5 ms·

Structural unemployment happens when the perceived skills of the workforce don't match the perceived needs of employers, so there is both unemployment and diffi

Structural unemployment happens when the perceived skills of the workforce don't match the perceived needs of employers, so there is both unemployment and difficulty hiring. A lot of engineers will tell you that companies are often expecting both too much (precise types of experience) and the wrong things (leetcode-type challenges, unnecessarily specific knowledge...), which leads them to pass over perfectly qualified candidates.

SideQuark 2y ago
Quite often perception of reality matches actual reality. I've found it extremely rare to the point of almost being non-existent that what engineers think a company needs or should do is accurate compared to what a company needs or should do.
- avmich 2y ago
  Probably to what company thinks the company needs or should do? It's rare - very - when a company really needs to do something unusual, which engineers wouldn't expect.
pjc50 2y ago
> Structural unemployment happens when the perceived skills of the workforce don't match the perceived needs of employers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons : when "buyers" cannot distinguish between good and bad due to informational issues, even the good products (or in this case employees) cannot find buyers. Market failure. It might be improvable by the relevant parties getting together and agreeing on a curriculum and exams so people only have to take a test once, for example. But I think that's a long way off. Of course, ChatGPT makes this a lot worse since it reduces the cost of fakes on both sides: fake applications and fake job adverts.
- pseudocomposer 2y ago
  Unions have historically solved this problem. Non-union accreditation programs don’t seem to have the same effect, though in some industries they do have a positive effect on salary.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - alephnerd 2y ago
    It would only make it harder for new grads, as unions aim to help their constituents increase salaries, which means paying non-union hires waaaaaay less. Look at the Automotive Engineering industry in Ohio/Penn/Mich for example - a union contract engineer will earn a decent amount, but the majority of new hiring is non-union.
    - lolinder 2y ago
      I'm relatively uninformed here, but isn't part of the union's job to propagate itself and ensure that there aren't non-union hires in the same industry and location?
      - alephnerd 2y ago
        > there aren't non-union hires in the same industry and location We live in a globalized world where location doesn't matter as much. Automotive Unions are good at demanding fairly competitive wages for their members, but this pushed margins significantly down, leading to vendors and even manufacturers in the Automotive industry to leave union-friendly states like MI, Ohio, and Pennsylvania for those that are right-to-work (eg. South Carolina). A major reason companies like GM and Stellaris fell behind on the EV trend was because battery technology and automation doesn't fall under the UAW, so there were constant protests and strikes against EV manufacturing (eg. the UAW strikes a couple months ago). Meanwhile, the Teslas, Hyundais, DaimlerBenzes, and Fords pivoted manufacturing to right-to-work states like Alabama, Kentucky, and Texas. Imo, a big reason for the PHEV push recently in the US is because of UAW negotiations to protect legacy ICE builds which can be modified into PHEVs as they use most of the same parts excluding the battery portion [0]. [0] - https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/16/business/electric-vehicles-uaw-gm-ford-stellantis.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/16/business/electric-vehicle...
sokoloff 2y ago
Leetcode (or hacker rank or others) and other algorithmic qualification (have recruiter ask for years of experience in exactly X) is an understandable response to the automated firehose tools that allow applicants to deluge companies with applications with relatively low effort per app. Companies have to find some way to filter out the percentage that have very low likelihood of succeeding. I hate it, but I don’t see a better way that doesn’t have its own limitations. (Referral of known ex-colleagues is a good one, but that’s limited in scope and has diversity problems).
- danaris 2y ago
  My observation has been that the causality is the other way around: the pointless mindgames of employers trying to find "the best" people via interviews led to job-seekers finding ways to game a system that was rigged against them. However, regardless of "who started it" in this round, ultimately, it is unquestionably a situation we can lay at the feed of industry, which abandoned decades ago the practice of actually training new hires for their positions. Sure, there are prerequisites they can expect (eg, in a programming position, you can expect some level of school learning or experience with programming in general, or particular categories of program/lanugauge), but the degree to which employers are willing to train people on the stuff they use has declined precipitously since the late 20th century. This is a well-known phenomenon, and it is substantially responsible for the modern arms race between job-seekers and prospective employers: if you know that whoever you bring on will get 3 months of well-designed training for the role they'll be filling, you don't need to spend 6 months vetting them over 10 rounds of interviews for an entry-level position.
  - sokoloff 2y ago
    That tracks reasonably well. We have a fair amount of success at hiring college grads, which we obviously have to train to professional proficiency. We have some success stories, but much longer search times and far more interviews per start when we hire for experience-required roles.
    - pdimitar 2y ago
jongjong 2y ago
Some of those interview questions have ridiculously short time constraints. You need to be perfectly rested and well practiced in order to finish the exercises in time. Some of these tests seem to select for cheaters because only cheaters who either knew the questions ahead of time or who used AI to solve the problem could finish them in time.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- joquarky 2y ago
  My last take-home wanted a sudoku solving app coded from scratch in 30 minutes in an unusually restricted online sandbox IDE that would disqualify you if you defocused the window. I have 28 years of verifiable professional software development experience on my resume.
  - jongjong 2y ago
    I would just close the window 1 minute in because that's just ridiculous. Unless you've already done this before and play Sudoku regularly for fun, it would take you 10 minutes just to absorb the problem. Doesn't leave much time for coding. If you can't even minimize the window to read up on Sudoku, how the heck can you complete the task. The company will end up full of Sudoku enthusiasts who can barely code. For my last online test, I wanted to close it within 5 minutes of reading the first question even though the problem was not particularly difficult, I just knew I couldn't solve it within 40 minutes because it was a problem that I had never seen before and was very disconnected from practical scenarios. I needed 20 minutes just to absorb the question fully. Also it was very late at night and I wasn't in an optimal state of mind.
- CM30 2y ago
  Exactly. A lot of the problems asked of people are basically "do this multi week task that a team would probably work on at the actual company, except in an hour or two". They also make you question whether you'd want to even work at a company with this sort of setup. Like, imagine a software engineering role where your boss wanted each project done within an hour, with no help from other developers or external sources, with a tech stack you're only told about the day the problem is given to you. Would anyone really consider that a good (or even tolerable) working environment?
rmbyrro 2y ago
Leetcode type challenges are just a proxy for logical habilities, which are highly desired for SWE positions. It's not meant to evaluate every ability. Despite imperfect, I don't know of a better indicator that has similar cost. An employer won't spend a lot more to evaluate with perfection how good we are with logic.
- b20000 2y ago
  leetcode challenges are a proxy for nothing employers can simply hire based on past projects
- bradlys 2y ago
  It really isn’t. Asking people stuff like N Queens, Trapping Rain Water, and other such questions is really about if you’ve seen the problem before and studied enough to solve them optimally in under 20 minutes while explaining out loud. It really is about testing how much you prepared for the interview and not the job.
  - VirusNewbie 2y ago
    I interviewed at Netflix and Google and not once did I see a question that was on leetcode. I had to think very hard about how to solve each of their coding questions. However, they didn't need any tricky esoteric algorithms either which I think was really well done. Microsoft on the other hand, did exactly what you said, they just pulled the classics, which I think is less helpful. I guess it filters on people who have a moderately good memory and are willing to study.
g9yuayon 2y ago
> wrong things (leetcode-type challenges, unnecessarily specific knowledge.. I'm curious about the dynamics of this. If leetcoding or requiring some specific knowledge is too much for candidates, those employers will not be able to find enough talent, so they will be forced to lower their standards and the mismatch should be gone, right? Case in point, I'd venture to guess that no more than 10% of the tech workers truly understand AI or stats or machine learning or basic college-level maths, yet magically millions of ML engineers or data scientists have popped up in the past few years just because the market had such high demand.
- gopher_space 2y ago
  > If leetcoding or requiring some specific knowledge is too much for candidates, those employers will not be able to find enough talent, so they will be forced to lower their standards and the mismatch should be gone, right? I'd revisit any train of thought that conflates access to capital with wisdom or intelligence. If someone invents a money printer then everything they do afterwards will be seen in a post hoc ergo propter hoc light as long as the original money printer still works. For example, your statement assumes feedback loops I see scant evidence for in real life.
- banannaise 2y ago
  If the corporation as a unit were a perfectly rational actor, sure. In practice, most corporations seem quite happy to collectively hand-wring over how they can't find new talent, squeeze everything they can out of the talent they currently have, and direct their existing personnel at direct profit-earners while letting systems gradually fall apart due to lack of maintenance.

SideQuark 2y ago

Quite often perception of reality matches actual reality. I've found it extremely rare to the point of almost being non-existent that what engineers think a company needs or should do is accurate compared to what a company needs or should do.

avmich 2y ago
Probably to what company thinks the company needs or should do? It's rare - very - when a company really needs to do something unusual, which engineers wouldn't expect.

pjc50 2y ago

> Structural unemployment happens when the perceived skills of the workforce don't match the perceived needs of employers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons : when "buyers" cannot distinguish between good and bad due to informational issues, even the good products (or in this case employees) cannot find buyers. Market failure. It might be improvable by the relevant parties getting together and agreeing on a curriculum and exams so people only have to take a test once, for example. But I think that's a long way off. Of course, ChatGPT makes this a lot worse since it reduces the cost of fakes on both sides: fake applications and fake job adverts.

pseudocomposer 2y ago
Unions have historically solved this problem. Non-union accreditation programs don’t seem to have the same effect, though in some industries they do have a positive effect on salary.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- alephnerd 2y ago
  It would only make it harder for new grads, as unions aim to help their constituents increase salaries, which means paying non-union hires waaaaaay less. Look at the Automotive Engineering industry in Ohio/Penn/Mich for example - a union contract engineer will earn a decent amount, but the majority of new hiring is non-union.
  - lolinder 2y ago
    I'm relatively uninformed here, but isn't part of the union's job to propagate itself and ensure that there aren't non-union hires in the same industry and location?
    - alephnerd 2y ago
      > there aren't non-union hires in the same industry and location We live in a globalized world where location doesn't matter as much. Automotive Unions are good at demanding fairly competitive wages for their members, but this pushed margins significantly down, leading to vendors and even manufacturers in the Automotive industry to leave union-friendly states like MI, Ohio, and Pennsylvania for those that are right-to-work (eg. South Carolina). A major reason companies like GM and Stellaris fell behind on the EV trend was because battery technology and automation doesn't fall under the UAW, so there were constant protests and strikes against EV manufacturing (eg. the UAW strikes a couple months ago). Meanwhile, the Teslas, Hyundais, DaimlerBenzes, and Fords pivoted manufacturing to right-to-work states like Alabama, Kentucky, and Texas. Imo, a big reason for the PHEV push recently in the US is because of UAW negotiations to protect legacy ICE builds which can be modified into PHEVs as they use most of the same parts excluding the battery portion [0]. [0] - https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/16/business/electric-vehicles-uaw-gm-ford-stellantis.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/16/business/electric-vehicle...

sokoloff 2y ago

Leetcode (or hacker rank or others) and other algorithmic qualification (have recruiter ask for years of experience in exactly X) is an understandable response to the automated firehose tools that allow applicants to deluge companies with applications with relatively low effort per app. Companies have to find some way to filter out the percentage that have very low likelihood of succeeding. I hate it, but I don’t see a better way that doesn’t have its own limitations. (Referral of known ex-colleagues is a good one, but that’s limited in scope and has diversity problems).

danaris 2y ago
My observation has been that the causality is the other way around: the pointless mindgames of employers trying to find "the best" people via interviews led to job-seekers finding ways to game a system that was rigged against them. However, regardless of "who started it" in this round, ultimately, it is unquestionably a situation we can lay at the feed of industry, which abandoned decades ago the practice of actually training new hires for their positions. Sure, there are prerequisites they can expect (eg, in a programming position, you can expect some level of school learning or experience with programming in general, or particular categories of program/lanugauge), but the degree to which employers are willing to train people on the stuff they use has declined precipitously since the late 20th century. This is a well-known phenomenon, and it is substantially responsible for the modern arms race between job-seekers and prospective employers: if you know that whoever you bring on will get 3 months of well-designed training for the role they'll be filling, you don't need to spend 6 months vetting them over 10 rounds of interviews for an entry-level position.
- sokoloff 2y ago
  That tracks reasonably well. We have a fair amount of success at hiring college grads, which we obviously have to train to professional proficiency. We have some success stories, but much longer search times and far more interviews per start when we hire for experience-required roles.
  - pdimitar 2y ago

jongjong 2y ago

Some of those interview questions have ridiculously short time constraints. You need to be perfectly rested and well practiced in order to finish the exercises in time. Some of these tests seem to select for cheaters because only cheaters who either knew the questions ahead of time or who used AI to solve the problem could finish them in time.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
joquarky 2y ago
My last take-home wanted a sudoku solving app coded from scratch in 30 minutes in an unusually restricted online sandbox IDE that would disqualify you if you defocused the window. I have 28 years of verifiable professional software development experience on my resume.
- jongjong 2y ago
  I would just close the window 1 minute in because that's just ridiculous. Unless you've already done this before and play Sudoku regularly for fun, it would take you 10 minutes just to absorb the problem. Doesn't leave much time for coding. If you can't even minimize the window to read up on Sudoku, how the heck can you complete the task. The company will end up full of Sudoku enthusiasts who can barely code. For my last online test, I wanted to close it within 5 minutes of reading the first question even though the problem was not particularly difficult, I just knew I couldn't solve it within 40 minutes because it was a problem that I had never seen before and was very disconnected from practical scenarios. I needed 20 minutes just to absorb the question fully. Also it was very late at night and I wasn't in an optimal state of mind.
CM30 2y ago
Exactly. A lot of the problems asked of people are basically "do this multi week task that a team would probably work on at the actual company, except in an hour or two". They also make you question whether you'd want to even work at a company with this sort of setup. Like, imagine a software engineering role where your boss wanted each project done within an hour, with no help from other developers or external sources, with a tech stack you're only told about the day the problem is given to you. Would anyone really consider that a good (or even tolerable) working environment?

rmbyrro 2y ago

Leetcode type challenges are just a proxy for logical habilities, which are highly desired for SWE positions. It's not meant to evaluate every ability. Despite imperfect, I don't know of a better indicator that has similar cost. An employer won't spend a lot more to evaluate with perfection how good we are with logic.

b20000 2y ago
leetcode challenges are a proxy for nothing employers can simply hire based on past projects
bradlys 2y ago
It really isn’t. Asking people stuff like N Queens, Trapping Rain Water, and other such questions is really about if you’ve seen the problem before and studied enough to solve them optimally in under 20 minutes while explaining out loud. It really is about testing how much you prepared for the interview and not the job.
- VirusNewbie 2y ago
  I interviewed at Netflix and Google and not once did I see a question that was on leetcode. I had to think very hard about how to solve each of their coding questions. However, they didn't need any tricky esoteric algorithms either which I think was really well done. Microsoft on the other hand, did exactly what you said, they just pulled the classics, which I think is less helpful. I guess it filters on people who have a moderately good memory and are willing to study.

g9yuayon 2y ago

> wrong things (leetcode-type challenges, unnecessarily specific knowledge.. I'm curious about the dynamics of this. If leetcoding or requiring some specific knowledge is too much for candidates, those employers will not be able to find enough talent, so they will be forced to lower their standards and the mismatch should be gone, right? Case in point, I'd venture to guess that no more than 10% of the tech workers truly understand AI or stats or machine learning or basic college-level maths, yet magically millions of ML engineers or data scientists have popped up in the past few years just because the market had such high demand.

gopher_space 2y ago
> If leetcoding or requiring some specific knowledge is too much for candidates, those employers will not be able to find enough talent, so they will be forced to lower their standards and the mismatch should be gone, right? I'd revisit any train of thought that conflates access to capital with wisdom or intelligence. If someone invents a money printer then everything they do afterwards will be seen in a post hoc ergo propter hoc light as long as the original money printer still works. For example, your statement assumes feedback loops I see scant evidence for in real life.
banannaise 2y ago
If the corporation as a unit were a perfectly rational actor, sure. In practice, most corporations seem quite happy to collectively hand-wring over how they can't find new talent, squeeze everything they can out of the talent they currently have, and direct their existing personnel at direct profit-earners while letting systems gradually fall apart due to lack of maintenance.