8 ms·

> You say "free choice" like companies are just throwing out job offers for free. Not for free, you still have to honestly work there. You get salary for value

> You say "free choice" like companies are just throwing out job offers for free. Not for free, you still have to honestly work there. You get salary for value you provide. In general companies set up hiring processes with intention to hire people. (I know this sounds like a heresy to some ears here on HN). They interviews are set up with intention to hire people while but also filter out people who will not be productive. That these processes are frequently badly designed is another matter. If you are genuinely good -- they want to hire you. Trust me on that. The issue is that, sadly, unfortunately, a lot of candidates simply can't do the job. And, tragically, they don't even understand how bad they are and they apply to tens if not hundreds of places making them overrepresented in the candidates' pool. Then they come back to HN and complain how badly these processes are designed, completely missing the point. Somebody will finally hire them, but why does it have to be me? Could I do something to prevent these people from even applying? Could I do something that, if these people apply, they have no hopes of getting the job? Sure, some good people who would be able to do the job will be collateral damage but guess what, it usually costs much more to hire a bad apple than accidentally not hire a perfectly acceptable candidate. The length of the process is supposed to discourage these people from even trying. If you only apply to one or two places, couple of hours of interviews is nothing compared to years of work you will spend there, but if your plan is to shotgun the interviews you can't attend ones that require some preparation, multiple rounds of interviews, maybe a trip onsite, etc. Believe or not, I just changed jobs and I only "applied" to one company and I spent over 24 hours total talking to representatives of the company over multiple sessions. If you are good at what you are doing, longer interview just gives you more occasions to prove that. And also learn more about the company. In my experience even with badly designed processes, good developers will still be better at navigating them than bad ones. Think about it: you attend an entrance exam where you know only 2% candidates will be accepted. Does it matter how difficult the exam is? No it does not, it only matters if you are better than 98% of applicants.

exBarrelSpoiler 5y ago
> The issue is that, sadly, unfortunately, a lot of candidates simply can't do the job. And, tragically, they don't even understand how bad they are and they apply to tens if not hundreds of places making them overrepresented in the candidates' pool. How did it come to this? You don't see this in other engineering industries. There's not a ton of incapable civil engineers bouncing from interview to interview. You don't hear about how bad aerospace hiring processes are. Are these candidates truly incapable of doing the job, or are the understanding of what the job entails misunderstood by everyone involved? On the other hand, is something wrong in how software engineers are educated to cause this surplus of incompetents? Does there need to be better training in this industry? Saying "a lot of people are just bad" without investigation the situation seems rather unscientific. > The length of the process is supposed to discourage these people from even trying. The amount of effort invested into the Leetcode prep industry would suggest otherwise. A lot of people are playing the game even if they are under-qualified. Maybe that process will make them better coders. Or maybe, they will just appear to be better coders to you the interviewer. > Believe or not, I just changed jobs and I only "applied" to one company and I spent over 24 hours total talking to representatives of the company over multiple sessions. Sounds like an extreme outlier. Even companies like Google who are notorious for having long drawn out interview processes mostly just have long wait times in between rounds and recruiter calls. They don't involve 24 hours of talking to Googlers.
- 3np 5y ago
  > Are these candidates truly incapable of doing the job, or are the understanding of what the job entails misunderstood by everyone involved? On the other hand, is something wrong in how software engineers are educated to cause this surplus of incompetents? Does there need to be better training in this industry? Yes, yes, yes, and yes. Pretty confident that the lack of in-house training has been mostly facilitated by that highly skilled computer people tend to take care of that on their own accord (since that’s how most got there in the first place).
  - Aeolos 5y ago
    I wanted to say that this echoes my experience perfectly. After interviewing several hundreds of people, two surprising things stood out: - a large percentage of technical applicants cannot program even in languages where they claim multiple years of work experience - this holds true for non-technical applicants too I think this is a combination of poor applicants being overrepresented in the applicant pool (good ones get hired), the fact that modern job complexity has grown compared to previous generations, and the desire for people to "hit the ground running". I don't know what's the solution. Fields that require certification don't seem to be suffering as much, but that has significant side effects too. What I know is the times where people would work for the same company for 30+ year, where they'd get taught what they needed on the job, are not coming back.
    - exBarrelSpoiler 5y ago
      But then how do these applicants manage to amass experience they claim to have? Massive lying and resume inflation? Performance anxiety leading to bombing interviews? Maybe the roles they were in didn’t actually require as much programming, or deep understanding of programming as people would expect? It could just be that a massive amount of work in the software industry is really code monkey work. “Gluing together APIs.” Refactoring existing code. All things that can be accomplished by referring to Stack Overflow copypasta or the existing codebase itself without requiring the coder to have any deep independent understanding of the code or the language they claim to know. And, if that gets the job done- how high should engineering standards even be if so much of the work is menial? Either able to be outsourced, or one day Autopiloted away?
varispeed 5y ago
> You get salary for value you provide. Salaries are not tied to value, otherwise developers would be making 7-8 digits not 5-6. Salaries are determined by "market rate" which is a synonym for market fixing. It does not matter what value you provide, only matters how low you will agree to get paid.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

exBarrelSpoiler 5y ago

> The issue is that, sadly, unfortunately, a lot of candidates simply can't do the job. And, tragically, they don't even understand how bad they are and they apply to tens if not hundreds of places making them overrepresented in the candidates' pool. How did it come to this? You don't see this in other engineering industries. There's not a ton of incapable civil engineers bouncing from interview to interview. You don't hear about how bad aerospace hiring processes are. Are these candidates truly incapable of doing the job, or are the understanding of what the job entails misunderstood by everyone involved? On the other hand, is something wrong in how software engineers are educated to cause this surplus of incompetents? Does there need to be better training in this industry? Saying "a lot of people are just bad" without investigation the situation seems rather unscientific. > The length of the process is supposed to discourage these people from even trying. The amount of effort invested into the Leetcode prep industry would suggest otherwise. A lot of people are playing the game even if they are under-qualified. Maybe that process will make them better coders. Or maybe, they will just appear to be better coders to you the interviewer. > Believe or not, I just changed jobs and I only "applied" to one company and I spent over 24 hours total talking to representatives of the company over multiple sessions. Sounds like an extreme outlier. Even companies like Google who are notorious for having long drawn out interview processes mostly just have long wait times in between rounds and recruiter calls. They don't involve 24 hours of talking to Googlers.

3np 5y ago
> Are these candidates truly incapable of doing the job, or are the understanding of what the job entails misunderstood by everyone involved? On the other hand, is something wrong in how software engineers are educated to cause this surplus of incompetents? Does there need to be better training in this industry? Yes, yes, yes, and yes. Pretty confident that the lack of in-house training has been mostly facilitated by that highly skilled computer people tend to take care of that on their own accord (since that’s how most got there in the first place).
- Aeolos 5y ago
  I wanted to say that this echoes my experience perfectly. After interviewing several hundreds of people, two surprising things stood out: - a large percentage of technical applicants cannot program even in languages where they claim multiple years of work experience - this holds true for non-technical applicants too I think this is a combination of poor applicants being overrepresented in the applicant pool (good ones get hired), the fact that modern job complexity has grown compared to previous generations, and the desire for people to "hit the ground running". I don't know what's the solution. Fields that require certification don't seem to be suffering as much, but that has significant side effects too. What I know is the times where people would work for the same company for 30+ year, where they'd get taught what they needed on the job, are not coming back.
  - exBarrelSpoiler 5y ago
    But then how do these applicants manage to amass experience they claim to have? Massive lying and resume inflation? Performance anxiety leading to bombing interviews? Maybe the roles they were in didn’t actually require as much programming, or deep understanding of programming as people would expect? It could just be that a massive amount of work in the software industry is really code monkey work. “Gluing together APIs.” Refactoring existing code. All things that can be accomplished by referring to Stack Overflow copypasta or the existing codebase itself without requiring the coder to have any deep independent understanding of the code or the language they claim to know. And, if that gets the job done- how high should engineering standards even be if so much of the work is menial? Either able to be outsourced, or one day Autopiloted away?

varispeed 5y ago

> You get salary for value you provide. Salaries are not tied to value, otherwise developers would be making 7-8 digits not 5-6. Salaries are determined by "market rate" which is a synonym for market fixing. It does not matter what value you provide, only matters how low you will agree to get paid.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]