VP of Engineering - "best of the best" = no more than 12 years experience?
jobscore.com
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I had a phone screen with 500friends recently. They were late calling me, and the person I was scheduled to talk with wasn't even on the call. They had pulled some poor engineer off of whatever he was doing, shoved my resume in front of him, and said "go".
The list of things that our "interview" contained:
1) Late in calling me at our scheduled time.
2) Scheduled person was not present on our interview call.
3) Engineer that was put on the call was ill-prepared for the conversation.
4) Questions asked of me were a combination of very basic and others being completely unrelated to the nature of the position being interviewed for.
5) The scheduled person appeared at the end of the call barely long enough to say his name before hanging up on me.
6) Hung up on me suddenly.
If you advertise a position as requiring a certain set of skills, then ask prospective employees about those skills! Go through their experiences and see if they're a good engineer outside of the narrow scope of "solves logic puzzles well". You might be surprised that someone who doesn't normally write linked lists in javascript or implement 2500 year old prime-solving algorithms on a weekly basis actually has skills and experience to contribute.
My personal recommendation for anyone considering 500friends is to skip over them. There's much better companies more deserving of your time and consideration, and you'll certainly be treated better.
## Just to add on, I don't have a problem with logic problems. But too many people only ask them and don't do real interviews. Yes, I can do linked lists in javascript. Does that tell you anything useful about what kind of engineer I am? No, it doesn't.
Granted, I think it was accidental on their part (ie: the person that interviewed me was newbie at Amazon himself and quite lost, but seemly the person that was going to interview me had a serious problem of sorts and could not do it)
Interviews are hard.
Fundamental attribution error. It was luck that they turned out to be a compatible work situation.
As I mentioned to you in my initial apology, we had a fire drill. That being said, the tardiness was inexcusable, and I talked to the developer about that.
Regarding our interview questions, they were meant as an "initial screen." We do ask more practical questions in person. However, we figure that most smart software engineers can write a linked list or prime number solver.
One way to respond to this kind of job posting is "fuck that, I'm not going to waste my time w/ that shit".
All that existed before 2001 was waterfall. Nothing else. Just waterfall. Only waterfall. You are mistaken in thinking that iterative delivery, spiral models, joint application development, daily build-n-smoke, test harnesses or any such practice or technology existed previously.
Then in 2001, Agile sprung fully-formed from the brow of Zeus and saved us. Agile has no predecessors whatsoever and completely invalides decades of careful observation, discussion and investigation by generations of software developers and managers.
All books and articles published before 2001 can be safely ignored, and nothing can be learned therefrom.
A VP role doesn't sound like a C role. It doesn't sound like a really big equity play. You're not going to be a founder w/ a big payout (probably). So why do it?
I'm repeating myself. It really doesn't matter at all... someone will apply or they will not and the company will hire the right person or they will not... you and I will go along with our lives just fine.
It's not that people with 12+ years of experience are not as good. We were trying to screen out candidates (many of them who are smart) but have been "managers" for so long that they can't get their hands dirty and solve issues themselves (something you have to do at a very small team).
Don't take my word for it, 26% of people on our team are older than 38. If you're bored, check out some of their bios at 500friends.com/team
Admittedly however, this was not clear in our post, and it has since been edited.
Thanks!!
Not understanding titles.
First, this is for a "vp of engineering" that is "hands on". Are you really looking for an architect that codes? Perhaps a Sr. Engineer/Team lead? Do the engineers directly report to this "vp of engineering"? What happens when the team gets to big?
Second, you are locking yourself into something prematurely. If you want someone hands on with management experience and capacity to grow into a future leader, state that and start looking. Make your interview quick on the technical assessment, heavy on the social and ask "what would you do in ..." or "how would you handle this ..." type of questions. See if the person has 1. experience 2. common sense or 3. good intuition on process/people.
Lastly, what does the rest of the company look like when the VP of Engineering clearly has an inflated title. Are all the C level/VP level people equally inflated?
Anyway, sorry for the rant. It seems a common occurrence in Startupsville to see people running around with titles that mean nothing for the sake of having the title.
"Oh, cool. I'm the VP of engineering at blah blah".
"nice, what do you do everyday."
"Oh, you know, code reviews".
Whatever.
Which seems harmless, but if and when money starts flowing, something primitive in the status=money&equity hindbrain clicks and such a title makes it easier to negotiate for a better deal.
Sorry but why can't a VP of engineering be somebody who should code(even if occasionally) or some who could be competent at a code review. Its precisely this kind of attitude that gives ammunition to the MBA culture of appointing people who are clueless about their current job to manage the best people under them.
The net result is getting people appointed who know nothing about the people they managing, or the line of work. And just take blanket common sense based decision which most of the times are wrong with regards to the domain they lead.
Regardless of who you are- architect, VP or whatever fancy title. If you claim to be the leader of a group of people with some specific skills you should be somebody who at the very least has mastered those skills.
According to me anybody who claims to lead a group must be the best among that group, in the job that group performs.
I think this is an error. Taking your best coder and then spending their time on not-coding is wasteful of their talents.
Furthermore, insofar as you create competition to hold that position, you're creating a destructive work environment. Software development is a cooperative activity that can't be efficiently partitioned.
Or the way I look at it, such a guy in a leader ship position can mentor young passionate folks to be just like him.
>>Furthermore, insofar as you create competition to hold that position
Having competent guys compete for a position is far better than promoting a total idiot to lead such guys.
>>you're creating a destructive work environment.
How is appointing a competent guy creating a destructive work environment, and appointing an incompetent guy not creating a demotivating environment.
Most demotivating part of my day is when I spend time with my higher ups, explaining them some very basics things like SQL or regular expressions or about network call latency which most of the times they have no clue of. Many times its so bad, you really have to talk to them like you talk to your 9 year old nephew and even after hours of explaining things are so bad they can't really get simple things like the difference between a DOM parser and a SAX parser.
I am not saying the guy must code like a champion 24x7. But he should have atleast been some one who has built a thing or two under tough demanding deadlines. Some one who has leaned stuff doing it by experience and not just some guy whose only known accomplishment is being at the right place at the right time, riding an economic wave or being some god father manager's yes man.
>>Software development is a cooperative activity that can't be efficiently partitioned.
Exactly that is why we need one of us to lead us.
Because you based it on competition.
Holding that position, which presumably comes with better pay, perks and a résumé line item, is a zero sum game.
Everything good that programmer A does for the company now directly disadvantages programmer B and vice versa.
Do you think this creates conditions conducive to cooperative efforts like developing and maintaining complex software?
If you want to pick a leader, pick a leader yourself. Boohoo, it's hard and you might hurt people's feelings. Well too bad. Picking leaders is itself an act of leadership. Too many senior managers shirk the responsibility of growing a cadre of good managers by connecting it all to numbers that encourage destructive behaviour. It's the lazy and gutless way to lead.
See Measuring and Managing Performance in Organizations for a full enumeration of why having people compete for a tech leadership job would easily destroy any small company.
Either way competition is inevitable- If its not from the inside, it will be far worse- from the outside. And in most cases companies have to acqui-hire people or purchase out an entire product line because they just can't get innovation out of their own people.
But the sad fact is its not current employees are at fault here. Unless you are super foolish, why should you ever work hard when some guy who isn't doing 1/10th work you do or is 1/100th as competent take all the credit, money and power stealing your work? The net result is no one contributes, the company struggles and buys their life saving kits every now and them from the outside.
And no competent person will accept a incompetent person over them, especially when getting a job or doing a start up/side project is so easy these days. How many times have we seen companies that claim to hire all super candidates with all those algo/ds questions routinely acquire start ups at big prices, yet they can't get something half decent out of their super star regular hires.
If you look down below, you will see it all gets down to incompetent middle management.
>>Too many senior managers shirk the responsibility of growing a cadre of good managers by connecting it all to numbers that encourage destructive behavior.
No, they do it because they know competent folks will grow and become a threat do their positions.
Why are you doing this? Most "higher ups" I've worked under have nearly zero interest in highly-technical explanations of what I'm working on. Interacting with managers should be an exercise in plain English.
Seen way too many of these kinds of management structures. The management decides to appoint the crony as the lead, because picking the best developer is "wasteful" and creates a "destructive work environment". The amount of cringe inducing perversion of logic in the comment above is a tragedy because of its pervasiveness. On the flip side, these kinds of organizations are not too hard to avoid, doomed startups and successful behemoths - both fit these criteria. A smaller company with decent growth is probably the better bet.
I'm sorry, and this is going to sound harsh, but this is awful, awful advise. And pitifully shortsighted.
So, a manager that leads developers should be the best developer?
What about a director that manages developers AND architects? Or developers AND QA? Does the director have to be the best at both those functions? Or some "best of the combination" of the two?
What about the VP? Now the VP of engineering likely leads (in a large enough organization) directors of QA, engineering, product, maybe some other roles like IS as well. In turn, they might lead managers or some function directly. Is this VP the uber of all those roles?
And then we get to the CEO.
No, this is terribly short sighted. Amazingly so.
In sports is quite commonly known that the best players usually make terrible managers. There are quite a few theories on why, but the end result is that very few great players have been great managers (oddly enough, MLB has more ex-player managers than the other leagues, and is more immune to the above criticism...again, many theories why). In fact, quite a few of the best managers in some sports are typically borderline players, if they played at all. Using your "best should lead" theory, only the best ex-basketball, ex-football, ex-baseball players should be running teams in the NBA, NFL or MLB.
No, the best leaders should lead. Doesn't matter if they are not the best developers And how good a developer one was becomes irrelevant past "team lead" or manager at best.
tl;dr, we are not "running through" them.
In other words, op is lying/mistaken because we were not hiring for this role last year.
(e) Printing or publication of notice or advertisement indicating preference, limitation, etc.
http://www.eeoc.gov/laws/types/age.cfm
Also, requiring experience is reasonable anyway since its easy to make a case about why it's required to do the work. I'd dying to here what kind of BS hand-waving argument could be constructed for why having too much experience prevents you from doing the work.
What you are not allowed do is discriminate based on criteria that are not part of essential qualifications for the job. And I for one can't conceive of one single thing that disqualifies, say, Jeff Dean, from holding that job over a candidate a few years his junior.
No more than 10 years experience seems very much not job related. How does having too much experience hurt a person's ability to do a job?
They don't say 12 years total experience, just less than 12 in Agile.
But that's grasping at straws, and if that is the intention it's a really unfortunate way of putting it.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agile_software_development
* edited to address the < / > mistake MaysonL pointed out. Thanks!
I'd claim that I subconsciously 'corrected' it, but let's be honest: what good would a post about a typical HR error be without a typical programmer error!
They want someone that has been building engineering organizations for 5-12 years, after having been an individual contributor.
Then, they want you to drop back into an individual contributor role. At least initially. Wink wink nudge nudge.
Besides the whole Agile not being codified for more than 12 years thing, if you've been out of the loop managing for 12 years, they say they don't want you. Part of the process apparently involves showing that your technical skills are still there.
And yes, it's blatantly ageist... It falls under the disparate impact provision:
"In addition to prohibiting intentional discrimination against older workers (known as “disparate treatment”), the ADEA prohibits practices that, although facially neutral with regard to age, have the effect of harming older workers more than younger workers (known as “disparate impact”), unless the employer can show that the practice is based on an RFOA."
So it's possible that you could have been a developer for twenty years and then a manager for ten years and still be within their ideal range. Considering the CEO is about 24 years old, it's hard to believe that that is the case, though it is possible.
And my team is very senior - check them out @ 500friends.com/team. We definitely value experience at 500friends.
It might not be any different from how someone with 5+ years of experience normally wouldn't be considered for junior roles.
Or it might just be ageist.
19yearsold... with free dinner after 8:00, unlimited vacation (subject to managerial approval) and equity (at-the-money options on 0.02%, subject to vesting and cliff)!
Truly, a pioneer of start-up branding.
What we meant is that we're looking for someone who has coded in the past decade. Someone that has been managing 1,000 people at Oracle may not be the right fit for a company of our stage. Make sense?
It just seems odd that of all the possible ways to ask for what you describe above, you choose arguably the most offensive and least effective way to do so. And I think as a marketing company, you should know better. The message matters -- not just the intent.
Seriously, think about a better way to phrase the requirement. There are several preferable ways to phrase the question (not just from a legal perspective, but even in terms of simply capturing the pool of candidates you desire).
We have gotten a lot of very smart but "big company" people who had applied for this position.
Sorry for the confusion however, most of our team is actually MUCH holder than the typical start-up: 500friends.com/team. We may be a lot of things but are definitely not ageist.
We want someone who has less than 12 years of MANAGEMENT EXPERIENCE. The reason is that if you haven't been coding for 12+ years...you probably are not "hands-on" enough
This arbitrary cutoff makes absolutely no sense. I'd like to see your quantification of skill drop off per year of management.
If what you are wanting is a hands-on technical manager, then you need to say so.
And it shouldn't matter if the person has been hands on for 5 years or 20.
But I feel I'm being a little too generous regarding your motives here.
But essentially, the ideal candidate was someone who was CODING 5-12 years ago...
Note:
Any notion that 500friends is ageist is a complete fabrication. This can be validated by looking at our team (link).
In our original job post, we had specified that the ideal candidate would, "not have more than 12 years of MANAGEMENT experience." We UNDERSTAND that this could be misunderstood to indicate that we do not value experienced people. As you can see from the seniority in our team however, this is far from the truth. The intent here was to indicate that we are looking for a "hands-on" VP of Engineering. Someone who has coded in the last decade and can solve issues themselves (rather than asking their engineering manager to then delegate it to a developer :).
Don't take my word for it, check out the people who work at my company - 500friends.com/team. 50%+ are 30+, and 25%+ are 38+
Justin, thanks for the private reply as well. Props for the consistent and genuine efforts at damage control.
If you write code and you are over 35, you are toast. Yes even you the "above average coder"...done and done.
Now wait till that immigration bill passes, make 150k? GOOD ___ing BYE.
In SV, maybe. Hopefully not so much elsewhere or I'm gonna have a hard time paying off my student loans...
Visa program has been hijacked and have subverted the career engineer.
For example, if x guy has been doing TPS reports for 12 years,maybe they are figuring that he has already just adjusted to a gotta-do-my-TPS-reports mindset?
just giving some benefit of the doubt
Justin (500friends founder/CEO)
i saw it earlier. perhaps it was a joke - agile manifesto was published 12 years ago? (an argument for this is that 12 years is a strange number to use otherwise).
[edit] and now there's a broken link on the front page saying that 26% of their team is older than 38. i hate to say it but (1) i told you so (2) do people lose their sense of humour with age? (3) i am 46 myself...
Programming has an ageism problem largely because it's run by career managers (who think all of us want to be them-- and we don't); engineers themselves aren't ageist. Management is where the ageism comes from and it's even worse in their world. It's not that they care about age so much as they want to avoid hiring terminal middle managers, and I can't blame them for the latter. This fact has absolutely nothing to do with age, but terminal middle managers are toxic.
I totally understand why coders like Agile, hey I like it because hacking code is the fun part :) Its also kind of a good fit for the app store era, where you throw something out there and see if its sticks before you actually develop most of it. Not entirely sure its actually a good way to develop nontrivial software.
If in your 20's you feel, some one over 30's is a plague. You have a big reason to be worried, because you will be in your 30's in less than 10 years. That's too less time for comfort.
It's not that people with 12+ years of experience are not as good. We were trying to screen out candidates (many of them who are smart) but have been "managers" for so long that they can't get their hands dirty and solve issues themselves (something you have to do at a very small team).
Don't take my word for it, 26% of people on our team are older than 38. If you're bored, check out their bios at 500friends.com/team
Admittedly however, this was not clear in our post, and it has since been edited.
Thanks!!