11 ms·

Tech companies say they can’t find good employees – companies may be the problem

72 points by lladnar 6y ago

annoyingnoob 6y ago
Can confirm. Been through a few 'adversarial' interview processes - if that is what it is like to work with you then no thank you. I don't want to report to someone in another city that I never even see.
- hinkley 6y ago
  I have found myself having this inner monologue about the scary implications of the way the question was asked or what question was asked quite a few times. I wouldn't say I've ever 'thrown' an interview (save maybe once), but I've certainly 'gotten through' a few after I started to wonder if I'd made a huge mistake showing up today.
908B64B197 6y ago
I don't know what they are whining about: I've never had any issue finding talent in this industry. Part of that is making sure the compensation is among the highest for the position, not simply in the "local market" or whatever recruiting jargon defines it these days, but worldwide (because in this century talent is global and so are your competitors). Then all you have to do is screen a little, to make sure you don't hire one of the 199 out of 200 applicants that can't program. [0] For new grads, it's possible to significantly reduce the noise by going to a CS program you trust and getting graduates from there to interview. [0] https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/
- jfim 6y ago
  What talent are you looking for, though? FAANG companies and many companies are okay with generalists (eg. can code on a whiteboard), but if you're looking for specialist expertise (eg. computer vision, control engineering, operations research) it's a lot trickier and not always only a matter of compensation.
  - OldHand2018 6y ago
    > but if you're looking for specialist expertise (eg. computer vision, control engineering, operations research) it's a lot trickier and not always only a matter of compensation. It's not tricky at all. Those are chicken/egg jobs - can't get the job without experience; can't get the experience without the job. Hire some people and train them. They won't all work out, but the ones that do will be worth it.
    - jfim 6y ago
      That's definitely doable at big corporations, which is why they can afford to hire generalists and assign them somewhere, train them, and reassign them somewhere else in the company if they don't pan out. For smaller companies, any given hire has an outsized impact, there's a more limited budget for hiring, there might not be the resources available to train a new hire from scratch for hard to train skills, and there might not be enough "bench space" for people that don't pan out. Many companies don't really need this kind of specialist expertise though. I wouldn't be surprised if hiring is much harder in the robotics industry than in, say, consumer mobile app development.
      - spaced-out 6y ago
        This is a a lot of words to say running a tech company is hard. Big-Ns are willing to pay people with specialized skills north of 500K, if you want those skills pay up, otherwise find someone who you can pay less that will grow into the role. Get more money from your investors. If you can't do any of those, then I guess you can't afford to run your business. In my experience in startups, the executive suite is full of people who imagine themselves a future Gates/Jobs/Musk/etc... Well, being that successful is hard.
      - webmaven 6y ago
        > For smaller companies, any given hire has an outsized impact, there's a more limited budget for hiring, there might not be the resources available to train a new hire from scratch for hard to train skills, and there might not be enough "bench space" for people that don't pan out. So prioritize finding intrinsically motivated learners instead of specific skills, and make sure you have a budget for any learning resources (books, courses, etc.) they would need to make rapid progress. Also, make sure that writing/improving documentation to help the next hire is one of their main responsibilities (this demonstrates what they are learning, gives senior folks the opportunity to correct mistakes & misunderstandings, selects for good communication skills, improves your onboarding, etc.)
- hinkley 6y ago
  Have you done any experiments to see if you have to weed out more people when you post a low range versus a high? Or do people think to themselves, "Well, I'm not qualified to do a job that's paying 40% above market. They want someone serious."
  - giantg2 6y ago
    I always think I'm unqualified for everything. I mean, just look at the "entry level" positions that want 5 years experience in 5 different technologies with a laundry list of required talents.
  - 908B64B197 6y ago
    > Have you done any experiments to see if you have to weed out more people when you post a low range versus a high? It's the opposite. The quality of the resumes simply went up. Sure there are more of them to filter out but the great ones stand out.
- patrakov 6y ago
  > Part of that is making sure the compensation is among the highest for the position I had the opposite experience back in 2015. We tried to find (locally) a C programmer with good understanding of Linux and network protocols, and offered approximately what we thought to be a fair market salary. The initial attempt has attracted various people like fresh graduates, and also (strangely) a disproportionate amount of bank employees - not sure why, our application has nothing to do with finances. We could not find a candidate that was good enough, but there were several who "almost" did it. So the financial director approved republishing the vacancy with slightly modified requirements and 2x the salary. Result: all we got was some former developers, now managers. And the flow of talented students has completely stopped. We were able to fill that vacancy by re-offering it to a person who clearly had the relevant skills but applied to a different position. When asked why he didn't apply as a C programmer, high salary and consequently an expectation of very high demands were explicitly named as a demotivating factor.
  - flukus 6y ago
    As someone who is probably much closer to the bank employees (assuming you mean developers from banks) but has considered transitioning to something like c at various times, the problem is there are no intermediate roles, everyone either want a c expert with years of commercial experience. To make the transition the only option seems to be to go for junior roles, which disregards the decades of experience that is relevant regardless of the language, and those junior roles are pretty few and far between too. The industry expects a constant supply of senior experienced devs but completely avoids any sort of training and development. It can somewhat work if you're in a mainstream field but it won't for anything specialized, which C is in my area.
  - 908B64B197 6y ago
    This could be the local market in which you operate or the timing when you advertised the position. College hiring is cyclical and the earlier you get to campus, the better. If you re-advertise the same position, especially after you interviewed a few fresh grads from the same university (who will talk to one another) and flunked them all, it's not surprising nobody bothered to apply. Also, keep in mind that it's not uncommon for college students to be offered full time position during their last internship (so 1+ year before they graduate). So by the time you try to hire new grads, some of the best are effectively already out of your local market.
shrubble 6y ago
I was shocked at the accuracy of the Wonderlic test, a timed 12 minute test with 50 questions (not always expected to be able to finish them) in terms of how it correlated with other tests that I took in the past. Not sure that layer after layer of tests would necessarily be better than Wonderlic plus a short interview in person to get a read on personality fit.
cheriot 6y ago
The whole article is about this study if anyone wants to skip to the source: https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3368089.3409712 https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3368089.3409712 tldr; More students solved the problem when there was no proctor in the room. The effect was especially pronounced with women.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
manfredo 6y ago
First a note on how to read the relevant study. The link to the study in the WSJ article is paywalled. This is a non-paywalled link [1] is the results [2]. 22 applicants solved a problem alone, 26 with a proctor present. Without the proctor present about 2/3rds passed, with the proctor present 1/2 passed. Using score >= 2 as "passing", 12 out of 16 men passed in private and 4 out of 4 women. 11 our of 20 men passed with the proctor, and 0 out of 6 women. The methodology looks robust, but especially with the claims with respect to gender I'd want to see a sample size larger than the single digits before making any generalizations. With that aside, my broader thoughts on tech interview processes: Companies want an interview process that are, - Successfully distinguishes between people that have the knowledge and abilities required to perform the job. - Has systems on accountability, consistency. - Is relatively easy to train employees to administer the interview. - Has a relatively low time-commitment for everyone involved, both interviewer and candidate. In reality, though, there are tradeoffs between each of these points. For instance, using a set question bank improves consistency and accountability. Rubrics can be more explicitly defined, and bias limited. But it means candidates can google for questions beforehand. This was a salient issue when I worked at Dropbox, there were only about a dozen technical. interview questions for a 2,500+ person company. Having developers come up with their own unique question helps mitigate this, but reduces accountability. Likewise, I've had some novel interview processes that more closely approximate real working conditions. One company's interview was conducted over git-hub. It was asynchronous, with tasks spread out over a week. After building the first solution, the interview came back with further feature requests and comments on the first iteration. This tested the candidate's ability to refactor existing solutions to meet changing tasks, and the ability to integrate feedback. These are things that are rarely captured by whiteboard interviews, but are arguably some of the more important skills in software development. But on the flip side, it was much more time-consuming in aggregate than 4 hour-long interviews. No one interview process has all the advantages. I think a lot of companies settle into a pattern of 1 or 2 remote technical screens followed by a circuit 3-4 hour-long interviews because it's logistically robust. It's a format candidates are familiar with. It's easy to train new employees to conduct these interviews, and there's broad enough set of people participating that one biased signal isn't going to be decisive. > Companies could also drop problem-solving tests as currently offered and instead ask candidates to spend five minutes explaining how they would perform a particular job-related task, Dr. Parnin says. Focusing on communication skills in this way, Dr. Parnin says, can reveal how a candidate thinks. But do we want to hire the candidate that can talk about high level ideas for five minutes in a convincing manner, but can't code Fizz Buzz? Or a binary search? I get that some people might stumble due to pressure, but at the end of the day if you need some mechanism to determine if the candidate has the required skills or not. And administering a test is an effective way of doing this. This isn't the first time articles like these have been written. X group is disadvantaged by problem-solving tests, so don't use said tests. But how then do you determine whether or not the candidate has the required skills? Usually whatever supplants the technical interviews are also subject to unfairness: referrals, recruiting alumni from specific universities or companies. While far from perfect, I still have trouble seeing what could replace problem-based tasks as a means of demonstrating skills. 1. http://chrisparnin.me/pdf/stress_FSE_20.pdf http://chrisparnin.me/pdf/stress_FSE_20.pdf 2. https://imgur.com/EIiofkQ https://imgur.com/EIiofkQ
xmunoz 6y ago
I think the problem is deeper than whiteboard interviews. Too few companies are willing to invest in junior talent. Netflix famously only hires senior-level engineers, and Facebook has recently offloaded many of their internships to Major League Hacking [1], an exploitative outsourcing platform for unpaid, entry-level labor from developing countries [2]. This is entirely a problem of the tech industry's making. [1] https://news.mlh.io/introducing-the-mlh-fellowship-externship-09-10-2020 https://news.mlh.io/introducing-the-mlh-fellowship-externshi... [2] A close friend who was formerly employed by MLH
- tabtab 6y ago
  Re: "an exploitative outsourcing platform for unpaid, entry-level labor from developing countries..." It hasn't quite happened yet, but the chance of IT going the way of factory workers in the future seems quite high. It's labor intensive but much of it can be done anywhere in the world. If you are lucky, you can be a liaison between management and constantly shifting overseas techies.
  - flukus 6y ago
    > It hasn't quite happened yet This is certainly not for lack of trying. Outsourcing was much more common 10-20 years ago than it is today but a combination of wage growth in outsourced countries and terrible quality has just about seen the end of the practice.
  - gumby 6y ago
    In Japan, programming / software development has always been a blue collar job.
    - tabtab 6y ago
      Societal status aside, how does it pay?
      - redis_mlc 6y ago
        Very low - possibly the lowest of any engineering job, since software is not considered engineering in Japan. Also, most employees have to buy their own notebook computers, so you see Windows thickies from the 90s. Source: worked in Tokyo doing field work for 2 months at a major corporation.
leet_thow 6y ago
Can confirm. I'm a senior engineer with a great track record at early stage startups as well as publicly traded companies. I'm staying put with my current employer because I refuse to put up with hiring process horseshit.
- giantg2 6y ago
  I'm staying with my employer because I don't see any other options.
- mclightning 6y ago
  Most other commenters seem to think Junior devs are failing interviews. But I think they're missing the point. I am in a similar position as you. I have 15+ years of experience. Built novel computer vision algorithms, entirely new barcode solutions. Built more 10 games in 5 different engines, so on and on. Yet I fail on interviews. Honestly, we are all nerds who like to think deeply about problems. I think the job requires to do so as well. Yet, all these interviews are asking memorised, quick-shot answers. But I gave up. I started practising for interviews on HackerRank.... Because I want to move to US, from Europe.
tabtab 6y ago
Experience in the specific technology combinations a particular organization wants is usually the "bottleneck", not raw education. Companies don't want to wait for nor pay for the learning curve: they want plug-and-play employees with paid hands-on experience matching their tools. But that's not realistic because the combinations they want are too specific. A person having a thousand college degrees won't fit the way companies frame their expectations. Note that I'm mostly talking about non-IT companies hiring IT workers. An IT-centric company like Google or Microsoft may take a different angle.
- giantg2 6y ago
  And don't forget that once they use you up, they are perfectly fine throwing you away.
musicale 6y ago
Absolutely. Whiteboard interviews, as practiced by FAANG etc., are largely useless. I've seen interviewers pose problems that took the likes of Dijkstra and Knuth years to solve the first time, yet somehow they expect candidates to solve two of them in 45 minutes. Unless you are actually Dijkstra reborn or Knuth you're unlikely to solve a problem of this type quickly unless you've seen it, or something very close to it, before. So it's essentially selecting for some combination of how recently you took an algorithms course or qualifying exam, how comprehensive that course of study was, how much experience and success you have had in "programming" (aka algorithm puzzle) competitions, how much grinding you've done on hackerrank/leetcode/etc., and pure luck. That being said, I suppose much of the content of medical boards or the bar exam has little to do with the actual practice of medicine or law, so I guess computing is not alone in terms of annoying hoops it makes people jump through. I just wish that algorithms qualifying exams were a standard thing that you could pass outside of a job interview and be done with, rather than something you have to suffer through repeatedly.
- paconbork 6y ago
  One thing these types of interviews do though is select for people who put in the time and effort to learn/relearn/apply these algorithms. Perhaps that correlates with other desirable traits
  - giantg2 6y ago
    Or the smart ones will go do something more lucrative instead of putting in time an effort for a lottery ticket interview. I have to spend years in college, years in industry, and then spend a bunch of free time learning random test questions that I might never apply in the real world... why not just go to med school or get a securities license?
    - mechEpleb 6y ago
      Because you are already stuck on the path you picked and have no choice
musicale 6y ago
Companies are always willing do do anything in their power to attract good employees, short of raising wages.
mesozoic 6y ago
I assure you not paying enough is the problem.
syntheticcorp 6y ago
Ironically? the code in the stock photo being written on the whiteboard contains a SQL injection vulnerability.
- tfvlrue 6y ago
  Ha, first thing I noticed before even reading the article. Can't decide whether it's just a coincidence or a subtle commentary (leaning towards the former).
mattkrause 6y ago
They're not looking very hard. Universities have departments full of grad students and postdocs that can code and analyze data: programming and ML are increasingly common tools in neuroscience, biology, psychology and a number of other fields. However, these people are mostly invisible to tech recruiters. I hear from one or two a year and I think that's on the high end for my neuro department (having a CS degree also helps). It might take some work to find a way to make academic achievements 'legible' to industry, or to sell industry jobs to people, but whoever figures it out (besides Insight) is going to make a mint.
- AlphaSite 6y ago
  Programming isn’t really the same as engineering. Building high quality, maintainable, extensible, reliable code takes different skills than you learn in an academic environment. Where honestly none of that matters.
gamechangr 6y ago
I had a friend that was trying to lose weight and he said "I've tried everything, I mean everything you can think of, except diet and excerice". Companies will try everything,I mean everything you can think of, except increasing wages or training people.
- PurpleFoxy 6y ago
  They know this. They are just trying to fool the average person in to voting for a government which will increase immigration, remove employee protections and welfare.
  - AnimalMuppet 6y ago
    If an individual company is doing so, they are hurting themselves until they get the government policy changes. I doubt that they're that clever or thinking that long term. I think they're just being stupid.
    - webmaven 6y ago
      They are only hurting themselves if they aren't able to get enough H1Bs to suppress the cost of local labor. You can't take tales of woe over skilled worker shortages at face value.
neonate 6y ago
https://archive.is/53bI4 https://archive.is/53bI4
arwhatever 6y ago
I have to take the opportunity to hawk https://sievejobs.com https://sievejobs.com, a website that lets you essentially block contact from Hiring Managers regarding jobs that are not aligned with your profile data, with Interview Format + Content being primary bits of metadata. I'm hoping that the site can serve as a feedback mechanism to the industry at large regarding interview and employment practices that we Software Developers feel to be counterproductive.
mbrodersen 6y ago
They can’t find good programmers because they are not willing to pay the salaries required. Good programmers are actually quite rare.

72 points by lladnar 6y ago

Can confirm. Been through a few 'adversarial' interview processes - if that is what it is like to work with you then no thank you. I don't want to report to someone in another city that I never even see.

hinkley 6y ago
I have found myself having this inner monologue about the scary implications of the way the question was asked or what question was asked quite a few times. I wouldn't say I've ever 'thrown' an interview (save maybe once), but I've certainly 'gotten through' a few after I started to wonder if I'd made a huge mistake showing up today.

908B64B197 6y ago

I don't know what they are whining about: I've never had any issue finding talent in this industry. Part of that is making sure the compensation is among the highest for the position, not simply in the "local market" or whatever recruiting jargon defines it these days, but worldwide (because in this century talent is global and so are your competitors). Then all you have to do is screen a little, to make sure you don't hire one of the 199 out of 200 applicants that can't program. [0] For new grads, it's possible to significantly reduce the noise by going to a CS program you trust and getting graduates from there to interview. [0] https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/

jfim 6y ago
What talent are you looking for, though? FAANG companies and many companies are okay with generalists (eg. can code on a whiteboard), but if you're looking for specialist expertise (eg. computer vision, control engineering, operations research) it's a lot trickier and not always only a matter of compensation.
- OldHand2018 6y ago
  > but if you're looking for specialist expertise (eg. computer vision, control engineering, operations research) it's a lot trickier and not always only a matter of compensation. It's not tricky at all. Those are chicken/egg jobs - can't get the job without experience; can't get the experience without the job. Hire some people and train them. They won't all work out, but the ones that do will be worth it.
  - jfim 6y ago
    That's definitely doable at big corporations, which is why they can afford to hire generalists and assign them somewhere, train them, and reassign them somewhere else in the company if they don't pan out. For smaller companies, any given hire has an outsized impact, there's a more limited budget for hiring, there might not be the resources available to train a new hire from scratch for hard to train skills, and there might not be enough "bench space" for people that don't pan out. Many companies don't really need this kind of specialist expertise though. I wouldn't be surprised if hiring is much harder in the robotics industry than in, say, consumer mobile app development.
    - spaced-out 6y ago
      This is a a lot of words to say running a tech company is hard. Big-Ns are willing to pay people with specialized skills north of 500K, if you want those skills pay up, otherwise find someone who you can pay less that will grow into the role. Get more money from your investors. If you can't do any of those, then I guess you can't afford to run your business. In my experience in startups, the executive suite is full of people who imagine themselves a future Gates/Jobs/Musk/etc... Well, being that successful is hard.
    - webmaven 6y ago
      > For smaller companies, any given hire has an outsized impact, there's a more limited budget for hiring, there might not be the resources available to train a new hire from scratch for hard to train skills, and there might not be enough "bench space" for people that don't pan out. So prioritize finding intrinsically motivated learners instead of specific skills, and make sure you have a budget for any learning resources (books, courses, etc.) they would need to make rapid progress. Also, make sure that writing/improving documentation to help the next hire is one of their main responsibilities (this demonstrates what they are learning, gives senior folks the opportunity to correct mistakes & misunderstandings, selects for good communication skills, improves your onboarding, etc.)
hinkley 6y ago
Have you done any experiments to see if you have to weed out more people when you post a low range versus a high? Or do people think to themselves, "Well, I'm not qualified to do a job that's paying 40% above market. They want someone serious."
- giantg2 6y ago
  I always think I'm unqualified for everything. I mean, just look at the "entry level" positions that want 5 years experience in 5 different technologies with a laundry list of required talents.
- 908B64B197 6y ago
  > Have you done any experiments to see if you have to weed out more people when you post a low range versus a high? It's the opposite. The quality of the resumes simply went up. Sure there are more of them to filter out but the great ones stand out.
patrakov 6y ago
> Part of that is making sure the compensation is among the highest for the position I had the opposite experience back in 2015. We tried to find (locally) a C programmer with good understanding of Linux and network protocols, and offered approximately what we thought to be a fair market salary. The initial attempt has attracted various people like fresh graduates, and also (strangely) a disproportionate amount of bank employees - not sure why, our application has nothing to do with finances. We could not find a candidate that was good enough, but there were several who "almost" did it. So the financial director approved republishing the vacancy with slightly modified requirements and 2x the salary. Result: all we got was some former developers, now managers. And the flow of talented students has completely stopped. We were able to fill that vacancy by re-offering it to a person who clearly had the relevant skills but applied to a different position. When asked why he didn't apply as a C programmer, high salary and consequently an expectation of very high demands were explicitly named as a demotivating factor.
- flukus 6y ago
  As someone who is probably much closer to the bank employees (assuming you mean developers from banks) but has considered transitioning to something like c at various times, the problem is there are no intermediate roles, everyone either want a c expert with years of commercial experience. To make the transition the only option seems to be to go for junior roles, which disregards the decades of experience that is relevant regardless of the language, and those junior roles are pretty few and far between too. The industry expects a constant supply of senior experienced devs but completely avoids any sort of training and development. It can somewhat work if you're in a mainstream field but it won't for anything specialized, which C is in my area.
- 908B64B197 6y ago
  This could be the local market in which you operate or the timing when you advertised the position. College hiring is cyclical and the earlier you get to campus, the better. If you re-advertise the same position, especially after you interviewed a few fresh grads from the same university (who will talk to one another) and flunked them all, it's not surprising nobody bothered to apply. Also, keep in mind that it's not uncommon for college students to be offered full time position during their last internship (so 1+ year before they graduate). So by the time you try to hire new grads, some of the best are effectively already out of your local market.

shrubble 6y ago

I was shocked at the accuracy of the Wonderlic test, a timed 12 minute test with 50 questions (not always expected to be able to finish them) in terms of how it correlated with other tests that I took in the past. Not sure that layer after layer of tests would necessarily be better than Wonderlic plus a short interview in person to get a read on personality fit.

cheriot 6y ago

The whole article is about this study if anyone wants to skip to the source: https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3368089.3409712 https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3368089.3409712 tldr; More students solved the problem when there was no proctor in the room. The effect was especially pronounced with women.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

manfredo 6y ago

First a note on how to read the relevant study. The link to the study in the WSJ article is paywalled. This is a non-paywalled link [1] is the results [2]. 22 applicants solved a problem alone, 26 with a proctor present. Without the proctor present about 2/3rds passed, with the proctor present 1/2 passed. Using score >= 2 as "passing", 12 out of 16 men passed in private and 4 out of 4 women. 11 our of 20 men passed with the proctor, and 0 out of 6 women. The methodology looks robust, but especially with the claims with respect to gender I'd want to see a sample size larger than the single digits before making any generalizations. With that aside, my broader thoughts on tech interview processes: Companies want an interview process that are, - Successfully distinguishes between people that have the knowledge and abilities required to perform the job. - Has systems on accountability, consistency. - Is relatively easy to train employees to administer the interview. - Has a relatively low time-commitment for everyone involved, both interviewer and candidate. In reality, though, there are tradeoffs between each of these points. For instance, using a set question bank improves consistency and accountability. Rubrics can be more explicitly defined, and bias limited. But it means candidates can google for questions beforehand. This was a salient issue when I worked at Dropbox, there were only about a dozen technical. interview questions for a 2,500+ person company. Having developers come up with their own unique question helps mitigate this, but reduces accountability. Likewise, I've had some novel interview processes that more closely approximate real working conditions. One company's interview was conducted over git-hub. It was asynchronous, with tasks spread out over a week. After building the first solution, the interview came back with further feature requests and comments on the first iteration. This tested the candidate's ability to refactor existing solutions to meet changing tasks, and the ability to integrate feedback. These are things that are rarely captured by whiteboard interviews, but are arguably some of the more important skills in software development. But on the flip side, it was much more time-consuming in aggregate than 4 hour-long interviews. No one interview process has all the advantages. I think a lot of companies settle into a pattern of 1 or 2 remote technical screens followed by a circuit 3-4 hour-long interviews because it's logistically robust. It's a format candidates are familiar with. It's easy to train new employees to conduct these interviews, and there's broad enough set of people participating that one biased signal isn't going to be decisive. > Companies could also drop problem-solving tests as currently offered and instead ask candidates to spend five minutes explaining how they would perform a particular job-related task, Dr. Parnin says. Focusing on communication skills in this way, Dr. Parnin says, can reveal how a candidate thinks. But do we want to hire the candidate that can talk about high level ideas for five minutes in a convincing manner, but can't code Fizz Buzz? Or a binary search? I get that some people might stumble due to pressure, but at the end of the day if you need some mechanism to determine if the candidate has the required skills or not. And administering a test is an effective way of doing this. This isn't the first time articles like these have been written. X group is disadvantaged by problem-solving tests, so don't use said tests. But how then do you determine whether or not the candidate has the required skills? Usually whatever supplants the technical interviews are also subject to unfairness: referrals, recruiting alumni from specific universities or companies. While far from perfect, I still have trouble seeing what could replace problem-based tasks as a means of demonstrating skills. 1. http://chrisparnin.me/pdf/stress_FSE_20.pdf http://chrisparnin.me/pdf/stress_FSE_20.pdf 2. https://imgur.com/EIiofkQ https://imgur.com/EIiofkQ

xmunoz 6y ago

I think the problem is deeper than whiteboard interviews. Too few companies are willing to invest in junior talent. Netflix famously only hires senior-level engineers, and Facebook has recently offloaded many of their internships to Major League Hacking [1], an exploitative outsourcing platform for unpaid, entry-level labor from developing countries [2]. This is entirely a problem of the tech industry's making. [1] https://news.mlh.io/introducing-the-mlh-fellowship-externship-09-10-2020 https://news.mlh.io/introducing-the-mlh-fellowship-externshi... [2] A close friend who was formerly employed by MLH

tabtab 6y ago
Re: "an exploitative outsourcing platform for unpaid, entry-level labor from developing countries..." It hasn't quite happened yet, but the chance of IT going the way of factory workers in the future seems quite high. It's labor intensive but much of it can be done anywhere in the world. If you are lucky, you can be a liaison between management and constantly shifting overseas techies.
- flukus 6y ago
  > It hasn't quite happened yet This is certainly not for lack of trying. Outsourcing was much more common 10-20 years ago than it is today but a combination of wage growth in outsourced countries and terrible quality has just about seen the end of the practice.
- gumby 6y ago
  In Japan, programming / software development has always been a blue collar job.
  - tabtab 6y ago
    Societal status aside, how does it pay?
    - redis_mlc 6y ago
      Very low - possibly the lowest of any engineering job, since software is not considered engineering in Japan. Also, most employees have to buy their own notebook computers, so you see Windows thickies from the 90s. Source: worked in Tokyo doing field work for 2 months at a major corporation.

leet_thow 6y ago

Can confirm. I'm a senior engineer with a great track record at early stage startups as well as publicly traded companies. I'm staying put with my current employer because I refuse to put up with hiring process horseshit.

giantg2 6y ago
I'm staying with my employer because I don't see any other options.
mclightning 6y ago
Most other commenters seem to think Junior devs are failing interviews. But I think they're missing the point. I am in a similar position as you. I have 15+ years of experience. Built novel computer vision algorithms, entirely new barcode solutions. Built more 10 games in 5 different engines, so on and on. Yet I fail on interviews. Honestly, we are all nerds who like to think deeply about problems. I think the job requires to do so as well. Yet, all these interviews are asking memorised, quick-shot answers. But I gave up. I started practising for interviews on HackerRank.... Because I want to move to US, from Europe.

tabtab 6y ago

Experience in the specific technology combinations a particular organization wants is usually the "bottleneck", not raw education. Companies don't want to wait for nor pay for the learning curve: they want plug-and-play employees with paid hands-on experience matching their tools. But that's not realistic because the combinations they want are too specific. A person having a thousand college degrees won't fit the way companies frame their expectations. Note that I'm mostly talking about non-IT companies hiring IT workers. An IT-centric company like Google or Microsoft may take a different angle.

giantg2 6y ago
And don't forget that once they use you up, they are perfectly fine throwing you away.

musicale 6y ago

Absolutely. Whiteboard interviews, as practiced by FAANG etc., are largely useless. I've seen interviewers pose problems that took the likes of Dijkstra and Knuth years to solve the first time, yet somehow they expect candidates to solve two of them in 45 minutes. Unless you are actually Dijkstra reborn or Knuth you're unlikely to solve a problem of this type quickly unless you've seen it, or something very close to it, before. So it's essentially selecting for some combination of how recently you took an algorithms course or qualifying exam, how comprehensive that course of study was, how much experience and success you have had in "programming" (aka algorithm puzzle) competitions, how much grinding you've done on hackerrank/leetcode/etc., and pure luck. That being said, I suppose much of the content of medical boards or the bar exam has little to do with the actual practice of medicine or law, so I guess computing is not alone in terms of annoying hoops it makes people jump through. I just wish that algorithms qualifying exams were a standard thing that you could pass outside of a job interview and be done with, rather than something you have to suffer through repeatedly.

paconbork 6y ago
One thing these types of interviews do though is select for people who put in the time and effort to learn/relearn/apply these algorithms. Perhaps that correlates with other desirable traits
- giantg2 6y ago
  Or the smart ones will go do something more lucrative instead of putting in time an effort for a lottery ticket interview. I have to spend years in college, years in industry, and then spend a bunch of free time learning random test questions that I might never apply in the real world... why not just go to med school or get a securities license?
  - mechEpleb 6y ago
    Because you are already stuck on the path you picked and have no choice

musicale 6y ago

Companies are always willing do do anything in their power to attract good employees, short of raising wages.

mesozoic 6y ago

I assure you not paying enough is the problem.

syntheticcorp 6y ago

Ironically? the code in the stock photo being written on the whiteboard contains a SQL injection vulnerability.

tfvlrue 6y ago
Ha, first thing I noticed before even reading the article. Can't decide whether it's just a coincidence or a subtle commentary (leaning towards the former).

mattkrause 6y ago

They're not looking very hard. Universities have departments full of grad students and postdocs that can code and analyze data: programming and ML are increasingly common tools in neuroscience, biology, psychology and a number of other fields. However, these people are mostly invisible to tech recruiters. I hear from one or two a year and I think that's on the high end for my neuro department (having a CS degree also helps). It might take some work to find a way to make academic achievements 'legible' to industry, or to sell industry jobs to people, but whoever figures it out (besides Insight) is going to make a mint.

AlphaSite 6y ago
Programming isn’t really the same as engineering. Building high quality, maintainable, extensible, reliable code takes different skills than you learn in an academic environment. Where honestly none of that matters.

gamechangr 6y ago

I had a friend that was trying to lose weight and he said "I've tried everything, I mean everything you can think of, except diet and excerice". Companies will try everything,I mean everything you can think of, except increasing wages or training people.

PurpleFoxy 6y ago
They know this. They are just trying to fool the average person in to voting for a government which will increase immigration, remove employee protections and welfare.
- AnimalMuppet 6y ago
  If an individual company is doing so, they are hurting themselves until they get the government policy changes. I doubt that they're that clever or thinking that long term. I think they're just being stupid.
  - webmaven 6y ago
    They are only hurting themselves if they aren't able to get enough H1Bs to suppress the cost of local labor. You can't take tales of woe over skilled worker shortages at face value.

neonate 6y ago

https://archive.is/53bI4 https://archive.is/53bI4

arwhatever 6y ago

I have to take the opportunity to hawk https://sievejobs.com https://sievejobs.com, a website that lets you essentially block contact from Hiring Managers regarding jobs that are not aligned with your profile data, with Interview Format + Content being primary bits of metadata. I'm hoping that the site can serve as a feedback mechanism to the industry at large regarding interview and employment practices that we Software Developers feel to be counterproductive.

mbrodersen 6y ago

They can’t find good programmers because they are not willing to pay the salaries required. Good programmers are actually quite rare.