This. To all the people who call this job post "silly", imagine how silly it is if a simple mistake of missing "-" like in "1-2 years" is overblown out of proportions and half the internet is discussing it. I've stumbled upon this "news" a few times during past 2 days. What a waste...
I assume it's on the front page because the majority of HN applicants have at one time or another seen job listings with impossible requirements as prerequisites. "Minimum 12 years Rust experience", etc.
The unstated half of this is that the honest programmer would say, "Well that's clearly impossible, I should either let them know or not apply," while the sleazy programmer tells the recruiter with a straight face that yes, he has the requisite 10 years' Swift experience, and gets the job.
Recruiters putting silly time requirements on skills is nothing new. My favorite moment of this type was at a meetup for .NET, where a recruiter came in and asked for too many years of experience, and the entire room burst out laughing. She just smiled, accepted the grief we all were giving her, and changed the job description to be accurate. I forget the exact wording she used, but I remember the gist of her response was, "Thanks for correcting me - if I was an expert in the technology I'd be doing it, not looking for people to do it, so I appreciate it when you all help me understand it better."
Maybe she could have a hiring manager proof what they’re looking for so it actually makes sense? This just means the first introduction to your company by a potential hire showcases a broken process.
At most jobs I've had the recruiters pretty much always work with the hiring manager on editing the job requirements and all that. Sure it could still just be a mistake, or it could mean the hiring manager wasn't in the loop.
I mean it also puts a bad light at the company. If they don’t even know when the software they want someone to be experienced in was released, how world they even judge if the applicant is competent in it?
I mean, that’s cool, and better than nothing. But why don’t they ask someone that is qualified to determine those kinds of things before posting the job.
At least, that’s what the recruiters at my company do.
Asking or not asking a dev doesn't really change anything. The problem that I'd worry about is it signals (rather clearly) that the hiring manager isn't in charge of setting the requirements for the position. Who knows what a hiree is walking in to.
> But why don’t they ask someone that is qualified to determine those kinds of things before posting the job.
Because they don't want to. The recruiter's point stands from the other perspective too: if the technical people wanted their job requirements to be perfect, they'd spend time writing them and not hiring recruiters to do it instead.
The software jobs requirements (where I work) are written by team leads/software engineers, pretty much the same people that would be doing the interviews.
This is obviously the correct way to do it. I say "obviously" sarcastically because you'd be surprised how many companies just don't understand this or have policies that disincentivize reality.
I worked at a company (who shall remain nameless) where the recruiters would "pad the requirements" asked for because it would draw in "more qualified candidates and people lie on their resumes anyway". I shit you not. I was aghast at this statement when I asked.... Needless to say, I just walked away from that particular conversation.
I get that she was actually a nice person who simply didn't know when .NET was invented. But I do not accept that she made a harmless and easily fixed error on the job requirements because of this.
Frankly, I'm not that concerned that the job requirements demanded more years of .NET experience then it was possible to have. I am more concerned about all the other requirements that were listed on that job description which were just as wrong but in a way that was not obvious.
Consider the analogy to all of the exonerations of convicted prisoners we have had since DNA analysis became possible. The minor problem is that hundreds of innocent people were held in prison for years before DNA analysis proved they were innocent. The bigger problem is that we have now demonstrated that the legal process has a significant rate of error, meaning that there are tens of thousands of innocent people serving years in prison whose cases didn't happen to permit exoneration by DNA.
That line in the job requirements that specifies you must have a college degree -- is that unnecessarily excluding a lot of qualified candidates? The general tendency to request more expertise and years of experience than are really needed -- is that driving off candidates with lower levels of self-aggrandizement? If it is, does that have anything to do with the deplorable number of women succeeding in our industry?
Asking for 12 years experience in Kubernetes isn't just a silly error: it is an unmistakable sign of a much deeper problem.
> That line in the job requirements that specifies you must have a college degree -- is that unnecessarily excluding a lot of qualified candidates?
Outside of careers requiring vocational degrees (like engineering), yes - but for any job posting simply requiring a degree (any degree) has a valuable selective effect of eliminating swathes of objectively unqualified and less-qualified candidates and thus shrinking the pool of people you'd need to call-in for an on-site interview - even though many objectively qualified but non-degree-holding candidates would be eliminated unfairly.
It's a trade-off based around how much value you assign to your recruiter's time.
I do feel that everyone who has been around the block knows that job requirements are nice to haves rather than need to haves. Otherwise no one would get hired.
On the other hand, I do think there are issues with how recruiters use descriptions that imply expectations that candidates have certain qualities like obsession with coding outside of work, being a tech bro, etc. And I do think some of the job requirement stuff overlaps. It makes it difficult for people who can do the work to feel comfortable applying and obviously is a negative for people who feel excluded from hacker culture which obviously does include minorities and women.
The problem is when resumes get filtered into trash because the computer determined that you don't fulfill the stated requirements (no matter how silly). Which is a common practice these days, especially in hiring agencies who are hired to do pre-screening of candidates for a company.
Add the outright dishonest recruiters ("Oh don't worry about that ultra short start date, I have only put that in there so that people apply faster!" - one 20something HR dude trying to rope me into a BS job ...) to the mix and then companies are wondering why they "can't find talent" and why skilled people have difficulties to find jobs.
I totally agree.
There are many fields and situations where the cost for a certain type of error is negligible or non existant.
This inevitably creates a system biased towards making gambles that end up create such errors.
If for example, a case where a person is discovered to have been wrongly accused and incarcerated would trigger a very serious investigation of the specific people that were involved in that decision (judge, jury, lawyers, experts etc), the system would be much more careful with such acts.
I am sure perfection cannot be reached. I am hoping that we can recognize how far from perfection we are and adjust our systems to take account of that.
For the criminal justice system in the US, one of the clearest implications is that we should allow lawyers -- or at least judges -- to inform jurors about the basics of what we know about witness reliability. Because a huge portion of those we now know to have been falsely convicted we're convicted solely or primarily on the basis of witnesses.
For hiring, I think it means we should deemphasize filtering out candidates using some basic thresholds (like X years experience with Y) and emphasize opportunities for the candidates to demonstrate the skills they will use on the job.
Therefor, out of all the 360 directions one can choose to walk, we should not even bother trying to figure out in which direction perfection lies, let alone pick that direction to walk. Got it.
Your assumption that the room was full of men and one female recruiter perpetuates gender inequality as much as your assertion that everyone should refrain from good natured ribbing at ridiculous requirements just because the person dictating the requirements is a woman.
Gender inequality in tech is a much deeper issue that starts much earlier in life. And it's possible the ridiculous requirement of 12 years of kubernetes itself perpetuates the issue because it immediately preferences people who came up with the OG attitude.
At first approach I wanted to agree with you, but after trying to imagine a room full of women vocally laughing at a male recruiter who’s made a similar mistake I must concede that the matter is not so black and white.
Although I suspect that may be bait, when you look at everything from that perspective everything looks gender related. Just because they hired a woman to do the job has nothing to do with it.
Tribalism around gender, race, nationality etc. serves only to divide us into smaller and smaller groups.
Seen this so many times in my LI feed and people point out that kubernetes wasn’t even out 12 years ago.
So that’s the joke of course but to make this even more sweeter I’d point out that even Go wasn’t publicly available. Wikipedia mentioned that first remarks about Go where from 2009 :)
I'd like to add that I find it scary that this basic info can't be found, neither by a cursory web search, nor on wikipedia. Makes you worry about a future generation raised in naive march-of-progress narratives wondering about how things came to be during the "dark ages" (= today) of the web
All of the patterns and default code referenced there were things I wrote or helped write or reviewed, and while a certain “java patterns” mindset was common in early devs, I can assure you we didn’t transcribe it from Java, we simply used patterns we were familiar with from previous languages. None of the open-source Kube project was “transcribed from Java” to the level being described here.
Kris isn’t wrong, but the details are far more nuanced than that. This talk is a non-primary source :)
Because id rather apply to a job at a company that pays enough respect to write a useful and information rich job description before asking me to spend time researching them, writing a cover letter, and tailoring my cv to highlight relevant experience for their needs.
Cover letters are sometimes requested, you look like a dick if you ignore the request, more so if you copy and paste without atleast a basic find and replace.
As for tailoring your cv to the role, I have 15 years of work experience, and I limit my cv to one page so it stands out, interviews are required, and my age doesnt show easily. In the half or so page I have available for work experience examples, I have to show relevance. Its pointless me talking about that time I wrote embeded software if Im applying for a react/node gig.
What does your cv look like if you can just send the same thing everywhere?
My resume is two pages - nothing before 2008 on it.
I only started taking my career seriously in 2008. Since then, I’ve been very focused about which jobs I will target and which technologies I will work on. Both my resume and my job search focus on that. Anything mentioning my C bit twiddling days got removed by 2012. Of course I didn’t mention my stint writing FORTRAN on Stratus VOS mainframes.
2008 - I was an “expert beginner” and I did have to massage my resume to get a mid level C# enterprise Dev job. The next two jobs after that were focused on staying in the “full stack developer role”
2015 - My focus was getting a job where I could lead a project so I focused on the projects that I had led. My resume focused on that for the next two jobs.
2020 - I was focused on getting a job as a “digital transformation consultant”, “enterprise architect”, or a “cloud consultant”. My resume was very targeted toward that. I only applied for one job - Amazon/AWS. By the time I was looking post Covid, every other decently paying consulting job had disappeared. I didn’t have to tailor my resume to AWS - that’s where all of my experience was on that side.
Correct. Years of experience requirements are there to filter out people who aren't confident in their skills and keep them from even applying.
Though I did get bounced later in a hiring process because my "total years of experience didn't qualify for the amount we require for this level of job".
This sounds like 4-5 years longer than Kubernetes has existed, and is definitely in the 40+ aged senior developer sphere. And at the same time they're busy doing damage control on multiple accusations of age discrimination against older employees. Bra-vo.
Almost as silly is to demand kubernetes administration as a primary skill at all from someone whose main job is (apparently?) to use "an ensemble of Deep learning and LSTM models" for "anomaly detection".
Hmm, I wonder if I’ve been looking at these requirements all wrong then. If a year of work experience is about 2000 hours, maybe what they’re really saying is they want someone with 8000 hours of experience, which I guess is possible in 1.5 years.
It's worse than that, HR is hiring for someone else. I think there are valid cases where someone doesn't know what they want, but can't think of an example when it's acceptable to "not know what is wanted" when that's the sole purpose of your job.
I found myself stopping after each line trying to understand the inscrutable images. A tie I get, as it's related to business.
The nervous laughing face and recycling symbol are beyond me.
The third line’s emoji is conciliatory false embarrassment masking amusement, e.g. the emotion on your face after you intentionally lose in arm-wrestling to a five-year-old.
That’s a pretty standard meaning for that emoji, despite the subtle shade of its meaning, because it’s quite common on Twitter or Instagram that you want to humble-brag about “what they missed out on”, but you also want to make it explicit that you realize that you’re doing so (a bit like sarcasm-flagging.)
The fourth line’s emoji is presumably a substitute for a “refresh” (or more precisely, “recompute”) icon, since we don’t actually have one of those.
...which is rather uncommon usage; but the proper emotion (“knowing but non-judgemental stare, as if a parent waiting for their child to figure out that they’re supposed to close the fridge after taking something from it”) isn’t a standard Unicode emoji... yet. (But nearly every Discord group I’m in has a custom one for that purpose!)
They are annoying because they are facebook emojis and everyone is using them so you are linking them to contexts as you used Facebook. ie: the smile emoji is the most hated because it's kinda related to a fake smile/malice.
I think @tiangolo likes to write like that, because there are other places in the FastAPI doc where he writes a "little story" (for instance to illustrate concurrency) and overuses emoji. I think it's just his style ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
This happened to me - got a call from a recruiter who said client needed 10 years. I replied 'I was a teenager back then' to which she said 'so you don't have enough experience?'. I responded 'Well I helped create the thing, it hasn't been around 10 years'. Silence followed, I was thoroughly dis-interested after that.
Why? The experience and intelligence of the recruiter has almost zero correlation to the experience and intelligence of the people you'd be working with.
Recruiting people / HR are just an administrative barrier to get through. Once you speak to the actual team you'd be working with, you can start being more discerning of the quality of the people.
> Why? The experience and intelligence of the recruiter has almost zero correlation to the experience and intelligence of the people you'd be working with.
It shouldn't. A well-run company should refuse to work with recruiters who lack experience and intelligence.
No, never this. If the hiring manager won’t be your manager or in the same tree, run. If they cant be bothered to read the job description they put out, run. If the technology is critical enough to need previous experience managers should know enough about it to not make this mistake.
Hiring is the most important thing managers do. If they suck at that it really doesn’t matter if they are great at other things.
its shocking how many people here totally misunderstand the role and daily job of inhouse recruiters
they churn out these job requirements daily
the person you speak with on the phone wasn't involved with writing it, just correct them and get to the first technical person as soon as possible.
this is done at companies of all sizes, whether it is IBM, Google, Uber, Pinterest, as well as expected in non-tech companies.
you guys are in for a rude awakening if you think this is still an employees market in choosing companies based on the smallest, most irrelevant and nuanced signals of operational efficiency
I am fairly certain it wasn't the recruiter who put in the experience requirement. My dis-interest wasn't due to the recruiter but to do with whichever manager thought they needed needed more experience than the age of a product - either they are careless or don't care about a persons skillset.
Could I have been wrong? Of course. All I said was I was dis-interested, I had better opportunities with people who I understood and who understood me.
> I had better opportunities with people who I understood and who understood me.
That's really lucky.
There are a lot of people who don't value my skillset who I thought should, and it isn't clear if people reach out to me because they like something I brought to the world that has caught on now, or if it is a totally random recruitment bot sending transactional messages.
All while the things I was working on over the last decade were not respected at the time I was working on them.
For employment, seems better for me to use variations of my name and more generic experience. Otherwise people just seem to want to have me in the room but not really interested in hiring me, or like they expect a more mythical and profound experience.
> I am fairly certain it wasn't the recruiter who put in the experience requirement.
Really? Because I've seen them copy/paste job requirements and just spitball the "years exp" number. They're just trying to fill as many roles as possible, and getting IT folks to put together job requirements is time consuming, so they often re-use old requirement and only update the language/tech on it.
> I am fairly certain it wasn't the recruiter who put in the experience requirement.
I've seen multiple job postings for my teams where somewhere in the HR->recruiting pipeline the (correct) job requirements were replaced with "standard" requirements.
I don’t think a lack of concern and thoughtfulness around hiring is an irrelevant or nuanced signal.
Having been both a manager and an IC I strongly believe that hiring is of the utmost importance. The same thoughtfulness, care, and responsibility that goes into leading engineering teams that are in charge of mission critical systems must extend to the hiring process or else everything else is at risk. A single bad or even just not great hire can be devastating to a team. A company with a culture that is just recruiters funneling candidates thoughtlessly is guaranteed to fail over time.
Sure if you need a job or aren’t in an employees market you might have to suck it up and take that job. I get that. I would advise saving a lot more than usual as that charade of hoop jumping is going to result in layoffs/bankruptcy in the mid to long term. Also, don’t expect them to be any more thoughtful in the layoffs than they were in the hiring.
Sure a lot of big companies do thoughtless hiring and that might work for awhile when you just need to scale thoughtlessly but a lot of big companies also get their lunch eaten by smaller companies with more thoughtful managers (ex. IBM, MSFT pre Nadella, possibly Google now)
> Why? The experience and intelligence of the recruiter has almost zero correlation to the experience and intelligence of the people you'd be working with.
Good recruiters are able to match a candidate's skills with the skills required for the role they're recruiting for. If they can't do that, they are bad at their job and are more often than not wasting the time you could be spending with a recruiter who knows the industry they're working in.
If they got that aspect wrong, what else are they getting wrong? Are you willing to waste time and money going through the interview process just to find out that the role isn't a good fit, even though the recruiter said it was?
Recruiters often doesn't have the role. They try to stir up an interest in you, so with your nice CV they can approach the - just prospecting - client.
Recruiters have different levels of experience: same as software engineers. Some are just starting their career, some have more experience. Most recruiters didn't go to school for recruiting; they usually landed the job based mostly on their inter personal skills. Most lack any context around technology. In that light, making a judgement call about a team based solely on the recruited seems suboptimal. If they make mistakes, most would be happy if you point it out to them.
Everyone is trying to help each other; don't let go of potentially great opportunities due to these misconceptions.
> Are you willing to waste time and money going through the interview process just to find out that the role isn't a good fit, even though the recruiter said it was?
You should pretend the recruiter - any recruiter is a compulsive liar, and put exactly zero value on whether or not they claim the role is a good fit. They are never going to interact with you again, they may not understand you or the role, and they are financially incentivised to bullshit to you.
Ignore what they say, and judge whether or not the role is a good fit for yourself. I wouldn't hold a good recruiter as a positive sign for a job, nor would I hold a shitty recruiter as a red flag.
If you have infinite choices and time, sure. ...but if you're looking for the best jobs/pay/environment/company, then those are the only things you should be selecting on.
> The experience and intelligence of the recruiter has almost zero correlation to the experience and intelligence of the people you'd be working with.
How do you figure? If you're perfectly qualified for a job and they don't seem to recognize that, what are they selecting for? You don't think that incompetence would have an impact on the quality of the team you'd be joining?
Having never worked in a large enough company to have an hr department, this confuses me.
My assumption is, a team needs personel and so the team manager makes a request to hr with a list of requirements for said recruit. Or at least that's how it seems like it should be.
Along the way, should not someone who put together that list of requirements have some idea of what they were asking for?
I've only worked at small enough business we had one general manager in charge of hiring. If one of the sections of our work needed employees, job postings would be created with those specific positions in mind, with the specific requirements of that position figured out by usually the most experienced person in that position and passed along to the manager.
Again, this may just be my ignorance, but, if it wasn't the hr person that wrote the requirements, wouldn't it have been someone that should have known better?
People say this about spammers (“there’s always some other sucker”) but scam-baiting still seems to work to diminish the number of scams/spam in the world.
Perhaps we need recruiter-baiters: people who will, as a hobby, intentionally get recruiters to pass them on to companies, at which point they will (under an assumed identity) say or do something so egregious that it will poison the recruiter’s relationship with the company.
Ah, this is standard python. For instance, «5 < x < 8» converts to «5 < x and x < 8». So «5 years experience and experience in FastAPI» is the pythonic reading of that job ad.
That job listing doesn't give specific credentials for it, but it seems to also involve:
"...anomaly detection solutions ... leveraging an ensemble of Deep learning and LSTM models. Natural Language Processing for entity, topic clusters
and relationship extraction. Text Analytics in human generated tickets and correlation with event tickets for event noise reduction. Apply Natural
Language Classification and RNN algorithms to automatically route tickets... Text mining, message clustering / templatization, Logs to metrics,
anomaly detection, event annotation and sequencing... for each mainframe batch job ... Identify Anomalies ... using sequence mining techniques"
In all it is an interesting product but it is going to take a lot of people with different skills to make that happen. Many of those areas such as "entity and relationship extraction" and "anomaly detection solutions ... [for] event noise reduction" are still almost pre-paradigmatic from the viewpoint of a working engineer.
The best interpretation I have is that they are hiring a large platoon or small company of software developers, data scientists, project managers, you name it. They are probably using a distributed version of UIMA that spins up at least one container per dev in the production system (because "microservices".)
The person they are hiring here is in charge of keeping that monster going at the K8s level. They may need to settle for hiring 12 people with 1 year of experience, but that would blow their budget -- if the whole team worked that way it would get bloated to a mid-sized or large battalion.
I don't see why they don't just run the system on one of the mainframes it is monitoring. With Parallel Sysplex, Workload Manager, etc. IBM had better stuff than VMWare, Docker, K8S, Zookeeper in the 1990s when they made the transition from bipolar to CMOS and had to go parallel to make up for the single-thread performance loss. z15 mainframes are just crammed with PCIe slots so they should have no problem attaching a tensor accelerator to one.
Trouble is, people who know how to administer mainframes are even harder to find than K8S experts.
It's like asking for ten years' experience with Swift.
The job descriptions (especially in hidebound companies like Big Blue) tend to have mandated experience levels.
HR folks aren't engineers, so they should not be expected to know.
However, this should be highly embarrassing to the hiring manager, who I'm sure, was handed the ad text for approval, and probably rubberstamped it without thinking.
It would be trivial for someone to Google it, then make a canonical list for the entire HR department. You’re talking about maybe 30 minutes of work to prevent your company from looking like corporate clowns.
Or, you could hand the ad copy to the hiring manager, and assume they would take responsibility (part of the job description for "manager" -I know. I was one for a long time) for approving the copy.
You're underestimating the amount of friction at most companies. For all your recruiters to use your measly google sheet, it has to be encoded somewhere on your intranet, a memo has to be sent by the director (whom you have to persuade that this is the correct thing to do) that there is this sheet, and you then become the point person to approve all the job ads because "you took initiative in the area."
> HR folks aren't engineers, so they should not be expected to know.
If you job description is to find someone to fill a position you should know what that position is. This is middle management "I don't need to know exactly what I'm managing" levels of cow manure.
We engineers tend to apply a "raised baseline" to non-engineers. We seem to assume that everyone "just knows" the "basics" of tech; especially if we are in a tech environment.
The vast number of employees at corporations over a certain size are non-tech, with specialties in Marketing, Sales, Finance, Administration, Support, Manufacturing, etc.
I see that a lot of tech companies have recruiters that are quite close to their teams. I know that Facebook and Apple do this, as they have contacted me in the past.
Those types of recruiters wouldn't make the same mistake, but they are not common in many corporations.
>HR folks aren't engineers, so they should not be expected to know.
Yeah, so make the engineers produce the requirements for the particular jobs. HR should not be in the business of defining technical requirements for jobs.
On the employee’s side, I always tell external recruiters that they do not have permission to modify my resume in any way outside of replacing my contact information with their heading.
I’ve seen too many horribly mangled resumes from the hiring side and I spend time at least once per quarter keeping my resume up to date.
Obviously a typo, they probably meant 1-2 years, which is realistic. While this is probably not actually the case here, I see it quite often that companies have unrealistic expectations when it comes to work experience with technologies like k8s. For example it is quite common here in Berlin to expect 4+ years of k8s experience. Which is unrealistic to find taking into account that k8s initial release was 6 years ago. It is paradox that companies want to use the latest technologies and require years of work experience at the same time.
Yes, you are right, that might be a reason. But work experience is a huge factor in infrastructure engineering. From my perspective it is what counts the most. Companies usually would like see that a candidate already worked on a similar stack, so that she/he won't make stupid beginner mistakes on your payroll and potentially ruining your business.
I can see missing a single keystroke as quite a believable typo.
Alternatively, I can also imagine recruiters just following familiar patterns for increasing "required" experience levels as they "level-up" the job description as a crutch for articulating requirements. But the problem here isn't the recruiters, they are just instruments. They often shouldn't be drafting the initial baseline JD at all and should never be posting the final one without approval.
I’d assume it’s a ”typo” as well. Most likely it’s not the same person hiring and writing the job ad. So a qualified guess would be that a character got lost during communication/translation.
I just hope companies get rid of the "hr recruitment" team. These people are utterly clueless folks, who hardly know anything about technology and worse these people call the shots when the time comes to settle on pay package.
Some are also designed to be impossible to satisfy so that they can bring non-local talent to satisfy Labour Market tests. Not sure if it is in this case, but there have been plenty of such cases in the past.
Given 12+ years requirement with tech that was initially released 6 years ago, the only "non-local talent" this listing would bring in are time travelers from the future.
I'm not sure how exactly it works but if I had to guess, the non-local talent would have fudged resumes showing they had the relevant experience. It's not like the relevant Labour departments would actually do the background check on hired candidates. All the companies/consultancies need to do is to show that they couldn't find a relevant candidate locally to satisfy the sponsorship requirements.
Note that I'm not just talking about US. Most countries in Europe have the Labour Market tests requirement before a foreigner can be sponsored for the position.
You have to provide evidence to USCIS (letters from past employers) that you worked on kubernetes for 12 years. They don't simply take your assertions at face value.
Do they take the letters at face value, or do they do some basic sanity checks to make sure the technology has been around as long as the experience you claimed to have?
Yeah it's a crime, but what use is it if nobody checks? Do they at least audit a certain % of the applications? Or do they do zero checking whatsoever, and will only use it to tack on more charges when you're already under investigation? eg. questions like "Have you EVER knowingly engaged in activities designed to overthrow the U.S. Government by force?" that appear on US security clearance applications
I understand what you're concerned about. Yeah they randomly audit a certain % labor condition applications by requesting more detailed evidence.
It's not like people don't lie on these forms and get falsified evidence. There are cases of people getting caught, and people who did attest to the falsified evidence have had their green cards revoked and deported.
Well, maybe this time there'll be more interest. The immigration services officer who fines IBM millions for this kind of illegal immigration scandal should expect a good career.
I was just thinking about this. Since a job must be advertised locally is there any requirement that the h1b holder actually has to satisfy the requirements for the job. If not, what is the purpose of the advertisement anyways?
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I’ll have to apply for the RUST job I’ve been keeping an eye on. 12 years experience should put me on a short shortlist.
Shouldn’t be on front page HN.
Its not like IBM team/dept is actually requiring this.
I clicked into this thinking oh maybe it had a long alpha/beta and IBM is doing something really interesting and needed someone with a deep history.
The unstated half of this is that the honest programmer would say, "Well that's clearly impossible, I should either let them know or not apply," while the sleazy programmer tells the recruiter with a straight face that yes, he has the requisite 10 years' Swift experience, and gets the job.
At least, that’s what the recruiters at my company do.
Because they don't want to. The recruiter's point stands from the other perspective too: if the technical people wanted their job requirements to be perfect, they'd spend time writing them and not hiring recruiters to do it instead.
Frankly, I'm not that concerned that the job requirements demanded more years of .NET experience then it was possible to have. I am more concerned about all the other requirements that were listed on that job description which were just as wrong but in a way that was not obvious.
Consider the analogy to all of the exonerations of convicted prisoners we have had since DNA analysis became possible. The minor problem is that hundreds of innocent people were held in prison for years before DNA analysis proved they were innocent. The bigger problem is that we have now demonstrated that the legal process has a significant rate of error, meaning that there are tens of thousands of innocent people serving years in prison whose cases didn't happen to permit exoneration by DNA.
That line in the job requirements that specifies you must have a college degree -- is that unnecessarily excluding a lot of qualified candidates? The general tendency to request more expertise and years of experience than are really needed -- is that driving off candidates with lower levels of self-aggrandizement? If it is, does that have anything to do with the deplorable number of women succeeding in our industry?
Asking for 12 years experience in Kubernetes isn't just a silly error: it is an unmistakable sign of a much deeper problem.
Outside of careers requiring vocational degrees (like engineering), yes - but for any job posting simply requiring a degree (any degree) has a valuable selective effect of eliminating swathes of objectively unqualified and less-qualified candidates and thus shrinking the pool of people you'd need to call-in for an on-site interview - even though many objectively qualified but non-degree-holding candidates would be eliminated unfairly.
It's a trade-off based around how much value you assign to your recruiter's time.
I do feel that everyone who has been around the block knows that job requirements are nice to haves rather than need to haves. Otherwise no one would get hired.
On the other hand, I do think there are issues with how recruiters use descriptions that imply expectations that candidates have certain qualities like obsession with coding outside of work, being a tech bro, etc. And I do think some of the job requirement stuff overlaps. It makes it difficult for people who can do the work to feel comfortable applying and obviously is a negative for people who feel excluded from hacker culture which obviously does include minorities and women.
Add the outright dishonest recruiters ("Oh don't worry about that ultra short start date, I have only put that in there so that people apply faster!" - one 20something HR dude trying to rope me into a BS job ...) to the mix and then companies are wondering why they "can't find talent" and why skilled people have difficulties to find jobs.
If for example, a case where a person is discovered to have been wrongly accused and incarcerated would trigger a very serious investigation of the specific people that were involved in that decision (judge, jury, lawyers, experts etc), the system would be much more careful with such acts.
For the criminal justice system in the US, one of the clearest implications is that we should allow lawyers -- or at least judges -- to inform jurors about the basics of what we know about witness reliability. Because a huge portion of those we now know to have been falsely convicted we're convicted solely or primarily on the basis of witnesses.
For hiring, I think it means we should deemphasize filtering out candidates using some basic thresholds (like X years experience with Y) and emphasize opportunities for the candidates to demonstrate the skills they will use on the job.
[1] - https://hbr.org/2014/08/why-women-dont-apply-for-jobs-unless...
I suggest re-examining the response you had based on understandings of gender issues in tech.
Gender inequality in tech is a much deeper issue that starts much earlier in life. And it's possible the ridiculous requirement of 12 years of kubernetes itself perpetuates the issue because it immediately preferences people who came up with the OG attitude.
Tribalism around gender, race, nationality etc. serves only to divide us into smaller and smaller groups.
But this doesn't pass muster, it doesn't require knowing the technology, just a quick search of when the language was invented
May as well be a truck driver recruiter who doesn't know what a CDL is. Or a real estate agent that can't search MLS.
Accurate? No, I don't think that's the correct word. The value was changed, but it was gibberish before and remains gibberish afterwards.
So that’s the joke of course but to make this even more sweeter I’d point out that even Go wasn’t publicly available. Wikipedia mentioned that first remarks about Go where from 2009 :)
I'd like to add that I find it scary that this basic info can't be found, neither by a cursory web search, nor on wikipedia. Makes you worry about a future generation raised in naive march-of-progress narratives wondering about how things came to be during the "dark ages" (= today) of the web
Kris isn’t wrong, but the details are far more nuanced than that. This talk is a non-primary source :)
How about, apply for jobs even if you don't have the skills they are asking for.
https://hbr.org/2014/08/why-women-dont-apply-for-jobs-unless...
On the hiring side, I’ve never actually paid attention to one and I thought they were kind of quaint.
As for tailoring your cv to the role, I have 15 years of work experience, and I limit my cv to one page so it stands out, interviews are required, and my age doesnt show easily. In the half or so page I have available for work experience examples, I have to show relevance. Its pointless me talking about that time I wrote embeded software if Im applying for a react/node gig.
What does your cv look like if you can just send the same thing everywhere?
My resume is two pages - nothing before 2008 on it.
I only started taking my career seriously in 2008. Since then, I’ve been very focused about which jobs I will target and which technologies I will work on. Both my resume and my job search focus on that. Anything mentioning my C bit twiddling days got removed by 2012. Of course I didn’t mention my stint writing FORTRAN on Stratus VOS mainframes.
2008 - I was an “expert beginner” and I did have to massage my resume to get a mid level C# enterprise Dev job. The next two jobs after that were focused on staying in the “full stack developer role”
2015 - My focus was getting a job where I could lead a project so I focused on the projects that I had led. My resume focused on that for the next two jobs.
2020 - I was focused on getting a job as a “digital transformation consultant”, “enterprise architect”, or a “cloud consultant”. My resume was very targeted toward that. I only applied for one job - Amazon/AWS. By the time I was looking post Covid, every other decently paying consulting job had disappeared. I didn’t have to tailor my resume to AWS - that’s where all of my experience was on that side.
Though I did get bounced later in a hiring process because my "total years of experience didn't qualify for the amount we require for this level of job".
> It required 4+ years of experience in FastAPI.
> I couldn't apply as I only have 1.5+ years of experience since I created that thing.
https://twitter.com/tiangolo/status/1281946592459853830
I'm not even that old (born in the 80s), but is that the style adults use now?
That’s a pretty standard meaning for that emoji, despite the subtle shade of its meaning, because it’s quite common on Twitter or Instagram that you want to humble-brag about “what they missed out on”, but you also want to make it explicit that you realize that you’re doing so (a bit like sarcasm-flagging.)
The fourth line’s emoji is presumably a substitute for a “refresh” (or more precisely, “recompute”) icon, since we don’t actually have one of those.
...which is rather uncommon usage; but the proper emotion (“knowing but non-judgemental stare, as if a parent waiting for their child to figure out that they’re supposed to close the fridge after taking something from it”) isn’t a standard Unicode emoji... yet. (But nearly every Discord group I’m in has a custom one for that purpose!)
tip: stop using facebook.
Why? The experience and intelligence of the recruiter has almost zero correlation to the experience and intelligence of the people you'd be working with.
Recruiting people / HR are just an administrative barrier to get through. Once you speak to the actual team you'd be working with, you can start being more discerning of the quality of the people.
It shouldn't. A well-run company should refuse to work with recruiters who lack experience and intelligence.
Hiring is the most important thing managers do. If they suck at that it really doesn’t matter if they are great at other things.
they churn out these job requirements daily
the person you speak with on the phone wasn't involved with writing it, just correct them and get to the first technical person as soon as possible.
this is done at companies of all sizes, whether it is IBM, Google, Uber, Pinterest, as well as expected in non-tech companies.
you guys are in for a rude awakening if you think this is still an employees market in choosing companies based on the smallest, most irrelevant and nuanced signals of operational efficiency
Could I have been wrong? Of course. All I said was I was dis-interested, I had better opportunities with people who I understood and who understood me.
That's really lucky.
There are a lot of people who don't value my skillset who I thought should, and it isn't clear if people reach out to me because they like something I brought to the world that has caught on now, or if it is a totally random recruitment bot sending transactional messages.
All while the things I was working on over the last decade were not respected at the time I was working on them.
For employment, seems better for me to use variations of my name and more generic experience. Otherwise people just seem to want to have me in the room but not really interested in hiring me, or like they expect a more mythical and profound experience.
Really? Because I've seen them copy/paste job requirements and just spitball the "years exp" number. They're just trying to fill as many roles as possible, and getting IT folks to put together job requirements is time consuming, so they often re-use old requirement and only update the language/tech on it.
I've seen multiple job postings for my teams where somewhere in the HR->recruiting pipeline the (correct) job requirements were replaced with "standard" requirements.
Having been both a manager and an IC I strongly believe that hiring is of the utmost importance. The same thoughtfulness, care, and responsibility that goes into leading engineering teams that are in charge of mission critical systems must extend to the hiring process or else everything else is at risk. A single bad or even just not great hire can be devastating to a team. A company with a culture that is just recruiters funneling candidates thoughtlessly is guaranteed to fail over time.
Sure if you need a job or aren’t in an employees market you might have to suck it up and take that job. I get that. I would advise saving a lot more than usual as that charade of hoop jumping is going to result in layoffs/bankruptcy in the mid to long term. Also, don’t expect them to be any more thoughtful in the layoffs than they were in the hiring.
Sure a lot of big companies do thoughtless hiring and that might work for awhile when you just need to scale thoughtlessly but a lot of big companies also get their lunch eaten by smaller companies with more thoughtful managers (ex. IBM, MSFT pre Nadella, possibly Google now)
Good recruiters are able to match a candidate's skills with the skills required for the role they're recruiting for. If they can't do that, they are bad at their job and are more often than not wasting the time you could be spending with a recruiter who knows the industry they're working in.
If they got that aspect wrong, what else are they getting wrong? Are you willing to waste time and money going through the interview process just to find out that the role isn't a good fit, even though the recruiter said it was?
Everyone is trying to help each other; don't let go of potentially great opportunities due to these misconceptions.
You should pretend the recruiter - any recruiter is a compulsive liar, and put exactly zero value on whether or not they claim the role is a good fit. They are never going to interact with you again, they may not understand you or the role, and they are financially incentivised to bullshit to you.
Ignore what they say, and judge whether or not the role is a good fit for yourself. I wouldn't hold a good recruiter as a positive sign for a job, nor would I hold a shitty recruiter as a red flag.
If they are so stupid as to do this, I wouldn’t want to work for them either.
HR is where things can go very wrong.
How do you figure? If you're perfectly qualified for a job and they don't seem to recognize that, what are they selecting for? You don't think that incompetence would have an impact on the quality of the team you'd be joining?
My assumption is, a team needs personel and so the team manager makes a request to hr with a list of requirements for said recruit. Or at least that's how it seems like it should be.
Along the way, should not someone who put together that list of requirements have some idea of what they were asking for?
I've only worked at small enough business we had one general manager in charge of hiring. If one of the sections of our work needed employees, job postings would be created with those specific positions in mind, with the specific requirements of that position figured out by usually the most experienced person in that position and passed along to the manager.
Again, this may just be my ignorance, but, if it wasn't the hr person that wrote the requirements, wouldn't it have been someone that should have known better?
So lie. It's what they want.
And if you don't, someone else will.
Perhaps we need recruiter-baiters: people who will, as a hobby, intentionally get recruiters to pass them on to companies, at which point they will (under an assumed identity) say or do something so egregious that it will poison the recruiter’s relationship with the company.
In 1995 a recruiter called me saying he has a position for someone with 5 years of Windows NT experience. (WNT shipped officially in 1993)
I told him hat if he finds someone, I’d him them myself! I’ve never met a person that owns a time machine!
He was very gracious about it.
"...anomaly detection solutions ... leveraging an ensemble of Deep learning and LSTM models. Natural Language Processing for entity, topic clusters and relationship extraction. Text Analytics in human generated tickets and correlation with event tickets for event noise reduction. Apply Natural Language Classification and RNN algorithms to automatically route tickets... Text mining, message clustering / templatization, Logs to metrics, anomaly detection, event annotation and sequencing... for each mainframe batch job ... Identify Anomalies ... using sequence mining techniques"
In all it is an interesting product but it is going to take a lot of people with different skills to make that happen. Many of those areas such as "entity and relationship extraction" and "anomaly detection solutions ... [for] event noise reduction" are still almost pre-paradigmatic from the viewpoint of a working engineer.
The best interpretation I have is that they are hiring a large platoon or small company of software developers, data scientists, project managers, you name it. They are probably using a distributed version of UIMA that spins up at least one container per dev in the production system (because "microservices".)
The person they are hiring here is in charge of keeping that monster going at the K8s level. They may need to settle for hiring 12 people with 1 year of experience, but that would blow their budget -- if the whole team worked that way it would get bloated to a mid-sized or large battalion.
I don't see why they don't just run the system on one of the mainframes it is monitoring. With Parallel Sysplex, Workload Manager, etc. IBM had better stuff than VMWare, Docker, K8S, Zookeeper in the 1990s when they made the transition from bipolar to CMOS and had to go parallel to make up for the single-thread performance loss. z15 mainframes are just crammed with PCIe slots so they should have no problem attaching a tensor accelerator to one.
Trouble is, people who know how to administer mainframes are even harder to find than K8S experts.
The job descriptions (especially in hidebound companies like Big Blue) tend to have mandated experience levels.
HR folks aren't engineers, so they should not be expected to know.
However, this should be highly embarrassing to the hiring manager, who I'm sure, was handed the ad text for approval, and probably rubberstamped it without thinking.
If you job description is to find someone to fill a position you should know what that position is. This is middle management "I don't need to know exactly what I'm managing" levels of cow manure.
The vast number of employees at corporations over a certain size are non-tech, with specialties in Marketing, Sales, Finance, Administration, Support, Manufacturing, etc.
I see that a lot of tech companies have recruiters that are quite close to their teams. I know that Facebook and Apple do this, as they have contacted me in the past.
Those types of recruiters wouldn't make the same mistake, but they are not common in many corporations.
Yeah, so make the engineers produce the requirements for the particular jobs. HR should not be in the business of defining technical requirements for jobs.
That was why it was so important for me to review the job descriptions. It was often an iterative process.
I’ve seen too many horribly mangled resumes from the hiring side and I spend time at least once per quarter keeping my resume up to date.
Translated: we want to hire Chris Lattner (who started developing Swift in July 2010, so has exactly ten years of experience with Swift).
The routine is to take you but make you feel like they do you a favor by taking you with less exp than it was originally stated.
Alternatively, I can also imagine recruiters just following familiar patterns for increasing "required" experience levels as they "level-up" the job description as a crutch for articulating requirements. But the problem here isn't the recruiters, they are just instruments. They often shouldn't be drafting the initial baseline JD at all and should never be posting the final one without approval.
Note that I'm not just talking about US. Most countries in Europe have the Labour Market tests requirement before a foreigner can be sponsored for the position.
Whoever issues the letter assumes liability for what they attest to.
It's not like people don't lie on these forms and get falsified evidence. There are cases of people getting caught, and people who did attest to the falsified evidence have had their green cards revoked and deported.
Kinda like IRS I guess.
Doing so enables him to get higher pay band set for the position and get better candidates who might accept, even if they have less experience.