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There's a shortage of Lamborghinis that I can afford. (I couldn't bring up the courage to click reply with just a quippy one liner, so let me assure you that I

There's a shortage of Lamborghinis that I can afford. (I couldn't bring up the courage to click reply with just a quippy one liner, so let me assure you that I do actually think this is the truth behind things; plain and simple expectation mismatch. Companies want the best skills at the lowest prices. Candidates want the best offer they think can manage. Incentives will always put these actors to opposite ends of the spectrum.) Edit: I would at least like to understand the downvotes, since I say the above _as an engineer_ who knows I'll run up against companies saying they have a shortage while I'm banging on the door. (In fact that has literally happened, rejection the same week as an article from a firm that posted a "shortage" article)

mywittyname 8y ago
We pass on qualified candidates for pretty silly reasons. Our process is basically, any one person in the interview process can veto an application. The problem is, the interviewers all seem to evaluate people for their current role, rather than the position the candidate is applying for. For example, one candidate interviewed for an engineering position that involved a lot of writing SQL/data wrangling. He listed machine learning on his resume and got interviewed by one of our researchers who lives and breaths ML and was torn apart. I didn't care that he didn't know how to do ML, even it if was listed on his resume, I was confident the candidate could do the job I needed him to. The candidate got the veto. I'm sure other companies pull the same crap. Interviewing is just all-around awful.
- InitialLastName 8y ago
  I'm usually skeptical of somebody who puts something on their resume that they can't back up. If you've claimed to know something, you'd better have studied up enough to have a conversation about it. One way I like candidates to get around this issue is to separate skills into categories like (for example) "very familiar with", "comfortable with", and "experience with". It's refreshing to see honest evaluations of skill levels, rather than people who say they know C/C++ but aren't capable of coding up a basic class in C++.
  - mywittyname 8y ago
    So am I. It comes down to how much knowledge you expect someone to have with a skill before listing it on their resume. In this guy's case, he came right out and said that his experience was limited to an online course on the subject. I do think this is another topic that make interviewing difficult. For example, I know Javascript pretty well, I've worked with it for years. However, I haven't done modern front-end development with it in a long time, thus I don't know Vue/Angular/React or even Node. But I have created browser plugins in pure JS. Some people would argue that I shouldn't list Javascript as a skill because I don't know the popular core libraries it's used with, and other people would have no problem with listing it. The problem is interviewees have no idea what kind of person they are going to run into. I do appreciate when people rank their skills, but that also takes up pretty valuable real-estate on a resume. I personally leave them off of my "list" of skills, but call them out on projects I've worked on the past. For example, I don't list C as a skill, but I do mention working on embedded devices with C for previous jobs.

mywittyname 8y ago

We pass on qualified candidates for pretty silly reasons. Our process is basically, any one person in the interview process can veto an application. The problem is, the interviewers all seem to evaluate people for their current role, rather than the position the candidate is applying for. For example, one candidate interviewed for an engineering position that involved a lot of writing SQL/data wrangling. He listed machine learning on his resume and got interviewed by one of our researchers who lives and breaths ML and was torn apart. I didn't care that he didn't know how to do ML, even it if was listed on his resume, I was confident the candidate could do the job I needed him to. The candidate got the veto. I'm sure other companies pull the same crap. Interviewing is just all-around awful.

InitialLastName 8y ago
I'm usually skeptical of somebody who puts something on their resume that they can't back up. If you've claimed to know something, you'd better have studied up enough to have a conversation about it. One way I like candidates to get around this issue is to separate skills into categories like (for example) "very familiar with", "comfortable with", and "experience with". It's refreshing to see honest evaluations of skill levels, rather than people who say they know C/C++ but aren't capable of coding up a basic class in C++.
- mywittyname 8y ago
  So am I. It comes down to how much knowledge you expect someone to have with a skill before listing it on their resume. In this guy's case, he came right out and said that his experience was limited to an online course on the subject. I do think this is another topic that make interviewing difficult. For example, I know Javascript pretty well, I've worked with it for years. However, I haven't done modern front-end development with it in a long time, thus I don't know Vue/Angular/React or even Node. But I have created browser plugins in pure JS. Some people would argue that I shouldn't list Javascript as a skill because I don't know the popular core libraries it's used with, and other people would have no problem with listing it. The problem is interviewees have no idea what kind of person they are going to run into. I do appreciate when people rank their skills, but that also takes up pretty valuable real-estate on a resume. I personally leave them off of my "list" of skills, but call them out on projects I've worked on the past. For example, I don't list C as a skill, but I do mention working on embedded devices with C for previous jobs.