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This answers a different, but important, question for the person doing the hiring: “how much do you value your time?” This is a step for the applicant to signa
by nr2x 5y ago
This answers a different, but important, question for the person doing the hiring: “how much do you value your time?”
This is a step for the applicant to signal “not much” way before salary gets discussed.
Which is why this type of screening is great for keeping down wages, but really not great for getting talent.
- antisthenes 5y agoCanonical's revenue per employee is only ~275k USD. Which means there's a pretty hard cap on talent compensation. I suppose this kind of "interview" like you said is a pretty heavy-handed way of filtering out candidates who are aiming for the top ends of compensation that they could get at MAANG firms.
- car_analogy 5y agoThat cap isn't so hard if you're willing to hire outside of California or the US.
- lucb1e 5y agoThat's revenue though, not profit. Subtract office rent or home office expenses, laptops and other hardware, server running costs, overhead like this hiring process / HR / legal / sales / ..., employee-specific overhead costs like health insurance (if I get $50k/y then a few % is subtracted for health insurance, but half of that % I never see and the employer has to add on top of the agreed-upon salary)... and maybe you want to keep a buffer for unforeseen events (having to do without your Ukrainian employees for a while, sick leave, new covid wave where anyone with a child is at like 50% capacity, etc.). I'm no businessman but this is just what I can think of that my employer has to take care of from a developer-level position myself. Even if in most countries the rate is less than half the USA's, without doing the actual math this sounds like quite a tight margin to be honest.
- nr2x 5y agoMaybe if they spent less time on requiring life essays from applicants and more on product they could afford to pay more.
- Closi 5y agoWell OPs point is that these essays save you time because you filter out applicants that aren’t serious. Anyone who has interviewed recently will know the amount of time wasted by organising interviews people don’t even turn up for, or show up and are completely winging it. This is designed to weed these people out, because it’s a way of demonstrating that the person applying actually wants the job and haven’t just sent their CV out to everyone who is hiring.
- freedomben 5y agoI don't disagree, but it's a band pass filter, rather than a low end filter. You are also weeding out the good engineers who recognize that you're asking them for a huge investment without any showing of good faith. I would honestly be shocked if the interviewers even read half of the answers they're asking.