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Tech industry hiring heavily believes in the "fixed mindset." Meaning that people are unable to grow. Combine with extreme risk avoidance, an explosion in the number of stacks, and no appetite for waiting a week for a dev to learn another thing. No hire.
Unicorn hunting is probably some of it. I followed up on one that sent me a rejection letter after two interviews and just said "I see your job has been re-posted" Never heard back. =)
I see a lot of unicorn job postings here and elsewhere. Bunch of companies here in the midwest are looking for 5 years experience in AI pipeline engineering. Those people exist, sorta*, but they aren't taking $60/hr contract gigs from bureaucratic hellscape Acme Corp types. Likewise, I see a lot of startups led by technical hustler types (more power to them) who would never pass their own hiring expectations. Your CT…
I was once interviewed by a girl who was probably not much more than an intern, I ended up explaining a couple things for her during our call; she didn't know AWS services had quotas, for instance. She was interviewing me for a Devops job that required 10 years (yeah, 10) of experience with AWS.
After our call, the CTO came back to me (we are somehow acquainted, that's why I applied there in the first place), to tell me the feedback he got from this woman is that I don't seem to know my stuff real well ... It's been two years and their team are mostly the same people, I don't think they ever hired anyone.
Big waste of time. A lot of people on these nu-companies are just LARPing, they do that until money runs out, blame it on "the economy" and move along.
I've posted on "Who's hiring" for years now, and hired many engineers from those posts. We reject the vast majority of candidates, and to those who we reject, it might seem like we can't hire "a single candidate." That's not true - if it were, I'd stop posting here!
I both got a job through such a thread, and have now seen the other side of the applicant pipeline. The average applicant (in general, idk about HN in particular) is not very strong! Especially true when you consider the alternative of preserving runway and being patient.
Smells to me that if you can be patient then you’re not after a need. Companies than can hire, hire because they can and not because they need? Isn’t that what got us into this mess?
As other posters said, if you get a bad hire (or even mediocre hire), it might be total negative - both because of negative contributions, but also because maybe the management only gave you one spot, and now you've given it to mediocre person, you no longer have a chance to giving to someone better.
Back when I was at a startup, we've were looking for the new people basically constantly. Very few people applied however (we were C++, not web, and in the constrained system...) and even fewer people passed, so we ended up with 1-2 people per year total.
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I don’t understand the argument for being patient. If you think the new hire will lead to increased profits, there’s an opportunity cost every day you don’t have them on board. And sure, maybe you wait for the best person and they are more productive, but they might be out the door in a few years.
Quality is more important than quantity in engineering, so a mediocre hire can be a net negative. In so many ways: - consuming time and attention from people who help them - time spend checking and fixing their work - additional maintenance costs from poorly thought out solutions - time spent reproducing and fixing bugs - lowering morale of better engineers - creating whatever the opposite of “a culture of excellence…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have seen enough devs being corporate drones and people who say they want to learn but do nothing to be tilting towards “fixed mindset”. I do have myself as a counter example but that’s small N and as usual always others are lazy ;)
Clock-punchers are similarly represented among other stacks. Sounds like an orthogonal concern.
Tech industry hiring heavily believes in the "fixed mindset." Meaning that people are unable to grow. Combine with extreme risk avoidance, an explosion in the number of stacks, and no appetite for waiting a week for a dev to learn another thing. No hire.
I think a big part of this problem is HR non technical recruiters. They really have no idea who to hire and trash people based on dumb voodoo criteria. They however will fight to the death on how important they are for hiring.
It is like they are never interested in what I do know and experienced but picking some thing they pride themselves on.
Like I never ran into issues with file descriptors on Linux and interview was about C# development well senior level so I guess it is fine.
Other time well I have comp sci degree so for a software dev with C# in web development it is perfectly reasonable to ask math questions I wasn’t expecting and then conclude I wasn’t prepared and wasted their time.
Well one time it was about C# development and writing code using generics that one I most likely should have practiced more often but I don’t use it as much and it would take me couple hours to brush up on it to be proficient - but was shot down as I couldn’t remember the syntax correctly.
I am happy I don’t work in those places so I am happy they did that :)
HR filters I probably haven’t seen from all the ones I never heard back from.
I don't stand a chance in an interview pool made up of a sample of HN readers.
Outside of HN, I am a successful IT director, with a graduate degree and a good career. Here, I am an auto-reject bottom-rung parasitic loser that never went to Stanford.