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Longtime tech recruiter shatters the engineering shortage myth

71 points by Avalaxy 14y ago

lilsunnybee 14y ago
I really like this article. There are a lot of unconventional candidates out there that could do great work if any established business or startup would give them a chance, but since they're not the perfect resume candidate, or close to it, they can't get in the door to show their chops. It's basically classism, because the candidates most likely to have that perfect resume or flawless work history would have come from a privileged background, where they had all sorts of resources available to them, were never forced to get a job outside their field to earn a wage, and were never hurting for connections. Take me for example. I graduated in 2008 with a computer science degree from a pretty good state school. I resigned from my first job after feeling extreme burn-out and anxiety from a broken process and constant missed deadlines. If you have any gap in employment though that throws up huge red flags for a lot of employers, as well as being anxiety prone and not interviewing so great because of it, or not being fully knowledgeable about whatever particular software stack that business is using. And i know you can lie on a resume but some of us aren't so comfortable doing that. So it ends up if you have any red flags, you're basically never getting employed again. Fired unfairly from your last job: good luck explaining that one. Family or personal emergency create a hole in your resume: that's not gonna look good. Have other concerns that take up your free time besides building up your Github: you must just not be dedicated or in love with the field (which is not the same as not being able to do the work). I sort of long for the early days of programming back when you could just walk in the door and take an IQ test with an employer to see if you were capable of being a programmer, regardless of your current / past employment, personal history, etc. Now to do any sort of work you have to have already done the work, which is exceedingly difficult if you are currently working full time in a different field (out of financial necessity), and aren't a lone white bachelor who has loads of free time to spend on personal projects. So what do i do now: i clean houses. It's fine work if you have nice clients, but i'm also underemployed and very low income. It's easy to get discouraged about even trying to interview, when you're pretty sure once they see your resume, any effort you've put in would have been a waste. No one seems to want to hire a housecleaner as a programmer (classism), regardless of my education, high SAT / GRE / college GPA. I'm damaged goods, and it doesn't matter if i can do the work or not, i'm just not an attractive candidate. Sorry for the rant. But i can't be the only one out there. I bet there are a lot of capable workers out there that are either unemployed or underutilized because of discrimination of one type or another.
- untog 14y ago
  I sort of long for the early days of programming back when you could just walk in the door and take an IQ test with an employer to see if you were capable of being a programmer Unfortunately, that's how you end up with a team that is incapable of communicating, because you never evaluated an employee based on their social skills. I do get what you mean, but I think that tech is actually an amazing field for self-improvement, if you try. I wanted to work at a company using a software stack unfamiliar to me. I downloaded it, got to grips with the basics and said as much in my interview. There are very few other fields in which you can do that. If you're unhappy with your current job, then it might be time to learn some new technologies and post some examples to Github. I know, it uses up free time you don't want to give up. But you have to sacrifice that stuff every once and a while if you want to move ahead in life.
  - lilsunnybee 14y ago
    Your first point is something covered in the article. When you evaluate a candidate's social skills, you really end up evaluating whether they're a good "cultural fit" or not, which usually means you aren't hiring a very diverse team. Wouldn't want things to be too awkward around the office by hiring someone too different. Investing time in learning a completely different stack for every job you apply for seems like a very inefficient use of time, especially when it could take you weeks to get a really good grasp on the nuances of a particular stack, but it only takes about a second for an employer to drop you from consideration. It's "possible" to be upwardly mobile, particularly in the tech field, nowadays, but it takes a certain personality type to do so. Upward mobility for driven, workaholic, A-type personalities is a pretty narrow path to success though, especially when even those personality types, given certain life circumstances, are extremely constrained in how much they are able to accomplish. So much for the meritocracy; capability counts for a lot less than the resources one already has available.
    - untog 14y ago
      When you evaluate a candidate's social skills, you really end up evaluating whether they're a good "cultural fit" or not, which usually means you aren't hiring a very diverse team. No. I know what you're saying- that a lot of startups encourage fratty behaviour and so on, which is true. But communication skills are entirely separate, and important. It's impossible to be an effective team without communication- that's not a "cultural" thing. Investing time in learning a completely different stack for every job you apply for seems like a very inefficient use of time True- I did it just once, for the job I wanted. But you could also quite easily look at what kinds of technologies companies are using- there will be general trends that can help you.
untog 14y ago
Not really "shatters", more "claims to have an insight into". I'm a little torn. It's interesting that he describes finding engineers as like "detective work". My first instinct (as a developer) is that if someone is difficult to find, it's quite possible that they're not interested in being found. If they were looking for a job, they'd be visible. Does he consider it his role to 'educate' engineers about the possibilities available to them? I've just been through the process of finding a new job. I expressly avoided using any recruiters, and am very happy with the result. Maybe engineers are hard to find because they're used to hiding from recruiters. I negatively judge startups that use recruitment agencies, but maybe I'm part of the problem.
- mmahemoff 14y ago
  My first instinct (as a developer) is that if someone is difficult to find, it's quite possible that they're not interested in being found. If they were looking for a job, they'd be visible. Not so sure about that. A lot of talented engineers are already in a job. They might be receptive to looking at another job for a period of months or years, but never actually looking. So a lot of the skill in recruitment is reaching those engineers with opportunities that will entice them to consider a move. Yes, sometimes this happens via aggressive recruiters, but it can also happen via "softer" approaches like publicity, sposnsorship, advertising etc.
- moocow01 14y ago
  I'd argue that this is largely due to the lack of standardization within our industry (note that Im not arguing for standardization for other reasons I think we all know)... Basically when you start a job there is a relatively long learning curve. The technology, business, and interpersonal relationships are all unique and they all take a rather long time to develop. Usually the beginning part of that learning curve hurts the most (ex. learning how not to break the build and speak with some competency about the code base) and the rest is called personal "growth" and is usually satisfying and can run for many years without plateauing. The problem is that once you get to this middle staged growth, you dont want to have to go back to beginning part that comes with getting a new job (although I do recognize some people are different). Now on the flip side if we were assembly line workers building light bulbs, the moment you heard the light bulb shop across the street pays 20% more and desperately needs people you'd probably be running across the street in a flash. And the next day at the new place would probably be about the same with 20% more pay. The fear within tech is that, without standardization of work places, you can end up realizing you stepped into a big pile of crap. Crazy managers, incompetence, long hours, shady investors, etc etc. Its not my desire to suggest we should turn the industry into light bulb manufacturing but I think the non-standardization has probably lead to the strangeness in hiring.
idunno246 14y ago
worked with a recruiter by that name. Creeped everyone out in the hitting on candidates sort of way.
shawnee_ 14y ago
And the truth he’s seen in the past decade is that our insecurity is getting the best of us. “The big problem in general is fear,” he says. “To counter their fear, companies make their standards too high and turn down people who would be great at their jobs. ... “Everyone wants the next Steve Wozniak to walk through the door, but really, they should be asking to see if they can do the job. … They want to populate their entire staff with engineering geniuses, and you don’t need the whole staff to be engineering geniuses. You need a couple really bright people who know what they’re doing, and then, just don’t turn down people who can do the job.” There's definitely a misconception out there that a company can make it on "great engineers" alone. I've been thinking about this lately, trying to come up with a good way to describe to people what I do. So far, the best thing I've been able to come up with is that it's akin to being a load balancer: the person who takes on the tasks that can and will be optimized, but that are (for whatever reasons/ priorities) not yet able to optimized. So maybe part of "the engineering shortage" is related to the shortage of people with enough technical competence to take on the tasks that the engineers could do, but don't want / like to do. So far in my experience, I've seen far more of a dearth of support people who know what they're doing, than a shortage of good engineers.
therealarmen 14y ago
This guy didn't shatter anything. It's basically a big advertisement for his services. Those of us on the ground know there is a real shortage due to the current tech boom.
- mattlong 14y ago
  To be fair, he says exactly that: “Oh, there’s definitely a shortage of people as the tech industry expands,” Marcus says. “The economy is expanding here, and they need a lot of engineers. You just need more and more people to code all this stuff.”
  - jdbernard 14y ago
    Right, which contradicts the title of the article.
pootch 14y ago
The tech industry is heavily reliant on the recruitment model. Its actually a great model, how many people can say there is an entire industry out there dedicated to getting you hired? But it has its underbelly. Spam, lowballing, misrepresentation, and some of that results in a lower than expected best match scenario for filling positions. I agree that many developers dont want to deal with the noise of job boards, and that may be a sense of hiding, but its also a sign that a high percentage of recruiters are not selling you into a good job, they are just resume bombing a hiring manager they have no relationship with, have never talked to and will probably never fill a seat. These kind of shops are to be avoided like the plague and only reinforce bad hiring practices because they submit consistently low quality candidates for positions which the candidate does not match.
- fecak 14y ago
  You really think the recruitment model is a great model? Just curious, great for who? I've been a recruiter for 15 years, and there are some glowing flaws with the model that are being exposed right now. I've written two articles about it recently, both here on HN. Search 'disrupt recruiting' and you'll find them. Here is the first http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4555165 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4555165
jdbernard 14y ago
The first twelve paragraphs boil down to: * Qualified software engineers are hard to find, it's like hunting or detective work, but they do exist. Not really a myth-shattering revelation, I think we all agree with this. * People are afraid of the unknown. This applies to hiring practices. Sure, nothing new here. * Interviewers do not ask the right questions. OK, what kinds of questions are "not right", why, and what would be the better approach? * Companies standards are too high. They do not need a team full of geniuses. Not sure I agree, have any evidence or supporting arguments? It is admittedly hard to measure, but most of the evidence from people who actually work with them points to the 10x or 100x engineer being a reality. Hiring that guy is a much better investment. The next section (10 paragraphs): * Candidates can come from anywhere. Sure, nothing new about that. * Networking and legwork are the staples of a successful career in recruiting. Nothing new here either. And the next (14): * For a recruiter, finding an engineer is like finding the "very few really big fish" among a whole bunch of sharks. Wait, doesn't this contradict what we said earlier? * Those looking to hire need to drop their false requirements like Ivy League schools, moral character. Hm. OK. Other than obviously exceptional anecdotes, why are these bad? Any other false requirements? How are we supposed to filter candidates? The final section (8 paragraphs): * Startup culture is often unhealthy. Run it like a business. OK, I suppose I agree with this in principle. But the opposite it true too: business environments can be unhealthy too (Office Space-esque?). What makes each unhealthy and how do we combat this? * People are afraid of the unknown. Did'nt we already do this one? * Ageism and sexism are related to this fear. OK, sure. What do we do about it? How do we combat that fear? Also, not new or myth-shattering. ---- The title reads like it should be a persuasive piece, but I think it is mostly fluff and history. It has a number of unsupported positions and suppositions thrown in, but many of the ones that ring true are nothing new and do not "shatter the myth". What about the real issues that created this so-called myth? How do you address FizzBuzz problem: a majority of applicants fail to meet the most basic of "can you do the job" type of requirements? How do you account for atypically high salaries? What about the large amount of head-hunting happening at places like Google and Facebook? If there is no shortage of good engineers why can't these extremely attractive companies seem to find enough of them? I have been in several teams full of both, the 10-100x engineers, and the good-enough engineers. The former have outperformed the latter in profit and productivity every time. My experience is that it is very hard to find the engineers that make up the 10-100x teams and this article has done almost nothing to shatter that "myth".
nradov 14y ago
It always irks me when someone refers to a "shortage" of potential employees. There is no such thing as a shortage in a free market, by definition. No external force is artificially constraining the supply of engineers or the wages that employers are allowed to pay them. Thus there is no shortage. QED. Sometimes recruiters and employers use the word "shortage" as a code to indicate that they can't find highly qualified employees who will do excellent work for low wages. But that's just a mismatch in expectations, not a true shortage. I've done a lot of hiring over the past few years and have always been able to find the engineers I need. Despite that flaw it's a good article with some helpful insights. Although it kind of comes across as a bit of a PR puff piece and advertisement for that particular recruiter's services.
- pjscott 14y ago
  > There is no such thing as a shortage in a free market, by definition. Nonsense. Supply and demand are not perfectly elastic. Consider a simplified hypothetical world where Alice harvests carrots that magically fall from heaven, Alice and Bob need 10 carrots per day to survive, and a total of 15 carrots fall from heaven every day. There is no other source of food. Alice eats ten carrots, and sells five to Bob. Bob's carrot-demand is at least ten carrots, but he can't buy them at any price, no matter how desperately he may need them to keep starvation at bay. Yes, there is such a thing as a shortage.
  - nradov 14y ago
    Go back and read what I wrote again. What you are describing is a market with artificially constrained supply, not a free market.
    - FaceKicker 14y ago
      If you're defining "free market" that strictly, then I don't see how your original post has any relevance. Shortages might not exist under your definition of "free market", but if that's the case then we clearly don't have a free market and properties of a free market are irrelevant to discussions of any real economy in existence.
tisme 14y ago
All that work and not one mention of this: Engineers usually really don't like recruiters. Not being found by recruiters is a feature, not a bug.
confluence 14y ago
> There is no shortage of engineers, but there is a shortage of engineers willing to work for very little money. I hate startups/companies that decry an engineering shortage when they aren't willing to pay for it - we make your products, your money and your fortune either pay us more, work on more interesting problems or have a better working environment. Engineers will gladly come to you if you do so - see Google or Valve. Otherwise - shut up.
CoolGuySteve 14y ago
In my experience, a lot of interviewers ask some pretty esoteric computer science or language errata questions in order to hire someone who will write what are essentially CRUD wrappers with a pretty GUI. Even if you scoff and rattle on about all the awesome hard problems you face, firstly, only a couple of people in any team actually need to solve those things, and secondly, you're probably lying and write everything on top of some already asymptotically slower abstraction already. At one company, we churned through several dozen candidates for a position that was incredibly dull because they couldn't recursively divide and conquer a hypothetical infinite data set or use dynamic programming to optimally subdivide a two dimensional space. None of these things were relevant to the endless property plumbing we did all day. It just made us feel smart and distracted us from the dismal day-to-day that was wasting our advanced degrees. The window dressing justification was that a smart person gets more done, 10x programmers and all that, but smart people also quit when they're bored, and smart people make boring jobs more complex than they need to be to stop from getting bored. Anyways, after that debacle and now that I've moved to a smaller company, I started giving out a programming test that mimics what we do. If the candidate hands in something that is clean, complete, and doesn't have a dumb design, I'm totally for them. So far it has still been difficult to find people, but the ones who pass seem a lot more capable than those we found using the pointless trivia method.
- dsolomon 14y ago
  I'm pretty sure the reason you churned through a dozen developers is that they found anything better to do.
- goldmab 14y ago
  CRUD wrappers with a pretty GUI are actually really hard to do well. Think of all unusable and unstable CRUD apps you've used. I wouldn't drill someone on dynamic programming for that kind of job, but I would want them to be smart enough and dedicated enough to do it well. In my experience that's rare.
sowhata 14y ago
"recruiting is a balancing of fears" "the other" Pretty much spot on. There is no shortage of people who can do the jobs. That is certainly not the fear being balanced (=Joe Candidate can't do the job). Rather, the fear is that Joe Candidate is not "like me", and that he might change the culture. He is "the other". But this is not as silly as it sounds. It makes a difference who you have to work with everyday. It's not just about work. In many cases, monkeys could do the work. (In other cases, only a very few people could do the work.) What it's about is being surrounded by "your kind of people". Work environment. This doesn't just apply to startups. So being a good recruiter is not just about finding qualified people, it's about understanding "cultural fit" and the particular pyschology (however irrational it may be) of your clients.
michaelochurch 14y ago
I've been on both sides of this one. I'm going to speak mostly from the side of one doing the recruiting, because that was where I had the chance to actually learn why people were sought or avoided, accepted or rejected. When you're a candidate, you only have your own conjectures about why you get yeses and nos, but when you're involved in recruiting, you get a front-row seat for how stupid companies can be. Companies think that if they set requirements 3 levels above the actual work, they'll get it done really well, very fast, and reliably. That's not true. It doesn't work that way. It's the opposite. Companies are afraid to hire at-level because they can't admit the truth about the quality of work they have to offer. Most of what they are doing is not very interesting, and their environments are often broken, but they're terrified that if they hire at-level for that work, they'll poison the environment with inferior programmers. Reality: the culture was already damaged by the crappy work. It's a sunk cost if that's the kind of work you have to do, so fucking accept it and hire at-level. There's also a social-climbing element to it that is pretty disgusting. I've seen this with startups. They hire the people they can get-- a few are bad, a few are great, most are OK-to-good-- but then, after they're more established and richer, they decide that none of those people are "good enough" to grow with the company, so they decide to upgrade their crowd and hire shiny, new people. Familiarity breeds contempt, so eventually they are used-up shoes and newer, shinier people need to be brought on. (This is why, if you're an early startup hire, you need to lock in a VP-level title even if you're a full-time programmer. You can never get full assurance that people won't be hired above you from outside, but the title makes it harder. It puts a limit on that sort of shit.) There's also a ridiculous pansy-ass risk aversion involved. "We can't do machine learning unless we hire a machine learning expert with 20 years of production experience." Bull-fucking-shit. So many companies refuse to get out there and do something interesting until they can hire a Messiah, and people anything like that Messiah want to work for companies that are already doing interesting work.
- icelancer 14y ago
  "Companies are afraid to hire at-level because they can't admit the truth about the quality of work they have to offer" Everything else you said is absolutely true, but you could have stopped here. Perfectly summarized, and dead right.
tnuc 14y ago
>“Everyone wants the next Steve Wozniak to walk through the door, but really, they should be asking to see if they can do the job. … Most interviews have a combination of the following. a) The interviewer wants to talk about himself/herself. b) Talk about how great the company is and how much of the kool-aid they drink. c) Ask one tech question and base their decision on that. d) Ask a few very obscure questions. e) Talk about big-O / Binary search / your education. f) Code samples... What could a code sample possible mean to someone who has no idea what the pitfalls of the code/problem/database is. Useless. Hiring is based on commenting ability? g) Play the game of are going to scrape and bow for them. Alpha males. h) Don't have a clue what they are talking about, got the job because they know someone. They ask questions from some article they read. i) Haven't read your resume. Less than 25% of interviews actually bother asking you questions about if you can do the job. Write some code.. ha, one in ten.
waterlesscloud 14y ago
Re-reading the PG essay on creating wealth and came across this- "The top 5% of programmers probably write 99% of the good software." Probably somewhat exaggerated for effect, but also probably true in general concept. Which hiring folks probably know at least subliminally. Of course, there's also the fact that the vast, vast majority of them are hiring for bad projects to begin with.
scotty79 14y ago
Title: Startup Stories: Longtime tech recruiter shatters the engineering shortage myth Interview: So the Great Engineer Famine of 2012 is — what, a total myth? “Oh, there’s definitely a shortage of people as the tech industry expands,” Marcus says. “The economy is expanding here, and they need a lot of engineers. You just need more and more people to code all this stuff.” Mismatch?
MaleKitten 14y ago
Is there any falsifiable evidence in this article? All I read was a big advertisement for a recuiter named Jon Marcus, with a bunch of assertions about how companies could recruit better if they only lowered their standards. Of course you can increase your yield if you accept lower quality. That's as true in manufacturing as it is in human resources. "He’s interviewed Ivy Leaguers and dropouts; and as a result, he has helped shape countless “A teams” and every other kind of team, then watched those teams suceed or fail." Really? I've never seen a recruiter follow up with any candidate whatsoever, and I've interviewed hundreds of candidates from the employer side. So I have serious doubts about his ability to shape or understand how a candidate can affect an organization. The feedback loop just doesn't exist - companies don't provide outside entities (recruiters) feedback about their hired employees. The legal risk alone is too high. Case in point: "[Y]ou don’t need the whole staff to be engineering geniuses. You need a couple really bright people who know what they’re doing, and then, just don’t turn down people who can do the job." really, I only need a couple of people who know what they're doing? What exactly are the rest of the engineers doing? They don't know what they're doing, but can follow instructions from those who do? I'd rather just not hire those people to begin with. According to Jon Marcus then, I'm part of the problem. Except, he has a real financial incentive to place marginal people, since he gets 20-25% of the first year salary. What do you think that does to his opinion of hirability?
yyyt 14y ago
I see the situation regularly from both sides. I know exactly why I get rejected: for having Masters in Economics (read: Applied Maths), not CS, for not knowing by heart all normal forms till the 6th, for using but not knowing the formal definition of Dependency injection pattern. I see how it works on the other side. I was the first guy at a new project in a wealthy company. We needed a genius, and we hired one from the first try. He solved all the Python puzzles I gave, and knows a lot just out of university. The problem is that we need to extend the app, which is boring and a bit repetitive, which takes discipline, not rare talent. So we see such guys coming. They learned Python on their own, out of joy, don't know many things. But our boring work will be a challenge to them. So, why not hire? My superstar fellow says they're retards, the management asks to not bother even calling them back, and I have no strong point in their favor.
eli_gottlieb 14y ago
So every company wants a social proof that the person they're interviewing is Really, Really Good -- often even before the person gets the interview. Problem is, social proofs are purely relative and zero-sum. If everyone graduated from Stanford or worked at Google, having Stanford or Google on your resume would become worthless (and, in fact, this has happened with some technologies that got very popular). Sounds like a rather contradictory environment, tough to crack.

71 points by Avalaxy 14y ago

I really like this article. There are a lot of unconventional candidates out there that could do great work if any established business or startup would give them a chance, but since they're not the perfect resume candidate, or close to it, they can't get in the door to show their chops. It's basically classism, because the candidates most likely to have that perfect resume or flawless work history would have come from a privileged background, where they had all sorts of resources available to them, were never forced to get a job outside their field to earn a wage, and were never hurting for connections. Take me for example. I graduated in 2008 with a computer science degree from a pretty good state school. I resigned from my first job after feeling extreme burn-out and anxiety from a broken process and constant missed deadlines. If you have any gap in employment though that throws up huge red flags for a lot of employers, as well as being anxiety prone and not interviewing so great because of it, or not being fully knowledgeable about whatever particular software stack that business is using. And i know you can lie on a resume but some of us aren't so comfortable doing that. So it ends up if you have any red flags, you're basically never getting employed again. Fired unfairly from your last job: good luck explaining that one. Family or personal emergency create a hole in your resume: that's not gonna look good. Have other concerns that take up your free time besides building up your Github: you must just not be dedicated or in love with the field (which is not the same as not being able to do the work). I sort of long for the early days of programming back when you could just walk in the door and take an IQ test with an employer to see if you were capable of being a programmer, regardless of your current / past employment, personal history, etc. Now to do any sort of work you have to have already done the work, which is exceedingly difficult if you are currently working full time in a different field (out of financial necessity), and aren't a lone white bachelor who has loads of free time to spend on personal projects. So what do i do now: i clean houses. It's fine work if you have nice clients, but i'm also underemployed and very low income. It's easy to get discouraged about even trying to interview, when you're pretty sure once they see your resume, any effort you've put in would have been a waste. No one seems to want to hire a housecleaner as a programmer (classism), regardless of my education, high SAT / GRE / college GPA. I'm damaged goods, and it doesn't matter if i can do the work or not, i'm just not an attractive candidate. Sorry for the rant. But i can't be the only one out there. I bet there are a lot of capable workers out there that are either unemployed or underutilized because of discrimination of one type or another.

untog 14y ago
I sort of long for the early days of programming back when you could just walk in the door and take an IQ test with an employer to see if you were capable of being a programmer Unfortunately, that's how you end up with a team that is incapable of communicating, because you never evaluated an employee based on their social skills. I do get what you mean, but I think that tech is actually an amazing field for self-improvement, if you try. I wanted to work at a company using a software stack unfamiliar to me. I downloaded it, got to grips with the basics and said as much in my interview. There are very few other fields in which you can do that. If you're unhappy with your current job, then it might be time to learn some new technologies and post some examples to Github. I know, it uses up free time you don't want to give up. But you have to sacrifice that stuff every once and a while if you want to move ahead in life.
- lilsunnybee 14y ago
  Your first point is something covered in the article. When you evaluate a candidate's social skills, you really end up evaluating whether they're a good "cultural fit" or not, which usually means you aren't hiring a very diverse team. Wouldn't want things to be too awkward around the office by hiring someone too different. Investing time in learning a completely different stack for every job you apply for seems like a very inefficient use of time, especially when it could take you weeks to get a really good grasp on the nuances of a particular stack, but it only takes about a second for an employer to drop you from consideration. It's "possible" to be upwardly mobile, particularly in the tech field, nowadays, but it takes a certain personality type to do so. Upward mobility for driven, workaholic, A-type personalities is a pretty narrow path to success though, especially when even those personality types, given certain life circumstances, are extremely constrained in how much they are able to accomplish. So much for the meritocracy; capability counts for a lot less than the resources one already has available.
  - untog 14y ago
    When you evaluate a candidate's social skills, you really end up evaluating whether they're a good "cultural fit" or not, which usually means you aren't hiring a very diverse team. No. I know what you're saying- that a lot of startups encourage fratty behaviour and so on, which is true. But communication skills are entirely separate, and important. It's impossible to be an effective team without communication- that's not a "cultural" thing. Investing time in learning a completely different stack for every job you apply for seems like a very inefficient use of time True- I did it just once, for the job I wanted. But you could also quite easily look at what kinds of technologies companies are using- there will be general trends that can help you.

untog 14y ago

Not really "shatters", more "claims to have an insight into". I'm a little torn. It's interesting that he describes finding engineers as like "detective work". My first instinct (as a developer) is that if someone is difficult to find, it's quite possible that they're not interested in being found. If they were looking for a job, they'd be visible. Does he consider it his role to 'educate' engineers about the possibilities available to them? I've just been through the process of finding a new job. I expressly avoided using any recruiters, and am very happy with the result. Maybe engineers are hard to find because they're used to hiding from recruiters. I negatively judge startups that use recruitment agencies, but maybe I'm part of the problem.

mmahemoff 14y ago
My first instinct (as a developer) is that if someone is difficult to find, it's quite possible that they're not interested in being found. If they were looking for a job, they'd be visible. Not so sure about that. A lot of talented engineers are already in a job. They might be receptive to looking at another job for a period of months or years, but never actually looking. So a lot of the skill in recruitment is reaching those engineers with opportunities that will entice them to consider a move. Yes, sometimes this happens via aggressive recruiters, but it can also happen via "softer" approaches like publicity, sposnsorship, advertising etc.
moocow01 14y ago
I'd argue that this is largely due to the lack of standardization within our industry (note that Im not arguing for standardization for other reasons I think we all know)... Basically when you start a job there is a relatively long learning curve. The technology, business, and interpersonal relationships are all unique and they all take a rather long time to develop. Usually the beginning part of that learning curve hurts the most (ex. learning how not to break the build and speak with some competency about the code base) and the rest is called personal "growth" and is usually satisfying and can run for many years without plateauing. The problem is that once you get to this middle staged growth, you dont want to have to go back to beginning part that comes with getting a new job (although I do recognize some people are different). Now on the flip side if we were assembly line workers building light bulbs, the moment you heard the light bulb shop across the street pays 20% more and desperately needs people you'd probably be running across the street in a flash. And the next day at the new place would probably be about the same with 20% more pay. The fear within tech is that, without standardization of work places, you can end up realizing you stepped into a big pile of crap. Crazy managers, incompetence, long hours, shady investors, etc etc. Its not my desire to suggest we should turn the industry into light bulb manufacturing but I think the non-standardization has probably lead to the strangeness in hiring.

idunno246 14y ago

worked with a recruiter by that name. Creeped everyone out in the hitting on candidates sort of way.

shawnee_ 14y ago

And the truth he’s seen in the past decade is that our insecurity is getting the best of us. “The big problem in general is fear,” he says. “To counter their fear, companies make their standards too high and turn down people who would be great at their jobs. ... “Everyone wants the next Steve Wozniak to walk through the door, but really, they should be asking to see if they can do the job. … They want to populate their entire staff with engineering geniuses, and you don’t need the whole staff to be engineering geniuses. You need a couple really bright people who know what they’re doing, and then, just don’t turn down people who can do the job.” There's definitely a misconception out there that a company can make it on "great engineers" alone. I've been thinking about this lately, trying to come up with a good way to describe to people what I do. So far, the best thing I've been able to come up with is that it's akin to being a load balancer: the person who takes on the tasks that can and will be optimized, but that are (for whatever reasons/ priorities) not yet able to optimized. So maybe part of "the engineering shortage" is related to the shortage of people with enough technical competence to take on the tasks that the engineers could do, but don't want / like to do. So far in my experience, I've seen far more of a dearth of support people who know what they're doing, than a shortage of good engineers.

therealarmen 14y ago

This guy didn't shatter anything. It's basically a big advertisement for his services. Those of us on the ground know there is a real shortage due to the current tech boom.

mattlong 14y ago
To be fair, he says exactly that: “Oh, there’s definitely a shortage of people as the tech industry expands,” Marcus says. “The economy is expanding here, and they need a lot of engineers. You just need more and more people to code all this stuff.”
- jdbernard 14y ago
  Right, which contradicts the title of the article.

pootch 14y ago

The tech industry is heavily reliant on the recruitment model. Its actually a great model, how many people can say there is an entire industry out there dedicated to getting you hired? But it has its underbelly. Spam, lowballing, misrepresentation, and some of that results in a lower than expected best match scenario for filling positions. I agree that many developers dont want to deal with the noise of job boards, and that may be a sense of hiding, but its also a sign that a high percentage of recruiters are not selling you into a good job, they are just resume bombing a hiring manager they have no relationship with, have never talked to and will probably never fill a seat. These kind of shops are to be avoided like the plague and only reinforce bad hiring practices because they submit consistently low quality candidates for positions which the candidate does not match.

fecak 14y ago
You really think the recruitment model is a great model? Just curious, great for who? I've been a recruiter for 15 years, and there are some glowing flaws with the model that are being exposed right now. I've written two articles about it recently, both here on HN. Search 'disrupt recruiting' and you'll find them. Here is the first http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4555165 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4555165

jdbernard 14y ago

The first twelve paragraphs boil down to: * Qualified software engineers are hard to find, it's like hunting or detective work, but they do exist. Not really a myth-shattering revelation, I think we all agree with this. * People are afraid of the unknown. This applies to hiring practices. Sure, nothing new here. * Interviewers do not ask the right questions. OK, what kinds of questions are "not right", why, and what would be the better approach? * Companies standards are too high. They do not need a team full of geniuses. Not sure I agree, have any evidence or supporting arguments? It is admittedly hard to measure, but most of the evidence from people who actually work with them points to the 10x or 100x engineer being a reality. Hiring that guy is a much better investment. The next section (10 paragraphs): * Candidates can come from anywhere. Sure, nothing new about that. * Networking and legwork are the staples of a successful career in recruiting. Nothing new here either. And the next (14): * For a recruiter, finding an engineer is like finding the "very few really big fish" among a whole bunch of sharks. Wait, doesn't this contradict what we said earlier? * Those looking to hire need to drop their false requirements like Ivy League schools, moral character. Hm. OK. Other than obviously exceptional anecdotes, why are these bad? Any other false requirements? How are we supposed to filter candidates? The final section (8 paragraphs): * Startup culture is often unhealthy. Run it like a business. OK, I suppose I agree with this in principle. But the opposite it true too: business environments can be unhealthy too (Office Space-esque?). What makes each unhealthy and how do we combat this? * People are afraid of the unknown. Did'nt we already do this one? * Ageism and sexism are related to this fear. OK, sure. What do we do about it? How do we combat that fear? Also, not new or myth-shattering. ---- The title reads like it should be a persuasive piece, but I think it is mostly fluff and history. It has a number of unsupported positions and suppositions thrown in, but many of the ones that ring true are nothing new and do not "shatter the myth". What about the real issues that created this so-called myth? How do you address FizzBuzz problem: a majority of applicants fail to meet the most basic of "can you do the job" type of requirements? How do you account for atypically high salaries? What about the large amount of head-hunting happening at places like Google and Facebook? If there is no shortage of good engineers why can't these extremely attractive companies seem to find enough of them? I have been in several teams full of both, the 10-100x engineers, and the good-enough engineers. The former have outperformed the latter in profit and productivity every time. My experience is that it is very hard to find the engineers that make up the 10-100x teams and this article has done almost nothing to shatter that "myth".

nradov 14y ago

It always irks me when someone refers to a "shortage" of potential employees. There is no such thing as a shortage in a free market, by definition. No external force is artificially constraining the supply of engineers or the wages that employers are allowed to pay them. Thus there is no shortage. QED. Sometimes recruiters and employers use the word "shortage" as a code to indicate that they can't find highly qualified employees who will do excellent work for low wages. But that's just a mismatch in expectations, not a true shortage. I've done a lot of hiring over the past few years and have always been able to find the engineers I need. Despite that flaw it's a good article with some helpful insights. Although it kind of comes across as a bit of a PR puff piece and advertisement for that particular recruiter's services.

pjscott 14y ago
> There is no such thing as a shortage in a free market, by definition. Nonsense. Supply and demand are not perfectly elastic. Consider a simplified hypothetical world where Alice harvests carrots that magically fall from heaven, Alice and Bob need 10 carrots per day to survive, and a total of 15 carrots fall from heaven every day. There is no other source of food. Alice eats ten carrots, and sells five to Bob. Bob's carrot-demand is at least ten carrots, but he can't buy them at any price, no matter how desperately he may need them to keep starvation at bay. Yes, there is such a thing as a shortage.
- nradov 14y ago
  Go back and read what I wrote again. What you are describing is a market with artificially constrained supply, not a free market.
  - FaceKicker 14y ago
    If you're defining "free market" that strictly, then I don't see how your original post has any relevance. Shortages might not exist under your definition of "free market", but if that's the case then we clearly don't have a free market and properties of a free market are irrelevant to discussions of any real economy in existence.

tisme 14y ago

All that work and not one mention of this: Engineers usually really don't like recruiters. Not being found by recruiters is a feature, not a bug.

confluence 14y ago

> There is no shortage of engineers, but there is a shortage of engineers willing to work for very little money. I hate startups/companies that decry an engineering shortage when they aren't willing to pay for it - we make your products, your money and your fortune either pay us more, work on more interesting problems or have a better working environment. Engineers will gladly come to you if you do so - see Google or Valve. Otherwise - shut up.

CoolGuySteve 14y ago

In my experience, a lot of interviewers ask some pretty esoteric computer science or language errata questions in order to hire someone who will write what are essentially CRUD wrappers with a pretty GUI. Even if you scoff and rattle on about all the awesome hard problems you face, firstly, only a couple of people in any team actually need to solve those things, and secondly, you're probably lying and write everything on top of some already asymptotically slower abstraction already. At one company, we churned through several dozen candidates for a position that was incredibly dull because they couldn't recursively divide and conquer a hypothetical infinite data set or use dynamic programming to optimally subdivide a two dimensional space. None of these things were relevant to the endless property plumbing we did all day. It just made us feel smart and distracted us from the dismal day-to-day that was wasting our advanced degrees. The window dressing justification was that a smart person gets more done, 10x programmers and all that, but smart people also quit when they're bored, and smart people make boring jobs more complex than they need to be to stop from getting bored. Anyways, after that debacle and now that I've moved to a smaller company, I started giving out a programming test that mimics what we do. If the candidate hands in something that is clean, complete, and doesn't have a dumb design, I'm totally for them. So far it has still been difficult to find people, but the ones who pass seem a lot more capable than those we found using the pointless trivia method.

dsolomon 14y ago
I'm pretty sure the reason you churned through a dozen developers is that they found anything better to do.
goldmab 14y ago
CRUD wrappers with a pretty GUI are actually really hard to do well. Think of all unusable and unstable CRUD apps you've used. I wouldn't drill someone on dynamic programming for that kind of job, but I would want them to be smart enough and dedicated enough to do it well. In my experience that's rare.

sowhata 14y ago

"recruiting is a balancing of fears" "the other" Pretty much spot on. There is no shortage of people who can do the jobs. That is certainly not the fear being balanced (=Joe Candidate can't do the job). Rather, the fear is that Joe Candidate is not "like me", and that he might change the culture. He is "the other". But this is not as silly as it sounds. It makes a difference who you have to work with everyday. It's not just about work. In many cases, monkeys could do the work. (In other cases, only a very few people could do the work.) What it's about is being surrounded by "your kind of people". Work environment. This doesn't just apply to startups. So being a good recruiter is not just about finding qualified people, it's about understanding "cultural fit" and the particular pyschology (however irrational it may be) of your clients.

michaelochurch 14y ago

I've been on both sides of this one. I'm going to speak mostly from the side of one doing the recruiting, because that was where I had the chance to actually learn why people were sought or avoided, accepted or rejected. When you're a candidate, you only have your own conjectures about why you get yeses and nos, but when you're involved in recruiting, you get a front-row seat for how stupid companies can be. Companies think that if they set requirements 3 levels above the actual work, they'll get it done really well, very fast, and reliably. That's not true. It doesn't work that way. It's the opposite. Companies are afraid to hire at-level because they can't admit the truth about the quality of work they have to offer. Most of what they are doing is not very interesting, and their environments are often broken, but they're terrified that if they hire at-level for that work, they'll poison the environment with inferior programmers. Reality: the culture was already damaged by the crappy work. It's a sunk cost if that's the kind of work you have to do, so fucking accept it and hire at-level. There's also a social-climbing element to it that is pretty disgusting. I've seen this with startups. They hire the people they can get-- a few are bad, a few are great, most are OK-to-good-- but then, after they're more established and richer, they decide that none of those people are "good enough" to grow with the company, so they decide to upgrade their crowd and hire shiny, new people. Familiarity breeds contempt, so eventually they are used-up shoes and newer, shinier people need to be brought on. (This is why, if you're an early startup hire, you need to lock in a VP-level title even if you're a full-time programmer. You can never get full assurance that people won't be hired above you from outside, but the title makes it harder. It puts a limit on that sort of shit.) There's also a ridiculous pansy-ass risk aversion involved. "We can't do machine learning unless we hire a machine learning expert with 20 years of production experience." Bull-fucking-shit. So many companies refuse to get out there and do something interesting until they can hire a Messiah, and people anything like that Messiah want to work for companies that are already doing interesting work.

icelancer 14y ago
"Companies are afraid to hire at-level because they can't admit the truth about the quality of work they have to offer" Everything else you said is absolutely true, but you could have stopped here. Perfectly summarized, and dead right.

tnuc 14y ago

>“Everyone wants the next Steve Wozniak to walk through the door, but really, they should be asking to see if they can do the job. … Most interviews have a combination of the following. a) The interviewer wants to talk about himself/herself. b) Talk about how great the company is and how much of the kool-aid they drink. c) Ask one tech question and base their decision on that. d) Ask a few very obscure questions. e) Talk about big-O / Binary search / your education. f) Code samples... What could a code sample possible mean to someone who has no idea what the pitfalls of the code/problem/database is. Useless. Hiring is based on commenting ability? g) Play the game of are going to scrape and bow for them. Alpha males. h) Don't have a clue what they are talking about, got the job because they know someone. They ask questions from some article they read. i) Haven't read your resume. Less than 25% of interviews actually bother asking you questions about if you can do the job. Write some code.. ha, one in ten.

waterlesscloud 14y ago

Re-reading the PG essay on creating wealth and came across this- "The top 5% of programmers probably write 99% of the good software." Probably somewhat exaggerated for effect, but also probably true in general concept. Which hiring folks probably know at least subliminally. Of course, there's also the fact that the vast, vast majority of them are hiring for bad projects to begin with.

scotty79 14y ago

Title: Startup Stories: Longtime tech recruiter shatters the engineering shortage myth Interview: So the Great Engineer Famine of 2012 is — what, a total myth? “Oh, there’s definitely a shortage of people as the tech industry expands,” Marcus says. “The economy is expanding here, and they need a lot of engineers. You just need more and more people to code all this stuff.” Mismatch?

MaleKitten 14y ago

Is there any falsifiable evidence in this article? All I read was a big advertisement for a recuiter named Jon Marcus, with a bunch of assertions about how companies could recruit better if they only lowered their standards. Of course you can increase your yield if you accept lower quality. That's as true in manufacturing as it is in human resources. "He’s interviewed Ivy Leaguers and dropouts; and as a result, he has helped shape countless “A teams” and every other kind of team, then watched those teams suceed or fail." Really? I've never seen a recruiter follow up with any candidate whatsoever, and I've interviewed hundreds of candidates from the employer side. So I have serious doubts about his ability to shape or understand how a candidate can affect an organization. The feedback loop just doesn't exist - companies don't provide outside entities (recruiters) feedback about their hired employees. The legal risk alone is too high. Case in point: "[Y]ou don’t need the whole staff to be engineering geniuses. You need a couple really bright people who know what they’re doing, and then, just don’t turn down people who can do the job." really, I only need a couple of people who know what they're doing? What exactly are the rest of the engineers doing? They don't know what they're doing, but can follow instructions from those who do? I'd rather just not hire those people to begin with. According to Jon Marcus then, I'm part of the problem. Except, he has a real financial incentive to place marginal people, since he gets 20-25% of the first year salary. What do you think that does to his opinion of hirability?

yyyt 14y ago

I see the situation regularly from both sides. I know exactly why I get rejected: for having Masters in Economics (read: Applied Maths), not CS, for not knowing by heart all normal forms till the 6th, for using but not knowing the formal definition of Dependency injection pattern. I see how it works on the other side. I was the first guy at a new project in a wealthy company. We needed a genius, and we hired one from the first try. He solved all the Python puzzles I gave, and knows a lot just out of university. The problem is that we need to extend the app, which is boring and a bit repetitive, which takes discipline, not rare talent. So we see such guys coming. They learned Python on their own, out of joy, don't know many things. But our boring work will be a challenge to them. So, why not hire? My superstar fellow says they're retards, the management asks to not bother even calling them back, and I have no strong point in their favor.

eli_gottlieb 14y ago

So every company wants a social proof that the person they're interviewing is Really, Really Good -- often even before the person gets the interview. Problem is, social proofs are purely relative and zero-sum. If everyone graduated from Stanford or worked at Google, having Stanford or Google on your resume would become worthless (and, in fact, this has happened with some technologies that got very popular). Sounds like a rather contradictory environment, tough to crack.