If you aren't "actively looking" but would bite if "that special snowflake" came in, aren't you actively hiring?
Maybe you're more like passively hiring, but I'd still consider them hiring.
Maybe you're more like passively hiring, but I'd still consider them hiring.
They didn't have an actual need for someone and it was all about how many/what type of degrees someone had and from where before they'd even consider looking at a candidate. In one of the cases, when the company did actually hire a person, that person had no work to do -- it was purely a means to justify their ask to investors for more money. We hire the best people!
Some people don't internalize that this is a sellers market. There are orders of magnitude more open jobs out there than there are qualified people to fill them. You shouldn't concern yourself with a bunch of toxic idiots trying to milk VC for a while.
I have to consider that some of the effort I spend chasing what looks like a great job might actually be a complete waste of time with no chance whatsoever.
I've been pretty vocal about my experiences, good and bad, job searching. I usually even like to name and shame and strangely enough it has paid off for me in connecting with the kinds of people I want to work with. I've been happily employed for a year now and have a good network of opportunities available to me.
The "shortage of engineers" meme that just won't die. If this were actually true, one or more of the following would be happening:
1. Qualified people would not be having difficulty finding work
2. Salaries would be increasing and low-paying open jobs would decrease in response to short supply until the market went into equilibrium
Physics and Math graduate unemployment rates are virtually zero, and practically all of us work in software.
That a lot of CS graduates actually can't do the job may be a pity, but its not our problem. Qualified people don't have difficulty finding work (by definition - if they're qualified, they will get hired).
Shortage of engineers is a meme?
"If you gave us another 100k great engineers we would only hire about 15k of those" - said none of the big 4 ever. They are perpetually hiring and they will absorb any capable engineer who comes their way. You know that. Don't pretend there's a shortage of jobs for qualified software engineers. That's just silly.
I know lots of qualified people who went through one or more stretches where they couldn't find work. Most employers wouldn't know a qualified engineer if they saw one.
It sounds like you're explicitly committing the No True Scotsman fallacy.
It's also an example of Goodhart's law: the people getting hired are demonstrably most qualified at getting hired, but the correlation between being good and being hired is quite clearly less than 1.0.
If you're good at what you're doing but somehow suck at presenting yourself in an appropriate way, retain an executive coach for 5 hours or whatever..
How many of them are overqualified for what they're doing and would jump if the market were paying more or if there were better opportunities? You can't say much about whether it's an employer's or employee's market merely by citing unemployment %.
> "If you gave us another 100k great engineers we would only hire about 15k of those" - said none of the big 4 ever. They are perpetually hiring and they will absorb any capable engineer who comes their way. You know that. Don't pretend there's a shortage of jobs for qualified software engineers. That's just silly.
Any discussion about a shortage or surplus of jobs/talent is meaningless without specifying compensation. Many companies would gladly take 100K great engineers at a salary of $20K/year. What if the going rate were $1M/year? Would there still be a shortage of engineers? When the bid and ask are far apart, both sides will complain about how hard it is to make a deal.
A lot of them are overqualified. But they are handsomely compensated. They could do less boring work, but there's less of a market for it.
> Any discussion about a shortage or surplus of jobs/talent is meaningless without specifying compensation. Many companies would gladly take 100K great engineers at a salary of $20K/year. What if the going rate were $1M/year? Would there still be a shortage of engineers? When the bid and ask are far apart, both sides will complain about how hard it is to make a deal.
I made that statement under the assumption of current market rates. Whatever google/facebook/uber/apple/microsoft are paying. Quit pretending that they wouldn't hire more engineers if there was supply. They clearly are willing to. Sure there's some hyperbole to it. But the entire valley + amazon/microsoft could easily absorb another 100k engineers without that event drawing down salaries significantly.
While the company isn't as competitive in salaries compared to some other shops in the Bay Area, it is extremely competitive in all other facets including supreme work-life balance, and yet even that hasn't been enough in itself.
Whether one particular employer can find workers at some arbitrary rate is not the same as whether there's a shortage, especially if that employer's rate is not in fact competitive.
If having trouble hiring while paying less than others indicates a seeker's market, what would an employer's market look like?
If it really was an employer's market, I wouldn't be getting up to 10 emails/messages/phone calls/tweets/etc. a day from recruiters trying to entice me to leave, even floating compensation up to $400k as inducement to action. I have walked away from exorbitant offers myself. Some of my friends/acquaintances in the industry also have shared similar experiences - the desperation of employers is obvious & almost ubiquitous, and you don't see that sort of desperation on employers' parts in an employer-sided market. You see them leaning in with aggressive tactics to accept what is given, which you see with some candidates that they deem weaker, but not with anyone half decent because the time & money cost of attracting people is significant.
Very few companies can claim to offer it all, but for the rest, they have to strategize as to what type of potential employees do they want to attract. Most cannot compete with the likes of those big companies mentioned prior because they have some negative that those don't have - for example, while the financial industry is known for sometimes paying very well, it also has a negative stigma to a not insignificant portion of engineers, as well as a reputation for poor work-life balance. Government work often comes with good work-life balance and is often well-regarded, but the reputation is also a two-edged sword (i.e. NSA being famed for their use of mathematicians, but also facing blowback after their overreach was revealed), pay isn't as competitive, and the level of bureaucracy is legendary in some cases. Startups/small companies offer a huge amount of responsibility & impact, but also offer varying levels of work-life balance (most are terrible, but some can be phenomenal) & lower compensation than one can often get in the open market with all industries considered. A company can try to pay more to attract the very top quality engineers, but in software at least, it can get very expensive & comes with a massive cost for a business, especially when competing against the very top revenue generating machines. Therefore, if a company isn't at that level, it needs to compete on other areas - it doesn't make sense to compete on the money realm, because that is a game that those big giants win at.
Being a pro-job seeker market is more than about cash. It's about negotiating power due to being able to easily find an opportunity they can weigh yours against if it doesn't satisfy the seeker.
So if you're so desperate for engineers, why not hire remotely outside North America, the most competitive market in the world for engineers? I realize it's much more comfortable having everyone in the same timezone, but sure it's preferable to hiring nobody? Also you can probably pay 30% less and still get great engineers.
Of course, it might also be simple racism. Otherwise I do admit to having difficulty explaining why I, as an American engineer, can make >$100k/yr even when working from outside the US while others make a fraction of that.
1. Compensation not rising to match demand
2. Overly-picky employers who would rather a req go unfilled than hire a less-than-perfect candidate
3. A recruitment process that fails to match qualified candidates with this engineering work
1. Qualified people (ie. know useful tech skills and have actual, demonstrated experience with those skills) can find work. Yes, you sometimes have to go through painful tech interviews but if you're actually qualified it is easily possible to secure an offer
2. Salaries are indeed rising, as nearly any salary survey would tell you. Do you think Facebook/Google/Amazon are paying people hundreds of thousands of dollars a year just for the kicks?
> low-paying open jobs would decrease in response to short supply
That's the one part which is incorrect. If there is a shortage then open jobs should increase steadily over time, which is definitely what's happening.
This is especially true because some companies just don't have a clue. So they'll leave up a bad position for months on end but never increase the pay, meanwhile complaining about the developer shortage.
Both as a hiring manager and an engineer, the developer shortage is very evident. We consistently took a long time to find qualified candidates (despite paying a respectably high salary) and on the flip side I have had no problem at all lining up offers any time I've interviewed in the past few years.
This does come with the caveat that the shortage is by far most acute in senior web-oriented engineers. There's no shortage of eager bootcamp graduates. If you don't have relevant experience on your resume or have crippling anxiety with technical interviews then your results will vary substantially.