Ask HN: Any startups solving for software engineering hiring?
I'm curious if anyone on the Ycombinator community is working or knows of any startups working to try to improve the software engineer hiring process.
The idea that you can assess an engineers ability to code AND collaborate with your team in a 3-5 hour window is just a losing battle. Hackerrank and triplebyte are good for the very large corps to rule people out and slim down the funnel. Not a real reflection of the work, code, or problems you will be solving in the job if hired.
15yrs tech recruiting corporate and agency. I have seen almost every tool out there and I will say very few have stood the test of time. Hiring is really hard and the fact remains there just isnt a one size fits all solution. Find the tools that suit your goals.
Personally I think small companies would be far better served investing in sourcing tools to attract and located the right talent. Have your leadership pitch these people directly hunt talent versus tools to automate volume (95% of which are not the people you are seeking any way).
What is the entire interview process to solve, the problem is trust. Can we trust this person to know what they claim they know, can we trust this person to be a good member of the team etc.
The reason we do code interviews, whiteboard exercises, culture fit assesstments is to make sure we want trust that hire.
Every company tries and checks for different things, the question that I been asking is there a model for someone to provide 'trust by proxy'
Literally every one of those things I would dismiss a company for using.
During my last job search I even politely called out a couple of companies for using them. I did get a nice response that could be summed up as: "yeah we figured someone would say they are bullshit and we agree"
I did get interviews with those companies but declined
It's not like having a bad date, it's them fucking up even asking you out on a date
Now not politely I would say that assessments and personality tests and all the other BS thrown an applicants way are stupid, easily game, a downright waste of everyones time and give an immediate indicator the company sucks. The person that thought it was a good idea at the company should be replaced.
Ideally candidates should be able to toss an assessment back to the person doing the hiring to take on the companies behalf
What's good for the goose after all
These tools are fine if you are a top 5 firm in your area and offering a 6 figure salary. Everyone does the Google take-home.
If you aren't Google, your completion rate for whatever assessment you use is going to get lower and lower the less you pay or prestige you have. Because strong candidates are already moving to the next stages at better companies.
> Personally I think small companies would be far better served investing in sourcing tools to attract and located the right talent. Have your leadership pitch these people directly hunt talent versus tools to automate volume (95% of which are not the people you are seeking any way).
Spend less on tools and more on signing bonus. Campus career fair is probably the best place to start, along with referral for more senior positions. Also, keep in mind HR is there to sign documents and offers, not to screen technical candidates.
For an engineer, getting a random non-technical recruiter's message is almost always spam.
But getting one from the CTO, no matter if job hunting or not, is always worth at least a response.
Most'solutions' that claim that recruitment is broken, don't understand recruitment.
YCombinator funds startups, and startups need scale.
Hiring is very personal, very hard to automate and scale.
Often, tech hiring startups start in a creative way but later become a database of profiles where recruiters can source, similar to Linkedin. Aline Lerner, founder of https://interviewing.io, wrote about this problem here: https://blog.alinelerner.com/ive-been-an-engineer-and-a-recr...
Looking at the link you just shared, she says there's a 45 min recruiter screen, 1 hr technical phone screen, 6 hr engineering onsite, 1 hr recruiter onsite.
That's four different parts that can be outsourced and specialized in. Codility probably replaces the technical phone screen. Onsite doesn't necessarily need to be in-house; both sides dread technical interviews.
I'd rather do a 15 hour interview with a middle man like Triplebyte who can forward my details to multiple startups, rather than do two 6 hour interviews with different companies with a 20% chance of getting accepted. As a hiring startup, we also dread doing those interviews, because we could be filtering out a perfectly good person and it's already hard enough to convince people to join a startup.
Value judgments aside, you have to respect Amazon's efficiency.
On the one hand, this opens up opportunities for people with a non-traditional background who might not have made it through a resume screen before. On the other hand, it can be dehumanizing. I also only think this process applies to entry-level. When companies try to use it for people who have experience they run into pushback since the experienced person is not just looking for any job in the same way a new grad would normally be.
For some reason, degrees and certifications in software are not reliable. You could have a PhD in math and they'll still make you do algorithms on whiteboards. It sounds like the proper solution isn't to improve the interviewing process, but to improve education, or rather have a better certification process that makes these things unnecessary.
We are a startup trying to improve the software engineering hiring process. What we are doing?
- We are standardizing the way of evaluate the engineering tech skills - Our tech Mentors Community design cool and real world challenges - We analyze the code and give feedback to all the candidates and as a company you get access to the code and a tech report like this--> https://bit.ly/2ZLzNKY - If you are a candidate looking for a new project just with one code challenge you can apply to multiple companies --> https://bit.ly/vetteddevs
We just launch our MVP, if you have any doubts I will be happy to answer any question.
found from / more info here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25790355
"a system that will automatically sin up a github project with a pull-request to review, or an issue to fix. Further test-types are planned but I will launch with these two. No matter the skill level of an IC engineer, they will need to carry out effective code reviews and fix bugs. I think that the PR test will be good for senior candidates while the bug fix test will be good for junior - mid-level engineers."
However, afaik none of them have even broached the personality aspect, which is imo is their biggest failing and quite solvable.
Imo triplebyte/interviewing.io don't have any special objectivity, but are trying to reduce the number of interviews and barriers-to-entry.
Also none of these platforms seems to have any critical mass, or made too much progress toward a critical mass recently (afiak).
One example that comes to mind is I have some outstanding coworkers who seem to just care/try 2-3x as hard as others. The value difference is huge but it's not a strictly technical skill.
1. Why there is no consistency for hiring?
2. Why companies have to be so different in assessing values ?
3. Why standardized leetcode kind of problems? instead focus on creativity & unconventional thinking?
etc.,
Some managers want a quiet, obedient, polite, gentle, patient, effective-communicator who will never embarrass or break anything.
Some managers want a self-starter genius who will solve an incredibly hard problem by himself without help (since he won't get any) and couldn't care less about anything else.
Etc.
>1. Why there is no consistency for hiring?
Because there is no consistency in humans. Jobseekers lie to me all the time, so do companies.
>2. Why companies have to be so different in assessing values ?
Because companies consist of humans, which are inconsistent, see 1.
>3. Why standardized leetcode kind of problems? instead focus on creativity & unconventional thinking?
That is only a SF/Nyc/big tech thing. Normal firms here in Switzerland (or Europe) rarely do this. The big brand names do it because they can.
Google et al. has a revolving door of applicants, so they can make them suffer. Also, if you show that you can study 3 months for an interview to balance a red black tree, you likely will do whatever the firm tells you to do. You likely will be a good worker!
If you are full of creativity & unconventional thinking, being employed (especially in a big firm) isn't a good bet, start your own firm instead. I did exactly that because I suffered as an employee, not because of the work part, programming was great, but because of the being employed part, and this is how I became a self-employed tech recruiter. Btw. if you look for work or career tips, my email is in my HN handle.
Ehh, that's not what I've seen. Most engineers at Google I've met and interacted with, even worked with in the past who are now at Google - are absolutely, undisputedly and unarguably exceptional. Google is not your 1980's regimented company where the boss tells whatever and the employees just follow. I've seen that type of company culture more in Europe (esp Germany) and Japan than anywhere else. Google empowers their employees and the culture is right up there with creative and unconventional thinking. It's not as cool as it used to be but still good.
Starting your own firm sometimes is a less creative endeavor. You're massively limited first and foremost with talent pool, experts and funding. At Google, you have one of the most rich environments for creativity - you've got funding, you have PMs, you have exceptional engineers all in great morale, all the resources to make you successful while getting paid well.
Hiring is the exact same way.
Frameworks/programming languages at last have some logic to it. JavaScript is good for web, C good for hardware; humans are just random!