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Hiring Developers: How to avoid the best
- GeekFortyTwo 5y agoRecently changed jobs in tech, high demand skillset. I sent out exactly one copy of my resume to a company that I thought might be interesting to work for. Otherwise I just responded to LinkedIn recruiter requests. In the time it took that one company to get back to me at all, I had landed a job and was on week 2 of 3 weeks notice. Move fast matters.
- peakaboo 5y agoI think you missed the sarcasm (or I'm reading something into that article that doesn't exist).
- jlund-molfese 5y agoI don’t think so, parent is providing an anecdote which supports the article’s first section
- MattGaiser 5y agoRecruiters/referrals seem to have a much faster process than cold resume drops.
- georgeecollins 5y agoIncentives matter. Recruiters get paid when someone accepts an offer and referrals often get a bonus at the same time. Many other people in the process get paid for every hour they spend in interviews, or going through resumes, or attending job fairs..
- gravypod 5y agoAt my last job I applied via Work at a Startup and.... Never heard back. I went to work for another company and when I was done there the CEO posted on bookface for me. A high up employee at the startup I applied to saw the post and forwarded me to the recruiter. I got a blind call (the person doing recruiting was so out of touch with how devs like contact) and he was amazed I knew a bunch about the company. I then explained I applied a year ago! My resume at the time wasn't as impressive but I was obviously more than qualified for the role and they were unable to fill the role for a year.
- MattGaiser 5y agoI would be interested to know the stats on percent of resumes even opened.
- hirako2000 5y agoThing is many companies post job ads that aren't actually available. It's a way to promote their supposed growth to clients, wanna be buyers. Quite often it is just regulatory as promoting internally requires them to open up the role to external candidates. Correct a good portion of CVs are never looked at.
- bartread 5y agoI'd imagine it varies a lot by company. I, or somebody else on our team, look at every single CV/resume that comes in, regardless of whether or not the HR team have looked at them. We also aim to respond to every single applicant (i.e., beyond the initial automated acknowledgement), even if it's a straight no thanks. Every now and again somebody will slip through the net, but that's a mistake rather than the norm. Lots of companies don't do either of those things. In their defense they probably get a lot more applicants for their roles, which makes it harder to keep on top of. Still, with half-decent modern ATSs it's generally pretty easy to quickly review and either reject or progress applicants, so it is infuriating if you apply for a job and just hear... nothing. Another thing we do that a lot of companies don't is give feedback for applicants we've interviewed who haven't been successful. You know, sometimes it's the case that someone was decent and there wasn't anything specifically wrong, it's just that we spoke to someone else with more experience, or more relevant experience, so they didn't get the job, but we do try to give (hopefully) helpful feedback to rejected applicants as often as we can. Occasionally that bites us in the ass because somebody will argue with the feedback, but not often enough that I'd want to stop doing it. The point I always try to remind people of is that they're never interviewing in a vacuum: we always have a cohort of applicants to consider so, whilst you might disagree with us that X is where you fell down in the interview, we're seeing that in the context of talking to half a dozen others about X, and how they performed, as well.
- fossuser 5y ago
- throwaway6734 5y agoIf you don't mind, what's the high demand skillset?
- justin_oaks 5y agoDuring my last job search, I applied to about 15 jobs, heard back from 5, interviewed with 3, took the job from 1. One of the other employers who interviewed me had not contacted me for a couple months. Then, out of the blue, they contacted me again asking if I'd like to continue the interview process. Unsurprisingly, I turned them down. I was already a few weeks into my new job. The long delay gave me a bad impression too.
- roland35 5y agoI had a lot of this last time I was looking for a new job! I applied to about 15 as well, heard back from a few quick no's but had only one interview which led to an offer. Literally months later I then received about 6 interview requests! It blew my mind how so many companies were months behind.
- disgruntledphd2 5y agoEbay (used to be) really, really bad for this. Over the course of 2-3 years I changed jobs twice. On all occasions, a recruiter from Ebay reached out a month or two after I'd started my new job to ask me if I wanted to interview there.
- teeray 5y agoRemember too that reminding companies that they’re in a competitive environment can be effective. Telling them when you’re in an offer stage with another company often makes them hit the gas.
- aqme28 5y agoNote: You don't actually have to have a competing offer . You can just tell them or imply that you do.
- the_only_law 5y agoThis happens to me all the time. In addition. Interviewing for multiple roles at once. I’ll get an offer, but am also awaiting a response from another company. Maybe I’ll get it, maybe I’ll get ghosted. In theory, the internet tells me I can use it for leverage, but more often the offer responses will almost never line up and I’ll have to take what I get first, or reject the offer m, betting on something else that may be coming.
- peakaboo 5y agoI love this article because it describes everything that is wrong with recruiting today. The quote from the matrix is suitable to all these recruiters... "how about I give you the finger..."
- wrnr 5y agoTrue people tread you like shit but this is just outrage porn for people that enjoy feeling sorry for themselves.
- ranguski 5y agoYep,this is a Apex guide to get the best developers away from your company, much recommended. Don't forget to make them fill the job form again after they already provided that info on resume and shared their linked in profile.
- Aromasin 5y agoThere's nothing quite like spending days fine tuning a CV to make it as information rich and digestible to read as possible, only to then have to spend hours filling out the companies own shitty application form so they can search for useless tech buzzwords and lose all of the context that a good CV can have.
- zerocount 5y agoYep, this really makes me mad. 10 years of job history plus 3 references and I have to go searching for addresses for all the jobs and dig through my phone for people's phone numbers. And then I never hear from them...
- makecheck 5y agoPlus, since they never tell you why you weren’t selected anyway, for all you know there are problems in their recopied version (which is probably all they read). Would you even know if they just failed to store half your work history in their database?
- MattGaiser 5y agoThis is when I paste the job description below the text resume.
- cebert 5y agoI feel like there’s a lot of room for improvement in the hiring process. Does hiring people who have the luxury or lack of life to grind LeetCode problems several hours every day for weeks or months really get you the best candidates? In what other industries are the bars so high. Take a chance on folks and don’t be afraid to part ways if it doesn’t work out.
- likeabbas 5y agoOnce you grind once or twice, the next times you practice it comes back quicker. The first time I interviewed it took me 3 months of daily morning prep and one weekend day of studying. This time, it took me one month of only a few days a week practicing to get back into it. Granted I’m single and young and Hopefully will never have kids.
- Aeolun 5y ago> This time, it took me one month of only a few days a week practicing Are you joking? I’m married with kids, and I’ll be lucky if I have a few hours of the week to myself. I don’t mind that, but beyond my unwillingness to grind leetcode in general, I wouldn’t have any time to so effectively. The selection bias for young, smart, single unattached people is incredible. Of course, that’s exactly the kind of people that’ll happily stay and work overtime too, so I can see why a company would like the idea of that.
- likeabbas 5y agoI mean, if you don’t have time to look for another job then don’t. If you need another job then you need find time to make yourself hire-able. There are plenty of jobs that don’t require leet code but if you want the cushy FAANG jobs, then you need to put in the effort. If That means spending less time with your kids and hiring a nanny, then do it.
- heartbreak 5y ago> If that means spending less time with your kids and hiring a nanny For their sake, please don't. It's not worth it.
- junon 5y agoNot just demand passion, but demand anything other than work. Any sort of positive virtue is a side effect and must be earned. Had a company recently tell me one of their principles was Loyalty, and to "remember loyalty when putting the ink on the paper". This was their attempt at solving early-stage developer burnout. I didn't sign.
- nowherebeen 5y agoAnytime a founder/startup mentions the words "family" or "loyalty", its a big red flag. Always run away from these companies that demand you be subservient just to be employed.
- Mc91 5y ago> have a slow hiring process I was reading advice about job hunting recently, and one person said interview at large companies first, that take a while to hire and have offers that stay good for some days or weeks - then interview at smaller companies, where turnaround can be quicker. This makes sense to me. I've also been asked by HR when interviewing where I am in terms of the process with other companies, and some mention to contact them if that process changes (e.g. if I get an offer).
- mytailorisrich 5y ago> I've also been asked by HR when interviewing where I am in terms of the process with other companies One piece of advice about this sort of question: The truth is irrelevant, answer what you think will serve your interests best.
- notapenny 5y agoAnd use it to ask questions about their process. It helps to know upfront if they're slow, you can use it to either try to slow down anything else you've got, or cut them loose when you need to.
- q-big 5y ago> The better the developer the quicker they’ll find a job. In my experience rather: The better the developer is at self-promotion, the quicker they’ll find a job.
- mytailorisrich 5y agoLooking for a job is a sales task. It is all about self-promotion. It does not come naturally for many dev./engineer types (and I'm one of them) but that's the mindset to adopt.
- sanitycheck 5y agoI know this is meant to be a joke, but I actually do think that from the perspective of an 'ordinary' company it's better to have 'ordinary' developers. They might stay for 5, even 10 years. If you manage to get excellent people they'll realise their mistake and be gone within 18 months along with your onboarding investment and everything they've learned.
- billytetrud 5y agoYou don't have to intentionally search for mediocre devs. They're everywhere. Good devs will probably not even apply to your mediocre company. But if one does actually want to work for it, you damn well better let them. Better to spend your time figuring out how to make your company better than how to keep food devs from "making the mistake" of working for you.
- sanitycheck 5y agoYou're right, you don't have to intentionally search for them. But you can be honest with candidates at the interview stage, rather than promising an amazing work environment, cutting edge tech and fascinating world changing projects - ensuring disappointment when first task is to migrate a CRUD app to a newer version of PHP. Also a reasonable strategy for dating, I suppose.
- buitreVirtual 5y agoMakes sense, assuming that the crappy company does want to be better. Most of them are not serious about it though.
- georgeecollins 5y agoEvery place I have ever worked has had some developers who were not amazing. The problem is places that insist that everyone they hire is a superstar, that's usually a drink the koolaid situation.
- jinksi 5y agoHow do you know if you’re a good dev or a mediocre dev?
- shantnutiwari 5y agoHere in the UK, everyone hates agents. Yet when I was applying for my last job, I made 2 dozen applications direct. Got 3 replies, about 2-3 months late. And for all 3, got a standard rejection. Sad but true: We need recruitment agents, as companies will never do anything until someone is breathing down their neck over the phone. Those companies that never replied? One year later, they are still running Linkedin ads promoting open positions.
- axelroze 5y agoIt could be the case that they 'hire' someone internally from role A to the advertised role B. But due to some legal requirements they have to run an Ad so they appear open to all candidates. I had pretty good experience with recruiting agents. Sadly didn't get the job as I flunked the leetcoding part but I got an interview compared to rejection when I applied via forms and CV.
- cadence- 5y agoThe usual process to hire engineering managers is even worse. Most of the questions are of the “open” type where you can easily fail them even if you answer correctly according to your own experience. It feels so random. You never know what kind of detail is important to the hiring manager.
- exdsq 5y agoRecently applied for two jobs - a startup as employee #11 and a growing startup (ChainLink). The startup moved fast with an initial chat, tech test, and follow-up tech interview taking four days in total. ChainLink, who offered more money, was on interview stage 3/8 by the time I had an offer from the startup. I just didn't have time to complete three more 1-hour tech interviews, a project management interview, and then an HR interview. Ended up stopping the process even even though they said they were keen.
- mtnGoat 5y agoCall me crazy but I always focus more on the individual and asking them personal questions more than delving into silly leetcode they learned for the sake of gaming a system and will soon forget. My company works with a bunch of not so mainstream APIs so if I just waited for experts in everything we work on, I’d wait forever. I’d rather hire good, smart, people and then fill in the gaps in their knowledge. Smart, hardworking dedicated employees are much harder to find than leetcoders. And they learn really quickly with a lot less attitude and grandiose opinions of themselves.
- StephenJGL 5y agoI want to talk about code just enough to know you can talk about it. Then, I"m trying to find out if you're curious, knowledge seeking, and refining your craft. I expect everyone I hire to get better over time and on long timespans measured in multiple years these other skills win out over point in time knowledge. Unfortunately, really identifying curiosity and growth mindsets is also hard.
- mycall 5y agoYou would think there has been research done in identifying curiosity and growth minds. Anyone? I think having a talk during lunch could answer this.
- mewpmewp2 5y agoThe whole leetcode thing is atrocious. People practicing months to leetcode instead of working on actual projects. People who do actual work will fail the interviews.
- bennyelv 5y agoWhat about the people who don't do actual work, but have a decent CV and a good story about how they do? Have you ever experienced what it's like to try and hire decent developers or are you only offering the candidates' point of view? In my experience more than 50% of the applicants who make through to an interview are the kind I describe in that first sentence.
- irateswami 5y agoOr here's my favorite: let someone go through the entire interview process at subcompany (Shipt) only to have your former, embittered, manager (Fuck you, Dave) at the parent company (Target) torpedo your offer. Don't work for Minnesota companies, kids. Optum, CHR, Target, etc, they all suck with shite culture, bad pay, and poor career prospects.
- halfmatthalfcat 5y agoGlad you named and shamed. Should be more of that around here. Too many toxic environments fly under the radar because people aren’t willing to speak up.
- nine_zeros 5y ago+1 to this. Name and shame. The onus is on the companies to fire their management, not on engineers to navigate whatever bureaucracy they put in place.
- devwastaken 5y agoTarget hires the cheapest bidders for their IT work. I stopped ever doing service for them because they'd send techs on site with little to no docs, and with hours of wait time to resolve basic issues on the phone. The inefficiency of that company is baffling.
- eddof13 5y agoI used to hate leetcode, and I've never done the grind, refusing to do so, so just a maybe 20-30 of them in total in my life to get an idea of it. I'm okay with not getting through hard leetcodes in competitive positions. However, recently when I put myself on the market I found many companies are now doing take-home tests. I find I hate them even more, so I appreciate leetcode interviews now. I think take homes are too asynchronous and the last thing I want to do is waste my nights and weekends working on them. I've refused to do the last 4-5 I have been offered after agreeing to do a couple and then dropping out instead. Ultimately I went with companies that didn't do tech screens beyond a simple code pairing session.
- courtf 5y agoI like the take home tests myself. Whiteboarding and brain teasers are not outside my experience (I did mathletics stuff as a child) but doing them out loud in front of a hostile audience is not a strength of mine. The best work I have done has been largely composed of private problem solving, syncing up with peers only once I was sure I knew the topology of the problem and perhaps had run a few experiments. It doesn't really take long to get to the point where talking about a problem with others can be helpful, less than a day most times, but starting off a new problem with verbal spitballing with peers has not been all that useful in my work. For me to really learn something I need to hold it in my hands/code editor and get to know the ins and outs, build up intuition so that I can speak about it accurately. Jumping into unknown problems in an interview by standing up at a whiteboard talking just seems like putting the cart before the horse to me. Maybe the interviewer wants to see my "thought process," whatever that means, but what does it really matter if I can get to a good solution without vocalizing every step along the way? I often go down the wrong paths when problem solving, if only to traverse them for my own edification. If I can make 10 mistakes or false starts in a row and still arrive at a decent solution as quickly as anyone else, what does it matter in the end? I also tend to write code out of order. I might jump around between concepts and write disparate sections of a solution without linking them back right away, following my intuition without trying to enforce order on everything I do. No one has ever complained about my speed or code cleanliness/clarity, quite the opposite in fact. Yet when I am put under the microscope, these behaviors inevitably stand out to the interviewer as cause for concern. Despite a strong track record of building numerous successful systems and apps, many solving "serious" problems that go beyond what can be assessed in an interview, on tiny teams where I shouldered large amounts responsibility, if I can't present my thoughts in a coherent, structured way, in the moment I am thinking them, I am bound to catch flak from the interviewer. So I often feel I must alter my behavior, go slower and try to only display ordered thinking, but this does not play to my strengths. Frustration and stage fright further degrade my performance. So the take home test is much appreciated for people like me. I am happy to be left to my own devices when starting a problem, and happy to talk with peers once I have gotten myself oriented, but the initial process I use does not lend itself well to interrogation.
- justinlloyd 5y agoJust recently switched jobs. Starting week two today. I applied for only one job at the insistence of my wife because it was with a renowned company. I had to actually write out a C.V. to apply, and as of Friday, a week into my new job, seven weeks later, my application is "still under review" according to the internal recruiter/manager. I had a lot of technical recruiters reach out to me, almost all of them failed to garner my interest based on a few simple questions I asked right up front. Before interview I prequalified all of the positions to ensure that it involved remote work and that the pay was within a range I was willing to accept. "Is this position remote? Or on-site? What is the pay range for this position?" A large proportion of the people who reached out did not respond to the questions, and of those that did, several gave responses that were immediate red flags. I interviewed with a FANG, on the recommendation of a friend, and I ultimately turned down the offer, but had it not been for my friend's insistence who works at the FANG, to "keep going" through the interview, I would have simply stopped the interview, and in fact thought about doing so several times. Whiteboarding and take-homes for people with decades of proven and verifiable experience and a couple of master's in computer subjects is still apparently a thing. I had an interview lined up with another FANG, which was to be a full day of "first round interviews" and then two full days with different teams to figure out where I would go. I withdrew my application once I accepted the offer for my current (new) position. It was not a company I was interestd in, but they were doing interesting things in augmented reality. I put in my two weeks notice, and the company I was working for made a counter-offer, almost two hours after my last day on the job. In all I had five offers on the table, at base compensation of $100K (absolutely absurd interview with a low-ball offer even after pre-qualifying), $120K (reasonable interview, low-ball offer even after pre-qualifying), $150K (45 minute interview, knew the size of the offer going in, interesting work), $230K (a quick chat, then four hours of shooting the shit, exceptionally interesting work) and $260K (two full days, whiteboarding and take home (which I refused to do), career advancement). My current position I didn't even apply for, and I don't think anyone even looked at the C.V. I got the job because of an old colleague who said "are you looking?" Total search time was from late June to mid-August. Maybe eight weeks total. I was being extremely picky with regard which companies I talked too.
- the_only_law 5y ago
- rurban 5y agoObnboarding the best developers would need 1-2 days, not 6 months. If it's 6 months the company is not worth it.
- nnevod 5y agoFrom a perspective of one once desperate for a job, the take-home test resonates the most. Market and approach to finding a job in IT sector seems to be somewhat different in Russia compared to US, even regarding remote work for non-resident employers, so don't be surprised if something would seem atypical. I'll omit most of the stuff that's not too relevant. I put an CV on a job site, had few calls, but they were clearly not what I did want. Over the course of about 5 months, I've applied for 3 positions that I could be applicable to - I've never had any experience with web - and that were remote. On all three I've done take-home tests. The last one took about one week, most of that just thinking, with maybe two evenings of actual coding. They accepted me, and strangely, told me do make a web app, despite no mentions of that in the job description. Luckily, half a year later, I've been offered an non-web, "mainline" position in team. The one before that didn't go as well. Due to misunderstanging, I've implemented a much more complex solution, and did a mistake in the implementation. Though it was indeed faster than expected solution, after fixing errors. The first one is what burned me. There were two tests, one done in two hours, and another one was "serious". It used some clearly real data - I had to download it from some US buerau, took a month of 3-4 hours of coding everyday for POC implementation, and not much less than that for a more formalised one, where rule set for matching data entries had to be indexed by 4-D array (not sure if I'm correctly using terminology). I haven't got answer for either version, and only got one a week after an reminding email, when I've asked for some clarification. They've told me they decided to drop the vacancy and not hire someone. Still I don't know whether they just wanted someone to do a task for free, or that it had to be done in a fundamentally different way. Given that what I'm currently doing isn't market relevant, most likely I won't be any less desperate when looking for a next job.
- xupybd 5y agoIt sounds like someone tricked you into working for free. I'm sorry that happened.
- shoulderfake 5y agoI'm glad there are so many posts like this these days which highlight the ridiculous de-facto process companies use to hire engineers. I've been on both sides of the interviewing process and the lesson is that startups that avoid using this process will gain an advantage on the ones that continue to. Really quality people are HARD to find. If you send people a pop quiz about probabilities and then some random brain teaser puzzle algo to solve in 30 mins you're gonna lose eventually because your competitors will have the actual quality people.
- pmkiwi 5y agoRecently applied to a DevOps Engineer position and after multiple interviews (took ages to plan them...), I finally reached the take-home challenge stage. I have been tasked to work on something absolutely not related to the job, with a framework I have never heard of, and which has never been evoked during the interviews... what a trap! I obviously failed miserably and they did not even follow up on the challenge even if they said they will... nice! It is not healthy to set up the candidates to fail - at especially such a late stage - because you just waste everyone's time (especially your own employees'!). I do understand that the companies are trying to protect themselves against false positives, but it sometimes reaches some ridiculous proportions! Since then, I have something else so happy end (at least for me because they still haven't filled their position...).
- cloudedcordial 5y agoI'd like to add "working in antiquated/propriety languages and infrastructure" in the list. As a new grad desperate for getting paid, I took a job working for a software built on a language no one uses outside of the company. Never got a promotion. Everyone was 10+ veteran. The processes was bureaucratic and inefficient but everyone was ok with it. After realizing I was paid 60% of market rate, I wanted to get out but it was hard. I thought about software architecture built when I was born. I was out-of-touch about new trends. LeetCode-like questions were my saviour because it's a way to break into the job interview process. Getting a new job away from antiquated tech was one of my best day in my career!