3 ms·

In my area at least, hiring isn’t slowing so much, but the quality of the average candidate has cratered in the last 5-10 years. My opinion personally on this i

In my area at least, hiring isn’t slowing so much, but the quality of the average candidate has cratered in the last 5-10 years. My opinion personally on this is that if you can’t find a job building software, you are suffering from some combination of these factors: * Titles be damned, you aren’t actually a very talented engineer. Maybe this isn’t the right job for you. * You’re coming off as a jerk. Ask your friends to be honest with you. Often we are the last ones to recognize our own faults. Either way, somehow you have managed to become a talented software engineer and haven’t made any meaningful connections along the way. Why not? * You don’t speak fluent English. This one isn’t any kind of cultural bias, but if I have to work with you we need to be able to communicate easily. I know I am being a bit over-broad, but I do think much of the current state of our industry is predicated on the fact that there are even more folks faking it than normal. And it’s also probably true that this flooding of the market with noise is detrimental to the people who have the skill and just lack the personal connections to find work.

nikolayasdf123 2y ago
or maybe you are not USA citizen.
- twodave 2y ago
  There's definitely some truth to this. It's a bit harder to build trust with someone who is very far a way, and paying foreign workers can be more or less problematic depending on the size of company and the type of industry. For instance, in my current (US-government-adjacent) full-time job it's actually not legal for us to hire from foreign countries. That said, I've done plenty of work with people from other countries. I find the difference in cultures to be very interesting. And I've worked with plenty of non-US citizens (from Russia, Brazil, India, and other English-speaking countries) who knew what they were doing, could communicate well and made good co-workers despite things like time zone differences and not being native English-speakers. In my experience the skill level isn't all that different, but it can be harder to pinpoint BS when the person speaks in an unfamiliar accent or isn't strong in English. For example, I might ask myself, is this person dodging the question I asked because they didn't understand it? Or because they're trying to BS me?
darby_nine 2y ago
What signals do you look for in a quality hire?
- twodave 2y ago
  I think the best insight you can get into a potential hire is by asking deep questions about their experience. This takes IMO a really smart interviewer. I try to think about their past projects as if I had to take them on myself and ask them questions based on what I’d expect to be the difficult parts of the implementation. Especially things that sound like data hot spots or might benefit from parallelization. I’m actually most interested in finding out what abstractions they were able to apply, and not necessarily the end result but more their problem solving process, because I’m going to have to live with this person’s design choices. In my experience the above is just really hard for someone to fake. If they try to steer me away from talking about their experience or gloss over too much then the BS alarms start to go off… Really the above is also IMO the real value in asking folks to solve coding challenges. It’s not so I can see you struggle to write code on the spot. I want you to talk to me. I want to know how it’s going to feel to collaborate with you. Are you going to go off on your own and do a bunch of stupid garbage I’ll have to fix later? Or do you design in the open?
- throw4023042q0 2y ago
  I've co-interviewed about ~15 people or so with the hiring manager and a guy from HR. We're looking for people that 1. match the requirements at least somewhat. 2. we can get excited about software and technology. 3. can communicate clearly about software. A good candidate has preferences in technologies and software. Bad candidates don't give a shit or can't mention languages or frameworks when asked. We ask questions about soft skills too: Have you ever been in a conflict at work, if so how did you approach it. If not, have you had to act "professionally" in other situations? Good candidates can always tell a story about some conflict where they talked it out with a colleague or a boss, or give some other lame story where they "learned something". Bad candidates can't say shit. The answers to such questions can reveal some true assholes that can easily be filtered. Finally we ask why you want this job. Why this company? Good candidates have some bullshit story or can tell something they actually find fascinating about our products. Bad candidates tell you that they don't actually care much where they work, it's just for the money etc. Even whey you give them hints and clues etc., the bad candidates are usually just an obvious bad fit for the role. Shitty applications get filtered in bunches. Good candidates write applications that read as if written for the job posting. Bad applications read as if written by ChatGPT or plain ol' copy/pasta. my 2 cents
leptons 2y ago
Your last paragraph explains perfectly what happened to me during the dot-com bubble burst in 2001. We're seeing similar situations now. This time when the music stopped playing, I had a stable job. I'm holding on to my current job like it's my first born child. I feel bad for developers who are in-between jobs now, I know it's really rough out there, and I know what it's like to go on interviews and see happy well-paid people with far less experience going about their day, while looking for a job was my only job and it paid nothing. I've sat at a bus stop in tears because I didn't know where my next rent payment was coming from, right after being in the fanciest offices in town with some of the dumbest developers that wouldn't hire me because they were protecting their job, they knew I was too good for their team. Now I'm a lot older, and my current problem is ageism. My current job may be the last one I ever get unless the job market improves significantly.
- twodave 2y ago
  What a gut-wrenching story. Except for you it isn’t just a story. My heart goes out to you! I know what it is like to not know how I’m going to survive the immediate future. Those kinds of moments test you as a human and reveal who you really are.
gniv 2y ago
> * You’re coming off as a jerk. This is a big one, although I would phrase is more generally -- you don't work well with other people. I have run interviews at [FAANG] and this becomes apparent quickly even in very technical discussions. So you may have thought you solved the problem and I have unfairly failed you. Sadly the way things work in our society nobody will tell you this on their own accord unless yes you ask close friends.

nikolayasdf123 2y ago

or maybe you are not USA citizen.

twodave 2y ago
There's definitely some truth to this. It's a bit harder to build trust with someone who is very far a way, and paying foreign workers can be more or less problematic depending on the size of company and the type of industry. For instance, in my current (US-government-adjacent) full-time job it's actually not legal for us to hire from foreign countries. That said, I've done plenty of work with people from other countries. I find the difference in cultures to be very interesting. And I've worked with plenty of non-US citizens (from Russia, Brazil, India, and other English-speaking countries) who knew what they were doing, could communicate well and made good co-workers despite things like time zone differences and not being native English-speakers. In my experience the skill level isn't all that different, but it can be harder to pinpoint BS when the person speaks in an unfamiliar accent or isn't strong in English. For example, I might ask myself, is this person dodging the question I asked because they didn't understand it? Or because they're trying to BS me?

darby_nine 2y ago

What signals do you look for in a quality hire?

twodave 2y ago
I think the best insight you can get into a potential hire is by asking deep questions about their experience. This takes IMO a really smart interviewer. I try to think about their past projects as if I had to take them on myself and ask them questions based on what I’d expect to be the difficult parts of the implementation. Especially things that sound like data hot spots or might benefit from parallelization. I’m actually most interested in finding out what abstractions they were able to apply, and not necessarily the end result but more their problem solving process, because I’m going to have to live with this person’s design choices. In my experience the above is just really hard for someone to fake. If they try to steer me away from talking about their experience or gloss over too much then the BS alarms start to go off… Really the above is also IMO the real value in asking folks to solve coding challenges. It’s not so I can see you struggle to write code on the spot. I want you to talk to me. I want to know how it’s going to feel to collaborate with you. Are you going to go off on your own and do a bunch of stupid garbage I’ll have to fix later? Or do you design in the open?
throw4023042q0 2y ago
I've co-interviewed about ~15 people or so with the hiring manager and a guy from HR. We're looking for people that 1. match the requirements at least somewhat. 2. we can get excited about software and technology. 3. can communicate clearly about software. A good candidate has preferences in technologies and software. Bad candidates don't give a shit or can't mention languages or frameworks when asked. We ask questions about soft skills too: Have you ever been in a conflict at work, if so how did you approach it. If not, have you had to act "professionally" in other situations? Good candidates can always tell a story about some conflict where they talked it out with a colleague or a boss, or give some other lame story where they "learned something". Bad candidates can't say shit. The answers to such questions can reveal some true assholes that can easily be filtered. Finally we ask why you want this job. Why this company? Good candidates have some bullshit story or can tell something they actually find fascinating about our products. Bad candidates tell you that they don't actually care much where they work, it's just for the money etc. Even whey you give them hints and clues etc., the bad candidates are usually just an obvious bad fit for the role. Shitty applications get filtered in bunches. Good candidates write applications that read as if written for the job posting. Bad applications read as if written by ChatGPT or plain ol' copy/pasta. my 2 cents

leptons 2y ago

Your last paragraph explains perfectly what happened to me during the dot-com bubble burst in 2001. We're seeing similar situations now. This time when the music stopped playing, I had a stable job. I'm holding on to my current job like it's my first born child. I feel bad for developers who are in-between jobs now, I know it's really rough out there, and I know what it's like to go on interviews and see happy well-paid people with far less experience going about their day, while looking for a job was my only job and it paid nothing. I've sat at a bus stop in tears because I didn't know where my next rent payment was coming from, right after being in the fanciest offices in town with some of the dumbest developers that wouldn't hire me because they were protecting their job, they knew I was too good for their team. Now I'm a lot older, and my current problem is ageism. My current job may be the last one I ever get unless the job market improves significantly.

twodave 2y ago
What a gut-wrenching story. Except for you it isn’t just a story. My heart goes out to you! I know what it is like to not know how I’m going to survive the immediate future. Those kinds of moments test you as a human and reveal who you really are.

gniv 2y ago

> * You’re coming off as a jerk. This is a big one, although I would phrase is more generally -- you don't work well with other people. I have run interviews at [FAANG] and this becomes apparent quickly even in very technical discussions. So you may have thought you solved the problem and I have unfairly failed you. Sadly the way things work in our society nobody will tell you this on their own accord unless yes you ask close friends.