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What works is companies not demanding that their employee be the square peg that fits their square hole. The square peg doesn’t exist. You’re going to have to h

What works is companies not demanding that their employee be the square peg that fits their square hole. The square peg doesn’t exist. You’re going to have to hire someone who doesn’t already have the specific skills you need and invest in training them and educating them. The interview process is just to evaluate if they are capable of succeeding in that process. Yes, it means companies have to take risk. It’s better than the risk of trying to carry on long term short-staffed.

teeray 2y ago
> It’s better than the risk of trying to carry on long term short-staffed Companies don’t feel that way. They feel they can just ramp up the workload on existing employees “until we can hire more.” What are they going to do, leave? Where do they think they’re going to go? They’ll be met with the same situation at another company, except they’ll be on the other side of the table this time. If there are companies with money, no employees, and the urgent desire to hire them, that breaks this equilibrium. The overworked employees jump ship to the startup, the incumbents become more desperate and finally relent.
- surajrmal 2y ago
  At some point, your employees don't just magically work harder. And then you fail to meet customer demand resulting in lost potential revenue. By the time this happens you're so far in the hole it's challenging to climb out.
- danaris 2y ago
  This is the (well, yet another) result of going for decades with such weak labor protections. If the answer to "What are they going to do?" is "strike", or "leave and take a massive severance payout because that's what their union negotiated in the contract that specifies you can't overwork them by more than X amount", then the company no longer has that abusive option on the table. They have to hire someone to fill that role.
  - FearOfTheDuck 2y ago
    I'm recently interested in the question of unions, and I'm wondering, if there any ICT unions somewhere? Or, at least, attempts of creating such? I was also thinking that it can be difficult to officially unite many developers worldwide. But can it be possible to get data ownership back? E.g. collectively crawl job openings from LinkedIn, and leave some personal reviews on them, at some independent platform?
setgree 2y ago
Unfortunately, the skill of being trainable/educable is very unevenly distributed in the population and very hard to assess from afar. Instead, companies hire based on whether you've already been trained/educated in how to do the thing, which amounts to letting someone else take on the risk associated with your failing to learn something. If I were tasked with solving this, I'd advocate for more frank discussion and use of various pseudo tests, e.g. SAT or GRE scores. This strikes a lot of people as unfair and non-inclusive.
- nicolas_t 2y ago
  That's a very good point. Over the course of my career, the best people I've seen are those that are really good at educating themselves and keep constantly learning new things. They were a small minority though of the coworkers I've worked with and an even smaller minority of people I've interviewed (the problem is that when trying to hire people who have those qualities, it's hard to avoid false positives).
- ativzzz 2y ago
  > various pseudo tests Leetcode fits this too
  - jeltz 2y ago
    All people I know who have been good at leetcode have been good at coding (of course they may lack other important skills but that you can assess with other questions). You can't become good at leetcode without being good at logical thinking. But not all good coders are good at it because it also requires skills unrelated to the job to be good at leetcode. I do not advocate for leetcode tests, but I think they have a bit unfair reputation. There are many worse interview questions.
    - maccard 2y ago
      I agree with you, for what it's worth. I think some of the "easy" leetcode questions are probably a decent filter, they're often contrived enough to force you t handle an edge case or two but simple enough that they should be solvable within a few minutes - they're a step above fizz buzz. They filter for a few super important qualities - can you solve a simple problem, follow some basic instructions, write somewhat comprehensible code. But most importantly, if you get stuck, how do you react. If your response is to lash out and blame the questions or the interview, that's a huge red flag that you're going to react like that when challenged in the work place. I wish I wasn't speaking from experience.

teeray 2y ago

> It’s better than the risk of trying to carry on long term short-staffed Companies don’t feel that way. They feel they can just ramp up the workload on existing employees “until we can hire more.” What are they going to do, leave? Where do they think they’re going to go? They’ll be met with the same situation at another company, except they’ll be on the other side of the table this time. If there are companies with money, no employees, and the urgent desire to hire them, that breaks this equilibrium. The overworked employees jump ship to the startup, the incumbents become more desperate and finally relent.

surajrmal 2y ago
At some point, your employees don't just magically work harder. And then you fail to meet customer demand resulting in lost potential revenue. By the time this happens you're so far in the hole it's challenging to climb out.
danaris 2y ago
This is the (well, yet another) result of going for decades with such weak labor protections. If the answer to "What are they going to do?" is "strike", or "leave and take a massive severance payout because that's what their union negotiated in the contract that specifies you can't overwork them by more than X amount", then the company no longer has that abusive option on the table. They have to hire someone to fill that role.
- FearOfTheDuck 2y ago
  I'm recently interested in the question of unions, and I'm wondering, if there any ICT unions somewhere? Or, at least, attempts of creating such? I was also thinking that it can be difficult to officially unite many developers worldwide. But can it be possible to get data ownership back? E.g. collectively crawl job openings from LinkedIn, and leave some personal reviews on them, at some independent platform?

setgree 2y ago

Unfortunately, the skill of being trainable/educable is very unevenly distributed in the population and very hard to assess from afar. Instead, companies hire based on whether you've already been trained/educated in how to do the thing, which amounts to letting someone else take on the risk associated with your failing to learn something. If I were tasked with solving this, I'd advocate for more frank discussion and use of various pseudo tests, e.g. SAT or GRE scores. This strikes a lot of people as unfair and non-inclusive.

nicolas_t 2y ago
That's a very good point. Over the course of my career, the best people I've seen are those that are really good at educating themselves and keep constantly learning new things. They were a small minority though of the coworkers I've worked with and an even smaller minority of people I've interviewed (the problem is that when trying to hire people who have those qualities, it's hard to avoid false positives).
ativzzz 2y ago
> various pseudo tests Leetcode fits this too
- jeltz 2y ago
  All people I know who have been good at leetcode have been good at coding (of course they may lack other important skills but that you can assess with other questions). You can't become good at leetcode without being good at logical thinking. But not all good coders are good at it because it also requires skills unrelated to the job to be good at leetcode. I do not advocate for leetcode tests, but I think they have a bit unfair reputation. There are many worse interview questions.
  - maccard 2y ago
    I agree with you, for what it's worth. I think some of the "easy" leetcode questions are probably a decent filter, they're often contrived enough to force you t handle an edge case or two but simple enough that they should be solvable within a few minutes - they're a step above fizz buzz. They filter for a few super important qualities - can you solve a simple problem, follow some basic instructions, write somewhat comprehensible code. But most importantly, if you get stuck, how do you react. If your response is to lash out and blame the questions or the interview, that's a huge red flag that you're going to react like that when challenged in the work place. I wish I wasn't speaking from experience.