Ask HN: Having trouble getting senior applicants, wondering what to do about it | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Having trouble getting senior applicants, wondering what to do about it

282 pointsthrow1138774 comments

We're a fairly typical run-of-the-mill mid-size enterprise software vendor trying to hire for fully-remote SWEs in the "DevOps" software space (Linux, containers, k8s, yadda yadda). We post in the usual places including Who's Hiring but we haven't even managed to backfill a retirement from six months ago, and we're junior-heavy already. Benefits and salary are good (though salary isn't posted in the ad), and the people are great, though the work requires a reasonably deep understanding of the underlying platforms which a lot of people seem to dislike.

I'm wondering if the work being a higher percentage non-code is what's causing us trouble, if we're just rubbish at hiring in general, or if it's something else.

What's everyone else's experience attracting applications from senior talent in this market, and what is everyone doing to increase their attractiveness?

Current hiring process:

  - Resume screened by in-house recruiter
  - 30m call with them
  - Resume passed up to engineering
  - Hour-long call with hiring manager (typically the engineering manager of the team the candidate would join)
  - Take-home technical assignment (~4h) or similar at candidate's choosing
  - Presentation of technical assignment to the team
  - Offer

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> Take-home technical assignment (~4h) or similar at candidate's choosing

If I can get a similarly-paying job at a place that doesn't do this, I'll skip you.

Many seniors (actual seniors, not 3-years-of-experience seniors) have a network and can say "hey I'm looking" and instantly have multiple options that won't have them do more than talk to the team and manager for an hour or two. If that.

Lol, take home technical assignment. Why would I ever? I'd much rather have a comfortable conversation with someone who has worked with me in the past. I'm never, ever doing a 4 hour assignment for you.

Agree, I will laugh at you asking me to do anything at home before we have a contract

Like... interview?

I think "senior" has at least two types. There's the FAANG-alum seniors who are used to and will put up with full-day or even multi-day interviews full of leetcode shit or "gotcha" edge-case quizzes about language features you trained yourself to avoid a decade ago or take-home assignments ("4 hours" sure except the other candidate put in 12 hours and lied about it, so...) for that sweet, sweet crazy-high comp. Unless you're offering these sorts a CTO position, they're not applying to your non-FAANG-tier-comp-and-security-and-presige company. Period.

Then there's senior in most of the rest of the industry. We don't do long, annoying interviews. If your process drags on we've already accepted one of our other offers. We don't make FAANG money (mostly) but we also don't put up with horseshit. You want me, or not? If not, 100 other companies do, so bye and have a nice day.

> ("4 hours" sure except the other candidate put in 12 hours and lied about it, so...)

Recently went through this. Got an email at 2pm saying "please run through this exercise". Looked at the doc, then decided to hit it. I submitted everything back before 6pm. It was around 2.5 hours, and I took a short break in the middle. I screen-captured my whole session (not sent in) but to have a little souvenir of the exercise. There's really not much way I could have 'cheated' on the time because there was only 4 hrs tops between sending the email and submitted my results.

Their estimate was 'we expect this to take 2-3 hours', and they weren't all that wrong. I could see someone less experienced taking more than 2 hours just on one of the bad queries - unless you've seen the pattern(s) before it's hard to recognize and refactor quickly.

> FAANG-alum seniors who are used to and will put up with full-day or even multi-day interviews full of leetcode shit or "gotcha" edge-case quizzes

As a current FAANG employee, I didn’t put up with that bullshit from anyone including FAANG companies.

People say this and I have yet to find a company that doesn't do some kind of technical assessment. But I have seen multiple coworkers with 10-20 years of experience as software engineers with glowing recommendations get fired because they couldn't write software. So I'm a little happier to have some bar for myself and coworkers to clear.

> I'm never, ever doing a 4 hour assignment for you.

Boo hoo, you need to spend four hours of your life to take home multiples of the median American family's income. It blows my mind how conceited some people in this industry can be, and I'm glad I don't work with them. This is one reason why the take home is a great filter.

You're not responding in good faith with your "boo hoo" comment. No one is crying here. The point here is there are many, many companies that don't require a 4 hour take home technical assessment, and thus people can decide to do them or not.

The post is about this topic, so the responses are about the topic. You think that 4 hour take home technical assessments are a reasonable filter. Awesome, you are a person who can apply for the position op is focused on.

Exactly the point they're missing - if everyone does it, it's part of the shit sandwich you have to eat. But if you're the only one doing it, there are entire classes of applicants that will pass you by.

Hiding that you're going to spring it on people should give you numbers, by the people who ghost you the moment it appears, if you wanted to test for it.

If I'm interviewing at multiple companies and they all do that, that's 4 hours per company I want to check out. And let's be honest, most of these I've been asked to do weren't reasonable to do, and do well, and double check, in four hours, despite the claim. Eight hours is more reasonable to do them properly, usually.

If I interview at three places, that's three days of unpaid work (or 6+ evenings after I've already worked a full day at my normal job), and if I'm already making "multiples of the median American family's income" elsewhere, then it becomes less attractive to put up with that, especially if other companies aren't asking for it.

Like I just can't find the energy to put up with Amazon's 2.5 hour span of unbroken time take-home test, no matter how desperate they make themselves sound or how often they contact me (which is almost every week at this point). When I last considered it, I was already having trouble juggling just finding holes in the day to manage about 30 interviews I ended up doing, across about 8 companies. I had no energy to study for, and then do, that exam on top of it (I did do three 45-60 minute exams, across three evenings, for three other companies, though).

> Like I just can't find the energy to put up with Amazon's 2.5 hour span of unbroken time take-home test

By the sounds of it, that test would be the best bit of your time at Amazon.

Haha, yeah that certainly hasn't helped motivate me to go through their process.

I assure you that the sort of person who is qualified for the original submitters job is not doing a “take home” test to get into Amazon. (raises hand).

> Boo hoo, you need to spend four hours of your life to take home multiples of the median American family's income. It blows my mind how conceited some people in this industry can be, and I'm glad I don't work with them. This is one reason why the take home is a great filter.

Point is they don't need to, and companies that insist on it are hurting only themselves.

> But I have seen multiple coworkers with 10-20 years of experience as software engineers with glowing recommendations get fired because they couldn't write software

I can imagine multiple reasons for this to occur at a company and a bunch of them reflect poorly on the build and architecture at the company

The problem isn’t the four hour take home. It’s the multiple interviews then surprise we need you to interview for two days with our junior engineers all from MIT and Stanford and go over how you think you would improve our systems. Thanks but no thanks.

But isn't the alternative to take home assignment leetcoding on whiteboards? Last time I was interviewing in the US market was in 2017 and it was literally just these two options. And the assignments tended to be long - like a week long. (tbh there were a few companies that pre-offered and just wanted one general discussion round with the team but they felt shady and desperate, and one was a literal consultancy)

Could someone articulate what's the norm now for non-FAANG pure-tech companies? I might go back to the open market next year after grad school since I don't have much of a network in Canada.

(I have decent 10y+ experience at startups and a unicorn, in both big data analytics and full stack applications and I'm good at system design, take home assignments and even live coding but really suck at physical white boarding complex algorithms with someone literally watching over me)

I think where the disconnect is occurring is that leetcoding on whiteboards, and home assignments are not the norm for many of us who are Senior.

I have 20y+ experience in startups, unicorn, large companies, big data analytics, full stack applications, and system design.

I am not asked to interview with whiteboard coding when someone wants to hire me from a referral. They are glorified meet and greets.

This is what having a network of people who have worked with you before, and have seen your productivity does. You don't interview the same way other people do, people want you for you, because they know that it doesn't matter what the technology is, you're going to provide a crazy level of value, and they want that level of value in their situation.

I've been duped into take-homes a few times. The one time I wasn't ghosted after submitting, they asked me to come in for an on-site... to do leetcode.

I’m not exactly a “dev ops” person like the original person is looking for. I am the classical definition of dev ops. A software developer who knows cloud and consults with companies on how to develop “cloud natively”.

Before my current job, my last three jobs (2014, 2016, and 2018) were as a bog standard “enterprise” Senior software engineer/team lead/de facto “architect” who was hired to help the company mature. I got my job by talking to the manager, director, CTO based on my network and discussing my past successes and how I would go about helping then with their real world problems.

I am 99% sure if and when I leave my current job in the cloud consulting department at BigTech and probably go back to smaller companies I won’t be asked to do a “take home test”. My network is stronger now than it was before I came.

I'm "senior" at least in the sense of having been around long enough to be called an old fart. My last two iterations involved:

1) a 2 hour conversation with one of the founders, followed by a 2 week tryout (paid consulting), followed by a job offer that I accepted. This was through a HN Who Is Hiring post.

2) a round of multi-hour onsite interviews involving white boards, live coding, pairing, etc., but no take-homes. This was through Triplebyte, which organized everything.

There were a couple of other discussions involving take-homes (one of them in good faith on the company's part, the other a little more doubtful) and those two experiences convinced me to not do them any more.

I guess I could imagine a take-home project if it was (through discussion) something that interested me and that I thought would be useful and I could keep the code afterwards, to re-use for other purposes.

If you are paying FAANG salary and giving real stock in a public company, you can insist on jumping through more hoops.

But if you are a medium size enterprise company that isn’t paying that type of compensation, you can’t.

I have four projects on GitHub with over 50 stars between them. I've submitted PRs for scapy and dnspython. Where's yours, recruiter? Need to pass me to someone? Ok. Good, now we have something to talk about / through. That's the technical part.

I'm senior. Got something I haven't seen? That and some stalking on LinkedIn or emailing and asking for a resume or just to say "hi", seems to be working for some recruiters out there.

OP is hiring for a devops role and has to mention k8s in their pleading. Anybody who mentions k8s to me as something I need to know immediately wins a quizzing regarding what their assets are and what are they doing with it which is so unique that they'd need my expertise; that's usually the end of it. To be clear: I am senior enough to know that doing k8s safely would be THE job, so not making it THE job means you don't meet my quality standards. Other people need my help more than you do, and I don't care what you pay.

Not to mention that usually the required time for take-home assignment is 2-3x the advertised one.

I have not found this to be the case, but I think the usual idea is that if it takes longer than advertised, you should probably stay away from the job.

I think this is part of the process to ridicule candidates.

Maybe interviewers are cynical after interviewing so many really bad candidates and the only enjoyment they get from the process is the ability to look down on them.

I have done a few of these take home assignments, later to be engaged by the firm, then to discover in a firm of 100 people, I only really met one or two who could even do the assignment, let alone do it in under an hour.

It looks like the take-home replaces a full day of 1-1 interviews. That does seem reasonable (though I personally think it's the wrong trade, and the 1-1 interviews are more informative).

One - is this made clear to the candidate, two - "presentation to the team" - if the team is four people, that's four chances to be rejected from the position, which is the same as the "multiple 1-1 interviews back to back" gauntlet. Does this presentation also require preparation work?

OP mentioned its a run-of-the-mill mid-size enterprise software company, which should rule out any necessity on their part to run full day interviews a-la FAANG. A 4h project would then be very overkill unless they're extremely confident about their technical ability

It's asymmetric warfare, as the interviewer gets to clone it... like software... and then demands proof of work from the applicant.

Even when I'm not looking I'm always willing to followup on the latter sort of interview opportunities. You never know and they're pain free for everyone involved. The value to both parties having each other vetted by a trusted third party is huge.

I'd only do the standard style interview if I was desperate for a job.

Agreed. If you give out take-home tests, they shouldn't take longer than an hour.

Unless, you pay them for the time. A few companies I applied to 6-7 months ago offered this. However, if you're on unemployment benefits, this may count as income.

Absolutely agree. People with 10+ years, a good network and decent resume pop their head up above the parapet and get instantly mobbed with offers. They're on the market 2 weeks, tops.

No-one good is going to do a takehome just so the hiring team can rub their beards and feel superior while they pick over the code. That approach worked a few years ago, in today's recruitment bear market you don't pick the candidates, the candidates will pick you.

We are having precisely the same trouble as you by the way - junior-heavy, but experienced folk are extremely thin on the ground, and we go from CV to offer within a week. One chap joined (for a few days) and left because he had started somewhere else at the same time - they won out. We're moving to 1-stage interviews, offer on the same day. Higher risk but we have no choice.

> They're on the market 2 weeks, tops.

My last search lasted 9 days from when I put out the signal to having interviewed (for 3 companies) and negotiated an offer and submitted my resignation and 2 weeks notice.

> My last search lasted 9 days

i think you did disservice to yourself by optimizing for minimizing downtime between jobs. You should've played the field longer and gone for the highest bidder. I am 100% sure you are not getting paid your worth because no FAANG type company finishes the process in 1 week.

That is condescending: you are jumping to a conclusion and implying that the person you are answering makes stupid rash decisions. Without a lot more context you can’t know how sensible their decision is. Even with that context, why should your opinion be listened to, and who are you anyway to tell someone else how to run their life?

I am 100% sure there is no way you can actually be 100% sure about that.

Some off ids don’t want to work for FAANG.

Three days. Three interviews. Three offers. Three short, brief chats about the problem. Done.

I agree 100% and imo is the proper approach in such a market. I was trying to explain this to people that the market has changed and the hiring pipelines must be simplified and significantly shortened and i kept getting the opposite outcome, more rounds and more time to make an offer to good candidates and eventually "we cannot find anyone, keep looking".

Companies keep their traditional pipelines with average time to hire time of 2+ months and think they will find and hire loyal people in this rapid market where people accept offers on top of others or with just a couple days or weeks in their new position. And they keep filtering others because "no culture fit", "not sure about this line of code in the take home assignment" and other nonsense.

> We're moving to 1-stage interviews, offer on the same day. Higher risk but we have no choice

Anecdotally, I've seen people actually been put off by this. Perhaps make it 2 interviews just to not seem desperate. It's not my own reaction, but I could see why people might think "They're really desperate, there must be something wrong there"

Communication here is key. If the process is described well and reasons explained, I believe it could work just fine.

The counter to this is not extra interviews but increasing the importance of the people in the interview. A one pass, 60 minute interview with the CEO and/or CTO on the call tells me a lot more about the kind of company.

One of the reasons I went independent consultant/freelancer is because I no longer face hiring bullshit like multiple interview rounds. I don’t charge to discuss the problems, sign an NDA if need be, and I get to talk frankly with both technical and business people to work out if I’m a good fit, zero pressure. I’ve turned down work and recommended other people I know would be better.

I fit the “senior” role here and honestly I’d be ok with the 4hr take home on one condition… pay me.

One tactic I know people are trying is to “flip” a freelance contractor by gradually offering work and then pitching the full time gig, convincing them to jump onboard when everyone already knows it’s a good fit and no one has d as any risks.

I never understood why people are so dogged on hiring - just get a senior consultant - pay 2-3x and save the equity. it's faster and in the end the expenses level out (cost of hiring, 401, insurance etc.)

Make the contract with 1 months notice both ways and it's pretty much for all intent and purpose a hiree

based on term and employment conditions (ex: onsight for years) they run the real risk of retroactively being classified as an employee. The only way to avoid this is to hire a consultant who comes from another company... where they're typically an employee, so someone else solves the problem.

For startups, equity is cheaper than cash. Cash has to actually exist in a bank account and be transferred out, equity is essentially imaginary.

> A one pass, 60 minute interview with the CEO and/or CTO on the call tells me a lot more about the kind of company.

Depends, if I had this, I'd think, why is the CEO spending time in an interview instead of running the company? Sure, it's part of their job but after a certain scale of company size, it makes me think they must truly be desperate if the company is bringing out C-level executives to interview.

It may seem odd, but I experienced this. I'm starting a new job in a few weeks and, while my path was definitely eased due to an internal referral, I got the job really easily, which makes me a little nervous, due to either the hiring situation or expectations.

> One chap joined (for a few days) and left because he had started somewhere else at the same time - they won out.

Wait what???

I think this will get more common with remote working. Start a new role, then dump it if one of the other searches turns up a better one.

I think FAANG has something to do with this too. They're often known to be slow in coming up with the offer, often seeming like they're not going to proceed. A friend started working at a startup, then got a top Google offer, dumped the startup for the better job that came in later.

Yeah reputation is still a thing...

You should be happy for them.

Let's see if you say the same thing when you interview 10+ candidates and you accept one like this, rejecting all the others since you filled the position.

No different from the firm rescinding the offer once the candidate has turned down all his others. Plus it's asymmetric, the firm has other staff that can somewhat do the work, the employee has no income if the job is rescinded.

I agree that that is a reputation-burning choice as well for the firm.

Not to mention the amount of time it takes to make a good presentation. For a 1 hour presentation that’s easily 8+ hours of work right there.

Yep, the only way I'll send a blind resume and think about jumping through hoops is if it's a super interesting company I want to work for. Otherwise, I just asked my friends and network and skip all the hiring BS.

I've found some companies are so process bound that they'll go the full set of interview, test, coding rounds even for a personal referral.

I have over 20 years of experience, and then they wonder why I start laughing when they start asking the newbie basic questions. It get even more absurd when they start asking about stuff that no one does more than once or twice a year except in very "edge case" type jobs. I'm a sysadmin, not a full time software developer, but I still get the dweebs who want me to do a leetcode b-tree sort with whatever fancy algorithm they read about last weekend in the hot language du jour.

> Many seniors (actual seniors, not 3-years-of-experience seniors) have a network and can say "hey I'm looking" and instantly have multiple options that won't have them do more than talk to the team and manager for an hour or two. If that.

Just wanted to back this up a little bit. This is exactly what happened to me on my last job search. I'm currently in between jobs, starting the new gig after the 4th of July holiday. The company that I went with: I had a 30 minute call with an engineering VP and the hiring manager that was followed by an hour long panel with a few members of the team that I'm joining. I also learned after I had accepted the offer that the person who referred me internally spent about 45 minutes chatting with the same engineering VP about me specifically before they reached out. This was for a staff/lead position and I've got over 15 years in the industry.

I specifically sought out referrals from former colleagues and friends where the interview process put a lot of emphasis and weight on the internal referral and it worked out really well for me. I really hope that this is a sign of things to come, not just for myself and my future employment but for others, at least at the ("actual") senior level.

edit/ Added some more context...

This is me exactly. My prior three jobs were based on my network referring me to a hiring manager (Directors and CTOs), us meeting for lunch and talking about their issues and how I would help them solve them. Then me meeting the rest of the team and them giving me an offer.

I would never do a “take home test”. Even my current job at $BigTech - working in the cloud consulting department doing exactly the type of work the original poster is looking for - involved a 5 hour behavioral loop and definitely not a “take home test”. They offered cash and real stock. Not equity that statistically will be worthless.

really hope they cut out this referral stuff. These guys have turned all of silicon valley into incestuous bro-land. This needs to be made illegal.

It should not IMO (and almost certainly will not) be made illegal. I’ve worked with or near maybe 1000 people in my almost 30 year career. Many of them I’d love to work with again or to refer to friends’ companies. Others, I have the opposite opinion.

It seems beyond unreasonable that I couldn’t make use of that information in choosing who I will work with professionally.

To me, it’s a clear-cut freedom of association (and/or a freedom of speech) right.

Referrals aren't a silicon valley thing or even a tech thing. The first bit of advice you get from anyone when it comes to a job search in any field is to leverage your network.

It's not about discrimination, it's because the single best way to know if someone can pull their weight and mesh with the team is if an existing, trusted member of the team can vouch for them. On the flip side, the single best way to know if a job is worth pursuing is to have it recommended by a trusted colleague.

Why would you not use those signals? And why in the world would any government make networking illegal? The economic impact on every sector would be insane!

Referrals mean very little at large tech companies. They basically just guarantee you an initial screen. I’m bombarded with enough recruiter BigTech spam for jobs, I’m sure getting an interview at another one wouldn’t be a problem.

I’m also much older and darker than your stereotypical “tech bro” and they actually put me in front of customers. Imagine that!

Not sure why you are being downvoted. I share your concern. I'm a minority and moved to the US some years ago. I don't think I share the same college connect or social connect that people have. This puts me at a disadvantage for these referral only hires.

Referrals are good source of attracting people, they can be used for additional data points.

I'd love to see what the break down of demographics of people hired using this practice.

+1. I literally have not had to interview for a job, not for real anyway, since college. I got hired in 1996 right out of college helping a friend move wherein the hiring manager let me know there was another job there. We'd all come out of the same computer science department. By 1999 I was managing the system administration team (dev ops wasn't a thing then) at company 1.

In 2000, the same person that hired me at company 1 had joined to a startup in CA. I got hired by him again. I did a basic tech screen via phone, got an offer, the company paid for my move to CA. I was there from 2000-2007 through that company splitting in two and the half I stayed with eventually getting acquired by a Fortune 500, company 3. No interview as part of the acquisition. I also moved in 2004 back to the east coast, again paid for by company 2. I started working mostly from home for company 2 about a year later, which persisted with company 3.

In 2009, some of the folks I worked with at company 2/3 founded a startup in CA. Got hired again, this is now company 4, with another pro-forma interview. I worked from home for company 4 from 2009-2013. That company then got acquired by my current employer, company 5. No interview as part of the acquisition. Continued to work from home. My current employer has changed hands twice now, but still calls itself the same as when I was acquired.

When I'm ready to go, I have a network of people I've worked with at a variety of tech companies. Company 5 is dysfunctional and filled with mediocre talent, but everyone is so cordial, pay and benefits are good, so I haven't really had reason to leave other than the frustration of dealing with some bureaucracy and creaky legacy systems. I've mostly been insulated from that because I've been responsible for a fairly self-contained system.

Now I'm inheriting other people's crap as folks move on, but you know, last week I deleted over 10,000 lines of unused or unneeded code and that was actually pretty satisfying.

The further along in your career, the more network matters. My wife and I both find that to be true.

This will not work at FAANG or similar top tier companies. Hiring like this introduces biases. I'd not like to work at a place like this.

> If I can get a similarly-paying job at a place that doesn't do this, I'll skip you.

Just wanted to back this up a little bit. This is exactly what happened to me on my last job search.

I was interviewing with 5-6 companies. It didn’t make sense for me to spend a whole weekend for a chance at an offer from a single company. Instead I spent that time brushing up on design. In hindsight that was the right call.

Yeah. They're looking for seniors, but they're treating them like juniors. Then they're surprised that they can't find any seniors.

You want actual seniors? Seniors have options. You have to be a place that seniors want to work, want more than they want to work somewhere else. Take home code assignments don't fit anywhere in that.

The thing with 4hr technical assignments is that you're saying no to anyone with kids, which I'm going to venture applies to more senior people than juniors.

I used to do these assignment. Now I simply don't sorry.

My schedule is

6:30 AM wake up with youngest daughter, to let wife sleep in (she takes care of her all night)

9:00 AM hand off youngest daughter to wife, who takes both girls the rest of the day. I go to my home office

12:00 PM lunch with family / kids

1:00 PM back to work

5:00 PM off work... Cook dinner / watch kids while wife cooks dinner. Set up table. Eat with family.

6:30 PM Play with kids for an hour

7:30 PM Bathtime + off to bed

9:30 - 10:30 PM Infant child actually goes to sleep

10:30 - 11:00 PM Wife and I chat about our day and spend 30 minutes of time actually being together

11:00 PM sleep until 6:30 the next day

Exactly where in that schedule am I supposed to fit a FOUR HOUR coding assignment. That's ridiculous. Unless you're providing child care, this is simply too much.

A one hour interview... I can handle.

Perhaps you'd get better leads by allowing for a choice. For my last job search. I had several different companies all in the upcoming AI accelerator space. Two of them had assignments. I said no thanks. The others did interviews. I got a good raise (base + stock options)anyway. I don't think I lost anything saying no to the ones with assignments.

Alternatively, perhaps pay people to complete the assignments.

I don't know what exactly OP is assigning to applicants, but in my experience a "four hour" coding assignment can be completed in an hour or two - and they don't have to be consecutive hours, it just means four hours is your limit and you have a few days or a week to complete it in.

I had a 4-hour assignment requiring a full weekend (10 medium to difficult queries on an unknown 20 table database and document with business analysis for the query results + additional code to extract from api and save to db with your own schema + additional queries on top of this).

I also had an 1-hour where i couldn't build the provided code and had to go through maven repos and older versions of the major test component to make it work after a couple hours and then lost any motivation to write the simple exercise.

I also had an honest one once, where the instructions were clear, you will need a full weekend to do it. I liked the job and i completed it, only to be rejected because they didn't like my scala syntax.

Sorry, but i won't take home test again and have to gamble whether it's an actual 1h test or a full weekend one, or some random guy will spend 1 minute only to reject me.

In my experience a (not timeboxed) 4 hours coding assignment will actually take at least a day.

Is not necessary malicious from those companies, they just underestimate the time their test take.

IMO, most engineers massively under-estimate the time it takes to do "simple" tasks if you don't already have the infrastructure/environment set up for it.

And some times they assume specific or latest versions of some platform because they are currently working on it. I remember some flink take home required some latest api, while i have worked with flink in earlier versions. It took me 4h just to go through the updated documentation, while it was supposed to be an 1h one.

This is why I prefer in person coding exercises. You can do 1-1.5 hours of a "4 hour timeboxed coding assignment" and the interviewer will usually be happy that theyve seen enough and that you're not too slow coz they watched you do it.

Thats 3-8 hours of your life back.

I had one take-home "4 hour" assignment that required me to install two different, poorly documented, third party packages on my computer before I could even begin to write the code. The Java-loaded piece of junk that I needed didn't work with my existing setup, and I wasn't going to rebuild my entire system just for some arbitrary assignment. It might have been "4 hours" if I already had an environment with all the extra cruft that they used, but if I had to fart with VMs or rebuild my machine? No, just no.

It's reasonable to expect someone have various languages on their personal boxen, and maybe git, but not repositories, specialized third party tools, etc. I don't run Puppet at home, for example.

I actually asked a company that had already offered me a position recently if they had a technical test. The one they sent me was clearly stated and it was easy to configure everything needed. If it had been otherwise I very likely wouldn't have accepted the offer.

Yeah it doesn't matter. The truth is that when you give an assignment like this, you want me to invest up to four hours in it, while you don't want to invest a single minute of company engineer time watching me solve it. Basically, you're expecting more of me than you are willing to give yourself. That's a huge red flag.

That being said, even if it takes an hour, I still have to allocate 4 hours for it.

This must depend a lot on the place.

I did a data science take-home that asked you to scrape some documents from the web, group them by topic, extract some information the clusters, and visualize it. This could be a few hours of work, or an entire research career.

IMO, a good take-home needs to be aggressively scoped. Ideally, I think you'd explicitly ask for --and expect--a "bare minimum" solution and a list of potential improvements. That list would be great fodder for in-person interviews too.

> perhaps pay people to complete the assignments.

Assuming this is legal at all according to current employment contracts, it's a huge pain for the new employer's payroll and more stuff to keep track for the employee's income tax.

>Assuming this is legal at all according to current employment contracts, it's a huge pain for the new employer's payroll and more stuff to keep track for the employee's income tax.

Is it actually? I run a small business, and have trialled people a few times. I normally just transfer them the $x and report it as a business expense, same as you'd do with a contractor.

Maybe it's not technically 100% compliant, but I'd be incredibly surprised if the tax office kicked up a stink about something so petty.

(Then again, maybe it's just a "she'll be right mate" attitude that permeates even government departments here in Australia)

In the US, you might end up having to send a whole bunch of 1099s, which I am sure would be a pain.

under $600 you don't need a 1099

In the US, you probably need to issue a tax form; this can be handled through a third party but then is a bit of a pain for the candidate. (I've had it work this way as a consultant on the side.)

Depending on the potential employee's contracts and business rules, doing a side project for someone may or may not be 100% kosher.

Disclaimer: I'm not a tax consultant, check with your accountant

If they don't have an ABN, they'll need to give you "Statement by a Supplier" [1], otherwise you're required to withhold tax at the top marginal rate.

[1] https://www.ato.gov.au/forms/statement-by-a-supplier-not-quo...

Two companies have offered me Amazon gift cards, one of them told me that it’s far easier for tax purposes (my understanding is that this is why user research often offers them, rather than cash). I assume they could give prepaid debit cards too, for people who prefer not to shop at Amazon.

I don't know what the law is. Years ago, but I've been paid for doing a focus group in cash. So there's presumably some threshold where you can just have essentially a petty cash business expense.

Obviously meals and so forth as well. (And, assuming the law hasn't changed, US government employees have to pay for even a modest meal at a company's executive briefing center.)

OTOH, I've had 1099s for even very modest side-consulting revenue.

> So there's presumably some threshold where you can just have essentially a petty cash business expense.

$600

How surprisingly sensible. :-)

Except now the IRS will be watching bank accounts for any transaction totaling over $600 to combat this loophole. Good luck!

They don't need to watch bank accounts. Companies are supposed to issue 1099s for payments over $600.

https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/irs-bank-account-update-cha...

Documented anywhere?

https://www.irs.gov/forms-pubs/about-form-1099-misc

I've had companies get around this with gift cards. I did a application-project and got a $300 amazon card (I think). This can come out of someone's general budget and doesn't need accounting to be involved, and can also (plausibly) treated as a "thank you" by the applicant, not income.

> it's a huge pain for the new employer's payroll

They're the ones giving take-home assignments.

I've interviewed twice at a place that pays for time spent in the technical assessment, since it involves writing actual production code for them, and never had any issues on my end. I'd rather do this than grind leet code for 2 months.

Why is it a pain? Not a payroll consideration, as they are not an employee (yet). Isn't it just a simple $600 max Form 1099 independent contractor situation? Small administrative burden to find the right senior.

I once applied somewhere that had a 20 minute pre interview test thing. They rejected me after the test but gave me $50 free credit for their service (sticker printing). I was reasonably pleased with the stack of stickers I received.

I couldn't agree with you more. This is my life.

> The thing with 4hr technical assignments is that you're saying no to anyone with kids, which I'm going to venture applies to more senior people than juniors.

Completely agree here - like a fool I recently went through an entire day's worth interviews for a role (hello Stripe recruiters!!) that required both me and my wife taking PTO, with her looking after the kids while I talked to one junior dev after another about data modelling and "culture fit".

As something of a counterpoint, a literal 4-hour assignment isn't that bad--especially as an alternative to a day of interviews. If they give you the assignment and it's immediately obvious that it's actually a 20+ hour assignment, you can always just walk.

When I worked for a technology analyst company, we would ask for writing samples--which most potential hires would already have. But, if someone didn't, they'd have to create one. It was very reasonably a non-negotiable requirement given that's what they'd be doing day to day.

As something of a counterpoint, a literal 4-hour assignment isn't that bad--especially as an alternative to a day of interviews.

On a relative scale that might be true. In absolute terms you've already lost a high proportion of good senior people who might otherwise have been interested either way. Most good developers I know would just walk on seeing a 4-hour assignment that was actually a 4-hour assignment. Some would accept a full day of interviews if the employer had a reputation for being a good place to work and offered exceptional compensation but plenty wouldn't and I doubt any would for an employer that wasn't very top tier. Risk/reward and all that.

To be honest, at some point if someone wants to work at Google and can get a job at Google--especially if the name and/or the salary is what they really care about--it's probably in the best interest of a lot of companies to just move on.

I'm sure that's true but another point I was trying to make there was that IME even top tier companies exclude a significant proportion of good developers by having excessive hiring processes. The kind of applicant who could get hired by those companies doesn't have to put up with those processes and at least here in the UK the pay at even top tier companies with annoying hiring processes isn't so much better than everyone else that it's worth the sacrifice.

In the US, there's probably a pretty significant delta between top SV big tech salaries and a lot of the rest. Of course, those companies probably exclude a lot of competent developers and other companies can offer other opportunities besides just salary that big tech can't (more interesting projects, less of a hiring gauntlet, smaller scale, etc.) But if someone is willing to and can get through the hiring gauntlet--and really cares about the comp--it's hard to compete.

> As something of a counterpoint, a literal 4-hour assignment isn't that bad--especially as an alternative to a day of interviews.

Don't forget to multiply that by however many companies they're interviewing at.

IME, the 4 hour assignment comes at the 'coding interview' stage, and most companies have a full day of interviews right after. Compared to companies with a one hour coding screen... by the time I even would get to the 4 hour assignment I likely already have three or four ful day interviews lined up

> IME, the 4 hour assignment comes at the 'coding interview' stage, and most companies have a full day of interviews right after.

This is not true at all. I know for a fact that some FANGs do hour-long phone screens followed by hour-long coding assignments followed by a 4-hour multi-interview round. I know for a fact that a couple of major Fintech companies do hour-long phone screens followed by a hour-long live coding sessions.

Personally, the max I endured was a 7-round hiring process comprised of a mix of one-hour interviews that culminated in a 4-hour interview round, and that was only because midway through I was bumped from a developer position track to a research engineer position.

> As something of a counterpoint, a literal 4-hour assignment isn't that bad--especially as an alternative to a day of interviews.

As a counter counterpoint, that only makes sense if the candidate is applying to a single place.

If the candidate has lined up 4 interviews, they're not going to get 16 hours in the week to complete them. The fifth place that has no 4 hour interviews will get the candidate.

Exactly this - it is incredibly disrespectful to peoples time, it's impossible to do a few interviews like this.

If you have kids, your partner may have to take time off too, it's just not workable.

I say no to these, and to tests these days.

To put it another way, it may be selecting for the candidate who wants exactly this job and none other.

Loyalty becomes the main criterion.

I have mixed feelings about this, but I can see why employers might want this.

I agree, but "loyalty" doesn't sound like the right word.

If a company demands you run an arbitrarily long and unpleasant obstacle course without any goal or criteria just because they asked you, what they are looking for is subservience.

Fair.

I was trying to be charitable. :)

What sucks though is when companies say 4 hours but then give extra credit to projects that clearly took more than 4 hours.

I did a take home project for Netflix that didn't have a time box IIRC - but something like "no more than a few hours". The task was to code a few movie poster carousels w/o using a web framework. Basically to create your own mini-higher level framework paradigm from vanilla JS or a low-level framework like JQuery.

I spent 7 hours on it and was fairly proud of it. I got dinged for not creating a virtual DOM and instead using the actual DOM as a source of truth. I even put in my notes (which I don't think were read) that in the real world you'd probably use a virtual DOM for this, but that would be a whole project in itself. Apparently I was supposed to spend the whole weekend creating React from scratch.

This is maybe overly cynical, but maybe they want people who say (to themselves, if nothing else) they did 10 hours of work in a few hours? Easy to keep people feeling inadequate and working overtime for free.

This kind of frustration is what got me into writing open source. I wanted an open body of work to point to that I could reuse from one employer to the next that proved I knew wtf I was doing.

It also let me weed out the weirdly numerous companies who threw 8 hour assignments over the wall but apparently lacked the time to spend 10 minutes looking at my open source projects.

The last time I was actively looking for a job (instead of being recruited via my network), was in 2016. Looking at my spreadsheet, I was somewhere in the process of interviewing (phone screen -> in person -> waiting for an offer) for 15 different companies. Why would I ever have jumped through hoops if they were all paying about the same.

I took the first one that met my compensation/technology/commute requirements. Back then, one Enterprise CRUD job looked like any other.

> Back then, one Enterprise CRUD job looked like any other.

They still do.

No it's not. When i do interviews in-person (even if virtual) , I get the benefit of meeting my future colleagues and learning more about the company. It's much more a two-way benefit, versus an assignment where only one party (the company) gets any information from the other (me).

> When I worked for a technology analyst company, we would ask for writing samples--which most potential hires would already have. But, if someone didn't, they'd have to create one. It was very reasonably a non-negotiable requirement given that's what they'd be doing day to day.

The equivalent in tech is asking for a portfolio, which I have an ample amount of on github. I'm more than happy to hand this over to potential employers for them to gauge my work. But, the idea that I could complete a 4hour assignment within a week is ridiculous. My portfolio comes through constant, marginal improvements that make up a working system in sum. I've collectively spent more than 4 hours on most projects on GitHub, but they're done at my leisure, in my miniscule amounts of spare time, just spread over many years. But again, the idea of spending a solid four hours on any of them is just laughable. I have no time to do that.

Also, when you get to full day interviews, it's typically a sign the company wants you. Having been in both the hiring manager position and the candidate position, I've only once seen a full day interview end in a "No" and it was for particular circumstance.

I’ve seen a lot of full-day (realistically 4-5 hours) interviews end in a no-offer. This is obviously true for one-of-one positions (CISO and other singletons), but even for one-of-several, candidates sometime bomb.

> The equivalent in tech is asking for a portfolio, which I have an ample amount of on github. I'm more than happy to hand this over to potential employers for them to gauge my work.

I don't have a very large open source portfolio, but I it's probably bigger than 95% of the people I work with, I don't think my open source work is particularly representative of my abilities.

Companies want to have a somewhat standardized hiring process so that they can evaluate candidates fairly, and most professional developers people don't do much open source work.

Someone having an impressive open source portfolio, might be a good signal that they are a great hire, but I don't think it's a good general strategy for hiring.

So maybe allow flexibility in the assignment? let the candidate choose between previous work, home assignment or on site?

I fully agree.

> It's much more a two-way benefit, versus an assignment where only one party (the company) gets any information from the other (me).

> The equivalent in tech is asking for a portfolio, which I have an ample amount of on github. I'm more than happy to hand this over to potential employers for them to gauge my work. But, the idea that I could complete a 4hour assignment within a week is ridiculous.

These two statements made me think of something. Usually, (and from comments I've seen many times on HN) I'll hand in my resumé and it has my Github etc, and the hiring team don't really look at it. Perhaps if I'm given a coding test or assignment, I should pick one of my projects and ask them to complete an open issue, so that I can gauge their coding ability and how they use Git, respond in issues etc?

Fair's fair, and it would tell me a lot more than I get to know right now.

Your last point is the most salient for me- I might be willing to do a long coding assignment if I’m already confident that the company has invested time in evaluating me individually and that an offer is likely, but I’m disinterested if I don’t believe I’m at a 30% chance or greater of getting an offer.

> When I worked for a technology analyst company, we would ask for writing samples--which most potential hires would already have. But, if someone didn't, they'd have to create one.

I have a github/gitlab full of code. You want to check it? Go for it. Happy to provide a portfolio on demand.

Make me write an api client..? No, get lost.

A lot of people do not have a public portfolio however. Whether for writing or for code. (For perfectly valid reasons.)

Of course, portfolios are a perfectly reasonable expectation in a lot of professions including the trades.

I'm with you on this. If you don't have a repo you can share, then a take home exercise seems like a reasonable alternative. Its about being respectful on peoples time, while still recognising the need to 'validate' claims of experience.

I didn’t have any open source work from 1996-2020. What I did have was the an active network and the ability to dig deep when asked about my prior projects/accomplishments.

If I ever pivoted back to pure software development and wanted to get a comparably compensated position at a large tech company would a jump through the DS&A grind - yes. But to work for a startup that offered meh compensation and meaningless “equity” - no.

Totally not equivalent in my view. In traditional interviews, I’m also interviewing the company to see if I want to work with these people.

A take home assignment only shows me that they like unpaid work.

> As something of a counterpoint, a literal 4-hour assignment isn't that bad--especially as an alternative to a day of interviews.

An assignment is no replacement for a face to face interview.

> As something of a counterpoint, a literal 4-hour assignment isn't that bad--especially as an alternative to a day of interviews.

_The_ alternative is not a day of interviews. There are in fact, an innumerable number of alternatives. One alternative is to simply drop the assignment entirely from the interview process (without replacement) and judging by what's left.

> As something of a counterpoint, a literal 4-hour assignment isn't that bad--especially as an alternative to a day of interviews.

No, it's really bad. It's half-day of useless, unpaid work which takes time other things you need/have to do.

Never in my career I had to endure a day of interviews. Even FANGS don't do days of interviews, even the ones notorious for their awful working conditions. At most, there is the final 4-hour interview/test round, and even that is too much.

I'd say that these hoop-jumping obstacle courses are major red flags. If a company is really interested in getting you to join their team, why do they show so little consideration for you with all these arbitrary, capricious demands?

If I'm looking at one place, I'd agree with you. As a senior I get multiple companies interested in me. If I want to evaluate 8 different positions (not unreasonable with somebody of decades of experience), you're asking me to invest 32 hours in your simple 4 hour test.

Hard pass.

> like a fool I recently went through an entire day's worth interviews for a role

whats the alternative though. why do you consider that foolish?

I personally 'rank' my full day interviews. I put them off until I have a good sample of companies lined up. Then I line up my 'best' company first, and the 'worst' company last. Basically, the goal is that by the time I get to the company i'm not as interested in, I have an offer from another one. That way I can frankly tender my resignation in before I get to that interview. I may or may not complete the last interviews depending.

In my case I didn't do a satisfactory initial call with the recruiters to ask them what the interview was going to be about, the level of the folks asking the questions and the possibility of doing it over a few days. They pulled the "we're excited to move forward..." trick, without saying too much about having to talk for 6 hours to very junior devs.

Seems like a good way to weed out people that are constantly taking time off to deal with kid issues.

This is just the wrong way to think about things if you actually want to hire senior devs. But it's not surprising, most companies are only used to dealing with being in a position of power.

In which part of the world do you work? Where I work, family is a lot more important than work. We help each other and taking time off for our family is normal and expected.

Please tell me where you work so I can tell everyone I know who has or wants to have kids to avoid it

Oh man, I hope you say things like this out loud so your coworkers and employer can hear you.

> Seems like a good way to weed out people that are constantly taking time off to deal with kid issues.

That's just a different way of saying "a good way to weed out seniors", which is what the original concern was - not enough seniors.

Looks like it works, though.

hopefully you forgot the /s at the end of your comment?

at any rate evidently 89.615% of people become parents https://www.quora.com/What-percentage-of-people-become-paren...

so, probably not a good thing to weed out.

Meh, I'll walk happily to the bank with my $400k compensation, while some company pats itself on the back over avoiding someone who spends time with their children LOL.

Yes, then they can focus on hiring those who*:

1. want to work from home to take their new bearded dragon to the vet.

2. have their moms contact me about work load.

3. pre-emptively book a sick day for Monday because they "plan to get really messed up this weekend".

People with kids are the worst employees!

* These have all happened to me in the past year.

If an employee wanted to work from home or take a half day off to take their pet to the vet, that’s cool. I’m glad they take care of their pet and I’ll see them the next workday.

I’ve had moms show up and want their kid to give them a tour of the office, but inquiring about their child’s workload is next level helicopter parenting.

Wait, Is this bad? I usually take my parents on one weekend to show where I work if the office is nice.

I am guessing a lot of folks did not see the sarcasm in this. Either that or I am wrong.

Anecdotally, as someone with three kids I'd much rather do a take-home 4 hour assignment than the usual round of interviews since I can work the former into my schedule however I like.

I recently did a 6 hour take-home, but was given an expectation of around 2 weeks to accomplish it, with flexibility for more if I needed it. I thought it was pretty fair compared to a never-ending round of tech interviews.

My experience with that is:

0) time doing the project is tracked, sometimes via the expectation that you commit to the git repository from start to finish. dinging you for "points" for going over the time allotment

and that the other candidates are:

1) doing way extra things that took way more than 6 hours

2) are not doing those extra things from scratch because they've been playing this game for a while

and that

3) the company still has inaccurate ideas of what a candidate should be expected to present in the 6 hours

4) is judging you on completely random things that they did not mention. "you didn't use this design pattern" "we don't like MVVP anymore, we're back on MVP. here's this other acronym."

waste of time

Totally agree that this will be something lots of places might do/expect. I will definitely work against that and judge them by it.

E.g. say they want me to commit to a Github project they provide or I am supposed to set up and commit to. I will use whatever time I am allotted and at the end, when I'm done and expected to hand it in, I will make one git commit that shows I committed everything exactly 1 second after I was supposed to start, then push that to the provided repo. Yes, start, not finish. Meaning "time travel". Maybe even commit as "Linus Torvalds" or something like that.

If they ask about this it's a great conversation starter either way. My experience is that if the talk does come to this either they have no idea how this could even happen and I can explain or judge them based on their reactions or we both have a laugh about their companies policies around this. They see I know my git and I know they're like most companies: actually pretty OK teams and hiring managers with generally crappy HR practices.

> sometimes via the expectation that you commit to the git repository from start to finish

Just rewrite your git history and fudge the commit timestamps. It's not even dishonest, it's just demonstrating your experience with Git.

Of course, that doesn't work if they expect you to push to Github/lab as you go.

That's too bad, in this case I had a particularly good experience. I handed in a tarball, not a repo, so they didn't track time. No idea what other candidates did, but I got specific and positive feedback on the code submitted. The task was pretty carefully thought out and presented to not lean too heavily on specific patterns or techniques. All of your experiences do sound particularly frustrating, I wouldn't be too excited with them either!

Agreed. Take-homes we’re greatly preferred by our candidates with families because they could be done on a weekend or in their spare time.

I’m also a parent of small kids with a busy schedule. Despite the packed schedule and demands of raising kids, it would be a huge exaggeration to suggest that I couldn’t find 4 hours of time to do a take-home if given a week of time (as is common).

The parent commenter might have been operating under the assumption that take home challenges must be done same-day, which kind of defeats the purpose of a take-home. If you’re demanding 4 hours of same day time, might as well bring them in for a 4-hour on site interview.

Strangely, few people complain about a half-day on-site but it’s literally the same time commitment. If you really have no other options and you literally cannot find a spare hour of time in any way, take a half day of PTO and complete the interview just as you would for a normal on-site.

Alright, and if you are actively interviewing and trying to get offers lined up at the same time? while also continuing to study some system design concepts and algorithm brainteasers?

Its not a one 4 hour take home project. Its the fifth one.

Also, is this a good week or a bad week for the kids. Cause if someone is sick or teething, well it’s not the same as any other week.

Same here, this is way easier to manage when I work on this vs on site or video tech interviews. Especially with companies who expect you to "prepare" for programming quizzes with long leetcode grinding ala FAANG companies..

"The thing with 4hr technical assignments is that you're saying no to anyone with kids"

Is 4 hours the amount of time the candidate is being given to complete it, or roughly how long the employer expects it will take? In the past I've generally come up with tests I know can be done in an hour or so (2 tops), but allowed 24 hours, exactly because not everyone is going to be in a position they can dedicate those 2 hours to it right there and then. Sure, those that did take the full 24 hours to complete I tended to apply higher expectations towards when judging, but at the end of the day it didn't make much difference - the tests were only to weed out those that had clearly made a poor career decision (and there were surprisingly many of those, to the point we switched to testing before interviewing).

Take home test as the first step in an interview process is the ultimate evil in this. I've spent hours then got ghosted. I will never do it again. This is a "run like hell" signal imo.

I've heard that before, and if we felt there was a significant risk we were putting off good devs from applying, I'd reverse that decision. But I like to think we made our tests a fun & interesting enough challenge that applicants were happy to spend the time doing them.

Lol read the responses here, you're kidding yourself.

I've read some. Doesn't align with my personal experience is all I can say. I can't remember a case where a candidate refused to do such a test, or that we never heard back from after letting them know that was our policy.

That's because those qualified candidates already saw enough proxy signals from you that they knew it wasn't worth the time to apply. Selection bias.

Possibly, but we introduced the policy simply because too many candidates were using up our time with interviews where they appeared to be knowledgeable etc. but then quickly demonstrated with the take-home test that weren't going to be a good fit for us. I'll be honest, there weren't really enough data points to take any grand conclusions from the experience, and this was all pre-covid etc. I'm moving to a new role soon and I'm expecting to get back into being more actively engaged in screening new hire candidates etc., so I'm sure I'll learn more as I go - some of the points raised in this forum have definitely given me pause for thought.

This might be fine for hiring juniors but I can't imagine many experienced applicants would be interested in gambling their time away on your test before any interview.

Actually I've never been heavily involved in hiring a junior. Even at my own level (>26 years prof. experience) I'd happily do a test before a formal interview (though I'd likely want a brief chat with someone from the company to get a feel for what sort of shop they run first). And I would be judging the employer on the quality of their test.

> "The thing with 4hr technical assignments is that you're saying no to anyone with kids"

> Is 4 hours the amount of time the candidate is being given to complete it, or roughly how long the employer expects it will take? In the past I've generally come up with tests I know can be done in an hour or so (2 tops),

Have you actually given these assignments to some of your colleagues and asked them to complete and how long it took (including setting up the development environment ...)? People are notoriously bad at estimating time it takes someone else to do something that oneself is intimately familiar with. So I would not be surprised that the assignments took more like 2-4 h, if you add the additional time for context switching, organising to free your schedule etc..

> but allowed 24 hours, exactly because not everyone is going to be in a position they can dedicate those 2 hours to it right there and then.

I don't think the GP was implying that the assignment was to be done right there and then, where and when would you do those 2 h in their schedule?

> Sure, those that did take the full 24 hours to complete I tended to apply higher expectations towards when judging,

So for someone with kids etc., who couldn't do the assignment straight away you actually expected more than 2h worth of work? To me that's already a red flag that you don't respect peoples life-work balance.

> but at the end of the day it didn't make much difference - the tests were only to weed out those that had clearly made a poor career decision (and there were surprisingly many of those, to the point we switched to testing before interviewing).

Unless you offer exceptionally high salary or are a highly desirable place to work at, you are likely not getting the best applicants.

Instead of allowing 24 hours, I prefer to agree on a start time with the candidate, schedule the email to go out at that time and expect to receive the reply two hours later. That way everyone has the same amount of time.

Yes, I'd used that method too, but I'm not sure how many developers do their best work when told they have 2 hours max to complete any task. In fact we never put any recommendations on how long the task should take, just that they had a 24-hour window in which to come up with the best submission they could. In some (rare) cases submissions that didn't technically complete all the requirements exactly were considered more favorably than ones that did.

I smiled reading your comment. You seem like a good partner and father. Keep up the good work.

FAANG type interviews are all day affairs with 5+hr of interview and breaks in between. Senior or not. I don't see anyone getting hired in 1 hr.

I had a 1hr chat with the hiring manager (and two others on the call) representing my current client for a 12 month contract.

The project was both new to them and myself so a combination of experience (as per my CV) and gut feeling on both sides lead to a signing.

In person interviews typically also involve being given lunch.

Funny how similar our days are! There is however the weekend for stuff like this. I assume an interested employer would be willing to allow that.

Sure, I could potentially do this on the weekend, but would still require work. For religious reasons, I do not work on Sunday and I make no exceptions. Sunday is for socializing with family and friends and doing nothing.

> Exactly where in that schedule am I supposed to fit a FOUR HOUR coding assignment. That's ridiculous. Unless you're providing child care, this is simply too much.

What do you do for normal on-site interviews or phone interviews that have similar time demands?

I’m also a parent of small children with a packed schedule, but I’d much rather take a 4-hour take home and handle it on the weekend or when I’m flexible. Giving up half or whole days of PTO to interview in real-time is actually worse for my overall schedule, not better, because I need that PTO more than ever as a parent of young kids.

The flexibility of take-homes is great as a parent.

It’s easy really. Walk. As a senior it’s insulting to expect to do a four hour take home test. When you hire a Michelin star chef do you make them make you a four course meal to prove they can cook?

Do you make a surgeon do four hour surgery?

It’s absolutely asinine that we accept this behavior in our industry. You’d be laughed at by every possible candidate in other industries.

I immediately decline if a company asks for unpaid work as part of the interview process. If it’s paid I don’t have an issue with it. I assume if a company starts the relationship with asking for unpaid work that expectation will continue throughout your employment.

There are simply too many companies hiring that don’t require this that it’s easy to just pass.

> I immediately decline if a company asks for unpaid work as part of the interview process.

Take-home challenges aren't unpaid work. They're just a take-home replacement for the on-site interview.

If anyone tries to get you to do unpaid work (as in, actual work that the company needs to be done rather than an arbitrary challenge given to candidates for review) then you should absolutely walk.

> When you hire a Michelin star chef do you make them make you a four course meal to prove they can cook?

> Do you make a surgeon do four hour surgery?

These are both poor examples. These are both credentialed examples. Both have already demonstrated their skill based on the credentials they hold.

Software development is not a credentialed field. Titles vary wildly - especially at startups where titles inflate.

Shouldn't a CS degree from a reputable university then just replace all the screening that is made for people without relevant degrees?

As someone who teaches CS at a reputable university, I can state with certainty that we graduate a lot of students who have no clue how to code.

As someone who used to do hiring for a small company, I can state that a lot of people who have degrees have no clue how to code.

Until our field gets the equivalent of a bar exam or NBME, each employer has to evaluate candidates on their own.

CS != coding, but CS combined with coding practice is an excellent basis. Now, how many of those graduates that managed to work in a software development job afterwards can still not code a couple of years later?

I never claimed that CS == coding, nor did I claim that CS graduates can't learn to code. All that I said is that a CS degree alone is not a sufficient substitute for screening, in counter to the grandparent comment.

I did quite a bit of recruiting for a software team in a large company. I can tell you that years of experience do not guarantee good quality code.

>a lot of people who have degrees have no clue how to code

I don't understand how this is possible. I know CS != coding, but every CS degree syllabus I've looked at does involve plenty of programming classes, practical programming projects, etc. How is it possible to graduate from that without being reasonably comfortable writing non-trivial stuff in a couple of major languages?

It works like this:

Step 1. The academics are themselves not that good at coding or teaching, and/or aren't interested in them. This might sound contradictory for a CS course, but at my university (as an example) the CS dept was run by a guy whose actual background was in mathematics. He loved hiring graph theory researchers and didn't like hiring people who knew programming.

Step 2. They try to teach programming to a class of newbies, but fail miserably because teaching programming is hard.

Step 3. They find ways to cover up the fact that nobody is learning to code properly. This can take many forms. At my university (a supposedly 'elite' British uni) they had evolved at least six or seven different tricks for this.

Step 4. Because nobody seems to be accountable for anything and the whole academic hierarchy is in on the scam, nothing gets fixed. Students who complain that they aren't being taught properly are simply punished with low grades. Because grades aren't connected to anything real or objective, there is no recourse.

A few of the tricks they used to cover up the lack of learning:

• Programming assignments that had almost all points allocated to the associated English-language "report", not code. As a consequence marks were arbitrary and depended mostly on whether the profs liked you or not.

• Unrealistic deadlines/workloads were set. Students who didn't submit work on time/whose programs crashed immediately on startup were then given extra time. Students who submitted work that started up were graded as-is on the deadline. This evened out the grades between self-taught programmers and those who were struggling.

• Group projects in which the group composition was fixed by the staff. They administered a programming test at the start of the course to identify those who had already taught themselves coding and then ensured every group had one such person. That person then did all the work, and the others in the group either slacked off or wrote the associated "report".

• Assessments in which the professors/TAs simply looked at the running program on the student's screen to judge if it worked. Students were informed of this practice up front, thus you could pass a programming exercise by simply making mockups in which the buttons didn't actually do anything, or updated the UI in hard coded ways.

And so on. I put report in quotes because the contents of these reports was primarily make-work.

The golden rule - at no point in the entire course did any of the teachers actually do a code review of any kind. Code was written but not read. Needless to say, cheating was rampant. None of the above can be fixed because academics are marking their own homework.

In that case I think we really do need the software engineering equivalent of the bar exam, as another commenter suggested.

It'd probably just create new problems. After all, degrees are supposedly regulated by governments already, but they aren't doing it properly. Why would some state-issued license be any better?

In theory, if there was demand for it the private sector could fix this by issuing certifications. In practice certifications aren't especially useful or well recognized, as the sort of people with the best skills don't see any need to take them. It's much easier and lower effort to demonstrate your skills in an interview. See this thread - people don't have the time/will to do take-home assignments that are meant to consume a few hours, tops (and I totally get that, I wouldn't want to either). They certainly wouldn't be happy if you suddenly told them they all had to cram for and take some government designed exam that checked their knowledge of e.g. Java 1.4 otherwise they'd all lose their jobs!

American degrees are decidedly not regulated by government. Professional groups and accreditation agencies perhaps, but not having a professional certification doesn't prevent a university from granting said degree. It's just one that some companies may not accept

> They find ways to cover up the fact that nobody is learning to code properly

Aha, so the secret summary is that:

Both students and teachers want the students to succeed,

so they cheat together, to make that (seem to) happen

> A few of the tricks they used

Thanks for writing about that, really interesting to read (!)

> cheating was rampant

(You don't happen to know about some websites being used for that? I recently found out about studypool dot com.)

Yep, that's exactly it.

By cheating I didn't mean getting solutions from websites although there's obviously a lot of that going on if you browse through e.g. Upwork. A staggering number of 'jobs' are obviously student coding assignments being farmed out.

The sort of cheating I meant was more stuff like students copy/pasting stuff off Wikipedia (it's all on the written reports remember) or copying answers off each other. Or they'd deliberately submit work they knew didn't function properly, aware of the fact that it wouldn't matter.

only if you're hiring somebody to be a CS major.

Actors must audition before they are chosen for a role. Sometimes several times..

Yeah, these are called technical interviews, and they usually take an entire day. I spend at least a two weeks studying for these before every job search.

If I have 4 jobs in my pipeline that assign me 4 hours of homework each, that's 16 hours of bullshit I have to slog through in addition to my study time, prep work, and a solid week or two of whiteboarding. This doesn't include the recruiter's technical trivia screen and the codeshare screen. No thanks.

If no thanks then why complain about 4 hours each? You are going to pick and choose the interviews you are going to do so what exactly is the problem if you say no any or all of them?

> Ask HN: Having trouble getting senior applicants, wondering what to do about it

Who would hire a chef without trying their food?

And a surgeon needs accreditation from the state.

Yeah I don't do these. I only do on-sites if I have a clear desire to work for the company. At the place I'm working at now, I did not do an onsite. At the place I was at previously, it was clear they were giving me an offer before I did the onsite, since the onsite was basically a 'get-to-know-you' thing. That's fine. On-sites serve a purpose of making sure you're not making a terrible decision. I actually made the decision this time to do two on-sites which is rare. This was because I had colleagues from previous positions at both locations and I honestly wanted to get a good sense.

However, one company was just really weird, so I learned that at the on-site. even though they wanted me... I said no. So in terms of preventing mistakes, on-sites are great. But, I'm not doing a 4 hour interview before any offer is made, or a clear indication of interest.

> Alternatively, perhaps pay people to complete the assignments.

That doesn't solve the majority of the "senior position" problem.

Like you point out, your schedule does not have a "spare" 4 hour block in it, and paying you $1000 to find one is not going to make you jump at the opportunity if the alternative is a different role that is not asking for a 4 hour block of your family time.

Anybody recruiting for "senior roles" needs to understand the 30-40 year olds, who are the only people who have the professional experience you're seeking, cannot be recruited like fresh college grads who can blast through pointless coding tests between 11pm and 3am, and do that 3 or 4 times a week and at least some off whom will genuinely enjoy doing so.

My first production code shipped for MacOS 7.5 and Windows 3.1. I am still shipping production code (although only rarely since these days I'm mostly managing a team rather than coding daily). I am _not_ going to do your take home 4hr assignment no matter who you are or what you're offering. Asking me to do it shows a fundamental misunderstanding of who I am, and I am not going to take a job with someone who knows that little about me. (And I have way better things to do with my free time than your pointless test)

But going onsite or remote interviewing for 4 hours is more reasonable?

Looking at the original post they have a 4 hour at home coding assignment that’s followed up by a group presentation. I’m guessing that one is an hour or so. Figure another hour or two to prepare for that.

It doesn’t seem like it is much off from a typical 5-6 hour on site interview. Plus I think you can get more of a signal about how they can explain a problem that they spent some time thinking about vs trying them trying to get excited about a leet code problem.

The advantage of interviews at least is that it's two-way. That's time out of their day as well as mine. When I'm interviewing at a company, I'm also interviewing them to see if I want to work for them. Doing a take-home assignment is completely one sided. It takes up my time but basically none of theirs and it gives them information about me, but not the other way around.

>But going onsite or remote interviewing for 4 hours is more reasonable?

I would never subject myself to a 4 hour interview either. What information can a company get in 4 hours they can't get in 1 hour? Seems like a massive waste of time done by a hiring process created by people that don't know any better.

If you want seniors to even consider you, you need to ditch all that garbage and save it for people fresh in the field.

Now if you are willing to pay double market rates you'll get more seniors willing to go through that, but if you are paying "market" rates and "good" benefits, you're not going to get the interest.

> 11:00 PM sleep until 6:30 the next day

Dude, if your wife is getting up multiple times a night, you really ought to consider stepping in and helping out. True males can't do the feeding, but if there is anyway you can help out with this, I guarantee your wife will be grateful. If your kids sleep then ignore this, but sleep deprivation is hell (to most people). My wife and I both worked and we slept in 4 hour shifts, then when they slept more, we went to night on then night off. Saved our marriage.

My wife doesn't work. I sleep with our older daughter. My wife and baby co-sleep. Babies sleep much better when they're nursing, but it does mean my wife gets more interrupted sleep, which is made up for by the amount of sleep she gets each night, which is much more than me.

This arrangement works for our marriage. We made a conscious decision early on to not both work.

We did the same. I had to sleep otherwise my job would have been unmanageable. It's one thing to move furniture, or be a manager, and it's completely different to have to actually write complex code and deal with hard engineering problems while sleep deprived.

P.S. My wife is now back on track with her career while being very happy about having spent all those early years with our kids.

One more data point here. As a father of three it took me a month to get around to doing a 2-3 hr take home coding exercise. I clocked in at about 2h15m, but yes, really, it took me a month to find 2.25 free hours with the energy required to even begin something like a take home coding thing.

All of the above, also

I've hired seniors - you'd be much better off replacing the 4+1 hour assignment with a 1 hour AMA or discussion about a project or ticket with the team they'd be working with and getting their feedback. Would they be able to work together?

Also, just post the salary!!! Seniors naturally will have made a wider range of life choices and will have a larger range of minimum salary they need to fund their lifestyle. Not posting it appears as if you're hiding something, which isn't a great starting point.

Can't you just quit and enjoy some time not working? Then suddenly have 8 hours a day which fits the 4 hours of coding assignment.

Quitting a job before you have another one is stupid.

Sorry, but if I had started my job search even a few weeks later, I would not have gotten my current thing. The economy has been in a free fall lately and I caught the last hiring wave before both my previous company and my new one announced hiring freezes.

So if I had quit and delayed a bit, I could have ended up unemployed, instead of with a raise. Quitting puts you in the position of disadvantage, so never do that.

So why have huge salaries and savings if you don't get to enjoy it? That's stupid as well.

Being unemployed as a SWE is not an issue at all.

Why is it people with kids can handle a 2-3 hours long interview on-site + travel that probably required taking time off work but can't handle a 4 hours assignment that they can do whenever?

I don't have kids, but I feel like solo coding comes out of a different pool of mental energy (more introverted, flow state) that I only have so much of. If I do a take-home for a potential employer, it's likely taking it out of the energy I have for my current one

Interviews where you're discussing your history or even coding challenges are different. I don't know what it is about having another person there to bounce things off of and explain the process, but it doesn't feel as exhausting.

"The thing with 4hr technical assignments is that you're saying no to anyone with kids". - or maybe they're saying "Yes" to someone who works from home and will do it while being paid by their current employer? ;). Which could mean (a) their current employer has mistreated them and "deserves" this to a certain extent, or (b) they'll do the same kind of thing and other naughty things on work time, if they get the job?

I have a similar schedule with 2 kids so I totally agree with this.

I don’t know, I’m single, in my 30s and there is just no way in hell I’m taking a 4 hour take home assessment. I guess my only exception to this would be if was a job & company I had always dreamed of working at ever since I was a child (extremely unlikely). If I did take a 4 hour assessment and got the job, I would require an additional sum to my signing bonus for the time taken on the initial assessment (something like 1-5k depending on the role/industry/negotiating power I have).

A four hour assessment is just absurd. When I’m job searching (I’ve been fortunate to only have to do this a few times in my lifetime, and am in a position to be very selective in the opportunities I pursue), I’d more or less be open to a quick 1hr take home assessment, but nothing more.

In my experience companies typically take one of two paths when engagement with a potential candidate: a 1ish hour take-home assessment or a 1ish hour interview with a recruiter where they typically ask a number of basic job-relevant basic questions - IMO both methods just serve as a way to weed out the people who liter their resumes with buzzwords one line and actually are not qualified for the position at all.

I was feeling like s..t for not returning to assignment to one of these companies. I had a week and still didn't find time. I'm just not going to accept them in the future, it makes me look bad for no good reason.

I just wrapped up a take home project. When I was told about it, I told the HM that I withdraw from processes that include a take home. They told me that they understood, but that this one really did only take an hour or two, and that they’d send it over to me anyway. All they asked was that I take a look, and if I completed it, they’d send me a $150 Amazon gift card. I took a look, and it really did seem straightforward (basically testing what I’d expect a live, 30-45 minute DS interview to cover), so I went ahead and did it. I ended up spending 2.5 hours on it, but only because I got sucked into making very pretty charts.

I’m pretty anti-take home, because they’re usually scoped as “it should only take you 4-5 hours, here’s a project that would take an in house DS a week at minimum”, but if they were actually scoped like this one (and even mildly comped), I really wouldn’t mind much.

I think I share your interpretation, plus it is possible to scope something small that's (gasp!) interesting. The last one I did was use the company's product to create something and then demo it to the team. In addition to a gift card is was (almost) fun.

IMO a (very small) take-home assignment is the least-worst of a lot of generally bad options. A pairing exercise focused on teamwork and communication (vs hardcore coding) is the only other option I even consider these days.

I always appreciate when they resemble the work the company expects I'll end up doing, because I do actually enjoy the work I do.

If I don't like the take-home, I assume I'll probably hate the job too. Whereas traditional interviews tell me almost nothing about what I'm going to end up doing day to day.

I'm happy with the idea of a pairing exercise. I've felt regretful about every time I've gotten involved with a take-home even when my submission was successful, so maybe that's why I'm reacting badly to it here. You mention scoping, but there really has to be a way to enforce that other candidates don't spend more time on it than you do. Otherwise it is a resource consumption contest.

I agree - I have regretted every time that I agreed to a take home assignment, including when it’s been successful. The reason this worked was the HM simply sent me the assignment and asked me to take a look (and clarified that there’d be no hard feelings if I decided not to move forward). I took a look, and it turned out they weren’t lying about it being well scoped!

I'm a "senior" (I was 55 when I started looking), and I didn't have a "network," because I was a manager, and wanted to get back into technical stuff (I'm very good at technical stuff, but I was paid to manage). I had a network of pretty heavy-duty people, but they all knew me as a manager, and I didn't want to put them on the spot for technical stuff, since that wasn't how they knew me.

That basically meant that I had to come in the front door to places I was interested in.

I was a bit "picky," because I wanted to do stuff that interested me. I didn't really care about making a lot of money, or beanbag chairs, or whatnot. I wanted to do work that engaged me.

I'm a very experienced Apple native developer, and I'm good at writing stuff that talks to other stuff (like client/server systems, device control, realtime video, etc.). I'm good at writing APIs and SDKs. Making devices sit up and beg is something I've always enjoyed.

So places that did stuff like that, interested me.

In my experience, I was treated like absolute crap. After a few rounds of "interviews" (which seemed to be opportunities for relatively young engineers and managers to patronize and condescend me), I just said "bugger this for a lark," and decided that I was retired. I set up a small company, so I could buy toys, and started following my own muse. I found some folks doing non-profit stuff, that couldn't afford people of my caliber, and started working with them, for free.

It was the best decision I've ever made. In the last five years, I've probably done more work than I did in two decades previously, I've learned more, every day, than I have, since my twenties.

[UPDATED TO ADD] If you want "senior" people, they are likely to come with a rather fetching shade of grey to their well-coiffed pompadours, and I'd suggest that it would be rather self-destructive to treat them badly. There seems to be considerable resentment towards us older folks. I'm not one to judge whether or not it is merited (in my case, it is definitely not), but it may interfere with efforts to recruit more experienced folks.

awesome story, what kind of non profit do you work with exactly?

We are a small 501(c)(3), creating an app that is aimed at a particular demographic. It is an amalgam of a simple social media graph, and a location-based event database.

It's not really device control, but it does involve a fairly robust iOS app, talking to multiple servers, and synthesizing relationships.

I won't go into a whole bunch of detail in public. Like I said, it serves a fairly narrow demographic, and won't really make a huge splash.

I've been writing software for this demographic for decades.

I can always chat about it offline.

I'm super happy that you found such a fulfilling role!

Was wondering if you could elaborate on this a bit:

> I set up a small company, so I could buy toys, and started following my own muse.

The Great Rift Valley Software Company[0] is a small corporation that allowed me to use a bit of my retirement money without tax penalties.

[0] https://riftvalleysoftware.com

Could you expand on the tax side of that a bit?

This is the first time I've heard of using a personal retirement account to pay business expenses without tax penalties, and I'm not finding any relevant hits on Google.

It's a way of setting up a 401(K), that funds a corporation.

Kind of a pain in the butt, and not many accountants know of it. There's a lot of fairly strict rules. You can't paint outside the lines.

There's a company that specializes in this kind of thing. I don't really want to go into detail, here, but feel free to get in touch (my HN ID has contact info).

Ah, thanks, that helped locate some relevant search results!

For those following along at home, the accounting term seems to be [[ Rollovers as Business Startups (ROBS) ]]. The IRS website has some unusually direct guidance[1][2] on tax compliance risks associated with ROBS.

[1] https://www.irs.gov/retirement-plans/rollovers-as-business-s...

[2] https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-tege/robs_guidelines.pdf

Yes, that’s it. It’s a really good idea to use a company that specializes in this stuff. They take care of all the accounting and legal stuff. My own accountant won’t touch that stuff.

First I've heard of ROBS, thanks for posting. I would have assumed OP was talking about a Self Directed IRA, which is an interesting account that can do a lot more than hold securities. From my understanding your IRA can at that point own an LLC which then might hold other assets like actual real-estate.

I think you can do something similar with Real Estate Investment trusts (REITs) depending on your country of citizenship.

More info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_estate_investment_trust#U...

Happy for you, but this is an oddly cynical take. Just because you are 55, you don't get special treatment. If you're interviewing for Staff or Senior Staff positions (assuming that's the role, with your years of experience), it would be discrimination if someone else was subjected to a different interview process than yours.

Well, if you interview senior staff, with the same techniques you use to interview junior staff, don’t be surprised, at the results.

I interviewed senior engineers (for a marquee corporation), for 25 years. I have some actual experience, here.

I never made any technical mistakes. Everyone I hired was technically, up to snuff.

The mistakes tended to be in how they worked in the team.

> it would be discrimination if someone else was subjected to a different interview process than yours.

And I really have to take exception to this. Every interview I ever did, was tailored to the applicant. There's absolutely no legal basis for this stance. There's a few "obvious" discriminatory things ("All our girls start in the typing pool," etc.), but people aren't cookies, and "cookie cutter" interview processes are for "cookie" positions. Our HR was very clear on what did, and did not, count as legally discriminatory behavior. HR was run by the Corporate General Counsel, and we managers were required to understand the legal ramifications of our duties.

The OP was talking about senior staff. These are folks that will have Responsibility for significant projects, will need to act as leaders and mentors, and will be the ones to take "point" on the corporate brand and public profile.

Treating them as "cookies" is, in my opinion, less than wise.

If you pit me against some kid, right out of college, that has been spending three hours (of their current employer's time), every day, for the last month, practicing leetcode, you'll get someone that is very good at doing quick, meaningless tests. It won't tell you much about how they'll perform in the breach, or when asked to architect a large-scale, heterogenous system (which is what I'm fairly good at). Not sure how un-discriminatory the process is, there...

In any case, it's all water under the bridge, now. A few companies didn't get me. I doubt that anyone is crying in their beer over it, and things turned out well, for me. All's well, that ends well, eh?

> I never made any technical mistakes. Everyone I hired was technically, up to snuff.

This itself would be a huge red flag in any interview process. If you think you never made any technical directions.

It's a false dichotomy to believe either tailor make the interview process or treat everyone like a college hire. Senior staff / staff positions also have a particular process, including writing exercises, explaining complex decisions, writing code, talking about system design and the various trade-offs.

> Every interview I ever did, was tailored to the applicant.

How do you make sure that your / someone else's biases don't creep into the interview if it's being tailor made.

What kind of diversity did you have at your previous job where the interviews were tailor made?

Hey, I won't engage.

I did well enough, so some very tough people kept me in my position for a long time.

When they finally rolled up my department, the person with the least tenure had a decade.

These were all senior-level C++ algorithm engineers. We did image processing pipelines for one of the most famous imaging companies on earth.

But feel free to judge me. You won't be alone.

You have victim mentality. Odds aren't stacked against you, most people in this industry don't care how old you are. Though statements like this show that you would be a hard person to work with: 1. There seems to be considerable resentment towards us older folks. 2. But feel free to judge me. You won't be alone.

You seem to be accusing companies and younger people of ageism, but I'm yet to hear a concrete example. From reading what you wrote, I can say it seems you seem to be exhibiting an adverse reaction to young people doing well.

> If you pit me against some kid, right out of college, that has been spending three hours (of their current employer's time), every day, for the last month, practicing leetcode, you'll get someone that is very good at doing quick, meaningless tests.

Not sure how you got to the conclusion that younger engineers are stealing time from their employers to leetcode.

I wish you the best, and hope you get a chance to analyze your biases.

This. Four hour assignment? That's a hard No. Unless you're very clearly offering something far above the norm (in either total comp or autonomy or working conditions or a combination thereof), I'm certainly not going to bother with your interview process.

I think I might (for non-network referrals) respond with "my hourly rate is $XX".

Has anyone done this? Has it worked?

PS - I also try to add on a 30m review of /their/ code, but so far it hasn't worked. I still ask!

Replace that with "my hourly rate is $XXX" and you will be good. Developers tend to under-charge for consulting, and this interview is likely to be a very short-term gig so you should charge more than you are worth on a long-term gig.

Edit: By the way, one company has actually paid for my time to do a take-home at my consulting rate. Most of them balk.

Snarky responses in interview processes like quoting an hourly rate might seem attractive but I urge you to avoid them. The best case is probably that it immediately ends the process but you get a moment's satisfaction. However you could easily be seen as unprofessional and that damage to your reputation could come back to bite you later when you're applying for something you really do want. If someone is asking too much just turn them down politely and move on. No need to burn bridges.

However asking to see some examples of their real code/documentation is a legitimate request IMHO and something I did in my later interviews when I was working as an employee. I'd usually bring it up at a second interview when we knew both sides were serious and they asked if there was anything I'd like to know more about. Nowhere ever thought it was an unreasonable request in my experience and some took it as a good sign that I was sincerely interested. Probably the majority of places actually did find something I could look at, though some refused and usually cited something like confidentiality or trade secrets. Of course the ones who showed me good code were more likely to get me to work for them than the ones who refused or showed me bad code.

Unprofessional? You are offering very bad advice. If your work is worth that much, don’t give it out for free to people who don’t recognize it.

PS: my rate for 4 hours work is $2500. Companies HAVE taken me up on this rate. In fact I am currently declining work because I haven’t the time. Know your worth!

If you have been paid $2500 for a 4-hour tech test then I'm sure a lot of people reading this would like to know who paid it. Most employers certainly won't.

And I didn't say you should work for free. I said shooting back your hourly rate in response to a request for a tech test could easily be seen as unprofessional. If you don't want to do a tech test that's fine but you can just withdraw gracefully at the start of the process when you ask what their stages are and they tell you about the test.

It's not unprofessional, it's setting expectations.

I wasn't saying that I got paid consulting rates to do tech tests. I have never had to do a tech test, and never will. But I've been approached by recruiters, and I always respond with my current top-tier hourly consulting rate, with a minimum half-day charge. Usually that's the end of that conversation, but twice such an unsolicited inbound request has resulted in the recruiter saying "okay, when can you come out?" Once was a certain large asian phone manufacturer, who flew me out to their headquarters halfway around the world for a week of consulting, which also acted as a sort of interview. I decided not to pursue a longer-term job with them for $REASONS. The second instance was my current non-FAANG job. Told them my rate, they again flew me out for 3 days, and on the last day we negotiated salary.

To be clear, my negotiated salary from this job is much, much less than $5000/day I charged them for that interview. It's actually on the lower end for my industry, although I'm still one of the higher paid members on my team. I took it because I like the team, I like the work, and I'm given a fair amount of freedom. It was also 100% work-from-home, prior to COVID. The $15000 I invoiced for 3 days of consulting? They considered it a signing bonus.

But yeah, some companies are willing to pay to get the attention of senior talent, and since I'm charging hourly they respect my time. I have my pick of places to work, so why not filter based on that?

>have a network and can say "hey I'm looking" and instantly have multiple options that won't have them do more than talk to the team and manager for an hour or two.

Wow. I have 10 years of work experience, the last few being "senior". I have a few friends and many recruiters I could reach out to, but absolutely expecting a full fledged 30-round interview like anyone else. I envy you!

Likewise. I do envy the GP. Currently looking for work, and this has not been my experience.

Same! In case others feel bad reading this, I’m in the same boat. Every place I’ve worked has a multi step interview process and as far as I know referrals don’t get to skip it.

Maybe it’s different types of work (consulting?) or companies (earlier stage startups?).

I don’t think I’m particularly good or bad at networking but fully expect to have to do coding interviews and/or take homes. Or maybe I really do need to get a stronger network!

Don't feel too bad. One counterpoint to this is that most companies I've worked at will require even highly recommended employees to go through the same interview process as everyone else, primarily for fairness and diversity reasons.

Getting a recommendation may "put you to the front of the line", and may allow you to skip a basic screening call, but honestly I think most well run organizations won't skip the interview process even if it's a well-known "superstar" - they would instead just change some of the interviews to let that superstar demonstrate their in-depth expertise in their niche.

It goes away at year 15 or so if you have a good reputation.

I resigned my previous role out of sheer boredom and a desire to work on something new and have been flooded with no/fit-only interview offers, not that i'm going to follow up on them.

Same here at 20 years. It definitely seems to be one of those things that's not universal to all Senior devs.

Same boat but a bit worse: 15 years and a "network" that consists of two people from my very first job as a developer. It is a bit rough knowing that I am so intrinsically bad at networking.

>Many seniors (actual seniors, not 3-years-of-experience seniors) have a network and can say "hey I'm looking" and instantly have multiple options that won't have them do more than talk to the team and manager for an hour or two. If that.

I couldn't point to this more. The recruiting circus is so bad and has been for decades, I don't even bother talking to recruiters anymore. If by some chance I actually did, I'd pass on the 4h test unless I was absolutely desperate. I haven't been absolutely desperate since the dot bomb, and a recruiter hosed me over by inviting me for an interview for a job he didn't really have.

He might not be fucked, but he's probably fucked. It's not so much his doing (albeit the 4h test is a deal breaker for most seniors), it's just the landscape has been so bad for so long, and seniors already have a network, unless he knows somebody who knows somebody, he's probably SOL.

The only thing I can think of is offer and post a salary that is 20%-50% above market and hope for the best. You'll be attracting and filtering out a bunch of bad candidates though. An alternative to that is find the best junior/mid you got, make him team lead and give him some motivational speeches. If you're lucky, they'll rise up to the task.

For what it's worth, back in the day when I started, it was typically a 10m phone call, 1 hour in person interview, then yay or nay. If the candidate wasn't working out, they'd let him go.

My personal policy on these assignments used to be that you get 4 hours free, and you agree to be billed for the rest at my consulting rate. Now I am down to 2 hours. Most of my network has a 1.5 hour test as a formality, and it's not that much longer than a phone interview.

Someone I spoke to recently had the audacity to ask for 20 hours of free work in the intro call, and I just shook my head and hung up.

I'd rather do four hours of a take home exercise on my own time, than block out an entire day to interview with 5-6 people in a row.

>actual seniors, not 3-years-of-experience seniors

I like how things are confusing enough to need this distinction, but also we still don't know if you're talking about actual seniors and not principal engineers

It's a pitiful state of affairs isn't it?

Conversely, to some extent I can't specify, if someone senior does applies to a "regular" job, it might mean their former coworkers don't want to work with them...

I've found that for the biggest numbers people expect me to memorize a bunch of bullshit from year three of MIT's CS program, so if anything I think this is better than most.

If a company doesn't bother to check how well I'm going to do the job, it makes me worried about what sort of smooth-talking incompetents I'm going to get stuck working with down the line.

Second the network thing. I've done two interviews in the last 25 years. Mostly it's a 30 minute call or coffee with the group leader just to make them feel ok about the decision they've already made to hire you.

Same when hiring: I'd much rather hire someone who I've seen work before than go through a whole interview process, and still feel like it's a crapshoot at the end when making an offer.

Seriously. Pretty insulting to assign a senior a 4 hr take home assignment when the hiring manager can just pick up the phone and talk to references, look up authored papers, etc. Ridiculous. Glad the tide is turning in favor of workers.

This seems weird to me. I hear it all the time, but I don't understand. It's a few hours, even as much as a day of effort - to make a huge jump that might be worth hundreds of thousands of Dollars, or perhaps have other major lifestyle improvements. And "if I can get a similarly..." - sure, but is it not worth a few hours up front to find the best job for you? I would happily to 4 hours of work to get a 1% better job.

Of course, if it's STEP 1, and you're faced with many iterations of this, that's a different story. But if I'm somewhat certain that I'm looking at a great offer from a great company at some point, why not spend the 4 hours?

Most senior (in the traditional sense, not the "7 years experience = senior" sense) people are mostly in jobs where the problem is they are bored, not the compensation.

Because a) it's not 'to make' but 'to possibly make' times APPLICATIONS_RUNNING b) most people on that level will already earn that compensation package.

So it tends to narrow down the pool to those for which it is an interesting position, ie. 'Not yet established senior yet'. Which explicitly doesn't seem to be what they want.

Hard pass for me too (and I'm not senior). How about they spend 4 hours looking through your Github instead?

I just skipped a 30 minute take home multiple choice test. After the second question I could tell this wasn't really testing my skills and was just a hoop to jump through. Could've googled the answers but decided if this is their strategy I didn't want to work there. I emailed the recruiter and declined.

The upside is, this is literally the answer! Just remove this step and the rest of the hiring process is more or less fine.

I would not do homework on principle. Life is too short and the company doesn't know how to hire senior people.

I often have to ask people that have no code I can look at to do a take-home. I do not have a choice. What I do have a choice in is paying for their time at an above average rate I would pay a contractor, so they know I value their time.

I agree, but if the assignment genuinely replaces an on-site and the recruiter and hiring manager make that clear, I'd consider it. If they don't, consider there doesn't seem to have been a technical phone screen, I'd assume it's just a first step, and I'd pass.

Agreed. As a datapoint, I’m fairly senior (staff SWE at 2 companies), and there’s absolutely no way I’d do a 4 hour take home assignment. I work long enough hours already, and when I’m considering a job move, I interview at multiple places. No way am I investing that much in a single “maybe” role, especially not when the job market is so excellent for experienced devs.

Also, re:

> Benefits and salary are good (though salary isn't posted in the ad)

If the salary is legitimately strong, you should post it.

In summary, as advice to OP:

- Put the salary in the ad

- Scrap the take home assignment

It’s still hard to hire legit senior devs, but those 2 changes will make it significantly easier.

Hardware companies manage to hire people without giving them assignments all the time (lets not even talk about management, HR, counsel ...), what makes software companies so special that they have to do it, except maybe that they can?

There was a time window where they could get away with it. This time window seems to come to an end now.

Exactly. Senior devs have choices already. Another nope on the assignment.

Offering someone you don't know a senior position without some kind of insight into their level of competence is just a lottery.

I've screened a number of very senior developers with impressive CV's applying for senior C++ positions. When I look at their code, usually it just sucks. More often than not it's just plain old C code with C++ dressing. For example, using pthreads in stead of C++11 std::thread, and mostly avoiding even the C++ standard library.

When I interview people, I usually ask them to write some code, for 4 to 6 hours, to solve whatever problem they find interesting, to show me; a) their level of understanding of the C++ language and libraries, b) how they solve problems (I prefer low complexity) and c) what they find interesting.

The interview + the code they show me, give me an idea about their qualifications in this specific area. It's still a lottery to hire someone, but the odds for a winning ticket is a little better ;)

> Offering someone you don't know a senior position without some kind of insight into their level of competence is just a lottery.

So what do you think the rest of the world does? Mechanical, civil, electrical engineering, lawyers, doctors, HR, managers? What makes software so special?

The rest of the world does different things, and software isn't that special.

For many jobs, the world outsources candidate quality assessment to trusted academic institutions and certification boards. But the software industry has decided — perhaps rightly — that software engineers do not have to go the traditional route of getting a tertiary education attested to by diplomas and certificates.

So rather than comparing with doctors and lawyers, you need to look at what the rest of the world is doing with professions that lack institutional gatekeeping. For example, it's pretty common for translators to do tests before they are offered a job. An agile consultancy described in a podcast how they are hiring scrum masters — and there is a combination of checking the certificates (PSM3's are fast-tracked to a final interview) and tests (seeing how a candidate scrum master can run a scrum event with a team). I am sure there will be lots of similar examples in other areas.

> So what do you think the rest of the world does? Mechanical, civil, electrical engineering, lawyers, doctors, HR, managers?

I think they end up hiring the wrong person most of the time.

> What makes software so special?

It's not. We also end up hiring the wrong person most of the time ;)

Finding the best possible person for any position is hard.

Or you could just ask them "What's your library of choice for threading?"

Sidenote: Senior people have been burned by the years where the STL was inconsistently implemented and horribly bloated and inefficient. That doesn't mean they won't quickly learn to love modern C++, especially if they're joining a codebase with good examples to follow.

How do you structure the interview to make sure they are any good, though?

A place I interviewed at wanted me to code a functional date picker using React - without any design frameworks and with a very specific CSS. I still think they just needed a date picker.

I might be okay with a supplementary assignment (depending) but I definitely need an interview. With an assignment I don't learn much about the team and thus whether I really want to work there.

Agreed. They're nonsense. They either test irrelevant capabilities that anyone with Google and Stack Overflow can solve, or they are hoop-jumping for the sake of it.

If you can't tell whether someone is just talking the talk or actually has done something during a 30m+ interview process, then you're not asking the right questions.

We solved this problem by paying a healthy hourly rate so that candidates don’t feel taken advantage of if we don’t move forward with them.

I should note that this seemed to help offset the concerns of people with families. They definitely don’t see it as a waste of time. It also incentivizes us to be sure we’re serious about the candidate.

Nice! More gatekeeping in the tech world. "actual seniors" vs "seniors"

I have kids and I can find 4 hours for an assignment. It's painful but for the right company, I'd do it (I did and I'm glad).

However, if I don't find the ballpark of the salary on Glassdoor, which is information you DON'T control (this is an hint at showing the salary), I won't even consider your company. What's worse than wasting 4 hours and then seeing an offer that's lower than your current pay?

I am going to add one thing that I haven't heard here. You probably need to raise the cash in your offer by a lot. Most mid-size companies think that they can get away with offering equity at a ridiculous valuation and attract people who aren't true believers. Most people aren't true believers in miscellaneous DevOps that doesn't involve a lot of code.

I have spoken to a few series-C and D companies that wanted to give me $X00,000 worth of stock at their series C valuation. I informed them that I needed $X,000,000 of common stock (at that valuation) to match the expected value of my gig at the time, or I would take $X00,000 of preferred stock (whatever they gave their series C investors). They thought that was crazy. If you pretend that the people you are trying to hire don't understand the economics of your stock price, you are only doing yourself a disservice.

To continue that very last sentence, you are doing yourself a disservice, or like a lot of startups I think people just legitamately don't know how to value stocks and I think there is definitely a predatory nature to that. Perhaps I'm reflecting on my own experience too much, but at my first startup I never asked the simple question "Assuming this company IPOs or gets bought and exits, what is the most this stock would reasonably be worth?". Investors and company leaders know what success looks like, and you multiple that company success by the percentage of stock you'd have when acquired and that's the actual payout you should expect if successful. Now go ahead and multiple by probability of success, and you have what you should expect. I was so proud of myself for negotiating for once, getting both a higher salary and higher amount of stock, but in the end, the company sold in a decent exit, and I pocketed a whopping extra $20K. A rounding error in salary given the risk and below-market salary. I definitely learned the hard way.

When calculating expected value of private stock/options I multiply by a factor of ~10 at the end. There are so many unknown unknowns that significantly decrease the value of your equity. The equity agreements I have seen also give ultimate discretion to the board on how your equity is executed. You don’t have control over triggering events and also there are usually quite a few clauses with “at the discretion of the board of directors”.

When negotiating offers for non-public companies I provide a sliding scale of cash vs equity. 1 dollar of cash is worth to me 10 dollars in equity of a private company. So if my total comp goal is 300k per year you can give me 250k of cash and 500k of equity, 200k cash and 1000k equity, or just 300k cash.

Most companies will baulk at this, but in my experience you have none of the power when holding private equity and so you need a really large multiplier to make it worth the risk.

Equity in a public company is a totally different story because the company valuation is controlled by the stock exchanges and you can cash out you equity at any time.

How would you value apple equity vs cash? I recently got a decent offer with a total comp higher than my current all cash salary, but rejected it as it seems that equity even in Apple is not a sure bet at the moment. Even with the generous offer that was greater than my current salary that they gave me a few months ago, it would still be worth less than my current job after the recent market dip. I asked for more equity to buffer for a potential market downturn, and they insisted that Apple stock doesn't go down lol. Unfortunately I was correct. I've been in the industry for 25 years - what do they take us for?

Most financially savvy people would say that public company equity is almost like cash. If you are saving money for retirement, you are going to put most of your cash in the stock market, and AAPL and the stock market are highly correlated. The vesting schedule essentially forces you to save that cash for a later date (in a volatile but usually highly accretive investment vehicle). You don't have the same kinds of situations as you get with a startup where your company folds but the rest of the market is unaffected.

I would say take what most 'financially savvy' people say with a grain of salt and go ahead and do your own research or find an actual professional to sort through the details. The average lifespan of a company on the S&P 500 is dropping fairly quickly, which puts the risk of a single investment going to 0(or on a long haul downward trend) higher.

Obviously "doing your own research" is good but I think the question is totally reasonable in a tech forum where probably a very large percentage of people here have gone through this process. Also, they asked specifically about Apple. Companies that are sitting on massive amounts of cash and have trillion dollar valuations don't disappear over night, they're not gonna "drop out of the S&P" any time in the foreseeable future.

What question? Did you even read the comment I was responding to(which was not the OP)?

I guess not

Yeah, I should have said "blue chip" stock. Public companies include COIN and HOOD, which I would say are more like startups.

We are talking about stock/option grants though. You have to factor in what you think the grant will be worth over the vesting period. A lot can happen to a public stock over 4 years and your grant can easily be worth an order of magnitude less once it vests.

Cash to a lesser extent has this problem as well that you don’t know how much a dollar will be worth in four years, but it most likely less volatile than the value of equity.

I would value a 4 year 500k grant in apple stock much higher than a 4 year 500k grant in a crypto company because I believe the apple grant will better hold it’s value over the vesting period.

I would personally value apple equity at 70-80% face value vs cash. Apple has solid fundamentals and their equity is liquid. The iphone and m1 macs are still really strong product offerings. Apple also has priority access to TSMC which means they will have the best silicon on the market for the foreseeable future.

Public company stock should be valued near it's current market value, minus a bit to account for volatility. I would think 90-95% is about right.

I think this really depends if you want to come up with it's expected value, or you care about e.g. the p50 or p25 or worse scenarios. Worst case is probably too negative most of the time, but occasionally you might choose to join a company that then implodes or has some really nasty problem surface that tanks the stock value. It really just depends on how risk-averse you want to be as to what metric personally makes the most sense.

It all depends on when you need the money. If you are expecting to have to spend the money right after the stock vests, it may be worth 50% of cash due to the chance of a bad market. If you are expecting to save the money for 10 years, it's probably worth as much as cash.

> When calculating expected value of private stock/options I multiply by a factor of ~10 at the end.

For early stage startups? I just go ahead and value them at zero. Ownership of equity in pre B series tech startup is, for me, about the same as ownership in a lottery ticket. It has some value in that it's fun to dream about what might happen, but that's pretty much it.

I am still likely to jump on start-up offers (I'm kinda waiting on two to form a little more fully right now) where I _know_ the salary will be below market rate, but where I also know the "mission" is something I care about and the team are people I want to work with. But I'm going to do that still valuing the equity at zero. If things work out like the pitch deck says, yeah maybe I'll make 7 figures out of it. But I'm not gonna assume that'll happen, even if the pitch deck success _does_ happen, I'd expect to have been diluted along the way to only end up with 6 or 5 figures.

Even without getting into the magnitude of the difference, and just talking about the direction, I think a lot of folks at private startups expect external candidates to value $1 of their stock (based on their last 409a) more than $1 of stock in a public company. I don't have a strong opinion on how big the liquidity premium for equity in a private tech startup should be, but I feel pretty strongly that it shouldn't be negative.

Honestly, I think most startups are betting that employees don’t know any better. This was true up to maybe 5 years ago, but sites like levels.fyi have really made this trade off clear to potential employees. Half the time when I talk to a potential hiring manager at a private company, they really don’t know what the equity is worth or how it’s structured.

I’d argue that an effective 20-30% discount on 409A for employees in series C+ is about right. On a successful, but expected, exit - this gives the employee some premium compared to working at a public tech company in exchange for deferred compensation and liquidity risk.

> Honestly, I think most startups are betting that employees don’t know any better.

Yeah, that's probably accurate. For whatever reason, many seem to view equity as a "check the box" formality rather than a material part of your compensation. I mostly avoided non-unicorn startups during my last job hunt for that reason, but the few that I got around to talking numbers with offered <$50k in equity over 4 years (and in the form of options to boot); the equity comp for the role I ended up taking is around an order of magnitude higher.

Yeah, this expectation is nuts, and it's why people who work for startups tend to be true believers in the mission. The startup has literally priced in the belief of the employees.

What does current price/share have to do with value of a stock option? The price/share is what I PAY to acquire the stock ... if I buy it at that strike price and it's valued at that price I have zero net gain. I've had various conversations where people making offers in more mature companies try to correlate my potential stock option grant X price/share as some measure of worth. It's only the gain that matters.

PSA: For those who don't fully understand the second paragraph above, be sure to google 'liquidation preference' before you're next evaluating an offer that includes equity or options in a private company.

But also know that if liquidation preferences are coming into play for the company’s exit, it’s almost certainly a giant failure and any late joining employees aren’t getting anything significant.

If the startup is not growing extremely fast, the stock will likely not be worth very much regardless of how “clean” the terms are on the preferred stock.

If you expect stock to be a big part of your compensation then leave after 2 years of the company’s growth is not sustained and rapid.

It's not a giant failure if liquidation preferences are in play. Liquidation preferences help in literally every scenario that is not an IPO. It is very common that a startup exits in an acquisition, and usually when that happens, small common shareholders get a lot less than the "value" of their stock. The liquidation preference protects you (or pays out a bonus) in that case.

It has a huge effect on the EV of a startup investment, and that's why VCs and founders use them.

Help who? I’m specifically talking about an employee getting standard common stock.

If liquidation preferences are coming into play, you’ve already lost as a common shareholder. But you should never be in that situation to begin with. If a company is struggling or growing slowly, quit and join one that isn’t.

Liquidation preferences advantage you compared to common stockholders in any situation that isn't an IPO. In a slightly disappointing acquisition (the most common outcome for a "successful" startup), it saves your butt. If you have double-dipping shares or a higher liquidation preference, you are going to make a lot of money in a bad acquisition situation.

Liquidation preferences are cheap insurance against bad outcomes. Most startups have bad outcomes. However, people getting common stock are hurt by every share with a liquidation preference. It is in your interest, as a startup investor (or employee), to get a liquidation preference if you can.

There is not a single respectable startup in existence that will give a random employee options or stock with liquidation preferences. For 99.9% of startups that would involve making a new class of shares for you, which ain’t gonna happen.

Investor is of course completely different for many reasons and I’m not speaking to that. And anyways unless you are leading the round, which you aren’t, you are just getting whatever preferences the lead is getting anyways.

Nobody would give you preferred stock, which is why you need to demand an absolutely absurd premium on the amount of common stock that they offer.

Also, it generally doesn't need a new class of shares, just a vote by the board.

Edit: Just to clarify, if you want to hire a mercenary, you can't do it expecting that they will take the same value of your stock that your true believer investors took without any of the guarantees that your investors got. They are investing time into your company and you need to make it worth it.

This just doesn’t make sense though. A company is going to have some standard bands of compensation, and if you demand something way outside of the bands based on your own feelings of stock value, they aren’t going to hire you no matter how great you are. Part of the reason companies can give generous stock grants are precisely because they are the lowest tier of stock.

This also is a stupid thing to bargain: if the company keeps growing, preferred and common will be worth the exact same thing. So instead of trying to extract better preferences on the stock (which you won’t), join a fast growing company and leave if it stops growing fast.

> A company is going to have some standard bands of compensation, and if you demand something way outside of the bands...

If you're joining early enough to get enough equity to matter, you're early enough that they don't have standard bands. You can absolutely negotiate.

> if the company keeps growing, preferred and common will be worth the exact same thing.

Only if it ends in an IPO. An acquisition, even a "successful" one, can easily end up with the preferences kicking in.

Some companies do tender offers (stock buyback) to give employees liquidity, but unfortunately the c suite and investors (those who typically have a more favorable liquidity preference) can cause the tender offer to be oversubscribed if they enter more sell orders than there are buy orders. Usually this means common stock owners do not get to participate. Preferred stock can also be converted to common, but not the other way around.

Tender offers will only happen when somebody wants to buy stock, which means they think the stock price is lower than it will be in the future, which means they expect the company to grow or keep growing.

The companies where liquidation preferences are going to screw you are not going to be having tender offers, because by definition nobody wants to buy the stock! If they did want to buy the stock at above the current price then liquidation preferences aren’t coming into play.

(Note: I’m sure there are examples where a company did have a tender offer at some decent price before falling off a cliff and having a bad exit where the common stock was wiped out… but that is not common at all)

I've never been at a company that was quite so liberal with their term sheet. Small or large, nobody wants to talk about it. My last place had a bunch of bickering in their allhands for a few months over total diluted outstanding and similar relevant equity metrics being kept secret.

You're not going to be able to hire someone senior without telling them how much they are making. This trick only works on college students and people who are really passionate.

Startups have a lot of toxic expectations around keeping those term sheets secret for no good reason.

Yes, valuations have gone through the roof, but the equity grants have not kept pace. This is a huge disservice to candidates. Got especially bad in 2021. Really important for people to research startup pay before signing: https://topstartups.io/startup-salary-equity-database/

To the OP: if you believe your comp bands are competitive, why not share in the posting itself?

> To the OP: if you believe your comp bands are competitive, why not share in the posting itself?

Leaving that out makes it clear that the post was made in good faith. If I thought the submission was just a job ad in disguise, I might have flagged it.

I think the GP is saying "Why don't you put your salary band into the job ad", rather than "why didn't you link the job ad itself here".

Which is 100% valid! Beyond being mandatory in more and more jurisdictions, having the salary range be posted has made me more likely to apply. Extremely confidence inspiring when it actually is market rate.

I know recruiters/C suite people think they can jedi mind trick people into taking super low offers that way, but really almost all really good candidates will be able to get jobs elsewhere anyways so you're just wasting a bunch of people's time cuz they're not going to take the offer.

Ah, thanks, that does make more sense!

You're either undervaluing common stock or vastly overvaluing preferred stock. Probably the latter?

If you join with options for preferred stock (assuming anyone is going to do such a thing), you're probably getting a 1x liquidation preference. But preferred stock has a higher fair market value than common stock. So the strike price will be higher. Probably close to the liquidation preference.

Which means, you're asking for something that will net you $0 if the liquidation preference kicks in. And you'll earn less in the upside case because your exercise price would be higher.

Oh no, that calculation was for equity, not for an option. An option would have totally different pricing models, and it would likely be closer in value due to the strike prices. However, options are probably overvalued a LOT by startups. They think they are like equities, when they are a lot more like... options.

Also, 10x is a little off, but I also work on infrastructure and infrastructure companies tend to get acquired rather than IPOing.

Edit - as for the actual terms of the stocks in question, it was never what you were thinking (1x preference), but I probably can't say what it was.

This.

The social media analytics company I left last year offered me 7 stock units (in RSU) for $20,000 as bonus. I declined. They are not in IPO yet. The confidence of the CFO saying, "[...] of course they will appreciate even higher" is laughable.

Giving an overblown estimate as bonus is doing disservice. The hard work is real, the valuation is not.

POST THE SALARY.

Senior people are senior because of their work experience, which they gain from steady employment.

Almost by definition you are looking to entice busy, employed people away from their current jobs.

They don’t have the time or inclination to trawl through job ad after job ad. Where your competition will ask for 15 years of experience and then only after hours of calls and meetings reluctantly make an offer half of what the candidate is currently making.

You have to stand out from this, or you’re perceived as the same “waste of time” category.

You’re not hiring starving students. You’re hiring people with options and responsibilities.

Respect their time and value and they’ll consider your offer.

I've tried to advocate for this at my organization and been told that we don't want people primarily motivated by money...

what else are people motivated by?

You can motivate juniors by things other than money: experience, gaining industry contacts, and filling a resume so that they can move on to…

… more senior roles with actual money on offer instead of intangibles.

You’re trying to hire senior staff the same way as junior staff.

This won’t work.

PS: I’m starting to suspect why you’re losing your juniors as soon as they get some experience…

I'm not the OP

Even people who aren't motivated by money will still follow the money, because unless you know the new employers personally, it's the most reliable indicator that your work is valued. And then, if it turns out that you don't really enjoy it for whatever reason, at least you know you are getting something for it.

Why exactly do they think people look to get hired? For fun?

It's important to me that I think my employer is doing good stuff for the world, but I'm there to be paid so I can get food and housing and internet.

If I'm making $XXX,XXX, why am I even going to waste my time if I think there's a decent chance you'll offer $XXX,XXX - 20,000?

I think what you'll find is that people aren't motivated by money, per se, but they have obligations: mortgages, car payments, retirement savings. An established standard of living. Especially the more senior they get. I don't do better work for money, but at this point in my career you can be damned sure I'm not going to lower my standard of living just to work at a company with free soda and a ping pong table. I'd put up with a lot of bullshit in my current situation before taking a pay cut.

The unlikely exception would be a mission-driven company (if your company is for-profit, this is not you) that is highly congruent with my values and truly makes the world a better place.

Colorado, USA now forces companies to post salary bands on job listings. It's quite refreshing and obviates this excuse.

Apparently the law in California is that salary ranges must be provided to candidates when they ask but I haven't found that to actually happen in practice.

Respectfully, I think that's nonsense.

It's called "work" because it's what you do to get money. It's not a hobby, nor an idealistic crusade (both of those are fine things, but they're different to "work").

The reason you work is to get money. That's the only motivation. You might choose between different work options on another basis, but the reason you're there at all is money.

Anyone trying to recruit people who doesn't accept this will fail.

> Anyone trying to recruit people who doesn't accept this will fail. 100% agree.

This is like saying we don't want companies primarily motivated by candidates' competence.

The counter to this is that many people aren't motivated by money, but need to actually make sure the job offers enough money. "Does the salary range enter into what I need for my life" is the question, not "what job ad has the maximum possible salary". A checkbox, not a parameter that needs to be globally maximal

This is what I've been told but it looks like all the other responses to my comment are arguing this isn't really true and people will switch jobs to a higher paying one even if both provide sufficient income to live off.

It probably depends on how much more the other job is paying.

For example, I would ignore a 10% raise; my reaction to 20% raise would depend on whether I like my current job; and a 50% would certainly be a strong temptation, unless it is a kind of job that predictably sucks.

The companies that complain that they cannot find a senior developer, they usually do not offer 50% more; or if they do, they carefully hide the fact from the unsuspecting audience. It is their choice, of course. I am just saying that it indeed is their choice.

What a tremendously facile argument. Either they genuinely believe it, or they have a very low opinion of you. Why are you still there?

Sounds like you're underpaid ;-)

What other motivators do they think they offer?

I mean, I am primarily motivated by the work, being something that I enjoy, but I already have a job that provides that. I need that and more to consider a move to another job.

> I've tried to advocate for this at my organization and been told that we don't want people primarily motivated by money...

Oh good, i do not want bosses only motivated by my work output either :)

I happily give the "I like the job discount." (I have 20 years professional development experience.)

What's critical is that you still need to be "market rate." You don't have to be the highest compensation on the market, but you need to pay me around the 60th percentile.

Edit: I should add that, in the two times I was below market rate, once I became indispensable, I threatened to leave unless my pay was jacked up. The "I like the job discount" only goes so far.

This is one place where growing up in a midwestern megachurch serves me well. Just like my childhood megachurch pastor, I mostly believe in what you pay me to believe. Actual believers are marks.

If my employer said this to me, I'd think: "Wait... am I the mark?"

So, who would still show up for work if they didn't pay money?

That's why you should show the salary, to get the money out of the way...

Why else would someone go to work for a for profit company?

There's a vein of truth here, but it's a bit navel-gazing.

The first truth is that people don't leave their current jobs because someone else is offering more. They leave because they're unhappy. For knowledge workers of all stripes, unhappiness is very, very rarely about compensation.

The second truth is that high compensation keeps people where they are. If a recruiter is offering $200k, you'll listen if you're making $180k. You won't listen if you're making $250k. If you're making $180k, the $20k bump becomes a socially acceptable reason to tell your employer you're leaving, but it's not the true reason you're leaving, because every time you switch jobs, you run the risk of bad management, mistreatment, etc. There's a price to taking that risk and it's not usually worth small bumps to people. When you post a salary band, 90% of the time, people who respond are not looking for the pay bump, they're just considering you before the 90+% of employers who are not posting pay bands or whose pay band is uncompetitive. And they know that they're that much more likely to stay because it'll be that much more difficult to persuade them to leave after they join.

The third, deeper, more cynical truth is that posting salary bands probably signals to employees internally that they are being underpaid, and can provoke discontent and departures. Rather than fix the problem with a long-term solution of unilaterally issuing raises internally before posting salary bands, most companies take the shortcut and keep the salary band private.

> The first truth is that people don't leave their current jobs because someone else is offering more. They leave because they're unhappy.

This is only true for small sums. No one leaves a job over a 5% raise. Some will jump ship over 20%. But most people absolutely will jump ship for 50% or 200% raises. And, unfortunately for small companies, that's often the wage differential between FAANG and the Small Co.

The numbers you are using here -- 180-250 -- are illustrative; total comp for true Senior at FAANG is comfortably in the 400s.

> The third, deeper, more cynical truth is that posting salary bands probably signals to employees internally that they are being underpaid, and can provoke discontent and departures. Rather than fix the problem with a long-term solution of unilaterally issuing raises internally before posting salary bands, most companies take the shortcut and keep the salary band private.

People talk. They're going to find out eventually. If you're having trouble hiring seniors, ensuring that you retain your existing seniors is probably step zero.

> that's often the wage differential between FAANG and the Small Co

I'm intentionally not including FAANG salaries here. Two things need to happen for that to be relevant - you a) need to be at that level, professionally and b) you need to have the disposition to work at a FAANG. I learned a long time ago that I don't have the patience for big-company politics, so it doesn't really matter to me what those salaries are; you might as well tell me I could make $400k if I went to medical school and became a doctor. It might as well be a different career path. Startups know that they can't compete with FAANG salaries; the only way forward is not to try.

> If you're having trouble hiring seniors, ensuring that you retain your existing seniors is probably step zero.

That's great long-term thinking - the issue is that people who refuse to post salary bands because "they don't want to hire people who are motivated by money" have a fundamentally short-term perspective.

But >90% of people are primarily motivated by money even if they overtly claim not to be.

If you are ok passing 90% of qualified people that could do the job you need done then you have, of course, the right to do that, but don't complain that you have trouble attracting senior talent.

I don't even begin reading an ad that doesn't post salary and I don't really need any more money. Just a force of habit.

A job posting without a salary is like a Tinder profile without a picture.

The description is nice, but it's not what grabs your attention

> I've tried to advocate for this at my organization and been told that we don't want people primarily motivated by money...

Says people at the top who exclusively care about the money. Do these people think we're THAT stupid?

So, how much percentage of the business are they offering then?

Oh, they don't do that? Its about... the money? Yep.

> ...we don't want people primarily motivated by money...

...as if that's the kind of investors the C-suite courts?

Strongly agree, when I was looking for a job in the 2 month timeframe, perhaps only 5% of the jobs descriptions had a salary range. I am currently working for a FAANG company, where the first thing that the recruiter talked about was the salary.

Devils advocate a little, it’s easy for faang to lead with salary because they know (and we know) they can afford to outpay everyone else. I think obviously all should include ranges, but there’s a reason mega tech is leading the change here

"Take-home technical assignment (~4h)"<-- This right here is why senior people aren't interested.

I've got 20 plus years of tech, I've been out of college since 1997 and you want to give a 4 hour homework assignment. If get you want to get a feel for someone's ability but this is more easily done by stating a problem during one of the interviews and asking the person "How would you approach this?" Listing for how they anticipate problems and tradeoffs.

This was my first thought as well. "If you want me to do homework to prove I'm not incompetent that means your interview process is garbage." and it's an automatic pass on that company.

My second thought was noticing that OP didn't actually ask for feedback from senior talent, the questions are addressed to other people hiring, so I figured I'd keep quiet.

But then I couldn't help myself. ;)

would you like a take-home or would you like a whiteboard session?

I need to have useful information that a candidate is more than a smooth talker.

What do you get from a whiteboard/take home assignment that you can't get from a conversation where you grill them about their answers?

Conversations allow smooth talkers to run a snow job on you. Having a work sample test provides a best-in-class hiring filter.

Only if you yourself don't know what you're talking about...

If the hiring manager cannot distinguish a smooth talker for a senior role position, maybe the hiring manager is the problem.

There is nothing a work sample can provide what a conversation cannot show for a senior role.

Okay so now we're hiring a hiring manager and a developer, great.

...or maybe people in this thread just don't like having to prove they know things in an industry where a lot of people don't know things.

More like we're tired of having to "prove we know something" to people who have no clue what they're talking about (most recruiters).

Further, there are probably lots of software engineers that have _never touched_ your framework of choice and will be able to learn and become proficient with it in a manner of weeks.

Having just gone through this with yet another developer who couldn't learn the framework in a couple of weeks, I am sick and tired of hiring people I have to coddle for months on end, only to end up having them quit because I didn't screen them correctly.

There are definitely a lot of bad candidates out there these days but I still find that I'm able to filter this by ignoring overly-hyped resumes and giving them a chance to talk about something that excites them as an engineer. If the answer is "learning new tech, becoming a better programmer, getting better at continuous integration", or something similarly encouraging, they're probably good to go in a few weeks to a couple of months. particular if they talk specifics and aren't talking out of their ass. If you can't discern that yourself then I don't know what to tell you ha. I'm aware that lying/cheating during interviews can be really common in enterprise. One approach that might work there is to try to meet candidates out at meetups in the area - this acts as a sort of self-filter and you can chat in person before the interview even gets extended.

> having to prove they know things in an industry where a lot of people don't know things.

The number of people I have interviewed who have been unable to code fibonacci or fizzbuzz, even the number of people with "senior" in their resume, is genuinely remarkable. I can appreciate the tiresome nature of interviews, but someone having to demonstrate that are not simply fakers is, simply, critical to the hiring process.

For people who are "hired by network", that is a different story. But if someone is coming in through the front gate, I will insist on having some kind of technical scrutiny, in technical and documented form, rather than simple conversations.

Work sample tests, according to the literature HN member `tokenadult` has gathered, provide the best predictor of future work.

My druthers today is for senior engineers to provide two work samples: code and design. Neither _particularly_ long or _particularly_ challenging, in a time frame that is not onerous. If the engineer has a portfolio with recent work, that is, IMO, a suitable replacement for code. Again, the point is to elicit fakery and have a demonstration of being able to do good work.

> The number of people I have interviewed who have been unable to code fibonacci or fizzbuzz, even the number of people with "senior" in their resume, is genuinely remarkable.

I believe you; I have met some. Luckily, neither fibonacci nor fizzbuzz requires 4 hours to code.

I've interviewed multiple people who were really great at talking about tech and work experience, projects, but when we got to the (not so hard) coding challenge they flopped.

Perhaps on you. I’ve never encountered someone where a 5 minute technical discussion told me less than a full day of interview would.

I'm a "smooth talker" but boy, do I fuck you over on practical project with 3 seniors sitting next to me.

I’ve interviewed people for the type of role that the submitter is looking for. I can guarantee you that I could see through a “smooth talker”. In fact, I can smell someone who just memorized stuff from ACloudGuru a mile away.

Not if you ask the right questions

What kind of questions would you ask?

Interview their referees and look at work they’ve done.

If you are not capable of dealing with charisma, you shouldn't be doing the interviews at all.

would you like a take-home or would you like a whiteboard session?

"Not if you'd like me to work for you, no." -- An actually senior developer in this market

Same I skip these. Same with interview processes that front-load things with an "Online Assessment".

I worked somewhere that had a phone screen with very basic coding exercise just to weed out people who had no business applying, which was well over half. I imagine the online assessment is a similar thing.

Exactly. 25+ years in tech here too. When a company says "we're going to give you homework", that is a giant flashing sign that basically reads "we assume your resume is a lie, your references are lying for you (or we just aren't going to bother calling them), so we're going to test you". Hard pass.

Having been on the hiring side of things, I get far more information out of a conversation where I can ask for details about someone's background and experience.

I got my most recent job offer by talking to the hiring manager & a couple engineers for about two hours. They grilled me on talking points I’d fed them in my CV, along with some questions I couldn’t have prepared for. No coding, no take home exams. It was pretty great.

It's impossible to gather someone's competence from a resume or even in a conversation.

A 4hr assignment is generally a really good way to gather competency.

That said - it's just 'too much' of a hill for senior devs. to bother with and there are probably some ways to do 'regular interviewing' in order to figure that out.

I have hired a ton of Engineers and I've found a lot of senior engineers to be particular, crusty and a bit weird: excelling in some ares, but cantankerous in other ways.

But yes, 4hr hr take home is going to be a barrier.

Yeah, but as a counterpoint: your years of experience are not indicative of your skill, just that you can meet some arbitrarily low bar for a long time.

The take-home technical assignment is to determine what, if anything, you actually learned in your 20+ years in tech.

A depressingly large number of people with that level of experience have not learned anything meaningful.

We do 2 hour interview. 1 hr of interactive coding with a sr/lead engineer, 1 with the hiring manager.

We want to see them solve a problem, sure, but what's even more valuable is seeing how they approach problems, can they explain what they're doing, do they ask good questions, etc. Much more predictive than just looking at the final output and seeing if it passes a few unit tests.

I would never hire an engineer without them writing actual code that gets compiled and run. It's the single most predictive thing we do in our hiring process. But, we also want to be respectful of people's time, hence limiting the coding session to an hour.

As someone who has been a hiring manager for the last decade, I'm absolutely befuddled by the "tenure => competence" assumption.

Tenure doesn't weed out mediocrity by any stretch. In fact, the more tenure someone has, often the more difficult it is to determine from their resume alone whether they know anything.

Time in the workforce doesn't indicate competence, but time at known employers can (since we're talking seniors here).

When you're hiring, you should know where you want to hire people from. Normally, you'll know someone there, or who used to be there, so you can do the unofficial check: "Hey, do you remember X who used to work in group Y at company Z? Should I hire them?" At worst, you can do a friend-of-a-friend check.

Of course, you should call their formal references as well, but their responses are normally going to range only from "yes" to "absolutely yes" (unless the candidate has messed up, and given a reference who will actually say "no").

Also useful: a short stint at a known-bad employer. This shows that the candidate recognized their mistake, and corrected it.

I'll normally only interview someone who I can't background if their resume looks super impressive and I've got no better options.

If you're having this problem, your first step is to get the recruiter out of the process. Start screening all resumes yourself.

I've had some bad experiences with recruiters, both in-house and otherwise, and I feel they usually get screenings wrong. But there's an even more important reason for you to take over this process now: you don't know where your dropoff is.

You need to get familiar with what's going on. Are you not getting any good resumes? If so, then the problem is your outreach. Are you getting lots of great resumes but they drop off after the first call? Then the problem is your sales pitch on the call.

If it's your responsibility to fill this position, then it's time to get your hands dirty in the data and figure out where the problem is.

Without more data on where you have dropoff, these are my takes on your process:

- The other commenters in this thread are right: the 4-hour assignment is likely a huge issue. I'd be shocked if you didn't have a huge dropoff there. There's no incentive for senior engineers to do this type of thing, because so many companies want to hire them. It's better to take your chances on someone who seems good, and be prepared to fire them if it turns out you're wrong.

- You should put a salary range in the job posting. You said "benefits and salary are good", but literally the only reason to not list these things in a posting is if they're not actually that good. You may need to pay more for someone very senior. They may be expecting more -- even substantially more -- than the person who just retired.

Maybe a good short term solution. But training the recruiter to screen effectively is what you really want. Unless you have enough time to do everything, you can’t have the attitude of doing the work of people who you view as ineffective. Learn how to delegate more effectively, part of which is getting the right people.

> You said "benefits and salary are good", but literally the only reason to not list these things in a posting is if they're not actually that good.

The other reason I have seen a reluctance to put salary in a job posting is that some companies may not want their current employees to know how much the new hires are getting.

That is a real problem, one I hope will be solved through more transparency in the future, rather than less.

It is a tough problem to crack from the businesses point of view. They need to have enough capital and profit to ensure that current staff are compensated at a competitive industry rate, but also hire at the same time to get the business goals met to get that revenue, and so on and so on.

Thankfully both of those issues indicate a company where nobody should work, because they're toxic.

It may vary from market. But here in Norway, I get cold-called or cold-emailed by multiple recruiters a week. They are all useless. They know little of the role outside the ad. They can't answer any questions. The only "value" they provide is spamming people and annoying them.

So I'm boycotting every company using an external recruiter to contact me unsolicited.

Lots of great comments here;

My thoughts on this as other Seniors have pointed out (and I am a Senior myself)

1- I have not looked for a job since 2014, every job since came through my network. Then the interviews were basically friendly meet&greets but super informal, not a single coding test or take home assignment - note than I always started as Tech lead/Architect. I put in the hours and took pride in my work, have never let anyone down.

2- Unless I am unemployed and desperate, why would I give you between 6 and 7 hours of “free” unpaid labor for an interview that might not go anywhere? A big part of the interview process is “luck”. I have many terrible interviewing stories; interviewing is hard and for the most part a numbers and luck game. I hate wasting time and for that reason I carefully calculate my odds before applying and put more emphasis on gigs when I have a sponsor on the inside or where the upside and risk make it worth the attempt. Which disqualifies most non tech non brand name companies.

My suggestions for you;

1- Include salary and TC on your job post (it will set you apart from others) and will attract more attention.

2- Shorten/Simplify your hiring process and consider paying folks for their time, at least $100hr.

I have interviewed at places where it costs $40 to park for the day, you are there for 3-5 hrs for a final in person round, but if you don’t get an offer they don’t validate your parking ticket so not only you wasted your time but also spent a bunch of money on top of taking a day off from your current job.

Last but not least, think about the state of the market, Seniors are likely older, with families and mortgages. in this market, stability is important, changing jobs can be a gamble, their offer could get rescinded, etc Why take the risk? This will be true in the next 12/24 months, what is the incentive - unless the candidate is already unemployed.

Thanks for your time.

> Then the interviews were basically friendly meet&greets but super informal, not a single coding test or take home assignment

I have 20 years experience and this is completely alien to my experience. I've gotten lots of job referrals over the years, but all it did was get my foot in the door. From there, it was the standard interview process with whiteboarding and take home tests. What am I missing here?

Not sure. The majority of comments from Seniors with 20 years of experience so far (including myself) are of the same type.

Friendly meet and greets that are informal, no coding test or take home assignment.

My best guess is your job referrals aren't from senior level people, while ours are. The CTO is the one who wants me. Or the top Senior who has control of the process.

But I'm just guessing. The norm for me is informal conversation.

For me (20+ year club):

1.) Senior Dev referred me, and they had a remarkable relationship with management - informal chat and offer that afternoon

2.) Senior Dev referred me, and they had a normal relationship with management - regular interview

3.) CTO referred me - informal chat with them and the CEO, offer letter handed to me at the end of the chat with the CEO.

So I've found that it really depends on who is referring you and what type of relationship they have with the person that controls the money.

edit: fixed formatting.

Agreed, well said. I could make a similar list as you did, but it's essentially the same.

VPs, and CTOs most often, informal chat, offer.

Yeah, the last couple of jobs in particular it wasn't getting a standard referral through the HR system. The first we were clients of a technology analyst firm CEO who I knew quite well and had met and spoken with at many events. The second was someone who had been clients of ours at the consulting company. In the first case, the "interview" was a lunch. In the second, it was a semi-normal hiring process but I talked to the most senior folks, starting with a chat with the product head, first.

Really haven't had a "normal" hiring process since first job out of grad school (shudder) 25 years ago.

Not dev per se but technology role.

1) Senior Dev referred me to his hiring manager. Regular job interview from there.

2) Hiring Manager I worked with for a few years prior agreed to give me a job. Ghosted me a week later.

3) A guy I worked closely with for 2 years later became a medium-sized startup CTO. I asked him for a job. He said yes, then referred me to the hiring manager. Normal interview from there on out.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Just to clarify: I'm not complaining. I have no problem going through job interviews to prove myself. But, it would be nice if I could figure out what I'm missing and not have to do that. Maybe it's a difference in reputation? I'm not seen as the hotshot. I'm the go to guy.

For me the difference has been the size / stage / ... prestige? of the company. Referrals have been a foot in the door and no more for me at very mature, well known, in demand companies, but more of an immediate hire at smaller, earlier, or obscure companies.

Heh. The most amusing referral I had, which I didn't ask for, caused me to get a surprise email from HR saying "we have received an internal recommendation from X about your interest in our position of mechanical engineer; to proceed with your application, please send your CV to...". I had to write back and say "I'm not a mechanical engineer, I wasn't applying for that role or any other role, and I didn't ask for a referral. However, here's a list of great relevant experience your robotics software division might be interested in, on the offchance."

Two weeks later I got another surprise email from HR again, saying "this is to let you know we have rejected your application for a web developer role..."

Needless to say, it's not a company I'm interested in actually applying to.

I have 26 years experience and mine matches svillar in not having anything other than pro-forma interviews literally since my first job from college.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31817596

The last seven job offers I got, "interviews" were friendly chat style with no coding test or assignment.

Some of them asked a string of technical questions, some did not. Where there were technical questions I enjoyed answering them, it felt like a fun conversation and was interactive with the interviewer, and I was surprised how easy I found them, so they didn't take long. Some did a screen share with me where we looked over some code and I explained what I was reading to them. All felt easy going. In my opinion, this made them skilled interviewers.

There have been a few times where I didn't even realise I was being interviewed. I thought we were just chatting about common ground in some field of interest. One was a chat in a pub that someone invited me to at short notice. And then a surprise offer appeared. The surprise offer has happened to me twice, and both were great opportunities I'd be a fool to decline.

Also, in recent years I noticed the best offers came from companies I had not sent a CV/résumé to (and therefore didn't have to tailor one, stress out over it etc). They were happy to go from my LinkedIn profile and other information they could find online, or asked me to send some specific info about my experience in an email (one or two paragraphs).

Due to this realisation, when I get messages from unknown recruiters asking cold, "<random job description>, if interested send me your CV/résumé", I treat the request as a signal of a lower quality opportunity, and am unlikely to reply. It's probably better to wait for a serendipitous great opportunity, but I'm aware the market can change and luck is a factor, so I don't take this for granted.

So, between jobs, I spend the time on study, practice, skilling up, R&D on my own projects, etc so that "luck favours the prepared", then reaching out for conversations without a particular agenda. In practice the good opportunities end up being inbound, perhaps an indirect effect of my outreach rather than direct.

Not "applying". Job ads are a big turn off. High effort, low likelihood of good result.

To the Ask HN author: For someone who had experiences like me, your job ad is one in a sea of tens of thousands of job ads, and it's very easy to scroll past. It doesn't help you that some professional career advisors say the worst way for a candidate to get a great job is via job ads, and seniors have of course had more years to internalise this advice.

There are a small number of skilled recruiters and would-be employers who know how to reach out and almost blindside me into having been interviewed before I realise I have, and then I'm starting to be excited. They are removing obstacles and nudging me forward, usually into something I wouldn't have applied for, which is exciting if I like where it's going.

Those people stand out and win by removing much of the friction. (Like good sales.)

Another factor which you can change is formality.

Imposter syndrome or performance anxiety can affect applications. A person may be a very smart and experienced senior, confident they could make a big, positive difference at your company, but fear that they won't perform in the "right" way when hazed during test-heavy rituals, unless they refresh specific skills - something they don't have time to do, or even know which exact skills to be fresh on. Are you going to ask them C++17 trick questions when they've only been doing C kernel development recently? Who knows.

They imagine your take-home or interview tests will not be the kind of thing they've done recently, and that they'll face nit-picking, either by cocky yet wrong interviewers with a childish mindset, or seasoned people much smarter than themselves. Remember, the smartest people tend to doubt themselves. Tech's tendancy to cycle through frameworks, tech-du-jour and (mandatory but sometimes terrible) "best practices", and talk about it as though everyone "should" know adds to this anxiety.

That's friction too. They're probably in no hurry. Scroll down to the next ad. Close tab.

Informality is a way to break past that, lowering the stakes while getting the conversation started.

You can change this factor if you can find a way to strike up "friendly chats" with people outside any formal job process, and then mindfully guide the ones you like through your assessment process with care.

A close friend of mine once told me:

"You are ALWAYS being interviewed"

I didn't really understand what she meant, until a couple of years later a good opportunity came up from seemingly nowhere. I couldn't figure out how or why it happened, and it eventually ended up from a half dozen links in recommendations over the span of a year or more, all happening in the background.

I really enjoyed reading your comment, everything there resonates strongly.

Impressions matter, people and networks matter, and being honest to who you are and being brave enough to show that to the world in a respectful way pays off in the long run.

And to tie it back to the original poster, instead of relying on job ads, also engaging with networks of people to find others can be hugely beneficial. These networks are bidirectional. People will make recommendations based on how your company behaves and what it is like to work there.

I was recently accused of googling during the inteview even though i didnt touch computer. it made me feel so sad for days.

I hear the “pay folks for their time” thing a lot, and have even done it. But for a senior engineer / architect level role, how is $100/hr meaningful in your mind? Just as a show of good faith? If you’re senior (and hence have been in this market the last 10 years) $100/hr wouldn’t seem to move the needle.

The money itself likely won't make a dent, IMO it's more on the good faith. "We understand you're busy and your time is valuable, and since we want you to do this work we will compensate you"

Post the salary range.

From what I can tell DevOps is the hardest thing to hire for right now, and it commands the highest salaries. It's tough to find someone who can code and troubleshoot code problems, but also has all the skills of a sys/net/cloud/k8s admin, and is willing to put up with the higher stress of that role.

Most qualified people have already done their best to get a job they're happy with. Personally I'm not making FAANG money, but as a self-employed freelancer I still do pretty well. So it's hard to see hidden-salary listings as anything other than a waste of time. 90% of them will come in too low. Things like a four-hour coding assignment just prove to me that it's smarter not to bother. If you make it that pointless for qualified candidates you'll only hear from the unqualified ones.

As someone from Colorado, the no-salary listings are basically a disqualifier since it demonstrates that the company is willing to break the law to try to take advantage of you.

This. I think I'm still technically in the "junior" category (coming up on four years of experience not counting internships) but I'm pretty much financially independent at this point. I only really stay employed for luxuries, funding for side projects, and the very good health insurance (and the whole "having responsibilities orders your life" thing but I know well how easy coasting is.) I have to imagine senior SWEs have a very very low tolerance for BS and can demand quite a lot.

Speaking of BS that 4hr take home project without even having a salary range is a lot. Even for Junior engineers here we have the manager and a couple engineers sit with the candidate during the coding test.

How did you make so much that quickly?

if you are expecting a DEvOps guy to know C#/Java/C++ and all the Jenkins/sys/k8s/cloud stuff, you want a unicorn. That person is also definitely not going to put up with a 4hr test.

If you want a senior DevOps person that knows the Jenkins/sys/k8s/cloud stuff write a basic test for that and don't test them on stuff they don't really need to know.

This is not directed at you, but rather at the poor hiring practices that have permeated the software industry for too long. We've been gaslighted into accepting abusive hiring practices, and it has to stop.

When you're hiring an accountant, do you give them 4h take-home assignments? How about hours of interviews with your accounting team to suss out their accounting skills and critique their style? I mean, how DO you determine if they're real accountants or one of these fakers I've heard so much about that can't even do some simple books?

Or how about lawyers? Do you ask them to write up a fictional legal brief or some boilerplate that the rest of your legal team can scrutinize to see if they're an A player? How about a multi-day interview just to make sure you've asked all the tough legal questions? No? Then how can you know that they're not going to drag your fragile company down with their poor performance and gasp have to be fired! The horror!

How about civil engineers? Would you have them design a building foundation as a take-home? What about tricky interview questions weighing the pros and cons of various retaining wall designs in, say, Arizona vs Washington (even though they'd be working in New York)?

I don't know how this level of abuse became a thing in software engineering, but I simply won't put up with it anymore. Won't post compensation ranges? You're trying to cheat me. Take home assignment? I walk. Interview gauntlet? I walk. Things drag on too long? I walk. I'm a professional - I have an extensive portfolio of my work slowly built up over decades that you can ask me in-depth questions about (and other things) during our reasonably timed interviews. Does inverting a tree in any way demonstrate my ability to do the job? No, it does not. My time is precious and the compensation trends are clear. Disrespect that and I can only conclude that you are not professional, and not worth my time.

> When you're hiring an accountant, do you give them 4h take-home assignments? How about hours of interviews with your accounting team to suss out their accounting skills and critique their style? I mean, how DO you determine if they're real accountants or one of these fakers I've heard so much about that can't even do some simple books?

I'm a software engineer. My brother is an accountant.

I know you're trying to pick a theoretical, but the answer to most of those questions is still yes. I don't think he had a take-home project, but he most definitely had several rounds of heavy-technical interviews. I'd much prefer the take home test over the BS he has to deal with.

Not to mention all of the example professions require passing some form of certification or licensing exam before one may call themselves a lawyer / CPA / professional civil engineer / etc.

All the jobs you listed have professional associations that require passing exams. If you required the same level of testing and exams for devs I doubt half the software industry would pass.

Would second what you said. If a team does not have the ability and confidence to determine hiring based on usual interviews, the team is not worth joining.

I've been at two startups, and both gave the accounting candidates take-home tests. Not an accountant, but on some interview loops.

Edit: Im not advocating for take homes, just noting that they exist for accountants.

> Or how about lawyers? Do you ask them to write up a fictional legal brief or some boilerplate that the rest of your legal team can scrutinize to see if they're an A player? How about a multi-day interview just to make sure you've asked all the tough legal questions? No? Then how can you know that they're not going to drag your fragile company down with their poor performance and gasp have to be fired! The horror!

This is my former career. Having take home tests would absolutely be an improvement over the legal hiring process.

IMO one solution to this problem would be to introduce some kind of industry wide licensing. Then we could pass the exam every 2 years or so and be done with all the current non-sense hiring practices.

I think one solution to this problem might be to actually introduce licensing as a proof of the required skills in our profession (or in specific specialized areas at least)

Some ideas to help you stand out:

* Post the salary in the ad. At least a range.

* Pay folks for their take home assignment time. A few years ago, we paid senior folks $500. It is a token, not a contract, but it shows you care.

* If it is the people that make it great, profile them so that potential hires can see their awesomeness. Help them grow their profile (speaking, writing, OSS) if they want.

* Are you properly developing your junior folks so they can grow into seniors? Giving them autonomy, learning opportunities and salary bumps?

* Have a shorter hiring process. Maybe cut out the recruiter screen?

* As a hard bitten senior engineer, I can tell you that I value equity at zero. If I get an equity win, awesome! But I don't count on it. (You don't mention it, but thought I'd share that.)

* Sponsor a meetup (~$100/month). This is a long term play.

* Any other benefits/things that make you special? Why should anyone want to work there?

That said, I like a saying that I learned when I worked in the real estate industry during the great recession: "there's no problem that price can't fix".

There's no hiring problem that higher salaries can't fix. The higher salaries may cause other issues, but you'll get your hires.

>* As a hard bitten senior engineer, I can tell you that I value equity at zero. If I get an equity win, awesome! But I don't count on it. (You don't mention it, but thought I'd share that.)

So much this!! I have been a paper millionaire more times than I care to remember, but none of them have panned out.

I'd add "* If they have a portfolio, then, for Gods' sake, look at the damn thing."

"Draw the Jackass" tests are what you give folks that have no track record, and nothing to show you what they can do.

Speaking only for myself, I have a portfolio of over 40 open-source repos (single-origin -me), containing multiple build and deploy applications, SDKs, libraries, tests, hundreds of pages of documentation, dozens of blog posts, a decade of checkin history, and testimonials out the wazoo.

It is a mortal insult to ignore that (or, even worse, indicate that "I probably faked it"). If you want to hire people, then I suggest that you don't start by insulting them.

These are not people that you are doing a favor, by hiring them. These are people that are your equals -or better. I spent 25 years, interviewing and hiring senior-level engineers. I never gave one damn leetcode test. I did spend a great deal of time, drawing out their passion projects, enthusiasm, and personalities.

> Have a shorter hiring process. Maybe cut out the recruiter screen?

The downside of this is that you'll spend a greater amount of time interviewing people who are not appropriate for the role.

From my perspective as what you might call a super-senior, I find this process itself a giant red flag. It is aimed towards recruiting juniors.

I have done enough contracting that before you have finished the sentence, I have already worked out in my head the opportunity cost of 4 non-billable hours. And in return I get.... nothing. Now while it is true that 4 hours of on-site talking to people is still 4 hours out of my life, but at least then I get to meet the people I would be working with and have an opportunity to ask about the company. And you are showing respect for my time by spending your time getting to know me.

And what do you learn from a 4 hour homework assignment that any undergrad should be able to complete, when you can see from my resume multiple L5/L6 positions at different companies? Nothing at all about what you want a senior to actually do. The senior you need is the person who can mentor the juniors through a 4-month long (not 4 hour long) project. Review their architecture, guide it in wise directions. Review their code. Raise the bar on unit testing. Teach the entire organization about better validation methodologies. Create realistic schedules and rational work-streams. Evaluate new technologies.

As a candidate, my interpretation of your process is that I would be working for management that can't think about problems from first principals. You can't hire a senior because you aren't looking for a senior because, as evidenced by your process, you don't know what a senior does.

The first thing you need to do is articulate to yourself what you want a senior to bring to your organization. Structure your interview process to try to uncover those skills and behaviors in a candidate.

The 4hr take-home test implies you're not after experienced "seniors", but rather those self-titled seniors with 3yrs under their belt.

Four hours of focus time is A LOT for a candidate with family responsibilities and heavily restricts your recruitment pool.

No parent is going to give up a precious weekend afternoon for an unpaid assignment.

That plus the lack of salary range will put 95% of "good" candidates off.

Instead have a time-boxed "chat" where the candidate is invited to talk about a topic they feel strongest in - networking, architecture, security, whatever.

As a company you want to leverage these strengths.

> Four hours of focus time is A LOT for a candidate with family responsibilities and heavily restricts your recruitment pool.

4 hours is probably OK for a single role. However if you're interviewing at 10 different companies it adds up to a lot more.

It is just not okay. Because I may have kids/wife/elders, because I have a job, because I value my spare time, or just because I enjoy the birds in the park more.

As a senior I don't do homework. I have a conversation with someone if I fit AND if they fit to me. They can test me and I will test the them during that conversation

Post on https://www.reddit.com/r/devopsjobs/ and you'll get free feedback on the specifics. Usually a combination of:

- low salary. - not remote. - long/cumbersome interview process (for ex, 4hr take-home is too much and you are selecting for people who have the time to do them and not better offers). - other yellow/red flags (bullshit language in the ad, what company does etc).

I'm a devops guy with experience hiring and interviewing, feel free to email me for a quick comment on your posting.

> Benefits and salary are good (though salary isn't posted in the ad)

Care to put a range on the value of "good"?

My experience when searching is that any company claiming "salaries are good" probably isn't even worth my time talking to. Occasionally I'll reply to recruiters if the role looks interesting but it's not uncommon that they can't even match my base, let alone my TC (and I don't even have that great of a TC).

Most truly senior devs that I know are working for a company that can offer considerable RSUs in addition to a solid base + bonus. When I see "salary is good" I'm assuming you're offering below 200k.

If you want senior devs to apply post that your total comp is somewhere in the 300k-400k range.

However I'm guessing that your comp is nowhere in that range, and I think it's fair to assume that most other senior devs also are making that guess.

> If you want senior devs to apply post that your total comp is somewhere in the 300k-400k range.

Even that's too low for senior folks with the skillset that OP is looking for, particularly if he wants the senior engineer to be mentoring and uplifting the rest of the team. Those skills can easily get $500k+ TC.

Can you point to these jobs that pay 500k+?

I'm currently a Staff 2 at VMware making that much doing DevOps for multiple SaaS services.

Not directly connected to the discussion but I was wondering what kind of lifestyle can be with such salary. Is it like from 9am to 5pm or you work much more than that time? Do you in genearal think that you are overworking or not? Is your working environment stressful? Thank you.

I work 40-55 hours a week and my house is paid off. There are busy times and slow times.

Any senior (10+ YOE leadership and mentorship -- the sort of thing OP is looking for; apologies if this is called something else at your co) band at FAANG will pay 500K with a single round of negotiation (or maybe even as the initial offer these days). Several second tier companies will also pay this much for key roles.

Good, experienced people would usually have built a decent network for themselves over their career. As seniority grows, you will find them less and less applying for new jobs, and more and more relying on their networks for new work. And if they are good, they very likely are sitting on open offers from well known ex-colleagues that they could take up at anytime. You will do much better to tap in through your own networks, find suitable candidates and reach out to them directly to get them interested.

This is a great point. I cannot imagine doing a real interview at this point. I decided to do one the last time I was job hunting just to see what the world has to offer.

I was interviewed for a position, and was clearly perfect, but I couldn't get that across to more than half of the people interviewing me. I had some people in my corner, but others were concerned I wasn't technical enough which is hilarious.

Why would I subject myself to that? I can get a job in a heartbeat from anyone who has ever worked with me in the past.

It's a demeaning and dumb process interviewing with people you don't know, when you interview people who know you, they just pitch you on why you should join them.

They don't even ask me questions, because they know I am going to be one of if not the top contributor. They've seen it, they don't have to guess on if I happen to forget syntax on a sql command because I am not focused on sql at the moment.

> cannot imagine doing a real interview at this point

Eh, if someone refers me for a job they may need others’ buy in. The take-home technical assignment, on the other hand, would be a show stopper. That’s consulting. I charge for that.

Sure, I've had to have a phone conversation for additional buy in, but it hasn't critically changed the matter.

Although by "real interview", I was indicating interviewing with people I didn't work with in the past. I wasn't referring to additional phone conversations for buy in.

Yeah at startups we called those people "pushons". Basically, the CTO would say hey, "this is eric, s/he starts tomorrow". Mercenaries. Pros. No interviews, no questions, no linked ins. Usually "pushons" turn into top performers. With a 6 month runway and cash being burned - we didn't have much time for fizzbuzz.

Exactly. There is no hiring better than the ones you have experience with already. You know what you're getting.

This should be the top comment. Many senior, great engineers aren't looking, and when they do, they usually don't just apply to job postings.

You need to overhaul your hiring process for Senior+ folks. Tap onto your network, encourage existing employees to refer candidates, or otherwise just reach to prospect candidates.

This is the right answer. There are a level of people that exist as Senior+ people that anyone they've worked for or with would take in a heartbeat. They'd move mountains to have you.

Those people are not part of your talent pool if you put up barriers to entry for them. I understand those barriers exist to keep unethical people out, but that's just the trade off you have to accept with barriers in.

You're not going to get top class people.

I'm someone who is likely your target candidate and I just went through the hiring process so here are my thoughts without seeing an example ad post (which you should link to):

- There are a ton of job openings right now in DevOps and similar roles. I spent about 2 days applying to as many as I could and that filled my entire next couple weeks with interviews/tasks. I went through interviews, received offers, and chose one all from those two days of applying, so unless a candidate sees your offer early in their search that could be a source of low application volume.

- Is the fact that it's a fully remote position prominent in your postings? I personally only applied for positions I could tell were fully remote at a glance.

- Put the salary range in the posting. I am way more likely to apply if I know ahead of time that it's going to be worth my time.

- Are you strict on coding languages? I am pretty flexible but still have my favorites. If you're C#, I'm out (no offense to those who like it, I started out my career in the .NET world and ended up feeling trapped there and I'm not going back).

- How quick are your turnarounds from application submission and interviews? Lots of companies are moving quickly to get people through the hiring process and if you're not then you'll be passed up for other companies.

> no offense to those who like it, I started out my career in the .NET world and ended up feeling trapped there and I'm not going back

I actually think C# is pretty decent for a big general purpose language, but I understand this sentiment. No one wants to talk to me about anything other than .NET positions. I can usually squeeze a decent raise out of it, but I'm approaching my ceiling.

I feel the same way and can understand where the original comment is coming from. To your point, I also think I’ve reached the ceiling too salary wise.

Was talking to a recruiter who specializes in recruiting for tech and product companies. The C# positions he had topped out at what other languages started at for senior developers.

I like C# it’s just it feels like it’s all enterprise jobs with bad development practices.

Remote is in the title of the post and mentioned multiple times throughout the post.

I dare say we're not posting frequently enough, that's a good point.

It's against company policy to put the range in the ad. Very very stupid, but probably nothing I can do about that.

We have three languages mentioned in the ad. But any senior candidate can be introduced to new technologies so they're not in the "requirements" section.

We could probably improve turnaround time, but the lack of applicants alongside natural attrition is making that even harder to make happen.

Thank you jhot!

Copypasta: This is a throwaway because I'm just an engineer on the team wondering if there's something obvious we're doing wrong, and I don't imagine this would be considered desirable attention by management.

> It's against company policy to put the range in the ad. Very very stupid, but probably nothing I can do about that.

This is already against the rules in CO and soon WA and NYC. Your company may as well get use to posting ranges. Ranges are also thought of to lead to more equitable outcomes for those working at the company.

I am in CO and saw one ad that had a link to a special page on their website to "comply" with this regulation. It was a blanket statement that salary can be between $20k (can't remember the low end but it was something like that) and $1MM based on position and experience. I was very put off by that and did not apply. I didn't take the time to look into the legality of using a blanket statement like that but it seems sketchy to me.

The legality is "not so much" but for smaller companies they can get away with it (because small companies are unlikely to have defined titles and bands to begin with).

> I started out my career in the .NET world and ended up feeling trapped there and I'm not going back

Can you expound on why you felt that way?

Post the salary range. It's 2022, you can't just say "Benefits and salary are good " That is absolutely meaningless.

You're wanting ~6hrs investment (30 call, 1hr interview, and 4hr+ assignment) for an offer? NO thank you.

Why the scare quotes around "DevOps"? Is it DevOps or not? These words do mean things and matter.

Exactly this. I can't think of a better way to punch yourself in the groin as a recruitment activity. Be transparent because it's respectful.

> Is it DevOps or not? These words do mean things and matter.

I'm surprised at this comment, in my experience, that word has almost no meaning at all.

It can mean anything from "Engineering teams are responsible for everything, including development and operations" to "We have a third DevOps silo inbetween our developer and operarions silos".

It does have, in my opinion, quite clear meaning as a term, otherwise it wouldn't exist as a term.

Obviously it means setting up & maintaining application-ecosystem infrastructure:

Servers/Containers/VMs, CICD, monitoring, logging, integration/production testing, permissions, and various automated jobs/workflows <-- that sort of stuff. So that developers can just focus on programming.

What you described is the "Ops" in "DevOps". A decade ago the people doing "Dev" work were different from the people doing "Ops" work. But then the "anyone can do anything and everyone should work on everything" trend arrived, and they invented the concept of "DevOps", meaning that the same people would now do both "Dev" and "Ops" work.

Note that this description is entirely antithetical to your description "So that developers can just focus on programming".

You're not entirely wrong; this term has certainly degraded to the point of meaningless, where many companies now have teams that they call "DevOps teams", despite the fact that those teams only do Ops work. It's like we've come a full circle back to where different people do Dev and Ops work, but for some reason we call it with a term that means the literal opposite of that.

To be fair, there's "ops to support production" and "ops to support development".

"Devops" means the latter at some companies, so it makes a kind of sense that those people don't do any dev work themselves.

But I agree with you, that's the exact opposite of the meaning "devops" has in other places, which is the meaning it was coined with.

That was the innovative approach of merging dev and ops teams to be the same people, and things like production CD, to explicitly prevent developers from just focusing on programming (which was considered detrimental when there's an outside world depending on it).

Like Agile and XP, it was a fresh new approach...

"A decade ago"

Attaching a time horizon on things which evolve causes many things to lose meaningful perspective relative to the discussion at hand.

The fact that things evolve does not negate my opinion that DevOps is a meaningful term.

Heck, I am currently watching the "That DevOps Guy" youtube channel (~50k subscribers) in order to learn about Helm Charts (related to kubernetes).

Clearly, people use the term DevOps to meaningfully communicate today. 10 years ago? This is a post from 2022, not 2012. So, you're referring to a discussion from 10 years ago... Yeah I don't know that its very relevant in a discussion of "DevOps actually does mean something [implied in today's age]"

a little over a hundred years ago a barber was a surgeon ("Up until the 19th century barbers were generally referred to as barber-surgeons, and they were called upon to perform a wide variety of tasks. They treated and extracted teeth, branded slaves, created ritual tattoos or scars, cut out gallstones and hangnails, set fractures, gave enemas, and lanced abscesses." [1] )

and a farmer was a soldier (WW1, US Civil War, & previously)

[1] https://brainblogger.com/2011/05/06/from-haircuts-to-hangnai...

I don't have any issue with language evolving and words changing their meaning over time. If the term "DevOps" today simply meant "doing Ops in the cloud", I wouldn't have a problem with that. The word meant X a decade ago, and today it means Y, that's fine. But that's not the reality today. The reality is that a decade ago this term meant exclusively X, and today this term is ambiguous and sometimes refers to X and sometimes refers to Y. When someone talks about "DevOps" today, that term could mean almost anything. It conveys almost no meaning. In that sense the term has definitely "lost its meaning".

Ultimately employment is a market. You're expecting something in exchange for some money.

Your objective is to get as much of "something" for the least amount of money.

The candidate's objective is to get as much money for the least amount of "something". Junior candidates are more flexible on this as they might do it for the passion of the tech or to make a name for themselves but seniors already have a "name" and no longer need to work for "exposure".

Your current situation seems to be that your competition offers a better deal than you do - employees manage to find other places where they can either get more money or get the same money you're offering for much less "something". That "something" includes the overhead of the interview process such as the tech test, etc.

In short, either offer more money or demand less "something" and make it known. 4-day work week, flexible working hours, no on-call, etc.

In addition, you're asking for specialized skills which means you need to consider markets beyond employment. If your prospective employee can make the yearly salary you're proposing in a 3-month consulting gig, there's no reason for him to even consider your offer. You mention that most applicants dislike the specialization you're asking for - maybe because those who like it don't even apply, potentially for the above reason.

I'd add to this, as someone who runs an eCommerce business: the general public is surprisingly lazy when it comes to optimising the returns on their time/money.

We've found things like attractive pictures, high-ranking listings and reduced legwork for customers have a far greater impact on sales than the price or quality of the good itself.

Nobody can help unless you show us your actual ads, your company site etc. There could me a million little signals that are putting people off.

You've also not said what your pipeline looks like - is there nobody coming in at the top? Or are the "great people" not as great as you think? Or the "really deep knowledge of the platform" is in fact less reasonable or badly paid than you think?

If you're stuck, find a good recruiter and pay them properly. They can end-run around whatever the problem is, at least temporarily and give you informed, discreet feedback on how to fix it.

This is a throwaway because I'm just an engineer on the team wondering if there's something obvious we're doing wrong, and I don't imagine this would be considered desirable attention by management.

Would posting a job ad on AskHN requesting feedback be acceptable? I ask because I'd have expected to see it a bunch if it were. @dang would be very appreciative of your word one way or another. Thanks mattbee.

Ohhhh OK.

I'd say don't post your actual ad because we will find you and give you more help than you wanted ;) Like maybe your team page is all white men, or your defence contracts are very prominent, or your CEO is a public dong.

It's a bit of a yellow flag that you don't feel you can go to your managers with this to help fix a team you're obviously invested in? But here's two tips that you might be able to implement or influence by yourself:

1) Treat incoming candidates like GOLD. Respond to them within hours, same day where at all possible. Make decisions really fast, schedule interviews within 1-2 days, drop other things to make that happen. Have future managers & engineers communicate directly, lightly backed up by HR if you have that function (and you trust them). Keep. It. Moving. Make it clear their time is more valuable than yours.

2) Document the whole interview process up-front, put it prominently on your ads, specify the damned salary, and stick to your word the whole way.

If you execute on both of these points, the FAANGs will not be able to come close in a really critical part of the process. They will be unclear about what happens next, who you're meeting, how important it is, maybe it will be a week, maybe it will be 12 weeks, who knows. But they got the prestige and the big bucks, and candidates will put up with a lot for that.

(fwiw, I co-designed careers.bytemark.co.uk/full-process for most of the above reasons, and my current role went from introductory chat->3 interviews->contract signed in about 10 days flat - I like fast recruitment!).

> Have future managers & engineers communicate directly, lightly backed up by HR if you have that function (and you trust them). Keep. It. Moving. Make it clear their time is more valuable than yours.

Yeah, this.

Not that I dislike recruiters or HR folks or don't appreciate the work they do, but with someone with engineering experience I can talk to them on an equal level and don't need to "dumb down" describing my skills or past experiences, and I can usually be a lot more straightforward and/or have an actual conversation instead of reading my CV out loud, which is what a lot of initial screenings are like (it's okay to use the CV as a starting point for the conversation). Talking to an engineer is also a signal I'm being taken serious as a candidate.

I get that people use recruiters for an initial screen, but if it's "recruiter → another recruiter → HR person → coding test → finally I talk to a damn engineer (or engineering lead)" then that's a bit of a turn-off. At this point you're expecting me to spend time to "prove" my technical skills and I don't even know if I want to work for you because I have no idea what your engineering is like beyond the buzzwords your HR people dropped (which is very little information).

If you've got more candidates than you know what to do with then that's fine, but if not... Using a recruiter for the initial (short) screening is fine to go through some basic preconditions from both sides, but the second person should really be an engineering lead if you're desperate for people IMHO.

If you do insist on a code test and you intent on hiring the person if nothing strange comes falling out then say so. A lot of times I have the impression these things are shotgunned to a bunch of candidates.

> careers.bytemark.co.uk/full-process

This is really cool!

1) Treat incoming candidates like GOLD. Respond to them within hours, same day where at all possible.

This is a huge point and something to work on. Act quickly and work out as many things in advance as you can. Don't be like unnamed company X who kept changing interview times and stretching it out so the candidate just took the offer from unnamed large company Y instead.

If you get some nibbles on your pipeline treat them quite fast, and note where they drop off. Likely for the process you have the salary is too low, and people skip out to find the same money easier or more money at the same difficulty.

This also includes being very, very, very upfront on whether your "remote" is: a) real, honest 100% remote, b) 100% remote unless you are within X miles of the office, in which case it's hybrid, c) hybrid that your management thinks is "remote", d) "remote until..." which means you will be called back into the office at the C-suite's whim, or e) on-site unless you are sick or have to meet a repair person at home.

Yeah, the real answer is "something is less good than you are describing." Ask a senior engineer you've worked with in the past to take a look at your job posting and give you some honest feedback about what the problem is.

There are yellow flags in your post, but it's unclear whether they are problems without details. For example:

> the work requires a reasonably deep understanding of the underlying platforms which a lot of people seem to dislike.

Why?

> I'm wondering if the work being a higher percentage non-code is what's causing us trouble

Probably.

> Benefits and salary are good

Are you sure?

Plus, where are people dropping out of your pipeline? Is it early, suggesting that the job posting isn't great, or is it later, so part of the discussion process could be bad?

> the work requires a reasonably deep understanding of the underlying platforms which a lot of people seem to dislike.

Why?

Willing to bet the 'dislike' is "we have lots of mismashed, disorganized stacks, and expect seniors to have 20 years experience with all of them." coupled with "Even though some tools/stacks/etc have only been around 3 years."

And... even though a senior can pick up a stack in a few days, the expectation is to find someone already skilled.

....

Here's the truth. When I walk onto a new jobsite, I typically don't even know the tech. I've worked for EDA companies, government departments, startups, geospatial corps, all sorts of new and antiquated stacks and tech.

I'm a senior, and I can walk in, and become the subject expert extremely fast. I do so all the time, it's why people hire me.

That's what being an actual senior means. Loads of market experience, which makes that learning curve flatten.

$5 says the 'dislike' is an expectation that stuff can't be learned fast. I'd scoff.

Seriously. I've been doing Linux Systems work for over 20 years. I've written code at one level or another on over 15 languages (scripting, macro and compiled) plus various forms of markdown. 90% of it I learned on the job, even on the fly. I regularly go in to a place ostensibly for one thing, and end up their SME on something else.

Do I remember all the details of every language and stack that I've touched? Hell no! But there are only so many ways to do a for loop or if-then set up. There are only a few flavors of regex out there. Anything more I just look it up. Part of being a senior is knowing what to look up.

What makes me a senior is my ability to learn on the fly, then become an SME, on whatever obscure stack you have. I will never know all of it coming in - there's just too much stuff out there. But there's very little that is so bad that I can't work with it in a few weeks.

But I've been rejected from jobs as "not technical enough" because I didn't have recent, full time, on the tip of my brain, coding to the algorithm and obscure function level in their preferred language "X". It just meant I hadn't coded in "X" in the last month. They though the fact that I didn't do obscure fanciness without looking things up meant I didn't know anything. I wanted to scream and say "No, damnit, I just haven't coded in that for two years, I don't have an eidetic memory."

This is part of why I hate whiteboards and take home crap. I do poorly at them, then get lowballed by smug jerks who think that defines what I know and have done.

Having just spent 3 weeks on 4x hour long interviews and completing a day long coding problem along with a "code while I watch" to get to the point that "we're tabling this for a few months" I suspect many of us senior types are just tabling the job seeking process ourselves until we seem to be in actual demand.

Sometimes companies pay for the time it takes to complete a take-home project. I think it’s a good idea, especially now given all the hiring freezes and especially for a remote position where the applicant has no idea how many other applicants (around the country/world) they might be competing against.

Agreed; if you have to have the 4 hour assignment, paying a market wage for a senior dev for those 4 hours, at least shows that you are serious about filling the position.

In the past often the ones that didn't pay would at least fly you over to headquarters and wine/dine you and put you up at a hotel for a night or two, which was a nice "off the books" payment.

Sounds like a deep penalty to this senior: I have learned to hate flights, corporate hotels are mostly crap (even expensive ones), it is very unlikely I desire another trip to that city, I hate wasting a day for that, and I really care about how good my food tastes.

That could sound nice to an inexperienced junior?

Has anyone ever expected (or received) payment for time off to attend interviews though?

Seems to me like a bad reaction to the relatively new thing, but actually the criticism applies just as well to the older thing.

(Maybe it should all be paid! Though having job search funded by prospective employers does seem a bit weird.. I think really I just think it's neither here nor there in terms of morality or whatever - but the 'take-home' isn't fundamentally different from the interview. If anything it might be better in this regard already, since I don't have to take time off for it (but also can, if I prefer that to spending my evening/weekend on it)?)

The difference is that interviewing costs the company in the form of the time required from existing employees, whereas the company could ask 50 people to do a take-home project for free at essentially no cost to them.

“Code while I watch” is the worst.

If it were peer programming, that would be fine. I'm happy with peer programming. We'd trade off, I'd have a look at their style, get a feel for their culture, they could see how I drive and navigate...

But, irrespective of how it's billed, it's always "code while I watch..."

If you're passively waiting for resumes to walk themselves over to your recruiters then the candidates you'd like to source are probably instead talking to the engineering managers who took the time to introduce themselves and their firms. The candidate profile you're looking for can write their own ticket; if you don't have a compelling answer to why that ticket should say "I'd love to work at a fairly typical run-of-the-mill mid-size enterprise software vendor" you need to spend some shoeleather convincing people of that.

I'd also recommend radically more effort in producing artifacts which some would classify as "top of funnel" or "engineering brand" so that you have some hook to start conversations with and some differentiation with all the other prospective employers of senior engineers.

In a hot job market (yes, recession may hit now) you maybe need to turn your process around.

Why are you a good employer for the candidate? Also, post the salary. I'm not going to start a 10+ hour process unless I'm sure it is worth it

Your process gives me no reason to work for you because I get to know nothing about you.

A call with a recruiter? Gonna hear all the standard phrases and have to answer basic questions.

A call with hiring manager? I still don't know anything about my future coworkers / team.

A 4h technical assignment? Why would I want to do this (unless I really need a job) after getting to know nothing about you? Why would I want to even work for you?

Companies often operate from a point of view of the candidate being the one who has to show they are worth it. For many senior candidates that's not going to cut it.

I can only speak form myself of course, and from a UK perspective, but here are my 2 pence: Most seniors are either already employed, or are consulting/contracting. Those employed will need serious incentives to move. You can read that as "significantly higher pay and lower friction on entry". That excludes the 4 hour assignment - I would have declined you there and then. I simply don't have the time to give you 4 hours on a maybe basis. Those consulting (myself included) are even a higher barrier to breach - you are unlikely to match them in pay requirement. However, here's another option: hire a couple those consultants for 3 months, pay them whatever day rate they want, and have them level up all your juniors.

You will then have the problem of retention of your less-junior staff.

One other anecdote, which is a pet peeve of mine - I used the words Senior/Junior because you referred to it, but I have a dislike to those tags as it's vague to what they means. Junior/Senior in years? in experience? in talent? Some of the best people I've worked with had zero commercial experience when I met them and they blew me out the water with raw talent.

P.S. If you do want to hire a top dev-ops consultant and don't mind him being remote, I know one who just became free and he won't be for long. My details are in my profile.

I recently posted this on my blog about why it's so hard to get an experience software engineer to respond to a recruiter: https://andrewrondeau.herokuapp.com/why_software_engineers_d...

But there are a few things that I didn't put in that article:

In my case, with 20 years experience, it's critical that I am not hired as a possession, or a trophy member of a team. It always works out poorly when someone pulls me onto a team because of my pedigree but tries to manage me like a junior developer, or someone who needs a lot of hand holding.

What's critical is that I will have a high degree of control in my job. This ranges from control of my day-to-day workflow, control of my development environment, and control of the architecture of the thing I am working on. I also seek to have some amount of control over the work of more junior developers.

Without that kind of control coming in the door, I really won't bother applying, because every time I've started a new job with an existing team, I've always had to fight to clean up messes. These messes will usually make a project fail, yet for various reasons management needs a lot of convincing to fix the messes.

This is a tip for everyone struggling to find someone to hire; look in a different pool of candidates and be willing to accommodate them. For example, you can find a lot of very skilled developers that are disabled.

I know a lot of people that have been coding professionally for 10+ years, have popularish open source projects, been lead devs at startups etc; yet feel stuck in their current jobs or even struggle to get hired. They would instantly job jump to something better or would love to switch from contract work to something with good health insurance/benefits. You just have to be a company willing to accommodate them. And accommodating their needs requires far less investment than paying FAANG level salaries to attract the same Sr engineers everyone else is competing for.

You can find engineers.

How exactly do you do that? I work for a company also struggling to find good senior developers and since the team is 100% remote, it's not like we'd have any idea if they were disabled or not...

Some ideas ...

- Do not put requirements into the job description if they aren't true requirements. For example, "ability to lift 25 pounds" is one that I see a lot, along with various other physical abilities that I don't think devs working from home actually need regularly.

- Offer extra paid (or unpaid!) time off, a 4-day work week, or other types of schedule flexibility.

- Minimize the required travel or indicate flexibility in this area for disabled applicants. (In-person meetups and adventures sound fun and totally reasonable for most able-bodied people who can travel alone, but for a wheelchair user who needs a personal care aide, your quarterly off-site to go skiing at Tahoe is, well, not a great fit.)

I'm answering mainly from the perspective of a physically disabled person with mobility issues. I'm sure people with other sorts of disabilities would come up with a very different list.

More ideas...

- On-call. Some people require a regular schedule with a limit of 40 hours per week.

- Allergies. Dog-friendly is not friendly to people allergic to dogs. And yes, your "hypoallergenic" dog will still give me an asthma attack.

- Dietary restrictions. Makes anything involving food the opposite of fun. (I'm allergic to milk proteins and cross-contamination can make me very sick.)

First, I would post a detailed list of your benefits package. This package should include 100% fully paid for health insurance that requires zero additional money from the employee except for perhaps prescription co-pays (not to exceed $20/ea or something).

You should also have a generous time off package and generous/unlimited sick days allowance. In Europe, this is already the norm. If I'm sick for 2 weeks in bed, I still would get paid. Obviously I need a doctor's note after a 2 or 3 days, but that shouldn't be an issue if they really are that ill.

Finally, really take a hard look at your expectations for when work will be completed. If you have a team of 10 devs and 2 of them really only work on average 10 months a year due to their disability, can you justify that to management and still meet your deadlines? Preferably, you work in a field where the deadlines are all made up and you can build in generous buffers.

This is true in industries like gamedev already. The game is sometimes done months in advance of the launch (or should be, ideally) and then marketing takes over while the team transitions to writing DLC or working on the next project.

It's laudable that you'd want to take on hiring people with disabilities but you must be realistic with what you are getting yourself into, especially if those disabilities are chronic in nature and require frequent visits to a doctor.

In return for providing all of these benefits, you will gain some of the most loyal, hardworking, and compassionate team members and all around great human beings. I have friends with such disabilities and it's not a secret who the good companies are to work for. By providing excellent benefits like these, you'll also attract a lot of other great talent and perhaps make new business partnerships because of the network influence of your engineering team. It's well worth it, in my opinion.

You are paying a market rate for the 4 hour technical assignment of course? Wait, you don't want to commit that kind of resources to someone who's not an employee yet? Well it works the same way for them.

> salary isn't posted in the ad

I don't know how US job market looks like right now but if this was in EU I would simply keep scrolling if there wasn't a salary range unless your name was really recognizable. There's too many offers to waste time writing emails/messages that lead to bullshit pitch-calls that waste my time before some recruiter gracefully tells me what the potential salary is.

The key question is WHERE in the process you lose applicants.

Do you lose candidates at the 4h assignment stage? If so, that is probably the issue. Otherwise, look elsewhere.

1. Title inflation. Many here are making glib comments about "not actually senior". Great! Call it a "Principal" role and see if that helps. You can always promote any existing Principals to Senior Principal or Staff or God or whatever the new better-than-old-senior title is ;-).

2. Actual inflation. What are you offering? Are you sharing that in a job posting? Hard truth: if you're not FAANG or a handful of other companies, everyone assumes you can't afford them. If you CAN afford them, share numbers in your job posts!

Senior at my FAANG is around $500K at the moment. If you can't beat FAANG, the best way to get people is to offer them more autonomy than they can get at FAANG. But at the Senior level that means making them part of leadership (assuming you're small); Senior at FAANG likely already has more technical autonomy than you can offer. So management and strategy autonomy is a great carrot.

Good luck!

500K is total comp right?

yes.

So you require 90 minutes of interviewing followed by a 4+ hour long unpaid homework assignment complete with a presumable additional hour of presenting the homework assignment to a team without them knowing what the pay could be.

I think you'd have to not have many other opportunities to be worth putting up with that much for the potential for a job. Imagine if they interviewed at even one other place that required this much from them, they wouldn't have the time.

We've been unsuccessful finding senior roles lately. The job is slightly underpaid, but the technologies, team, and everything else are amazing.

It's difficult to communicate that in a job rec. I'd never leave for a much more higher paying role because the weight of being on a team of real experts working on real challenges far outweighs additional money.

Just the way it goes out here. For the same reasons you wouldn't be able to hire me, other people won't be hired for less than what they want.

Edit: The "slightly underpaid" comment is getting all the attention, so I'm just going to make it literal.

200k before considering stocks, and other benefits, remote US.

That's what I consider slightly underpaid. It's not a euphemism for "massively underpaid"

> job is slightly underpaid, but the technologies, team, and everything else are amazing

I would be sceptical of someone describing themselves as senior who falls for this. Pay them properly. If you can’t afford cash, make it up in stock and responsibility and flexibility and be open that you’re proposing that tradeoff from the start. You’ll filter out everyone with a mortgage or kids close to college or a lifestyle they love, but that’s better than hoping someone falls for the schtick Silicon Valley regularly foist on twenty somethings.

(I would also be sceptical of someone describing themselves as senior responding to job postings versus being recruited, but that may be more bias than truth.)

I mean, it's entirely reasonable if those are your objectives. I don't decide pay, so I have no say in those details.

I do agree that you don't find seniors by job postings very often, but we have had success with it provided the job posting is narrow on a technology that is specialized, so you know the candidates in a way. They come from a company you've worked with, or interacted with on some vertical.

> I would be skeptical of someone describing themselves as senior who falls for this. Pay them properly.

100%. Seniors are likely to have families, kids, etc. I'm not leaving a job for "dream tech, or dream team" if I'm taking a step down, or for a lateral compensation move.

Given the current economic/inflationary environment "slightly underpaying" is massively underpaying them.

I literally meant slightly underpaying. I'm sorry, if I realized people weren't going to use the words I said with their own meaning, I would have said it differently.

I'm not marketing a job to you, I'm just saying that it doesn't pay as high as the highest offers I get for roles which I wouldn't take to replace it.

Edit: Let's just make this literal, it's 200k without considering stock, benefits, etc. I consider that slightly underpaid, but the idea you can't raise a family on it is mind boggling.

Thanks for the update (with the numbers), I was about to reply that without a number it's hard to gauge what 'slightly underpaying' means.

It would be interesting to see if you added a pay range if you got any additional hits. I'm not a devops guy, so I can't say whether it's underpaying or not. It doesn't seem unreasonable to me.

It's also a remote US role, and it isn't Devops, as much as Software Engineering.

It's going to depend a lot on where you live for how competitive the numbers are, but I don't care where someone lives. I need someone equally as useful as everyone else in the team. It's a very high quality team, so it's a challenge certainly. But pay isn't the issue, it's differentiating yourself from all the other positions that say similar things, but don't mean it.

Like, every job rec says the same boring things. everyone wants "a+ players" or "force multipliers" or whatever bs they say. I wouldn't apply for the role as listed in the rec, and I know the job is great!

It's tough to say, no really, this is dope.

Think about it. You expect to hire people making less right now, because most people won't take a pay cut if they aren't forced to.

But if you are paying $200K, then presumably you will not hire anyone who is now making $100K, $50K, or $5K. So you're restricted to a fairly narrow band.

Where is your "glass ceiling", the minimum someone has to be making for you to take them seriously?

How much someone is making now is not part of the analysis on if they would be a good hire. I wouldn't even ask this within the process.

Let's set aside whether it's explicitly screened for or discussed.

If, hypothetically, you knew what they were making, either as a dollar figure or implicitly because of their previous/current job description, what would be the minimum?

I'm asking something which necessarily has an answer, even if you won't answer it.

I'm asking about the limits to your imagination - where is the boundary between a plausible hire and and one that is not? Both in numeric terms and all the stuff associated with it.

When I wrote $5K, that was a serious possibility - think of it as 4 lakh rupees per annum.

You don't seriously go through the same analysis for everybody. Nobody does. Maybe you won't share exactly when you jettison the analysis, but the important thing is to realize this is where the problem lies, and questioning the implicit rules related to shortcutting your process.

I don't even know how to respond to your line of thinking here. You've already stated that if I tell you the truth, then I'm lying, because the truth isn't true.

You clearly have an issue you've experienced that bothers you, and you are critically concerned with it. That makes sense. Best of luck to you.

It doesn't change the reality which is in my case, in the situation I'm discussing, the previous salary of the person applying is a completely irrelevant part of the hiring process.

You're bristling like I'm personally attacking you.

I'm not calling you a liar, if you say that you don't explicitly consider previous salary.

But you consider things that are correlated with previous salary. Everybody does, and that's why salary is sticky over time.

Think of it as an output, instead of an input.

I'm asking for you to consciously consider what you might be doing. I don't know! So of course I can't legitimately tell you (accuse you) of anything specific.

But how often do you, say, hire someone whose current job is, say, at a Best Buy retail location? Or someone without a college degree?

I am not pursuing some idea of fairness - I am suggesting that if you are not getting what you want, there is some kind of self-defeating aspect of the current process.

I'm not bristling like you're attacking me, that again is you assuming my reaction. You've done it multiple times. That isn't how you have a productive conversation.

You said distinctly that if I said it wasn't an impact, that I just wouldn't admit that it was. That is calling me a liar.

I do not consider things that are "correlated" with a previous salary. I consider only if you can do the role. You can make less or more, and it doesn't change the reality that you need to fit into a very high performing logical team.

I don't have a college degree, and would never consider it in a hiring process. I don't know if I've ever hired someone with a previous position at a Best Buy retail location, however I have certainly hired people with relevant experience of that.

Again, you continue to assume my actions. That's all you're doing, creating a model in your head of who I am based on your past experiences, and then questioning me to confirm I am who you've made up in your head.

The current process is certainly broken, but it isn't due to interviewing. If you'd have asked that question, I could have explained it. Instead you've done nothing but tell me who I am, which is incorrect.

Have a nice day.

>You said distinctly that if I said it wasn't an impact, that I just wouldn't admit that it was. That is calling me a liar.

This is not distinct or clear to me; I certainly can't say you are lying when I can't parse this.

>I do not consider things that are "correlated" with a previous salary.

Ok, I believe you believe this if you say so. It doesn't sound like a lie. I can't understand how you can believe it.

>Again, you continue to assume my actions

The things I am confident about have nothing to do with your actions.

There's a lot of talk about things like "institutional racism" and it seems to me deeply weird that it is such an emotional topic, when it should be a bloodless technical one, given the premises. Namely that because of correlations, outcomes that are not intentional are endemic.

The overall sense I have of your comments is that the idea of unintended consequences is offensive. But how do you correct anything without thinking about them?

> think of it as 4 lakh rupees per annum

So is your question _actually_ "Will you/why won't you hire overseas remote, rather than in the US?"

Ah, sorry I didn't get that. The answer is this is a global team, and we do hire all over the globe. This particular position is for the US timezone, and that is why it's in the US.

is the stock liquid? checkout levels.fyi for senior / staff level compensation.

The only actually senior people who are going to jump through the hoops of doing a 4 hour take home technical assessment are the ones interested in:

a) you are offering some absurd amount of stock options for something they really think will be valuable in the future

b) the net take-home compensation after federal/state income taxes will be absurdly high

You're doing it backwards. Tell me why you're worth working for. Sell me on it. We should be giving you the take-home exam.

You're a self-described "run of the mill" software vendor. That sounds like a workplace that is zero fun. Strike one. Good candidates who can help you are in it for the adventure. We're not in it for your average benefits and wet mop process. Strike two. You're pretentious declaring that your run-of-the-mill job "requires a reasonably deep understanding of the underlying platform" presuming that we software engineers with decades of problem-solving experience can't learn it in an afternoon. Strike three.

It seems to me as though you're going through the motions to check a box but don't really want to fill the position.

What are the vertices and edges of your hiring graph?

What are the conversions like for each edge? Candidate finds out about you ---> Candidate Contacts you ---> Step 0 ---> Step 1...

If there are not many viewing your offers, you may want to consider your channels.

If you have views but not applications, you may want to consider your copywriting.

If you're getting applications but they're not following through, contact them and ask why.

If you sent offers they did not accept, ask for more info on why they didn't accept.

Make a graph for transitions from each step to the other. Look at the percentages and numbers. Look for dropouts, etc.

View it like a conversion funnel, or more accurately a graph.

It is beauty competition. Disclaimer: I am biased gray-hair contractor who's milking own network.

"fairly typical run-of-the-mill mid-size enterprise software vendor" - read: boring, maintenance, legacy, but that is ok, I work on such stuff when it pays decent daily rate;

"fully-remote SWEs in the "DevOps" software space (Linux, containers, k8s, yadda yadda)", "higher percentage non-code" - sysadmin, jira queue, SEVs, on-call duty, yaml development, no essential prog lang skill, o'rly you need SWE?

"we're junior-heavy already" - babysitting, scrum;

"haven't even managed to backfill a retirement from six months ago", "the work requires a reasonably deep understanding of the underlying platforms" - seek Sol. Architect or on-board into small area first, legacy can wait;

"take-home technical assignment (~4h) or similar at candidate's choosing" - what? take-home k8s cluster? Maybe better try some gig/probation week, daily rate applies ofc.

I think I would fit, but why I should move my lazy ass off my golden handcuffs just before summer?

I feel similar but just want to add that letting people do a ~20 hour probation week could be useful for both parties here. Meaning they can keep their same job, but you're going to pay them to do 1-2 weeks at 20 hours per week. This doesn't sound like a sensitive IP situation, either.

Also, if you can't get someone up and delivering value in 20 hours that's good data about your internal setup. My goal is a minor commit on day 1. And if you can't spec out value that could be delivered in that time frame you probably have weak requirements.

I'm in between jobs at the moment and a lot of people here are commenting with some very reasonable hiring practices that I actually haven't seen out in the wild yet. From what I'm seeing, the take home assignment process is getting out of control.

The take home assignment process seems to vary wildly between different companies. One place wanted me to complete a take home assignment that was estimated to take between 30 - 40 hours. Another startup had me come in for a 3 hour interview, and then asked me to take home assignment after the onsite interview. Hard pass.

I think I still prefer the take home assignments over the leetcode misery. But, candidates like myself will quickly find themselves having to pick and choose which ones they want to complete because some are just asking way too much.

I just came out of the job hunt, and I disagree about preferring take-home tests to leetcode. I much prefer the timeboxed leetcode scenarios to a project with no defined end aside from the specifications. The expectations for the takehome never seem chasee to me. I might solve the exercise in 4 hours, but how do I know the other candidates aren't pouring days into the exercise? Leetcode with a time constraint allows me to prepare for a known quantity.

People grind leetcode problems for weeks or months ahead of time though.

Most take assignments are throwaway code, but once in a while they are things you can add to a portfolio and expand on. Also if you finish and need to reaapply to another position you’re already done.

Definitely a time consuming practice, but i like knowing what I’m getting into versus the mystery of leetcode. Short and sweet is the key though. Someone else mentioned live pair coding on some revelant feature , I think those are ideal

I’m a staff engineer @ a big co, and my guess is the assignment is filtering out senior people with day jobs already. I hate take home assignments since they aren’t fairly timeboxed and offer no opportunity for me to ask questions or get info about the company.

There is nothing realistically preventing other applicants from spending 12+ hrs on it over the weekend or whatever, and so I feel pressure to also “cheat” on the time box. Not to mention this is competing for weekend or family time. Timed interviews, even if they take all day are a much easier pill for me to swallow, I just burn a vacation day.

I also get something out of the much-maligned leetcode+behavioral style of interview- usually 5-10 minutes depending on how long it took me to solve the question to ask them about their role, tenure and pulse on the company. These quick chats with the potential team members are incredibly valuable and missing out on them is an understated cost to take-home assignments.

I’ve only done take home assignments as a junior eng for startups that sounded really cool and wouldn’t do it any other way, (and I never actually ended up working for any of them afterwards making the roi kinda bad).

AD: Put the pay scale in the ad. Let's not waste everyone's time. Take-home technical assignment (~4h) or similar at candidate's choosing: If you want 4 hours of someone's valuable time a) pay for it, or b) commit 4 hours of your time. Either is reasonably fair Presentation of technical assignment to the team: That's just straight-up pay-for-the-time. If you've all come this far in the process, there must be some interest and it only seems fair. Also, why do you care what the team thinks? They're either on the initial phone-screen, or you really don't care what they think. Don't waste the team's time. If you really care, make that 45-60 minutes.

> - Take-home technical assignment (~4h) or similar at candidate's choosing > - Presentation of technical assignment to the team

Are these two jokes? What makes you think you're worth somebody wasting their time with such stuff? How about you actually interview them properly 1:1 and stop wasting the candidates time?

This! The utterly lack of respect is disgusting. The company is in need! What if the candidate asks the company to provide an 8 hours presentations about their processes, people, events, dancing capabilities is the CEO?

Yeah, the last three steps are killing you. I'm not going to do a 4 hour skill assessment, period. No senior people will. We're not making a solid 6 figures because we're idiots faking our way through the world.

Skip that assessment and presentation, and implement a 90 day probationary period like everyone else.

THANK YOU, THIS ^^^

Any company needing to "Test" me, is an instant sign of disrespect. It means you already don't trust me so I don't trust you. Now obviously there needs to be some accountability, and I think a 90 probationary period is a perfect compromise.

When you are hiring senior talent, we aren't desperate or dying for your job. You need to sell it to us. You need to accommodate us. You need to make it easy for us. Assignments are a sure fire way to let me know you have no idea what you are doing, and don't have competent people on your team who would be able to just talk to me and tell i know what i'm doing.

Entitled much? Instead of 4 hours of your time [0], you get to waste up to 90 days of an employer's? (or more likely some multiple of that, counting interactions with others on the team)

[0] it probably takes even more of the employer's time in reviewing and discussing the application.

Hiring sucks for all parties. Everyone should try to meet half way, and be respectful of the other's time.

Good luck with that. Employeers need good senior staff a lot more than those senior staff usually need that specific job.

But that's what I 'm saying. Don't waste my time, I didn't get to this high level job I'm in by being so stupid I can't write a ten line Python script. Interview me, ask what I've done, don't think your company is so advanced that nothing compares and you have to give basic skills tests to everyone. If a company thinks that at my level I might not have the skills I have demonstrated, I don't want to waste my time with that company. Entitled? Yes. I've earned it over the past 30 years.

> - Take-home technical assignment (~4h) or similar at candidate's choosing

That's probably your problem. You've gotta respect people's time. It'd be ok if that were the final step in the process, but it looks like it's followed by Yet Another Interview Round (TM). Try to slim that down, or remove the "presentation" aspect, and have it be the team's burden to audit the assignment. Ask for a small writeup explaining their technical decisions from the candidate instead.

I don't respect any HR Team/Company that demands tests, assessments or homework as part of the interview/onboarding process. If you don't have a competent enough team, that can identify I know what you need me to know just by talking to me, I don't respect your company philosophy, I will assume your team is incompetent or not fully formed, and I will choose not to work for you. Its a cheap cop-out for HR to not have to do their job and not have to involve working members of the team in the hiring process. If you need to "Test" me to hire me, I find it disrespectful. It means you already don't trust me, so I will never trust you.

Also there's lots of incredible talent out there, who are horrible test takers or do poorly under the context of the stress of performing for an interview... these people actually tend to be more talented than the people that are good test takers and good under that kind of pressure. You're shooting yourself in the foot by not considering them.

Hiring "the best candidate for the job" is a nebulous term that HR has misinterpreted to mean "most technically skilled during an unrealistic interview test". The best candidate is really the person who interfaces with a team the best on an interpersonal level, and they will grow in to their position over time, and fill in any gaps in technical experience they don't have if they are truly passionate about their field. Either a lead person has leadership traits or they don't. Some technical homework assignment and presentation will prove nothing.

I have a few things to add. For some context, I've been building software for 22 years, have ran my own company, and worn many hats. The thoughts below are also in the context of hiring senior people.

Moving fast and being responsive is really important, i.e. be lucky. I only just this week moved from part time consulting to a full time job. I think I was very lucky, but from the first moment of contacting recruiters/applying/reaching out it took only 1.5 weeks to get an offer that exceeded my expectations. It is hard to be lucky enough to capture the attention of the right application at the right time.

Include the salary in the job ad. I only applied for jobs with salary in the ad. It saves everyone so much time to know that everyone is in the same ballpark before starting any discussions.

Look beyond the resume. The trouble is over 20 years, I've done A LOT. So many different technologies, problems, industries, roles. It's too much to condense into a resume that perfectly fits your expectations. Come up with some probing questions that are relevant to what you need from a problem solving point of view, and ask those. I remember interviewing and it prompted a whole set of memories I had omitted from my resume and cover letters, all because I just plain forgot.

Be proactive. For example, I added a post to a monthly "whos looking for work" post on HN. I didn't hear from you and I would have loved to. Maybe I wasn't the perfect fit, but no way to know unless we talked. I wonder how many other potentials could have been missed?

I wouldn't worry about whether or not the take home technical assignment is causing issues or not. You will need some way of evaluation candidates in a practical way, and it might be video discussions, or it might be take home assessments, or something else. All a quite time consuming, and will exclude people who don't have that time. If people are genuinely looking and are interesting in your team, they will find a way to make the time. Perhaps be flexible in this point and work with the candidate to decide what method of evaluation works for both parties.

I don't pretend that the above will fix any hiring issues, but I think it's worth considering. In a job market where there is an overwhelming demand for senior people, ask yourself - why should they work for you?

Your job description is a close match to what I'm currently doing, "senior" developer who gradually transitioned into platform engineering due to the need and greater than average for a developer familiarity and comfort with the platform and infrastructure layers of the stack. I currently work for one of the CNCF software vendors doing consulting engineering for customers setting up their own platforms for multi-tenant, heterogeneous workloads.

I'll say I don't really mind the take-home assessment, contra most of what you're seeing here, but 4 hours is pushing it. 1 hour max is more in line with what I'm willing to do for a pre-interview screen.

The bigger obstacle for me is why would I be looking for jobs to apply to in the first place? I haven't applied for a job since getting out of the Army and moving into the software world at all. Not once. Every job I have taken in this industry has either been from a recruiter or professional network reaching out to me. I've never looked for a job and never plan to, so I'd never see your ad and I don't read the Hacker News who's hiring pages. Recruiters who don't give a salary range aren't going to hear back from me unless it's a FAANG-level company with a well-known salary range I already know, though. I'm often annoyed by the amount of "not writing code" I have to do, but I'm used to it at this point.

I'll just grant your claim as a person who works there that the job is sufficiently enjoyable and pays well that I'd consider it all things being equal, but the biggest obstacle is just that I don't look for jobs. People offering jobs look for me. How good your ad is means nothing if I never see it and don't want to see it.

Many people said it already but actual good seniors have networks they get offers from and won’t/don’t do homework. I can see myself apply to your offer, but with decades of enterprise experience, up to date skills and such I cannot see where homework fits. That is why, as a senior, I do not apply but get asked for things and those jobs don’t have homework or tests as they are referrals. I would take a look at your concrete offer but I do not know the actual offer or company; feel free to mail me, I have a lot of highly skilled friends who might be interested, minus the homework.

When I see a job posting with no salary all I think is what are they scared of? Must be low. A 4 hour project for a senior? For DevOps? I could spend those 4 hours pinging people in my network and probably have interviews scheduled.

Let's try with a metaphor.

I am a man (it works better from this point of view) on a dating app, with a few blurry pictures making up my profile. It kinda looks like I look ok, but who knows. I reach out to a good-looking and engaging woman (the "seniority") and I tell her that I am possibly interested in her being my partner, I can provide and care for her (that's what I say, she does not know whether in reality I can or cannot do it), but before I make my offer, she has to take professional photos, answer to a 4-hour survey, a couple of calls of 30 to 45 minutes each when she is asked about her previous experience with relationships, then introduce herself to my family and friends and see if they are ok with her.

Then, maybe I will make an offer. And, maybe, an offers she would like.

I don't know why I have troubles finding a partner.

DevOps isn't exactly an ancient field. I know you said you're already junior heavy but even if building someone up takes you six months you're going to likely be better off in the meantime than trying to find someone able to produce the value you need from day one.

My employer is also having trouble attracting senior frontend devs right now and our take seems to be that there's a lot of competition for good candidates, that's unlikely to change in the short term.

EDIT: Not to doom, but times are changing, might be worth evaluating if you really do NEED a senior. A lot of the way people look at used cars, and housing, (and gas prices), and remote work has changed in the past few years. Maybe easily acquiring senior devs is something that is also changing.

`- Take-home technical assignment (~4h) or similar at candidate's choosing`

This. Get rid of this. Everybody that reads this, get rid of it if you have such a step in your interview process.

Do a 1 hour maximum live challenge instead, or skip it entirely if the candidate has any public code you review and good enough.

This is what I've done in the current company and we've managed to hire some extremely good senior candidates because of it.

100% agree on the 1 hour maximum live challenge. As long as the challenge is relevant to the role being applied for, this is the way to go. This is enough time for the company to see some code and for both parties to ask questions about the tech, role, etc.

This is actually insulting to senior developers. You're gonna ask for a four hour take home and presentation like it's show and tell at hight school. I know how to code and don't have to prove to you that I can. If you think I do then you have a real problem.

As others have pointed out, a possibly less-than-exceptional comp plus a 4-hour assessment will ensure many people opt out of applying. Given that folks could get anywhere from $400 to $1200+ / day for contracting gigs, you’re asking them to give up $100-$300+ worth of time for the chance at a role that in all likelihood pays less than what they can land at many other places. That may not be a lot of money for some people, but if I were to part with it for little to no upside why not just buy way OTM calls/puts and see if they print later?

A lot of other pertinent comments re: time commitment trade-offs for people with families or even having to decide between burning some PTO for this

You don't specify how far candidates progress down your pipeline. I'd guess that if you get no applicants; post more details in ads (eg: sallary/benefits, 100% remote ok/no remote etc).

Not sure if 1 hour 30 minutes before technical assignment makes sense - maybe 15 min with hr, then assignment - then more face time?

I agree with general sentiment that 4 hour assignment doesn't square well with "senior". Maybe take home assignment (look over for 1 hour give or take) then 1-2 hour technical/architectural discussion with technical team lead? Preferably with a real problem recently encountered and solved by the team?

Post the salary, don't make me spend 6+ hours before I find out you are offering less than what I already make.

TBH I think I perfectly fit your profile but I am not in the market. And the idea of a 4 hour take home assignment is not helping.

Best of luck OP!

I got this onto the front page a few years ago: https://andrewrondeau.herokuapp.com/takehome_vs_whiteboard_c...

Honestly, if you want to know why developers like me aren't applying, you you need to post your job description here. It's impossible to give good feedback on something that I can't see.

(And by the way, I very rarely do take-homes, unless I am between jobs and see personal value in doing it.)

No salary listed, hard pass right there.

If I even bother with an inquiry for a no-salary listing, it's going to be to ask what the comp is like. I made the mistake of doing an entire interview without knowing in advance that we had expectations in the same ballpark, one time. Never again. Waste of everyone's time.

I'm getting that way with interviews, too. Agenda and some sense of the topics, scope, and difficulty level of any "quiz" shit you're doing, provided to me early in the process, or GTFO. You don't need to keep it all secret for it to work. FAANG practically publishes study guides. Jim Bob's 3rd-rate B2B SaaS isn't going to go down in flames because they published too much info about their interview process. Meanwhile, making it a pop-quiz with a scope of literally anything and with everything about it hush-hush is a bunch of pointless stress I don't need in my life.

> we haven't even managed to backfill a retirement from six months ago

Ok. OP, can you please define "senior" and "junior" for the assembled audience? There seems to be some ambiguity concerning those terms. On one hand they can refer to a level of experience in a specific field, specialty or toolset; or, they can refer to levels of experience in life (and "senior" in this context doesn't mean "senescence" although they are admittedly correlated).

Given the foregoing, how junior or senior is the recruiter? What does the funnel look like (somebody else mentioned this too)? Have you considered consulting your marketing people on your pitch?

Over 20 years ago I was "fix the ship" Director of Tech for a small software company. I managed dev and support personnel and recruitment; when I was ready to throw up my hands I recruited my own replacement (actually I recruited a lead engineer who got along with the president, and promoted the dev with a minor in accounting into my role).

The conversation which needs to occur is not appropriate for HN. You should be able to find me and reach out and we can have a telephone / zoom chat; professional courtesy, no obligations. You want 4 hour technical assessments, you should be able to stalk people at least a little bit. It's a zen thing.

I don't know what you mean by "the work being a higher percentage non-code"?

But also: "Take-home technical assignment (~4h)"?

For what? Just give me a contract to work on one specific module or account or whatever. Real work, real pay. That ticket that's been itching you, but you've never assigned, or that customer request that just "can't be done". Give me that, pay me for it.

Now afterward, I've actually worked together with your team on something and we both know whether or not we want to keep doing that. And you've got rid of that nagging ticket, and hired someone who does the things that can't be done. Or worst case, you decide my work's crap and you're no worse off.

2/3rds of my career jobs have been contract-to-hire like that. And the other 1/3rd were cases where I'd already worked with these people before due to something like that.

A couple of calls and a contract job like that should be all it takes.

I guess the questions you have to ask are:

- Are you just not getting applicants at all? - Or are you getting altogether the wrong applicants? - Or are you getting ones that might possibly fit but they're just not making it through the process?

If it's either the first or the second, then your posts maybe aren't right in some way. If it's the third, then you need to look at where they're falling out. If it's the assignment, then that's your problem. And there's an easy solution.

I wouldn't be comfortable opening our code base to every applicant for "real work".

I see 2 weak points, possibly 3:

#1 "Resume screened by in-house recruiter", my experience is that they are not very well versed at "screening", they leave out individuals who are 97% qualifies, at the same time they screen in technically unqualified individuals who know how to play the "screening game". Get someone technical to do the screening.

#2 "though salary isn't posted in the ad" if it's good, why not disclose it?

#3 (Maybe) who does the 30m call? see #1 above.

It sounds like you may be looking for a very narrow band of skills. Awkwardly, people who are into systems administration were often there _because_ they didn't have to write code and people who were into coding were often there _because_ they didn't have to do systems administration.

DevOps as a concept is only about 10 years old, and a lot fewer people were doing it towards the start. There just aren't that many really senior people out there.

My recommendation would be to think about specific skills you would like to add to the team, rather than a generic skill level, and see if you can get creative about filling those. If you need platform expertise, can you pull from defense contractors & teach them the social norms of your company on the fly? If you need someone who can lead culture building, does that have to be the same person who has the deep platform expertise?

If you really need all the things in one person, you need some reason why they'd want to work for you instead of Google. Which usually means either paying through the nose, or offering something about the culture that appeals to a niche audience. Having a particular point of view can be a winning strategy, rather than trying to appeal to everyone all at once.

I've noticed an increasing reticence from senior programmers I know to have anything to do with DevOps. They see it as an aggravation they don't want in their lives. Somebody posted a little while back about it being easy to find consulting work in DevOps with relatively little skill, especially AWS pricing, specifically because devs at companies aren't putting in the time to learn AWS properly.

Has anybody else noticed the same? Or am I way off base?

Large swaths of the developer community have long seen commercial-platform-specific certifications as a bad path, and DevOps seems pretty heavy on that. Goes back at least to the days when people were picking up MCSE and Cisco certs and such and trying to base a career on them (sometimes successfully! But a stigma definitely developed around those certs, too)

I find it funny that you said "learn AWS properly" — have you loaded AWS services page recently? I've seen even very experienced DevOps engineers struggle to remember what was the service name to get into "parameter value store" (and I already forgot, and that was two weeks ago).

AWS is a mess. You learn just enough to get by and long for the days of simplicity where you could manage a bunch of servers yourself.

Oh, sorry, we are using Azure or GPC or OpenStack, that's an entirely new set of names for you to even know what you are looking for.

K8S is just the same. Every company decides on an "easier to use tool" like k9s that you have to learn from scratch if you don't want to jump through hoops to just use kubectl directly.

If anything is a definition of boring work, it's this: work to assemble a bunch of existing pieces without creating anything really new. I like being tasked with creating things, not being an assembly line worker who's got to learn terminology de jour.

I think the way devops is right now is that a few great tech companies have it as an interesting role where there is time to write code and improve things. Most companies treat devops as regular ops, as in developers do all the interesting work and expect ops to be on call 247 to keep all the crappy bits running.

What's worse is that they want full-on programming, leetcode, algorithm mashing for jobs that end up being nothing more than slinging yaml or json and maybe tweaking a Jenkins job.

That's the reality of DevOps - it's not primarily development, it's applying frameworks to infrastructure and deployment tasks. Get a senior sysadmin in operations and pay for a few courses in what you need from them.

I just want it to work. Stick some kid on it who isn't going to realize how craptastic the job is for a few years. They get to feel like a ninja and I can get my PR in prod.

DevOps is slightly more sophisticated system administration--janitorial work. With a much higher occurrence of vomit.

I'm going to speak from a place of an engineer / hiring manager that's been in startups for the past ~12 years and recently bootstrapped an engineering recruiting with a friend.

- As others said, you should post your salary. You'll likely need to be competitive in the markets you're hiring for. If you're open to folks within the US as fully remote, you'll likely want to be targeting the 50-75th percentile of salaries for the YoE you're looking for.

- The take home of 4 hours is quite a lot of time end-end. I'd consider slimming this down to 2 hours if you can OR allowing candidates to have several days where they can work on it at anytime vs being timed.

- It is extremely hard to stand out as an individual company nowadays. There are a truly amazing amount of startups, mid-size, enterprise, and beyond, companies hiring engineers of all levels. Without a way to tap into a market which you may serve organically and leverage those users into potential candidates, it's just going to be tough to stand out.

- You likely will need to spend time sourcing yourself and investigating a variety of avenues where you either a) spend your time sourcing / using a tool that helps (such as triplebyte / AngeList AList) or b) bring on an external recruiter. I would suggest bringing on someone that is actually technical and has a history in engineering, which is likely tough to find.

- Feel free to email me if you'd like to just chat more about this bit (external recruiting). We're happy to help, email in profile so-as not to simply self-promote within the comments. As a simple plug, we specialize in providing mid-funnel engineers for hard-to-hire roles and are happy to take over the first third of most engineering hiring processes.

> Benefits and salary are good (though salary isn't posted in the ad)

Even before seeing your hiring process (and I agree with the other comments about that), not listing a salary means I've already scrolled past your ad.

We're in an employee's market right now, and there are plenty of opportunities out there that are transparent about the comp package (and have shorter hiring processes).

40+ years (30+ professionally) here, and like others have said 4hrs take home is a real turn off. Having done a bunch of hiring myself using a bunch of techniques (some really bad!), what I like to do is get people to code interactively with me, I usually set a small task that should take < hour, but usually within 10-15 minutes I have a really good sense of whether they can or struggle, especially with more senior people, I will start side tracking and talking different options, and play with code to try to get a sense of what kind of discussions this person is likely to have, what kind of design options they consider, also I like to get them to review some code, and refactor code, discuss some real problems we have, etc. For senior people, once I know they can code, I look at how rigid they are, I pay close attention to how strongly opinionated they are, what they think is important etc. (too often people can end up with "rules" instead of principles of software development which tends to be limiting). I also notice this on twitch, if you go to https://www.twitch.tv/directory/game/Software%20and%20Game%2... and watch people code, you won't need 4 hours to work out who can program, you will likely have a good sense of what they can do in < 10-15 minutes (as long as they are actually coding, not chit chatting, or if they are learning a new language, might take a bit longer to work out), and within an hour you will get a pretty good sense of what they are like. So, optimize your interviewing process, try to engage the people so the interview is engaging and collaborative so that the interviewer / and candidate feel like they'd be working with someone they'd like to work with. Don't be too rigid about interview structure but be clear about the things you need to work out before giving them an offer.

I'm not a true senior (<5YOE) but I refused to do take home assignments. It's too open ended and there's really no way to tell exactly what will please the hiring manager.

Do you simply try to rush through the code to make it work within the allotted time limit?

Do you put more effort into the design and structure of the code to make it production ready?

What do you do when making the code nice and the 4 hours are up? Do you stop and turn in an incomplete assignment or do you put in more hours of work?

Even if by chance, you killed it and built awesome code in the 4 hours, there's no guarantee that the hiring manager will like the patterns.

I'm all of my online interviews I have never once received specific feedback on what I "failed" to do "right".

So no, I will not waste my time on take home tests unless I get paid for it.

As much as I also dislike algorithms, I can at least research what I did wrong and patch up that weakness. Can't really do that with take home assignments because there are too many variables.

I got my current job on the back of a 90 minute phonecall and had an offer the next day. I got my previous job after a 45 minute phonecall. The one before that, I had a 1 hour phone interview. The one before that, the engineering manager bought me lunch and we chatted for 45 minutes, and then I spent an hour in their office with him a few days later. The one before that was a 90 minute in person interview.

That’s the majority of the companies I’ve worked for that weren’t startups I started and none of them had a long or time consuming process.

I also interviewed with a company recently that required multiple rounds with multiple people and it was not worth the effort, so I will stick to the companies that can decide quickly whether I fit or not. I wouldn’t even bother if I had to do a take home assignment. I also want to know up front if it will be worth my time or not, so not disclosing salary range is also a red flag for me. I’m not there to play cat and mouse.

> - Resume screened by in-house recruiter

1st mistake

> - 30m call with them

2nd mistake

stopped reading after that. :-)

and I dont mean to sound harsh. but in a market where experienced talent is in high demand, we get TONS of inbound leads, in parallel, and thus look for ultra easy ways to filter them down. you immediately gave me a way to do it

> Take-home technical assignment (~4h) or similar at candidate's choosing

DOH. if I hadn't bailed by now, heres where I would pass on you fast. you're welcome to look at my resume/CV and respect my word, welcome to look at my GitHub, and welcome to offer me a paying project, but if you think I'll give you 4+ unpaid hours of my professional time, to every rando who pings me, just to prove, "Yes, I'm A Programmer Like I Already Told/Showed You" then be prepared to miss out on all the people with BATNA's and self-respect.

The attitude of entitlement by some companies in 2022 has gotten out of hand. Overdue for corrective turn.

I’m a devops engineer. I sometimes write code (like interfacing with the k8s apis and gluing stuff together).

Some considerations:

1. No salary = you don’t pay well.

If you paid well you’d be listing that first in the job posting.

2. Also the four hours assignment… when it comes to devops kind of stuff, chances are it’s impossible, or impossible to do in 4 hours.

If I have to spin up infrastructure to do your assignment, I have to pay out of pocket.

If there’s a service I haven’t used before then I must spend additional time to go though the documentation, do some trial and error (on my time, out of my pocket).

Chances are very high there could be a tool I haven’t used before, and that would mean I could just fail because I don’t know that tool (but I could learn it easily on the job, if I hadn’t a four hour limit).

So yeah the four hour assignment is completely moronic and unless the scope is cristal clear and laser focused (eg: only aws and only ec2+s3) i’d skip you too.

I would never do a 4h home assignment if I didn't have any clue yet about the salary. And I guess most senior developers think the same. Why risk wasting so much time? I would even suspect that you had good reason not to mention your salary until the end, probably it wouldn't be very good.

How big is your company? you're talking about 2 hours of interviews before you get to the take home. Seriously?

My current gig, my boss talked to me for 30 minutes and made me a job offer by the end of the day. This is at a firm with 200,000 employees. I've been there for 4 going on 5 years. I started as a contractor and have decided to make the hop to FTE.

I'd offer the candidate a 30-60 minute interview followed by offer with a mandatory 90 day termination / probation period or a 1099 contract. Ask the senior about the last project they led, talk through challenges and how you faced them, talk to them about politics and how they manage those, talk about a technical problem they faced etc.... Behavioral interview ish ... Engage, talk, gauge experience and if they don't jive, don't hire them.

Besides the take-home, which has been addressed in other comments (in short, a take-home for a senior role is just a flat 'no' from me), it would definitely help to include salary range in the postings.

When I was searching, if a company did not include a salary range, I automatically excluded it.

I'd recommend hiring an agency for dev ops work instead. That level of responsibility (and probably having to be on call) could be too much for one person, and also a sign of missing infrastructure around E2E testing, CI/CD, backups and monitoring.

It seems like senior professionals reach a career crossroads where the opportunity cost becomes too high at any price. I've been thinking about getting out of software engineering for several years now for that reason. And because I'm tired of reinventing the wheel in proprietary ways, only to see the code get thrown away because most internet businesses fail early on.

In other words, this might be a problem with the industry, not your hiring process. Perhaps a #nocode or managed solution could be an alternative?

I have those skills. I joined LinkedIn 2 weeks ago and in that time have been bombarded by recruiters. I've had maybe 30-40 message me directly. I was looking but now I'm sitting tight in my current job. I'd consider moving for unlimited time off, full remote and twice the salary most offer (starting around £250k basic) because I know my current job and it's cushy.

And yeah, I'd direct you to my GH instead of doing tests, but would obviously be ok to interview.

Like others have said, without knowing your salary I wouldn't even reply, and you'd need to contact me initially anyway.

In this market you may need to approach hiring not as fishing for bites, but more like headhunting for execs, since that's what your competitors are doing.

Are you fully remote right now? I get messages for jobs like this in finance a lot, but they're all mostly London based it seems.

Yes I am, and a reasonable number of SRE jobs I'm being contacted about are fully remote. Not sure if that's just within the UK or worldwide, which is what I want. Now I don't have to go into the office I don't see any difference between being at my place vs Ibiza, etc.

I'm a senior engineer and lead developer with 16 years experience.

>Take-home technical assignment (~4h) or similar at candidate's choosing

Yeah, I'm not doing that. I don't feel like spending four hours doing unpaid work in my free time, nor do I really feel like setting up a dev environment on my personal computer in the first place. It's probably actually more than four hours too and my time is valuable.

I am extremely confident that I have no problem getting a job without doing "homework" and I get bombarded by recruiters as is. So I'll skip you. Plus this is before you even know what the offer even is!

You simply aren't going to get many actual, good senior engineers to jump through your hoops.

Option 1: Train juniors Option 2: Pay a lot more

Stop the take homes. They suck.

“Benefits and salary are good” is subjective. Can you provide examples so we can verify?

What’s your hiring process like? What’s your company rep like? How are the interviews ram? Any steps taken to help interviewees feel comfortable? Etc etc

Unless the employer has a reputation of providing above average compensation, anytime at least a pay range and description of benefits is not provided, it is safe to assume they are not competitive (for above average people).

Which is why I am stoked Microsoft is going to disclose salary ranges for their roles.

If you give someone a take home 4 hour assignment you better be paying contracting rates. I have been in situations where someone gives an assignment of a problem they are actively working on. I'm not working for free.

As an option - everyone has stated the easy problems of no salary listed and the take-home assessment - if you KNOW your salary is low, offer 4-day workweeks instead. I mean x4 7-8 hours, not 10-hour days. It might help hook some traffic.

You also might have to open up the doors to 1099/C2C consultants, as well. Or talk to a staffing company and borrow some resources to get stuff done in the meantime.

A good pipeline can hire a candidate in 3-4 hours. You have to run a technical interview, but I personally prefer verbal over paired-programming. I will refuse to do take-homes at this point and refer to my active github.

Why aren’t your juniors becoming seniors? Why do so many get rich fast companies do that? You’re cutting the talent pool.

In a lot of companies juniors don't get mentored enough, burn out due to low pay, and leave for greener pastures.

https://twitter.com/typesfast/status/1536406121249796096?s=2...

"It might be that many software business models don't work when engineers cost $400k/year."

You just cannot run a "normal" business model.

If you want cheap employees, hire Egyptians.

The US technical market is inflated because so many companies are earning $$$.

Even if you fix your "process" problems, things won't get better. You need to offer a better quid pro quo.

> we're junior-heavy already

even if you didn't have 4h unpaid assignment, that one would still make me think a lot. Junior heavy possibly signals what the management doesn't treat/value people well (not surprisingly that 4h assignment really dove tails with that), that work is full of unnecessary self-inflicted death marches, that the management isn't capable to recognize/utilize/value the senior technical experience/skills, etc., so that only junior ones who need experience and don't yet know better stay there.

If you're scared of posting the salary range after a dozen people have asked..there's your issue. Fin.

- Resume screened by in-house recruiter

Are they fully up to speed with what you really need, as opposed to box-ticking? (eg seniors might not have the official certifications and degrees, but they will have the years of experience)

  - 30m call with them

What can the in-house recruiter ask that the hiring manager can't? What's the point of this interview?

  - Resume passed up to engineering


  - Hour-long call with hiring manager (typically the engineering manager of the team the candidate would join)

This is the most important part. If you can't decide after talking to someone for an hour, why not? What more information do you need that you're not getting?

  - Take-home technical assignment (~4h) or similar at candidate's choosing

Waste of time for both sides

  - Presentation of technical assignment to the team

Again, waste of time for both sides, including waste of time for the team. If you're hiring a senior, what is the purpose of presenting to the team?

If you're hiring for an architect, where communications is more important than technical skill, have them present on something in their expertise (eg, for a security role, the structure of PKI CA/RA/VA and the relationship between chains of trust and root certs).

  - Offer

Our process for an SME in the UK:

CV screened.

30 minute call with engineering manager

Tech task < an hour for a senior level applicant. Nothing here that’s difficult at all

Technical interview where we ask questions based on the content of that exercise

Offer

Even with that we’re struggling, but we’re loathe to reduce it because the technical exercise has shown that a lot of people talk the talk but can’t walk the walk. We’re doing it in a way that’s “write an API end point for something real world-y” so no leetcode and it’s incredible how many people say they know Framework X but can’t even do this basic task.

Totally food for thought, but here are my 2.7349 cents:

The hiring process doesn't seem to, and of course this is totally an completely assumptive-- based only on the list of items in your post, reflect any reason why a senior engineer would want to apply there. Most people want one of two things: more money or more growth. Right now, I'd guess, that potential candidates aren't feeling either from the ad. Is the salary actually good? Reading the job details I can say I'd expect at least ~$200k/yr cash, some sort of yearly cash bonus, and equity in the company.

Additionally, there may be language in the job ad; which, turns off more experienced candidates, e.g. "ninja," "rockstar," "10x". Very subtle changes to the language you use can completely change your applicant pool for both good and bad, it's worth experimenting via services that help with this (by reviewing the job ad) or consultants (though I'd try a service first, gonna be a lot cheaper).

Finally, seeing your stack being ops related, I'd guess a lot of qualified people are assuming you don't pay enough or will have awful work life balance. Are folks on-call 24/7? Salary might be alright unless your on-call 20% of your life-- in which case maybe it ain't. Speaking to that in the ad might really help pique some folks interests (if the work-life balance is good).

Good luck!

DevOps folks are in high demand because everybody and their mother is on the k8s/complex deployment train.

My last boss told me it was harder (and cost more) to hire DevOps folks than software engineers.

I agree with others on the technical assessment. I'll at least give you some points for offering it after speaking to someone for an hour which a lot of companies don't do—it's a really fucking low bar. I don't know that I'm necessarily senior by everyone's metric, but I've been in development for nearing 10 years depending how you look at it. I usually count it as something like 7-10 if someone wants to scrutinize, because really I'm just an IC without much more responsibility. I'd do *A* technical assessment, but not a 4hr one, and only if the resulting career move would be really impactful or I'm desperate. I'm planning to do a full day of Amazon interviews at the end of the month just because I've never worked at a fang and don't think I'd pass, so it's a challenge and a healthy time risk for high potential outcome. There's nothing more defeating than doing a lengthy technical test for an arbitrary company, only to be told something like my formatting was bad while using HackerRank, or to have some arrogant Junior review the submission and have it not be to their standard. You don't get time back. I wouldn't work for my current contract if there was a chance I wouldn't get paid, and I ain't doin it for many others.

I was looking for a job, had 3 offers all of them without an assignment.

I had one job opportuniy i liked, with a 4h assignment and i didn't get the job.

I fully accept doing and learning for Google or Microsoft or Apple etc. but they pay in germany like 30-50k a year more than the normal companies.

Normal company is 80k, the others are 120k up to 160k.

And others mentioned it but i want to repeat it: The offer i actually took (and it was the best choice as well) was actually because an ex collegue pointed me to it. There was already a foot in the door.

I won't do 'assignments'. I understand the reasoning, but I'm just plain burnt-out on test-taking of any-kind after I left grad school. I also don't want my 'test' answer to actually get used to solve a problem they actually had. To me, that is work-product-for-free.

Most of the code I've previously written is considered proprietary and I'm restricted to not disclose. That leaves me with only being able to show-off screen shots of personal projects.

If I were to ever do a take home test, I would absolutely attach an AGPL 3.0 license to it.

> No listed salary

> Long interview process

> Standard benefits (I'm guessing this, but if you were offering a 4-day work week or something, you'd probably mention it)

The market is extremely busy right now, overwhelming actually. If a candidate wants to get through it with any time left, they'll need to apply filters, and the busier the market is, the harsher those filters need to be. A candidate who can only apply for 3 jobs at a time will do so whether the market is offering 3 jobs or 300.

Sounds like your version of good, and the market of candidate's version of good, do not align.

Who does the "30 minute call with them"? That's the first real contact, and that's where you're probably blowing the sale. (Yes, you're selling.)

Care to share something specific to get specific feedback?

What’s the point asking generic questions, i just don’t get it. Whatever the answers — chances they are helpful for you is near zero.

I did one of these after a long day spent deep in the guts of the web framework (Elixir/Phoenix) trying to optimize performance under DDOS on an ad-tech system.

They gave me a codebase with a "REST" API for their mobile client that had some problems and wanted me to spend "4 hours" adding features to it and fixing any problems that I saw.

I made the changes, then told them that the biggest problem was that their REST API was just ad-hoc JSON over HTTP, with ill-defined data and poor error handling. I recommended using GraphQL, which defines the over-the-wire format and error handling, reduces network round-trips, and is "self-serve", avoiding many meetings between front-end and back-end people and increasing dev velocity.

This was too much for them, as they were expecting some changes to put lipstick on the pig. I said that there were other REST-based frameworks that would add standard structure (e.g. JSON API) and support introspection with e.g. OpenAPI.

I got rejected because I "didn't have enough experience with the framework", and "it didn't seem like a good fit". Their "seniors" doing the interviewing were not able to build a system that worked before they ran out of money, and they are now out of business.

Please show us your original job ad, that may get useful feedback.

Some questions,,,

What's the salary and why won't you post it?

What is the work about, and why not state it here?

Why do people say they dislike the underlying platform?

Why are you so specifically needing senior talent?

How many people applied? How many did you turn down, and why? How many dropped out before you could hire or reject them (and how long did you make them wait)?

Edit: can you give an example of the kind of technical assignment you ask for.

Telling us these may get you a long way to an answer.

Just let go of the 4h assignment. I know it seems like the perfect process for the company: introductory talk, assessment, talk, offer/negotiation. However, in reality that's for Juniors who need to prove their knowledge and have the time to do it. Seniors don't have that much time and good ones can show what they know in a 1-1:30 talk. Sorry if I've put it bluntly, just trying to help.

Agreed with the vibe of other comments here. It's hard not to come off snobby, and the market won't allow such snobbery forever, but for now the reality is that a senior engineer is interviewing YOU, not the other way around. Anything longer than a few emails and maybe a one hour conversation and you risk them moving on. Technical assignment is definitely pushing it, unless perhaps it's paid.

This looks like a funnel designed to get rid of all qualified people.

Get rid of your recruiter because they obviously lack access to senior resumes, which is not surprising. I long stopped even replying to recruiters as have many others that I know that are properly senior. Most qualified people don't deal with recruiters at all if they can avoid it. And there is no shortage of very lucrative good jobs to be had. Alternatives: get your senior people attending conferences and local meetups. Make sure there's a referral program. Treat incoming referrals with urgency. Those are your best shot at hiring good people. Don't scare them away with your bureaucracy. If anyone good comes along, be ready to act fast.

And of course skip the take home exam; it's usually completely redundant, humiliating, and candidates hate them. The best ones doubly so and they'll probably tell you so. The ones least eager to take that test are exactly the people you should be making an offer. Probably your recruiter is losing those candidates long before you even get to talk to them.

I'll just add on the technical assignment: it can be very different, and in many cases a 4-hour one is unlikely to be interesting. I do like interviews and test tasks, but if it's just another CRUD app, I won't be able to start: it's painfully boring.

Add that need to present the already boring result, and you need something really amazing to make it worth the time. I doubt it is.

My best guess is the take home assignment. Not going to happen if you ask me. You want credentials? Then look at my degree/diploma, my portfolio, experience and whether I know what I'm talking about in the interview. That's it. You don't ask a senior experienced surgeon to perform an op for you to prove he can do the job, and neither should you for this.

Personally, I usually fail tests. I don't have good memory to memorize all the algos, keywords, I am a StackOverflow driven developer:), but the last interview went really good, I could say I liked it and I even received an offer letter.

Let me briefly describe the setup. The job is with a well-known software outsourcer, the position is Middle Java Engineer. 1. Quick interview with the recruiter; 2. A hour long interview with senior engineer, where I told him about the projects I have completed, he asked some questions, at the end he gave me a relatively simple java task; 3. An interview with the engineering manager, who wanted to know how would I approach some problems, e.g. concurrency, security related.

The interview process did not require me to spend weeks to prepare, no 2-3-4 hours commitment and no questions outside of context. IMO, when you do hundreds of interviews you realize that passing tests successfully does not mean you will be successful at workplace.

Some thoughts:

* Pay _much_ more.

* Post the salary in the ad.

* Get rid of half of your hiring process.

- The recruiter call is likely worthless, engineering managers can tell in about 3 minutes if a CV/resume is worth an interview.

- Instead of 4h homework and a presentation, do an hour of pairing with a team member.

* Come up with some other benefits - 4 day week, full remote, options/sharesave etc.

* Reward your team for using their network to get candidates.

I usually get offers on the spot within the hour of "just talking shop" with the manager and the most senor technical person on the team. Why would I waste a day with your homework and class presentation only to be offered half of what I make now? You are filtering for desperate bottom feeders, and that is all you're gonna get.

Winner!

Unless there's something I particularly like about a job, or I'm super unhappy in my current one, I'm going to pass on a take-home assignment.

I can whiteboard, I can tell you about past projects, sure. The demand on my time is fixed. I can communicate and discuss it with you. We have a conversation.

Take-home is too opaque and too much of a potential time demand.

I have the interest and skills to work in a position like you described. If you’re interested, I’d be happy to give your process a shot and give feedback. Feel free to reach out, here’s my LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/qwertyq

Pay more, and disclose it. Unless there's something that stands out about your company, no one is interested in going through the process to be offered mediocre pay. Or find something else to offer (say $5000 personal equipment + guaranteed attendance at AWS Reinvent or something similar)

Are you paying candidates for the take-home?

The 4h take-home will narrow your funnel a lot. Most senior people will not do a free 4-hour take home. Try replacing it with a 2-hour interview by 3 people (that is, three 40-minute interviews each). One interviewer can do a hypothetical design question and the two others can do a programming question each. These do not have to be very difficult, but only to ensure that you are not hiring an architecture astronaut. If they can code and can explain a coherent design + some followup questions, the hiring manager can do a resume deep-dive and behavioral questions (all 4 people must be alert to behavioral cues).

EDIT: For a devops person, you could do one programming interview, one design interview, and another interview of various subject-specific technologies including networking, access control, alerting/monitoring and database management.

Technical manager here. We have a similar process (although for a programming-heavy role) and getting a decent flow of applicants passing through. Some deviations though from your way:

- We combine steps 4 and 6. Our assignment presentation is 90min (which sometimes goes onto 2 hours) and the hiring manager is present in that call.

- Our take home assignment usually takes 4-6 hours to complete for a competent dev, but we let them do it across a week or so. They have a work life, family etc, and we let them balance that against the interview process. It's worked really well for us.

Edit: To add, we feel that a quicker feedback loop and turnaround time helps the candidate and make them aware of that. And we don't wish to compromise on the assignment - we would like to see their output after giving them sufficient space and time to complete it.

I have family. I suspect a lot of senior engineers do. My interpretation of "DevOps" suggests a lot of on-call time. Junior heavy and senior poor makes me think you're not presenting an appropriate work-life balance. Younger SWEs are far more willing to sign on for that kind of thing.

Are you hiring a DevOps engineer, or a software engineer? While there's overlap, these are fundamentally different things.

Focus your job description on either: 1. A software engineer who can (and is willing) to do some DevOps work. 2. A DevOps engineer who can (and is willing ) do some software development.

Definitely #1, and the ad is fairly up-front with that.

I've been having the same problem. It's actually a lot to ask of someone to be a solid coder but also willing to do on-call support. The direction we're looking is to replace "DevOps" with "Platform Engineering" and retain an MSP to do on-call tier 1 and 2 support.

To echo what a few other comments have said, seeing "DevOps" as part of the responsibilities for a role is an immediate turn off to me. I want nothing to do with DevOps. It isn't interesting work (to me) and there are currently a lot of opportunities to do interesting work. DevOps also isn't challenging work (to me), it is simply frustrating work because I do not want to learn it, I just want to complete my dev task and move on to the next.

> Take-home technical assignment (~4h) or similar at candidate's choosing

This is why I wouldn't continue interviewing with you, but perhaps not for the reasons you think.

Despite my 15 years of experience as a software developer, your test will likely have some edge-case question that I won't get right. I'm terrible at timed tests, but I'm not a terrible software developer. Why should I spend 4 hours of my weekend failing to prove myself to you? I'd so much rather spend an hour or two having a detailed, technical conversation with you—and I think you would too. You can glean a lot from a conversation (it's easy to copy/paste code from Stack Overflow, but it's not easy to fake it through a lengthy, technical discussion)!

I'm willing to go through the process and give you direct feedback.

I'm a Senior "DevOps" (Sysadmin), resume is here: dijit.sh/resume.pdf

Sounds conceited; but if you want to know how an outsider feels about your companies and the process: this can be an effective way.

Think you might want to know that there is a flaw in your page navigation. Under 'About me', clicking 'View portfolio' goes to 'Contact me' section.

Nice page otherwise.

If it's speculative, as in 20 other people doing the same test for one job, I'd probably not.

If it was, "we want to give you the job, but just need to check if you can actually do exactly what we need", well that's different.

This alas will be buried -- pity.

Read https://www.honeycomb.io/blog/observations-on-the-enterprise...

My first question would be to look at the steps in your hiring process as a series of filters.

Do any steps that have either a larger drop-off than the others or a larger drop-off than in your past experience? What is the reason for the drop-off, are applicants dropping out/ghosting you, or are you rejecting them?

Do you have any data or insight on firms competing for these applicants? For example, are you putting in place an obstacle such as the 4h take-home assignment that your competitors do not have? Are you not posting compensation when your competitors are? Might these be subtracting more value than they add to the process?

Why isn’t the salary posted in the ad?

Many companies don’t do this but it could be something to set yourself apart.

We used to do takehomes but now we let the candidate choose if they want to do a take home or do a pair programming session in the interview.

If you want good people pay them and respect them. It's crazy how you have to explain humanity to people in the tech industry.

If you are good at what you do then there are two reasons you will do it. 1. You are paid well 2. You are respected

Don't be annoying about doctors appointments or time off, if they do their job just let them do it. Don't make them come into an office they don't want to be in, don't make them be in meetings that have nothing to do with them and could have been an email. It's really crazy simple, just think what you would want and then treat people the same.

Looks like you're only focusing on technical skills in your recruiting process. New research (link below) shows "soft skills" such as values are more important, especially for senior positions. My company quantifies applicant values such as empathy, agility, & disruption and measures alignment with org culture. Reach out if you want more info.

HBR article: https://hbr.org/2022/06/the-c-suite-skills-that-matter-most

Get rid of the take home work and and presentation. If you want senior or staff engineers their resume and a series of human conversations with whoever the stakeholders are should tell everybody everything they need to know. Your process seems more like you're looking for new grads with little or no experience. Almost as if you're ignoring all their past experience and wanting them to start all over again.

In short: Most mid to upper level engineers don't have copious amounts of free time to spend on maybes. There are too many better options for them out there.

Looks like you're only focusing on the technical side. New research (link below) shows that recruiting for "soft skills" is more important, esp. for senior positions. My company quantifies values like empathy, agility & disruption and measures applicant value alignment with org culture. Reach out if you'd like more info.

HRB article: https://hbr.org/2022/06/the-c-suite-skills-that-matter-most

> Benefits and salary are good (though salary isn't posted in the ad)

if the salary is actually good, then you should be showing that off in your job listing in the same way you show off your other benefits.

4 hour take home tests are an immediate no from me. It’s cheaper for you, but you’re essentially asking to do my job unpaid. If it’s an hour long interview, you’re bought in and we’re both there. A take home test does not tell me in any way that you’re serious with me for this role, and I haven’t decided your company is worth my time yet.

Typical engineering interviews are 30 minute intro to the company, hour long technical, then full on site. I put in 1.5 hours total before I know if you’re serious. I’m not putting in 4.5 hours before an on site.

> Benefits and salary are good (though salary isn't posted in the ad)

“I understand that most people are interested in working to exchange labor for money to support their addiction to food and shelter. But we don’t post how much money we are willing to exchange for said labor and I wonder why I can’t get qualified candidates who are interested”

Does that about sum it up?

And on top of that you expect me to do a take home assignment as a “senior” employee when even public companies that offer cash and RSUs (not lottery tickets - ie “equity”) only require a 5 hour interview loop?

From my experience: 1. In House recruiter are just bad, they have no energy and you lose all motivation after you talk to them. 2. Put the salary range, when it's not written I don't even bother applying. 3. 4 hours assignment is long, people tend to not want to spend too much time on assignment as it could be a complete waste of time, you don't get paid and most already have a job and don't want to work another few hours for something that lead nowhere and that you may not ever receive a feedback.

Also, if you don't have someone at your company with a network & social cachet to pull in the talent you need, you might need to start there. If you don't have an in-house recruiter, bring one on to spend their time managing your proactive outreach. Giving up the equity/cash required to attract a Director/CTO may be a harder pill to swallow, but you need someone whose job it is to be trying things out & experimenting with what works at your company.

In this market, you can't expect that talent will come to you.

Most likely, your offer is just too low.

Senior developers almost by definition have experience with their own market value and plenty of offers from their network. If you're going to offer less than what a friend's company offers, you'll need to have insanely amazing tech to compensate. And I'm always assuming that companies pay badly if they are cagey about naming the salary. I mean you also didn't say if you were offering $100k or $300k annually.

> - Take-home technical assignment (~4h) or similar at candidate's choosing

I refuse to do this since I don't do unpaid work.

And frankly, you want me to sink .5h+1h+4h = 5.5h unpaid on your demands? Nope. Not going to happen.

And I work as a senior AWS & Azure cloud/systems engineer. My resume speaks for itself. And if that's not good enough, I'd be glad to have a sit-down with a few of your own system engineers. If that's not adequate for you, then the problem is you.

> (though salary isn't posted in the ad)

Might be the problem ...

> the work being a higher percentage non-code is what's causing us trouble

Might be another problem... are you recruiting a PM or a Software Eng ?

> - Take-home technical assignment (~4h) or similar at candidate's choosing

I've personnaly stopped doing those. Either they are very far off the job either too revealing. And generally taking way too much time.

The problem for me is not that I am being asked to do take home work - the issue is that I do not know how engaged the employer is. I have done the work and been ghosted. Hell - I have done the work and received an offer but no one ever talked about my solution. I also have had the other end of the spectrum- interviews that ask me to correct production code - because they can not solve it.

Maybe the answer is to pay me for my time at a consulting rate.

Let me guess, the juniors are filtering the seniors out because they don't subscribe to the latest fads or are opinionated/more realistic about somethings that the juniors take as gospel

Also, the issue with most technical assignments I see is that they're judged much harshly than the actual work would be (including by the ones doing the assessment) and the fact that actual work is interactive and not a fire-and-forget (as the assignment is)

Having some kind of salary range in the initial post is very helpful, or even knowing early on in the process(recruiter screen) what that might be. If I think that there is even a small chance that I won't get a number range until my part is done in the interview, then 99/100 times I won't even apply.

When you say "benefits and salary are good" I literally have no idea what that means or what the frame of reference there is...

The thing a lot of people want and don’t have is the ability to work from anywhere in any time zone. Give the people what they want and they shall come to you.

Having been in the same boat, the take-home problem is... too much. If you show you don't respect the time of your candidates (4 hours of unpaid work is not respecting someone's time), they're not going to be interested. I would try to keep any sort of technical white-board interview or take-home problem small enough that it can be done in under an hour, 15 minutes for a truly experienced engineer.

Well, a good question is what are you offering the senior applicants, other than (hopefully competitive) money for their time. Are there interesting problems to solve? Is there potential for growth?are they going to have a say in the technical direction and strategy? How about the business side? Think of better ways to formulate the opportunity, your pitch, and ways to stand out in the market

I think you're not giving us enough information. Do you have numbers/percentages for each stage?

Is the problem that you aren't getting enough applications? At what stages are you filtering what percentage of applicants? This can help you debug your process ;)

Sorry, since this may be beating a dead horse, but ... Are you sure your salary/TCO is actually competitive (and wins some of the competitions ;)?

You can save yourself a lot of time and possibly attract the right type of candidate By posting the salary (not just a range) including all benefits as well as the type of work they’ll be responsible for (not just what skills you expect them to have). Top tier candidates have to deal with a lot of noise, you can make your signal stronger by being upfront about as much detail as possible.

I personally tend to ignore positions that don’t post the salary range. I’ve been burnt before by not knowing how much can the job actually pay.

Seriously.

I applied for one position who asked what I wanted, then told me that the top of their range was $5K less than my minimum, was I still interested? LOL, no. My minimum is my minimum now, no dropping it for a hard luck story or company in a cheaper area. Been there, done that, burned that t-shirt.

Is the comp enough to make on call tolerable? If one can make $150k-$250k without being on call, why would they take a DevOps position as a SWE?

There is no on-call. Like I say, it's not a DevOps position, but an SWE position requiring more significant knowledge (not administration) of the underlying platform than is typical.

Your interview process is very one-sided. It is quintessential "we interview them". Even meeting your team is framed as "Presentation of technical assignment to the team". In reality, it should be more like dancing tango. They are also interviewing your company and your team to gauge your culture and how do they fit in. More so with senior candidates.

Honestly, take home tests for a Sr. position is an no go for many engineers who have settled down. When I was casually looking, I had a strict no asymmetric interview process since I've been burned by many companies who never respond after an online/take home test. I was surprised how many companies just let me skip that part and got me into the onsite interviews.

I wonder, how often people would check candidate public repo and hire based on that? I have not seen this to happen to my network, people are asked to do homework assignment or algo coding in front of somebody but had never been hired based on their github. I'd imagine public github repo to the programmer is like portfolio to the artist, should be good indication?

I'm not senior in title, but I recently accepted an offer from a place that looked over my publicly visible GitLab projects and bypassed the technical challenge based on that work. We still had a technical conversation to confirm that I knew what I was talking about. Their willingness to do this played a huge role in me choosing their offer.

The process looks okay. But your post still lack crucial details.

What has always been the most important factors for all decent engineers I know:

1. What exactly do you do (what’s the mission, the goal, the challenge)

2. The compensation

If these 2 are good - we can bear any meaningful interview process, and many even prefer home assignments to nonrealistic pressure of on-site interviews.

If not - nobody actually cares if interview process is great.

I do not work in software, so I find how hiring works in it really odd. The amount of weight put on the interview compared to accreditation is unusual, and people in this thread consider that normal. There's no certification or examination for minimum competency. Looking online, there were attempts at making one, but they failed. How did it come to be this way?

I suspect the very horrible interviews at top-comp places exist in no small part to make it painful to switch between them, to reduce upward pressure on wages. I think it's version 2.0 of the earlier wage-fixing scheme they got busted for. That's why even a rigorous standardized examination isn't acceptable as a replacement for their painful interviews, even though spending all that time on whiteboard quiz interviews is expensive—the pain is much of the point.

That makes sense, thanks. Only way an examination could come about would be with their collaboration.

Everything about software and software employment is kinda odd. The most relevant college degree is fairly irrelevant to the actual experience and skills necessary to succeed in industry. The field is the result of a merger between rarified theory (computation as applied mathematics) and hands-on practice (organizing sand to conduct electricity in useful ways). There's a high proportion of practitioners without any formal training. The industry has existed for about a half-century, and now more than half of the top ten companies by market cap are software companies.

Post the salary. Expecting someone to give you 5-6 hours of their time for FREE while not knowing if they even want the job is stupid.

//- Resume screened by in-house recruiter//

The first step - usually recruiter filter about more then 50% of candidates who are more then enough for you.

//- Take-home technical assignment (~4h) or similar at candidate's choosing// wow, that's a lot. Change that to AMA session, and rate candidate based on the answers.

Hire faster, fire faster.

> Take-home technical assignment (~4h) or similar at candidate's choosing

This is an instant no-go for me. As others have said as well, I usually find work from my network so I don't really have to look at ads.

The problem is also that a significant portion of seniors at some point will want to start their own business too, so they will leave the job market.

Post the compensation upfront and get rid of your 4hr assessment. I would not waste 4 hours of billable time on a mere chance at a real interview after having already invested 1.5 hours interviewing with your company.

Lower the time commitment by 75%, and pay your candidates for their time on their ~1 hour take home assignment, or get rid of the take home entirely, and you won't have candidates drop out of your hiring process.

tldr: 1.5hr phone interview + a 4hr take home afterwards is ridiculous, especially if the compensation bands are a mystery. Stop expecting candidates to do ~4hr of free work and pay your candidates for their time.

You have thousands of senior devs reading this thread right now and you still haven't linked the company / job ad. If you missed this opportunity, you're probably making a lot of other silly mistakes in your recruitment process.

My suggestions:

1) Post the job ad here ASAP

2) Ask feedback from your candidates to figure out what other mistakes you are making in recruitment

I would bet that people flake after the 30 minute call. And not the take-home technical assignment.

Hiring these days is incredibly difficult. People genuinely do not really want to work anymore. I don't mean this in a bad way, but people are just more interested in their personal life instead of working for someone else.

Especially senior people.

Four hour assignment is instant pass. My Rolodex is huge, I don’t need an exam. In god we trust, all others pay cash.

Me and many other people I know will not do take-home assignments. Top paying (FAANG) companies do not require them.

But they do sometimes interview the crap out of you, speaking from personal recent experience.

I have recently interviewed for a startup with very cool hiring process.

1. 30 min introductory call with their recruiter. 2. 1.5h interview with an engineer involving pair programming and some technical questions. 3. Offer

This was it, very efficient. I was impressed with their interview process and immediately accepted the offer.

I'm at a FAANG and our team has the same problem. Hiring is tight right now. Pretty sure we pay more than you.

Benefits and salary are "good"? Example from another situation: I own my house not because I made a "good" offer. Plenty of people made a "good" offer. I made the best offer.

Try something like Hired.com. It takes time and energy for people to seek out and apply to jobs. On Hired, people have a profile just seeing what’s out there, are open to interviews and will already have posted their salary and their interests. You apply to them instead of hoping they apply to you.

I would offer to compensate for the 4h assignment. That's a huge time commitment and basically means a 1/2 day on the weekend or evening to complete. They'll have lots of options if they're good and will drop annoying assessments like this if they don't feel it's worth the time.

  - Take-home technical assignment (~4h) or similar at candidate's choosing

That is an instant nope.

> Take-home technical assignment (~4h) or similar at candidate's choosing

Can you determine I know what I'm talking about and can do the work without doing a 4h unpaid hoop? You should be able to ask probing questions and pretty quickly have a rough idea of if I've worked with this stuff or not.

It's likely the take home assignment. At this point in my career I'm not doing one. Maybe if you pay me.

Who determined that the technical assignment takes ~4hr in the first place? If a company tells me it'll take 4 hours I take that with a grain of salt.

I run https://t.me/withpublic_jobs Telegram channel and managed to find several senior level candidates, including DevOps. If you are ok to remove 4h tech assignment:), I can post your job there

Where are you posting your ad?

Lack of salary will put off a % of browsers who are unsure if they want a move… you need to either add package or try and make it clear in the text it’s good.

The interview schedule looks fine to me - but I don’t have super young children (maybe I’m more senior than I realise!)

So to make things clear:

A junior is an engineer that has less than 2-3 years experience professionally, and about the same time building and learning how to code by themself on their spare time. An Intermediate engineer is a Junior engineer with a good attitude - that says: I am still earning, and I am humble, and I listen more than I talk. A Senior Engineer Has 10+ years of experience coding, and developing solutions. He has navigated all the corporate BS, politics, and quit several teams of arrogant Junior con artists, or poor project managers - and is tired of all this BS. A real Senior engineer can code the entire solution by himself in 6 months , instead of a team of 5 juniors over 2 years. A real senior engineer - worth 10x the salary of a junior, and at least 5 time the one of his direct supervisor - for one reason:

You can remove everyone in the product team that doesn't have at least 5 years of experience developing code. And you will have better results at delivering your product.

In your case, you probably will end up with zero employee.

Now how much money are you offering this Senior engineer? Will you pay him/her the equivalent of the whole team you just fired? Or just advertise a "competitive (LMAO) " 170k$ package with amazing bonuses...

Which is like what.... only 40% more than the Junior that costs more time than it actually saves?

Maybe start respecting what it means to be a performant senior engineer - Most of them died of depression, burnout - or jumped in the management wagon - because they were too tired of corporate BS and saw no points in even remotely trying to deliver technical solution in an environment where they don't have decision power - while at the same time - nobody in the hierarchy above (and under them) slightly understand the blueprints.

When you realize the value of this rare person, you can think of multiplying the salary package by at least 3.

Then, you can do your interview rounds.

The heck! if I ever want to work in a tech team again - that either will be at a market salary (understand getting paid 5 times less than what I technically worth) for an ethical projects - which is rewarding for my soul and self respect - OR - I will get a 500k$/y for a basic coder job at Google/FB/etc.

Maybe you are not looking for a senior engineer, maybe you are looking for an intermediate one.

If you come to hire a senior engineer at that salary, be warned: he's not a senior.

List your salary/renumeration/offer, or at least the range.

I have issues with some of the steps listed but by far my biggest issue is that companies don't list their offer. Which for potential candidates makes them wonder if it's even worth attempting to apply.

Where are you losing people in your hiring process? Are you getting no initial applications? Do you give the coding exercise but they never do it? Do you give an offer but they turn it down? There is a lot of speculation in this thread but you should have the data.

> though the work requires a reasonably deep understanding of the underlying platforms which a lot of people seem to dislike.

Would it have taken 6 months to train someone instead of wait for someone to “hit the ground running”?

This is actually rhetorical for other hiring managers and recruiters

Post the salary, ditch the take home assignment. We're engineers, busy people, not students.

we need to have better diagnostics here

- what is your candidate acquisition strategy?

- what is your assessment strategy?

- what are the conversion ratio's in the assessment stages?

- what do the candidates themselves say if / when they say no?

I don't mean my comment as admonishment, so if you can reply with above, I will try to help

I won't even consider companies with a take-home assignment.

If you stick with it, be sure to give candidates a heads up that that's part of the process by the time they chat with the recruiter. Otherwise you're being really disrespectful of their time.

Make the 4h assignment paid $100-$200, as a token of appreciation and respect. Everyone's time is money.

Furthermore, that assignment should ideally be something you can use internally.

> Take-home technical assignment (~4h) or similar at candidate's choosing

This one should be paid, I would ignore this one if I am going thru other applications, if the salary is good I'd mention it before bringing up any 4-hours technical assignment.

Maybe pay significantly above your competition and loudly communicate that you do?

When does the mental detachement happens where people reaponsible for hiring stop understanding this? Why the headscratching? It‘s dead simple. Just make offers people can‘t refuse.

Nothing about the hiring process laid out is specific to senior hiring and is basically time intensive. You are not the only company reaching out to them or that they are applying for, so your assignment is completely not going to fly.

Lately, the only metric I've been using to decide if I want to work at a company is "is the team competent"?

If I get a vibe that too many people are, for lack of a better word, dumb assholes, I just won't take the offer.

Review the take-home assignment. Is it really relevant to the job ?

And if you really have to have it, is it specific and interesting? For example don’t ask to use a JavaScript library if the job post specifically asked for talent in rust.

I'm going to be blunt here - there is a genuine shortage of good senior candidates right now.

I would nix the take-home assignment, or drastically minimize the size, and ensure salaries align with, or are above the current market rate.

Sounds like the pay is too low.

It's taken me 8 months from starting to hire to having our new devops hire start.

here in the UK these types of positions are some of the hardest to fill within Engineering. Hiring software engineers is comparatively a walk in the park.

Why was it so hard to fill?

Was it lack of interested candidates, or were your requirements such that you rejected all the candidates until you found an excellent fit?

"Take-home technical assignment (~4h)"

Last time I was interviewing, I had ~5 take-home assessments sent to me. I didn't finish any of them. Much easier to prioritize a live interview. Less risk of having my time wasted.

Are you being too specific?

Most senior people have the experience to make good decisions and to guide the younger staff. What they may not have is experience in your tool set. But that can be picked up quickly, their seniority cannot.

It baffles me you decide to ask other people in your position instead of the people you actually want to attract. What is this?

And as a side note, is the 4h assignment and posterior presentation close to what day to day would be?

"SWEs in the "DevOps" software space (Linux, containers, k8s, yadda yadda)"

Eh. That is a pretty hard hire right now in GENERAL. That kind of hire is a months long process. BUT! Super worth it if they are good.

You arent going to like this, but unless you need large numbers of people regularly (big growth trajectory) your best bet for quality candidates is going to be referrals from existing members of staff.

> (though salary isn't posted in the ad)

I generally don't bother with these

As someone who used to do devops but now SWE - Do you have a link or contact? I've been considering something new but being picky, but in the worst case I can give you my honest feedback.

> We're a fairly typical run-of-the-mill mid-size enterprise software vendor

So that doesn't really sell it. What's interesting about "fairly typical run-of-the-mill mid-size" ?

Why is the salary not posted? What do you gain by not posting a range?

Add on-call load/expectations for the job if any. If your company has a fairly stable platform that is not constantly on fire and paging 24/7 -- that will be a positive.

My experience with assignments is that I will have a guaranteed waste of time on assignment if post asignment interview go bad.

Unless I really want a job, i usually avoid assignments.

Are you not getting applications or they are falling out of the funnel.

The take home test for a high level individual sounds asinine, but it was not clear where the problem lay.

Your process seems reasonable. How detailed is the job spec? Is there something you could add to it? Is the screening process by recruiter consistent?

what is this? it's the second time I see a post like this. It's really simple - senior people don't want to deal with your 8 step recruiting process or your leetcode challenges. they've been around for many years. just get on with it and hire them, then if they don't do a good job, fire them. you are not in europe, so firing is cheap.

Why don't you post salary in the ad?

That's the first thing that gets me interested in the ad. I don't even start to read ads without salary.

> Take-home technical assignment (~4h) or similar at candidate's choosing

Are you paying me my consulting rate of $2500 for this half day of work?

If not, skip

Take home assignments GTFO; pay me or forget it.....

8 steps? are you insane? keep it to 3, and no leetcode. these are senior people, just look at past projects and make a decision.

It’s the 4 hr technical assessment. We now offer a choice between the take home and a white boarding session with our engineers.

Everybody on HN always gets huffy and prima-donna-ish about the idea of a take home assignment. So I'll try to provide a different perspective.

For some people, like me, at least in theory, I would love it, because it's much easier for me to shine than when put on the spot in an interview.

I like to talk in an interview, but I'm no good at retrieving technical knowledge in real time.

Unfortunately, in real life, the one hiring process I went through that required a take-home assignment, I realized at the end, I wasted my time doing it, because ultimately it was not deciding the outcome, but a regular in person coding session was. I assume this is because you never know how clever people can be in cheating remotely, so they can't really trust the applicant did the project.

Now, the way you list your steps in hiring suggests the take-home assignment (and presentation) is the final qualification, not the first screen. Which should be good, if it really is your intention...except...

I see a contradiction in your post. You want a "SWE", a "senior", and someone who already has a "deep understanding" of the underlying platform.

The whole point, for an applicant, of doing a take home assignment is that they can demonstrate their intelligence rather than knowledge or ability to think quickly on their feet. If you don't want that sort of person, and it seems you don't, then who do you expect to apply?

I'm approaching the same conclusion as other people, but I'm trying to avoid explaining it in terms of seniors being too good to do take-home assignments.

Plenty of people in tech hate interviewing, don't have good networks, and some of them have a lot of experience. Maybe not with your tech, and maybe not with a SWE title though. You'd call them juniors, maybe. Or, you'd treat someone who's never been a SWE per se like they didn't know what a computer was.

Something I have never understood was why hiring seems to almost always be following a paradigm of filtering the pool of candidates for a very specific imaginary perfect hire, rather than taking the best candidate available independent of the job and figuring out how to utilize them.

And an afterthought: your use of "rubbish" suggests you are in the UK, while "fully remote" suggests you are seeking global candidates, and maybe your idea of a reasonable salary in the UK for a "senior" nullifies your willingness to hire from anywhere. Obviously there are lower wage areas, but maybe the people you are looking for are mostly in higher wage areas.

Also, just wondering - suppose a candidate takes much longer than 4 hrs or whatever you consider normal. Is that a problem in your mind? Are you screening for that? Are you happy hiring them as long as they don't brag about how long it took, and do a good presentation?

>. I assume this is because you never know how clever people can be in cheating remotely, so they can't really trust the applicant did the project.

I mean.. in the tech world tho... Unless you are literally having someone else do the assignment for you entirely, what exactly constitutes 'cheating'? Isn't it common knowledge that most programmers refer to StackOverflow (or the equivalent site for devops) all day?

This is what I find so dumb about assessments and tests in the tech space.... there is no such thing as "cheating". Either you know how to google and figure something out or you don't. Most people can't just pull solutions off the top of their head. Tech is too broad. You have to do research.

And if thats not what you mean by 'cheating', I just don't believe people are applying to jobs out there and having other people literally do entire assignments for them.... If you can't do the work yourself, you would be fired in no time... so whats the point? Or if you can have someone else always do the work for you, why not still hire that person if the works getting done either way?

There is no "You might not always have a calculator in your pocket, so we need to test that you know this stuff off the top of your head" in tech. I will always have a calculator, robust IDE, and google. Tests and assignments for hiring in tech are completely bogus, at all levels.

> Unless you are literally having someone else do the assignment for you entirely

I've seen stories on HN about one person showing up for an interview and another for the first day of work.

But it doesn't matter so much if it's an urban myth, if the people involved in the hiring process imagine elaborate scams can happen.

99% chance you will have BOTH a take home test AND quiz show interviewS'.

Pay more, it is literally that simple. At some point, people will find that compensation fair and will accept a job from you.

Have you considered outsourcing? Lots of good senior engineers in south america, europe, asia, etc. that will do just fine.

I don't do take-home assignments, sorry not sorry. And yes, I can get hired without it. Happened in last 3 positions.

If at any step of the interview process I see more than 2 people, I assume the company doesn't know how to hire.

You shouldn’t be waiting for them to come to you.

You should be spending hours each day looking for, reaching out, and networking.

Whats the salary range?

Whats the bonus / stock structure?

Whats the product?

Honestly, the process you list only works if you pay well and have great benefits.

> Benefits and salary are good (though salary isn't posted in the ad)

Why hide the salary if you think it's good?

1. Identify a smart, motivated person in your company who is interested in the position.

2. Train said person to do the job.

To those who are against a take home assignment (fair enough) how should employers assess your skill set?

Employers should use their brains instead of copying other peoples homework. Because that's how we got this mess. Everybody copying the same interview practices.

What does that look like in practice? Interview questions?

4 hour technical assessment is a bit heavy after I've already invested 1.5 hours into the process.

Someone who is senior is more likely to be a parent, and 4h+ spare time, may be a stretch.

anyway, it seems it takes 5 steps to get to the offer.

I am reminded of a thing I had an Accenture a couple years ago where they kept passing me along to people and the last one came with an offer and it was too late, I had just taken another offer.

I would try a 3 step process.

Take-home technical assignment sounds too broad. What kind of questions are these?

Define ‘senior’. Doing that in a way that everyone understands will reveal your problem.

I think a 30-60 min assessment should be enough, and maybe you can also list the salary?

>Benefits and salary are good (though salary isn't posted in the ad)

Stopped reading right there

That hiring process doesn't sound too bad to me. I know some people are iffy on the take home portion though. I'm looking for work at the moment, 5+ years as a Frontend web dev. React.js, Typescript and lot's of good CSS skills if anyone is in need send me a message.

Are you at least tracking where in the funnel you are losing candidates?

Steps 1-4 plus probation period is sufficient. The rest is bs.

What's the salary?

Does your "remote" include international workers?

1. Post the comp levels if not available on something like levels.fyi. If the comp is above average, sell on it.

2. Make it a paid technical assignment. I don't think your process is unreasonable except some may object to the assignment. If you make it paid it is much less objectionable.

Are you paying candidates to do the technical assignment?

"Presentation of technical assignment to the team"

awful idea...

4 hour take home assignment?

I wouldn't even apply.

4 hours? try reducing that to an hour.

>though salary isn't posted in the ad

why not?

If you have a candidate with 15+ years of experience and you can't decide their value by their resume, references and a couple conversations, it speaks volumes about your company and or your process.

I don't consider a person senior until they hit 10 years and even then they are just starting their senior journey.

You don't get 15 years in if you can't code.

I've got 30 years in a career I love, writing code and architecting solutions.

I've been on a bunch of shitty interviews and have done countless interviews myself. It's difficult for everyone.

With senior people you are being interviewed as much as you are interviewing them.

Tests and take home coding projects work for guys under 15 years, but I hold them for a last resort if I'm on the fence with someone.

Senior guys have a lot of options, are looking for the right fit. A one size fits all interview process is the worst thing you can do to attract that level of talent.

Once you are past the "is this person a team player, easy to work with" part. Then look at their work experience. That should tell you a lot about their coding chops.

Really for senior people it's more about their level of expertise and problem solving abilities. For this I ask probing questions, based on their resume. Starting with easy, general questions. If they nail each question I get recusively, progressively more technical as I drill down into their last answer until they satisfied me or I've identified where their expertise ends. You very quickly see if the person just studied the topic or lived it.

There is alot to interviewing people and should only have your best people doing them and you should get them some training if possible.

Elon Musk says, he knows if he has a real candidate infront of him if they can talk about the details of their work. The deeper you go, the more detail they can give you because they actually did the work. People who speak ambiguously or can't explain the details didn't do the work.

The fact that you are asking the questions proves you know your process might not be working. That is a strong indicator that you are on the right path to fixing it.

Remember senior guys have options you have to win them not vet them.

> Benefits and salary are good

In your opinion :)

first off, 4h assignments are almost never 4h assignments. at best they tend to be 4h coding, 1h of non-coding stuff (check out repo, branch repo, create repo, pr etc. read specs to make what you are going to make)

I have only ever had one actual 4h assignment that took exactly 4 hours, I was amazed. They actually wanted me to spend more than 4 hours.

I also had one assignment that had a bug in a particular library that was supposed to be used, I spent 4 hours solving that bug, at the end of which I could then have spent 4+ hours to make the solution.

but most assignments are in the 6-8 hour range while advertising 4h.

Part of the reason for this is most assignments are supposedly wanting you to make quality solutions etc. which is at odds with the supposed reasons for you to take assignments which are, as I have heard it stated, that a large number of programmers don't know how to program or program so badly it isn't worth hiring them. But take home assignments are not just that you can program (so you don't make the mistake of hiring someone who then sits around for a few months not contributing before you fire them) but also that you can produce quality code, that is to say it is really worthwhile hiring this person.

think about it, you want to hire a senior, but you think a 4 hour assignment is going to really help you determine that they are a senior? I remember a fellow I worked with once had a ballpark rule that the smallest time a ticket could take would be half a day, so 4 hours. Why that? Well once you added in reading the ticket, asking about any not well specified parts, made your branch, did the code, tested, made pr, accepted code review, you were almost always at 4 hours. (it was only a ballpark rule, obviously there were some 1 lines, typos etc. that took less but most often 4 hours was a trivial ticket)

So you are able to test the quality of a potential hire by giving them a trivial ticket?

So this leads to people 'cheating' on the assignment, doing more than 4 hours. So maybe 4 hours of coding, but then cleanup, then maybe modularization, then documenting what you did sending back the message etc. This was basically what that 4h assignment that really was 4h I discussed earlier wanted, they wanted me to make everything pretty after I finished. They asked me if I had another hour what I would have done, I guess at that point if I still wanted the job I would have said I would have done these things but instead I said I would have taken a nap because I finished the job as described in 4. Because, he I am willing to take a little test or something to prove yes I can program but not waste 4 hours of my life.

I also have a family as has been pointed out is a real filter on people being willing to do this.

A bit contra, but this is a bit like asking fish how to catch them and the fish saying, "send more worms!"

I'm pretty senior as an architect in my field and I ask things in interviews like when their last round was, staff size, runway, revenue - basically like I'm an investor, because at this stage of my career that's exactly what I am doing. If that sounds funny, consider that there are LPs participating in seed and A rounds for less than the value or revenue a key hire can deliver. Obviously, I'm not an investor, but consider treating senior talent like somone who is investing in your company and they may open up. You don't have to kiss anyone's ass, and arguably a lot of perks are kind of patronizing above a certain level, so just treat recruiting as a business deal and not a patronage application. A lot of recruiting processes optimize for finding people who don't know what they are worth, and often at the expense of finding the people who really are worth a lot.

Also, this is for finding exceptional talent for near term outcomes in the growth phase of a company. Once your major growth phase is behind you (e.g. an D-F round to get you over the line to an IPO or an acquisition, or you are an institution) I'd recommend moderate and steady hands who can manage and scale jr's, and not a fireteam of tactical operators. Consider whether you just need better mid level managers who can really leverage a team better instead of more experienced IC's. A good IC is gold, but a good manager is a refinery.

Someone who is still an IC after more than a decade in the field is going to be motivated by solving interesting problems that actualize them, so perhaps lead with your hard problems. Someone senior understands organizations and starts with second order thinking, so tip some of your strategy and business model to them to let them apply their experience.

Individuals who are really, really good at something are usually good at it because they were optimizing against a constraint. As in anything, technique is an artifact of constraints, so consider that the very best technical talent is likely going to have an albatross of some sort. Look for minor contradictions, inconsistencies, and rough edges that created a situation where they have to be at least 2x better than anyone else in a specialty just to sit at the table. Their value has to offset their roughness for them to survive, and whether its conscious or not, that's often how they signal it. Many of them are more outdoor cats than indoor cats, as all the strategic sr. indoor cats are already managing directors and SVPs somewhere running people and not machines, so maybe see if you can lure someone out of a successful consulting run with some recognition and respect, and let them meet your execs. Post exit or significant culture change they will attrit out, but it's to mutual benefit.

Just a few ideas, but being attractive isn't a transaction, it's demonstrating that you are growing and how someone can be a part of that trajectory, so really attracting talent is the effect of showing promise.

full day on-site is better than a 4hr take-home

4 day work week.

Pay more.

more $, simple as

I don't get the hate on take homes. Also what's with the downvotes? At least you could help me see your point of view by explaining.

If anything they are much more time efficient than the alternative - grinding dozens of hours of leetcode in preparation of live coding challenges. In my experience that is pretty much the sole alternative.

There usually is a generous time frame for take homes of at least a couple of weeks. This is so much better and more flexible than coding challenges - not to mention coding rounds usually take several hours for the multiple rounds. Basically there's no time disadvantage at all for take homes.

Also speaking as a recent dad, so I get the time constraints.

The downvotes are likely because of the false dichotomy you present.

Like I said,

>In my experience that [code challenges] is pretty much the sole alternative.

I would love more options but I can only speak based on my own experiences. I've gone through many interviews and only once have any of them escaped this "false" dichotomy. To me, and I suppose many others, it is not false.

Doesn’t the single example you yourself have experienced actually confirm that it is false?

If we were talking about math theorems, yes. In real world situations like this though it is customary to equate "extremely rare" with "not existent"

How many interviews have you taken to determine that one is an outlier?

I haven’t had a “formal” interview in some years now, but of the 5 job interviews I’ve had in the last decade, zero had a take home component and one had leetcode style questions.

Since I’m 0 for 5 on take homes, and 1 for 5 on leetcode I can only surmise based on your logic that neither actually exist.

I've taken at least a couple dozen interviews, maybe more. I create trello boards to keep track of them when I do job searches.

The take home is a no go because its goal is make me invest my time with no corresponding investment of the other person's time. From a game theory perspective that makes my time disposable to them. I'm used to full day interview rounds and in principle I don't mind doing a 4 hour programming exercise, but only if one of the company's own engineers is there in the room with me talking to me while I work. That way we are both investing time. A paid initial engagement is of course also fine. Or perhaps a $1000 donation to the nonprofit of my choice would do it. I'm not necessarily in it for the money myself, but I need to see evidence (in evolutionary terms, an "honest signal") that the take-home isn't an exercise in bullshit.

The other trouble with take-homes (as someone mentioned) is the incentive to incessantly refactor and polish the code, write tests, etc. So it goes way beyond the 4 hours mentioned. I felt ok doing a 30 minute thing like that once, but only because it was a timed online test, "press go when you are ready to start". So I knew it would not run over 30 minutes.

The take-home thing might not immediately be a red flag to a naive participant, but once you've done a couple of them, you get to realize they are bad news. The exact reason companies want to do them (so they can burn the candidate's time without burning any of their own) is the same reason experienced candidates know to refuse them.

I don't think your premise is accurate because you don't have insight into how much, if any, time the company invests in reviewing take homes.

As a reviewer, I sure spent considerable time reviewing take homes. As an applicant I got extremely thoughtful and detailed reviews.

Conversely, I've interviewed at least as many times in code challenges with unhelpful, absent-minded interviewers.

To me it boils down to sync VS async. I default to async always. Take home is async, code challenge is sync.

> As a reviewer, I sure spent considerable time reviewing take homes.

You mean like 4 hours reviewing? I'll believe you, but it surprises me. Anyway I can only go by what I can see. If you've already got a candidate you mostly like, you might solicit more take homes hoping to get one that blows you away, and take only a minute each to spot that none of them do.

> As an applicant I got extremely thoughtful and detailed reviews.

That's cool to hear. I myself have never gotten any kind of feedback to a take-home, beyond "hey, you did that really well, let's move forward to a live interview", or alternatively, dropping communication.

I do understand that sync is more hassle for you than async, but that is part of what makes it an honest signal.

These days, I find myself slightly-handicapped: I'm had emergency eye surgery to correct a detached retina condition. I'm told that I won't get back normal eyesight in that eye. I practically live-to-code. I used to do 'hardware design' until I spent my middle-age years back in universities getting 2 degrees in computer science. But now, reading tires out my one good eye quickly. I'm not "comfortable" driving a car anymore with my reduced eyesight.

1. I would not want stock or stock options, i don't care who you are, for compensation. 2. Taking care of the commute for me would be very very helpful. 3. You might offer to pay-off my outstanding student loan balance (it's 6 figures at this point) up front. 4. You must favor LGBTQ+ staff.

And yes, I'm sure I won't get hired with this list, so I'll just stay 'retired' as it's easier and cheaper.

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