7 ms·

A dude from Compose here, I'm currently helping out with hiring. If you'd like to know more about the process described in the article, we've recently blogged

by grayfox 11y ago

A dude from Compose here, I'm currently helping out with hiring. If you'd like to know more about the process described in the article, we've recently blogged about it: https://www.compose.io/articles/compose-hiring-scaling-to-100/ https://www.compose.io/articles/compose-hiring-scaling-to-10... We have a bunch of postings up right now for those of you who are looking to give something like this a try (you may have seen us looking in the latest Who's Hiring): https://compose.io/jobs https://compose.io/jobs If you have any questions, I'll be more than happy to answer.

simoncion 11y ago
> https://compose.io/jobs https://compose.io/jobs Typo: "Our two main offices are located in San Fransisco, California..." should be: "...San Francisco..." Also, why does your map show SM, CA, rather than SF, CA? Did you move and not yet update the map?
- grayfox 11y ago
  You're correct! We recently moved out of the San Mateo office (sad) but still have space within San Fransisco. We need to update the map... Thanks for pointing that out.
  - lifeisstillgood 11y ago
    The grandparent point is the mis spelling of Fran-s-isco I believe, which as you repeat it here might be the weirdest Spellchecker bug for a while :/)
    - simoncion 11y ago
      > The grandparent point is the mis spelling of [Francisco as] Fran-s-isco I believe... Yes, exactly.
    - grayfox 11y ago
      Indeed! Also, I believe I've been ousted as a Canadian. ... Fixed this... :)
    - to3m 11y ago
      The HN text box defeats at least Firefox's spell checking. Saf Farsisco. Falaffel. Hemmoridge. Antidisistablishmintirinismisms. Firifofxofox doesn't appear to caer! This whole comment passes with flying colours.
      - simoncion 11y ago
        > The HN text box defeats at least Firefox's spell checking. Can't repro. Firefox 41 on Gentoo Linux.
        to3m 11y ago
        I'm using Firefox 43.0.3 on Mac OS X. I've got "Check my spelling as I type" enabled, and I don't appear to have changed any spelling-related about:config stuff. I wonder if it's something else affecting Firefox. Very odd.
e12e 11y ago
OT: Why the USA, Canada and UK only - and not EU/EEC as well (or at least other Commonwealth contries, but maybe that's not a (tax/business)thing any more..?) [Ed: Or does UK really mean anyone with the right to work in/through the UK, and not anyone actually in the UK?]
- grayfox 11y ago
  We were acquired by IBM last year. As we adjust to their HR systems, we have to limit our hiring range. Each region needs to have a "proxy" manager to take care of the employees within that region. As we had Canadians and folks from London with us at the time of the acquisition, we were set-up respectively. We hired an excellent engineer out of Germany before we were clear on the processes, and it's added a significant amount of time to getting him into the the swing of things. To avoid this discomfort, we're narrowing the region. Hopefully, this is something that will ease in the future - it stings every time we have to turn away someone potentially brilliant from places like Brazil or Israel. For your edit: The former is correct. Anyone with the right to work in/through the UK. You can work _from_ anywhere you'd like! I prefer at home in my jammies.
  - e12e 11y ago
    Thank you for your reply. But I'm a little confused (perhaps the EU/EEC labour marked is more complicated than I thought (or your German hire wasn't a German citizen?): Surely a German is entitled to work in the UK? Would you need/want EU hires to relocate physically to the UK - and if so, why? (Seeing as you're remote-first anyway)?
    - mrkurt 11y ago
      This is mostly an IBM process problem. Employees need to have "in country managers". We didn't have anyone in Germany, thus we had to scare someone up to have the new person report to on paper despite working with us. IBM itself can hire in basically any country, but for a lot of really irritating and well entrenched reasons, we're further limited by internal org structure and finance. In theory, had the person relocated to the UK it would have been easier because we do have in country managers that know what we're up to there.
bitL 11y ago
So you are telling us that if we had a PhD, multiple awards from previous companies for actual work and not politicking/backstabbing/brownnosing, Coursera/edX certificates relevant to your area of business with almost 100% success rate on their most difficult courses, can program in 50+ languages, you would still ignore our past success and we have to go through your normal hiring process? I am sure this would bring you plenty proven world-class talent... /s
- grayfox 11y ago
  I'm glad you brought up the other side of things. If you were an applicant of such impressive, world renowned stature the answer would be: yes, (sir), you still need to go through the regular hiring process. It isn't an arbitrary request, like building a JavaScript calculator. The samples we ask that you complete closely resemble the type of work you'd do in the role. When hiring engineers for example, we take a piece of our application, take a chunk out, then ask you to complete it. If you're a major talent, it's maybe 2-3 hours of work. If you were to circumvent this, or feel you "shouldn't have to do this", what message does that send to the rest of the team? We're a remote, self-managing, and loosely structured group - would it be wise to suggest that you are to be treated differently than the rest of us? It sends a poor message and reflects on the (entitled) attitude of the candidate. Team work makes the dream work.
  - toomuchtodo 11y ago
    I think you guys will do great for junior folks (where a resume with little experience would be a hinderance traditionally) or perhaps people who are willing to jump through hoops to work from home, but I don't see it catching on (unfortunately?). > If you were to circumvent this, or feel you "shouldn't have to do this", what message does that send to the rest of the team? Does everyone on your team get paid the same? If not, does that not send the same message? Is your HR process willing to let top talent go to a competitor who doesn't require such a test? (All real questions, not rhetorical)
    - grayfox 11y ago
FLUX-YOU 11y ago
Can you share a sample test?
- mrkurt 11y ago
  It totally depends on the position. For developers, we extract some production application code, remove some features, and give people relatively open ended "implement a feature to solve X problem" instructions. The criteria for those range from "idiomatic code" to "good enough to ship right now" to "good UX", depending on what specific type of dev we're after. For support, we pull actual tickets and ask for responses + documentation. Criteria for those are things like "technically accurate" and "doesn't overpromise". Others could be writing samples (we have a new feature, write a how-to) or even a marketing plan. After the sample project, we do a "work day" in place of a series of interviews. These are typically continuations of what the sample project was, and involve a whole day on Slack / video / whatever with people they'd be working with.
  - FLUX-YOU 11y ago
    Any chance of sharing an old test for a dev position?
    - mrkurt 11y ago
      This one's current, I don't know why but I'm vaguely weirded out about posting it here. It's already public on GH though so I guess I'll power through. :) https://github.com/compose/app-ws https://github.com/compose/app-ws
saynotocompose 11y ago
Yep, I have looked over your sample test. It was in both Go and Ruby. I finished the Go section and then decided against bothering with the rest. The "instructions" for the sample test were either purposely obfuscated or just badly written and it reflected poorly on the merit of your documentation methods more so than anything else. To be quite honest, you are nothing more than an arm of IBM at this point and I would never work for a company that so carelessly devalues developer time and then comes into a forum arguing with random developers that they are right and everyone who disagrees is wrong. In all seriousness though, what do you guys even do? Set up etcd for a cluster? Or PostgreSQL? etc.? Do you have any idea how simple that is these days? For all interested: the work sample was focused around alerting DevOps via third-party services like Slack and PagerDuty. In other words: I imagine the developer positions here are simultaneously "on-call" operations positions as well! haha! Good luck, Compose Team. You're going to need it! :)

by grayfox 11y ago

simoncion 11y ago

> https://compose.io/jobs https://compose.io/jobs Typo: "Our two main offices are located in San Fransisco, California..." should be: "...San Francisco..." Also, why does your map show SM, CA, rather than SF, CA? Did you move and not yet update the map?

grayfox 11y ago
You're correct! We recently moved out of the San Mateo office (sad) but still have space within San Fransisco. We need to update the map... Thanks for pointing that out.
- lifeisstillgood 11y ago
  The grandparent point is the mis spelling of Fran-s-isco I believe, which as you repeat it here might be the weirdest Spellchecker bug for a while :/)
  - simoncion 11y ago
    > The grandparent point is the mis spelling of [Francisco as] Fran-s-isco I believe... Yes, exactly.
  - grayfox 11y ago
    Indeed! Also, I believe I've been ousted as a Canadian. ... Fixed this... :)
  - to3m 11y ago
    The HN text box defeats at least Firefox's spell checking. Saf Farsisco. Falaffel. Hemmoridge. Antidisistablishmintirinismisms. Firifofxofox doesn't appear to caer! This whole comment passes with flying colours.
    - simoncion 11y ago
      > The HN text box defeats at least Firefox's spell checking. Can't repro. Firefox 41 on Gentoo Linux.
      - to3m 11y ago
        I'm using Firefox 43.0.3 on Mac OS X. I've got "Check my spelling as I type" enabled, and I don't appear to have changed any spelling-related about:config stuff. I wonder if it's something else affecting Firefox. Very odd.

e12e 11y ago

OT: Why the USA, Canada and UK only - and not EU/EEC as well (or at least other Commonwealth contries, but maybe that's not a (tax/business)thing any more..?) [Ed: Or does UK really mean anyone with the right to work in/through the UK, and not anyone actually in the UK?]

grayfox 11y ago
We were acquired by IBM last year. As we adjust to their HR systems, we have to limit our hiring range. Each region needs to have a "proxy" manager to take care of the employees within that region. As we had Canadians and folks from London with us at the time of the acquisition, we were set-up respectively. We hired an excellent engineer out of Germany before we were clear on the processes, and it's added a significant amount of time to getting him into the the swing of things. To avoid this discomfort, we're narrowing the region. Hopefully, this is something that will ease in the future - it stings every time we have to turn away someone potentially brilliant from places like Brazil or Israel. For your edit: The former is correct. Anyone with the right to work in/through the UK. You can work _from_ anywhere you'd like! I prefer at home in my jammies.
- e12e 11y ago
  Thank you for your reply. But I'm a little confused (perhaps the EU/EEC labour marked is more complicated than I thought (or your German hire wasn't a German citizen?): Surely a German is entitled to work in the UK? Would you need/want EU hires to relocate physically to the UK - and if so, why? (Seeing as you're remote-first anyway)?
  - mrkurt 11y ago
    This is mostly an IBM process problem. Employees need to have "in country managers". We didn't have anyone in Germany, thus we had to scare someone up to have the new person report to on paper despite working with us. IBM itself can hire in basically any country, but for a lot of really irritating and well entrenched reasons, we're further limited by internal org structure and finance. In theory, had the person relocated to the UK it would have been easier because we do have in country managers that know what we're up to there.

bitL 11y ago

So you are telling us that if we had a PhD, multiple awards from previous companies for actual work and not politicking/backstabbing/brownnosing, Coursera/edX certificates relevant to your area of business with almost 100% success rate on their most difficult courses, can program in 50+ languages, you would still ignore our past success and we have to go through your normal hiring process? I am sure this would bring you plenty proven world-class talent... /s

grayfox 11y ago
I'm glad you brought up the other side of things. If you were an applicant of such impressive, world renowned stature the answer would be: yes, (sir), you still need to go through the regular hiring process. It isn't an arbitrary request, like building a JavaScript calculator. The samples we ask that you complete closely resemble the type of work you'd do in the role. When hiring engineers for example, we take a piece of our application, take a chunk out, then ask you to complete it. If you're a major talent, it's maybe 2-3 hours of work. If you were to circumvent this, or feel you "shouldn't have to do this", what message does that send to the rest of the team? We're a remote, self-managing, and loosely structured group - would it be wise to suggest that you are to be treated differently than the rest of us? It sends a poor message and reflects on the (entitled) attitude of the candidate. Team work makes the dream work.
- toomuchtodo 11y ago
  I think you guys will do great for junior folks (where a resume with little experience would be a hinderance traditionally) or perhaps people who are willing to jump through hoops to work from home, but I don't see it catching on (unfortunately?). > If you were to circumvent this, or feel you "shouldn't have to do this", what message does that send to the rest of the team? Does everyone on your team get paid the same? If not, does that not send the same message? Is your HR process willing to let top talent go to a competitor who doesn't require such a test? (All real questions, not rhetorical)
  - grayfox 11y ago

FLUX-YOU 11y ago

Can you share a sample test?

mrkurt 11y ago
It totally depends on the position. For developers, we extract some production application code, remove some features, and give people relatively open ended "implement a feature to solve X problem" instructions. The criteria for those range from "idiomatic code" to "good enough to ship right now" to "good UX", depending on what specific type of dev we're after. For support, we pull actual tickets and ask for responses + documentation. Criteria for those are things like "technically accurate" and "doesn't overpromise". Others could be writing samples (we have a new feature, write a how-to) or even a marketing plan. After the sample project, we do a "work day" in place of a series of interviews. These are typically continuations of what the sample project was, and involve a whole day on Slack / video / whatever with people they'd be working with.
- FLUX-YOU 11y ago
  Any chance of sharing an old test for a dev position?
  - mrkurt 11y ago
    This one's current, I don't know why but I'm vaguely weirded out about posting it here. It's already public on GH though so I guess I'll power through. :) https://github.com/compose/app-ws https://github.com/compose/app-ws

saynotocompose 11y ago

Yep, I have looked over your sample test. It was in both Go and Ruby. I finished the Go section and then decided against bothering with the rest. The "instructions" for the sample test were either purposely obfuscated or just badly written and it reflected poorly on the merit of your documentation methods more so than anything else. To be quite honest, you are nothing more than an arm of IBM at this point and I would never work for a company that so carelessly devalues developer time and then comes into a forum arguing with random developers that they are right and everyone who disagrees is wrong. In all seriousness though, what do you guys even do? Set up etcd for a cluster? Or PostgreSQL? etc.? Do you have any idea how simple that is these days? For all interested: the work sample was focused around alerting DevOps via third-party services like Slack and PagerDuty. In other words: I imagine the developer positions here are simultaneously "on-call" operations positions as well! haha! Good luck, Compose Team. You're going to need it! :)