Obviously it is more complicated than that. Just saying there could be legitimate concerns.
So set up an employment agreement that addresses those concerns. Use a vesting schedule or clawbacks on a signing bonus.
> Most managers are probably not thrilled with the idea of investing in someone who may not even stay a year.
Most managers aren't optimizing their technology for productivity, especially when new team members are concerned. This is a solvable problem. That is, "we're concerned they might quit in nine months" can be rephrased as "we're not capable of onboarding an experienced new hire in a reasonable amount of time".
> In another thread, a Google employee said the manager didn't expect them to make a real contribution in the first six months. Is that unreasonable?
I can't comment without more details. In particular "real contribution" can mean a lot of things. I think a trivial bug patch (forgot to validate an input) or implementing an already designed feature (we have five of these, implement the sixth) should be possible in the first couple weeks.
I am surprised that Google has code bases like that. I was under the impression that Google has engineers from completely different parts of the company transforming each others' code all the time so they can make breaking changes to libraries.
In the end, a truly "senior" developer doesn't need training on anything, just point them at the code, build and deployment scripts, and that's all they need.
I did not want to waste time and lose my skills, so I talked to a few people here and there, found a few sharp corners in the product that many wanted to improve and started working on them.
Turned out, the reason behind the "relax for 1 year" rule was stack ranking. In order to promote the right people and award them bonuses, the management needed a steady flow of newcomers that would perform poorly and get abysmal review scores.
Being an employee, generally (not always but it must be 99% of places) you need to:
1. love the company you are working for. 2. be willing to receive emails constantly. 3. not be attracted to other companies. 4. accept begin laid-off as and when the company desires.
Contracting on a fixed length contract, I am almost guaranteed to have work until the end of that contract - working for a company, 0 guarantee i will have a job in 1,2,6,12,18 whatever months.
(how the hell do you get lists on multiple lines here ha ha)
Years ago, I tried running my own consulting company. I found that I was fine at the technical side, but I really and truly sucked on the business side. I just couldn’t keep the contracts rolling in, and I couldn’t do the marketing and PR, etc....
More importantly, by trying so hard to do those things that I was really horribly bad at, I ended up hurting myself on the technical side.
So, how long can you afford to not have any income? How long until you go hungry and get kicked out into the cold?
Leave a blank line between each item.
1. Foo
2. Bar
My experience tells me otherwise. As soon as you have a job, everyone wants to hire you. If you have no job, nobody wants to touch you. It's kind of like dating, where scarcity makes you attractive.
Don’t tell me that I’ve got a great resume and that you’re looking for someone who is just exactly like me but five years younger, and then ask if I know anyone who is looking.
If you said those other ones were a legitimate concern for avoiding hiring young people I would say "... I guess, so learn to interview properly and lower your risk of that". The scale of that risk doesn't fit the scale of the issue at all.
So offer them the job and provide a path for more responsibility and pay as they prove themselves. I don't see the downside for the company. There's probably a downside for certain middle managers, I guess.
And more particularly, Im probably not looking to pay for one, and Im probably not looking for a senior manager to do intern level work for intern level pay with the expectation of approaching senior management work and pay.
More likely than not, Im looking for an intern who I can pay intern wages, and maybe slightly more as he improves.
The problem with this interpretation is that a lot of these so called "intern-level" jobs are not labeled as such. In fact, many of these opportunities require this so-called intern to have senior level skills based upon the job description and (no joke) seven-part interview spread over several weeks. So if these companies are just looking for interns, why not decide in one simple interview? And the other problem here is that many who apply to be older "interns" who are career changers are also rejected. There is really no way for the hiring company to explain that away as over-qualification.
At least that's my read on the situation. If I were a manager and I could choose between hiring somebody with 10 years experience and fresh college graduate I'd hire the experienced guy for sure (or hire them both). The only reason I can see why you would only hire junior is if your budget is limited (because of course the person with 10 years industry experience will require higher compensation than fresh graduate).
Most managers can't see past next quarter's numbers. A year is long term planning that is well beyond them!
Just like the topic at hand, that kind of requirement is correlated with other characteristics, think young, fresh grad, not married probably, no kids, really wants the job, maybe a bit desperate, doesn't mind expending their free time etc.
In some cases the companies are aware of what they are doing. They know it is not about the take-home test but about picking those types of candidates most of all, and they are ok not selecting the rest. This was my friend's company.
In other cases, companies are not aware of it, they just copy what others are doing or say believe that this testing method is better, so use it strictly for that reason. Which is fine too, it might work for them better. However, they'll still end up selecting certain candidates and not others, but they just don't do it explicitly.
The test was designed to be a 6 hours task. I spent a Saturday on it (with regular pauses to go out a bit, play games, watch tv, etc)
I got the job. I have started there very recently so I can't really speak about the amount of work / week in that place.
Again, compared to a very skilled friend who had to cram for 2 hours each evening for a couple of months (and speaking with other people I know having gone through that, it seems pretty standard), I really see my time investment as ridiculously less than an on-site whiteboard.
I am obviously only referring to programmers, knowledge workers etc.
yes it’s entirely possible to be at a stage where you can’t pull more hours out of your sleep or other obligations to fulfill X task you truly want to. I really have a lot invested in believing it.
Could you burn the candle at both ends ? Sure! But I the case that you already are, what more can you do?
If you are a knowledge worker - and on HN, perhaps you do have the spare time.
But if you are older - Do you need to take care of your family? Help around the house, sleep? Maybe not! But usually the older you are, the more likely it is that you don’t have those hours lying around to just burn a weekend at your convenience.
Which supports the idea that this is going to be a request (take home exercises) that will favor one type of person. The person with the freedom to burn that time.
A very competent friend had to cram for months in order to pass the whiteboard interviews at one of the tech giants.
I had to spend a Saturday on this test (it was scoped to be a 6 hours project, I spent the day on it with frequent and long pauses).
My time investment is orders of magnitude lower what it would have been for a whiteboard.
I do think that "homework" interview problems are better than pointless algo.
Something which takes 2-3 hours is much more reasonable and I am willing to do that because it leaves me with enough time for family / life over the weekend or to do homework for few different companies to not put all my eggs into single basket when interviewing.
If you are looking for a job you would rarely only concentrate on one opportunity. For sure you would try to compare at least 2-3 comparable jobs to choose the one which fits you best. So these sort of tests / home work assignments should be quite simple, probably algorithmic questions which can be completed in 50-100 lines of code.
You will easily spend 10-20h for "normal" coding interview.
5h to refresh basic algorithms BFS, DFS, sorts, Trees.
2h for hackerrank challenge from clueless HR person
3h for another preparation before whiteboarding on site
1h whiteboarding before any design question is asked
Any owner who thinks they can get more real work done by driving a college grad hard than they can by hiring me is an owner who's short-changing their bottom line.
I agree you. Was just presenting someone else's perspective. Don't think such things are usually shared or discussed so I found it interesting. I personally advocated for a more diverse team - more women, more age ranges, more cultural backgrounds, rather than just young college guys.
Age discrimination probably starts close to 50 I think.
But that's not the real reason. The reason is they are afraid because the experienced person can see through bullshit better. They are harder to fool and brainwash to work for free. With stuff like "There won't be a paycheck next month, but don't worry we are turning corner, once we exit you'll all drive Ferraris!", "We are changing the world, just need to finalize this feature by next week, so let's all work a little harder (and by all I mean you all)". Someone with experience will say something "Thanks but no thanks, I've heard this before" a new college graduate will say "Yay! Let's do it, I'll impress everyone with how little sleep I can get each night".
And I am not being too hyperbolic here. I've heard from owners before confessing that hey love hiring college grads because they can drive them hard, they are full of enthusiasm and are not "tainted" by other corporations.
Another friend from another startup, confessed that they like those take-home interview problems. Stuff like "Implement a distributed database over the weekend and show us the code on Monday during the interview". The reason is because they can get the really desperate and dedicated people willing to invest that much time into projects. As when crunch time comes, they'll need those "skills".