10 ms·

Many companies have policies requiring that all jobs have to be posted both internally and externally before being filled. The intent is to prevent Sam the VP

Many companies have policies requiring that all jobs have to be posted both internally and externally before being filled. The intent is to prevent Sam the VP from just slotting his buddy into the job. At the end of the day, Sam the VP is just going to slot his buddy into the job but now you made a whole bunch of people apply for a job that was never available to them. Same thing happens with H1B/PERM, except now it's the law requiring it rather than company policy. The company already has someone doing the job today, but legally they have to post the job and interview a certain number of candidates to prove there is no US citizen that can do it. Terrible situation for all involved.

iancmceachern 2y ago
Not only posted, but often they require that several folks are actually interviewed.
thrw42A8N 2y ago
In Europe jobs have to be published. Even if there is no intention of filling it from the public. And companies also publish bullshit jobs which are used to manipulate regulatory requirements if needed (eg. if you want to hire a foreigner, you must prove you couldn't fill the position locally - by publishing it for 3 months).
- orwin 2y ago
  > In Europe jobs have to be published No. If you publish it, you have to give an estimation of the salary, but that's the only limitation, at least in my country. Companies have internal guidelines, like in mine, you can't hire a relative to your own department, but the job i got wasn't on a public listing, it's my agent who gave my CV to my current team leader, he was interested, organized an itw, then 3 month later i hoped to my current job (and i am way better for it).
  - thrw42A8N 2y ago
    Yes, just not everywhere.
    - orwin 2y ago
      So we agree it isn't European law? Just practice for some big companies that want to avoid cryonism?
      - thrw42A8N 2y ago
        It is law, just not in every European country, but it's definitely not unusual. And yes, companies often go with the lowest common denominator across Europe to avoid any doubt when dealing with multinational people. In my personal case it could be reasonably claimed that laws of 5 different countries apply to me based on citizenship, registered residence, actual places of work... Of course my employer wants to be covered.
KerrAvon 2y ago
H1B has evolved into a bizarre collaborative scam between the government and tech corporations; there is, in fact, a US citizen who can fill any software engineering role a US company has.
- thrw42A8N 2y ago
  Not really. You can't get an expert in most recent European or Asian technology (for example 5G mobile network backbone) in the US.
  - Eumenes 2y ago
    H1b isn't about "experts", there are other visas for that (eb1 or o1). H1b's purpose it to find talent after search has been "exhausted" locally. That is rarely done in good faith.
    - vunderba 2y ago
      Agreed, you're really reaching if your company implies that it needs to search abroad to find a dev who's proficient with react...
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- lurking15 2y ago
  It's an outrage once you work at these companies and behold the sheer dysfunction and they're all getting paid wages native American citizens would take.
  - astrange 2y ago
    The model that Americans would take any job if the wages were high enough is simple but obviously false. For manual labor there's no amount of money you could pay Americans to be farmworkers. For desk jobs there's no amount that'll overcome Americans' cultural belief that you can't do math unless you were born as a special sort of person who is "good at math".
vosper 2y ago
> The company already has someone doing the job today, but legally they have to post the job and interview a certain number of candidates to prove there is no US citizen that can do it. Posted obscurely in a corner of the cafeteria, but exposing my salary to anyone who cared to look. They were never going to hire someone else, and we all knew it, but the charade had to be played.
- nsxwolf 2y ago
  Written with incredibly specific requirements that might as well have the name of the person they're retaining as one of them.
  - hn72774 2y ago
    The ones at Amazon were super generic. SDE skills were supposedly "fungible."
    - djmips 2y ago
      That's such a laugh IRL for a lot of job types. Are surgeons fungible? Need brain surgery?, oh don't worry we'll get the orthopedic surgeon in here. I feel confident there are software jobs where it's essentially as specialized.
      - jamesfinlayson 2y ago
        Very much so - I worked at a place that tried to make all testers easily transferable between teams because apparently testing is testing. Except they didn't go so far as to do it for the team that tested some ancient Fortran application running on obscure hardware because it turns out that testers can be specialised.
ojbyrne 2y ago
When I was doing PERM, I was also WFH. HR told me to put 2 postings up in my apartment.
gaws 2y ago
> At the end of the day, Sam the VP is just going to slot his buddy into the job but now you made a whole bunch of people apply for a job that was never available to them. Nowadays, in tech, it's all about who you know rather than what you know.
- drawnwren 2y ago
  This is all a function of interviews sucking right? Leet code is essentially completely independent from dev skill. Projects take too much commitment and time from the team and devs. So, what option do teams have? Just hire the people that your good devs say are good is honestly the most effective practice that I've seen.
  - johnnyanmac 2y ago
    Honestly, even referrals are sucking for me in 2023/4. Referral would almost always mean I at least talk to someone on the hiring team . Now it's been maybe a 40% chance I even get a recruiter call?
- drillsteps5 2y ago
  This has been true in any area of human activity since forever. If you have a choice to work with someone you know/worked with previously and someone completely new, who may or may not be as good as advertised... Who would you hire? When your future bonuses/promotions and maybe job itself depends on it?
jay_kyburz 2y ago
Also back in the day, we would say we need X new staff, corporate would encourage us to advertise and interview, but when it came to extending and offer they would tell us we can't increase head count. Happened over and over till I left.
- kjs3 2y ago
  I have never started the interview process before there was a headcount approved[1]. I have never had anyone push back when I said "I'll worry about that when the headcount is approved, because I got things to do"; but then I can't recall more than a handful of times anyone wanted me to front-run the recruiting process with a fishing expedition. Have things really become that shitty? [1] To be fair, sometimes the headcount disappeared for various reasons, but that's not the same as "meh...just have a look around and jerk some peoples chains".
jajko 2y ago
> but legally they have to post the job and interview a certain number of candidates to prove there is no US citizen that can do it I've got my first job after moving countries in Europe, despite this (very similar but it was 6 weeks IIRC) limitation being in place by law, within a week. Consulting body shop through which I was billing per day, and the umbrella company took 20% cut. It seems its trivial to circumvent this kind of rule across the globe, and TBH what kind of state employee team would go over every single foreign first hire in given region, all the evidence and check its validity, gather all the details. Heck police ignore smaller crimes below certain threshold, states have no real processing power to handle this well.
djmips 2y ago
For H1B/PERM, I remember they had to post it on the wall in a public place. Our company posted the jobs on the wall in the lunch room at our office. It has every information including the salary. I guess things have changed a bit since the early 2000s?
- raincom 2y ago
  That's what Apple was doing. After their settlement with DOJ, Apple posts jobs on their job board as well.
icedchai 2y ago
I've recently witnessed a situation where VP hired someone he used to work with This VP is not the best judge of talent. The guy barely does any work, and rarely responds to messages. He'll send me a scheduled slack at 8 AM. I reply. I don't hear from him all day. It's incredibly frustrating, since we had better candidates.
drillsteps5 2y ago
> Sam the VP is just going to slot his buddy into the job but now you made a whole bunch of people apply for a job that was never available to them. ...except now the recruiting and HR can report these candidates and interviews on their metrics, candidates had a hope of finding a job, and Sam has a bulletproof explanation in case if anybody asks why his buddy was hired. Win-win-win.

iancmceachern 2y ago

Not only posted, but often they require that several folks are actually interviewed.

thrw42A8N 2y ago

In Europe jobs have to be published. Even if there is no intention of filling it from the public. And companies also publish bullshit jobs which are used to manipulate regulatory requirements if needed (eg. if you want to hire a foreigner, you must prove you couldn't fill the position locally - by publishing it for 3 months).

orwin 2y ago
> In Europe jobs have to be published No. If you publish it, you have to give an estimation of the salary, but that's the only limitation, at least in my country. Companies have internal guidelines, like in mine, you can't hire a relative to your own department, but the job i got wasn't on a public listing, it's my agent who gave my CV to my current team leader, he was interested, organized an itw, then 3 month later i hoped to my current job (and i am way better for it).
- thrw42A8N 2y ago
  Yes, just not everywhere.
  - orwin 2y ago
    So we agree it isn't European law? Just practice for some big companies that want to avoid cryonism?
    - thrw42A8N 2y ago
      It is law, just not in every European country, but it's definitely not unusual. And yes, companies often go with the lowest common denominator across Europe to avoid any doubt when dealing with multinational people. In my personal case it could be reasonably claimed that laws of 5 different countries apply to me based on citizenship, registered residence, actual places of work... Of course my employer wants to be covered.

KerrAvon 2y ago

H1B has evolved into a bizarre collaborative scam between the government and tech corporations; there is, in fact, a US citizen who can fill any software engineering role a US company has.

thrw42A8N 2y ago
Not really. You can't get an expert in most recent European or Asian technology (for example 5G mobile network backbone) in the US.
- Eumenes 2y ago
  H1b isn't about "experts", there are other visas for that (eb1 or o1). H1b's purpose it to find talent after search has been "exhausted" locally. That is rarely done in good faith.
  - vunderba 2y ago
    Agreed, you're really reaching if your company implies that it needs to search abroad to find a dev who's proficient with react...
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
lurking15 2y ago
It's an outrage once you work at these companies and behold the sheer dysfunction and they're all getting paid wages native American citizens would take.
- astrange 2y ago
  The model that Americans would take any job if the wages were high enough is simple but obviously false. For manual labor there's no amount of money you could pay Americans to be farmworkers. For desk jobs there's no amount that'll overcome Americans' cultural belief that you can't do math unless you were born as a special sort of person who is "good at math".

vosper 2y ago

> The company already has someone doing the job today, but legally they have to post the job and interview a certain number of candidates to prove there is no US citizen that can do it. Posted obscurely in a corner of the cafeteria, but exposing my salary to anyone who cared to look. They were never going to hire someone else, and we all knew it, but the charade had to be played.

nsxwolf 2y ago
Written with incredibly specific requirements that might as well have the name of the person they're retaining as one of them.
- hn72774 2y ago
  The ones at Amazon were super generic. SDE skills were supposedly "fungible."
  - djmips 2y ago
    That's such a laugh IRL for a lot of job types. Are surgeons fungible? Need brain surgery?, oh don't worry we'll get the orthopedic surgeon in here. I feel confident there are software jobs where it's essentially as specialized.
    - jamesfinlayson 2y ago
      Very much so - I worked at a place that tried to make all testers easily transferable between teams because apparently testing is testing. Except they didn't go so far as to do it for the team that tested some ancient Fortran application running on obscure hardware because it turns out that testers can be specialised.

ojbyrne 2y ago

When I was doing PERM, I was also WFH. HR told me to put 2 postings up in my apartment.

gaws 2y ago

> At the end of the day, Sam the VP is just going to slot his buddy into the job but now you made a whole bunch of people apply for a job that was never available to them. Nowadays, in tech, it's all about who you know rather than what you know.

drawnwren 2y ago
This is all a function of interviews sucking right? Leet code is essentially completely independent from dev skill. Projects take too much commitment and time from the team and devs. So, what option do teams have? Just hire the people that your good devs say are good is honestly the most effective practice that I've seen.
- johnnyanmac 2y ago
  Honestly, even referrals are sucking for me in 2023/4. Referral would almost always mean I at least talk to someone on the hiring team . Now it's been maybe a 40% chance I even get a recruiter call?
drillsteps5 2y ago
This has been true in any area of human activity since forever. If you have a choice to work with someone you know/worked with previously and someone completely new, who may or may not be as good as advertised... Who would you hire? When your future bonuses/promotions and maybe job itself depends on it?

jay_kyburz 2y ago

Also back in the day, we would say we need X new staff, corporate would encourage us to advertise and interview, but when it came to extending and offer they would tell us we can't increase head count. Happened over and over till I left.

kjs3 2y ago
I have never started the interview process before there was a headcount approved[1]. I have never had anyone push back when I said "I'll worry about that when the headcount is approved, because I got things to do"; but then I can't recall more than a handful of times anyone wanted me to front-run the recruiting process with a fishing expedition. Have things really become that shitty? [1] To be fair, sometimes the headcount disappeared for various reasons, but that's not the same as "meh...just have a look around and jerk some peoples chains".

jajko 2y ago

> but legally they have to post the job and interview a certain number of candidates to prove there is no US citizen that can do it I've got my first job after moving countries in Europe, despite this (very similar but it was 6 weeks IIRC) limitation being in place by law, within a week. Consulting body shop through which I was billing per day, and the umbrella company took 20% cut. It seems its trivial to circumvent this kind of rule across the globe, and TBH what kind of state employee team would go over every single foreign first hire in given region, all the evidence and check its validity, gather all the details. Heck police ignore smaller crimes below certain threshold, states have no real processing power to handle this well.

djmips 2y ago

For H1B/PERM, I remember they had to post it on the wall in a public place. Our company posted the jobs on the wall in the lunch room at our office. It has every information including the salary. I guess things have changed a bit since the early 2000s?

raincom 2y ago
That's what Apple was doing. After their settlement with DOJ, Apple posts jobs on their job board as well.

icedchai 2y ago

I've recently witnessed a situation where VP hired someone he used to work with This VP is not the best judge of talent. The guy barely does any work, and rarely responds to messages. He'll send me a scheduled slack at 8 AM. I reply. I don't hear from him all day. It's incredibly frustrating, since we had better candidates.

drillsteps5 2y ago

> Sam the VP is just going to slot his buddy into the job but now you made a whole bunch of people apply for a job that was never available to them. ...except now the recruiting and HR can report these candidates and interviews on their metrics, candidates had a hope of finding a job, and Sam has a bulletproof explanation in case if anybody asks why his buddy was hired. Win-win-win.