Ask HN: Hiring managers, which type of engineer is hardest to find nowadays?
11–20 of 93 posts
Re: Ask HN: Hiring managers, which type of engineer is hardest to find nowadays?
#12I sort of understand where this question is coming from, but as someone who's spent a fair amount of time browsing software job postings recently, the real question isn't specialization, it's seniority . I routinely have found organizations that have, literally, dozens of open listings for "Senior Software Engineer, Sub-field", but few (if any) explicitly non-senior positions available. My very non-scientific estimat…
Re: Ask HN: Hiring managers, which type of engineer is hardest to find nowadays?
#13In my observation, Data Engineering leadership is the hardest skill to find recently. There is a good amount of entry-mid level individual contributors in the market, but at the Manager+ level the market is insanely competitive .
Re: Ask HN: Hiring managers, which type of engineer is hardest to find nowadays?
#14Every org I know is interviewing engineers fairly regularly, but some have maybe one offer accepted in 10?
Re: Ask HN: Hiring managers, which type of engineer is hardest to find nowadays?
#15The hardest "engineer" to find "nowadays" is the same as it was 10, 20, 40, 100 years ago: the one who can communicate what [s]he wants to do in a way that non-engineers can grok And, the flipside of that: the one who can take what [s]he is given in magic, hand-waving, bafflegab statements from non-engineers and convert it into something someone else can actually use If you can communicate to and understand from othe…
When it all works people see something small that they relate to, but behind that is a set of practices that aren't obvious and that often I got to by a roundabout route. Frequently I discover these practices instead of invent them and there is a big element of circularity which makes it hard to put together a story that has just the essential elements in the right order, trying to explain things chronologically is just about the worst I can do.
The answer to that is doing it over and over again, doing a better job each time, and occasionally having the breakthrough where you can put things in a new relationship that makes a lot of sense.
Re: Ask HN: Hiring managers, which type of engineer is hardest to find nowadays?
#16The hardest "engineer" to find "nowadays" is the same as it was 10, 20, 40, 100 years ago: the one who can communicate what [s]he wants to do in a way that non-engineers can grok And, the flipside of that: the one who can take what [s]he is given in magic, hand-waving, bafflegab statements from non-engineers and convert it into something someone else can actually use If you can communicate to and understand from othe…
Isn't that what a.Business Analyst does?
Re: Ask HN: Hiring managers, which type of engineer is hardest to find nowadays?
#17I sort of understand where this question is coming from, but as someone who's spent a fair amount of time browsing software job postings recently, the real question isn't specialization, it's seniority . I routinely have found organizations that have, literally, dozens of open listings for "Senior Software Engineer, Sub-field", but few (if any) explicitly non-senior positions available. My very non-scientific estimat…
My last org just wanted one senior software engineer. Just one. They couldn't find one as the salary sucked, despite interviewing about a dozen over 6 months.
Did they really want one? I'd wager that if they took those six months of interviews, job ads and recruiter time and instead took that money, added it to the salary they are planning on offering (say divided by the average tenure in that role at your company) and threw up a post on the monthly "Who is hiring" thread here they could've found someone.
A common tactic is to say "Oh, we are looking for the right person we just can't find them!" when the rest of the team picks up the workload of the exited employee and to keep that up as long as possible. It happened to me at my first dishwashing job at 13 years old and I've seen it a few dozen times since.
Re: Ask HN: Hiring managers, which type of engineer is hardest to find nowadays?
#18Re: Ask HN: Hiring managers, which type of engineer is hardest to find nowadays?
#19I sort of understand where this question is coming from, but as someone who's spent a fair amount of time browsing software job postings recently, the real question isn't specialization, it's seniority . I routinely have found organizations that have, literally, dozens of open listings for "Senior Software Engineer, Sub-field", but few (if any) explicitly non-senior positions available. My very non-scientific estimat…