Peroni

This is a fantastic post.

>From my admittedly anecdotal and narrow point of view, once you clear a baseline of competence, your willingness to do the work takes you much further than knowing a bit more.

From my own, 15+ years of experience focusing entirely on this problem, point of view, I can't emphasise enough how much I agree with this principle. Finding people who are technically capable of doing the job isn't hard. Finding people who can do the job well, that actively make doing the job more rewarding is much more difficult and no technical assessment on earth can screen for that.

>Nobody should burn tokens for a company that hasn’t had a proper conversation with them yet.

PREACH! This same sentiment applies to all tasks that you expect candidates to do during an interview process. If you want them to put in the work, get buy in first. You get that buy in by having conversations with them and helping them understand why they should care about your company and your opportunity in the first place.

I honestly have no notes on this post other than to encourage you to hold on to your current way of approaching the problem because I promise you, you are absolutely on the right track!

'committed suicide' is leftover from a time when suicide was considered a crime. 'Dying by suicide' is more accurate and more empathetic.

I once asked a high-ranking Meta trust & safety employee why they don't just block paid ads that include telegram links and the short version of the incredible mental gymnastics they went through was "identifying telegram links is hard".

'normies' is, and has always been, self-deprecating. We (people who use HN, et al) are 'nerds' and 'geeks' who understand tech beyond the surface layer and can immediately see the downside to using things like Muse. We're significantly in the minority, hence we're not 'normal'.

I think that's a reasonable part of the assessment but the focus is primarily on the candidates understanding of the output and essentially their ability to QA the output.

The better way existed before AI existed. Take-home tasks were always poor attempts to find a measure for technical ability. Pairing exercises or live problem-solving tasks were, and still are, vastly more effective. If your team uses AI for those challenges on the job, then the people you interview should too.

The measure should always be the quality of a solution a candidate produces in response to a problem, not how they got to the solution. If you want to dive into the 'how' then what you're actually measuring is communication, something AI is still pretty bad at.

I like it! The 'skill focus' prep appears to be the only way to improve my skill attributes but despite choosing that for each tournament in early season, it doesn't appear to have any permanent effect on my attributes.

>At work, if your job is to move a bunch of heavy things from one side of the room to another, you should use whatever assistive tech you have on hand: a wagon, a forklift ... even an AI-powered robot. But at the gym, it makes no sense for that robot to lift weights for you. The point of weightlifting isn’t to move heavy things across the room; it’s to actually lift those heavy things.

The point of going to the gym isn't to make it easier to lift heavy things at work, it's for self-improvement.

>The writing assignments I give my students are gym tasks, not work tasks... I assign them because the very act of writing, which includes thinking and outlining and drafting and editing, making and criticizing and revising arguments, will help develop the critical thinking skills they will need in their future careers.

I'm sorry but why are we assuming that any of those things are 'critical' skills? I think there's already a strong argument that the need for those skills in the workplace are declining.

There doesn't have to be commercial gain for it to be promotion. The distinction is promotion vs contribution. If you view HN as a community and all you're doing is saying "look at the thing I made" rather than actively engaging with the community as a whole, then your contribution value to the community is low.

The HN algo is intentionally obscure to prevent people from gaming the system. For example, if there's a bunch of traffic going directly to the discussion link, it will heavily punish the weighting of the post as it's assumed the OP is sharing the link to farm upvotes. There's a bunch of other black magic involved in the HN ranking system so to try and understand it based on numbers alone is a waste of time.

Depends on a whole bunch of factors. Location, growth stage, product industry, and funding are the main influencers.

Location - Assuming you're not based somewhere obscure, there'll be endless compensation reports, benchmarks, glassdoor data, etc available as a starting point.

Growth stage - How you compensate people when there are three people in the company is immensely different to when there are 20 people, 120 people, 500 people, etc. Equity is more important at the earlier stages but with everything going on in the world, don't assume equity alone will be sufficient to win people over.

Product industry - Some of this is location specific but different product industries pay different premiums. In the UK for example, FinTech pays more than most areas of tech, gaming pays less than most.

Funding - If you're sitting on a ridiculous amount of funding, then you need to lean into paying as far above average as possible. One thing that doesn't and probably never will change is that the more you pay people, the easier it is to hire. Obviously the less funding you have, the less you have to spend on comp but see my point above in growth stage.

16 years and counting.

Recruiters (internal and external) rarely actually look at any of your personal projects. The more experienced you are, the less relevant your personal projects are to a recruiter unless you've created some well known OS work. For less experienced engineers, the approach is relatively similar.

It's difficult to put much value in your personal projects without some form of social or commercial validation. Essentially, personal projects that aren't being used by anyone but you hold little to no value in terms of resume content.

It can be both too. It's entirely possible to protect a companies best interests and promote employee well-being.

Yeah I read it but it doesn't help me understand why it's considered bad UX, hence why I asked for clarification.

>Please get rid of that top panel.... This is just bad UX.

How so? It displays useful info at a glance. Where's the bad UX?

The most valuable thing to employers is decent experience with a reputable employer in the US. If you're serious about the move, learn as much as you can about the various visa options. The UK government website is surprisingly excellent for this stuff: https://www.gov.uk/browse/visas-immigration/work-visas

OP - Without a work visa or other right to work in the UK already established, you're not gonna have a good time. Tech vacancies are dropping in the UK and QA vacancies are one of the hardest hit. Couple that with the fact that QA salary is one of the lowest in the UK tech sector. If you also have to factor in an employer who is willing to sponsor you, then the odds of you securing something decent are almost non-existent.

>Cut your take home pay expectations by 60-70% as the government will take a huge chunk of your income.

20%-30% on average.

>Assume you'll struggle to heat your home because the UK has the highest energy costs in the world.

This really isn't the lived reality for most people in the UK.

>Assume you won't be have access to healthcare unless on your deathbed and you won't be able to afford private because the above.

No idea where this assumption is coming from. Free universal healthcare is the default and access is easy, even through the NHS.

>If you're happy with this lifestyle then you might be able to find a QA engineer job in the UK for £30,000

Utter nonsense. I won't deny, decent QA jobs are becoming more difficult to find but the average salary is at least double that.

>Often times we assume that hiring an L8 at faang is perfect for a startup and thats usually not the case

Agreed. In my experience that's almost always a bad idea if that L8 hasn't previously had first-hand experience of working at a very early stage company and understands the enormous difference between the two environments.

The startup world has been my exclusive focus for almost twenty years now so I stand by my position. Granted if you have fewer than five years of experience then it's harder to demonstrate value on a CV and that's certainly where a portfolio of work helps however your question was framed much more broadly.

>That’s why more people are showcasing their work through portfolios. And that’s what recruiters actually look for.

Not sure where this assumption is coming from. Most recruiters are looking for consistent work experience with reputable companies. Sure portfolios help but it's not even remotely on the same spectrum.

>I dont know how people are coming up with such juicy and vanity metrics but mostly are noise.

It's really not noise at all. If you actually use these ATS platforms from the hiring side, you'll see first hand how they've all doubled down on AI filtering. Candidates are directly experiencing increased difficulty in getting past the initial screening stages.

Growing companies from ~10 to ~200+ has been my bread and butter for almost 20yrs now. A few relatively universal observations:

1. As sloaken said, your documentation of processes and procedures is NOT adequate. This applies to everything. From your code commit process to how to book vacation days. Document everything early. Notion is your friend.

2. Like it or not, your work culture is going to change. New people obviously means new personalities but it also means new ways of working, some good, some bad. It really is worth spending some time with the first 15 people that helped get your company to where it is today and define some operating principles (otherwise known as 'company values'). This blog post (not mine) is an incredible insight into why this stuff actually matters at your stage of growth: https://lowercaseopinions.com/post/useful-values

3. Hiring gets expensive and laborious. You're reaching a point where it just isn't practical for you to be involved in every hiring decision. That being said, don't let go of it until you are confident that everyone involved in hiring for your company is aligned on what 'good' looks like both in terms of candidates and hiring process.

4. More people means more individual questions, problems, and ultimately admin. More people getting paid means more payroll issues and questions and adjustments. More people interacting with each other means more disagreements, arguments, and issues. Someone needs to be able to handle all of these issues. Usually the challenges are distributed across different teams but again, without some rigour around how you want your company to approach these issues means that different managers/teams will take different approaches which in turn will amplify the problems rather than solve them.

5. Reconsider the financial impact of hiring experienced people. Bringing in strong leaders early can enormously mitigate the operational costs of scaling. Hiring a highly experienced person at your stage will have a big impact on your budget but long-term, that investment will pay dividends both in terms of the quality of work but also in sharing the burden of handling these scaling challenges.

>In the process, they may bypass the valuable experience of struggling through early tasks and learning from their mistakes. Students, I worry, could simply become an intermediary between the raw idea and the AI’s output.

Even if all AI progress grinds to a permanent halt today, there's already enough utility in its current capability to force these questions. As a result, how we train and educate graduates and young people needs to change.

I have no doubt you need to have actual experience to be able to ensure AI output is at a production standard but if we accept that reality, then a shift in how we educate and train young people could make an enormous difference in ensuring employers still see value in hiring people with no real commercial work experience.

>the carve-out only protects people inside the US. Speaking as someone based in Europe, that's a detail that doesn't go unnoticed.

I'm not sure an American company prioritising the privacy of American people is worth questioning. As a European, Anthropic are very low on the list of companies I worry about in terms of the progressive eradication of my privacy.

If your thought process is "someone should make X..." then your next thought should be "I should try and make X...".

Go give it a go and as a minimum, you'll learn something about why it doesn't already exist yet and in the best case scenario, you'll create something that lots of people find useful!

We'd announce it on here and on twitter but we managed it on meetup.com so if you were a part of the HN London meetup group, you got emailed every time the next event got announced.

Nice! I'll keep an eye out for it.

One small bit of feedback is that it would be useful to see an 'other' category as the four roles defined seem a bit limiting.

There's a lot of references in the report to companies "reporting difficulties in filling vacancies" with no clarity on what constitutes 'difficulties'.

Also, the data notes that 83% of the companies surveyed were small enterprises (with 10-49 employees or self-employed persons). It's no surprise that these companies find it more difficult as they tend to be more budget-conscious, meaning they struggle to compete with bigger company salary levels.

Really cool tool. Would love to see similar analysis on the 'Who's Hiring' threads. How is the 'Want Remote' criteria assessed?