We Don't Have a Talent Shortage. We Have a Sucker Shortage
resumeskills.us
resumeskills.us
They're aren't many expects in my field with my background and skill set and they said the right things to get me to interview (compensation won't be a concern).
Anyway... Went in for 4-5 interviews. Took me about 10 hours in total to interview with them.
Kept hearing that they have a difficult time filling the position. Reports directly to the CTO, etc, etc.
They came in at 1/2 my current salary. It was about 30-40% of what you would pay a decent engineer with experience.
I told them my salary level BEFORE the interview...
Gave them a hard now. They came back and said they can offer more stock and remote work.
Why in the heck would I turn down a bird in the hand for 1x in the bush?
Part of the problem is that if you're interviewing you need to know what you're buying!
You can't go to a ferrari dealership and offer to buy one or $20k.. that's just not how it works.
The final offer, however, was 60% of my current pay. Lower than the average for someone with my experience and position.
I had good rapport with the HR recruiter and flat out asked why they proceeded, even though she knew I was already getting more, at a better company, with more benefits.
The answer: they assumed I was lying about my current salary and I was just bluffing. Recommended me that I lie in my next interview.
I thought to myself...that's not how it works. I'm sure I could have negotiated higher. But I wonder if he thinks I inflated my salary and those said match.
Keeping in mind my current company has some of the best benefits I've seen outside of Silcone Valley...
My first interview for a job after law school, first interviewer. Guy begins to look at my resume, tosses it aside, and says “I don’t read resumes. Everyone lies in their resume. Hell, I lie on my resume.” After that, the whole time I’m thinking to myself “what kind of moron lies on a legal resume? The bar calls every employer you’ve ever had since high school.”
That's commonplace, I've heard many engineers say they overstated their current salary. When I'd apply for jobs, I'd include a copy of a paystub, because I knew the companies knew about the practice and would discount the offer accordingly.
The ultimate problem is that people want "unicorns for peanuts". Google, Facebook and a few other large tech companies have hired most of the top of the labor market, the "ferraris" in your analogy. Most companies want the ferrari but can't afford the price when others are willing to pay much much more.
The only way to really balance the market is for more of the talented engineers to start their own companies (reducing labor supply and possibly increasing demand). Arguably the proliferation of one-person or small bootstrapped startups is a reflection of the state of the labor market.
People buy that line of reasoning. It is sad but they do, and I have colleagues who have worked in several such positions and failed to increase their 401k savings by much (given the low base pay) and after 10 years of work and haven't seen a dime from the so-called "valuable" equity. Worse they are now considered 'old' so they are pushing headwinds when they even get to an interview (much like the original author).
When I talk with newly minted engineers today about compensation I will often recommend that they "do the math" which is to say they compute their living expenses and assume they are going to save the maximum allowable 401k and they are going to pay taxes at what ever the current rate is. To take those numbers, try to plot them out with inflation and the stock market return, take a million off the top for each kid they expect to have if their future spouse isn't working, a half million if they are working. And then see if they exit 20 - 25 years with enough to live on or not.
Once you have the basic model you are in a much better position to understand how the base salary you are being offered helps or hinders your future self.
So in technical roles there are a lot of companies that are always hiring. Recruiters work for free until they find you someone and placing job listings online is so inexpensive it barely registers as a cost.
On top of that, most states are "at will" employment, so even if a company does not have any openings, if they find someone better, and cheaper, than another employee that is currently working at the company, they can hire them and then eventually let that other employee go.
For example, I'm not in the market for a new laptop, but if a brand new, top of the line laptop came up for sale at half price, I'd probably buy it.
Its so cheap to look for new talent due to automation, so most companies will shop around in case they get lucky and land a fantastic bargain. Many are not seriously looking to fill an immediate need.
With that said, there are still plenty of companies out there with an immediate need, so please do not get discouraged by that group of companies that are "always hiring".
That is not really cheap, I am sure technology has helped reduce the amount of man administrative man hours, and helped fill a pipeline, but you still need to train new hires and actually interview them, which is no cheap.
The reality is outside of very early resume screening very little of the process is automated. Recruiting spends most of their day contacting people on sites like linked-in trying to find talent as not nearly enough shows up at our door.
My colleagues at FAANG companies tell me similar stories.
The cost of replacing an existing employee is also very high. In most domains can’t just plug that cheaper developer in, they need training and expertise building.
Outside of some very simple domains I don’t think your hypothesis holds up.
There is actually a Dutch site that tries to do something like that [0], but those recruiters are not even remotely as bad as these stories. They may be annoying parasites, but at least when they mention a number, it's fairly reliable.
Yes, just like Tinder and other assorted dating apps and sites have made it incredibly easy and efficient to search for a mate, but relatively few people end up in a relationship because of it. The act of swiping endlessly appeals to people, apparently. I vaguely remember hearing that once you are given 2 or more options, it induces strong paralysis, whereas if you have one option you tend to just jump at it and move forward with your life. I imagine the dynamics of dating and hiring are quite parallel.
The experience of the poster you are responding to doesn't seem to align with the situation you are describing. Sure posting an online job ad is pretty cheap. The rest of the hiring process, not so much.
Eg when we post a senior eng job on eg glassdoor, stackoverflow, or linkedin, we are deluged with resumes. Just the ad easily costs $250. Then we get applications who ignore that we don't sponsor visas, clearly don't have the skills required (6 year SAP programmer who wants to be a senior fullstack eng? No thanks), or are junior eng trying to make a huge jump. 1.5 years experience does not make you a senior SE who can be trusted to design and land large features with minimal oversight.
The first problem is an eng manager reviews all those resumes. It easily requires 10 minutes per, including writing nice rejection letters. And that's just for inbound. Outbound can take 30+ minutes per.
If someone passes the resume filter, we do a phone screen with one of our senior eng shadowed by a junior. A 45 minute call plus prep plus decision afterwards costs me 2 hours of eng time.
If you come in, we do about a 3.5 hour interview across 6 people. We cover travel expenses and lunch if an interview runs over lunchtime.
The whole thing easy costs us $1.5k, plus tons of eng time. And that's if we source. If a recruiter sources, we're looking at 20%.
As more recruiters offers their services to employers the employers starts to feel like there are more potential hires than there actually are.
As a thought experiment we could assume that there used to be two recruiting firms for each employer but then costs went down and now there are ten. This gave the illusion that there are five times as many potential hires even if everyone should take a step back and realize that the recruiters are still all trawling in the same pool in their search for talent.
I also wonder how much of it is also #1 data gathering, #2 advertisement, and #3 slightly counter to what you are saying - bad tools/people using said tools.
for point one, I can learn a lot on what microsoft is doing by pulling resumes from microsoft workers, even more if I interview them. you can quickly glean direction, head count, tech stack, etc.
for point two, tech companies especially have to remain relevant in the news. Imagine if you post positions for great ML shiny positions, that gets seen by tens of thousands of people for 0 cost. "Did you see that great posting at company X? wow they have an impressive Y team"
point 3, I have seen recruiters get thousands of resumes for a position they posted on the web, really want to hire someone, but instead send people through the hiring loops because of direct contacts. Its like they search for skills, the resumes on the website dont get searched well so they assume there are no matches. its baffling to me this happens given the tools you mentioned
Interviews went well, liked the people I met; things looked good. As a condition of the offer, the recruiter told me they needed my current salary. I provided that, and they dropped their offer ~$15,000 below the low end of their range because my income (in another state and a different industry) was lower.
I told them, "that's not how this works. You base your offer on what the work is worth here, not on what I was making in another role."
Walked, and got an offer two weeks later - $30,000 above their original range and no bullshit trying to tie it to my current income.
As far as salary goes, I absolutely cannot afford to compete and hire at market rate prices so I rely on:
-People who are motivated by other factors than money (everyone at our company took a pay cut to join). We have schedule flexibility, we are like-able, our tech is interesting, our mission and vision are inspiring I hope, we are good at selling ourselves.
-People who like the gamble of stock options
-People who are unaware of their market value
This is how every startup in seed round works pretty much.
That said, I don’t go around complaining that there is a talent shortage. I’m well aware of the situation we are in.
First of all it sounds like there was some really dishonest communication and there is no excuse for that.
With this one:
People who are unaware of their market value
1) every company I have interviewed with has lied to me at some point in the process. Sometimes those are small lies, sometimes they are very big ones. I get that hiring is a complex process but a company's recruiters and hiring managers should make an effort to not over-promise and under-deliver to people that want to work there.
2) I have never received an offer from a company that asked me my salary expectations. I consider that question a loud signal that I am just being regarded as a data point by the recruiter, and I basically write them off.
maybe you need some funding then
You could if you were willing to take rawer unproven talent.
You chose another option and that worked for you and that's great. You could have perhaps hired a student at market rate.
I've had a few short interviews that quickly turned into a sales pitch on why I should work for them. I've also had the same you experienced: they act like they really want you specifically then feed you into the human resource machine. Basically made me feel scammed so I bowed out after the first 30 minutes.
I get the sense that a lot of tech companies' hiring playbook is all about making you feel special and elite then feeding you into the machine.
I guess I could understand it if I REALLY wanted to work at company X and company X happened to have annoying interview practices. But is that the condition for most people seeking jobs? Or is there some selection bias of who is posting about their experiences?
I was interviewing with the CTO/CEO etc and some of them were out of town. Normally I would agree btw.
The asked how much I was looking for, I told them X, which was 25% more than I was getting now and on the high-end for a similar role. They say ok.
Interview goes great, everyone loves me, offer time. They offer me X-20%. WTF? That’s basically what I’m making now and they didn’t offer big company perks like 401k match, stock grants, etc. So in fact, the offer was less than I was currently getting. They were willing to go up to X-15%, but no higher.
Why say ok when someone says they want X, then make an offer way lower than X?
Where they get comfy, rationalize that they know their job, and the company never has to spend more than 98k on this person for the next 35 years.
Weirdly enough, it seems like Fortune 500 pays best for the brightest and they have them working on high level concepts and paying suppliers to perform the nitty gritty engineering.
I don't quite understand the rationale behind this hiring phenomenon.
Had a software company offer me a position, tech support + some maintenance of existing codebase. I have a demonstrated capability to meet the requirements. Remote + onsite work at client premises. Existing employees doing the roll are way overloaded and obviously stressed.
The person I'd report to travelled to interview me. This person admitted they hadn't received a pay rise in four years.
I told them my current pay grade BEFORE the interview.
Their offer: $45,000 BELOW my current pay, then another $5000 per year I'd spend paying for my dependants to be cared for during the time suggested I'd be at clients premises.
I finished an interview in London, UK and they start umming and ahing over a measly five grand. It happened in Toronto too last year.
They offered me 15% below what I wanted alongside a very uninspiring business in advertising. I was honest and said I was interviewing elsewhere and wasn't about to accept that offer quickly, though it wasn't off the table. They waited one week and pulled the offer. I accepted a better offer pretty much the next day.
The recruiter got back in touch with me a week or two later and said quite frankly that they regretted their decision as they've struggled to find anyone comparable in my salary range. Because, as it finally dawned on them, my salary expectations weren't even that high - I intentionally put them in the mid-range for my skill-set because I care deeply about work/life balance and I'm picky about tech stack.
Unrelated, but I also had a similar experience last year when buying my first home. First place we put an offer in with was poorly advised by their agent, and they came back begging a few months later by which point it was too late. It's only two anecdotal data points but it does seem to be that people are willing to lose a lot in order to gain a pittance.
After one instance of that routine I learned to unashamedly [at least loosely] state my asking rate, and ask about salary up front (or early) after hearing the interview process.
It's saved me. I would have faced the same interview length for [same as you] half of my current salary, and would have had to share a machine as a matter of principle. For an intermediate->senior role. With longer hours, and fewer benefits (but there would be a ping pong table and exposed brick walls...).
Though the situation I experienced seems especially endemic to Toronto's dev mills. I've since learned to recognize them at the outset and stay away.
All it does is displaying for everyone to see their indecisiveness and wasting other people's time. They obviously couldn't make up their mind even after the first four rounds and that's just bad in any businesses.
If I ever had to go through a five-rounds interview and they ended up turning me down, I will not care if it burns bridges as I will track down their boss and he/she will receive some nice hand-written letters from me to let them know how their company performed. A working relationship always goes both way and they obviously have not valued much of your time.
If the only thing you have to offer is equity (risk) and a lower salary than what I was getting/market salary why don't I just save me some time and risk it all by starting my own company.
She replied that she was pretty sure this was an organization she had interviewed at some time before. They found her qualified, and made her an offer substantially below what she had clearly said she required. They said, Well, we thought you'd find the work so interesting that you'd be willing to work for that. They thought wrong.
It is a startup. That is what they do. They offer low comp but with more stocks. How is this a surprise to you?
That's how employers work though. Next step is to whine about a Ferrari shortage and bribe (I mean lobby) the goverment to increase immigration of Ferrari knock of builders in order to reduce the shortage.
Then when the locals get indignant about all these new Ferraris depressing sale price of Ferraris, if your the UK you blame the EU and have a vote on brexit.....
> They're aren't many expects in my field with my background and skill set
contradicts the title of the submitted post.
If there aren't many people that meet the requirement, but there are at least as many as jobs that need to hire them, then there's no shortage - that small number could even be too many, if some of those people are overqualified for the jobs they end up doing.
Most startups and new businesses fail. Part of that is a lack of funding and a lack of information/knowledge about the specifics of the markets they are working in.
They may not know that they are looking for a Ferrari or what the market for Ferraris looks like.
If I start a business that sells Ferraris for 20k, then complain how I cant buy them cheap enough wholesale, there isn't a shortage.
There is NOT a shortage of software developers. That myth was developed by big tech, and pushed all the way up the ladder, to the top of government. The goal? Reduce labor costs.
Big tech has always been 1 step ahead of the employee, just like coal, and metal working was. They saw the huge need for developers and realized their costs would increase unless they actively pursued ways to prevent that from happening.
And that's how you get organizations like code.org. That's how you get President Obama on the big screen, telling everyone to learn to code. That's how you get a GREAT job, and make it BLUE COLLAR.
What if we could outsource this to some magic 3rd world slave mine? What if we could hire some recent graduates or interns instead? What if we could get someone on an H1B and chain them to the desk?
It’s the natural result of being labor. Don’t like it? Be an owner.
The only alternative I can think of is for software to become a true profession with licensing and standards. This makes a lot of sense in a world fraught with security risks and ethics concerns about the usage of data.
In the meantime, I’m getting ready to hang up the keyboard. All the dynamism and potential has been ground out of this career path. What’s left is crushing demands and compensation that just doesn’t cut it anymore.
After two cycles, they started treating their local employees well. This was a big firm with much momentum. A small firm could be ruined by this. Sometimes the firm just needs to see the grass isnt necessarily greener on the other side. I got paid well and my business counterparts always know that when I said 3mo, I meant 3mo.
The longer term, better solution is to be owners. Worker owned tech companies only don't exist because they're not our currently accepted default. If people stop defaulting to the venture backed capital model we can turn this industry around.
For example, "Chart.js" makes it really easy to create beautiful charts in a web app. Because of tools like that it's much easier to learn how to build a feature rich app now than 20 years ago.
Still, the guy who can create "Chart.js" (an artist) should be getting paid a lot more than a guy who can only use it (a craftsmen).
It's one thing to code what you see in front of you, another to think about problems and solve them thoughtfully, research, debug, and etc. Troubleshooting(debugging) in particular is a hard thing to learn.
Stop blaming other people.
Start blaming other people, because they are out to get you.
God forbid we open that up to people who should be resigned to whatever you think "blue collar" means?
There's nothing wrong with trades and blue collar work. There's a reason you can't outsource plumbers, electricians, and other technicians who must be on site to practice their craft. But there's also a reason that work is so expensive: the skills required take time to acquire, and there's a limited pool of talent with those skills.
Disclaimer: My personal stance is I want the labor market as tight as possible, for as long as possible, to push wages up for as many people as possible, while using government policy to put backstops in place that are progressively ratcheted forward.
It’s also funny because this creates a problem where wages have been driven down to a point where skilled workers can barely afford to support a family in tech zones. So because of these depressed wages in software engineering, there are fewer skilled workers living in these regions. Make no mistake this is software engineering specific. Otherwise show me roles in tech where there are lots of H1B visa employees.
You create a website with a list of job skills that 'slave wage companies (SWC)' are claiming to need to fill.
You collect resumes from unemployed U.S.candidates with these skills and send them to the SWCs. If the candidate gets hired you keep a recruiters fee.
If the candidate is rejected your startup lawyers sue the pants of the SWC for violating U.S H1B law. You pass on the settlement money to the rejected U.S. candidate keeping a percentage for your lawyer and your retirement fund.
US H1B law is clearly explained online [0], there are searchable databases [1] and most recruiting/HR people will gladly spill the loophole secrets that they have (posting jobs in obscure local newspapers, tailoring job description to an existing known foreign candidate etc).
[0] https://www.uscis.gov/working-united-states/temporary-worker... [1] https://h1bdata.info/index.php
You will be protecting American jobs and making money in the process.
- Set high minimum wage for H1B ($150,000+ annual salary, set to increase in response to inflation in technology salaries)
- Incorporated an automatic green card "path to citizen" into the process, which will be portable between employers (with a decent provision for unemployment or family leaves).
Seems like:
- Dramatic improvement in living conditions for higher end H1B roles (less beholden to employer, more career mobility)
- Immediately eliminates abusive lower-tier H1B roles (you could grandfather existing arrangements for the duration)
- Opens up entry level tech roles to native-born trainees
- Opens up unencumbered path to citizenship for top talent
I'm sure there's a way for politicians to screw this up... but seems like this might be a good first step towards ending the current abuses within this system...
The field of software is growing. It will change. That change may be for the better or worse.
But I feel it’s unethical for those of us privileged to be in this field to act as gatekeepers and prevent others from having the same opportunities I (and I suspect many others had) when I entered it.
If you want to keep making the big bucks, continue to provide meaningful value and skills that justify it.
What would have to be true for you to agree that there is a shortage of software developers? Big tech cos have total comp of ~$600k/engineer. Would you think there is a shortage if they had to pay $6m/engineer? $60m? How do you define "shortage"?
Normally supply shortage --> higher costs.
Let's be absolutely clear the goal was simply to bring in foreign workers to reduce salary costs.
What is the line of reasoning than goes from 'there is a shortage of developers' to 'therefore, we need to pay less.'?
I have been running a successful business, but it's not "tech". I want to get back into the software industry. I didn't have a software business idea, so I explored some tech company jobs.
I am well-qualified at the VP/Director level for startups and even larger companies.
I did go so far as to do an on-site interview for one company. I have verifiable proof that I can generate huge returns in their exact industry.
They didn't want to give away any equity, even though hiring someone at this high of a level would generate huge returns for their business.
They had a completely undefined budget not only for this role, but for the 4-6 people who would be underneath this role starting out.
They weren't even sure they wanted to hire someone full-time, but they knew this position was a clear gap in skillsets of their current executive team.
And the kicker to all of this was that they were already doing 8 figures a year in revenue. This wasn't a broke startup.
I rapidly came to the same conclusion as the post's author. There are so many companies that want to hire a "VP of X", but they really don't understand what that means or how to pay someone who doesn't just want a 6-figure a year salary for the rest of their lives.
I'm now starting a software company.
So ok, you have proven track record, how are you proving that again? I mean just coming in off he street and promising rainbows and money to fall out of the sky is easy.
So are you going to
a) hire the best developer you know and pay them whatever they ask, or
b) hire the best developer who falls within your budget (which, I presume, cannot be very high when you are starting)
If you answered b), then I guess you already know the problem. No matter how qualified you personally think you are (and you are, I am not doubting that) - the only thing that matters is whether you fit into the plans of your employer, which includes whatever nebulous salary range they have in mind.
I suppose you will say that you are already running a successful business. But IMO that doesn't actually amount to much when you are creating a software business. Why? Because you are now competing with the FAANGs of the market. And there is already a lot of talk that FAANGs are actively hiring to take the best labor off the talent pool even if they don't need the services of those hires. So suddenly you have just lost almost all opportunity you had to create arbitrage - that wonderful and probably mythical situation where you buy labor low and sell the output high and take home a handsome profit.
So you recalibrate your expectations and go one rung lower. And you do grow your company quite successfully, because, lets be honest, if you can "do things which do not scale" at first to grow companies, it pretty much follows that you can make plenty of money despite hiring ordinary talent in the beginning stages if you have a good business background - which you do. And at some point, because you grew so fast, you will face a similar shortage for some kind of skillset, only to find that you suddenly cannot really afford to pay what the very well qualified person wants because that isn't even a part of your culture anymore.
And ironically, said person then goes and writes a post about how your company completely lowballed them :-)
I'm starting a company, but want to retain 100% ownership. I don't want to give equity as I don't want to lose control. Been there, done that. I'd much rather go down the road of profit sharing based on the results.
While this may earn respect at the very top of the company from another founder or former founder, there more typically a lovely process of watching an insecure middle manager do the math about what you did and freak out....
The corrolary of this is: not everyone knows this, so _after_ you're done negotiating salary, equity and benefits, it might be a good idea to inquire about a grandiose title to go with all of that. "Head of Javascript" if you're junior, or "VP of Backend" if you're senior, stuff like that. :-)
These statements don't exactly follow. Revenue is not a profit. It's possible they are broke with a great revenue.
When u say equity - do u mean they wouldnt offer u a standard options package ? Or was it too low ?
Or do u expect to get couple of % of a $10M ARR company?
I am curious because HR is hard and broken for everyone. But expectations are also very high.
As an inteviewer, you're job is not to stump the candidate. Your job is to figure out how well they can do the job. The questions you come up with should reflect the actual job, and the actual tasks that will be assigned (that's where you should draw your questions/inspiration from), rather than some random data structures question you remember from college or some random questions you found on a google search.
It's pretty clear what kind of work someone will do when you can look at work they've done.
I typically want to see how people use resources and deliver with real IDEs and collaborative tools like git
All you have to do after that is listen.
Never be proud of anything that you created - since it probably is not of "top of the world quality". Even in the rare case that it is - it is very likely that even "top of the world" can still be improved.
The rest of it is suggesting to the population at large there's such a high demand for these positions they should enter the market and pursue that career. The idea is to flood the market with labor to drive labor costs down by pretending there aren't people qualified to do the work.
After enough people couldn't be found locally they'd have a legal justification for a work visa.
Also, the notion that H1b's are cheap is not always true. With the added costs of filing H1b visa and green card, the true costs are much higher, especially in a cutting edge industry.
When it's not used for visa indentured servant games, it's arguably a relatively decent way to to do things (don't put applicants through a charade of being considered, and you're already certain who you want to hire), but better would be to not post the job at all in that situation.
> Super Narrow Selection Criteria
e.g. "We need nodejs, mongo, grpc, golang, etc - decades of experience in software is not what we need. We need exactly those things - and we are going to give you an online code challenge to solve an irrelevant puzzle while a 27 year old sits there watching you." And then when you get the job its nothing more than spending hours upon hours updating a web front end, tweaking a database, and watching logs.
> Outright Age & Lifestyle Discrimination
I'm only 36 and I feel old sometimes. I apply for jobs where I have to talk to a panel. It looks like everyone on the panel is less than 30. You can feel the lack of experience exuding from their pores. Everything this panel says sounds like some misconceptions I had sever years ago when I was their age and only had experience working on small projects. Where are the older more experienced workers? I mean are people over 30 not applying for jobs?
> What Are Your Salary Requirements?
Someone tried to hire me for 85K after decades of experience for a very early stage startup. They were offering equity but equity doesn't mean anything if the company folds in 2 years. I need more than that.
> Stop wasting people's time and make experienced candidates a real offer.
When I was a new developer many moons ago, I worked with many old guys and gals who would always let me know how green I was (no matter how much I studied and tried to impress them). Now, if I was to look for a job, I would be working with very young guys and gals who think experience == 2 weeks of reading a book on Facebook's React framework. Hey times have changed.
They apply to different jobs. Larger companies and so on. Some move into management or consulting. Startups in general make little economical sense and the downsides are rather high if you have a family.
If I owned a company I would never let some inexperienced fresh grad interview a senior engineer. They are letting some kid take part in one of the most important parts of their business.
It's yet another area of software development hiring where all logic and reason have gone out the window.
Wow. That's how much someone ought to make after a few years. You ought to have straight up told them why their company is going to be dysfunctional in a few short years.
Don't put box tickers in charge of a critical function unless you want every thing they touch to be turned into an exercise in box ticking.
IMO, that's just a symptom. The real problem is that the hiring managers/engineers find the job of "recruitment" beneath them.
All of us know the recruiter might not really understand the difference between "java", "scripting" and "javascript". But then, why should that role exist? That role exists because the engineers/managers/leads/architects (generally, the tech folks) just don't want to do the grunt work (search and source candidates, co-ordinate and schedule interviews etc). The actual folks in need of teammates/additional people want a piece of the action alright, nobody wants to miss being an interviewer where one gets to go on a power trip asking the poor candidate to balance B+ trees or some such thing, while letting out tch-tch noises like a lizard watching the poor candidate struggle on the whiteboard.
All that needs to be around is a tool/system that can make the job of searching/sourcing/co-ordination easier for the actual hiring managers/leads who are looking to add people to their teams and have got the necessary budgetary stuff covered already.
Maybe they actually aren't doing either. Perhaps they are simply building a log of candidates for a position that does not exist currently but may exist or another future hypothetical position related or unrelated. In other words doing the legwork way in advance and figuring if they dangle a large enough offer (at that time) someone will leave what they are doing and join the company.
(1) An HR employee is hired to cover certain areas (recruiting in this case) of expertise that the individual manager may not have or may be biased towards.
(2) Manager(s) may look to outsource a segment of their work.
In most cases, it is a combination of the two that leads to HR being the gatekeeper. I would argue that if there was no HR, society would simply blame the next person in charge of the hiring segment.
That said, in general, all of these efforts to "learn to code" etc. are all just trying to increase the supply and lower wages. The challenge is that there often is a difference between the developers what will accept the lower offers and the ones who will hold out for more. Many still believe the a larger number of cheaper people is better than a few top devs... Despite the fact that this was proven be a bad strategy over 30 years ago in "The Mythical Man Month".
I have nothing against people coming to work in the United States, but I thought those visas were specifically for roles where the skills weren’t available.
In this case, by making the skills super specific, like that Home Depot sales portal in this article, they made them rare.
The guy I knew only got out because my then employer promised to endorse his visa and deal with any legal stuff.
What I find interesting is that if you point all of this out to HR/management, sometimes they don't believe you!
I just left a company for which I was the random unicorn (perfect intersection of 3 different skillsets and relevant past experience) after one year. I was referred because someone at the company knew I had the exact skillset they needed, and ended up joining right as they were planning to expand to several other states.
Two months in, I brought up the rarity of finding someone with such an intersection of skills. Looking for an exact match would not be realistic. Especially when trying to expand to states with a much more competitive job market that requires a higher salary than what they offered me. Of course, my concerns were shot down with such confidence that I thought, "maybe they already have the perfect set of candidates lined up."
One year later, expansion plans have completely 180ed because they simply cannot find the personnel that they need. They cannot even entice those who are capable of learning and performing in the role because they aren't willing to pay market rates. And now I left because they weren't willing to give me a reasonable raise or additional benefits like more equity.
This experience has made me wonder if cognitive dissonance plays a larger role in blinding HR/companies.
> This experience has made me wonder if cognitive dissonance plays a larger role in blinding HR/companies.
I think cognitive dissonance was also at play in the case I'm referring to. There's probably a lot of biases at play when people are trying to estimate what skills someone has. Also its easier to delude yourself into thinking the Bayesian priors are different when you have someone who has the rare combination of skills on staff, I remember hearing a few versions of: "how rare could it be when we already have this manager on staff?".
Because over 95% of them are completely random and do not meet even one single criteria of the job. Or, are fake resumes from H1B consulting shops.
Post a senior software developer job in New York? Get ready for over half of the applications to be from a Burger King employee in South Carolina, a security guard in Florida, a mechanic in Idaho, etc. They spam their resume to every open job in America. The next 25% will be from grad students desperate to get an H1B sponsorship before their OPT runs out. They will, yes, spam their resume to every open job in America. The final 24% will be fake C2C resumes from H1B consulting shops. "Yes, he is my consultant, how can you pay on the corp to corp for this job?" They, yes, spam their resume to every open job in America.
Out of those 1000, I bet you over 95% do no match one single qualification posted
I changed careers and was inundated with recruiters contacting me..... a total n00b. Nice huh?
Not really, every one of them just seemed to be sweeping up resumes and names and faces and not paying attention.
I'd talk to them on the phone "no I don't have 5 years experience, just like it shows on my resume"...
One after another, total waste of time.
Then I'd get a bite, or even interview and ... some would just go radio silence. Man how hard is it even to send a cookie cutter "we went in another direction" email?
I wish I could have only talked to people who actually looked at my resume first and wanted to talk to that guy. Maybe it wouldn't be many but it would save a lot of time, looking for a job is hard enough as it is.
Meanwhile every job does require 5 years experience but I'm pretty sure they don't. I'd hear the actual job and no man a n00b could do that just fine.
Meanwhile my last job now requires a CS degree where really a high school grad who is mildly capable with a CCNA could do just fine, but they're still looking to fill my position a year later... They could have brought on two people for like 6 months to just try them out and but they'd rather not.
I'm fairly sure there's just a lot of busy work being made by HR and head hunters who have no clue anyway.
Whaddaya Mean, You Can't Find Programmers? https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/06/15/whaddaya-mean-you-...
(Repost from five years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6454140#6455545 and 7 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17946388#17948113)
After a week I reached out to the recruiter, and she replied with a curt, "You're not qualified for this role so we're looking elsewhere." I was a bit surprised as the reqs they described in the job listing were exactly what I had been doing for the last 3 years. But it got me thinking whether the company (HR, Hiring Manager, etc) had made the decision or if the recruiter had?
In addition, there was no additional offer from the recruiter to work with me? It was literally that one line. It got me thinking that maybe my experience(s) wasn't valued by the recruiter as someone worth pursuing, as I may be more "work" to land a job than she would want to invest?
Anyway, with my pride slightly dinged, I immediately wrote off the recruiter (and cybercoders as a whole) as someone I wouldn't want to work with in the future. I got a job at a larger company and a few years later, enjoyed responding to the SAME recruiter asking if I was interested in some jobs she had to offer (nothing bridge-burning worthy, but it felt great saying "NO THANKS")
A few weeks later, I get a call from a retained recruiter I had worked with previously, after having had my resume sent to her by the company. She basically proceeds to "force me" out of the running for the position by talking it down. She clearly had some firm favorite sitting in the wings...
[in reality, I was out as soon as they asked me to relo my family for a lower total comp package than I was currently receiving. Yeah right.... not that hungry yet...]
I was doing an interview with their head of ML and brought this subject up in general without mentioning that I had already solved it. His immediate response was: "that's impossible." And it was totally concrete, not some sort of challenge. He had no interest in discussing the topic at all.
Those kinds of people are out there. Best to detect them early and move on.
That is, sometimes the claimed "impossible" is indeed just that and the speed of response comes from the experience rather than ignorance or arrogance.
The last job I applied for was open from February 1 - March 1. After that, they pulled it down and began interviewing candidates. Six weeks later, I have an offer letter for a specific role with a well-negotiated compensation package.
Personally if HR treats you the way OP is saying, my guess is you don't want to work for that company anyways. Interviewing experienced people is more the company needing to sell themselves to the candidate, rather than the candidate sell themselves to the company.
My last job hunt (signed a new contract just a few weeks ago) has taken me 3 months and I've seen all of the issues OP (and some of the comments) mentions, not only in startups, but also in fortune 500 companies and everything in between (including quite a few companies in the "best place to work" ranking). I've probably sent about 60-70 cv's and most of them have gotten me at least a phone interview (about 50? I lost count but in the document I was using to keep track of open processes I have 30 companies).
One of my ex-managers (and one of the best I've ever had, at that) is also job hunting (after taking a year off after being made redundant in a merge). He's in his 50's and the stuff he tells is even worse than my own experiences.
They made me work 60-80 hour weeks and didn’t pay me overtime.
When I criticized them, they fired me after a month.
I’d love to expose them here, but I’ll be the better person than them.
I saw the same thing happen in the same city to another developer. In the fitness space though but didn't get paid at all.
The company that I ended up accepting an offer for started off with a recruiter who talked to me about my background and then asked a few technical questions to screen whether or not I knew the technologies that they were hiring for. Passed the recruiter screen.
Interviewed with a hiring manager and then interviewed with the team with some technical challenges that were more to see how it would be like to work together. Talking to the team made me feel excited to work with them and the technical challenges were straight forward. I was able to look up and use some code that I had written previously to solve part of the challenge.
I ended up with an offer higher than what I asked for. Part of me feels as though this is almost too good to be true but I don't know if I am just really jaded by the entire hiring process.
I faced so much rejection that landing the position that I am starting soon makes me feel like I am either extremely lucky or maybe I'm just another sucker; however, this company definitely set the standard for me as far as interviewing/hiring process.
> I may not want to assume the risk of startup business right now but if you're going to offer the deal on those terms...
The author is asserting that a company needs him or her more than they need the company, then confesses to being reluctant to take the risk of starting a business themselves. As such they're actually depending on the company to shoulder the risk they're not willing to take; they actually do need the company to create value.
The author should decide which of the two statements quoted above has precedence. Either they depend on some other company to shoulder the risks, or they start one themselves.
In short, if this post is representative of the way workers are thinking and communicating, then we do have a talent shortage, it's just not the talents you're thinking of.
Accept that people work for money, not because they believe in your company.
It's often a "well, I need a job, you're hiring, and what you guys are doing looks at least marginally interesting to me" - I ought not need to find whatever product/service/market they're doing/in inspiring - I should just want to do it for the pay offered.
Cute and snarky, but lets not misdirect. The article isn't a representation of how people communicate to REASONABLE employers, so your comment doesn't make much sense. Its in response to the pervasive disconnect that is prevalent in the current hiring industry.
And if after that clarification you still think the article takes an unjustified tone, I'd say you are just as much a part of the problem.
Is it not possible to identify those people without paying them less to prove it?
I'm not really sure what you're getting at here otherwise I would think if someone is a perfect fit with the org and the org isn't willing to compensate that person accordingly then all you're doing is picking up suckers who may not even be worth the reduced pay rate. A good engineer knows what they are worth.
I don’t come to work because I care about your business, I care because you pay me. I’d like to work with others who have the same rational outlook, not with a cult.
If anyone is interested in trying out this process at their company, my email is in my profile.
I think the challenge is that you need to have related experience in order for this to work; if you don't, you will be scrambling for an answer. I didn't even realize I was doing this when I started directing the hiring manager to my related experience until after the interview.
It worked out that I didn't have direct experience with what they were looking for but have a lot of related experience in the same language but different domain as well as with other languages, all of which was visible on my github profile.
These companies hire every engineer that meet their criteria.
Most engineer given an offer from one of them would accept it since that is the highest possible offer they can get.
If there is no talent shortage, these companies should have no open recs or fill them as soon as they're opened because they are the best possible jobs for any engineer.
Since they have open recs (sometimes open for months), there is a talent shortage at the skill level they require.
Please let me know what is missing in this logic?
He is technically correct, the number of attractive ladies who want to date him is much lower than the number of dates he is available to go on.
But no one is going to be sympathetic to that shortage, why should anyone be sympathetic to this one.
It's not.
> These companies [FAANG] hire every engineer that meet their criteria.
They don't hire anywhere close to that. Their hiring practices are notoriously capricious.
> Most engineer given an offer from one of them would accept it since that is the highest possible offer they can get.
I had an offer like this and turned it down because they wouldn't let me work on my open source project.
> If there is no talent shortage, these companies should have no open recs or fill them as soon as they're opened because they are the best possible jobs for any engineer.
These companies have more money than they know what to do with, and more is coming in all the time. The more they hire, the more things they make, and the more they want to hire.
I am moving to LA from Brazil next month. I am a self-taught frontend developer. I am 39 years old, but still a junior as I changed careers less than two years ago.
I participated in two process with the standard remote technical interview solving a problem live coding in communication with a senior developer.
I realized I won't pass this kind of interview unless I focus on studying solely for it. I am planning to buy "Cracking the code interview" because I cannot afford to not have a job in LA, but it feels such a waste of time. I am almost 40 and tired of pretending that some trivia and practice on a simulated environment is transferable to real jobs.
I am the kind of developer that agrees with the idea that software developers' job is to solve business problems, not coding. That knowing what to code is more important than coding fast. That communication with people in and out of the team, developers and not developers is an essential skill.
But that's not what the hiring game values.
I have no ambitions of being a "real software engineer" that will work on cutting edge technology. I am happy building complex websites that will make a company money.
I hope that once in LA I will meet some entrepreneurial types with promising business models that value what I can do well. But the reality is that I will have to learn to play the hiring game.
You can choose not to play the game, which significantly reduces your chances and opportunities Or choose a different game, like
> I will meet some entrepreneurial types with promising business models that value what I can do well
which is still a game, but a game you are willing to play.
Can you imagine that if on hiring a new truck driver the company was passing him trough 50 different routes on snow, ice and wet road. Or forcing a construction worker to build a house or something.
Yet if one of these two professions fucks it up - people might die, if a coder fucks up - he'll be fired and someone will remove 10 lines of code boo hooo.
What I didn't know at the time, was that in those two years I'd obtained experience and knowledge that at any other company would have warranted a 25% pay increase from what I was getting at this start-up.
The excuse? You have "options". That you can "exercise". And maybe eventually be worth something. Maybe.
Except this company had gone well past Series B. And had no exit strategy.
Given what I know now, I've resorted to telling recruiters and HR people that I'm not interested in "stock" or "bonuses" or anything else of the sort. The company pays me for my expertise and my hours, I give them what they pay me for. No promises, no gimmicks, no dice-rolling.
TBH, people in high-school and college looking to enter the workforce need a series of workshops on compensation, benefits, and HR before they start their first "real" job.
Had I known that the "options" I was being given access to would: A) "vest" over time, B) not be worth anything even 5+ years later, C) be IMPOSSIBLE to sell on the secondary market, and D) would result in a deflation of my take-home wages... I'd have told them "skip the options, bump my pay by 10%, and maybe I'll take you more seriously".
People need to realize that equity != pay. Equity is so dependent on so many other factors that you have ZERO control over that the risk-reward ratio is heavily slanted toward the former.
I don't see any larger conclusion here. Let's assume HR talent falls on a normal distribution: just like you'll meet some absurd engineering candidates you'll also meet some absurd HR people.
I imagine companies that make really bad hiring decisions are put under selection pressure and are less likely to continue to exist. It's a problem that I think can be fixed by the marketplace, but I don't know if a post makes any tangible impact.
Apparently my ability to answer some random function that in no way shows my ability to do day to day engineering work disqualifies me from employment. Yet these same companies are posting month in and month out looking for engineers and complaining that they are unable to find viable employees.
Knowing that ruby has a humanize gem (and python's humanize module doesn't get as granular as they wanted their example to be), I mentioned this to the interviewer, saying, "Hey -- why would I want my development team to spend an hour re-inventing the wheel when it can already be done with a code import?" -- while showing him the gem, and providing a sample code.
Suffice to say, he wasn't interested in that, he wanted to see how I'd implement something like that...
...so, I provided my code...which was as clunky as it could be in 30 minutes -- and then was almost certain that I lost this specific position because I didn't interpret my numbers from right to left vs left to right.
Seriously -- if you've booked a hotel room in the US, there's a 50% chance you've booked it on infrastructure that I've designed and implemented from the ground up. I've led teams of 20+ SRE's around the world in a 40 billion dollar company. My references speak for themselves. The reality is that they're going to still be looking for a SRE manager position in three months, and I won't be looking anymore because I would have found something that I'm interested in (and isn't me doing a containerization of a Windows-based ERP system in 96 hours).
That may be the case, but I've also worked with a programmer who said he'd never needed hash tables.
As you can imagine, this said more about the solutions he arrived at than the usefulness of these data structures.
It sounds as though you have some basis of where you need to improve, I would continue to look for jobs but also try to improve in those areas (recursion and algorithms).
I spent the last year looking for jobs and it's definitely a weird market right now. I got offered a position that another company told me I lacked the relevant experience for.
You would be surprised by how a company may value your talents. It seems like the companies you've interviewed for don't require the talents that you have which is a good indicator that you probably would not want to work for those companies.
Keep looking for the company that values your talents and shares your values, but make sure to learn more in the areas that you have identified as needing improvement.
It requires there to be a large pool of highly qualified candidates who don't work in the industry right now (and more likely completely unemployed) who would want to work in the industry if the conditions were "just right".
But such a pool just doesn't exist. All employers can do, especially considering wages, is to try and poach candidates from competitors, other industries, other countries.
There clearly is a perception of depressed wages. I believe this mostly is an issue of a distorted labor market. There seems to be an issue of collusion among employers not entering into mutually harmful wage competition. Maybe regulations don't give employees enough power in the process. Unionization is also rare, and may not work in any case.
The problem is a limited supply of labor for them, and they just haven't figured out that their business plans will not come to fruition until they change their assumptions.
I see this in healthcare all the time:
Healthcare MBA doesn't want to pay market rate for nurses. Experienced nurses quit and take jobs elsewhere with sign on bonuses. Hospital hires inexperienced nurses to fill gap. Inexperience causes burdens on surgeons and physicians and other nurses. More experienced nurses quit, surgeons and physicians quit, ad nauseum.
Saving some money short term leads to the inevitable destruction of the institution. Who gets paid bonuses for this clever trick? Healthcare MBAs who move onto the next victim.
I know this because I have gone through this process several times.
Then once I was done with the interview, I went to the near by restaurant and casually asked if they knew anything about the company and luckily, a person from the accounts dept was there. So, he told me how the company initially had 12 members in the IT department when 6-8 would be enough. Then on a cost cutting sphere, they axed 6 on 1 day and then it thinned out to 3. Of which, the IT manager has resigned leaving just 2 members, both related to the owner. While the owner's son, a 1st yr cs grad student is the IT manager.
This is an extreme tale and I couldn't verify the story. But now this trend of making 1 person do the job of 2-3 for the salary of 1 seems common nowadays.
Personal story ahead. I've been looking for a job for around two months already. I'm Ruby/JS dev, so there are a few offers I can choose from. The problem is, half of that offers pay very little. Based on my experience, related to working with other people and to my previous salaries, I'd be a sucker to apply to those cheap offers. What I'm even more afraid is the people I'd work with. I'm pretty young and ambitious and I learn fast and I want to learn a lot, but if you don't have a good mentor you are not gonna learn that much.
Unfortunately, the offers, that interest me, require much more experience than I have. I doubt that I'd have a real problem with adapting and doing the job unwell. But I don't even get invited to any interview from that offers, because my CV has one year or two years of experience less than they expect :( How can I show that I could be a good fit then?
I know it's not that much related to the topic, but I've been a bit frustrated.
The hiring manager should already have an idea what level of experience is needed, what kind of budget exists, and how quickly the hire needs to be made by. Winnowing down from a stack of resumes to an offer is the art of compromising on those three axes. If your job opening can actually legitimately be kept open for that long (i.e. for a year plus, with no consequences), you should probably reassess whether you need to hire for the position in the first place.
What's going on here? What we have here is a min-max problem. In one case, the hiring manager would like to reduce risk of a bad hire and reduce amount of time needed to train an engineer. On the other side of the scale, the hiring manager needs to hire someone and get a butt in seat to get the work done. So what to do?
A couple of things come to mind. First, there is an algorithm for this, the optimal stoppage problem. That is you review a certain amount of candidates, lets say X, then pick the best one after X. The problem comes down to solving for X. I forget the solution, but there is one out there that is based on how long you want to wait.
Second thing that comes to mind is relying on core attributes, like hard work, motivation, overall intelligence, team-player, etc... versus overly specific skills.
Yes in both cases a lot is still left up to subjectivity and can still lead to long lead times in filling a position.
There is either an internal candidate already identified or there is a h1b candidate who needs their work authorization. Either way, that job was never going to be yours regardless of your qualifications.
“Yes, ten other companies are doing the exact same thing our company does, and there is open source that almost does what we want but we’ve hired fifty developers to reinvent that wheel because reasons.”
There are too many people out there who could cut and paste most of my job descriptions onto their resume. That’s only partly a failure on my part. Most of my bosses don’t value my specialized skills (or only 3 months out of the year), and there are too many people repeating my work or vice versa.
There are a lot of custom CMS systems out there. If we refused to build them or insisted on making them thinner layers over standard modules, we would have plenty of people to go do other things. And I bet HN could name at least three other tropes that repeat all over the industry like that.
Super Narrow Selection Criteria in particular however is not absurd; it means they have a specific candidate in mind. I don't mean to defend the practice (it either means the company has a screwed up hiring process or more likely they are trying to hire a specific domain expert from overseas and want to minimize the number of interviews of less qualified people) however I do believe this one case doesn't support the thesis.
I did manage to navigate through completely retarded 45 minute HR conversation and got invited for the interview with the director of UX. From the moment I walked in the guy was ultra uncomfortable and shy because he was obviously 15~20 years younger than myself. Also clearly never interviewed people before. I never heard back from them, but I see that the position is still open...
I'm reaching 40 next year, 20 years of code experience. What's bizarre about the whole thing is that I would be consider to be reaching my productive peak in the next 10 years in any other field.
In tech you are treated like a dinosaur, as if not knowing what the latest hipster JS framework of the week makes you obsolete.
>Are you people complete morons?
Yes.
1) The majority of companies don't understand what they want and/or need in terms of personnel. Why that is can be a discussion some other time.
Of course there are exceptions. Typically they are the successful companies, the industry leaders, etc. Those who fail to make this cut believe these companies are auccessful because of open floor plans, ping pong tables, etc.
Collins said "Get the right people on the bus."
That's kinda true but also incomplete. It's actually: "Get good people on the right bus and get rolling in the right general direction. No ping pong tables required."
2) What most job posters don't seem to realize is that better / great people typically have a well serviced bullshit detector. Post your nonsense all you want. The ones you wish you could get can smell your turd-scented confusion and won't bother. It's not them. It's you. Suck it up and deal with it already.
That is bound to manifest itself in the generally quality of prospective employees. The term "idiocracy" takes that idea to the extreme...but unfortunately is not far from the truth. In my experience, a general rule of thumb in Fortune 500 HR (and even large federal agencies) is that a star will almost never apply directly through the front door. There will be either recommended by a trusted insider or will find an ingenious way to demonstrate their talent. For all the rest, the assumption (mostly correct) is that they are junk or at the very least significantly overrating their self-professed abilities/talents/worth/salary/etc. So, what looks like a sucker shortage is simply the trend for lower value default offers most HR departments will put out there based on the (reasonable) assumption of the (low) quality of the person up against them.
But there are also good reasons why companies are often extremely careful hiring new staff. Many companies are desperately seeking the right dev's because they know that the wrong pick can cost them tons of money. The mess a wrong dev can create can do so much damage to the product while it often has to be released within a certain timeframe. I've seen a startup failing because of that.
That suggests problems in management and organization. Likely also with existing seniors and their communication with management. If not having developer causes less issues then hiring average one, then the company really needs to rethink their processes and onboarding.
Check out this job posting: metaltoad dot bamboohr.com/jobs/view.php?id=103
> 90k max salary
> 9 years of industry experience
Totally clueless. Good luck with that.
Recently talked to a certain Beaverton, Oregon based shoe company. APPARENTLY, they hire a lot of their new hires as "contractors" and dangle the "full time" carrot in front of their face for a year. Swear up and down you are not a second class citizen... except you can't use the gym. Or go to the holiday party or use a lot of their facilities. And your badge is a different color.
Yeah, go sell that to someone else. Good luck finding a competent engineer.
But then, 95% of them can't fizzbuzz.
...and they can't write code to count up in increments of five in python.
It's simple economics - if there truly is a shortage of drivers, offer a higher salary. Yes, it really is that simple.
There's no shortage of drivers - or of people who would become drivers. There's a shortage of people who will accept a low-ball wage, whereas with an autonomous truck you don't have to deal with inconvenient things like salary, health insurance, union dues, etc.
A lot of this may be due to the H-1B -> Green Card application process. I think the company has to prove their existing H-1B employee is the only possible person who can fill the role by posting the job publicly, so the lawyers will craft the req as narrowly as possible. As a result, many of these listings were never intended to be filled with external hires.
They promised me to be partner, I felt bad leaving there for my colleagues. But I would never return, as their promise was just for keeping me interested.
Just 1/5th of the stress of before now. Thank god, sometimes being a sucker is doing too much.
Eg. Night calls because one of my applications ( e-commerce) was for fast-food, who did their orders at 01:00 am. Guess who had to fix other's people's sync services at night.
Even when I went swimming, I had to check phone calls. Urgh
Show continuity of experience over a long time (even if it's just a project, list it in your experience section) and put "Javascript" or "Python" in your headline. Talk about some of the things you've done, and skip the video game references imo. Don't let it get you down, 5 months is not really that long, and definitely don't give up.
Can you add any bullet points to the experience you have on your LinkedIn? Talk about what role you had and what things you have accomplished in those roles even though they are relatively new.
One has to be on serious drugs (or profoundly ignorant on the not-very-bright-kindergartener level) to think somebody 45 years old working in tech is ignorant about tech or social media. This is the generation who had computers since they were 10. And back then computers required real investment of time and knowledge to use.
Is it a real thing that happens? Are there recruiters like that?
this pretty much describes the landscape, even for positions at companies like Google
I couldn't get beyond this sounding like: Old Guy Yells at Cloud https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/019/304/old...
Coming from an older guy myself.
Most companies will say 'no', the tiny minority that say 'yes' are the ones that are serious.
Clearly only works if you have enough 'dealflow' to end up with nonzero takers
Maybe simply a barrier to someone who is not knowledgeable enough to know the true intent of that question. Let's take an extreme. Say there was a job listing and part of the listing said 'must be able to cook hotdogs at barbecues'. Nobody would take that seriously and a vegan would still apply. Right? Or perhaps a vegan would not apply because they are not able to figure out what the intent of the 'trick' question was.
A 'sales director' is someone who understands sales and is above all not afraid to get past some sales barrier 'sorry we aren't interested right now' but will keep pressing on even after 'no' is the repeated answer (if of course they deem the opportunity appropriate).
I buy high end good. You don't know how many times I get back a reply which says 'sorry it's not for sale at any price'. That always means the same thing 'show me the money'. Of course there are things that are 'not for sale at any price' but typically not what I have found to be the case. What they are saying is 'I don't think someone will offer a price I would ever consider accepting' or 'I don't know the current market enough to even know what I have is valued at' and so on.
Good or bad, i think its debatable. but most of the experience and "meta" these days is to wait for a great candidate.
This would seem to indicate that there is a huge oversupply of coders. The fact that knowing how to code wasn't even considered important in the "Startup School" curriculum does as well.
"Sucker" is a pejorative that implies you can beat the system if you're smart enough. You can only beat the system by breaking rules and becoming what you hate.
> There are easily several thousand people in the town who are capable of building that business. Get over yourselves and just freakin hire someone. You're running a website, not curing cancer.
I hear you here. I've posted my team's hiring principles here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18586590
At the top:
- Hiring cycles will be structured and as short as possible.
- When we start a hiring cycle, we will finish it by hiring the most qualified applicant who accepts our offer.
But on this point, I'm a little confused:
> So let me get this straight. You want me to bootstrap a multi-million dollar business, from scratch, operating with minimal marketing and operating funding in a highly competitive channel. Or get your consumer product slotted at a major retailer. Or launch your new web application. For $100,000 a year and no equity.
The general advice I come across here is to treat equity as a lottery ticket and focus on salary. Is the complaint here that salary is an insult? In the Bay Area, sure. But Atlanta? This comes off a bit self-entitled to me. At least without more context.
I think there's also signs of what I'll call premature hindsight bias (feel free to offer a better term). You assume, perhaps reasonably, that once hired, you're going to come in, make friends, kick ass and provide value. I want to believe that you can do it at a salary we both find fair. But until you get here and have been on the job for a few weeks or months, it's going to be really hard for me to know if that's what's going to happen. And if you happen to not be a great fit for unexpected reasons, how do we deal with that? That can be a lot of stress for everyone if not a full-scale disaster. In short, you don't want to get suckered, I don't want to get suckered.
There's a lot of risk and uncertainty in hiring and I imagine risk aversion drives a lot of it. I know it does for me even as I do my best to control it. Hence the 4-5 interviews mentioned in the top comment. (That seems excessive to me. I always wonder what a company gets out of the 5th interview that they didn't get out of the 4th, or the 10th hour of meeting with a candidate that they didn't get out of the 9th.)
Here's an exercise I call Black Boxes that I came up with recently for one of our hiring retrospectives. I think we have a pretty good hiring approach but I'm always looking to improve it. I share it here because I'm interested in hearing the ideas of others:
BOX OPTIONS (alphabetical order):
- Car Type (what type of car does applicant drive?)
- Cover Letter (box may be empty)
- Gender
- LinkedIn Profile (box may be empty)
- Phone Conversation (20-30 minutes)
- Resume
PART 1
Ten people have applied for our web application position. You know nothing about them. You have only a black box for each one. Ten black boxes. You get to look into each black box. Then you have to hire one of these ten applicants.
You get to choose the contents of the box from the options above. Which type of box do you choose to make your hiring decision? In a comment below, list your box. You may include a brief explanation if you wish. Example:
> Resume: This is the first thing I always look at. It should contain the most relevant info and is pretty low investment as it's a standard part of application.
PART 2
Now rank the rest of the boxes above in order of utility.
PART 3
What other boxes would you like to have as an option? Consider time/money costs associated with each box.
I sometimes get pings from Japanese and European recruiters, and it's not uncommon to see the ranges in those. They're usually pretty hilarious by US standards, though, so I politely decline without wasting anybody's time interviewing (even though I wouldn't mind spending a few years in Europe or Japan). At the very least, this is respectful of my time and effort.
There are people who just want a decent job with decent pay and a decent place to work. They will do consistently decent work for stability, neat stuff to work on. They are not heavy negotiators, and maybe don't realize they could make '40% more elsewhere' - or frankly are not willing to move their wife/husband and 3 kids.
Real 'market value' is what you are being offered, or rather, what people are accepting. So if people are accepting those supposedly low-ball numbers, well, that is 'market value'.
The situation was this: I had two former managers and one co-worker all advocating for me for the one job they knew was available--my old job!
I have not been able to get any response from the company at all.
of the people looking for jobs........ ?
I agree with most of the sentiment, but not this one.
Someone with the right experience, skills, maturity, 'get go' and initiative ... there are not 'thousands' of people like that in a mid tier city. More likely only a handful.
I posit the big VC-backed or FAANG companies 1) can offer huge initial salaries to not have to deal with competition 2) hire juniors at high salaries because they can afford to spend 1-2 years training them. Combine with the sheer volume of hiring they all perform, and it starts to set some false expectations. Maybe smaller companies are failing at capitalism by not competing?
Anecdotally, I have seen engineers refuse pretty good gigs because they were expecting to be treated like royalty without much to back it up. This industry is skewed, in many ways.
My personal anecdote is that I took the first tech job that was offered as a junior, a little bit before this reversal started taking place, and as a result, I left a lot of money on the table. Years later, I realized that if I had just said no, and extended my search a little bit longer, or had role models telling me my knowledge at the time was worth a lot more, I might be worth a lot more right now (factoring in compound interest with sensible investing of excess profit from work + modest lifestyle).
These companies just have profit margins high enough to afford to blow everyone out of the water with their offers. They’re competing with each other for the top talent, and it makes it really hard for companies in other industries to retain their best and brightest.
> Maybe smaller companies are failing at capitalism by not competing?
Pretty much. It makes sense for employees to land where they can create the most value. If FAANG can get 4x the value out of a junior engineer than your small company can, of course they are going to outcompete you in hiring top junior engineers.
Figure out how to extract more value or set your sights lower (and regardless probably want to keep your contempt to yourself).
By not having money?
This is capitalism working as expected, the only reason you would word it that way is out of ignorance.
"Must have experience with the Home Depot vendor system"
I mean, what if someone fulfilled all my "musts"?!? That'd be the perfect person.
But you hardly ever find rock stars. And so you hire the best person who doesn't have all the required skills. Don't let job requirements stop you from applying. And don't think that I'm being unrealistic for asking for what I probably won't get.
Especially if x isn't something very useful like experience with a framework you use, but something relatively trivial like knowledge of a CRUD app they periodically do a bit of data input into.