Eric's Guide to Hiring Software Developers | Hacker News Reader

Eric's Guide to Hiring Software Developers

lawler.io

140 pointsgalfarragem29 comments

This is really solid advise for pre-interview hiring. If you are hiring or will ever be hiring, read it. Aside from some word choice, there is only one thing I (and the author!) am not sold on:

> The Who book recommends selling this as some kind of cool, Disney-styled Fast Pass, where people can go through a step or two of your funnel and get advance notice of new listings, a shorter trip through the process, etc

This is in reference to always interviewing even when not hiring so you have a warm funnel. You are interviewing real people with real feelings and real obligations. Be very upfront with them if this is a warm-funnel interview and not a potential soon-to-be job offer. One of my worst interview experiences was after scoring at the 98th percentile of some organization's test, I was told via writing that they are not hiring now, but look forward to reaching out when a position opens up. Yeah, no thanks, I'm trying to be employed like immediately.

Side note: I really like the superscript functionality in the post.

A few of the things are sort of illegal in EU, esp. recording without notice.

Holding hiring databases is problematic too due to GDPR.

I missed the recording part, and, yeah, gdpr for sure.

The one absolutely, infuriating thing about jobs that will cause me to throw keyboards through windows:

A 'requirement' or a 'minimum' must be exactly that.

If they are negotiable, they aren't a requirement or minimum.

GET THIS RIGHT, GODDAMNIT. THOSE WORDS HAVE DEFINITIONS FOR A REASON.

If you can't come up with any, then chances are they aren't actually required! And if you don't actually have any, you don't have to write those words in the job description! Fucking easy, right?

This helps everyone. I don't waste time applying for jobs where I don't meet the requirements, and you don't waste time rejecting me for the same reason.

The fact that this isn't followed is why we have dumb job-seeker rules like "just apply even if you don't meet those requirements". It's throwing common sense out along with the keyboards. And yes, fuck recruiting companies that tell you to do this, too.

The thing is that when you’re hiring, assuming you have some autonomy in the process, your ‘minimum requirements’ are always somewhat negotiable. If someone is truly amazing in an important skill that you need, but doesn’t meet some other so-called requirements, you very well might hire that person, even choosing them over others that do meet all the ‘requirements’. At the same time, you do want to establish some sort of minimum bar so you aren’t swamped with wildly underqualified applicants. You just hope the exceptional people will realize that they’re exceptional and that exceptions can always be made. It’s a difficult balance to get right.

That said, I totally understand the frustration. These should not be called requirements, since they aren’t really, but this is just how life works. You’re better off adjusting to the fact that there’s always wiggle room than becoming bitter about it.

If you need general talent like that, make a general talent job posting or put a message with a generic jobs@company email address at the top of your job board.

That signals that you're willing to consider people who don't currently meet any requirements on any of your jobs.

That also gives you the option to shut it down if general hiring has to freeze or you stop having the time to review general talent because you need to prioritize hiring for specific roles.

I really think that for a lot of positions out there, there really are very few requirements actually needed (e.g. security clearances, certificates). Everything else really falls under ideal or nice-to-have.

Requirements changing based on the candidate means they can probably be reduced or eliminated entirely. That might even increase the talent pool that you can choose from by inviting others to apply.

Hell, maybe we can start putting the same effort into writing good job ads that candidates put into their resumes, cover letters, and interviewing skills. It'd be nice to have some reciprocation in the effort department.

It's not that hiring managers are using the words incorrectly. It's that their predictions about their own future behaviour are wrong. They think they'll have a lot of applicants, and hope that they'll reduce their own workload by helping the lower-quality candidates self-select out of the process, or maybe getting HR to do it for them.

In practice it doesn't work that way. There aren't that many applicants, and none of them are exactly what the requirements specify. So they have to do the work of really understanding a candidate's skill set and experience, and then sketch out the onboarding and training that would be required to get them up to speed. Which is fine, because there aren't clear-cut predictors for success at these sorts of jobs anyway.

I thought exhaustive requirements were for disqualifying Americans so H-1B positions could be filled.

> About four times a year, new studies come out with an ever-lower percentage of how many job seekers won’t apply to a job unless they meet precisely 100% of your listing’s overly-strict requirements. Even worse, all of the studies have a clearly highlighted gender difference between men and women: fewer women than men apply for a job with requirements they don’t meet.

Thank you! It's amazing how many hiring managers I've worked with who aren't aware of this fact at all. It's literally your job to understand hiring, and being aware of the latest research needs to be part of that.

It's especially important since I see every other possible hiring practice on both a "must do" and "must not do" list every week, but this one is universally confirmed. If you've learned nothing else about hiring in the past 10 years, know this.

Did they mean to write that the percentage of job seekers applying is dropping? because a lower percentage of people not applying means that more people are applying.

No link to the studies, even in the article. I couldn't find any after a visit to DDG. Would be interesting to know the underlying metrics here

> FAANG is Facebook, Apple, Amazon, LinkedIn, and Google.

LinkedIn? Was that a tongue in cheek joke that I've missed,

Netscape it is

I thought Netflix?

It's actually NeXT.

Enron

"FLAAG"

In my mind, Facebook is not really a tech company, LinkedIn and Neflix are not really in the same class (they're added to make for a cool acronym), and Google is actually much more than the search engine. So the only acronym that works is AAA.

Yikes, any place where a senior manager or executive exudes the attitude “do more with less” is a place to avoid.

I know one team that is doing everything the other way around. They don't inverview their new hires, they don't test them, they basically take everybody who wants to join and let them show themselves. Aside from that, they rely on newcomers public profiles, in GitHub, StackOverflow, and so on. Check this out: https://www.yegor256.com/2016/03/01/how-we-interview-program...

25% of engineering managers are named Eric. It's science

As usual "pay well!" isn't in the list.

It kinda is. At the very beginning he mentions that his startup couldn't pay as well as FAANG.

Most people won't take a pay cut when switching jobs, unless they are moving to a place with a lower cost of living. But a lot of people are kinda elastic on pay raises. Here's a list of stuff that can stimulate different people more than a larger pay raise when switching jobs:

- becoming a manager - no longer being a manager - a tech stack they want to work with - a company mission that aligns with their morals - stable office hours - office layout - proximity to home

Paying well helps, but unless you're an ICE contractor located in a hangar in Fort Nowhere hiring people to rewrite a legacy COBOL application in RPG in three months you probably have other ways to attract more and more diverse applicants rather than just stacks of money.

You forgot:

- title change

And man is that a head shaker.

Some say hiring is as complex as life itself

I was a bit irritated by the section about employees not doing outreach well enough.

Who does hiring reflect well upon? I’m not bothering people in my network so you can look like an effective recruiter to your boss. Maybe employees don’t try because you don’t give them a reason to, and they have incentives in the other direction, like not being the guy in the friend group that’s always talking about how awesome their company is. When in reality, our industry is made up of people hopping between companies so they are more similar than dissimilar.

>always talking about how awesome their company is.

no need for "always talking", or pretty much talking at all - a new over-the-top-packaged Model X and the second home in Los Gatos do all the "outreach", and the casual mentioning of 500K+ total comp and an FB 600K+ offer not moving you because it is much more heavier on stock than your current comp is all the talking needed to easily convince me that my friend's company is awesome (even though i had thought that it is a pretty crappy one until i learned of the money they pay, and they happen to be more awesome even than Google who gave me pretty low offer ) and to make me sorry for failing to get into such an awesome company :).

Is this a typo or total misunderstanding? In this article:, the author said "FAANG is Facebook, Apple, Amazon, "LinkedIn" (Wrong! it should be Netflix) and Google. ..." Frankly, if someone wants to give a "hiring (software developer) guide" but does not even know what FAANG is, I seriously doubt how good this guide could possibly be.

This is a trivial mistake. Many people outside of HN haven't even heard "FAANG", much less what it means. A lot of very smart people commit such trivial mistakes all the time.

I haven't gone through this guide, but judging through other comments, it isn't that bad (some even praised it).

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