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The OP literally said “The good engineers just aren't enticed by our mediocre salaries” and people are trying to figure out how to fix the interview question.
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Feb 19, 2024 03:29
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When I was in college, one of my STEM profs said 'I completed this exam in (idk) 7 minutes, so I think 50 minutes is fair for you' Seems like you're considering the right things. What's the salary and whats the COL? And is it remote? In the job market, if you're not attracting the talent you want there are only a few levers you can pull, aren't there?
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Feb 19, 2024 03:31
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Working is mainly about exchanging time + skills for money so if you can't increase the money end you can decrease the time end, i.e. try offering a 4 day workweek.
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Feb 19, 2024 17:06
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Are you offering WFH? I'd take a lower salary for a 5-day WFH workweek.
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Feb 19, 2024 17:50
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smackfu posted:The OP literally said “The good engineers just aren't enticed by our mediocre salaries” and people are trying to figure out how to fix the interview question. Yeah, I kind of have to assume the employee base is the union of "unable to leave the region for whatever reason" and "wouldn't get hired in a competitive job market" and the salaries are set accordingly. If you pay peanuts, expect a bunch of clowns.
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Feb 19, 2024 20:19
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Volmarias posted:"unable to leave the region for whatever reason" and "wouldn't get hired in a competitive job market"
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Feb 19, 2024 21:21
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Judge Schnoopy posted:I'm getting back into conducting interviews and getting bummed out. Our company is early and we're not offering flashy salaries, instead opting for 6% 401k match, bonuses up to 10%, and good bennies. Had a very similar problem - a big part of it is that you're not a Big Name and you're not paying Big Name salaries. You'll get candidates eventually, but you're going to be going through a lot of chaff to get there. My company has never paid great while I've been interviewing and I deeply identify with this because we had an even easier assignment and the number of people we had that just straight up bounced off of it was horrifying. Like I get interview anxiety and everything but 35 mins should at least get us some good discourse on where the problem might be coming from. I shudder to think of how much trouble we'd have had if we'd had any sort of concurrency.
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Feb 20, 2024 03:32
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ChickenWing posted:Had a very similar problem - a big part of it is that you're not a Big Name and you're not paying Big Name salaries. You'll get candidates eventually, but you're going to be going through a lot of chaff to get there. This is why some companies seem to be embracing automated tech screens more and more.
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Feb 20, 2024 07:01
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Speaking of hiring and continuing my journey of questioning why I am still here. One of the other tech leads put together a technical test for the new hiring round and management got wind of it and has demanded all current devs take it. Of course the result you would expect has happened, devs working on BAU stuff with no prep time and who are completely out of practise on LeetCode style exercises have done pretty poorly. One dev, who has been performing badly in general, had a full on panic attack in the middle of it because he thought it was a way to catch him out and is now off sick with anxiety.
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Feb 20, 2024 07:13
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Mega Comrade posted:One of the other tech leads put together a technical test for the new hiring round and management got wind of it and has demanded all current devs take it. Sounds like he's right.
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Feb 20, 2024 08:20
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Volmarias posted:This is why some companies seem to be embracing automated tech screens more and more. If you're interviewing a few dozen candidates a week, then it's likely beneficial to have a fully automated online solution to filter candidates. Otherwise you'll benefit more from the hands on approach. I've still automated ours. 10min is enough for a quick code check, dropping in some input/output handler, and running 20-200 tests depending. We still check code and failures to ensure we know how they've screwed up, and for structure/comments/documentation/etc., but it's fairly streamlined.
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Feb 20, 2024 08:41
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thotsky posted:Sounds like he's right. He is. They are looking for justification to start winding down the team and canning people. We were recently bought and the new owners are getting frustrated why we are slower than their other more Greenfield team. Explaining the complexity of the product and the mountain of tech debt falls on deaf ears and I'm pretty sure they are thinking about moving our product slowly over to a new team. This will be disastrous for the product, but the new CEO is a mini Musk, with even less tech knowledge.
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Feb 20, 2024 08:57
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Mega Comrade posted:the new owners are getting frustrated why we are slower than their other more Greenfield team. Maybe the real career strategy isn't to fix what's broken or to cut costs, but rather to just endlessly bootstrap replacements from scratch and then hand off the components to other people so you can start on the next replacement to bootstrap.
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Feb 20, 2024 11:28
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Always rewriting is also more fun than actually running and maintaining a system that has annoying things like data and active users.
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Feb 20, 2024 11:33
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ChickenWing posted:Had a very similar problem - a big part of it is that you're not a Big Name and you're not paying Big Name salaries. You'll get candidates eventually, but you're going to be going through a lot of chaff to get there. My company's salaries are just okay. Not terrible, but you can definitely find better in the area (benefits and PTO are alright, though). Plus we're a fairly niche company in a traditionally non-tech industry, in a not particularly big Midwestern city. What's really helped us is university recruiting. We have a dedicated program that brings in people every year, along with training programs for the grads to get them up to speed on our tech stack. It's important enough to our leadership that we have continue to recruit even when we've been in a hiring freeze for other roles. I think that does a lot to make the rest of our hiring easier too, since we need fewer experienced hires. and if I'm being cynical, it also lets us find very talented people before we'd need to pay them an arm and a leg for being talented AND experienced. we also don't have to compete with their current employer on salary, although that may be less of a thing lately with all the layoffs
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Feb 20, 2024 12:34
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Cup Runneth Over posted:Are you offering WFH? I'd take a lower salary for a 5-day WFH workweek. Yeah we're fully remote in the US, and we have a pretty good focus on work life balance so people aren't overloaded with work. Base salary starts around 160k, 170 for senior engineers. It's no west Coast 200k salary but again, we're a startup, so the work is far more enjoyable than your big name company project slog. I know we'll find candidates eventually. Some of these ex faang-type folks I've seen so far are delusional about being able to write code because they were part of a 10 person feature team that delivered in 6 months.
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Feb 20, 2024 13:38
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Love Stole the Day posted:This must be why tech debt never gets addressed, and they keep reinventing the wheel from scratch endlessly. The wheel of endless replacements is unironically how you actually use and grow a bench of junior engineers. We all want to run under the delusion that we can hire only senior engineers for everything, because if it were true, it would make the hardest parts of the job (unchangeable financial constraints) so much easier. Sagacity posted:Always rewriting is also more fun than actually running and maintaining a system that has annoying things like data and active users. Vulture Culture fucked around with this message at 13:48 on Feb 20, 2024 |
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Feb 20, 2024 13:44
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Love Stole the Day posted:Maybe the real career strategy isn't to fix what's broken or to cut costs, but rather to just endlessly bootstrap replacements from scratch and then hand off the components to other people so you can start on the next replacement to bootstrap. You've just invented IT consulting.
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Feb 20, 2024 13:51
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thotsky posted:You've just invented IT consulting.
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Feb 20, 2024 13:51
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I just cannot imagine doing, let alone proposing, LeetCode bullshit in 2024. Unless they've adapted to offer practical test scenarios instead of gimmick brain teasers, surely their poor correlation with on-the-job performance has been established for long enough that it should be common knowledge (or at least repeated ad infinitum on the first page of search results for 'how to come up with software engineer hiring process")? To the poster whose coworker came up with the bright idea: did your engineering leadership really give ownership to this one guy without opportunity for other senior-level input? When it comes to "is this meeting worth having or not?", surely something as critical as aligning on your candidate intake process meets the bar. I don't know, maybe I got absolutely spoiled by the last time I interviewed where I had a few great experiences with collaborative interviewers and assessment that reflected the actual day-to-day work.
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Feb 20, 2024 15:14
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Cugel the Clever posted:I just cannot imagine doing, let alone proposing, LeetCode bullshit in 2024. Unless they've adapted to offer practical test scenarios instead of gimmick brain teasers, surely their poor correlation with on-the-job performance has been established for long enough that it should be common knowledge (or at least repeated ad infinitum on the first page of search results for 'how to come up with software engineer hiring process")? Management wanted LeetCode etc despite our push back. They demanded something with metrics because we are a "data driven company". The got annoyed that we took anyone with a score less than 90th percentile on to final interviews. Basically I think management are control freaks and the idea of trusting development to hire the right people is just not something they feel comfortable doing.
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Feb 20, 2024 15:21
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Mega Comrade posted:management are control freaks and the idea of trusting development... is just not something they feel comfortable doing.
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Feb 20, 2024 15:28
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While we're vaguely talking about salaries and comp, I've got a question or two. We're setting our compensation policy for the first time and got it all pretty clear except for two questions: * how are people handling contractors vs employees in terms of compensation? * what about cost-of-living adjustments? I'm from the US but working in EU so for contractors I'm used to the US where you would have a rule of thumb that contractors get betwen 2x and 3x compared to employees, due to benefits and taxes. But here, there aren't really benefits, healthcare is from the government, and the extra taxes freelancers pay is pretty small (although this varies by country). The biggest difference is probably no automatic severance pay from getting laid off. I guess I'm just wondering if there's a rule of thumb that companies in the EU tend to use. I was thinking maybe 30% more for contractors (which aligns with where we ended up before having a compensation policy). Regarding cost-of-living, the challenge seems to be that due to (I'm guessing) factors like globalizing job market and gentrification, it looks like to be competitive in places with lower COL you can't really reduce your offer too much. I was thinking something like "apply a COL adjustment based on [website] but the max difference that can be applied from [HQ location] is 20%". Even that maybe not competitive in some places though. It's hard to tell. What are other EU companies doing? For context, we're a small startup (30-40 total), already generating revenue but not enough yet to fully support the business, funded by industry partners not VC, all the engineers are 100% remote though most are in commuting distance to the office, several are abroad. Comp target for now is basically 50th percentile in the market, which is enough to assemble a good team but doesn't make it easy. I guess for the COL question, the easiest would be to get market data from the candidate's market, but so far we only found a way to get data from our home market.
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Feb 20, 2024 16:17
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Cugel the Clever posted:I just cannot imagine doing, let alone proposing, LeetCode bullshit in 2024. Unless they've adapted to offer practical test scenarios instead of gimmick brain teasers, surely their poor correlation with on-the-job performance has been established for long enough that it should be common knowledge... Experience, even similar roles. https://hbr.org/2019/09/experience-doesnt-predict-a-new-hires-success Interview performance (well a little bit maybe). https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2013/06/28/is-there-a-link-between-job-interview-performance-and-job-performance/?sh=40424b1458bc What does correlate? Cognitive ability, but it's complicated. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10869-022-09796-1 Mental ability plus work sample, integrity test, or structured interview. https://psycnet.apa.org/buy/1998-10661-006 So I'd say: If you want to build a culture that isn't offended by leetcode style questions, use those. If you want a culture not offended by take home assignments, use those. Pair programming assessment, use those. Live debugging, timed debugging, GitHub existing candidate code review, whiteboard-only design, narfle the garthok, function duplication+extension, practical performance running on an ec2 instance, web app on their home server, live reading+documentation, test cases for existing code, security review... use whatever. Think of the choice you make as a basic filter leading to the more useful followup conversations.
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Feb 21, 2024 01:29
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Ah the senior/principle engineers who are passionate about all code being unreadable unless it matches their personal style, have always been strong proponents of policy guides for style. After all, why shouldn't it take 15min or more to go through a four page checklist before typing code for discussion in chat?! They have also always been the last to improve the developers' lives with automation, even to the point of complaining that automation is not possible. But then... Did you know they conspire to make it so? Today's winner: Style that's dependent on context. After knowing the definition of the function, then you're allowed to determine the calling style. Because of the libraries, it actually ends up being runtime context dependent style. Yay!
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Feb 21, 2024 18:13
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PhantomOfTheCopier posted:Ah the senior/principle engineers who are passionate about all code being unreadable unless it matches their personal style, have always been strong proponents of policy guides for style. After all, why shouldn't it take 15min or more to go through a four page checklist before typing code for discussion in chat?! They have also always been the last to improve the developers' lives with automation, even to the point of complaining that automation is not possible. It's amazing how many fewer comments you get in code review when you have the power to give people a lot of work very quickly.
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Feb 21, 2024 21:56
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I thought my team was the only one with someone against automation. 'Maybe it won't be perfect' is not a good reason continue doing dumb bullshit by hand
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Feb 21, 2024 23:35
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autoformat or die
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Feb 21, 2024 23:59
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StumblyWumbly posted:I thought my team was the only one with someone against automation. 'Maybe it won't be perfect' is not a good reason continue doing dumb bullshit by hand Being the beginning of the year, a manager had it in their bucket list to just have engineers run the standard style tool and then let the interested parties put in whatever configuration they wanted. He presented that to them. Their response: We're not going through the configuration, there are a couple hundred options!
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Feb 21, 2024 23:59
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StumblyWumbly posted:I thought my team was the only one with someone against automation. 'Maybe it won't be perfect' is not a good reason continue doing dumb bullshit by hand I agree with you entirely.poo poo drives me up a wall.
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Feb 22, 2024 04:42
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Vulture Culture posted:autoformat or die
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Feb 22, 2024 06:00
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StumblyWumbly posted:'Maybe it won't be perfect' is not a good reason continue doing dumb bullshit by hand I've taken the tack of just repeating the phrase "the perfect is the enemy of the good" as often and as loudly as is professional until people shut the hell up about this it's worked surprisingly well
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Feb 23, 2024 03:53
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SurgicalOntologist posted:For context, we're a small startup (30-40 total), already generating revenue but not enough yet to fully support the business, funded by industry partners not VC, all the engineers are 100% remote though most are in commuting distance to the office, several are abroad. Comp target for now is basically 50th percentile in the market, which is enough to assemble a good team but doesn't make it easy. I guess for the COL question, the easiest would be to get market data from the candidate's market, but so far we only found a way to get data from our home market. I work for a similar sized company in EU with people also in the US. Most of the team is fully remote and they don’t have any COL adjustments, and have consistent salary points for each level (so no bands, every 3.2 engineer is paid the same). We’ve since moved for my partners work (she’s in academia) and I can’t accept my work suddenly being worth less to the company because I’m remote from a different place in the same timezone.
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Feb 26, 2024 19:53
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After spending 45 minutes trying to prove to a dev that his code is the cause of perf shiting the bed after deploy and getting no where, I am now vindicated as we patch all sites at 3am. I bet my manager £5 I was right. A pyrrhic victory.
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Feb 29, 2024 12:04
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Oh no you too? Yesterday (Wed) I watched a manager hop in a task and claim that, no, engaging a member of the Beijing team was not necessary to perform manual validation after a one-time scheduled script executes for an important customer tonight (Thu). Our Beijing team is generally engaged, engineers trade code reviews back and forth almost daily, and it will be 2pm their time (Fri) when the script runs. I have no idea how the manager is planning to address this today (Thu) because there's no opportunity to plan ahead with Beijing beyond just dropping it in their lap. Meanwhile the script runs tonight at 11pm, the local team obviously won't be around, and the company is closed Friday for a three day weekend because they decided to celebrate Employee Appreciation Day this year. I foresee a lengthy conversation with ggaanntt and calendar charts drawing little lines until they realize they have resources that can operate during standard business hours.
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Feb 29, 2024 16:26
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PhantomOfTheCopier posted:Oh no you too?
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Feb 29, 2024 18:04
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PhantomOfTheCopier posted:Oh no you too? At a previous job there was an org that decided one day that they wanted to do 24 hour rotations, despite having a follow the sun team. This resulted in all sorts of incredibly dumb bullshit, like us having to manually call people in China, who would answer the phone in chinese during US business hours to try and escalate problems (or waking up some poor jerk in California at 3AM). It was made significantly worse by the fact that on several occasions we found that the phone numbers were wrong, so we were just calling some random person in china. it culminated in an outage where the engineering manager tried planting his foot and saying "Look it's my team and we can do whatever we want". In response, one of the leaders in the org, like VP level, took his glasses off and rubbed his eyes for a long time before asking "Yes, but why?" - to which the team engineering manager could not articulate a good response. It resulted in it being rolled back to a follow the sun schedule.
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Feb 29, 2024 22:17
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Vulture Culture posted:Ggaanntt sounds like a guy who's been making visual kei music since the '80s  No offense to Mr Gannt, but it's a challenge to find five people who know how to spell his name and he should have chosen something better. It may not be his fault; being the early 20th before we chose buzzword names for everything, perhaps some peer just started calling it the Gantt chart. I have to trust that by typing ggaanntt I have a 25% chance of doubling at least one of the letters correctly!But I prefer PERT charts generally. Falcon2001 posted:At a previous job there was an org that decided one day that they wanted to do 24 hour rotations, despite having a follow the sun team. In sadder news, because of the holiday many took off Thursday so I had to delay a week. I was going to talk about some software theory and some mathematics we used to justify not doing something, because an engineer on the team asked how we got our numbers. More theory!
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Mar 1, 2024 15:25
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Cup Runneth Over posted:Are you offering WFH? I'd take a lower salary for a 5-day WFH workweek. I was actually coming in here to ask about this... how would one evaluate the value of WFH. The company I'm currently at offers WFH short of maybe 1-2 times a month for meetings. However my salary has been somewhat iffy. Looking for jobs most don't really state if they're offering WFH or not so I assume if it doesn't say anything that they're going to make me go into an office. This is obviously subjective but trying to figure out how much I'd take over having to work in an office/commute. Just my back of napkin evaluation: My current commute is about 30 minutes (all public transportation, maybe 10 minutes of it is walking), so an hour commute both ways. Let's say 50 week work year, 5 days a week, that's 250 days, 250 hours to commute. Say for the sake of argument let's say I value my time at $20/hour. That's $5000 worth of my time I'm spending traveling. On top of that having to sit in an office building.. say I demand a 10% premium per hour. $20*0.10*8*250.. That's another $4000 right there. So basically the formula I've set in my mind is 250*X*Y + 250*X*0.10*8. Where X is my hourly value, Y is daily commute time. Obviously accounting for how much at a minimum of a premium I'd want, etc... does that feel about right?
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Mar 5, 2024 22:54
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$20/hour seems like an insanely undervalued estimate. I took a roughly 25% pay cut for full-time WFH at a remote-first company and I haven’t regretted it for even one second.
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Mar 5, 2024 23:45
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