24 ms·

Note that I wouldn’t pass the listed minimum requirements

666 points by gone35 5y ago

DrNuke 5y ago
A new trend is experienced candidates now asking for tech specs or six-month Gantt plans before starting contact with any HR person, in that trying to by-pass most of the bs.
skunkworker 5y ago
One of the “minimum requirements” “ 8+ years of experience in one or more of the following areas: machine learning, recommendation systems, pattern recognition, NLP, data mining, or artificial intelligence”
- yangminded 5y ago
  That's entirely feasible. Mind that 8 years ago was 2013 and systems like the recommendation system from Amazon was already online. Also it only specifies machine learning, pattern recognition, NLP etc - all of which are active research fields for far more then 20 years already. It's not like they are asking for more than 8 years of experience in Pytorch.
  - user-the-name 5y ago
    Sure, it's feasible on its own. But the position is for working on graphics rendering, a completely unrelated field. Are you supposed to have had two careers at the same time, working eight years in AI while also working all that same time on graphics?
    - mkr-hn 5y ago
      There's a lot of research on using AI/ML with graphics. I've seen demos people have done using it to create HD remasters of shows originally in SD on tape or too-small film, or where there wasn't much interest from IP owners in doing it. Or where, once you expanded sideways, there was too much crew or rough set to use it. Since Facebook is doing VR, and this position is about VR, I can easily see the potential of using ML to make the most of sketchy/low-quality models and textures people might want to use in worlds. Imagine if you could upload a rough model, describe what you want, and get it made for you.
      - seoaeu 5y ago
        Yeah, but back in 2013? Most of what you're talking about is much more recent. To have 8 years of AI/ML expertise already while also previously being a graphics expert requires a very improbable career progression
      - Scarblac 5y ago
        Yes, but _on mobile_? With details like "graphics hardware and drivers on mobile platforms" and "the mobile graphics pipeline and interaction across display and optics". I mean obviously a lot of people work in that area but the overlap with AI/ML simultaneously seems very small, for 8+ years in one person. And of course if you're in research then it's hard to tick boxes like "leading consumer-based projects with industry-wide impact" and "mentoring/influencing senior engineers across organizations" and so on.
        TeMPOraL 5y ago
        [snip; not enough coffee]
        user-the-name 5y ago
        Try re-reading the post you responded to.
  - Aerroon 5y ago
    But how many people are also going to be "highly experienced in the mobile graphics pipeline"? Isn't that also about ~10 years old?
    - marcinzm 5y ago
      When you're willing to pay a million+ a year you just need a couple people.
      - thrill 5y ago
        When you are willing to pay a million+ a year you already know who you want to hire.
  - dalbasal 5y ago
    Feasible, but in a naive sense. much sk The number of people working in "those areas," defined narrowly, is much bigger than it was eight years ago. That makes this a big requirement. People who are skilled, deep or enthusiastic enough to make that 8 years experience better than 4 are not likely to just show up, while also ticking the other boxes. Narrowing the pool past a certain point is a different type of problem. In any case, these aren't to be taken to literally.
- sbarre 5y ago
  While I agree the overall minimum requirements for this job are a bit silly, most (all?) of those topics have been around for more than 8 years, in some shape or form.
  - viraptor 5y ago
    For NLP, the famous Alice is from 1995 and ELIZA is from 1960s. You can easily have 8 years of experience in this area.
    - kevinmchugh 5y ago
      Eliza is like 8 if conditions. It's a parlor trick
      - viraptor 5y ago
        It doesn't matter how simple it was. For its time, that was the state of art as far as I can tell. There's lots of things invented decades ago that would be a parlor trick today.
  - CrazyStat 5y ago
    Each requirement taken individually is plausible, but the intersection of them all is absurd.
    - sbarre 5y ago
      Agreed! Perhaps that's why the listing says "one or more" and not "all"
      - CrazyStat 5y ago
        It only says that about the various ML/AI requirements, which is a single bullet point. That doesn't help the intersection between bullet points, which is the issue.
  - alistairSH 5y ago
- pmontra 5y ago
  It seems that the whole AI field was started four or five years ago but actually it's several decades old. A recent example: for how long did Amazon use recommendation systems? And data mining was called OLAP [1] in the 90s and probably with another name in the 60s. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_analytical_processing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_analytical_processing
- 988747 5y ago
  Professor Geoffrey Hinton would have 30+ years of experience with machine learning, I think.
  - long_time_gone 5y ago
    But probably 0 years experience in "the mobile graphics pipeline and interaction across display and optics", which is the actual job.
  - htrp 5y ago
    Can't hire... failed the leetcode test
- dcolkitt 5y ago
  IMO using pre-determined time windows to filter on experience is always a mistake. Smart people acquire mastery in much shorter chronological time. This is literally the definition of intelligence and it’s been repeatedly verified over decades by industrial psychology. If Linus Torvalds decided to pick up data engineering tomorrow, he’d be far better at it in 3 months than the average dev who’s been in the field for 10 years. When you filter on years of experience, you’re inadvertently biasing towards less intelligent candidates. Smart people with that much experience will have enough mastery that they’re not looking for a mid level position. Polymaths who jump between fields, quickly building up competence won’t meet your arbitrary threshold.
  - ratww 5y ago
    > Smart people acquire mastery in much shorter chronological time ...and lots of people don't, even after 10 years working in the field. Not because they're not smart, of course, but it's common.
  - tester34 5y ago
    >If Linus Torvalds decided to pick up data engineering tomorrow, he’d be far better at it in 3 months than the average dev who’s been in the field for 10 years. bold claim, I'd want to take a bet with you for real money on that decade ago was 2011, wasn't it time where applied data engineering started becoming cool? thus majority of people shouldnt be those, who started learing it due to $$, but out of curiosity? idk
    - test_epsilon 5y ago
      He kind of already did that -- designed and wrote git in a month.
      - tester34 5y ago
        I don't think I'd call git "data (science) engineering tool"
        5y ago
- marcinzm 5y ago
  Machine learning, data mining and pattern recognition aren't brand new fields in any meaning of the word. I've had classes on them 20 years ago in college and I know a lot of people with 8+ years of experience (including myself). Hell, my dad worked on them when he was in college 40+ years ago. Facebook pays more than enough to get world class experts so why would they not aim to hire them?
easton 5y ago
Is the sole requirement Carmack doesn't meet the masters degree? If so, he has more than enough work experience to meet that benchmark. If you don't meet one of the other requirements (like if you know nothing about mobile graphics rendering or have never been an architect before) I'm willing to bet they'd pass.
- NullPrefix 5y ago
  I'm sorry to break the bad news to you, but unfortunately the machine says no. You are more than welcome to apply again after a year :)
- onion2k 5y ago
  They certainly would, and that's why it's a problem. The advert is not designed to find the best candidate. It's designed so that anyone who believes the requirements doesn't apply even if they would be the best candidate. The point is not that you need a masters degree (you don't if they'd accept someone without one); the point is to stop people who don't have masters degrees from applying because the team that wrote the advert don't want to work with people who don't have degrees even if they're as brilliant as Carmack. Job adverts are filters. Some job adverts are written to encourage certain people not to apply.
_wldu 5y ago
It seems some sort of real-world sanity check on the requirements would be useful.
- supportlocal4h 5y ago
  I tend to think such requirements are helpful to me if I were job seeking. It helps to avoid an employment situation with an organization that doesn't really know its own needs, or is trying to cover three bases with a single hire. Dysfunctional job postings often (though not always) indicate an undesirable situation.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
__s 5y ago
It's a bit facetious, since as much as people like to cite the Homebrew Google example, the reality is that Carmack should have a network which allows him to already have the job before the interview Still, it's true. I've done hiring at a small company where the job listing had a bunch of random tech we used, meanwhile we were desperate to talk to anyone with more experience than a bit of school & working at a pizzeria (& we didn't care for education if they had non zero programming work experience). But our salaries weren't competitive. Demonstrated experience matters more than credentials. I worked there a couple years before looking for a better job as a substitute for post secondary
tut-urut-utut 5y ago
Do people actually think the listed requirements are really requirements when applying for a job? I was always believing that list requirements are just a wish list, something that the company would like to have in ideal case, but even they don't expect they will find an actual perfect match. The more important thing when reading the job requirements is to figure out what is actually a core requirement that is important for the job, and what can be learned later, and just apply.
- rurounijones 5y ago
  > Do people actually think the listed requirements are really requirements when applying for a job? When there are two lists in a job description named "minimum qualifications" and "preferred qualifications" I think a significant number of people would think _exactly_ that for the "minimum qualifications" list. Women appear to be much more affected by this which biases job descriptions with ridiculous requirements to men: https://hbr.org/2014/08/why-women-dont-apply-for-jobs-unless-theyre-100-qualified https://hbr.org/2014/08/why-women-dont-apply-for-jobs-unless... Also see the comment by MS employee on the topic of "minimum requirements": https://twitter.com/colinmbrandt/status/1409577979731058699 https://twitter.com/colinmbrandt/status/1409577979731058699
- mechEpleb 5y ago
  The most important thing is just to apply because unless you're connected, the job search process is much like a lottery.
- Filligree 5y ago
  That’s why they’re minimum requirements. To filter out people who have no chance of being hired.
- speeder 5y ago
  I've been applying for jobs for some... years? now. I rarely apply to any position where I don't meet the mininum requeriments. Also I've seen vacancies with huge lists of requeriments, including exotic ones (like being an RPG player) and I meet them all, sent a resume, and didn't got invited to the interview... So I guess that indeed, the requeriments are bullshit.
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
Carmack does not have a Master’s Degree, as listed in the minimum requirements. Other than that, he seems to greatly exceed every other requirement. Everyone should know that the requirements in job listings are almost always guidelines, not a strict checklist. Obviously someone with 3 years of programming experience won’t be considered for this job, but someone who has 11 years of experience instead of the 12 listed in the requirements section should apply. Rule of thumb: If you can reasonably say that you’re “close enough” to the listed requirements or you satisfy most but maybe not all of them, apply anyway. Let the company decide. Don’t waste your time applying to jobs you’re obviously not qualified for, but don’t prematurely reject yourself from jobs if you’re close enough. Hiring is hard. Finding candidates is hard. Contrary to some of the more cynical comments on HN, hiring managers aren’t interested in rejecting otherwise qualified candidates due to small technicalities. That’s what Carmack is trying to convey here.
- exporectomy 5y ago
  Then don't call it minimum because it's a lie. All these secret code-language gatekeeping tricks in industry are awful. I'm happy to see one of the replies calls it sex discrimination. If that's what it takes to stop employers lying on job ads, good on them.
  - shadilay 5y ago
    It would be great if job ads were actually honest and gave a real minimum, maximum, and typical qualifications.
    - vsareto 5y ago
      They should really just list the responsibilities and let people apply. Minimums and/or requirements are often not correct per the word definitions, but maximum and typical qualifications are probably fraught with even more ambiguity.
      - shadilay 5y ago
jasode 5y ago
The 2 minimum requirements that stand out because Carmack does not have a ML/AI mathematics background and he's a college dropout: >- 8+ years of experience in one or more of the following areas: machine learning, recommendation systems, pattern recognition, NLP, data mining, or artificial intelligence >- Master’s degree in Computer Science, Mathematics or related technical field What was Carmack's development focus during Oculus? Was it building artificial worlds for the headset such as video games or Augmented Reality of processing video input with ML/AI and enhancing it with tags etc? It's possible that Carmack's expert knowledge of graphics shaders/rendering is a different skillset than mathematics of Augmented Reality.
- nickjj 5y ago
  > What was Carmack's development focus during Oculus? I'm not sure exactly but there's a bunch of keynotes from Carmack around Oculus Connect on YouTube. Here's one from 2014: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gn8m5d74fk8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gn8m5d74fk8, and another one from a year later where he's live coding in a VR environment https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydyztGZnbNs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydyztGZnbNs. You'll find a bunch more if you search too. I remember skimming through them years ago not because I'm into VR development but I've been a life long fan of Carmack's work and like listening to him talk about things.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
  Lots of notable people in computing, and in particular game dev, do not have a college degree, yet it continues to be insisted upon by employers. My suspicion is that it is because it is an effective class filter. If you're high class enough it won't matter because you'll just network your way in.
  - Zababa 5y ago
    By definition, notable people are a minority. When you're recruiting John Carmack, you don't care about degrees because he's John Carmack. But most people are not, and for those, college degrees are considered some kind of safety net.
skytreader 5y ago
General SE hiring comment: One thing I realized, for most IT/SE jobs, the more accurately you describe your current stack in the requirements (or maybe the person you are replacing), the smaller your candidate pool is. You might even find that your candidate pool is exactly the people you are already working with. Which makes it problematic when we make HR people do the initial screening. They would filter out a lot of good candidates just because they used Python instead of Java, or had been working on a C++ project one year less than the person leaving the team. Could it be then that this is a communication problem between the Engineering team and the HRD? After all, the Eng'g team writes the requirements for the job post, HRD just checks it and makes it look attractive. (Though honestly, I don't think this general comment applies to the job post in Carmack's tweet. Honestly I can't fault the job post for the way it was worded. I say the higher you are in an SE-org chain, the less this is a problem.)
- Aeolun 5y ago
  In my experience, the HRD makes it look like crap. Seriously, I don’t know how they can mangle such a nicely formatted document so badly.
  - dylan604 5y ago
    That's a skill set requirement on the HR position's miminum standards.
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  > Which makes it problematic when we make HR people do the initial screening. They would filter out a lot of good candidates just because they used Python instead of Java, or had been working on a C++ project one year less than the person leaving the team. Companies paying top dollar for the best engineering talent aren’t having inexperienced HR drones or automated software filter resumes. They have dedicated recruiters who have a proven track record of being able to properly interpret resumes and work with candidates to accurately understand their backgrounds. They’re also very good at working with engineering hiring managers to understand the actual requirements of the job. That’s more or less what John Carmack is trying to say here: The requirements aren’t being used internally as a strict pass/fail criteria before anyone is considered for the position. I’ve only worked for one company that had inexperienced HR people screen resumes. It was standard practice among engineering hiring managers at that company to use external recruiters for this reason. Hiring managers aren’t dumb. Companies paying high six figures or more for engineers aren’t dumb. We don’t want to miss out on good candidates. I personally read every single resume that comes through applications to my job postings, and I know I’m not alone. Hiring is hard, and it’s not worth letting someone else screw it up just to save a little bit of time. On the other hand, if you’re applying to a local dinosaur of a tech company that pays below-average compensation and takes 3 months to respond to candidates, all bets are off. You could indeed be up against automated hiring software and people who don’t know how to read resumes. But you also don’t want to work there if you can avoid it.
balabaster 5y ago
This makes me laugh exactly because the number of jobs I've seen advertised after I've left them to do other things because they weren't challenging enough, only to see that the prerequisites posted for the "new" job would've screened me out before I even had the chance to interview and are far beyond what is necessary to do the job well. 99% of the jobs that high quality developers could do that they're screened out of are because of poor concepts of what is needed to be successful. If someone has decent problem solving and analytical skills, can understand the problem domain and has the capacity to learn a new language/framework/construct in a short period of time (which frankly most of us can, and do with frightening regularity), unless you have something miraculously niche and technical, they're capable of doing the job. All you need to worry about is are they a competent developer and whether they'll be a good personality fit for the team. They say we rise to the level of our incompetence, but most developers never really grow out of solving problems and only get better with time and experience. Most degrees and professional certifications are meaningless to people who only care about the knowledge - there's no point in chasing paper that's out of date the minute the course is designed. We don't want that knowledge, it's old. We want current information which the courses and qualifications haven't been designed for yet.
- l33t2328 5y ago
  > Most degrees and professional certifications are meaningless to people who only care about the knowledge - there's no point in chasing paper that's out of date the minute the course is designed. This is a stretch. Most of what you learn in a CS curriculum is extremely useful. Things like algorithms, computer organization, object oriented programming, operating systems, networking, mathematical approaches, etc. aren’t going anywhere anytime soon.
  - balabaster 5y ago
    Fair. Perhaps I was over-zealous to include degrees in my statement.
  - throwawayboise 5y ago
    Yes and no. I have never implemented so much as a linked list never mind any more complicated data structures at $JOB. These things are provided by standard libraries. But knowing what they are, and when to use them, is useful. As is the general background knowledge when it comes to understanding something new (since everything devolves to machine language eventually).
ant6n 5y ago
From "Masters of Doom": > In the fall of 1988, the eighteen-year-old Carmack reluctantly enrolled at the University of Kansas, where he signed up for an entire schedule of computer classes. It was a miserable time. He couldn’t relate to the students, didn’t care about keg parties and frat houses. Worse were the classes, based on memorizing information from textbooks. There was no challenge, no creativity. The tests weren’t just dull, they were insulting. "Why can’t you just give us a project and let us perform it?" Carmack scrawled on the back of one of his exams. "I can perform anything you want me to!" After enduring two semesters, he dropped out.
- jokoon 5y ago
  Yes, not surprised by this. There is a difference between a degree and an education. I will repeat this over and over: university is a nursery for young adult who have no idea what to do with their lives. I'm not discounting higher education, but to me, degrees are a way to filter people by arbitrary forms of selection, and calling that "merit", and then justifying that "losers" deserve their social status because their failed at school. Universities should be open for everyone, students would help each other, professors and teachers would organize to deliver education the best they can. Students who fail to follow will just stop coming to classes by themselves. There is no need to filter, because eventually, you will filter out students who actually learn and have the potential to use that education. Just keep universities open. I'm constantly hearing that teachers and professors spend a large portion of their time filling paperwork, instead of just teaching and helping students. And I'm not even in the american education system, I live in france, which educate a large portion of the best math students.
  - pessimizer 5y ago
    I think the way you create this is to make college education free and of good quality for prisoners. To get the general public to agree to this, education would have to become free for everyone, at any age.
    - whywhywhywhy 5y ago
dalbasal 5y ago
The way HR communicates (requirements are a communication) is asymmetrical. Within HR, you are regularly exposed to examples. These requirements yielded these resumes, these hires... A lot of this is temporal and demand sensitive. That allows people involved to develop nuance that outsiders (like those applying) can't intuit... like the nuanced language that dealers of exotic livestock or antiques develop. Anyway... these aren't to be taken too literally.
phkahler 5y ago
I understand the FB angle for VR now. I've been playing a lot of Echo VR (recommended BTW) and the social aspect of the game is very important. Unfortunately the "party" and "friend" systems are absolute dog shit in terms of reliability. So many bugs, so often people join a party and can not figure out how to relocate to the game or lobby (even when not full) etc... I understand that between platform calls and in-game party and working across multiple games is challenging. Just saying it's kind of a cluster fuck right now. Given that, this rendering architect position seems like a low priority for FB at this time from where I sit. Huge potential in this though - I have a number of "friends" I really enjoy playing with that I've never met IRL and I'm not much of a gamer.
tonyedgecombe 5y ago
I’m pretty sure I missed some opportunities in the early part of my career because I took job requirements too seriously.
wsc981 5y ago
I thought the following comment from the Twitter thread was kinda funny: > "So basically they’ve already given it to Michael Abrash but HR said they have to look open minded."
- twobitshifter 5y ago
  It’s actually not that much of a joke (although it may not be Abrash) - often higher level positions have the job listing tailored to only one candidate that they already know is interested. To satisfy legal you have to advertise the position externally and internally but if you want someone specific setting unreasonable minimum requirements, that only they have, is a way to get there. Similar things happen in consulting contracts all the time. The RFP will be written for a particular company.
- draw_down 5y ago
  It seems to me like this is the proper takeaway here. In general I agree tech job ads have requirements that don’t make sense. But here it seems like they already know who they’re going to hire, whether it’s Abrash or someone else.
- jobigoud 5y ago
  As far as I know Michael Abrash doesn't have 8+ years of experience in machine learning either.
davidkunz 5y ago
Carmack really should up his game if he wants to be successful in the software development space.
- leokennis 5y ago
  I advise him to have a look at the code of classic games like Wolfenstein, Doom and Quake. He could pick up a trick or two from the geniuses who created those.
  - dylan604 5y ago
    Maybe he should spend time learning JS darling language of the month?
    - runawaybottle 5y ago
      The name of the game is Leetcode my friend. Maybe he needs to do more ‘deliberate practice’.
      - EvilEy3 5y ago
        I'm sorry to disappoint you, but Carmack would pass those with flying colors.
    - gentleman11 5y ago
      Not enough years of experience with react, auto reject
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    Yeah, but can he invert an AVL tree on the whiteboard?
    - eloisius 5y ago
      He probably needs to grind on LeetCode for a few months before trying to crack FAANG
FartyMcFarter 5y ago
Those minimum qualifications are hilarious. I wouldn't be surprised if there isn't a single person in the world that can meet them.
GuB-42 5y ago
HR ask for god himself, hoping to hire a prophet, the best they get are believers.
bitwize 5y ago
Unless you have an in (like, I don't know, being John Carmack), what's listed on the req are hard requirements.
b20000 5y ago
probably wouldn’t pass the leetcode bullshit either, hiring is broken
- EvilEy3 5y ago
  Yeah, no. He would.
dec0dedab0de 5y ago
Could it be that minimum requirements like this select people who ignore superficial blockers? In my experience all the best programmers and IT professionals, are the ones that are able to identify when it's okay to break the rules. If you're so timid that you won't apply, maybe you're not the right person for the job. I suspect this holds true for most creative or intellectual jobs.
- musingsole 5y ago
  If so, I have to believe it's a happy accident and not the HR people I've worked with somehow managing to play 4D developer-recruitment chess shortly after asking what's the difference between SQL and HTTP.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
the_only_law 5y ago
Yeah, but when you’re a household name, you probably get a little more slack than Joe Nobody
- EvilEy3 5y ago
  Let them circlejerk a bit, they think that if one thought of their idol aligns with their thoughts it means that it is correct.
temp00345 5y ago
It would be easier if they just addressed the 6 candidates in the world that fit these requirements by their names. Hey John, Jack, Matt, etc.. would you like to join us ?
- bogwog 5y ago
  Maybe the person who wrote the requirements doesn’t actually want people to apply so they can forward it to their buddy.
- gentleman11 5y ago
  Actually, John isn’t invited. He’s not elite enough
CalChris 5y ago
My first job, I was hired by the hiring manager and sent to HR for paperwork. HR didn't like that.
huhtenberg 5y ago
It really irks me that John ended up in Facebook and decided to stay there. It's just... wrong.
- bluedino 5y ago
  Probably makes over a half a million a year and can do pretty much whatever he wants.
  - xenihn 5y ago
    He easily makes way more than that. E5s can hit 500k with refreshers and stock appreciation. I would be shocked if he's making less than 2 million. Not that he even needs it.
- whywhywhywhy 5y ago
  Have you tried the product he worked on? Oculus has done extremely impressive hardware and software for VR and created the only viable mass market headset in the world and most importantly managed to ship consistently. If he wanted to work on that there isn't really another company that he could have worked at. Valve doesn't take it seriously enough, and personally I believe they would have actually abandoned it already if Oculus hadn't been competing with them, they just lack the ambition and making hardware successful is infinitely more work than just running a videogame store.
  - huhtenberg 5y ago
    No, I haven't and I won't as it has FB attached to it, which is a real pity, because it does indeed look very interesting. But that's off the point. It's not the product I'm salty about.
yupper32 5y ago
One of the first things I learned in the field as a professional, even during college, was to basically ignore the listed requirements and apply anyway. Is this not common knowledge?
- ianbicking 5y ago
  It common knowledge for some people, that's why these positions still get filled. It's also been observed that for people who are less confident they belong in a position that they will self-exclude themselves from these jobs, which includes all the groups of people who are already underrepresented in the field.
randompass 5y ago
I'm in my early thirties, and I have been applying to remote jobs since this pandemic started. I still have not landed a single interview. I was an active "reverse code engineer" around 2005-2011, I worked on reversing popular software protections on both Windows & Symbian, and was involved with a certain famous (at the time) team that released tutorials on those subjects under pseudonyms. That was back when I was in high school and early years into college. I live in a third world country, and in my early twenties I dropped out of college to support my family. I built a business that's unrelated to tech and the pandemic put an end to that, so I started thinking about applying to remote jobs thinking that I can easily land an interview and ace it. Well, the problem was getting an interview. I worked extensively with x86 ASM (MASM, FASM), wrote packers/unpackers in C back in the day, wrote extensions for IDA at some point. When I built the family business, I had free time so over the last few years and I've learned and used a few other languages (Golang, Rust). I've been doing LC and LC-like problems over the years, so I can comfortably solve most DSA problems that I've seen thrown at FAANG candidates, tackled system design questions as well, so I'm familiar with SW architectures of modern software. However, since I don't have a college degree, nor an active online portfolio (github and the like), I don't meet any requirements for any of these jobs which I can do better than a large portion of the SWEs complaining on Blind about their 6 figure TC and how awful WLB is at Facebook. I could do their jobs at a fraction of the TC. Unfortunately, I was an idiot and dropped out of college.
- htrp 5y ago
  My advice for you... lie and say you have one. (Or just get one from a diploma mill)
  - vishnugupta 5y ago
    This is a terrible advice, please don’t do this. If found out you will not only be blacklisted by the company but also by all the companies of recruiters network. Not worth it.
- rickspencer3 5y ago
  That sucks, I'm sorry. It sounds like what you really need is a network. You get interviews from ex-colleagues and friends when you don't have a reputation that speaks for itself.
moron4hire 5y ago
Job listings are written like this to give the illusion of being an equal opportunity employer. It's meant to be impossible to fill, through the front door, because they are holding out for someone coming through on a personal recommendation. Because people tend to only socialize with people just like themselves, personal recommendations for jobs end up reinforcing the existing corporate culture.o
6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
I would urge everyone to push back on your recruiters/hiring managers when they want to post requirements you and your team don’t meet. It’s harder to come up with the “real” requirements, but boy does it make you feel less scummy once you have.
gameswithgo 5y ago
It is definitely bad that jobs often have illogical requirements posted. We should work to change that. Meanwhile, when applying for jobs, keep in mind that you need not totally fulfill all requirements even if it say you do!
lmilcin 5y ago
I think listing all technologies used in the project as requirement is a huge problem. I have personally learned to ignore large part of this and apply even if I don't know everything (and then make sure the client understands). But I know a lot of candidates treat requirements as gospel. Rather than doing that I try to list only most important ones as requirement, and everything else as part of description of the project. So, the description for senior Java dev might look like this: We require very good knowledge of Java (11) and experience with Spring applications. Other than that our project uses ... (list of technology stack, databases, etc. follows)
MattGaiser 5y ago
And how many of those requirements are not even real? A prior job wanted experience with test driven development. We skimped on testing and there certainly was no TDD.
- gorpomon 5y ago
  Certainly learning about TDD and trying to practice it has some benefits, it can really help you suss out some edge cases of your API designs. But at this point I've professionally done some level of work with around 200 developers and never once seen actual TDD practiced.
  - htrp 5y ago
    You mean you don't just test everything in prod?
everyone 5y ago
Note: Not relevant comment! In 'Masters of DOOM' Carmack explained his process for making anything.. As I understand it, first do the absolute simplest, easiest implementation you can think of.. and if it's fit for purpose (passes benchmarks, whatever) happy days! move on to the next highest priority thing. I follow this almost religiously. The CEO / business guy at my company is the opposite tho, he is a perfectionist. Usually he tells people to do more work and polish things, and I tell them that its done, move on, keep going and get it all roughed out 1st, maybe return and polish later. Just thought I'd share and see what peoples thoughts here are on this + do they have any good anecdotes.
Waterluvian 5y ago
I’m hiring a few people this summer and it felt so good to have the power to decide: - not to include anything re: education requirements - for Sr. to be 5 years experience and Jr. to be 2 years. Kudos to HR departments that give you this latitude.
weinzierl 5y ago
I get "Sorry, something went wrong." "We're working on getting this fixed as soon as we can." Has anyone made a screenshot or archived it otherwise?
aranchelk 5y ago
Specifically for engineering jobs, I’ve learned to regard boosted requirements very much like the high pressure interview. Not only are you needlessly screening out great candidates, in terms of personality you’re often disqualifying the absolute best candidates.
tombert 5y ago
I feel like this is a lesson that basically any college dropout learns fairly quickly: the job requirements simply aren't. If you have the ability to do the job, and pass the interview, it's not too hard to get companies to overlook your lack of formal education. Until very recently, I was a college dropout who managed to finagle my way into senior-level positions at big companies, and I think it's mostly because I almost never bother even reading the "requirements" section of a job posting, instead applying to anything that seems interesting.
oldsklgdfth 5y ago
I work for a large corp. We used to get resumes from HR (not sure what filtering they did) and follow up with a phone screening. If that went well there was an hour interview and a panel interview. I don't think our process was the best. Recently, hiring was overhauled. Every office that needs engineers submits a list of requirements. All interviewing is handled by a hiring panel that consists of HR and engineers with relevant experience, but who do not work on the team or with the project. The hiring panel hires people without any interaction between the team and the candidate and without any input from the team. Basically, we sent in a posting and they send us an engineer. I'm curious to see how this plays out, though I'm not very hopeful. I think someone looked at how much money was being spent on staffing at the lower level and decided to consolidate it. Anyone have similar experience?
- kingnothing 5y ago
  This is how all of the FAANG companies hire.
  - oldsklgdfth 5y ago
    Does this mean the applicant doesn’t interact with the team before getting hired? This seems strange to me. I would like to interact with team members before I accept a job.
    - fzil 5y ago
      I am not sure how it is at the more experienced levels but for new grads and juniors you apply for the company, then have a "general" interview (think leetcode, some nominal system design stuff). If you clear the bar, you proceed to some team matching stage (this where the companies start to differ). Your experience and your input is taken into account and you are matched with a team where you fit in best. Some companies have the team manager talk to the new candidate to check for fit, others have different processes.
  - somethingabo 5y ago
    This is not how Apple hires.
not2b 5y ago
Sometimes when a job listing shows impossible requirements, it's because they already know who they want to hire for it and they are just going through the motions. For example, if a US company wants to hire a specific person on an H1B visa, they have to show that they couldn't hire a US citizen or permanent resident for the job. And if the person they hire doesn't fit the requirements either, they don't worry about that because it's very unlikely that anyone would ever check each individual hire.
KIFulgore 5y ago
I've seen several job postings requiring 10 years' experience with the cloud platform I work with. It released in 2015. I always go by the "75% rule" - if I meet 75% of requirements they ask for, I apply. You never know who actually wrote and contributed to the posting. The requirements can be far removed from what the hiring manager actually cares about. https://www.manager-tools.com/2010/06/career-tools-rule-job-applications-75 https://www.manager-tools.com/2010/06/career-tools-rule-job-...
- maccard 5y ago
  The most straightforward example of how this happens is: - we're hiring a principal engineer. That is 10+ years experience - engineering says required skills are ML & Graphics Programming. - our handbook says graphics programmers have degrees And the listing gets made by doing: for each requirement, (role number of years - 2) years experience in (requirement).
- jasonladuke0311 5y ago
  Prime example here; you can tell which lines were added by HR/execs: https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/2477201397/ https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/2477201397/
duxup 5y ago
I worked at a job for nearly 20 years. Good job, good people, really hard to leave. The folks at the company who hired me at the time (dot.com era) "Just wanted people who could think about second order effects". They didn't care about resume much. They wanted "thinkers". I worked in tech support and had a great relationship with engineering and etc. They'd ask tickets get assigned to me because they knew I was honest and thorough when it came to documentation and etc. It was a good gig. Eventually we were acquired and before selling the company off as pieces they laid a huge % of people off, including myself (it was ok, I was ready to move on / and would eventually change careers). The company that got a bunch of the engineers eventually needed support people and the engineers reached out to me to apply. I applied. But the job requirements had changed, masters degree required. I no longer qualified (I didn't / don't even have a degree). I applied, but didn't make it past new company's filters. The engineers were told that if I didn't make it through the filter they wouldn't consider me. 20 years doing that job in one form or another, and there's maybe a handful of people who know the proprietary side of their equipment... but no masters = not even considered for job. This was a technical job to be sure but it was largely IP (and some proprietary stuff) networking troubleshooting. You could take capable high school students and they could do it with some good guidance. The hiring people industrial complex is insane.
- randcraw 5y ago
  It's probably lucky you were rejected. Almost certainly, that's not the same company you left. Large corporations attract cost-cutting groupthinking bureaucrats and heavyweight processes governed by straightjacket apps like SAP or Office 365. In that world, everyone is a replaceable cog in the machine.
  - duxup 5y ago
    Agreed. When I heard I got filtered by default ... I didn't really want to work there. It was a red flag for me as far as if I wanted to ever be there. If they can't hire a guy who knows their product up down left and right, not sure I want to be there while they reinvent the wheel and hire more people who just check HR boxes. Seems like a bad direction to take.
sireat 5y ago
Unsurprising a nice dark pattern on cookies at the job site: "Some cookies are required to use our services. To continue to Facebook, review the available cookie controls and make any optional changes you'd like before selecting accept below." There is only Accept Cookies button.
DarkmSparks 5y ago
Experience leading consumer-based projects with industry-wide impact Everything definitely had some impact across every industry, not always good. Proven cross-functional partner, working across functions to drive solutions CS, electronics and economics. Experience in mentoring/influencing senior engineers across organizations 7 years guest university lecturer 12+ years of experience in programming languages (Python, C++, Java or R) with a technical background Started in 1997 8+ years of experience in one or more of the following areas: machine learning, recommendation systems, pattern recognition, NLP, data mining, or artificial intelligence Master’s degree in Computer Science, Mathematics or related technical field Build and deployed 20 or 30 projects in all areas since 1997 PhD in economics and computer science Highly experienced in the mobile graphics pipeline and interaction across display and optics only been doing that for 10 years or so. Experience in encoding/compression technologies in graphics display pipeline dds isn't that special Experience in working with graphics hardware and drivers on mobile platforms vulkan crashes a lot. ____ Now mine. #1 Not US based #2 Not an evil company .... Oh dear, good luck everyone.
caeril 5y ago
The VAST majority of the comments here are missing John's point entirely. This is about credentialism, not experience. John definitely meets the listed minimum requirements in terms of experience, but he was too busy inventing an entire industry to go get a Master's degree, or any degree, for that matter.
Symmetry 5y ago
It's the easiest thing in the world to set up an Asshole Filter where you only get to interact with people who are willing to transgress the boundaries you set. https://siderea.livejournal.com/1230660.html https://siderea.livejournal.com/1230660.html Now, sophisticated consumers of minimum requirements will know that these aren't necessarily meant to be taken seriously and that ignoring them isn't really transgressing boundaries. But that's still filtering out a lot of people from different backgrounds, inexperienced people, and literal minded people.

666 points by gone35 5y ago

A new trend is experienced candidates now asking for tech specs or six-month Gantt plans before starting contact with any HR person, in that trying to by-pass most of the bs.

skunkworker 5y ago

One of the “minimum requirements” “ 8+ years of experience in one or more of the following areas: machine learning, recommendation systems, pattern recognition, NLP, data mining, or artificial intelligence”

yangminded 5y ago
That's entirely feasible. Mind that 8 years ago was 2013 and systems like the recommendation system from Amazon was already online. Also it only specifies machine learning, pattern recognition, NLP etc - all of which are active research fields for far more then 20 years already. It's not like they are asking for more than 8 years of experience in Pytorch.
- user-the-name 5y ago
  Sure, it's feasible on its own. But the position is for working on graphics rendering, a completely unrelated field. Are you supposed to have had two careers at the same time, working eight years in AI while also working all that same time on graphics?
  - mkr-hn 5y ago
    There's a lot of research on using AI/ML with graphics. I've seen demos people have done using it to create HD remasters of shows originally in SD on tape or too-small film, or where there wasn't much interest from IP owners in doing it. Or where, once you expanded sideways, there was too much crew or rough set to use it. Since Facebook is doing VR, and this position is about VR, I can easily see the potential of using ML to make the most of sketchy/low-quality models and textures people might want to use in worlds. Imagine if you could upload a rough model, describe what you want, and get it made for you.
    - seoaeu 5y ago
      Yeah, but back in 2013? Most of what you're talking about is much more recent. To have 8 years of AI/ML expertise already while also previously being a graphics expert requires a very improbable career progression
    - Scarblac 5y ago
      Yes, but _on mobile_? With details like "graphics hardware and drivers on mobile platforms" and "the mobile graphics pipeline and interaction across display and optics". I mean obviously a lot of people work in that area but the overlap with AI/ML simultaneously seems very small, for 8+ years in one person. And of course if you're in research then it's hard to tick boxes like "leading consumer-based projects with industry-wide impact" and "mentoring/influencing senior engineers across organizations" and so on.
      - TeMPOraL 5y ago
        [snip; not enough coffee]
        user-the-name 5y ago
        Try re-reading the post you responded to.
- Aerroon 5y ago
  But how many people are also going to be "highly experienced in the mobile graphics pipeline"? Isn't that also about ~10 years old?
  - marcinzm 5y ago
    When you're willing to pay a million+ a year you just need a couple people.
    - thrill 5y ago
      When you are willing to pay a million+ a year you already know who you want to hire.
- dalbasal 5y ago
  Feasible, but in a naive sense. much sk The number of people working in "those areas," defined narrowly, is much bigger than it was eight years ago. That makes this a big requirement. People who are skilled, deep or enthusiastic enough to make that 8 years experience better than 4 are not likely to just show up, while also ticking the other boxes. Narrowing the pool past a certain point is a different type of problem. In any case, these aren't to be taken to literally.
sbarre 5y ago
While I agree the overall minimum requirements for this job are a bit silly, most (all?) of those topics have been around for more than 8 years, in some shape or form.
- viraptor 5y ago
  For NLP, the famous Alice is from 1995 and ELIZA is from 1960s. You can easily have 8 years of experience in this area.
  - kevinmchugh 5y ago
    Eliza is like 8 if conditions. It's a parlor trick
    - viraptor 5y ago
      It doesn't matter how simple it was. For its time, that was the state of art as far as I can tell. There's lots of things invented decades ago that would be a parlor trick today.
- CrazyStat 5y ago
  Each requirement taken individually is plausible, but the intersection of them all is absurd.
  - sbarre 5y ago
    Agreed! Perhaps that's why the listing says "one or more" and not "all"
    - CrazyStat 5y ago
      It only says that about the various ML/AI requirements, which is a single bullet point. That doesn't help the intersection between bullet points, which is the issue.
- alistairSH 5y ago
pmontra 5y ago
It seems that the whole AI field was started four or five years ago but actually it's several decades old. A recent example: for how long did Amazon use recommendation systems? And data mining was called OLAP [1] in the 90s and probably with another name in the 60s. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_analytical_processing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_analytical_processing
988747 5y ago
Professor Geoffrey Hinton would have 30+ years of experience with machine learning, I think.
- long_time_gone 5y ago
  But probably 0 years experience in "the mobile graphics pipeline and interaction across display and optics", which is the actual job.
- htrp 5y ago
  Can't hire... failed the leetcode test
dcolkitt 5y ago
IMO using pre-determined time windows to filter on experience is always a mistake. Smart people acquire mastery in much shorter chronological time. This is literally the definition of intelligence and it’s been repeatedly verified over decades by industrial psychology. If Linus Torvalds decided to pick up data engineering tomorrow, he’d be far better at it in 3 months than the average dev who’s been in the field for 10 years. When you filter on years of experience, you’re inadvertently biasing towards less intelligent candidates. Smart people with that much experience will have enough mastery that they’re not looking for a mid level position. Polymaths who jump between fields, quickly building up competence won’t meet your arbitrary threshold.
- ratww 5y ago
  > Smart people acquire mastery in much shorter chronological time ...and lots of people don't, even after 10 years working in the field. Not because they're not smart, of course, but it's common.
- tester34 5y ago
  >If Linus Torvalds decided to pick up data engineering tomorrow, he’d be far better at it in 3 months than the average dev who’s been in the field for 10 years. bold claim, I'd want to take a bet with you for real money on that decade ago was 2011, wasn't it time where applied data engineering started becoming cool? thus majority of people shouldnt be those, who started learing it due to $$, but out of curiosity? idk
  - test_epsilon 5y ago
    He kind of already did that -- designed and wrote git in a month.
    - tester34 5y ago
      I don't think I'd call git "data (science) engineering tool"
      - 5y ago
marcinzm 5y ago
Machine learning, data mining and pattern recognition aren't brand new fields in any meaning of the word. I've had classes on them 20 years ago in college and I know a lot of people with 8+ years of experience (including myself). Hell, my dad worked on them when he was in college 40+ years ago. Facebook pays more than enough to get world class experts so why would they not aim to hire them?

easton 5y ago

Is the sole requirement Carmack doesn't meet the masters degree? If so, he has more than enough work experience to meet that benchmark. If you don't meet one of the other requirements (like if you know nothing about mobile graphics rendering or have never been an architect before) I'm willing to bet they'd pass.

NullPrefix 5y ago
I'm sorry to break the bad news to you, but unfortunately the machine says no. You are more than welcome to apply again after a year :)
onion2k 5y ago
They certainly would, and that's why it's a problem. The advert is not designed to find the best candidate. It's designed so that anyone who believes the requirements doesn't apply even if they would be the best candidate. The point is not that you need a masters degree (you don't if they'd accept someone without one); the point is to stop people who don't have masters degrees from applying because the team that wrote the advert don't want to work with people who don't have degrees even if they're as brilliant as Carmack. Job adverts are filters. Some job adverts are written to encourage certain people not to apply.

_wldu 5y ago

It seems some sort of real-world sanity check on the requirements would be useful.

supportlocal4h 5y ago
I tend to think such requirements are helpful to me if I were job seeking. It helps to avoid an employment situation with an organization that doesn't really know its own needs, or is trying to cover three bases with a single hire. Dysfunctional job postings often (though not always) indicate an undesirable situation.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

__s 5y ago

It's a bit facetious, since as much as people like to cite the Homebrew Google example, the reality is that Carmack should have a network which allows him to already have the job before the interview Still, it's true. I've done hiring at a small company where the job listing had a bunch of random tech we used, meanwhile we were desperate to talk to anyone with more experience than a bit of school & working at a pizzeria (& we didn't care for education if they had non zero programming work experience). But our salaries weren't competitive. Demonstrated experience matters more than credentials. I worked there a couple years before looking for a better job as a substitute for post secondary

tut-urut-utut 5y ago

Do people actually think the listed requirements are really requirements when applying for a job? I was always believing that list requirements are just a wish list, something that the company would like to have in ideal case, but even they don't expect they will find an actual perfect match. The more important thing when reading the job requirements is to figure out what is actually a core requirement that is important for the job, and what can be learned later, and just apply.

rurounijones 5y ago
> Do people actually think the listed requirements are really requirements when applying for a job? When there are two lists in a job description named "minimum qualifications" and "preferred qualifications" I think a significant number of people would think _exactly_ that for the "minimum qualifications" list. Women appear to be much more affected by this which biases job descriptions with ridiculous requirements to men: https://hbr.org/2014/08/why-women-dont-apply-for-jobs-unless-theyre-100-qualified https://hbr.org/2014/08/why-women-dont-apply-for-jobs-unless... Also see the comment by MS employee on the topic of "minimum requirements": https://twitter.com/colinmbrandt/status/1409577979731058699 https://twitter.com/colinmbrandt/status/1409577979731058699
mechEpleb 5y ago
The most important thing is just to apply because unless you're connected, the job search process is much like a lottery.
Filligree 5y ago
That’s why they’re minimum requirements. To filter out people who have no chance of being hired.
speeder 5y ago
I've been applying for jobs for some... years? now. I rarely apply to any position where I don't meet the mininum requeriments. Also I've seen vacancies with huge lists of requeriments, including exotic ones (like being an RPG player) and I meet them all, sent a resume, and didn't got invited to the interview... So I guess that indeed, the requeriments are bullshit.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago

Carmack does not have a Master’s Degree, as listed in the minimum requirements. Other than that, he seems to greatly exceed every other requirement. Everyone should know that the requirements in job listings are almost always guidelines, not a strict checklist. Obviously someone with 3 years of programming experience won’t be considered for this job, but someone who has 11 years of experience instead of the 12 listed in the requirements section should apply. Rule of thumb: If you can reasonably say that you’re “close enough” to the listed requirements or you satisfy most but maybe not all of them, apply anyway. Let the company decide. Don’t waste your time applying to jobs you’re obviously not qualified for, but don’t prematurely reject yourself from jobs if you’re close enough. Hiring is hard. Finding candidates is hard. Contrary to some of the more cynical comments on HN, hiring managers aren’t interested in rejecting otherwise qualified candidates due to small technicalities. That’s what Carmack is trying to convey here.

exporectomy 5y ago
Then don't call it minimum because it's a lie. All these secret code-language gatekeeping tricks in industry are awful. I'm happy to see one of the replies calls it sex discrimination. If that's what it takes to stop employers lying on job ads, good on them.
- shadilay 5y ago
  It would be great if job ads were actually honest and gave a real minimum, maximum, and typical qualifications.
  - vsareto 5y ago
    They should really just list the responsibilities and let people apply. Minimums and/or requirements are often not correct per the word definitions, but maximum and typical qualifications are probably fraught with even more ambiguity.
    - shadilay 5y ago

jasode 5y ago

The 2 minimum requirements that stand out because Carmack does not have a ML/AI mathematics background and he's a college dropout: >- 8+ years of experience in one or more of the following areas: machine learning, recommendation systems, pattern recognition, NLP, data mining, or artificial intelligence >- Master’s degree in Computer Science, Mathematics or related technical field What was Carmack's development focus during Oculus? Was it building artificial worlds for the headset such as video games or Augmented Reality of processing video input with ML/AI and enhancing it with tags etc? It's possible that Carmack's expert knowledge of graphics shaders/rendering is a different skillset than mathematics of Augmented Reality.

nickjj 5y ago
> What was Carmack's development focus during Oculus? I'm not sure exactly but there's a bunch of keynotes from Carmack around Oculus Connect on YouTube. Here's one from 2014: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gn8m5d74fk8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gn8m5d74fk8, and another one from a year later where he's live coding in a VR environment https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydyztGZnbNs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydyztGZnbNs. You'll find a bunch more if you search too. I remember skimming through them years ago not because I'm into VR development but I've been a life long fan of Carmack's work and like listening to him talk about things.
AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
Lots of notable people in computing, and in particular game dev, do not have a college degree, yet it continues to be insisted upon by employers. My suspicion is that it is because it is an effective class filter. If you're high class enough it won't matter because you'll just network your way in.
- Zababa 5y ago
  By definition, notable people are a minority. When you're recruiting John Carmack, you don't care about degrees because he's John Carmack. But most people are not, and for those, college degrees are considered some kind of safety net.

skytreader 5y ago

General SE hiring comment: One thing I realized, for most IT/SE jobs, the more accurately you describe your current stack in the requirements (or maybe the person you are replacing), the smaller your candidate pool is. You might even find that your candidate pool is exactly the people you are already working with. Which makes it problematic when we make HR people do the initial screening. They would filter out a lot of good candidates just because they used Python instead of Java, or had been working on a C++ project one year less than the person leaving the team. Could it be then that this is a communication problem between the Engineering team and the HRD? After all, the Eng'g team writes the requirements for the job post, HRD just checks it and makes it look attractive. (Though honestly, I don't think this general comment applies to the job post in Carmack's tweet. Honestly I can't fault the job post for the way it was worded. I say the higher you are in an SE-org chain, the less this is a problem.)

Aeolun 5y ago
In my experience, the HRD makes it look like crap. Seriously, I don’t know how they can mangle such a nicely formatted document so badly.
- dylan604 5y ago
  That's a skill set requirement on the HR position's miminum standards.
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
> Which makes it problematic when we make HR people do the initial screening. They would filter out a lot of good candidates just because they used Python instead of Java, or had been working on a C++ project one year less than the person leaving the team. Companies paying top dollar for the best engineering talent aren’t having inexperienced HR drones or automated software filter resumes. They have dedicated recruiters who have a proven track record of being able to properly interpret resumes and work with candidates to accurately understand their backgrounds. They’re also very good at working with engineering hiring managers to understand the actual requirements of the job. That’s more or less what John Carmack is trying to say here: The requirements aren’t being used internally as a strict pass/fail criteria before anyone is considered for the position. I’ve only worked for one company that had inexperienced HR people screen resumes. It was standard practice among engineering hiring managers at that company to use external recruiters for this reason. Hiring managers aren’t dumb. Companies paying high six figures or more for engineers aren’t dumb. We don’t want to miss out on good candidates. I personally read every single resume that comes through applications to my job postings, and I know I’m not alone. Hiring is hard, and it’s not worth letting someone else screw it up just to save a little bit of time. On the other hand, if you’re applying to a local dinosaur of a tech company that pays below-average compensation and takes 3 months to respond to candidates, all bets are off. You could indeed be up against automated hiring software and people who don’t know how to read resumes. But you also don’t want to work there if you can avoid it.

balabaster 5y ago

This makes me laugh exactly because the number of jobs I've seen advertised after I've left them to do other things because they weren't challenging enough, only to see that the prerequisites posted for the "new" job would've screened me out before I even had the chance to interview and are far beyond what is necessary to do the job well. 99% of the jobs that high quality developers could do that they're screened out of are because of poor concepts of what is needed to be successful. If someone has decent problem solving and analytical skills, can understand the problem domain and has the capacity to learn a new language/framework/construct in a short period of time (which frankly most of us can, and do with frightening regularity), unless you have something miraculously niche and technical, they're capable of doing the job. All you need to worry about is are they a competent developer and whether they'll be a good personality fit for the team. They say we rise to the level of our incompetence, but most developers never really grow out of solving problems and only get better with time and experience. Most degrees and professional certifications are meaningless to people who only care about the knowledge - there's no point in chasing paper that's out of date the minute the course is designed. We don't want that knowledge, it's old. We want current information which the courses and qualifications haven't been designed for yet.

l33t2328 5y ago
> Most degrees and professional certifications are meaningless to people who only care about the knowledge - there's no point in chasing paper that's out of date the minute the course is designed. This is a stretch. Most of what you learn in a CS curriculum is extremely useful. Things like algorithms, computer organization, object oriented programming, operating systems, networking, mathematical approaches, etc. aren’t going anywhere anytime soon.
- balabaster 5y ago
  Fair. Perhaps I was over-zealous to include degrees in my statement.
- throwawayboise 5y ago
  Yes and no. I have never implemented so much as a linked list never mind any more complicated data structures at $JOB. These things are provided by standard libraries. But knowing what they are, and when to use them, is useful. As is the general background knowledge when it comes to understanding something new (since everything devolves to machine language eventually).

ant6n 5y ago

From "Masters of Doom": > In the fall of 1988, the eighteen-year-old Carmack reluctantly enrolled at the University of Kansas, where he signed up for an entire schedule of computer classes. It was a miserable time. He couldn’t relate to the students, didn’t care about keg parties and frat houses. Worse were the classes, based on memorizing information from textbooks. There was no challenge, no creativity. The tests weren’t just dull, they were insulting. "Why can’t you just give us a project and let us perform it?" Carmack scrawled on the back of one of his exams. "I can perform anything you want me to!" After enduring two semesters, he dropped out.

jokoon 5y ago
Yes, not surprised by this. There is a difference between a degree and an education. I will repeat this over and over: university is a nursery for young adult who have no idea what to do with their lives. I'm not discounting higher education, but to me, degrees are a way to filter people by arbitrary forms of selection, and calling that "merit", and then justifying that "losers" deserve their social status because their failed at school. Universities should be open for everyone, students would help each other, professors and teachers would organize to deliver education the best they can. Students who fail to follow will just stop coming to classes by themselves. There is no need to filter, because eventually, you will filter out students who actually learn and have the potential to use that education. Just keep universities open. I'm constantly hearing that teachers and professors spend a large portion of their time filling paperwork, instead of just teaching and helping students. And I'm not even in the american education system, I live in france, which educate a large portion of the best math students.
- pessimizer 5y ago
  I think the way you create this is to make college education free and of good quality for prisoners. To get the general public to agree to this, education would have to become free for everyone, at any age.
  - whywhywhywhy 5y ago

dalbasal 5y ago

The way HR communicates (requirements are a communication) is asymmetrical. Within HR, you are regularly exposed to examples. These requirements yielded these resumes, these hires... A lot of this is temporal and demand sensitive. That allows people involved to develop nuance that outsiders (like those applying) can't intuit... like the nuanced language that dealers of exotic livestock or antiques develop. Anyway... these aren't to be taken too literally.

phkahler 5y ago

I understand the FB angle for VR now. I've been playing a lot of Echo VR (recommended BTW) and the social aspect of the game is very important. Unfortunately the "party" and "friend" systems are absolute dog shit in terms of reliability. So many bugs, so often people join a party and can not figure out how to relocate to the game or lobby (even when not full) etc... I understand that between platform calls and in-game party and working across multiple games is challenging. Just saying it's kind of a cluster fuck right now. Given that, this rendering architect position seems like a low priority for FB at this time from where I sit. Huge potential in this though - I have a number of "friends" I really enjoy playing with that I've never met IRL and I'm not much of a gamer.

tonyedgecombe 5y ago

I’m pretty sure I missed some opportunities in the early part of my career because I took job requirements too seriously.

wsc981 5y ago

I thought the following comment from the Twitter thread was kinda funny: > "So basically they’ve already given it to Michael Abrash but HR said they have to look open minded."

twobitshifter 5y ago
It’s actually not that much of a joke (although it may not be Abrash) - often higher level positions have the job listing tailored to only one candidate that they already know is interested. To satisfy legal you have to advertise the position externally and internally but if you want someone specific setting unreasonable minimum requirements, that only they have, is a way to get there. Similar things happen in consulting contracts all the time. The RFP will be written for a particular company.
draw_down 5y ago
It seems to me like this is the proper takeaway here. In general I agree tech job ads have requirements that don’t make sense. But here it seems like they already know who they’re going to hire, whether it’s Abrash or someone else.
jobigoud 5y ago
As far as I know Michael Abrash doesn't have 8+ years of experience in machine learning either.

davidkunz 5y ago

Carmack really should up his game if he wants to be successful in the software development space.

leokennis 5y ago
I advise him to have a look at the code of classic games like Wolfenstein, Doom and Quake. He could pick up a trick or two from the geniuses who created those.
- dylan604 5y ago
  Maybe he should spend time learning JS darling language of the month?
  - runawaybottle 5y ago
    The name of the game is Leetcode my friend. Maybe he needs to do more ‘deliberate practice’.
    - EvilEy3 5y ago
      I'm sorry to disappoint you, but Carmack would pass those with flying colors.
  - gentleman11 5y ago
    Not enough years of experience with react, auto reject
- pjmlp 5y ago
  Yeah, but can he invert an AVL tree on the whiteboard?
  - eloisius 5y ago
    He probably needs to grind on LeetCode for a few months before trying to crack FAANG

FartyMcFarter 5y ago

Those minimum qualifications are hilarious. I wouldn't be surprised if there isn't a single person in the world that can meet them.

GuB-42 5y ago

HR ask for god himself, hoping to hire a prophet, the best they get are believers.

bitwize 5y ago

Unless you have an in (like, I don't know, being John Carmack), what's listed on the req are hard requirements.

b20000 5y ago

probably wouldn’t pass the leetcode bullshit either, hiring is broken

EvilEy3 5y ago
Yeah, no. He would.

dec0dedab0de 5y ago

Could it be that minimum requirements like this select people who ignore superficial blockers? In my experience all the best programmers and IT professionals, are the ones that are able to identify when it's okay to break the rules. If you're so timid that you won't apply, maybe you're not the right person for the job. I suspect this holds true for most creative or intellectual jobs.

musingsole 5y ago
If so, I have to believe it's a happy accident and not the HR people I've worked with somehow managing to play 4D developer-recruitment chess shortly after asking what's the difference between SQL and HTTP.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

the_only_law 5y ago

Yeah, but when you’re a household name, you probably get a little more slack than Joe Nobody

EvilEy3 5y ago
Let them circlejerk a bit, they think that if one thought of their idol aligns with their thoughts it means that it is correct.

temp00345 5y ago

It would be easier if they just addressed the 6 candidates in the world that fit these requirements by their names. Hey John, Jack, Matt, etc.. would you like to join us ?

bogwog 5y ago
Maybe the person who wrote the requirements doesn’t actually want people to apply so they can forward it to their buddy.
gentleman11 5y ago
Actually, John isn’t invited. He’s not elite enough

CalChris 5y ago

My first job, I was hired by the hiring manager and sent to HR for paperwork. HR didn't like that.

huhtenberg 5y ago

It really irks me that John ended up in Facebook and decided to stay there. It's just... wrong.

bluedino 5y ago
Probably makes over a half a million a year and can do pretty much whatever he wants.
- xenihn 5y ago
  He easily makes way more than that. E5s can hit 500k with refreshers and stock appreciation. I would be shocked if he's making less than 2 million. Not that he even needs it.
whywhywhywhy 5y ago
Have you tried the product he worked on? Oculus has done extremely impressive hardware and software for VR and created the only viable mass market headset in the world and most importantly managed to ship consistently. If he wanted to work on that there isn't really another company that he could have worked at. Valve doesn't take it seriously enough, and personally I believe they would have actually abandoned it already if Oculus hadn't been competing with them, they just lack the ambition and making hardware successful is infinitely more work than just running a videogame store.
- huhtenberg 5y ago
  No, I haven't and I won't as it has FB attached to it, which is a real pity, because it does indeed look very interesting. But that's off the point. It's not the product I'm salty about.

yupper32 5y ago

One of the first things I learned in the field as a professional, even during college, was to basically ignore the listed requirements and apply anyway. Is this not common knowledge?

ianbicking 5y ago
It common knowledge for some people, that's why these positions still get filled. It's also been observed that for people who are less confident they belong in a position that they will self-exclude themselves from these jobs, which includes all the groups of people who are already underrepresented in the field.

randompass 5y ago

I'm in my early thirties, and I have been applying to remote jobs since this pandemic started. I still have not landed a single interview. I was an active "reverse code engineer" around 2005-2011, I worked on reversing popular software protections on both Windows & Symbian, and was involved with a certain famous (at the time) team that released tutorials on those subjects under pseudonyms. That was back when I was in high school and early years into college. I live in a third world country, and in my early twenties I dropped out of college to support my family. I built a business that's unrelated to tech and the pandemic put an end to that, so I started thinking about applying to remote jobs thinking that I can easily land an interview and ace it. Well, the problem was getting an interview. I worked extensively with x86 ASM (MASM, FASM), wrote packers/unpackers in C back in the day, wrote extensions for IDA at some point. When I built the family business, I had free time so over the last few years and I've learned and used a few other languages (Golang, Rust). I've been doing LC and LC-like problems over the years, so I can comfortably solve most DSA problems that I've seen thrown at FAANG candidates, tackled system design questions as well, so I'm familiar with SW architectures of modern software. However, since I don't have a college degree, nor an active online portfolio (github and the like), I don't meet any requirements for any of these jobs which I can do better than a large portion of the SWEs complaining on Blind about their 6 figure TC and how awful WLB is at Facebook. I could do their jobs at a fraction of the TC. Unfortunately, I was an idiot and dropped out of college.

htrp 5y ago
My advice for you... lie and say you have one. (Or just get one from a diploma mill)
- vishnugupta 5y ago
  This is a terrible advice, please don’t do this. If found out you will not only be blacklisted by the company but also by all the companies of recruiters network. Not worth it.
rickspencer3 5y ago
That sucks, I'm sorry. It sounds like what you really need is a network. You get interviews from ex-colleagues and friends when you don't have a reputation that speaks for itself.

moron4hire 5y ago

Job listings are written like this to give the illusion of being an equal opportunity employer. It's meant to be impossible to fill, through the front door, because they are holding out for someone coming through on a personal recommendation. Because people tend to only socialize with people just like themselves, personal recommendations for jobs end up reinforcing the existing corporate culture.o

6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago

I would urge everyone to push back on your recruiters/hiring managers when they want to post requirements you and your team don’t meet. It’s harder to come up with the “real” requirements, but boy does it make you feel less scummy once you have.

gameswithgo 5y ago

It is definitely bad that jobs often have illogical requirements posted. We should work to change that. Meanwhile, when applying for jobs, keep in mind that you need not totally fulfill all requirements even if it say you do!

lmilcin 5y ago

I think listing all technologies used in the project as requirement is a huge problem. I have personally learned to ignore large part of this and apply even if I don't know everything (and then make sure the client understands). But I know a lot of candidates treat requirements as gospel. Rather than doing that I try to list only most important ones as requirement, and everything else as part of description of the project. So, the description for senior Java dev might look like this: We require very good knowledge of Java (11) and experience with Spring applications. Other than that our project uses ... (list of technology stack, databases, etc. follows)

MattGaiser 5y ago

And how many of those requirements are not even real? A prior job wanted experience with test driven development. We skimped on testing and there certainly was no TDD.

gorpomon 5y ago
Certainly learning about TDD and trying to practice it has some benefits, it can really help you suss out some edge cases of your API designs. But at this point I've professionally done some level of work with around 200 developers and never once seen actual TDD practiced.
- htrp 5y ago
  You mean you don't just test everything in prod?

everyone 5y ago

Note: Not relevant comment! In 'Masters of DOOM' Carmack explained his process for making anything.. As I understand it, first do the absolute simplest, easiest implementation you can think of.. and if it's fit for purpose (passes benchmarks, whatever) happy days! move on to the next highest priority thing. I follow this almost religiously. The CEO / business guy at my company is the opposite tho, he is a perfectionist. Usually he tells people to do more work and polish things, and I tell them that its done, move on, keep going and get it all roughed out 1st, maybe return and polish later. Just thought I'd share and see what peoples thoughts here are on this + do they have any good anecdotes.

Waterluvian 5y ago

I’m hiring a few people this summer and it felt so good to have the power to decide: - not to include anything re: education requirements - for Sr. to be 5 years experience and Jr. to be 2 years. Kudos to HR departments that give you this latitude.

weinzierl 5y ago

I get "Sorry, something went wrong." "We're working on getting this fixed as soon as we can." Has anyone made a screenshot or archived it otherwise?

aranchelk 5y ago

Specifically for engineering jobs, I’ve learned to regard boosted requirements very much like the high pressure interview. Not only are you needlessly screening out great candidates, in terms of personality you’re often disqualifying the absolute best candidates.

tombert 5y ago

I feel like this is a lesson that basically any college dropout learns fairly quickly: the job requirements simply aren't. If you have the ability to do the job, and pass the interview, it's not too hard to get companies to overlook your lack of formal education. Until very recently, I was a college dropout who managed to finagle my way into senior-level positions at big companies, and I think it's mostly because I almost never bother even reading the "requirements" section of a job posting, instead applying to anything that seems interesting.

oldsklgdfth 5y ago

I work for a large corp. We used to get resumes from HR (not sure what filtering they did) and follow up with a phone screening. If that went well there was an hour interview and a panel interview. I don't think our process was the best. Recently, hiring was overhauled. Every office that needs engineers submits a list of requirements. All interviewing is handled by a hiring panel that consists of HR and engineers with relevant experience, but who do not work on the team or with the project. The hiring panel hires people without any interaction between the team and the candidate and without any input from the team. Basically, we sent in a posting and they send us an engineer. I'm curious to see how this plays out, though I'm not very hopeful. I think someone looked at how much money was being spent on staffing at the lower level and decided to consolidate it. Anyone have similar experience?

kingnothing 5y ago
This is how all of the FAANG companies hire.
- oldsklgdfth 5y ago
  Does this mean the applicant doesn’t interact with the team before getting hired? This seems strange to me. I would like to interact with team members before I accept a job.
  - fzil 5y ago
    I am not sure how it is at the more experienced levels but for new grads and juniors you apply for the company, then have a "general" interview (think leetcode, some nominal system design stuff). If you clear the bar, you proceed to some team matching stage (this where the companies start to differ). Your experience and your input is taken into account and you are matched with a team where you fit in best. Some companies have the team manager talk to the new candidate to check for fit, others have different processes.
- somethingabo 5y ago
  This is not how Apple hires.

not2b 5y ago

Sometimes when a job listing shows impossible requirements, it's because they already know who they want to hire for it and they are just going through the motions. For example, if a US company wants to hire a specific person on an H1B visa, they have to show that they couldn't hire a US citizen or permanent resident for the job. And if the person they hire doesn't fit the requirements either, they don't worry about that because it's very unlikely that anyone would ever check each individual hire.

KIFulgore 5y ago

I've seen several job postings requiring 10 years' experience with the cloud platform I work with. It released in 2015. I always go by the "75% rule" - if I meet 75% of requirements they ask for, I apply. You never know who actually wrote and contributed to the posting. The requirements can be far removed from what the hiring manager actually cares about. https://www.manager-tools.com/2010/06/career-tools-rule-job-applications-75 https://www.manager-tools.com/2010/06/career-tools-rule-job-...

maccard 5y ago
The most straightforward example of how this happens is: - we're hiring a principal engineer. That is 10+ years experience - engineering says required skills are ML & Graphics Programming. - our handbook says graphics programmers have degrees And the listing gets made by doing: for each requirement, (role number of years - 2) years experience in (requirement).
jasonladuke0311 5y ago
Prime example here; you can tell which lines were added by HR/execs: https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/2477201397/ https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/2477201397/

duxup 5y ago

I worked at a job for nearly 20 years. Good job, good people, really hard to leave. The folks at the company who hired me at the time (dot.com era) "Just wanted people who could think about second order effects". They didn't care about resume much. They wanted "thinkers". I worked in tech support and had a great relationship with engineering and etc. They'd ask tickets get assigned to me because they knew I was honest and thorough when it came to documentation and etc. It was a good gig. Eventually we were acquired and before selling the company off as pieces they laid a huge % of people off, including myself (it was ok, I was ready to move on / and would eventually change careers). The company that got a bunch of the engineers eventually needed support people and the engineers reached out to me to apply. I applied. But the job requirements had changed, masters degree required. I no longer qualified (I didn't / don't even have a degree). I applied, but didn't make it past new company's filters. The engineers were told that if I didn't make it through the filter they wouldn't consider me. 20 years doing that job in one form or another, and there's maybe a handful of people who know the proprietary side of their equipment... but no masters = not even considered for job. This was a technical job to be sure but it was largely IP (and some proprietary stuff) networking troubleshooting. You could take capable high school students and they could do it with some good guidance. The hiring people industrial complex is insane.

randcraw 5y ago
It's probably lucky you were rejected. Almost certainly, that's not the same company you left. Large corporations attract cost-cutting groupthinking bureaucrats and heavyweight processes governed by straightjacket apps like SAP or Office 365. In that world, everyone is a replaceable cog in the machine.
- duxup 5y ago
  Agreed. When I heard I got filtered by default ... I didn't really want to work there. It was a red flag for me as far as if I wanted to ever be there. If they can't hire a guy who knows their product up down left and right, not sure I want to be there while they reinvent the wheel and hire more people who just check HR boxes. Seems like a bad direction to take.

sireat 5y ago

Unsurprising a nice dark pattern on cookies at the job site: "Some cookies are required to use our services. To continue to Facebook, review the available cookie controls and make any optional changes you'd like before selecting accept below." There is only Accept Cookies button.

DarkmSparks 5y ago

Experience leading consumer-based projects with industry-wide impact Everything definitely had some impact across every industry, not always good. Proven cross-functional partner, working across functions to drive solutions CS, electronics and economics. Experience in mentoring/influencing senior engineers across organizations 7 years guest university lecturer 12+ years of experience in programming languages (Python, C++, Java or R) with a technical background Started in 1997 8+ years of experience in one or more of the following areas: machine learning, recommendation systems, pattern recognition, NLP, data mining, or artificial intelligence Master’s degree in Computer Science, Mathematics or related technical field Build and deployed 20 or 30 projects in all areas since 1997 PhD in economics and computer science Highly experienced in the mobile graphics pipeline and interaction across display and optics only been doing that for 10 years or so. Experience in encoding/compression technologies in graphics display pipeline dds isn't that special Experience in working with graphics hardware and drivers on mobile platforms vulkan crashes a lot. ____ Now mine. #1 Not US based #2 Not an evil company .... Oh dear, good luck everyone.

caeril 5y ago

The VAST majority of the comments here are missing John's point entirely. This is about credentialism, not experience. John definitely meets the listed minimum requirements in terms of experience, but he was too busy inventing an entire industry to go get a Master's degree, or any degree, for that matter.

Symmetry 5y ago

It's the easiest thing in the world to set up an Asshole Filter where you only get to interact with people who are willing to transgress the boundaries you set. https://siderea.livejournal.com/1230660.html https://siderea.livejournal.com/1230660.html Now, sophisticated consumers of minimum requirements will know that these aren't necessarily meant to be taken seriously and that ignoring them isn't really transgressing boundaries. But that's still filtering out a lot of people from different backgrounds, inexperienced people, and literal minded people.