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Ask HN: For those trying to hire how hard is it to find people currently?

• towhom 3y ago
  Seems like hiring has been broken forever. Even with the plethora of job sites like LinkedIn it doesn't seem any better. Someone who can come up with a better way of matching up candidates with hiring managers could do really well, but apparently the problem is quite hard since there's been a lot of attempts but not much success.
  • UncleOxidant 3y ago
    Someone on another thread here about hiring in the ML/AI space bemoaned the fact that they mostly get applications from people who have dabbled with ML/AI on the side and very few applicants who have actual ML/AI work experience. But it seems like the ML/AI space is still nascent and growing rapidly - you're not going to find a lot of available people with ML/AI work experience. Given that ML/AI is where a lot of current hiring is maybe that's the reason for the hiring disconnect? If so hiring managers are going to have to start looking at people who have an interest and have done some self-learning in the field.
    • jwells89 3y ago
      It's another variation on the classic, "6 years experience with X required" where X is something that has only been publicly available for a year or less. Everybody wants candidates who can hit the ground running even when that's not practically possible.
      • atrettel 3y ago
        This is just one example of the overall problem. In my view, hiring managers often are just going off a list of requirements and do not really know too much about the technology. They tend to reject anyone who does not use the exact terms they are looking for, even if they have a sufficient amount of experience. I'm thinking about people who worked in optimization for a long time before applying to machine learning jobs. Both fields have basically equivalent work, just with different techniques, and optimization is a lot older and more mature of a discipline. If hiring managers do not know that, they will skip over qualified candidates.
      • throwaway5959 3y ago
        That sounds more like H1-B shenanigans. Easier to justify not being able to find someone local if they make the job req impossible.
    • thih9 3y ago
      > If so hiring managers are going to have to start looking at people who have an interest and have done some self-learning in the field. Or candidates who have just started working with ML/AI are going to have to accept lower pay as their cost of changing specialisation. Or, likely, both.
      • PeterisP 3y ago
        I think there really aren't very many job positions that try to hire candidates who have just started working with ML/AI for a lower pay, everyone wants 'all or nothing', exclusively trying to hire people who already did that specialization change somewhere else; many are willing to pay for experience, but they aren't willing to accept lack of it for less pay.
        • throwaway5959 3y ago
          This is true in general. The average software developer is doing the jobs of three or four people when I started fifteen years ago. Ops, dev, DBA, storage (s3, ebs, etc).
    • Cthulhu_ 3y ago
      The problem there is that a lot of people follow hypes because they think it's cool and/or earns them a lot of money. I've also seen it in job adverts though, at some point pretty much every software development job would have "crypto" and "IoT" sprinkled in the description. It's tiring. And it's insulting. And also, to the developers that actually look for that kind of thing without already being in that space, have some pride. It's a Java job, you aren't going to turn your home climate control hobby into a job through that one.
    • quickthrower2 3y ago
      “We need 10 years GPT experience!”
    • jwestbury 3y ago
      I used to work in the cleared space -- i.e., people with top-secret security clearance. My first job in this space was at AWS, where we probably had about 1/4 of the qualified, cleared talent pool in our space. It was almost possible to hire people with sufficient technical skill who also had clearance -- but it was equally hard to get people cleared, because we and Microsoft were pushing so many people through the pipeline that clearance decisions were often taking 2+ years. We would have people get hired, get a promotion, and leave all before getting their clearance decisions. My team started taking a different approach: We started hiring people at the lowest level we could ("associate", below even entry-level engineer), with minimal tech skills, but with active clearance and some adjacent skills. STEM background, or tech writing, or just someone who was a hobbyist. I started interviewing people on troubleshooting -- someone told me a fantastic story about troubleshooting a comms issue while deployed in the middle east. The fix involved copious amounts of superglue on a ground-based satellite. Switch out the words, and you could easily have a story of a grizzled old sysadmin patching in production. We actually ended up being pretty successful. Sure, a substantial portion of our hires were still misses -- but that was already true. Meanwhile, we hired some really talented people from this route, who I ended up trying to poach years after leaving AWS, and leaving the cleared space entirely, because they were just genuinely great engineers who needed to be given that chance. tl;dr, I agree, and it's nearly always a good idea to look at expanding the talent base in some way or another if you're struggling. In many cases, it means hiring people who have potential, as long as you have sufficient numbers of senior staff to help get them up to speed.
  • ozim 3y ago
    How are you going to stop people from lying? Job seekers exaggerate their experience and skills. Hiring managers exaggerate how great job is. It is a problem with no technical solution. Well you have leetcode to check tech proficiency but is leetcode grinding hire best hire for the company? There is also bunch of problems like, company itself doesn’t know what they want. Job seekers on the other hand not knowing what position they exactly want.
    • JohnFen 3y ago
      Hiring (on both sides of the desk) is and always has been hard, it's true. Both the company and the applicant are taking a risk when they make the hiring decision. I think that a lot of companies get more focused than is wise on reducing that risk, and they harm themselves because of it. In the end, that risk can never be reduced to zero, so you have to accept a certain amount of bad hires/employers. There must be a level of risk where, in the big picture, the maximum benefit lies, and that's what should be aimed for rather than trying to accomplish the impossible at any cost.
• meindnoch 3y ago
  >Tech people reporting that it's hard to find a new gig right now and hiring managers reporting that it's hard to find people right now. It's hard to find people with the desired skills at their offered price point. Simple as.
  • sirobg 3y ago
    Of course, but as OP asked: any thoughts on why it seems exacerbated now?
    • toomuchtodo 3y ago
      Companies thought they’d be able to get a discount on labor due to FAANG layoffs that mostly impacted non tech roles. There is no labor recession, so no discount to be found for senior talent, but companies are still tire kickers waiting for that undervalued unicorn to land in front of a hiring manager. Expectations take the elevator up and the stairs down. https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/tech-layoff-draft/ https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/tech-layoff-draft/ (“Tech layoffs see former workers in high demand elsewhere”)
      • beernet 3y ago
        > FAANG layoffs that mostly impacted non tech roles. Source? My impression is the exact opposite.
        • toomuchtodo 3y ago
          My Linkedin feed was full of Google, Facebook, and Amazon non techs getting axed, I'll need to look through https://layoffs.fyi/ https://layoffs.fyi/ to see how accurate my statement is.
  • entuno 3y ago
    And equally, it's hard to find jobs with the low enough requirements and the desired conditions at the offered salary.
  • deleted 3y ago
• MattGaiser 3y ago
  It wouldn’t surprise me if this is a question of credentials. I don’t know any experienced people with solid skills who also have degrees who have been having difficulty. I know one good one, but without a relevant degree who is struggling. I also know lots of boot camp/recent grads in iffy masters programs who aren’t getting anywhere. I am aware of a few hiring processes that are just inundated with people who don’t have a relevant degree that keep restarting as a result. So it may simply be that standards rose more than actual availability in the market did.
  • _8j50 3y ago
    Are people struggling even with years of experience because of lacking a degree? Or are they entry level?
    • MattGaiser 3y ago
      This one person has 10 years of experience, but he is mostly enterprise Java, so target companies are more traditional.
  • throwaway38475 3y ago
    Degrees are as useless a metric as bootcamps in my experience. I've done so many interviews in which a 4.0 CS grad can't sort a list that a degree from even 'elite' institutions doesn't mean much.
    • Mountain_Skies 3y ago
      Does the job you're hiring for actually require sorting a list? If Kroger wants to hire a new CEO, they're unlikely to require candidates to walk up to the cash register and ring up customers even if it's a very basic skill for the industry.
      • deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      • 3y ago
• comprev 3y ago
  It doesn't help when salary is rarely disclosed on the adverts, so those only casually looking won't want to invest any time into the process - only to learn the salary is not within their expectations. It's a complete waste of time for everybody involved.
  • jwestbury 3y ago
    Salary details are the first thing I look for in a job posting. If they don't exist, and the company isn't well-known enough to have a well-populated salaries page on levels.fyi, I just close the page and ignore the posting.
• aurizon 3y ago
  You expose some meat(job ad), soon there are 10,000 flies on it(applicants), so out comes the Raid(screen) - the harder you spray, the less flies, but you want a superior fly(applicant) - what to do? Less Raid? Then evolution selects flies immune to Raid. In online search and online work you soon hire apparent good flies and a few months shows they lack buzz, = costs/time wasted. For small companies, friends of friends etc does work, but the IBM's and Meta's need swarms. You can either do detailed online tech screening with your capable people using their time, or hire a specialist company with(or who have a retained pool of expertise) to do the deep search. Twas ever thus = probationary periods etc.
• Racing0461 3y ago
  There is no labor shortage.
• dzek69 3y ago
  I'm working at crypto startup that grows fast right now. There is enough candidates, but we can't find anyone good. We aim for seniors and we pay a nice price IMO. Current "seniors" are much worse than 2016's "middles". I'd not mind hiring a "middle", but people seem so unmotivated right now to work and learn. It's more about the attitude than skills. Also funny stats: For 15 candidates interviewed we even got "scammed" thrice (fake CVs, one was basically copy-paste from other people, stolen code presented as their own). We hired one person so far.
  • koolba 3y ago
    > We aim for seniors and we pay a nice price IMO. What’s “a nice price” in 2023?
  • UncleOxidant 3y ago
    I'm going to guess that pretty much everyone who wants to be in Crypto is by now. Others outside the field are going to be wary to enter it given the volatility and reputation issues of the industry.
  • mmanciop 3y ago
    And there I thought that being good at scamming was a key skill in crypto. (Nothing personal, but it had to be said.)
  • vlod 3y ago
    >but people seem so unmotivated right now to work and learn Hmm.. not been my experience and not for me specifically. My attitude to interviewing (when I was on that side of the fence), was to hire for (I hate to say it as it's subjective), by perceived IQ and their drive to learn/get stuff done. It usually worked out quite well for my hires. ATM, I'm getting rejected for the most stupid f.things of not knowing some obscure dated framework/library. Not sure if interviewers realize this, but in a lot of cases, it's an evening hacking on a project to learn it. These things are not rocket science. My thoughts is that there's so many candidates (or maybe posting bots?), that if all checkboxes are not ticked, they can discard them.
    • 3y ago
• vlod 3y ago
  For freelancers, I am occasionally seeing extremely low hourly rates (linkedin), targeted at (I assume) Latin America. i.e. $15-$20 is the lowest, but sometimes $35ph. (Pretty shocking, but if it works out for everyone, good luck to them). I know companies that are only hiring from that region, where previously they were hiring Americans. Generally, I'm seeing hourly rates 40%-60% lower than a year ago (for senior roles). It's pretty crappy. Even when I apply to them (with those rates), 95% of the time, I don't get a response. (This has been talked about a few times in other threads, mainly to do with cover letters). Are all these layoff I keep hearing about, really screwing things up to this extent? I'm confused on wtf is going on.
  • throwaway5959 3y ago
    Work from home advocates clearly didn’t think through the fact that there are extremely talented devs in LatAm in the same time zone as them that can live like royalty on half their salary.
    • vunderba 3y ago
      Lol. Time zones differences are the least of an employers concerns if they're interested in hiring internationally. Taxes / liability / language differences are far more of an issue. This is why you see tons of positions that state "Remote US only".
      • throwaway5959 3y ago
        I work with a number of employees in Eastern Europe and LatAm. Their English is fine and the taxes/liability stuff is all managed by the contracting company. Whenever they switch companies a new employee is swapped in by the company. It’s way easier than trying to find employees in southern CA.
        • isbvhodnvemrwvn 3y ago
          Not sure about the other countries, but in Poland the quality of developers working for body leasing companies is very poor.
• digitalsushi 3y ago
  As someone casually looking for a better fit as an infrastructure person, it can be disparaging for some of these portals to keep stats on interesting jobs. I'll open up an email advertisement, to see that sometimes >10,000 people have applied for this single role. I'll chuckle and close that tab - I am not a lottery player and I will not drop my resume into an applicant pool twice as large as my town. I would say my personal cutoff is about 25, whether these statistics are trustworthy or not.
  • UncleOxidant 3y ago
    Same. I saw a job on LinkedIn that had 1000+ applies yet it was asking for quite a few skills. I wonder if these numbers are being gamed somehow? Are they accurate? Are there bots involved?
    • karmakurtisaani 3y ago
      I remember reading that the numbers include the applicants from previous times the same job opening was posted. That's why you get hundreds of applicants 3 hours after the job was listed.
    • analognoise 3y ago
      EasyApply filter on, hit apply on every job for the first 10 pages that even remotely mentions something you do, want to do, or thought about once. I would not be surprised if jobs were getting 1000+ applicants.
• g4zj 3y ago
  Most so-called opportunities feel like scams anymore. Navigating the current job market hardly seems worth the risk, considering I've already got a stable, fairly well-paying job.
• linsomniac 3y ago
  A couple weeks ago we put a advert out on Indeed and also listed it here on HN. Initially we didn't have any further qualifications beyond the job post, which did indeed go into details on the job and requesting a cover letter. After spending a couple days of 2-3 hours each on reviewing resumes that were "only ok", we started adding additional hoops for getting resumes in, and also tried to put in a gatekeeper to really urge applicants to write cover letters. After that the rate has dropped to bearable, but we still maybe get one out of 10 applications with a cover. So, if you are applying to a job right now, I'd say that rather than optimizing your process for getting a lot of jobs applied for, spend some more time and apply for jobs that you're well suited for, and then make a cover letter that explains why. I've been very lucky, I've not had to apply for many jobs. But when I have, I always wrote a specific cover letter AND customized my resume to the job advert. But, yeah, we're having a hard time finding full-stack people that can hit the ground running with Java and Vue.
  • UncleOxidant 3y ago
    I'm kind of surprised to hear that cover letters still matter. It seems like most of the places I've applied to recently don't even have an option for including a cover letter. Since most of this is driven by keywords anymore, I guess I figured the cover letter was kind of an anachronism. I suspect you're in a small to medium sized company?
    • JohnFen 3y ago
      My company is a large one, but we aren't keyword-driven or the like. A human screens the applications. Cover letters matter to us.
      • deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      • whynotmaybe 3y ago
        What criteria are you looking for in a cover letter? I find the concept of cover letter completely disassociated of a candidate competency to do their job. I can spend 1h to write a cover letter with perfect structure, good intention and really speaking my vision of me in the company, this won't show that I can do a leetcode medium or that my clipper code is well structured.
• aabhay 3y ago
  My observation is that there were recent (2022/2023) layoffs that have now flooded the job market in tech with lots of unfortunately mediocre candidates. Therefore, it is both challenging to hire and challenging to find a job. I don’t think it’s that there’s any lack of good tools to use to find candidates. And great engineers are still just as hard to find, as companies are very reluctant to fire top performers even in mass layoff rounds that affect the rest of their division.
• timeagain 3y ago
  I think the “hard on both sides” nature of tech hiring is the desired end result of the “hiring industry” (indeed, freelance recruiters, leetcode, HR bureaucracy, etc.) the incentives are just like any other intermediary: make their services ubiquitous, unavoidable, and in constant need. These services, like most others, sell something that cannot be bought. Namely, high quality candidates delivered to the hiring managers door. But in reality the incentives are more similar to Tinder than they are to a matchamker. Get everyone on both sides in a pay-to-play whirlpool and provide just enough value to seem useful. In many industries hiring is still done primarily in-person through real-world network referrals. Maybe you tell yourself that these jobs are more fungible so the extra steps aren’t as necessary, but I think that as developers we underestimate our own fungibility.
  • sirspacey 3y ago
    Having worked in the recruiting industry, these are the three top barriers to hiring: 1. The CEO/Board/Leaders ignore clear signals from candidates on what they want in a job (hybrid/remote being most common issue) 2. Hiring managers refused to learn the basics on how to attract & vet quality candidates. They are unreliable, capricious, and generally run hot/cold during the process 3. Recruiters have given up on addressing points #1 & #2, so they shovel candidates and jobs back and forth without expecting to be heard Most intermediaries are in this position, they are trying to apply expertise on a business function to those who don’t share it. It’s very difficult to overcome, even when internal owners (like HR team members) know the gap and are advocating for an effective approach
    • rawgabbit 3y ago
      In your opinion what are the basics, hiring managers should do to attract the best candidates?
• JohnFen 3y ago
  We've had two positions open on my team for months. Filling them has been a struggle. There's no lack of applicants, but none of them have the needed kind/amount of experience. Pay isn't the issue. I think there's three reasons why this is the case: we need genuine senior-level people, web/internet stack technology experience isn't relevant, and there's a requirement to work in the office. I mention that second one because the vast majority of applicants we get are Java/C#/etc. programmers and we need C/C++ ones. Hopefully, the company will at least give a bit on the office requirement. I think if they did, we'd have filled these months ago.
  • cebert 3y ago
    Is there a reason you don’t think a good Java/C# developer willing to learn couldn’t learn C/C++. Especially with LLMs, I feel like which language(s) a developer is currently comfortable with is less of an issue. I previously had no Python experience, but know how to code well in C# and JavaScript. Using a LLM, I was able to quickly get up to speed writing DevOps Python scripts because I understood basic programming concepts and terms.
    • JohnFen 3y ago
      No reason at all, and we don't rule out applicants because of language. But Java/etc programmers have a strong tendency to be specialized in a particular sort of programming that we don't do, and get very weak when they're not doing that. They need more training that we can afford in order to come up to speed. But we absolutely interview the ones who seem like they'd be able to come up to speed. The pickings seem a bit slim, though. We also aren't in SV, Seattle, or any of the other hot places people want to be. That's why I think the problem is more the office requirement than anything else. The positions also aren't ML positions (we do use ML, but those positions are already well-covered.)
      • UncleOxidant 3y ago
        What general geographic area are you in?
• chiefalchemist 3y ago
  I generally keep an eye on (web dev) job ads. What follows is all anecdotal, but such is the nature of the question. Once the talk of possible recession started (earlier this year), postings fell off. Also salary range seemed to have dipped. As in the hiring company was looking for more for less. It appear many were fishing for better talent, recently downsized and desperate of steady income. Sure, such people exist. But when you sense it from a job ad, it's not a good look. Since the beginning of Sept (read: end of Summer) it feels like things have picked up, and there's less bottom feeding. I've been getting interviews steady enough but in nearly all cases in the first five to ten minutes I find myself thinking, "Why am I here?" The point is, I often feel companies post ads but the ad doesn't actually refect their needs, or they are for some reason confused about their wants and needs. It's very annoying.
• wendyshu 3y ago
  At my company we put engineers (instead of HR) in charge of job descriptions, resume review, and phone screens and saw a sharp increase in quality of candidates we interviewed.
  • mensetmanusman 3y ago
    I wish we could bypass hr, but they exist because of bad actors and lawsuits.
  • javcasas 3y ago
    I (engineer) wrote a job description for a job, pretty much cutting all the bullshit. Got quite a few good applicants, ended up hiring a random guy without a degree that is now making himself a well known name in the Flutter community. Cut-the-bullshit attracts talent.
  • schmookeeg 3y ago
    Being an interviewing engineer on the hiring side of a recent round at our company -- my goodness, I forgot how bad HR could make the tech hiring process. I personally referred two excellent colleagues from past gigs, and had HR waste 3 hours of their time before DQing them because they mismatched on a cultural index quiz of some sort. I was not notified. When I finally found out, I was super embarrassed, and it damaged my relationship with one of the two friends. Guess how many colleagues I will be referring to this company in the future? Our best applicants seemed to take weeks to schedule first interviews with. By the time we got to them, they had secured other gigs. Strangely, many of the mediocre and "you're kidding, right?" candidates were actually promoted to us by our HR crew, wasting our time. I assume because their calendar times were widely open and available to us. We ended up hiring some decent people, but.. I like to think if there was some sort of Quality Score we could apply, our HR team's involvement cost us 30% on the quality of people we ultimately brought on. I wish I understood why companies did this. Our CTO apparently did not want to "ruffle feathers" to push back on HR's process. My continued howls of frustration about the process and its ineptitude actually got ME reprimanded. Which sent me back to the "fine, they're good enough" mindset in my screenings. Which completes the cycle of mediocrity. Sigh. It should be better than this.
  • 3y ago
• noone_youknow 3y ago
  For me, it’s still the remote thing. I’m a principal, couple decades of experience, I’m still seeing quite a few approaches on LinkedIn but almost all are wanting a few days a week / month in some “fantastic” office in some city. Nope.
• dccoolgai 3y ago
  I think it's just the after-effects of the layoffs working their way through the system. If you want to read something that makes you feel better, I'll give you a link... But more than that, I'll explain the meaning behind it that you might not pick up on unless you've worked around the press/PR industry. The link: https://www.businessinsider.com/airbnb-boss-laid-off-staff-pandemic-asked-ceos-hire-thousands-2023-10 https://www.businessinsider.com/airbnb-boss-laid-off-staff-p... The deeper story: Business Insider does not write these stories themselves. They just take articles basically "pre-written" by corporate PR/press flaks and reprint them... Maybe, maybe, _maybe_ they might reach out for a "pushback/response" quote and add "x,y,z refused to comment for this story" if they don't get a response within a couple hours. Or they might spend 5 minutes fact-checking something - but probably not: if it's a source they "trust" who gives them articles that make their life easier by feeding them stories people click on, why bite the hand that feeds? So what? Well, this story was written by _AirBnB_, most likely at the behest of Chesky either directly or indirectly. And the narrative essentially reduces to "Brian Chesky cares about the people he laid off". Why would he pay people to create that narrative? I won't lead you all the way there, but suffice to say it's good sign.
• Mountain_Skies 3y ago
  Hiring pipeline have been extended to absurd lengths and now are extremely successful at achieving their true purpose: avoiding hiring anyone. There's no good reason for the current state other than pathological laziness and extreme fear of ever having a "bad" hire where bad means anyone who can't be productive their first day in the office with whatever weird frankenstack the company has implemented. There's no shortage of intelligent people who could fulfill your company's needs but there is an extreme shortage of unicorns who will work for a junior/mid salary and be able to produce senior level work instantly. Everyone struggling to hire will deny all of this but they also will recognize it completely because it is the simple truth. Blow up your pipeline, tell your HR department to buzz off with their navel gazing requirements that aren't job related, and most of all, tell your hiring managers to get over their fears and their laziness. The Earth won't spiral into the Sun if you have to train someone on your department's specific needs and should you hire someone who just never adapts, the universe won't snuff out of existence because they have to be let go and you have to look again. Companies have been hiring tech resources for longer than most of us have been alive (yes, even if you're from the mainframe era) and it's only recently that this madness has taken hold to a level that everyone is self paralyzing. Get over yourself, you and your company just aren't as important as your hiring process implies. Billions won't die from a famine if you hire someone who only understand half your stack and some of what they do understand is a dated version. They'll learn and if you treat them well (you do treat them well, right?) and don't do headcount reductions each time Wall Street feels a slight breeze, you can build up a competent team. Or you can continue the madness and profess endless confusion as to why you're unable to find anyone as smart as you to do the work you need done.
  • throwaway5959 3y ago
    > There's no shortage of intelligent people who could fulfill your company's needs but there is an extreme shortage of unicorns who will work for a junior/mid salary and be able to produce senior level work instantly. Everyone struggling to hire will deny all of this but they also will recognize it completely because it is the simple truth. Sometimes comments are so good on Hacker News I wish I could click a button and tip them. Companies that don’t deserve to have way too high of standards/requirements now.
  • 3y ago
• jpp 3y ago
  We finished a hiring process about 2 months ago, along with two other hires earlier in the year. As a hiring manager, 2023 has been brutal — 1,000:1 application to hire ratio (based on stats in Lever; no exaggeration). I’ve made a point to try to be as open and as fair as possible in our hiring process. We list the salaries up-front in the job description. We create per-hire ”join our team” pages that share a lot more about the role, including the exact hiring process, links to docs with interview prompts, timelines, and who you’ll interview with. We don’t require any formal studies; we hire globally through an EOR; we don’t change salary based on where in the world. We’re also a non-profit with a compelling mission and interesting technical challenges. We want to hire people who bring different viewpoints and add stuff to our team, and where we can give them a good professional experience too. A few observations on folks who are applying: - About a third are just outright unqualified. For example, one of the roles needs folks with experience in Postgres at a medium level (triggers, plpgsql, replication, PostGIS, etc) and we’ll get applicants who’ve only used an ORM to work with Postgres). We have a few screening questions that literally confirm the required skills listed in the job posting and use these to auto-reject applicants. (Again, nothing unfair or tricky; just literally “have you used features like triggers or replication in Postgres?”) - About half seem like good candidates from application but are obvious-no’s after either several-minute examination of application materials or a 20-30 minute call. (Generally failing a screening call because they’ve exaggerated on their resumes; haven’t read our “join our team” page that we ask them to read before our call; have red-flags in our call; etc.) - The remaining ~15% are reasonable folks for us to do technical interviews, and it comes down to how much their experience lines up with the areas we need and how well we can asses their skills in interviews. (Two-way street, of course… lots of chances for them to ask us Qs!) Where it’s been tough is filtering through the top of the funnel. In part: ChatGPT has really made a difference, in that many candidates are now using it along with much more sophisticated tools to track all their potential jobs. I think it’s _good_ in some ways, but previously we could use the ability to write well (resume, answering Qs like “why do you want to work at our company?”, communication in email) as a good proxy signal of overall effectiveness of communication. (For a fully distributed remote team that does its work via slack and GitHub, this is a relevant skill.) So we’re now having to do a _lot_ of extra work to try to be fair to everyone and keep bias as much as possible down. (I had to hire a contract recruiter to work with us - it used to be resume screening and initial calls were an average of 45 minutes a day; it went to 3 1/2 hours this year; as a CTO there’s no way I can spend that kind of time). I don’t know what the solution is — it feels like a bit of an arms race. For every company that’s trying to run a good process, the extra application load is a real cost; for companies that aren’t particularly thoughtful, it makes it worse for the candidates. I’d love to hear what others think about anything I’ve shared. What can we as hiring managers do to make it easier for you? And: what can we do to make it easier on us?
• drdunce 3y ago
  It's incredibly easy to find people, there's a huge surplus of talent and very few opportunities going. You can scoop up top engineers laid off from big tech companies for small change right now.
  • greydius 3y ago
    "Top engineers" aren't the tech workers that are getting laid off.
    • drdunce 3y ago
      Ok, fair enough, "top" has been redefined in our field. PhD research scientists with decades of software dev experience are going cheap. It might not be the exact candidate you want, but they're not really mediocre. If it was any other field, decades of experience and a PhD would be considered a "top" player.
• moltar 3y ago
  Finding people is easy. Finding talented people is harder than before. It was talented people who were not laid off (mostly, generalizing ofc). So now we have a huge surplus of untalented, average developers applying for all the jobs en mass. Signal to noise ratio is worst I’ve ever witnessed.
• janalsncm 3y ago
  I interview ML engineers for our team. Juniors are relatively easy to hire. If you know some fundamentals and can do leetcode you’re in. For seniors the bar is much higher because they will be expected to provide leadership and strategic guidance.
• fy20 3y ago
  At my company, I feel the biggest issue is execs don't want to pay more to get good people and don't want to do anything to make it more attractive to work here. The last person I hired was at the start of this year, and at the time our salary offer was around market average. For this role we (well the execs... I'm pro WFH but not my call) were asking people to be in the office four days a week and work non-standard office hours. Most of the applicants we got were living in cities far away and not willing to relocate - even though the job spec clearly stated this is an in-person role in this city. One person we interviewed seemed like the only thing they were interested in was growing their Twitch subscriber count. Then we interviewed the person we ended up hiring, who I'm sad to say we only hired because they seemed the least bad - and by that point we were desperate for someone, and worried execs may cut our budget. Oh and for anyone wondering, the role in question just needed standard frontend React skills. Nothing special.
  • logicalmonster 3y ago
    > Most of the applicants we got were living in cities far away and not willing to relocate - even though the job spec clearly stated this is an in-person role in this city. The reason this might happen so often is that a job is incorrectly categorized on the job boards. I've last track of the number of jobs I've seen that are listed on a job board as Remote with that word prominently displayed on the post, but buried in the job description is some clarification that says something like "Candidates must be able to work 4 days a week in the office."
• ochronus 3y ago
  Data point from Berlin/Amsterdam/Munich/Dublin/Madrid (plus EU remote in general): we've been hiring around 100+ seniors/leads/staffengs (backend/frontend engineers) in the past 9 months, and it's been quite easy. Healthy influx, no major delays.