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We Don't Have a Talent Shortage. We Have a Sucker Shortage

• mr_cyborg 7y ago
  One of the things that always surprised me at a previous company was seeing the H1B hiring notices posted for easily-trainable positions. I have nothing against people coming to work in the United States, but I thought those visas were specifically for roles where the skills weren’t available. In this case, by making the skills super specific, like that Home Depot sales portal in this article, they made them rare.
  • blihp 7y ago
    That's the whole point of the nit-picky requirements: they often don't want to fill the positions with locals. They really want a more malleable, and often cheaper, workforce using H-1B's etc. but can't go that route until they can document that there is no locally available talent.
  • povertyworld 7y ago
    The other possibility is that they are going to hire internally, but for some legal reasons they have to make a public job post. Requiring some super specific thing like "Home Depot sales portal" sounds like a tipoff that this is going to be an internal hire. The place I currently work is like that. The decision makers already know who they want to give the job to before it's even posted, but they still make three other poor bastards come in and go through the interview process even though they have no chance. The interviewees will no doubt end up second guessing every answer, handshake, etc. when really it was just never going to happen. To be extra obnoxious the job listing is left up for months after it's filled.
    • Frost1x 7y ago
      I've been that person so I can attest. The "opening" was essentially a copy of my resume. The more specific requirements (details from my resume) the better. Either way, if listings are that specific, I ignore them for both reasons.
    • beager 7y ago
      Yep, I’ve certainly seen the same for big companies, but some of them are kind enough to list a requirement that is a dead giveaway, like: “Candidates for Solutions Architect 4 at X Corp preferably have three or more years of experience as a Corp X Solutions Architect 3”
  • mavelikara 7y ago
    When filing an H-1B, the employer only has to promise that the hiring won't have an adverse effect on employees already employed at the firm, NOT that they made a good faith effort to hire anyone locally, much less train someone into it.
  • ycombonator 7y ago
    The super specific skill requirements is usually a sign its being posted either for Green Card application or H1B. Both require "recruiting attempts".
    • dmode 7y ago
      H1B doesn't require any recruitment nor does it require any specific skill. So the OP has no idea what he is talking about. H1 only requires bachelor degree and a job in the same field. The PERM process in green card requires the recruitment process, but that has been around since forever and it is for someone internal whose greencard is being filed
  • mattkevan 7y ago
    I knew someone who used to work for a company where they had a policy to only hire developers on work visas. The management treated them as indentured servants rather than employees, using the threat of losing their visas and making them pay ‘legal fees’ as tools for coercion. The guy I knew only got out because my then employer promised to endorse his visa and deal with any legal stuff.
• Aloha 7y ago
  I broadly agree with the basic point this guy is making, we have an issue where the HR gatekeepers (who don't have the knowledge to make accurate technical assessments) are effectively searching for a perfect match, rather than someone who could do the job well. Don't put box tickers in charge of a critical function unless you want every thing they touch to be turned into an exercise in box ticking.
  • solipsism 7y ago
    Easy to blame it all on HR. I've witnessed many engineers draft reqs that included all kinds of unnecessary "musts".
    • tomrod 7y ago
      HR is the cause of this issue, either the ossified silo, or the general company policy to HR, which results in too big of asks for too low of wage from folks that have to use that policy.
      • hopler 7y ago
        It's tautological to say that bad HR policies are the cause of bad HR policies.
        • tomrod 7y ago
          Right. HR professionals (and the c-suite) are the cause of bad HR policies. Bad HR policies perpetuate bad HR policies after that.
      • solipsism 7y ago
        You can keep saying this but it's just not true. In the number of companies in which I've been involved, engineering managers are solely responsible for writing the reqs. HR is just an easy scapegoat. I'm sure that often HR is primarily responsible, but often HR just works with what they're given.
• meesles 7y ago
  One important point I didn't see mentioned was the other side: engineers also think they're worth more than they are. I posit the big VC-backed or FAANG companies 1) can offer huge initial salaries to not have to deal with competition 2) hire juniors at high salaries because they can afford to spend 1-2 years training them. Combine with the sheer volume of hiring they all perform, and it starts to set some false expectations. Maybe smaller companies are failing at capitalism by not competing? Anecdotally, I have seen engineers refuse pretty good gigs because they were expecting to be treated like royalty without much to back it up. This industry is skewed, in many ways.
  • caprese 7y ago
    > Maybe smaller companies are failing at capitalism by not competing? By not having money? This is capitalism working as expected, the only reason you would word it that way is out of ignorance.
  • exelius 7y ago
    There’s a lot of brain drain going on at consulting companies as everyone flees a dying industry for 30% raises at FAAMG companies as they start to tackle vertical industry offerings. They’re all aggressively attacking the enterprise space. These companies just have profit margins high enough to afford to blow everyone out of the water with their offers. They’re competing with each other for the top talent, and it makes it really hard for companies in other industries to retain their best and brightest.
    • rightbyte 7y ago
      I like FAAMG but it's not pronounceble. I always though Netflix was a odd company next to the giants. MS is a better one. Maybe IBM should be included as well. "FAGAMI" ... maybe "FAMAGI" to be less profound.
      • exelius 7y ago
        IBM doesn’t belong; their revenue has been flat for 20 years and they have almost no influence in the tech world anymore. My clients view IBM as a consulting company with a market position somewhere between Infosys and Accenture. On the other hand, Microsoft is still quite relevant to the future; Azure is getting a lot of traction in the enterprise world as an alternative tech stack to AWS. VSTS is rapidly displacing the whole Jira ecosystem and VS Code needed 6 months to become one of the most popular development tools.
• burtonator 7y ago
  I had a recruiter call me a year ago with what sounded like a really amazing offer. Working for a well funded startup on a problem in which I happen to be a domain expert. They're aren't many expects in my field with my background and skill set and they said the right things to get me to interview (compensation won't be a concern). Anyway... Went in for 4-5 interviews. Took me about 10 hours in total to interview with them. Kept hearing that they have a difficult time filling the position. Reports directly to the CTO, etc, etc. They came in at 1/2 my current salary. It was about 30-40% of what you would pay a decent engineer with experience. I told them my salary level BEFORE the interview... Gave them a hard now. They came back and said they can offer more stock and remote work. Why in the heck would I turn down a bird in the hand for 1x in the bush? Part of the problem is that if you're interviewing you need to know what you're buying! You can't go to a ferrari dealership and offer to buy one or $20k.. that's just not how it works.
  • Aloha 7y ago
    Yeah, I see this all the time too, they offer 50-60% of market rate and wonder why they get no takers.
    • polskibus 7y ago
      Aren't most startup founders straight out of school and never worked anywhere full time in software? Maybe that's why they behave like they do with only small guidance from their VCs that could well be detached from reality too.
      • phamilton 7y ago
        Or, as the title of the post suggests, the VC guidance is to look for suckers.
      • shaggerty 7y ago
        The average age of a software startup founder is 40 [1]. [1] https://hbr.org/2018/07/research-the-average-age-of-a-successful-startup-founder-is-45 https://hbr.org/2018/07/research-the-average-age-of-a-succes...
• wjossey 7y ago
  I’m interested in trying to solve this problem by helping people express how they have relatable skills, rather than direct experience. In particular, I believe that the opportunity is to highlight during person to person conversations during an interview a person’s relevant, but perhaps not directly related, skills. Interviewers often just ask, “have you written in X” as an example, and candidates don’t know how to properly answer that question as “Not directly, but I’ve written in Y which is similar. Happy to discuss my experience there with you.” If anyone is interested in trying out this process at their company, my email is in my profile.
  • rajangdavis 7y ago
    I did this with an interview recently and I think it was the only reason why I got an offer. I think the challenge is that you need to have related experience in order for this to work; if you don't, you will be scrambling for an answer. I didn't even realize I was doing this when I started directing the hiring manager to my related experience until after the interview. It worked out that I didn't have direct experience with what they were looking for but have a lot of related experience in the same language but different domain as well as with other languages, all of which was visible on my github profile.
    • wjossey 7y ago
      I recently had a mentoring session with a person going for a lead position, but they haven’t been an “on paper lead” before. I had to talk them through it but I think they understood at the end how to position themselves. I do not find most people know how to adequately fill in the dots for people on the other side of the table because businesses aren’t always terribly forethcoming about what they are looking for. If you’re not an excellent communicator (which many people in IC roles are not) it can be easy to not pull sufficiently the information needed to position oneself sufficiently.
      • rajangdavis 7y ago
        Honestly, I think it comes down to personal values. I like doing unit testing even though my current employer doesn't; in that regard, when I was asked about testing experience, because I spent time writing packages in python, php, node, and ruby with full unit tests, it was really an easy question to answer.
• jobthrowaway420 7y ago
  Made my first ever HN throwaway account to respond to this. I have been running a successful business, but it's not "tech". I want to get back into the software industry. I didn't have a software business idea, so I explored some tech company jobs. I am well-qualified at the VP/Director level for startups and even larger companies. I did go so far as to do an on-site interview for one company. I have verifiable proof that I can generate huge returns in their exact industry. They didn't want to give away any equity, even though hiring someone at this high of a level would generate huge returns for their business. They had a completely undefined budget not only for this role, but for the 4-6 people who would be underneath this role starting out. They weren't even sure they wanted to hire someone full-time, but they knew this position was a clear gap in skillsets of their current executive team. And the kicker to all of this was that they were already doing 8 figures a year in revenue. This wasn't a broke startup. I rapidly came to the same conclusion as the post's author. There are so many companies that want to hire a "VP of X", but they really don't understand what that means or how to pay someone who doesn't just want a 6-figure a year salary for the rest of their lives. I'm now starting a software company.
  • tomrod 7y ago
    I want to hear more of these experiences, and to learn how to manage my career this way. I care about my client's satisfaction and get tired of corporate mentality. I hope someday you can share your experiences without fear of anonymity.
  • no1youknowz 7y ago
    If no equity was available, but profit sharing was? i.e if you brought in X million you get a % of that. Would you have taken the position? I'm starting a company, but want to retain 100% ownership. I don't want to give equity as I don't want to lose control. Been there, done that. I'd much rather go down the road of profit sharing based on the results.
    • jobthrowaway420 7y ago
      I might have been interested, depending on the startup. One way to solve for both preferences, in tech, is to create an option pool. I broached this with an executive. He said they were looking into it, but it wouldn't be available until next year at the earliest. My interest in working full-time for them declined to 0 at that point.
• SamuelAdams 7y ago
  It sounds to me that this might be a problem with startups. I've been working in the enterprise space for 5 years, and I've never come across this sort of hiring. The last job I applied for was open from February 1 - March 1. After that, they pulled it down and began interviewing candidates. Six weeks later, I have an offer letter for a specific role with a well-negotiated compensation package. Personally if HR treats you the way OP is saying, my guess is you don't want to work for that company anyways. Interviewing experienced people is more the company needing to sell themselves to the candidate, rather than the candidate sell themselves to the company.
  • wolco 7y ago
    Startups. They are afraid to hire or to get it wrong. They would take someone recommended over qualified anyday.
  • loopbit 7y ago
    You might have not experienced it and if you didn't, congratulations! I'm happy for you (honestly!). But these problems exist all across the board. My last job hunt (signed a new contract just a few weeks ago) has taken me 3 months and I've seen all of the issues OP (and some of the comments) mentions, not only in startups, but also in fortune 500 companies and everything in between (including quite a few companies in the "best place to work" ranking). I've probably sent about 60-70 cv's and most of them have gotten me at least a phone interview (about 50? I lost count but in the document I was using to keep track of open processes I have 30 companies). One of my ex-managers (and one of the best I've ever had, at that) is also job hunting (after taking a year off after being made redundant in a merge). He's in his 50's and the stuff he tells is even worse than my own experiences.
    • ptmcc 7y ago
      > I've probably sent about 60-70 cv's and most of them have gotten me at least a phone interview (about 50? I lost count but in the document I was using to keep track of open processes I have 30 companies). Genuine question: why are you applying to so many companies? Are you just coming out of school or unemployment? That seems like a ton of work to juggle and you can't possibly be interested in them all. In this hot market it seems like you should be able to be a lot pickier, especially if you've already got a job. In my most recent round of "should I get a new job" I only applied with 3 good companies that I knew I was interested in and even that felt like a lot to juggle on top of a day job.
• caprese 7y ago
  > "We only hire the best" of the people looking for jobs........ ?
  • sokoloff 7y ago
    And who weren't hired by the other 100 companies who also "only hire the top 5% [of people they get resumes from]"...
• solatic 7y ago
  Question - why even bother having "box tickers"? When you post a job listing, write a short blurb about the company culture and what the job itself involves. Don't bother listing "requirements" or "boosters", because the fact of the matter is, people will send resumes which don't meet your "requirements" and in order to put a boost-worthy resume at the top of the pile, you need somebody to read it in the first place to decide whether it deserves to be boosted to the top of the pile, in which case... it was already read in the first place. And that's assuming you even have a stack of resumes in the first place, which in engineering is a reason to put your hands together in silent thanks that you've become successful. The hiring manager should already have an idea what level of experience is needed, what kind of budget exists, and how quickly the hire needs to be made by. Winnowing down from a stack of resumes to an offer is the art of compromising on those three axes. If your job opening can actually legitimately be kept open for that long (i.e. for a year plus, with no consequences), you should probably reassess whether you need to hire for the position in the first place.
  • Spooky23 7y ago
    Because once you run into somebody who decides that your subjective judgement represents illegal discrimination, you’ll wish that a third party checked the boxes you.
    • solatic 7y ago
      And it's not evidence of illegal discrimination if you eventually decide to hire somebody who didn't have the "required" level of skills or experience but submitted their resume anyway and you happened to give them an interview anyway but found them much more impressive in person? If anything, it would seem to me that the more you put down on paper, the more legally exposed you are if you don't follow it to the letter. Of course, this doesn't absolve companies whose hiring managers do stupid things in interviews that are almost guaranteed to get their company sued; but that's a concern to be trained against regardless of how discerning your textual job posting is.
• deleted 7y ago
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• vetelphon 7y ago
  I had an interview with a company working in the ML space. There is a semi-difficult problem that their particular industry needs a solution for so I spent a couple hours in the hotel the night before writing up a solution for it. I was doing an interview with their head of ML and brought this subject up in general without mentioning that I had already solved it. His immediate response was: "that's impossible." And it was totally concrete, not some sort of challenge. He had no interest in discussing the topic at all. Those kinds of people are out there. Best to detect them early and move on.
  • hellllllllooo 7y ago
    What was the problem?
  • pault 7y ago
    Please tell me you went to work for a competitor and ate their lunch. That would be so satisfying.
  • eps 7y ago
    At some point I was working for a shop that did smartcard-based payment systems. I was patching some smaller bug when I noticed a call that was suspiciously close to an assert() that was accidentally left in. Merely commenting it out made the payment handshake complete 50% faster. Being an eager junior as I was I went to the principal dude who wrote this part (and pretty much the rest of the core) and he dismissed me with exactly that - that's impossible. I decided to push it a bit and went to PM with my demo, he was equally awed and summoned the dude... to which the dude said, and I'm paraphrasing to soften, "this fucking bonehead just commented out the RSA sig verification for the handshake." That is, sometimes the claimed "impossible" is indeed just that and the speed of response comes from the experience rather than ignorance or arrogance.
    • nullc 7y ago
      Thank you for documenting exactly how some of the more absurd bugs we encounter in the wild might actually happen. :) E.g. https://www.talospace.com/2019/04/broadcom-bcm5719-libre-firmware-coming.html https://www.talospace.com/2019/04/broadcom-bcm5719-libre-fir...
• iliketosleep 7y ago
  I've always assumed that the so-called "talent shortage" was an excuse to get cheap labor from abroad. They make job ads such that it's improbable that a local will meet the highly specific requirements, after which they complain of a skills shortage, and then they have their excuse to import cheap labor.
  • dsparkman 7y ago
    Nailed it :)
  • Frost1x 7y ago
    That's most of it. The rest of it is suggesting to the population at large there's such a high demand for these positions they should enter the market and pursue that career. The idea is to flood the market with labor to drive labor costs down by pretending there aren't people qualified to do the work.
  • alexandercrohde 7y ago
    I actually recently spoke to somebody who said his job was to exactly this. He said they'd find a remote candidate, with random skills X, Y, Z, and his company would then craft a very specific job opening that could only ever match this particular employee. After enough people couldn't be found locally they'd have a legal justification for a work visa.
    • ianai 7y ago
      That’s clearly not illegal but should be.
  • neilv 7y ago
    This isn't specific to justifying a visa. This same method is sometimes used when the obvious choice non-cheap-labor hire has already been picked by the hiring manager, but they're required (for any of a variety of reasons outside the manager's control) to post the job. When it's not used for visa indentured servant games, it's arguably a relatively decent way to to do things (don't put applicants through a charade of being considered, and you're already certain who you want to hire), but better would be to not post the job at all in that situation.
• debatem1 7y ago
  Just came off the job market recently and totally agree. The number of only-a-genuinely-dumb-person-would-take-this offers is staggering.
• golergka 7y ago
  The author treats requirements as necessary - but they never are. I think that at most positions I applied to and got offer for, I haven't checked at least half of those "ticks". In the end, nobody treats them as if they're really required.
  • pault 7y ago
    It's doubly self sabotaging because some of the most talented juniors and mid-level engineers I've worked with are the types that will say "oh, I can only do half of those things, I probably can't get that job anyway".
• plink 7y ago
  The glut of Uber drivers belies the title.
• loteck 7y ago
  As an employee, it is valuable to me that my company will not hire someone who doesn't think our business does something important ("get over yourselves, you're not curing cancer"), or who thinks the right way to ask business decision questions is to ask if "you're morons", or who has a problem with the company asking very basic probing questions, such as confirming you've thought through the challenge of changing from remote work to a commute. In short, if this post is representative of the way workers are thinking and communicating, then we do have a talent shortage, it's just not the talents you're thinking of.
  • EduardoBautista 7y ago
    Well, I believe there is a surplus of companies who think they are doing something important. Can you imagine answering "Why do you want to work here" if you apply to a company like Marlboro? Sometimes requiring people to believe in what your company is doing is not that important because the majority of startups just aren't that interesting. Accept that people work for money, not because they believe in your company.
    • philipov 7y ago
      That's why working in finance is nice. "I want to make money" is believing in the company.
      • Frost1x 7y ago
        That's really believing in any company. At least financing doesn't put up a facade and pretend they're doing "God's work" or something.
    • kakwa_ 7y ago
      A lot of startups and companies are centered around advertisement. And ads & martketing are not exactly the most popular thing in the world. Disclaimer: my job is basically making sure our customers can send you commercial email spa... sorry, interesting product offers from their line of business. It's also making sure the tracking is properly working and detect if opened the email/clicked on a link. It's really hard to get motivated about that. One, ecologically minded for example, could even see it as damaging for the environment as it pushes people to buy things they don't really need. However, it's also where a lot of the the money is, and also some of the interesting technical challenges, for which an engineer could be motivated.
• sonnyblarney 7y ago
  "There are easily several thousand people in the town who are capable of building that business" I agree with most of the sentiment, but not this one. Someone with the right experience, skills, maturity, 'get go' and initiative ... there are not 'thousands' of people like that in a mid tier city. More likely only a handful.
• alexandercrohde 7y ago
  So to try to distill what this is -- I guess it's just a post to vent about some frustrating anecdotes? I don't see any larger conclusion here. Let's assume HR talent falls on a normal distribution: just like you'll meet some absurd engineering candidates you'll also meet some absurd HR people. I imagine companies that make really bad hiring decisions are put under selection pressure and are less likely to continue to exist. It's a problem that I think can be fixed by the marketplace, but I don't know if a post makes any tangible impact.
• sonnyblarney 7y ago
  Should note: there is quite a schism in 'market value' - it's a hard one to nail down. It's a range and it depends on a lot of factors. There are people who just want a decent job with decent pay and a decent place to work. They will do consistently decent work for stability, neat stuff to work on. They are not heavy negotiators, and maybe don't realize they could make '40% more elsewhere' - or frankly are not willing to move their wife/husband and 3 kids. Real 'market value' is what you are being offered, or rather, what people are accepting. So if people are accepting those supposedly low-ball numbers, well, that is 'market value'.
  • mattnewport 7y ago
    If the positions are being filled and the offers accepted then why would anyone be complaining about a "talent shortage"?
    • sonnyblarney 7y ago
      Because companies will always want better talent at a better price - in that context, there will always be a 'shortage'. Markets for labour are obviously clearing - we're seeing tons of hiring (and laying off) - so people are getting hired. Many companies are also looking for specialized talent, for specific jobs, which are actually hard to fill. In some areas there is definitely a 'shortage' for opportunity cost. One could argue 'they could just pay more' - but it's not like industry will boost wages for some job by 30% in the hopes that more people will start to study and train for that subject! It's a short-run/long-run problem. For broader industry trends, this happens: software is a 'good paying job' in many places, ergo, more devs. But for specialization it's hard. And often it's difficult to clearly justify the ROI. This ambiguity is tantamount to just a lower real value due to the inherent risk. The offers being made for most jobs are ballpark near 'market wages'. Companies have a lot more data than individuals.
      • mattnewport 7y ago
        Well yeah, companies will always want better employees that cost them less and employees will always want better jobs that pay them more. These desires are somewhat at odds with each other. "Talent shortage" is the language employers use to imply that rather than this just being an eternal truth and their current situation being the current market equilibrium, there is some kind of societal problem that society should help them solve (at society's expense of course).
• purplezooey 7y ago
  Love the specific examples in this article.
• mrtweetyhack 7y ago
  Pretend there's a talent shortage, tell government they need more visa, hire cheap foreign labor, win.
• pascalxus 7y ago
  But HR isn't the only problem. In my experience having worked for a company that hired heavily for several years, it was the engineers who lacked the talent necessary to conduct proper interviews. Great candidates were being rejected by the truck load. Us engineers, we're great at engineering but many of the junior and mid-level ones don't have much experience interviewing people and usually no training whatsoever. So interviewers tend to ask different questions with every candidate (whatever they feel like it that day), then make some decision based on a random feeling they get. There's not much objectivity. There's not much thought that goes into the questions. Most engineers think intervewing is a game of "how to stump the candidate". As an inteviewer, you're job is not to stump the candidate. Your job is to figure out how well they can do the job. The questions you come up with should reflect the actual job, and the actual tasks that will be assigned (that's where you should draw your questions/inspiration from), rather than some random data structures question you remember from college or some random questions you found on a google search.
  • castratikron 7y ago
    One time after I was hired I learned that one of the engineers didn't want to hire me because I didn't wear a tie to the interview. This was a few years ago.
  • mooreds 7y ago
    We switched from a random set of questions to a take home coding assignment (that we compensate for) and a discussion of said coding assignment. It's pretty clear what kind of work someone will do when you can look at work they've done.
    • soneca 7y ago
      Just took a look at Culture Foundry, seems great, will apply! :)
      • mooreds 7y ago
        Excellent, looking forward to hearing from you!
• unreal37 7y ago
  When I was hiring developers, I wrote the job role hoping for the perfect rock star candidate. "Must have experience with the Home Depot vendor system" I mean, what if someone fulfilled all my "musts"?!? That'd be the perfect person. But you hardly ever find rock stars. And so you hire the best person who doesn't have all the required skills. Don't let job requirements stop you from applying. And don't think that I'm being unrealistic for asking for what I probably won't get.
  • detaro 7y ago
    Why write "must have" when it's not a "must have"? Why not admit that you'd consider people not ticking all the boxes?
    • ranci 7y ago
      So that it weeds out rational, reasonable, honest people and the company can continue to receive people who are prone to overconfidence, lying, and other pro-social psychopathic traits.
    • koala_man 7y ago
      Why go to a restaurant and ask "can I get a diet Coke, please"? Why not admit that you'd consider other sugar free, carbonated, cola flavored soft drinks? Because both parties should already be aware that it's a negotiation between people and not a blockchain contract to be mechanically evaluated according to a spec.
      • detaro 7y ago
        Indeed, you say "can I get a Coke please", not "it must be a diet Coke" - or if you do, you probably want to make it clear that you'd not consider alternatives. Similarly, enough companies use actual-must in job offerings (for all or for some requirements), and enough companies are clear about (some) requirements being a preference that expecting candidates to divine which employers do and which don't mean it when they say "must" means you'll loose out on some candidates, for no good reason.
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• wheelerwj 7y ago
  this is a big trend in business, startups, and HR right now (and growing for the last 10 years+). Don't rush to hire a good candidate, put time into the perfect candidate. Good or bad, i think its debatable. but most of the experience and "meta" these days is to wait for a great candidate.
  • ranci 7y ago
    Then you don't need the work associated with that job to be done very badly. Yet it will still be marketed as "an opportunity to change the world".
    • wheelerwj 7y ago
      i don’t think those two things are mutually exclusive. you can need the job done, and need it done very well, in order for it the opportunity to change to succeed.
• externalreality 7y ago
  This is very relevant in software these days > Super Narrow Selection Criteria e.g. "We need nodejs, mongo, grpc, golang, etc - decades of experience in software is not what we need. We need exactly those things - and we are going to give you an online code challenge to solve an irrelevant puzzle while a 27 year old sits there watching you." And then when you get the job its nothing more than spending hours upon hours updating a web front end, tweaking a database, and watching logs. > Outright Age & Lifestyle Discrimination I'm only 36 and I feel old sometimes. I apply for jobs where I have to talk to a panel. It looks like everyone on the panel is less than 30. You can feel the lack of experience exuding from their pores. Everything this panel says sounds like some misconceptions I had sever years ago when I was their age and only had experience working on small projects. Where are the older more experienced workers? I mean are people over 30 not applying for jobs? > What Are Your Salary Requirements? Someone tried to hire me for 85K after decades of experience for a very early stage startup. They were offering equity but equity doesn't mean anything if the company folds in 2 years. I need more than that. > Stop wasting people's time and make experienced candidates a real offer. When I was a new developer many moons ago, I worked with many old guys and gals who would always let me know how green I was (no matter how much I studied and tried to impress them). Now, if I was to look for a job, I would be working with very young guys and gals who think experience == 2 weeks of reading a book on Facebook's React framework. Hey times have changed.
  • ravenstine 7y ago
    > Someone tried to hire me for 85K after decades of experience for a very early stage startup. They were offering equity but equity doesn't mean anything if the company folds in 2 years. I need more than that. Wow. That's how much someone ought to make after a few years. You ought to have straight up told them why their company is going to be dysfunctional in a few short years.
  • marcinzm 7y ago
    >I mean are people over 30 not applying for jobs? They apply to different jobs. Larger companies and so on. Some move into management or consulting. Startups in general make little economical sense and the downsides are rather high if you have a family.
• HelloNurse 7y ago
  There's an obvious distortion that makes bad recruiters overrepresented: good positions in good companies tend to be filled immediately, typically through personal contacts and headhunters without posting ads, while mediocre positions require a serious recruitment effort (with mediocre recruiters, mediocre job postings and mediocre candidates) and really unreasonable morons need to shout very long and very loudly to select suckers.
• hinkley 7y ago
  I skimmed but there’s a kind of sucker I think he missed: “Yes, ten other companies are doing the exact same thing our company does, and there is open source that almost does what we want but we’ve hired fifty developers to reinvent that wheel because reasons.” There are too many people out there who could cut and paste most of my job descriptions onto their resume. That’s only partly a failure on my part. Most of my bosses don’t value my specialized skills (or only 3 months out of the year), and there are too many people repeating my work or vice versa. There are a lot of custom CMS systems out there. If we refused to build them or insisted on making them thinner layers over standard modules, we would have plenty of people to go do other things. And I bet HN could name at least three other tropes that repeat all over the industry like that.
• ycombonator 7y ago
  The OP is so spot on. This still frustrates me. The HR, the contract recruiters including technical recruiters are completely disconnected from what the organization needs. On top of that the applicant systems some of these companies employ is horrendous. You have to retype every elfin piece of work history like an FBI background check and in the end your application becomes a metric of the recruiter who can show they have really worked hard to get as many applications as possible. Remove the middle men.
• lostgame 7y ago
  I had a ludicrous experience with an AR startup in Toronto last year where I was offered $35 an hour - worked a week, and then was told they could only afford to pay $20/hr. They made me work 60-80 hour weeks and didn’t pay me overtime. When I criticized them, they fired me after a month. I’d love to expose them here, but I’ll be the better person than them.
  • detaro 7y ago
    Covering for them doesn't make you a better person.
    • freewilly1040 7y ago
      Neither does identifying the company and potentially identifying yourself
      • detaro 7y ago
        Sure, there's perfectly good reasons not to share the name. "being a better person" isn't one of them, IMHO.
  • tracer4201 7y ago
    How does not reporting them to the labor board make you a better person? There’s more to this story than you’re telling us or it’s made up. This story doesn’t add up.
    • wolco 7y ago
      Who said he didn't? Him not going through that process doesn't make him a liar either. The fear of being blackballed or being a shy person or the experience of knowing what a waste of time it is are all valid reasons not to.
      • lostgame 7y ago
        First off, I’m a she. :P Second off - I am the type of individual who believes karma will come back to people. I have a very very comfortable position at the moment somewhere else and I personally just don’t want to stir up any trouble. I’ve been through enough in the past year, from sexual assault to the passing of my mother, to add the trauma of lawyers chasing after me for an HN comment to boot.
• human20190310 7y ago
  > What you're missing is that while you may need someone like me to get this done, people like me don't necessarily need you to create that kind of value. > I may not want to assume the risk of startup business right now but if you're going to offer the deal on those terms... The author is asserting that a company needs him or her more than they need the company, then confesses to being reluctant to take the risk of starting a business themselves. As such they're actually depending on the company to shoulder the risk they're not willing to take; they actually do need the company to create value. The author should decide which of the two statements quoted above has precedence. Either they depend on some other company to shoulder the risks, or they start one themselves.
• huffmsa 7y ago
  The amount of inflationary BS on "senior engineer" resumes I've read when hiring is astounding. 5 years of this, 4 years of that, 5 frameworks, 3 languages, the whole AWS alphabet soup in the toolbox. But then, 95% of them can't fizzbuzz.
  • legohead 7y ago
    The more senior I've gotten, the more I've removed from my resume. I used to stuff it with everything I had learned over the years. But my real profession is just "software engineer." You give me a language and a problem, and let me figure out the rest.
  • imroot 7y ago
    Hire in the DC area -- "Senior Engineer" is nothing more than a title that is used to justify a higher billing rate from the government... ...and they can't write code to count up in increments of five in python.
• throwaway25475 7y ago
  Making a throwaway to share my anecdote. What I find interesting is that if you point all of this out to HR/management, sometimes they don't believe you! I just left a company for which I was the random unicorn (perfect intersection of 3 different skillsets and relevant past experience) after one year. I was referred because someone at the company knew I had the exact skillset they needed, and ended up joining right as they were planning to expand to several other states. Two months in, I brought up the rarity of finding someone with such an intersection of skills. Looking for an exact match would not be realistic. Especially when trying to expand to states with a much more competitive job market that requires a higher salary than what they offered me. Of course, my concerns were shot down with such confidence that I thought, "maybe they already have the perfect set of candidates lined up." One year later, expansion plans have completely 180ed because they simply cannot find the personnel that they need. They cannot even entice those who are capable of learning and performing in the role because they aren't willing to pay market rates. And now I left because they weren't willing to give me a reasonable raise or additional benefits like more equity. This experience has made me wonder if cognitive dissonance plays a larger role in blinding HR/companies.
  • ianai 7y ago
    Can you expand on how cognitive dissonance would play a role here?
    • throwaway25475 7y ago
      The role it plays is in how people may respond to evidence that runs counter to their perception of reality. The blinding happens when HR/management decides that rejecting feedback and evidence is the best route to resolving the contradiction of reality vs belief. If they ignore it, then no such conflict exists. Obviously this isn't the ideal way to handle cognitive dissonance. However, it is a way of handling and one that you often see. Another bad way of handling it is when you see people "explaining things away" without ever really addressing anything of substance. In my case, I saw it manifest in the sheer confidence they displayed all year despite our rollout plans failing. It did not matter how many market signals they received either. There was always another excuse as to why things will eventually go smoothly.
• gumby 7y ago
  I'm typically cynical about claims like this but the situations he describes are absurd and support his claim. Super Narrow Selection Criteria in particular however is not absurd; it means they have a specific candidate in mind. I don't mean to defend the practice (it either means the company has a screwed up hiring process or more likely they are trying to hire a specific domain expert from overseas and want to minimize the number of interviews of less qualified people) however I do believe this one case doesn't support the thesis.
• Trisell 7y ago
  I've been looking for jobs recently. Have a background building pretty robust Node/React apps. At the 4 places that have given me an interview. I've been told that I don't meet their needs. The reason for this. I'm unable to solve their pet coder wars function challenge. Being a self taught programmer, not having a 'learned' background has proven to be a hindrance. Because I don't have the traditional algorithmic chops. In the time I've been working as a programmer I've had the need to use recursion one maybe two times. 3 of the 4 interviews have required me to over use recursion because iteration is to 'easy'. Apparently my ability to answer some random function that in no way shows my ability to do day to day engineering work disqualifies me from employment. Yet these same companies are posting month in and month out looking for engineers and complaining that they are unable to find viable employees.
  • imroot 7y ago
    I'm in a similar boat -- my educational background is hardware engineering, but, I've been a Linux nerd/SRE for the last 20 years. I found a great position that would be perfectly in line with what I'm doing now -- specifically managing teams of SRE's for a startup in NYC that would allow me to work remotely, but, during their "technical" interview, I was asked to "humanize" a number using any language that I chose. Knowing that ruby has a humanize gem (and python's humanize module doesn't get as granular as they wanted their example to be), I mentioned this to the interviewer, saying, "Hey -- why would I want my development team to spend an hour re-inventing the wheel when it can already be done with a code import?" -- while showing him the gem, and providing a sample code. Suffice to say, he wasn't interested in that, he wanted to see how I'd implement something like that... ...so, I provided my code...which was as clunky as it could be in 30 minutes -- and then was almost certain that I lost this specific position because I didn't interpret my numbers from right to left vs left to right. Seriously -- if you've booked a hotel room in the US, there's a 50% chance you've booked it on infrastructure that I've designed and implemented from the ground up. I've led teams of 20+ SRE's around the world in a 40 billion dollar company. My references speak for themselves. The reality is that they're going to still be looking for a SRE manager position in three months, and I won't be looking anymore because I would have found something that I'm interested in (and isn't me doing a containerization of a Windows-based ERP system in 96 hours).
• galfarragem 7y ago
  I'm not in position of hiring people but, a priori, the maxim - trial most, hire the best - seems correct. I consider CV and interviews to be a waste of time. Any thoughts about this?
  • avip 7y ago
    The sheer volume of resumes makes this approach impractical. You can easily get 1000 resumes for a sw position.
• black-alert 7y ago
  I think we do have a talent shortage, seriously, I see it all the time in the companies I work for. And if you run in an interview like the author describes, it is very likely that the interviewer just lacks talent and happens to be in that position, otherwise he or she would recognise the opportunity and go for a good deal. But there are also good reasons why companies are often extremely careful hiring new staff. Many companies are desperately seeking the right dev's because they know that the wrong pick can cost them tons of money. The mess a wrong dev can create can do so much damage to the product while it often has to be released within a certain timeframe. I've seen a startup failing because of that.
  • watwut 7y ago
    > Many companies are desperately seeking the right dev's because they know that the wrong pick can cost them tons of money. The mess a wrong dev can create can do so much damage to the product while it often has to be released within a certain timeframe That suggests problems in management and organization. Likely also with existing seniors and their communication with management. If not having developer causes less issues then hiring average one, then the company really needs to rethink their processes and onboarding.
• wrestlerman 7y ago
  Based on my experience this is very true. It's very annoying when you want to find a job, but you don't want to be a sucker, so you end up looking for a job for a long time. I don't get it. You want to hire someone talented or smart, obviously, you are gonna have to pay them good money. What's the problem with that? I'm sure they will bring much more value than a usual sucker. Personal story ahead. I've been looking for a job for around two months already. I'm Ruby/JS dev, so there are a few offers I can choose from. The problem is, half of that offers pay very little. Based on my experience, related to working with other people and to my previous salaries, I'd be a sucker to apply to those cheap offers. What I'm even more afraid is the people I'd work with. I'm pretty young and ambitious and I learn fast and I want to learn a lot, but if you don't have a good mentor you are not gonna learn that much. Unfortunately, the offers, that interest me, require much more experience than I have. I doubt that I'd have a real problem with adapting and doing the job unwell. But I don't even get invited to any interview from that offers, because my CV has one year or two years of experience less than they expect :( How can I show that I could be a good fit then? I know it's not that much related to the topic, but I've been a bit frustrated.
  • burlesona 7y ago
    Where are you located?
    • wrestlerman 7y ago
      I'm located in EU. I think this is part of the problem. Based on my job search, I've noticed that there is much more (interesting) jobs in USA.
      • burlesona 7y ago
        Yeah. I moved to the Bay Area for an interesting gig, and now I get 3-5 recruiter pitches a day, many of which are from interesting companies. Same Ruby/Js background. It’s so much recruiting it’s gone from amazing to annoying actually, but it’s a good problem to have. If you can find a way to get here I think you’ll have an easy time finding a nice job.
• scottlegrand2 7y ago
  When a company wants to hire a specific person and they have already found that specific person, to comply with employment law, they have to write up a job description so other people can apply for that job. By making that job description so specific that only one person in the known universe satisfies it, they comply with employment law and get to hire the person they want. I know this because I have gone through this process several times.
  • gesman 7y ago
    +1
  • projektfu 7y ago
    Tell me, where is this the law? I know that government positions (VA, universities, etc.) often have to do this, but where is a private company required to allow competitive application to these positions? As I understand it, it's simply corporate policy. But I'd be interested to know where it's actually illegal to hire someone based solely on referral/networking.
• gist 7y ago
  > "Experience with Home Depot’s Vendor Portal required" Posted by a national recruiting firm, no less. So let me get this straight. You're going to toss a resume in the trash because they haven't been keypunching data into a particular retailer's portal? For a Sales Director Job? Are you people complete morons? Maybe simply a barrier to someone who is not knowledgeable enough to know the true intent of that question. Let's take an extreme. Say there was a job listing and part of the listing said 'must be able to cook hotdogs at barbecues'. Nobody would take that seriously and a vegan would still apply. Right? Or perhaps a vegan would not apply because they are not able to figure out what the intent of the 'trick' question was. A 'sales director' is someone who understands sales and is above all not afraid to get past some sales barrier 'sorry we aren't interested right now' but will keep pressing on even after 'no' is the repeated answer (if of course they deem the opportunity appropriate). I buy high end good. You don't know how many times I get back a reply which says 'sorry it's not for sale at any price'. That always means the same thing 'show me the money'. Of course there are things that are 'not for sale at any price' but typically not what I have found to be the case. What they are saying is 'I don't think someone will offer a price I would ever consider accepting' or 'I don't know the current market enough to even know what I have is valued at' and so on.
• klenwell 7y ago
  Like a lot of people here, I've been on both sides of the table. Currently on the hiring side of the table interviewing web application developers. I agree with a lot that's said in TFA, especially as someone who's suffered through a months-long motivated job search where I shared the pain. For example: > There are easily several thousand people in the town who are capable of building that business. Get over yourselves and just freakin hire someone. You're running a website, not curing cancer. I hear you here. I've posted my team's hiring principles here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18586590 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18586590 At the top: - Hiring cycles will be structured and as short as possible. - When we start a hiring cycle, we will finish it by hiring the most qualified applicant who accepts our offer. But on this point, I'm a little confused: > So let me get this straight. You want me to bootstrap a multi-million dollar business, from scratch, operating with minimal marketing and operating funding in a highly competitive channel. Or get your consumer product slotted at a major retailer. Or launch your new web application. For $100,000 a year and no equity. The general advice I come across here is to treat equity as a lottery ticket and focus on salary. Is the complaint here that salary is an insult? In the Bay Area, sure. But Atlanta? This comes off a bit self-entitled to me. At least without more context. I think there's also signs of what I'll call premature hindsight bias (feel free to offer a better term). You assume, perhaps reasonably, that once hired, you're going to come in, make friends, kick ass and provide value. I want to believe that you can do it at a salary we both find fair. But until you get here and have been on the job for a few weeks or months, it's going to be really hard for me to know if that's what's going to happen. And if you happen to not be a great fit for unexpected reasons, how do we deal with that? That can be a lot of stress for everyone if not a full-scale disaster. In short, you don't want to get suckered, I don't want to get suckered. There's a lot of risk and uncertainty in hiring and I imagine risk aversion drives a lot of it. I know it does for me even as I do my best to control it. Hence the 4-5 interviews mentioned in the top comment. (That seems excessive to me. I always wonder what a company gets out of the 5th interview that they didn't get out of the 4th, or the 10th hour of meeting with a candidate that they didn't get out of the 9th.) Here's an exercise I call Black Boxes that I came up with recently for one of our hiring retrospectives. I think we have a pretty good hiring approach but I'm always looking to improve it. I share it here because I'm interested in hearing the ideas of others: BOX OPTIONS (alphabetical order): - Car Type (what type of car does applicant drive?) - Cover Letter (box may be empty) - Gender - LinkedIn Profile (box may be empty) - Phone Conversation (20-30 minutes) - Resume PART 1 Ten people have applied for our web application position. You know nothing about them. You have only a black box for each one. Ten black boxes. You get to look into each black box. Then you have to hire one of these ten applicants. You get to choose the contents of the box from the options above. Which type of box do you choose to make your hiring decision? In a comment below, list your box. You may include a brief explanation if you wish. Example: > Resume: This is the first thing I always look at. It should contain the most relevant info and is pretty low investment as it's a standard part of application. PART 2 Now rank the rest of the boxes above in order of utility. PART 3 What other boxes would you like to have as an option? Consider time/money costs associated with each box.
• assblaster 7y ago
  I think there's a problem with MBAs in general who want to decrease costs, expecting the market to cater to their desires. The problem is a limited supply of labor for them, and they just haven't figured out that their business plans will not come to fruition until they change their assumptions. I see this in healthcare all the time: Healthcare MBA doesn't want to pay market rate for nurses. Experienced nurses quit and take jobs elsewhere with sign on bonuses. Hospital hires inexperienced nurses to fill gap. Inexperience causes burdens on surgeons and physicians and other nurses. More experienced nurses quit, surgeons and physicians quit, ad nauseum. Saving some money short term leads to the inevitable destruction of the institution. Who gets paid bonuses for this clever trick? Healthcare MBAs who move onto the next victim.
• soneca 7y ago
  I am at the other side of the spectre, I have less than 2 years of experience, but I have the same feeling that there's no shortage, just unnecessary friction. I am moving to LA from Brazil next month. I am a self-taught frontend developer. I am 39 years old, but still a junior as I changed careers less than two years ago. I participated in two process with the standard remote technical interview solving a problem live coding in communication with a senior developer. I realized I won't pass this kind of interview unless I focus on studying solely for it. I am planning to buy "Cracking the code interview" because I cannot afford to not have a job in LA, but it feels such a waste of time. I am almost 40 and tired of pretending that some trivia and practice on a simulated environment is transferable to real jobs. I am the kind of developer that agrees with the idea that software developers' job is to solve business problems, not coding. That knowing what to code is more important than coding fast. That communication with people in and out of the team, developers and not developers is an essential skill. But that's not what the hiring game values. I have no ambitions of being a "real software engineer" that will work on cutting edge technology. I am happy building complex websites that will make a company money. I hope that once in LA I will meet some entrepreneurial types with promising business models that value what I can do well. But the reality is that I will have to learn to play the hiring game.
  • ativzzz 7y ago
    Every interaction with other humans that can have an outcome that you are trying to pursue (like getting a job) is best viewed as a game. You can choose not to play the game, which significantly reduces your chances and opportunities Or choose a different game, like > I will meet some entrepreneurial types with promising business models that value what I can do well which is still a game, but a game you are willing to play.
    • soneca 7y ago
      Indeed, I do not disagree with anything you said
• mathattack 7y ago
  He rants about overly narrow descriptions. One reason companies do this is to favor or eliminate specific internal candidates.
• NicoJuicy 7y ago
  I moved from where there was not IT, to a bigger city. I was pretty well compensated and have the same thing now. They promised me to be partner, I felt bad leaving there for my colleagues. But I would never return, as their promise was just for keeping me interested. Just 1/5th of the stress of before now. Thank god, sometimes being a sucker is doing too much. Eg. Night calls because one of my applications ( e-commerce) was for fast-food, who did their orders at 01:00 am. Guess who had to fix other's people's sync services at night. Even when I went swimming, I had to check phone calls. Urgh
• aidenn0 7y ago
  I agree with most things in this, but one point about the "super narrow criteria" part. It's annoying but in reality the list of "must haves" is actually a list of "want to haves" If you check some of the requirements, go ahead and reply. Maybe 10% of the companies actually mean it, the rest will consider hiring you.
  • nikofeyn 7y ago
    in my experience it is some seemingly arbitrary criteria that was never mentioned.
• rubicon33 7y ago
  I feel like a broken record, but I'm going to say it anyways. There is NOT a shortage of software developers. That myth was developed by big tech, and pushed all the way up the ladder, to the top of government. The goal? Reduce labor costs. Big tech has always been 1 step ahead of the employee, just like coal, and metal working was. They saw the huge need for developers and realized their costs would increase unless they actively pursued ways to prevent that from happening. And that's how you get organizations like code.org. That's how you get President Obama on the big screen, telling everyone to learn to code. That's how you get a GREAT job, and make it BLUE COLLAR.
  • cheez 7y ago
    But nurse practitioners... God forbid they prescribe you antibiotics.
    • Scoundreller 7y ago
      Uhhh, they can prescribe antibiotics just like prescribing any other non-controlled drug.
      • cheez 7y ago
        I know, the fight was prolonged to even get to that point. These days you still only have nurse practitioners in hospitals, at least where I live.
        • Scoundreller 7y ago
          Oh I get you. Credentialism is another level in health care.
  • gwright 7y ago
    There is so much to disagree with here, but #1 is the disparaging attitude towards manual labor.
    • 7y ago
• claydavisss 7y ago
  Okay lets just get this out of the way - hiring has become a hellish experience due to economics. If there was legit DEMAND, none of these SUPPLY issues would be a concern. So I no longer believe there is a techie shortage, in fact, I feel the opposite, most companies are in fact overstaffed and most hiring is just to find the goldilocks candidate...because, why not? My new strategy is...I have two questions for prospective employers: 1. What % of candidates that you express interest in end up with offers? If the number is less than 10%, they are window shopping and it isn't worth my time...or if I bother applying, its just through some automated spray-and-pray online resume forwarder (Glassdoor, Indeed whatever). 2. Do you put newgrads and senior people through a single interview funnel? If so, count me out. Every company is now the same and has the same interview process...resumes are irrelevant, experience is irrelevant...here is a coderpad link, answer Igor's question correctly, thanks. What gets me about (2) is that companies are telling me I can use any coderpad language...even if it is one they don't use at all...HUH? Like, you're a Java shop and you don't care if I know Java AT ALL...you care more about the fact that I can write mergesort in a language you don't use...okay... I no longer bother trying to build a rapport with anyone. Shit, why even put my name on my resume? Just call me "candidate" and send me the coderpad link. Congrats Coderpad, TripleByte etc...you have turned practical skills and experience into zeroes not even worth putting on my resume. These companies have basically destroyed any notion of "careers" in this industry. Good news for the companies is...people aren't dumb, candidates will eventually optimize for the process and we'll end up with a generation of people who can quickly solve trivial CS problems within 45 minutes and nothing else. They'll be very very good at writing mergesort, rotating an array, and returning the set of all subsets...AND NOTHING ELSE. Enjoy!
• teddyh 7y ago
  As is common, Joel said it all back in 2000: Whaddaya Mean, You Can't Find Programmers? https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/06/15/whaddaya-mean-you-cant-find-programmers/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/06/15/whaddaya-mean-you-... (Repost from five years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6454140#6455545 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6454140#6455545 and 7 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17946388#17948113 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17946388#17948113)
• TheLuddite 7y ago
  I never understood why the hiring process in IT is so tedious compared to let's say...construction work or driving? Can you imagine that if on hiring a new truck driver the company was passing him trough 50 different routes on snow, ice and wet road. Or forcing a construction worker to build a house or something. Yet if one of these two professions fucks it up - people might die, if a coder fucks up - he'll be fired and someone will remove 10 lines of code boo hooo.
  • badpun 7y ago
    It's incomparably harder to judge the output of a coder vs a truck driver (where you pretty much have 100% visibility into work performance). Hence, companies are wary of hiring slackers or people of low talent, because they know that if they hire one, his low performance may never be detected afterwards. This leads to interviews checking for raw ability (whiteboard tests) and "passion" (show me your github etc.), as both are resonable insurance against hiring a dumbo or a slacker.
    • ranci 7y ago
      how in the hell would you "never detect a poor performer"? It's one of the most obvious things about the workplace if it is going on.
      • badpun 7y ago
        Colleagues can usually tell, tech lead less so, and manager is often clueless. Basically the only way to judge someone’s output is to work alongside him for a couple months, and only a few colleagues in the team do that. Maybe methodically reviewing someone’s commits every 6 months or so would also work, but that ignores one’s input into decision making, help and mentoring of colleagues etc.
        • TheLuddite 7y ago
          And what will happen if they do a bad work at this? Someone is going to die? No. Someones useless iPhone app will collapse on them? No.
• m0zg 7y ago
  I feel like it's high time for companies to consider posting salary ranges up front. It is understandable that salary will vary depending on experience, but when the offer can vary between companies by as much as 2-3x, it's a total waste of time for me (and for the prospective employer) to interview at companies which pay one third of what I'm making now. You could say there's Glassdoor and Blind, but both are pretty unreliable, albeit in different directions (Glassdoor usually shows too little, and on Blind people brag too much), and leave room for the kind of negotiation that assumes the hire is a sucker. I sometimes get pings from Japanese and European recruiters, and it's not uncommon to see the ranges in those. They're usually pretty hilarious by US standards, though, so I politely decline without wasting anybody's time interviewing (even though I wouldn't mind spending a few years in Europe or Japan). At the very least, this is respectful of my time and effort.
• rdiddly 7y ago
  Sorry to bring this up, but then again if he's gonna get all old-school and freely call people "suckers," "crazy," and "morons," I guess I don't feel too bad asking: What kind of crazy sucker moron makes a site that is perfectly simple and lightning-fast, almost to the point of looking like motherfuckingwebsite.com, and then allows AMP into the picture? The one very small & economical image on this particular page doesn't load unless I enable scripts from ampproject.org and the AMP CDN. I mean AMP is for speeding up bloated pages and sucking Google's proverbial... bandwidth... isn't it?
• torqueTorrent 7y ago
  In my experience, this is a new development in the software industry. In the past, the software industry was far more constrained when it comes to talent acquisition. I vividly recall an old-guard software CEO in the mid 1990s lamenting the beginning of the dot-com era: its overwhelming demand for engineers and seemingly skyrocketing staffing costs. I've been in the industry for decades and to me this feels like an effect whereby there is now a massive, seemingly endless stream of candidates for recruiters or companies to choose from. I can only imagine there are many problems that can arise from an environment whereby there are effectively an infinite number of candidates. Analysis paralysis for instance?
• laurentoget 7y ago
  So this is a person who built a website about writing efficient resumes, yet is having a hard time finding a job in the current market?
  • rightbyte 7y ago
    Ye. He also seems to have a quite big ego.
• lgleason 7y ago
  It does not surprise me that this is out of Atlanta. One of the former Atlanta Business Chronicle writers that covered tech rightfully calls it the Bangalore of the South. https://twitter.com/Urvaksh/status/1092948535627137024 https://twitter.com/Urvaksh/status/1092948535627137024 https://twitter.com/Urvaksh/status/893087188451196928 https://twitter.com/Urvaksh/status/893087188451196928 Tech in ATL is a second class citizen and the salaries reflect that, plus there is a glut of marketing and business people. The other issue with Atlanta is that from an IT/corporate headquarters perspective (which is a significant driver for the job market) Suntrust just merged with BB&T and is moving the headquarters out of Atlanta along with Turner combining with AT&T. Layoffs will ensue at some point. Most tech companies located in high cost areas such as New York, San Fran etc. that open up a location in ATL do it to reduce costs. That said, in general, all of these efforts to "learn to code" etc. are all just trying to increase the supply and lower wages. The challenge is that there often is a difference between the developers what will accept the lower offers and the ones who will hold out for more. Many still believe the a larger number of cheaper people is better than a few top devs... Despite the fact that this was proven be a bad strategy over 30 years ago in "The Mythical Man Month".
  • Xcelerate 7y ago
    I would have loved to stay near Atlanta since it's near my family, but you're right. It was difficult to find tech jobs there, despite Georgia Tech having a world class CS program. So I moved to the Bay Area.
    • sixtypoundhound 7y ago
      Great place to run a business though... cost of living is low. (Granted, you get funding / talent lift from the Bay Area)
  • bob33212 7y ago
    There is a good pool of talent in ATL and the cost of living is low compared to SF. Kabbage, Cardlytics, and a couple others operate a model of high turnover and low pay. It costs more than the mythical man month method overall, but the output of the product group is more predicable and there is less risk of a small group of 10x engineers leaving and gutting the product team.
• jmartrican 7y ago
  I agree with this article. But maybe not so much HR but the hiring managers that is the root cause. HR takes its marching orders of who to recruit/hire from the hiring managers. What's going on here? What we have here is a min-max problem. In one case, the hiring manager would like to reduce risk of a bad hire and reduce amount of time needed to train an engineer. On the other side of the scale, the hiring manager needs to hire someone and get a butt in seat to get the work done. So what to do? A couple of things come to mind. First, there is an algorithm for this, the optimal stoppage problem. That is you review a certain amount of candidates, lets say X, then pick the best one after X. The problem comes down to solving for X. I forget the solution, but there is one out there that is based on how long you want to wait. Second thing that comes to mind is relying on core attributes, like hard work, motivation, overall intelligence, team-player, etc... versus overly specific skills. Yes in both cases a lot is still left up to subjectivity and can still lead to long lead times in filling a position.
• NeroTheWolf 7y ago
  Years ago, I worked at an unnamed MA-based "start-up" with $100MM in revenue and 400+ employees worldwide with a footprint in AWS. I was brought on as a "junior" Operations person and within two years I was basically indispensable to the team and had acquired a reputation as "the guy that finds the most interesting bugs". What I didn't know at the time, was that in those two years I'd obtained experience and knowledge that at any other company would have warranted a 25% pay increase from what I was getting at this start-up. The excuse? You have "options". That you can "exercise". And maybe eventually be worth something. Maybe. Except this company had gone well past Series B. And had no exit strategy. Given what I know now, I've resorted to telling recruiters and HR people that I'm not interested in "stock" or "bonuses" or anything else of the sort. The company pays me for my expertise and my hours, I give them what they pay me for. No promises, no gimmicks, no dice-rolling. TBH, people in high-school and college looking to enter the workforce need a series of workshops on compensation, benefits, and HR before they start their first "real" job. Had I known that the "options" I was being given access to would: A) "vest" over time, B) not be worth anything even 5+ years later, C) be IMPOSSIBLE to sell on the secondary market, and D) would result in a deflation of my take-home wages... I'd have told them "skip the options, bump my pay by 10%, and maybe I'll take you more seriously". People need to realize that equity != pay. Equity is so dependent on so many other factors that you have ZERO control over that the risk-reward ratio is heavily slanted toward the former.
• chiefalchemist 7y ago
  Two thoughts: 1) The majority of companies don't understand what they want and/or need in terms of personnel. Why that is can be a discussion some other time. Of course there are exceptions. Typically they are the successful companies, the industry leaders, etc. Those who fail to make this cut believe these companies are auccessful because of open floor plans, ping pong tables, etc. Collins said "Get the right people on the bus." That's kinda true but also incomplete. It's actually: "Get good people on the right bus and get rolling in the right general direction. No ping pong tables required." 2) What most job posters don't seem to realize is that better / great people typically have a well serviced bullshit detector. Post your nonsense all you want. The ones you wish you could get can smell your turd-scented confusion and won't bother. It's not them. It's you. Suck it up and deal with it already.
• mcnichol 7y ago
  Although I agree that HR is totally jacked and merely reading the yearly buzzwords to detect for "good candidates"... I couldn't get beyond this sounding like: Old Guy Yells at Cloud https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/019/304/old.jpg https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/019/304/old... Coming from an older guy myself.
• effnorwood 7y ago
  #Smuckers
• Mr_Shiba 7y ago
  >I'm 45 and have gray hair. I'm reaching 40 next year, 20 years of code experience. What's bizarre about the whole thing is that I would be consider to be reaching my productive peak in the next 10 years in any other field. In tech you are treated like a dinosaur, as if not knowing what the latest hipster JS framework of the week makes you obsolete. >Are you people complete morons? Yes.
  • quickthrower2 7y ago
    Also there is no reason why a 50 year old can’t learn Vue, React, Rust, Blockchain, PWA, Docker or anything else that is hot. It’s all logic, all 1s and 0s. Someone with 20 years experience can probably learn it faster.
    • ScottFree 7y ago
      The problem is that somebody with 20 years experience knows Vue and React are really just older technologies refried and served to new programmers who weren't around the first time. Hiring too many people who can say "this looks suspiciously like what I was doing 10 years ago" ruins the tech marketing cycle.
    • Mr_Shiba 7y ago
      Exactly my point, I don't mean to brag but just picked react and redux 4 months ago. I'm already one of the most productive react-redux sr. engs at my current job Is not about me being a "ninja" is about me doing this computer science thing for over 20 years
• ghufran_syed 7y ago
  I feel like the way to deal with this situation is to ask them to pay a $1000-2000 deposit to take a day to interview, refundable in the event that the company makes an offer meeting certain conditions (e.g cash salary >= $amount) Most companies will say 'no', the tiny minority that say 'yes' are the ones that are serious. Clearly only works if you have enough 'dealflow' to end up with nonzero takers
• tomek_zemla 7y ago
  I had an interview with a recruiter for an apparently (from what I hear) good AI company in Montreal, Canada. Their business is happening so they need to find a lot of people of various specialities. So they hired some ultra junior and not very bright full time recruiters. They are the ones that make lots of initial rejections stopping good candidates from actually getting to the proper subject matter interviews. The recruiter was confused because I applied for a UX/UI design position - my focus last 10 or so years - but I actually studied computer science so I have lots of coding experience not only design skills. This is an actual quote from the conversation: 'So, I see you _also_ have programming experience, but you applied for UX/UI design position, so I am not sure it is _good_...'. I did manage to navigate through completely retarded 45 minute HR conversation and got invited for the interview with the director of UX. From the moment I walked in the guy was ultra uncomfortable and shy because he was obviously 15~20 years younger than myself. Also clearly never interviewed people before. I never heard back from them, but I see that the position is still open...
• duxup 7y ago
  It's a strange hiring world out there. I changed careers and was inundated with recruiters contacting me..... a total n00b. Nice huh? Not really, every one of them just seemed to be sweeping up resumes and names and faces and not paying attention. I'd talk to them on the phone "no I don't have 5 years experience, just like it shows on my resume"... One after another, total waste of time. Then I'd get a bite, or even interview and ... some would just go radio silence. Man how hard is it even to send a cookie cutter "we went in another direction" email? I wish I could have only talked to people who actually looked at my resume first and wanted to talk to that guy. Maybe it wouldn't be many but it would save a lot of time, looking for a job is hard enough as it is. Meanwhile every job does require 5 years experience but I'm pretty sure they don't. I'd hear the actual job and no man a n00b could do that just fine. Meanwhile my last job now requires a CS degree where really a high school grad who is mildly capable with a CCNA could do just fine, but they're still looking to fill my position a year later... They could have brought on two people for like 6 months to just try them out and but they'd rather not. I'm fairly sure there's just a lot of busy work being made by HR and head hunters who have no clue anyway.
• musicale 7y ago
  Companies are so desperate to find qualified employees that they will do anything short of raising wages.
• rajangdavis 7y ago
  I spent the last year looking for a new job and it was extremely demotivating at times. The company that I ended up accepting an offer for started off with a recruiter who talked to me about my background and then asked a few technical questions to screen whether or not I knew the technologies that they were hiring for. Passed the recruiter screen. Interviewed with a hiring manager and then interviewed with the team with some technical challenges that were more to see how it would be like to work together. Talking to the team made me feel excited to work with them and the technical challenges were straight forward. I was able to look up and use some code that I had written previously to solve part of the challenge. I ended up with an offer higher than what I asked for. Part of me feels as though this is almost too good to be true but I don't know if I am just really jaded by the entire hiring process. I faced so much rejection that landing the position that I am starting soon makes me feel like I am either extremely lucky or maybe I'm just another sucker; however, this company definitely set the standard for me as far as interviewing/hiring process.
  • sizzle 7y ago
    I've experienced the same, honestly it's a numbers game and it took me many rejections and turning down toxic roles to find a good team of people I could enjoy being around 40+ hrs a week.
• hash872 7y ago
  "Why Are You Reposting Jobs With Over 1000 applications?" Because over 95% of them are completely random and do not meet even one single criteria of the job. Or, are fake resumes from H1B consulting shops. Post a senior software developer job in New York? Get ready for over half of the applications to be from a Burger King employee in South Carolina, a security guard in Florida, a mechanic in Idaho, etc. They spam their resume to every open job in America. The next 25% will be from grad students desperate to get an H1B sponsorship before their OPT runs out. They will, yes, spam their resume to every open job in America. The final 24% will be fake C2C resumes from H1B consulting shops. "Yes, he is my consultant, how can you pay on the corp to corp for this job?" They, yes, spam their resume to every open job in America. Out of those 1000, I bet you over 95% do no match one single qualification posted
  • whttheuuu 7y ago
    That's still over 50 qualified applicants..
    • hash872 7y ago
      I said 95% don't meet any qualifications. Those remaining 50 are at best a partial match
• HillaryBriss 7y ago
  > Get over yourselves and just freakin hire someone. You're running a website, not curing cancer. this pretty much describes the landscape, even for positions at companies like Google
• shobith 7y ago
  Serious question to the author: Can we know how many hires you've made that you're happy about? what is your interviewing process like?
• fopen64 7y ago
  https://medium.com/@carlosreutemann/tech-job-interviews-the-tinder-of-labor-marketplace-d5ea644e0501 https://medium.com/@carlosreutemann/tech-job-interviews-the-...
• danieltillett 7y ago
  This is not unique to the employment area. I got a buyout offer from one of my larger customers for my company. After a lot of back and forth the offer ended up being 2x EBITA (i.e. 2 years profit) but with a 3 year workout. Even they were sheepish after that offer. According to them this sort of offer was often accepted.
• j79 7y ago
  After moving to California in 2011, I decided I missed the office banter and started looking for a job. I found a listing on a large, tech-based recruiting firm (cybercoders) and the job was perfect for my skills. I applied but heard nothing back. After a week I reached out to the recruiter, and she replied with a curt, "You're not qualified for this role so we're looking elsewhere." I was a bit surprised as the reqs they described in the job listing were exactly what I had been doing for the last 3 years. But it got me thinking whether the company (HR, Hiring Manager, etc) had made the decision or if the recruiter had? In addition, there was no additional offer from the recruiter to work with me? It was literally that one line. It got me thinking that maybe my experience(s) wasn't valued by the recruiter as someone worth pursuing, as I may be more "work" to land a job than she would want to invest? Anyway, with my pride slightly dinged, I immediately wrote off the recruiter (and cybercoders as a whole) as someone I wouldn't want to work with in the future. I got a job at a larger company and a few years later, enjoyed responding to the SAME recruiter asking if I was interested in some jobs she had to offer (nothing bridge-burning worthy, but it felt great saying "NO THANKS")
  • sixtypoundhound 7y ago
    I've found the recruiting community to be very self-serving and manipulative. Recent example - someone who I had spoken with (shared the stage) at a conference indicated one of her clients needed someone with the my background. Naturally, a resume was on her desk before the end of the afternoon... A few weeks later, I get a call from a retained recruiter I had worked with previously, after having had my resume sent to her by the company. She basically proceeds to "force me" out of the running for the position by talking it down. She clearly had some firm favorite sitting in the wings... [in reality, I was out as soon as they asked me to relo my family for a lower total comp package than I was currently receiving. Yeah right.... not that hungry yet...]
    • hobofan 7y ago
      Best one a recruiter pulled on me was putting me (a freelancer) in an interview for a full-time position, without me knowing. They initially contacted me and indicated that they just raised a funding round and now have to staff the position ASAP, potentially with a freelancer for some time. So I thought: "Great, I'll freelance for them for a few months and they can kick me out once the found someone to employ!" This is unironically one of my favourite scenarios, so I went for it, and let the recruiter set up a meeting. I was a bit surprised that HR was also invited for the meeting, as I usually haven't seen that done when bringing freelancers on in other companies, but tried to not interpret to much into it. So the meeting rolls around, and voilà, it is a full blown job interview! I went with it, acing the interview, but when they asked "Why are you looking to switch away from freelance?", I had to tell them that I don't, and it turned out that the recruiter told them something completely different. WTF WOULD A RECRUITER THINK THAT THIS WOULD EVER WORK??? Do they think that 1 in 10 freelancers just resigns to his new fate during the interview and accept to work as an employee now? Truly one of my strangest recruiter experiences.
• ec109685 7y ago
  The part about companies being too picky doesn’t ring true. LinkedIn allows people to apply en-masse to jobs without any cost to them, so you end up getting a lot of nonsense applicants. That’s why it’s not surprising to see 1000 people applying to that person‘s job. I wish LinkedIn had more built in (but optional) ways of pre-filtering candidates before they reached the employer.
• sevilo 7y ago
  And every shitty little startup thinks they’re Google, and demand so called “unicorn” developers while hoping to pay them 60k a year. And if you don’t know exactly “Home Depot Vendor System” then in their mind you’re marked as not the developer they want, despite having experience in like 5 other super similar technology. That seriously grinds my gears, those companies deserve to not be able to hire anyone.
• WheelsAtLarge 7y ago
  This happens in other industries too. A few years ago 60 Minutes did a story about a manufacturing company desperately looking for people to fill their positions. They interviewed the CEO and he said that the shortage was so extreme that they had to partner with a local college to create a training program to get the needed workforce. They went on an on about how hard it was to fill their positions and could not understand it since at the time the unemployment rate was relatively high. Finally, the interviewer asked what the salary for the position was. They, in an extremely serious tone, responded with $13.00/hour. And this was at a time when you could get a fast food job for $10-$11 without a bit of experience.
• sureaboutthis 7y ago
  I often see some former co-workers who often tell me I should apply at my old job should I ever sell my business. That happened four months ago and, during that time, I couldn't find any contact information to apply. I called the company's main number and was transferred to a voice mail of someone who never called me back. I applied online to a different job, explaining the situation, but never heard back. The situation was this: I had two former managers and one co-worker all advocating for me for the one job they knew was available--my old job! I have not been able to get any response from the company at all.
• jk27277 7y ago
  The job market has collapsed. The phenomenon is called "market for lemons"
• nell 7y ago
  Let's assume pay is the only parameter in a job offer. Also assume Big tech (FANG) set the ceiling for software engineer salary. These companies hire every engineer that meet their criteria. Most engineer given an offer from one of them would accept it since that is the highest possible offer they can get. If there is no talent shortage, these companies should have no open recs or fill them as soon as they're opened because they are the best possible jobs for any engineer. Since they have open recs (sometimes open for months), there is a talent shortage at the skill level they require. Please let me know what is missing in this logic?
  • rabidrat 7y ago
    > Let's assume pay is the only parameter in a job offer. It's not. > These companies [FAANG] hire every engineer that meet their criteria. They don't hire anywhere close to that. Their hiring practices are notoriously capricious. > Most engineer given an offer from one of them would accept it since that is the highest possible offer they can get. I had an offer like this and turned it down because they wouldn't let me work on my open source project. > If there is no talent shortage, these companies should have no open recs or fill them as soon as they're opened because they are the best possible jobs for any engineer. These companies have more money than they know what to do with, and more is coming in all the time. The more they hire, the more things they make, and the more they want to hire.
  • bob33212 7y ago
    Think about an ugly, unemployed dude with a bad attitude and bad personality saying that there is a shortage of girls in the dating pool who meet his attractiveness standards. He is technically correct, the number of attractive ladies who want to date him is much lower than the number of dates he is available to go on. But no one is going to be sympathetic to that shortage, why should anyone be sympathetic to this one.
• tqi 7y ago
  > So apparently you won't be considered for a senior position unless you've worked in almost exactly that role in a company that was almost exactly the same at almost exactly the same career level. A lot of this may be due to the H-1B -> Green Card application process. I think the company has to prove their existing H-1B employee is the only possible person who can fill the role by posting the job publicly, so the lawyers will craft the req as narrowly as possible. As a result, many of these listings were never intended to be filled with external hires.
• krob 7y ago
  Rule #1, know going in that they know what your salary requirement is. Ask them many times throughout the process, if they flinch at any point drop them. Then continue on with your interviews. If you're asked to go in for an interview more than a few times, it's a major red flag. There is zero reason for this. They can do background checks on you. They can ask for references to people you worked with etc. Don't be led on. At this point, you're time is worth more than theirs because this process drains you mentally & physically, and likely drains your vacation time / pay, so it's literally costing you $$$$ when you interview at new companies.
• toasterlovin 7y ago
  If we don’t have a shortage of talent, then why are people with one set of talents (software developers) making so much more money than people who lack those talents? A talent supply that reflected the needs of the economy would result in a flat distribution of incomes.
• honkycat 7y ago
  I've been seeing this a LOT lately. There is plenty of work out there, but some of the offers I have been seeing are PATHETIC. Check out this job posting: metaltoad dot bamboohr.com/jobs/view.php?id=103 > 90k max salary > 9 years of industry experience Totally clueless. Good luck with that. Recently talked to a certain Beaverton, Oregon based shoe company. APPARENTLY, they hire a lot of their new hires as "contractors" and dangle the "full time" carrot in front of their face for a year. Swear up and down you are not a second class citizen... except you can't use the gym. Or go to the holiday party or use a lot of their facilities. And your badge is a different color. Yeah, go sell that to someone else. Good luck finding a competent engineer.
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• haidut 7y ago
  Talent shortage and sucker shortage are not mutually exclusive. In fact, there is good evidence that the former can drive the latter. Basically, most of the talentless people also tend to lie about their experience, educational background, knowledge level, previous salaries, career preferences, etc to compensate for their lack of talent. It does NOT work of course, most of the time, but what do they stand to lose? So, when this goes on for some time the HR departments start to assume everybody is a talentless, lying, P.O.S. as it is simply cheaper and less taxing on corporate resources to go with that assumption if the majority of interviewers truly are like that. Yes, they may miss a star here and there, but they will also save themselves an HR-wide (and beyound) burnout and a ton of wasted money. I will be the "negative Nancy" in this thread and say that unfortunately there has been a drastic drop in IQ scores around the world over the last 30 years. https://raypeatforum.com/community/threads/iq-scores-have-been-dropping-for-decades-and-the-reason-is-not-genetic.24367/ https://raypeatforum.com/community/threads/iq-scores-have-be... That is bound to manifest itself in the generally quality of prospective employees. The term "idiocracy" takes that idea to the extreme...but unfortunately is not far from the truth. In my experience, a general rule of thumb in Fortune 500 HR (and even large federal agencies) is that a star will almost never apply directly through the front door. There will be either recommended by a trusted insider or will find an ingenious way to demonstrate their talent. For all the rest, the assumption (mostly correct) is that they are junk or at the very least significantly overrating their self-professed abilities/talents/worth/salary/etc. So, what looks like a sucker shortage is simply the trend for lower value default offers most HR departments will put out there based on the (reasonable) assumption of the (low) quality of the person up against them.
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• guardincress 7y ago
  I've been applying to jobs for about 5 months now and I haven't even managed to get a single technical interview, let alone a job offer. Can somebody please take a look at my linkedin and tell me if I'm stupid (www.linkedin.com/in/niyeturner)? Honestly if I'm completely out of my league and just need to quit making software I just want to hear it from somebody, rather than just all of a sudden being ignored. I guess there's also the possibility my web traffic is being attacked by my house mates
  • jaggederest 7y ago
    Your linkedin shows zero experience (<1 year, but two jobs?) and a 4 year gap between college and any technical work, plus you don't actually expand on any of the technologies you've worked on. Show continuity of experience over a long time (even if it's just a project, list it in your experience section) and put "Javascript" or "Python" in your headline. Talk about some of the things you've done, and skip the video game references imo. Don't let it get you down, 5 months is not really that long, and definitely don't give up.
    • guardincress 7y ago
      thank you
  • techplex 7y ago
    Have you tried Tripplebyte https://triplebyte.com/iv/TpOcf1q/cp https://triplebyte.com/iv/TpOcf1q/cp (referral link). I found their interview process to be quite helpful in my job search. Can you add any bullet points to the experience you have on your LinkedIn? Talk about what role you had and what things you have accomplished in those roles even though they are relatively new.
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• ggm 7y ago
  In tertiary education and the state and federal government system here in Australia the pay banding is well understood. Asking how a job equates in responsibilities and renumeration can work.
• jackcosgrove 7y ago
  If you are conscientious and have some passions beyond making money, you will always be a sucker to the cluster B personalities that run many businesses. I don't think you can beat this system - the only way to win the game is to give up who you are. The main advantage of being careful and sticking to your guns is that you repel a lot of cluster B's, who do the filtering for you. You will be happier ending up with those who remain. "Sucker" is a pejorative that implies you can beat the system if you're smart enough. You can only beat the system by breaking rules and becoming what you hate.
• oblib 7y ago
  "Why Are You Reposting Jobs With Over 1000 applications?" This would seem to indicate that there is a huge oversupply of coders. The fact that knowing how to code wasn't even considered important in the "Startup School" curriculum does as well.
• bayesian_horse 7y ago
  That is a very popular sentiment, but entirely without basis in fact. It requires there to be a large pool of highly qualified candidates who don't work in the industry right now (and more likely completely unemployed) who would want to work in the industry if the conditions were "just right". But such a pool just doesn't exist. All employers can do, especially considering wages, is to try and poach candidates from competitors, other industries, other countries. There clearly is a perception of depressed wages. I believe this mostly is an issue of a distorted labor market. There seems to be an issue of collusion among employers not entering into mutually harmful wage competition. Maybe regulations don't give employees enough power in the process. Unionization is also rare, and may not work in any case.
• canterburry 7y ago
  I'm sorry people, but one job posting != one job opening. That position was taken before it was even posted. Posting the job is purely a legal formality. There is either an internal candidate already identified or there is a h1b candidate who needs their work authorization. Either way, that job was never going to be yours regardless of your qualifications.
• smsm42 7y ago
  > I'm 45 and have gray hair. /.../ It apparently indicates I am completely ignorant about technology and social media. One has to be on serious drugs (or profoundly ignorant on the not-very-bright-kindergartener level) to think somebody 45 years old working in tech is ignorant about tech or social media. This is the generation who had computers since they were 10. And back then computers required real investment of time and knowledge to use. Is it a real thing that happens? Are there recruiters like that?
  • JanisL 7y ago
    Thankfully there's not many people like this but I have met a few over the years.
• srndh 7y ago
  I once interviewed at a company and I was shocked at the job description as it was network & server support + IT support + full stack developer in python, java & .net but the ad was for "an experienced python developer". My career history is, I started in IT support then became a developer in .net & later moved to Python. Maybe that is why they called me. But none the less, I told it was not possible for 1 person to do it all. But they said thats how they have it in the company with 3 member IT team. Interestingly, no member of the IT department or IT manager was at the interview. They refused to give any more details without me joining the company & signing a non-disclosure + non-competence + 2 yr bond. Then once I was done with the interview, I went to the near by restaurant and casually asked if they knew anything about the company and luckily, a person from the accounts dept was there. So, he told me how the company initially had 12 members in the IT department when 6-8 would be enough. Then on a cost cutting sphere, they axed 6 on 1 day and then it thinned out to 3. Of which, the IT manager has resigned leaving just 2 members, both related to the owner. While the owner's son, a 1st yr cs grad student is the IT manager. This is an extreme tale and I couldn't verify the story. But now this trend of making 1 person do the job of 2-3 for the salary of 1 seems common nowadays.
• slowhadoken 7y ago
  This article is true for jr devs too. I program and study everyday. I've been trying to get into tech lately and it seems pointless. HR only wants senior devs and recruiters want to make a buck filling those positions. Seems like a racket.
• pjdemers 7y ago
  Maybe there is some kind of survivor bias in open jobs. That is, jobs that are desirable are filled in a few days. Crummy jobs stay open for months. So, therefore, most open jobs are bad.
  • ryandrake 7y ago
    I was curious about this too and got about halfway through a project to parse historic "Ask HN: Who's Hiring" data and find companies with the same job posting over and over. Use it to generate a "Who's Not Actually Hiring" list :) Wasn't curious enough to finish it though...
• mashireh 7y ago
  Looks like this page is AMP. Disabling the AMP cdn with uMatrix causes the page to take a whopping 11 seconds to load an 18kb page. I'm not sure where this is going.
• BrandonMarc 7y ago
  Reminds me of what I hear over and over and over about the "crisis" shortage of truck drivers in America, and because of this "crisis" they just have to spend billions developing automated trucks that will put millions of current drivers out of work. It's simple economics - if there truly is a shortage of drivers, offer a higher salary. Yes, it really is that simple. There's no shortage of drivers - or of people who would become drivers. There's a shortage of people who will accept a low-ball wage, whereas with an autonomous truck you don't have to deal with inconvenient things like salary, health insurance, union dues, etc.