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> you wouldn't have all these shops using spam-tactic recruiters to drive volume. I think those are unrelated concepts. I think connecting with the right pool

> you wouldn't have all these shops using spam-tactic recruiters to drive volume. I think those are unrelated concepts. I think connecting with the right pool of talent is an art, and a lot of shops are completely artless. > It's most definitely a seller's market, if programmers can take their pick Maybe I've been lucky, but I've never worked at a company that felt like we couldn't take our pick of applicants. Especially the lower down the scale we went. > My last job hunt took one hour. I have applicants for positions that don't exist. My applicant search takes negative time. > If they fired me I could line up a dozen interviews next week If someone quits, I can line up a dozen candidates next week. > they'd still have to wade through a sea of unqualified/foreign/unmotivated alternatives. Every day, you make judgements about which companies would be fun to work through - you're always doing that background processing. > they interviewed a dozen guys before me. So, as a Buyer, they had a line of candidates applying. Most of their problem was probably announcing to the world that they had an open position that people should know to apply to. That sounds like a Buyer's Market to me. > I don't know where you're getting the idea that it's a buyer's market for programming talent. The length of time I've seen open positions sit unfilled, and the number of applicants who'd be qualified to fill it. In any market, a good that's sufficiently - well - "valuable" - will be picked up in no time. Congrats on crossing that threshold, I guess. But yes, I consider it a Buyer's Market.

potatolicious 14y ago
I'll be somewhat blunt - but this isn't meant as disrespect for you. The software industry is highly bimodal. There are two very, very clear camps - you fall into the other camp than most HNers. The market for mid-top end talent is a huge sellers market. There aren't enough people to go around, salaries inflate double-digit percentages every year, and crazily does not seem to be stopping. The market for low-end warm-body coders is a huge buyers market. There are more clueless VB coders than there are seats; many, many more. Do you, by any chance, work for a consultancy where innovation, code quality, or engineering excellence aren't exactly high up on the list of priorities? This may explain your glut of candidates - whereas on the other side of the industry fence companies are offering six-figures to fresh graduates and creating bidding wars around entry-level applicants?
- zanny 14y ago
  I agree on the two camps ideology, and this is HN after all, so I'll ask - how to you get into the sellers market? I graduated with my CS degree with an ok 3.4 GPA recently, and I cast a wide net on jobs from Django to openCL, but everywhere I apply I either get cold shoulders, a 30 minute phone interview that never gets a response even with follow up, or rejection on a lack of project experience. I've been working FOSS for a few months now, and I hope that helps, but when you live in the middle of PA and not a big tech hot spot, have no networking contacts, and no desire to try to play founder-with-some-arbitrary-webapp-maybe-1mil-people-will-use-but-will-be-forgotten-in-a-year how do you get ahead?
  - UncleOxidant 14y ago
    You may have to move out of "the middle of PA".
    - nitrogen 14y ago
      There's a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem for intelligent developers trapped in a less favorable city: you can't make it to in-person interviews in a more active city, so you have to cross a higher threshold to be interesting to employers there; you don't have the funds to move to a better city, so you need to find a local job; local jobs are both low-end and scarce, so you can't save the funds you need to move.
      - pnathan 14y ago
        This is very true. I advise everyone who is young and in the field to move to a tech hotspot. Otherwise you appear to be screwed.
      - vinceguidry 14y ago
        If you're in a small town, you need to network more. My preferred method of doing so is to hang out at Starbucks and shoot the breeze with whoever walks through the door. Eventually a job will fall into your lap.
rhizome 14y ago
The length of time I've seen open positions sit unfilled There's an excluded middle here, where the ability of a company to choose correctly (avoid false negatives) is not a given, and that they are filtering properly in the first place (as I mentioned of a rockstar-seeking YC company elsewhere in this thread).
doktrin 14y ago
> I have applicants for positions that don't exist. My applicant search takes negative time. Why do you feel it's necessary to waste a candidates time by having them apply for make-believe vacancies?
- jacalata 14y ago
  The charitable reading would be that he is talking about unsolicited applications.
  - doktrin 14y ago
    Perhaps, but honestly the wording lead me to believe he was referring to the practice of keeping job postings open for non-existent positions. It's a relatively common practice, albeit a questionable one IMHO.
vinceguidry 14y ago
> So, as a Buyer, they had a line of candidates applying. Most of their problem was probably announcing to the world that they had an open position that people should know to apply to. That sounds like a Buyer's Market to me. Choice isn't all there is to it. Let's say you're at a grocery store to get onions, but all the onions you see are terrible but really cheap. Being a discerning buyer, you decide to hit the next store. Same there too; more crap onions. It's like this at the next three stores. Finally you get to a store with decent onions, but they're 4x the price of normal onions. You, starved for choice and not willing to shop any more, despite the glut of onions, grab one and go home to make dinner. This is a classic seller's market. The sellers with the goods command premium prices because there aren't that many of them at the quality that the buyer wants. Lots of crap onions to pick from, good ones are ridiculously expensive. A buyer's market would be the other way around, there'd be lots of good onions, so you could get them at bargain rates. I also think you might be misreading the fact that the company you work for is letting open positions sit. What this effectively means is that the workload hasn't gotten to the point where they have to take the next person that comes along. They can still afford to be discerning. If it goes on like this the workload will either get worse, at which point they will have to take the first guy that comes along, or they'll just stop looking, deciding they didn't really need a new guy. Both outcomes are exactly what happens in seller's markets, the buyer eventually gets fed up and takes a sub-par deal or walks away.
- VikingCoder 14y ago
  > so you could get them at bargain rates. I think when you look at the DJIA, companies really are getting developers at bargain rates. How much revenue do you think the top 30% of software companies are earning, versus how much they're paying their top talent? > I also think you might be misreading the fact that the company you work for is letting open positions sit. They're not - they're filling as quickly as we want them to. That's a Buyer's Market.

potatolicious 14y ago

I'll be somewhat blunt - but this isn't meant as disrespect for you. The software industry is highly bimodal. There are two very, very clear camps - you fall into the other camp than most HNers. The market for mid-top end talent is a huge sellers market. There aren't enough people to go around, salaries inflate double-digit percentages every year, and crazily does not seem to be stopping. The market for low-end warm-body coders is a huge buyers market. There are more clueless VB coders than there are seats; many, many more. Do you, by any chance, work for a consultancy where innovation, code quality, or engineering excellence aren't exactly high up on the list of priorities? This may explain your glut of candidates - whereas on the other side of the industry fence companies are offering six-figures to fresh graduates and creating bidding wars around entry-level applicants?

zanny 14y ago
I agree on the two camps ideology, and this is HN after all, so I'll ask - how to you get into the sellers market? I graduated with my CS degree with an ok 3.4 GPA recently, and I cast a wide net on jobs from Django to openCL, but everywhere I apply I either get cold shoulders, a 30 minute phone interview that never gets a response even with follow up, or rejection on a lack of project experience. I've been working FOSS for a few months now, and I hope that helps, but when you live in the middle of PA and not a big tech hot spot, have no networking contacts, and no desire to try to play founder-with-some-arbitrary-webapp-maybe-1mil-people-will-use-but-will-be-forgotten-in-a-year how do you get ahead?
- UncleOxidant 14y ago
  You may have to move out of "the middle of PA".
  - nitrogen 14y ago
    There's a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem for intelligent developers trapped in a less favorable city: you can't make it to in-person interviews in a more active city, so you have to cross a higher threshold to be interesting to employers there; you don't have the funds to move to a better city, so you need to find a local job; local jobs are both low-end and scarce, so you can't save the funds you need to move.
    - pnathan 14y ago
      This is very true. I advise everyone who is young and in the field to move to a tech hotspot. Otherwise you appear to be screwed.
    - vinceguidry 14y ago
      If you're in a small town, you need to network more. My preferred method of doing so is to hang out at Starbucks and shoot the breeze with whoever walks through the door. Eventually a job will fall into your lap.

rhizome 14y ago

The length of time I've seen open positions sit unfilled There's an excluded middle here, where the ability of a company to choose correctly (avoid false negatives) is not a given, and that they are filtering properly in the first place (as I mentioned of a rockstar-seeking YC company elsewhere in this thread).

doktrin 14y ago

> I have applicants for positions that don't exist. My applicant search takes negative time. Why do you feel it's necessary to waste a candidates time by having them apply for make-believe vacancies?

jacalata 14y ago
The charitable reading would be that he is talking about unsolicited applications.
- doktrin 14y ago
  Perhaps, but honestly the wording lead me to believe he was referring to the practice of keeping job postings open for non-existent positions. It's a relatively common practice, albeit a questionable one IMHO.

vinceguidry 14y ago

> So, as a Buyer, they had a line of candidates applying. Most of their problem was probably announcing to the world that they had an open position that people should know to apply to. That sounds like a Buyer's Market to me. Choice isn't all there is to it. Let's say you're at a grocery store to get onions, but all the onions you see are terrible but really cheap. Being a discerning buyer, you decide to hit the next store. Same there too; more crap onions. It's like this at the next three stores. Finally you get to a store with decent onions, but they're 4x the price of normal onions. You, starved for choice and not willing to shop any more, despite the glut of onions, grab one and go home to make dinner. This is a classic seller's market. The sellers with the goods command premium prices because there aren't that many of them at the quality that the buyer wants. Lots of crap onions to pick from, good ones are ridiculously expensive. A buyer's market would be the other way around, there'd be lots of good onions, so you could get them at bargain rates. I also think you might be misreading the fact that the company you work for is letting open positions sit. What this effectively means is that the workload hasn't gotten to the point where they have to take the next person that comes along. They can still afford to be discerning. If it goes on like this the workload will either get worse, at which point they will have to take the first guy that comes along, or they'll just stop looking, deciding they didn't really need a new guy. Both outcomes are exactly what happens in seller's markets, the buyer eventually gets fed up and takes a sub-par deal or walks away.

VikingCoder 14y ago
> so you could get them at bargain rates. I think when you look at the DJIA, companies really are getting developers at bargain rates. How much revenue do you think the top 30% of software companies are earning, versus how much they're paying their top talent? > I also think you might be misreading the fact that the company you work for is letting open positions sit. They're not - they're filling as quickly as we want them to. That's a Buyer's Market.