7 ms·

Why you're having trouble hiring developers

49 points by remyp 9y ago

cgore 9y ago
"we expect people to act like an owner" This has got to be the most stupid thing I've ever heard in an interview. Okay then, I'll act like an owner. Make me an owner. Oh, wait, you didn't mean it like that?
- remyp 9y ago
  In my experience it almost always means "I expect you to work 14 hour days like I do even though I have 40x the equity you do."
  - cgore 9y ago
    Yeah, and that's exactly my point. Okay, I'll act like an owner. Make me an owner.
    - ramphastidae 9y ago
      How ridiculous! You should just be thankful for the opportunity to be part of their incredible journey! Think of all the exposure and experience you're getting! /s
  - whataretensors 9y ago
    40x would be a lot more fair than what I've seen. Usually it's > 100-1000x in a different stock class(preferred/common).
    - hkmurakami 9y ago
      founders have common.
- hkarthik 9y ago
  The sentiment they are trying to get across is that they want someone who won't let problems lie and who will proactively execute on fixes without waiting for permission or being assigned the work by a tech lead or manager. Couple of examples of this: 1. Speeding up a test suite by identifying the slowest parts and optimizing it so every developer that runs the test suite benefits. 2. Making deploys more stable or getting them to zero down time so you're not forced to deploy during off hours and impact your customers. Wanting people who will do things like this is often expressed as "ownership", but I think it's the wrong term. It's more about making the team more efficient and productive.
  - maxxxxx 9y ago
    I think that's called being diligent or conscientious. Or call it "doing a good job" or "being a professional".
  - philipov 9y ago
    The sentiment they're getting at is "We want people who are as dedicated as owners, but without the incentives" and this translates to "We are only interested in gullible people who don't know their own value." The reason people have trouble finding good developers is because they don't want to pay for them. Owners aren't driven by only doing as well as the market average. If you want people who want to beat the market, offer them something better than the market rate.
  - nhoiunh4nth 9y ago
    > The sentiment they are trying to get across is that they want someone who won't let problems lie and who will proactively execute on fixes without waiting for permission or being assigned the work by a tech lead or manager. I find that's rarely what they want. I've often seen cases where there's some fundamental architectural flaw that will make future development extremely difficult, only to be told, "Don't worry about these things - just ship something!" Yeah, that's going to break really soon, and we'll be running around trying to put out fires because of your incompetence. If I were the owner of this, I'd fix it immediately, or at least prioritize it reasonably so we don't screw ourselves in the future.
  - 9y ago
- random42_ 9y ago
  Yeah, it's like, act like an owner, but you have to do everything that the _actual_ owner tells you to.
- twelve40 9y ago
  It can mean different things, no? For example, a team was switching to git from a different vcs. Devs who actually gave a crap then researched best practices and wrote up an internal how-to for everyone else to follow. Not because they were "business owners" or told by the management, but just because they knew there would be total chaos if they didn't. Other people - who somewhat cared - followed the internal manual. Finally, people who should be fired started shitting right into master without reading anything on git, internal or otherwise. In my mind, the first set of devs really acted like owners here. Nobody exploited them, or even pushed them to overwork, they just knew to do the right thing.
  - echaozh 9y ago
    Yeah, they're not "business owners", they're just fake owners who will be fired when writing the internal how-to took too much of their work time.
chrisbennet 9y ago
Here's another question that bugs me: "Why do you want to work for Acme Corp?" Employers need to remind themselves that the interview is a date - the company needs to let the candidate know why they might want to work for ("marry") Acme Corp, not the other way around. What would you think if you were on a real date and the other person said: "Why do you want to marry me?"
- mason55 9y ago
  I think it's valid question, the issue is just in the presentation. If you ask it with the attitude of trying to find people who are 1000% in love with the concept of working at your very specific company then I think you're deluding yourself. Unless you're a world-famous company or your company has a very niche mission, it's unlikely that the applicant cares about working for you specifically. If, however, you ask it in the context of "why are you looking to leave your current job and why does this one interest you" then there's a lot of room to figure out where the applicant's expectations don't align with reality. I work for a small enterprise SaaS company in NYC. We get a lot of people interviewing who are coming from a long career working in banks. I always ask why they want to go from working in a bank to working at a company like ours. Sometimes it turns out that they won't get what they're looking for if they come work with us and that's a discussion worth having. It's all about managing expectations
  - rafiki6 9y ago
    So why isn't the question phrased "What are your expectations of how we work here?" or something along those lines? If the goal of the question is to address the motivations of the person applying for the job to determine if there's any mismatch with the companies mission than "why do you want to work here" is absolutely the wrong test.
    - dozzie 9y ago
      >> "why are you looking to leave your current job and why does this one interest you" > So why isn't the question phrased "What are your expectations of how we work here?" Because it's not the same question at all. I don't know what to expect from your work practices yet, but (a) you work at a big scale and I'm interested in that, or (b) you use Erlang/Ada and I'd like to use that professionally, or (c) you make CNC machines and I'd like to move to writing industrial hard-realtime code, or a number of similar reasons before you even know what the company looks like from the inside.
Y7ZCQtNo39 9y ago
Compensation seems to be surprisingly missing from this list. If I work at a FANG company, and you're just getting started, chances are you won't be able to compete nearly as well as compensation. That's not to say that compensation is the only thing people work for -- though it is a large part -- but you must offer something especially unique to set yourself apart.
- solipsism 9y ago
  The very first section is Let's (briefly) talk about pay.
  - Y7ZCQtNo39 9y ago
    It wasn't a part of the numbered list of things. The author didn't even treat it as a first-class thing to be talking about when considering "trouble hiring developers".
    - jabzd 9y ago
      It was a preface to that list, as in "if you don't solve this one, don't bother reading the rest of the list." That makes it the most important thing...that's how I read it anyways.
      - mcondit 9y ago
        Yes, I believe that is definitely what the author was going for. If you don't pay market rate for development, you're 9 out of 10 times going to regret it.
jakebasile 9y ago
Missing is "your torturous interview process that consists of a worthless online test, a 10 hour homework assignment, and a grueling whole day interview with whiteboard trivia unrelated to your day to day work has a high rate of false negatives".
- swagtricker 9y ago
  This: closely followed by "people have heard of your torturous interview process and assume developers willing to both submit to it AND continue to administer it to others must be a bunch of egotistical assholes (who they'd rather not work with)".
  - rdudek 9y ago
    I bet they don't like folks posting on Glassdoor and Indeed company reviews, interview processes, etc. It's amazing how many bad companies I filtered out just using those two resources.
- FLUX-YOU 9y ago
  Yep. In particular, stay away from anyone funded by Vista Equity Partners because they enforce IQ tests during hiring for all of their companies. That's overlaid on top of a whiteboard assessment.
  - jakebasile 9y ago
    Wait, aren't IQ tests during hiring illegal in the US?
    - Sevii 9y ago
      Yes they are very illegal.
    - FLUX-YOU 9y ago
      It's not called an IQ test legally. But it has precisely zero to do with your job unless you need to predict the next shape in a sequence of shapes, write essays on grammar, word association, or do head math within ~30s. Here's another kind with (broken) word association problems from FirstBank looking to hire developers: https://imgur.com/a/QXlKC https://imgur.com/a/QXlKC
FollowSteph3 9y ago
It should really be re-phrased why you’re having trouble hiring developers at the rates you want because if for example you paid double market rates you would most likely be rejecting a lot of good developers. Money isn’t the only thing but it’s definitey a very big issue.
- matwood 9y ago
  Exactly. Every single problem can be worked around with more money. Market rates are simply tables stakes to hire, and how much I require goes up from there. Obligatory reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3XGAmPRxV48 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3XGAmPRxV48
- JustSomeNobody 9y ago
  Money is THE biggest issue. The companies I work for are motivated by money, so I am too. All the warm fuzzy, "we're family" BS is only good for lunches and bagels. When the company no longer is hitting numbers, engineering will be cast out faster than they can say resume.
olfactory 9y ago
I recently overheard a "startup mentor" telling a CEO that developers are very smart and sometimes persuasive, but that they don't have a clue what is going on and need to be told exactly what to do. She then went on to tell the CEO that she took an intro to javascript class and she felt that doing that gave her great insight into how long things reasonably ought to take developers to finish. It's amazing that this kind of mindset exists today. While it often makes sense for startups to take on technical debt (as well as management debt and other practices that don't scale well) the issue is rarely that developers are clueless, it's that the project cycle does not include a proper accounting of tech debt and the compounding interest that it generates. The simple answer is to first establish the minimum guaranteed lifespan of the business based on funding that is guaranteed, and work backwards to determine what milestones are necessary to extend that timeline and create a profitable (or venture backed) business. If the only option is to take on technical debt, plan for when it will be paid off. I've seen many cases where an early team rallies to ship a product and takes on technical debt so that it can be viewed as having shipped successfully, only to find themselves mired in the debt a few weeks after launch, during which time they lose a lot of credibility and some may even end up burning out and quitting the team. If you are hiring junior engineers, that may mean you are taking on technical debt... maybe even architecture debt. This may be a smart decision, as long as you are aware you are doing it and have a plan to pay it back before it becomes too costly.
- ericmcer 9y ago
  Technical debt is also more costly to pay in terms of morale. Slogging through painful refactors for weeks on end can pretty quickly make me start to resent my job and question whether this is a product I want to work on.
  - flukus 9y ago
    My morale goes up if I ever get to actually repay some of that debt. More often than not developers are discouraged from paying it back, having to add new features or quick hacks instead, making it worse. In my company we can't spends weeks refactoring because there is no new business functionality to tie it to and IME that is the norm. At the moment I'm working on a story that requires a massive refactor of a core process, I'm loving the process of cleaning up the spaghetti but I'm not sure if the business will accept the risk of the changes.
PaulKeeble 9y ago
I see these every single day in my inbox, the amount of bad indicators in job specs is impressive, I nope out within the first few lines on 95% of the specs. At least they are being upfront about the mess they are in and it is going to be a bad place to work. The alternative is nothing other than a very basic technical list and those are worse as they give me no reason to enquire either, hiding the bad is even worse. One yesterday contained so many little nope moments in it: "Christmas contract" "a few outstanding issues that need ironing out" "Critical Path web app" "system is reflective of an Excel spreadsheet" "two junior and one senior developer" "senior developer is cutting down his working days" "mentoring element" "based in the office to help out the junior developers" "3 years + experience" "Experience mentoring" "for 3 months" "terrible pay" "interviews immediately on Skype" "start immediately"
- liquidcool 9y ago
  At least they were honest about the terrible pay. That's refreshing.
- arwhatever 9y ago
  Once saw a humorous tweet asking, "Are you compatible with our ongoing bad decision making, and can you save us?" but can't find it right now.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
rafiki6 9y ago
Compensation simply and purely. I'm taking a risk coming to join your start-up that has a high likelihood of failure. Pay me as such. You as the founder likely aren't taking as much of a risk as me an employee would be, especially if you didn't put your own money and are mostly operating on other's money. Not only do I lose the opportunity cost of a big-co with a safe job and stable hours, but I also have almost no control of decisions or outcome despite how much you the owner want me to feel like an "owner". Don't delude yourself into thinking your special and deserve more compensation than any of your early employees. A lot start-ups seem to forget this and tend to offer senior skilled people paltry "stock options" that are points of a percentage.
PretzelFisch 9y ago
Also deciding to pass on someone because they don't fit your mythical 10x unicorn developer vision
_e 9y ago
Is $30k salary + 30% equity considered good compensation for a recent college grad?
- remyp 9y ago
  At 30% equity I'm guessing they're very early on and expect you to build the whole thing. Probably not a good role for a junior unless you really know what you're doing. Feel free to send me an email if you need career advice.

49 points by remyp 9y ago

"we expect people to act like an owner" This has got to be the most stupid thing I've ever heard in an interview. Okay then, I'll act like an owner. Make me an owner. Oh, wait, you didn't mean it like that?

remyp 9y ago
In my experience it almost always means "I expect you to work 14 hour days like I do even though I have 40x the equity you do."
- cgore 9y ago
  Yeah, and that's exactly my point. Okay, I'll act like an owner. Make me an owner.
  - ramphastidae 9y ago
    How ridiculous! You should just be thankful for the opportunity to be part of their incredible journey! Think of all the exposure and experience you're getting! /s
- whataretensors 9y ago
  40x would be a lot more fair than what I've seen. Usually it's > 100-1000x in a different stock class(preferred/common).
  - hkmurakami 9y ago
    founders have common.
hkarthik 9y ago
The sentiment they are trying to get across is that they want someone who won't let problems lie and who will proactively execute on fixes without waiting for permission or being assigned the work by a tech lead or manager. Couple of examples of this: 1. Speeding up a test suite by identifying the slowest parts and optimizing it so every developer that runs the test suite benefits. 2. Making deploys more stable or getting them to zero down time so you're not forced to deploy during off hours and impact your customers. Wanting people who will do things like this is often expressed as "ownership", but I think it's the wrong term. It's more about making the team more efficient and productive.
- maxxxxx 9y ago
  I think that's called being diligent or conscientious. Or call it "doing a good job" or "being a professional".
- philipov 9y ago
  The sentiment they're getting at is "We want people who are as dedicated as owners, but without the incentives" and this translates to "We are only interested in gullible people who don't know their own value." The reason people have trouble finding good developers is because they don't want to pay for them. Owners aren't driven by only doing as well as the market average. If you want people who want to beat the market, offer them something better than the market rate.
- nhoiunh4nth 9y ago
  > The sentiment they are trying to get across is that they want someone who won't let problems lie and who will proactively execute on fixes without waiting for permission or being assigned the work by a tech lead or manager. I find that's rarely what they want. I've often seen cases where there's some fundamental architectural flaw that will make future development extremely difficult, only to be told, "Don't worry about these things - just ship something!" Yeah, that's going to break really soon, and we'll be running around trying to put out fires because of your incompetence. If I were the owner of this, I'd fix it immediately, or at least prioritize it reasonably so we don't screw ourselves in the future.
- 9y ago
random42_ 9y ago
Yeah, it's like, act like an owner, but you have to do everything that the _actual_ owner tells you to.
twelve40 9y ago
It can mean different things, no? For example, a team was switching to git from a different vcs. Devs who actually gave a crap then researched best practices and wrote up an internal how-to for everyone else to follow. Not because they were "business owners" or told by the management, but just because they knew there would be total chaos if they didn't. Other people - who somewhat cared - followed the internal manual. Finally, people who should be fired started shitting right into master without reading anything on git, internal or otherwise. In my mind, the first set of devs really acted like owners here. Nobody exploited them, or even pushed them to overwork, they just knew to do the right thing.
- echaozh 9y ago
  Yeah, they're not "business owners", they're just fake owners who will be fired when writing the internal how-to took too much of their work time.

chrisbennet 9y ago

Here's another question that bugs me: "Why do you want to work for Acme Corp?" Employers need to remind themselves that the interview is a date - the company needs to let the candidate know why they might want to work for ("marry") Acme Corp, not the other way around. What would you think if you were on a real date and the other person said: "Why do you want to marry me?"

mason55 9y ago
I think it's valid question, the issue is just in the presentation. If you ask it with the attitude of trying to find people who are 1000% in love with the concept of working at your very specific company then I think you're deluding yourself. Unless you're a world-famous company or your company has a very niche mission, it's unlikely that the applicant cares about working for you specifically. If, however, you ask it in the context of "why are you looking to leave your current job and why does this one interest you" then there's a lot of room to figure out where the applicant's expectations don't align with reality. I work for a small enterprise SaaS company in NYC. We get a lot of people interviewing who are coming from a long career working in banks. I always ask why they want to go from working in a bank to working at a company like ours. Sometimes it turns out that they won't get what they're looking for if they come work with us and that's a discussion worth having. It's all about managing expectations
- rafiki6 9y ago
  So why isn't the question phrased "What are your expectations of how we work here?" or something along those lines? If the goal of the question is to address the motivations of the person applying for the job to determine if there's any mismatch with the companies mission than "why do you want to work here" is absolutely the wrong test.
  - dozzie 9y ago
    >> "why are you looking to leave your current job and why does this one interest you" > So why isn't the question phrased "What are your expectations of how we work here?" Because it's not the same question at all. I don't know what to expect from your work practices yet, but (a) you work at a big scale and I'm interested in that, or (b) you use Erlang/Ada and I'd like to use that professionally, or (c) you make CNC machines and I'd like to move to writing industrial hard-realtime code, or a number of similar reasons before you even know what the company looks like from the inside.

Y7ZCQtNo39 9y ago

Compensation seems to be surprisingly missing from this list. If I work at a FANG company, and you're just getting started, chances are you won't be able to compete nearly as well as compensation. That's not to say that compensation is the only thing people work for -- though it is a large part -- but you must offer something especially unique to set yourself apart.

solipsism 9y ago
The very first section is Let's (briefly) talk about pay.
- Y7ZCQtNo39 9y ago
  It wasn't a part of the numbered list of things. The author didn't even treat it as a first-class thing to be talking about when considering "trouble hiring developers".
  - jabzd 9y ago
    It was a preface to that list, as in "if you don't solve this one, don't bother reading the rest of the list." That makes it the most important thing...that's how I read it anyways.
    - mcondit 9y ago
      Yes, I believe that is definitely what the author was going for. If you don't pay market rate for development, you're 9 out of 10 times going to regret it.

jakebasile 9y ago

Missing is "your torturous interview process that consists of a worthless online test, a 10 hour homework assignment, and a grueling whole day interview with whiteboard trivia unrelated to your day to day work has a high rate of false negatives".

swagtricker 9y ago
This: closely followed by "people have heard of your torturous interview process and assume developers willing to both submit to it AND continue to administer it to others must be a bunch of egotistical assholes (who they'd rather not work with)".
- rdudek 9y ago
  I bet they don't like folks posting on Glassdoor and Indeed company reviews, interview processes, etc. It's amazing how many bad companies I filtered out just using those two resources.
FLUX-YOU 9y ago
Yep. In particular, stay away from anyone funded by Vista Equity Partners because they enforce IQ tests during hiring for all of their companies. That's overlaid on top of a whiteboard assessment.
- jakebasile 9y ago
  Wait, aren't IQ tests during hiring illegal in the US?
  - Sevii 9y ago
    Yes they are very illegal.
  - FLUX-YOU 9y ago
    It's not called an IQ test legally. But it has precisely zero to do with your job unless you need to predict the next shape in a sequence of shapes, write essays on grammar, word association, or do head math within ~30s. Here's another kind with (broken) word association problems from FirstBank looking to hire developers: https://imgur.com/a/QXlKC https://imgur.com/a/QXlKC

FollowSteph3 9y ago

It should really be re-phrased why you’re having trouble hiring developers at the rates you want because if for example you paid double market rates you would most likely be rejecting a lot of good developers. Money isn’t the only thing but it’s definitey a very big issue.

matwood 9y ago
Exactly. Every single problem can be worked around with more money. Market rates are simply tables stakes to hire, and how much I require goes up from there. Obligatory reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3XGAmPRxV48 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3XGAmPRxV48
JustSomeNobody 9y ago
Money is THE biggest issue. The companies I work for are motivated by money, so I am too. All the warm fuzzy, "we're family" BS is only good for lunches and bagels. When the company no longer is hitting numbers, engineering will be cast out faster than they can say resume.

olfactory 9y ago

I recently overheard a "startup mentor" telling a CEO that developers are very smart and sometimes persuasive, but that they don't have a clue what is going on and need to be told exactly what to do. She then went on to tell the CEO that she took an intro to javascript class and she felt that doing that gave her great insight into how long things reasonably ought to take developers to finish. It's amazing that this kind of mindset exists today. While it often makes sense for startups to take on technical debt (as well as management debt and other practices that don't scale well) the issue is rarely that developers are clueless, it's that the project cycle does not include a proper accounting of tech debt and the compounding interest that it generates. The simple answer is to first establish the minimum guaranteed lifespan of the business based on funding that is guaranteed, and work backwards to determine what milestones are necessary to extend that timeline and create a profitable (or venture backed) business. If the only option is to take on technical debt, plan for when it will be paid off. I've seen many cases where an early team rallies to ship a product and takes on technical debt so that it can be viewed as having shipped successfully, only to find themselves mired in the debt a few weeks after launch, during which time they lose a lot of credibility and some may even end up burning out and quitting the team. If you are hiring junior engineers, that may mean you are taking on technical debt... maybe even architecture debt. This may be a smart decision, as long as you are aware you are doing it and have a plan to pay it back before it becomes too costly.

ericmcer 9y ago
Technical debt is also more costly to pay in terms of morale. Slogging through painful refactors for weeks on end can pretty quickly make me start to resent my job and question whether this is a product I want to work on.
- flukus 9y ago
  My morale goes up if I ever get to actually repay some of that debt. More often than not developers are discouraged from paying it back, having to add new features or quick hacks instead, making it worse. In my company we can't spends weeks refactoring because there is no new business functionality to tie it to and IME that is the norm. At the moment I'm working on a story that requires a massive refactor of a core process, I'm loving the process of cleaning up the spaghetti but I'm not sure if the business will accept the risk of the changes.

PaulKeeble 9y ago

I see these every single day in my inbox, the amount of bad indicators in job specs is impressive, I nope out within the first few lines on 95% of the specs. At least they are being upfront about the mess they are in and it is going to be a bad place to work. The alternative is nothing other than a very basic technical list and those are worse as they give me no reason to enquire either, hiding the bad is even worse. One yesterday contained so many little nope moments in it: "Christmas contract" "a few outstanding issues that need ironing out" "Critical Path web app" "system is reflective of an Excel spreadsheet" "two junior and one senior developer" "senior developer is cutting down his working days" "mentoring element" "based in the office to help out the junior developers" "3 years + experience" "Experience mentoring" "for 3 months" "terrible pay" "interviews immediately on Skype" "start immediately"

liquidcool 9y ago
At least they were honest about the terrible pay. That's refreshing.
arwhatever 9y ago
Once saw a humorous tweet asking, "Are you compatible with our ongoing bad decision making, and can you save us?" but can't find it right now.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

rafiki6 9y ago

Compensation simply and purely. I'm taking a risk coming to join your start-up that has a high likelihood of failure. Pay me as such. You as the founder likely aren't taking as much of a risk as me an employee would be, especially if you didn't put your own money and are mostly operating on other's money. Not only do I lose the opportunity cost of a big-co with a safe job and stable hours, but I also have almost no control of decisions or outcome despite how much you the owner want me to feel like an "owner". Don't delude yourself into thinking your special and deserve more compensation than any of your early employees. A lot start-ups seem to forget this and tend to offer senior skilled people paltry "stock options" that are points of a percentage.

PretzelFisch 9y ago

Also deciding to pass on someone because they don't fit your mythical 10x unicorn developer vision

_e 9y ago

Is $30k salary + 30% equity considered good compensation for a recent college grad?

remyp 9y ago
At 30% equity I'm guessing they're very early on and expect you to build the whole thing. Probably not a good role for a junior unless you really know what you're doing. Feel free to send me an email if you need career advice.