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Ask HN: Hiring managers, which type of engineer is hardest to find nowadays?

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Re: Ask HN: Hiring managers, which type of engineer is hardest to find nowadays?

#41

Post by JesseObrien »

TameAntelope wrote: post #32
edrxty wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Am a self starting generalist. Every company I've worked for has desperately tried to beat it out of me. They think they want this but what they actually want is someone who will turn pre-chewed tickets into code on whatever platform they have without attempting to fix underlying issues as they identify them.

I used to think like this, but what I ultimately realized was that it's pretty arrogant for an individual contributor to think they know best what the user wants. Once I realized that, it made a lot more sense why I wasn't (and shouldn't!) be the one calling the shots on priority, UX, tempo. Even for things like tech debt, it really needs to be baked into the ability to deliver new value to a customer or it's very of…

You can't be a one man band, but if the organisation supports it, you can achieve both. In my experience, it doesn't need to be a trade off. We can get close to the users and program to your hearts content. We need the right company and environment to want to invest in that for us. There's a great loop we can get into by doing things like offering demos of new features to clients weekly or bi-weekly. What I've seen happen is that we don't need to code as much because we know the specific problems that need to be solved, rather than loads of guesswork and trying to write blanket solutions for misunderstood problems.

Re: Ask HN: Hiring managers, which type of engineer is hardest to find nowadays?

#42

Post by juancn »

Past a certain level of seniority (Principal Engineer and above), you get recruited by headhunter types.

They take a lot more time and effort to figure out who you are before even reaching out.

My guess is that these are the hardest ones to fill, which involve some sort of leadership in the role.

Re: Ask HN: Hiring managers, which type of engineer is hardest to find nowadays?

#43

Post by cheeze »

Agreed with the senior engineer sentiment. Finding entry level is difficult, but doable. Especially with a good intern program, etc.

But finding _any_ senior engineers is hard right now. With FAANG paying so much, it's just hard to compete.

IMO it gets even worse when you end up in specialized ares. Eg CV, ML, etc. Pretty much anything that requires a masters degree (or a heck of a lot of self motivation)

Re: Ask HN: Hiring managers, which type of engineer is hardest to find nowadays?

#45

Post by uf00lme »

ForHackernews wrote: post #31

Security Engineers that know how to secure applications running on a cloud platform are rare as hen's teeth. We've tried and failed to hire one for almost two years now. All the candidates are either "cloud security experts" who will run through a checklist of AWS best practices while remaining wilfully ignorant of the application itself, or on-prem dinosaurs who want to talk to us about the ports on our corporate fi…

I think they are rare to find since corporates mostly prefer checkbox insecurity and not a well rounded security professional, better to grow your own in-house talent.

Re: Ask HN: Hiring managers, which type of engineer is hardest to find nowadays?

#46

Post by Wiseacre »

giantg2 wrote: post #22
warrenm wrote: post #2

The 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…

That's not my experience. I'm consistently told that communication is my strong point, that I'm good at interpreting statements into wanted functionality, and that my professional opinions are very thorough and well-thought out. I'm told I'm slow. When I do code screens, usually in a language that I have limited experience in due to my diverse background in technologies, I don't get the job because others are faster.

Ah the never ending difference between what employers say they want and what they actually want.

Re: Ask HN: Hiring managers, which type of engineer is hardest to find nowadays?

#47

Post by jonny2112 »

giantg2 wrote: post #18

Should SRE and DevOps be grouped together? I thought they were separate.

In my (very limited) experience, small companies that separate out SRE and devops are a bad smell when it comes to type of work. It ends up being something like:

Devops: Someone who is oncall for fixing all pipelines and making sure everyone has access/credentials for various services (AWS, git, etc). Maybe if they have time they can start to teraform things.

SRE: Someone who is just oncall for everything and doesn't have time to improve things

On the other hand when a job listing is not specific but mentions SRE/Devops, they seem to be looking for someone who can build new systems to make things better, rather than just keeping the lights on.

Re: Ask HN: Hiring managers, which type of engineer is hardest to find nowadays?

#48

Post by [deleted] »

edrxty wrote: post #27
skrebbel wrote: post #25

Self-starting generalists

Am a self starting generalist. Every company I've worked for has desperately tried to beat it out of me. They think they want this but what they actually want is someone who will turn pre-chewed tickets into code on whatever platform they have without attempting to fix underlying issues as they identify them.

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Hiring managers, which type of engineer is hardest to find nowadays?

#49

Post by giantg2 »

Wiseacre wrote: post #46
giantg2 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not my experience. I'm consistently told that communication is my strong point, that I'm good at interpreting statements into wanted functionality, and that my professional opinions are very thorough and well-thought out. I'm told I'm slow. When I do code screens, usually in a language that I have limited experience in due to my diverse background in technologies, I don't get the job because others are faster.

Ah the never ending difference between what employers say they want and what they actually want .

It's not even reading between the lines. I ace my behavioral and/or conceptual sections. Then I fail the code screen for being too slow. I know they want fast people - they all do. That just leaves people like me in a shitty position, questioning what I should do with my professional life since the first 10 years have been a waste.

Re: Ask HN: Hiring managers, which type of engineer is hardest to find nowadays?

#50

Post by rocgf »

rmk wrote: post #36
qchris wrote: post #3

I 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…

The definition of "Senior" has now changed to "has > 5 years of experience". Combine this with the tendency of people to move every two years (because companies rarely keep up with the market), and you can see that "Senior" casts a wide net. It essentially includes people who may have seen maybe one major iteration of a product, perhaps none. In my opinion, that basically translates to a junior.

Well, that is a highly subjective opinion.

As with everything, moving every 2 years has pros and cons. The flip side of what you said is that a person who spent >5 years at the same company has only really seen a limited number of problems, methodologies, technology stack. And that could also count as "junior", right?

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