Placing someone at mid / senior / junior is not "cocky"... it's pretty subjective if you do it right. The guy missed questions that over 50% of our applicants knew the answers to.
I'm not talking the "implement this obscure algorithm from scratch on a whiteboard" kind of question HN is so fond of. The hardest coding question we ask is Fizz-Buzz.
But we can't / won't pay him more than we pay other employees with similar or higher skill sets.
If we drew a bell curve of all the applicants we had, this guy would be in the middle.
His resume was impressive though. My guess is the company that hired him didn't do their diligence and only weighed the resume.
I won't comment on whether the guy was or could be a senior because I obviously did not attend the interview but there are many many incredibly skilled people that just suck at doing f2f / online interviews.
> - We are probably priced out of the market
> I work at a startup that isn't profitable yet so our salaries are very low...
... was "too low... if we could afford it I'd pay three times that much" not "oh look what a great deal we are getting! Haha, suckers!"
The fact employers will reject based on a test that is fashionable just because a few coding blogs said so doesn't mean they can't provide value. What about their past work or qualifications?
Cocky. Sounds like a clique i'd want to avoid at all costs.
For years the only way to do zebra striped tables was that way.
Also, I never said...
1. We were taking about front-end.
2. We reject solely based on it. I just used it as an example of a type of question.
In fact we've hired candidates who didn't know what modulo was because when they encountered it they were able to reason through it.
Furthermore... this candidate failed far easier questions that that. I used FizzBuzz as the "hardest" question.
Does not knowing Fizz Buzz mean you won't be productive? No. But it is probably a good indicator you aren't commanding of $150k a year this guy got hired for.
Anyway, this guy you placed as a "lower mid", this is your judgement, how do you know it's correct? Did other people say the same? Perhaps he didn't have the skills you were looking for but was good at other things. Saying the other company didn't do their diligence is easy but is that really what happened?
If you are hiring developers and placing them as lower, mid, lead etc. you are going to get flak anyway as you're just jailing them and hiring a load of people who only agree with what you think.
You're going to get people who are good at developing software who don't care about math(s) or machine learning, give them 2 seconds and Google and they can answer your Modulo question.
Is it not about the willingness and enthusiasm to learn? Or do they have to go through "hard" tests to prove they can work out some academic nonsense they are never going to need to use. To prove themselves to the frat. I'd argue a lot of really clever people good at the hardcore Computer science and data analysis type subjects aren't always as good at writing decent code.
Second one of my other posts talk about how we've had great luck bringing on and mentoring juniors and they have been successful. I have hired people who literally dropped out of school freshman year. Again, you're either not reading or not listening.
I think you may be projecting your pre-conceived image of who I am and I don't think I can convince you otherwise.
I also think the fact I have almost 1700 on my throw away account and you have -1 on your year old account is very telling. I shouldn't have even engaged. I'm done now.
No need to get competitive about who has the highest score - sounds like this guy dodged a bullet from having to work with you anyway. You seem like you would be a nightmare to work for.
Planning to pay people half market value is madness. If you cannot afford salaries, you need a business plan that involves more profits and/or more "runway" of sacrificial capital or debt.
We pay about 70% below market. Unfortunately I am not the one that makes the decisions or the business plans. I am just barely high enough in the org to be privy to what people get paid.
For what it's worth I 100% agree with you.
The result is we get software engineers with much less experience. For what it's worth... they have all worked out very well. But I think someone with more experience would work twice as fast and therefor work out to about the same cost anyway.
Exactly. Do not be so cocky. This is free market and while you are entitled to your opinion why should a candidate try too hard to get a position that pays less than half of what he will get elsewhere just because his skills are not up to your standards ?
You cannot really assess my skills in an interview the same way I cannot really asses whether it's actually worth taking your offer. Money talks bullshit walks. Eventually at the end of the day all of us unless really financially secure are in it for the money.