We're a fairly typical run-of-the-mill mid-size enterprise software vendor trying to hire for fully-remote SWEs in the "DevOps" software space (Linux, containers, k8s, yadda yadda). We post in the usual places including Who's Hiring but we haven't even managed to backfill a retirement from six months ago, and we're junior-heavy already. Benefits and salary are good (though salary isn't posted in the ad), and the people are great, though the work requires a reasonably deep understanding of the underlying platforms which a lot of people seem to dislike.
I'm wondering if the work being a higher percentage non-code is what's causing us trouble, if we're just rubbish at hiring in general, or if it's something else.
What's everyone else's experience attracting applications from senior talent in this market, and what is everyone doing to increase their attractiveness?
Current hiring process:
- Resume screened by in-house recruiter
- 30m call with them
- Resume passed up to engineering
- Hour-long call with hiring manager (typically the engineering manager of the team the candidate would join)
- Take-home technical assignment (~4h) or similar at candidate's choosing
- Presentation of technical assignment to the team
- Offer
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.
I used to do these assignment. Now I simply don't sorry.
My schedule is
6:30 AM wake up with youngest daughter, to let wife sleep in (she takes care of her all night)
9:00 AM hand off youngest daughter to wife, who takes both girls the rest of the day. I go to my home office
12:00 PM lunch with family / kids
1:00 PM back to work
5:00 PM off work... Cook dinner / watch kids while wife cooks dinner. Set up table. Eat with family.
6:30 PM Play with kids for an hour
7:30 PM Bathtime + off to bed
9:30 - 10:30 PM Infant child actually goes to sleep
10:30 - 11:00 PM Wife and I chat about our day and spend 30 minutes of time actually being together
11:00 PM sleep until 6:30 the next day
Exactly where in that schedule am I supposed to fit a FOUR HOUR coding assignment. That's ridiculous. Unless you're providing child care, this is simply too much.
A one hour interview... I can handle.
Perhaps you'd get better leads by allowing for a choice. For my last job search. I had several different companies all in the upcoming AI accelerator space. Two of them had assignments. I said no thanks. The others did interviews. I got a good raise (base + stock options)anyway. I don't think I lost anything saying no to the ones with assignments.
Alternatively, perhaps pay people to complete the assignments.
Completely agree here - like a fool I recently went through an entire day's worth interviews for a role (hello Stripe recruiters!!) that required both me and my wife taking PTO, with her looking after the kids while I talked to one junior dev after another about data modelling and "culture fit".
That doesn't solve the majority of the "senior position" problem.
Like you point out, your schedule does not have a "spare" 4 hour block in it, and paying you $1000 to find one is not going to make you jump at the opportunity if the alternative is a different role that is not asking for a 4 hour block of your family time.
Anybody recruiting for "senior roles" needs to understand the 30-40 year olds, who are the only people who have the professional experience you're seeking, cannot be recruited like fresh college grads who can blast through pointless coding tests between 11pm and 3am, and do that 3 or 4 times a week and at least some off whom will genuinely enjoy doing so.
My first production code shipped for MacOS 7.5 and Windows 3.1. I am still shipping production code (although only rarely since these days I'm mostly managing a team rather than coding daily). I am _not_ going to do your take home 4hr assignment no matter who you are or what you're offering. Asking me to do it shows a fundamental misunderstanding of who I am, and I am not going to take a job with someone who knows that little about me. (And I have way better things to do with my free time than your pointless test)
I've hired seniors - you'd be much better off replacing the 4+1 hour assignment with a 1 hour AMA or discussion about a project or ticket with the team they'd be working with and getting their feedback. Would they be able to work together?
Also, just post the salary!!! Seniors naturally will have made a wider range of life choices and will have a larger range of minimum salary they need to fund their lifestyle. Not posting it appears as if you're hiding something, which isn't a great starting point.
What do you do for normal on-site interviews or phone interviews that have similar time demands?
I’m also a parent of small children with a packed schedule, but I’d much rather take a 4-hour take home and handle it on the weekend or when I’m flexible. Giving up half or whole days of PTO to interview in real-time is actually worse for my overall schedule, not better, because I need that PTO more than ever as a parent of young kids.
The flexibility of take-homes is great as a parent.
Assuming this is legal at all according to current employment contracts, it's a huge pain for the new employer's payroll and more stuff to keep track for the employee's income tax.
Is 4 hours the amount of time the candidate is being given to complete it, or roughly how long the employer expects it will take? In the past I've generally come up with tests I know can be done in an hour or so (2 tops), but allowed 24 hours, exactly because not everyone is going to be in a position they can dedicate those 2 hours to it right there and then. Sure, those that did take the full 24 hours to complete I tended to apply higher expectations towards when judging, but at the end of the day it didn't make much difference - the tests were only to weed out those that had clearly made a poor career decision (and there were surprisingly many of those, to the point we switched to testing before interviewing).
Dude, if your wife is getting up multiple times a night, you really ought to consider stepping in and helping out. True males can't do the feeding, but if there is anyway you can help out with this, I guarantee your wife will be grateful. If your kids sleep then ignore this, but sleep deprivation is hell (to most people). My wife and I both worked and we slept in 4 hour shifts, then when they slept more, we went to night on then night off. Saved our marriage.
A four hour assessment is just absurd. When I’m job searching (I’ve been fortunate to only have to do this a few times in my lifetime, and am in a position to be very selective in the opportunities I pursue), I’d more or less be open to a quick 1hr take home assessment, but nothing more.
In my experience companies typically take one of two paths when engagement with a potential candidate: a 1ish hour take-home assessment or a 1ish hour interview with a recruiter where they typically ask a number of basic job-relevant basic questions - IMO both methods just serve as a way to weed out the people who liter their resumes with buzzwords one line and actually are not qualified for the position at all.
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Just wanted to back this up a little bit. This is exactly what happened to me on my last job search. I'm currently in between jobs, starting the new gig after the 4th of July holiday. The company that I went with: I had a 30 minute call with an engineering VP and the hiring manager that was followed by an hour long panel with a few members of the team that I'm joining. I also learned after I had accepted the offer that the person who referred me internally spent about 45 minutes chatting with the same engineering VP about me specifically before they reached out. This was for a staff/lead position and I've got over 15 years in the industry.
I specifically sought out referrals from former colleagues and friends where the interview process put a lot of emphasis and weight on the internal referral and it worked out really well for me. I really hope that this is a sign of things to come, not just for myself and my future employment but for others, at least at the ("actual") senior level.
edit/ Added some more context...
I would never do a “take home test”. Even my current job at $BigTech - working in the cloud consulting department doing exactly the type of work the original poster is looking for - involved a 5 hour behavioral loop and definitely not a “take home test”. They offered cash and real stock. Not equity that statistically will be worthless.
In 2000, the same person that hired me at company 1 had joined to a startup in CA. I got hired by him again. I did a basic tech screen via phone, got an offer, the company paid for my move to CA. I was there from 2000-2007 through that company splitting in two and the half I stayed with eventually getting acquired by a Fortune 500, company 3. No interview as part of the acquisition. I also moved in 2004 back to the east coast, again paid for by company 2. I started working mostly from home for company 2 about a year later, which persisted with company 3.
In 2009, some of the folks I worked with at company 2/3 founded a startup in CA. Got hired again, this is now company 4, with another pro-forma interview. I worked from home for company 4 from 2009-2013. That company then got acquired by my current employer, company 5. No interview as part of the acquisition. Continued to work from home. My current employer has changed hands twice now, but still calls itself the same as when I was acquired.
When I'm ready to go, I have a network of people I've worked with at a variety of tech companies. Company 5 is dysfunctional and filled with mediocre talent, but everyone is so cordial, pay and benefits are good, so I haven't really had reason to leave other than the frustration of dealing with some bureaucracy and creaky legacy systems. I've mostly been insulated from that because I've been responsible for a fairly self-contained system.
Now I'm inheriting other people's crap as folks move on, but you know, last week I deleted over 10,000 lines of unused or unneeded code and that was actually pretty satisfying.
No-one good is going to do a takehome just so the hiring team can rub their beards and feel superior while they pick over the code. That approach worked a few years ago, in today's recruitment bear market you don't pick the candidates, the candidates will pick you.
We are having precisely the same trouble as you by the way - junior-heavy, but experienced folk are extremely thin on the ground, and we go from CV to offer within a week. One chap joined (for a few days) and left because he had started somewhere else at the same time - they won out. We're moving to 1-stage interviews, offer on the same day. Higher risk but we have no choice.
Companies keep their traditional pipelines with average time to hire time of 2+ months and think they will find and hire loyal people in this rapid market where people accept offers on top of others or with just a couple days or weeks in their new position. And they keep filtering others because "no culture fit", "not sure about this line of code in the take home assignment" and other nonsense.
Anecdotally, I've seen people actually been put off by this. Perhaps make it 2 interviews just to not seem desperate. It's not my own reaction, but I could see why people might think "They're really desperate, there must be something wrong there"
My last search lasted 9 days from when I put out the signal to having interviewed (for 3 companies) and negotiated an offer and submitted my resignation and 2 weeks notice.
Wait what???
That basically meant that I had to come in the front door to places I was interested in.
I was a bit "picky," because I wanted to do stuff that interested me. I didn't really care about making a lot of money, or beanbag chairs, or whatnot. I wanted to do work that engaged me.
I'm a very experienced Apple native developer, and I'm good at writing stuff that talks to other stuff (like client/server systems, device control, realtime video, etc.). I'm good at writing APIs and SDKs. Making devices sit up and beg is something I've always enjoyed.
So places that did stuff like that, interested me.
In my experience, I was treated like absolute crap. After a few rounds of "interviews" (which seemed to be opportunities for relatively young engineers and managers to patronize and condescend me), I just said "bugger this for a lark," and decided that I was retired. I set up a small company, so I could buy toys, and started following my own muse. I found some folks doing non-profit stuff, that couldn't afford people of my caliber, and started working with them, for free.
It was the best decision I've ever made. In the last five years, I've probably done more work than I did in two decades previously, I've learned more, every day, than I have, since my twenties.
[UPDATED TO ADD] If you want "senior" people, they are likely to come with a rather fetching shade of grey to their well-coiffed pompadours, and I'd suggest that it would be rather self-destructive to treat them badly. There seems to be considerable resentment towards us older folks. I'm not one to judge whether or not it is merited (in my case, it is definitely not), but it may interfere with efforts to recruit more experienced folks.
Was wondering if you could elaborate on this a bit:
> I set up a small company, so I could buy toys, and started following my own muse.
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.
> I'm never, ever doing a 4 hour assignment for you.
Boo hoo, you need to spend four hours of your life to take home multiples of the median American family's income. It blows my mind how conceited some people in this industry can be, and I'm glad I don't work with them. This is one reason why the take home is a great filter.
Could someone articulate what's the norm now for non-FAANG pure-tech companies? I might go back to the open market next year after grad school since I don't have much of a network in Canada.
(I have decent 10y+ experience at startups and a unicorn, in both big data analytics and full stack applications and I'm good at system design, take home assignments and even live coding but really suck at physical white boarding complex algorithms with someone literally watching over me)
I’m pretty anti-take home, because they’re usually scoped as “it should only take you 4-5 hours, here’s a project that would take an in house DS a week at minimum”, but if they were actually scoped like this one (and even mildly comped), I really wouldn’t mind much.
IMO a (very small) take-home assignment is the least-worst of a lot of generally bad options. A pairing exercise focused on teamwork and communication (vs hardcore coding) is the only other option I even consider these days.
I couldn't point to this more. The recruiting circus is so bad and has been for decades, I don't even bother talking to recruiters anymore. If by some chance I actually did, I'd pass on the 4h test unless I was absolutely desperate. I haven't been absolutely desperate since the dot bomb, and a recruiter hosed me over by inviting me for an interview for a job he didn't really have.
He might not be fucked, but he's probably fucked. It's not so much his doing (albeit the 4h test is a deal breaker for most seniors), it's just the landscape has been so bad for so long, and seniors already have a network, unless he knows somebody who knows somebody, he's probably SOL.
The only thing I can think of is offer and post a salary that is 20%-50% above market and hope for the best. You'll be attracting and filtering out a bunch of bad candidates though. An alternative to that is find the best junior/mid you got, make him team lead and give him some motivational speeches. If you're lucky, they'll rise up to the task.
For what it's worth, back in the day when I started, it was typically a 10m phone call, 1 hour in person interview, then yay or nay. If the candidate wasn't working out, they'd let him go.
I have over 20 years of experience, and then they wonder why I start laughing when they start asking the newbie basic questions. It get even more absurd when they start asking about stuff that no one does more than once or twice a year except in very "edge case" type jobs. I'm a sysadmin, not a full time software developer, but I still get the dweebs who want me to do a leetcode b-tree sort with whatever fancy algorithm they read about last weekend in the hot language du jour.
Wow. I have 10 years of work experience, the last few being "senior". I have a few friends and many recruiters I could reach out to, but absolutely expecting a full fledged 30-round interview like anyone else. I envy you!
Getting a recommendation may "put you to the front of the line", and may allow you to skip a basic screening call, but honestly I think most well run organizations won't skip the interview process even if it's a well-known "superstar" - they would instead just change some of the interviews to let that superstar demonstrate their in-depth expertise in their niche.
I resigned my previous role out of sheer boredom and a desire to work on something new and have been flooded with no/fit-only interview offers, not that i'm going to follow up on them.
Maybe it’s different types of work (consulting?) or companies (earlier stage startups?).
I don’t think I’m particularly good or bad at networking but fully expect to have to do coding interviews and/or take homes. Or maybe I really do need to get a stronger network!
Just wanted to back this up a little bit. This is exactly what happened to me on my last job search.
I was interviewing with 5-6 companies. It didn’t make sense for me to spend a whole weekend for a chance at an offer from a single company. Instead I spent that time brushing up on design. In hindsight that was the right call.
Maybe interviewers are cynical after interviewing so many really bad candidates and the only enjoyment they get from the process is the ability to look down on them.
I have done a few of these take home assignments, later to be engaged by the firm, then to discover in a firm of 100 people, I only really met one or two who could even do the assignment, let alone do it in under an hour.
I've screened a number of very senior developers with impressive CV's applying for senior C++ positions. When I look at their code, usually it just sucks. More often than not it's just plain old C code with C++ dressing. For example, using pthreads in stead of C++11 std::thread, and mostly avoiding even the C++ standard library.
When I interview people, I usually ask them to write some code, for 4 to 6 hours, to solve whatever problem they find interesting, to show me; a) their level of understanding of the C++ language and libraries, b) how they solve problems (I prefer low complexity) and c) what they find interesting.
The interview + the code they show me, give me an idea about their qualifications in this specific area. It's still a lottery to hire someone, but the odds for a winning ticket is a little better ;)
Sidenote: Senior people have been burned by the years where the STL was inconsistently implemented and horribly bloated and inefficient. That doesn't mean they won't quickly learn to love modern C++, especially if they're joining a codebase with good examples to follow.
So what do you think the rest of the world does? Mechanical, civil, electrical engineering, lawyers, doctors, HR, managers? What makes software so special?
You want actual seniors? Seniors have options. You have to be a place that seniors want to work, want more than they want to work somewhere else. Take home code assignments don't fit anywhere in that.
Unless, you pay them for the time. A few companies I applied to 6-7 months ago offered this. However, if you're on unemployment benefits, this may count as income.
Of course, if it's STEP 1, and you're faced with many iterations of this, that's a different story. But if I'm somewhat certain that I'm looking at a great offer from a great company at some point, why not spend the 4 hours?
So it tends to narrow down the pool to those for which it is an interesting position, ie. 'Not yet established senior yet'. Which explicitly doesn't seem to be what they want.
Also, re:
> Benefits and salary are good (though salary isn't posted in the ad)
If the salary is legitimately strong, you should post it.
In summary, as advice to OP:
- Put the salary in the ad
- Scrap the take home assignment
It’s still hard to hire legit senior devs, but those 2 changes will make it significantly easier.
I like how things are confusing enough to need this distinction, but also we still don't know if you're talking about actual seniors and not principal engineers
Same when hiring: I'd much rather hire someone who I've seen work before than go through a whole interview process, and still feel like it's a crapshoot at the end when making an offer.
Someone I spoke to recently had the audacity to ask for 20 hours of free work in the intro call, and I just shook my head and hung up.
If a company doesn't bother to check how well I'm going to do the job, it makes me worried about what sort of smooth-talking incompetents I'm going to get stuck working with down the line.
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I'd only do the standard style interview if I was desperate for a job.
Has anyone done this? Has it worked?
PS - I also try to add on a 30m review of /their/ code, but so far it hasn't worked. I still ask!
Edit: By the way, one company has actually paid for my time to do a take-home at my consulting rate. Most of them balk.
However asking to see some examples of their real code/documentation is a legitimate request IMHO and something I did in my later interviews when I was working as an employee. I'd usually bring it up at a second interview when we knew both sides were serious and they asked if there was anything I'd like to know more about. Nowhere ever thought it was an unreasonable request in my experience and some took it as a good sign that I was sincerely interested. Probably the majority of places actually did find something I could look at, though some refused and usually cited something like confidentiality or trade secrets. Of course the ones who showed me good code were more likely to get me to work for them than the ones who refused or showed me bad code.
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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?
If you can't tell whether someone is just talking the talk or actually has done something during a 30m+ interview process, then you're not asking the right questions.
I should note that this seemed to help offset the concerns of people with families. They definitely don’t see it as a waste of time. It also incentivizes us to be sure we’re serious about the candidate.
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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.
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.
To the OP: if you believe your comp bands are competitive, why not share in the posting itself?
Leaving that out makes it clear that the post was made in good faith. If I thought the submission was just a job ad in disguise, I might have flagged it.
I’d argue that an effective 20-30% discount on 409A for employees in series C+ is about right. On a successful, but expected, exit - this gives the employee some premium compared to working at a public tech company in exchange for deferred compensation and liquidity risk.
If the startup is not growing extremely fast, the stock will likely not be worth very much regardless of how “clean” the terms are on the preferred stock.
If you expect stock to be a big part of your compensation then leave after 2 years of the company’s growth is not sustained and rapid.
If you join with options for preferred stock (assuming anyone is going to do such a thing), you're probably getting a 1x liquidation preference. But preferred stock has a higher fair market value than common stock. So the strike price will be higher. Probably close to the liquidation preference.
Which means, you're asking for something that will net you $0 if the liquidation preference kicks in. And you'll earn less in the upside case because your exercise price would be higher.
Also, 10x is a little off, but I also work on infrastructure and infrastructure companies tend to get acquired rather than IPOing.
Edit - as for the actual terms of the stocks in question, it was never what you were thinking (1x preference), but I probably can't say what it was.
The social media analytics company I left last year offered me 7 stock units (in RSU) for $20,000 as bonus. I declined. They are not in IPO yet. The confidence of the CFO saying, "[...] of course they will appreciate even higher" is laughable.
Giving an overblown estimate as bonus is doing disservice. The hard work is real, the valuation is not.
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.
It's called "work" because it's what you do to get money. It's not a hobby, nor an idealistic crusade (both of those are fine things, but they're different to "work").
The reason you work is to get money. That's the only motivation. You might choose between different work options on another basis, but the reason you're there at all is money.
Anyone trying to recruit people who doesn't accept this will fail.
I think what you'll find is that people aren't motivated by money, per se, but they have obligations: mortgages, car payments, retirement savings. An established standard of living. Especially the more senior they get. I don't do better work for money, but at this point in my career you can be damned sure I'm not going to lower my standard of living just to work at a company with free soda and a ping pong table. I'd put up with a lot of bullshit in my current situation before taking a pay cut.
The unlikely exception would be a mission-driven company (if your company is for-profit, this is not you) that is highly congruent with my values and truly makes the world a better place.
… 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…
The first truth is that people don't leave their current jobs because someone else is offering more. They leave because they're unhappy. For knowledge workers of all stripes, unhappiness is very, very rarely about compensation.
The second truth is that high compensation keeps people where they are. If a recruiter is offering $200k, you'll listen if you're making $180k. You won't listen if you're making $250k. If you're making $180k, the $20k bump becomes a socially acceptable reason to tell your employer you're leaving, but it's not the true reason you're leaving, because every time you switch jobs, you run the risk of bad management, mistreatment, etc. There's a price to taking that risk and it's not usually worth small bumps to people. When you post a salary band, 90% of the time, people who respond are not looking for the pay bump, they're just considering you before the 90+% of employers who are not posting pay bands or whose pay band is uncompetitive. And they know that they're that much more likely to stay because it'll be that much more difficult to persuade them to leave after they join.
The third, deeper, more cynical truth is that posting salary bands probably signals to employees internally that they are being underpaid, and can provoke discontent and departures. Rather than fix the problem with a long-term solution of unilaterally issuing raises internally before posting salary bands, most companies take the shortcut and keep the salary band private.
If my employer said this to me, I'd think: "Wait... am I the mark?"
I mean, I am primarily motivated by the work, being something that I enjoy, but I already have a job that provides that. I need that and more to consider a move to another job.
It's important to me that I think my employer is doing good stuff for the world, but I'm there to be paid so I can get food and housing and internet.
Oh good, i do not want bosses only motivated by my work output either :)
Says people at the top who exclusively care about the money. Do these people think we're THAT stupid?
So, how much percentage of the business are they offering then?
Oh, they don't do that? Its about... the money? Yep.
The description is nice, but it's not what grabs your attention
What's critical is that you still need to be "market rate." You don't have to be the highest compensation on the market, but you need to pay me around the 60th percentile.
Edit: I should add that, in the two times I was below market rate, once I became indispensable, I threatened to leave unless my pay was jacked up. The "I like the job discount" only goes so far.
If you are ok passing 90% of qualified people that could do the job you need done then you have, of course, the right to do that, but don't complain that you have trouble attracting senior talent.
I don't even begin reading an ad that doesn't post salary and I don't really need any more money. Just a force of habit.
...as if that's the kind of investors the C-suite courts?
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.
Having been on the hiring side of things, I get far more information out of a conversation where I can ask for details about someone's background and experience.
A 4hr assignment is generally a really good way to gather competency.
That said - it's just 'too much' of a hill for senior devs. to bother with and there are probably some ways to do 'regular interviewing' in order to figure that out.
I have hired a ton of Engineers and I've found a lot of senior engineers to be particular, crusty and a bit weird: excelling in some ares, but cantankerous in other ways.
But yes, 4hr hr take home is going to be a barrier.
The take-home technical assignment is to determine what, if anything, you actually learned in your 20+ years in tech.
A depressingly large number of people with that level of experience have not learned anything meaningful.
Tenure doesn't weed out mediocrity by any stretch. In fact, the more tenure someone has, often the more difficult it is to determine from their resume alone whether they know anything.
We want to see them solve a problem, sure, but what's even more valuable is seeing how they approach problems, can they explain what they're doing, do they ask good questions, etc. Much more predictive than just looking at the final output and seeing if it passes a few unit tests.
I would never hire an engineer without them writing actual code that gets compiled and run. It's the single most predictive thing we do in our hiring process. But, we also want to be respectful of people's time, hence limiting the coding session to an hour.
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. ;)
I need to have useful information that a candidate is more than a smooth talker.
"Not if you'd like me to work for you, no." -- An actually senior developer in this market
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.
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.
It is a tough problem to crack from the businesses point of view. They need to have enough capital and profit to ensure that current staff are compensated at a competitive industry rate, but also hire at the same time to get the business goals met to get that revenue, and so on and so on.
So I'm boycotting every company using an external recruiter to contact me unsolicited.
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.
I have 20 years experience and this is completely alien to my experience. I've gotten lots of job referrals over the years, but all it did was get my foot in the door. From there, it was the standard interview process with whiteboarding and take home tests. What am I missing here?
Two weeks later I got another surprise email from HR again, saying "this is to let you know we have rejected your application for a web developer role..."
Needless to say, it's not a company I'm interested in actually applying to.
Friendly meet and greets that are informal, no coding test or take home assignment.
My best guess is your job referrals aren't from senior level people, while ours are. The CTO is the one who wants me. Or the top Senior who has control of the process.
But I'm just guessing. The norm for me is informal conversation.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31817596
Some of them asked a string of technical questions, some did not. Where there were technical questions I enjoyed answering them, it felt like a fun conversation and was interactive with the interviewer, and I was surprised how easy I found them, so they didn't take long. Some did a screen share with me where we looked over some code and I explained what I was reading to them. All felt easy going. In my opinion, this made them skilled interviewers.
There have been a few times where I didn't even realise I was being interviewed. I thought we were just chatting about common ground in some field of interest. One was a chat in a pub that someone invited me to at short notice. And then a surprise offer appeared. The surprise offer has happened to me twice, and both were great opportunities I'd be a fool to decline.
Also, in recent years I noticed the best offers came from companies I had not sent a CV/résumé to (and therefore didn't have to tailor one, stress out over it etc). They were happy to go from my LinkedIn profile and other information they could find online, or asked me to send some specific info about my experience in an email (one or two paragraphs).
Due to this realisation, when I get messages from unknown recruiters asking cold, "<random job description>, if interested send me your CV/résumé", I treat the request as a signal of a lower quality opportunity, and am unlikely to reply. It's probably better to wait for a serendipitous great opportunity, but I'm aware the market can change and luck is a factor, so I don't take this for granted.
So, between jobs, I spend the time on study, practice, skilling up, R&D on my own projects, etc so that "luck favours the prepared", then reaching out for conversations without a particular agenda. In practice the good opportunities end up being inbound, perhaps an indirect effect of my outreach rather than direct.
Not "applying". Job ads are a big turn off. High effort, low likelihood of good result.
To the Ask HN author: For someone who had experiences like me, your job ad is one in a sea of tens of thousands of job ads, and it's very easy to scroll past. It doesn't help you that some professional career advisors say the worst way for a candidate to get a great job is via job ads, and seniors have of course had more years to internalise this advice.
There are a small number of skilled recruiters and would-be employers who know how to reach out and almost blindside me into having been interviewed before I realise I have, and then I'm starting to be excited. They are removing obstacles and nudging me forward, usually into something I wouldn't have applied for, which is exciting if I like where it's going.
Those people stand out and win by removing much of the friction. (Like good sales.)
Another factor which you can change is formality.
Imposter syndrome or performance anxiety can affect applications. A person may be a very smart and experienced senior, confident they could make a big, positive difference at your company, but fear that they won't perform in the "right" way when hazed during test-heavy rituals, unless they refresh specific skills - something they don't have time to do, or even know which exact skills to be fresh on. Are you going to ask them C++17 trick questions when they've only been doing C kernel development recently? Who knows.
They imagine your take-home or interview tests will not be the kind of thing they've done recently, and that they'll face nit-picking, either by cocky yet wrong interviewers with a childish mindset, or seasoned people much smarter than themselves. Remember, the smartest people tend to doubt themselves. Tech's tendancy to cycle through frameworks, tech-du-jour and (mandatory but sometimes terrible) "best practices", and talk about it as though everyone "should" know adds to this anxiety.
That's friction too. They're probably in no hurry. Scroll down to the next ad. Close tab.
Informality is a way to break past that, lowering the stakes while getting the conversation started.
You can change this factor if you can find a way to strike up "friendly chats" with people outside any formal job process, and then mindfully guide the ones you like through your assessment process with care.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I've been at two startups, and both gave the accounting candidates take-home tests. Not an accountant, but on some interview loops.
Edit: Im not advocating for take homes, just noting that they exist for accountants.
> 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!
This is my former career. Having take home tests would absolutely be an improvement over the legal hiring process.