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Comment by throwaway2016a | Hacker News Reader

throwaway2016a

Don't be so quick to judge.

Placing someone at mid / senior / junior is not "cocky"... it's pretty subjective if you do it right. The guy missed questions that over 50% of our applicants knew the answers to.

I'm not talking the "implement this obscure algorithm from scratch on a whiteboard" kind of question HN is so fond of. The hardest coding question we ask is Fizz-Buzz.

But we can't / won't pay him more than we pay other employees with similar or higher skill sets.

If we drew a bell curve of all the applicants we had, this guy would be in the middle.

His resume was impressive though. My guess is the company that hired him didn't do their diligence and only weighed the resume.

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Well I have to tell you this that there are a lot of companies that want you basically re-engineer the whole universe and want to pay you peanuts while I can get a DECENT salary (eg. your 70-75k vs 100k) and have time for my family and hobbies doing less challenging job.

I won't comment on whether the guy was or could be a senior because I obviously did not attend the interview but there are many many incredibly skilled people that just suck at doing f2f / online interviews.

It sounds like you don't pay market salaries and are in denial

Sounds like he is well aware that they aren't paying market salaries:

> - We are probably priced out of the market

Also what I meant when I said...

> I work at a startup that isn't profitable yet so our salaries are very low...

... was "too low... if we could afford it I'd pay three times that much" not "oh look what a great deal we are getting! Haha, suckers!"

Then I guess you are targeting the wrong pool of candidates. Do the candidates know how much can you pay (ranges?). It often happens that I as a candidate have to go through several rounds just to learn that they can't afford me.

So what Modulo is there to catch people out. If you were a front end developer do you really need this?

The fact employers will reject based on a test that is fashionable just because a few coding blogs said so doesn't mean they can't provide value. What about their past work or qualifications?

Cocky. Sounds like a clique i'd want to avoid at all costs.

I can't tell if you're being serious or trolling but using modulus in front-end is not all that uncommon. Especially when doing reporting or animation.

For years the only way to do zebra striped tables was that way.

Also, I never said...

1. We were taking about front-end.

2. We reject solely based on it. I just used it as an example of a type of question.

In fact we've hired candidates who didn't know what modulo was because when they encountered it they were able to reason through it.

Furthermore... this candidate failed far easier questions that that. I used FizzBuzz as the "hardest" question.

Does not knowing Fizz Buzz mean you won't be productive? No. But it is probably a good indicator you aren't commanding of $150k a year this guy got hired for.

I said Front end as an example could apply to most developer jobs really.

Anyway, this guy you placed as a "lower mid", this is your judgement, how do you know it's correct? Did other people say the same? Perhaps he didn't have the skills you were looking for but was good at other things. Saying the other company didn't do their diligence is easy but is that really what happened?

If you are hiring developers and placing them as lower, mid, lead etc. you are going to get flak anyway as you're just jailing them and hiring a load of people who only agree with what you think.

You're going to get people who are good at developing software who don't care about math(s) or machine learning, give them 2 seconds and Google and they can answer your Modulo question.

Is it not about the willingness and enthusiasm to learn? Or do they have to go through "hard" tests to prove they can work out some academic nonsense they are never going to need to use. To prove themselves to the frat. I'd argue a lot of really clever people good at the hardcore Computer science and data analysis type subjects aren't always as good at writing decent code.

First I didn't say "lower mid" ... I said "middle"... you are miss-categorizing what I said. It's a minor difference but the fact you changed the facts of the discussion in a direction that makes me look more extreme is very telling. Not only did you twist what I said but you even quoted it as if it is a citation.

Second one of my other posts talk about how we've had great luck bringing on and mentoring juniors and they have been successful. I have hired people who literally dropped out of school freshman year. Again, you're either not reading or not listening.

I think you may be projecting your pre-conceived image of who I am and I don't think I can convince you otherwise.

I also think the fact I have almost 1700 on my throw away account and you have -1 on your year old account is very telling. I shouldn't have even engaged. I'm done now.

You said mid generously so I think it was fair to say lower middle.

No need to get competitive about who has the highest score - sounds like this guy dodged a bullet from having to work with you anyway. You seem like you would be a nightmare to work for.

Also you remind me of PHP CEO https://twitter.com/PHP_CEO

If the candidate received and accepted another offer for twice what you would pay him, it is hard evidence that you pay half market value.

Planning to pay people half market value is madness. If you cannot afford salaries, you need a business plan that involves more profits and/or more "runway" of sacrificial capital or debt.

Hey... I know this is a late reply but so was your's :)

We pay about 70% below market. Unfortunately I am not the one that makes the decisions or the business plans. I am just barely high enough in the org to be privy to what people get paid.

For what it's worth I 100% agree with you.

The result is we get software engineers with much less experience. For what it's worth... they have all worked out very well. But I think someone with more experience would work twice as fast and therefor work out to about the same cost anyway.

Not at all. The discussion of whether a person is a senior or mid level developer can be completely separate from a discussion of whether the company pays fairly for those positions.

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