficially in deciding acceptance of the candidate, without the organization having an opportunity to manage that
Besides the immediate impact of each incident, this can lead to a culture in which such things are viewed as OK, which can then escalate to much worse incidents/scandals, bad morale, dysfunction.
You could even add more metrics, like tying amount of referral fee employee closely to some quantified performance of the hire over a meaningful time period.
Ideally, I'd prefer a very simple goal alignment, in which the employee doesn't get a referral fee, and instead is motivated by professionalism, wanting the organization to make good hires, of people they'd like to work with, and wanting those hires to further the success of the project/organization. (I realize this is not the situation in many organizations, but it's what I'd prefer, and throwing referral fees into it seems to head in the other direction.)
(Been thinking about getting back into it for local Boston companies. Anyone out there interested in working with me to find you great, Boston-local candidates? Please feel free to drop me a line.)
The correct metric is the opportunity cost of that hour - the lost productivity for that hour.
As an approximation take total revenue and divide by total engineering hours.
If you are hiring engineering because engineering is a bottleneck (not just hiring due to churn), then the metric is realistic. It would still be an underestimation in his calculation because he isn't including the hours taken to get new hire up to speed (oppositely assuming hire is due to churn).
This does assume every hour spent on engineering is equal, and that's not even close to true. In most companies about 50% of the hours account for 99% of the revenue. Companies spend lots of time on things that don't make any money, and in some cases they knowingly spend time on things that lose money.
If you can identify the waste then you can easily find engineering time to spend on things like hiring with no impact on the bottom line at all.
Yeah, the other 50% is interviewing. :P
Edit: To be clear, corporations are morally bankrupt slow AI whose goals are increasingly tangential to ours. However, their proponents must have _some_ justification for valuing what we value (in this case, candidates' time), or else admit the above moral bankruptcy.
I am not being sarcastic, I am challenging this forum's many corporatists to reassure me that corporations are motivated to accommodate a basic decency represented by valuing candidates' time.
Downvotes on a simple question, as usual, evidence this forum's continued inadequacy as a harbor for empirical discussion.
I am not trolling, nor sarcastic. I am simply ignorant of the corporatist argument for valuing candidates time.
Airbnb bought me onsite for 2 day interview process and kicked me out after 1 st interview.
I went to the beach and museums in SFO for 2 days. Not the best use of my vacation time but not the worst either.
Particularly if you treat a well connected talented engineer poorly, and they tell their friends, or even end up not using your service in the future out of spite.
This may be true. I have only seen candidacy experience complaint posts where the author deliberately neglected to mention the company's name.
I've seen close friends have all-day interviews, or require spec work (requiring higher end hardware and a couple days of dedicated work) as part of the interview process. Peers blow off those companies or knock them down a tier when seeking work.
Just having an all-day interview can make scheduling way more difficult, delaying it until that other job with a 2-hour interview has happened and moved onto negotiating benefits.
Unless I am mistaken, this only happens when candidates' experiences are shared, and only impacts business decisions if shared widely.
The same applies to 8 hour interviews or multiple interviews. It might not be common place, but I've learned to ask upfront about the start-to-finish hiring process.
I'm not saying its unwarranted or even a hidden cost to the business--just that it raises the burden and likely will filter out qualified candidates. I do think networking and shared experiences you mentioned should be thought about. That's often the best/cheapest way to get qualified candidates (why referral bonuses are a thing). If candidates are telling each other informally or on something like GlassDoor how onerous the interview process is, you have to compensate by reaching out with things like ads and job fairs and do the filtering yourself.
I would much prefer if we had a "hiring department" who are technically knowledgeable, talk to applicants, maybe give them tests and build up a pool of candidates who then can be interviewed by the actual engineering teams.
Even after you hire them, and you see them under-perform, it can be difficult to know if it's because of some intrinsic problem (e.g., just not so smart, or laziness), or if the problem is with the employer (e.g., not managing work, lack of communication, poor team integration). Yes, there are obvious stars and duds, but the middle is a vast gray area.
As engineers, we naturally try to turn hiring and performance assessment into an analytical questions that have clear answers, or that at least can follow a clear process. However, it still seems like voodoo.
This is one of the reasons that many companies work with us at Insight (insightdatascience.com), as the interviews to join the program are done by Data Scientists and Engineers.
These numbers are a bit nuts.
Agree with a lot of what is written tho, but not this crazy number.
I don't know much about what recruiters earn, but for a senior engineer that is not crazy.