12 ms·

Why is it taking longer and longer to fill open jobs?

115 points by jrs235 11y ago

th0ma5 11y ago
I think this misinterprets something deliberately, and misses some things entirely. It mentions that wages have been stagnant as proof that it isn't that people aren't applying for jobs that have low pay, but only uses wage statistics as evidence for that, which doesn't really indicate one way or the other that such is the situation. I think the thing it really misses is the increased conceptualization of open positions that makes it so about the only person in the entire world qualified for a job the way it is posted is either the person that had the job previously, or the exact skills of some other team member. I assisted in hiring a technical person at a previous job over a decade ago, and after finding no one with the skills we wound up just hiring the most enthusiastic person, and they wound up over achieving. After harassing HR at my company, I finally made a lateral move where my manager told me he thought at the time of hiring that they needed someone and they thought I might be able scrape by, but now they want me to find someone else just like me. I've read other studies drawing parallels to online dating and in the face of abundance you keep holding out for something better. Either people have to do the hard work to generalize the description of the kinds of skills they are looking for that doesn't wind up into yet another set of impossibilities, or the entire hiring process needs a complete reset in some other way. While we're at it we should probably throw degree requirements out the window, and the silly hiring puzzles everyone has been upset about.
- draugadrotten 11y ago
  > I assisted in hiring a technical person at a previous job over a decade ago, and after finding no one with the skills we wound up just hiring the most enthusiastic person, and they wound up over achieving. It is good to hire for attitude. You can always teach new team members new skills but it is next to impossible to change their attitudes. > After harassing HR at my company, Ah, yes. HR. Could they be part of the problem.
  - jrs235 11y ago
    I know that when a certain global HVAC company brings in a new "fresh" class of salespeople, they bring them in all at once about 20 to 30 at a time. The will go through weeks of training. Some make it, some don't. The majority, if not all, of the incoming (just of of college) class did not major or obtain a degree in anything sales related (business, management, accounting, marketing, etc.). Most of them graduated with mechanical engineering degrees. Why? Because it is easier to train and teach someone how to sell than it is to teach some the technical details (physics) of HVAC systems. It is also easier to sell when you know and understand the product you are selling. Most of the units sold are custom built for the particular building they are being used on/in. Likewise, it is easier to train or teach someone a new programming language than it is to change or modify someone's attitude and personality.
- mc32 11y ago
  In my experience what you say rings true; the job descriptions are such that its hard for a single person to hit all the reqs and if the company is underpaying, it's going to be hard filling that position. With regard to internal hires, yes, the jobs are posted to meet some HR criteria and are merely a formality and thus get filled quickly. But.... This is in tech which accounts for a minute part of all jobs opps, so what applies to tech may not necessarily apply to non tech jobs.
- smil 11y ago
  As a recent graduate for whom it took a year and a half and a move to a different country to find another job, I think I've developed job searcher's PTSD. Applied to lots of jobs I was very excited about, only to get degraded during interviews or not hearing back at all. I wouldn't dream of asking for a lateral move as that might make my boss think I don't like my current job, and as they can fire my with 48 hrs notice, which would cost me my week visa, I can't take any chances.
  - GreenPlastic 11y ago
    In my experience, a lot of new grads don't know how little they actually know and expect the degree itself to qualify them for the job.
    - smil 11y ago
      Sure, but this is not a relevant response to my comment unless you meant it as an insult.
      - GreenPlastic 11y ago
        Wasn't meant as an insult. Just have a lot of phone screens where people list 100 technologies on a resume and don't have a rudimentary understanding of any. The majority of candidates have never used source control or haven't spent the time to brush up on basic data structures questions.
        Decade 11y ago
        That's because there are thousands of job openings and a ton of stuff to do. I don't have enough hours in a day to implement all the job seeker advice I've been given. Your adversarial approach to hiring doesn't help. You think of it as filtering out incompetents so you can concentrate on successful candidates. I think of it as shooting down candidates without giving them a chance to show what they can do. I suspect that your job requirements may be a bit unrealistic. Expert at Objective C and Swift and design with apps in the App Store? Chances are that person already has a happy job, probably working for Apple.
- ryandrake 11y ago
  Extreme pickiness. Every hiring manager is convinced that they must only hire A+++ players or their business is doomed. They'd rather a position go un-filled for 6 months than take a risk on someone simply hungry and enthusiastic. Companies are holding out for that unicorn employee (but, strangely enough, not offering unicorn salaries).
  - dba7dba 11y ago
    They need to wake up. They are not google or apple.
    - Buzzzz 11y ago
      Sometimes I wonder if even Apple and Google are Apple and Google :)
    - walshemj 11y ago
      so right I rember the boss of a supermarket chain complaining about quality of candidates some one needs to take them aside and say your a "jumped up grocer" you don't get to employ Oxbridge first's to work on the checkouts.
  - memracom 11y ago
    It is a sign of incompetent management that they demand only A+++ players. A good manager would hire only B players, then train and mentor them. A really GREAT manager would hire only C players that have the right attitude, and still end up with the best team in the company. Before the MBA scourge hit the land, managers tended to hire the first B or C players that seemed to have the right aptitude and attitude. They would fire fast too, when they made mistakes. In the end they got long term productive employees and, I MUST point out, they did successfully build the modern world that we marvel at around us.
    - wyclif 11y ago
      I hear you on the A+++ player/unicorn/ninja/rockstar thing, but I wonder if the reason for resistance to mentoring and training is a bit more complicated: 1. Finding good mentors is hard, because companies (even large ones as opposed to startups) have cut back and folded several positions into one, all while wages are flat. That means nobody has time to mentor. Everybody's working insane hours at their primary responsibilities. Only the most well-funded startups do mentoring well. Most startups are "all hands on deck" with developers doing a lot of other functions essential to business that wouldn't normally be part of their job description. But these functions are "tyranny of the urgent" life support and there's no time for training. 2. Everybody on both sides of the table knows that the only real way to get a raise or change direction is to leave and get a new job. That's good for the employee who wants to be mobile and transferable, and good for the company that needs warm bodies and is growing, but it's terrible for training/mentoring and the people who want to think long-term.
- hkmurakami 11y ago
  >I've read other studies drawing parallels to online dating and in the face of abundance you keep holding out for something better. Commonly referred to as the "secretary selection problem" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem
  - ryandrake 11y ago
    From that Wiki (interesting by the way, thank you): > 5. Immediately after an interview, the interviewed applicant is either accepted or rejected, and the decision is irrevocable. Many companies actually think this is the way things have to be done in the real world! I once worked somewhere they were trying to hire a software engineer with a very particular technical skill. They interviewed a few people and then interviewed Candidate X. He was very good, but not a "unicorn A++++ hire" so the company decided to hold out for a better candidate. 6 months pass, and none of the subsequent applicants were better than Candidate X, so they finally swallowed their pride and called him back. Luckily, he was still looking to change jobs and we got him, but that was 6 months we could have had another person powering our (then) 3 person team.
- commandar 11y ago
  >After harassing HR at my company, I finally made a lateral move where my manager told me he thought at the time of hiring that they needed someone and they thought I might be able scrape by, but now they want me to find someone else just like me. I so relate to this. I was specifically poached from one department by another for a new position within my company. HR process requires internal transfers to apply for the posting on the company website. I did so overnight, and about 15 minutes after HR got in for the day the next morning, I got an email telling me thank you for the application but I would not be considered or interviewed for the position. My new manager had to fight with HR to even get them to send the application she had requested from me on to her because I didn't precisely tick all the checkboxes on the posted job description. This despite the fact that A. she'd specifically gone after me because her people knew the work I was already doing and knew I'd be a good fit with them and B. the position had gone unfilled for months, was badly needed, and the apps HR had passed on were a far worse fit for the job. I mean, I had the odds about as stacked in my favor as you can get and it was still an uphill battle to get me hired on. Makes me cringe to think how many solid people we have to have missed out on because HR rejected them out of hand.
  - gcb0 11y ago
    A. you were enough to get the job done but wasn't the person to change the game. B. they knew that person was out there but they were failing to reach out to then
    - pyre 11y ago
      At the same time, it says something about the HR process if the hiring manager says that filling the position is critical and that this person would be adequate for the job (even if not game-changing), that HR will fight tooth-and-nail to not consider this person just because every checkbox is not precisely checked in exactly the right way.
      - commandar 11y ago
        Exactly this. HR wanted to hold out for a unicorn candidate when we're geographically in an area that makes finding such a candidate difficult and when the pay they were willing to offer wasn't going to attract a unicorn. Meanwhile, we were having to spend several multiples the cost of an employee on outside consultants just to keep daily operations going and had been doing so for months. It probably doesn't help that tech isnt our core competency and we work in an industry that's occupational license heavy, so HR is probably used to being highly selective, but there comes a point where not just cross training somebody that's already been vetted by the hiring manager --and actively resisting it-- when having the position unfilled is costing the company serious money just gets absurd.
- makeitsuckless 11y ago
  With my current employer, hiring the "most enthusiastic" people instead of the finding people with the necessary skills backfired hard. We're now stuck with serious inefficiencies in the organisation and people that under local labor protection laws are hard to get rid of and replace holding key positions. This may be easy to overcome in a larger organisation in which the underskilled enthusiasts are surrounded by more senior appropriately skilled coworkers, but in a smaller company it's a disaster.
- venomsnake 11y ago
  > I think this misinterprets something deliberately, and misses some things entirely. Well it is Vox.com The skills requirements are absurd. And for me they are a bit like a red flag - every job that has 3 pages of technical abbreviations is not worth applying for. Good jobs are always by personal contacts first.
alister 11y ago
> What's changed over the past fifteen years is that the internet has dramatically decreased the cost of identify in an open job listing and sending in an application. The stack of resumes you need to read through in order to start scheduling interviews has just gotten longer. The easier you make it to apply for jobs, the slower the hiring process becomes. The above explanation of why it now takes employers longer to fill open jobs isn't convincing. Perhaps it would make sense if you received: (a) 10,000 resumes for a single opening (but that doesn't happen) (b) 50 resumes from 50 different Nobel laureates and you were torn trying to decide which one is best (but that doesn't happen either) My experience is that if you got 5 resumes pre-Internet, you'd get 50 post-Internet. But the additional screening is negligible. I found that I can immediately reject 45 of the 50 resumes after looking at them for a minute each because so many of the resumes are unqualified. You might say that that is 45 minutes lost, but even a single interview will take longer than that. It's insignificant to the overall hiring process. Maybe what really happens is that in large HR-driven companies, the HR department forces the hiring manager to interview many more incompetent or unqualified people because they got so many resumes to choose from.
- GreenPlastic 11y ago
  Posted a senior iOS dev position to Indeed, LinkedIn, Glassdoor where the company is paying 25%(maybe 40% if you include RSUs) above market here (although we don't put comp in the job listing) and only got 3 applicants in a month.
  - hayksaakian 11y ago
    Try posting the same exact thing in Craigslist. There's too much tangential noise in those websites.
  - xeni 11y ago
    Any chance you could link the listing (or paste the description)? Just curious to see what sort of things you're looking for. I'm currently 5 months into my first full-time iOS dev position. I'm also really curious to know what sort of questions you ask during your interview process (both pre-screens and onsite). I understand if you don't want to share info on that though :)
Animats 11y ago
How often do you see "Help Wanted - Will Train"?
- mc32 11y ago
  That is more likely to happen if the employer can legally keep the worker after training, like say when the gov pays for your med school and gets you to commit x years at below market rates in exchange for paying your tuition (and training) otherwise the employee has little incentive to stay in the face of better offers given the added skills the prev employer paid for.
  - ryandrake 11y ago
    So, make sure there are no better offers out there. If you think your employees are going to leave after you train them, that's a problem you can solve.
    - mc32 11y ago
      Yes, but you have already invested money into them by hiring "green" (underproductive) workers. Someone else didn't have that burden so it's easy for them to pay a bit more to get the trained worker. So everyone is trying to get this trained worker "ready to hit the ground running".
      - ryandrake 11y ago
        Get creative. Admittedly super-simplified example: Would you find it sensible to hire someone inexperienced at 70% of market value, with a written guarantee to increase him/her to 110% after (let's say 6 months of) training? After 2.5 years, you've gotten 2 productive years out of him, and you have paid him (total) the same as you'd have paid an instantly productive person for 2 years. And they're not going anywhere because they're making more than market rate.
      - craigyk 11y ago
        for most positions training a "green" hire is probably like 20% new, transferrable skills (PLs, frameworks, etc.), and 80% highly specific, and less broadly applicable domain knowledge. That includes things things like figuring out your process, or even who to go to for what. Besides, the best employees probably are the ones that want to learn new things, so if you land the perfect candidate that doesn't need any "training" he might be more likely to leave since he's probably doing the same "boring" thing he was doing at his last job...
caseyf7 11y ago
I would like to see someone quantify how many job listings are posted to meet H1-B requirements where there is no intent to hire. I've been hearing more and more stories of people trying to get interviews for jobs they see online only to find out the listing was to meet visa requirements for the person in the current role.
- arkem 11y ago
  Job postings that are aiming to satisfy visa requirements are generally easy to identify. Here are some indicators: * They're usually listed in a Sunday newspaper rather than online. * They will not be posted to the company's website. * They'll require a specific education level * They'll require experience that is oddly specific
  - mrspeaker 11y ago
    Like this one: https://twitter.com/mrspeaker/status/525650833174978560 https://twitter.com/mrspeaker/status/525650833174978560 I thought it was the most hilarious thing I'd ever seen until a co-worker on a H1-B told me what it really was.
    - walshemj 11y ago
      Obviously spelling is not one of the skills required "stored proceeds" :-)
dba7dba 11y ago
It seems no one is mentoring anyone in professional setting anymore. Stackoverflow.com is nice but sometimes face2face mentoring can't be beat. And no company seems willing to offer 'apprenticeship'. You are working on a hard problem with latest methodologies and tools? Then it's very likely you won't find anyone out there who has the experience in the methodologies and tools. You just can't hold out looking for the perfect candidate. You are not google or apple. So just give up and hire the best you can find in the pool. Don't wait till you find the ONE. Again, you are not google or apple. The other problem I think is HR department itself. How many small/mid HR departments keep track of hiring process like SEO metrics are kept/measured? Do they know which manager seems to hire the most duds? AFAIK, HR department is the least automated piece of a tech company. I can tell because they are still scheduling interviews using emails. And lastly, please take a look at your Job desc/requirement. Is it real or are you just copying/pasting from some other job postings?
- mpdehaan2 11y ago
  Pretty much most job positions want a pony. It's the old "10 years experience in J2EE" thing, when a technology doesn't really take that long to learn, or a group of technologies that someone uses, that are impossibly incommon in combination. People want developers in Foo, not Bar, when Foo and Bar are basically the same. I prefer hiring smart people that can learn, and that are good to work with, but I do feel people don't believe that as much when there are are a lot of people on the market. It's somewhat similar to how it's hard to get an employer to fund a conference trip, classes, books, and all of those kinds of things. And because you can't really move and grow at work, I think that's also why people change jobs more, we're in a very creative professional that desires knowledge - and the system really wants us to hire someone who already knows X or has built X before, and crank out more of the same many times.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
resoluteteeth 11y ago
I think another interpretation is that it's become easier for companies to keep jobs "open" and collecting applicants without really having to put in effort to find people. Or, to put it another way, the idea of an "open job" has become meaningless, if it was ever meaningful in the first place. As a metaphor, we can imagine many people wanting to buy apples, but not being willing to pay the 1$ the supermarket will charge. They could create an "apple opening", posting on an apple selling site looking for people who are willing to sell them apples with certain qualities for a given price that depends on the individual, for example 5 cents. Then, we could poll consumers to see how many have apple openings. Perhaps we could find millions of such unfilled openings, but would this tell us anything about trends in the quality of apples or actual apple consumption?
- d4nt 11y ago
  This aligns with my person experience in a startup incubator. If I was a ruby/php/js guru willing to work for £25,000/year plus a bit of equity, I could take my pick of 100s of jobs.
- golergka 11y ago
  That's a reasonable theory, but it doesn't correspond with the stats about "labor quality" problem.
  - XorNot 11y ago
    Sure it does. There's a problem in that there's not enough quality labor willing to work for peanuts and then watch their life get destroyed when a major medical event happens.
- hebdo 11y ago
  A relevant read: Whaddaya Mean, You Can't Find Programmers? http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000050.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000050.html
  - arenaninja 11y ago
gcb0 11y ago
by that graph, hiring:openings is finally at 1.0. that actually sounds perfect, and it seems inflated before. when it was over 1.5 so, what's the problem?
colechristensen 11y ago
* Employers overvalue experience, forgetting that a human is a fantastic machine and with appropriate training and management, most people will be able to do most jobs. * Communication is hard: both writing resumes and job descriptions – it becomes this strange difficult-to-play game that both sides engage in often having little to nothing to do with the actual job * Education is poor: at all levels actual learning is not emphasized. Especially learning how to do things. From preschool to graduate school, the game of education far surpasses actual learning. Students aren't interested in learning and teachers are only interested in grades and tests.
- VLM 11y ago
  "Employers overvalue experience" Only at hiring time. One of the execs reads a journalist article in a trade rag about any random fad and "we" need to have it implemented yesterday. Which is not a problem because successful employees are really good at OTJ training and learn by experimentation. Unfortunately no one has told HR that, and they think they're hiring for tax audit avoidance accountants in the most conservative and uncreative criteria possible. The ideal candidate has 20 years of experience in a field 10 years old (that only takes 6 weeks to learn of course), in other words focused entirely on the past. The ideal employee on the other hand is an expert at learning "6 week" technologies and making them produce once they're hired. There's going to be friction and failure and massive wastes of money. There is also the extremely low social status issue. It would be possible to micro-specify (nano-specify?) any management or executive job, but they're not going to put up with it, as an industry, so instead we get "good judgment" type of hiring criteria. The reason why programmers have incredibly low social status is the oversupply (nationwide, anyway) requires them to be talked down to or replaced by someone who will tolerate being talked down to. The extremely low social status permeates the rest of the field too, call center like work environments, crazy disrespectful deadlines, poor management techniques (most modern fads, really), so its not going to be as simple as some sort of union saying "no" to disrespectful job advertisements.
memracom 11y ago
Don't well written cover letters help employers quickly evaluate a large number of applications? And don't complain that you don't get them along with the resumes. 1) Ask for a cover letter explaining why you are a fit for the job. 2) Discard applications that don't include them. 3) Resist the urge to look through the resumes anyway. And if you directly ask for a cover letter, and you get anm application that doesn't have one, send the applicant a form letter that says. "This is a form letter. Apparently you do not care about finding a job because you failed to follow the instructions in the job posting. We have deleted your application/email. If you still want to be considered for the job, apply again WITH A COVER LETTER that explains why you are the right fit for the job". If Employers want Job Applicants to do the right thing, then they need to be proactive and teach. Nobody else trains job applicants how to apply for a job, how to help the employer see quickly that you deserve to get an interview.
- slyall 11y ago
  > Ask for a cover letter explaining why you are a fit for the job How does this help anything. Plenty of these out there which the applicant can attached to the application. "I am very enthusiastic to leverage my [INSERT HERE] skills to help [COMPANY] transform the [WHATEVER] industry "
  - raverbashing 11y ago
    This 99% of cover letters will just be, self-importance exaggeration, prospective employer excessive praise, etc.
    - tomjen3 11y ago
      And resumes are not? I am a decent programmer but not exceptional, but when you read my resume you will see that I am a child prodigy - and that is done without any lying at all just selective highlighting facts.
      - vonmoltke 11y ago
d4nt 11y ago
My theory is that people are shopping around for better employers and better cultural fit, and that it's not just a question of taking the highest offer any more. That would explain why wages are not rising.
- PythonicAlpha 11y ago
  If the problem would be just employees "shopping around" that would not explain, why wages are not rising. If they would shop around, wages would also rise, even when they are only marginal interested in wages ... (show me 3 employees that are not interested in wages)
  - hodwik 11y ago
    Tech wages are very inflated as is, expecting them to rise is pretty silly. When I was looking for my current job, I forgot to even ask about wages. So maybe what they gave me in pay is "flat" from five years ago, but it's still twice what any of my friends my age are making, while they have degrees and I do not.
    - PythonicAlpha 11y ago
      I was only reacting on the argument was made by the OP, that is not logical in my opinion. I do not know about tech wages in the US. In Germany, the tech wages are not inflated, at least not in my opinion. The normal tech wages have risen maybe 3-5% per year the last few years in Germany (I don't call this inflated) and the years before it was even less. In the same time, the wages for top-managers have risen maybe 10-15% per year and are since decades incredible high above the wages of "tech wages" (the difference is climbing and climbing). I call that inflated. Your statement of course is more logical than that of the OP.
      - hodwik 11y ago
        Developer wages in the US average around €62k, about 20 higher than in Germany, while the US has roughly 30% lower cost of living. Also, in Germany you're at a 40% income tax rate at €43k, while in the US at €62k you're only taxed at 25%. Sure, that 40% income tax rate gets you universal healthcare, while in the US we're paying ~6,339.71 Euros a year to insure a family of four. But I think even accounting that, wages are much higher in the US.
gizi 11y ago
I am busy already. I already have a job that I like. So, I am not even remotely looking at what other jobs are around, because at the moment I consider that to be a distraction, a waste of time. Now you can generalize this: you can safely assume that anybody who is even just remotely good at what he does, is already busy. He already has a job and he is not interested in your job advert. In other words, above a certain treshold of skill level that is not even that high, you must approach the candidate, because the candidate will not approach you. Besides the fact that he considers your approach to be a distraction (he does not need it right now) the most important question on his lips will be: How much more are you offering than I am getting now already?
- vonmoltke 11y ago
  This attitude is so wring, and hearing it so many times has contributed to my perceptions of myself as a shit engineer. There are plenty of good engineers like myself who are at times actively or semi-actively looking for a job. I'm in Dallas, and I have a lot of hot keywords associated with myself that are not my core competency. What that means is over 90% of the jobs I get approached about are inappropriate, sometimes wildly. I only get approached by the highly active recruiters, since so many seem to have limited geographical areas and I am not in a position to network with non-recruiting people. These recruiters frequently misinterpret or misunderstand my background. Thus, I am forced to actively apply to openings if I want something new. Hearing things like this gives me the impression that I will be viewed as inferior just because I had to stoop to the level of applying like the rest of the plebs.
PythonicAlpha 11y ago
One of the problems IMHO is, that employers get more and more demanding. There is this joke, that fits very good: "If Carpenters Were Hired Like Programmers" [1] In former days, the readiness to take people and train them on the job was much higher. In Germany this is a really ugly trend. The licence for truck drivers is very, very costly but the earnings of the drivers are very low. In former days the transportation companies educated their own drivers. Today, they don't. They just expect, that the drivers somehow have to have the education and come from somewhere. What is the result: The state is in more and more cases educating unemployed people that they can become truck drivers. They pay tax money, that the transporting companies don't have to pay for it ... I don't think, that a "free market" has to mean that more and more costs have to been taken over by the state, but that is, what is happening. Today, when you apply for a job, they search for exactly those skills needed. They are not ready to train you on the job or take people that have to do a lot of learning on the job. And also in Germany: They are not ready to take people above a specific age. [1] http://www.jasonbock.net/jb/News/Item/7c334037d1a9437d9fa6506e2f35eaac http://www.jasonbock.net/jb/News/Item/7c334037d1a9437d9fa650...
- PhantomGremlin 11y ago
  I've read that joke before. It's great. It should be re-posted every time one of these "jobs" discussions comes up on HN. It very clearly summarizes what's wrong with the hiring process.
spacko 11y ago
Maybe HR tends to complicate the process to expand its power and justify its existence. There is this "law" that proclaims this is what happens in bureaucratic organisations - hierarchies tend to be grown for that purpose.
- walshemj 11y ago
  Exactly read the laundry files
- analog31 11y ago
  Parkinson's Law -- an amusing read, even if quaint. The same book also gave rise to the contemporary term "bikeshedding."
  - spacko 11y ago
    Parkinson's Law states that work is expanded to fill the available time. The law I refer to is that the time itself with work to be filled is expanded - for the purpose of requiring more human and non-human resources - which again requires expanding the hierarchy - which expands the power of those who cause this process (as the newly hired people will be added below those "managers").
    - analog31 11y ago
      Quite true. I should have italicized Parkinson's Law, the book. Parkinson spends a number of short chapters discussing the expansion of hierarchies, with historical examples.
- dublinben 11y ago
  This seems highly related to Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy.[0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Pournelle#Iron_Law_of_Bureaucracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Pournelle#Iron_Law_of_Bu...
anti-shill 11y ago
it's not--it's just propaganda...I never trust any stats promulgated or hyped by the gov't, the media, corporations or nonprofit foundations. They all have an agenda, and agenda that portends no good for the average american.
thrillgore 11y ago
I mean, the solution is simple to fix right? Raise the wages for these positions.
- hodwik 11y ago
  It's not about wages being too small, it's about offices not being pleasant places to work. I have never heard a programmer complain about not enough pay. They do, however, complain about incompetent bosses, not enough vacation, and having to deal with non-programmers.
known 11y ago
interview != quiz
njloof 11y ago
What's also missing is that most resumes are culled mechanically by grepping for keywords. Nobody reads every resume they receive. That's why they ask for digital documents -- and then ask you to submit them again in plain text elsewhere on the form.
autokad 11y ago
I wonder if part of it (besides keeping positions open just to see what is out there) is that companies can use job openings as analytic data. you find information that re-affirms how much you should be paying employees, expectations of employee turn over, and more interestingly what the competition is doing. I mean, imagine I am google, I fain interest in a job posting to get some facebook employees to apply. I even give them an interview. between the resume, cover letter, and interview I might be able to get lots of information on what projects facebook is working on and then just turn down the candidate after 3 interviews and say: google is quirky, if one person dont like you, you dont get in no matter how good you think it went.
ChuckMcM 11y ago
Historically long lead times to hiring has been a leading indicator of wages rising. The mechanism is pretty well understood. Employer A decides that if they can get an employee at a low wage, they would hire another employee and they create an advertisement for the opening. If the economy has moved up, they don't fill it and it remains open. Meanwhile employer B loses an essential employee for some reason and they go out and actively try to recruit a replacement (generally from other employers in the same industry / space) They find employer A's top performer and offer them a raise to come work for B (which A takes because they have had really poor wage increases over the last 5 years) Now Employer A has a problem, they are down a key employee and they had an "opening" already so they are in danger of losing income if they don't replace their employee. In order to do that they raise what they are willing to pay the "right" person who walks in the door. And they may try to recruit out of other employers. "Nice to fill" job openings are an indicator that the business is profitable enough to add labor, which means that the labor it is employing is at or above the productivity rate needed to succeed or expand. In that environment some firms will seek to grow more aggressively than others and that will result in opportunities to be employed at the entry level. That is a good indicator for folks who are coming into the workforce. How the rest of the economy responds will be interesting indeed.
Animats 11y ago
Here's a famous recruiting ad for "Super programmers" from Autodesk, in 1986.[1] It includes two things you seldom see today. First, there's no list of narrow technical skills: "Relevant experience is nice, but if you're as good a person as we want, you'll be able to pick it up in a week or two." And finally: "We'll pay you more than anybody else in the industry." That worked. Autodesk ended up owning the CAD industry and the animation industry. If your company is complaining that it can't find programmers, try that. [1] https://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/www/chapter2_43.html https://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/www/chapter2_43.html
- fsckin 11y ago
  It'd be awesome if AutoDesk unleashed some super programmers on their online store and subscription management portal. Both are an absolutely abismal experience.
- kayge 11y ago
  Are there any companies out there today with that mindset? I've received 4 rejections over the last couple of months that all seem to boil down to me not having "enough brown". One would think having a bachelor's in computer science, 7 years of broad IT experience, and an easygoing attitude might excuse me from being a little rusty with the latest RoR after not touching it for 3 years :) Sorry for the rant (and minor self-promotion), but this topic has been weighing on my mind a lot recently.
sopooneo 11y ago
Because it seems there are many people commenting who might know: is it heard of for a potential employee to negotiate compensation also in terms of amount of paid time off? And if so, has anyone ever heard of a US dev getting European levels of vacation? Like eight weeks? Because that is my ideal, and I would be willing to give up a lot to get that sort of thing. I need stability, but live pretty frugally, so I would only be interested in an otherwise traditional full-time position. Any input greatly appreciated.
- dhd415 11y ago
  I've heard of people negotiating 4 or 4.5-day work weeks for 80% or 90% of the position's full-time salary. In the few cases where I've seen that happen, someone in the company had prior work experience with the candidate and knew that they would be worth bringing in even on a part-time basis.
jrs235 11y ago
This might explain it too: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ByFCtZfCcAAg_A3.jpg:large https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ByFCtZfCcAAg_A3.jpg:large

115 points by jrs235 11y ago

I think this misinterprets something deliberately, and misses some things entirely. It mentions that wages have been stagnant as proof that it isn't that people aren't applying for jobs that have low pay, but only uses wage statistics as evidence for that, which doesn't really indicate one way or the other that such is the situation. I think the thing it really misses is the increased conceptualization of open positions that makes it so about the only person in the entire world qualified for a job the way it is posted is either the person that had the job previously, or the exact skills of some other team member. I assisted in hiring a technical person at a previous job over a decade ago, and after finding no one with the skills we wound up just hiring the most enthusiastic person, and they wound up over achieving. After harassing HR at my company, I finally made a lateral move where my manager told me he thought at the time of hiring that they needed someone and they thought I might be able scrape by, but now they want me to find someone else just like me. I've read other studies drawing parallels to online dating and in the face of abundance you keep holding out for something better. Either people have to do the hard work to generalize the description of the kinds of skills they are looking for that doesn't wind up into yet another set of impossibilities, or the entire hiring process needs a complete reset in some other way. While we're at it we should probably throw degree requirements out the window, and the silly hiring puzzles everyone has been upset about.

draugadrotten 11y ago
> I assisted in hiring a technical person at a previous job over a decade ago, and after finding no one with the skills we wound up just hiring the most enthusiastic person, and they wound up over achieving. It is good to hire for attitude. You can always teach new team members new skills but it is next to impossible to change their attitudes. > After harassing HR at my company, Ah, yes. HR. Could they be part of the problem.
- jrs235 11y ago
  I know that when a certain global HVAC company brings in a new "fresh" class of salespeople, they bring them in all at once about 20 to 30 at a time. The will go through weeks of training. Some make it, some don't. The majority, if not all, of the incoming (just of of college) class did not major or obtain a degree in anything sales related (business, management, accounting, marketing, etc.). Most of them graduated with mechanical engineering degrees. Why? Because it is easier to train and teach someone how to sell than it is to teach some the technical details (physics) of HVAC systems. It is also easier to sell when you know and understand the product you are selling. Most of the units sold are custom built for the particular building they are being used on/in. Likewise, it is easier to train or teach someone a new programming language than it is to change or modify someone's attitude and personality.
mc32 11y ago
In my experience what you say rings true; the job descriptions are such that its hard for a single person to hit all the reqs and if the company is underpaying, it's going to be hard filling that position. With regard to internal hires, yes, the jobs are posted to meet some HR criteria and are merely a formality and thus get filled quickly. But.... This is in tech which accounts for a minute part of all jobs opps, so what applies to tech may not necessarily apply to non tech jobs.
smil 11y ago
As a recent graduate for whom it took a year and a half and a move to a different country to find another job, I think I've developed job searcher's PTSD. Applied to lots of jobs I was very excited about, only to get degraded during interviews or not hearing back at all. I wouldn't dream of asking for a lateral move as that might make my boss think I don't like my current job, and as they can fire my with 48 hrs notice, which would cost me my week visa, I can't take any chances.
- GreenPlastic 11y ago
  In my experience, a lot of new grads don't know how little they actually know and expect the degree itself to qualify them for the job.
  - smil 11y ago
    Sure, but this is not a relevant response to my comment unless you meant it as an insult.
    - GreenPlastic 11y ago
      Wasn't meant as an insult. Just have a lot of phone screens where people list 100 technologies on a resume and don't have a rudimentary understanding of any. The majority of candidates have never used source control or haven't spent the time to brush up on basic data structures questions.
      - Decade 11y ago
        That's because there are thousands of job openings and a ton of stuff to do. I don't have enough hours in a day to implement all the job seeker advice I've been given. Your adversarial approach to hiring doesn't help. You think of it as filtering out incompetents so you can concentrate on successful candidates. I think of it as shooting down candidates without giving them a chance to show what they can do. I suspect that your job requirements may be a bit unrealistic. Expert at Objective C and Swift and design with apps in the App Store? Chances are that person already has a happy job, probably working for Apple.
ryandrake 11y ago
Extreme pickiness. Every hiring manager is convinced that they must only hire A+++ players or their business is doomed. They'd rather a position go un-filled for 6 months than take a risk on someone simply hungry and enthusiastic. Companies are holding out for that unicorn employee (but, strangely enough, not offering unicorn salaries).
- dba7dba 11y ago
  They need to wake up. They are not google or apple.
  - Buzzzz 11y ago
    Sometimes I wonder if even Apple and Google are Apple and Google :)
  - walshemj 11y ago
    so right I rember the boss of a supermarket chain complaining about quality of candidates some one needs to take them aside and say your a "jumped up grocer" you don't get to employ Oxbridge first's to work on the checkouts.
- memracom 11y ago
  It is a sign of incompetent management that they demand only A+++ players. A good manager would hire only B players, then train and mentor them. A really GREAT manager would hire only C players that have the right attitude, and still end up with the best team in the company. Before the MBA scourge hit the land, managers tended to hire the first B or C players that seemed to have the right aptitude and attitude. They would fire fast too, when they made mistakes. In the end they got long term productive employees and, I MUST point out, they did successfully build the modern world that we marvel at around us.
  - wyclif 11y ago
    I hear you on the A+++ player/unicorn/ninja/rockstar thing, but I wonder if the reason for resistance to mentoring and training is a bit more complicated: 1. Finding good mentors is hard, because companies (even large ones as opposed to startups) have cut back and folded several positions into one, all while wages are flat. That means nobody has time to mentor. Everybody's working insane hours at their primary responsibilities. Only the most well-funded startups do mentoring well. Most startups are "all hands on deck" with developers doing a lot of other functions essential to business that wouldn't normally be part of their job description. But these functions are "tyranny of the urgent" life support and there's no time for training. 2. Everybody on both sides of the table knows that the only real way to get a raise or change direction is to leave and get a new job. That's good for the employee who wants to be mobile and transferable, and good for the company that needs warm bodies and is growing, but it's terrible for training/mentoring and the people who want to think long-term.
hkmurakami 11y ago
>I've read other studies drawing parallels to online dating and in the face of abundance you keep holding out for something better. Commonly referred to as the "secretary selection problem" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem
- ryandrake 11y ago
  From that Wiki (interesting by the way, thank you): > 5. Immediately after an interview, the interviewed applicant is either accepted or rejected, and the decision is irrevocable. Many companies actually think this is the way things have to be done in the real world! I once worked somewhere they were trying to hire a software engineer with a very particular technical skill. They interviewed a few people and then interviewed Candidate X. He was very good, but not a "unicorn A++++ hire" so the company decided to hold out for a better candidate. 6 months pass, and none of the subsequent applicants were better than Candidate X, so they finally swallowed their pride and called him back. Luckily, he was still looking to change jobs and we got him, but that was 6 months we could have had another person powering our (then) 3 person team.
commandar 11y ago
>After harassing HR at my company, I finally made a lateral move where my manager told me he thought at the time of hiring that they needed someone and they thought I might be able scrape by, but now they want me to find someone else just like me. I so relate to this. I was specifically poached from one department by another for a new position within my company. HR process requires internal transfers to apply for the posting on the company website. I did so overnight, and about 15 minutes after HR got in for the day the next morning, I got an email telling me thank you for the application but I would not be considered or interviewed for the position. My new manager had to fight with HR to even get them to send the application she had requested from me on to her because I didn't precisely tick all the checkboxes on the posted job description. This despite the fact that A. she'd specifically gone after me because her people knew the work I was already doing and knew I'd be a good fit with them and B. the position had gone unfilled for months, was badly needed, and the apps HR had passed on were a far worse fit for the job. I mean, I had the odds about as stacked in my favor as you can get and it was still an uphill battle to get me hired on. Makes me cringe to think how many solid people we have to have missed out on because HR rejected them out of hand.
- gcb0 11y ago
  A. you were enough to get the job done but wasn't the person to change the game. B. they knew that person was out there but they were failing to reach out to then
  - pyre 11y ago
    At the same time, it says something about the HR process if the hiring manager says that filling the position is critical and that this person would be adequate for the job (even if not game-changing), that HR will fight tooth-and-nail to not consider this person just because every checkbox is not precisely checked in exactly the right way.
    - commandar 11y ago
      Exactly this. HR wanted to hold out for a unicorn candidate when we're geographically in an area that makes finding such a candidate difficult and when the pay they were willing to offer wasn't going to attract a unicorn. Meanwhile, we were having to spend several multiples the cost of an employee on outside consultants just to keep daily operations going and had been doing so for months. It probably doesn't help that tech isnt our core competency and we work in an industry that's occupational license heavy, so HR is probably used to being highly selective, but there comes a point where not just cross training somebody that's already been vetted by the hiring manager --and actively resisting it-- when having the position unfilled is costing the company serious money just gets absurd.
makeitsuckless 11y ago
With my current employer, hiring the "most enthusiastic" people instead of the finding people with the necessary skills backfired hard. We're now stuck with serious inefficiencies in the organisation and people that under local labor protection laws are hard to get rid of and replace holding key positions. This may be easy to overcome in a larger organisation in which the underskilled enthusiasts are surrounded by more senior appropriately skilled coworkers, but in a smaller company it's a disaster.
venomsnake 11y ago
> I think this misinterprets something deliberately, and misses some things entirely. Well it is Vox.com The skills requirements are absurd. And for me they are a bit like a red flag - every job that has 3 pages of technical abbreviations is not worth applying for. Good jobs are always by personal contacts first.

alister 11y ago

> What's changed over the past fifteen years is that the internet has dramatically decreased the cost of identify in an open job listing and sending in an application. The stack of resumes you need to read through in order to start scheduling interviews has just gotten longer. The easier you make it to apply for jobs, the slower the hiring process becomes. The above explanation of why it now takes employers longer to fill open jobs isn't convincing. Perhaps it would make sense if you received: (a) 10,000 resumes for a single opening (but that doesn't happen) (b) 50 resumes from 50 different Nobel laureates and you were torn trying to decide which one is best (but that doesn't happen either) My experience is that if you got 5 resumes pre-Internet, you'd get 50 post-Internet. But the additional screening is negligible. I found that I can immediately reject 45 of the 50 resumes after looking at them for a minute each because so many of the resumes are unqualified. You might say that that is 45 minutes lost, but even a single interview will take longer than that. It's insignificant to the overall hiring process. Maybe what really happens is that in large HR-driven companies, the HR department forces the hiring manager to interview many more incompetent or unqualified people because they got so many resumes to choose from.

GreenPlastic 11y ago
Posted a senior iOS dev position to Indeed, LinkedIn, Glassdoor where the company is paying 25%(maybe 40% if you include RSUs) above market here (although we don't put comp in the job listing) and only got 3 applicants in a month.
- hayksaakian 11y ago
  Try posting the same exact thing in Craigslist. There's too much tangential noise in those websites.
- xeni 11y ago
  Any chance you could link the listing (or paste the description)? Just curious to see what sort of things you're looking for. I'm currently 5 months into my first full-time iOS dev position. I'm also really curious to know what sort of questions you ask during your interview process (both pre-screens and onsite). I understand if you don't want to share info on that though :)

Animats 11y ago

How often do you see "Help Wanted - Will Train"?

mc32 11y ago
That is more likely to happen if the employer can legally keep the worker after training, like say when the gov pays for your med school and gets you to commit x years at below market rates in exchange for paying your tuition (and training) otherwise the employee has little incentive to stay in the face of better offers given the added skills the prev employer paid for.
- ryandrake 11y ago
  So, make sure there are no better offers out there. If you think your employees are going to leave after you train them, that's a problem you can solve.
  - mc32 11y ago
    Yes, but you have already invested money into them by hiring "green" (underproductive) workers. Someone else didn't have that burden so it's easy for them to pay a bit more to get the trained worker. So everyone is trying to get this trained worker "ready to hit the ground running".
    - ryandrake 11y ago
      Get creative. Admittedly super-simplified example: Would you find it sensible to hire someone inexperienced at 70% of market value, with a written guarantee to increase him/her to 110% after (let's say 6 months of) training? After 2.5 years, you've gotten 2 productive years out of him, and you have paid him (total) the same as you'd have paid an instantly productive person for 2 years. And they're not going anywhere because they're making more than market rate.
    - craigyk 11y ago
      for most positions training a "green" hire is probably like 20% new, transferrable skills (PLs, frameworks, etc.), and 80% highly specific, and less broadly applicable domain knowledge. That includes things things like figuring out your process, or even who to go to for what. Besides, the best employees probably are the ones that want to learn new things, so if you land the perfect candidate that doesn't need any "training" he might be more likely to leave since he's probably doing the same "boring" thing he was doing at his last job...

caseyf7 11y ago

I would like to see someone quantify how many job listings are posted to meet H1-B requirements where there is no intent to hire. I've been hearing more and more stories of people trying to get interviews for jobs they see online only to find out the listing was to meet visa requirements for the person in the current role.

arkem 11y ago
Job postings that are aiming to satisfy visa requirements are generally easy to identify. Here are some indicators: * They're usually listed in a Sunday newspaper rather than online. * They will not be posted to the company's website. * They'll require a specific education level * They'll require experience that is oddly specific
- mrspeaker 11y ago
  Like this one: https://twitter.com/mrspeaker/status/525650833174978560 https://twitter.com/mrspeaker/status/525650833174978560 I thought it was the most hilarious thing I'd ever seen until a co-worker on a H1-B told me what it really was.
  - walshemj 11y ago
    Obviously spelling is not one of the skills required "stored proceeds" :-)

dba7dba 11y ago

It seems no one is mentoring anyone in professional setting anymore. Stackoverflow.com is nice but sometimes face2face mentoring can't be beat. And no company seems willing to offer 'apprenticeship'. You are working on a hard problem with latest methodologies and tools? Then it's very likely you won't find anyone out there who has the experience in the methodologies and tools. You just can't hold out looking for the perfect candidate. You are not google or apple. So just give up and hire the best you can find in the pool. Don't wait till you find the ONE. Again, you are not google or apple. The other problem I think is HR department itself. How many small/mid HR departments keep track of hiring process like SEO metrics are kept/measured? Do they know which manager seems to hire the most duds? AFAIK, HR department is the least automated piece of a tech company. I can tell because they are still scheduling interviews using emails. And lastly, please take a look at your Job desc/requirement. Is it real or are you just copying/pasting from some other job postings?

mpdehaan2 11y ago
Pretty much most job positions want a pony. It's the old "10 years experience in J2EE" thing, when a technology doesn't really take that long to learn, or a group of technologies that someone uses, that are impossibly incommon in combination. People want developers in Foo, not Bar, when Foo and Bar are basically the same. I prefer hiring smart people that can learn, and that are good to work with, but I do feel people don't believe that as much when there are are a lot of people on the market. It's somewhat similar to how it's hard to get an employer to fund a conference trip, classes, books, and all of those kinds of things. And because you can't really move and grow at work, I think that's also why people change jobs more, we're in a very creative professional that desires knowledge - and the system really wants us to hire someone who already knows X or has built X before, and crank out more of the same many times.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

resoluteteeth 11y ago

I think another interpretation is that it's become easier for companies to keep jobs "open" and collecting applicants without really having to put in effort to find people. Or, to put it another way, the idea of an "open job" has become meaningless, if it was ever meaningful in the first place. As a metaphor, we can imagine many people wanting to buy apples, but not being willing to pay the 1$ the supermarket will charge. They could create an "apple opening", posting on an apple selling site looking for people who are willing to sell them apples with certain qualities for a given price that depends on the individual, for example 5 cents. Then, we could poll consumers to see how many have apple openings. Perhaps we could find millions of such unfilled openings, but would this tell us anything about trends in the quality of apples or actual apple consumption?

d4nt 11y ago
This aligns with my person experience in a startup incubator. If I was a ruby/php/js guru willing to work for £25,000/year plus a bit of equity, I could take my pick of 100s of jobs.
golergka 11y ago
That's a reasonable theory, but it doesn't correspond with the stats about "labor quality" problem.
- XorNot 11y ago
  Sure it does. There's a problem in that there's not enough quality labor willing to work for peanuts and then watch their life get destroyed when a major medical event happens.
hebdo 11y ago
A relevant read: Whaddaya Mean, You Can't Find Programmers? http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000050.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000050.html
- arenaninja 11y ago

gcb0 11y ago

by that graph, hiring:openings is finally at 1.0. that actually sounds perfect, and it seems inflated before. when it was over 1.5 so, what's the problem?

colechristensen 11y ago

* Employers overvalue experience, forgetting that a human is a fantastic machine and with appropriate training and management, most people will be able to do most jobs. * Communication is hard: both writing resumes and job descriptions – it becomes this strange difficult-to-play game that both sides engage in often having little to nothing to do with the actual job * Education is poor: at all levels actual learning is not emphasized. Especially learning how to do things. From preschool to graduate school, the game of education far surpasses actual learning. Students aren't interested in learning and teachers are only interested in grades and tests.

VLM 11y ago
"Employers overvalue experience" Only at hiring time. One of the execs reads a journalist article in a trade rag about any random fad and "we" need to have it implemented yesterday. Which is not a problem because successful employees are really good at OTJ training and learn by experimentation. Unfortunately no one has told HR that, and they think they're hiring for tax audit avoidance accountants in the most conservative and uncreative criteria possible. The ideal candidate has 20 years of experience in a field 10 years old (that only takes 6 weeks to learn of course), in other words focused entirely on the past. The ideal employee on the other hand is an expert at learning "6 week" technologies and making them produce once they're hired. There's going to be friction and failure and massive wastes of money. There is also the extremely low social status issue. It would be possible to micro-specify (nano-specify?) any management or executive job, but they're not going to put up with it, as an industry, so instead we get "good judgment" type of hiring criteria. The reason why programmers have incredibly low social status is the oversupply (nationwide, anyway) requires them to be talked down to or replaced by someone who will tolerate being talked down to. The extremely low social status permeates the rest of the field too, call center like work environments, crazy disrespectful deadlines, poor management techniques (most modern fads, really), so its not going to be as simple as some sort of union saying "no" to disrespectful job advertisements.

memracom 11y ago

Don't well written cover letters help employers quickly evaluate a large number of applications? And don't complain that you don't get them along with the resumes. 1) Ask for a cover letter explaining why you are a fit for the job. 2) Discard applications that don't include them. 3) Resist the urge to look through the resumes anyway. And if you directly ask for a cover letter, and you get anm application that doesn't have one, send the applicant a form letter that says. "This is a form letter. Apparently you do not care about finding a job because you failed to follow the instructions in the job posting. We have deleted your application/email. If you still want to be considered for the job, apply again WITH A COVER LETTER that explains why you are the right fit for the job". If Employers want Job Applicants to do the right thing, then they need to be proactive and teach. Nobody else trains job applicants how to apply for a job, how to help the employer see quickly that you deserve to get an interview.

slyall 11y ago
> Ask for a cover letter explaining why you are a fit for the job How does this help anything. Plenty of these out there which the applicant can attached to the application. "I am very enthusiastic to leverage my [INSERT HERE] skills to help [COMPANY] transform the [WHATEVER] industry "
- raverbashing 11y ago
  This 99% of cover letters will just be, self-importance exaggeration, prospective employer excessive praise, etc.
  - tomjen3 11y ago
    And resumes are not? I am a decent programmer but not exceptional, but when you read my resume you will see that I am a child prodigy - and that is done without any lying at all just selective highlighting facts.
    - vonmoltke 11y ago

d4nt 11y ago

My theory is that people are shopping around for better employers and better cultural fit, and that it's not just a question of taking the highest offer any more. That would explain why wages are not rising.

PythonicAlpha 11y ago
If the problem would be just employees "shopping around" that would not explain, why wages are not rising. If they would shop around, wages would also rise, even when they are only marginal interested in wages ... (show me 3 employees that are not interested in wages)
- hodwik 11y ago
  Tech wages are very inflated as is, expecting them to rise is pretty silly. When I was looking for my current job, I forgot to even ask about wages. So maybe what they gave me in pay is "flat" from five years ago, but it's still twice what any of my friends my age are making, while they have degrees and I do not.
  - PythonicAlpha 11y ago
    I was only reacting on the argument was made by the OP, that is not logical in my opinion. I do not know about tech wages in the US. In Germany, the tech wages are not inflated, at least not in my opinion. The normal tech wages have risen maybe 3-5% per year the last few years in Germany (I don't call this inflated) and the years before it was even less. In the same time, the wages for top-managers have risen maybe 10-15% per year and are since decades incredible high above the wages of "tech wages" (the difference is climbing and climbing). I call that inflated. Your statement of course is more logical than that of the OP.
    - hodwik 11y ago
      Developer wages in the US average around €62k, about 20 higher than in Germany, while the US has roughly 30% lower cost of living. Also, in Germany you're at a 40% income tax rate at €43k, while in the US at €62k you're only taxed at 25%. Sure, that 40% income tax rate gets you universal healthcare, while in the US we're paying ~6,339.71 Euros a year to insure a family of four. But I think even accounting that, wages are much higher in the US.

gizi 11y ago

I am busy already. I already have a job that I like. So, I am not even remotely looking at what other jobs are around, because at the moment I consider that to be a distraction, a waste of time. Now you can generalize this: you can safely assume that anybody who is even just remotely good at what he does, is already busy. He already has a job and he is not interested in your job advert. In other words, above a certain treshold of skill level that is not even that high, you must approach the candidate, because the candidate will not approach you. Besides the fact that he considers your approach to be a distraction (he does not need it right now) the most important question on his lips will be: How much more are you offering than I am getting now already?

vonmoltke 11y ago
This attitude is so wring, and hearing it so many times has contributed to my perceptions of myself as a shit engineer. There are plenty of good engineers like myself who are at times actively or semi-actively looking for a job. I'm in Dallas, and I have a lot of hot keywords associated with myself that are not my core competency. What that means is over 90% of the jobs I get approached about are inappropriate, sometimes wildly. I only get approached by the highly active recruiters, since so many seem to have limited geographical areas and I am not in a position to network with non-recruiting people. These recruiters frequently misinterpret or misunderstand my background. Thus, I am forced to actively apply to openings if I want something new. Hearing things like this gives me the impression that I will be viewed as inferior just because I had to stoop to the level of applying like the rest of the plebs.

PythonicAlpha 11y ago

One of the problems IMHO is, that employers get more and more demanding. There is this joke, that fits very good: "If Carpenters Were Hired Like Programmers" [1] In former days, the readiness to take people and train them on the job was much higher. In Germany this is a really ugly trend. The licence for truck drivers is very, very costly but the earnings of the drivers are very low. In former days the transportation companies educated their own drivers. Today, they don't. They just expect, that the drivers somehow have to have the education and come from somewhere. What is the result: The state is in more and more cases educating unemployed people that they can become truck drivers. They pay tax money, that the transporting companies don't have to pay for it ... I don't think, that a "free market" has to mean that more and more costs have to been taken over by the state, but that is, what is happening. Today, when you apply for a job, they search for exactly those skills needed. They are not ready to train you on the job or take people that have to do a lot of learning on the job. And also in Germany: They are not ready to take people above a specific age. [1] http://www.jasonbock.net/jb/News/Item/7c334037d1a9437d9fa6506e2f35eaac http://www.jasonbock.net/jb/News/Item/7c334037d1a9437d9fa650...

PhantomGremlin 11y ago
I've read that joke before. It's great. It should be re-posted every time one of these "jobs" discussions comes up on HN. It very clearly summarizes what's wrong with the hiring process.

spacko 11y ago

Maybe HR tends to complicate the process to expand its power and justify its existence. There is this "law" that proclaims this is what happens in bureaucratic organisations - hierarchies tend to be grown for that purpose.

walshemj 11y ago
Exactly read the laundry files
analog31 11y ago
Parkinson's Law -- an amusing read, even if quaint. The same book also gave rise to the contemporary term "bikeshedding."
- spacko 11y ago
  Parkinson's Law states that work is expanded to fill the available time. The law I refer to is that the time itself with work to be filled is expanded - for the purpose of requiring more human and non-human resources - which again requires expanding the hierarchy - which expands the power of those who cause this process (as the newly hired people will be added below those "managers").
  - analog31 11y ago
    Quite true. I should have italicized Parkinson's Law, the book. Parkinson spends a number of short chapters discussing the expansion of hierarchies, with historical examples.
dublinben 11y ago
This seems highly related to Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy.[0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Pournelle#Iron_Law_of_Bureaucracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Pournelle#Iron_Law_of_Bu...

anti-shill 11y ago

it's not--it's just propaganda...I never trust any stats promulgated or hyped by the gov't, the media, corporations or nonprofit foundations. They all have an agenda, and agenda that portends no good for the average american.

thrillgore 11y ago

I mean, the solution is simple to fix right? Raise the wages for these positions.

hodwik 11y ago
It's not about wages being too small, it's about offices not being pleasant places to work. I have never heard a programmer complain about not enough pay. They do, however, complain about incompetent bosses, not enough vacation, and having to deal with non-programmers.

known 11y ago

interview != quiz

njloof 11y ago

What's also missing is that most resumes are culled mechanically by grepping for keywords. Nobody reads every resume they receive. That's why they ask for digital documents -- and then ask you to submit them again in plain text elsewhere on the form.

autokad 11y ago

I wonder if part of it (besides keeping positions open just to see what is out there) is that companies can use job openings as analytic data. you find information that re-affirms how much you should be paying employees, expectations of employee turn over, and more interestingly what the competition is doing. I mean, imagine I am google, I fain interest in a job posting to get some facebook employees to apply. I even give them an interview. between the resume, cover letter, and interview I might be able to get lots of information on what projects facebook is working on and then just turn down the candidate after 3 interviews and say: google is quirky, if one person dont like you, you dont get in no matter how good you think it went.

ChuckMcM 11y ago

Historically long lead times to hiring has been a leading indicator of wages rising. The mechanism is pretty well understood. Employer A decides that if they can get an employee at a low wage, they would hire another employee and they create an advertisement for the opening. If the economy has moved up, they don't fill it and it remains open. Meanwhile employer B loses an essential employee for some reason and they go out and actively try to recruit a replacement (generally from other employers in the same industry / space) They find employer A's top performer and offer them a raise to come work for B (which A takes because they have had really poor wage increases over the last 5 years) Now Employer A has a problem, they are down a key employee and they had an "opening" already so they are in danger of losing income if they don't replace their employee. In order to do that they raise what they are willing to pay the "right" person who walks in the door. And they may try to recruit out of other employers. "Nice to fill" job openings are an indicator that the business is profitable enough to add labor, which means that the labor it is employing is at or above the productivity rate needed to succeed or expand. In that environment some firms will seek to grow more aggressively than others and that will result in opportunities to be employed at the entry level. That is a good indicator for folks who are coming into the workforce. How the rest of the economy responds will be interesting indeed.

Animats 11y ago

Here's a famous recruiting ad for "Super programmers" from Autodesk, in 1986.[1] It includes two things you seldom see today. First, there's no list of narrow technical skills: "Relevant experience is nice, but if you're as good a person as we want, you'll be able to pick it up in a week or two." And finally: "We'll pay you more than anybody else in the industry." That worked. Autodesk ended up owning the CAD industry and the animation industry. If your company is complaining that it can't find programmers, try that. [1] https://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/www/chapter2_43.html https://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/www/chapter2_43.html

fsckin 11y ago
It'd be awesome if AutoDesk unleashed some super programmers on their online store and subscription management portal. Both are an absolutely abismal experience.
kayge 11y ago
Are there any companies out there today with that mindset? I've received 4 rejections over the last couple of months that all seem to boil down to me not having "enough brown". One would think having a bachelor's in computer science, 7 years of broad IT experience, and an easygoing attitude might excuse me from being a little rusty with the latest RoR after not touching it for 3 years :) Sorry for the rant (and minor self-promotion), but this topic has been weighing on my mind a lot recently.

sopooneo 11y ago

Because it seems there are many people commenting who might know: is it heard of for a potential employee to negotiate compensation also in terms of amount of paid time off? And if so, has anyone ever heard of a US dev getting European levels of vacation? Like eight weeks? Because that is my ideal, and I would be willing to give up a lot to get that sort of thing. I need stability, but live pretty frugally, so I would only be interested in an otherwise traditional full-time position. Any input greatly appreciated.

dhd415 11y ago
I've heard of people negotiating 4 or 4.5-day work weeks for 80% or 90% of the position's full-time salary. In the few cases where I've seen that happen, someone in the company had prior work experience with the candidate and knew that they would be worth bringing in even on a part-time basis.

jrs235 11y ago

This might explain it too: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ByFCtZfCcAAg_A3.jpg:large https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ByFCtZfCcAAg_A3.jpg:large