
Hiring Developers in a Remote and Distributed Company - wozmirek
https://softwaremill.com/hiring-developers-remote-distributed-company/
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lgieron
I wish companies were more open about their salaries, esp. in remote roles.
The discrepancies between what companies offer can be so big (like up to 3x
for essentially the same job), that I often don't apply based on my prejudices
("they don't look like they'd be willing to pay too much") - and with time,
I've found that my prejudices can sometimes be dead wrong.

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falcolas
The phrase "we want to hire passionate people" tends to re-enforce that
prejudice to me. It frequently seems like marketing speak for "we want people
who will write code for us outside business hours without reasonable
compensation".

~~~
wozmirek
Luckily, none of the sort. We'd like to hire people who think and think
independently. There's no such thing as you've mentioned here. Good point
about the wording, though, haven't thought it's used like this.

~~~
slackpad
I thought you tempered your use of "passionate" with specific examples that
showed it wasn't exploitive or BS. It was clear you were looking for people
who could write really high quality code and who had strong thoughts on what
was right.

It's when you see "passionate" without any context that it becomes a turn off.

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mklappstuhl
Polish language as a requirement is a big blocker I'd assume.

~~~
wozmirek
We hire people remotely, though so it happens that they dwell mostly in Poland
(plus on in the UK and one moving to SF); that gives us a bigger advantage
over companies that employ locally people that must communicate in English
only, e.g. by easier company get-togethers and basically smoother in-house
communication.

~~~
whatthemick
"Next, there's a short Skype/mobile call that basically makes sure you can
communicate in both Polish and English"

You hire people remotely, but they have to speak polish?

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wozmirek
From all over the country, usually. We do have two people working from abroad,
though.

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mikegreen
Very interesting.

"But all in all, we take aboard around 20% of the applicants who started the
recruitment process."

What is the % that take the survey and move forward?

Since the 'recruitment' process starts after passing the survey.. Have you
given thought to analyzing the survey results of the 80% that don't make it,
and see if you could better adjust the survey or conditions to weed out more
undesirable candidates earlier? It seems quite resource intensive on your side
to perform this process.

~~~
wozmirek
Around 90%.

That's a neat idea, I passed it to the recruiting tribe :) As for what's
causing the people to drop out, it's mostly the tech stuff that's hard to
notice in a short survey.

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hansy
An interesting post, but I'm not quite sure I see a difference in hiring
protocol between hiring for remote and non-remote work.

The remote hiring process listed in the blog posts goes:

1.) Application (survey) step

2.) Basic Skype call

3.) Programming task

4.) Feedback on programming task

5.) Long technical interview

6.) Lunch invitation

At least from my own personal experiences as well as outside information I've
gathered over the years, isn't this process relatively the same for hiring
non-remote workers?

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wozmirek
Might be! Yet we've stumbled upon so many different doubts concerning remote
work, including tracking people, mistrust, overt disregard and more, that
we've thought: why not show people how we do it? Plus, some non-remote works
require you to pair-program, which may be stressful for some and actually
making some good impression face-to-face at which some people may not, well,
excel. And talking via Skype from your living room is more comfortable than
visiting an office, suited-up. Plus, you don't waste time for commuting.

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stpe
Do you follow up the candidates that drop out of inactivity? Is the reason
that they feel they're not up to the task, lack of time or do they pursue
other opportunities?

Personally I find the a technical assignment really necessary as part of an
recruitment process to really get down to the candidate's "coding
personality". Weakness, strengths, interesting, motivation, etc. When doing
recruiting I've found that more "open answered" technical assignment are
better than "solve this very specific problem".

A solution that could be discussed and put in different perspectives ("what
would be the first thing you do if traffic suddenly jumped by a factor 1000",
"...if the amount of data was much larger", "...if you had to support feature
x...") generally reveal more skills than something more focused on specific
algorithms or even syntax.

~~~
wozmirek
We don't follow them as a rule, most of the time we hear about them doing sth
else - seems that it's option 2 &3 then :)

The tech assignment is meant to check how you think AND how much you know - we
think that it's easier for a programmer to spend time coding and learning than
"reprogramming" their mindset (the coding personality).

As for the solution discussed - well, this checks the self-independence of a
candidate, doesn't it? ;)

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shahocean
If everyone is remote, where is that lunch held? Do you fly to them, or do
they fly in to some "central" location? Just wondering what that location is
if you are truly distributed...

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wozmirek
As I answered you under the blog post itself, it's mostly held in Warsaw or
any other big Polish city the person applying is based near :)

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Cocodyne1
Makes sense until you get to the part about "having lunch together".

How does that work when remote workers are hundreds of miles away?

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phazmatis
"We don't have HR"... Sounds like they are risking a github-style fiasco.

