3 ms·

The crux of the problem is that we've interviewed dozens of applicants and none of them have been able to pass the sniff test. We are setting the bar pretty low

• SkyBelow 7y ago
  >There just isn't a supply of good developers for companies that aren't FAANGs or unicorns. ...at the salary you are offering. I see many people hiring adjusting for cost of living but not adjusting for the place being less desirable to live. Also, given the reputation of FAANG and similar, working for them is viewed as something of a future investment. That is a benefit your company likely cannot offer. So even if everything else was on par with a FAANG in terms of pay, benefits, and working conditions, ideally you would have to pay a slight bit more to make up for the difference. Granted, the market is never that rationally acting in any individual case. Having seen numerous IT managers having trouble hiring, the most common shared issue is too little pay.
  • pault 7y ago
    No, that's why I said "before anyone says we're not paying enough...". There are team members making $2xxK/year here, and we're not in a coastal city. The problem we have is that almost every person that comes in here bombs out in the first five minutes of the interview.
    • winter_blue 7y ago
      Wow, $250k/year is quite high for Austin, Texas. It's shocking to realize that you can't find decent programmers even at that pay grade.
    • sokoloff 7y ago
      If that's a competitive salary for your area (you would know better than me, but that range in the middle of the country certainly seems competitive), then have a look at your recruiting sourcing funnel. If you're only sourcing the same 75% of active job seekers who are bombing most of their other interviews [thus leaving them available to come in and bomb yours as well], start advertising your positions elsewhere or trying to recruit passive job seekers/encourage employees to scour their own networks. If you don't change something, you're likely going to keep getting more of the same.
      • pault 7y ago
        You're correct. The problem is that the positions we have open are for front end developers, and for a variety of reasons (mostly that the scale of complexity on the front end has increased so rapidly that the industry still has a lot of people in it that were writing mostly HTML and CSS a few years back) the supply of competent developers is far lower than the demand, and anyone worth their salt is already happily employed. Highly skilled front end developers can basically write their own check these days, and if you manage to find one in the brief amount of time they're in-between jobs it's pure luck.
        • ikiris 7y ago
          ... so you're not paying enough to entice them. Which is what was said three posts up.
          • pault 7y ago
            Thanks. Unfortunately we can't afford to pay front end developers $300k/year. And what we are paying is more than competitive. It's not an issue of pay, it's an issue of availability and not having the resources to stalk and poach developers from other companies. We also have a generous internal referral bonus, and various recruiters sourcing candidates. Is there something else I'm missing? Edit: I don't think you are understanding what I'm saying. We are offering higher than average pay for a job with average requirements, and we haven't been able to find average candidates. And I'm well aware of average, upper, and lower bounds to salaries here.
• skinnymuch 7y ago
  How quickly do they answer that to get that so wrong? I freeze like crazy with interview questions. Even you just putting the question there, my brain froze and I couldn’t remember the word “action” for a couple of seconds.
  • pault 7y ago
    They usually answer confidently right away. It's one thing if you're nervous in interviews, it's another if someone asks you a novice-level question about your area of expertise and you give an answer that is objectively wrong.
    • rectaway 7y ago
      Judging by your posts in this thread, have you considered the problem might be that you (and many other companies) hire people based on their ability to answer theoretical questions (which also happens to be while under a lot of pressure), rather than their ability to code? I'd like to think there are plenty of candidates that have open source projects that showcase their coding skills, or that have made impressive side-projects.
      • pault 7y ago
        It's not really a theoretical question though. It's a very concrete example of the most common operation you would need to perform in a front end developer role. And none of the applicants we've seen have side projects or code on github. If you know of a method to ascertain someone's ability to code in a professional environment in a one hour interview, I'm all ears!
        • ikiris 7y ago
          Honestly you don't seem to be a well put together environment and it feels like you expect to hire experts in some random framework instead of good software engineers. I'm not surprised you're only getting code monkeys who have used your framework in passing or have done basic pixel dev applying that don't meet your bar.
• mywittyname 7y ago
  Javascript sucks. I work with lots of really, really good developers who struggle a bit with JS. Most of it is because they come from a totally different background, and the other part is Javascript in general just makes things difficult.
  • fiddlerwoaroof 7y ago
    This is just false: there are a bunch of sharp edges in JavaScript, but once you know them, the language itself is one of the more pleasant languages to use: this can be a bit of a problem, since the languages itself doesn’t force a particular structure on your code like Java or Haskell do, but on the other hand, JavaScript is an amazing language for experimenting with new programming paradigms and application architectures.
    • tene 7y ago
      What structure do you believe Haskell forces on your code? My experience with Haskell is that it's the most expressive and flexible environment for exploring different ways of structuring code that I've ever used. I've seen everything from extremely-imperative code carefully managing memory allocations and munging bits, to very abstract high-level libraries that declare abstract computations that can be interpreted or executed in a variety of ways. I'm very confused and surprised to see someone assert that Haskell forces a particular structure on your code.
      • pjscott 7y ago
        Haskell doesn't force anything, but it does make some pretty strong suggestions. Haskell suggests immutable data, pure functions, and algebraic thinking. You can make your data mutable, do everything in the `IO` or `State` monad, etc., because Haskell doesn't force structure on your code -- but the suggestion is still there, whispering in the back of your mind. (This is what I love about Haskell, BTW, so please don't read this as a criticism.)
        • fiddlerwoaroof 7y ago
• aianus 7y ago
  Could you not hire someone smart who doesn't already know react/redux and teach it to them? Or give them a couple of weeks to do some tutorials? I knew almost zero about web dev (I had been a decent C++/Java/Scala backend programmer) when I was hired to work in a web dev role -- I spent the first two weeks doing RoR tutorials on the internet and was just as productive as anyone else a couple of months after that.
  • oldandtired 7y ago
    This is usually not a consideration and has not really been there for decades. What many forget is that people who are speciallists in the area thay are recruiting for are not necessarily the best candidates for the actually position. Sometimes (many times) if you can get someone who is more of a generalist and is capable of diving in to gain the necessary skills is far more valuable. They are quite often the first to be discarded from the interview process. Many of the psoitions I have participated in required handling new tasks that were not within the broad scope of what the position was expected to handle. Yet, having the attitude of "let us see what is needed", meant that I was bale to be functionally more effective in that position, including being the "go to" person for those who needed problems to be solved that their normal IT groups would not handle. I have found too many "code guru's" to not be capable of thinking outside of the box whaen it is necessary. You don't have to be a "brilliant coder" but more of a person who can develop an understanding of the "problem space" of those having the problems that require solutions.
  • pault 7y ago
    This is what we've resigned ourselves to, but it's very expensive. We're building crud apps, not doing cutting edge research, so I assumed we would be able to find someone that is already up to speed on the language and frameworks. You also have to factor in the cost of senior developer time spent coaching, the lost productivity, and the code quality suffering in the meantime.
    • gowld 7y ago
      > We're building crud apps Perhaps you shouldn't be using complicated faddish framework then?
• gowld 7y ago
  > There just isn't a supply of good developers for companies that aren't FAANGs or unicorns. > interviewing for a react/redux position one of the first questions I ask is [very vendor-specific technology question] FAANGs don't hire people for "react/redux positions", they trust smart, conscientious people to learn it when needed. Maybe that's your problem. Maybe the good people aren't already "react/redux programmers".
• fiddlerwoaroof 7y ago
  This question is really tricky, though: depending on your frontend stack, the answer could be in an event handler prop (e.g. onClick). In mapDispatchToProps, in a thunk, in a saga, etc.
  • pault 7y ago
    Correct. Any one of those answers would be acceptable :) (except mapDispatchToProps, that will fire the API request every time an action is dispatched anywhere in your app). Also, the context of the question is very specifically "within redux", and all I'm looking for is an understanding that redux is synchronous by default and asynchronous logic has to be performed in a middleware. If your answer is "put it in literally the only place you aren't allowed to put it", you lose some credibility. Also, so many people in this thread are getting hung up on the fact that we're trying to find people that understand a very common framework that we use, and that the candidates claim to have professional experience with. I wouldn't expect a junior to understand the details of redux, but we need senior people that don't require a year of hand-holding to be productive. If I am hiring a plumber to fix my toilet, and they say they have three years of experience fixing toilets, and they don't know how a toilet works... am I at fault for having unrealistic expectations?
    • fiddlerwoaroof 7y ago
      I mean in the functions in the object returned by mapDispatchToProps, something like `onClick: v => fetchJson(‘/foo’).then(w => dispatch(fooAction(w))`
    • titusjohnson 7y ago
      Plumbers with 3 years of experience fixing toilets are usually still in their Apprenticeship programs. Around year 4 or 5 they'll graduate to Journeyman at which point they're authorized to work without the supervision of a more senior plumber. You hired a plumber to fix your toilet, but you have a waterless composting toilet and your plumber's knowledge is still at the level of "water and poo goes down the pipes". Your hiring woes will get easier to handle once you start treating the Competent Sr React+Redux Developer role as rare. React is certainly popular tech, but solid knowledge of the ecosystem is still far from common. All the places I've done react at had ~10 frontend capable devs, but only 1 or 2 people who really knew what was going on.