"In the IT world, where there is a talent shortage, ..."
Could we please stop perpetuating this myth? If there really was a shortage, companies would fall over each other trying to hire anyone they could, not make it almost impossible to get hired by imposing ridiculous and long interview processes.
From Wikipedia "In economics, a shortage or excess demand is a situation in which the demand for a product or service exceeds its supply in a market.". If you look at the market, the pace of growth of wages in programming field exceeds most of other industries. This means that there is a shortage.
> If you look at the market, the pace of growth of wages in programming field exceeds most of other industries.
If you're going to make that claim it would be helpful to cite a source or two. Would also be nice to know how much it "exceeds most of other industries", if the average wage growth is 3% but it's 3.1% for us that's not very meaningful.
...companies would fall over each other trying to hire anyone they could, not make it almost impossible to get hired by imposing ridiculous and long interview processes.
This doesn't follow. Gold is a scarce resource. This doesn't mean that gold purchasers should stop using assays to determine if they are buying gold or pyrite.
Lots of people apply for the jobs, but only a small percentage is actually good.
Of course some of the interview processes are ridicilous, but after seeing the world from the other side of the table I understand where they are coming from.
"Talent shortage" is not the same as "people shortage". If you ever took part in recruiting, you know that most of the people you end up interviewing are not fit for the particular job you are offering.
There's a lot of people in CS/IT, each with varying skills on various technologies.You can't just ask for a "software engineer", that doesn't exist (anymore). The field is growing more and more specialized, so you must impose interview processes, those being ridiculous and long are each recruiter's choice.
My understanding is that companies are getting pickier because the market is getting pickier. Every website has to be secure, has to be responsive, has to have analytics, has to do a million different things. This means adding talent, and there's only so much to go around.
Exactly. This is the myth that just won't die. If there really was a talent shortage, wages would be going up and up until supply met demand, and/or companies would become a lot less picky about their hires than they are now. You can't say there is a shortage of something without naming the price you're offering. Otherwise I could say there's a shortage of new Teslas because I can't find a lime green one for $10K.
But it could cause demand to decrease. Price does not just affect supply. There would super high demand for talented Bay Area SW engineers if the going rate was $50K per year. Not so much demand if the going rate was $500K per year.
I think there's a shortage of good candidates, and an abundance of bad ones. Companies who have been burned on the bad ones and/or have convinced themselves they only hire "the best" then put those overly-restrictive barriers on new hires.
This problem is made worse by the lack of investment in training once hired, as some are discussing in these comments. Companies become even more reliant on the hiring process to produce the perfect candidate, and employed people are encouraged to stagnate their skills which dwindles the talent pool further.
Most companies, in my own personal experience, do fall over themselves to hire proven great candidates right now. Update your linkedin with some engineering accomplishments in in-demand fields like devops, cloud infrastructure, or machine learning, or at well known companies and watch the recruiters circle like sharks in heat.
There is a shortage, but its largely imaginary. It would be more accurate to call it a talent gap. The talented candidates are certainly out there, but there are far more candidates available who are less talented. Increasing the pay rate for talented candidates does not magically convert somebody with fewer skills into somebody with awesome skills.... so therefore there must be a shortage (sarcasm).
Hummmm... you wonder how much of that money is invested in internal training for those skills they claim they cannot find. I bet the average is pretty close to 0. I guess it just makes more sense to throw money at the problem and hope for magic in 43 days.
Instead, why not just devote that $33K to a training program for a duration of roughly 43 days? Now you have the skills you were missing with the bonus of added loyalty and lower risk at no additional cost (money and time that would have been spent anyways). You also get a massive productivity boost for free according to Brook's Law. The only cost is that an external candidate might (or might not) have a diversity of skills your company doesn't provide.
Training is also a good idea since bringing a new person to a team has a negative effect on the productivity of the team (#):
(1) If you are not working on a greenfield project, it takes some time for the new hire to get up to speed. During that time, their productivity is negative: They are not really productive yet, and they need help from everyone else on the team.
(2) If you add people to a mature team (or remove people), the team dynamics change completely and the team might need several months to get back to their previous performance again (##).
So, hiring a new developer can cost you several tens of thousands of dollars / euros even after you already hired them. Training your existing developers can make sense here - They get a productivity boost sooner. And, when I teach inhouse-trainings, I always have a feeling that people are more motivated to do their job after the training, even when they cannot immediately use what they have learned: It matters to them that their employer cares about them and their technical excellence.
Still it often makes sense: Some times, you just don't have enough people for your long term plans. But don't expect too much too early.
(#) Adding people to a late software project makes it later / You cannot get a baby in one month by hiring a team of nine women.
(##) I collected some data about this when I was an agile coach for two teams at a large company. We added 2 developers, productivity dropped, needed ~6 months to become reliably higher than before adding the developers. Unfortunately, I cannot share the data. Also, I guess this was an extreme case: Complicated legacy system.
Sounds like we've found the guy who has the secret to measuring productivity. Care to share what the rest of the industry has yet to figure out? How, on earth, do we measure developer productivity?
I know that this every productivity measurement is very fuzzy and can be cheated (#), but here's how we did it:
We were simply looking at the number of features delivered to the customer in a certain amount of time, number of defects found in production and number of critical defects found immediately after roll-out (a.k.a. hot-fixes). We adjusted for holidays, vacations and sick leaves.
Those numbers were relatively stable until we changed the team, then dropped, and it took quite a while to reliably get to higher levels than before.
(#) I don't think the team cheated, because if they had, they could have easily cheated the numbers in a way that they'd steadily rise.
> Those numbers were relatively stable until we changed the team, then dropped, and it took quite a while to reliably get to higher levels than before.
That could be a reflection on a number of things, most notably the code quality. If your new hires are taking a while to get up to speed (you didn't specify how long) then that's also an indication of either quality or doing something quite different.
By definition, you cannot train a Senior Developer in 43 days, as that takes years. But it would be interesting to find out how much companies can save on recruiting by hiring promising entry-level developers rather than chasing rarer and more expensive Senior Developers. On the other hand, what is the potential loss from putting developers in over their head? As always, the most important figures that one needs for management are unknown and unknowable (Lloyd S. Nelson).
Training never happens at least not in the us and not even in big companies the big companies here have largely sent the work overseas and when it is local they use temps
As someone who manages an ATS for a global company that keyword myth drives me crazy. The ATS adds a ton of value to the recruiting process and in my experience most good recruiters don't use a keyword scoring system or at least trust one.
Why oh why does the page need a custom hijacked scroll speed and a custom scrollbar? Completely awful to use, closed the page as soon as I noticed the wonky scroll behavior.
It didn't for me on either of its strictness settings, so I sent in a report of this site. This extension seems to have been quite successful with most other sites, however.
You're probably right to a degree but people will still leave and you'll still have to replace. Saying that you won't have restaffing costs if you paid everyone $35k/yr more just isn't true.
For smaller shops, there are some easy ways to bring the cost down.
1) Make sure you are networking and social, budget time for this. It's good for team moral to get people out of the office anyway. Sponsor some talks / Meetup groups, host some public lunch and learns, get booths at career fairs... just get your folks out to meet people. Is there a cost? Yes, but as being proactively social becomes part of company culture you get a ton of benefits... more applicants, more partnership opportunities, better informed and educated staff, more confident staff if you give them more opportunities for showing their knowledge / public speaking / leadership...
2) Get better screening questions. I've hired a ton of developers for clients, I have 4-5 questions on my screen. I use a web form (you can even use a Google Form) that takes maybe 5 minutes for the person to write a few paragraphs for the responses. A fast no is good at this stage -- it's more about getting to a reason to ding the candidate at this point than a reason to hire them. Don't waste the candidates time asking them to re-type their resume, those systems are really stupid and turn off qualified candidates.
3) Get better at phone screens. I jump right in, I don't normally budget more than 5-10 minutes for a phone screen. Either they've got the skills, have confidence, and communication ability -- or they don't. If an employee sent them in as a referral, they always get to skip the phone screen and I just do a scheduling call to set up a time for them to come in. Always a good idea to respect your employee referrals. (Make sure you are paying a generous bonus for referrals.)
4) Given it takes ~20k to hire another dev, when you get the right candidate don't fret on salary. If they said they were looking for $125k, offer them $127k... easy easy way to come off strong out the gate with them. Understand that if you have a shitty health plan, people with kids and families aren't going to want to work for you -- the cost of skimping on your dental plan in terms what it does to employee turnover is staggering. "Stitch in time to save nine" type stuff right there. Understand that if you don't have 401k matching... you aren't a real company and your offers won't be competitive just because you have sodas and a foosball table in the break room. Get all your shit in order to reduce on-boarding speed-bumps, your employees can work other places and showing you care about them is a great way to retain them.
5) Spend money educating your staff. Do you need to hire for the position, or can someone you have cover it with a bit more training? Make sure employees have a training budget, make sure they are discouraged from not using it, make sure they are getting value from the training they take -- having them do summary lunch and learns for the company is a great way to spread the knowledge. And you never know who's going to be interested and what that will lead to... had an accountant show up for a talk on SEO... a year later she was running the analytics department at the agency. People can pivot, and you can benefit from that if your structure allows for personal growth.
Also, spend money retaining staff. What use is hiring someone at $127k if it causes three equally senior employees, currently earning $90k, to quit in anger?
I'm currently experiencing a softer version of this pattern as top management treats the very small team of a promising product as the future of the company, and the people and customers providing 98% of revenue as legacy.
On a related notes, devs now you know how much it costs to replace you. Next time you ask for a raise, remember the alternative is for the company to spend $30,000 replacing you.
Scroll hijacking is absolutely deplorable. Who in their right mind thinks this is a good idea? And I don't mean that sarcastically, but who... in their sane and healthy mind, thinks its a good idea to blindly overwrite a user's personal scroll preference and neuter it, muck it up, and completely change it to something thats not as performant, clunky, buggy, and doesn't match the speed their used to.
I gave up reading the article because I shot past the paragraph a bunch of times.
Chrome on Linux. One scroll blip on my mouse wheel and I'm half way down the page. I no longer care about what it costs to hire a pineapple or whatever the article was.
50 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 80.8 ms ] threadCould we please stop perpetuating this myth? If there really was a shortage, companies would fall over each other trying to hire anyone they could, not make it almost impossible to get hired by imposing ridiculous and long interview processes.
If you're going to make that claim it would be helpful to cite a source or two. Would also be nice to know how much it "exceeds most of other industries", if the average wage growth is 3% but it's 3.1% for us that's not very meaningful.
This doesn't follow. Gold is a scarce resource. This doesn't mean that gold purchasers should stop using assays to determine if they are buying gold or pyrite.
Of course some of the interview processes are ridicilous, but after seeing the world from the other side of the table I understand where they are coming from.
Unless increasing wages don't directly cause supply to increase overnight.
This problem is made worse by the lack of investment in training once hired, as some are discussing in these comments. Companies become even more reliant on the hiring process to produce the perfect candidate, and employed people are encouraged to stagnate their skills which dwindles the talent pool further.
Most companies, in my own personal experience, do fall over themselves to hire proven great candidates right now. Update your linkedin with some engineering accomplishments in in-demand fields like devops, cloud infrastructure, or machine learning, or at well known companies and watch the recruiters circle like sharks in heat.
Instead, why not just devote that $33K to a training program for a duration of roughly 43 days? Now you have the skills you were missing with the bonus of added loyalty and lower risk at no additional cost (money and time that would have been spent anyways). You also get a massive productivity boost for free according to Brook's Law. The only cost is that an external candidate might (or might not) have a diversity of skills your company doesn't provide.
(1) If you are not working on a greenfield project, it takes some time for the new hire to get up to speed. During that time, their productivity is negative: They are not really productive yet, and they need help from everyone else on the team.
(2) If you add people to a mature team (or remove people), the team dynamics change completely and the team might need several months to get back to their previous performance again (##).
So, hiring a new developer can cost you several tens of thousands of dollars / euros even after you already hired them. Training your existing developers can make sense here - They get a productivity boost sooner. And, when I teach inhouse-trainings, I always have a feeling that people are more motivated to do their job after the training, even when they cannot immediately use what they have learned: It matters to them that their employer cares about them and their technical excellence.
Still it often makes sense: Some times, you just don't have enough people for your long term plans. But don't expect too much too early.
(#) Adding people to a late software project makes it later / You cannot get a baby in one month by hiring a team of nine women.
(##) I collected some data about this when I was an agile coach for two teams at a large company. We added 2 developers, productivity dropped, needed ~6 months to become reliably higher than before adding the developers. Unfortunately, I cannot share the data. Also, I guess this was an extreme case: Complicated legacy system.
We were simply looking at the number of features delivered to the customer in a certain amount of time, number of defects found in production and number of critical defects found immediately after roll-out (a.k.a. hot-fixes). We adjusted for holidays, vacations and sick leaves.
Those numbers were relatively stable until we changed the team, then dropped, and it took quite a while to reliably get to higher levels than before.
(#) I don't think the team cheated, because if they had, they could have easily cheated the numbers in a way that they'd steadily rise.
That could be a reflection on a number of things, most notably the code quality. If your new hires are taking a while to get up to speed (you didn't specify how long) then that's also an indication of either quality or doing something quite different.
Devs: That would be a setting on your device, we can't control that without some terrible hacks.
PM: I don't understand any of that, just make it work how I said.
FTFY
1) Make sure you are networking and social, budget time for this. It's good for team moral to get people out of the office anyway. Sponsor some talks / Meetup groups, host some public lunch and learns, get booths at career fairs... just get your folks out to meet people. Is there a cost? Yes, but as being proactively social becomes part of company culture you get a ton of benefits... more applicants, more partnership opportunities, better informed and educated staff, more confident staff if you give them more opportunities for showing their knowledge / public speaking / leadership...
2) Get better screening questions. I've hired a ton of developers for clients, I have 4-5 questions on my screen. I use a web form (you can even use a Google Form) that takes maybe 5 minutes for the person to write a few paragraphs for the responses. A fast no is good at this stage -- it's more about getting to a reason to ding the candidate at this point than a reason to hire them. Don't waste the candidates time asking them to re-type their resume, those systems are really stupid and turn off qualified candidates.
3) Get better at phone screens. I jump right in, I don't normally budget more than 5-10 minutes for a phone screen. Either they've got the skills, have confidence, and communication ability -- or they don't. If an employee sent them in as a referral, they always get to skip the phone screen and I just do a scheduling call to set up a time for them to come in. Always a good idea to respect your employee referrals. (Make sure you are paying a generous bonus for referrals.)
4) Given it takes ~20k to hire another dev, when you get the right candidate don't fret on salary. If they said they were looking for $125k, offer them $127k... easy easy way to come off strong out the gate with them. Understand that if you have a shitty health plan, people with kids and families aren't going to want to work for you -- the cost of skimping on your dental plan in terms what it does to employee turnover is staggering. "Stitch in time to save nine" type stuff right there. Understand that if you don't have 401k matching... you aren't a real company and your offers won't be competitive just because you have sodas and a foosball table in the break room. Get all your shit in order to reduce on-boarding speed-bumps, your employees can work other places and showing you care about them is a great way to retain them.
5) Spend money educating your staff. Do you need to hire for the position, or can someone you have cover it with a bit more training? Make sure employees have a training budget, make sure they are discouraged from not using it, make sure they are getting value from the training they take -- having them do summary lunch and learns for the company is a great way to spread the knowledge. And you never know who's going to be interested and what that will lead to... had an accountant show up for a talk on SEO... a year later she was running the analytics department at the agency. People can pivot, and you can benefit from that if your structure allows for personal growth.
I'm currently experiencing a softer version of this pattern as top management treats the very small team of a promising product as the future of the company, and the people and customers providing 98% of revenue as legacy.
I gave up reading the article because I shot past the paragraph a bunch of times.
It's really an incomplete picture when you don't look at the cost of churn at the same time.