Hiring software engineers
I am seeing a trend which is worrying me. There are a lot of posts on LinkedIn where I see experienced engineers post something like this:
“2021 Jan, applied to company X — Rejected. I studied more.
2021 March, applied to company Y — Rejected. I did more exercises on LeetCode
2021 July, applied to company Z — Rejected. I studied more system design on YouTube.
2021 September, applied to dream company A — Rejected. I did even more studies on platform A and B. More coding exercises
2021 October, applied to dream company B — I did it!! I got an offer!!”
This is all great if the candidate is applying for higher education, preparing for a highly competitive entrance examination but having brushed up through online sources, memorised algorithms, system design, coding platforms and then applying for the nth time and getting through in a company — would you want someone like that? Whatever happened to industry experience?? If you really want engineers who are just good in solving the hardest system design and coding rounds — wouldn’t you want to just look at students from the top schools? You will definitely get them there. Why look at experienced engineers when you don’t look at their experience while hiring? Sometimes this trend is repeated while hiring engineering leaders as well!!
I seriously feel it is time we completely change the way we look and hire for experienced engineers.
The three top areas for me are:
Experience
How often do we even look at the resume to see if the experience is relevant to what we are looking for? Why not start with the basics and understand for an entire hour or more on what the candidate has done. How and what was the contribution in his last few projects? Ask probing questions based on their answers. This will also help to align the candidate’s experience with your company’s leadership principles which could be collaboration, Wellness, Innovation and whatever else you hold dear to your heart.
Looking at the experience and digging deep there also helps you understand how problems were approached and the technologies, platforms, programs used and the testing /quality methodologies employed.
Soft skills/Team Work
Many times I have seen some of the top notch programmers/system designers lack basic communication skills and team work. Unless you are OK with the engineer just coding away and no one else knowing what they are doing, would you want to hire someone like that? Evaluate the soft skills and ask examples of their team work. Give scenarios of conflict in teams and understand how they would approach the problem. Understand how they would document, communicate with others, collaborate with team. Their view on stand up meetings, numerous scrum ceremonies (retrospectives, pre planning, planning, code reviews) would be very important.
Technology/Programming
I wouldn’t discount this at all for engineers but let us be cautious on the details and the kind of questions based on experience. Asking leaders/engineers with lots of experience a simple programming question or designing a system with the questions coming straight out of some web page or books — what is the point?
Why not ask questions that you have come across in your experience and understand how they would solve it — of course keeping it generic? The pesky memory leak issue that you encountered, the P0/P1 issue that you came across, the scheduling system that you have designed yourself to solve a problem, the code you or your team built to solve some product or engineering needs that you are proud of are all great examples.
For me, hiring someone who cleared your most difficult coding round or system design round is just not enough. We have to look at what they have learnt in their experience as a software engineer. You want to hire the right talent who would fit naturally into your team right from day one.
