Entry Level Positions – 3 Years Experience | Hacker News Reader

Entry Level Positions – 3 Years Experience

medium.com

55 pointsthindjinn52 comments

Entry level requiring 3 years experience is code for Experienced but willing to take an entry level salary. Full stack on half comp.

I remember when the last tech bubble popped, in my area there were literally no entry level development positions -- 3-5 years minimum experience required or no call back. This percolated up the experience tree to the top. You'd see job postings asking for more years experience with a certain technology than that technology had even existed.

I actually ended up changing careers into something else it was so bad and finally in the last few years moving back in to pure tech work.

From the hiring side, I understand why the plethora of job descriptions: companies are usually forming job openings where they're having current pain. They take the skillset of the team they have, look at what's missing, shove a title on top of those things and post it out in the world. Quite often they don't really know what they want so all kinds of craziness ends up in the posting.

> Quite often they don't really know what they want so all kinds of craziness ends up in the posting.

That sounds like one of the answers to the question: "How do I know if the company I am applying to is a good fit?"

People need to stop reading 3 years of professional experience as 3 years of technical experience. So long as you've been in the work world for 3 years already, doing contracts or whatever, then you have 3 years of experience. You can have 3 years at McDonalds.

Also, a college grad should not shy away from applying to such positions. If a job appeals to you, you should apply and let them tell you you don't qualify.

Mostly that clause is added to weed away wannabes.

>Mostly that clause is added to weed away wannabes.

All applicants to a job are by definition "wannabe" holders of that job.

You don't seem to be understanding.

Businesses generally get dozens to hundreds of applications for each job posting. These applicants largely range from completely unqualified to way overqualified. The main thing you're looking at when you read a job posting is 'spray-and-pray' ways of cutting down on the noise.

If you can see through the filters, then you can start to tailor your applications to fit exactly what they're looking for. It's not an exact science, but paying a little attention can cut your miss rate by orders of magnitude.

Would it be accurate, then, that if you don't see a massive laundry list of skills that the employer in question is having trouble finding people to fill the position?

I wouldn't conclude that. There's a reason why everything on a posting was put there. There's not necessarily a reason why they would leave certain things off.

> Businesses generally get dozens to hundreds of applications for each job posting.

Is it your typical experience as a hiring manager?

My estimate is that on average, number of applications is about 10 per job posting.

Occasionally number of applications could go above 100, but usually it is just a few.

Especially if job posting is for skilled professionals, such as programmers.

That is several orders of magnitude off for engineer positions at Bay Area tech companies with name recognition. At my last employer the interview rate was about 1%. Obviously some channels (like referral) had far better hit rates than others (like applications off the website).

You can have 3 years at McDonalds.

No, that's clearly not what it means.

"3+ years experience" always means "3+ years of relevant experience."

Mostly that clause is added to weed away wannabes.

No. It's specifically there to weed out anyone with 2.99726 years experience of, also. In other words, it's just nonsense filler.

In more direct terms, what it's really trying to say is:

"Shit, the bossman wants me to crank out 10 position reqs before the 4p meeting. But I'm so hungry I can't think straight, and all the good bagels in the kitchen have been taken... What am I gonna say... I know, lemme just mouse-grab from this other startup's jobsite over here..."

This attitude is counter-productive and will lead to only being able to get jobs precisely like the ones you describe, where you're over-worked and underpaid.

Work is what you make of it. If you want to hate work, that thing you have to spend 40+ hours of your week doing, then nobody is going to stop you.

One can make work into something that adds to your life instead of takes away from it. If you can figure out how to do this then you'll find that everything about your life changes utterly for the better.

Others have said this, but what they mean is that the pay will be poor regardless of the qualifications requested.

The point is that employers are now very comfortable with paying experienced people poorly; this works well to serve their interests as it keeps wages depressed, saving costs. The trick is getting the job-seekers to be comfortable with being undervalued-- and so, job seekers are told implicitly that they are not valuable (they don't have enough experience to get an entry level job or that the experience they already have doesn't take them above entry level), in the hopes that they start to believe the putdowns and settle for a weak opportunity. This malice hurts everyone except employers; recent grads are "too inexperienced" to get their first job, and people who are just finishing up their first or even second job are most likely forced to take another job at the same level before they can move up.

I have applied to these mid-level (yet advertised as entry level) jobs and was eminently qualified for a few, resulting in interviews. The cherry on top is that the interviewers tried to imply that I was unqualified. To reiterate, the employers attempted to minimize the experience I had even though it was enough to get the interview. I am sure that this regrettable behavior was posturing designed to somehow result in lower wages paid out. This has happened to me multiple times!

The career ladder is being pulled up behind the people who made it to the middle level first. Of course, this is just another damned instance of eating the young to feed the old.

This is so relevant to me. Mainly the years of experience part.

I've always been a technical minded person who dabbles in coding for side projects. I've come to a point in my career where I want my side work, coding (web to be specific), to actually be my professional career.

I'm willing to take a significant pay cut to do so and I've been searching Indeed, LinkedIn, and Angel for weeks now.

For the record I am in Boston. Not only are junior postings so rare, but when I do find them, they are as this article describes: "2-3 years+ professional experience and proficient in at least one of the following".

I get Boston is wildly competitive now, so do I accept this as the junior/entry expectations? So I'll never be qualified unless I go to a bootcamp? Do I just grind and start my own business or large portfolio on the side?

Or is there agreement that these junior requirements are too aggressive in this space?

Well first, have you actually applied to any of the places that asked for that experience? A lot of places will settle for far less than their advert asks. Second, have you emphasised your side-projects sufficiently? If you sell them properly, those count as professional experience.

I can echo this. Speaking as someone who has sat on the hiring side a fair bit, years of experience is almost always a guideline and/or set based on HR requirements if it's a large company ("Oh, you are looking to hire an X? That requires Y years of experience").

The job description is to fill a role. It's loosely what the hiring manager's understanding of what it will take to fill that role would require. A compelling case for why you have what it takes to fill the role, regardless of what the hiring manager thought it would take, will still be considered. A curious mind, someone self motivated and learning about technology on their own, and showing that they've done things with it, who establishes a good rapport when interviewing, is -more- desirable, to me at least, than someone who just checks off the qualifications, at least for entry level.

My team actually recently hired someone who doesn't have a CS degree, and who never did any development, but who had done solutions contracting, configuring and patching together off the shelf solutions to meet customer needs. That is, has a track record of figuring out and solving problems, with technology, with minimal code (scripts to tie things together, that sort of thing). It was just above entry level, and with the expectation that some training and mentoring would need to happen, but everyone on the team felt this person would be a positive

Then the bomb dropped. Every entry level position I looked at required 3+ years of experience;

It's amazing how many job ads contain statements in plain, black-and-white English that make no sense whatsoever, either in the real world or just in terms of logical self-consistency. Another one of my favorites is:

Minimum of 3-5 years ...

Why not just say "Minimum of 3 years"? Does the person who wrote this really not understand that they're saying?

One has to wonder.

There are 2 subplots this article has yet to unfold, which will only be revealed on the other side of the hiring process, after landing a seemingly desirable job.

  1. HR's fortifications, subversive booby traps and 
     no-mans-land designed to repel applications by 
     way of sinister salary negotiations, that leave
     behind a simmering animosity even after getting 
     hired. 

  2. On the other side of the wall, all of your co-
     workers turn out to be fantastically retarded, 
     including your own boss and boss' bosses, largely 
     due to HR's low-ball tactics, leaving you with 
     the startling realization that the job description
     and hiring interrogation (ahem! interview) was 
     all smoke and mirrors.

This is so on point. After graduating college I found myself in the "loser" layer surrounded by the "clueless." The org was so big I didn't even get to see the "sociopaths" at the top. 2 years of putting in the "bare minimum" I quit only to find the same structure in my new job. I'm now planning my second exit this time hoping to find a lower paying but cushier job were I can serve my 8 hour daily sentence without having to talk to anyone and in a real office probably browsing HN all day (I already have a couple of apps out there).

I've also been working on FIRE, entrepreneurship and hobbies that could provide income. But the most important thing and what I wish I knew when I was starting my adult life is that obtaining true happiness from a career is bullshit. I now enjoy spending my time with family and on my own interests. I just wish I had more of that time.

I recently saw a position open that required 5 years Laravel experience.

It hasn't even been available for 5 years.

Haha. Comical.

On the other hand, it's nice of them to provide evidence of their unrealistic expectations right in the ad. Now you know not to waste any time with them!

Ah yes, in the biotech space I see this same problem (HR people outside of their narrow expertise) with CRISPR.

Everyone wants years of experience with CRISPR. Never mind that it's brand new.

I am a big fan of finding work through referrals, though that obviously doesn't work for the initial position.

An alternative I'd consider is the pain letter and addressing hiring managers directly, as outlined here: http://www.humanworkplace.com/whats-pain-letter/

I know when I was hiring junior folks (for a small company), I would have been blown away by the larger perspective a pain letter indicates.

Referrals DO work for the initial position. I'm a developer and spend my entire day staring at a screen. When I was on the job hunt, I barely sat in front of my screen. Referrals come from meeting people, whether or not it's from prior work or just a good random conversation.

I've always read requirements for tech jobs to be a laundry list of things that are "nice to haves". Read "requirements" as "skills we're interested in," even if they have an explicit section for bonus talents.

This is especially true for junior and/or entry level roles. Every place I've seen just has an eternally published "opening" on theirs careers section. They keep it there so that when they finally decide that they're ready to hire, they'll have a ready-made pool to of résumés from which to draw.

If you're not experienced enough, you'll be able to tell from a specific, well written job description. If it's full of buzz words and meaningless fluff, they're not looking for someone specific and you should apply.

I think the commonality of "three years experience" is probably more a function of the author searching for jobs in the design side of industry. The fact that portfolio requirements come as a shock and are seen as a burden suggests unfamiliarity with design culture. Filtering people based on their commitment or non-commitment to aesthetics is legitimate here...and design aesthetics aren't about resolution.

Anyway, the portfolio requirement is meant to balance the experience requirement.

Man, some of you kids should have been around in the late 1990's bubble.

"Wow, you can spell 'internet' without sticking an A in there? Here is a job!"

Didn't go so well for those people when it burst.

But that's nothing to say of the surrounding jobs. I was in this company that blew up to something like a 3:1 ratio of sales/marketing to developers. Eek!

Company parties had live bands and free booze, with unlimited repeats (no two-drink-vouchers bullshit).

a 3:1 ratio of sales/marketing to developers isn't at all unusual.

>"Wow, you can spell 'internet' without sticking an A in there? Here is a job!"

We went on to "Wow, you can write javascript without having any formal CS education or any regards concerning optimization? Here is a job!". Not sure it's better.

I guess you've never built a product for a business then? Someone who can write Javascript and deliver features that work (even if inefficient) is actually providing significant value to the company. Customers pay for features, not formal CS education.

Apply analogy to any construction work. I can build a house with terrible foundations. It may work right now, but sooner or later you're going to need to change it before it collapses. And the price of doing so is much, much greater than properly building it at first.

Same thing happens with software. Yeah, it works now, but the cost of the 10-dev team required to maintain it after is going to end up being a greater cost than properly writing software (if there is such as thing.)

Except cs degrees don't teach you anything about properly writing software. I've encountered plenty of graduates from top CS curriculums that couldn't code their way out of a paper bag. Understanding finite automata and formal methods does jack shit to help you write maintainable code. So your example of a 10-dev team maintaining code would apply more to a fresh CS grad's work than someone that has any experience writing software.

Pure UX Designers are s dying breed. I know a bunch of designers and they confirm this. You need to know how to code on top of UX design. Finding pure UX design jobs are hard and in 5 years it might be extinct. It's just the nature of the industry unfortunately n

As a designer myself I can promise you that any UX designer employed at a respectable company already knows how to code.

The change that I see coming soon is that designers will be required to program. I don't think we'll see Front-end Developers and Designers (be it visual, UX or Product) as separate job roles for much longer.

I certainly don't think this is a good thing. I'm constantly reminded of how tedious and time consuming Front-end development. I'd much rather spend my days designing experiences, but I don't see that as a possibility in the future.

Seattle seems to be one of the worst markets for this. We have a huge number of job openings in tech, but very few entry level openings.

"Oh no, different companies have different requirements for a position that has the same name!"

"3+ years" is a filter for people who give up or have self-doubt. We put that on our job postings because it filters out people who don't think they are qualified. People with 1 year experience applying to a 3+ year position DO get their resumes glanced at (the reason I say 1 is because we rarely hire a straight up college grad, because we want someone who has a month of working in an office that understands the difference between the college sensitivity bubble and real life)

A tough realization for the entry-level people: You're not special and your "skills" are meaningless. Entry-level hiring is a crapshoot. You just hope you get someone that is capable of learning so you don't waste 3 months of training and then have to go back to hiring the next useless entry-level person.

My words of advice: If you're reading a job posting, you're not going to get the job. People get jobs by meeting other human beings. If you want to deal with jobs online, throw a bunch of random buzzwords on your linkedIn profile and wait for the recruiter swarm to come vett your bullshit.

I'm sure this toxic hiring strategy serves your company's interests well, but is terrible for the industry. Let's all adopt this approach and in a few years there won't be anyone taking someone from 0 experience to 1-3 years.

Training someone for a job is expensive. Training two people for one job is even more expensive. Dragging me away from programming to review resumes/interview people that don't even think themselves qualified is that much more expensive. I'm happy to train someone. I've actually really enjoyed it over the years. What I don't like is having to train two people for the same position. THAT'S a toxic hiring strategy.

The first rule of getting hired is never to show any sign of humility or weakness.

Pity that once you are actually in the job, it's not very helpful to have a bunch of egomaniacal Dunning-Kruger cases running around.

> The first rule of getting hired is never to show any sign of humility or weakness.

I don't think this is true at all. I'm very comfortable saying "I have no idea" in an interview setting (though I think it's generally understood that I'll go find out), I'm generally up-front with weaknesses in that, hey, there are things that I just don't work well with. There are a bajillion jobs out there, and it doesn't make any sense to push a bad fit.

It depends entirely on the company. The first rule of getting hired at a company run by sociopaths or brogrammers is never to show any sign of humility or weakness. Some people seem to think that's the only kind of company there is, so that bit is sometimes accidentally left out.

Getting the interview is drastically different than getting the job. Filtering what you don't want is drastically different than choosing what you do want.

You lie just to make things slightly easier for yourself, and you think this is OK?

Yes. 100% and unequivocally yes. I don't understand how you could think that's wrong. When doing hiring, my job isn't to make you feel good about yourself or give everyone an equal chance. It's to _filter out talent_. I have better things to do than sift through 1000 extra resumes from people who don't even think themselves qualified.

What are your thoughts on new hires who, when you tell them something, don't believe you, on the principle that you've lied to them before?

Alternately: if we were to try and write this function:

fn isStatementTrue (statement){

}

and apply it to your statements to jobseekers and employees, how many lines of code would be necessary for it to achieve a 99% accuracy rate?

When I'm hungry and I go to the fridge, I'm reasonably confident that when I open the door, I'm not going to start chewing on a stick of butter or bite into an onion. That doesn't mean I know what I want to eat. Filtering out what you don't want is a lot different than choosing what you do want, and you treat them differently. Both parties know that. I don't care about being an asshole to a sheet of paper than floats onto my desk on its way to the shredder. I'd never act like an asshole in an interview. If they are in the room, they are a potential coworker and will be treated as if they are already one. Your statement can't be applied to jobseekers and employees. They aren't the same Type.

You don't understand how I could think that lying for selfish reasons is wrong?

Maybe you could explain to me why you think that's selfish.

Here's why I don't see it as selfish:

Hiring is expensive. My time has a numerical number attached to it. As a tangible example, my revenue for my company is $125 an hour. I ended up interviewing 10 people for our most recent junior level hire. 2 of them were duds, immediately costing the company $250. The rest of them each spent about 2.5 hours with me: $2500. 4 were invited back, spending about 4 hours each with me: $2000. 1 was invited back to spend the day with me pair programming. I'll discount this at half price, given that I was still able to accomplish something: $500. They didn't end up taking the job offer, so I invited my second choice in for the same deal: $500. I ended up hiring them. 10 people cost the company $5,750. Read back through what I wrote, and you'll notice I said "I". I'm solely talking about my contribution to being in an interview room, not even accounting for my coworkers' contributions, nor the time spent with resumes. Now read back through it again, and replace "company" with "fellow employees". My "selfish" approach saves my coworkers money by eliminating candidates who were statistically unlikely to get the job anyway. If that's truly selfish, sign me up any day of the week.

For some more context, go flip through linkedIn profiles of people with <5 years of work experience and you'll see a strong trend: (5 months) (5 months) (3 months) (7 months). Not even 2 years and 4 "full time" jobs. Going back to the hiring numbers, intro_to_hiring puts the cost of replacement equal to their salary. Now imagine my hire follows this trend. I've spent $15k on finding them, $10k on training them, $40k in salary, and now I have to spend another $80k replacing them. All of that in a span of 6 months. Sounds like a pretty one-sided deal. All said and done, I struggle to believe I'm the selfish asshole of the story.

It doesn't become better or somehow "not selfish" just because you bring your coworkers into it. It is ultimately the company which is lying for selfish reasons. The company lies about its requirements to save money. And you don't understand how I could think that's wrong?

You seem to not even grasp what I have a problem with, since you spend your entire final paragraph talking about the perils of hiring inexperienced people. I have no problem with companies saying they want 3+ years of experience because they don't want inexperienced people. That's totally fine. Where I have a problem is when you say "3+ years" but actually want 1+ years, as you described in your original comment.

Not only is that dishonest, but it selects for dishonest applicants, since scrupulous people with 1-2 years of experience will not respond to your ad, while unscrupulous people will.

Again, I have no problem with experience requirements, I merely have a problem with lying about them as you said you do. If you reply, please keep that in mind, and don't explain why experience is so important, because that's not the issue.

> It doesn't become better or somehow "not selfish" just because you bring your coworkers into it. It is ultimately the company which is lying for selfish reasons.

A company is it's employees. All of whom are coworkers. Acting in their interests isn't selfish, it's responsible. The things you're talking about have no effect on a stranger who has the choice whether or not to click a button on the internet and attach their resume to an email. If it's making decisions based on the interest of strangers instead of its employees, that's when I'd start reaching for the moral compass. You're saying that lying is wrong. It sure is. But this is a job posting. You're taking it WAY to seriously and literally. It's a 100 word post explaining who you are, and what you'll be doing for 3000+ hours every year* . Prior to this conversation, I would never have thought anyone cared or put value into what it said. It's nothing more than a car commercial. The details are at the dealership. An accurate and detailed description of a job comes during an interview. Your resume doesn't end up on my desk if you keep it to yourself.

> Not only is that dishonest, but it selects for dishonest applicants, since scrupulous people with 1-2 years of experience will not respond to your ad, while unscrupulous people will.

Why apply to Harvard if your SAT scores aren't in their range? When I was unemployed, I spammed my resume to everything that resembled a job I was willing to do, whether it was entry level or 10+ years. I'm not sure how you could possibly turn that into a debate on morality. I'd rather my name be out there than keeping it locked away until I find _The One_. If I took some misguided moral stance about my job applications, I'd be unemployed and inexperienced. I'd have thrown away the one random job that came along which actually fit my skill set, simply because of a lack of interview experience. The job hunt is about interviewing for jobs you're not qualified for, finding the skill set that those posts are actually looking for, and preparing for the next one. You don't know until you ask. This has nothing to do with morality. If an interviewee spoke of a moral stance on our job posting, they'd be at the top of the no-call list as a potential HR nightmare.

* Terms may vary. Hours and pay are dependent upon experience. Other conditions may apply.

What company do you hire for? I never want to work there.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com