What: Databases-as-a-service. We offer production grade, auto-scaling, automatically backed-up, add-on compatible MongoDB, PostgreSQL, Redis, and more.
$: All roles start at 100k and scale up based on experience. MacBook Pro, pension match, health.
Hiring Process: Blind hiring! First, a light application. Second, all candidates who complete the application receive a work-sample resembling the work one would do in the role. No deadline. Final step is a paid work day ($500).
Compose has grown into a vibrant group where folks can feel comfortable being themselves, living a balanced life. We welcome you to enjoy comfort when taking risks, collaborate with spirited peers, and to unleash your creative and talented personality.
* Work from anywhere!
* Many neat conundrums to solve.
* Self-managing, distributed decision making. Choose your projects. We're deadline averse and quality focused.
I tried this process because it sounded pretty fun and unique.
One warning I have for anyone interested is that there are some big waiting times involved. I'll share my timeline. Some of the lags were on my end, but I was assured I had as much time as I needed.
- Day 0-6 - First contact
- Day 7 - Assigned work sample
- Day 21 - Submitted work sample
- Day 62 - Work sample results returned
- Day 72 - Paid work day
- Day 79 - Work day report completed
- Day 85 - Final decision
Overall there were 21 days where they were waiting on me and 47 days where I was waiting on them. This seemed to me like a lot of waiting but maybe it is normal.
I probably worked 15 hours on the work sample, 8 hours on the work day, and 8 more hours putting together the report after the work day.
Oof, bummer. Your experience is slower than average. We ran into a grading crunch when we launched our Enterprise product. When you submit your work to us, your submission is anonymous. Three engineers grade each submission.
Platform Engineers will experience the greatest wait periods. The other roles tend to be quicker.
Expected time-frame:
* Proceed from application to work sample: 24 hours.
* Complete work sample: Up to the candidate. We build them to take 2-6 hours.
* Grade work sample: 1-4 weeks.
* Schedule work day: 1 week.
* Receive decision: 2-5 days.
Thanks for taking our time to try the process out, it is appreciated. The method is constantly under improvement.
It's hard to see how you can have much success with this method. Current recruiting strategies involve getting from recruiter telephone call to final decision within 2 weeks, or 1 if possible. The faster you move on a candidate the more likely they end up working for you. At my current employer initial phone conversation, telephone interview and on site were all within 7 days.
While I'd never argue its a "good" thing to have a slower pipeline, in the past when I had pipelines with timing similar to this companies, it didn't have extreme negative impacts on the success of the pipeline.
I don't know why that was, but my suspicion was that our highest qualified leads were those coming from candidates that were "happy enough" at their current positions to not be frantically searching.
As long as we seemed like a good place to work, and we did a good job of communicating why back logs were happening, we didn't lose many of the candidates we were most excited about.
my experience is that I am mostly happy where I am, and I am not in market when I am Happy, but when I am not happy, I want to get out asap and wait times as high as a month is a real turn off
It seems you truly care about feedback and the quality of your process. FWIW: I'm glad you are making these timelines transparent so people can decide whether the position is a good fit or not for them. As someone who is in the field for over a decade, it strikes me that this timeline is really long and you run the risk of getting people who couldn't get a better offer from another top employer faster. In addition, I personally have stopped engaging any hiring process that has a take home exam. My view is that my degrees and track record are sufficient evidence of my competence. Also, my time is really valuable .. so engaging with companies who are forced to waste their engineer's time as well as mine seems fair. Just one person's opinion :)
Agreed. That's kind of ridiculous. I don't understand this whole "we are not interested in speaking with you as a real human being but 'here', here is some homework for you to do' Seems really silly.
It has its tradeoffs. The point is, if they're going to go that route the assignment should be short and sweet, and the response should be quick. Especially since we can pretty much tell, like, right away whether we like someone else's code or not, now can't we?
Basic, common-sense considerations which a lot of places don't seem to appreciate, unfortunately.
And to not respond at all is just a gratuitous insult.
He's understating what he's done a bit. We're vastly more consistent with candidate feedback than we used to be, largely due to tooling + process changes that grayfox has put in place. It's improving, we'd like to turn evals around in <1 week for everyone.
Apologies,but this process feels really lame. I know that many companies do it, (like atlassian, for example) - but it feels as though one is interviewing for a slavery post. Let me explain:
You hire people. People have lives. But this type of process just illustrates that you're a Corp and not really having the best interest of the people you're hiring. The reason I state this is because corporations don't give a fuck about anyone who under performs and they shall fire anyone at will. You're not a family, you're (the corp) not going to put in nearly as much effort as the candidate did to get the job, in order to keep said candidate.
You make them take many weeks to apply and get the job, but even for trivial reasons (we lost that customer/contract or we don't have the funding) you'll kick said candidate to the curb without a second thought.
It's a one sided position in the favor of the corp, and for that reason I would never choose to work at any company with this method for hiring - and especially a company that has this example of how long that fucking process takes.
The point is, you think you're looking for "the best fit" but you're actually alienating people who would be a good fit.
Of course they're a 'corp', and of course they're looking after their own interests over yours. Looking after your interests is your own job, no one else's.
The employer-employee relationship is partly a fight. The best you can hope is that it be a gentleman's one, with no hits under the belt, rather than an all-out brawl or backstabbing.
grayfox is showing you cards that the average employer would hold back and would only release at gunpoint: salary range, internal details of hiring process, how long the process takes... seems this is gentleman's territory for now.
The long process selects for people who are happy with their jobs, which is the situation of most experienced and skilled people. I have seen worse.
Edit: I'm realising this is more aggresive than I like. I'll leave it as is, with the addition that I once thought like you, and this here is the state of mind I've come to have now that I've been on both sides of the recruiting fence.
I sympathize with you and also dislike long evaluation times. I also have kids and a life outside of work. Personally I think 6 hours is too long to design a work sample around but it's not that bad, I've done work samples (early in my career) that took 3 days and that I would've billed out for $3k when I became a consultant later.
In grayfox's timeline, things really seem to hang up around the time it takes to evaluate the sample, asking for 1-4 weeks. This is another point in favor of minimalist work samples (smaller sample = less time required to review). IMO work samples should be a simple problem where the candidate demonstrates his basic awareness of the core skills needed to perform the daily work and the bulk of the hiring process should occur in a discussion between parties.
Anyway, I'd suggest that they tighten up this process by a) minimizing their work samples and b) making it priority to review work samples as they come in, which means adding more resources for this purpose if necessary. It shouldn't take more than a week to hear back at any step of the process.
Minimalist work sample tests don't work. The work sample test is the test. There is no other criteria involved in whether to hire someone other than their performance on the work sample test. Otherwise it's not a work sample test; it's an intro.
This is a step forward for our industry. For those who don't like it, there are plenty of jobs where you can do the traditional whiteboard hazing.
I've had a lot of success hiring with minimalist work samples.
>Otherwise it's not a work sample test; it's an intro.
Well, like I said, I think the work sample should only be needed to show basic awareness and that the rest of the process should be based upon the course of a discussion around the candidate's relevant experience, the company's needs and intended role for the candidate, etc., so perhaps it's not wrong to call the code sample an "intro". I referred to it as a "litmus test", meaning it's a simple pass/fail; they are either able to throw something together in 1-2 hours showing that they have basic awareness and competence dealing with the problem space, or they're not.
Overall fit is much more important than something like "candidate Y has better indentation habits". Human cycles are thousands of times more valuable than CPU cycles. It's better to choose the good fit candidate whose coding habits can be trained up over the course of his employment than the unstable abrasive candidate whose code ran 1.5x faster than anyone else's.
>whiteboard hazing
Heh, I don't suggest this either.
The frightening reality about hiring is that it can't really be reduced down to a formula. There are subjective judgments that have to be made (in both directions, meaning that you shouldn't be absolutist about things that are correctable in their code sample) if you're going to get good hires and a cohesive team. Questions like "Is this person an active, curious learner?", "Is this person able to field fair critiques of his work product professionally, reasonably, and humbly?", and "Is this person's personality going to mesh OK with the rest of the team within a professional work-day setting?" are all much more important than a raw benchmark of their code sample.
I know that a lot of people don't like that subjectivity, especially when they're on the wrong end of a subjective judgment, but I don't think it's a good idea to discard evaluation on those metrics. We just have to hope hiring managers are using reasonable subjective criteria, and if they're not at the company we want to work for, we gotta move on. Fortunately for us, there are plenty of fish in the sea looking to employ programmers right now.
Our sample projects are meant to tell us that a person is technically capable of doing the individual work for a given job. The work day that comes after answers "can they work well with us?"
The criteria for both project/workday is predefined ahead of time, and the part we spend the most time on. Sample projects have ~40 criteria, nothing quite so minute as "indentation habits" but we do give points for "idiomatic use of golang" on the go work.
What we found when we were putting processes in place is that we just shifted our bias. As an exampe: if a recruiting process judges abrasiveness during a traditional set of interviews, it's probably biased. It's better to put people into a work scenario and judge their actual work and how they interact with other people.
A self-contained project that gives the candidate room to demonstrate a basic grasp on core skills. It should take no more than an hour or 2 hours at most if the candidate chooses to stay within the constraints of the project (in my experience, candidates will often throw in a few extra features since we're not monopolizing their time with a demanding list of requirements, which provides really awesome insight into the candidate). In most cases, if the candidate is capable of a simple project like that, they'd be equally capable of a larger project, and there's no use wasting anyone's time on a larger thing (unless you're focusing on the wrong stuff, like specific knowledge of one particular library).
For my purposes, I like variations on a project that asks them to implement a very basic listing call from a public API. I let them use any language they want. This shows that they can put together a project in some language, look up API and/or library documentation, provision an API key, reference external API docs and code a function that reads against it. I understand that Compose covers a different space and would need to tailor a different minimalist project.
For me, if they're capable of this minimalist code task, it demonstrates basic competency and filters out almost all of the guys that aren't worth wasting time on. It doesn't demand too much of their time and allows them maximum freedom, which allows us to see a lot of information not only about their organizational skills but also about their code ideals. It doesn't penalize a great asset for not having run across a specific language, platform, library, algorithm, or data structure in his/her past; those things can be learned quickly by good candidates. It doesn't depend on knowledge of trivia or number of times they've seen the problem in past interviews/tests. It's not overly academic and doesn't depend on how long it's been since they reviewed their compsci textbook.
The rest of the information needed to make a hiring decision is derived from an extensive discussion on their background in the field, their attitude and goals, and their immediately relevant experience.
Agreed with (b), we've gotten lots more consistent and turnaround on all the evals has improved substantially (largely because of the person you're all responding to).
I love the hiring process at Compose. I myself have applied here. I also love it how they understand the pain points in the hiring process and sympathize with potential candidates.
However, I am a little disappointed. Given the process they have and the ranking procedures, unfortunately, the process is very time taking. Been 8+ weeks after I turned in the coding exercises and haven't heard back anything (positive remarks or a rejection) yet. So far I have been to a decent amount of hiring procedures (have been extended 2 offers and declined), and the entire procedure is usually 6-8 weeks. But again those hiring procedures are quite "traditional" compared to how Compose is performing. I guess, patience is virtue :)
Anyways, overall I enjoyed working on the problems and exercises. Good luck!
I must correct myself here. @mrkurt apologies for misleading information. What I meant was I haven't heard about the next steps or about a rejection. However, I was notified that my submission is in queue and to expect a decision soon. I am 100% in support for the hiring procedures followed by Compose :).
What was disappointing was, overall the timeline has been 8+ weeks since submission of coding exercise and a decision on the same isn't available.
Yeah 8 weeks is terrible, and I'm pretty sure it means something broke. I'm happy to look it up (incidentally, people are very hesitant to email us and ask what's up because they're worried about seeming pushy. They shouldn't be, if a company thinks you're pushy for respecting your time you shouldn't work there).
Your hiring practices and willingness to disclose pay are refreshing. It would be interesting to read a more detailed case study on how this works for you.
For me, the paid work day was 8 hours in a Slack chat asking a lot of questions of 1-2 employees. My task was to get familiar with their existing systems by querying these employees. I was asked to prepare a report about what I found.
The guys seemed busy so for a lot of the day I was on my own, waiting for more information.
It was intense, but by the end of the day I had a pretty good sense of the internals. I think it was a good test overall.
It sounds like it worked like we want, kind of! The work days should be more interactive than what you experienced, I think. The really good ones seem to be super busy for the first 4 hours, with 3-4 existing employees interacting. The latter half is frequently quiet if people are on the right track.
I can guess which position you were going through the process for, and it's something that we've been talking about a lot.
One thing we've noticed is that even when it's not perfect, the process we have helps a lot. You had an imperfect work day, but got a good idea of what the actual work is like. I'd rather you have a perfect workday though.
By "legally work" do you mean "pay taxes"? Because AFAIK European people can legally work in UK and live or pay taxes in their origin countries (France, Germany, Spain, etc)
It's tricky. The hiring pool can technically include the whole EU, but people need to live in the UK while they work here (I believe). We can't hire someone in Germany and have them be employed in the UK.
> people need to live in the UK while they work here
Not really. The only issue is where the employee wants to pay taxes (and get social benefits), in the UK or in the country of residence. This also applies for UK nationals living abroad in Europe.
Generally you're forced to pay local taxes when you spend 183+ days living in the same country (you automatically get resident status), but most of the EU countries have bilateral income tax agreements in order to prevent double-taxation. (you can live in Spain and request tax exemption/return from the UK or Spain gov) and viceversa.
It's trickier than simply hiring EU contractors but it's definitely doable (I know some cases) and opens a whole new talent pool for an UK company.
Same, I've upvoted everyone who provided a salary estimate. I saw this in action last month and think it's a great principle so I encourage others to do the same.
While I admire your "blind hiring," I've become increasingly aware that when it comes to team dynamics, EQ matters as much as IQ and social skills/empathy matter as much as ability... (Perhaps that accounts for your $500 "first day.") Has this method been working for you?
The work-day would be where we assess EQ. It is difficult to stay objective and consistent when assessing soft-skills. It provides the risk that biases and could-be-wrong impressions dictate your hiring decisions.
Two things, in my eyes, have helped us find bright and 'good' people:
First, by using consistent criteria that are as specific (binary) as possible, we have been able to find people who are not just talented, but conscientious contributors.
Secondly, the way we write/pitch/communicate during the process sets the tone for both the people we want and the environment we want to create. If you go through an uncomfortable, even aggressive, hiring process, what would you expect from the environment and the people within that environment? We try for good-ness from word one.
Yes. Our process actually meshes with IBM's reasonably well, people still have to go through the IBM recruiting system (very late in our process) but it's not used for any screening / decisions.
Our Support Engineers and Technical Content Creators do real intensive technical work.
The role is not important at Compose. The system is built to best groom out 'core competencies'. A Support Engineer is a strong Ops/Systems Administrator with great communication and customer skills. A Technical Content Creator is a strong developer with excellent written communication skill.
Our Analytics is maintained, built, and improved by a 'Content Creator'. Our hiring, too, is ran by a 'Content Creator'. Similar folk contribute across the app, and apply skills in various areas.
It is a mature way to work. To get the best people, you need to offer competitive wages.
I'm not interested in applying, but very curious as to what kind of work sample you might have for a systems profile. Is it okay to 'apply' just for the sample?
What: Databases-as-a-service. We offer production grade, auto-scaling, automatically backed-up, add-on compatible MongoDB, PostgreSQL, Redis, and more.
$: All roles start at 100k and scale up based on experience. MacBook Pro, pension match, health.
Hiring Process: Blind hiring! First, a light application. Second, all candidates who complete the application receive a work-sample resembling the work one would do in the role. No deadline. Final step is a paid work day ($500).
Compose has grown into a vibrant group where folks can feel comfortable being themselves, living a balanced life. We welcome you to enjoy comfort when taking risks, collaborate with spirited peers, and to unleash your creative and talented personality.
* Work from anywhere!
* Many neat conundrums to solve.
* Self-managing, distributed decision making. Choose your projects. We're deadline averse and quality focused.
* Hardly any meetings.
* Ruby/Go.
* Fizz: https://www.compose.io/articles/the-tool-we-built-to-help-us...
Roles:
* Platform Engineer / Application Developer
* Support Engineer
* Technical Content Creator ('Developer Advocacy' type of role)
To begin: https://compose.interviewed.com