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> It makes me sad for the less privileged candidates who might be working a job while also trying to break into the IT field. Very good point. I didn't really
by geodel 5y ago
> It makes me sad for the less privileged candidates who might be working a job while also trying to break into the IT field.
Very good point. I didn't really think about it much before. It is even difficult for candidates who are in IT field but not in FAANG type companies.
- monkeybutton 5y agoDepends on how motivated you are to to your current job. On two occasions I've witnessed a fellow developer mentally check themselves out after a round of layoffs, start doing the minimal amount of work necessary, and then spending the rest of their time cracking coding problems. When the next round of layoffs came, they were gone to Amazon and Google.
- TheOtherHobbes 5y agoWhere are they now?
- monkeybutton 5y agoSorry if I was a bit ambiguous. They are at Amazon and Google now. The point is treat your staff well or they might spend their time between tasks prepping for a FAANG interview.
- majormajor 5y agoNow imagine if instead of coding exercises we had the interview process from other industries that weighs degree and past experience more heavily in the absence of any other sort of testing. What would it look like to break in then? Completing a BS in your spare time? EDIT: Most ideas I've seen about replacement for live coding - like take home projects or contract-to-hire - are not really any more friendly to people with busy schedules anyway.
- ghaff 5y agoOr how impressive their GitHub is. Or another mostly (rightfully so IMO) choice you see here. Set a low bar to hiring but have a probationary period after which you fire a notable percentage.
- cableshaft 5y agoI have a decent amount of commits to my Github, but it's to 98% private projects. Things that may become products someday. Don't have a whole lot to show potential employers. My day jobs have always been private or onprem repos.
- majormajor 5y agoYeah probationary period would be great for companies, maybe better for people trying to break into industry (unless they can't fired and can't get their old job back), and not so good for most people already in the industry.
- LordDragonfang 5y agoFrom looking at job postings, there's no shortage of jobs for people already in the industry, and a proportionally much lower number of positions for entry-level. Every company has open positions for seniors, but no one wants to train them up.
- yourapostasy 5y agoI think this is mainly a side effect of the kind of work being performed at companies has leaned over the decades towards an increasingly bimodal skills distribution, and the entry level work's sophistication is eroding from advances in automation and continuous improvement feedback loops. For example, I see at all of my clients entry level help desk positions to do things like help with provisioning a new employee's Wintel laptop, answer internal software packaging problems, intake VPN trouble reports, that sort of activity. But not nearly as much as when I entered the industry, because so much has been automated away or folded into centralized management systems, and the trend continues with advances in desktop engineering. On the other hand, I see an explosion of demand for the desktop engineering team positions. This is being reflected in many other IT areas as far as I can tell. There is a constant push these days at all my clients to automate all repetitive work, and a much bigger appetite from leadership to automate entry level work even when the ROI payoff is longer than 1-4 fiscal quarters than when I started. The push isn't due to direct labor savings though: it is to drive down variance of configurations exposed to the more senior and expensive roles, so the real high-payoff automation can really shine, and they can reduce business-as-usual work hours remediating the impact from those variances.