8 ms·

I see a similar problem even in software jobs. Employers frequently advertise for highly specific skill sets that almost nobody has. Then when nobody or only f

• ivany 14y ago
  A similar problem is HR departments abusing the "knobs" on the position's requirements. For a software-based CRM company, they required something like 7 years of Java EE development experience for the lower level development positions, and 14+ for the team lead positions. How many 14 year Java developers are there? Furthermore, do you really need 14 years of experience in a particular language for this position? I think the HR desk is lamenting the lack of good applicants and turning up the "years of experience" knob, which is in all likelyhood counter-productive.
  • qq66 14y ago
    I've seen several job ads requiring "5+ years experience with Technology X" where Technology X is not yet 5 years old.
    • kiba 14y ago
      Don't forget that companies also discriminate against old people in favor of young people. The result? They don't hire anybody despite a looooooooooong line of overqualified greybeards. (I am young myself, too!)
      • wyclif 14y ago
        The problem is that age discrimination laws in the US aren't readily enforceable.
      • eshvk 14y ago
        I believe age discrimination is being split into two chunks: 1) Some people with a mistaken belief that correlation does imply causation think that just because some programmers have let their skillsets atrophy implies that one should stay away from older programmers. 2) Older people by virtue of experience, skillsets are pricing themselves out of the job market. I have an older friend who is a phenomenal hacker but doesn't like going into management. He found himself either being offered VP of Engg type roles which required way more management than he was willing to do or being given Engineering roles with way less money than he was prepared to accept. Also, once you get a family, the amount of leeway you have in accepting a tiny fraction of what you are worth in exchange for money and stocks becomes quite limited.
    • continuations 14y ago
      "Requirements: - 25 years of HBase experience - candidate must be 22 year old or younger"
    • kenrikm 14y ago
      "Position requires 7 years of iOS Programming experience" ... the iOS SDK is only 4 years old.
    • wyclif 14y ago
      Yes, absolutely. I remember back when Java was only a few years old, it was common to see jobs where the company wanted 5-6 years of experience. Now, it could have been agency recruiters who had no idea what they were talking about, or it could have been coming from HR. But the result is the same: flagged for spam.
      • ishbits 14y ago
        Sure wish I had a nickle for every time I've heard/read this.
    • qq66 14y ago
      kenrikm, you have been hellbanned -- your posts are not visible but you're not informed of this. I hope you see this. I'm seriously considering leaving the HN community because of the frequency with which I see good contributors hellbanned.
      • Strshps1MoreTim 14y ago
        Where to? What is a good discussion site similar to HN nowadays?
        • krapp 14y ago
          You could make one. That's the easy part, though. Getting people to show up would be the hard part.
      • baltcode 14y ago
        How did you see the hellbanned post?
        • plorkyeran 14y ago
          Enable showdead in your profile.
      • lilsunnybee 14y ago
        I'm ready to jump ship too. It's gotten ridiculous. I wonder if they keep track of which mods are hellbanning people. Is it just a few bad apples or is it systemic? I've seen so many thoughtful, but invisible posts lately that it makes me feel sort of sick.
        • nostrademons 14y ago
          It's not necessarily a person - I think PG has a machine-learning algorithm that's trained on the decisions of actual human mods, and then uses various features of the comment history to determine whether to hell-ban.
      • 14y ago
    • deleted 14y ago
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• mseebach 14y ago
  It's not just HR. I did an interview with a YC startup that obsessed over my lack of Rails experience. I have several years of industry relevant professional experience in Java, Python and PHP, but only ever dabbled in Ruby and Rails. Their offer (which did come through, grudgingly, through many repetitions of "so will you commit to teaching yourself rails before starting?" (No, I won't.) was quite a bit on the low end, but I'd probably have turned it down anyway for that strange lack of comprehension of programming skills.
  • redguava 14y ago
    I don't see a problem with requiring Rails experience. It depends on the job of course. If I don't mind a slow ramp up and want someone right for the job that might last a few years then I don't care. If I have some complicated technical issues I need fixed quickly, I want someone that can jump in and go right away. Particularly with Rails where it's convention over configuration, knowing the conventions is a great headstart.
    • venomsnake 14y ago
      Then you probably need consultant if it is only for a specific issue. Otherwise once this is solved you got bored to death employee, with skill set for which you are overpaying and under-utilizing. Unless you need language guru, the languages known don't matter much. If someone can write a LISP interpreter in Haskell for 2 days I would hire her for a Java position even if she doesn't know what a loop is.
      • capisce 14y ago
        Except that person is going to bounce as soon as a better opportunity (not involving Java) comes along.
  • raverbashing 14y ago
    There are two sides to this: Either you have another skill that they need, or they just want a "generic (good) rails programmer" Of course skills are transferrable, within a timeframe. So if you're trying to ship something in 6 months this may not be acceptable
• logn 14y ago
  Yes, it's similar. To explain the manufacturing situation in our terms, they're advertising for the equivalent of "Java programmer, 1 year of experience" and paying $10/hr. No one applies. Then there's a phony "skills gap". But also, no one wants to study to go into the field which actually creates a real skills gap.
• enko 14y ago
  I think a core problem is "HR" departments with absolutely no understanding of the positions they are supposed to be hiring for, even for technology companies where technology is supposed to be a core competency. The only thing stopping me from calling out HR departments in general as a sign of organisational cancer, since I am yet to encounter one that pulls even a tenth of its weight, is that they tend to be comprised of the only cute girls in the whole company. Even on Friday (2 days ago) I was out drinking with a bunch of tech guys and a single cute HR girl. That is pretty much the sole reason I would oppose eliminating HR as we know it from all technology companies.
  • eshvk 14y ago
    Nice, very classy of you. Tell me again, how does it feel to time travel here from the fifties?
    • enko 14y ago
      Why, did they tell the truth in the fifties or something? I assume "classy" is your stand-in word for politically correct. I can see that no-one likes what I said but I assure you it's my honest feeling. HR departments' best contribution to an organisation is cute HR girls. You can deny this truth, or perhaps try to change the way of things. Clicking to downvote me, of course, changes absolutely nothing.
    • pinaceae 14y ago
      well, it is a correct observation that HR (and marketing) departments have the highest female ratio in pretty much any company. let's look at famous examples: Carly Fiorina? Marketing. Brigitte Ederer (Siemens)? HR. Meg Whitman? Marketing (started as a Brand Manager) the cute moniker is unnecessary, I agree. the overall observation is correct. i agree in particular with the fact that once HR takes over hiring from the team-leaders, the company has jumped the shark. one of the core tasks for a manager is hiring, ensuring his/her team is correctly staffed and has enough fresh blood to ensure senior people can move upward or away without disruption. if you don't, the Peter principle is in play. overzelous HR is the ruin of a company because by definition HR has no clue about the core competencies of a company, no feeling for its customers nor products/services.
• achompas 14y ago
  Agreed. Further, I personally think this is the issue at the core of the "data science shortage" right now. "Data science" means many things to many people. Some shops want BI folks who can code. Others want people who can keep up in deep learning threads (like the one on HN's front page) and know about Hinton's work. Others still want HDFS badasses who can distinguish between Cascading and Cascalog (lol). Shops classify all of these things as "data science" when they're really very different (respectively: Excel/scripting BI analyst; ML researcher with a focus on deep learning and neural networks; data infrastructure developer with broad exposure to MR frameworks) This is stupid. I worried about checking off these boxes until I realized recruiters are doing the 1990s Java thing all over again. This time, though, the buzzwords are Hadoop, information retrieval, and Andrew Ng. I think it's best to ignore this, keep working hard, and grow your employment options.
  • eshvk 14y ago
    I agree with you: However, I am unsure who is at fault here. There is a unique problem in that people don't genuinely know what to call the role they want to hire for and there is a worry among recruiters that the "wrong" or "unsexy" job title will put off potentially amazing candidates. E.g. In Linkedin, the data science position for the most part could be more accurately called a Machine Learning Engineer. There are other companies where the data science role could be called a Statistician (As in someone who has advanced degrees in Statistics but who for all they care can't write anything but SQL). On the other hand, I have never ever found the requirements for a role to be nothing but mostly bullshit. So they don't really help you much. Your best bet if you are not going through a referral is to attempt to get to a phone screen where the Engineer/Data Scientist will be kind enough to spare some time at the end of the interview to tell you what on earth they are actually looking for. You could get lucky and learn just enough to terminate the interview process at this time. The worst situation is where you go there and realize that either a) You are not what they are looking for which is a half a day wasted or even worse b) They have not completely realized what they are looking for. Me? I have made a decision that I will either apply for software engineering positions where I will maybe be one of the Machine Learning folks or apply to data science positions only if I know some one in the team who can explain to me what on earth that company is actually looking for.
• nostrademons 14y ago
  Often times the absurdly specific skillset requirements are an H1B game. To get an H1B, you have to prove that no citizen is qualified for the position, so when companies find a foreign candidate they like, they'll put out a job ad with exactly the skillset that that candidate has, and then when nobody responds or all the candidates are unqualified, they can hire the person that they really wanted to hire in the first place.