15 ms·

Convincing engineers to join your team

168 points by Harj 8y ago

expertentipp 8y ago
You are not Facebook, you are not Google, you are not Apple. You will never be any of these. They have piles of cash and can afford almost anything, they have unimaginable datasets about private lifes of billions of people. Stop using the same practices as them, stop using the same frameworks and stacks as them, even reconsider using technologies produced by them.
deleted 8y ago
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chadash 8y ago
During the recruiting process, I expect a company to be putting its best foot forward. If things seem disorganized at that stage, then I assume that day-to-day operations at the company are even more disorganized. Additionally, it always makes a big difference to me if people high up in the organization (even if they aren't technical) are involved in the interview process. If a founder or C-level employee spends some time talking to me during the hiring process, it's a positive sign that they see this as an important position and you as an important hire.
- noCertainty 8y ago
  Honestly, the interview process is no guarantee of anything behind door number one. I've learned that the hard way. If a company is putting their best foot forward, and they've contrived an act, but can't back it up? What then? There's no accounting for willful deception, and sometimes you are straight lied to.
- laurentMiguel 8y ago
  Honestly, the interview process is no guarantee of anything behind door number one. I've learned that the hard way. If a company is putting their best foot forward, and they've contrived an act, but can't back it up? What then? There's no accounting for willful deception, and sometimes you are straight lied to.
  - jonny_eh 8y ago
    Exactly, I've seen the same with sales. Some companies put all their effort into sales and marketing, but the product turns out to be crap.
- BookmarkSaver 8y ago
  >If things seem disorganized at that stage, then I assume that day-to-day operations at the company are even more disorganized I'm not really sure about that. In my experience there can be a pretty big gap between the initial recruiters (who often understand nothing about the actual qualifications necessary) that are just trying to get as many people in the door as possible, and the actual operations of the company. Granted I have a pretty small sample size, but I've had this misalignment go in both directions.
  - vonmoltke 8y ago
    Having recruiters that are so clueless about the jobs they are recruiting for is a significant red flag for me and an indication that the company is immature and disorganized.
throwaway9412 8y ago
Hear that everyone? "As a startup it's hard to compete with Facebook and Google compensation packages, especially for senior engineers" Also, Oracle apparently had a lot of success building out their bare metal (now cloud infrastructure) team by making uncharacteristically (for them) good offers. You can hire good people, if you're willing to pay them. Bullshit doesn't work anymore.
- atopuzov 8y ago
  Have you tried offering other things? Like work from home, work remotely, more interesting work, various education ranging from various courses, conferences up to paid tuition at an university (and then actually giving people the time to do it)?. And please don't say you have snacks, have better working environments not snacks. As a startup you mostly expect people to work 10+h a day. It's not always about the money, but if all other things are equal, yeah everybody is gonna take the higher payed position.
  - sigstoat 8y ago
    > Have you tried offering other things? as much as employers don't want to pay you more wages, they seem even _less_ inclined to offer anything that isn't wages. respect? pfff. sooner get another 4% out of most employers. install some sound dampening anything to make the working environment nicer? madness, instead the marketing folks will pick some new colors for the walls. fire the toxic asshole who fucks up all the projects? whoa, that toxic asshole is critical to completing every project going at the moment; they'd sooner let mr polite&courteous go.
    - dx87 8y ago
      I've yet to find an employer that would give me more PTO instead of a pay raise. They'd rather pay an extra 10k between a pay raise and corresponding 401k matching increase, but they won't even consider giving me 5 extra vacation days so I'll have the time to enjoy stuff with the money I already have.
      - 8y ago
ninetax 8y ago
> ... the final step is presenting them an offer to join your team and convincing them to accept it. I think more effort could be made to sell before the candidate decides to interview. The best candidates have to be sold on the opportunity before they invest their time into an interview process because they have so many opportunities available. Widen the funnel at the mouth. Anecdotally I have had many experiences where the hiring manager didn't take the time to listen to what I was looking for before launching into their 10 minute spiel give everyone, and then they ask me for phone screen availability. Why is this the right opportunity for me? EDIT: after reading TFA, I see this is exactly what they're advocating for. cool!
- Harj 8y ago
  I agree hearing what sounds like a pre-prepared, generic spiel about the company isn't very effective. That's why I suggest hiring managers/recruiters ask the candidate what they're looking for first and then talk about how the company fits into that (or not). Being able to tailor the pitch on the fly like that is what we've seen be the difference between average and great recruiters.
- nrb 8y ago
  Yeah, companies that use TripleByte all do this. There's a phone pitch phase of the interviewing once you've been accepted to TripleByte where you take ~20 minute phone calls where the point of the call is for the company to figure out your goals/interests and pitch you. It's an extremely good way to filter out companies that will probably not be worth the time to go on-site with; by the end of the call you are usually extremely excited about the opportunity or have saved yourself a lot of time cutting off the process there.
  - gumby 8y ago
    ...and saves the company the effort of interviewing someone who turns out not to be interested in the opportunity. A good recruiter can sell the company properly. They are as rare as hen's teeth though.
- mrfusion 8y ago
jaggederest 8y ago
Definitely shows their expertise in the space. Strongly agree with all of this, one of the most important things for me as a candidate is to feel appreciated as a person, not just "headcount". Being thoughtful and considerate is a very rare thing in a hiring process.
michaco33 8y ago
Oh wait let me guess, non stop spamming every social media outlet they use! Am I right guys?
ashelmire 8y ago
What's with the standard of doing a full day interview? Who does this work for other than fresh graduates? I don't want to spend a whole day (which I have to request off from my current employer) answering probably-silly technical puzzles as the first round interview (the 25 minute phone call doesn't really count since it sounds like just a pitch). Does a full day of whiteboarding really get you better candidates than say, a single hour technical interview or 1 or 2 hour homework? I'd rather do half a dozen video chat interviews spread out over a month than give a whole day just for the possibility of a new job. I'd prefer a single technical interview or homework over that by a mile. If you tell me your interview process is a 25 minute call followed by a whole day of technical interviews, I'll tell you to take a hike.
- larrik 8y ago
  Agreed, I wouldn't consider doing a full day interview, unless I was looking to relocate and wanted to fit the whole process into a single day. As a regular job offer, it's absurd.
- dfabulich 8y ago
  A full day interview is standard. You grant that it's standard, right in the first sentence of your post. But you'll tell anyone who offers you a standard interview to take a hike? This is symptomatic of a broader problem with HN comment threads on "how to interview" articles: for any given approach to interviewing, the top comment will be a middle-brow dismissal saying, "I would never interview at a place that interviewed that way." For all X. I would never interview at a place that does whiteboarding. I would never interview at a place that gave me a take-home assignment. I would never interview at a place that asked me to pair-program on a real assignment during the interview (I should get paid for that). I would never interview at a place that asked me to work as contract-to-hire. I would never interview at a place that used HackerRank. I would never interview at a place that looks at Github profiles. I would never interview with a recruiting firm. I would never interview if contacted by a recruiter (instead of the hiring manager). And apparently some people would refuse to interview at a place that asked you to talk to half a dozen of your potential teammates before offering you the job. There's just no good approach.
throwaway8610 8y ago
Has anyone been able to reapply to Triplebyte after an initial rejection? Somewhat relevant question as this is an article by Triplebyte and Harj who I understand is a YC partner. They say you can reapply after 4 months but I can't find how to do that when I login and emails to their support line go unanswered.
- merlincorey 8y ago
  When I was going through Triplebyte, I asked a lot of questions. According to the recruiter I was working with, it could be 4-6 months between "refreshes". I would say to keep trying to get in touch with them - everyone I interacted with on the Triplebyte team was nothing but helpful. If you washed out of the process at the initial testing stage, make sure to let them know that you have been working on your skills and you are ready to re-take the test.
  - throwaway8610 8y ago
    Thanks. I'm just going by their website that indicates 4 months but I'm actually at 5 months. I've tried emailing support@triplebyte.com but have not gotten any response. My first time around I made it to the online in-person interview and thought I did fairly well but got rejected after that point with some rather vague, generic reason and feedback. I just want to know if I should just cut my losses at this point so wondering if anyone has had any success at being able to just reapply.
OmarIsmail 8y ago
This is a great post and founders/hiring managers/junior recruiters are advised to listen to them. After a continual refinement of our own process over many years we've landed on almost this exact process near completely independently. This is a standard for a reason. You will save yourself A LOT of headaches if you incorporate this feedback into your own hiring processes. I also highly recommend Marco Rodgers' advice http://firstround.com/review/my-lessons-from-interviewing-400-engineers-over-three-startups/ http://firstround.com/review/my-lessons-from-interviewing-40... For people that are "too good for this process" - well, in my experience those are the ones that aren't a good fit for most organizations. You're self selecting out and limiting your own options. For some people that's totally fine, but for most I don't think that's good advice.
- timr 8y ago
  "For people that are "too good for this process" - well, in my experience those are the ones that aren't a good fit for most organizations." My experience is that most companies are asking for too much and being downright rude in the way that they do it. Especially from more senior people who have options. I turned down a number of companies at (or just after) the phone screen stage during my last job search. Usually the pattern was that they'd done one form of preliminary screen, and then wanted to do one (or two, or three...) additional steps before going onsite. One company I remember asked me to do an eight hour programming exercise, after I had finished a phone-based technical screen. I told them it was unreasonable, and that I'd consider it only if I had nothing else to do with an entire day of my time. Never got back to them. I am a tolerant person, but I am, indeed, too good for that kind of process. Early stage startups especially need to accept the reality that they're not attractive places to work, and behave accordingly. The less reasonable your process, the fewer good candidates will stay in the pipeline. Eventually, you're just intensely screening the people who didn't have better options.
  - wpietri 8y ago
    For me it depends a lot on the details of that process. I want to work with really good people, so I'm ok with a process that takes time and/or work as long as a) I think the added process is likely to get better results, and b) it's handled in a way that's respectful of the time and energy of all concerned. A good example for me is interviews. I'm totally happy to do a full day on site, exhausting as it is. But only if I feel like they have gained new insight in each round. A few months back I did like 8 individual interviews during a 1-day startup visit, and easily half the time was answering the same questions repeatedly. The could have just had people pair up and saved me time while getting better results themselves. It gave me the impression they didn't have their act together. Take-home work is in the same category. If it's the kind of thing that makes me say, "Oooh, I want to work with people who pass this," then it's great. But if it mainly seems to be testing my ability to put up with nonsense, that's a big negative sign.
jedberg 8y ago
> A complaint we hear from Triplebyte candidates is being asked how likely they would be to accept an offer before knowing the actual offer details. The reality is that compensation details are a large factor in where people decide to work and you can't expect someone to know if they want to work for you without giving them that data. The numerical salary shouldn't be the deciding factor. I want to know if you're interested in the work that you'll be doing and the team you'll be working with. I don't want you to think, "man I wasn't going to go there but they offered a huge salary!". Of course the salary is relevant, but I want to know that we're just negotiating on the number, and not number+job. Are you interested in the work that we'll be doing? Yes? Good, is this number high enough to make it worth your while? No? Ok, well that was the highest I could go, so thanks for your time.
- thereare5lights 8y ago
  > The numerical salary shouldn't be the deciding factor. I don't think people that didn't grow up poor can appreciate how stupid that statement sounds to us.
  - jedberg 8y ago
    You're assuming I didn't grow up poor. You'd be correct in that assumption, but that doesn't mean I can't empathize. I didn't grow up poor, but when it came time to get my first job, I didn't have any money nor any help from my parents, or any fall back options. I had to get a job to afford food and shelter. I still cared about the work that I'd be doing.
    - thereare5lights 8y ago
      > You're assuming I didn't grow up poor. True, but given the evidence, I considered it highly unlikely that you did. > I didn't grow up poor, but when it came time to get my first job, I didn't have any money nor any help from my parents, or any fall back options. I had to get a job to afford food and shelter. It's not about that. It's about how you look at the world and how you view finances because of the way a person grows up. You don't have the same scars that we have. > I still cared about the work that I'd be doing. For us, that would be pretty low on the list of things that mattered.
hotpotjunkie 8y ago
Why would companies need to change anything? Every engineering job gets hundreds of applicants. Its an employers' market.
- xtracto 8y ago
  But of that hundred, maybe 1 or 2 are somewhat qualified.
tootie 8y ago
My phone screen technique is more old school but I think works well. I pick their top language or domain (web or mobile or whatever) and ask 10 trivia questions. Medium difficulty questions I'd expect a programmer with any experience to answer. I look for maybe 70% correct and I look for quick answers. You know it or you don't. And I set that expectation up front so they can give me a few "I don't know"s with no penalty. This is my sanity check and I think it's faster and more accurate than a FizzBuzz and doesn't require screenshare.
- ssully 8y ago
  Could you provide a few example questions you would do? Just curious what medium difficulty questions look like to you.
  - gumby 8y ago
    "What do you think are the top strengths and top weaknesses of <language X>?" Doesn't matter what the specific answers are, much less if you even like language X or not. Instead it says: does the person really have an understanding of the language; do they have enough experience to say "well I really do like X, but I do often wish it had feature y of language Z". or "yes, I have a lot of JS experience since that's the job and I sure know how to sling it, but I far prefer Lisp which I found made me more productive than any other. Why? Well because at XXX I was able to do YYY...."
    - aspaceman 8y ago
      This is one of the best questions to ask imo. It's very free-form and honest, and gives you the potential to dive into things technically. Do you like C or C++ better? Oh you don't like pointers? How do you avoid them in C++? etc.
  - tootie 8y ago
    By medium I just mean, stuff beyond CS 101. So for Java, I'd ask about standard lib or basic language-specific features or tools. What's the difference between a List, Set and Map? What does the final keyword do? What does it mean for a class to be thread safe? What do you use for dependency management? What's the difference between a checked and unchecked exception? For JavaScript I can ask about let vs const? What are arrow functions good for? Maybe specific framework stuff if they say they know react. For general web stuff, I can ask about response codes. What's the difference between 400 and 500 level? What's a CDN for? What is HTTPS? You can ask basics about version control or CI. Sometimes I'll do process questions about agile. I try to stick to what they claim on their resume (and what I know about) and can tell pretty quickly if they are actually what they say they are based on how quickly, confidently and succinctly they answer.
TinyBig 8y ago
The industry standard onsite interview to offer rate seems astonishingly low at 20%. Is this symptomatic of poor filtering early in the pipeline?
- vonmoltke 8y ago
  No, it's symptomatic of paranoid hiring processes, arbitrarily high bars, and interviewers who have no business interviewing people.
- redisman 8y ago
  It just means that popular companies can very much cherry-pick and inconvenience plenty of engineers. There is no shortage of people for them.
tptacek 8y ago
Broken record, but here's our hiring process: 1. An initial call, handled by a principal ("founder"), with the objective of explaining the role and the company and arming the candidate with as much detail about the hiring process as is practicable. 2. A followup in email shortly thereafter confirming interest and locking down schedule. 3. 1-3 work-sample challenges (our current set, for the role we're hiring now, is a short combined AWS/Django security assessment, an automated best-effort-secure deployment of that Django app in a fresh AWS environment we provide, and a short API scanner programming challenge): 3a. Introduction: provide the candidate with advance knowledge of what will be on the challenge and what they'll want to know going in, along with time expectations. 3b. Preparation: offer the candidate books, links to presentations, and a practice version of the challenge to get confident and comfortable with the challenge. 3c. The challenge proper. 3d. Scoring: each challenge has a pre-built scoring rubric, on a 1-5 scale, designed so that anyone on the team can quickly score a submission. 4. Meet in person: after informing the candidate they did well on technical qualification, we do a single round of in-person "interviews"; no whiteboard, no coding, just meet and greet and discuss logistics. 5. Offer. Missing from this process: 1. Recruiters. 2. Resumes. 3. Telephone interviews. 4. Technical interviews from members of the engineering team. 5. Any significant interruption to the engineering team's work. 6. Interview exercises with a member of our team watching you code. 7. Free pizza and coffee (though I guess if you asked, we'd send you one). 8. 5 of the 6 hours onsite this recommended process includes. I'm happy to keep repeating this just as a sort of reminder that we're hiring, but this is a streamlined and improved (we didn't have practice challenges at Matasano!) version of the way we've been hiring for coming up on 10 years, and it works spectacularly well for us. People keep telling me why what we're doing can't work, and I keep wondering what I'm doing wrong to make it work. You should consider cutting way back on interviews --- especially telephone interviews, which I've found to be completely worthless as generators of real insight into candidates --- and replacing them with work-sample challenges. But be serious about it if you do: candidates hate "take-home projects", and when I ask them about it, it always turns out that those projects precede or follow a standard interview loop. Fuck the interview loop. Interviews are a random function. Figure out what skills you need candidates to have on day 1, and then just build something that checks if candidates have those skills.
- 8y ago
maerF0x0 8y ago
> Have your recruiter keep a list of reasons why candidates said they wouldn't move forward So companies want this kind of feedback, but won't provide it?
- anandsuresh 8y ago
  True that! IMHO this has been a trend that I've observed where interview feedback is something that doesn't exist. More often than not, even when requested, I've never received any kind of feedback from companies. Despite the the abundance of companies like Hired, TripleByte, LinkedIn and others, recruitment still remains a black-art!
jakobegger 8y ago
Very valuable advise! When I hired my first employees, I focussed too much on compensation. I ran the numbers and offered as much as I could afford. I was really disappointed when great candidates declined my offers, and went with other companies that didn't even pay more (I asked). Now I understand that I just failed to excite them. You really need to tell people how awesome the work is, good engineers will always have many options. And also understand that what excites you may not be what excites the candidate, so starting with asking about what the candidate is looking for is a really good idea.
- Kludgist 8y ago
  Both are certainly important. A few years ago, received offers from two places. One had employees that were excited about the work, the culture was great, the job had a combination of data science and programming that was right up my alley and we talked in-depth about real problems. The other office was just depressing. I mean, it was literally kind of dark and bare. They seemed evasive about what day to day work was like -- something about "dashboards." No one seemed happy to be there. It was a satellite to the main office in New York. When I got the offers, the second job offered $25k more than the first job. I did a little bit of moral handwringing, but... you know, I was getting married the next week, we wanted to buy a house, and an extra $2k a month can make up for a LOT of shitty work environment. I took the second job, got a $5k raise each year, and haven't regretted my decision at all.
tuxidomasx 8y ago
I often hear or read about how there is a developer/software engineer shortage. And the rising salaries seem to reflect that-- supply and demand and all that... Yet it seems that there are hundreds of applicants vying for each position. How is this possible? Are there really that many lesser-skilled people trying to finagle their way in as software developers? Is the shortage one of _skilled_ engineers, while the deluge of applicants is a result of posers and imposters trying to get a slice of the pie?
torgian 8y ago
I’ve had many interviews such as “all day interviews” to ones that were only an hour or two at a time in America. The current position I’ve accepted is a German owned company that has a Japanese branch. Small company. Pay is low when compared to compensation I could get in America. BUT, the interview process was simple. Skype video call with a few people at the same time. Met two of the owners while vacationing in Japan. Got an offer and accepted it. Despite the low pay, I accepted it because it is completely remote. The work is fulfilling (right now my project involves data that can help farmers). I’m learning a lot of new stuff. It’s actually because of all three that I might stay long term. Remote, fulfilling work, and learning new things checked all the boxes despite the low pay. Stuff like that matters. Many companies don’t understand this.

168 points by Harj 8y ago

You are not Facebook, you are not Google, you are not Apple. You will never be any of these. They have piles of cash and can afford almost anything, they have unimaginable datasets about private lifes of billions of people. Stop using the same practices as them, stop using the same frameworks and stacks as them, even reconsider using technologies produced by them.

deleted 8y ago

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chadash 8y ago

During the recruiting process, I expect a company to be putting its best foot forward. If things seem disorganized at that stage, then I assume that day-to-day operations at the company are even more disorganized. Additionally, it always makes a big difference to me if people high up in the organization (even if they aren't technical) are involved in the interview process. If a founder or C-level employee spends some time talking to me during the hiring process, it's a positive sign that they see this as an important position and you as an important hire.

noCertainty 8y ago
Honestly, the interview process is no guarantee of anything behind door number one. I've learned that the hard way. If a company is putting their best foot forward, and they've contrived an act, but can't back it up? What then? There's no accounting for willful deception, and sometimes you are straight lied to.
laurentMiguel 8y ago
Honestly, the interview process is no guarantee of anything behind door number one. I've learned that the hard way. If a company is putting their best foot forward, and they've contrived an act, but can't back it up? What then? There's no accounting for willful deception, and sometimes you are straight lied to.
- jonny_eh 8y ago
  Exactly, I've seen the same with sales. Some companies put all their effort into sales and marketing, but the product turns out to be crap.
BookmarkSaver 8y ago
>If things seem disorganized at that stage, then I assume that day-to-day operations at the company are even more disorganized I'm not really sure about that. In my experience there can be a pretty big gap between the initial recruiters (who often understand nothing about the actual qualifications necessary) that are just trying to get as many people in the door as possible, and the actual operations of the company. Granted I have a pretty small sample size, but I've had this misalignment go in both directions.
- vonmoltke 8y ago
  Having recruiters that are so clueless about the jobs they are recruiting for is a significant red flag for me and an indication that the company is immature and disorganized.

throwaway9412 8y ago

Hear that everyone? "As a startup it's hard to compete with Facebook and Google compensation packages, especially for senior engineers" Also, Oracle apparently had a lot of success building out their bare metal (now cloud infrastructure) team by making uncharacteristically (for them) good offers. You can hire good people, if you're willing to pay them. Bullshit doesn't work anymore.

atopuzov 8y ago
Have you tried offering other things? Like work from home, work remotely, more interesting work, various education ranging from various courses, conferences up to paid tuition at an university (and then actually giving people the time to do it)?. And please don't say you have snacks, have better working environments not snacks. As a startup you mostly expect people to work 10+h a day. It's not always about the money, but if all other things are equal, yeah everybody is gonna take the higher payed position.
- sigstoat 8y ago
  > Have you tried offering other things? as much as employers don't want to pay you more wages, they seem even _less_ inclined to offer anything that isn't wages. respect? pfff. sooner get another 4% out of most employers. install some sound dampening anything to make the working environment nicer? madness, instead the marketing folks will pick some new colors for the walls. fire the toxic asshole who fucks up all the projects? whoa, that toxic asshole is critical to completing every project going at the moment; they'd sooner let mr polite&courteous go.
  - dx87 8y ago
    I've yet to find an employer that would give me more PTO instead of a pay raise. They'd rather pay an extra 10k between a pay raise and corresponding 401k matching increase, but they won't even consider giving me 5 extra vacation days so I'll have the time to enjoy stuff with the money I already have.
    - 8y ago

ninetax 8y ago

> ... the final step is presenting them an offer to join your team and convincing them to accept it. I think more effort could be made to sell before the candidate decides to interview. The best candidates have to be sold on the opportunity before they invest their time into an interview process because they have so many opportunities available. Widen the funnel at the mouth. Anecdotally I have had many experiences where the hiring manager didn't take the time to listen to what I was looking for before launching into their 10 minute spiel give everyone, and then they ask me for phone screen availability. Why is this the right opportunity for me? EDIT: after reading TFA, I see this is exactly what they're advocating for. cool!

Harj 8y ago
I agree hearing what sounds like a pre-prepared, generic spiel about the company isn't very effective. That's why I suggest hiring managers/recruiters ask the candidate what they're looking for first and then talk about how the company fits into that (or not). Being able to tailor the pitch on the fly like that is what we've seen be the difference between average and great recruiters.
nrb 8y ago
Yeah, companies that use TripleByte all do this. There's a phone pitch phase of the interviewing once you've been accepted to TripleByte where you take ~20 minute phone calls where the point of the call is for the company to figure out your goals/interests and pitch you. It's an extremely good way to filter out companies that will probably not be worth the time to go on-site with; by the end of the call you are usually extremely excited about the opportunity or have saved yourself a lot of time cutting off the process there.
- gumby 8y ago
  ...and saves the company the effort of interviewing someone who turns out not to be interested in the opportunity. A good recruiter can sell the company properly. They are as rare as hen's teeth though.
mrfusion 8y ago

jaggederest 8y ago

Definitely shows their expertise in the space. Strongly agree with all of this, one of the most important things for me as a candidate is to feel appreciated as a person, not just "headcount". Being thoughtful and considerate is a very rare thing in a hiring process.

michaco33 8y ago

Oh wait let me guess, non stop spamming every social media outlet they use! Am I right guys?

ashelmire 8y ago

What's with the standard of doing a full day interview? Who does this work for other than fresh graduates? I don't want to spend a whole day (which I have to request off from my current employer) answering probably-silly technical puzzles as the first round interview (the 25 minute phone call doesn't really count since it sounds like just a pitch). Does a full day of whiteboarding really get you better candidates than say, a single hour technical interview or 1 or 2 hour homework? I'd rather do half a dozen video chat interviews spread out over a month than give a whole day just for the possibility of a new job. I'd prefer a single technical interview or homework over that by a mile. If you tell me your interview process is a 25 minute call followed by a whole day of technical interviews, I'll tell you to take a hike.

larrik 8y ago
Agreed, I wouldn't consider doing a full day interview, unless I was looking to relocate and wanted to fit the whole process into a single day. As a regular job offer, it's absurd.
dfabulich 8y ago
A full day interview is standard. You grant that it's standard, right in the first sentence of your post. But you'll tell anyone who offers you a standard interview to take a hike? This is symptomatic of a broader problem with HN comment threads on "how to interview" articles: for any given approach to interviewing, the top comment will be a middle-brow dismissal saying, "I would never interview at a place that interviewed that way." For all X. I would never interview at a place that does whiteboarding. I would never interview at a place that gave me a take-home assignment. I would never interview at a place that asked me to pair-program on a real assignment during the interview (I should get paid for that). I would never interview at a place that asked me to work as contract-to-hire. I would never interview at a place that used HackerRank. I would never interview at a place that looks at Github profiles. I would never interview with a recruiting firm. I would never interview if contacted by a recruiter (instead of the hiring manager). And apparently some people would refuse to interview at a place that asked you to talk to half a dozen of your potential teammates before offering you the job. There's just no good approach.

throwaway8610 8y ago

Has anyone been able to reapply to Triplebyte after an initial rejection? Somewhat relevant question as this is an article by Triplebyte and Harj who I understand is a YC partner. They say you can reapply after 4 months but I can't find how to do that when I login and emails to their support line go unanswered.

merlincorey 8y ago
When I was going through Triplebyte, I asked a lot of questions. According to the recruiter I was working with, it could be 4-6 months between "refreshes". I would say to keep trying to get in touch with them - everyone I interacted with on the Triplebyte team was nothing but helpful. If you washed out of the process at the initial testing stage, make sure to let them know that you have been working on your skills and you are ready to re-take the test.
- throwaway8610 8y ago
  Thanks. I'm just going by their website that indicates 4 months but I'm actually at 5 months. I've tried emailing support@triplebyte.com but have not gotten any response. My first time around I made it to the online in-person interview and thought I did fairly well but got rejected after that point with some rather vague, generic reason and feedback. I just want to know if I should just cut my losses at this point so wondering if anyone has had any success at being able to just reapply.

OmarIsmail 8y ago

This is a great post and founders/hiring managers/junior recruiters are advised to listen to them. After a continual refinement of our own process over many years we've landed on almost this exact process near completely independently. This is a standard for a reason. You will save yourself A LOT of headaches if you incorporate this feedback into your own hiring processes. I also highly recommend Marco Rodgers' advice http://firstround.com/review/my-lessons-from-interviewing-400-engineers-over-three-startups/ http://firstround.com/review/my-lessons-from-interviewing-40... For people that are "too good for this process" - well, in my experience those are the ones that aren't a good fit for most organizations. You're self selecting out and limiting your own options. For some people that's totally fine, but for most I don't think that's good advice.

timr 8y ago
"For people that are "too good for this process" - well, in my experience those are the ones that aren't a good fit for most organizations." My experience is that most companies are asking for too much and being downright rude in the way that they do it. Especially from more senior people who have options. I turned down a number of companies at (or just after) the phone screen stage during my last job search. Usually the pattern was that they'd done one form of preliminary screen, and then wanted to do one (or two, or three...) additional steps before going onsite. One company I remember asked me to do an eight hour programming exercise, after I had finished a phone-based technical screen. I told them it was unreasonable, and that I'd consider it only if I had nothing else to do with an entire day of my time. Never got back to them. I am a tolerant person, but I am, indeed, too good for that kind of process. Early stage startups especially need to accept the reality that they're not attractive places to work, and behave accordingly. The less reasonable your process, the fewer good candidates will stay in the pipeline. Eventually, you're just intensely screening the people who didn't have better options.
- wpietri 8y ago
  For me it depends a lot on the details of that process. I want to work with really good people, so I'm ok with a process that takes time and/or work as long as a) I think the added process is likely to get better results, and b) it's handled in a way that's respectful of the time and energy of all concerned. A good example for me is interviews. I'm totally happy to do a full day on site, exhausting as it is. But only if I feel like they have gained new insight in each round. A few months back I did like 8 individual interviews during a 1-day startup visit, and easily half the time was answering the same questions repeatedly. The could have just had people pair up and saved me time while getting better results themselves. It gave me the impression they didn't have their act together. Take-home work is in the same category. If it's the kind of thing that makes me say, "Oooh, I want to work with people who pass this," then it's great. But if it mainly seems to be testing my ability to put up with nonsense, that's a big negative sign.

jedberg 8y ago

> A complaint we hear from Triplebyte candidates is being asked how likely they would be to accept an offer before knowing the actual offer details. The reality is that compensation details are a large factor in where people decide to work and you can't expect someone to know if they want to work for you without giving them that data. The numerical salary shouldn't be the deciding factor. I want to know if you're interested in the work that you'll be doing and the team you'll be working with. I don't want you to think, "man I wasn't going to go there but they offered a huge salary!". Of course the salary is relevant, but I want to know that we're just negotiating on the number, and not number+job. Are you interested in the work that we'll be doing? Yes? Good, is this number high enough to make it worth your while? No? Ok, well that was the highest I could go, so thanks for your time.

thereare5lights 8y ago
> The numerical salary shouldn't be the deciding factor. I don't think people that didn't grow up poor can appreciate how stupid that statement sounds to us.
- jedberg 8y ago
  You're assuming I didn't grow up poor. You'd be correct in that assumption, but that doesn't mean I can't empathize. I didn't grow up poor, but when it came time to get my first job, I didn't have any money nor any help from my parents, or any fall back options. I had to get a job to afford food and shelter. I still cared about the work that I'd be doing.
  - thereare5lights 8y ago
    > You're assuming I didn't grow up poor. True, but given the evidence, I considered it highly unlikely that you did. > I didn't grow up poor, but when it came time to get my first job, I didn't have any money nor any help from my parents, or any fall back options. I had to get a job to afford food and shelter. It's not about that. It's about how you look at the world and how you view finances because of the way a person grows up. You don't have the same scars that we have. > I still cared about the work that I'd be doing. For us, that would be pretty low on the list of things that mattered.

hotpotjunkie 8y ago

Why would companies need to change anything? Every engineering job gets hundreds of applicants. Its an employers' market.

xtracto 8y ago
But of that hundred, maybe 1 or 2 are somewhat qualified.

tootie 8y ago

My phone screen technique is more old school but I think works well. I pick their top language or domain (web or mobile or whatever) and ask 10 trivia questions. Medium difficulty questions I'd expect a programmer with any experience to answer. I look for maybe 70% correct and I look for quick answers. You know it or you don't. And I set that expectation up front so they can give me a few "I don't know"s with no penalty. This is my sanity check and I think it's faster and more accurate than a FizzBuzz and doesn't require screenshare.

ssully 8y ago
Could you provide a few example questions you would do? Just curious what medium difficulty questions look like to you.
- gumby 8y ago
  "What do you think are the top strengths and top weaknesses of <language X>?" Doesn't matter what the specific answers are, much less if you even like language X or not. Instead it says: does the person really have an understanding of the language; do they have enough experience to say "well I really do like X, but I do often wish it had feature y of language Z". or "yes, I have a lot of JS experience since that's the job and I sure know how to sling it, but I far prefer Lisp which I found made me more productive than any other. Why? Well because at XXX I was able to do YYY...."
  - aspaceman 8y ago
    This is one of the best questions to ask imo. It's very free-form and honest, and gives you the potential to dive into things technically. Do you like C or C++ better? Oh you don't like pointers? How do you avoid them in C++? etc.
- tootie 8y ago
  By medium I just mean, stuff beyond CS 101. So for Java, I'd ask about standard lib or basic language-specific features or tools. What's the difference between a List, Set and Map? What does the final keyword do? What does it mean for a class to be thread safe? What do you use for dependency management? What's the difference between a checked and unchecked exception? For JavaScript I can ask about let vs const? What are arrow functions good for? Maybe specific framework stuff if they say they know react. For general web stuff, I can ask about response codes. What's the difference between 400 and 500 level? What's a CDN for? What is HTTPS? You can ask basics about version control or CI. Sometimes I'll do process questions about agile. I try to stick to what they claim on their resume (and what I know about) and can tell pretty quickly if they are actually what they say they are based on how quickly, confidently and succinctly they answer.

TinyBig 8y ago

The industry standard onsite interview to offer rate seems astonishingly low at 20%. Is this symptomatic of poor filtering early in the pipeline?

vonmoltke 8y ago
No, it's symptomatic of paranoid hiring processes, arbitrarily high bars, and interviewers who have no business interviewing people.
redisman 8y ago
It just means that popular companies can very much cherry-pick and inconvenience plenty of engineers. There is no shortage of people for them.

tptacek 8y ago

Broken record, but here's our hiring process: 1. An initial call, handled by a principal ("founder"), with the objective of explaining the role and the company and arming the candidate with as much detail about the hiring process as is practicable. 2. A followup in email shortly thereafter confirming interest and locking down schedule. 3. 1-3 work-sample challenges (our current set, for the role we're hiring now, is a short combined AWS/Django security assessment, an automated best-effort-secure deployment of that Django app in a fresh AWS environment we provide, and a short API scanner programming challenge): 3a. Introduction: provide the candidate with advance knowledge of what will be on the challenge and what they'll want to know going in, along with time expectations. 3b. Preparation: offer the candidate books, links to presentations, and a practice version of the challenge to get confident and comfortable with the challenge. 3c. The challenge proper. 3d. Scoring: each challenge has a pre-built scoring rubric, on a 1-5 scale, designed so that anyone on the team can quickly score a submission. 4. Meet in person: after informing the candidate they did well on technical qualification, we do a single round of in-person "interviews"; no whiteboard, no coding, just meet and greet and discuss logistics. 5. Offer. Missing from this process: 1. Recruiters. 2. Resumes. 3. Telephone interviews. 4. Technical interviews from members of the engineering team. 5. Any significant interruption to the engineering team's work. 6. Interview exercises with a member of our team watching you code. 7. Free pizza and coffee (though I guess if you asked, we'd send you one). 8. 5 of the 6 hours onsite this recommended process includes. I'm happy to keep repeating this just as a sort of reminder that we're hiring, but this is a streamlined and improved (we didn't have practice challenges at Matasano!) version of the way we've been hiring for coming up on 10 years, and it works spectacularly well for us. People keep telling me why what we're doing can't work, and I keep wondering what I'm doing wrong to make it work. You should consider cutting way back on interviews --- especially telephone interviews, which I've found to be completely worthless as generators of real insight into candidates --- and replacing them with work-sample challenges. But be serious about it if you do: candidates hate "take-home projects", and when I ask them about it, it always turns out that those projects precede or follow a standard interview loop. Fuck the interview loop. Interviews are a random function. Figure out what skills you need candidates to have on day 1, and then just build something that checks if candidates have those skills.

8y ago

maerF0x0 8y ago

> Have your recruiter keep a list of reasons why candidates said they wouldn't move forward So companies want this kind of feedback, but won't provide it?

anandsuresh 8y ago
True that! IMHO this has been a trend that I've observed where interview feedback is something that doesn't exist. More often than not, even when requested, I've never received any kind of feedback from companies. Despite the the abundance of companies like Hired, TripleByte, LinkedIn and others, recruitment still remains a black-art!

jakobegger 8y ago

Very valuable advise! When I hired my first employees, I focussed too much on compensation. I ran the numbers and offered as much as I could afford. I was really disappointed when great candidates declined my offers, and went with other companies that didn't even pay more (I asked). Now I understand that I just failed to excite them. You really need to tell people how awesome the work is, good engineers will always have many options. And also understand that what excites you may not be what excites the candidate, so starting with asking about what the candidate is looking for is a really good idea.

Kludgist 8y ago
Both are certainly important. A few years ago, received offers from two places. One had employees that were excited about the work, the culture was great, the job had a combination of data science and programming that was right up my alley and we talked in-depth about real problems. The other office was just depressing. I mean, it was literally kind of dark and bare. They seemed evasive about what day to day work was like -- something about "dashboards." No one seemed happy to be there. It was a satellite to the main office in New York. When I got the offers, the second job offered $25k more than the first job. I did a little bit of moral handwringing, but... you know, I was getting married the next week, we wanted to buy a house, and an extra $2k a month can make up for a LOT of shitty work environment. I took the second job, got a $5k raise each year, and haven't regretted my decision at all.

tuxidomasx 8y ago

I often hear or read about how there is a developer/software engineer shortage. And the rising salaries seem to reflect that-- supply and demand and all that... Yet it seems that there are hundreds of applicants vying for each position. How is this possible? Are there really that many lesser-skilled people trying to finagle their way in as software developers? Is the shortage one of _skilled_ engineers, while the deluge of applicants is a result of posers and imposters trying to get a slice of the pie?

torgian 8y ago

I’ve had many interviews such as “all day interviews” to ones that were only an hour or two at a time in America. The current position I’ve accepted is a German owned company that has a Japanese branch. Small company. Pay is low when compared to compensation I could get in America. BUT, the interview process was simple. Skype video call with a few people at the same time. Met two of the owners while vacationing in Japan. Got an offer and accepted it. Despite the low pay, I accepted it because it is completely remote. The work is fulfilling (right now my project involves data that can help farmers). I’m learning a lot of new stuff. It’s actually because of all three that I might stay long term. Remote, fulfilling work, and learning new things checked all the boxes despite the low pay. Stuff like that matters. Many companies don’t understand this.