Comment by blowski | Hacker News Reader

Comment by blowski | Hacker News Reader

I've been interviewing software engineers for around 15 years. In total, I think I've interviewed around 600 people in a range of roles.

My main advice is to listen to your gut instinct. Things that mildly annoy or worry you in the interview will probably come to dominate your working relationship with them. Don't assume you can fix someone's flaws after they join. Get other people to give their gut instinct too, and everyone has a veto. When a new hire doesn't work out, it's extremely expensive and stressful for you, the person themselves, and the whole team to manage the situation, so it's better not to hire in the first place.

This means you'll need to be patient. On average, I've needed to interview 30 people to make 1 strong hire. A few extra months looking for the right person will deliver far more long-run productivity. However, treat every candidate with dignity - get back to them promptly with helpful feedback.

The best hires I've made have come through personal connections, and niche job boards. Most recruitment consultants are working merely for short-term commission, and don't care about your or the candidate's long term interests.

My problem is that we're trying to hire for a very niche position, where we get maybe 3-4 candidates A YEAR. So we don't really have the comfort of waiting a bit longer to interview those 30 candidates - we have to look at whether the people that come in could maybe work in the position we have.

Yes, hiring for a niche position is hard because you don’t have the luxury of choosing between many candidates.

It seems like there are three approaches:

1. Pay above market rate. Retention can be expensive with this strategy because you get into an arms race with the competition, but if you’ve got the budget, it’s the quickest.

2. Hire for attitude and re-train. Probably the slowest route to success as it can take years to build up true expertise, so it depends how much expertise you need and how quickly as to whether this is viable.

3. Hire for the niche skills and accept some other trade-off. I had limited budget to hire a strong MySQL DBA, and hired someone that wanted limited and extremely flexible working hours and could afford a paycut.

How do you handle it?

Wild, what area is that? Maybe it's a pipeline/intake/compensation issue?

I had this problem recently trying to hire people good at and willing to work with a big Angular v1 codebase.

Angular v1 can be picked up a lot easier than what OP describes. You could/should cast a wider net

Compensation might also have been an issue.

>rendering programmers

How many months will it take for 'regular' programmer with 5 years experience to say have the skills of say a 5 years of a rendering programmer ?

What is the pay range for rendering programmer with 5 years of experience?

Rendering programmers in video games industry. The problem is that any rendering programmers are immediately hoovered up by medical/automotive/research industries at ridiculous salaries that very few gaming companies can compete with, and even then there are very very few programmers who are interested in that area.

Yes, the answer to the problem is "just offer more money" but that decision is way above my paygrade - I have to hire someone though, and the choice of candidates is very small.

To expand on listening to your gut instinct: I find taking a "trust but verify" approach useful. Take the time to dig into what your instinct is telling you, try to match it up in words to your hiring criteria (which should go beyond technical stuff, including capturing whether or not you'd want to work with the person), and compare against other candidates to check you're being consistent. For instance, you don't want to unfairly penalise someone for being loquacious just because their interview was right before lunch and you were getting hungry, whereas you enjoyed interviewing the similarly talkative candidate that happened to be interviewed just after lunch.

Yes, unconscious bias is a huge risk in my “trust your got instinct” approach to hiring. For example, I bristle at the name “Daryl” because I went to school with someone with that name and I remember him laughing at me. Maybe this is why I’ve never hired someone called Daryl.

So I agree you need to articulate and challenge your reasons, even if only to yourself. Periodically review the ones you’re rejecting and ask others if there’s a pattern, then deliberately spend time with people represented by that pattern.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t come naturally to me and I have to work hard at it.

My 'agent' found me the perfect job, so I wouldn't avoid recruitment consultant.

But you have to ask the question : how long have you worked with him/her (the first job I landed with her was not a good fit).

I've also had reasonably good experience with agents. but it's important to understand their position. potential employer != recruiting agent

I’ve also had good experiences with agents, but only when I learned how. Early on I was burned by pump-and-dump agents - they send you below-par candidates, bullshit both of you, pressure you into saying yes, and then walk away with their commission. They dominate the market because they send everybody as fast as they can, and have the lowest fees. So if it’s your first hiring experience the odds are that you’re working with such an agent, whatever they tell you.

Find an agent who takes a long-term view of the relationship by showing them you will be hiring many people over the years. Get them to send you their best candidates - respond to their messages quickly and with useful feedback. Nurture the relationship by also sending good engineers and employers their way. They are often more expensive and send fewer candidates, but the ones they do send are stronger.

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