On the flipside, we had a senior position open for something like 2 years before we finally got someone we’re happy with. We fired two before we found someone would would actually do work and not cuss out our external partners.
We’re still having trouble hiring mid-levels. Most of the candidates are surprised when we ask them questions about React when the job position clearly states it’s for React, and they’re also surprised when we ask them to write a few lines of code in an interview (nothing crazy, should take a competent dev 5-10 min, and a nervous one 15, so we allocate 20 min). I don’t think our expectations are unreasonable, here’s how we delineate between tiers:
junior - needs help from a mentor to deliver feature work
mid-level - needs direction on larger features, but can deliver independently
But all the senior applicants are mid-level at best, mid-level applicants are recent college grads, and junior applicants just finished a coding bootcamp and think they’re hot stuff because they built a rails app by following step-by-step instructions.
We’re not a flashy tech company, we manufacture niche products for a niche field, and our software does simulations and reports. It’s a complicated product, and we’re totally willing to train people, we just want people who can demonstrate that they can ask proper questions and translate that into easy to understand code. The interview questions aren’t hard, but they are intentionally incomplete because we’re not testing coding ability but instead the ability to recognize vagueness and ask clarifying questions (i.e. ask before you assume).
We’re not anyone’s top pick, but we do have a lot of interesting problems to solve and people tend to really like it here. So the candidates we tend to get are desperate people who aren’t getting bites at the flashier companies, which often means they’re not all that competent. During COVID, we’d get maybe 5 applicants for a role after it has been open for a month, and now we’re getting 200-300 in the first few days of the position being open. A lot of those applicants are incompetent and I’m surprised they were offered their previous role, but there are some diamonds in the rough.
I feel you on a lot of that. Big FAANG and Covid lockdowns changed the landscape hard in the favor of the inexperienced. In late 2020, I had a junior position to fill with a 90k salary. The guy that has accepted called me back a few days later to inform me Disney+ just offered him 220k. I couldn’t even be mad he was taking their offer after he had already accepted mine. I’m sure a lot of that resulted in incompetent people with higher paying jobs and titles than they deserved. Note that it’s setting the other way, well, no one can afford to take a pay cut, so they’re of course applying to jobs they don’t qualify for. My current role clearly says PHP, but I’ve dumped maybe 10% of the candidates already for not even having the term PHP on their resume.
We’re Python on the BE and we don’t really care if they have it on their resume because it’s not hard to learn (that’s why we picked it) and our problems are more complex than just building some CRUD here and there, so we’re willing to teach the right candidate.
So when we do interviews, we let them pick whatever language they want. We’re not testing language knowledge afterall, we’re simply testing logic competence. Can you design a system that will scale when requirements change? That’s what we want to know.
On the flipside, we had a senior position open for something like 2 years before we finally got someone we’re happy with. We fired two before we found someone would would actually do work and not cuss out our external partners.
We’re still having trouble hiring mid-levels. Most of the candidates are surprised when we ask them questions about React when the job position clearly states it’s for React, and they’re also surprised when we ask them to write a few lines of code in an interview (nothing crazy, should take a competent dev 5-10 min, and a nervous one 15, so we allocate 20 min). I don’t think our expectations are unreasonable, here’s how we delineate between tiers:
But all the senior applicants are mid-level at best, mid-level applicants are recent college grads, and junior applicants just finished a coding bootcamp and think they’re hot stuff because they built a rails app by following step-by-step instructions.
We’re not a flashy tech company, we manufacture niche products for a niche field, and our software does simulations and reports. It’s a complicated product, and we’re totally willing to train people, we just want people who can demonstrate that they can ask proper questions and translate that into easy to understand code. The interview questions aren’t hard, but they are intentionally incomplete because we’re not testing coding ability but instead the ability to recognize vagueness and ask clarifying questions (i.e. ask before you assume).
We’re not anyone’s top pick, but we do have a lot of interesting problems to solve and people tend to really like it here. So the candidates we tend to get are desperate people who aren’t getting bites at the flashier companies, which often means they’re not all that competent. During COVID, we’d get maybe 5 applicants for a role after it has been open for a month, and now we’re getting 200-300 in the first few days of the position being open. A lot of those applicants are incompetent and I’m surprised they were offered their previous role, but there are some diamonds in the rough.
I feel you on a lot of that. Big FAANG and Covid lockdowns changed the landscape hard in the favor of the inexperienced. In late 2020, I had a junior position to fill with a 90k salary. The guy that has accepted called me back a few days later to inform me Disney+ just offered him 220k. I couldn’t even be mad he was taking their offer after he had already accepted mine. I’m sure a lot of that resulted in incompetent people with higher paying jobs and titles than they deserved. Note that it’s setting the other way, well, no one can afford to take a pay cut, so they’re of course applying to jobs they don’t qualify for. My current role clearly says PHP, but I’ve dumped maybe 10% of the candidates already for not even having the term PHP on their resume.
We’re Python on the BE and we don’t really care if they have it on their resume because it’s not hard to learn (that’s why we picked it) and our problems are more complex than just building some CRUD here and there, so we’re willing to teach the right candidate.
So when we do interviews, we let them pick whatever language they want. We’re not testing language knowledge afterall, we’re simply testing logic competence. Can you design a system that will scale when requirements change? That’s what we want to know.