9 ms·

Tech companies will post incoherent ads for open positions in tiny local papers

89 points by davidgerard 7y ago

braythwayt 7y ago
A very long time ago, I applied to collect benefits for what is now called “Employment insurance” in the Socialist Republic of Kanuckistan. In those days, you went in person to a drab office located inside a monumental Government building designed in Brutalist style. Besides making the application, you could also look for jobs: There was a physical job board with little cards posted on it. I mentioned an ad I saw for a job in my field, and the civil servant helping me said, “Don’t bother. They already have someone they want to hire from overseas, and they’re required to post an advertisement here for 90 days.” (I may misremember the exact duration.) The agent told me that anybody who applied would have a long delay before getting an interview, long delays trying to follow up or even get an answer about how the interview went, and in the end, they wouldn’t hire anybody local regardless of experience or expertise. I complained that this was clearly gaming the system, and the agent shrugged: “If you can’t get another job just as good, come back and complain then.” For me in my field, that was certainly a fine answer. But for other fields, maybe not.
Fodloot 7y ago
Ah,a printed ad, that brings back some memories. The years have gone by...
lotsofpulp 7y ago
Is this accurate? According to this person, it's not for faking lack of candidates in order to secure an H1B, but rather for the green card process: https://twitter.com/sanaerosen/status/1208389683132030978 https://twitter.com/sanaerosen/status/1208389683132030978
- volfied 7y ago
  They are right. H1B is a temporary visa that you can get with a company sponsor pretty easily. You get a H1B for 3 years, and you can renew it once for another 3. Within those 6 years, if the company wants to retain you and get you a green card, they need to prove that "they looked, but couldn't find an eligible American" to replace you. Hence these ads with overly specialized position descriptions.
  - klipt 7y ago
    > you can get with a company sponsor pretty easily Not very easily these days. There's a yearly limit on H1-B visas, and more applications than visas, so they're assigned by lottery. For 2019 there was only a 32% chance of selection: https://www.immi-usa.com/h1b-lottery-2016-results-chances-process/ https://www.immi-usa.com/h1b-lottery-2016-results-chances-pr...
- sweis 7y ago
  I think you’re right. It’s for green cards and E visas.
mensetmanusman 7y ago
Posting these is a legal requirement. I wonder how things would change if America had essentially open borders for highly skilled workers.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- coldtea 7y ago
  >I wonder how things would change if America had essentially open borders for highly skilled workers. Probably lower wages for programmers born in America, as highly skilled workers from an 8 billion pool of people abroad would flood the market.
  - lotsofpulp 7y ago
    Or the US would gain a population of highly productive people who can further technological advances which would induce demand for high skilled labor at a faster rate than supply would lower the price point. I haven’t heard of a region complaining about an influx of educated people. I commonly hear about regions complaining about brain drains though.
    - Mountain_Skies 7y ago
      And the rest of the world would experience brain drain, further widening the global inequality gap. But hey, some corporations in the United States get higher stock prices. The rest of the planet should be ok with that. The planet exists to prop up the US tech industry.
      - lotsofpulp 7y ago
        That’s a greater philosophical question of who is entitled to what in this world, and it always comes down to might makes right. Taken to the extremes, the only “fair” solution is a one world country with redistribution taxes, but that’s just now how people work. There’s significant brain drain going on within the US, and stopping the free movement of people is a solution, but in the long run it’s not going to be sufficient.
imgabe 7y ago
Funny how abbreviating words by removing vowels - very common in newspaper ads where you pay by the letter - is now considered "incoherent" and must be some kind of sinister obfuscation.
- sweis 7y ago
  OP here. Yes, Apple is certainly saving a bundle on classified ads in the free community paper with circulation of 6,000. These ads are just to go through the motions to get someone a visa. They don’t actually want anyone to reply to the ad. That’s why they have mailing addresses in the ad instead of email addresses or URLs.
  - imgabe 7y ago
    Well, as some other people pointed out, it's for a green card, not a visa. Posting an ad in the local paper is likely a legal requirement to go through the process. So, yeah, why would they spend any more on doing it than necessary? But if you actually are old enough to have looked for jobs or anything else in a physical newspaper, that kind of writing is typical of want ads in the classifieds. It's not some special thing Apple is doing to prevent people from understanding the ad. Almost every ad that size is written like that.
    - SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
      I definitely do get the impression that a lot of people expect Apple to take out a full page ad in the NYT or something.
  - whoopdedo 7y ago
    What would happen if someone replied though?
    - klipt 7y ago
      The large FANG companies are always hiring. If you can pass their interviews, you would probably get an offer for, if not exactly the same team, a similar position in another team with open headcount.
dublinben 7y ago
Non-javascript mirror: https://nitter.net/sweis/status/1208253229617709056#m https://nitter.net/sweis/status/1208253229617709056#m
caseysoftware 7y ago
Yes, placing a newspaper ad is a requirement. I think the primary criticisms are the incomprehensible ad and the selection of newspapers itself. This is normally called Malicious Compliance - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malicious_compliance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malicious_compliance - where someone meets the requirements, not the intent. Maybe both the intent and the requirements should be spelled out more specifically but the players involved - large tech companies and legislators - don't have an interest in that.
- fhennig 7y ago
  Oh what a nice concept, "malicious compliance". It's nice that it takes into account the intent as well. I'd say the way google et al manage taxes is also malicious compliance. Technically everything is fine, but this level of taxation is clearly not the intention.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - fountainofage 7y ago
    ... well, it is, though, otherwise it wouldn't be possible. I think it's fairly obvious our tax system is designed to heavily reward those who have the means to pay experts to find the correct combination of steps to report revenue. edit: are to our
- asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
  Malicious compliance is when you comply to the letter with the intention of interfering, as with industrial safety rules. This is simply compliance to the letter without complying with the spirit -- maybe. If these positions are posted on their main job portal, then I would argue they are complying with the spirit of the law, but the law's letter is lagging behind technological reality. In any case, their act lacks the malicious component of malicious compliance. I.e. they aren't impeding some other process by the act of posting these job ads. It's not the same thing.
- peter_retief 7y ago
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
hotsauceror 7y ago
My dad was an IT manager back in the 1980s, for a Fortune 500 company. He said it was a common end-run around certain compliance requirements. Like, if they had a candidate that they knew they wanted to hire for a position, but that required a public posting to ensure that hiring, in general, was fair to everyone, they would post the opening in the classified section of the Wall Street Journal, knowing that no one in their right mind would look there for job postings.
- doublement 7y ago
  > ...no one in their right mind would look there for job postings I'm not sure if it's quite the same thing, but 6-7 years ago I saw an employment ad from a well-known tech company in the local Craigslist, with only a postal address listed and no phone or email. I sent a paper resume to the address. They got back to me after a long delay, when I'd already found other work.
  - hotsauceror 7y ago
    I actually got my first IT job by responding to an ad on Craigslist. At the time it seemed to me like the sort of “guerrilla marketing” that a company I’d want to work for would do. This was in 2008.
williesleg 7y ago
Of course, it's the law. Then they can say there's nobody to fill those positions and get more H1B slaves that just do the needful. In government it's how they steal taxpayer dollars. Ask Pelosi and Maxine.
rguzman 7y ago
this is one of my favorite (bc it is pretty harmless) cases of regulations failing spectacularly: the reason the companies do this is that it is a legal requirement for H1B visas. the idea, IIUC, is that before giving the job to an immigrant, the company should do a proper search to fill the position with an american candidate. what happens instead is that the companies make no additional effort to find american candidates after they've decided to sponsor the H1B (largely because that's just not how the hiring pipelines work), and instead everyone wastes time and effort "complying" with the requirements that law has for a proper search.
- belltaco 7y ago
  It isn't for H1B, it's for green cards.
downvoteme1 7y ago
Well what do people suggest that companies like Apple and google do in such a position. They have hired somebody on a work visa and want them to stay after their six years of visa are up. The only option is to file for a green card and one of the requirements of the green card labor process is to show an ad in a local newspaper. So they do what the law tells them to do.
- supercanuck 7y ago
  Hire an American.
  - downvoteme1 7y ago
    That attempt was does at the interview stage. Nobody wants to hire a foreigner and then spend 6k for their initial H1B, each subsequent renewal and then spend an additional 10k on the green card process.
    - HarryHirsch 7y ago
      Of course the company wants to spend money for the visa application and maybe the Green Card. The purpose behind all that is to hire employees that will not negotiate as hard for higher salaries because they want to immigrate and are not encumbered by student loans. Besides, while they are on H1-B they are chained to their jobs and cannot easily leave. The investment is easily recovered.
      - downvoteme1 7y ago
        You are counteracting your point. Yes an employee on H1 will not negotiate for higher salaries as they can be laid off and sent packing . However these ads are for green cards. So by filling their green card, Apple, Google and others are setting their employees free. Once they get a green card, they can effectively negotiate for higher salaries without risk of losing jobs and being sent back. If the intent was truly to fill positions with H1 then they should be laying off H1 employees every 3-5 years and rotate them with a fresh crop of H1 so that they never have to set their employees free.
peter_retief 7y ago
They basically want to hire foreigners that will be more vulnerable and work for less money, longer hours with no overtime, not unionised. Common practice in the UK and Australia as well
- jimbob45 7y ago
  This is my read on the situation too. The GOP stands to make a killing if they can persuade the voting population of this after the left has put all their eggs in the immigration basket.
  - lotsofpulp 7y ago
    The proper solution would be to untie green card and visas from employers, not to dissuade and disallow educated, productive people from immigrating to your country.
  - peter_retief 7y ago
    I have friends working in Australia and London and they were taken advantage of because they were from South AFrica and depended on their employer to keep their work visa, they could not resign and get another job.
jmccorm 7y ago
Another trick (not seen in this example) is when you already have a specific candidate you want to promote or hire, listing a job with the very specific and unique set of products and skills that few candidates could hope to match so exactly.
fileyfood500 7y ago
As an engineer on an Amazon sw team, I will comment that teams frequently have spots they struggle to fill (ie my team has 3 open spots on a 7 person team, and this isn’t uncommon). Many many candidates will fail the interviews, so we end up with perpetually open positions listed online. The idea that the print ad is a legal requirement makes sense, given that I wouldn’t expect to find candidates by printing the positions in the paper. American candidates have great advantages like speaking English fluently, and it’s great that there are so many initiatives to teach programming skills, but supply isn’t meeting demand.
- JustSomeNobody 7y ago
  Sounds like the interview process is what is really failing.
- mrep 7y ago
  > I will comment that teams frequently have spots they struggle to fill (ie my team has 3 open spots on a 7 person team, and this isn’t uncommon). Those perpetually open spots should tell you that you aren't paying enough. Just look at Amazon's pay compared to competitors like Google and Facebook [0] who pay more and it should be obvious why you are struggling to hire people. Start offering higher wages than them and watch as all those positions magically fill up. [0]: https://www.levels.fyi/SE/Amazon/Google/Facebook https://www.levels.fyi/SE/Amazon/Google/Facebook
zubairq 7y ago
I worked in tech recruitment for many years. This article is correct, as often the candidate is already chosen but they still have to say they looked on the open market. There is also another case though where sometimes they don’t intend at all to find someone to fill a position so that they can say it is really hard to find someone, which is for other poluitical or personal gain. I will also say that usually the job adverts are not so badly written as the article suggests. Usually they even interview the candidates and then say none of them were suitable, even if the candidates were a good fit
- zubairq 7y ago
  Good to see my previous comment downvoted. It shows that the truth of hiring is so unbelievable that I needed to be downvoted
  - zubairq 7y ago
    I love the downvoters! Hiding behind their screens instead of being able to engage in conversation ;)
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
shadowgovt 7y ago
Are they doing this because the jobs are already advertised on the company website and if a job can be filled by an H-1B applicant and an American they still have to post the print ad? The abbreviated print and post address makes sense if they're just complying with a law that's redundant to the job posting system they already offer on the website.
aasasd 7y ago
So, if I understand the ads pretty easily, then I'm apparently already a better fit for the job than the tweet author?
iamjono 7y ago
I am from NZ and currently live in Canada. My US “employer” has tried for a long time, years in fact, to find a senior engineer with the speciality I work in. I’ve worked in this speciality around the world, and am well versed in what it takes to get temporary and permanent work visas in several different countries... What Apple and Google etc are doing, there’s nothing to see here. This is basically click bait. However what is more of note, is that while the supply of top end, skilled and speciality software engineers is ridiculously constrained in the US, if you’re not one of the big guys like Google and Apple, youre pretty screwed. Either train more highly skilled software engineers, or allow more from over the borders and stop the stupid rhetoric about stealing jobs from Americans.
geofft 7y ago
This post is inaccurate in two ways. One, these ads are mandated by law. Even if you are hiring people through normal modern channels like online ads, you must legally show that you placed a newspaper ad because the law is old and expects old-fashioned ads. Obviously they don't want candidates through this pipeline but that hardly means they don't want candidates! Two, this legal requirement is for green cards / permanent residency, for a candidate already hired via H-1B or equivalent - and a green card allows immigrants to move jobs and otherwise demand a genuine market rate just as if they had generations of American blood. I don't think this tweet was intended to be nativist propaganda - replies make it sound like he was just ill-informed - but it's still nativist propaganda.
- sweis 7y ago
  You are right. I was ill-informed. This is for green cards. My intent is opposite of nativist propaganda. I think the regulations are silly and companies are minimally complying with them.
gumby 7y ago
Why is this a "Silicon Valley" thing? I first saw these green card ads 30 years ago.
geebee 7y ago
A law firm came under fire a couple years ago for doing a presentation on how to comply with the requirements for searching for a US citizen n a way that ensures you don’t end up succeeding. Anyone remember the link?
zenexer 7y ago
The tweet has been deleted, but to preserve the context, here’s the original, with a screenshot of the text as well: https://imgur.com/gallery/wbE6zF7 https://imgur.com/gallery/wbE6zF7

89 points by davidgerard 7y ago

A very long time ago, I applied to collect benefits for what is now called “Employment insurance” in the Socialist Republic of Kanuckistan. In those days, you went in person to a drab office located inside a monumental Government building designed in Brutalist style. Besides making the application, you could also look for jobs: There was a physical job board with little cards posted on it. I mentioned an ad I saw for a job in my field, and the civil servant helping me said, “Don’t bother. They already have someone they want to hire from overseas, and they’re required to post an advertisement here for 90 days.” (I may misremember the exact duration.) The agent told me that anybody who applied would have a long delay before getting an interview, long delays trying to follow up or even get an answer about how the interview went, and in the end, they wouldn’t hire anybody local regardless of experience or expertise. I complained that this was clearly gaming the system, and the agent shrugged: “If you can’t get another job just as good, come back and complain then.” For me in my field, that was certainly a fine answer. But for other fields, maybe not.

Fodloot 7y ago

Ah,a printed ad, that brings back some memories. The years have gone by...

lotsofpulp 7y ago

Is this accurate? According to this person, it's not for faking lack of candidates in order to secure an H1B, but rather for the green card process: https://twitter.com/sanaerosen/status/1208389683132030978 https://twitter.com/sanaerosen/status/1208389683132030978

volfied 7y ago
They are right. H1B is a temporary visa that you can get with a company sponsor pretty easily. You get a H1B for 3 years, and you can renew it once for another 3. Within those 6 years, if the company wants to retain you and get you a green card, they need to prove that "they looked, but couldn't find an eligible American" to replace you. Hence these ads with overly specialized position descriptions.
- klipt 7y ago
  > you can get with a company sponsor pretty easily Not very easily these days. There's a yearly limit on H1-B visas, and more applications than visas, so they're assigned by lottery. For 2019 there was only a 32% chance of selection: https://www.immi-usa.com/h1b-lottery-2016-results-chances-process/ https://www.immi-usa.com/h1b-lottery-2016-results-chances-pr...
sweis 7y ago
I think you’re right. It’s for green cards and E visas.

mensetmanusman 7y ago

Posting these is a legal requirement. I wonder how things would change if America had essentially open borders for highly skilled workers.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
coldtea 7y ago
>I wonder how things would change if America had essentially open borders for highly skilled workers. Probably lower wages for programmers born in America, as highly skilled workers from an 8 billion pool of people abroad would flood the market.
- lotsofpulp 7y ago
  Or the US would gain a population of highly productive people who can further technological advances which would induce demand for high skilled labor at a faster rate than supply would lower the price point. I haven’t heard of a region complaining about an influx of educated people. I commonly hear about regions complaining about brain drains though.
  - Mountain_Skies 7y ago
    And the rest of the world would experience brain drain, further widening the global inequality gap. But hey, some corporations in the United States get higher stock prices. The rest of the planet should be ok with that. The planet exists to prop up the US tech industry.
    - lotsofpulp 7y ago
      That’s a greater philosophical question of who is entitled to what in this world, and it always comes down to might makes right. Taken to the extremes, the only “fair” solution is a one world country with redistribution taxes, but that’s just now how people work. There’s significant brain drain going on within the US, and stopping the free movement of people is a solution, but in the long run it’s not going to be sufficient.

imgabe 7y ago

Funny how abbreviating words by removing vowels - very common in newspaper ads where you pay by the letter - is now considered "incoherent" and must be some kind of sinister obfuscation.

sweis 7y ago
OP here. Yes, Apple is certainly saving a bundle on classified ads in the free community paper with circulation of 6,000. These ads are just to go through the motions to get someone a visa. They don’t actually want anyone to reply to the ad. That’s why they have mailing addresses in the ad instead of email addresses or URLs.
- imgabe 7y ago
  Well, as some other people pointed out, it's for a green card, not a visa. Posting an ad in the local paper is likely a legal requirement to go through the process. So, yeah, why would they spend any more on doing it than necessary? But if you actually are old enough to have looked for jobs or anything else in a physical newspaper, that kind of writing is typical of want ads in the classifieds. It's not some special thing Apple is doing to prevent people from understanding the ad. Almost every ad that size is written like that.
  - SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
    I definitely do get the impression that a lot of people expect Apple to take out a full page ad in the NYT or something.
- whoopdedo 7y ago
  What would happen if someone replied though?
  - klipt 7y ago
    The large FANG companies are always hiring. If you can pass their interviews, you would probably get an offer for, if not exactly the same team, a similar position in another team with open headcount.

dublinben 7y ago

Non-javascript mirror: https://nitter.net/sweis/status/1208253229617709056#m https://nitter.net/sweis/status/1208253229617709056#m

caseysoftware 7y ago

Yes, placing a newspaper ad is a requirement. I think the primary criticisms are the incomprehensible ad and the selection of newspapers itself. This is normally called Malicious Compliance - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malicious_compliance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malicious_compliance - where someone meets the requirements, not the intent. Maybe both the intent and the requirements should be spelled out more specifically but the players involved - large tech companies and legislators - don't have an interest in that.

fhennig 7y ago
Oh what a nice concept, "malicious compliance". It's nice that it takes into account the intent as well. I'd say the way google et al manage taxes is also malicious compliance. Technically everything is fine, but this level of taxation is clearly not the intention.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- fountainofage 7y ago
  ... well, it is, though, otherwise it wouldn't be possible. I think it's fairly obvious our tax system is designed to heavily reward those who have the means to pay experts to find the correct combination of steps to report revenue. edit: are to our
asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
Malicious compliance is when you comply to the letter with the intention of interfering, as with industrial safety rules. This is simply compliance to the letter without complying with the spirit -- maybe. If these positions are posted on their main job portal, then I would argue they are complying with the spirit of the law, but the law's letter is lagging behind technological reality. In any case, their act lacks the malicious component of malicious compliance. I.e. they aren't impeding some other process by the act of posting these job ads. It's not the same thing.
peter_retief 7y ago

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

hotsauceror 7y ago

My dad was an IT manager back in the 1980s, for a Fortune 500 company. He said it was a common end-run around certain compliance requirements. Like, if they had a candidate that they knew they wanted to hire for a position, but that required a public posting to ensure that hiring, in general, was fair to everyone, they would post the opening in the classified section of the Wall Street Journal, knowing that no one in their right mind would look there for job postings.

doublement 7y ago
> ...no one in their right mind would look there for job postings I'm not sure if it's quite the same thing, but 6-7 years ago I saw an employment ad from a well-known tech company in the local Craigslist, with only a postal address listed and no phone or email. I sent a paper resume to the address. They got back to me after a long delay, when I'd already found other work.
- hotsauceror 7y ago
  I actually got my first IT job by responding to an ad on Craigslist. At the time it seemed to me like the sort of “guerrilla marketing” that a company I’d want to work for would do. This was in 2008.

williesleg 7y ago

Of course, it's the law. Then they can say there's nobody to fill those positions and get more H1B slaves that just do the needful. In government it's how they steal taxpayer dollars. Ask Pelosi and Maxine.

rguzman 7y ago

this is one of my favorite (bc it is pretty harmless) cases of regulations failing spectacularly: the reason the companies do this is that it is a legal requirement for H1B visas. the idea, IIUC, is that before giving the job to an immigrant, the company should do a proper search to fill the position with an american candidate. what happens instead is that the companies make no additional effort to find american candidates after they've decided to sponsor the H1B (largely because that's just not how the hiring pipelines work), and instead everyone wastes time and effort "complying" with the requirements that law has for a proper search.

belltaco 7y ago
It isn't for H1B, it's for green cards.

downvoteme1 7y ago

Well what do people suggest that companies like Apple and google do in such a position. They have hired somebody on a work visa and want them to stay after their six years of visa are up. The only option is to file for a green card and one of the requirements of the green card labor process is to show an ad in a local newspaper. So they do what the law tells them to do.

supercanuck 7y ago
Hire an American.
- downvoteme1 7y ago
  That attempt was does at the interview stage. Nobody wants to hire a foreigner and then spend 6k for their initial H1B, each subsequent renewal and then spend an additional 10k on the green card process.
  - HarryHirsch 7y ago
    Of course the company wants to spend money for the visa application and maybe the Green Card. The purpose behind all that is to hire employees that will not negotiate as hard for higher salaries because they want to immigrate and are not encumbered by student loans. Besides, while they are on H1-B they are chained to their jobs and cannot easily leave. The investment is easily recovered.
    - downvoteme1 7y ago
      You are counteracting your point. Yes an employee on H1 will not negotiate for higher salaries as they can be laid off and sent packing . However these ads are for green cards. So by filling their green card, Apple, Google and others are setting their employees free. Once they get a green card, they can effectively negotiate for higher salaries without risk of losing jobs and being sent back. If the intent was truly to fill positions with H1 then they should be laying off H1 employees every 3-5 years and rotate them with a fresh crop of H1 so that they never have to set their employees free.

peter_retief 7y ago

They basically want to hire foreigners that will be more vulnerable and work for less money, longer hours with no overtime, not unionised. Common practice in the UK and Australia as well

jimbob45 7y ago
This is my read on the situation too. The GOP stands to make a killing if they can persuade the voting population of this after the left has put all their eggs in the immigration basket.
- lotsofpulp 7y ago
  The proper solution would be to untie green card and visas from employers, not to dissuade and disallow educated, productive people from immigrating to your country.
- peter_retief 7y ago
  I have friends working in Australia and London and they were taken advantage of because they were from South AFrica and depended on their employer to keep their work visa, they could not resign and get another job.

jmccorm 7y ago

Another trick (not seen in this example) is when you already have a specific candidate you want to promote or hire, listing a job with the very specific and unique set of products and skills that few candidates could hope to match so exactly.

fileyfood500 7y ago

As an engineer on an Amazon sw team, I will comment that teams frequently have spots they struggle to fill (ie my team has 3 open spots on a 7 person team, and this isn’t uncommon). Many many candidates will fail the interviews, so we end up with perpetually open positions listed online. The idea that the print ad is a legal requirement makes sense, given that I wouldn’t expect to find candidates by printing the positions in the paper. American candidates have great advantages like speaking English fluently, and it’s great that there are so many initiatives to teach programming skills, but supply isn’t meeting demand.

JustSomeNobody 7y ago
Sounds like the interview process is what is really failing.
mrep 7y ago
> I will comment that teams frequently have spots they struggle to fill (ie my team has 3 open spots on a 7 person team, and this isn’t uncommon). Those perpetually open spots should tell you that you aren't paying enough. Just look at Amazon's pay compared to competitors like Google and Facebook [0] who pay more and it should be obvious why you are struggling to hire people. Start offering higher wages than them and watch as all those positions magically fill up. [0]: https://www.levels.fyi/SE/Amazon/Google/Facebook https://www.levels.fyi/SE/Amazon/Google/Facebook

zubairq 7y ago

I worked in tech recruitment for many years. This article is correct, as often the candidate is already chosen but they still have to say they looked on the open market. There is also another case though where sometimes they don’t intend at all to find someone to fill a position so that they can say it is really hard to find someone, which is for other poluitical or personal gain. I will also say that usually the job adverts are not so badly written as the article suggests. Usually they even interview the candidates and then say none of them were suitable, even if the candidates were a good fit

zubairq 7y ago
Good to see my previous comment downvoted. It shows that the truth of hiring is so unbelievable that I needed to be downvoted
- zubairq 7y ago
  I love the downvoters! Hiding behind their screens instead of being able to engage in conversation ;)

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

shadowgovt 7y ago

Are they doing this because the jobs are already advertised on the company website and if a job can be filled by an H-1B applicant and an American they still have to post the print ad? The abbreviated print and post address makes sense if they're just complying with a law that's redundant to the job posting system they already offer on the website.

aasasd 7y ago

So, if I understand the ads pretty easily, then I'm apparently already a better fit for the job than the tweet author?

iamjono 7y ago

I am from NZ and currently live in Canada. My US “employer” has tried for a long time, years in fact, to find a senior engineer with the speciality I work in. I’ve worked in this speciality around the world, and am well versed in what it takes to get temporary and permanent work visas in several different countries... What Apple and Google etc are doing, there’s nothing to see here. This is basically click bait. However what is more of note, is that while the supply of top end, skilled and speciality software engineers is ridiculously constrained in the US, if you’re not one of the big guys like Google and Apple, youre pretty screwed. Either train more highly skilled software engineers, or allow more from over the borders and stop the stupid rhetoric about stealing jobs from Americans.

geofft 7y ago

This post is inaccurate in two ways. One, these ads are mandated by law. Even if you are hiring people through normal modern channels like online ads, you must legally show that you placed a newspaper ad because the law is old and expects old-fashioned ads. Obviously they don't want candidates through this pipeline but that hardly means they don't want candidates! Two, this legal requirement is for green cards / permanent residency, for a candidate already hired via H-1B or equivalent - and a green card allows immigrants to move jobs and otherwise demand a genuine market rate just as if they had generations of American blood. I don't think this tweet was intended to be nativist propaganda - replies make it sound like he was just ill-informed - but it's still nativist propaganda.

sweis 7y ago
You are right. I was ill-informed. This is for green cards. My intent is opposite of nativist propaganda. I think the regulations are silly and companies are minimally complying with them.

gumby 7y ago

Why is this a "Silicon Valley" thing? I first saw these green card ads 30 years ago.

geebee 7y ago

A law firm came under fire a couple years ago for doing a presentation on how to comply with the requirements for searching for a US citizen n a way that ensures you don’t end up succeeding. Anyone remember the link?

zenexer 7y ago

The tweet has been deleted, but to preserve the context, here’s the original, with a screenshot of the text as well: https://imgur.com/gallery/wbE6zF7 https://imgur.com/gallery/wbE6zF7