141–150 of 254 posts
I've only once ticked of roughly 95% of job requirements. I didn't get the job. They actually cited the 1/20 requirements I didn't fulfill and said they can't hire anybody who doesn't have that. They wanted a 100% candidate. Looking through the list of the things they listed as must haves and that they wanted an internal candidate I showed them it is statistically very unlikely they would even find a better candidate…
Heh, I think most autodidacts have discovered this independently. I'm a Physics-Major dropout, and have managed to find jobs in big brand-name companies that have "strict requirements" for a degree. Now, it's led to a level of imposter syndrome (I've posted about it on HN before), but at the same time, it demonstrates that these "requirements" are more "strong preferences". Sadly, it does seem like the research-orien…
> Now, it's led to a level of imposter syndrome I challenge that what you're feeling is imposter syndrome in this case. I posit it's the realization that at the next economic downturn, should you find yourself out of work and the landscape for being hired is more competitive, you are at a strategic disadvantage. Upward mobility into Director/VP roles is also quite limited without a degree, even though a degree in Com…
I also don't have much interest in management/directing, though your statement probably applies to individual contributor roles.
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At 60 you just got a few more years to work until you have to retire. It takes 2-3 years to really get comfortable with some bigger code base... So if you are looking for some longterm employee (if such a thing even exists), it's not worth it.
That sort of reason for not hiring a 60 year old is illegal in the US.
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They wanted a 100% candidate. You sure about that? Maybe they wanted an easy way to tell people no. Maybe that 1/20 requirement was very heavily weighted compared to the other 19. Maybe they didn't really want to hire anyone at all or wanted to hire a specific person, but had to make a job posting for political/legal/policy reasons...
Great point. Having been on both sides of the hiring table, I can tell you that the candidate has no idea what we use to make decisions, because the candidate has no visibility into our internal issues. Most of our decisions (especially to pass) have nothing to do with the candidate. And they have no way to know, so instead they over-analyze their resume or what was said during the interview to try to extract some ki…
BOTH of your examples are things that in no way whatsoever make you liable legally and you have no reason not to tell the candidate in either situation. You could literally tell the candidate even vaguely that there might be issues that will take awhile to clear up before the company can make a hiring decision. You can vaguely say that these are based on internal business processes that you aren't at liberty to explain.
Please TELL the candidate that they did well and you would hire them and might be interested in hiring them in the future if not for 'vague thing that lets the candidate know it is the company and not you'. This is incredibly frustrating and there is no reason for lying about it.
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At 60 you just got a few more years to work until you have to retire. It takes 2-3 years to really get comfortable with some bigger code base... So if you are looking for some longterm employee (if such a thing even exists), it's not worth it.
Since they're over 40, it may not be worth it but it's also almost certainly illegal. Assuming the employer is in the U.S. and has over 20 employees. https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/types/age.cfm
I've only once ticked of roughly 95% of job requirements. I didn't get the job. They actually cited the 1/20 requirements I didn't fulfill and said they can't hire anybody who doesn't have that. They wanted a 100% candidate. Looking through the list of the things they listed as must haves and that they wanted an internal candidate I showed them it is statistically very unlikely they would even find a better candidate…
They can only really reject you for lack of qualifications for such a job ad by law so that's probably what happened. If it was open for a while, they probably have a few internal candidates they needed it for.
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Sometimes it isn’t even an HR person. A computer will scan your resume and if you don’t match enough keywords a person won’t even read it.
That's actually better, since in this case there's reason to the madness, which cannot be said for the typical second order ignorant HR person.
Resume: "Ported XYZ from Angular to React, built a Rails app"
Response: "Sorry, we need someone with JavaScript and Ruby experience"
I think it's best to have two resumes, one that's more or less a big list of keywords, and another that you can show actual humans.
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I disagree, unless you and I have radically different definitions of what "comfortable" means. If I'm hiring an engineer with the seniority I'd expect them to have at 20, 30 or 40 years in industry then I want them to ramp up inside of a year. I'm not going to expect them to be completely self-sufficient within a month. But they should be capable of implementing performant solutions to nontrivial problems with autono…
I meant comfortable as in knowing exactly how to solve something, instead of first having to read and debug through (legacy) code for 1-2 days everytime you touch some new area of the application. For me personally the worst unsecurity is not knowing where to put new code, without messing up some architectural separation that I'm not aware of.