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Comment by nostromo | Hacker News Reader

The labor shortage in tech doesn't exist. I know of so many very good engineers that were rejected by massive corporations that have gone on to do great things.

Google and other big employers will even brag publicly about how they reject the majority of great candidates because they are more afraid of false positives than false negatives. But then they'll turn right around and tell the government and universities that there is a tech talent shortage.

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I think for the most part you're right. When companies start hiring people who have adjacent skills (instead of exact skills) and a growth mindset then you'll know they're really facing a shortage of talent. In the 80s & 90s there was much less nit-pickiness on the part of companies trying to find people with some exact exhaustive list of skills that must be complete in order for the candidate to even be considered - there was a an acceptance of the idea that people could learn on the job and grow into it. Hiring decisions were made a lot more quickly back then in my experience. It seems like they realized that it was better to get someone on the team and get them started towards getting up-to-speed than to wait around 6+ months or more trying to find some kind of exact perfect match.

This is my sense. Most companies are just bad at hiring, so they hire a bunch of bad engineers and then go "there's a shortage of good engineers!" No, you're just bad at attracting and selecting a good distribution.

It also takes good engineers to recruit good engineers. You don't know what your missing if you don't know it exists.

Yep. And those people need to be empowered and listened to enough to affect the hiring process. No great engineer I've ever met said "put them through 20 hours of leetcode, that'll do it." But here we are.

My sense is that there is a drain on experienced engineers at the moment. There are an awful lot of coding camp engineers that can't cut it as managers.

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