[Game_Ender]

Interviews take 2-3 man days from a company per candidate you end up doing a full onsight interview. That is on the order of $1000’s per interview, and you generally have to do several per role. Then for high demand roles even the best will take several months to ramp up which costs a large fraction, say 25-50% of their total compensation. So replacing a dev can cost you in total $100k+ at least.

That is not really cheap, I am sure technology has helped reduce the amount of man administrative man hours, and helped fill a pipeline, but you still need to train new hires and actually interview them, which is no cheap.

[dreamcompiler]

This happens because high costs that are not easily measurable (such as the productivity hit from interviewing candidates) don't show up on spreadsheets and thus don't result in recriminations from on high. But the relatively low, one-time cost of a new hire shows up immediately on the spreadsheet and that means whoever did the hiring is going to get yelled at for paying too much. Given this incentive structure, it makes sense to drag out the hiring process as long as possible.

[maxsilver]

I agree with this, but practically no one ever does this math. (Paradoxically, even the people who claim to understand this, and who mention how expensive interviewing is -- even they still fall back into the old patterns)

Interviewing at all companies is always "free", because once your an employee, your time has "no cost", irregardless of what anyone's wages are, and regardless of any opportunity costs for the time.

[retiredcoder]

I agree with your calculations but some managers seem to not have done this math yet.

As result, what we have are poor hiring evaluations, horrible onboarding, etc.

[bartimus]

It's exactly those managers that are the problem. They're incompetent and not needed for self-managed agile teams. So they keep rotating developers to safeguard their positions.

Meanwhile those managers are getting the salaries that better be spent on a team of great developers.

[retiredcoder]

I think it is also how budget for hiring seems to be allocated. New funding round, hire a bunch, got budget approved, hire a bunch. Senior management and above seems to not like to give money with time conditions against their expectations.

[interestica]

There's some derived value in the interviewing. It might be to gain insight from an expert in a field. It might be test out interview/hiring practices. For OP, it seems like they were never really intent on hiring someone at the time but put out a lowball offer on the chance it would get picked up.

[shobith]

I wonder at what point would it make sense to start exposing a part of your "software development pipeline" to the external world and then hiring people after they've proven themselves on your pipeline (with compensation). Think lambda school but for your own company.

[baddox]

Open source projects started by or significantly invested in by tech companies must be a huge recruiting tool. I can think of several people in the React community that ended up working at Facebook.

[areyouseriousxx]

The current data we have about hiring practices seem to disagree with you. So either, this process is not as expensive as you think it is, or companies believe it is less expensive than it actually is.

Either way, the effect on hiring is the same.

[NotSammyHagar]

searching is easier in terms of internet ads and reviewing candidates. But hiring dev candidates is extremely hard. Virtually everyone has a job who is experienced already, college students get offers somewhere in the early junior year, so you hire them with at most 2 internships. It's very difficult to pull people out of an existing job, it's kind of begging them to consider you. Then for random applicants to a company, you can check their resume, but many people end up failing our interview.

So it's not easy to actually hire. I'm not at amazon, but we do offer reasonable rates - example, new college hires get 130k+stock, benefits at our company.

[mooreds]

Are you in the Bay area or Seattle? That's higher rates than what I have seen for new college hires (I have seen in the 40-60k range).

[NotSammyHagar]

We compete with top companies, although we are a startup. Don't want to say the name. But each year it creeps up. If you want top students who work on backend infra, that's what you pay.

Yes, we are in seattle and/or sf. Don't want to say the name.

[lotsofpulp]

$60k seems low to me for any decent size city in the US too. From experience, new grads were offered much more even in late 00s, after recession started.

[stevbov]

I made 52k fresh out of college 16 years ago. Seems really low today.

[mooreds]

Hmmm. I don't have a ton of data points, but we:

* don't care if you have a CS degree (we have hired plenty of bootcamp grads)

* are 100% remote which is super valuable to some folks

* aren't looking for super specialized skills--we build websites and web applications on some common open source stacks.

* explicitly don't pay top dollar. As the CEO says in the typical hiring conversation, every so often we'll be talking to folks who are also talking to Microsoft and Facebook, and we'll quietly back away--we choose to compete on different axes than dollars.

But maybe we're on the lower end. We definitely pay above that band for folks with 1-2 years of experience.

[joshuamorton]

Fwiw, when I interned in a suburb of Atlanta, as a sophomore at a company no one cares about, I made $25/hr. I believe the people who went there full time started at ~75k.

So I'd consider 60k low for any urban area.

[nickbarnwell]

Even at the top end of that range it's less than what a competitive internships annualised compensation would be. Are you really able to hire people at those rates?

[kraigie]

>Are you really able to hire people at those rates?

Not the poster,although I've found a lot of people will take 50% pay for fully remote jobs.

I was suprised just how valuable fully remote is to so many people.

[areyouseriousxx]

> but many people end up failing our interview

If you are having this much trouble hiring, are you 100% sure your interview process is correct?

What is the KPI for your interview process?

[retiredcoder]

That’s another hot topic here in HN. Not claiming is the GP case but interviewing nowadays feels like human Tetris.

[NotSammyHagar]

I do know we must miss some good candidates. We have been discussing lowering our bar, I'm in favor of changing it. We do the usual 5 or 6 questions. One thing that is interesting about our company is we have a list of x questions (x is less than 20), and we generally ask the same questions, everyone is calibrated on them the same way. Most people who make it through the screening pass the interview loop and get an offer. All our interns got offers the last 2 years. Maybe half the industry people say yes and a smaller percentage of students. For students I think we just don't offer enough.

[areyouseriousxx]

> We do the usual 5 or 6 questions

But what metric are you determining that those 5 or 6 questions are correct?

For example, have you put together a pool of current workers that are successful at your type of work at different companies and seen how many can pass your interview test? Its pretty easy to find a recruiter that will reach out to their network and you pay 10 employed quality engineers $1,000 that do similar work to attempt the questions. If you find a significant amount of successful engineers cannot do it, then you may want to recalibrate.

I have helped several different companies fix their hiring process, purely by recalibrating their interview test questions to their specific needs. This sometimes actually means, more difficult or simply different types of questions. But very often people just do some Google searches for interviewing at FAANG and repeat those questions without tailoring them to their specific roles.

With that said, in the case of your company, it may very well be the case that the work you do requires particularly high IQ candidates, which is actually what most interview questions at the big tech companies test. In that case, you will always have a difficulty finding candidates as there are only a limited amount of high IQ people in the world. So changing your interview questions may not apply. But when that is the case, you can often save yourself quite a bit of time by asking potential hires to take an IQ online. This will cost your organization almost nothing and will likely screen out the vast majority of people that will not be able to pass those types of interview questions.

[retiredcoder]

Sorry, I didn’t mean to deflect the convo towards your company’s hiring practices.

What I was trying to say that lot have been said about hiring metrics and standards around here and elsewhere. Yet, at the end of the day still like arbitrary in both ends and makes the job transaction cost higher than what could possible be.

Anyways, as I read your company’s interview process. Something came to my mind, why not let the candidate decide which questions to pick? I say so because I find the a lot of interviews are so hit or miss but if I was given a bit of control over the process, things could be different (or at least I would like to think this way).

[jammygit]

As someone in Canada looking at an offer for much lower than that, I'm not sure what to do to negotiate upwards. I can't find concrete enough numbers that others are making up here for example.