Discussion: Job seekers can't find a job and Employers can't find an employees
I want to start an honest discussion here and see 1st if I am alone feeling this way? and 2nd how can we solve this weird situation?
My view as employer: Job posting usually sucks. If you're too specific about the position, you get too few quality candidates. If you keep it too broad, you get swamped with applicants that you don't know what to do. I don't even want to get in people faking their jobs/positions/duties/diplomas etc. Also, job posting and application management platforms are usually quiet expensive. As a bonus: if you are a startup, hiring wrong people will most likely kill your company. The best method that works as per my opinion is working with an agency to give you better first results however again nothing comes for free.
My view as job seeker: There are million companies and million posts. (especially with remote positions). LinkedIn is the platform that you can find more coverage yes however it doesn't usually represent the reality about the job/market. As first step, you start with the companies you like/know with being a bit more selective on the jobs but after some point you basically apply all somewhat related jobs and then want to see what happens after. (which only increase the complexity of the problem)
I am thinking to come up with a solution however I am not sure if there is a solution.
I guess my question here is that what else that you have experienced that worked/not worked. Also what would be the dream solution.
380 comments
[ 6.2 ms ] story [ 351 ms ] threadhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons
My sources are telling me they get a few hundred applications per day for just one role. Beating those odds will be a lot easier if you know the hiring manager.
Ultimately, what I’m seeing is that companies are just more picky when it comes to interviewing too. Everyone is asking harder or less common leetcode questions than before and are evaluating more strongly than before.
It’s significantly harder to get an offer these days even if you get an interview.
This isn't even for top compensation either. I'm finding that the offers overall are meager as well.
which essentially means you have to know the hiring manager to get the job.
There is also insufficient information going the other way. Unlike buying a car, there is more to the buyer's side than just money. There is the work environment, how well employees are treated, the probability of future raises, probability the company will lay you off or cut pay or force you to relocate in the future, etc. And that assymetry impacts the market as well. For example a company might be a really great place to work, and that would compensate for a lower salary, but the prospective employee doesn't know that.
Networking is an essential life-skill, and worth all the discomfort it takes to get better at it. (You don't have to be the top 1% of networkers to be successful).
Lots of great coders don't have a big open presence. Years of experience isn't a good sign with the churn in tech, plus you don't know if they wrote code or just watched. Is being able to do a l33t coding exercise in a fixed time a sign? IMHO I'm decent programmer and I've failed them. Can you come up with an exercise that matches the work that will be done and can be completed in a reasonable amount of time?
And the phrase "matches the work that will be done" is doing some heavy lifting: many companies don't really know what they need. I've seen companies that need 99% soft skills that want a ton of niche tech experience. Or advertise for something other than the real dumpster-fire that you'll have to work on.
This is the fundamental reason that knowing someone works: they know your coding skills and they can give you the inside scoop on the position.
For dating (tinder especially), good photos are important. Many people, and men especially, do not have good photos of them. None of my male friends even take photos, and if they do, they are not flattering or of them wearing nice clothes that make them look attractive. Nor would some of them be attractive because they are overweight and not in shape or dress like middle schoolers
And that's just looks.
Interviewing is the same. People who play the game (networking, leetcode, etc) win by getting the high salary jobs, and everyone else has to fight for the scraps
And, yeah, I'd like to think I am at least decent at both games if only because I realize they are games.
As a job seeker, you need to be in the 90th percentile.
As an employer, you need to be there.
The same thing which makes Tinder a blight on human happiness would make the format an excellent way to pair jobs with job seekers.
Companies don’t feel that way. They feel they can just ramp up the workload on existing employees “until we can hire more.” What are they going to do, leave? Where do they think they’re going to go? They’ll be met with the same situation at another company, except they’ll be on the other side of the table this time.
If there are companies with money, no employees, and the urgent desire to hire them, that breaks this equilibrium. The overworked employees jump ship to the startup, the incumbents become more desperate and finally relent.
If the answer to "What are they going to do?" is "strike", or "leave and take a massive severance payout because that's what their union negotiated in the contract that specifies you can't overwork them by more than X amount", then the company no longer has that abusive option on the table. They have to hire someone to fill that role.
If I were tasked with solving this, I'd advocate for more frank discussion and use of various pseudo tests, e.g. SAT or GRE scores. This strikes a lot of people as unfair and non-inclusive.
Leetcode fits this too
I do not advocate for leetcode tests, but I think they have a bit unfair reputation. There are many worse interview questions.
They filter for a few super important qualities - can you solve a simple problem, follow some basic instructions, write somewhat comprehensible code. But most importantly, if you get stuck, how do you react. If your response is to lash out and blame the questions or the interview, that's a huge red flag that you're going to react like that when challenged in the work place. I wish I wasn't speaking from experience.
There also a million other reasons why people don't find jobs and companies don't find suitable people, like difference in fundamental values, public image, tech stack, and so forth. But IMHO pay is still the most important thing after all.
Structural unemployment is usually high when there's a rapid change in demand for skills, as of course there is in tech. It results in crazy high salaries too. People with machine learning experience are getting 7-figure offers, while people with jQuery experience can't find jobs.
As an individual, you can both improve the economy AND make fat stacks by learning the skills that are in high demand. As an employer, you can do better by finding skill sets that aren't in high demand, with enough overlap with what you need that you can retrain. There are a lot of unemployed video game programmers right now, so if you can figure out how to use people with those skills you can hire some smart, energetic people at moderate salaries.
My hot take is the labor market was very tight, employers thought they were going to get a deal on folks with the layoffs [1] that took place over the last 2 years, but the labor market still remains tight so they continue to search for "diamonds in the rough" at lower costs (which leads to this mismatch at scale). Offshoring is cost optimization to continue to realize desired profits in a high capital cost macro, and there is probably some knock on effect from software development tax code changes [2].
[1] https://layoffs.fyi/
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39133028
This has been previously discussed in detail on HN 12 years ago; https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2414135 I would suggest that times have changed since then and disparate impact lawsuits are now more likely to prevail in 2024 than in 2012, so the in-effect aspect has increased since then.
I know quite a few CEOs who confide in me that they would rather give IQ tests but do not because of their concerns over legal consequences. Clearly this is anecdotal but this sentiment does seem to be pervasive and extensive and repeated throughout the internet over a long period of time.
It would be helpful if you could list some of these companies that publicly state they give IQ tests. I've only heard about this as a practice at hedge funds and even then it was public knowledge / gossip but not publicly stated.
In my brief search for such companies I came across this; https://nypost.com/2022/03/15/silicon-valley-firm-apologizes... which is a company that has now apologized for giving IQ tests and is being warned about the legal consequences for having them.
My assertion is that IQ tests are already known to have disparate impact and with laws as they are in effect they are illegal. My next assertion is that aptitude tests will suffer the same fate as IQ test because they too will be shown to have disparate impact for the same reasons. That not all such aptitude tests have been sued already under this law does not make them safe from lawsuits as the burden of proof is on the company using them.
You cannot use the absence of lawsuits for a list of companies that you are keeping secret as evidence of absence of legal liability.
There are test prep firms for it much like you’d find for the mcat or gre.
Other info I found on it suggests that it’s easily gamed which is something real IQ tests are designed to be resistant to.
I’m not trying to ‘no true Scotsman’ this but it would be helpful if the company described their test at least as an intelligence test. They seem to describe it more as a personality test; “Discover the PEAK Performance Assessment from Procter & Gamble (P&G) tand get an insight into how your personal profile matches the company's needs.”
My specific focus on IQ tests is to be less opaque alternative to leetcode, the P&G assessment seems to be similarly and perhaps more opaque and thus, for now, confers the same protections from disparate impact lawsuits.
Here is official AON documentation (who also use P&G Switch) on Switch calling it a Deductive Logical Reasoning test.
https://assessment.aon.com/aon.assessment/media/files/factsh...
Nope, it just has to be shown to be relevant to the requirements of the job.
So you call it an "employment skills assessment," make 80% of it indistinguishable from an IQ test, and add some domain-specific questions related to the industry or the position.
P&G has done this for a long time, among other companies.
As best I can tell 'Judge Wood ruled that an older state-certification test, which was intended to measure teachers’ knowledge of the liberal arts and science, was racially discriminatory.'
Elsewhere I'm seeing "The court found that Black and Latino teachers clearly passed these tests at lower rates than white teachers. In order to prove that this wasn't illegal, the defendants had to show that the test actually demonstrated what it promised: that teachers who did well on the test would do better in their jobs."
It seems to me that the error was using the wrong test and it was the wrong test because it had disparate impact. What it does not appear to be is a case that is not about disparate impact because it instead had errors.
(I'm writing as if I think real IQ tests are a good idea, and they are not --- in fact, that's my whole point: there's a mythology that IQ tests aren't used because they're illegal, but they are not that; what they are is ineffective.)
If men get into traffic accidents more often than women, then clearly there is something wrong with the cars and car manufacturers should be sued for their discrimination?
In the Eastern bloc, agriculture was immensely held back because everybody had to follow the ideology and adjust their science and methods to "I god damned said so!" of the rulers. Seems like America is curious about following the same path.
Perhaps a proxy for a corporate IQ test would be net earning per employee which is often pretty public information.
The military branches world wide also generally hires and promotes on merit and testing. So it's nothing strange.
But consider: the hiring pipeline looks pretty much the same for all companies? Why is that? Well, they mostly use similar services to manage hiring, and those services all have similar features. But those features aren't great: they've narrowed the hiring pipeline to squeeze all candidates for all jobs down to the same sort of toothpaste that can be squeezed through the pipe.
Are the employers unreasonable? No, they are following what is considered HR best practices for attracting and vetting talent. But that process is broken, therefore the majority of companies are struggling to find talent.
The process is both homogenized across the industry and fundamentally geared towards preventing false positives - hiring the wrong person. That filters out many people that might have been hired, blowing up the number of false negatives - not hiring the right person.
Companies can't find candidates and job seekers can find jobs because the tools and processes for connecting candidates with jobs is both broken and homogeneous across the industry.
Yes, and the network effects are largely detrimental to minority groups since networks tend to be biased toward similar people.
“… detrimental to low socioeconomic status groups, within which minorities are over-represented”.
FTFY, not to be a pedant, but to highlight the fact that many white people from certain backgrounds also struggle with this, while well-connected minorities largely do not.
In fact, connected minorities essentially have super-powered network effects since the demand for minorities who can jump through all of the hiring hoops greatly exceeds the supply.
Yeah, certain minorities can benefit from programs that value them above others, but the above and beyond results you talk about come after the main connections are made. This doesn't extend to all minority groups either, like those with invisible disabilities (after all, it's mostly about how things look).
...in isolated pockets where those things exist.
Outside of those places, minorities have their slider set to something-other-than the easiest difficulty level.
As a white guy in generally good condition, my slider was slid all the way to easy. My road was still super hard - but it was easier than it was for women, brown people, etc.
In 1990 I moved to FL and ran headfirst into no connections=no work. I did the Make Your Own Luck thing. Hundreds of brief introductions led to a few relationships. A few of those became potential leads. It was a years long process. The eventual successes hinged on a few, key connections with people who saw something familiar.
If I hadn't been familiar, I wouldn't have been remembered past the introduction.
Sad Eastern European noises, aka "You are on this council, but we do not grant you the rank of master"
Seems to me that minorities (Asians) are quite over-represented in tech.
Many people are of course racist and don't count Asians as minorities...
I don't think it's right to consider networking/knowing someone to be luck, exactly. Networking is a skill and a tool, and has consistently been presented as that for my entire career. As a result, I go out of my way to try to make those connections. I go in to the office, I have lunch and drinks with coworkers, I say Hi to people I recognize from chat at large meetings, I make friendly conversations on chat and email. When someone I have made a connection like that with leaves, I say goodbye and pass them my personal email address. It is difficult, I'm not an outgoing person and I have to make conscious effort to start those connections. But it has paid off, I've received several job pings over the years, and when I was ready to move on from a job recently I took up one of those pings on the offer. It wasn't luck, it was a skill and resource I specifically put work in to cultivate over years.
Cold-applying is the absolute hardest route to getting hired. A big part of your career is doing what you can to make that your last resort when job hunting.
Cold applying should be the most fair and introduce the least bias. My entire life has been cold applying.
A) be unrealistic. A need for 8 years of experience in a framework that existed for a year is a need zero people can fulfill.
B) if your needs are so special that such an employee doesn't exist. I recall the days when companies would train people to do a job.
C) The job description is realistic but the people who you seek to attract won't do the job for that salary in that location for that company.
The ability to do self directed learning of a new skill / technology is something that is difficult to find (a lot of developers that I know don't know how to learn a new version of Java or framework and are still writing code exactly as they did when they graduated college... and they could put down "Java developer - 5 years experience" and apply for senior positions.)
There are a lot of devs who appear decent with current tech, but lack the ability to learn new tech without someone hand holding them for several months.
Of course, but companies have deadlines to hit and features to release.
It absolutely sucks on the applicant's end, but we can't spend a year helping a new hire work through burnout when most companies are in a fairly competitive market with extremely demanding customers AND much more competitive vendors.
I mean, they're allowed to be shortsighted if they want. Burn through people and spend time and money hiring replacements.
The answer is simple - don't burn out your existing employees.
Enough hiring managers and applicants have been screwed over by the other that it's become adversarial.
It is what it is.
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My two cents though to you giantg2, the mentality you have is not feasible in the private sector as neither employers nor employees have any loyalty anymore.
Either switch to a government programming job (plenty of those now and they are increasingly remote first - especially Federal) or a new industry.
Or start learning the game (how to market yourself, constantly upskilling with "hot" tech stacks, networking, etc).
That companies aren't hiring people (and complaining that there's no one to hire) is what we're seeing rather than burning through people and dealing with Net Negative Producing Programmers ( https://web.archive.org/web/20030517045551/http://www.pyxisi... ).
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Because people are leaving for greener pa$ture$ at a faster rate, and the higher compensation demanded, companies are mitigating that risk by requiring a person to come in with the expected training rather than spending months training a person who may not be able to preform at expected levels.
The other side of that is that there are a lot of places out there that are moving slow and not updating things quickly. I worked at a retail company a number of years ago where you could make $70k / year as a programmer and be able to work at a more leisurely pace. I currently work in the public sector and things are on much longer timescales.
However, if you want to work in the fast paced and highly paid sector of Big Tech startups, you may need be able to meet the needs that they have. And there its less risky to have one of the existing employees take on another task than to hire someone (and burn runway faster) that might not be able to contribute until after the runway is gone.
100% THIS.
If I wanted to fire someone I just hired, it ends up taking 2-3 quarters (1 Q realize they suck, 1-2 Qs managing them out/building a case) AND looks very bad on the hiring manager because you wasted $1.75*BASE_SALARY of company money and have nothing to show for it.
I understand some candidates can learn quickly, but as a hiring manager you learn very quickly to plan and assume for the worst case, because sadly, most people do kinda suck.
At that point your best option is to open an office in India/Israel/Eastern Europe because at least people don't complain as much, you get similar productivity (depending on what you pay), and you don't need to deal with a lot of these headaches.
The same thing happened to the CPA/Accounting industry in the 1990s.
English fluency and/or Employment Laws are a big issue as well.
Most companies have already had an Israeli or Indian subsidiary since the 1990s-2000s.
Most didn't start entering Eastern Europe until the 2010s, and much of that was in Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus thanks to EPAM and the massive Soviet Diaspora in the US.
Poland, Czechia, and Romania are known quantities, but newish (late 2000s/early 2010s), and the larger ecosystem (not just engineers but lawyers, bureaucrats, accountants, etc that you need to run a subsidiary) don't have working English fluency and in some countries are Indian bureaucracy level headaches (looking at you Bulgaria) with the added lack of an English speaking ecosystem headaches.
In all honesty, if the Russia-Ukraine War didn't start in 2014, much of the Eastern EU's tech scene would have been much weaker as it's largely powered by the UKR/RUS/BEL diaspora who emigrated the moment all 3 countries entered an economic and social tailspin.
At a previous employer 5-7 years ago, we had an office in Czechia, but most of the Engineers were Russians or Ukrainians.
But employment laws are not an issue. Last 8 years I didn't have even one employment arrangement, it was all contracts. I get it, you still have to pay some overhead for each country but you can outsource to various services that cover those quite well.
I am giggling as I am monitoring several job forums and seeing several companies pop up periodically (once a quarter I'd say) looking for the same positions... 2.5 years later.
So let's change the example. Is it really worth it to be as picky for 2.5 years? I'd wager they lost money because of that. Any senior dev can learn GWT or anything similar in much less than 6 weeks even (though proficiency is another matter).
And ability to self-learn can be somewhat gauged by a take-home assignment.
Yes as an employer.
> I'd wager they lost money because of that
No. If a role isn't filled in a quarter, that money is in most cases reverted back into the compensation pool used to either help hire a high performer, or give bonuses to the existing team.
99% of a time, an IC Engineering role will NOT make or break a company's entire financial future.
If this is one of those 1% roles, those are hired through internal networks because of how critical they are.
Even something as stable as Java has changed dramatically as it has absorbed functional and parallel concepts from Scala and Kotlin. Any dev should be hired on their ability to learn, not, or not just, on what specific tech they know now.
One of the companies in the area has a strict N year cycle for contractors. After N years all contracts end and they rehire for the next cycle.
If the technology stack changes then they hire different contractors as the projects forecast needs.
I am not saying that this is a good idea - lots of domain knowledge gets lost ever N years... but it is a solution the "we can't require contractors to learn new skills and are unable to hire for the aptitude to learn new things."
I might steal this line in the future if you don't mind. That's a decent way to explain it.
I desperately wish I could do my old career still.
A lot of engineers will tell you that companies are often expecting both too much (precise types of experience) and the wrong things (leetcode-type challenges, unnecessarily specific knowledge...), which leads them to pass over perfectly qualified candidates.
I've found it extremely rare to the point of almost being non-existent that what engineers think a company needs or should do is accurate compared to what a company needs or should do.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons : when "buyers" cannot distinguish between good and bad due to informational issues, even the good products (or in this case employees) cannot find buyers. Market failure.
It might be improvable by the relevant parties getting together and agreeing on a curriculum and exams so people only have to take a test once, for example. But I think that's a long way off.
Of course, ChatGPT makes this a lot worse since it reduces the cost of fakes on both sides: fake applications and fake job adverts.
Look at the Automotive Engineering industry in Ohio/Penn/Mich for example - a union contract engineer will earn a decent amount, but the majority of new hiring is non-union.
We live in a globalized world where location doesn't matter as much.
Automotive Unions are good at demanding fairly competitive wages for their members, but this pushed margins significantly down, leading to vendors and even manufacturers in the Automotive industry to leave union-friendly states like MI, Ohio, and Pennsylvania for those that are right-to-work (eg. South Carolina).
A major reason companies like GM and Stellaris fell behind on the EV trend was because battery technology and automation doesn't fall under the UAW, so there were constant protests and strikes against EV manufacturing (eg. the UAW strikes a couple months ago).
Meanwhile, the Teslas, Hyundais, DaimlerBenzes, and Fords pivoted manufacturing to right-to-work states like Alabama, Kentucky, and Texas.
Imo, a big reason for the PHEV push recently in the US is because of UAW negotiations to protect legacy ICE builds which can be modified into PHEVs as they use most of the same parts excluding the battery portion [0].
[0] - https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/16/business/electric-vehicle...
(i am not saying this to criticize the comment but just to point out one of the many differences between unions in the US and europe)
the problem with apprentice programs is that they lag behind the changes in the industry. when i was in school there were none for software developers for example. there are now, but the second problem is that apprentice programs are considered of lower status compared to studying at a university. think blue-collar programmers vs white-collar software developers. the pay is also different.
i don't know anything about union accreditation programs, but i can imagine that they would be targeted at the available jobs, and with unions in the US having more influence at who gets hired, they probably can make sure that an accreditation actually leads to a job.
apprentice programs traditionally also promised that you'd get hired at the company where you learned, but this is no longer certain. together with the status and pay differences it is no surprise then that the number of people starting apprentice programs is declining.
on the other side university studies are not targeted at the industry. which only adds to the perception of candidates not matching employers needs. as an employer it is difficult to tell whether a candidate with a diploma is actually capable of doing the job.
Re. universities, it was widely quoted a few years ago that more people graduated with a bachelors in photography during that year than there were practising photographers!
At least in Western Europe, the big Unions won't fight tooth and nail over mass layoffs (eg. Volvo in 2009-12 Sweden versus GM in 2009-12 US) and make it a major political issue, as the Union Leadership has larger ambitions beyond their Union.
A lot of this seems to stem from the influence National Syndicalism had on most European unions in the 20th century compared to traditional Syndicalism in the US+UK in the 20th century.
US labor law was designed to be adversarial at the firm level because that gives individual firms greater power to crush unions and prevents sectoral bargaining and sympathy strikes. One can see the vestiges of “European” labor organizing in the film industry, which has an exemption to this that was grandfathered in.
i don't see how US law wants companies to crush unions. and what is that film industry exemption about? any references?
Older craft professions had guilds. Lawyers go back still further in history and have their "bar" exams.
But in all cases it requires imposing a costly barrier to entry in exchange for not having to prove yourself over and over again to potential employers. Nobody makes a lawyer do fizzbuzz before hiring them.
Put another way, everyone has to do the fizzbuzz leetcode test just to be in the industry. But you only have to do it once.
I hate it, but I don’t see a better way that doesn’t have its own limitations. (Referral of known ex-colleagues is a good one, but that’s limited in scope and has diversity problems).
However, regardless of "who started it" in this round, ultimately, it is unquestionably a situation we can lay at the feed of industry, which abandoned decades ago the practice of actually training new hires for their positions. Sure, there are prerequisites they can expect (eg, in a programming position, you can expect some level of school learning or experience with programming in general, or particular categories of program/lanugauge), but the degree to which employers are willing to train people on the stuff they use has declined precipitously since the late 20th century. This is a well-known phenomenon, and it is substantially responsible for the modern arms race between job-seekers and prospective employers: if you know that whoever you bring on will get 3 months of well-designed training for the role they'll be filling, you don't need to spend 6 months vetting them over 10 rounds of interviews for an entry-level position.
We have some success stories, but much longer search times and far more interviews per start when we hire for experience-required roles.
As an applicant senior dev, I found a small take-home + a discussion over my solution + just chatting in general has worked best. Chill atmosphere and not going by a checklist helped a lot as well, to both sides.
The kind of developer who writes code quickly may also be the kind of developer who jumps to conclusions too quickly; this attitude is a huge problem in the medium and long term when working on any decent size project. Choosing sub-par solutions can trigger a cascade of negative consequences for the project over time. Often, it's better to have developers who are really thorough and don't move to the next stage until all reasonable possibilities have been considered.
The people who can solve problems quickly are often not the same people who can solve problems optimally.
The current system seems to favor fast-moving code monkeys with zero understanding of architecture or security.
an industry expanding into distant lands with telecommute for ever faster results with ever cheaper workers, appears to be embracing the AI interview and AI CoPilot assistant standard, to further reduce the bargaining power and individual contributions of employees for writing ordinary code
AI is useless at big-picture reasoning when coding. It's only good for short snippets. Yet companies seem to reject developers who are good at big-picture, architectural thinking.
I'm the opposite of this, but when I wanted a really high paying job, I just practiced a bunch to code quickly. That was actually my biggest hurdle, sometimes I'd understand the problem but I couldn't bang out actual working code fast enough.
Other times I'd get so nervous that I wouldn't have time to code that I'd stumble on the thinking part. Once I deliberately practiced for speed, I was much calmer in interviews.
And now I have a really high paying job. shrug. Now, it's not the best at finding outright geniuses, but making people solve slightly harder than trivial coding questions is a pretty consistent filter for people who can't code.
If you're good at coding and you can't do it, then it's just a matter of practicing a bit.
The kind who want to get an extra 100 - 200k a year in RSUs?
That's the reality of most software positions - they're hyper-specialized, and key competencies don't transfer between them. It's similar in medicine - a top cardiologist could at best be hired as a "junior" pulmonologist-in-training, even though he may be a doctor with 20 years of experience.
I have 28 years of verifiable professional software development experience on my resume.
For my last online test, I wanted to close it within 5 minutes of reading the first question even though the problem was not particularly difficult, I just knew I couldn't solve it within 40 minutes because it was a problem that I had never seen before and was very disconnected from practical scenarios. I needed 20 minutes just to absorb the question fully. Also it was very late at night and I wasn't in an optimal state of mind.
They also make you question whether you'd want to even work at a company with this sort of setup. Like, imagine a software engineering role where your boss wanted each project done within an hour, with no help from other developers or external sources, with a tech stack you're only told about the day the problem is given to you. Would anyone really consider that a good (or even tolerable) working environment?
employers can simply hire based on past projects
It really is about testing how much you prepared for the interview and not the job.
Microsoft on the other hand, did exactly what you said, they just pulled the classics, which I think is less helpful. I guess it filters on people who have a moderately good memory and are willing to study.
I'm curious about the dynamics of this. If leetcoding or requiring some specific knowledge is too much for candidates, those employers will not be able to find enough talent, so they will be forced to lower their standards and the mismatch should be gone, right? Case in point, I'd venture to guess that no more than 10% of the tech workers truly understand AI or stats or machine learning or basic college-level maths, yet magically millions of ML engineers or data scientists have popped up in the past few years just because the market had such high demand.
I'd revisit any train of thought that conflates access to capital with wisdom or intelligence. If someone invents a money printer then everything they do afterwards will be seen in a post hoc ergo propter hoc light as long as the original money printer still works.
For example, your statement assumes feedback loops I see scant evidence for in real life.
In practice, most corporations seem quite happy to collectively hand-wring over how they can't find new talent, squeeze everything they can out of the talent they currently have, and direct their existing personnel at direct profit-earners while letting systems gradually fall apart due to lack of maintenance.
I’m paid fairly well, but not this much, so I think the threshold is a bit higher than this.
Another cause of structural unemployment is workforces aging into retirement, and again there's stacks of money to be made filling this gap.
This applies to Cobol developers. There are a ton of "too big to fail or rewrite" applications written in Cobol, particularly in finance. The people who wrote them are retiring. Finance is generally a great industry to have your hand in the pockets of anyway. A friend of mine has been doing this since shortly after he graduated college in 2010. He was able to start freelancing a lot earlier than I was, and his billing rate in 2012 was something like $125/hour (only slightly less than my current billing rate). Last time I talked to him he was billing $300/hour and had a 7 month backlog of work. I'm not good at keeping up with people, so we haven't talked in a few years, but it would not surprise me if he's billing $350/hour now.
I've largely prioritized time/freedom over stability/money in recent years, but if I ever had a kid and needed stability/money again, I'd be transitioning toward that.
This sounds like a gross exaggeration. Unless they did something like start a company. For an IC at least, even at FAANG it would be bit crazy to start at more than ~$400k. If a project lead, then its obviously more and you can make bank as you move up the ladder.
It is a paradox, because it is a market where people basically only do one salaried job at a time, meaning they have a fixed 40-60 hours to sell and it shouldn't take long to sell it if they want to move on to another job. (Here "selling" means you've been hired for your next job, since you just took the 40 hours you had available every week starting next month and sold it for money.)
Within reason, people can be retrained to adjacent jobs or basically could do exactly what an employer wants within a low number of weeks. People know what kind of jobs they're capable of or it can be tested for quickly.
Instead there are candidates who spend a year both training themselves and applying for jobs unsuccessfully, while employers spend MORE than the same amount of time on that, if you add up the amount of time recruiters are putting in on behalf of employers and HR puts in and employers put into interviews. It is a market failure for people to want to work, for employers to want to hire them, for them to be able to do the work, but for them not to actually be doing the work. It would be kind of like if people were desperate for any of either tomatoes, carrots, wheat, rice, potatoes, or really anything, whatever they get is fine for them since they can look up recipes for that and make it with a tiny investment of time (this is the demand side), so they are putting in ads for "Want any of: rice, carrots, wheat, potatoes, tomatoes" and willing to pay for it! Just put up a hundred ads, a hundred unfilled jobs. On the supply side meanwhile you have a farmer who owns all the necessary land (hours in the day) and has ALL the equipment (a computer, Internet, transportation, clothes, anything anyone needs to start working) and is really willing to produce anything and can do so on that arable land! There are no capital requirements. Great. So we have the demand side taken care of, people want quite a few different types of food and supply side taken care of, the farmer is willing to farm just about anything. But, for some reason, what ends up happening isn't that the fields are filled, it's that there are farmers spending all day every day selling and nobody is buying. And instead of saying, here try this sample, and it's fine, you have a weird request for "What exactly had grown on these fields since the beginning of time" (this is called a resume) and then you have buyers inundated with answers to their bizarre requests for "what has grown on these fields since the beginning of time" but the buyers still aren't getting the food and the fields are empty, the farmers are trying unsuccessfully to sell all day and the buyers are somehow inundated with sales pitches but aren't actually buying anything, while burning time on putting up advertisements of all the food they want to buy.
Why is this happening? How can people not be working but want to work, when they can train into being productive workers within a few weeks and are more than willing to do so?
It would be like if shoppers spent days at a time at farmer's markets going from stand to stand and buying nothing, and farmers spent days at a time standing at the farmer's market with buyer after buyer asking them questions about the history of their land and not buying any damn potatoes. It's a potato lady you want it or not? If not step aside so someone who actually wants it can see it.
p.s. half of the farmers are asking other farmers to endorse them on linkedin. Buyers ignore this noise completely.
The job market is highly dysfunctional.
Any study on why there would be this kind of mismatch in the tech industry? I'd imagine that tech industry is the most transparently competitive and least regulated sector so there should be a reasonable balance between the supply of skills and the demand. In addition, there are so much resource that teaches people all kinds of tech skills, so people should be able to move from one skill set to another if really needed.
Let's say that we need to solve a new problem. The shop language is Scala. Who can learn how to program in Scala? Can the boot camp who learned how to do NodeJS be trained in Scala? If so, how long will it take? If we spend a year to get them to being an acceptable Scala dev, will they get a new job immediately? If we are paying a "we are training you low rates" can we get any applicants? If we are paying a "we assume you to be a skilled Scala dev in a year and we expect to get 2-3 years of productive work beyond training" rate and they leave immediately after getting them sufficiently trained... what then?
As many developers see themselves as a "Java developer" or "React front end developer" rather than a software engineer, the mismatch is akin to asking "why can't we get plumbers to do electrical work?" The people who are Java developers or React front end developers are skilled in the trade rather than as a knowledge worker in software engineering.
There are incumbents who are not able (don't have the skill scaffolding to support a broader understanding) or are unwilling to spend time to continue to be able to work or are a "follow instructions".
I've quipped that...
In this simplified model, I know a lot of junior devs (even with a decade of experience) who for whatever reason are unable to partition their software development tasks themselves to be able to be given a task to complete. Likewise, I know a number of devs who can be given tasks but if you give a broader "this is a problem that the organization needs to solve" are hopelessly lost and apply and reapply the patterns that they have learned to try to make the problem fit into a solution they know.I do not believe that everyone has the skills / aptitude to move from one to the next.
Those that do will have the ability to navigate the new market. Those that lack the ability to move up will eventually be overtaken either by younger (cheaper) workers, or improving automation.
I know someone who was laid off from an AI group at a large chipmaker last year- his group was eliminated. But because he wasn't doing LLMs, he was doing CNNs for vision, it took him about a year to find a new gig teaching Machine Learning classes - not his preferred gig or level of pay. He could easily have transitioned from CNNs to LLMs but the algorithms sorting the resumes didn't seem to think so.
Personally, I've worked on optimizing code to make machine learning algorithms run faster/more efficient - also compiler/LLVM work. When I was laid off over a year ago I'd apply for things and it was mostly crickets - had a few interviews which often ended up in ghosting. I gave up looking and am working on a startup with some other who've found themselves in a similar situation - no pay at this point, only equity.
Anyway, I think your premise is flawed: AI/ML skills are in demand, but even people with those skills are having a hard time getting back into the industry. Maybe the companies doing AI/ML are spending so much money on GPUs now that they can't actually afford to hire people?
People love to poke fun at it, but employers are not trying to make it bad. It's just a hard problem.
Also I bet there are ESL business owners who have an English-first speaking friend review their job listings, but maybe not their random forum comments.
You’re complaining about someone’s “typography” on a forum that doesn’t really allow a lot of font and layout flexibility.
Or did you mean typographical?
The questions thrown at me are trivia, if I knew the answer, or not, it doesn't mean anything. People are looking for weird specifics for things that ... really don't need it. The job inevitably doesn't even rely on those specifics.
I'll learn whatever anyone wants, I like doing that ... no honestly I do.
Can I just talk to the folks I'll potentially be working with / for right away? No? Why?
Looking for a job should be fun with all the possibilities, and yet it's a bureaucratic, unprofessional, and opaque nightmare. I don't understand what is going on.
Not many do. Especially those doing the hiring. The thing is, there isn't much business value in making it a core competency, so employers just wing it mostly based on copying what they see someone else do, without any attempt to measure effectiveness, combined with plain old hope and prayer. The result is what you have witnessed.
I don't hear from those kind of recruiters anymore. I just get recruiting spam. Come to think of it talking to recruiters now seems about as honest, opaque, and enjoyable as going into my email spam folder...
If we take that as a given, and I don't disagree with you, what happens? The hiring pipeline becomes optimized to prevent unqualified people from getting through the process. It's focused on reducing false positives: hiring the wrong person. As a side effect, it eliminates more people who might be hired before they get far. In other words, the number of false negatives is not controlled.
In short, the way the filter works is broken. Good candidates never get to the offer stage. They are incorrectly filtered out by a process optimized for filtering, not discovering.
This isn’t a single round N-choose-1 game; the unqualified candidates don’t dematerialize, but rather keep applying and may even engage with automation tools to apply to hundreds of roles every day. So, they become wildly over-represented in the applicant pool for any given role.
Yeah, certain hard skills help. I don't want to teach you excel or basic computer skills.
But we work in data analytics/marketing and my coworkers consist of people like a theater major, an anthropologist, someone that previously negotiated govt contracts for Lockheed, a sommelier, and more. Yeah, we hire mostly at entry level, but our team is highly capable because they were hired based on curiosity, critical thinking skills, etc and taught by the people who possess hard skills
There are plenty of applicants which are simply awful and you do not have time to interview all of them.
I am not impressed by the people hiring but I also understand why their task is hard.
Agreed. I do work with some folks who are all "OMG I have to work with this archaic mess." way too often. And I don't disagree with them, but man... not that hard to learn it and code your way out of it. But no they just complain.
Hard to really find out who REALLY has the interest in fighting through the unexpected / rough spots.
You also get a feel for the history of various things too.
I work with a big old Coldfusion system at times. Server side rendering was a thing in the past too ;)
Thankfully a somewhat distant inside connection was achieved, who managed to suggest “maybe that wasn’t actually the correct decision” and I got the chance to continue with the process. It’s all been good since then.
I sure do have an internal chuckle every time I have to use that particular tool… and still have to look up the options. :-)
But they also did give me what I thought was quite a good test, which was talking through some working code and suggesting how it could be improved.
I'm sure in the ML sector right now, it's hell. Seven figure salaries are going to get some optimistic over-reachers desperate to try and get in the door and BS their way through the first few months.
My own experience: I had a CEO and board member of the startup I was CTO'ing push a dev my way. "Brilliant", they said, "just really great attitude, check them out see if we can get them hired, fast". I was excited, and keen to meet them. Turns out their way to code was to find a library (this was a Ruby shop, so technically a gem), that did the thing needed, bolt it in using example code and ship it. "OK", I said, "but we're a startup trying to solve an optimisation problem in the logistics space. There is no gem. We're going to have to be smart and solve this ourselves by reading papers and experimenting and trying things out. How would you do that?". And I kid you not, the exact response was "If there isn't a gem, I don't think it's doable, or maybe we should wait until it's done".
When I told my CEO and board member that this great, exciting prospect they found couldn't code, they refused to believe me until I spelled it out really carefully: if we hired them, we'd have to train them to solve problems in code. Like, give them CS50 or something. Is that right for a senior engineer as 4th or 5th hire in a startup?
So now I ask some trivia for engineer roles. I dress it up a bit so as not to be patronising, but I kind of want to have a conversation about how they code, what they do, what their method and see if it rings true. On a lot of phone screens, it still just doesn't tally up.
[1] This is 2007, but I see no evidence of it having really changed much, TBH: https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/
By reading papers and experimenting and trying things out? Throw in a few books for good measure?
Why are you answering the question you are asking yourself?
You might not understand how low the bar is here. If I ask 100 applicants to write a working function to calculate E=mc^2 for different values of m, 30+ just won't know where to start.
So when I ask how we might solve a problem I am not asking for the abstract 10000 foot view. I'm checking they can write simple code. Filters out a huge number of people, unfortunately.
Yikes. But I have also known many people with this mindset (and it appears to be workable for a certain subset of the tech industry)
>but I kind of want to have a conversation about how they code, what they do, what their method and see if it rings true.
I think these are great ideas. What kinds of things were you asking in your interviews?
My favourite answer was a guy who replied "I've been working recently on some OpenGPL stuff in Common Lisp for the X window protocol". That was an interesting chat, and I was happy when he accepted the offer I made at the end of it.
Fortunately they gave me the opportunity to explain that it was a well-known interview question dating back to 2007 (with that blog post as evidence), and that I had previously asked this question in interviews, so I basically had the answer memorized. (I think the fact that I had correct, unique answers for the other questions helped me also.)
I've hired a few people for a small company and been a recruiter/screener/hiring manager. It's _incredibly_ time consuming, and it's one of the many things on my to-do list.
https://blog.readme.com/designing-a-candidate-focused-interv...
The trouble is that _everyone_ will say this during an interview, but few have the ability or interest to _actually_ learn on the job.
How to tell the difference?
Probably because those people are writing code and don't want to spend more than a couple hours a week interviewing folks.
If a role gets 500 applications in a week, it seems reasonable that there will be some sort of filter before candidates start talking with SWEs whose time is very expensive (compared with that of HR or recruiters). Whether that filter is an HR person doing a phone call, a take home assignment, or an automated code test, all methods are vehemently hated on HN.
I hate job hunting just like everyone else, but I'm also on the other side of it and kind of understand why things are the way they are. It's not a "cargo cult" or a conspiracy; it's just companies trying to balance a lot of different concerns.
No! As many applicants as possible should be rejected before we start interrupting these people's days.
You might be a great candidate but what about the other 10 doofuses who aren't? Do they all get to talk to the folks they'll potentially be working with/for right away?
I see doofuses hired regardless.
Whether you agree w/ the filtering or not, you want people who you aren't willing to hire (and who won't be willing to work for you) to be removed from the process as quickly and cheaply as reasonably possible.
This is why phone screens with a single person who has a general idea of what to look for exist. The key is that this person receives feedback on future interviews and their decisions and can make adjustments to exclude/include the right people.
My belief on this is that if that person isn't being told, "You let a bad one through" occasionally, they're being too strict on filtering, for example. But you don't want to hear that too often.
Think about somebody rejecting a job offer.
In most cases, many hours of people-time will be invested and wasted when this happens. So look at why was it wasted? Was salary, a company policy, benefits, or something similar a dealbreaker? If so, start bring that thing up earlier on – either in that first phone screen or ideally in an email before the first phone screen.
Of course, you're not always going to get a clear answer so this is where instinct and experimentation come into play. This is also why it pays to have a single person specialize in the phone screens – they will get many reps and opportunities to develop that intuition.
The coding tests are specifically designed to hire only recent graduates of computer science. My education was electronics engineering so specifically did not have much "algorithm specific" training (too bad hiring managers have no idea how to change their expectations based on that)
I usually just get underhired in technician and production roles and end up running the entire IT/technical/engineering of small companies in a couple years.No interviewer has ever showed interest in this either.
Static job slots are also a problem, though. It would be wonderful to see companies hire for a vector/trajectory at the company, but that comes with its own issues if the employee doesn't change as well as hoped.
I have a lot of experience and job hop too, I just never put the 3 month stints on my resume and keep the 2+ year engagements on it
Its an adaptation. I don’t think avoiding juniors helps you
Companies are only hiring people that perfectly fit their criteria. No more budget for junior devs and people that needs any kind of training.
Most companies keep roles open but don't hire anyone, because typically they have recruiters in house and need to give them something to do.
I know this based on mine and other friends that are execs in big companies. It has never been that bad for new grads.
Even before software engineering was hyped and paid well, you could expect a job once you graduate, this is no longer the case as so many people have chosen to study CS because of $. And now the big employers aren't hiring that much.
Lots of people that would instead study another STEM subject picked up CS because of salaries and hype, now are without a job and could be instead an electrical engineer or any other profession that has a real career.
Medium touch hiring (Hired dot com / trilobyte) doesn't scale like recruiting firms tend not to scale well, so there's good small/medium business there, but technology can't fix the human incentive problems so they end up succumbing to the same issues and the problem comes back.
The volume of cheating, embellishment, and massive shotgun spray-n-pray imposed by shrewd brokers/job-seekers on hiring teams at nearly every company is overwhelming. Things are moving so fast in the industry that everyone's having a hard time understanding what the other wants to see and hear. And recruiters have so little time to study resumes because of the sheer volume that they are relying on crude heuristics, mainly buzzword lookups, that only seem to benefit the well-established (i.e., those most likely already to have jobs!).
The way I did it was, over the years I built a curated list of headhunters that I respected. They weren't just low-effort people - they really knew what they were doing. When I was ready for a new job, I broke out the list. Half of the names on it weren't valid any more, but one of the ones that was came through for me.
I'm not sure that scales, though...
I think the following factors contributed to my long unemployment:
(1) At first, lousy market for remote jobs. Big layoffs from major tech companies made it an employer's market.
(2) Rusty interview skills. I wasn't at all ready for Leetcode-type tests, and I hadn't realized that I suck at live coding tests in general. Practice helped somewhat.
(3) Delays from testing the market to determine the new pay rate for my skillset. I.e., for a while I didn't apply to any jobs that paid well below my previous comp.
(4) Indecision about my technical focus area. I was doing DL compilers, which didn't really excite me. I wanted to break into traditional compilers. But I also worked on other skills to apply to specific job openings I'd found. In retrospect, I'd have been more successful just picking one focus area and going deep on learning just that.
I'm also a little over 50, so maybe there was some ageism at play, I don't know.
It's one thing that we senior (in both senses of the word!) developers should definitely keep in mind about the job market, and indeed I value stability a lot more because of this. The equivalent position that we were hired / promoted into a while back might very well immediately weed us out in 2024 because the interview standards have changed!
Until this general expectation is restored in "western civilization", you'll need to apply ideological filters to where you seek employees, and where you are willing to work as an employee.
Some in society may find this ... undesirable. However, one may ask whether these are the same people who wish to enjoy the benefits of High Trust environments, without the corresponding obligations.
I'd make the argument that authoritarian civilization work was a low-trust environment.. i.e. most professionals in post-communist countries ended with a very stingy untrustworthy personality due to the constraints and incentives of a highly bureaucratic environment with non-genuine pretentious loyalty.
What I am finding of late is most people are woefully under prepared and under skilled.
In the other hand everybody has a degree and wants six figures because of it.
The job market is tight, but not fucked. When tight it does not have the stomach to employee warm bodies.
The fix is lowerred expectations from job seekers and the long term fix is schools need to become hard again and stop being a product.
We need weed out classes, the goal is not to graduate as many as we can, it’s to educate. Maybe if they hard class was hard, it was hard for a reason, and dumbing it down so people don’t drop the class is only doing them a disservice when it comes to the work force which will demand results, not attendance.
Employers have already shifted enough of their job training costs onto universities and their unwitting students. The free ride is over.
> Employers have already shifted enough of their job training costs onto universities and their unwitting students. The free ride is over.
I'm fine with this model, but will applicants be interested in earning a bit above minimum wage for 3 years as we train them from scratch?
This is the model that the Indian and Chinese tech industry uses - hire everyone, pay them a pittance, make them work insane hours, and the ones who survive and build relevant skills graduating to European level salaries in Asia.
The more valid the cert program is as a hiring signal, the more it will restrict the quantity of labor supply, and employers don't want this; they want to churn and burn through a pile of young people--or outsource--and then throw them away when their upkeep gets too expensive.
I am an employer and have funded employers. That is a VERY WARPED view of hiring and I hope to god you never ever come near to getting a promotion to EM.
> I think certification institutions--from universities to bootcamps--have found that it's more profitable to focus on quantity over quality
That's BS. There's a reason employers still subconsciously discriminate based on the quality of program you graduated from.
The CS curriculum at Cal beats the CS curriculum at CSU East Bay in almost every single way, and it isn't because of the content alone but also the broad education provided.
We don't need code monkeys (and if you are a code monkey, you job is absolutely going to be automated or outsourced in the next 3-5 years), we need people who deep down understand or can think critically about a specific domain (technical or business).
I don't care if you can code in Cobol or NodeJS - can you deliver an MVP in a quarter, and then have the ability to pivot that MVP to meet changing customer or product demands? Can you architect services to both be cost efficient AND resource efficient?
We pay people in the tech industry good money to THINK. Critical Thinking is the actual blocker, and this is the primary reason why Leetcode and Whiteboard interviews are so popular.
At the end of the day, a Leetcode medium and Whiteboard interview is a puzzle, and if you can solve puzzles, you can think critically about architecture, product decisions, etc.
It’s so tiring to me people with masters in CS who can’t fizzbuzz or for that matter do basic programming even more simple.
Now days if too many people fail a class or get a bad grade, the students rally and write notes about how they are so smart and the teacher sucked. The. They grade on a curve and get a degree that is suitable for toilet paper.
Most jobs don’t require a degree and we should stop acting like they do.
Which pretty much confirms my point. Stop complaining, stop blaming schools, and start paying more.
This sounds like a joke, and it is. But this is actually what happens in practice (with less rigorous random disposal).
In my admittedly limited experience going to meetups, I found that it was a good place to chat with people without major pressure of moving forward. And the cocktail party esque vibe of the meetups I have been to further enhance that idea?
I just need someone who can learn stuff and has shown technical competence at some point in their career (even new grads). It's definitely harder as a new grad because hey, you have no experience. But show me how you've done something technical in school or an internship. Or have gone above and beyond in a class project. For my more experienced roles, I need to see some passion for what you're doing in addition to knowing what you're talking about. I don't do whiteboards or coding interviews. I don't ask those stupid interview questions either. I don't need the best of the best of the best. But I have been pretty successful for what I've been looking for and the quality of the coworkers I've been a part of hiring has been great from my perspective.
This is what I optimize for as well, and it's amazing how much pushback I get from others on this. I've been hiring software engineers and other roles for over 10 years, and not once did I ever lament that someone "just didn't have enough Python experience."
That doesn't mean that there aren't cases where zero domain knowledge would be a huge detriment, or that having such knowledge wouldn't be a positive. However, there is a tendency to overindex on "requirements" that are really "nice to haves"
It’s unrealistic. But I don’t see the paradox (companies say they “can’t find talent “ but what they mean is that they can’t find top talent according to some dubious tests).
On top of that, if you have years of experience in, let’s say Go or Python, but the company is only looking for Java or Kotlin devs, you’re out of the question. Ridiculous.
Anyone who can pass a drug test can likely go get a $20/hour job at McDonalds/Walmart/Target/Home Depot this afternoon and you're offering new college grad engineering positions paying $50k? Yeah, that is why you're having trouble hiring. You're not going to get the best of the best for a small increase in pay over the bare minimum.
I have yet to find more than 2 or 3 recruiters who actually know the space that they're working in, don't make unrealistic demands, and have basic empathy for the job seeker.
As an example of this, I was messaged by a recruiter last week asking if I was interested in a potential position, and when I asked him about the position, he asked if I was willing to send over not only my portfolio (I'm a UX designer), but also do some free work on top of that. Nothing about the actual responsibilities, nothing about location, nothing about salary. I responded to him, asked a few questions of my own, and he ghosted me.
I don't care how many technically aligned recruiters you've read articles from over the years, the simple fact of the matter is that the people who are at the top of the leaderboards at these companies couldn't give two shits about the technology. Their job is to land asses in seats, and they are ultimately in a vastly better position if they focus and refine their talents on selling and networking as opposed to learning about the problem domain. I still keep in touch with people from my recruiting days, and the high school dropout with 3 years experience when I joined a company is still a senior manager over the Cornell grad. They both make excellent money, but the dropout is easily the better salesperson.
When you've interviewed enough people, you can sniff out the bullshit artists, and virtually all decent to great candidates have a certain cadence to how they describe their roles and responsibilities regardless of the tech stack. I don't need to know the ins and outs of SAP AR and Treasury, I just need to know that the candidate has a consistent work history, is up to date, and can confidently describe their work. Client managers are more likely to go back to recruiters who can consistently put candidates in front of them, which is yet another reason why the numbers / networking game is more important.
I don’t have anything like that now, and I’m not sure how to get it back again, because all the local talent agencies I used to work with are no longer operating.
What do you mean by too few? I'd say that zero is too few, but one quality candidate might be perfect, because then the hiring process can go very fast. There's no reason why you couldn't or shouldn't hire the first quality person you find.
In my opinion, the biggest problems with job postings are:
1) No salary/compensation listed, which can end up wasting everyone's time when there's a mismatch in expectations. "Competetive salary" is BS and often a lie. (This might also be why you're getting fewer quality applicants than desired.)
2) The posting focuses too much or even exclusively on arbitrary "qualifications" that the employer mistakenly believes are necessary but ends up relaxing anyway in many cases. Instead, the posting should describe in as much detail as possible the actual job, what the employee is to do, and then the qualifications will implicitly follow from that.
Some will find a job before they finish you interview process.
Some will change their mind.
Some will have a change on personal circumstances.
Some (many?) will ask for more than you can offer.
To hire one good person, you usually need many to apply.
"one quality candidate might be perfect, because then the hiring process can go very fast"
> Some (many?) will ask for more than you can offer.
This seems to ignore my point 1 about listing salary/compensation on the job posting.
But that's the employer's own fault. I was offering suggestions to employers.
> And in most cases, you can't revamp the whole hiring process
In most cases, they should revamp their whole hiring process. The point of this HN submission is that employers can't find employees, and that's also the point of my original comment. "We can't change anything about hiring" is why you can't find employees. It's a poor excuse.
The more this happens the greater the chances your interview process is too long.
A fast interview process has many many benefits.
It sounds like a different company was able to find and hire talent faster, to their benefit. So the solution is to be more like them.
Not if your interview process allows for a good candidate to get an offer in a reasonable time frame. If so, then rare. You could make an offer on spot, for example.
>Some will change their mind.
Not if your interview process allows for a good candidate to get an offer in a reasonable time frame. If so, then rare. You sign a contract on the spot for example.
>Some will have a change on personal circumstances.
Not if your interview process allows for a good candidate to get an offer in a reasonable time frame. If so, then rare.
These first three are all the same. People will bail out if you're too slow with your dumb hiring processes. Don't be slow and the problem mostly goes away.
>Some (many?) will ask for more than you can offer.
Not if you post your salary bands with your job openings like any decent company would do.
>To hire one good person, you usually need many to apply.
Nah, you need a couple of decent candidates to apply, a first choice and a fallback if you want to worry about those rare case of someone changing their mind. If your salaries are public and your process is efficient, you need only one good candidate, maybe two for backup and variety outside of core competency.