When interviewing, I would expect the interviewers to be the same. If they are not, then that already tells me a great deal about the culture.
* "how's your work life balance?"
* "how often do you work outside hours? Is there an always-on culture?"
* "when is crunch time and what does that look like?"
* "what's your least favorite thing about working here?"
And then I watch their microexpressions.
If multiple interviewers have the same reaction, there's your answer.
And you just risk not getting the job
Of course, take what they say, praise or otherwise, with a grain of salt. It's more about looking at the general theme between a few people, rather than what an individual or two says.
Helps to avoid DevHops companies were the tech debt rolled out to customers is sending the core team fleeing..
I’m interested in your experience with the Neat CSS framework (this is the first time I’ve come across it organically). I’m also curious about the testing you’re doing.
My email address is in my profile if you see this.
If you are interested in what life is really like at a company, why use vague abstract concepts such as "culture"? Especially if the company has multiple engineering teams, and you are interviewing for one of them, it is quite possible that the "culture" differs from one team to the other. Why not ask something like "how does the team communicate on a daily basis?", "do you use practices x, y, or z?", "what do you expect from a new hire on this position?", "what are your most important values in the area of tech for which you are hiring?"
All is speculation. Culture is a term that has no meaning. There are niches for everything everywhere.
We are all on a spectrum. If AI and ML reminded us of anything, than it is that there is always a spectrum.
The only question is, whether you are willing to take risks or not. If you have a boss, you live by his mercy. Bosses change, circumstances do as well, team members do, workspace and subjects to work on. All not in your control.
I think of my pay check in terms of punitive damage to a certain extent. High enough to stay? High enough to find out?
If you have a somewhat plan b worrying about culture becomes meaningless.
I saw it many times, there are no predictors. Slow processes? Fantastic people bound to decisions. Friendly encouraging folks wanting you? Crazy sociopath who forget about you, once lured in. Fantastic tech stack? Yeah, at the beginning.
So what do you do? Professional attitude that honeymoon means nothing. Money and options do.
There might be one exception that I used and that was bluntness. I told people that I look for people who care about professionalism. I told them, about what we are really doing, how our tech stack came to be and is managed over time. What our career model really is. Nothing shiny 24/7/365, but great devs with challenging technical objectives looking for similar people or others who want to have a more relaxed supportive function. Nothing wrong here.
I quite talked them out of the job so to say. Addressing mistakes and how you cope with them might be the only helpful predictor I am looking for.
That said, the right tradeoffs can make it totally worth it. I think I joined one by accident, personally, but I feel that I have the best people, career growth and tech here (always wanted to do some networking work), so it still feels right to me.
I'm not seeing how this is a bad thing? If companies are looking for signals to hire me, I can look for signals that indicate mismanagement, incompetence or toxicity in the workplace (or all of the previous).
"What types of people tend to succeed and do well with your team? What types of people tend to struggle in your team?"
"What are your main objectives in the next 6 to 12 months? What's your plan to meet those objectives?"
"How do you see the candidate in this role contributing to that objective?"
"Tell me about how the team collaborates and coordinates work"
and then.. "How is this role contributing toward solving that challenge?" (Sometimes people replace "challenges" with "vision" or "goal")
These question catches me off guard sometimes. But if I were the candidate, they are great questions to expose whether a company is hiring this role to fix a problem (if so there are probably very specific expectations) or are they hiring the role to make a good thing better.
Dirty secret about interviews: there are very few questions a candidate can ask that would leave a negative impression. You can literally ask "Are you profitable?" or "What is the turnover rate of your team?" or "If you had to improve our team culture, what's one thing you would change?" or even "I've worked at a lot of companies that don't know what they're doing. What's your plan?"
On the interviewer side, there's also very few questions candidates won't answer. I always ask what their salary expectations are, where they are in the process with other companies, how they like to be managed, etc --- occasionally there's someone who's dodgy with these questions, but 95% of candidates are extremely transparent. I return the favor by happily answering any questions a candidate asks. It's a big decision on both sides to hire someone or accept an offer, so no point in putting on a facade.
One small nit though
> I always ask what their salary expectations are
I thought we were supposed to never answer this question. Why do you even bother asking this question? You have a budget for any role, right? Why not share this information instead of asking people how much they want? Does it matter if I want a million dollars a year?
My reply is pretty much always "What's your budget?". If they tell me the budget, I say the top of what they said or sometimes a bit above it (because it's pretty much a guarantee that they're lying about the real budget), if they don't or try weasel out of it, I tell them I'm not comfortable answering without knowing what I should realistically be looking at (and they get negative points from my POV, because why be sneaky with this kind of info?)
It's a shitty question born out of the company trying to screw candidates if they say the wrong number unknowingly. Too high of an expectation? That's a negative mark. Too low? Great, we can fuck them over by underpaying them 20% below what we would've if we'd just posted the salary.
Same with all the other similar ones. Where am I in the process with others? None of your business, I just say I'm not interviewing with anyone else.
next year: "achieve 20% of the above..."
:)
worth it's weight in GOLD
About 10 years ago, my colleague and I were interviewing a guy for SWE role. He wanted to learn about presence of pressure, difficult deadlines and overtime. But for that he didn't ask about company culture, values, how our day to day looked like etc. He just clearly stated, that he does not want to work long hours, just 9-5, that it would make him unhappy otherwise and asked can we give him that. While also emphasizing that he understands this may not be possible and he does not feel entitled, it's just that he knows himself well and it's very important to him.
We confirmed that he could get what he wished for (we were in a position to do it), and thanked him for being open about it. He landed the job, and when I've seen him some time later, he looked satisfied, so I believe that the organization delivered on its promise.
I wish all of us such fruitful interviews.
A common SWE interview setup is that you talk to the manager and then a few of the engineers.
The manager will keep up a professional company facade.
But the individual engineers will usually answer pretty much any question honestly. Both because we're bad at lying, and because you don't want to end up working with someone when they discover that you lied to them.
So much interviewing advice is bullshit, but it’s 100% true that asking good questions at the end is the ideal point to get the most accurate picture of what your job experience is going to be like. Just like my interview questions are in-part trying to gauge what it’s going to be like working with you.
Larger companies will start prepping interviewers what to answer, for any questions that aren't already covered in training.
It'll be a new ritual by companies that don't know how to interview, in the designated 5 minutes remaining after the interviewer clicks the stopwatch on the Leetcode hazing. The candidate can ask the standard questions to which no one should expect genuine answers, and the interviewer can recite the corporate-approved useless responses. And then the interviewer will literally check the boxes for which standard questions the candidate asked, and whether they asked that STAR format be used. (And someone who ruins an entire field, by defining psychotic interview rituals, and then turning around and selling candidate prep for those rituals, will then incorporate these checkboxes into the latest edition of the prep, guaranteeing that the ritual will be complete.)
I sometimes get meaningful, genuine answers to some questions about the company, I think partly because I tend to be candid, and maybe some people recognize and respect that. However, I think most people won't answer very candidly, if the candidate is reinforcing the mode by only doing what interview prep says. (For example, most people will realize that honestly answering what a company should improve upon, to any random person who walks in off the street, could get the interviewer fired. Why would they risk that.)
Do they ask if you need water, coffee, etc.? Do they give you time to use the bathroom? Do they keep you waiting excessively? Do they listen to your answers and look you in the eye, or do they keep staring at the resume as if they've never seen it before?
What they say is certainly interesting, but what they do is more so.
I was in one office where the CEO had pictures all over his office of his collection of race cars, but the bathroom hadn't seen a coat of paint in 20 years.
Massive red flag.
- If you could snap your fingers and change/improve one thing at the company, what would it be.
The responses could be technical, cultural, about management, communication, etc. But this question has never let me down. If I a random distribution of different things, I know that - like any company - there's always going to be different things that people don't like (and that I won't like either). And I'm just asking myself if any of these are not a good fit for my personality.
However, if I notice multiple people all identifying the same one or two items, then the higher I get in the food-chain of interviews, I might pivot the question, calling it out:
- I've heard multiple times now $PROBLEM, what would it take to address it?
The best answers come from mid-level management. They'll usually be very frank about any cultural issues that prevent the problem be solved, but are aware of it. Regardless, the higher up I get, this one question usually has me knowing whether or not this is a place (culturally) that I want to be at.
Interviews are serious business and if I'm in one I want to be hired; so I won't ask that. But there is a certain temptation to ask that as a counter question the next time "Please describe your greatest weakness" comes up on the theory that it'd annoy the interviewer if they were expected to put up with the silliness they make candidates go through. The trials and tribulations of being disagreeable.
In all seriousness though, this is a bad question for exactly the same reason as "Please describe your greatest weakness" is a bad question. You're only testing the verbal intelligence of the person your talking to and they are, without a shadow of a doubt, going to give a diplomatic say-nothing answer if they have any sense in them.
As a tangent, when I am interviewing someone, I try to find additional signals about the candidates communication skills / behavioural traits as well as their motivation in seeking the role.
Candidate: “how is this role going to change in X years?” Me (internally): This person is likely growth oriented, and their growth may have stalled at their current role.
Candidate: “How is the on-call load?” Me: This person may be burning out and looking for a place with some stability.
Of course, these are only assumptions and I try to be self-aware not to be biased in my decision by them.
Tell me about the last 3 people to leave the company.
Putting aside whether the company's policies would allow them to do so.
I have asked several more indirect variations of that same questions but you boiled it down to an exact phrase and I am memorizing it.
What level/grade are folks generally talking about here? Or is this a difference between applying for a role vs. being hunted for it?
I’m not going to work for you based on the negligible amount of information I’ve gotten out of you so far. I’m still workshopping more assertive ways to just say this. We are wasting our time here folks.
But it’s been a while since that happened. Long enough that I believe your never.
There are not two companies, the recruiting-company and the working-company.
The way they deal with you as a candidate, they deal with you as an employee.
I’m not the greatest natural communicator, and I didn’t get into software to work with people, but I have come to the conclusion that there just aren’t very many roles for senior software engineers that don’t require solid communication efforts to be successful. It’s not about subjective vs objective, it’s just that most paid software positions are about solving a problem for other humans, and it’s hard to get it right if you aren’t well practiced in both listening and discussing their needs interactively. The user will never understand the reasoning for the technical choices, so the empathy must flow the other way.
After the first day (which I didn’t feel great about) I asked the recruiter if I had passed the interviews I had given, since there was presumably no point in prioritizing further Meta interviews if I already failed. But they refused to give me any useful information.
Maybe that’s just part of their “process” but let me tell you, that process sucks. If I have other interviews to prepare for, I need to know how much time to allocate to each role. Thats not the only thing that turned me off about meta but it stuck out to me as unnecessarily bureaucratic and inflexible.
If the receptionist and the person you meet are cold and disdainful, that's the culture. If they are compassionate and creative, that's the culture - that's the CEO, even.
Unless it's a special event, people are too busy, stressed, and weary to constantly conceal who they are, and they are usually not self-aware enough and too jaded to see themselves with any perspective. Even the professional con artists (which includes many business leaders these days) are obvious cons; even if you don't know the truth they hide, they are transparent about it - like someone playing Three Card Monte, you know they're a con and it's a trick, even if you can't figure out where the card is. Brazenness almost a point of pride for them, so believe them!
And you are doing it too; don't forget that. :)
I have progressively reserved more and more time for it, particularly for candidates who are already making a strong impression. And for candidates who are otherwise hard to read or on the boundary, it’s been a great opportunity for clarifying discussion.
Would strongly recommend leaving 30-50% of the interview for candidate-driven topics.
Of course, that's because I cultivate teams where I want people to think for themselves, even if that means dissent or arguing with me. I'm not trying to hire a bunch of "yes people" who just make me feel good. And I'm aware that it takes a lot of courage to ask questions or challenge an interviewer, but that's a similar trait that I'm after in the roles I'm usually filling.
But, some companies do team matching and allocate time for you to ask questions to managers/ICs you won’t be working with.
What questions are worth asking in this context?
As an interviewee they become "What do you like best about working here?" and "What would you change if you could?"
but those questions in the article don't make sense. your interviewers, go through interview training and are coached into giving politically correct answers.
just like you BS some answers in your interview, companies do the same as well.
no interviewer, is going to be like - this place sucks - we're slow moving, we're led by leaders without vision, there's a lot of internal politics.
everyone will tell you - this is the best place they have worked etc.
the reasonable answer to work life balance is to ask how long they have worked there - usually places with better work life balance for people that have families - not solos like us - tend to have good work life balance - and people have long tenures. YMMV.
best place I worked - before the usual tech grilling - I had an hour lunch with the team and the rest of the company. they got to know me, made me comfortable and I got to know them as well.
Very few companies have a standardized interview process where interviewers get training. Less than 10% easily.
My Fortune 500 company doesn't have it. Perhaps the managers get such training but the majority of interview sessions are not with managers.
Yeah, and just like they sniff out your BS, you need to sniff out theirs. Ask for details and see if they check out.
You usually don't have a lot of time for detailed questioning with each interviewer though. You should get a lot of time with the manager or lead, but use your other time well; don't ask everyone the same questions unless you expect different answers.
It also helps to figure out what you actually want from an employer. A lot of these articles are written from a perspective that there are specific things everyone should want and must verify, but terrible environments for some can be great for others. Of course, late and missing paychecks is terrible for all.
Where were you during the Inquisition, I wonder.
I'm thinking back to all the places I worked at, unless the interviewers were being completely honest, there was no way to figure out the actual culture by asking questions.
- what is the scope/mandate of the team; i.e. would I be powerless in fixing things because ownership lies elsewhere.
- how close is the team to the business; i.e. do they have a good understanding of what matters and can they have impact on revenue.
The whole dynamic of employment is deeply flawed. Employees should have contracts. Without them people can say and do whatever they want after the honeymoon. Everything else in business requires a contract, except for employment so they can do whatever they please with the employee. An abusive relationship from the start.
In particular I only did this at 2nd/3rd round for jobs I was pretty sure I didn't want because the managers just seemed like hardos.
Seeing a hiring managers corporate robot brain go into "this does not compute" mode was confirmation I did not want the job.
If you are unable to even contemplate relating to me at a human level at that step of the process, and/or genuinely have zero interests outside of work - no thanks. I am not an automaton which consumers Jiras and outputs PRs.
I have used this question for candidates as well. I received responses about hobbies, families, quirky preferences... It's a great way to get to know someone personally. I imagine it works well for getting to know future team members and bosses too.
I'd like to be somewhere that I work I can best do is what is actually needed, and that need is recognized.
If there isn't reason to suspect that the truth is being glossed over, being direct is a simpler, clearer path. But if things sound too good to be true, you may need to figure out how to get more information, like open-ended questions. I'd follow that up with probing questions to dig deeper towards anything that sets off your spider-senses (but ask in a nice way and continue to present a friendly vibe).
I think this is very similar to being on the interviewing side. People talk about impressive projects they worked on, but that could mean they contributed to a small part of the project or they had real responsibility for the project and its execution. Everyone is putting their best foot forward so you have to ask follow-up questions and dig to uncover the truth.
If there were REAL open markets with plenty of information for both sides, then it would be common place for employees to be very honest about taking less money for their preferences like no overtime, less deadline pressure, not being under the thumb of nonsense managers whims and bad estimates.
But this will never exist, because its all about tricking someone into taking as little as possible, for being as overworked as possible, hiding all the negatives until after they have moved halfway across the country, not telling them the company is going under in 6 months, and you just need some temp sucker to fulfill existing orders. Don't even hide the fact you wont hire anyone with union aspirations, because there are no reprecussions
By asking these questions up front you might weed yourself out even though the role might have been a good match.
I laugh because I don't want to cry.
They're not necessarily trying to cover up anything, like telling you some unfavorable truth, but merely trying to act corporate.
So, it's evidence in support of the suspicion that this company is full of commonplace corporate BS, but it probably doesn't even indirectly answer the more specific information you were trying to get at.
But why? Why would you not expect an answer like "our website is slow, and we are hoping you can help us with that"; or "we are thinking of improving collaboration between front-end and back-end engineers; and we were wondering what your experience has been in this area", etc?
I get what you are saying though, if you are talking like that then people instinctively will want to allocate you where there are fires.
Truthfully though, I gave up caring. Most companies are IMO a train wreck in progress anyway. Might as well score political / influence points by going in and measurably helping others.
The best teams know that being embarrassed about problems, or, at minimum, acknowledging some of the downsides of an intentional decision, is not the best way to solve them.
I memorized to reply with “I have a weakness for Italian pasta.”
Even though you may be tempted to reply with “You fight like a cow.”
I absolutely get that sentiment, but I think it's far from unconditionally true for most people who aren't desperate for a job. Do you really want to be hired into a company where you'll be unhappy and likely to fail? I'd much rather wash out at the interview stage than be fired or leave in disgust two months later (the company doesn't want this either - hiring a candidate is typically not profitable until many months on the job). At its most productive, interviewing is about collaborating on the most accurate prediction of whether the candidate will be happy and productive in the situation being hired for. Many companies and candidates are bad at this, but I think it's the ideal we should be striving for on both sides.
I rephrase the above question, just as I do when I'm the interviewer. For example, "Tell me about a change that's been made with the support of senior leadership to improve engineering culture. What were some of the things people were unhappy about that led to that change? What is and isn't working about the change?" If the answers I get are too diplomatic, then my suspicion is that changes aren't being made to improve culture, and therefore it's headed in a bad direction (without active curation in some form, culture goes downhill). If they give me an example that had flawless results, I say "Give me an example that didn't work so well." The more transparency and introspection I see, the more hope I have for where things are headed. Nothing is black and white here, but questions like this can separate companies if you're fortunate enough to get more than one offer.
When asked well, questions like this suggest that the candidate thinks / cares about the health of the org and is willing to politely, but directly, ask tough questions to make a difference. That's leadership. It can directly increase the odds of a better offer. When I'm the interviewer and you're a candidate for a role in management or you're an IC with the word "leader" on your resume, it works against you if you don't ask probing questions like the above, because I'm expecting you to do so on the job.
There is no "engineering culture" in a company. I don't know why everyone loves that word so much.
Or this person has encountered companies that massively overwork people and is looking for a place that isn't constantly in emergency crunch mode. Hearing this question, I wouldn't assume a person who's burned out; I'd assume a person who has been burned or knows someone who has.
Any answer to “What kind of people succeed here?” Is more likely to reveal how well the interviewer can BS business speak than anything
Also the bigger the company, the more differences there are from team to team. Maybe there's a strong overall company culture, but with large companies they operate mostly at, sort of, guidelines level. Teams, and the people in them, have more of an impact to everyone's every day life.
That being said, I think you're right if the recruiting process is full of problems, that is probably a sign there are problems at the company. Could also be that your recruiter had a bad day.
As a fellow human being I can completely understand but I'd urge them to reschedule the interview if that's the case. Being an HR should be a super responsible job and they should always be at their best because their half-arsed decisions affect the lives of people on a regular basis.
Oftentimes there are two departments sufficiently distant from each other that there are effectively two companies. The HR portion is distant from actual employees and cares very little for culture.
One of the ways this happens is just that you have, say, a mixed engineering department, but your manager happens to be great. Another way is that a company got good engineering talent and culture in its formative years, and carries on, but the business or corporate side evolved distinctly.
Note that in some companies this might mean that you're only one great manager quitting away from being exposed to a ruthless corporate culture grown by stack-ranking Hunger Games and deadly-sharp elbows.
Or it could mean that your team's brilliant product design and solid engineering end up having the market opportunity ball dropped by the dysfunction of others just going through the motions. And maybe you should've suspected that, based on hints during the hiring process.
Some girl that I am not sure has passed 22 years old and reading questions (slowly and carefully) from a script is making decisions affecting the lives of people times smarter and working harder than her, routinely, on dozens of thousands of places out there, even now.
I am disgusted by the state of the industry. If that's the best that most of humanity can do then I am not impressed to say the least. "Sub-optimal" does not even begin to describe it.
As someone over 50, that interviewed at several places, before giving up, and accepting that I'm retired, I can say that there seem to be a number of companies that actively seek to humiliate prospective employees.
It's entirely possible that it was not the usual experience, but I have found that modern HR philosophy seems to be "Always keep the employee/candidate on their back foot." Always make sure the corporation is Alpha Dog.
A humiliating interview is a great way to filter out candidates that won't roll over for the Alpha.
But you're right about rounds with multiple interviewers - they obviously collect feedback from everyone before deciding.
What leaves a bad impression of a company for me is being gaslit in an interview that they seem interested then getting a passive aggression rejection email later. If you know you aren't going to hire the person you're interviewing, you should let them know and immediately end the interview. That's the polite and decent thing to do.
Sometimes there is a candidate who is so obviously far from the bar that we could stop early, but if the phone screen process is working well it's rare. My experience is that the typical interview loop is ambiguous enough that it is rare that later interviews are a waste of time—these may turn out to be the ones where the candidate shines the most.
You people apparently don't dwell in Eastern Europe or even most of Europe (I have been around). It's a meat grinder here.
Especially if you make X and they reply with X - 20% (or worse).
Plus we don't work for glory and smiles. A while ago I always made it clear during interviews that I don't enjoy the money negotiations -- of course, that has been used against me so I learned to keep my wits about myself, and nowadays I am like "sure we like each other but I still would not work if I had my needs covered so what are you paying?" (obviously not asked in that form, of course).
If you're raising kids, you probably want this anyway. What kind of schools and jobs are they going to be able to pursue without moving far away otherwise? What kind of hospital systems will you and your elder parents be able to access as you grow old otherwise?
I've come to peace with the fact that major metros have significant economic gravity for anyone with a long term time horizon and a focus on family.
So...definitely for larger orgs, where "emergency availability" would be a big red flag, unless one explicitly opted into a (compensated) on call rota.
I guess one can make an exception for very early career, but again this was about setting a 9-5 boundary
There is, with out doubt, engineering culture. Culture really means "what customs we use and how we work." Every single company has a set of customs for working. Sales customs, engineering customs, management customs, etc.
Engineering customs, or culture, dictate how the org approaches software development. Code reviews? How deep? Quality checks or not? Is quality encouraged?Level of collaboration between teams and teammates? is there a partnership with Product or does product dictate? How much and what gets written down? How are new solutions brought forward?
Does the company intentionally grow/weed-out these customs? That is engineering culture. You should work somewhere where their customs are things you can adopt. Else, you are not a culture fit.
There could be company values promoted by CEO, but they are marketing bullshit created to look good for the shareholders.
Bringing it back, while I have not worked at Amazon, I know they favor smaller teams that are self owned / directed. Yes, one team may suck (different subculture) and not mesh with another. But, in general, you can expect for some commonality. And it will be very different than a start up culture where everyone shares the root account and password to all dbs and env.
In my ~1k person company they have traditionally favored moving fast and validating code in prod. A new culture pushing higher quality to support larger, more demanding customers is being pushed from leadership and demanded by many developers and teams. The culture is changing. What other word could that be other than "culture"? Processes? Those are just codified customs (which is culture)
A company that does not consciously cultivate culture will still have a culture, but it may be like driving a car with no hands on the wheel. At 5 companies so far, someone or group is ay least attempting to steer.
It is legal to ask what they're looking for or "expect".
It is not legal in many US jurisdictions (California, New York as notable ones) to ask what they made at their prior job.
The first question is necessary since the numbers have to start somewhere.
The second question tends to perpetuate any comp bias the interviewee may have been subject to previously.
That said, as the interviewee, it's fair to turn the order of setting expectations on its head: “I hear your question, but first, what are you expecting to spend to fill this?”
If they object you can try again: “You are a differentiated business with differentiated priorities, meaning your roles provide different returns on investment relative to other companies. What value do you put on this role?”
If they object again, and you are confident in your value creation, try: “One of us has to start with expectations, so I'll start with this — based on my prior roles, I expect to have fully paid for myself within the first X days/weeks/months. My expectation is that will be true here as well.”
Reality is a candidate's dollar "value" to a firm does in fact depend on the utility the firm can make of that skill. This is largely out of the candidate's control. As such, the firm should reveal the range they have in mind first.
It’s not, though. The only thing asking the candidate for a number specifically generates is leverage for the company performing the interview. The company can just as easily provide a range to start “the numbers” and display good will to boot.
As a candidate that's the first question I get, and as an interviewer it also helps a lot.
I understand the risk to abuse the info to low ball a candidate, but setting an expectation level as early as possible helps to better target the interview process and be more efficient when it won't work out.
If someone is asking for a CTO level salary but but we're seeing they'd fit an entry level position, it needs to be discussed at the second round, not at the last round after both sides spent 6h of overall process.
Having the info earlier also helps better target the interview, in particular to justify the person fits in the role. If you're only doing 2~3 interview, they better be well targeted.
If someone is asking for $250k and we're budgeting $150k, I don't want to waste their (and my) time.
At our company no candidate talks to anyone at our company before talking to our 3rd party recruiter who screens all candidates before they make it to us. The recruiter has short 15-20 min pre-screening calls with candidates and she’s responsible for weeding out candidates who are likely to not be a fit.
A major category to evaluate is mutual compensation expectations (what are they expecting to be paid, what are we expecting to pay).
I don’t have full visibility into how our recruiter articulates this part of the screening call. She says some candidates don’t have a salary in mind, in which case she shares the lower bound of our range to feel them out.
All roles have a salary range, e.g. could be $130-160k. We don’t just come out and say that, otherwise everyone will want the top end of the range, even if (in our opinion) their experience matches closer to the bottom or middle of the range.
It’s an art, not a science. My goal is to not overpay for a role if we don’t have to. (Important: overpay doesn’t mean underpay!) more importantly, I want the person we’re hiring to be happy with the compensation. I don’t want to hire someone who’s going to quit in 6 months for a higher paying role.
It’s a negotiation and both sides are trying to find the “market rate” through the process. You can be bitter about this fact, but it’s a simple reality in business. That’s just how things work.
That's great! There's also that method of throwing paper curriculums up on a stair, and discarding the ones that land on the wrong steps.
Recruiter: “what are your compensation requirements?
Candidate: “$250k”
Recruiter: “Ah, that’s too bad. We were thinking this role would pay closer to $150k. Are you still interested in moving forward?”
Candidate: (negotiate…)
You thought people were never supposed to answer that question? Well, they do. Especially developers, who are more introverted than average, on average, and are easy to catch off guard.
I have a budget, sure. Unless your corporate setup is one that especially takes all power away from hiring managers, it’s almost always more complex than that. Maybe I could move some money around to free more budget up. Maybe someone on my team is a retention risk and I need to weigh up priorities. Maybe a billion billion other things.
Your personal budget, no matter how implicit or explicit it is, almost certainly isn’t this simple so I have no idea why anyone thinks it works this way at work. Any organisation that is that simple and rigid isn’t capable of rolling with the punches, and isn’t somewhere anyone should want to work.
This is absolutely true. A good way of accomplishing a more submissive team is by making it more diverse. If the members of the team can't relate to one another, the less personal connection, and the more submissive each person is to the guys on top.
I am sure some people will think this is not the case and that companies just care about "making things right".
They could actually think you are indeed great but want to get you at the lowest possible price.
> Are all your coworkers and managers also going to be people they don't think are great but settled for anyway?
Extremely likely.
> Or is it that they're not very profitable and can't afford to pay for quality?
That one is 50/50, many companies, even those not very successful, can afford programmers just fine, but they want to get away with paying less.
> Do you want to work for someone who may not be in business much longer?
Of course not, this is why I am asking uncomfortable questions during the interview, like are they profitable, are their customers bound with longer-term contracts, do they expect sudden inflow of competition, are there any regulation changes on the horizon, and others.
I wouldn't call this shady, it's just basic business. If you want to buy a house, and you want to lower the price, you can't act all excited.
An employer-employee relationship lasts for years, perhaps many years, and requires the employee to act as the agent of the employer, repeatedly.
Would you accept this kind of thing if you can help it from a potential future spouse?
Come on.
They're welcome to try this stunt. They're also welcome to lose their best candidates who would have been most loyal after showing a lack of capacity for loyalty on day zero, and instead select for only those candidates who are equally disloyal in return.
Having the employee commit to more interviews is also a great way to get them into a sunk cost fallacy mindset, which might lead to them accepting a lower offer. There was an article about this on HN a while ago, where it was revealed that Meta would lowball you, unless you had a competing offer on the table (which can be hard to get when you need to do several interview rounds at several companies).
A few hours later, the come back... offering 30K less than I'm making now. "I just talked to the manager and we are willing to come up!" I told him thanks again, but under no circumstances would I take less I was making now. Did he think I was kidding about the initial range? I never heard from him again.
I have been contracting for little over 8 years now and I can tell you this happens a lot. Likely, really a lot. Very often.
And then they moan that programmers are overpaid divas who can't achieve anything, while just yesterday their 20-year old HR girl refused yet another NASA level 40-50 year old guy who can practically solve half the tech problems of the company, because she couldn't relate to him in a semi-informal interview.
Yep. This happens. All the time.
Some of these guys hated each other, but, when the boss said "Go!" they put their differences aside, and all gave 110%, to meet the goal. They helped each other out, shared information, and never sabotaged anyone else's work.
Japan has the strongest teams that I've ever seen, but there's cultural reasons, and it would probably not scale to many other cultures. There's also tradeoffs, and many people would not be happy with those.
If you want a culture that is really good at ganging up on a problem, then Japan is a good bet.
They wouldn't dream of testing for "cultural fit," because that is assumed.
That's not to say there isn't some element of negotiation but it's generally at the margins (definitely not 20%).
The reason I might ask about expectations is just not to waste people's time, not to screw the candidate. I ask about your process with others to know if I should try and get through the process faster on my side. Having a competitive offer might be relevant for the negotiation process but again it's at the margins. You also need to consider your compensation over time, you might be hired at a slightly higher comp but then it won't get adjusted as quickly.
Once we've interviewed a candidate and have a good sense of where we think they are in terms of their level, and decide we want to hire them, then there's no problem sharing the numbers with them, at this point that's an offer. Before we can estimate the candidate's level I don't really think it's useful to tell them that if they're a "level 10" (or whatever) then the salary range is 44,000 to 46,000 dollars (or whatever). If a company posts a range of 100-300k for a software engineering role that doesn't mean that every candidate can negotiate a 320k salary. It means they're ok with hiring someone relatively junior at 100k or paying a significantly stronger candidate 300k.
What I'm trying to say is that with a good employer there is actually alignment and win-win here. If you're dealing with a bad employer who is trying to take advantage of you there are probably better signals for that. The engineering manager who is hiring you into a large tech company is generally motivated to hire a good engineer and make sure they're happy.
But I won't know where the company sits on that spectrum until after the interview.
On the other side of this, there exist a compensation amount, above which I will accept a job offer knowing nothing about the company, am willing to suffer through almost any job or working condition, regardless of whether I believe in the company's mission, want to be a part of the company, where I'll simply say yes sight unseen. No company has even remotely gotten close to this number with their actual offer, but nonetheless I must admit the number exists. If a company just asks "how much do you want?" I don't see any harm in giving them that number. If they are OK with it, jackpot. If not, we negotiate way down from there after I learn more about the company.
Usually, a job post will be for a specific role. A senior, principal, medior, junior, L9, ABC123, doesn't matter, a rank is usually attached to the job description. At least from what I've seen (and I'm sure this part does vary a lot company to company and role by role, but IME it's pretty rigid with tiny allowances for things like mediors switching to a senior position and stuff like that), the business is pretty adamant on hiring for the advertised role, and not someone who's over/under the role. If you're hiring a senior, how often is it that you'll take a junior instead? Presumably there's a reason the posting says senior. I've seldom ever seen free-range postings, and I'd definitely never apply to one either.
> ...then there's no problem sharing the numbers with them...
But that's the problem, you're only informing them at the offer stage about what their compensation could be, and they still have no clue whether you're screwing them over. Many people don't realize/aren't comfortable with negotiating for higher pay, I've known a surprising number of people who take the offer as-is (or don't) with no follow up or negotiation.
If you give people the range from the start (preferably before they ever even send the application in the first place), you're saving everyone's time and also setting expectations early on for all parties. People who'd balk at the range would just not apply, and you'd get more candidates who are more likely to accept whatever you end up deciding on.
> What I'm trying to say is that with a good employer there is actually alignment and win-win here.
And I think this is a bit of a naive viewpoint. The business has no reason not to fuck you over, and they in fact often do. And it makes perfect sense why they would, after all especially SWE's are expensive to employ, but regardless of if it's understandable or not, it's still a shitty and lopsided dynamic that heavily leans in the favor of the corporation.
The best way to understand the company culture is by what is asked on the interview and what the person doing the interview is like.
This question tells you everything you need to know about the company culture and that it is not going to be a good experience.
Or a startup hiring for a job title they’ve never hired for before and they literally don’t know what the market rate is?
We just hired our first SRE. We knew what we wanted for in the role but had no idea how to price it. What are we supposed to do other than ask candidates what their salary expectations are? There’s no bible saying what “market rate” is for every given role.
You’re selling your services to an employer. It’s the candidate’s responsibility to know their worth and coherently communicate their worth to prospective employers. Just my opinion.
Yes, it's a candidate's responsibility to know their worth and communicate it to prospective employers. If prospective employers are ignorant of the market, they just look like they're unprofessional.
there actually is. there are multiple salary benchmarks available. you should be using one.
But if you decide to just poll undifferentiated candidates to extract valuable information, well, that's really not ok.
In which case to find the market salary, we ask candidates (candidates are the market, we want to pay market rates. So, we ask candidates)
Some companies have “bands” that define the range of pay for given titles, but many don’t. Even those that do are constantly questioning whether they are the right ones based on a wide variety of factors: Are salaries moving up, or moving down? Are there few candidates, or many? Is the value of this role to the company increasing or decreasing? Does the company have the cash flow? Will it have the cash flow in six months or a year? Etc.
Sitting on either side of the hiring relationship it’s easy to simplify and vilify the other side. But it’s foolish to do so. Over time in your career folks may be on each, in turn.
Especially for developers, you can get a crazy range of quality, experience and location at different multiples of cost. Like if I was buying a car I first determine my needs and money to spend then start searching in that band of prices. What if I just went to a cqr salesman and asked how much are you expecting to make from this sale? Is that a smart starting point for anyone?
Are these less reliable that they look like they think they are, or... ?
My perspective of this, sometimes stated, sometimes not, is that if I'm getting the offer I should at least be in the top 50% of the range.
Why?
How many candidates did you interview, with all their experiences, some more than me, some less than me, but you chose me, which means you saw me as the highest caliber candidate, but you also see me as "closer to the bottom of the range"? Barring other contributing factors, "does not compute".
As a 12 person engineering team, we really need a strong team lead or someone who we can put on a management track over the next 2-3 years (SWE to Lead to EM to Director to VP). We prefer to promote from within rather than hire those roles directly.
So, the top end of our range for engineering roles right now is reserved for people with management potential because we’re willing to pay a premium for that, but doesn’t mean we will reject good individual contributors.
(This is my last reply on this thread, the debate could go on, e.g. “how do you know if someone has management potential”, etc - hiring and finding a job is an art, not a science, no right answers, nothing is perfect)
I can't really find much justification for hiring in the lower third of a band, but I could see what you've said, or middle third being the default, upper third.
I usually don't like the "we prefer to leave room for raises and such", because that's trite - you set the bands, you can adjust them.
(I also get - and have been burned by companies who didn't - the need for a pipeline: not every engineer can be a senior engineer, you need juniors to be able to grow and evolve and be the seniors when those people become EMs etc.)
So, disclose that.
You clearly have two ranges, one for folks who are decent tech folks, and one who are decent tech folks who can (and are willing to) do management.
Disclose both pairs of numbers, along with the caveat that the company is very, very highly unlikely to hire (and pay for) an external management-potential employee.
I hope you can see the hypocrisy in this statement: you want the candidate to take on the risk you're unwilling to, in a situation where you hold all the cards.
What if a candidate said $110k? Would you still offer them $160k if you felt they were worth that? Or would you take advantage of this newfound information and offer them less than what you thought the job was worth to you?
Because of this - as a candidate - when someone asks me "what salary are you looking for?" it's an immediate turn-off for me. I pretty much refuse to answer the question or ask what the salary range is for the company.
My favorite thing that a company can do regarding comp is to publicly state what their roles, titles, and salary ranges for those are. Then specify in the job description what title they are hiring for and link to that information.
This absolutely is great for the already-working employees as well as candidates. Knowing what title I am, how much I can expect my compensation to be upon promotion, etc. is beneficial for everyone. You can also publicly state the trade-offs your company has chosen to make regarding compensation and attract candidates who appreciate those things.
Perhaps your base salary is lower than the norm, but you offer other things that make up for it. Examples of things worth more to me than base salary:
* More vacation time * 100% remote * 100% medical coverage * 9+% 401K match * ESPP, RSUs, ... * Very short vesting times * Paid child care (possibly on-site)
The list goes on. I guarantee - unless you are grossly underpaying your employees - that if you just publicly list title : salary, heavily promote your other benefits, and have recruiters link to that, you'll end up being much better off.
I will answer from the things that I control, but yes I would offer what I believe their value is to me. The number given to me by a candidate is just the conversation we have to ensure we are in each other's ballpark. If my budget is in range and your performance in the interview is good to excellent you will be getting good to excellent pay in my organization from my say on the matter.
But there are absolutely things I don't control. E.g. my company participates in regional pay adjustments on salary.
Negotiations provided other competing offers are things HR have effectively full control over, at best I can recommend an uplevel for exceptional talent here to keep in budget for a particular role, but this is determined sooner at the evaluations stage.
The process to uplevel may require input from other managers in my org, my manager, and my skip (maybe even my skip's skip which is pretty much C-suite) to approve depending on experience so its an uphill battle even for me to do this.
Lowest friction is to bring you in at the level I have approved and then get you promoted within the year, but this would likely not be ideal for the candidate as on-hire package items would not be adjusted. OTOH, given a certain level of visibility and impact, you would be eligible for special awards and extra bonus pay which would likely exceed the amortized scheduled of an uplevel on its own for a single year.
A person can double the salary for the same responsibilities simply moving to the other company/location.
And yes, company will easily accept higher attrition than increase salary by 10%. Now even more so, and will hire for lower salary because there are so many desperate unemployed people who have no choice but to accept huge pay cut.
Instead of being cagey about comp, do your own homework. Determine how much filling the role is worth (which should also include cost of keeping it vacant). Disclose a range to candidates. Evaluate them for your needs and determine what you're willing to compensate them based on your own estimation of their competence. If there's a mismatch between their expectations and yours, that's where negotiations should begin.
Not overpaying for a role if you don't have to? How much is "overpaying"? You're a business, so shop like one. Don't play games with nickel and dime accounting. Put a number on resources. Acquire them and move it to expenses. Then go back to getting things done.
> We don’t just come out and say that, otherwise everyone will want the top end of the range, even if (in our opinion) their experience matches closer to the bottom or middle of the range.
Of course candidates would want the top range. You don't have to give it to them if you feel that don't deserve it.
Again, you claim don't want to waste people's time including your own, so just post range and then if people don't like it, they won't apply. What's so hard about that?
> That’s just how things work.
No it's not. Plenty of companies post their salary ranges. It's perfectly within your right to choose not too. I have no problem with that. The part I'm criticizing is your hypocritical self-justification for it.
And in those cases when it seems worth it, I've offered the higher level at the lower end of the range.