46 ms·

Ask HN: Having trouble getting senior applicants, wondering what to do about it

• colinsane 4y ago
  > Benefits and salary are good (though salary isn't posted in the ad) if the salary is actually good, then you should be showing that off in your job listing in the same way you show off your other benefits.
• strzibny 4y ago
  I don't do take-home assignments, sorry not sorry. And yes, I can get hired without it. Happened in last 3 positions.
• danamit 4y ago
  > Take-home technical assignment (~4h) or similar at candidate's choosing This one should be paid, I would ignore this one if I am going thru other applications, if the salary is good I'd mention it before bringing up any 4-hours technical assignment.
• GiorgioG 4y ago
  DevOps folks are in high demand because everybody and their mother is on the k8s/complex deployment train. My last boss told me it was harder (and cost more) to hire DevOps folks than software engineers.
• bryanrasmussen 4y ago
  anyway, it seems it takes 5 steps to get to the offer. I am reminded of a thing I had an Accenture a couple years ago where they kept passing me along to people and the last one came with an offer and it was too late, I had just taken another offer. I would try a 3 step process.
• pryelluw 4y ago
  Whats the salary range? Whats the bonus / stock structure? Whats the product? Honestly, the process you list only works if you pay well and have great benefits.
• chx 4y ago
  This alas will be buried -- pity. Read https://www.honeycomb.io/blog/observations-on-the-enterprise-of-hiring/ https://www.honeycomb.io/blog/observations-on-the-enterprise...
• synaesthesisx 4y ago
  I'm going to be blunt here - there is a genuine shortage of good senior candidates right now. I would nix the take-home assignment, or drastically minimize the size, and ensure salaries align with, or are above the current market rate.
• b20000 4y ago
  what is this? it's the second time I see a post like this. It's really simple - senior people don't want to deal with your 8 step recruiting process or your leetcode challenges. they've been around for many years. just get on with it and hire them, then if they don't do a good job, fire them. you are not in europe, so firing is cheap.
• kojeovo 4y ago
  It's likely the take home assignment. At this point in my career I'm not doing one. Maybe if you pay me. Who determined that the technical assignment takes ~4hr in the first place? If a company tells me it'll take 4 hours I take that with a grain of salt.
• lcrmorin 4y ago
  > (though salary isn't posted in the ad) Might be the problem ... > the work being a higher percentage non-code is what's causing us trouble Might be another problem... are you recruiting a PM or a Software Eng ? > - Take-home technical assignment (~4h) or similar at candidate's choosing I've personnaly stopped doing those. Either they are very far off the job either too revealing. And generally taking way too much time.
• gauchoplugins 4y ago
  Make the 4h assignment paid $100-$200, as a token of appreciation and respect. Everyone's time is money. Furthermore, that assignment should ideally be something you can use internally.
• Jugurtha 4y ago
  What are the vertices and edges of your hiring graph? What are the conversions like for each edge? Candidate finds out about you ---> Candidate Contacts you ---> Step 0 ---> Step 1... If there are not many viewing your offers, you may want to consider your channels. If you have views but not applications, you may want to consider your copywriting. If you're getting applications but they're not following through, contact them and ask why. If you sent offers they did not accept, ask for more info on why they didn't accept. Make a graph for transitions from each step to the other. Look at the percentages and numbers. Look for dropouts, etc. View it like a conversion funnel, or more accurately a graph.
• arpyzo 4y ago
  Are you hiring a DevOps engineer, or a software engineer? While there's overlap, these are fundamentally different things. Focus your job description on either: 1. A software engineer who can (and is willing) to do some DevOps work. 2. A DevOps engineer who can (and is willing ) do some software development.
  • throw1138 4y ago
    Definitely #1, and the ad is fairly up-front with that.
    • tootie 4y ago
      I've been having the same problem. It's actually a lot to ask of someone to be a solid coder but also willing to do on-call support. The direction we're looking is to replace "DevOps" with "Platform Engineering" and retain an MSP to do on-call tier 1 and 2 support.
    • nitrixion 4y ago
      To echo what a few other comments have said, seeing "DevOps" as part of the responsibilities for a role is an immediate turn off to me. I want nothing to do with DevOps. It isn't interesting work (to me) and there are currently a lot of opportunities to do interesting work. DevOps also isn't challenging work (to me), it is simply frustrating work because I do not want to learn it, I just want to complete my dev task and move on to the next.
• gigatexal 4y ago
  “Benefits and salary are good” is subjective. Can you provide examples so we can verify? What’s your hiring process like? What’s your company rep like? How are the interviews ram? Any steps taken to help interviewees feel comfortable? Etc etc
  • lotsofpulp 4y ago
    Unless the employer has a reputation of providing above average compensation, anytime at least a pay range and description of benefits is not provided, it is safe to assume they are not competitive (for above average people).
    • gigatexal 4y ago
      Which is why I am stoked Microsoft is going to disclose salary ranges for their roles.
• silisili 4y ago
  As someone who used to do devops but now SWE - Do you have a link or contact? I've been considering something new but being picky, but in the worst case I can give you my honest feedback.
• aristofun 4y ago
  Care to share something specific to get specific feedback? What’s the point asking generic questions, i just don’t get it. Whatever the answers — chances they are helpful for you is near zero.
• toomuchtodo 4y ago
  Is the comp enough to make on call tolerable? If one can make $150k-$250k without being on call, why would they take a DevOps position as a SWE?
  • throw1138 4y ago
    There is no on-call. Like I say, it's not a DevOps position, but an SWE position requiring more significant knowledge (not administration) of the underlying platform than is typical.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
• hunglee2 4y ago
  we need to have better diagnostics here - what is your candidate acquisition strategy? - what is your assessment strategy? - what are the conversion ratio's in the assessment stages? - what do the candidates themselves say if / when they say no? I don't mean my comment as admonishment, so if you can reply with above, I will try to help
• ikiris 4y ago
  Sounds like your version of good, and the market of candidate's version of good, do not align.
• Bishop_ 4y ago
  DevOps isn't exactly an ancient field. I know you said you're already junior heavy but even if building someone up takes you six months you're going to likely be better off in the meantime than trying to find someone able to produce the value you need from day one. My employer is also having trouble attracting senior frontend devs right now and our take seems to be that there's a lot of competition for good candidates, that's unlikely to change in the short term. EDIT: Not to doom, but times are changing, might be worth evaluating if you really do NEED a senior. A lot of the way people look at used cars, and housing, (and gas prices), and remote work has changed in the past few years. Maybe easily acquiring senior devs is something that is also changing.
• basilecom 4y ago
  Sounds like the pay is too low.
• potamic 4y ago
  Good, experienced people would usually have built a decent network for themselves over their career. As seniority grows, you will find them less and less applying for new jobs, and more and more relying on their networks for new work. And if they are good, they very likely are sitting on open offers from well known ex-colleagues that they could take up at anytime. You will do much better to tap in through your own networks, find suitable candidates and reach out to them directly to get them interested.
  • AndyNemmity 4y ago
    This is a great point. I cannot imagine doing a real interview at this point. I decided to do one the last time I was job hunting just to see what the world has to offer. I was interviewed for a position, and was clearly perfect, but I couldn't get that across to more than half of the people interviewing me. I had some people in my corner, but others were concerned I wasn't technical enough which is hilarious. Why would I subject myself to that? I can get a job in a heartbeat from anyone who has ever worked with me in the past. It's a demeaning and dumb process interviewing with people you don't know, when you interview people who know you, they just pitch you on why you should join them. They don't even ask me questions, because they know I am going to be one of if not the top contributor. They've seen it, they don't have to guess on if I happen to forget syntax on a sql command because I am not focused on sql at the moment.
    • JumpCrisscross 4y ago
      > cannot imagine doing a real interview at this point Eh, if someone refers me for a job they may need others’ buy in. The take-home technical assignment, on the other hand, would be a show stopper. That’s consulting. I charge for that.
      • AndyNemmity 4y ago
        Sure, I've had to have a phone conversation for additional buy in, but it hasn't critically changed the matter. Although by "real interview", I was indicating interviewing with people I didn't work with in the past. I wasn't referring to additional phone conversations for buy in.
• AndyNemmity 4y ago
  We've been unsuccessful finding senior roles lately. The job is slightly underpaid, but the technologies, team, and everything else are amazing. It's difficult to communicate that in a job rec. I'd never leave for a much more higher paying role because the weight of being on a team of real experts working on real challenges far outweighs additional money. Just the way it goes out here. For the same reasons you wouldn't be able to hire me, other people won't be hired for less than what they want. Edit: The "slightly underpaid" comment is getting all the attention, so I'm just going to make it literal. 200k before considering stocks, and other benefits, remote US. That's what I consider slightly underpaid. It's not a euphemism for "massively underpaid"
  • JumpCrisscross 4y ago
    > job is slightly underpaid, but the technologies, team, and everything else are amazing I would be sceptical of someone describing themselves as senior who falls for this. Pay them properly. If you can’t afford cash, make it up in stock and responsibility and flexibility and be open that you’re proposing that tradeoff from the start. You’ll filter out everyone with a mortgage or kids close to college or a lifestyle they love, but that’s better than hoping someone falls for the schtick Silicon Valley regularly foist on twenty somethings. (I would also be sceptical of someone describing themselves as senior responding to job postings versus being recruited, but that may be more bias than truth.)
    • AndyNemmity 4y ago
      I mean, it's entirely reasonable if those are your objectives. I don't decide pay, so I have no say in those details. I do agree that you don't find seniors by job postings very often, but we have had success with it provided the job posting is narrow on a technology that is specialized, so you know the candidates in a way. They come from a company you've worked with, or interacted with on some vertical.
    • GiorgioG 4y ago
      > I would be skeptical of someone describing themselves as senior who falls for this. Pay them properly. 100%. Seniors are likely to have families, kids, etc. I'm not leaving a job for "dream tech, or dream team" if I'm taking a step down, or for a lateral compensation move. Given the current economic/inflationary environment "slightly underpaying" is massively underpaying them.
• dijit 4y ago
  I'm willing to go through the process and give you direct feedback. I'm a Senior "DevOps" (Sysadmin), resume is here: dijit.sh/resume.pdf Sounds conceited; but if you want to know how an outsider feels about your companies and the process: this can be an effective way.
  • MrDresden 4y ago
    Think you might want to know that there is a flaw in your page navigation. Under 'About me', clicking 'View portfolio' goes to 'Contact me' section. Nice page otherwise.
• corrral 4y ago
  > Take-home technical assignment (~4h) or similar at candidate's choosing If I can get a similarly-paying job at a place that doesn't do this, I'll skip you. Many seniors (actual seniors, not 3-years-of-experience seniors) have a network and can say "hey I'm looking" and instantly have multiple options that won't have them do more than talk to the team and manager for an hour or two. If that.
  • websap 4y ago
    Nice! More gatekeeping in the tech world. "actual seniors" vs "seniors"
  • Fire-Dragon-DoL 4y ago
    I have kids and I can find 4 hours for an assignment. It's painful but for the right company, I'd do it (I did and I'm glad). However, if I don't find the ballpark of the salary on Glassdoor, which is information you DON'T control (this is an hint at showing the salary), I won't even consider your company. What's worse than wasting 4 hours and then seeing an offer that's lower than your current pay?
  • AndyNemmity 4y ago
    Lol, take home technical assignment. Why would I ever? I'd much rather have a comfortable conversation with someone who has worked with me in the past. I'm never, ever doing a 4 hour assignment for you.
    • Redsquare 4y ago
      Agree, I will laugh at you asking me to do anything at home before we have a contract
      • madeofpalk 4y ago
        Like... interview?
    • corrral 4y ago
      I think "senior" has at least two types. There's the FAANG-alum seniors who are used to and will put up with full-day or even multi-day interviews full of leetcode shit or "gotcha" edge-case quizzes about language features you trained yourself to avoid a decade ago or take-home assignments ("4 hours" sure except the other candidate put in 12 hours and lied about it, so...) for that sweet, sweet crazy-high comp. Unless you're offering these sorts a CTO position, they're not applying to your non-FAANG-tier-comp-and-security-and-presige company. Period. Then there's senior in most of the rest of the industry. We don't do long, annoying interviews. If your process drags on we've already accepted one of our other offers. We don't make FAANG money (mostly) but we also don't put up with horseshit. You want me, or not? If not, 100 other companies do, so bye and have a nice day.
• Traubenfuchs 4y ago
  Maybe pay significantly above your competition and loudly communicate that you do? When does the mental detachement happens where people reaponsible for hiring stop understanding this? Why the headscratching? It‘s dead simple. Just make offers people can‘t refuse.
• mattbee 4y ago
  Nobody can help unless you show us your actual ads, your company site etc. There could me a million little signals that are putting people off. You've also not said what your pipeline looks like - is there nobody coming in at the top? Or are the "great people" not as great as you think? Or the "really deep knowledge of the platform" is in fact less reasonable or badly paid than you think? If you're stuck, find a good recruiter and pay them properly. They can end-run around whatever the problem is, at least temporarily and give you informed, discreet feedback on how to fix it.
  • throw1138 4y ago
    This is a throwaway because I'm just an engineer on the team wondering if there's something obvious we're doing wrong, and I don't imagine this would be considered desirable attention by management. Would posting a job ad on AskHN requesting feedback be acceptable? I ask because I'd have expected to see it a bunch if it were. @dang would be very appreciative of your word one way or another. Thanks mattbee.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • mattbee 4y ago
      Ohhhh OK. I'd say don't post your actual ad because we will find you and give you more help than you wanted ;) Like maybe your team page is all white men, or your defence contracts are very prominent, or your CEO is a public dong. It's a bit of a yellow flag that you don't feel you can go to your managers with this to help fix a team you're obviously invested in? But here's two tips that you might be able to implement or influence by yourself: 1) Treat incoming candidates like GOLD. Respond to them within hours, same day where at all possible. Make decisions really fast, schedule interviews within 1-2 days, drop other things to make that happen. Have future managers & engineers communicate directly, lightly backed up by HR if you have that function (and you trust them). Keep. It. Moving. Make it clear their time is more valuable than yours. 2) Document the whole interview process up-front, put it prominently on your ads, specify the damned salary, and stick to your word the whole way. If you execute on both of these points, the FAANGs will not be able to come close in a really critical part of the process. They will be unclear about what happens next, who you're meeting, how important it is, maybe it will be a week, maybe it will be 12 weeks, who knows. But they got the prestige and the big bucks, and candidates will put up with a lot for that. (fwiw, I co-designed careers.bytemark.co.uk/full-process for most of the above reasons, and my current role went from introductory chat->3 interviews->contract signed in about 10 days flat - I like fast recruitment!).
• GiorgioG 4y ago
  > Benefits and salary are good In your opinion :)
• NullPrefix 4y ago
  >Benefits and salary are good (though salary isn't posted in the ad) Stopped reading right there
• PainfullyNormal 4y ago
  I've noticed an increasing reticence from senior programmers I know to have anything to do with DevOps. They see it as an aggravation they don't want in their lives. Somebody posted a little while back about it being easy to find consulting work in DevOps with relatively little skill, especially AWS pricing, specifically because devs at companies aren't putting in the time to learn AWS properly. Has anybody else noticed the same? Or am I way off base?
  • corrral 4y ago
    Large swaths of the developer community have long seen commercial-platform-specific certifications as a bad path, and DevOps seems pretty heavy on that. Goes back at least to the days when people were picking up MCSE and Cisco certs and such and trying to base a career on them (sometimes successfully! But a stigma definitely developed around those certs, too)
  • necovek 4y ago
    I find it funny that you said "learn AWS properly" — have you loaded AWS services page recently? I've seen even very experienced DevOps engineers struggle to remember what was the service name to get into "parameter value store" (and I already forgot, and that was two weeks ago). AWS is a mess. You learn just enough to get by and long for the days of simplicity where you could manage a bunch of servers yourself. Oh, sorry, we are using Azure or GPC or OpenStack, that's an entirely new set of names for you to even know what you are looking for. K8S is just the same. Every company decides on an "easier to use tool" like k9s that you have to learn from scratch if you don't want to jump through hoops to just use kubectl directly. If anything is a definition of boring work, it's this: work to assemble a bunch of existing pieces without creating anything really new. I like being tasked with creating things, not being an assembly line worker who's got to learn terminology de jour.
  • rr808 4y ago
    I think the way devops is right now is that a few great tech companies have it as an interesting role where there is time to write code and improve things. Most companies treat devops as regular ops, as in developers do all the interesting work and expect ops to be on call 247 to keep all the crappy bits running.
• jhot 4y ago
  I'm someone who is likely your target candidate and I just went through the hiring process so here are my thoughts without seeing an example ad post (which you should link to): - There are a ton of job openings right now in DevOps and similar roles. I spent about 2 days applying to as many as I could and that filled my entire next couple weeks with interviews/tasks. I went through interviews, received offers, and chose one all from those two days of applying, so unless a candidate sees your offer early in their search that could be a source of low application volume. - Is the fact that it's a fully remote position prominent in your postings? I personally only applied for positions I could tell were fully remote at a glance. - Put the salary range in the posting. I am way more likely to apply if I know ahead of time that it's going to be worth my time. - Are you strict on coding languages? I am pretty flexible but still have my favorites. If you're C#, I'm out (no offense to those who like it, I started out my career in the .NET world and ended up feeling trapped there and I'm not going back). - How quick are your turnarounds from application submission and interviews? Lots of companies are moving quickly to get people through the hiring process and if you're not then you'll be passed up for other companies.
  • the_only_law 4y ago
    > no offense to those who like it, I started out my career in the .NET world and ended up feeling trapped there and I'm not going back I actually think C# is pretty decent for a big general purpose language, but I understand this sentiment. No one wants to talk to me about anything other than .NET positions. I can usually squeeze a decent raise out of it, but I'm approaching my ceiling.
    • rc_hackernews 4y ago
      I feel the same way and can understand where the original comment is coming from. To your point, I also think I’ve reached the ceiling too salary wise. Was talking to a recruiter who specializes in recruiting for tech and product companies. The C# positions he had topped out at what other languages started at for senior developers. I like C# it’s just it feels like it’s all enterprise jobs with bad development practices.
  • 4y ago
• dancocos 4y ago
  "Take-home technical assignment (~4h)"<-- This right here is why senior people aren't interested. I've got 20 plus years of tech, I've been out of college since 1997 and you want to give a 4 hour homework assignment. If get you want to get a feel for someone's ability but this is more easily done by stating a problem during one of the interviews and asking the person "How would you approach this?" Listing for how they anticipate problems and tradeoffs.
  • carapace 4y ago
    This was my first thought as well. "If you want me to do homework to prove I'm not incompetent that means your interview process is garbage." and it's an automatic pass on that company. My second thought was noticing that OP didn't actually ask for feedback from senior talent, the questions are addressed to other people hiring, so I figured I'd keep quiet. But then I couldn't help myself. ;)
  • pnathan 4y ago
    would you like a take-home or would you like a whiteboard session? I need to have useful information that a candidate is more than a smooth talker.
    • capableweb 4y ago
      What do you get from a whiteboard/take home assignment that you can't get from a conversation where you grill them about their answers?
      • pnathan 4y ago
        Conversations allow smooth talkers to run a snow job on you. Having a work sample test provides a best-in-class hiring filter.
        • ShamelessC 4y ago
          Only if you yourself don't know what you're talking about...
• vba616 4y ago
  Everybody on HN always gets huffy and prima-donna-ish about the idea of a take home assignment. So I'll try to provide a different perspective. For some people, like me, at least in theory, I would love it, because it's much easier for me to shine than when put on the spot in an interview. I like to talk in an interview, but I'm no good at retrieving technical knowledge in real time. Unfortunately, in real life, the one hiring process I went through that required a take-home assignment, I realized at the end, I wasted my time doing it, because ultimately it was not deciding the outcome, but a regular in person coding session was. I assume this is because you never know how clever people can be in cheating remotely, so they can't really trust the applicant did the project. Now, the way you list your steps in hiring suggests the take-home assignment (and presentation) is the final qualification, not the first screen. Which should be good, if it really is your intention...except... I see a contradiction in your post. You want a "SWE", a "senior", and someone who already has a "deep understanding" of the underlying platform. The whole point, for an applicant, of doing a take home assignment is that they can demonstrate their intelligence rather than knowledge or ability to think quickly on their feet. If you don't want that sort of person, and it seems you don't, then who do you expect to apply? I'm approaching the same conclusion as other people, but I'm trying to avoid explaining it in terms of seniors being too good to do take-home assignments. Plenty of people in tech hate interviewing, don't have good networks, and some of them have a lot of experience. Maybe not with your tech, and maybe not with a SWE title though. You'd call them juniors, maybe. Or, you'd treat someone who's never been a SWE per se like they didn't know what a computer was. Something I have never understood was why hiring seems to almost always be following a paradigm of filtering the pool of candidates for a very specific imaginary perfect hire, rather than taking the best candidate available independent of the job and figuring out how to utilize them. And an afterthought: your use of "rubbish" suggests you are in the UK, while "fully remote" suggests you are seeking global candidates, and maybe your idea of a reasonable salary in the UK for a "senior" nullifies your willingness to hire from anywhere. Obviously there are lower wage areas, but maybe the people you are looking for are mostly in higher wage areas. Also, just wondering - suppose a candidate takes much longer than 4 hrs or whatever you consider normal. Is that a problem in your mind? Are you screening for that? Are you happy hiring them as long as they don't brag about how long it took, and do a good presentation?
  • 4y ago
• dam_broke_it 4y ago
  Take home assignments GTFO; pay me or forget it.....
• zo1 4y ago
  My best guess is the take home assignment. Not going to happen if you ask me. You want credentials? Then look at my degree/diploma, my portfolio, experience and whether I know what I'm talking about in the interview. That's it. You don't ask a senior experienced surgeon to perform an op for you to prove he can do the job, and neither should you for this.
• thrill 4y ago
  Having just spent 3 weeks on 4x hour long interviews and completing a day long coding problem along with a "code while I watch" to get to the point that "we're tabling this for a few months" I suspect many of us senior types are just tabling the job seeking process ourselves until we seem to be in actual demand.
  • BadCookie 4y ago
    Sometimes companies pay for the time it takes to complete a take-home project. I think it’s a good idea, especially now given all the hiring freezes and especially for a remote position where the applicant has no idea how many other applicants (around the country/world) they might be competing against.
    • rossdavidh 4y ago
      Agreed; if you have to have the 4 hour assignment, paying a market wage for a senior dev for those 4 hours, at least shows that you are serious about filling the position.
    • bombcar 4y ago
      In the past often the ones that didn't pay would at least fly you over to headquarters and wine/dine you and put you up at a hotel for a night or two, which was a nice "off the books" payment.
      • robocat 4y ago
        Sounds like a deep penalty to this senior: I have learned to hate flights, corporate hotels are mostly crap (even expensive ones), it is very unlikely I desire another trip to that city, I hate wasting a day for that, and I really care about how good my food tastes. That could sound nice to an inexperienced junior?
    • OJFord 4y ago
      Has anyone ever expected (or received) payment for time off to attend interviews though? Seems to me like a bad reaction to the relatively new thing, but actually the criticism applies just as well to the older thing. (Maybe it should all be paid! Though having job search funded by prospective employers does seem a bit weird.. I think really I just think it's neither here nor there in terms of morality or whatever - but the 'take-home' isn't fundamentally different from the interview. If anything it might be better in this regard already, since I don't have to take time off for it (but also can, if I prefer that to spending my evening/weekend on it)?)
• username314159 4y ago
  I'll just add on the technical assignment: it can be very different, and in many cases a 4-hour one is unlikely to be interesting. I do like interviews and test tasks, but if it's just another CRUD app, I won't be able to start: it's painfully boring. Add that need to present the already boring result, and you need something really amazing to make it worth the time. I doubt it is.
• asfarley 4y ago
  No salary listed, hard pass right there.
  • corrral 4y ago
    If I even bother with an inquiry for a no-salary listing, it's going to be to ask what the comp is like. I made the mistake of doing an entire interview without knowing in advance that we had expectations in the same ballpark, one time. Never again. Waste of everyone's time. I'm getting that way with interviews, too. Agenda and some sense of the topics, scope, and difficulty level of any "quiz" shit you're doing, provided to me early in the process, or GTFO. You don't need to keep it all secret for it to work. FAANG practically publishes study guides. Jim Bob's 3rd-rate B2B SaaS isn't going to go down in flames because they published too much info about their interview process. Meanwhile, making it a pop-quiz with a scope of literally anything and with everything about it hush-hush is a bunch of pointless stress I don't need in my life.
• v3gajerusalem 4y ago
  Why aren’t your juniors becoming seniors? Why do so many get rich fast companies do that? You’re cutting the talent pool.
  • JTbane 4y ago
    In a lot of companies juniors don't get mentored enough, burn out due to low pay, and leave for greener pastures.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• kevdragon6 4y ago
  Add on-call load/expectations for the job if any. If your company has a fairly stable platform that is not constantly on fire and paging 24/7 -- that will be a positive.
• summertime42 4y ago
  As an option - everyone has stated the easy problems of no salary listed and the take-home assessment - if you KNOW your salary is low, offer 4-day workweeks instead. I mean x4 7-8 hours, not 10-hour days. It might help hook some traffic. You also might have to open up the doors to 1099/C2C consultants, as well. Or talk to a staffing company and borrow some resources to get stuff done in the meantime. A good pipeline can hire a candidate in 3-4 hours. You have to run a technical interview, but I personally prefer verbal over paired-programming. I will refuse to do take-homes at this point and refer to my active github.
• joegahona 4y ago
  Are you paying candidates to do the technical assignment?
• throwaway6734 4y ago
  What's the salary?
• atraac 4y ago
  > salary isn't posted in the ad I don't know how US job market looks like right now but if this was in EU I would simply keep scrolling if there wasn't a salary range unless your name was really recognizable. There's too many offers to waste time writing emails/messages that lead to bullshit pitch-calls that waste my time before some recruiter gracefully tells me what the potential salary is.
• ternaryJimbo 4y ago
  Why is the salary not posted? What do you gain by not posting a range?
• dougk16 4y ago
  Agreed with the vibe of other comments here. It's hard not to come off snobby, and the market won't allow such snobbery forever, but for now the reality is that a senior engineer is interviewing YOU, not the other way around. Anything longer than a few emails and maybe a one hour conversation and you risk them moving on. Technical assignment is definitely pushing it, unless perhaps it's paid.
• nickdothutton 4y ago
  You arent going to like this, but unless you need large numbers of people regularly (big growth trajectory) your best bet for quality candidates is going to be referrals from existing members of staff.
• majormajor 4y ago
  Unless there's something I particularly like about a job, or I'm super unhappy in my current one, I'm going to pass on a take-home assignment. I can whiteboard, I can tell you about past projects, sure. The demand on my time is fixed. I can communicate and discuss it with you. We have a conversation. Take-home is too opaque and too much of a potential time demand.
• comprev 4y ago
  The 4hr take-home test implies you're not after experienced "seniors", but rather those self-titled seniors with 3yrs under their belt. Four hours of focus time is A LOT for a candidate with family responsibilities and heavily restricts your recruitment pool. No parent is going to give up a precious weekend afternoon for an unpaid assignment. That plus the lack of salary range will put 95% of "good" candidates off. Instead have a time-boxed "chat" where the candidate is invited to talk about a topic they feel strongest in - networking, architecture, security, whatever. As a company you want to leverage these strengths.
  • rr808 4y ago
    > Four hours of focus time is A LOT for a candidate with family responsibilities and heavily restricts your recruitment pool. 4 hours is probably OK for a single role. However if you're interviewing at 10 different companies it adds up to a lot more.
    • oaiey 4y ago
      It is just not okay. Because I may have kids/wife/elders, because I have a job, because I value my spare time, or just because I enjoy the birds in the park more. As a senior I don't do homework. I have a conversation with someone if I fit AND if they fit to me. They can test me and I will test the them during that conversation
• svillar 4y ago
  Lots of great comments here; My thoughts on this as other Seniors have pointed out (and I am a Senior myself) 1- I have not looked for a job since 2014, every job since came through my network. Then the interviews were basically friendly meet&greets but super informal, not a single coding test or take home assignment - note than I always started as Tech lead/Architect. I put in the hours and took pride in my work, have never let anyone down. 2- Unless I am unemployed and desperate, why would I give you between 6 and 7 hours of “free” unpaid labor for an interview that might not go anywhere? A big part of the interview process is “luck”. I have many terrible interviewing stories; interviewing is hard and for the most part a numbers and luck game. I hate wasting time and for that reason I carefully calculate my odds before applying and put more emphasis on gigs when I have a sponsor on the inside or where the upside and risk make it worth the attempt. Which disqualifies most non tech non brand name companies. My suggestions for you; 1- Include salary and TC on your job post (it will set you apart from others) and will attract more attention. 2- Shorten/Simplify your hiring process and consider paying folks for their time, at least $100hr. I have interviewed at places where it costs $40 to park for the day, you are there for 3-5 hrs for a final in person round, but if you don’t get an offer they don’t validate your parking ticket so not only you wasted your time but also spent a bunch of money on top of taking a day off from your current job. Last but not least, think about the state of the market, Seniors are likely older, with families and mortgages. in this market, stability is important, changing jobs can be a gamble, their offer could get rescinded, etc Why take the risk? This will be true in the next 12/24 months, what is the incentive - unless the candidate is already unemployed. Thanks for your time.
  • amsnl 4y ago
    I hear the “pay folks for their time” thing a lot, and have even done it. But for a senior engineer / architect level role, how is $100/hr meaningful in your mind? Just as a show of good faith? If you’re senior (and hence have been in this market the last 10 years) $100/hr wouldn’t seem to move the needle.
    • kojeovo 4y ago
      The money itself likely won't make a dent, IMO it's more on the good faith. "We understand you're busy and your time is valuable, and since we want you to do this work we will compensate you"
• ransom1538 4y ago
  "SWEs in the "DevOps" software space (Linux, containers, k8s, yadda yadda)" Eh. That is a pretty hard hire right now in GENERAL. That kind of hire is a months long process. BUT! Super worth it if they are good.
• tuckerpo 4y ago
  > - Take-home technical assignment (~4h) or similar at candidate's choosing That's probably your problem. You've gotta respect people's time. It'd be ok if that were the final step in the process, but it looks like it's followed by Yet Another Interview Round (TM). Try to slim that down, or remove the "presentation" aspect, and have it be the team's burden to audit the assignment. Ask for a small writeup explaining their technical decisions from the candidate instead.
• alx__ 4y ago
  I would offer to compensate for the 4h assignment. That's a huge time commitment and basically means a 1/2 day on the weekend or evening to complete. They'll have lots of options if they're good and will drop annoying assessments like this if they don't feel it's worth the time.
• solumos 4y ago
  full day on-site is better than a 4hr take-home
• blankusername_ 4y ago
  I have the interest and skills to work in a position like you described. If you’re interested, I’d be happy to give your process a shot and give feedback. Feel free to reach out, here’s my LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/qwertyq https://www.linkedin.com/in/qwertyq
• rossdavidh 4y ago
  You are paying a market rate for the 4 hour technical assignment of course? Wait, you don't want to commit that kind of resources to someone who's not an employee yet? Well it works the same way for them.
• zip1234 4y ago
  1. Post the comp levels if not available on something like levels.fyi. If the comp is above average, sell on it. 2. Make it a paid technical assignment. I don't think your process is unreasonable except some may object to the assignment. If you make it paid it is much less objectionable.
• walrus01 4y ago
  The only actually senior people who are going to jump through the hoops of doing a 4 hour take home technical assessment are the ones interested in: a) you are offering some absurd amount of stock options for something they really think will be valuable in the future b) the net take-home compensation after federal/state income taxes will be absurdly high
• Animats 4y ago
  Who does the "30 minute call with them"? That's the first real contact, and that's where you're probably blowing the sale. (Yes, you're selling.)
• IAmPym 4y ago
  If you give someone a take home 4 hour assignment you better be paying contracting rates. I have been in situations where someone gives an assignment of a problem they are actively working on. I'm not working for free.
• WheatM 4y ago
• valbaca 4y ago
  Post the salary range. It's 2022, you can't just say "Benefits and salary are good " That is absolutely meaningless. You're wanting ~6hrs investment (30 call, 1hr interview, and 4hr+ assignment) for an offer? NO thank you. Why the scare quotes around "DevOps"? Is it DevOps or not? These words do mean things and matter.
  • Humdeee 4y ago
    Exactly this. I can't think of a better way to punch yourself in the groin as a recruitment activity. Be transparent because it's respectful.
  • sunaurus 4y ago
    > Is it DevOps or not? These words do mean things and matter. I'm surprised at this comment, in my experience, that word has almost no meaning at all. It can mean anything from "Engineering teams are responsible for everything, including development and operations" to "We have a third DevOps silo inbetween our developer and operarions silos".
    • hellohowareu 4y ago
      It does have, in my opinion, quite clear meaning as a term, otherwise it wouldn't exist as a term. Obviously it means setting up & maintaining application-ecosystem infrastructure: Servers/Containers/VMs, CICD, monitoring, logging, integration/production testing, permissions, and various automated jobs/workflows <-- that sort of stuff. So that developers can just focus on programming.
      • baobabKoodaa 4y ago
        What you described is the "Ops" in "DevOps". A decade ago the people doing "Dev" work were different from the people doing "Ops" work. But then the "anyone can do anything and everyone should work on everything" trend arrived, and they invented the concept of "DevOps", meaning that the same people would now do both "Dev" and "Ops" work. Note that this description is entirely antithetical to your description "So that developers can just focus on programming". You're not entirely wrong; this term has certainly degraded to the point of meaningless, where many companies now have teams that they call "DevOps teams", despite the fact that those teams only do Ops work. It's like we've come a full circle back to where different people do Dev and Ops work, but for some reason we call it with a term that means the literal opposite of that.
• rmk 4y ago
  The 4h take-home will narrow your funnel a lot. Most senior people will not do a free 4-hour take home. Try replacing it with a 2-hour interview by 3 people (that is, three 40-minute interviews each). One interviewer can do a hypothetical design question and the two others can do a programming question each. These do not have to be very difficult, but only to ensure that you are not hiring an architecture astronaut. If they can code and can explain a coherent design + some followup questions, the hiring manager can do a resume deep-dive and behavioral questions (all 4 people must be alert to behavioral cues). EDIT: For a devops person, you could do one programming interview, one design interview, and another interview of various subject-specific technologies including networking, access control, alerting/monitoring and database management.
• toss1 4y ago
  My first question would be to look at the steps in your hiring process as a series of filters. Do any steps that have either a larger drop-off than the others or a larger drop-off than in your past experience? What is the reason for the drop-off, are applicants dropping out/ghosting you, or are you rejecting them? Do you have any data or insight on firms competing for these applicants? For example, are you putting in place an obstacle such as the 4h take-home assignment that your competitors do not have? Are you not posting compensation when your competitors are? Might these be subtracting more value than they add to the process?
• confidantlake 4y ago
  Me and many other people I know will not do take-home assignments. Top paying (FAANG) companies do not require them.
  • codr7 4y ago
    But they do sometimes interview the crap out of you, speaking from personal recent experience.
• k2052 4y ago
  This is a tip for everyone struggling to find someone to hire; look in a different pool of candidates and be willing to accommodate them. For example, you can find a lot of very skilled developers that are disabled. I know a lot of people that have been coding professionally for 10+ years, have popularish open source projects, been lead devs at startups etc; yet feel stuck in their current jobs or even struggle to get hired. They would instantly job jump to something better or would love to switch from contract work to something with good health insurance/benefits. You just have to be a company willing to accommodate them. And accommodating their needs requires far less investment than paying FAANG level salaries to attract the same Sr engineers everyone else is competing for. You can find engineers.
  • randrews 4y ago
    How exactly do you do that? I work for a company also struggling to find good senior developers and since the team is 100% remote, it's not like we'd have any idea if they were disabled or not...
    • BadCookie 4y ago
      Some ideas ... - Do not put requirements into the job description if they aren't true requirements. For example, "ability to lift 25 pounds" is one that I see a lot, along with various other physical abilities that I don't think devs working from home actually need regularly. - Offer extra paid (or unpaid!) time off, a 4-day work week, or other types of schedule flexibility. - Minimize the required travel or indicate flexibility in this area for disabled applicants. (In-person meetups and adventures sound fun and totally reasonable for most able-bodied people who can travel alone, but for a wheelchair user who needs a personal care aide, your quarterly off-site to go skiing at Tahoe is, well, not a great fit.) I'm answering mainly from the perspective of a physically disabled person with mobility issues. I'm sure people with other sorts of disabilities would come up with a very different list.
      • kayodelycaon 4y ago
        More ideas... - On-call. Some people require a regular schedule with a limit of 40 hours per week. - Allergies. Dog-friendly is not friendly to people allergic to dogs. And yes, your "hypoallergenic" dog will still give me an asthma attack. - Dietary restrictions. Makes anything involving food the opposite of fun. (I'm allergic to milk proteins and cross-contamination can make me very sick.)
• taesu 4y ago
  4 hours? try reducing that to an hour.
• stack_framer 4y ago
  > Take-home technical assignment (~4h) or similar at candidate's choosing This is why I wouldn't continue interviewing with you, but perhaps not for the reasons you think. Despite my 15 years of experience as a software developer, your test will likely have some edge-case question that I won't get right. I'm terrible at timed tests, but I'm not a terrible software developer. Why should I spend 4 hours of my weekend failing to prove myself to you? I'd so much rather spend an hour or two having a detailed, technical conversation with you—and I think you would too. You can glean a lot from a conversation (it's easy to copy/paste code from Stack Overflow, but it's not easy to fake it through a lengthy, technical discussion)!
• nonameiguess 4y ago
  Your job description is a close match to what I'm currently doing, "senior" developer who gradually transitioned into platform engineering due to the need and greater than average for a developer familiarity and comfort with the platform and infrastructure layers of the stack. I currently work for one of the CNCF software vendors doing consulting engineering for customers setting up their own platforms for multi-tenant, heterogeneous workloads. I'll say I don't really mind the take-home assessment, contra most of what you're seeing here, but 4 hours is pushing it. 1 hour max is more in line with what I'm willing to do for a pre-interview screen. The bigger obstacle for me is why would I be looking for jobs to apply to in the first place? I haven't applied for a job since getting out of the Army and moving into the software world at all. Not once. Every job I have taken in this industry has either been from a recruiter or professional network reaching out to me. I've never looked for a job and never plan to, so I'd never see your ad and I don't read the Hacker News who's hiring pages. Recruiters who don't give a salary range aren't going to hear back from me unless it's a FAANG-level company with a well-known salary range I already know, though. I'm often annoyed by the amount of "not writing code" I have to do, but I'm used to it at this point. I'll just grant your claim as a person who works there that the job is sufficiently enjoyable and pays well that I'd consider it all things being equal, but the biggest obstacle is just that I don't look for jobs. People offering jobs look for me. How good your ad is means nothing if I never see it and don't want to see it.
• Helitico 4y ago
  I was looking for a job, had 3 offers all of them without an assignment. I had one job opportuniy i liked, with a 4h assignment and i didn't get the job. I fully accept doing and learning for Google or Microsoft or Apple etc. but they pay in germany like 30-50k a year more than the normal companies. Normal company is 80k, the others are 120k up to 160k. And others mentioned it but i want to repeat it: The offer i actually took (and it was the best choice as well) was actually because an ex collegue pointed me to it. There was already a foot in the door.
• tmaly 4y ago
  Your process seems reasonable. How detailed is the job spec? Is there something you could add to it? Is the screening process by recruiter consistent?
• lwelyk 4y ago
  So you require 90 minutes of interviewing followed by a 4+ hour long unpaid homework assignment complete with a presumable additional hour of presenting the homework assignment to a team without them knowing what the pay could be. I think you'd have to not have many other opportunities to be worth putting up with that much for the potential for a job. Imagine if they interviewed at even one other place that required this much from them, they wouldn't have the time.
• rubyn00bie 4y ago
  Totally food for thought, but here are my 2.7349 cents: The hiring process doesn't seem to, and of course this is totally an completely assumptive-- based only on the list of items in your post, reflect any reason why a senior engineer would want to apply there. Most people want one of two things: more money or more growth. Right now, I'd guess, that potential candidates aren't feeling either from the ad. Is the salary actually good? Reading the job details I can say I'd expect at least ~$200k/yr cash, some sort of yearly cash bonus, and equity in the company. Additionally, there may be language in the job ad; which, turns off more experienced candidates, e.g. "ninja," "rockstar," "10x". Very subtle changes to the language you use can completely change your applicant pool for both good and bad, it's worth experimenting via services that help with this (by reviewing the job ad) or consultants (though I'd try a service first, gonna be a lot cheaper). Finally, seeing your stack being ops related, I'd guess a lot of qualified people are assuming you don't pay enough or will have awful work life balance. Are folks on-call 24/7? Salary might be alright unless your on-call 20% of your life-- in which case maybe it ain't. Speaking to that in the ad might really help pique some folks interests (if the work-life balance is good). Good luck!
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• nickmyersdt 4y ago
  Steps 1-4 plus probation period is sufficient. The rest is bs.
• alexanderh 4y ago
  I don't respect any HR Team/Company that demands tests, assessments or homework as part of the interview/onboarding process. If you don't have a competent enough team, that can identify I know what you need me to know just by talking to me, I don't respect your company philosophy, I will assume your team is incompetent or not fully formed, and I will choose not to work for you. Its a cheap cop-out for HR to not have to do their job and not have to involve working members of the team in the hiring process. If you need to "Test" me to hire me, I find it disrespectful. It means you already don't trust me, so I will never trust you. Also there's lots of incredible talent out there, who are horrible test takers or do poorly under the context of the stress of performing for an interview... these people actually tend to be more talented than the people that are good test takers and good under that kind of pressure. You're shooting yourself in the foot by not considering them. Hiring "the best candidate for the job" is a nebulous term that HR has misinterpreted to mean "most technically skilled during an unrealistic interview test". The best candidate is really the person who interfaces with a team the best on an interpersonal level, and they will grow in to their position over time, and fill in any gaps in technical experience they don't have if they are truly passionate about their field. Either a lead person has leadership traits or they don't. Some technical homework assignment and presentation will prove nothing.
• xupybd 4y ago
  Are you being too specific? Most senior people have the experience to make good decisions and to guide the younger staff. What they may not have is experience in your tool set. But that can be picked up quickly, their seniority cannot.
• everfrustrated 4y ago
  It's taken me 8 months from starting to hire to having our new devops hire start. here in the UK these types of positions are some of the hardest to fill within Engineering. Hiring software engineers is comparatively a walk in the park.
  • jlokier 4y ago
    Why was it so hard to fill? Was it lack of interested candidates, or were your requirements such that you rejected all the candidates until you found an excellent fit?
• MauroIksem 4y ago
  Post the salary. Expecting someone to give you 5-6 hours of their time for FREE while not knowing if they even want the job is stupid.
• zackmorris 4y ago
  I'd recommend hiring an agency for dev ops work instead. That level of responsibility (and probably having to be on call) could be too much for one person, and also a sign of missing infrastructure around E2E testing, CI/CD, backups and monitoring. It seems like senior professionals reach a career crossroads where the opportunity cost becomes too high at any price. I've been thinking about getting out of software engineering for several years now for that reason. And because I'm tired of reinventing the wheel in proprietary ways, only to see the code get thrown away because most internet businesses fail early on. In other words, this might be a problem with the industry, not your hiring process. Perhaps a #nocode or managed solution could be an alternative?
• Nextgrid 4y ago
  Ultimately employment is a market. You're expecting something in exchange for some money. Your objective is to get as much of "something" for the least amount of money. The candidate's objective is to get as much money for the least amount of "something". Junior candidates are more flexible on this as they might do it for the passion of the tech or to make a name for themselves but seniors already have a "name" and no longer need to work for "exposure". Your current situation seems to be that your competition offers a better deal than you do - employees manage to find other places where they can either get more money or get the same money you're offering for much less "something". That "something" includes the overhead of the interview process such as the tech test, etc. In short, either offer more money or demand less "something" and make it known. 4-day work week, flexible working hours, no on-call, etc. In addition, you're asking for specialized skills which means you need to consider markets beyond employment. If your prospective employee can make the yearly salary you're proposing in a 3-month consulting gig, there's no reason for him to even consider your offer. You mention that most applicants dislike the specialization you're asking for - maybe because those who like it don't even apply, potentially for the above reason.
  • AussieWog93 4y ago
    I'd add to this, as someone who runs an eCommerce business: the general public is surprisingly lazy when it comes to optimising the returns on their time/money. We've found things like attractive pictures, high-ranking listings and reduced legwork for customers have a far greater impact on sales than the price or quality of the good itself.
• noasaservice 4y ago
  > - Take-home technical assignment (~4h) or similar at candidate's choosing I refuse to do this since I don't do unpaid work. And frankly, you want me to sink .5h+1h+4h = 5.5h unpaid on your demands? Nope. Not going to happen. And I work as a senior AWS & Azure cloud/systems engineer. My resume speaks for itself. And if that's not good enough, I'd be glad to have a sit-down with a few of your own system engineers. If that's not adequate for you, then the problem is you.
• nsxwolf 4y ago
  Option 1: Train juniors Option 2: Pay a lot more Stop the take homes. They suck.
• rantallion 4y ago
  > Benefits and salary are good (though salary isn't posted in the ad) Even before seeing your hiring process (and I agree with the other comments about that), not listing a salary means I've already scrolled past your ad. We're in an employee's market right now, and there are plenty of opportunities out there that are transparent about the comp package (and have shorter hiring processes).
• shadowofneptune 4y ago
  I do not work in software, so I find how hiring works in it really odd. The amount of weight put on the interview compared to accreditation is unusual, and people in this thread consider that normal. There's no certification or examination for minimum competency. Looking online, there were attempts at making one, but they failed. How did it come to be this way?
  • corrral 4y ago
    I suspect the very horrible interviews at top-comp places exist in no small part to make it painful to switch between them, to reduce upward pressure on wages. I think it's version 2.0 of the earlier wage-fixing scheme they got busted for. That's why even a rigorous standardized examination isn't acceptable as a replacement for their painful interviews, even though spending all that time on whiteboard quiz interviews is expensive—the pain is much of the point.
    • shadowofneptune 4y ago
      That makes sense, thanks. Only way an examination could come about would be with their collaboration.
  • bcbrown 4y ago
    Everything about software and software employment is kinda odd. The most relevant college degree is fairly irrelevant to the actual experience and skills necessary to succeed in industry. The field is the result of a merger between rarified theory (computation as applied mathematics) and hands-on practice (organizing sand to conduct electricity in useful ways). There's a high proportion of practitioners without any formal training. The industry has existed for about a half-century, and now more than half of the top ten companies by market cap are software companies.
• l30n4da5 4y ago
  Besides the take-home, which has been addressed in other comments (in short, a take-home for a senior role is just a flat 'no' from me), it would definitely help to include salary range in the postings. When I was searching, if a company did not include a salary range, I automatically excluded it.
• PheonixPharts 4y ago
  > Benefits and salary are good (though salary isn't posted in the ad) Care to put a range on the value of "good"? My experience when searching is that any company claiming "salaries are good" probably isn't even worth my time talking to. Occasionally I'll reply to recruiters if the role looks interesting but it's not uncommon that they can't even match my base, let alone my TC (and I don't even have that great of a TC). Most truly senior devs that I know are working for a company that can offer considerable RSUs in addition to a solid base + bonus. When I see "salary is good" I'm assuming you're offering below 200k. If you want senior devs to apply post that your total comp is somewhere in the 300k-400k range. However I'm guessing that your comp is nowhere in that range, and I think it's fair to assume that most other senior devs also are making that guess.
  • x3n0ph3n3 4y ago
    > If you want senior devs to apply post that your total comp is somewhere in the 300k-400k range. Even that's too low for senior folks with the skillset that OP is looking for, particularly if he wants the senior engineer to be mentoring and uplifting the rest of the team. Those skills can easily get $500k+ TC.
    • SamuelAdams 4y ago
      Can you point to these jobs that pay 500k+?
      • x3n0ph3n3 4y ago
        I'm currently a Staff 2 at VMware making that much doing DevOps for multiple SaaS services.
        • vasili111 4y ago
          Not directly connected to the discussion but I was wondering what kind of lifestyle can be with such salary. Is it like from 9am to 5pm or you work much more than that time? Do you in genearal think that you are overworking or not? Is your working environment stressful? Thank you.
• stevetron 4y ago
  I won't do 'assignments'. I understand the reasoning, but I'm just plain burnt-out on test-taking of any-kind after I left grad school. I also don't want my 'test' answer to actually get used to solve a problem they actually had. To me, that is work-product-for-free. Most of the code I've previously written is considered proprietary and I'm restricted to not disclose. That leaves me with only being able to show-off screen shots of personal projects.
  • jen20 4y ago
    If I were to ever do a take home test, I would absolutely attach an AGPL 3.0 license to it.
• burnte 4y ago
  Yeah, the last three steps are killing you. I'm not going to do a 4 hour skill assessment, period. No senior people will. We're not making a solid 6 figures because we're idiots faking our way through the world. Skip that assessment and presentation, and implement a 90 day probationary period like everyone else.
  • alexanderh 4y ago
    THANK YOU, THIS ^^^ Any company needing to "Test" me, is an instant sign of disrespect. It means you already don't trust me so I don't trust you. Now obviously there needs to be some accountability, and I think a 90 probationary period is a perfect compromise. When you are hiring senior talent, we aren't desperate or dying for your job. You need to sell it to us. You need to accommodate us. You need to make it easy for us. Assignments are a sure fire way to let me know you have no idea what you are doing, and don't have competent people on your team who would be able to just talk to me and tell i know what i'm doing.
    • lmc 4y ago
      Entitled much? Instead of 4 hours of your time [0], you get to waste up to 90 days of an employer's? (or more likely some multiple of that, counting interactions with others on the team) [0] it probably takes even more of the employer's time in reviewing and discussing the application. Hiring sucks for all parties. Everyone should try to meet half way, and be respectful of the other's time.
      • burnte 4y ago
        But that's what I 'm saying. Don't waste my time, I didn't get to this high level job I'm in by being so stupid I can't write a ten line Python script. Interview me, ask what I've done, don't think your company is so advanced that nothing compares and you have to give basic skills tests to everyone. If a company thinks that at my level I might not have the skills I have demonstrated, I don't want to waste my time with that company. Entitled? Yes. I've earned it over the past 30 years.
      • 4y ago
• lazyant 4y ago
  Post on https://www.reddit.com/r/devopsjobs/ https://www.reddit.com/r/devopsjobs/ and you'll get free feedback on the specifics. Usually a combination of: - low salary. - not remote. - long/cumbersome interview process (for ex, 4hr take-home is too much and you are selecting for people who have the time to do them and not better offers). - other yellow/red flags (bullshit language in the ad, what company does etc). I'm a devops guy with experience hiring and interviewing, feel free to email me for a quick comment on your posting.
• ivanech 4y ago
  "Take-home technical assignment (~4h)" Last time I was interviewing, I had ~5 take-home assessments sent to me. I didn't finish any of them. Much easier to prioritize a live interview. Less risk of having my time wasted.
• harshalizee 4y ago
  Honestly, take home tests for a Sr. position is an no go for many engineers who have settled down. When I was casually looking, I had a strict no asymmetric interview process since I've been burned by many companies who never respond after an online/take home test. I was surprised how many companies just let me skip that part and got me into the onsite interviews.
• lbrito 4y ago
  I don't get the hate on take homes. Also what's with the downvotes? At least you could help me see your point of view by explaining. If anything they are much more time efficient than the alternative - grinding dozens of hours of leetcode in preparation of live coding challenges. In my experience that is pretty much the sole alternative. There usually is a generous time frame for take homes of at least a couple of weeks. This is so much better and more flexible than coding challenges - not to mention coding rounds usually take several hours for the multiple rounds. Basically there's no time disadvantage at all for take homes. Also speaking as a recent dad, so I get the time constraints.
  • jen20 4y ago
    The downvotes are likely because of the false dichotomy you present.
    • lbrito 4y ago
      Like I said, >In my experience that [code challenges] is pretty much the sole alternative. I would love more options but I can only speak based on my own experiences. I've gone through many interviews and only once have any of them escaped this "false" dichotomy. To me, and I suppose many others, it is not false.
      • jen20 4y ago
        Doesn’t the single example you yourself have experienced actually confirm that it is false?
        • lbrito 4y ago
          If we were talking about math theorems, yes. In real world situations like this though it is customary to equate "extremely rare" with "not existent"
          • jen20 4y ago
• kache_ 4y ago
  more $, simple as
• aaomidi 4y ago
  4 day work week.
• kayo_20211030 4y ago
  AD: Put the pay scale in the ad. Let's not waste everyone's time. Take-home technical assignment (~4h) or similar at candidate's choosing: If you want 4 hours of someone's valuable time a) pay for it, or b) commit 4 hours of your time. Either is reasonably fair Presentation of technical assignment to the team: That's just straight-up pay-for-the-time. If you've all come this far in the process, there must be some interest and it only seems fair. Also, why do you care what the team thinks? They're either on the initial phone-screen, or you really don't care what they think. Don't waste the team's time. If you really care, make that 45-60 minutes.
• ipaddr 4y ago
  "Presentation of technical assignment to the team" awful idea...
• coffee_is_nom 4y ago
  Post the salary, don't make me spend 6+ hours before I find out you are offering less than what I already make. TBH I think I perfectly fit your profile but I am not in the market. And the idea of a 4 hour take home assignment is not helping. Best of luck OP!
• imhoguy 4y ago
  It is beauty competition. Disclaimer: I am biased gray-hair contractor who's milking own network. "fairly typical run-of-the-mill mid-size enterprise software vendor" - read: boring, maintenance, legacy, but that is ok, I work on such stuff when it pays decent daily rate; "fully-remote SWEs in the "DevOps" software space (Linux, containers, k8s, yadda yadda)", "higher percentage non-code" - sysadmin, jira queue, SEVs, on-call duty, yaml development, no essential prog lang skill, o'rly you need SWE? "we're junior-heavy already" - babysitting, scrum; "haven't even managed to backfill a retirement from six months ago", "the work requires a reasonably deep understanding of the underlying platforms" - seek Sol. Architect or on-board into small area first, legacy can wait; "take-home technical assignment (~4h) or similar at candidate's choosing" - what? take-home k8s cluster? Maybe better try some gig/probation week, daily rate applies ofc. I think I would fit, but why I should move my lazy ass off my golden handcuffs just before summer?
  • jelling 4y ago
    I feel similar but just want to add that letting people do a ~20 hour probation week could be useful for both parties here. Meaning they can keep their same job, but you're going to pay them to do 1-2 weeks at 20 hours per week. This doesn't sound like a sensitive IP situation, either. Also, if you can't get someone up and delivering value in 20 hours that's good data about your internal setup. My goal is a minor commit on day 1. And if you can't spec out value that could be delivered in that time frame you probably have weak requirements.
• pjungwir 4y ago
  Post the salary range. From what I can tell DevOps is the hardest thing to hire for right now, and it commands the highest salaries. It's tough to find someone who can code and troubleshoot code problems, but also has all the skills of a sys/net/cloud/k8s admin, and is willing to put up with the higher stress of that role. Most qualified people have already done their best to get a job they're happy with. Personally I'm not making FAANG money, but as a self-employed freelancer I still do pretty well. So it's hard to see hidden-salary listings as anything other than a waste of time. 90% of them will come in too low. Things like a four-hour coding assignment just prove to me that it's smarter not to bother. If you make it that pointless for qualified candidates you'll only hear from the unqualified ones.
  • singron 4y ago
    As someone from Colorado, the no-salary listings are basically a disqualifier since it demonstrates that the company is willing to break the law to try to take advantage of you.
  • usrn 4y ago
    This. I think I'm still technically in the "junior" category (coming up on four years of experience not counting internships) but I'm pretty much financially independent at this point. I only really stay employed for luxuries, funding for side projects, and the very good health insurance (and the whole "having responsibilities orders your life" thing but I know well how easy coasting is.) I have to imagine senior SWEs have a very very low tolerance for BS and can demand quite a lot. Speaking of BS that 4hr take home project without even having a salary range is a lot. Even for Junior engineers here we have the manager and a couple engineers sit with the candidate during the coding test.
    • moneywoes 4y ago
      How did you make so much that quickly?
  • ryathal 4y ago
    if you are expecting a DEvOps guy to know C#/Java/C++ and all the Jenkins/sys/k8s/cloud stuff, you want a unicorn. That person is also definitely not going to put up with a 4hr test. If you want a senior DevOps person that knows the Jenkins/sys/k8s/cloud stuff write a basic test for that and don't test them on stuff they don't really need to know.
• brailsafe 4y ago
  I agree with others on the technical assessment. I'll at least give you some points for offering it after speaking to someone for an hour which a lot of companies don't do—it's a really fucking low bar. I don't know that I'm necessarily senior by everyone's metric, but I've been in development for nearing 10 years depending how you look at it. I usually count it as something like 7-10 if someone wants to scrutinize, because really I'm just an IC without much more responsibility. I'd do *A* technical assessment, but not a 4hr one, and only if the resulting career move would be really impactful or I'm desperate. I'm planning to do a full day of Amazon interviews at the end of the month just because I've never worked at a fang and don't think I'd pass, so it's a challenge and a healthy time risk for high potential outcome. There's nothing more defeating than doing a lengthy technical test for an arbitrary company, only to be told something like my formatting was bad while using HackerRank, or to have some arrogant Junior review the submission and have it not be to their standard. You don't get time back. I wouldn't work for my current contract if there was a chance I wouldn't get paid, and I ain't doin it for many others.
• heavyset_go 4y ago
  Post the compensation upfront and get rid of your 4hr assessment. I would not waste 4 hours of billable time on a mere chance at a real interview after having already invested 1.5 hours interviewing with your company. Lower the time commitment by 75%, and pay your candidates for their time on their ~1 hour take home assignment, or get rid of the take home entirely, and you won't have candidates drop out of your hiring process. tldr: 1.5hr phone interview + a 4hr take home afterwards is ridiculous, especially if the compensation bands are a mystery. Stop expecting candidates to do ~4hr of free work and pay your candidates for their time.
• mattnewton 4y ago
  I’m a staff engineer @ a big co, and my guess is the assignment is filtering out senior people with day jobs already. I hate take home assignments since they aren’t fairly timeboxed and offer no opportunity for me to ask questions or get info about the company. There is nothing realistically preventing other applicants from spending 12+ hrs on it over the weekend or whatever, and so I feel pressure to also “cheat” on the time box. Not to mention this is competing for weekend or family time. Timed interviews, even if they take all day are a much easier pill for me to swallow, I just burn a vacation day. I also get something out of the much-maligned leetcode+behavioral style of interview- usually 5-10 minutes depending on how long it took me to solve the question to ask them about their role, tenure and pulse on the company. These quick chats with the potential team members are incredibly valuable and missing out on them is an understated cost to take-home assignments. I’ve only done take home assignments as a junior eng for startups that sounded really cool and wouldn’t do it any other way, (and I never actually ended up working for any of them afterwards making the roi kinda bad).
• devoutsalsa 4y ago
  The thing a lot of people want and don’t have is the ability to work from anywhere in any time zone. Give the people what they want and they shall come to you.
• stevetron 4y ago
  These days, I find myself slightly-handicapped: I'm had emergency eye surgery to correct a detached retina condition. I'm told that I won't get back normal eyesight in that eye. I practically live-to-code. I used to do 'hardware design' until I spent my middle-age years back in universities getting 2 degrees in computer science. But now, reading tires out my one good eye quickly. I'm not "comfortable" driving a car anymore with my reduced eyesight. 1. I would not want stock or stock options, i don't care who you are, for compensation. 2. Taking care of the commute for me would be very very helpful. 3. You might offer to pay-off my outstanding student loan balance (it's 6 figures at this point) up front. 4. You must favor LGBTQ+ staff. And yes, I'm sure I won't get hired with this list, so I'll just stay 'retired' as it's easier and cheaper.
• pilgrimfff 4y ago
  I won't even consider companies with a take-home assignment. If you stick with it, be sure to give candidates a heads up that that's part of the process by the time they chat with the recruiter. Otherwise you're being really disrespectful of their time.
• physicsguy 4y ago
  Our process for an SME in the UK: CV screened. 30 minute call with engineering manager Tech task < an hour for a senior level applicant. Nothing here that’s difficult at all Technical interview where we ask questions based on the content of that exercise Offer Even with that we’re struggling, but we’re loathe to reduce it because the technical exercise has shown that a lot of people talk the talk but can’t walk the walk. We’re doing it in a way that’s “write an API end point for something real world-y” so no leetcode and it’s incredible how many people say they know Framework X but can’t even do this basic task.
• pclmulqdq 4y ago
  I am going to add one thing that I haven't heard here. You probably need to raise the cash in your offer by a lot. Most mid-size companies think that they can get away with offering equity at a ridiculous valuation and attract people who aren't true believers. Most people aren't true believers in miscellaneous DevOps that doesn't involve a lot of code. I have spoken to a few series-C and D companies that wanted to give me $X00,000 worth of stock at their series C valuation. I informed them that I needed $X,000,000 of common stock (at that valuation) to match the expected value of my gig at the time, or I would take $X00,000 of preferred stock (whatever they gave their series C investors). They thought that was crazy. If you pretend that the people you are trying to hire don't understand the economics of your stock price, you are only doing yourself a disservice.
  • gleenn 4y ago
    To continue that very last sentence, you are doing yourself a disservice, or like a lot of startups I think people just legitamately don't know how to value stocks and I think there is definitely a predatory nature to that. Perhaps I'm reflecting on my own experience too much, but at my first startup I never asked the simple question "Assuming this company IPOs or gets bought and exits, what is the most this stock would reasonably be worth?". Investors and company leaders know what success looks like, and you multiple that company success by the percentage of stock you'd have when acquired and that's the actual payout you should expect if successful. Now go ahead and multiple by probability of success, and you have what you should expect. I was so proud of myself for negotiating for once, getting both a higher salary and higher amount of stock, but in the end, the company sold in a decent exit, and I pocketed a whopping extra $20K. A rounding error in salary given the risk and below-market salary. I definitely learned the hard way.
    • __turbobrew__ 4y ago
      When calculating expected value of private stock/options I multiply by a factor of ~10 at the end. There are so many unknown unknowns that significantly decrease the value of your equity. The equity agreements I have seen also give ultimate discretion to the board on how your equity is executed. You don’t have control over triggering events and also there are usually quite a few clauses with “at the discretion of the board of directors”. When negotiating offers for non-public companies I provide a sliding scale of cash vs equity. 1 dollar of cash is worth to me 10 dollars in equity of a private company. So if my total comp goal is 300k per year you can give me 250k of cash and 500k of equity, 200k cash and 1000k equity, or just 300k cash. Most companies will baulk at this, but in my experience you have none of the power when holding private equity and so you need a really large multiplier to make it worth the risk. Equity in a public company is a totally different story because the company valuation is controlled by the stock exchanges and you can cash out you equity at any time.
• lowbloodsugar 4y ago
  I'm at a FAANG and our team has the same problem. Hiring is tight right now. Pretty sure we pay more than you. Benefits and salary are "good"? Example from another situation: I own my house not because I made a "good" offer. Plenty of people made a "good" offer. I made the best offer.
• sys_64738 4y ago
  > - Take-home technical assignment (~4h) or similar at candidate's choosing > - Presentation of technical assignment to the team Are these two jokes? What makes you think you're worth somebody wasting their time with such stuff? How about you actually interview them properly 1:1 and stop wasting the candidates time?
  • oaiey 4y ago
    This! The utterly lack of respect is disgusting. The company is in need! What if the candidate asks the company to provide an 8 hours presentations about their processes, people, events, dancing capabilities is the CEO?
• bryanrasmussen 4y ago
  first off, 4h assignments are almost never 4h assignments. at best they tend to be 4h coding, 1h of non-coding stuff (check out repo, branch repo, create repo, pr etc. read specs to make what you are going to make) I have only ever had one actual 4h assignment that took exactly 4 hours, I was amazed. They actually wanted me to spend more than 4 hours. I also had one assignment that had a bug in a particular library that was supposed to be used, I spent 4 hours solving that bug, at the end of which I could then have spent 4+ hours to make the solution. but most assignments are in the 6-8 hour range while advertising 4h. Part of the reason for this is most assignments are supposedly wanting you to make quality solutions etc. which is at odds with the supposed reasons for you to take assignments which are, as I have heard it stated, that a large number of programmers don't know how to program or program so badly it isn't worth hiring them. But take home assignments are not just that you can program (so you don't make the mistake of hiring someone who then sits around for a few months not contributing before you fire them) but also that you can produce quality code, that is to say it is really worthwhile hiring this person. think about it, you want to hire a senior, but you think a 4 hour assignment is going to really help you determine that they are a senior? I remember a fellow I worked with once had a ballpark rule that the smallest time a ticket could take would be half a day, so 4 hours. Why that? Well once you added in reading the ticket, asking about any not well specified parts, made your branch, did the code, tested, made pr, accepted code review, you were almost always at 4 hours. (it was only a ballpark rule, obviously there were some 1 lines, typos etc. that took less but most often 4 hours was a trivial ticket) So you are able to test the quality of a potential hire by giving them a trivial ticket? So this leads to people 'cheating' on the assignment, doing more than 4 hours. So maybe 4 hours of coding, but then cleanup, then maybe modularization, then documenting what you did sending back the message etc. This was basically what that 4h assignment that really was 4h I discussed earlier wanted, they wanted me to make everything pretty after I finished. They asked me if I had another hour what I would have done, I guess at that point if I still wanted the job I would have said I would have done these things but instead I said I would have taken a nap because I finished the job as described in 4. Because, he I am willing to take a little test or something to prove yes I can program but not waste 4 hours of my life. I also have a family as has been pointed out is a real filter on people being willing to do this.
• apeace 4y ago
  If you're having this problem, your first step is to get the recruiter out of the process. Start screening all resumes yourself. I've had some bad experiences with recruiters, both in-house and otherwise, and I feel they usually get screenings wrong. But there's an even more important reason for you to take over this process now: you don't know where your dropoff is. You need to get familiar with what's going on. Are you not getting any good resumes? If so, then the problem is your outreach. Are you getting lots of great resumes but they drop off after the first call? Then the problem is your sales pitch on the call. If it's your responsibility to fill this position, then it's time to get your hands dirty in the data and figure out where the problem is. Without more data on where you have dropoff, these are my takes on your process: - The other commenters in this thread are right: the 4-hour assignment is likely a huge issue. I'd be shocked if you didn't have a huge dropoff there. There's no incentive for senior engineers to do this type of thing, because so many companies want to hire them. It's better to take your chances on someone who seems good, and be prepared to fire them if it turns out you're wrong. - You should put a salary range in the job posting. You said "benefits and salary are good", but literally the only reason to not list these things in a posting is if they're not actually that good. You may need to pay more for someone very senior. They may be expecting more -- even substantially more -- than the person who just retired.
  • devoutsalsa 4y ago
    Maybe a good short term solution. But training the recruiter to screen effectively is what you really want. Unless you have enough time to do everything, you can’t have the attitude of doing the work of people who you view as ineffective. Learn how to delegate more effectively, part of which is getting the right people.
  • bstpierre 4y ago
    > You said "benefits and salary are good", but literally the only reason to not list these things in a posting is if they're not actually that good. The other reason I have seen a reluctance to put salary in a job posting is that some companies may not want their current employees to know how much the new hires are getting.
• jake_morrison 4y ago
  I did one of these after a long day spent deep in the guts of the web framework (Elixir/Phoenix) trying to optimize performance under DDOS on an ad-tech system. They gave me a codebase with a "REST" API for their mobile client that had some problems and wanted me to spend "4 hours" adding features to it and fixing any problems that I saw. I made the changes, then told them that the biggest problem was that their REST API was just ad-hoc JSON over HTTP, with ill-defined data and poor error handling. I recommended using GraphQL, which defines the over-the-wire format and error handling, reduces network round-trips, and is "self-serve", avoiding many meetings between front-end and back-end people and increasing dev velocity. This was too much for them, as they were expecting some changes to put lipstick on the pig. I said that there were other REST-based frameworks that would add standard structure (e.g. JSON API) and support introspection with e.g. OpenAPI. I got rejected because I "didn't have enough experience with the framework", and "it didn't seem like a good fit". Their "seniors" doing the interviewing were not able to build a system that worked before they ran out of money, and they are now out of business.
• _Parfait_ 4y ago
  If you're scared of posting the salary range after a dozen people have asked..there's your issue. Fin.
• doopy1 4y ago
  I think a 30-60 min assessment should be enough, and maybe you can also list the salary?
• bdcravens 4y ago
  Pay more, and disclose it. Unless there's something that stands out about your company, no one is interested in going through the process to be offered mediocre pay. Or find something else to offer (say $5000 personal equipment + guaranteed attendance at AWS Reinvent or something similar) Are you paying candidates for the take-home?
• anarticle 4y ago
  Four hour assignment is instant pass. My Rolodex is huge, I don’t need an exam. In god we trust, all others pay cash.
• cottonseed 4y ago
  Where are you losing people in your hiring process? Are you getting no initial applications? Do you give the coding exercise but they never do it? Do you give an offer but they turn it down? There is a lot of speculation in this thread but you should have the data.
• _odey 4y ago
  `- Take-home technical assignment (~4h) or similar at candidate's choosing` This. Get rid of this. Everybody that reads this, get rid of it if you have such a step in your interview process. Do a 1 hour maximum live challenge instead, or skip it entirely if the candidate has any public code you review and good enough. This is what I've done in the current company and we've managed to hire some extremely good senior candidates because of it.
  • crackinmalackin 4y ago
    100% agree on the 1 hour maximum live challenge. As long as the challenge is relevant to the role being applied for, this is the way to go. This is enough time for the company to see some code and for both parties to ask questions about the tech, role, etc.
  • sys_64738 4y ago
    This is actually insulting to senior developers. You're gonna ask for a four hour take home and presentation like it's show and tell at hight school. I know how to code and don't have to prove to you that I can. If you think I do then you have a real problem.
• chrisseaton 4y ago
  > Benefits and salary are good (though salary isn't posted in the ad) Why hide the salary if you think it's good?
• rajman187 4y ago
  As others have pointed out, a possibly less-than-exceptional comp plus a 4-hour assessment will ensure many people opt out of applying. Given that folks could get anywhere from $400 to $1200+ / day for contracting gigs, you’re asking them to give up $100-$300+ worth of time for the chance at a role that in all likelihood pays less than what they can land at many other places. That may not be a lot of money for some people, but if I were to part with it for little to no upside why not just buy way OTM calls/puts and see if they print later? A lot of other pertinent comments re: time commitment trade-offs for people with families or even having to decide between burning some PTO for this
• randomtwiddler 4y ago
  4 hour technical assessment is a bit heavy after I've already invested 1.5 hours into the process.
• codenesium 4y ago
  When I see a job posting with no salary all I think is what are they scared of? Must be low. A 4 hour project for a senior? For DevOps? I could spend those 4 hours pinging people in my network and probably have interviews scheduled.
• gwnywg 4y ago
  I wonder, how often people would check candidate public repo and hire based on that? I have not seen this to happen to my network, people are asked to do homework assignment or algo coding in front of somebody but had never been hired based on their github. I'd imagine public github repo to the programmer is like portfolio to the artist, should be good indication?
  • dejawu 4y ago
    I'm not senior in title, but I recently accepted an offer from a place that looked over my publicly visible GitLab projects and bypassed the technical challenge based on that work. We still had a technical conversation to confirm that I knew what I was talking about. Their willingness to do this played a huge role in me choosing their offer.
• fxtentacle 4y ago
  Most likely, your offer is just too low. Senior developers almost by definition have experience with their own market value and plenty of offers from their network. If you're going to offer less than what a friend's company offers, you'll need to have insanely amazing tech to compensate. And I'm always assuming that companies pay badly if they are cagey about naming the salary. I mean you also didn't say if you were offering $100k or $300k annually.
• tluyben2 4y ago
  Many people said it already but actual good seniors have networks they get offers from and won’t/don’t do homework. I can see myself apply to your offer, but with decades of enterprise experience, up to date skills and such I cannot see where homework fits. That is why, as a senior, I do not apply but get asked for things and those jobs don’t have homework or tests as they are referrals. I would take a look at your concrete offer but I do not know the actual offer or company; feel free to mail me, I have a lot of highly skilled friends who might be interested, minus the homework.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• jiggawatts 4y ago
  POST THE SALARY. Senior people are senior because of their work experience, which they gain from steady employment. Almost by definition you are looking to entice busy, employed people away from their current jobs. They don’t have the time or inclination to trawl through job ad after job ad. Where your competition will ask for 15 years of experience and then only after hours of calls and meetings reluctantly make an offer half of what the candidate is currently making. You have to stand out from this, or you’re perceived as the same “waste of time” category. You’re not hiring starving students. You’re hiring people with options and responsibilities. Respect their time and value and they’ll consider your offer.
  • s0rce 4y ago
    I've tried to advocate for this at my organization and been told that we don't want people primarily motivated by money...
    • love2read 4y ago
      what else are people motivated by?
    • jiggawatts 4y ago
      You can motivate juniors by things other than money: experience, gaining industry contacts, and filling a resume so that they can move on to… … more senior roles with actual money on offer instead of intangibles. You’re trying to hire senior staff the same way as junior staff. This won’t work. PS: I’m starting to suspect why you’re losing your juniors as soon as they get some experience…
      • s0rce 4y ago
        I'm not the OP
    • enasterosophes 4y ago
      Even people who aren't motivated by money will still follow the money, because unless you know the new employers personally, it's the most reliable indicator that your work is valued. And then, if it turns out that you don't really enjoy it for whatever reason, at least you know you are getting something for it.
• mr90210 4y ago
  I personally tend to ignore positions that don’t post the salary range. I’ve been burnt before by not knowing how much can the job actually pay.
  • geekbird 4y ago
    Seriously. I applied for one position who asked what I wanted, then told me that the top of their range was $5K less than my minimum, was I still interested? LOL, no. My minimum is my minimum now, no dropping it for a hard luck story or company in a cheaper area. Been there, done that, burned that t-shirt.
• e12e 4y ago
  You don't specify how far candidates progress down your pipeline. I'd guess that if you get no applicants; post more details in ads (eg: sallary/benefits, 100% remote ok/no remote etc). Not sure if 1 hour 30 minutes before technical assignment makes sense - maybe 15 min with hr, then assignment - then more face time? I agree with general sentiment that 4 hour assignment doesn't square well with "senior". Maybe take home assignment (look over for 1 hour give or take) then 1-2 hour technical/architectural discussion with technical team lead? Preferably with a real problem recently encountered and solved by the team?
• scarface74 4y ago
  > Benefits and salary are good (though salary isn't posted in the ad) “I understand that most people are interested in working to exchange labor for money to support their addiction to food and shelter. But we don’t post how much money we are willing to exchange for said labor and I wonder why I can’t get qualified candidates who are interested” Does that about sum it up? And on top of that you expect me to do a take home assignment as a “senior” employee when even public companies that offer cash and RSUs (not lottery tickets - ie “equity”) only require a 5 hour interview loop?
• crackinmalackin 4y ago
  I'm in between jobs at the moment and a lot of people here are commenting with some very reasonable hiring practices that I actually haven't seen out in the wild yet. From what I'm seeing, the take home assignment process is getting out of control. The take home assignment process seems to vary wildly between different companies. One place wanted me to complete a take home assignment that was estimated to take between 30 - 40 hours. Another startup had me come in for a 3 hour interview, and then asked me to take home assignment after the onsite interview. Hard pass. I think I still prefer the take home assignments over the leetcode misery. But, candidates like myself will quickly find themselves having to pick and choose which ones they want to complete because some are just asking way too much.
  • SauciestGNU 4y ago
    I just came out of the job hunt, and I disagree about preferring take-home tests to leetcode. I much prefer the timeboxed leetcode scenarios to a project with no defined end aside from the specifications. The expectations for the takehome never seem chasee to me. I might solve the exercise in 4 hours, but how do I know the other candidates aren't pouring days into the exercise? Leetcode with a time constraint allows me to prepare for a known quantity.
    • crackinmalackin 4y ago
      People grind leetcode problems for weeks or months ahead of time though. Most take assignments are throwaway code, but once in a while they are things you can add to a portfolio and expand on. Also if you finish and need to reaapply to another position you’re already done. Definitely a time consuming practice, but i like knowing what I’m getting into versus the mystery of leetcode. Short and sweet is the key though. Someone else mentioned live pair coding on some revelant feature , I think those are ideal
• crackinmalackin 4y ago
  That hiring process doesn't sound too bad to me. I know some people are iffy on the take home portion though. I'm looking for work at the moment, 5+ years as a Frontend web dev. React.js, Typescript and lot's of good CSS skills if anyone is in need send me a message.
• roguecoder 4y ago
  It sounds like you may be looking for a very narrow band of skills. Awkwardly, people who are into systems administration were often there _because_ they didn't have to write code and people who were into coding were often there _because_ they didn't have to do systems administration. DevOps as a concept is only about 10 years old, and a lot fewer people were doing it towards the start. There just aren't that many really senior people out there. My recommendation would be to think about specific skills you would like to add to the team, rather than a generic skill level, and see if you can get creative about filling those. If you need platform expertise, can you pull from defense contractors & teach them the social norms of your company on the fly? If you need someone who can lead culture building, does that have to be the same person who has the deep platform expertise? If you really need all the things in one person, you need some reason why they'd want to work for you instead of Google. Which usually means either paying through the nose, or offering something about the culture that appeals to a niche audience. Having a particular point of view can be a winning strategy, rather than trying to appeal to everyone all at once.
• cosmiccatnap 4y ago
  If you want good people pay them and respect them. It's crazy how you have to explain humanity to people in the tech industry. If you are good at what you do then there are two reasons you will do it. 1. You are paid well 2. You are respected Don't be annoying about doctors appointments or time off, if they do their job just let them do it. Don't make them come into an office they don't want to be in, don't make them be in meetings that have nothing to do with them and could have been an email. It's really crazy simple, just think what you would want and then treat people the same.
• roguecoder 4y ago
  Also, if you don't have someone at your company with a network & social cachet to pull in the talent you need, you might need to start there. If you don't have an in-house recruiter, bring one on to spend their time managing your proactive outreach. Giving up the equity/cash required to attract a Director/CTO may be a harder pill to swallow, but you need someone whose job it is to be trying things out & experimenting with what works at your company. In this market, you can't expect that talent will come to you.
• mooreds 4y ago
  Some ideas to help you stand out: * Post the salary in the ad. At least a range. * Pay folks for their take home assignment time. A few years ago, we paid senior folks $500. It is a token, not a contract, but it shows you care. * If it is the people that make it great, profile them so that potential hires can see their awesomeness. Help them grow their profile (speaking, writing, OSS) if they want. * Are you properly developing your junior folks so they can grow into seniors? Giving them autonomy, learning opportunities and salary bumps? * Have a shorter hiring process. Maybe cut out the recruiter screen? * As a hard bitten senior engineer, I can tell you that I value equity at zero. If I get an equity win, awesome! But I don't count on it. (You don't mention it, but thought I'd share that.) * Sponsor a meetup (~$100/month). This is a long term play. * Any other benefits/things that make you special? Why should anyone want to work there? That said, I like a saying that I learned when I worked in the real estate industry during the great recession: "there's no problem that price can't fix". There's no hiring problem that higher salaries can't fix. The higher salaries may cause other issues, but you'll get your hires.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • moosterv 4y ago
    >* As a hard bitten senior engineer, I can tell you that I value equity at zero. If I get an equity win, awesome! But I don't count on it. (You don't mention it, but thought I'd share that.) So much this!! I have been a paper millionaire more times than I care to remember, but none of them have panned out.
  • ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
    I'd add "* If they have a portfolio, then, for Gods' sake, look at the damn thing." "Draw the Jackass" tests are what you give folks that have no track record, and nothing to show you what they can do. Speaking only for myself, I have a portfolio of over 40 open-source repos (single-origin -me), containing multiple build and deploy applications, SDKs, libraries, tests, hundreds of pages of documentation, dozens of blog posts, a decade of checkin history, and testimonials out the wazoo. It is a mortal insult to ignore that (or, even worse, indicate that "I probably faked it"). If you want to hire people, then I suggest that you don't start by insulting them. These are not people that you are doing a favor, by hiring them. These are people that are your equals -or better. I spent 25 years, interviewing and hiring senior-level engineers. I never gave one damn leetcode test. I did spend a great deal of time, drawing out their passion projects, enthusiasm, and personalities.
• harel 4y ago
  I can only speak form myself of course, and from a UK perspective, but here are my 2 pence: Most seniors are either already employed, or are consulting/contracting. Those employed will need serious incentives to move. You can read that as "significantly higher pay and lower friction on entry". That excludes the 4 hour assignment - I would have declined you there and then. I simply don't have the time to give you 4 hours on a maybe basis. Those consulting (myself included) are even a higher barrier to breach - you are unlikely to match them in pay requirement. However, here's another option: hire a couple those consultants for 3 months, pay them whatever day rate they want, and have them level up all your juniors. You will then have the problem of retention of your less-junior staff. One other anecdote, which is a pet peeve of mine - I used the words Senior/Junior because you referred to it, but I have a dislike to those tags as it's vague to what they means. Junior/Senior in years? in experience? in talent? Some of the best people I've worked with had zero commercial experience when I met them and they blew me out the water with raw talent. P.S. If you do want to hire a top dev-ops consultant and don't mind him being remote, I know one who just became free and he won't be for long. My details are in my profile.
• stuaxo 4y ago
  Someone who is senior is more likely to be a parent, and 4h+ spare time, may be a stretch.
• patio11 4y ago
  If you're passively waiting for resumes to walk themselves over to your recruiters then the candidates you'd like to source are probably instead talking to the engineering managers who took the time to introduce themselves and their firms. The candidate profile you're looking for can write their own ticket; if you don't have a compelling answer to why that ticket should say "I'd love to work at a fairly typical run-of-the-mill mid-size enterprise software vendor" you need to spend some shoeleather convincing people of that. I'd also recommend radically more effort in producing artifacts which some would classify as "top of funnel" or "engineering brand" so that you have some hook to start conversations with and some differentiation with all the other prospective employers of senior engineers.
• znpy 4y ago
  I’m a devops engineer. I sometimes write code (like interfacing with the k8s apis and gluing stuff together). Some considerations: 1. No salary = you don’t pay well. If you paid well you’d be listing that first in the job posting. 2. Also the four hours assignment… when it comes to devops kind of stuff, chances are it’s impossible, or impossible to do in 4 hours. If I have to spin up infrastructure to do your assignment, I have to pay out of pocket. If there’s a service I haven’t used before then I must spend additional time to go though the documentation, do some trial and error (on my time, out of my pocket). Chances are very high there could be a tool I haven’t used before, and that would mean I could just fail because I don’t know that tool (but I could learn it easily on the job, if I hadn’t a four hour limit). So yeah the four hour assignment is completely moronic and unless the scope is cristal clear and laser focused (eg: only aws and only ec2+s3) i’d skip you too.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• yieldcrv 4y ago
  > though the work requires a reasonably deep understanding of the underlying platforms which a lot of people seem to dislike. Would it have taken 6 months to train someone instead of wait for someone to “hit the ground running”? This is actually rhetorical for other hiring managers and recruiters
• baobabKoodaa 4y ago
  You have thousands of senior devs reading this thread right now and you still haven't linked the company / job ad. If you missed this opportunity, you're probably making a lot of other silly mistakes in your recruitment process. My suggestions: 1) Post the job ad here ASAP 2) Ask feedback from your candidates to figure out what other mistakes you are making in recruitment
• mkhpalm 4y ago
  Get rid of the take home work and and presentation. If you want senior or staff engineers their resume and a series of human conversations with whoever the stakeholders are should tell everybody everything they need to know. Your process seems more like you're looking for new grads with little or no experience. Almost as if you're ignoring all their past experience and wanting them to start all over again. In short: Most mid to upper level engineers don't have copious amounts of free time to spend on maybes. There are too many better options for them out there.
• JPatRedCarpet 4y ago
  I'm going to speak from a place of an engineer / hiring manager that's been in startups for the past ~12 years and recently bootstrapped an engineering recruiting with a friend. - As others said, you should post your salary. You'll likely need to be competitive in the markets you're hiring for. If you're open to folks within the US as fully remote, you'll likely want to be targeting the 50-75th percentile of salaries for the YoE you're looking for. - The take home of 4 hours is quite a lot of time end-end. I'd consider slimming this down to 2 hours if you can OR allowing candidates to have several days where they can work on it at anytime vs being timed. - It is extremely hard to stand out as an individual company nowadays. There are a truly amazing amount of startups, mid-size, enterprise, and beyond, companies hiring engineers of all levels. Without a way to tap into a market which you may serve organically and leverage those users into potential candidates, it's just going to be tough to stand out. - You likely will need to spend time sourcing yourself and investigating a variety of avenues where you either a) spend your time sourcing / using a tool that helps (such as triplebyte / AngeList AList) or b) bring on an external recruiter. I would suggest bringing on someone that is actually technical and has a history in engineering, which is likely tough to find. - Feel free to email me if you'd like to just chat more about this bit (external recruiting). We're happy to help, email in profile so-as not to simply self-promote within the comments. As a simple plug, we specialize in providing mid-funnel engineers for hard-to-hire roles and are happy to take over the first third of most engineering hiring processes.
• updateavailable 4y ago
  You're doing it backwards. Tell me why you're worth working for. Sell me on it. We should be giving you the take-home exam. You're a self-described "run of the mill" software vendor. That sounds like a workplace that is zero fun. Strike one. Good candidates who can help you are in it for the adventure. We're not in it for your average benefits and wet mop process. Strike two. You're pretentious declaring that your run-of-the-mill job "requires a reasonably deep understanding of the underlying platform" presuming that we software engineers with decades of problem-solving experience can't learn it in an afternoon. Strike three. It seems to me as though you're going through the motions to check a box but don't really want to fill the position.
• anothernewdude 4y ago
  Are you at least tracking where in the funnel you are losing candidates?
• jd24 4y ago
  - Take-home technical assignment (~4h) or similar at candidate's choosing That is an instant nope.
• rwaksmunski 4y ago
  I usually get offers on the spot within the hour of "just talking shop" with the manager and the most senor technical person on the team. Why would I waste a day with your homework and class presentation only to be offered half of what I make now? You are filtering for desperate bottom feeders, and that is all you're gonna get.
  • datavirtue 4y ago
    Winner!
• DevToRecruiter 4y ago
  You can save yourself a lot of time and possibly attract the right type of candidate By posting the salary (not just a range) including all benefits as well as the type of work they’ll be responsible for (not just what skills you expect them to have). Top tier candidates have to deal with a lot of noise, you can make your signal stronger by being upfront about as much detail as possible.
• mym1990 4y ago
  Having some kind of salary range in the initial post is very helpful, or even knowing early on in the process(recruiter screen) what that might be. If I think that there is even a small chance that I won't get a number range until my part is done in the interview, then 99/100 times I won't even apply. When you say "benefits and salary are good" I literally have no idea what that means or what the frame of reference there is...
• trhway 4y ago
  > we're junior-heavy already even if you didn't have 4h unpaid assignment, that one would still make me think a lot. Junior heavy possibly signals what the management doesn't treat/value people well (not surprisingly that 4h assignment really dove tails with that), that work is full of unnecessary self-inflicted death marches, that the management isn't capable to recognize/utilize/value the senior technical experience/skills, etc., so that only junior ones who need experience and don't yet know better stay there.
• bergenty 4y ago
  It’s the 4 hr technical assessment. We now offer a choice between the take home and a white boarding session with our engineers.
• golergka 4y ago
  Does your "remote" include international workers?
• motohagiography 4y ago
  A bit contra, but this is a bit like asking fish how to catch them and the fish saying, "send more worms!" I'm pretty senior as an architect in my field and I ask things in interviews like when their last round was, staff size, runway, revenue - basically like I'm an investor, because at this stage of my career that's exactly what I am doing. If that sounds funny, consider that there are LPs participating in seed and A rounds for less than the value or revenue a key hire can deliver. Obviously, I'm not an investor, but consider treating senior talent like somone who is investing in your company and they may open up. You don't have to kiss anyone's ass, and arguably a lot of perks are kind of patronizing above a certain level, so just treat recruiting as a business deal and not a patronage application. A lot of recruiting processes optimize for finding people who don't know what they are worth, and often at the expense of finding the people who really are worth a lot. Also, this is for finding exceptional talent for near term outcomes in the growth phase of a company. Once your major growth phase is behind you (e.g. an D-F round to get you over the line to an IPO or an acquisition, or you are an institution) I'd recommend moderate and steady hands who can manage and scale jr's, and not a fireteam of tactical operators. Consider whether you just need better mid level managers who can really leverage a team better instead of more experienced IC's. A good IC is gold, but a good manager is a refinery. Someone who is still an IC after more than a decade in the field is going to be motivated by solving interesting problems that actualize them, so perhaps lead with your hard problems. Someone senior understands organizations and starts with second order thinking, so tip some of your strategy and business model to them to let them apply their experience. Individuals who are really, really good at something are usually good at it because they were optimizing against a constraint. As in anything, technique is an artifact of constraints, so consider that the very best technical talent is likely going to have an albatross of some sort. Look for minor contradictions, inconsistencies, and rough edges that created a situation where they have to be at least 2x better than anyone else in a specialty just to sit at the table. Their value has to offset their roughness for them to survive, and whether its conscious or not, that's often how they signal it. Many of them are more outdoor cats than indoor cats, as all the strategic sr. indoor cats are already managing directors and SVPs somewhere running people and not machines, so maybe see if you can lure someone out of a successful consulting run with some recognition and respect, and let them meet your execs. Post exit or significant culture change they will attrit out, but it's to mutual benefit. Just a few ideas, but being attractive isn't a transaction, it's demonstrating that you are growing and how someone can be a part of that trajectory, so really attracting talent is the effect of showing promise.
• charlie0 4y ago
  I'm not a true senior (<5YOE) but I refused to do take home assignments. It's too open ended and there's really no way to tell exactly what will please the hiring manager. Do you simply try to rush through the code to make it work within the allotted time limit? Do you put more effort into the design and structure of the code to make it production ready? What do you do when making the code nice and the 4 hours are up? Do you stop and turn in an incomplete assignment or do you put in more hours of work? Even if by chance, you killed it and built awesome code in the 4 hours, there's no guarantee that the hiring manager will like the patterns. I'm all of my online interviews I have never once received specific feedback on what I "failed" to do "right". So no, I will not waste my time on take home tests unless I get paid for it. As much as I also dislike algorithms, I can at least research what I did wrong and patch up that weakness. Can't really do that with take home assignments because there are too many variables.
• ratherbefuddled 4y ago
  Some thoughts: * Pay _much_ more. * Post the salary in the ad. * Get rid of half of your hiring process. - The recruiter call is likely worthless, engineering managers can tell in about 3 minutes if a CV/resume is worth an interview. - Instead of 4h homework and a presentation, do an hour of pairing with a team member. * Come up with some other benefits - 4 day week, full remote, options/sharesave etc. * Reward your team for using their network to get candidates.
• sbmthakur 4y ago
  Take-home technical assignment sounds too broad. What kind of questions are these?
• urthor 4y ago
  https://twitter.com/typesfast/status/1536406121249796096?s=20&t=7UQfZNKeauxeMj79Jyopmw https://twitter.com/typesfast/status/1536406121249796096?s=2... "It might be that many software business models don't work when engineers cost $400k/year." You just cannot run a "normal" business model. If you want cheap employees, hire Egyptians. The US technical market is inflated because so many companies are earning $$$. Even if you fix your "process" problems, things won't get better. You need to offer a better quid pro quo.
• phil-martin 4y ago
  I have a few things to add. For some context, I've been building software for 22 years, have ran my own company, and worn many hats. The thoughts below are also in the context of hiring senior people. Moving fast and being responsive is really important, i.e. be lucky. I only just this week moved from part time consulting to a full time job. I think I was very lucky, but from the first moment of contacting recruiters/applying/reaching out it took only 1.5 weeks to get an offer that exceeded my expectations. It is hard to be lucky enough to capture the attention of the right application at the right time. Include the salary in the job ad. I only applied for jobs with salary in the ad. It saves everyone so much time to know that everyone is in the same ballpark before starting any discussions. Look beyond the resume. The trouble is over 20 years, I've done A LOT. So many different technologies, problems, industries, roles. It's too much to condense into a resume that perfectly fits your expectations. Come up with some probing questions that are relevant to what you need from a problem solving point of view, and ask those. I remember interviewing and it prompted a whole set of memories I had omitted from my resume and cover letters, all because I just plain forgot. Be proactive. For example, I added a post to a monthly "whos looking for work" post on HN. I didn't hear from you and I would have loved to. Maybe I wasn't the perfect fit, but no way to know unless we talked. I wonder how many other potentials could have been missed? I wouldn't worry about whether or not the take home technical assignment is causing issues or not. You will need some way of evaluation candidates in a practical way, and it might be video discussions, or it might be take home assessments, or something else. All a quite time consuming, and will exclude people who don't have that time. If people are genuinely looking and are interesting in your team, they will find a way to make the time. Perhaps be flexible in this point and work with the candidate to decide what method of evaluation works for both parties. I don't pretend that the above will fix any hiring issues, but I think it's worth considering. In a job market where there is an overwhelming demand for senior people, ask yourself - why should they work for you?
• stakkur 4y ago
  Define ‘senior’. Doing that in a way that everyone understands will reveal your problem.
• SMAAART 4y ago
  I see 2 weak points, possibly 3: #1 "Resume screened by in-house recruiter", my experience is that they are not very well versed at "screening", they leave out individuals who are 97% qualifies, at the same time they screen in technically unqualified individuals who know how to play the "screening game". Get someone technical to do the screening. #2 "though salary isn't posted in the ad" if it's good, why not disclose it? #3 (Maybe) who does the 30m call? see #1 above.
• Tao3300 4y ago
  I have family. I suspect a lot of senior engineers do. My interpretation of "DevOps" suggests a lot of on-call time. Junior heavy and senior poor makes me think you're not presenting an appropriate work-life balance. Younger SWEs are far more willing to sign on for that kind of thing.
• dcj4 4y ago
  >though salary isn't posted in the ad why not?
• gwbas1c 4y ago
  I got this onto the front page a few years ago: https://andrewrondeau.herokuapp.com/takehome_vs_whiteboard_coding_the_problem_is_bad_interviews https://andrewrondeau.herokuapp.com/takehome_vs_whiteboard_c... Honestly, if you want to know why developers like me aren't applying, you you need to post your job description here. It's impossible to give good feedback on something that I can't see. (And by the way, I very rarely do take-homes, unless I am between jobs and see personal value in doing it.)
• InefficientRed 4y ago
  The key question is WHERE in the process you lose applicants. Do you lose candidates at the 4h assignment stage? If so, that is probably the issue. Otherwise, look elsewhere. 1. Title inflation. Many here are making glib comments about "not actually senior". Great! Call it a "Principal" role and see if that helps. You can always promote any existing Principals to Senior Principal or Staff or God or whatever the new better-than-old-senior title is ;-). 2. Actual inflation. What are you offering? Are you sharing that in a job posting? Hard truth: if you're not FAANG or a handful of other companies, everyone assumes you can't afford them. If you CAN afford them, share numbers in your job posts! Senior at my FAANG is around $500K at the moment. If you can't beat FAANG, the best way to get people is to offer them more autonomy than they can get at FAANG. But at the Senior level that means making them part of leadership (assuming you're small); Senior at FAANG likely already has more technical autonomy than you can offer. So management and strategy autonomy is a great carrot. Good luck!
  • 10x-dev 4y ago
    500K is total comp right?
    • InefficientRed 4y ago
      yes.
• brx86 4y ago
  It baffles me you decide to ask other people in your position instead of the people you actually want to attract. What is this? And as a side note, is the 4h assignment and posterior presentation close to what day to day would be?
• daemonhunter 4y ago
  Post the salary, ditch the take home assignment. We're engineers, busy people, not students.
• gwbas1c 4y ago
  I recently posted this on my blog about why it's so hard to get an experience software engineer to respond to a recruiter: https://andrewrondeau.herokuapp.com/why_software_engineers_dont_respond_to_recruiters https://andrewrondeau.herokuapp.com/why_software_engineers_d... But there are a few things that I didn't put in that article: In my case, with 20 years experience, it's critical that I am not hired as a possession, or a trophy member of a team. It always works out poorly when someone pulls me onto a team because of my pedigree but tries to manage me like a junior developer, or someone who needs a lot of hand holding. What's critical is that I will have a high degree of control in my job. This ranges from control of my day-to-day workflow, control of my development environment, and control of the architecture of the thing I am working on. I also seek to have some amount of control over the work of more junior developers. Without that kind of control coming in the door, I really won't bother applying, because every time I've started a new job with an existing team, I've always had to fight to clean up messes. These messes will usually make a project fail, yet for various reasons management needs a lot of convincing to fix the messes.
• astura 4y ago
  I'm a senior engineer and lead developer with 16 years experience. >Take-home technical assignment (~4h) or similar at candidate's choosing Yeah, I'm not doing that. I don't feel like spending four hours doing unpaid work in my free time, nor do I really feel like setting up a dev environment on my personal computer in the first place. It's probably actually more than four hours too and my time is valuable. I am extremely confident that I have no problem getting a job without doing "homework" and I get bombarded by recruiters as is. So I'll skip you. Plus this is before you even know what the offer even is! You simply aren't going to get many actual, good senior engineers to jump through your hoops.
• okaram 4y ago
  I think you're not giving us enough information. Do you have numbers/percentages for each stage? Is the problem that you aren't getting enough applications? At what stages are you filtering what percentage of applicants? This can help you debug your process ;) Sorry, since this may be beating a dead horse, but ... Are you sure your salary/TCO is actually competitive (and wins some of the competitions ;)?
• oxff 4y ago
  Pay more.
• phibz 4y ago
  > Take-home technical assignment (~4h) or similar at candidate's choosing Can you determine I know what I'm talking about and can do the work without doing a 4h unpaid hoop? You should be able to ask probing questions and pretty quickly have a rough idea of if I've worked with this stuff or not.
• JohnHaugeland 4y ago
  > (though salary isn't posted in the ad) I generally don't bother with these
• kstenerud 4y ago
  This is not directed at you, but rather at the poor hiring practices that have permeated the software industry for too long. We've been gaslighted into accepting abusive hiring practices, and it has to stop. When you're hiring an accountant, do you give them 4h take-home assignments? How about hours of interviews with your accounting team to suss out their accounting skills and critique their style? I mean, how DO you determine if they're real accountants or one of these fakers I've heard so much about that can't even do some simple books? Or how about lawyers? Do you ask them to write up a fictional legal brief or some boilerplate that the rest of your legal team can scrutinize to see if they're an A player? How about a multi-day interview just to make sure you've asked all the tough legal questions? No? Then how can you know that they're not going to drag your fragile company down with their poor performance and gasp have to be fired! The horror! How about civil engineers? Would you have them design a building foundation as a take-home? What about tricky interview questions weighing the pros and cons of various retaining wall designs in, say, Arizona vs Washington (even though they'd be working in New York)? I don't know how this level of abuse became a thing in software engineering, but I simply won't put up with it anymore. Won't post compensation ranges? You're trying to cheat me. Take home assignment? I walk. Interview gauntlet? I walk. Things drag on too long? I walk. I'm a professional - I have an extensive portfolio of my work slowly built up over decades that you can ask me in-depth questions about (and other things) during our reasonably timed interviews. Does inverting a tree in any way demonstrate my ability to do the job? No, it does not. My time is precious and the compensation trends are clear. Disrespect that and I can only conclude that you are not professional, and not worth my time.
  • SkyPuncher 4y ago
    > When you're hiring an accountant, do you give them 4h take-home assignments? How about hours of interviews with your accounting team to suss out their accounting skills and critique their style? I mean, how DO you determine if they're real accountants or one of these fakers I've heard so much about that can't even do some simple books? I'm a software engineer. My brother is an accountant. I know you're trying to pick a theoretical, but the answer to most of those questions is still yes. I don't think he had a take-home project, but he most definitely had several rounds of heavy-technical interviews. I'd much prefer the take home test over the BS he has to deal with.
• tumanian 4y ago
  Well, a good question is what are you offering the senior applicants, other than (hopefully competitive) money for their time. Are there interesting problems to solve? Is there potential for growth?are they going to have a say in the technical direction and strategy? How about the business side? Think of better ways to formulate the opportunity, your pitch, and ways to stand out in the market
• Spooky23 4y ago
  Are you not getting applications or they are falling out of the funnel. The take home test for a high level individual sounds asinine, but it was not clear where the problem lay.
• SoftTalker 4y ago
  1. Identify a smart, motivated person in your company who is interested in the position. 2. Train said person to do the job.
• ant1oz 4y ago
  So to make things clear: A junior is an engineer that has less than 2-3 years experience professionally, and about the same time building and learning how to code by themself on their spare time. An Intermediate engineer is a Junior engineer with a good attitude - that says: I am still earning, and I am humble, and I listen more than I talk. A Senior Engineer Has 10+ years of experience coding, and developing solutions. He has navigated all the corporate BS, politics, and quit several teams of arrogant Junior con artists, or poor project managers - and is tired of all this BS. A real Senior engineer can code the entire solution by himself in 6 months , instead of a team of 5 juniors over 2 years. A real senior engineer - worth 10x the salary of a junior, and at least 5 time the one of his direct supervisor - for one reason: You can remove everyone in the product team that doesn't have at least 5 years of experience developing code. And you will have better results at delivering your product. In your case, you probably will end up with zero employee. Now how much money are you offering this Senior engineer? Will you pay him/her the equivalent of the whole team you just fired? Or just advertise a "competitive (LMAO) " 170k$ package with amazing bonuses... Which is like what.... only 40% more than the Junior that costs more time than it actually saves? Maybe start respecting what it means to be a performant senior engineer - Most of them died of depression, burnout - or jumped in the management wagon - because they were too tired of corporate BS and saw no points in even remotely trying to deliver technical solution in an environment where they don't have decision power - while at the same time - nobody in the hierarchy above (and under them) slightly understand the blueprints. When you realize the value of this rare person, you can think of multiplying the salary package by at least 3. Then, you can do your interview rounds. The heck! if I ever want to work in a tech team again - that either will be at a market salary (understand getting paid 5 times less than what I technically worth) for an ethical projects - which is rewarding for my soul and self respect - OR - I will get a 500k$/y for a basic coder job at Google/FB/etc. Maybe you are not looking for a senior engineer, maybe you are looking for an intermediate one. If you come to hire a senior engineer at that salary, be warned: he's not a senior.
• jsiaajdsdaa 4y ago
  Lately, the only metric I've been using to decide if I want to work at a company is "is the team competent"? If I get a vibe that too many people are, for lack of a better word, dumb assholes, I just won't take the offer.
• gigatexal 4y ago
  Why isn’t the salary posted in the ad? Many companies don’t do this but it could be something to set yourself apart. We used to do takehomes but now we let the candidate choose if they want to do a take home or do a pair programming session in the interview.
• aristofun 4y ago
  The process looks okay. But your post still lack crucial details. What has always been the most important factors for all decent engineers I know: 1. What exactly do you do (what’s the mission, the goal, the challenge) 2. The compensation If these 2 are good - we can bear any meaningful interview process, and many even prefer home assignments to nonrealistic pressure of on-site interviews. If not - nobody actually cares if interview process is great.
• airbreather 4y ago
  If it's speculative, as in 20 other people doing the same test for one job, I'd probably not. If it was, "we want to give you the job, but just need to check if you can actually do exactly what we need", well that's different.
• foobiekr 4y ago
  Nothing about the hiring process laid out is specific to senior hiring and is basically time intensive. You are not the only company reaching out to them or that they are applying for, so your assignment is completely not going to fly.
• keithnz 4y ago
  40+ years (30+ professionally) here, and like others have said 4hrs take home is a real turn off. Having done a bunch of hiring myself using a bunch of techniques (some really bad!), what I like to do is get people to code interactively with me, I usually set a small task that should take < hour, but usually within 10-15 minutes I have a really good sense of whether they can or struggle, especially with more senior people, I will start side tracking and talking different options, and play with code to try to get a sense of what kind of discussions this person is likely to have, what kind of design options they consider, also I like to get them to review some code, and refactor code, discuss some real problems we have, etc. For senior people, once I know they can code, I look at how rigid they are, I pay close attention to how strongly opinionated they are, what they think is important etc. (too often people can end up with "rules" instead of principles of software development which tends to be limiting). I also notice this on twitch, if you go to https://www.twitch.tv/directory/game/Software%20and%20Game%20Development https://www.twitch.tv/directory/game/Software%20and%20Game%2... and watch people code, you won't need 4 hours to work out who can program, you will likely have a good sense of what they can do in < 10-15 minutes (as long as they are actually coding, not chit chatting, or if they are learning a new language, might take a bit longer to work out), and within an hour you will get a pretty good sense of what they are like. So, optimize your interviewing process, try to engage the people so the interview is engaging and collaborative so that the interviewer / and candidate feel like they'd be working with someone they'd like to work with. Don't be too rigid about interview structure but be clear about the things you need to work out before giving them an offer.
• cardosof 4y ago
  Just let go of the 4h assignment. I know it seems like the perfect process for the company: introductory talk, assessment, talk, offer/negotiation. However, in reality that's for Juniors who need to prove their knowledge and have the time to do it. Seniors don't have that much time and good ones can show what they know in a 1-1:30 talk. Sorry if I've put it bluntly, just trying to help.
• dbcurtis 4y ago
  From my perspective as what you might call a super-senior, I find this process itself a giant red flag. It is aimed towards recruiting juniors. I have done enough contracting that before you have finished the sentence, I have already worked out in my head the opportunity cost of 4 non-billable hours. And in return I get.... nothing. Now while it is true that 4 hours of on-site talking to people is still 4 hours out of my life, but at least then I get to meet the people I would be working with and have an opportunity to ask about the company. And you are showing respect for my time by spending your time getting to know me. And what do you learn from a 4 hour homework assignment that any undergrad should be able to complete, when you can see from my resume multiple L5/L6 positions at different companies? Nothing at all about what you want a senior to actually do. The senior you need is the person who can mentor the juniors through a 4-month long (not 4 hour long) project. Review their architecture, guide it in wise directions. Review their code. Raise the bar on unit testing. Teach the entire organization about better validation methodologies. Create realistic schedules and rational work-streams. Evaluate new technologies. As a candidate, my interpretation of your process is that I would be working for management that can't think about problems from first principals. You can't hire a senior because you aren't looking for a senior because, as evidenced by your process, you don't know what a senior does. The first thing you need to do is articulate to yourself what you want a senior to bring to your organization. Structure your interview process to try to uncover those skills and behaviors in a candidate.
• hans0l074 4y ago
  Technical manager here. We have a similar process (although for a programming-heavy role) and getting a decent flow of applicants passing through. Some deviations though from your way: - We combine steps 4 and 6. Our assignment presentation is 90min (which sometimes goes onto 2 hours) and the hiring manager is present in that call. - Our take home assignment usually takes 4-6 hours to complete for a competent dev, but we let them do it across a week or so. They have a work life, family etc, and we let them balance that against the interview process. It's worked really well for us. Edit: To add, we feel that a quicker feedback loop and turnaround time helps the candidate and make them aware of that. And we don't wish to compromise on the assignment - we would like to see their output after giving them sufficient space and time to complete it.
• syngrog66 4y ago
  > - Resume screened by in-house recruiter 1st mistake > - 30m call with them 2nd mistake stopped reading after that. :-) and I dont mean to sound harsh. but in a market where experienced talent is in high demand, we get TONS of inbound leads, in parallel, and thus look for ultra easy ways to filter them down. you immediately gave me a way to do it > Take-home technical assignment (~4h) or similar at candidate's choosing DOH. if I hadn't bailed by now, heres where I would pass on you fast. you're welcome to look at my resume/CV and respect my word, welcome to look at my GitHub, and welcome to offer me a paying project, but if you think I'll give you 4+ unpaid hours of my professional time, to every rando who pings me, just to prove, "Yes, I'm A Programmer Like I Already Told/Showed You" then be prepared to miss out on all the people with BATNA's and self-respect. The attitude of entitlement by some companies in 2022 has gotten out of hand. Overdue for corrective turn.
• nprateem 4y ago
  I have those skills. I joined LinkedIn 2 weeks ago and in that time have been bombarded by recruiters. I've had maybe 30-40 message me directly. I was looking but now I'm sitting tight in my current job. I'd consider moving for unlimited time off, full remote and twice the salary most offer (starting around £250k basic) because I know my current job and it's cushy. And yeah, I'd direct you to my GH instead of doing tests, but would obviously be ok to interview. Like others have said, without knowing your salary I wouldn't even reply, and you'd need to contact me initially anyway. In this market you may need to approach hiring not as fishing for bites, but more like headhunting for execs, since that's what your competitors are doing.
  • physicsguy 4y ago
    Are you fully remote right now? I get messages for jobs like this in finance a lot, but they're all mostly London based it seems.
    • nprateem 4y ago
      Yes I am, and a reasonable number of SRE jobs I'm being contacted about are fully remote. Not sure if that's just within the UK or worldwide, which is what I want. Now I don't have to go into the office I don't see any difference between being at my place vs Ibiza, etc.
• nnurmanov 4y ago
  Personally, I usually fail tests. I don't have good memory to memorize all the algos, keywords, I am a StackOverflow driven developer:), but the last interview went really good, I could say I liked it and I even received an offer letter. Let me briefly describe the setup. The job is with a well-known software outsourcer, the position is Middle Java Engineer. 1. Quick interview with the recruiter; 2. A hour long interview with senior engineer, where I told him about the projects I have completed, he asked some questions, at the end he gave me a relatively simple java task; 3. An interview with the engineering manager, who wanted to know how would I approach some problems, e.g. concurrency, security related. The interview process did not require me to spend weeks to prepare, no 2-3-4 hours commitment and no questions outside of context. IMO, when you do hundreds of interviews you realize that passing tests successfully does not mean you will be successful at workplace.
• nscalf 4y ago
  4 hour take home tests are an immediate no from me. It’s cheaper for you, but you’re essentially asking to do my job unpaid. If it’s an hour long interview, you’re bought in and we’re both there. A take home test does not tell me in any way that you’re serious with me for this role, and I haven’t decided your company is worth my time yet. Typical engineering interviews are 30 minute intro to the company, hour long technical, then full on site. I put in 1.5 hours total before I know if you’re serious. I’m not putting in 4.5 hours before an on site.
• b20000 4y ago
  8 steps? are you insane? keep it to 3, and no leetcode. these are senior people, just look at past projects and make a decision.
• nnurmanov 4y ago
  I run https://t.me/withpublic_jobs https://t.me/withpublic_jobs Telegram channel and managed to find several senior level candidates, including DevOps. If you are ok to remove 4h tech assignment:), I can post your job there
• raverbashing 4y ago
  Let me guess, the juniors are filtering the seniors out because they don't subscribe to the latest fads or are opinionated/more realistic about somethings that the juniors take as gospel Also, the issue with most technical assignments I see is that they're judged much harshly than the actual work would be (including by the ones doing the assessment) and the fact that actual work is interactive and not a fire-and-forget (as the assignment is)
• andsoitis 4y ago
  You shouldn’t be waiting for them to come to you. You should be spending hours each day looking for, reaching out, and networking.
• misja111 4y ago
  I would never do a 4h home assignment if I didn't have any clue yet about the salary. And I guess most senior developers think the same. Why risk wasting so much time? I would even suspect that you had good reason not to mention your salary until the end, probably it wouldn't be very good.
• JanSt 4y ago
  In a hot job market (yes, recession may hit now) you maybe need to turn your process around. Why are you a good employer for the candidate? Also, post the salary. I'm not going to start a 10+ hour process unless I'm sure it is worth it Your process gives me no reason to work for you because I get to know nothing about you. A call with a recruiter? Gonna hear all the standard phrases and have to answer basic questions. A call with hiring manager? I still don't know anything about my future coworkers / team. A 4h technical assignment? Why would I want to do this (unless I really need a job) after getting to know nothing about you? Why would I want to even work for you? Companies often operate from a point of view of the candidate being the one who has to show they are worth it. For many senior candidates that's not going to cut it.
• adastra22 4y ago
  > Take-home technical assignment (~4h) or similar at candidate's choosing Are you paying me my consulting rate of $2500 for this half day of work? If not, skip
• Elinvynia 4y ago
  Pay more, it is literally that simple. At some point, people will find that compensation fair and will accept a job from you.
• eric4smith 4y ago
  I would bet that people flake after the 30 minute call. And not the take-home technical assignment. Hiring these days is incredibly difficult. People genuinely do not really want to work anymore. I don't mean this in a bad way, but people are just more interested in their personal life instead of working for someone else. Especially senior people.
• edf13 4y ago
  Where are you posting your ad? Lack of salary will put off a % of browsers who are unsure if they want a move… you need to either add package or try and make it clear in the text it’s good. The interview schedule looks fine to me - but I don’t have super young children (maybe I’m more senior than I realise!)
• pharmakom 4y ago
  To those who are against a take home assignment (fair enough) how should employers assess your skill set?
  • grldd 4y ago
    Employers should use their brains instead of copying other peoples homework. Because that's how we got this mess. Everybody copying the same interview practices.
    • pharmakom 4y ago
      What does that look like in practice? Interview questions?
• jillesvangurp 4y ago
  This looks like a funnel designed to get rid of all qualified people. Get rid of your recruiter because they obviously lack access to senior resumes, which is not surprising. I long stopped even replying to recruiters as have many others that I know that are properly senior. Most qualified people don't deal with recruiters at all if they can avoid it. And there is no shortage of very lucrative good jobs to be had. Alternatives: get your senior people attending conferences and local meetups. Make sure there's a referral program. Treat incoming referrals with urgency. Those are your best shot at hiring good people. Don't scare them away with your bureaucracy. If anyone good comes along, be ready to act fast. And of course skip the take home exam; it's usually completely redundant, humiliating, and candidates hate them. The best ones doubly so and they'll probably tell you so. The ones least eager to take that test are exactly the people you should be making an offer. Probably your recruiter is losing those candidates long before you even get to talk to them.
• wetpaws 4y ago
  My experience with assignments is that I will have a guaranteed waste of time on assignment if post asignment interview go bad. Unless I really want a job, i usually avoid assignments.
• bodge5000 4y ago
  > No listed salary > Long interview process > Standard benefits (I'm guessing this, but if you were offering a 4-day work week or something, you'd probably mention it) The market is extremely busy right now, overwhelming actually. If a candidate wants to get through it with any time left, they'll need to apply filters, and the busier the market is, the harsher those filters need to be. A candidate who can only apply for 3 jobs at a time will do so whether the market is offering 3 jobs or 300.
• SideburnsOfDoom 4y ago
  > We're a fairly typical run-of-the-mill mid-size enterprise software vendor So that doesn't really sell it. What's interesting about "fairly typical run-of-the-mill mid-size" ?
• nogenhat 4y ago
  //- Resume screened by in-house recruiter// The first step - usually recruiter filter about more then 50% of candidates who are more then enough for you. //- Take-home technical assignment (~4h) or similar at candidate's choosing// wow, that's a lot. Change that to AMA session, and rate candidate based on the answers. Hire faster, fire faster.
• mtw 4y ago
  Review the take-home assignment. Is it really relevant to the job ? And if you really have to have it, is it specific and interesting? For example don’t ask to use a JavaScript library if the job post specifically asked for talent in rust.
• Namari 4y ago
  From my experience: 1. In House recruiter are just bad, they have no energy and you lose all motivation after you talk to them. 2. Put the salary range, when it's not written I don't even bother applying. 3. 4 hours assignment is long, people tend to not want to spend too much time on assignment as it could be a complete waste of time, you don't get paid and most already have a job and don't want to work another few hours for something that lead nowhere and that you may not ever receive a feedback.
• zasdffaa 4y ago
  Please show us your original job ad, that may get useful feedback. Some questions,,, What's the salary and why won't you post it? What is the work about, and why not state it here? Why do people say they dislike the underlying platform? Why are you so specifically needing senior talent? How many people applied? How many did you turn down, and why? How many dropped out before you could hire or reject them (and how long did you make them wait)? Edit: can you give an example of the kind of technical assignment you ask for. Telling us these may get you a long way to an answer.
• snow_mac 4y ago
  How big is your company? you're talking about 2 hours of interviews before you get to the take home. Seriously? My current gig, my boss talked to me for 30 minutes and made me a job offer by the end of the day. This is at a firm with 200,000 employees. I've been there for 4 going on 5 years. I started as a contractor and have decided to make the hop to FTE. I'd offer the candidate a 30-60 minute interview followed by offer with a mandatory 90 day termination / probation period or a 1099 contract. Ask the senior about the last project they led, talk through challenges and how you faced them, talk to them about politics and how they manage those, talk about a technical problem they faced etc.... Behavioral interview ish ... Engage, talk, gauge experience and if they don't jive, don't hire them.
• TrackerFF 4y ago
  Have you considered outsourcing? Lots of good senior engineers in south america, europe, asia, etc. that will do just fine.
• dkersten 4y ago
  I got my current job on the back of a 90 minute phonecall and had an offer the next day. I got my previous job after a 45 minute phonecall. The one before that, I had a 1 hour phone interview. The one before that, the engineering manager bought me lunch and we chatted for 45 minutes, and then I spent an hour in their office with him a few days later. The one before that was a 90 minute in person interview. That’s the majority of the companies I’ve worked for that weren’t startups I started and none of them had a long or time consuming process. I also interviewed with a company recently that required multiple rounds with multiple people and it was not worth the effort, so I will stick to the companies that can decide quickly whether I fit or not. I wouldn’t even bother if I had to do a take home assignment. I also want to know up front if it will be worth my time or not, so not disclosing salary range is also a red flag for me. I’m not there to play cat and mouse.
• Falkon1313 4y ago
  I don't know what you mean by "the work being a higher percentage non-code"? But also: "Take-home technical assignment (~4h)"? For what? Just give me a contract to work on one specific module or account or whatever. Real work, real pay. That ticket that's been itching you, but you've never assigned, or that customer request that just "can't be done". Give me that, pay me for it. Now afterward, I've actually worked together with your team on something and we both know whether or not we want to keep doing that. And you've got rid of that nagging ticket, and hired someone who does the things that can't be done. Or worst case, you decide my work's crap and you're no worse off. 2/3rds of my career jobs have been contract-to-hire like that. And the other 1/3rd were cases where I'd already worked with these people before due to something like that. A couple of calls and a contract job like that should be all it takes. I guess the questions you have to ask are: - Are you just not getting applicants at all? - Or are you getting altogether the wrong applicants? - Or are you getting ones that might possibly fit but they're just not making it through the process? If it's either the first or the second, then your posts maybe aren't right in some way. If it's the third, then you need to look at where they're falling out. If it's the assignment, then that's your problem. And there's an easy solution.
  • jnothing 4y ago
    I wouldn't be comfortable opening our code base to every applicant for "real work".
• throwawaythrow1 4y ago
  List your salary/renumeration/offer, or at least the range. I have issues with some of the steps listed but by far my biggest issue is that companies don't list their offer. Which for potential candidates makes them wonder if it's even worth attempting to apply.
• scotty79 4y ago
  Why don't you post salary in the ad? That's the first thing that gets me interested in the ad. I don't even start to read ads without salary.
• donedealomg 4y ago
• opendomain 4y ago
  The problem for me is not that I am being asked to do take home work - the issue is that I do not know how engaged the employer is. I have done the work and been ghosted. Hell - I have done the work and received an offer but no one ever talked about my solution. I also have had the other end of the spectrum- interviews that ask me to correct production code - because they can not solve it. Maybe the answer is to pay me for my time at a consulting rate.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• edem 4y ago
  > Take-home technical assignment (~4h) or similar at candidate's choosing This is an instant no-go for me. As others have said as well, I usually find work from my network so I don't really have to look at ads. The problem is also that a significant portion of seniors at some point will want to start their own business too, so they will leave the job market.
• lr1970 4y ago
  Your interview process is very one-sided. It is quintessential "we interview them". Even meeting your team is framed as "Presentation of technical assignment to the team". In reality, it should be more like dancing tango. They are also interviewing your company and your team to gauge your culture and how do they fit in. More so with senior candidates.
• rmars527 4y ago
  If you have a candidate with 15+ years of experience and you can't decide their value by their resume, references and a couple conversations, it speaks volumes about your company and or your process. I don't consider a person senior until they hit 10 years and even then they are just starting their senior journey. You don't get 15 years in if you can't code. I've got 30 years in a career I love, writing code and architecting solutions. I've been on a bunch of shitty interviews and have done countless interviews myself. It's difficult for everyone. With senior people you are being interviewed as much as you are interviewing them. Tests and take home coding projects work for guys under 15 years, but I hold them for a last resort if I'm on the fence with someone. Senior guys have a lot of options, are looking for the right fit. A one size fits all interview process is the worst thing you can do to attract that level of talent. Once you are past the "is this person a team player, easy to work with" part. Then look at their work experience. That should tell you a lot about their coding chops. Really for senior people it's more about their level of expertise and problem solving abilities. For this I ask probing questions, based on their resume. Starting with easy, general questions. If they nail each question I get recusively, progressively more technical as I drill down into their last answer until they satisfied me or I've identified where their expertise ends. You very quickly see if the person just studied the topic or lived it. There is alot to interviewing people and should only have your best people doing them and you should get them some training if possible. Elon Musk says, he knows if he has a real candidate infront of him if they can talk about the details of their work. The deeper you go, the more detail they can give you because they actually did the work. People who speak ambiguously or can't explain the details didn't do the work. The fact that you are asking the questions proves you know your process might not be working. That is a strong indicator that you are on the right path to fixing it. Remember senior guys have options you have to win them not vet them.
• packetlost 4y ago
  Having been in the same boat, the take-home problem is... too much. If you show you don't respect the time of your candidates (4 hours of unpaid work is not respecting someone's time), they're not going to be interested. I would try to keep any sort of technical white-board interview or take-home problem small enough that it can be done in under an hour, 15 minutes for a truly experienced engineer.
• dekhn 4y ago
  4 hour take home assignment? I wouldn't even apply.
• erin_at_summery 4y ago
  Looks like you're only focusing on technical skills in your recruiting process. New research (link below) shows "soft skills" such as values are more important, especially for senior positions. My company quantifies applicant values such as empathy, agility, & disruption and measures alignment with org culture. Reach out if you want more info. HBR article: https://hbr.org/2022/06/the-c-suite-skills-that-matter-most https://hbr.org/2022/06/the-c-suite-skills-that-matter-most
• thebigspacefuck 4y ago
  Try something like Hired.com. It takes time and energy for people to seek out and apply to jobs. On Hired, people have a profile just seeing what’s out there, are open to interviews and will already have posted their salary and their interests. You apply to them instead of hoping they apply to you.
• erin_at_summery 4y ago
  Looks like you're only focusing on the technical side. New research (link below) shows that recruiting for "soft skills" is more important, esp. for senior positions. My company quantifies values like empathy, agility & disruption and measures applicant value alignment with org culture. Reach out if you'd like more info. HRB article: https://hbr.org/2022/06/the-c-suite-skills-that-matter-most https://hbr.org/2022/06/the-c-suite-skills-that-matter-most
• m3047 4y ago
  > we haven't even managed to backfill a retirement from six months ago Ok. OP, can you please define "senior" and "junior" for the assembled audience? There seems to be some ambiguity concerning those terms. On one hand they can refer to a level of experience in a specific field, specialty or toolset; or, they can refer to levels of experience in life (and "senior" in this context doesn't mean "senescence" although they are admittedly correlated). Given the foregoing, how junior or senior is the recruiter? What does the funnel look like (somebody else mentioned this too)? Have you considered consulting your marketing people on your pitch? Over 20 years ago I was "fix the ship" Director of Tech for a small software company. I managed dev and support personnel and recruitment; when I was ready to throw up my hands I recruited my own replacement (actually I recruited a lead engineer who got along with the president, and promoted the dev with a minor in accounting into my role). The conversation which needs to occur is not appropriate for HN. You should be able to find me and reach out and we can have a telephone / zoom chat; professional courtesy, no obligations. You want 4 hour technical assessments, you should be able to stalk people at least a little bit. It's a zen thing.
• borroka 4y ago
  Let's try with a metaphor. I am a man (it works better from this point of view) on a dating app, with a few blurry pictures making up my profile. It kinda looks like I look ok, but who knows. I reach out to a good-looking and engaging woman (the "seniority") and I tell her that I am possibly interested in her being my partner, I can provide and care for her (that's what I say, she does not know whether in reality I can or cannot do it), but before I make my offer, she has to take professional photos, answer to a 4-hour survey, a couple of calls of 30 to 45 minutes each when she is asked about her previous experience with relationships, then introduce herself to my family and friends and see if they are ok with her. Then, maybe I will make an offer. And, maybe, an offers she would like. I don't know why I have troubles finding a partner.
• abyesilyurt 4y ago
  I have recently interviewed for a startup with very cool hiring process. 1. 30 min introductory call with their recruiter. 2. 1.5h interview with an engineer involving pair programming and some technical questions. 3. Offer This was it, very efficient. I was impressed with their interview process and immediately accepted the offer.
• shahbaby 4y ago
  If at any step of the interview process I see more than 2 people, I assume the company doesn't know how to hire.
• rswail 4y ago
  - Resume screened by in-house recruiter Are they fully up to speed with what you really need, as opposed to box-ticking? (eg seniors might not have the official certifications and degrees, but they will have the years of experience) - 30m call with them What can the in-house recruiter ask that the hiring manager can't? What's the point of this interview? - Resume passed up to engineering - Hour-long call with hiring manager (typically the engineering manager of the team the candidate would join) This is the most important part. If you can't decide after talking to someone for an hour, why not? What more information do you need that you're not getting? - Take-home technical assignment (~4h) or similar at candidate's choosing Waste of time for both sides - Presentation of technical assignment to the team Again, waste of time for both sides, including waste of time for the team. If you're hiring a senior, what is the purpose of presenting to the team? If you're hiring for an architect, where communications is more important than technical skill, have them present on something in their expertise (eg, for a security role, the structure of PKI CA/RA/VA and the relationship between chains of trust and root certs). - Offer