4 ms·

The thing I don't understand is why so many companies are so inefficient at hiring developers. They'll spend months giving out interviews and take-home tests an

The thing I don't understand is why so many companies are so inefficient at hiring developers. They'll spend months giving out interviews and take-home tests and disqualifying people for the smallest subjective hangups and then finally hire a friend of an existing employee who talks a big game but can't code their way out of a paper bag. Meanwhile, I've helped several clients hire new remote devs before and all it took was a few basic coding questions to weed out 90% of the candidates, followed by a small paid trial task before hiring them long-term. The results we got were fantastic, completely merit-based, and easy to reproduce.

pc86 3y ago
Well I mean you've answered the question right there. The salaries and benefits for the current employees are a sunk cost and are getting paid no matter what. So having them spend a few months talking to people isn't an additional cost in the accounting sense of things. The minute you add "paid trial task" you're talking about a (usually non-trivial) expansion in budget. Where does the money come from? How many of the devs on that team are going to be happy with smaller bonuses, smaller raises, so they can pay someone to write code they're going to reject? Maybe this is objectively The Right Way to hire developers, but good luck convincing the accountants of that, and good luck convincing your current developers to pay for it.
- codazoda 3y ago
  Presumably it would come out of the budget for the new employees own salary. Note: I’m not the original commenter and I have not used this hiring method, but I do have to budget.
  - pc86 3y ago
    Okay so teasing that out a bit, you're now offering a lower salary than similar competitors because you're paying a bunch of people to do an interview. Are you applying for that job? Are you willingly taking a lower salary because they're paying the people you interviewed against hundreds or thousands of dollars?
mistermann 3y ago
Do you have an opinion on a decent website these days for sourcing some "reasonably priced" developers to hack on a proof of concept web app, preferably Eastern European or some similar straight talking culture?
- Pikamander2 3y ago
  I dunno about hiring from specific countries, but I would say that some combination of Indeed, Upwork, and Linkedin can cover just about whatever you need.
- pdimitar 3y ago
  ElixirForum.
sausagefeet 3y ago
I have been heavily involved in the tech interview/hiring process for a few unicorns, doing a couple hundred interviews in that time, and my experience was: 1. A lot of people have no idea how to evaluate a candidate, even with a rubrik. I have been in many evaluations where I tracked with particular interviewers said about a pros or cons of a candidate and it is near noise when you get beyond candidates that are clearly not qualified. Even simple questions like "dedup a list of integers". Sometimes the interviewer really focuses on if they maintained order of the dedup list, other times it doesn't matter, other times they care about time complexity, sometimes not. This is especially bad when an interviewer is allowed to choose the question that they ask, because they choose questions that have something they find "cute" and if the candidate doesn't pick up on that "cuteness" it's really hard to evaluate them. 2. A lot of people I have met think that an interview process should be able to evaluate some random developer you pluck off the street without prep. The larger companies are less inclined to believe this but smaller ones I have found either don't know or don't have the person-power to prep interviewees. Again, a lot of people think whatever knowledge they like is the knowledge everyone should have. 3. A lot of people I have met think that you can understand after 5-7 hours worth of interviewing, where one person probably only interacts with the candidate for an hour or so under stressful conditions, it that translate to someone you can be around for 40 hours. It just doesn't. 4. A lot of companies look at interviewing as finding the missing puzzle piece of the company rather than shaping the puzzle piece. They just want candidates to join and go. That's really tough to do at even a moderate scale. I think a lot of companies don't really realize how both difficult and high leverage hiring is. You're spending a few hours with someone to determine how they will work over thousands of hours. They want hiring to be easy, you just see if the person passes the checkmarks and they are in! And if you don't confront the reality you can't adequately solve the problem.
- wakawaka28 3y ago
  If only there were a group of people who could reliably evaluate people based on a rubric, and issue a certificate to people who are satisfactory so that you don't even have to waste copious amounts of time and energy figuring out what a person is capable of. Wait a minute...
stantaylor 3y ago
I think a lot of people buy into the fallacy that there is a single best candidate, and you must find that candidate. I choose to approach hiring assuming that there are many good enough candidates. Furthermore, hiring is the process of finding the best candidate within the given constraints on the hiring company/manager: time, effort, primarily.
- usrusr 3y ago
  A lot of software dev hiring is not on demands, to fill a pressing gap, but more like an opportunistic background process. The perfect candidate will be added to the herd, but if that perfect candidate fails to show up, the opening will remain open forever. Not hiring the almost-perfect candidate is a hedge against the scenario of the perfect one entering the market while the company is not advertising an opening.
tivert 3y ago
> The thing I don't understand is why so many companies are so inefficient at hiring developers. They'll spend months giving out interviews and take-home tests and disqualifying people for the smallest subjective hangups and then finally hire a friend of an existing employee who talks a big game but can't code their way out of a paper bag. That kind of sounds like a general organizational dysfunction: someone designs and elaborate and expensive process that doesn't work and rejects 100% of the candidates (which was almost certainly sold a a "process improvement"), then people end up working around it to get things done.

pc86 3y ago

Well I mean you've answered the question right there. The salaries and benefits for the current employees are a sunk cost and are getting paid no matter what. So having them spend a few months talking to people isn't an additional cost in the accounting sense of things. The minute you add "paid trial task" you're talking about a (usually non-trivial) expansion in budget. Where does the money come from? How many of the devs on that team are going to be happy with smaller bonuses, smaller raises, so they can pay someone to write code they're going to reject? Maybe this is objectively The Right Way to hire developers, but good luck convincing the accountants of that, and good luck convincing your current developers to pay for it.

codazoda 3y ago
Presumably it would come out of the budget for the new employees own salary. Note: I’m not the original commenter and I have not used this hiring method, but I do have to budget.
- pc86 3y ago
  Okay so teasing that out a bit, you're now offering a lower salary than similar competitors because you're paying a bunch of people to do an interview. Are you applying for that job? Are you willingly taking a lower salary because they're paying the people you interviewed against hundreds or thousands of dollars?

mistermann 3y ago

Do you have an opinion on a decent website these days for sourcing some "reasonably priced" developers to hack on a proof of concept web app, preferably Eastern European or some similar straight talking culture?

Pikamander2 3y ago
I dunno about hiring from specific countries, but I would say that some combination of Indeed, Upwork, and Linkedin can cover just about whatever you need.
pdimitar 3y ago
ElixirForum.

sausagefeet 3y ago

I have been heavily involved in the tech interview/hiring process for a few unicorns, doing a couple hundred interviews in that time, and my experience was: 1. A lot of people have no idea how to evaluate a candidate, even with a rubrik. I have been in many evaluations where I tracked with particular interviewers said about a pros or cons of a candidate and it is near noise when you get beyond candidates that are clearly not qualified. Even simple questions like "dedup a list of integers". Sometimes the interviewer really focuses on if they maintained order of the dedup list, other times it doesn't matter, other times they care about time complexity, sometimes not. This is especially bad when an interviewer is allowed to choose the question that they ask, because they choose questions that have something they find "cute" and if the candidate doesn't pick up on that "cuteness" it's really hard to evaluate them. 2. A lot of people I have met think that an interview process should be able to evaluate some random developer you pluck off the street without prep. The larger companies are less inclined to believe this but smaller ones I have found either don't know or don't have the person-power to prep interviewees. Again, a lot of people think whatever knowledge they like is the knowledge everyone should have. 3. A lot of people I have met think that you can understand after 5-7 hours worth of interviewing, where one person probably only interacts with the candidate for an hour or so under stressful conditions, it that translate to someone you can be around for 40 hours. It just doesn't. 4. A lot of companies look at interviewing as finding the missing puzzle piece of the company rather than shaping the puzzle piece. They just want candidates to join and go. That's really tough to do at even a moderate scale. I think a lot of companies don't really realize how both difficult and high leverage hiring is. You're spending a few hours with someone to determine how they will work over thousands of hours. They want hiring to be easy, you just see if the person passes the checkmarks and they are in! And if you don't confront the reality you can't adequately solve the problem.

wakawaka28 3y ago
If only there were a group of people who could reliably evaluate people based on a rubric, and issue a certificate to people who are satisfactory so that you don't even have to waste copious amounts of time and energy figuring out what a person is capable of. Wait a minute...

stantaylor 3y ago

I think a lot of people buy into the fallacy that there is a single best candidate, and you must find that candidate. I choose to approach hiring assuming that there are many good enough candidates. Furthermore, hiring is the process of finding the best candidate within the given constraints on the hiring company/manager: time, effort, primarily.

usrusr 3y ago
A lot of software dev hiring is not on demands, to fill a pressing gap, but more like an opportunistic background process. The perfect candidate will be added to the herd, but if that perfect candidate fails to show up, the opening will remain open forever. Not hiring the almost-perfect candidate is a hedge against the scenario of the perfect one entering the market while the company is not advertising an opening.

tivert 3y ago

> The thing I don't understand is why so many companies are so inefficient at hiring developers. They'll spend months giving out interviews and take-home tests and disqualifying people for the smallest subjective hangups and then finally hire a friend of an existing employee who talks a big game but can't code their way out of a paper bag. That kind of sounds like a general organizational dysfunction: someone designs and elaborate and expensive process that doesn't work and rejects 100% of the candidates (which was almost certainly sold a a "process improvement"), then people end up working around it to get things done.