5 ms·

Why is it simultaneously so hard to hire software engineers and so hard for new ones to find a job?

shimonabi 5y ago
Nobody wants to invest anything in "human capital" anymore. The senior developers are busy making deadlines for products that should have been delivered moths ago, so they and their managers can't really afford "knowledge transfer". A young employee is far more likely to fail in this kind of enviroment than someone with some experience. I got my foot in the door by applying to an unpaid position and lying about my knowledge. They were looking for experience in a particular framework and I then learned the basics of it over the weekend.
- UncleMeat 5y ago
  > Nobody wants to invest anything in "human capital" anymore. I can understand the resistance to do this given that juniors are demanding well over six figures and the widespread recommendation to skip town every two years. Paying $400,000 to spend a year eating up a senior engineer's mentorship time and then getting a year of work taking tickets off the wall is not a great trade. I don't know how to square this circle.
  - shimonabi 5y ago
    Not every job is in Silicon Valley. Where I live, you can get 15 motivated and capable CS graduates for that kind of money.
google234123 5y ago
It’s hard to hire good engineers.
legerdemain 5y ago
It behooves a company to miss at least twenty good candidates if it means avoiding hiring one bad one. A bad hire can utterly destroy a company. See the fiasco with Timnit Gebru.
- thaumasiotes 5y ago
  > A bad hire can utterly destroy a company. See the fiasco with Timnit Gebru. As far as I can tell... Google is still around?
- bdavis__ 5y ago
  in the US, employment is at will. when you hire a problem, at the 90 day point you should see that it is a problem. take action, give 2 weeks severance, move on. both sides. now, someone that turns into a problem after 5 years, that's on you. they weren't bad when you hired them, you made them that way.
afuchs 5y ago
For a rough anecdote, what I've heard consistent from my network is that the current job market is wildly different depending on experience level. From what I've heard and seen, anyone hiring a junior engineer is getting overwhelmed with applicants the moment they advertise it. Going up in experience level, the same places that are overwhelmed with junior engineers are begging for senior and principal engineers and are leaving these positions unfilled due to a lack of applicants.
- glangdale 5y ago
  Agreed. It's hard to hire senior people with experience in anything much. I strongly suspect that our industry has a self-inflicted injury where we make developers - even people who are meant to be doing deep algorithmic stuff - do web stuff and devops and 80 other ancillary things - then we jump up and down because we can't find people with experience at higher level things. Even at a very senior level, I've been asked to do some ridiculously sysadmin-ish stuff that I'm not good at, and I've seen more junior people loaded up with web/testing/devops/admin work to the point that the majority of their time is no longer being spent on what is ostensibly their job.
  - sokoloff 5y ago
    Isn’t much of the job/industry “web stuff” though?
    - glangdale 5y ago
      I shouldn't have made it sound like I was sneering at "web stuff" - just that people I work with who are meant to be doing other things have been regularly dragged into fairly menial "web stuff" (i.e. they're not specialists at that, and they're meant to be spending their time on other things). If you are doing a bunch of random firefighting then you don't get good at what your chosen specialty is (it would be similar to having a bunch of web specialists and making them do sysadmin chores half the time).
TheCoelacanth 5y ago
It's only hard to hire experienced developers. You can hire new grads easily if you are paying remotely competitive salaries.
xboxnolifes 5y ago
Everyone is hiring for senior positions. Everyone graduating is not a senior.

Nobody wants to invest anything in "human capital" anymore. The senior developers are busy making deadlines for products that should have been delivered moths ago, so they and their managers can't really afford "knowledge transfer". A young employee is far more likely to fail in this kind of enviroment than someone with some experience. I got my foot in the door by applying to an unpaid position and lying about my knowledge. They were looking for experience in a particular framework and I then learned the basics of it over the weekend.

UncleMeat 5y ago
> Nobody wants to invest anything in "human capital" anymore. I can understand the resistance to do this given that juniors are demanding well over six figures and the widespread recommendation to skip town every two years. Paying $400,000 to spend a year eating up a senior engineer's mentorship time and then getting a year of work taking tickets off the wall is not a great trade. I don't know how to square this circle.
- shimonabi 5y ago
  Not every job is in Silicon Valley. Where I live, you can get 15 motivated and capable CS graduates for that kind of money.

google234123 5y ago

It’s hard to hire good engineers.

legerdemain 5y ago

It behooves a company to miss at least twenty good candidates if it means avoiding hiring one bad one. A bad hire can utterly destroy a company. See the fiasco with Timnit Gebru.

thaumasiotes 5y ago
> A bad hire can utterly destroy a company. See the fiasco with Timnit Gebru. As far as I can tell... Google is still around?
bdavis__ 5y ago
in the US, employment is at will. when you hire a problem, at the 90 day point you should see that it is a problem. take action, give 2 weeks severance, move on. both sides. now, someone that turns into a problem after 5 years, that's on you. they weren't bad when you hired them, you made them that way.

afuchs 5y ago

For a rough anecdote, what I've heard consistent from my network is that the current job market is wildly different depending on experience level. From what I've heard and seen, anyone hiring a junior engineer is getting overwhelmed with applicants the moment they advertise it. Going up in experience level, the same places that are overwhelmed with junior engineers are begging for senior and principal engineers and are leaving these positions unfilled due to a lack of applicants.

glangdale 5y ago
Agreed. It's hard to hire senior people with experience in anything much. I strongly suspect that our industry has a self-inflicted injury where we make developers - even people who are meant to be doing deep algorithmic stuff - do web stuff and devops and 80 other ancillary things - then we jump up and down because we can't find people with experience at higher level things. Even at a very senior level, I've been asked to do some ridiculously sysadmin-ish stuff that I'm not good at, and I've seen more junior people loaded up with web/testing/devops/admin work to the point that the majority of their time is no longer being spent on what is ostensibly their job.
- sokoloff 5y ago
  Isn’t much of the job/industry “web stuff” though?
  - glangdale 5y ago
    I shouldn't have made it sound like I was sneering at "web stuff" - just that people I work with who are meant to be doing other things have been regularly dragged into fairly menial "web stuff" (i.e. they're not specialists at that, and they're meant to be spending their time on other things). If you are doing a bunch of random firefighting then you don't get good at what your chosen specialty is (it would be similar to having a bunch of web specialists and making them do sysadmin chores half the time).

TheCoelacanth 5y ago

It's only hard to hire experienced developers. You can hire new grads easily if you are paying remotely competitive salaries.

xboxnolifes 5y ago

Everyone is hiring for senior positions. Everyone graduating is not a senior.