Ask HN: Ever been hired through a “who's hiring” post?
How many people here have ACTUALLY gotten a job through the monthly post?
Provide what information you can (company, job title, post (if it's still alive)).
Provide what information you can (company, job title, post (if it's still alive)).
288 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 248 ms ] threadThey posted in the last Who's Hiring and it was similar to the one I replied to.
If I can make a recommendation, go for the companies that supply personal email addresses. If they don't supply them, go find them.
The folks that I did hear back from were great, though. Nothing ever actually worked out in my case, though.
I have a feeling those positions will be open for a while ;)
To your second point, they are probably fishing for good devs that will work for lower than market rate. They don't actually have a job but are hoping to find a unicorn.
Perhaps H1B fraud? There's a local company just a mile from my house that's been advertising the same $50K CCIE position for near fifteen years now.
If you haven't done that part yet, I actually wrote a scraper[1] in Java for the "Who's Hiring?" threads when I built a job searcher[2].
Not the prettiest, but it's pretty fast.
[1] https://github.com/hnjobs/parser
[2] https://hnjobs.emilburzo.com/
It says a lot for the professionalism of a company when they can't even auto-respond a receipt, although a personal rejection would always be nice - if you can't be bothered to say you're not interested, why should I be bothered to apply ?
I had one job I finally got a rejection from a week after I had started someplace else. As much as I may have liked any one position, I had mouths tl feed. No point in waiting 3 weeks for a simple response.
Hiring managers & HR: Tired of getting "spray and pray" resumes? STOP DOING THIS.
Point is it's nothing personal. If you're not getting replies, try to stand out more. Don't just send a resume, send a GitHub link to a project that's relevant to the company.
I get a dozen resumes a day (not joking), so give me a reason to not hit "Archive" immediately.
You say that replying to everyone isn't a good use of your time, but having to apply to everyone, with the likelihood of being ignored apparently is a good use of my time ? My time is just as valuable as yours.
The Github idea is great... except there's no way I can magic up a project 'relevant to the company' for all of the applications I'm making - which I have to be making because nobody replies any more. I'm certainly looking to get some projects going in my spare time, which is minimal.
I'm too old to 'stand' out - if 20 years of programming isn't enough to get a more personal interview, then I'll just move on - I have no interest in competing with people from a marketing perspective.
Of course, I don't expect us to agree, as we're coming from completely different sides (and requirements).
In the modern world, it's amazing how many old-school (Business time is more valuable than employee) mindsets still exist.
Thanks for taking the time to reply though. I genuinely do appreciate that.
The co-founder's time is worth what? They just got investors to hand them millions of dollars over a few meetings, on the assumption that if successful, they'll be worth hundreds of millions one day.
You are one of dozens of applicants. Some guys with 20 years have the problem that it was the same year over and over. How do they know your skills are even current and relevant?
If you're an experienced programmer, maybe you're going to make $50 to $100 an hour (depending on your market). But if you're applying to multiple firms, wouldn't you put yourself to work at that opportunity cost to differentiate yourself enough to get the job you want?
Why wouldn't you be willing to jump through whatever hoops necessary to get the job you want?
Building good relationships is a good foundation for future success. I have had interviews that didn't result in me getting/accepting an offer, but the process was smooth and the decision amicable that I look forward to meeting/cooperate with/work with the same people in the future when the stars align. On the flip side, I have had interactions so terrible I won't ever consider working/meeting with or recommending the companies and the people involved, should they move on. It's a small world.
Because I'm not a performing animal.
A 'reply' template is rarely useful. If it is not a yes/no response, then you are just wasting more of the candidate's time by making them wait.
As a founder if you aren't able to handle the volume of the applications that you are receiving, then you should delegate the work to someone else and get them to filter the applications.
I get that they're trying to be different and evaluate candidates on metrics other than just resume, but to send that kind of thing in (which takes a week of effort outside of your real job) and receive no acknowledgement or response to a follow up a couple weeks later is lame.
The recruiter knew my inexperience with the technology but have it as "a challenge to observe my performance in an unfamiliar setting."
It made that rejection much worse. Particularly when I had my code judged for a framework I'd only used for a week.
Even though I've been in this industry awhile, the _luxury_ of being sought after in the job market still shocks me. Every time a recruiter reaches out to me on LinkedIn, even when they're clearly spamming, it is still mind-blowing. Every time I get a casual job offer from friends or acquaintances who are hiring on their teams, I'm flabbergasted.
Back in the day, I would've been thrilled to hear even a "thanks but no thanks."
My story was - getting interviewed by progressively more senior folks with positive feedback on the spot from whoever I was talking to. So then finally after 4 rounds of technical interview calls I get to talk to the hiring manager who is telling me something along the lines of "the feedback has been awesome BUT we didn't expect to find someone this fast and now need to wait till the next hiring cycle".
1. look at resume
2. recruiter phone screen, just basic are you a human who knows how to answer the phone, usually 15-30 minutes
3. tech phone screen, 45 minutes
4. half-day in-person set of interviews, some tech and some not
And then make a decision, although we'll filter out at each step.
It's been forever since I was involved in on-site interviewing but it used to be pretty standard to have more than one (but usually not more than two) rounds of in-person interactions.
The point being:
A) avoid "having a bad day" bias on both sides
B) not decide too quickly on the "maybe" candidates
C) get more senior people in to convince the outstanding ones
Any strong "don't hire" reactions could cut this short of course but it seems like a good idea to give it a little more time for a serious candidate.
Is that not done anymore, or are you trying to make your hiring decisions faster than other companies?
(And in either case, do you have any insight as to why?)
Since it's a buyer's market for developers (supposedly, I haven't always seen evidence of that out here in the midwest), a developer that's already employed (and thus, signalling that they're good enough to keep their job, which makes them more desirable to other corporations) isn't going to want to take a bunch of time off for interviews with a single company (especially if they're actively looking for work with other companies too - going through the process with 4 or 5 companies could easily eat up most of my PTO time for the year).
I know I hate to take a PTO day for an interview, and if you made me take two you better be willing to pay me an ass load of money and be doing something I really want to do.
Besides, the interview process is exhausting enough. Since so many companies have intense coding exercises or quizzes you have to practice for (especially since they rarely warn you what you're going to be asked you pretty much have to refresh your entire computer science degree), I may have spent 20-30 hours in my spare time refreshing my knowledge ahead of the interview already. I had a five hour intense onsite interview at Google and I needed a couple days just to recover from the mental exhaustion of it. If I know you're going to do that to me twice, for maybe a 25% chance of getting the job (assuming a handful of other good candidates), I might just not bother altogether.
My girlfriend is going in for her second onsite interview in a couple days, but she's in corporate real estate, and all she had to do to prepare is get dressed and make sure she had her portfolio. The first interview they asked her a bunch of personality questions, some questions about her job history, and looked at her portfolio. If that was as intense as a developer interview was, it wouldn't be AS big of a deal to have two onsites.
Flying someone in twice probably only makes sense for higher-level positions, though you could always schedule two days of interviews on the same trip. Having already paid for the flight and expenses, you could make an argument for it that most flown-in candidates would I think accept.
(For local candidates, AFAICT the "doctor's appointment" or similar excuse seems pretty easy to manage.)
As to the exhausting Google-style interviews, I guess they're designed as a one-pass filter. Which seems unfortunate -- many people are more compelling on the second pass -- but apparently works pretty well for giant ad brokerages that also happen to do lots of computer-science-y stuff.
My favorite interview, in fact, was one were a grizzled veteran (he was the Lead Programmer on NBA Jam), asked me a couple questions on the code sample I brought in, showed me an example (uncommented) class from their actual code base (I verified later) and asked me to interpret what it's doing, asked me a couple more questions, then said "Okay, I know you can handle the job, now let's see what you really know."
And he proceeded to ask me deep questions about memory and graphics, which I could only partially answer most of them, and then he proceeded to teach me about the details.
It felt more like a mini-lecture at that point than a pop quiz ("Do you know this? No? Well tough! Better look it up later. Next question!"). I legitimately learned things from that interview that I can still recall today.
Then I had a friendly chat with the president of the company afterwards, who used to work for Midway and designed many classic arcade games, most notably Rampage, about what they do at the company. I played that game a ton when I was a kid, so I was happy just to be chatting to him like we happened to run into each other at a family BBQ.
I was in and out of there in about an hour, and there wasn't even a weed-out phone screen.
Then I got a job offer a few days later, which I ended up accepting.
Some of our more recent engineers have come via the monthly thread too.
Despite obvious reasons like lack of corresponding skills or lack of intention on the job poster's side this can have a lot of other reasons, though. Finding a good match and having the right ressources, department green lights, etc ready just at the time when you want to hire is also tough. Lots of things can go wrong. Hope you keep up trying!
A few local companies reached out, and I interviewed with one or two, but for whatever reason neither ended up working out. At that point I wrote it off and went on with life.
Two months after the post someone from RethinkDB reached out explicitly mentioning it. It later turned out he had gone back through all the posts. After two phone interviews they flew me in, had a the hardest interview in my life to date, but ended up with an offer which I happily accepted.
The rest is history as they say. I had a great time at RethinkDB until about two months ago when we unfortunately had to shut down.
I will say it's pretty rare, but when searching for a very particular skill set "Who wants to be hired" can totally work for finding new to mid-level devs.
Since it was RethinkDB I suspect the combination of C++ (which RethinkDB is written in), Python (one of the 4 languages for which there are/were "official" libraries), experience with 2 different DBMSs and an interest in "a challenge as a backend enginer to further hone my C++ skills" were probably all factors.
Based in London.
For example, on yesterday's Who's Hiring I saw a London advert for a full stack dev with 4-5 years experience for £38k-£44k[1].
That's a very low salary for London.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12846786
The ones around £40k are not even trying to recruit.
Even though the emails had lower response rates, they work much better in my experience. You get to talk to someone (usually an engineer or manager, sometimes a founder or exec) at the company.
Wish you the best!
But I did get flown to the US (from Australia) for an interview.
It was for a DevRel position at a (quite successful) YC company. I've never done DevRel, but I did have a background in the field. Almost my communications was with the CTO.