My company is cash flow positive. The VC is getting ambitious and wants to expand expand expand. The problem is, I haven't met a single candidate that blows my mind. 90% of the resumes look horrible, and 98% of the candidates I interviewed are utterly awful, and mediocre at best. The founding eng is a hacky band-aid hacker-- non computer science. I'm a second eng. The third hire is pretty good, but only after scouring 100s of resumes. I've been trying very hard to bring good Googly culture in -- like HIRE ONLY THE BEST so that you don't have to manage, and so there will be no need for silly hierarchy and perf and promotion committee. Some take-away points in my startup so far:
1) I use all standard Google interview process. That screens out 98% of the people who call themselves "developers." Case in point: "Cal State LA doing B2B in J2EE asking for 120K salary." -- this guy can't even do recursion or order 4 functions in the increasing order as n approaches infinity. Or, some can't even do a Venn diagram to explain some hypothetical question! A large # of these guys will give you a dumbass linear scan answer to an question that can be solved in O(1)! Most are just mind-boggling stupid!!!
2) I can't believe how high they're asking for their salaries (doing banking, defense, bullshit B2B or other BS web site). Something doesn't sound right. These companies (in Southern Cal) that pay them that type of salaries are probably stupid, desperate, or both.
3) In my entire life, I'm used to being with people like me (similar background). I've been in the ivory tower and a corporation [that can be best described as a bubble], but I now realize that living in an academically driven bubble is not normal. What is normal in life, is having to deal with a bunch of "normal people" -- loud talking ones. Instead of doing work, I now need to spend much more time explaining, teaching, guiding, and even delegating! UGH!!! Ultimately, the sudden realization that I stepped outside of the ivory tower/bubble/whatever you call it, and having to deal with "normal" people makes me feel-- very very VERY lonely at times.
4) Hiring people who are anywhere close to the average caliber in Google (which unfortunately, doesn't even say that much these days) is near impossible.
5) The VC pressure to do more things, faster, expand, is killing my ability to do just that.
You know anyone who have/had similar frustrations? What's the best way to go about this?
Did you see the talk that Piaw gave to UCB? The market for SWE is incredibly good right now.... for the SWE looking for a job. Fresh BA grads getting stock/option packages worth 500k over 4 years.
ReplyDeleteHiring good people is hard to begin with, even harder when you are not near SV and don't have a sexy token.
If you are not doing prescreens for the phonescreen, I recommend it. When I was screening contractors for GOOG, we had a 20 multiple choice question section, 3 simple programming problems (intersection of 2 lists, and i forget the other two). Things that are easily searchable on the web, but the average idiot assumes they already know the answer and don't search. Filters out like 50-80% of the idiots you don't want to bother phone screen.
Strongest source of good candidates is your network. People you know or people you know and trust, recommendations.
Contractors are in general idiots. Recruiters aren't much better.