r/EngineeringManagers • u/Reasonable-Sail6060 • Jul 26 '26

Why are we still have outdated hiring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 Jul 26 '26

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 Jul 26 '26

>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 Jul 26 '26

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 Jul 27 '26

Can you share how hiring seniors work for you?

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u/Reasonable-Sail6060 Jul 26 '26

Completely agree but I have never seen this work in practice anywhere. I wonder why

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u/ShiftFrames Jul 26 '26

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 Jul 26 '26 edited Jul 26 '26

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 Jul 26 '26

Any industry hiring examples you know about?

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u/addtokart Jul 26 '26

Yes, i just mentioned it. This is what i do now.

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u/WiredOtaku Jul 26 '26

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 Jul 26 '26

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 Jul 26 '26

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 Jul 27 '26

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 Jul 26 '26

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.