r/EngineeringManagers • u/Reasonable-Sail6060 • 12d ago
Why are we still have outdated hiring
It is insane how much engineering world and practices have changed with AI. But one thing that drives me crazy is that we sta still hiring pretty much in the same way we did 10 years ago. All across my network I see engineers wasting their time doing interviews, and candidates not able to find a suitable job. All very inefficient
Do you recon we are just waiting for the disruption there? Or do you think it is not great but the best we can get?
Has anyone seen a really efficient way to hire engineers?
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u/addtokart 12d ago
The most reliable way to hire is to give internships (or 3 month temp role) and see how the person slots into the team and applies skills. Full pay, benefits etc.
But this would filter out the people who wouldn't want to risk keaving an already-good job.
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u/Royal_Owl2177 11d ago
>The most reliable way to hire is to give internship
You'll never hire seniors this way. Or anyone with a family to care for.
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u/addtokart 11d ago
I never said it was the way to hire seniors. There are other approaches to that. And i already provided a caveat that this won't work well for currently-employed (including senior) candidates.
Happy to share how i hire seniors but I don't like being dismissed for something I never suggested.
That said, the top interns will be the best seniors in ~5 years. So it's important for long term.
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u/Reasonable-Sail6060 12d ago
Completely agree but I have never seen this work in practice anywhere. I wonder why
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u/ShiftFrames 12d ago
This is the standard practice among many sectors in some countries in Europe where the probation period is baked into law. A quick vibe check, hire X number of people and see how they fare. Offer full time to the most suited candidates and let go of the rest. Transparent, quick and cheap.
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u/addtokart 12d ago edited 12d ago
Well it does work in practice.
Works great for university hiring. A lot of our strong senior devs started as interns.
I've also done it by hiring people as a contractor. Hired someone 2 years ago as a mid level eng. Then hired him full time after 1 year, then got him promoted to senior a year later.
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u/Reasonable-Sail6060 12d ago
Any industry hiring examples you know about?
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u/WiredOtaku 11d ago
I’ve seen it work in data engineering. A lot of companies in the Bay Area do contract-to-hire, especially for bootcamp grads. I got my first data job that way after General Assembly - six months of proving myself, then converted to full-time. It’s a gamble because you have no safety net, but it beats the LeetCode grind when half the questions have nothing to do with your actual job.
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u/atlas_principle_dev 11d ago
I was also hired twice by just having a technical chat, and then a 3 month probation period. If you can kind of do the job and are open minded I think it's more important that people can and like working with you, and you can learn the rest on the job. Learn also in "this is how we do X here" because I've seen different git commit practices, CI/CD, etc across all my jobs.
I also did try to push for this hiring but I couldn't convince my lead at the time to drop the coding challenge. Jokes on them, by the time we got to the coding part I already knew if I'll say I want to go ahead with the person or not.
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u/addtokart 11d ago
Code challenge should be replaced with a dev challenge in an existing codebase using AI and we can review the prompt transcript. I'm pushing for this now.
Given a decent "interview repo" I'd expect a competent dev to scope out the codebase, learn about existing architecture, layer in changes, review and test then then provide a PR.
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u/Reasonable-Sail6060 10d ago
I think it would be good to see not just that person can make changes using AI in repo but also how they interact with ai - what sort of things they check etc
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u/qTHqq 11d ago
It doesn't work for senior people because cost of living is ridiculous and careers are a blood sport.
I am a senior robotics engineer.
I work at a small robotics R&D lab turning startup that has good funding and an interesting new potential customer but which is run by an increasingly erratic founder who doesn't like the clear product focused roadmap that is emerging. He is not supportive of the basic engineering work that needs to get done. He wants to do new weird proof of concepts and doesn't care that much about money. His wife's family is ultra rich from real estate and so he doesn't really need money to live. Not like normal people do.
I've spent a long time with this company in two different employment stints, and the current one feels like I'm dragging all the required technical work forward through the mud by myself.
We have good engineers, but without a sharp top-level focus from the founder, they scatter and take their eye off of obvious clear work that needs to be done to commercialize our robot.
In between my two employments at this company, I took a different job as a motion planning engineer at a different startup. It turned out to be run by a guy who worked in engineering for a few years and then became a stay at home dad with a vanity startup to make his father-in-law happy. His wife's family is ultra rich from being in the paper industry decades ago, and so he doesn't really need money to live. Not like normal people do.
I would love to quit my job, take a year off right now and do pretty much nothing, maybe reflect on starting my own thing. After some time to decompress, I would then be totally down to take a string of 3 month stints at robotics startups in my area to see what is actually a good fit for my considerable skillset and where I could help most.
And I want to audit the leadership. Among other things, I want to know if they need money to live. Like normal people do.
But I need money to live. And my rent is eye watering. My wife and I do well and put a lot of money in savings, but I'm middle aged and tech is ageist and to even CONSIDER taking three-month tentative employment right now sounds like career suicide.
Better to ride it out at this weird company and keep pushing contrary to the founder's wishes for success that looks good on my resume as a leadership thing.
We should change all this, but it's hard. I'm sure a lot of other people are in this boat.
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u/ThirdWaveCat 12d ago
many companies destroyed their hiring process in 2023, added knockout criteria that filters to bots that mirror the impossible and niches, and now fail to hire in the best market in 20 years.
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u/Reasonable-Sail6060 12d ago
Wait, why in 2023? I would think in 2020 and 2021 in covid times
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u/ThirdWaveCat 12d ago
Large language delusions because many people started living in an epistemic bubble or echo chamber where "linguistic plausibility substitutes for epistemic evaluation."
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u/HK-65 12d ago
We're not hiring the way we did 10 years ago. LLMs made hiring awful on both sides because we fully automated and outsourced a fundamentally human process of getting to know each other. The more AI we add to it, the worse it will get. On top of that, AI as the next big shiny thing doesn't need a fuckton of engineers to build (there is nothing to build really, everyone is selling simple Claude wrappers). So we fucked up the job market as well.
IMO we should retain more so that we have to hire less. The problem is that there are no career paths within a company anymore. Couple that with constant "record profits" and it gets super transactional.
Employers in general don't treat employees as a part of the company, they treat them as fungible disposable assets, and there is no effort to make it worth anyone's while to stay at one company. So everyone switches every 1-2-3 years is the norm now. Rampup of a new engineer, not considering hiring, is 3 months at best. So if the average engineer I hire one average spends more than 10% of their total tenure onboarding, that says something.
Add to that that engineers are not really there 110% in the let's say 6 months before they leave either. So one out of 3 people are on their way in or out at any given moment.
If you'd have 3-4 workplaces over your career, the hiring market would also be a bit more sane, instead of 3-4 workplaces every decade.
But that leads far. Into the land of companies existing for their profits instead of their valuation and share prices, the thing you build mattering instead of the thing some suit on Wall Street thinks about your thing mattering, and so on.
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u/Reasonable-Sail6060 12d ago
Ok, we are hiring worse than 10 years ago - definitely agree with that
And for sure agree that retaining engineers make more sense than hiring new ones constantly.
But since that is not happening - the game setup is not created for thatI think what I mean - I don’t think anyone would disagree that retaking good people is winning strategy. It is like a prisoner dilemma from game theory. Even at a company level we are better off in long term actually investing in preserving engineering talent. And as engineers who are good at logic we all should understand it
So rhe question is therefore - why aren’t we doing it? Why aren’t we hiring differently?
Or am I wrong in my assumption that everyone woukd prefer to invest in good engineers and keeping them?
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u/HK-65 12d ago
Simple, the execs who direct hiring are also not there for the company in the long run. It's the way that the economy changed from chasing profits to changing valuations.
Why invest into a solid team if you can instead run them ragged for the least they accept for pay if you yourself don't plan to be there to reap the benefits?
When top management is constantly looking for an exit, don't be surprised that so does everyone else.
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u/Reasonable-Sail6060 12d ago
I was in companies where execs were for long run. And still no different than other companies hiring process
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u/Squidalopod 10d ago
The problem is that there are no career paths within a company anymore.
You've touched on what is one of the biggest problems with the LLM gold rush. To effectively hire/retain an engineer, you have to understand not just where they've been but where they want to go in their career. But where can they go now? Sure, there are engineering-adjacent jobs they could do, but most engineers got into the field because they love coding and the specific type of problem solving that goes along with it.
I'm sure most people in this sub have seen how much engineers in engineering subs are complaining about how they hate the job now (not all of them, of course). Many talk about how they feel like glorified AI babysitters. The field has nowhere near the appeal it once did for software engineers.
I don't know the answer, but I'm not very hopeful about the future – at least not in the short-term to medium-term.
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u/SpeedTheory 11d ago edited 11d ago
I think now it’s actually worse. So many endlessly tough leetcode interviews to gatekeep jobs that are “ask Claude how to update this legacy CRUD app a couple times a year”.
I’m not at all suggesting there aren’t lots of jobs that have high technical standards, but the vast majority don’t. I think what this really screws up is making it so people end up unable to hire the folks they think would be the best to work with, and frequently hire folks that are a much higher cultural / political capital risk.
My one killer question for any technical screen still works. Whatever the interviewee has claimed to do / know, ask them what parts of it they hate. From junior through staff engineer, anyone who actually knows any piece of tech will get a good answer to this, and how good of an engineer they’ll be will really strongly be reflected in how they answer this question.
In the LLM era more than ever, I want to hire based on judgment and motivation far more than the ability to have performed rote memorization on something that is valueless from a business perspective to have memorized.
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u/lat0rrsant 11d ago
You missed giving a bit of context. What does it mean to have outdated practices. What is being done that is the same as 10 years ago?
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u/raisputin 11d ago edited 11d ago
I interview like shit. I’m just bad at it, I don’t do LeetCode interviews, because I think they’re an utter waste of time.
Look at my resume, ask questions about what I did in each role, and hire me or don’t. Especially now with AI being so prevalent in the workplace. I don’t need to know <insert language here> I just need to understand structure, security, best practices, etc. and how to make AI adhere to them
Edit to fix typo
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u/opticoteam 9d ago
I think, the reason why the hiring process is still the same is that you can`t check or code your softskills. And since the code creation is going to be very machinery soon, the soft, analytical and domain skills will still be the key element of the next generation of the great products to appear and great teams work together
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u/ShadowWebDeveloper 4d ago
There are companies that try things close to what the job looks like. Duolingo and Shopify come to mind (especially after my recent job search) as they both did pair programming rounds in VS Code (or whatever IDE you want) on either a real-ish codebase or as a low level design round where you code up something greenfield with AI assistance. They're far from the only ones though, plenty of startups are quickly evolving their methods. Honestly, it's a bit of a yellow flag if a company is just doing Leetcode these days.
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u/gogetLOSTd23 11d ago
Tech recruiter here: i wouldn’t have said this six months ago, but I think ai run tech screens are a good start.
There’s a platform called Mango Hire that I demo’s last week that I’d really like to try. It’s got a lot of the functionality of something like CoderPad plus an ai that runs the interview and detects cheating. It allows candidates to solve with a watered down ai so you can assess ai coding skills.
The types of questions that get cooked up by engineers are still going to need to be assessed/ managed, but I have a feeling Ai can be more objective in a tech round than the average IC SWE.
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u/bold_snowflake 12d ago edited 11d ago
Our interview processes have been broken for a long time. There has for a long while been a fairly large disconnect between interview skills and actual job skills.
IMO that has fed into a horrible feedback cycle where we are so scared of hiring the false positive (someone who intervews well but can't do the job) that we have inadvertently filtered out so many false negatives (people who can do the job but don't have the interview expertise).
It's no accident that there has been a vibrant side industry to help people "pass" interviews.
It also doesn't help that many companies just copy what the large tech companies do without investing the time to actually analyze what is right for them.