4 ms·

My current reading of the job market around me, and I may well be just in a funky mood so forgive me, is that all the IT job listings seem to itemize all the wa

by th0ma5 15y ago

My current reading of the job market around me, and I may well be just in a funky mood so forgive me, is that all the IT job listings seem to itemize all the ways you won't be allowed to be creative, and also list a bunch of surprisingly general, and contradictory, experience requirements. They promote any kind of actual CS knowledge as being a masters degree skill only needing 10 years in direct experience in a 10 year old technology. This combination sounds like they have a bunch of old crap that they've built up to be so complex that no one wants to maintain it, and it will take a year for anyone to understand it anyway. So that's the total message like "here, you take this," but the HR people can only translate the requirements into someone that doesn't exist, because they want someone to hit the ground running, on an amateur complexity study.

RandallBrown 15y ago
I used to passive-agressively mention this to our HR department and my old job all the time. The basic "Software Engineer" posting has "At least 3 years of desktop or server software development" as a requirement. I always liked to point out that I (and everyone else they hired out of college) wasn't qualified for the jobs we were doing. They're in Michigan, so finding development talent is a little bit harder so I don't know why they're discouraging college students from applying by having pointless job requirements that don't actually matter.
- randomdata 15y ago
  > they're discouraging college students from applying by having pointless job requirements that don't actually matter. From the opposite end of the spectrum, I'm always amazed at the jobs that slap on the computer science degree requirement. My small rural municipal government was recently looking for a web developer to work on their CMS. A CS degree was a requirement for the job, despite there being very little pure CS work to being with (it is your standard db-driven website). I don't know, It struck me as odd. Why would this small government, in a low income area - average single income was $25K/year in a report a few years ago - restrict their search to people who are said to be in high demand and probably being courted by places like Google with interesting CS problems that they trained many years to work on? And as a taxpayer, why would I want to pay Google prices? It is a useful resource, but not $100K/year useful. After several months they finally did find someone for the role. Though, I cannot say if they finally relaxed their CS requirement or not.
  - suresk 15y ago
    Playing devil's advocate here a little bit - If you were a small organization with little technical expertise, how would you hire developers? As someone who doesn't have a CS degree, I agree that it is frustrating to see hard requirements like this. But looking at it from the perspective of your "small rural municipal government", hiring developers is probably a pretty tough and scary endeavor. Lots of people hold themselves out as developers, and frankly, a lot of them are pretty bad at it. How do you tell the bad ones from the competent ones? A CS degree at least gives you the guarantee that they at least had some training.
    - randomdata 15y ago
      I think that is a fair point, but it seems akin to requiring a physics degree for the job of mechanic. Generally, the people doing the hiring decidedly know no more about mechanical work than they do about software development, so I do not think this is a unique issue. Now, I am sure it would be useful for a mechanic to understand all of the properties of the materials to manually derive the torque setting needed for a wheel bolt and all, but in reality, you just follow the book. The science behind the application is not particularly useful within this context. Hiring is hard, but I think this goes back to the original submission: If all you look for is a physicist, you're going to miss the master mechanic. You might even end up with someone who has no interest in tearing down engines at all. Is that really the better member for your team?
- tomjen3 15y ago
  I when I applied right out of college I didn't give a shit about how many years of experience they required (for some reason they never count the years of experience I had accumulated in college) and just applied anyway. I got a job out of it too, so I wouldn't recommend anybody else pay attention to that.

by th0ma5 15y ago

RandallBrown 15y ago

I used to passive-agressively mention this to our HR department and my old job all the time. The basic "Software Engineer" posting has "At least 3 years of desktop or server software development" as a requirement. I always liked to point out that I (and everyone else they hired out of college) wasn't qualified for the jobs we were doing. They're in Michigan, so finding development talent is a little bit harder so I don't know why they're discouraging college students from applying by having pointless job requirements that don't actually matter.

randomdata 15y ago
> they're discouraging college students from applying by having pointless job requirements that don't actually matter. From the opposite end of the spectrum, I'm always amazed at the jobs that slap on the computer science degree requirement. My small rural municipal government was recently looking for a web developer to work on their CMS. A CS degree was a requirement for the job, despite there being very little pure CS work to being with (it is your standard db-driven website). I don't know, It struck me as odd. Why would this small government, in a low income area - average single income was $25K/year in a report a few years ago - restrict their search to people who are said to be in high demand and probably being courted by places like Google with interesting CS problems that they trained many years to work on? And as a taxpayer, why would I want to pay Google prices? It is a useful resource, but not $100K/year useful. After several months they finally did find someone for the role. Though, I cannot say if they finally relaxed their CS requirement or not.
- suresk 15y ago
  Playing devil's advocate here a little bit - If you were a small organization with little technical expertise, how would you hire developers? As someone who doesn't have a CS degree, I agree that it is frustrating to see hard requirements like this. But looking at it from the perspective of your "small rural municipal government", hiring developers is probably a pretty tough and scary endeavor. Lots of people hold themselves out as developers, and frankly, a lot of them are pretty bad at it. How do you tell the bad ones from the competent ones? A CS degree at least gives you the guarantee that they at least had some training.
  - randomdata 15y ago
    I think that is a fair point, but it seems akin to requiring a physics degree for the job of mechanic. Generally, the people doing the hiring decidedly know no more about mechanical work than they do about software development, so I do not think this is a unique issue. Now, I am sure it would be useful for a mechanic to understand all of the properties of the materials to manually derive the torque setting needed for a wheel bolt and all, but in reality, you just follow the book. The science behind the application is not particularly useful within this context. Hiring is hard, but I think this goes back to the original submission: If all you look for is a physicist, you're going to miss the master mechanic. You might even end up with someone who has no interest in tearing down engines at all. Is that really the better member for your team?
tomjen3 15y ago
I when I applied right out of college I didn't give a shit about how many years of experience they required (for some reason they never count the years of experience I had accumulated in college) and just applied anyway. I got a job out of it too, so I wouldn't recommend anybody else pay attention to that.