34 karma · joined February 19, 2020
I hope this isn't something I have to do on a regular basis though. I also hope this is actually helpful to candidates and not distracting (in which case I will stop)
Again - to all candidates, keep it up - you got this!
Congratulations and good luck!
May I suggest creating a "smarterdx" or "smarterdxjobs" account on HN that's not tied to a specific individual? Then when you get fired in a few months, we don't have to repeat these same conversations with stacey_sdx in July 2024 or arthur_sdx in February 2025. Here are some examples of companies with accounts that post jobs:
https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=enthoughtjobs https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=Fleetio https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=powertoolstech https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=vannevarlabs
This makes it really easy for candidates to see the hiring needs of the company over time and how they engage with the candidates and HN community. Previous posts under a different account has had extremely meaningful conversations that are insightful to candidates and HN community in general.
I am sure you reference check your candidates - afford us the same courtesy by not bouncing between various accounts.
Did he leave once markets improved?
Thanks! Wil keep an eye out for these in the future. I didn't even know this was a thing
Employers: If you get overwhelmed with applications, please post an update or a followup that you are, so that candidates know you're not processing applications any longer. Candidates take time to read your post, do research, then apply: if all that effort is never going to be reciprocated, be kind and inform upfront.
Candidates: HANG IN THERE. Also, please help out other candidates and let us know how the company has/is treating you.
dang (and HN Mods), a request: I understand making comments about company behavior is against the spirit of "Ask HN: Who is hiring?", so we want your help. Not only a lot more candidates are applying right now but a lot more are unemployed and have been for months. So they are desperate and companies are taking advantage of and abusing their desperation. Is there a way other candidates can comment on companies that misbehave? Two companies that have been prolific on "Ask HN: Who is hiring?", posting every month for the last year have been identified where they take every candidate through the whole interview process as an exercise to train their current staff on interviewing with no actual intention of hiring candidates - where should we share this feedback? Also, please see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39886586
My response was a quote from the link they posted
Give it some more thought! There's a graph based solution that works equally well even if all participants (people providing feedback) are throwaway accounts with just one comment.
True but I think they were being sarcastic with their post.
You also made me think how first technical cofounders hedge against being taken for a ride even if they agree to no cash compensation for the role
Yes this does seem to be the case - but what's a good usecase for resume farming?
Are they trying to figure out if they are overpaying their current employees?
Yes, Great hires are hard to find, and yes, it also cost money in time and effort for that much recruiting effort.
However, in the current market, great hires are getting easier to find and even if all the current team was doing was interviewing all day, every day (which is not the norm), the 1-3 months it takes to onboard an employee is the break even point.
Now when you notice that the current team does interviews an hour or so a day, unless a company was flush with cash (as MAANG was the last decade), hoarding candidates because they are hard to find, isn't capital efficient.
What's the solution? I propose increased transparency between candidates, so they can quickly figure out which companies are serious and which not.
> Candidates: HANG IN THERE. For those who are unemployed and have been for months, I suggest we create a separate post or move to a subreddit where we can do interviewing, resume and application reviews?
Using separate posts or changing platforms (subreddit) was for the candidates who are having a tough time getting hired and might need resume/interview reviews. This would be orthogonal to the "Who is hiring?" post themselves
This makes a lot of sense. I also Thank You for suggesting how I could have done better so I upvoted you as well - I made this comment because it might feel like I was disagreeing with you, but I was really challenging you with an alternate POV and clarifying my own thought process
I wasn't aware! I searched a bit and didn't find one - would you mind sharing posts for founders please?
How likely is it that these 2 companies are actually hiring?
If a company was really needing to hire constantly for a year and wasn't a consulting company, rapidly ramping up adhoc projects, the highest likelihood it seems to me is that the management is really bad and they suffer high churn where they are going through candidates like candy (or they fear they will loose people and are building a queue to tap into during attrition).
Indeed and in part why I posted this
This feels a bit too extreme but I assume it comes from a place of pain and the effects of being exploited.
A less extreme solution could be increased transparency.
Here are some examples:
- Companies that post "remote" but it's "remote" only if you live 50 miles away from an office location.
They divulge this only in the offer. Why did they do the interview if they knew you were 200 miles away? To find out whether there's another hub worth opening where there are equally skilled candidates but cheaper
- Companies that post take home assignments to see if a problem they have solved can be solved in a more efficient or novel way. They don't intend to hire - they just don't want to share their current solution and also want to find out if there's a better way to solve their problem
Is that the case here?
> First, lead your post with the problem
This is a great suggestion, but writing, like good engineering is context sensitive - a "good pattern" can have an exception.
For this post, I wanted to empathize with candidates most of who are having a terrible time right now and some being outright exploited. Which is why it begins the way it does.
> Also, elaborate on why this following one is a problem [edit: clarified which quote I was talking about], and how much you're speculating
This post is in part, to check my hypothesis that atleast one company is using the weak market to expose their staff to the process of interviewing experienced candidates - something that would be hard to do in a "hot" market where experienced candidates are hard to come by to interview.
this is a great idea actually! Based off this feedback I'm thinking I post this on tomorrow's "Who is hiring?".
Is this going to be useful?:
METAPOST: I hope this helps candidates.
Employers: If you get overwhelmed with applications, please post an update or a followup that you are, so that candidates know you're not processing applications any longer. People take time to read your post, do research, apply: if all that effort is never going to be reciprocated, be kind and inform upfront.
Candidates: HANG IN THERE. Also, please help out other candidates and let us know how the company has/is treating you.
dang (and HN Mods), a request: I understand making comments about company behavior is against the spirit of "Ask HN: Who is hiring?", so we want your help. Not only a lot more candidates are applying right now but a lot more are unemployed and have been for months. So they are desperate and companies are taking advantage of and abusing their desperation. Is there a way other candidates can comment on companies that misbehave? Two companies that have been prolific on "Ask HN: Who is hiring?", posting every month for the last year have been identified where they take every candidate through the whole interview process as an exercise to train their current staff on interviewing with no actual intention of hiring candidates - where do we share this feedback?
Did you discuss salary at any time before the rejection?
When the market is hot, it's hard to get applications from experienced candidates. During down markets like right now, there actually are experienced candidates open to interview at all, so you build skills on how to interview experienced candidates so you are ready when you really want to hire.
What if there is no job and the "job interview" is just a ruse to train their staff on interviewing?
Yes, scroll to the very end of every recent "Who is hiring?" post and you will see dead and detached comments about how companies are misbehaving.
Not a throwaway. I did initially plan to name companies but I fear I would be banned if I did so. However, if others are noticing bad agents too, I would assume this is a problem that the HN mods would like to see addressed, making them more open to solutions that dont get me banned
This is actually a question on itself - HN afterall is a place for startups and "true" startups in the extremely early stages have little to no cash - what if they wanted a tech cofounder and gave you equal equity?
Or was it the case that you did need cash and wasn't in a situation to work off pure equity for a while?
Worth a shot! I initially thought about it myself but I hesitate to use codereview - from my network, everyone has reddit and HN accounts. Very few have SE accounts but could be a sampling bias though.
> I would certainly never complete one I thought was directly related to the business and what they were looking for was free consulting.
This reminds me of a few interviews from 2018 right here from "Who is hiring?"! One was a WeWork clone from NYC that was a coworking space and needed a dashboard of issues at that coworking space that their members would then get to vote and comment on reddit style. You could take my assignment and deploy to Vercel (that's how I did the demo to make it easy to test.)
They rejected me, as feedback said "it was too complicated", and promptly took my code without any modifications and put it up under their domain. Thankfully this was in the U.S. but if this company was outside the U.S. I would practically have had no recourse. Maybe the E.U. has strong employee laws but how would I, from the U.S., even go about taking action against a company in Sweden or Norway using my code without authorization?
> I would likely refuse to complete one that was extensive or complex enough that feedback wwould not be expected or required.
I'm unsure if there's any take home assignment that's not complex enough that feedback is expected or required. Let's take the simple FizzBuzz.
- Are they looking whether you can simply code at all?
- Are they looking whether you can do pattern matching in the language of your choice?
- Are they looking whether you can do dynamic dispatch or understand functional programming?
- Are they looking whether you can write the code in an extensible way such that in additional to 3 and 5, it's easy to add in additional behavior for 7, 9 and 15?
If there are some assignments that are simple enough that feedback is not expected or required, please share and also what position it was for.
One company asked me to write a webservice that would increment a counter and gave me 3 hours to turn it in. I asked them whether they expected to deploy it behind a load balancer and be resilient to crashes. Whether they wanted a "close to production ready" solution or something we could work on iteratively.
They told me to not overthink it, that we could iterate on it - so I turned it in an hour - it accepted a GET (fetch current counter value), a PUT (increment it by 1), and a POST (create initial counter). It was literally an in-memory counter that could take any type (int, long, a custom large number), call its get, "increment" and init method respectively.
They rejected my assignment right away saying that the position was for a staff engineer and they could not accept an in-memory counter and expected that the staff engineer would turn in a solution that used persistence.
I assumed they would have gotten back to me and said "ok, we can see you can code a webservice but now instead of an in-memory counter, use persistence".