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Tech Companies Face a Fresh Crisis: Hiring

pjc50 5y ago
I wish we could get a little "(paywalled)" badge on links like this on HN so I don't have to click on them to find out.
blunte 5y ago
For a business world supposedly in love with the concept of “free market”, it amazes me that management cannot figure out why they aren’t filling spots. Some combination of: pay is too low, working conditions are not desirable, problem domain is not interesting, and required applicant skills and experience are too rigid.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
fxtentacle 5y ago
In my opinion, it is pretty easy to hire if you pay fairly and treat people with respect. But I do get a lot of job offer emails that go straight to Trash: - recruiters with an exciting opportunity but they don't mention the technologies or the compensation - companies that want 10+ years of experience at $36k annually - job board spam that just wants me to create an account inside their system - mandatory "play coding game XY" to apply Every company who makes one of those mistakes will feel like hiring is difficult, but it's mainly because they are doing it wrongly. When it's about firing employees, everyone is happy to use the free market as an excuse. But when it's about hiring employees, nobody seems to get the hint that the free market is telling them to stop being cheapskates ^_^
- throwawayninja 5y ago
  Having a conversation with people isn't even that cheap, an email / phone call starting with "I'm looking for an engineer who can build XYZ stuff and I can start your salary at 123 plus ABC benefits, please get in touch with Joe Schmoe at 555-555-5555 if interested to discuss details". The reason people don't communicate this way is pride, they want to sound like hot shit so they feel better about the fact that nobody's applying. Self-induced failure flywheel mechanism.
- cwbrandsma 5y ago
  I’ve spent the last year/year and a half hiring developers. We pay well, company is relaxed, no overtime, and established. I will post for a senior level position and get 200 resumes with zero experience. Just a undergrad or grad degree, but never in a relevant technology/skill set. Maybe two will fit the bill. By the time I get ahold of them they already have another job. If I post a junior level position, for someone just out of college or a code school…crickets. No one applies.
  - ryanmonroe 5y ago
    If you pay well and post a junior level position on LinkedIn with the salary range included, there is approximately 0% chance “no one applies”
  - fxtentacle 5y ago
    Since you can become "senior" on paper with a few weekend courses, I'm not surprised. Maybe require actual years of working experience instead and ask applicants to name the company where they gained that experience. That said, when I got my first team lead position, I had no experience actually working, but only a lot of hobby projects. So make sure not to discard the "senior" overmotivated hobbyists.
mbrodersen 5y ago
Companies that use recruiting agencies are doing it wrong. It’s that simple. Hiring the right people is super important. It is not something you should outsource to recruiting agencies. Give it the proper attention, budget, and training that’s required to be successful at it. Measure outcomes and improve the process step by step to become world class.
ryanmonroe 5y ago
How can you write an entire article about how hiring is difficult in some field, and only mention salary in a short parenthetical with no concrete numbers? (“salaries have risen in some cities by as much as 10 percent”)
gwern 5y ago
> When working with one employer in a city that is not known as a tech hub, Dyba felt that she had to chip away, carefully, at the company’s insistence for on-site workers; one position had been open for six months. Dyba started showing the hiring manager the credentials for someone she’d found, but omitted a crucial detail. If the employer was interested, then and only then did she reveal that the talent was based in Florida or Boston. “I had to kind of say, ‘Listen, it’s costing more money right now for us to keep this job open than it would be for you to send someone a laptop and coach your leadership team differently about how to manage remotely,’” she said. She believes the hiring manager raised the issue with the chief executive; slowly, someone with decision-making power came around, and Dyba was able to start filling positions. When the pandemic ebbs and local workers are back in that office, 15 to 20 percent of its work force will be remote. The market rather than Dyba changed the company’s workplace culture — a market of empowered technology workers who could pick and choose their employers, who could take or leave any job they wanted and were forcing a shift.
kwertyoowiyop 5y ago
The word “crisis” isn’t really appropriate.
- softwarebeware 5y ago
  Why not? > crisis (noun) > 1. A crucial or decisive point or situation, especially a difficult or unstable situation involving an impending change. -- American Heritage Dictionary, 5th Ed.
  - nradov 5y ago
    There's nothing difficult or unstable about this situation. There are workers available. If companies want to hire them then just offer higher compensation or better working conditions.
    - softwarebeware 5y ago
      > There's nothing difficult or unstable... Sure there is. There are companies that are going to go out of business if they can't hire. > ... just offer higher compensation or better working conditions Not if they are a startup and simply can't. They only have so much funding. And besides that, it's not even a question of offering more. It's a classic low supply and high demand situation. Only those with the most are going to win the bid in the end. The rest will go out of business for failure to hire. That's the crisis.
      - fzzzy 5y ago
        World's tiniest violin is now playing
      - nradov 5y ago
        That's not a crisis. The majority of startups have always failed. So nothing has changed. You can't reasonably describe a permanent situation as a "crisis". While I'm not currently a hiring manager, I've done plenty of software developer hiring in recent years. It's not that hard. I always found candidates who could do adequate work. The managers and founders complaining about the difficulty of hiring either have unrealistic expectations, or they're just incompetent and don't know how to do it well. There's no limit to supply as long as you're willing to hire people with potential and invest in training them. Funding isn't fixed. For startups there is effectively infinite investment capital available. You can always do another funding round if investors like your story.
Waterluvian 5y ago
I used to get one recruitment email a week. Now I get two a day. The problem is that they’re all crap. They’re always recruiters who just try to herd me like livestock. And they never have any useful answers. So maybe you have a really good job I’d be great at and you’re prepared to pay me properly. I won’t ever know because you’re using one of the worst mediums of communication.
- missedthecue 5y ago
  Hiring is such a headache not only from the employee perspective but also from the employer perspective. There have been numerous tech companies that have tackled this, but mostly in the form of job boards, or job boards with a twist (AI, social media, etc...) There has to be a better solution.
  - nefitty 5y ago
    A first step could be a large survey of people who have found themselves on both sides of the equation recently. Hiring seems opaque to me. I sometimes don't even get feedback on why I was passed up for a role that I match perfectly (I mean, at least as to what HR posted...). I'm sure there's also troves of evidence-based guidance somewhere that no one takes the time to utilize.
masonic 5y ago
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Tech%20Companies%20Face%20a%20Fresh%20Crisis%3A%20Hiring&type=story&dateRange=all&sort=byDate&storyText=false&prefix&page=0 https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Tech%20Companies%20Face%20a%20...
rand846633 5y ago
Nothing new in the article for anyone working in tech. A few funny things nevertheless: the recruiter thinks it’s unreasonable if candidates want to know the salaries right away before investing time in the hiring process. Also quite amusing is that the article never once mentions the idea that a job offer could compete by offering generous compensation, they mentions fancy snacks in the on-site office as a way to convince candidates to join a company, so it’s really no surprise that they can’t hire. Later they mention salaries going up by 10percent in some regions and think this is much, all while not realizing that consumer prices increase as well as inflation will eat those 10%.
- blunte 5y ago
  Yeah, when I see half of a job req talking about all the little perks, I assume they are compensating for something (lower than expected pay). I can buy my own snacks.
- Apocryphon 5y ago
  Maybe recruiters should take a page from PMs and UX researchers and so forth and ask the candidates themselves what they feel they're missing out on.
- dekhn 5y ago
  I always let the recruiter make the first move on compensation. Then I give a give a number about 10% higher than my existing salary. When I turn the offer down the first time, they always come back 10% higher than before. The reason the recruiter should ask for compensation bounds early is to avoid spending time interviewing and considering a candidate who simply won't take your offer, because it's too small.
rightbyte 5y ago
I got a feeling the underlying problem is that companies are so picky. That leads to workers needing to do multiple applications while searching for jobs. So while e.g. a position has 30 applicants, each applicant has applied to 30 positions. It gives the impression of it being hard to hire, since the applicant might pick another company during the talks. The solution for the company would be to give an offer directly, after a interview. No long recruiting processes.
- sage76 5y ago
  And the hiring managers all made offers to the same 5 people. So those 5 think the job market is hot, hiring managers think candidates are unreasonable, the rest of the 25 candidates without an offer are getting tired of leetcode marathons.
- trashtester 5y ago
  I think part of the reason is that the basic skillset needed to produce any value has been increasing over the last 10-20 years. For those who master this skillset, the result is increased productivity (often by a multiple), but for others it provides a barrier to entry. A few examples: - 2000 sysadmin requirements: Good work ethic, basic IT knowledge, join some MS sponsored training programme. - 2020 "devops" requirements: Medium+ developer skills, broad skills within linux, networking and cloud technologies (multiple vendors), expert at ansible, terraform, k8s, bash, AD integration and often other technologies. Also, the same work ethic and ability to be systematic that was required 20 years ago. - 2000 data analyst: MSc form some STEM field, basic knowledge of SAS or SPSS, some presentation skills. - 2020 data scientist: Still needing the stats knowledge, but now also requiring a much broader IT skillset. Ideally a fully Python developer skillset, including the ability to collect and manipulate data, train a model, present output (graphs etc), and deliver the model as a microservice directly into a k8s production environment. - 2000 app developer: Competency in at least 1 programming language (perl, java, php, VB(.Net not available yet)). Bonus point ("full stack") for being able to do all the html/css as well as database integration. - 2020 developer: Same as in 2020, but now do the same in a containerized environment in ways that should be inherently scalable (even when not strictly needed), and fully master a dev-test-prod deployment process on top of k8s or similar, often in an environment where it is not practically possible to run all services on the local machine. 10 years ago, there were still a lot of jobs requiring only the year 2000 skillset, but now there are not many such jobs any more. And a lot of the applicants are either stuck in the legacy skillset or are fresh out of school and have not had time to learn the essential skills. Those who have mastered the modern stack can sometimes be 5x more productive than similar roles in 2020, those who have not may be useless, or even produce negative value. I think part of the problem, is that there are way too many organizations out there that want to be "like google", and use a highly scalable, highly advanced tech stack, even if they are only computing similar data volumes that they did in 2020. Most don't realize that only the top 1-5% (my estimate) of tech people have the talent to properly leverage the modern stacks, while probably more than 50% could be productive in a simpler setup. A simpler setup also has the advantage of allowing people of average+ talent to spend more time focusing on business requirements rather than struggling with the tech stack itself. As was mentioned in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29188355 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29188355 , this is not the first time we've been in this situation. The industry seems to swing back-and-forth betweeen complex code-heavy development and "no-code"/"visual" approaches. Over the last 5 years, the pendulum has been on the code side, maybe a bit too far, so 5 years from now, I would not be surprised if the pendulum swings too far in the other direction again.

I wish we could get a little "(paywalled)" badge on links like this on HN so I don't have to click on them to find out.

For a business world supposedly in love with the concept of “free market”, it amazes me that management cannot figure out why they aren’t filling spots. Some combination of: pay is too low, working conditions are not desirable, problem domain is not interesting, and required applicant skills and experience are too rigid.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

fxtentacle 5y ago

In my opinion, it is pretty easy to hire if you pay fairly and treat people with respect. But I do get a lot of job offer emails that go straight to Trash: - recruiters with an exciting opportunity but they don't mention the technologies or the compensation - companies that want 10+ years of experience at $36k annually - job board spam that just wants me to create an account inside their system - mandatory "play coding game XY" to apply Every company who makes one of those mistakes will feel like hiring is difficult, but it's mainly because they are doing it wrongly. When it's about firing employees, everyone is happy to use the free market as an excuse. But when it's about hiring employees, nobody seems to get the hint that the free market is telling them to stop being cheapskates ^_^

throwawayninja 5y ago
Having a conversation with people isn't even that cheap, an email / phone call starting with "I'm looking for an engineer who can build XYZ stuff and I can start your salary at 123 plus ABC benefits, please get in touch with Joe Schmoe at 555-555-5555 if interested to discuss details". The reason people don't communicate this way is pride, they want to sound like hot shit so they feel better about the fact that nobody's applying. Self-induced failure flywheel mechanism.
cwbrandsma 5y ago
I’ve spent the last year/year and a half hiring developers. We pay well, company is relaxed, no overtime, and established. I will post for a senior level position and get 200 resumes with zero experience. Just a undergrad or grad degree, but never in a relevant technology/skill set. Maybe two will fit the bill. By the time I get ahold of them they already have another job. If I post a junior level position, for someone just out of college or a code school…crickets. No one applies.
- ryanmonroe 5y ago
  If you pay well and post a junior level position on LinkedIn with the salary range included, there is approximately 0% chance “no one applies”
- fxtentacle 5y ago
  Since you can become "senior" on paper with a few weekend courses, I'm not surprised. Maybe require actual years of working experience instead and ask applicants to name the company where they gained that experience. That said, when I got my first team lead position, I had no experience actually working, but only a lot of hobby projects. So make sure not to discard the "senior" overmotivated hobbyists.

mbrodersen 5y ago

Companies that use recruiting agencies are doing it wrong. It’s that simple. Hiring the right people is super important. It is not something you should outsource to recruiting agencies. Give it the proper attention, budget, and training that’s required to be successful at it. Measure outcomes and improve the process step by step to become world class.

ryanmonroe 5y ago

How can you write an entire article about how hiring is difficult in some field, and only mention salary in a short parenthetical with no concrete numbers? (“salaries have risen in some cities by as much as 10 percent”)

gwern 5y ago

> When working with one employer in a city that is not known as a tech hub, Dyba felt that she had to chip away, carefully, at the company’s insistence for on-site workers; one position had been open for six months. Dyba started showing the hiring manager the credentials for someone she’d found, but omitted a crucial detail. If the employer was interested, then and only then did she reveal that the talent was based in Florida or Boston. “I had to kind of say, ‘Listen, it’s costing more money right now for us to keep this job open than it would be for you to send someone a laptop and coach your leadership team differently about how to manage remotely,’” she said. She believes the hiring manager raised the issue with the chief executive; slowly, someone with decision-making power came around, and Dyba was able to start filling positions. When the pandemic ebbs and local workers are back in that office, 15 to 20 percent of its work force will be remote. The market rather than Dyba changed the company’s workplace culture — a market of empowered technology workers who could pick and choose their employers, who could take or leave any job they wanted and were forcing a shift.

kwertyoowiyop 5y ago

The word “crisis” isn’t really appropriate.

softwarebeware 5y ago
Why not? > crisis (noun) > 1. A crucial or decisive point or situation, especially a difficult or unstable situation involving an impending change. -- American Heritage Dictionary, 5th Ed.
- nradov 5y ago
  There's nothing difficult or unstable about this situation. There are workers available. If companies want to hire them then just offer higher compensation or better working conditions.
  - softwarebeware 5y ago
    > There's nothing difficult or unstable... Sure there is. There are companies that are going to go out of business if they can't hire. > ... just offer higher compensation or better working conditions Not if they are a startup and simply can't. They only have so much funding. And besides that, it's not even a question of offering more. It's a classic low supply and high demand situation. Only those with the most are going to win the bid in the end. The rest will go out of business for failure to hire. That's the crisis.
    - fzzzy 5y ago
      World's tiniest violin is now playing
    - nradov 5y ago
      That's not a crisis. The majority of startups have always failed. So nothing has changed. You can't reasonably describe a permanent situation as a "crisis". While I'm not currently a hiring manager, I've done plenty of software developer hiring in recent years. It's not that hard. I always found candidates who could do adequate work. The managers and founders complaining about the difficulty of hiring either have unrealistic expectations, or they're just incompetent and don't know how to do it well. There's no limit to supply as long as you're willing to hire people with potential and invest in training them. Funding isn't fixed. For startups there is effectively infinite investment capital available. You can always do another funding round if investors like your story.

Waterluvian 5y ago

I used to get one recruitment email a week. Now I get two a day. The problem is that they’re all crap. They’re always recruiters who just try to herd me like livestock. And they never have any useful answers. So maybe you have a really good job I’d be great at and you’re prepared to pay me properly. I won’t ever know because you’re using one of the worst mediums of communication.

missedthecue 5y ago
Hiring is such a headache not only from the employee perspective but also from the employer perspective. There have been numerous tech companies that have tackled this, but mostly in the form of job boards, or job boards with a twist (AI, social media, etc...) There has to be a better solution.
- nefitty 5y ago
  A first step could be a large survey of people who have found themselves on both sides of the equation recently. Hiring seems opaque to me. I sometimes don't even get feedback on why I was passed up for a role that I match perfectly (I mean, at least as to what HR posted...). I'm sure there's also troves of evidence-based guidance somewhere that no one takes the time to utilize.

masonic 5y ago

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Tech%20Companies%20Face%20a%20Fresh%20Crisis%3A%20Hiring&type=story&dateRange=all&sort=byDate&storyText=false&prefix&page=0 https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Tech%20Companies%20Face%20a%20...

rand846633 5y ago

Nothing new in the article for anyone working in tech. A few funny things nevertheless: the recruiter thinks it’s unreasonable if candidates want to know the salaries right away before investing time in the hiring process. Also quite amusing is that the article never once mentions the idea that a job offer could compete by offering generous compensation, they mentions fancy snacks in the on-site office as a way to convince candidates to join a company, so it’s really no surprise that they can’t hire. Later they mention salaries going up by 10percent in some regions and think this is much, all while not realizing that consumer prices increase as well as inflation will eat those 10%.

blunte 5y ago
Yeah, when I see half of a job req talking about all the little perks, I assume they are compensating for something (lower than expected pay). I can buy my own snacks.
Apocryphon 5y ago
Maybe recruiters should take a page from PMs and UX researchers and so forth and ask the candidates themselves what they feel they're missing out on.
dekhn 5y ago
I always let the recruiter make the first move on compensation. Then I give a give a number about 10% higher than my existing salary. When I turn the offer down the first time, they always come back 10% higher than before. The reason the recruiter should ask for compensation bounds early is to avoid spending time interviewing and considering a candidate who simply won't take your offer, because it's too small.

rightbyte 5y ago

I got a feeling the underlying problem is that companies are so picky. That leads to workers needing to do multiple applications while searching for jobs. So while e.g. a position has 30 applicants, each applicant has applied to 30 positions. It gives the impression of it being hard to hire, since the applicant might pick another company during the talks. The solution for the company would be to give an offer directly, after a interview. No long recruiting processes.

sage76 5y ago
And the hiring managers all made offers to the same 5 people. So those 5 think the job market is hot, hiring managers think candidates are unreasonable, the rest of the 25 candidates without an offer are getting tired of leetcode marathons.
trashtester 5y ago
I think part of the reason is that the basic skillset needed to produce any value has been increasing over the last 10-20 years. For those who master this skillset, the result is increased productivity (often by a multiple), but for others it provides a barrier to entry. A few examples: - 2000 sysadmin requirements: Good work ethic, basic IT knowledge, join some MS sponsored training programme. - 2020 "devops" requirements: Medium+ developer skills, broad skills within linux, networking and cloud technologies (multiple vendors), expert at ansible, terraform, k8s, bash, AD integration and often other technologies. Also, the same work ethic and ability to be systematic that was required 20 years ago. - 2000 data analyst: MSc form some STEM field, basic knowledge of SAS or SPSS, some presentation skills. - 2020 data scientist: Still needing the stats knowledge, but now also requiring a much broader IT skillset. Ideally a fully Python developer skillset, including the ability to collect and manipulate data, train a model, present output (graphs etc), and deliver the model as a microservice directly into a k8s production environment. - 2000 app developer: Competency in at least 1 programming language (perl, java, php, VB(.Net not available yet)). Bonus point ("full stack") for being able to do all the html/css as well as database integration. - 2020 developer: Same as in 2020, but now do the same in a containerized environment in ways that should be inherently scalable (even when not strictly needed), and fully master a dev-test-prod deployment process on top of k8s or similar, often in an environment where it is not practically possible to run all services on the local machine. 10 years ago, there were still a lot of jobs requiring only the year 2000 skillset, but now there are not many such jobs any more. And a lot of the applicants are either stuck in the legacy skillset or are fresh out of school and have not had time to learn the essential skills. Those who have mastered the modern stack can sometimes be 5x more productive than similar roles in 2020, those who have not may be useless, or even produce negative value. I think part of the problem, is that there are way too many organizations out there that want to be "like google", and use a highly scalable, highly advanced tech stack, even if they are only computing similar data volumes that they did in 2020. Most don't realize that only the top 1-5% (my estimate) of tech people have the talent to properly leverage the modern stacks, while probably more than 50% could be productive in a simpler setup. A simpler setup also has the advantage of allowing people of average+ talent to spend more time focusing on business requirements rather than struggling with the tech stack itself. As was mentioned in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29188355 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29188355 , this is not the first time we've been in this situation. The industry seems to swing back-and-forth betweeen complex code-heavy development and "no-code"/"visual" approaches. Over the last 5 years, the pendulum has been on the code side, maybe a bit too far, so 5 years from now, I would not be surprised if the pendulum swings too far in the other direction again.