|
Top-level
 When I was an executive engineering recruiter / headhunter, sometimes the interviews for my candidates would go on for weeks. I did my best to make my clients compress the time as much as possible, but you get one hiring manager throw a wrench... Maddening. HR at big tech, however, were the absolute worst. I mostly did end runs around them as much as possible. They HATED me. Lol. 11 comments
@karlkatzke @april Outstanding. You would have been my dream client. I courted Rackspace as a client SO HARD back in the day. I wanted to staff for them so bad, but it wasn't to be. But yes, it was so incredibly frustrating when I had a candidate that was absolutely amazing for a position and one old codger 86'd the whole thing, or their process was such a mess the candidates were simply lost to other companies. I was an old school recruiter. I knew my people and my clients went with me. @JenWojcik @april it’s condensed down into a lighting talk, but - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mn6XEm915b8 I’m trying to get some of the olds to change their minds. Nice! But yes, I absolutely agree with you. Now, there is the opposite issue with companies who try to replace their more senior engineers with several less experienced folks to "save money," and this also leads to disaster. Architecture goes off the rails, projects bloat, etc. I saw it over and over again in the early 00s. I was right in the middle of all of that in Austin. I had to quit recruiting altogether even though I was amazing at it. Pressure cooker. I burned out. @JenWojcik @april I’m very worried about that happening to me and a lot of my peers. Somehow, I lucked into a community of practice that involves mental health. We don’t talk about it enough and we let people with executive pay packages manipulate us. What’s sad is it doesn’t have to be this way. My wife is a civil engineer and she expects to be productive without mental health problems well past the age that I expect to be too burnt and hollowed out to work. I'm functionally disabled from it and in recovery. I literally worked myself sick. I am so glad you are in a more supportive environment rather than the meat grinders, but the industry as a whole needs to change. It needs to unionize. I said that 25 years ago, and I will keep saying it. The only way this changes is if everyone in the industry stands up. @JenWojcik @april I have about 25ish years in tech now and I’m pretty convinced that people are all of our problems, not tech. I’ve worked so hard that I needed two months of being emotionally unresponsive. I would love to help other people not fall victim to that but the most I can seem to do is to try to shift the narrative a bit. |
Gregory's Server
@JenWojcik @april did that at my previous job when I got exhausted from an understaffed team. We went six months without a slot filled because my director tried to hire a “rockstar” and kept failing.
After I got access to the raw pre-HR resumes, and re-developed our hiring pipeline, we spent two weeks interviewing at various stages and then hired an absolute dreamboat of a candidate off of Rackspace’s third shift linux support into a mid level position. The only big hurdles we had post-hire were getting him to realize he could make decisions as long as he could execute them, and that his teammates weren’t infallible, even the architect-ranked ones. He was a great diversity hire as well.
I wish more companies would learn this. We burnt more than $100k in engineering and management hours over six months with futile hiring efforts. As soon as we made it a team effort and agreed we didn’t need to hire a senior+ engineer we landed an ideal teammate in two weeks.
@JenWojcik @april did that at my previous job when I got exhausted from an understaffed team. We went six months without a slot filled because my director tried to hire a “rockstar” and kept failing.
After I got access to the raw pre-HR resumes, and re-developed our hiring pipeline, we spent two weeks interviewing at various stages and then hired an absolute dreamboat of a candidate off of Rackspace’s third shift linux support into a mid level position. The only big hurdles we had post-hire were...