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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?

#71

Post by gumby »

rocgf wrote: post #50
rmk wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The five years is the issue, imho. As I sometime put it: this role needs someone who’s made a lot of mistakes on someone else’s dime.

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

#72

Post by colangelod »

A junior engineer with some (but not too much) experience. Im not sure what exactly has been causing this lately but we have had serious issues at my current org as well as others that I help, finding junior engineers with 2-4 years of relevant experience. We run a fairly straight forward stack (postgres, python/node depending on the service, react front end), our packages are pretty competitive and we have not had a lot of (read basically none) good stuff come across the wire. Recently we have been inundated with resumes from boot camps, college kids, "self taught" people, and just people looking to change careers and expecting us to foot the bill to train them, none of them can hack it on even simple coding challenges or basic architecture questions. At this point ill take someone who can look at a common stack dump and have a fair idea of whats going wrong...

The best analogy I can think of is that we dont need Frank Gehry, but we need someone know knows the studs should be 16 inches apart, and all we are getting is people who know that 3 inch screws might be involved in the job but that is the only screw they have ever seen and the only screw they are comfortable using.

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

#73

Post by [deleted] »

skrebbel wrote: post #54
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.

Well, we're hiring :-) https://talkjs.com/jobs No deadlines, nearly no meetings, and definitely no pre-chewed tickets. Write your own spec and then ship it (all with help from team mates ofc). I'm pretty confident that we're not the only company that works like this. What I think I mean is, if you're appalled by employers that treat people like replaceable cogs, then it might be worth your while to find an employer t…

[deleted]

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

#75

Post by bradlys »

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…

So - just in case anyone doesn't know this - companies put up listings even if they're not hiring.

Do you know why? 1) Creates an image that they're always hiring and growing (should be self-explanatory) 2) If some holy amazing engineer applies and they can get them for bottom $ - it was basically no cost to get them.

Glad to fill you in on a very common practice.

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

#76

Post by bradlys »

Almost none of the more common ones are hard to find for the right price. The issue is that no one wants to pay.

I have friends trying to do some computer/robot vision stuff. They need people who specialize in that field. It's a bit niche but they know plenty of people. You can imagine someone with that expertise likely has a PhD and has worked in the field for some time. Problem is: They don't come cheap in SV because that person could easily get a job doing something similar at a huge company with a big offer. So, you're going to struggle as a startup who is trying to pay very low $.

And if they didn't do some machine vision stuff then they'd easily be able to transfer to some typical role. So, therefore, you gotta still pay top dollar... It's a real issue for folks who can't raise huge rounds.

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

#77

Post by antisthenes »

edmcnulty101 wrote: post #64
giantg2 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would agree, if I were making 6 figures. I'm DevSecOps, so I'm definitely doing multiple things. I don't earn "so much".

DevSecOpsBizProj is prob more like it. Hope you get a position in the future that pays you what you're worth.

At this point, you're sitting there wondering if you should be working for yourself.

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

#78

Post by antisthenes »

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…

This kind of comment baffles me.

Hiring a person and training them for the role is going to be quite a lot cheaper than finding that rare professional, who's going to command a very high premium.

Which means that at least one of the following things is true:

1. You're not willing to pay enough for an individual who's a perfect fit.

2. You're not willing to hire someone who's not a perfect fit and spend money to train them for the role.

3. You've done the math and concluded that the cost of doing either 1. or 2. above is higher than the value brought by actually securing these applications (who's doing it now? nobody?)

So in cases 1. or 2. it's entirely your company's fault, and in case 3. it's nobody's fault and you don't actually care about the end result. It's an evergreen listing for a job that you already decided shouldn't exist.

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

#79

Post by trowawee »

colangelod wrote: post #72

A junior engineer with some (but not too much) experience. Im not sure what exactly has been causing this lately but we have had serious issues at my current org as well as others that I help, finding junior engineers with 2-4 years of relevant experience. We run a fairly straight forward stack (postgres, python/node depending on the service, react front end), our packages are pretty competitive and we have not had a…

Is the issue, possibly, that virtually every company has decided that hiring people and training them up in the requisite skillsets is an unreasonable ask? Despite that being the pattern for employment for most of the history of employment as a concept? Where do you think the population of junior engineers is going to come from if everyone thinks it's unreasonable to "foot the bill to train them"?

Drives me crazy that people don't want to hire entry level engineers, don't want to train people, and then complain they can't hire anyone. I was a bootcamp grad, and I was pretty useless for at least the first 6 months after I got my first job, as are most entry level engineers. Since then, I've been a pretty substantial bargain for every company I've worked for, based on the fact that I've managed 25+% raises at each subsequent job hop. I'd still be working at the first place I ever worked if they'd just kept my comp roughly in the same ballpark as what I was being offered.

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