areyouseriousxx

I'm sorry, but this sounds very strange from someone claiming to know about interviewing and hiring.

You need an engineering manager to filter out SAP programmers who want to be a senior full stack engineer? You need an engineering manager to figure out someone only has 1.5 years of experience?

How many people are you interviewing? How many positions are you filling? Seems like you would realistically need about 5-10 phone screens plus 1 or 2 in person interviews to fill a position. 3 if your phone screens were really off the mark.

I'm actually curious who hired you. Because this sounds like dismal operations management. Seriously, you seem to be a great example of how much a bad hire can cost a company.

But what metric are you determining that those 5 or 6 questions are correct?

For example, have you put together a pool of current workers that are successful at your type of work at different companies and seen how many can pass your interview test? Its pretty easy to find a recruiter that will reach out to their network and you pay 10 employed quality engineers $1,000 that do similar work to attempt the questions. If you find a significant amount of successful engineers cannot do it, then you may want to recalibrate.

I have helped several different companies fix their hiring process, purely by recalibrating their interview test questions to their specific needs. This sometimes actually means, more difficult or simply different types of questions. But very often people just do some Google searches for interviewing at FAANG and repeat those questions without tailoring them to their specific roles.

With that said, in the case of your company, it may very well be the case that the work you do requires particularly high IQ candidates, which is actually what most interview questions at the big tech companies test. In that case, you will always have a difficulty finding candidates as there are only a limited amount of high IQ people in the world. So changing your interview questions may not apply. But when that is the case, you can often save yourself quite a bit of time by asking potential hires to take an IQ online. This will cost your organization almost nothing and will likely screen out the vast majority of people that will not be able to pass those types of interview questions.

Most landlords simply purchase, or very often inherit, their property, not unlike feudal lords, and then charge rent to live there. We are drawing some very small lines to separate those two.

I should add that I consider it much different if someone builds a structure and then rents it out. I, and most, would not consider that rend seeking, as they created new value in the creation of the house. Simply purchasing land and then renting it out, creates no new value.

Normal investments, stocks, bonds, etc help to create value in that the things they support need capital to be built. Land itself, will exist with or without capital resources. So the things that make capital markets work, do not apply to land.

If you are having this much trouble hiring, are you 100% sure your interview process is correct?

What is the KPI for your interview process?

Either way, the effect on hiring is the same.

Sure it isn't free, but remember, this person had made it all the way to the end of the process. The determination was made that they represented such a large gain, for the low salary they were paying, that it was worth the risk of that small cost to get an employee at a 30% reduction in salary.

If you are going to save 30% of $140k, that means you will save $42k. It would take a lot of interviews to make up that gap.

So in technical roles there are a lot of companies that are always hiring. Recruiters work for free until they find you someone and placing job listings online is so inexpensive it barely registers as a cost.

On top of that, most states are "at will" employment, so even if a company does not have any openings, if they find someone better, and cheaper, than another employee that is currently working at the company, they can hire them and then eventually let that other employee go.

For example, I'm not in the market for a new laptop, but if a brand new, top of the line laptop came up for sale at half price, I'd probably buy it.

Its so cheap to look for new talent due to automation, so most companies will shop around in case they get lucky and land a fantastic bargain. Many are not seriously looking to fill an immediate need.

With that said, there are still plenty of companies out there with an immediate need, so please do not get discouraged by that group of companies that are "always hiring".

Be a part of the solution and build something. Do not be a part of the problem and become a landlord.

The same is generally true about rebasing etc.

Due to the high visibility of commit messages, a lot of details certainly look pretty bike shed-ish.

What can be important is simply a general concept of meaningful messages when they make sense. For example, bug fixes that may not be obvious by looking at the code, should probably have a reasonably detailed description of the bug. Commits implementing a brand new feature and involving a ton of changes, probably don't need a whole lot more than what the feature is and what is the expected behavior. Possibly some info about potential future bugs that could happen. When updating the readme, "Updating documentation" is just fine plenty of times.

Otherwise, probably just make sure you include some important keywords to make it easier for people to git-grep and I think most projects will be just fine.

There ar certain personality types that really enjoy organization and rules. And the feeling of security that comes from having a well defined set of procedures everyone must follow. It really isn't about making software more maintainable based on any existing research we have about how maintainable software is. But if it benefits some of my coworkers mental health by following those rules, it really doesn't take me any additional effort to follow those rules so I have no problem doing it.

This advice can backfire if your natural state can get you in trouble and cause damage to your life. A perfect example of people not being themselves for their benefit is mental health services for people with minor issues. While a person's natural state may be to be very emotional, current society frowns upon most emotions beyond happiness, so it may be more beneficial for that person to take a drug to make them more in line with other's emotional level.