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Though I don't do recruiting myself I have a few friends in tech HR here in Berlin. It is not the total number of developers available that makes the problem, i

Though I don't do recruiting myself I have a few friends in tech HR here in Berlin. It is not the total number of developers available that makes the problem, it's the high percentage of incompetence.

flavor8 10y ago
That's exactly right. If you are a competent engineer, you have your pick of jobs. And for every one of you, there are 100 others on the market, probably 80 whose resumes I'll throw away after 30s, 15 who won't make it through an initial code screen, and 4 who will fail in final round interviews.
- IndianAstronaut 10y ago
  What makes you throw away a resume?
  - jakobegger 10y ago
    Someone claiming they "have multiple apps on the App Store", and it of course it's a bunch of useless crap apps that they made by following a tutorial on youtube.
lj3 10y ago
That's assuming you're good at spotting competent engineers. Everything I've seen both in this thread and elsewhere tells me companies are horrible at determining engineering competence.
- web007 10y ago
  Spotting competence is different from filtering incompetence. I can tell in 15 minutes if someone is clueless, but it takes a long time to establish if a candidate is just above that threshold or truly exceptional.
ryandrake 10y ago
I don't know--It looks to me that people have a very, very narrow view of "competence" then. When you define a role so narrowly, with so many requirements and conditions, don't be surprised when you reject 399 out of 400 resumes, and don't call it a shortage of talent.
- dhimes 10y ago
  It seems like generally "competence" is being defined as being in the 95% percentile in tech.
  - user5994461 10y ago
    The 80% percentile of applicants is defined as people who can write a program to print numbers from 1 to 10. Not sure about the 95%. Maybe that's people who can do it without bugs nor expressing that this is a very dumb question unworthy of them xD
    - dhimes 10y ago
      LOL yeah that would be a problem.
- mullsork 10y ago
  I won't bite on the "talent" part as that's obviously hard as hell to spot. Someone can seem entirely incompetent yet sitting on talent that hasn't been nurtured yet. What I do see and hear about are people that simply do not know how to program. FizzBuzz generally cuts out 50% or something out of the pool right? So that's 200 of those 400 resumes out the window already. If you can't pass FizzBuzz then I think it's safe to call you incompetent, right? From the POV of paying you to code, obviously. At least in Berlin there's a lot of competition for "talent" (perhaps we should call them skilled developers rather) and if one can already cut the number of applicants in half before even defining the job description... well then it's not hard to see how there might be a shortage. However I think if you're looking for entry level developers there are way more options.

flavor8 10y ago

That's exactly right. If you are a competent engineer, you have your pick of jobs. And for every one of you, there are 100 others on the market, probably 80 whose resumes I'll throw away after 30s, 15 who won't make it through an initial code screen, and 4 who will fail in final round interviews.

IndianAstronaut 10y ago
What makes you throw away a resume?
- jakobegger 10y ago
  Someone claiming they "have multiple apps on the App Store", and it of course it's a bunch of useless crap apps that they made by following a tutorial on youtube.

lj3 10y ago

That's assuming you're good at spotting competent engineers. Everything I've seen both in this thread and elsewhere tells me companies are horrible at determining engineering competence.

web007 10y ago
Spotting competence is different from filtering incompetence. I can tell in 15 minutes if someone is clueless, but it takes a long time to establish if a candidate is just above that threshold or truly exceptional.

ryandrake 10y ago

I don't know--It looks to me that people have a very, very narrow view of "competence" then. When you define a role so narrowly, with so many requirements and conditions, don't be surprised when you reject 399 out of 400 resumes, and don't call it a shortage of talent.

dhimes 10y ago
It seems like generally "competence" is being defined as being in the 95% percentile in tech.
- user5994461 10y ago
  The 80% percentile of applicants is defined as people who can write a program to print numbers from 1 to 10. Not sure about the 95%. Maybe that's people who can do it without bugs nor expressing that this is a very dumb question unworthy of them xD
  - dhimes 10y ago
    LOL yeah that would be a problem.
mullsork 10y ago
I won't bite on the "talent" part as that's obviously hard as hell to spot. Someone can seem entirely incompetent yet sitting on talent that hasn't been nurtured yet. What I do see and hear about are people that simply do not know how to program. FizzBuzz generally cuts out 50% or something out of the pool right? So that's 200 of those 400 resumes out the window already. If you can't pass FizzBuzz then I think it's safe to call you incompetent, right? From the POV of paying you to code, obviously. At least in Berlin there's a lot of competition for "talent" (perhaps we should call them skilled developers rather) and if one can already cut the number of applicants in half before even defining the job description... well then it's not hard to see how there might be a shortage. However I think if you're looking for entry level developers there are way more options.