How long does this have to be an unsolved problem before people start to think, hey, maybe future success just isn't predictable, and certainly not if all you have is a resume and a couple hour interview.
Maybe hire people with at least some demonstrated aptitude and invest in them instead.
I would much rather join a company, devote myself to a problem, a team, and a product, and have the company reward me as such.
Instead, engineers who are willing to jump are generally able to attain much higher compensation than those who stay put - so we're incentivized to do so, rather than investing ourselves in a company and having the company invest in us.
As a result, engineers are forced to maintain two skillsets: one for interviewing, and one for actually building & shipping products.
And except for the time I gave up government contracting to move to the middle of nowhere, I've always made much more by switching jobs than I would have by asking for a raise.
That said, I've never switched jobs just because of the money. Either there was no more room for growth, the company was falling apart around me or I just wanted to take a different path in my career.
Notwithstanding the fact there are companies that under-invest in their employees, you make it sound like engineers are being forced to try to maximize compensation.
The reality is that compensation varies, and the differences can be quite pronounced in the technology industry. A startup with minimal revenue and $1 million in funding probably isn't going to be able to compete with Facebook or Google on salary and benefits. Expecting it to is like trying to get blood from a stone.
There is nothing wrong with trying to maximize your compensation at the cost of everything else, but if that's your approach, you need to live with the fact that you will almost always have better opportunities somewhere else. Constantly lamenting the fact that your current employer can't pay you as much as another employer can is no way to live life.
Incidentally, in my experience, a lot of people who allow their job satisfaction to be based entirely on a perception of relative compensation are never happy no matter how much they make. They constantly find ways to convince themselves that they could and should be making more.
Based on the recruiting contacts I get, there are some startups with massive amounts of cash in the bank that are still stingy on the salaries but will go on and on about equity even when they've raised several rounds at ever-higher valuations. But, fortunately, there are also others that are starting to be willing to pay more cash at earlier stages. I'm far from convinced that this is a bad thing.
I recall losing some relatively good engineers at various startups due to very small, in the end, not bank-breaking levels of compensation, we just couldn't compete with larger companies, when I really would have loved to hire them and maybe just hire less people.
Meanwhile, people who work at companies like Cisco in the area are able to command about 30-40% more in salary sometimes and have better hours.
If you find the right big company, your work can be quite as good as a small one, and you may have better hardware/software resources.
For me, I think the answer is mid-size to large startups right now, but small ones can be good. Can be. But they can go either way really quick.
I recall a similar thread somewhere about sales compensation, which gets super crazy at times, but sometimes getting an engineer who is going to work tons of hours $100k (who is going to make the product you sell or raise money for) at some companies can be really hard. It's not right.
They lose big to save a dime in the most important areas and blow it elsewhere.
If you have a more remunerative job offer from a big grey company and you still take the startup job they're pricing their offer correctly. Hell, they might be offering too much.
(Nor do you have to got to a huge corporation to find the larger offers.)
It's just something to keep in mind when you see "why can't I hire enough good engineers?" posts... not the only reason, by any means, but certainly a reason.
We should have stayed with thou/ye instead of you/you. It was more clear.
While there absolutely are startups offering unreasonably low wages, there are also a good number of startups where relatively young engineers with just a few years of professional experience are being paid well into the six figures annually.
A lot of the complaints about "poor compensation" are misguided and based on unrealistic salary comparisons. Just because Company A has salaries 50% higher than Company B doesn't necessarily mean that Company B is offering "poor compensation."
> Based on the recruiting contacts I get, there are some startups with massive amounts of cash in the bank that are still stingy on the salaries but will go on and on about equity even when they've raised several rounds at ever-higher valuations.
So you'd prefer to go to work for a company that isn't increasing its valuation?
If you think that a company's valuation is far too rich, by all means discount the equity you're offered. But also consider that your ability to predict a company's future value might not be very good. How many people claimed companies like Facebook and Twitter were already overvalued years before they went public? I'll readily admit that I'm guilty of this.
> But, fortunately, there are also others that are starting to be willing to pay more cash at earlier stages. I'm far from convinced that this is a bad thing.
That's great, but be mindful of how this affects runway. Such startups, if they don't hit the milestones required to get to the next round of funding, may not be able to continue paying you for very long.
I happen to make a living because this dichotomy is real. I run a bootcamp to prep engineers for interview skills (http://InterviewKickstart.com). We routinely have sad moments, thinking and seeing how little correlation there is, to what technical interviewing tests for, and what is actually required to ship a product.
Because I've also been on the other side, I clearly understand why it's so. There is just no good way to predict future success with what's demonstrated today. Human beings work differently in different contexts.
(BTW: Aline, who blog this article is from, is awesome)
It seems like most of our employers pass up on people we know are qualified BECAUSE WE'VE WORKED WITH THEM ON HARD SHIT, to hire people who can whiteboard but something but are miserable engineers.
Or, at one recent employer, desperation to hire a certain flavor of mobile engineer, only to interview them with graph theory questions and reject them on the basis of that.
Or, there's another, nastier possibility. Code quality + stability is not valued nowadays, just getting shit done, no matter how buggy it is later. Management and teams will probably churn before the product collapses into itself, so nobody loses.
Anyone with a few months experience at a big company knows that a new hire's coworkers are, for the most part, selected randomly. When the co-workers match, everything can work out, even if the candidate isn't technically strong. If the co-workers don't match, for whatever reason, the working relationship can easily fall apart.
I don't know what the ultimate solution is. Even work trials aren't perfect since company and team structure change. Accepting the unpredictability of future co-worker relationships makes it easy to see there's no magical solution. Understanding this might help things move in the right direction.
> I don't know what the ultimate solution is.
Two approaches to this problem that might make sense are: (1) hire based on your current employees' recommendations; or (2) hire entire existing teams all at once.
Based on what I read, both of those are fairly popular approaches already.
No one wants to admit this. We want to have control of the future! And prediction is one way to do that.
I once read in an agile book somewhere that certain factors don't necessarily predict success but merely the maximum possible value.
As in, if you don't do X, you cannot be successful. But if you DO do X, you have a probability of being successful, but you can still suck.
So the possibility of sucking is ever present, but the maximum ceiling of possibility is controlled by the number of best practices you implement.
So maybe there's something like that. Our factors aren't predictive, but they open up the landscape to find great people.
Sucky people are evergreen.
It turns out there ARE things that can strongly indicate employee competence and success, but nearly no one uses them. People like her get hired, and then management promptly ignores their suggestions. On one of her job interviews, while waiting for a manager to come in for the interview, she got to talking shop with the HR rep who was co-conducting the interview. They talked a little bit socially afterwards too, and the HR rep agreed with my wife that the interview went terribly because it didn't focus on anything of real substance. The HR rep said to my wife, "we've been looking for someone like you for months, and we've seen a few as qualified as you, but not many, and we've never made an offer to folks like you because they won't listen to me, I keep getting overruled, and we're still without that position filled." They can't fill the job because they keep ignoring the advice they're paying for.
One example is the interview. It turns out the interview as we do it is actually one of the WORST ways to hire people, because it rewards all the wrong behaviors over the real needed skills. Simply scanning a resume isn't great either, you need to engage with the person on theoretical tasks, like an audition, rather than simply conversation and crazy questions.
TL;DR We know how t hire people, experts have it worked out, but we don't want to listen to their advice.
Schmidt & Hunter, 1998: http://mavweb.mnsu.edu/howard/Schmidt%20and%20Hunter%201998%...
Honesty is a huge factor. She mentioned a blog post by a semi-well known HR professional Tim Sackett that ends on a very telling note: "Here’s my take on candidate lies – candidates continue to lie, because Talent/HR Pros don’t call them out on it. We (HR) also perpetuate this problem by hiring the folks who give you the crappy lie, but don’t hire the folks who come clean and tell you the truth." Here's a link [ http://www.timsackett.com/2013/07/24/top-candidate-lies/ ] but the lies were less important than the fact that interviewers ignore the honesty and look only at the "problem" that was revealed. She said if someone told her "yes there was crime X from ten years ago," it's more important to evaluate their honesty about it and the circumstances than simply crossing that person off the list, for example. Did they bounce a check, or get a single DUI in college? Is that really relevant when they're 35? Isn't that level of honesty a good sign?
Another aspect of honesty was revealed by that study that came out last year: http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/narcissists-do-better-on-job... "Narcissists or shameless self-promoters do better in job interviews than more modest personalities, a study by University of British Columbia researchers finds"
She read the study and felt it was very insightful and academically solid. Again, interviewers examine the delivery but not the substance. Which is better, someone who says, "Yes, I'm very proficient" to every skill question, or someone who honestly says, "I'm very god with XYZ but I do feel there's room for improvement"? It turns out the latter winds up being a more conscientious and useful employee, but they don't perform as well in interviews.
Testing is huge, as well. There are a lot of companies that use it, but some, like ProMetric tests given to low level retail employees are still flawed, and don't use sound methodologies in eliminating biases in answers.
In my own businesses, she's helped me create better hiring methods, and I went from never hearing about "I/O Psychology" to wondering why more people don't know about that seemingly very valuable type of professional.
Note: I'm not trying to blow my own horn or even my wife's, but simply point out that there's a lot of science in HR that a lot of companies don't utilize. HR is more than managing people like machines.
I'll try to remember to add to this after a few days when she's found more for me to share.
I agree in theory, but the real world doesn't work like this. There is a very high probability that the candidate that you want to hire is a very busy person and can devote half a day or a day to figuring out if they want to come work for you. Similarly if you have 5 people on your shortlist, you can only devote a finite amount of time to figuring out which one of them is the best fit.
Everything about the interview process incentivises both sides to LIE, LIE, LIE. The skill being tested for is acting.
Your cites below will be useful. Thanks :-)
It has only gotten worse.
I don't have a degree from a prestigious school. I do have a bachelors in Computer Information Systems though. What this means is I have hands on practical experience in what to do and how to do it - but I don't have the deep theory tutelage that everyone in SV seems to require.
Unfortunately I was duped in to thinking you build a career and build ontop of what you have done. In SV - nobody even bothers to look at my resume.
I've never been asked about my experience. I've only been shown a whiteboard and told to jump through hoops.
It is B.S. because the white-boarding ability has no bearing on how good of a colleague you are. How much you contribute, and whether or not you are a good engineer.
IMO all it does is validate that you went to a top tier school - and allows for the the hiring company to add 1 more million onto their valuation on exit.
Case and point: a few years ago I interviewed at a company that wanted to build a Learning Management System focused on re-educating senior-citizens. I had 4 years of relevant experience in that industry, which included working for the top two companies in that verical. I happened to be a Rails engineer which they wanted to leverage. It seemed like a perfect fit and they were on the cusp of giving me an offer - but they passed me up to hire someone from MIT that had never worked for a company and had never touched ruby. His MIT degree was more valuable to them.
If merrit was a thing in silicon valley - that would not have happened.
Even a graduate of a top-tier school will struggle with that whiteboard stuff after 10-20 years on the job. A real working programmer just doesn't use this stuff day-to-day. The real purpose of it is as an age filter.
1. Cultural compatibility. Ego generally not good. Wanting to work with others - good. I've knocked back "stars" because they'd try to derail a good team 2. Basic competency in the areas needed. If I need real-time knowledge or distributed systems, show me enough that you know the traps. 3. Ambition/commitment. If they're too ambitious they won't last. If they lack commitment, they won't strive.
Ultimately, it's about creating the culture where willing and capable people will fit. Someone mentioned about their wife being an expert and not being hired despite HR recommendation. I've seen this on several levels before, "I like this person so they should be hired". However, HR do not understand culture of teams, relevant skills, etc - although they will tell you that they do. "When I said they need to be able to program machine language, I didn't mean stacking vending machines". My example is flippant (I'm tired, not thinking), but the idea is there. HR don't have the knowledge in most organisations I've worked for.
how do you demonstrate this?
Someone who can show their own past work, either open-source, side-project, launched projects, or work at somebody else's company ... well there is a high chance that they can at least code their way out of a wet paper bag. Probably more than that too.
Another, perhaps better, approach is to just hire a few of the most promising candidates for a couple of days. Give them a small project. See if there's a fit.
I think that the issue is not only about predicting future success but about trust as well.
The code that they select tells a lot and is a great starter for further discussion and finding out about how they think. It also demonstrates an essential skill, and that is evaluating other peoples work and how to work with it rather than against it.
If only I could figure out how to keep more of it for myself, but alas I'm lazy and undisciplined. ;-)
If we had a choice (we don't), how do we decide if we should invest in ourselves or not?
There's another domain that struggles with this. Professional sports. I'm more familiar with the NFL, but this applies to the NBA as well. There are countless "can't miss" 1st overall draft picks that are busts; there are undrafted players that make it into the hall of fame.
hire people with at least some demonstrated aptitude and invest in them instead
Certainly pro sports tries to do this, but some players are just more coach-able than others.
Also, especially at the pro level, there's a certain very intangible "thing" that separates the merely good from the great. How do you coach for that?
This is all a loser like me has. I can't whiteboard too well, I cant talk so great some times (other times I'm great at it). I can work hard, though, and for longer hours.
I'm currently doing temp work at a startup now but it feels like they are constantly thinking of letting me go.
A child knows that predicting the future is impossible.