New ask Hacker News story: Attention HN: What's the Best Way to Find a Good Dev for Your Startup?
Attention HN: What's the Best Way to Find a Good Dev for Your Startup?
3 by Anthology | 3 comments on Hacker News.
Hey Everyone! I’m a startup founder who recently secured VC funding. As a technical founder, I understand the realistic and unrealistic expectations when working with developers. Over the past few weeks, I've been searching for my first dev, specifically a Next.js Full Stack Developer. I posted the job on LinkedIn and received over 1200 applications in the first week (I manually went through each and every one!). After screening, I narrowed it down to about 80 candidates for interviews (Again I was being very generous with screening and anyone I thought who even remotely had a chance got a interview). However, my interview experience has been quite disappointing. Out of the 80+ interviews, only 4 candidates had portfolio websites, which is quite surprising for a Next.js dev role. Even more frustrating was discovering that all 4 had copied the same tutorial for their portfolios. It's not hard to find out that people copied a tutorial when they all look the exact same... When interviewing I try to avoid asking Leetcode questions because in my opinion they are scary and intimidating and unrealistic. My interviews are scenario-based, where I present a problem and ask the dev to walk me through a solution verbally (NO CODE!). These problems are usually straightforward but help me test the persons problem solving skills, often involving scenarios like retrieving data from an S3 bucket in AWS but when bringing them on the website having issues with rendering. Despite this, less than 5 candidates could solve the scenarios. The meme of putting "Software Engineer" on your resume after watching a hello world tutorial became a little bit more true after that experience. I am not trying to be mean or anything. I gave everyone a very fair chance. I’m starting to wonder if the era of good developers is over, or if my approach to finding them is flawed. Some other founders have suggested using take-home assignments that are 24 hours long instead of traditional interviews for this role. For those of you who have been hiring React/Next/Vue/JS developers for a while, how do you find the "good" devs? Any tips or strategies would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
3 by Anthology | 3 comments on Hacker News.
Hey Everyone! I’m a startup founder who recently secured VC funding. As a technical founder, I understand the realistic and unrealistic expectations when working with developers. Over the past few weeks, I've been searching for my first dev, specifically a Next.js Full Stack Developer. I posted the job on LinkedIn and received over 1200 applications in the first week (I manually went through each and every one!). After screening, I narrowed it down to about 80 candidates for interviews (Again I was being very generous with screening and anyone I thought who even remotely had a chance got a interview). However, my interview experience has been quite disappointing. Out of the 80+ interviews, only 4 candidates had portfolio websites, which is quite surprising for a Next.js dev role. Even more frustrating was discovering that all 4 had copied the same tutorial for their portfolios. It's not hard to find out that people copied a tutorial when they all look the exact same... When interviewing I try to avoid asking Leetcode questions because in my opinion they are scary and intimidating and unrealistic. My interviews are scenario-based, where I present a problem and ask the dev to walk me through a solution verbally (NO CODE!). These problems are usually straightforward but help me test the persons problem solving skills, often involving scenarios like retrieving data from an S3 bucket in AWS but when bringing them on the website having issues with rendering. Despite this, less than 5 candidates could solve the scenarios. The meme of putting "Software Engineer" on your resume after watching a hello world tutorial became a little bit more true after that experience. I am not trying to be mean or anything. I gave everyone a very fair chance. I’m starting to wonder if the era of good developers is over, or if my approach to finding them is flawed. Some other founders have suggested using take-home assignments that are 24 hours long instead of traditional interviews for this role. For those of you who have been hiring React/Next/Vue/JS developers for a while, how do you find the "good" devs? Any tips or strategies would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
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