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Ask HN: good places to find less experienced engineers?

14 points by joshu ↗ HN
Any suggestions on how to find engineers who are less far along the experience curve? We've done a good job finding very senior folks, but it feels like a mix would be better.

I guess the second question is how to evaluate more junior folks? It seems easier to figure out what you expect of a truly senior engineer...

17 comments

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aditya
What about engineers straight out of college? Or is that too junior?

Also, re: how to interview junior people. I'd say the one thing they don't have is experience, or to measure a senior engineer's abilities it makes sense to ask how many times have you built this <insert rocket ship> before, and what did you learn?

For a junior engineer, it is enough to test for willingness to learn, and aptitude for problem solving. Personally, I hate brain teasers and straight up algorithmic complexity type questions. But, given a real world system, asking them how they would build it is usually a good start. So, test for ability to understand big problems, break them down into smaller problems and then figure out a way to attack each small problem.

Curious about other people's interviewing ideas.

FirstHopSystems
Figuring out the basic concepts they are familiar with might be a good start. If they have the capability to learn from other more experienced engineers.

Having the means to figure out what domain a challenge/problem is in would be another plus.

EDIT: Defining a Junior engineer might be a good place to start.

joshu
Yeah. We have three engineering folks: My cofounder, who has 8 years experience (and a CS PhD), myself, with 13 years experience, and one more with 16 years experience. We've all built significant projects outside of a job, we've all lead teams and been responsible for products, etc. So I guess that's fairly senior.

More junior would be folks with just a few years experience, or haven't built or led major projects. Even more junior would be right out of school.

pmb
College career fairs.
maxbrown
This is all well and good, but speaking as a non-engineering college student, you're going to have to weed out A LOT of non-engineers at a general college career fair.

If you're hiring just for engineer/developer types, I would go straight to the college of engineering's professors and/or career center. You may be able to get the professors to send out e-mails to their students about the opportunity, or have the career center let you hold info sessions for interested students.

nathanb
Some colleges have engineering- or even cs-specific career fairs. I know Virginia Tech does...it's called the CSRC fair, and it's held twice a year. I recruit there for my company, and we get everyone from sophomores looking for internships to PhDs looking for full-time research positions. Many of the grad students have industry experience as well if you're looking for candidates who aren't completely inexperienced.

Other engineering colleges likely have the same thing.

http://www.cs.vt.edu/partnering/employer

maxbrown
Josh - to be a little more useful, I'm a senior at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and I'd be glad to pass along your job opportunity to engin/CS seniors I know here if you have a blurb and contact info I can forward them.
pmb
I'll echo this comment and offer to pass along any job opportunities to the students I teach (CS at Manhattan College in NYC).
shailesh
Two scenarios:

1. With 2+ years of experience, the person should be able to solve a small programming assignment and upload it on GitHub / BitBucket.

2. Evaluating an absolute fresher is a little hard. Puzzle and a simple programming problem helps. Great care has to be taken in designing or even selecting what kind of puzzles to be asked. Also, the puzzles tend to get shared very quickly by candidates who appeared for the interview rounds. This needs to be factored in those puzzles.

joshu
We're not looking for a huge number of people...
goalieca
You've found one fresh out of grad school right here ;)
SkyMarshal
Off the top of my head, both reddit/r/[learnprogramming|coding|lisp|haskell|etc.] and Stackoverflow questioners who are asking things a junior engineer would typically ask. Maybe the same at Quora too.
JoachimSchipper
Internships (for students, obviously)? Joel is a big fan. Do note that this takes a while...
req2
As someone who has mostly unsuccessfully looked for junior positions...

I see some, but not many, junior positions on job sites like 37signals' or Stack Overflow's, or Monster, or Dice... A lot of the 'junior' positions want things that don't seem terribly junior- several years experience in a certain conjunction of technologies.

My computer science education has largely come from books like K&R and Programming Pearls, C2Wiki, Wikipedia, and a whole bunch of personal projects in Python, C, and occasionally C++. It's not exactly conducive to the commonly posted requirements for a junior position.

My limited perspective suggests it's a lot easier to make a good junior engineer than it is to find one that meets your requirements.

Ben_Dean
Write interesting job posts. You may be able to tap into the small but motivated and smart pool of people with non-traditional backgrounds.

Evaluating them means being clear with yourself about what makes one a suitable candidate. Extracurricular projects of any sort are going to be invaluable, but ask general problem-solving questions and feel out how they do. Do they ask questions when they're stumped, but don't get stumped until they've chewed the problem over for themselves? That's the number one sign of a good junior programmer.

xtrycatchx
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