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> Number one for first two questions: hiring. Finding solid, dependable people with the right skills and attitude is really, really hard. I probably spend 30-40

> Number one for first two questions: hiring. Finding solid, dependable people with the right skills and attitude is really, really hard. I probably spend 30-40% of my time on the hiring side of things. We have so much work to do and not enough people to do it, and combining that with the slow rate of inbound high quality candidates means that I have to spend a ton of my time screening and talking to candidates. Spending 30-40% on hiring is a lot. How is the current compensation and what does your hiring pipeline looks like? Internships? One of the smartest decision I've ever seen was to simply raise initial offers by quite a bit. Suddenly the quality of applicants just jumped. > Number two problem relating to the above: diversity. It's nigh impossible to find women and other marginalized groups. They're in such high demand and the supply is so low that it's just so hard to hire people and have your team not look like a team of white dudes. I'm curious why does it matters? Shouldn't folks be hired on their abilities rather than some arbitrary reasons?

lifebeyondfife 5y ago
This is a great question. Diversity is the solution to groupthink. From the book Surrounded By Idiots, the author demonstrates that people with different backgrounds and behaviour models come together to make stronger teams. As engineers become more senior, they have a hand in design, in product etc. they bring something of themselves to their software solutions. Making software with only a team of white dudes means you miss the mark on issues important outside that group. Also, inclusion goes hand in hand with diversity. People from all ethnicities and not just cis males can code, but if your team is mainly white guys, you have to work twice as hard convincing others that they'll be welcome and fit right in otherwise it becomes a self perpetuating pattern. Also, "abilities" is subjective. If your exemplar for software engineer progression is a path that fits a majority white man route into the industry, and plays to the strengths of the people you promote, you'll over-index on those abilities. It's a good question to ask, what skills are we missing out on because our lack of diversity leads us to self selecting? For transparency, I'm a white cis male manager, who manages a team of almost exclusively white cis males. I'm working on some long term strategic projects to help foster diversity in engineering in my city.
- Jemaclus 5y ago
  Well said.
Jemaclus 5y ago
Someone else answered the second part so I'll just focus on the first part. The 30-40% might be a little hyperbole, but napkin math says it's not terribly far off. The reason I spend that much of my time on hiring is because we always have more work than we have engineers, and we have yet to fill our headcount quota. There's ALWAYS a position open. It just never ends. Fortunately, I like the process, so it's not a burden on me! Our comp isn't the most competitive in the SF Bay Area. It's competitive, but if you really want more money, there are other places to go. We're fine with that, generally. Our HQ is not in SF at all, and neither is our parent company, so there's some weirdness at the really high levels of the company about how much we should be offering people. In fact, there are some states that we hire in people make a KILLING. SF is not one of those. That said, we are competitive enough and I rarely get offers declined because of pay. Most folks don't even try to negotiate much, even though they should! [0] I actually have a great closing rate! In other words, when I make an offer, people accept! I'm very good at selling people on the team and the company! If you get to the stage where I make you an offer, I am generally pretty confident that you're going to accept and that you're going to be a great fit. But getting a candidate to that offer stage is fairly hard. My standards are a little different than most of my peers (a thesis on which I'm not sure I could elaborate coherently nor in the space allotted here on HN... maybe a future blog post), and so I suspect I spend less time actually interviewing than you might think. But "time on hiring" is not just the interviewing process. It's figuring out what the best process is, looking at our funnel and identifying bottlenecks, sourcing high quality candidates. Is our technical screen a good one? Does it evaluate what we think it does? Do our candidates that are rejected walk away feeling frustrated rather than challenged? Is it a fair and equitable hiring process? Is the interview panel a diverse cross-section of the company and representative of the types of folks the candidate would work with? Are we giving them adequate time to learn about us as well? I could go on... Then there's the looking at resumes. Most of my peers are almost exclusively looking for senior roles, whereas I'm usually willing to have more of a mix between senior/intermediate/new engineers. This willingness depends on the composition of the team, but I actually really enjoy converting interns into full-time employees (75% success rate on that so far!). But we get SO. MANY. APPLICANTS. for every single role, that for me and my recruiting team to go through them and figure out which ones are worth taking 30 minutes out of my day to talk to, that takes time and energy. And I feel bad about every single person that I decline to speak to, but I just have to manage my time more efficiently or else I'd be spending 100% of my time on this specific part of the hiring process. This part DOES take a lot of time, but truthfully, it's like 2-3 hours a week on any given week, and sometimes 4-5 hours on my worst weeks, and it's easily the worst part of the whole process. The actual interview process, for me, is about 30+15 minutes per candidate. I do a 30 minute phone screen at the start, and then I'm usually the one who makes the offer at the end, since I have one the best closing rates in the company. The actual interview process is not a huge time sink for me. In fact, the interview process is pretty streamlined and at this point is kind of a well-oiled machine. I average about 1.5 offers per month, and I'd say we interview 3-5 candidates before one of them gets an offer, so this isn't tremendously burdensome. Then there's the post-offer phase, where we need to coordinate with HR and recruiting to get the new hire onboarded, get them a laptop and some swag, make sure all of their credentials are set up, set up a welcome happy hour, and perhaps most importantly, make sure we have a well-defined project for them to start on day 1! There's nothing worse than starting on day 1 and twiddling your thumbs because nobody knows what you should be working on. It's the wooooorst. On average, my org has a new hire start every 2-3 weeks, so this isn't a trivial process, though it's far more streamlined than it was when I started. Then there's the follow-up, which falls outside the "hiring" definition, but my managers and I absolutely spend time with the new hires for their first week or two to make sure they get up to speed quickly and become productive quickly. Especially since our primary programming language is Go and most folks don't know Go, so there's a short training class that we do to get them onboarded quickly. So if you take the phrase "hiring" to mean only the interviewing process, then sure, 30% of my time seems like a lot. But when you add all the other stuff in, it's not really that bad. And in recent months, I've been training some of the managers to do it My Way (TM) and we're seeing some good results, so maybe it'll drop down to 15% soon! Ahh, a person can dream... Thanks for the questions and the suggestion! [0] https://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/ https://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/

lifebeyondfife 5y ago

This is a great question. Diversity is the solution to groupthink. From the book Surrounded By Idiots, the author demonstrates that people with different backgrounds and behaviour models come together to make stronger teams. As engineers become more senior, they have a hand in design, in product etc. they bring something of themselves to their software solutions. Making software with only a team of white dudes means you miss the mark on issues important outside that group. Also, inclusion goes hand in hand with diversity. People from all ethnicities and not just cis males can code, but if your team is mainly white guys, you have to work twice as hard convincing others that they'll be welcome and fit right in otherwise it becomes a self perpetuating pattern. Also, "abilities" is subjective. If your exemplar for software engineer progression is a path that fits a majority white man route into the industry, and plays to the strengths of the people you promote, you'll over-index on those abilities. It's a good question to ask, what skills are we missing out on because our lack of diversity leads us to self selecting? For transparency, I'm a white cis male manager, who manages a team of almost exclusively white cis males. I'm working on some long term strategic projects to help foster diversity in engineering in my city.

Jemaclus 5y ago
Well said.

Jemaclus 5y ago

Someone else answered the second part so I'll just focus on the first part. The 30-40% might be a little hyperbole, but napkin math says it's not terribly far off. The reason I spend that much of my time on hiring is because we always have more work than we have engineers, and we have yet to fill our headcount quota. There's ALWAYS a position open. It just never ends. Fortunately, I like the process, so it's not a burden on me! Our comp isn't the most competitive in the SF Bay Area. It's competitive, but if you really want more money, there are other places to go. We're fine with that, generally. Our HQ is not in SF at all, and neither is our parent company, so there's some weirdness at the really high levels of the company about how much we should be offering people. In fact, there are some states that we hire in people make a KILLING. SF is not one of those. That said, we are competitive enough and I rarely get offers declined because of pay. Most folks don't even try to negotiate much, even though they should! [0] I actually have a great closing rate! In other words, when I make an offer, people accept! I'm very good at selling people on the team and the company! If you get to the stage where I make you an offer, I am generally pretty confident that you're going to accept and that you're going to be a great fit. But getting a candidate to that offer stage is fairly hard. My standards are a little different than most of my peers (a thesis on which I'm not sure I could elaborate coherently nor in the space allotted here on HN... maybe a future blog post), and so I suspect I spend less time actually interviewing than you might think. But "time on hiring" is not just the interviewing process. It's figuring out what the best process is, looking at our funnel and identifying bottlenecks, sourcing high quality candidates. Is our technical screen a good one? Does it evaluate what we think it does? Do our candidates that are rejected walk away feeling frustrated rather than challenged? Is it a fair and equitable hiring process? Is the interview panel a diverse cross-section of the company and representative of the types of folks the candidate would work with? Are we giving them adequate time to learn about us as well? I could go on... Then there's the looking at resumes. Most of my peers are almost exclusively looking for senior roles, whereas I'm usually willing to have more of a mix between senior/intermediate/new engineers. This willingness depends on the composition of the team, but I actually really enjoy converting interns into full-time employees (75% success rate on that so far!). But we get SO. MANY. APPLICANTS. for every single role, that for me and my recruiting team to go through them and figure out which ones are worth taking 30 minutes out of my day to talk to, that takes time and energy. And I feel bad about every single person that I decline to speak to, but I just have to manage my time more efficiently or else I'd be spending 100% of my time on this specific part of the hiring process. This part DOES take a lot of time, but truthfully, it's like 2-3 hours a week on any given week, and sometimes 4-5 hours on my worst weeks, and it's easily the worst part of the whole process. The actual interview process, for me, is about 30+15 minutes per candidate. I do a 30 minute phone screen at the start, and then I'm usually the one who makes the offer at the end, since I have one the best closing rates in the company. The actual interview process is not a huge time sink for me. In fact, the interview process is pretty streamlined and at this point is kind of a well-oiled machine. I average about 1.5 offers per month, and I'd say we interview 3-5 candidates before one of them gets an offer, so this isn't tremendously burdensome. Then there's the post-offer phase, where we need to coordinate with HR and recruiting to get the new hire onboarded, get them a laptop and some swag, make sure all of their credentials are set up, set up a welcome happy hour, and perhaps most importantly, make sure we have a well-defined project for them to start on day 1! There's nothing worse than starting on day 1 and twiddling your thumbs because nobody knows what you should be working on. It's the wooooorst. On average, my org has a new hire start every 2-3 weeks, so this isn't a trivial process, though it's far more streamlined than it was when I started. Then there's the follow-up, which falls outside the "hiring" definition, but my managers and I absolutely spend time with the new hires for their first week or two to make sure they get up to speed quickly and become productive quickly. Especially since our primary programming language is Go and most folks don't know Go, so there's a short training class that we do to get them onboarded quickly. So if you take the phrase "hiring" to mean only the interviewing process, then sure, 30% of my time seems like a lot. But when you add all the other stuff in, it's not really that bad. And in recent months, I've been training some of the managers to do it My Way (TM) and we're seeing some good results, so maybe it'll drop down to 15% soon! Ahh, a person can dream... Thanks for the questions and the suggestion! [0] https://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/ https://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/