Some of my friends that read this blog are still in school and haven’t started working yet and a couple other friends have asked me advice on evaluating the job offers they’ve gotten. So here’s a summary on how I currently evaluate job offers. This is purely from my perspective as a young engineer with no kids so your priorities may be very different. I am certain that my evaluation method will change as I go on to the later phases of my life. Right now, here are the things I consider in order of importance:
The Job and the Company — The first and most important thing is to understand what I will be doing in the position offered. Is this job something I would be happy doing eight to nine hours a day? Would I be creating a product or service that people find useful? Are there opportunities for advancement and recognition in this job? Of course, the best place to learn about the job is through asking questions at the interview or asking HR. It’s important to get as much information as possible because a lot of job descriptions these days are pretty vague. Additionally I would find out about the company from external sources such as surveys and friends. I would find out the working conditions and hours and the general company ethics. I really can’t stress enough how important it is to have a job you enjoy with a company that takes care of its employees because otherwise life is pretty miserable.
Your Future Coworkers – If you read my article on interviewing in the Valley, then you’ll know how important it is to me to find useful people that I can get along with at work. Interviews work both ways, so when I am the job candidate I am also assessing how skilled and amiable the interviewer is. The most important person that has to get along with me is my direct supervisor so I try to ask questions about his/her management style and gauge his/her personality. If my direct manager isn’t even interviewing me, then something is definitely broken at the company and I wouldn’t consider it.
The Benefit Package — A lot of people I know seem to put salary as the top priority in evaluating a job, but it’s really just part of a greater benefits package. Other major things to consider are paid time off, health insurance, retirement contributions, bonuses, and equity compensation. Each one of these benefit items could be worth a considerable amount financially. In some jobs, bonuses are the bulk of the compensation so you can’t really decide that a certain job pays worse just based on the salary. Retirement contributions is also a big benefit. A lot of people my age think that retirement is really far away and it’s not a big deal, but we are the generation that can’t depend on social security and pensions, so anything a employer would give us now could be a lifesaver in the future. Vacation days is another great thing. The difference between having 10 days and 15 days of vacation per year is huge. That extra week of vacation may just save your sanity. Equity compensation can include stock grants, incentive stock options, or employee stock purchase programs. If the company is doing well, then the equity is a worthwhile bonus. Health insurance is very important, but a lot of employers these days don’t pay for 100% of the premiums. So when I look at a compensation package I would find out how much health insurance the company pays for. There are also other miscellaneous benefits a company could offer such as free food, club memberships, and discounts. Those are also great, but they’re more minor additions to a benefits package.
The Location of the Job and Commuting– Most of the time I don’t apply for jobs that are more than 20 miles away from where I live. The physical accessibility of the job is very important because you need to consider that it takes time and money to commute. If your company offers telecommuting then that’s possibly the greatest location because you can work at home and not commute at all. I personally don’t mind going to the office because I like to interact with my coworkers, but if I have to drive more than an hour each way to work everyday I think I would go insane. And yet I know some people in the Bay Area that drive two to five hours per day to work because housing is so expensive in areas close to work. Driving that much is really not worth it because an 8 hour day turns into a 10 to 13 hour day and there will be no other life but work. I would prefer to take public transit to work if I could, so if the job is along well established public transportation then that’s a plus in my book.
In conclusion, there are many aspects of a job to consider before accepting an offer. The best thing to do is to get as much information as possible, either through the interview, people you trust, or online resources. If there are terms that you don’t like about the benefits package there is always room for negotiation. I have found that it’s never as clearcut as “this offer is better because it pays more”. Trust your instincts, and if you feel like you wouldn’t fit into a particular job or company, then don’t take it because if you do the lives of everyone involved may become a little worse.
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It’s tough to hire good people these days in the Silicon Valley mostly due to the world renowned event known as the “dot-com bubble”. A lot of people my age decided not to pursue software engineering, or switched jobs so the talent pool is pretty small. Additionally, there seems to be a “Bubble 2.0″ brewing in the Valley as a new battallion of small “Web 2.0″ companies are sprouting up like mushrooms after a rainy day. It’s especially difficult to find mid level people with 3 to 6 years of experience because those are the classes that graduated during the great technology depression. In the past few years of working in the Valley I conducted many interviews, and here are some stories and lessons learned.
Lesson 1: Retain My Position as the Interviewer
When I started out, I was not yet 22, and I had to interview a lot of people much older than me. That was a bit intimidating, and there are times when the candidates actually started telling me what I should do in my job. It was pretty annoying because it felt like they were interviewing me and giving me advice. Later on I learned to just take the reins of the conversation and stop candidates when they babble on. An interviewer really has to be in control.
Lesson 2: Object Strongly to Candidates You Don’t Want
You spend most of your waking hours with your coworkers if you work at a regular office with a regular eight hour shift. So it’s really important to reject the people you don’t want. There is a problem when someone above you is bent on hiring someone you don’t like, but object as loudly as you can. I’ve already had to deal with this twice. The first time my own manager hired someone he didn’t want because a VP above him wanted to hire the candidate who happened to be the VP’s excoworker. The end result was that the new person really didn’t fit in well within our team but had the support of the VP, and I ended up leaving the company, and then my manager and two other team members also left so the only person left was the VP’s excoworker. The second time, I really thought that one candidate wouldn’t be able to learn as quickly as she needs to, and told my manager that. However, he hired her anyway, and the end result is that she felt really overwhelmed and quit in three months. It’s an incredible waste to hire someone that could destroy an entire team or produce discord in an otherwise happy team. It’s hard to assess a person in a short amount of time, but if you can’t even deal with someone for thirty minutes to an hour, it would be very hard for you to work with them for eight hours a day. If you’re not the hiring manager, it’s best to voice your objections as much as you can before a horrible hiring mistake is committed. Now I think my manager trusts my opinions more because I was the only one who really objected to the hiring of that particular candidate. If your manager isn’t open to suggestions and objections, then he/she probably isn’t a very good manager anyway. That’s why in my last company my whole team left after that particular VP took over.
Lesson 3: Don’t Be Too Friendly to the Candidates
I’m not saying “don’t be nice”, but don’t talk to a candidate like you would talk to a friend. Be courteous but not too familiar. Useless smalltalk in interviews really bother me and they’re a waste of time. At the time of the interview, I really don’t care that a candidate loves cats or can cook really good vegetarian food. I also don’t like people who read the things on my shirts and ask me about them. I am also disturbed by compliments on my looks, because that’s almost like sexual harassment. I liked to get to the business of interviewing and nothing more
Lesson 4: People with Long Resumes Aren’t Necessarily Skilled
I just went through two beyond painful interviews today with two candidates with 10+ years of experience. It’s almost like they write as much as they can on their resumes without actually having corresponding skills to back it up. It’s really easy to just throw a few simple questions at them and discover that they pretty much lied on their resume. That really doesn’t sit well with me. I asked a candidate once why she wrote all that stuff she clearly didn’t have any knowledge about, and she said, “well, my friend told me that I should write every technology I have heard of”. That is really not the way to go. So now when I see resumes with too many keywords I go into the interview fearing the worst. Most people are experts in a few things, and I think it’s better to highlight one’s expertise rather than writing every hot buzzword there is on the resume.The problem is, HR people can only search on resumes, and they tend to be fooled easily by these liars and we end up wasting some time.
Lesson 5: Don’t Feel Sorry for the Candidate When You Reject Them
Basically, don’t be afraid to reject a large number of people you interview and don’t take their feelings into your consideration. They might find another job with a competitor, and possibly create an inferior product. That’s better for your company anyway. So don’t feel bad for them.
Lesson 6: Keep on Improving My Own Skills
The technologies we use change very rapidly, and it’s important to upgrade my own skills. I have interviewed a few people with more years of work experience than years I have been alive, but their skills are no longer applicable. It’s really easy to learn things these days because there are so many manuals and tutorials available on the web. Having a few horrible interviews actually motivated me to not become a dinosaur and upgrade my knowledgebase in order to be competitive.
Okay, enough of the serious stuff. Now I bring you some highlights of comical and craptacular interviews:
- Once I was asking a candidate a question, and he said, “excuse me, may I go to the bathroom?” So of course I let him go, and then five minutes after he came back he asked again, “may I go to the bathroom?” At this point it was clear to me he had some sort of bowel problem. So we finished up the interview and I returned to my supervisor. I said to him, “I think the candidate has diarrhea”. My supervisor almost fell out of his chair and exclaimed, “WHAT?!”. I repeated, “I think he has diarrhea.” He seemed relieved and said, “oh my god, I thought you said he DIED”. We all had a pretty good laugh about it over happy hour. I guess the lesson here is to cancel interviews if you’re feeling sick.
- Once there was a man I interviewed that I could barely understand. When I asked him what about the company interested him he answered, “when you guys go public lots of money!” I really appreciated the honesty and thought that was a better answer than the cliche answer “I like your product”, but unfortunately, he had none of the technical skills we were looking for.
- I’ve gotten some horribly wrong answers to some of the simple technical questions I ask. One of the simplest questions I ask is “how do you get an output of all the lines in a text file that start with a certain word or letter”. This is a list of horrible answers I have gotten (a few were from today): ping A, ls -lrt, dir, find A, head, tail,some Unix command. The one that takes the cake is “ping”, because two different people gave this answer independently. Is there some demented interview guide that tells interviewees just to say “ping” to things they don’t know? In my opinion, even answering “manually copy and paste the lines that start with the word or letter” is better than throwing out random command names and hoping it’s right.
- This one is short, and it was funny to me. I walked into the interview room and introduced myself. Then the candidate got a call and looked extremely nervous. When he got off the phone he said, “I need to go back to work” and left.
Interviews are the closest thing to blind dates. It’s hard to find that special someone, especially in this mad place. People are always switching jobs and doing new things here, and maybe one day I will be interviewed by one of my ex-interviewees (the horrors!). Anyway, if you know someone who is awesome at programming or QA please send me a note and maybe we can set up something.
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