First, /r/jobs skews towards young people just getting started, and further skews towards people who are having trouble finding a job. Those who aren't having trouble don't bother posting rants about it. So you can point to a 100 complaints there, it doesn't mean its a representative sample of all job-seekers. Selection Bias.
I mean even BASIC statistics would say at least count what PERCENTAGE of posts are "I cant get a job" relative to the total. Just finding 10 posts saying "I can't get a job" means there are 10 people in that situation .. it says almost nothing about the market except that there are 10 frustrated people. Unrepresentative Sample.
Companies don't offer feedback on why they rejected candidates because of legal issues. OP - now that you are a recruiter, are you going to give candidates feedback even when HR tells you never to do that because it might get you sued? Are you willing to put your job on the line and risk getting your company sued? If not, then perhaps you understand why it is the way it is..
The point about not enough "diverse" candidates in hiring channels. Again, refuting it by saying women are so MUCH MORE DETERMINED is 1. bullshit stereotyping (there are no gender differences, remember???), 2. doesn't address the point. If roughly 20-25% of CS majors are women (look it up), OF COURSE the hiring pool will tend to reflect the same ratio - 2/10 women, 8/10 men. When the pipeline is skewed all the way starting from school/college, it will remain skewed in jobs too. The employers cannot fix the pipeline. Biased Population => Biased Sample.
Your own linked article shows 28% CS majors are women, and 28% of people with jobs in IT are women!! Does not sound particularly biased to me.... how about learning some statistics before ranting?
Also, believe it or not, everyone gets rejected from jobs they are qualified for. There are only so many spots.. and many more candidates. So many who pass the minimum bar will get rejected because a better qualified candidate came along!
A whole lot of frustration does not make an argument. I agree the hiring process IS broken because of clueless recruiters, low salaries, ridiculously high interview bars etc. But uninformed rants don't help. Of course, some will call me a sexist... as if I can only be on "team diversity" or "team sexist". The (statistical) truth is much subtler than either of those poles. I'm on "team look at the data without a pre-conceived notion of what you want to find".
I agree some of the problems she mentions with hiring are there. I am against this particular article because its very poorly thought through. Its twisting facts and collecting anecdotes to suit a pre-determined narrative.
Personal attacks are not allowed on Hacker News. Since you don't seem to have a history of this, I haven't banned you, but if you post like this again, we will.
After a certain point, you really have to wonder if, just maybe, it's you. Anecdotally, those who somehow can't find work in this field might be sending all the wrong signals. Are companies looking for less than what you want? Sure. However, are your skills and connections actually worth that much?
This also doubly counts if you've made yourself a public figure in any way. Quite a few companies may not want to have to deal with someone who is very likely to talk poorly about them.
The post burned my eyes. Couldn't make it halfway. Hopefully the resume is a bit easier to read? My goal isn't to judge resumes by how they look, but they can't burn my eyes.
I agree with the article's sentiment, but perhaps for different reasons.
I'm 22 and have been unemployed for a few months now. I recently had a handful of on-site interviews, all of which I didn't pass. I quit my previous job due to management issues and general workplace issues that were exceptionally abnormal (apologies for the vagueness, but I don't want to be too identifiable).
I'm currently living with my parents and recovering from the emotional exhaustion of it all. To me, at least, rejection itself isn't the real issue -- if I could get rejected quickly and regularly that would be ideal for finding a better match. The issue for me is more so the social and emotional fatigue of getting genuinely interested in the companies I interviewed at and going through the 5-8 hour on-site process (which, in general, I've actually enjoyed -- most of the people I've met with at the interviews have been quite fun to talk with).
I think it's a shame that hiring isn't more efficient. I find searching through job lists soul-crushingly boring and incredibly tedious. Especially because many jobs throw around certain technologies as buzzwords and don't (and likely don't have any intention of) actually using them, making search engines very ineffective as well.
I miss working on teams and getting things done in the way that only teams can, but so far that hasn't outweighed my general apathy towards the process to continue.
So I do think that the hiring process is broken, if only for the existence of people that are bored and would be happy to work just for its own sake. I'm in the process of becoming more active in some FOSS projects I care about but I find working from my room a lot less productive than a proper office environment.
I used obscure languages as a filter for interesting jobs in interesting companies, worked really well. Unfortunately, Common Lisp now is so strong filter pretty much nothing left :) Try Haskell, it is great.
This post dedicates the first several paragraphs - not sentences - on why the author posted her "rant", why it was a mistake, why she deleted the posts, and re-posted, multiple times. She could have simply said "This article was originally posted on Reddit as a rushed rant, and I dropped out of fear that it might impact my employability when it gained traction. I decided to post this, however, because I felt this point needed to be said"
A couple of "pages" in, I still have no grasp of what the point is, just that she got lots of attention in Reddit and people. Let's not forget the "RIP my career" hyperbole.
Past the "why I'm posting this again", the original article starts with "I'm shooting myself in the foot right now". At this point, this serves no better purpose than grandstanding for attention. I can see from the provocative title the article is going to be about hiring process, which we can all agree is non-optimal. I'm expecting this would either contain critical thought backed either by data or personal anecdote. This sentiment has been expressed by so many people, I have hard time believing this would "end" your career. Let's get to the point.
Past random rants, follows a meta-analysis on a subreddit. The author shares a screenshot from one subreddit that seems to gear towards job seekers. (the author mentions /r/jobs) There are no links, none of the post titles she mentions are found in the top page of that subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/jobs/top/ Even one examplarly post that she shared a screenshot of - "No interview no nothing..." has 8 upvotes in 3 days. It's not a pinnacle of "concensus". Even for her standards, it's not representative of any meaningful sample.
Then there's a distracting update on upvotes and comments. Why does that matter? Two-digit upvotes are not even impressive; look at any post in front page, right now.
Several pages' worth of reading and I still have no idea why the hiring is broken. I've learned that there is a subreddit for job hunters and a preview of random posts, and her imaginations on why. Oh, and the post gained some traction in Reddit. Sure.
It then links to several medium posts - and no followup. What does the article by Jason Shen matter? How does that relate to your point? What am I expected to get out of it that would help understanding your point?
And that's when I stopped. The author is right; this post would likely hinder her employability. If I had Googled her name, and saw this meandering screed, I would have second thoughts in bringing her in. Not because she's become too controversial figure to be a risk, but due to her apparent lack of organization of thought. Not to mention apparent need for attention. Even this response is a screed, because there's no central point or articulation to respond to.
Best of lucks to the author, I hope she gets better vindication than internet endorsements.
> It is complete and utter nonsense that people find it hard to garner female and minority applications through traditional channels...We aren’t getting hired, and aren’t being paid well, because of unconscious biases.
Support for this comes from a large number of (not listed) medium.com posts.
Then we launch into James Damore.
> Or, for shits and giggles, check out the Google Manifesto, and see that some milquetoast gish galloping member of /r/IAmVerySmart decided to ram his face into Google’s hiring practices and get himself fired over crying about diversity hurting hiring practices.
After complaining "tons of writers just here on medium.com...discredited with a hand-wave", the author in the next breath dismisses Damore and his citations of Wikipedia, research articles, Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, etc. [1] with a hand-wave.
> There is no biological basis to be found for any of this Google Manifesto garbage.
Tear that 10-page manifesto apart you want, but take more than one sentence. "This is BS because I say so."
> I have asked every person who has turned me down what I could do better.
I wouldn't say anything either. There's no upside. Why risk giving any kind of ammo to someone with a grievance they want to justify?
She says she's a frontend developer and a nerd, so why is she pigeonholing herself in these "digital content coordinator/content marketer" fad jobs instead of moving up from PHP?
It's anecdata, and I'm sure it's regional, but around me, there's vastly more "digital content marketing" jobs than development jobs (front or backend, much to my chagrin).
That's because you, like most companies aren't interested in the ecosystems' growth except on your own terms. See a perceived grievance if you like, but the hiring practice is broken.
Hiring is often run by HR personnel who have no idea what's going on. Anyone against the status quo is apparently someone with a grievance or chip on their shoulder, right? Nerds and marketing are fads. /s
Companies think like idiots when do dating -- "oh, I don't have the feels".
The fact that you see pigeonholing instead of addressing the matter at hand, and point away from how broken the accepted practices are says it all. Take the example of time -- companies think that their time is far more valuable than any candidate's. And you know what that does? It causes the candidates and other companies to suffer because the shitty HR personnel and the shitty companies (yes, you too) aren't investing in others and the future, and in some cases it really is a Boys Club Elitism. You know what companies stand out to candidates? Places where the Hiring Manager isn't talking to you for an hour because they're bored. When requests for followup and information are met. When declining a candidate means declining a candidate but keeping communication lines open rather than a canned e-mail with the words "keep your resume on file".
You know, I've been working in various fields, mostly IT fields, since I turned 15 years old in 1996 and was hired for my first technical support job. I've worked in PC Repair, Systems Administration, Marketing, and more. And the latest generation of elitist fucktards makes me even more sick with their nonsense. You have borderline autistic programmers who can't deal with others socially. You have overentitled affluenza wastes of space running companies. You have elitist pricks who went to exclusive schools. And from the outside, from genius (literally) business professionals who have and can work a number of roles, the hiring process caters to some imaginary checklist that some literal idiot thought up years ago. I've heard the whole "well, with that attitude" line, and it never proves true to my next employer.
HR and Hiring needs to be replaced with Artificial Intelligence that actually understands human beings rather than nepotism-hires, "I have 5 years in IT hiring"-hires, "I worked at Google"-hires, "I went to Stanford"-hires, "I've been in the industry ten years"-hires, "I'm a great programmer"-hires and every other variation under the sun that has a sheltered, condescending, often wrong, commonly-borderline-mentally-ill, self-deluded, "culture"-brainwashed tool of a "Recruiter", that goes based upon the human principle of "If they're attractive to me, they're a great fit.".
The ecosystems that you continue to support are why social engineers do better than expert programmers in programming fields. They're why literal geniuses who were programming revolutionary usenet code and identifying vulnerabilities in Internet infrastructure are ignored. They're why literal geniuses who are so exceptional that the NSA comes and talks to them about their work aren't hired. They're why people who grew up chatting on IRC with the likes of Julian Assange and other now-famous and now-infamous Hackers and know your field better than anyone in your company because it grew up with them are turned away.
After all, it's small-mindedness and selfishness. Obviously you're more interested in the bottom-line in your perception rather than even thinking about a solution for five minutes that turns a grievance into a growth opportunity for your business. And instead, while trying to sabotage or cast shadows on the topic at hand, you're why your decisionmaking, and the roles involved with hiring are going to die. Because you're costing the world, and your companies, and yourself more than you cou...
17 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 50.4 ms ] threadFirst, /r/jobs skews towards young people just getting started, and further skews towards people who are having trouble finding a job. Those who aren't having trouble don't bother posting rants about it. So you can point to a 100 complaints there, it doesn't mean its a representative sample of all job-seekers. Selection Bias.
I mean even BASIC statistics would say at least count what PERCENTAGE of posts are "I cant get a job" relative to the total. Just finding 10 posts saying "I can't get a job" means there are 10 people in that situation .. it says almost nothing about the market except that there are 10 frustrated people. Unrepresentative Sample.
Companies don't offer feedback on why they rejected candidates because of legal issues. OP - now that you are a recruiter, are you going to give candidates feedback even when HR tells you never to do that because it might get you sued? Are you willing to put your job on the line and risk getting your company sued? If not, then perhaps you understand why it is the way it is..
The point about not enough "diverse" candidates in hiring channels. Again, refuting it by saying women are so MUCH MORE DETERMINED is 1. bullshit stereotyping (there are no gender differences, remember???), 2. doesn't address the point. If roughly 20-25% of CS majors are women (look it up), OF COURSE the hiring pool will tend to reflect the same ratio - 2/10 women, 8/10 men. When the pipeline is skewed all the way starting from school/college, it will remain skewed in jobs too. The employers cannot fix the pipeline. Biased Population => Biased Sample.
Your own linked article shows 28% CS majors are women, and 28% of people with jobs in IT are women!! Does not sound particularly biased to me.... how about learning some statistics before ranting?
Also, believe it or not, everyone gets rejected from jobs they are qualified for. There are only so many spots.. and many more candidates. So many who pass the minimum bar will get rejected because a better qualified candidate came along!
A whole lot of frustration does not make an argument. I agree the hiring process IS broken because of clueless recruiters, low salaries, ridiculously high interview bars etc. But uninformed rants don't help. Of course, some will call me a sexist... as if I can only be on "team diversity" or "team sexist". The (statistical) truth is much subtler than either of those poles. I'm on "team look at the data without a pre-conceived notion of what you want to find".
I agree some of the problems she mentions with hiring are there. I am against this particular article because its very poorly thought through. Its twisting facts and collecting anecdotes to suit a pre-determined narrative.
Please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and post civilly and substantively, or not at all, from now on.
This also doubly counts if you've made yourself a public figure in any way. Quite a few companies may not want to have to deal with someone who is very likely to talk poorly about them.
I'm 22 and have been unemployed for a few months now. I recently had a handful of on-site interviews, all of which I didn't pass. I quit my previous job due to management issues and general workplace issues that were exceptionally abnormal (apologies for the vagueness, but I don't want to be too identifiable).
I'm currently living with my parents and recovering from the emotional exhaustion of it all. To me, at least, rejection itself isn't the real issue -- if I could get rejected quickly and regularly that would be ideal for finding a better match. The issue for me is more so the social and emotional fatigue of getting genuinely interested in the companies I interviewed at and going through the 5-8 hour on-site process (which, in general, I've actually enjoyed -- most of the people I've met with at the interviews have been quite fun to talk with).
I think it's a shame that hiring isn't more efficient. I find searching through job lists soul-crushingly boring and incredibly tedious. Especially because many jobs throw around certain technologies as buzzwords and don't (and likely don't have any intention of) actually using them, making search engines very ineffective as well.
I miss working on teams and getting things done in the way that only teams can, but so far that hasn't outweighed my general apathy towards the process to continue.
So I do think that the hiring process is broken, if only for the existence of people that are bored and would be happy to work just for its own sake. I'm in the process of becoming more active in some FOSS projects I care about but I find working from my room a lot less productive than a proper office environment.
This post dedicates the first several paragraphs - not sentences - on why the author posted her "rant", why it was a mistake, why she deleted the posts, and re-posted, multiple times. She could have simply said "This article was originally posted on Reddit as a rushed rant, and I dropped out of fear that it might impact my employability when it gained traction. I decided to post this, however, because I felt this point needed to be said"
A couple of "pages" in, I still have no grasp of what the point is, just that she got lots of attention in Reddit and people. Let's not forget the "RIP my career" hyperbole.
Past the "why I'm posting this again", the original article starts with "I'm shooting myself in the foot right now". At this point, this serves no better purpose than grandstanding for attention. I can see from the provocative title the article is going to be about hiring process, which we can all agree is non-optimal. I'm expecting this would either contain critical thought backed either by data or personal anecdote. This sentiment has been expressed by so many people, I have hard time believing this would "end" your career. Let's get to the point.
Past random rants, follows a meta-analysis on a subreddit. The author shares a screenshot from one subreddit that seems to gear towards job seekers. (the author mentions /r/jobs) There are no links, none of the post titles she mentions are found in the top page of that subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/jobs/top/ Even one examplarly post that she shared a screenshot of - "No interview no nothing..." has 8 upvotes in 3 days. It's not a pinnacle of "concensus". Even for her standards, it's not representative of any meaningful sample.
Then there's a distracting update on upvotes and comments. Why does that matter? Two-digit upvotes are not even impressive; look at any post in front page, right now.
Several pages' worth of reading and I still have no idea why the hiring is broken. I've learned that there is a subreddit for job hunters and a preview of random posts, and her imaginations on why. Oh, and the post gained some traction in Reddit. Sure.
It then links to several medium posts - and no followup. What does the article by Jason Shen matter? How does that relate to your point? What am I expected to get out of it that would help understanding your point?
And that's when I stopped. The author is right; this post would likely hinder her employability. If I had Googled her name, and saw this meandering screed, I would have second thoughts in bringing her in. Not because she's become too controversial figure to be a risk, but due to her apparent lack of organization of thought. Not to mention apparent need for attention. Even this response is a screed, because there's no central point or articulation to respond to.
Best of lucks to the author, I hope she gets better vindication than internet endorsements.
> It is complete and utter nonsense that people find it hard to garner female and minority applications through traditional channels...We aren’t getting hired, and aren’t being paid well, because of unconscious biases.
Support for this comes from a large number of (not listed) medium.com posts.
Then we launch into James Damore.
> Or, for shits and giggles, check out the Google Manifesto, and see that some milquetoast gish galloping member of /r/IAmVerySmart decided to ram his face into Google’s hiring practices and get himself fired over crying about diversity hurting hiring practices.
After complaining "tons of writers just here on medium.com...discredited with a hand-wave", the author in the next breath dismisses Damore and his citations of Wikipedia, research articles, Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, etc. [1] with a hand-wave.
> There is no biological basis to be found for any of this Google Manifesto garbage.
Tear that 10-page manifesto apart you want, but take more than one sentence. "This is BS because I say so."
And I stopped there.
[1] https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586/Googles-I...
I wouldn't say anything either. There's no upside. Why risk giving any kind of ammo to someone with a grievance they want to justify?
She says she's a frontend developer and a nerd, so why is she pigeonholing herself in these "digital content coordinator/content marketer" fad jobs instead of moving up from PHP?
Hiring is often run by HR personnel who have no idea what's going on. Anyone against the status quo is apparently someone with a grievance or chip on their shoulder, right? Nerds and marketing are fads. /s
Companies think like idiots when do dating -- "oh, I don't have the feels".
The fact that you see pigeonholing instead of addressing the matter at hand, and point away from how broken the accepted practices are says it all. Take the example of time -- companies think that their time is far more valuable than any candidate's. And you know what that does? It causes the candidates and other companies to suffer because the shitty HR personnel and the shitty companies (yes, you too) aren't investing in others and the future, and in some cases it really is a Boys Club Elitism. You know what companies stand out to candidates? Places where the Hiring Manager isn't talking to you for an hour because they're bored. When requests for followup and information are met. When declining a candidate means declining a candidate but keeping communication lines open rather than a canned e-mail with the words "keep your resume on file".
You know, I've been working in various fields, mostly IT fields, since I turned 15 years old in 1996 and was hired for my first technical support job. I've worked in PC Repair, Systems Administration, Marketing, and more. And the latest generation of elitist fucktards makes me even more sick with their nonsense. You have borderline autistic programmers who can't deal with others socially. You have overentitled affluenza wastes of space running companies. You have elitist pricks who went to exclusive schools. And from the outside, from genius (literally) business professionals who have and can work a number of roles, the hiring process caters to some imaginary checklist that some literal idiot thought up years ago. I've heard the whole "well, with that attitude" line, and it never proves true to my next employer.
HR and Hiring needs to be replaced with Artificial Intelligence that actually understands human beings rather than nepotism-hires, "I have 5 years in IT hiring"-hires, "I worked at Google"-hires, "I went to Stanford"-hires, "I've been in the industry ten years"-hires, "I'm a great programmer"-hires and every other variation under the sun that has a sheltered, condescending, often wrong, commonly-borderline-mentally-ill, self-deluded, "culture"-brainwashed tool of a "Recruiter", that goes based upon the human principle of "If they're attractive to me, they're a great fit.".
The ecosystems that you continue to support are why social engineers do better than expert programmers in programming fields. They're why literal geniuses who were programming revolutionary usenet code and identifying vulnerabilities in Internet infrastructure are ignored. They're why literal geniuses who are so exceptional that the NSA comes and talks to them about their work aren't hired. They're why people who grew up chatting on IRC with the likes of Julian Assange and other now-famous and now-infamous Hackers and know your field better than anyone in your company because it grew up with them are turned away.
After all, it's small-mindedness and selfishness. Obviously you're more interested in the bottom-line in your perception rather than even thinking about a solution for five minutes that turns a grievance into a growth opportunity for your business. And instead, while trying to sabotage or cast shadows on the topic at hand, you're why your decisionmaking, and the roles involved with hiring are going to die. Because you're costing the world, and your companies, and yourself more than you cou...