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Ask HN: How to manage expectations in finding talent in a small city?

3 points by SMFloris ↗ HN
I work at a young startup that got funded. This startup is based out of a small city. We conducted somewhere between 20-30 interviews for software developers in the course of 5 months. Even though most of the people seemed nice enough and ready to work at a startup, they failed even the basic coding puzzles.

Now, since the first 10 candidates's levels were pretty low. I have simplified the coding puzzles to the point that my first question is: "Given 'n' a natural number, can you write a method that returns the sum of numbers from 1 to n?". Almost every person out of the next 20 interviews failed this question.

I wouldn't mind training a junior or taking an intern if he has the foundations covered. In fact, I did this with one of my friends that joined this company. Now he is doing a stellar job.

Talking with local business owners, I got reprimanded a bit because I ask such "algorithmic questions" and they don't matter when you do the actual job. In my mind, I wonder how you can do your job without knowing how to write a "for" loop. The questions just test that the candidate has a good grasp on data structures, they are not at all complicated for someone that actually does coding. I guide them through the puzzles that they get stuck at (mind you, most get stuck at the sum test) with helping questions. If they fail the test, I tell them on what to improve upon if they want to have another go at the interview (no candidates returned for a second interview).

I'm not going to get discouraged and keep searching, but how do I manage the expectations when interviewing in a small city?

11 comments

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InGodsName
Can you hire remote contractors/employees if local talent pool isn't enough?
SMFloris
We do have a remote team that we work well with for third party plugins and such, but I do prefer having one more person here to work on the core of the product.
arethuza
Are you asking them to do these "puzzles" on a whiteboard with you watching or with a bit of privacy and a computer and development tools?
SMFloris
If face to face, it is on a white piece of paper. If it is on skype, I just ask them to open up any code/text editor they want. Also, I allow them to use whatever resource they want. And yes, in both cases I would be watching them, the reason being I want to see the way they think and how they reason.
arethuza
Personally I don't think that kind of approach is a great idea as coding isn't really a performance activity - I prefer letting people work on a task in isolation then discussing what they have done afterwards. YMMV.

Edit: Also, and I do mean this constructively, some people can be pretty intimidating on a 1 to 1 basis without knowing it. I only realised this when I was in a CTO position and had some training where I was videoed in meetings and I realised that a lot of what I was doing was actually pretty rough on people....

SMFloris
Interesting point. I never thought of this. I'll give it a shot in the next 10 interviews.
cimmanom
Does your city have an institution of higher education, and does it have a computer science department?
SMFloris
Yes and it has a CS department. Although, I have a feeling it is not such a strong department.
cimmanom
It may be that the best graduates are leaving town because of a lack of challenging or well-paying jobs.

Have you interviewed any brand new grads? Surely immediately after completing a CS degree you’d be able to write a function with a simple loop?

How competitive is the salary you’re offering?

SMFloris
Yes, candidates are leaving this city. Some of them return though, but prefer working in corporations (lots of benefits, not so stressful job, etc). I don't think we had any fresh grads, although we did do some efforts in organising workshops based on the tech we use in order to meet devs and some of them were pretty young, but without a CS degree.

Our salaries are pretty competitive, its as much as you would get in a bigger city. Other companies here face the exact problem we are facing, but I think they can attract talent based on job security alone (i.e. IBM), whereas we don't know if we're going to be around next year unless we get another round :) I do agree that there is a lack of challenging jobs around here, most companies are web-shops that do basic websites/blogs/web-apps. We had a candidate that spent 2 years doing just css/html for forms.

cimmanom
I suggest you try recruiting on campus toward the end of each semester, and right after graduation in spring. Maybe even try to get some interns. Young grads will be hungry and trainable, and are facing the toughest hiring market of any software developers these days. And if the program is halfway decent, they should at least be capable of writing a fizzbuzz after graduation.

The downside is that new grads need a LOT of training.