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You Only Need 50% of Job “Requirements”

talent.works

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Re: You Only Need 50% of Job “Requirements”

#151

Post by scarejunba »

chrisbennet wrote: post #130
rhacker wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's one thing for engineers to "be the HR department" at small companies. They are willing to let things slide because they know the candidate, especially after interviewing them, that they can fill in the knowledge gaps (well I don't know about the willing to move to china bit). Contrast that with a large company with a specific HR department that is in charge of taking a job requirement sheet and finding and filte…

If I see a position that has been open for longer than a month, I assume they are not serious about filling it. Either they aren't really hiring or they don't want to pay the market rate.

Most of the job positions all of FAANG have posted have been open for months, some for over a year. They are really hiring and have no problem paying market rate. That's a counterexample.

Re: You Only Need 50% of Job “Requirements”

#152

Post by sillyquiet »

anticensor wrote: post #147
sillyquiet wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Does US anti-discrimination law really operate like "you have to serve the protected class whatever the consequences for unprotected ones?" European ones typically require both weak and strong classes be served equally, not in results, but in the manner and the matter.

Not sure what you mean by 'consequences' for the unprotected classes in this context, but the age discrimination case would only be valid if both the Over-40 candidate and Under-40 candidate were equally qualified, and the Over-40 candidate was rejected solely because they are too close to retirement age.

Note that due to the letter of the EEO law, there is NOT actionable age discrimination if all candidates were over 40, and for example, the 60 year old was rejected in favor of a 41 year old for the same reason as above.

edit: I should also mention IANAL

Re: You Only Need 50% of Job “Requirements”

#153

Post by crispyambulance »

astura wrote: post #134
Double_a_92 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yet it happens, ALL THE TIME, even for candidates that are 40-ish and higher. It is always trivial to find another reason to not hire an older worker.

Re: You Only Need 50% of Job “Requirements”

#154

Post by camjohnson26 »

kamaal wrote: post #85
scarejunba wrote: post #4

Perhaps companies over-list requirements because everyone knows requirements are not ANDed together. There is a scoring scheme that combines all of these, and the quality of the requirement. And let’s be honest having spent “5 years of Python” at a Google is a different story from having spent “5 years of Python” at an Infosys. To be honest, I’ve never seen a job description that exactly lays out what you’re going to…

>>And let’s be honest having spent “5 years of Python” at a Google is a different story from having spent “5 years of Python” at an Infosys. Unless Infosys employees code on computers bought to earth by aliens, for their business software requirements, I can't even imagine what the difference between code written at Google and Infosys could be. Its code, at the end of the day. The differences are in productivity and…

As a consultant I've seen the code quality produced by developers at several companies, and there is absolutely a difference. I've worked with experienced 3rd party developers on offshore teams who seemed unfamiliar with basic architecture patterns such as reusing code. Their productivity was incredible but they were incurring a lot of tech debt.

Re: You Only Need 50% of Job “Requirements”

#155

Post by jriot »

alain94040 wrote: post #121
dfxm12 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Those are the most frustrating reasons. You wonder why people hate finding a job, its because of people like you doing this type of nonsense. Figure out what you want and need before wasting people's time.

Re: You Only Need 50% of Job “Requirements”

#156

Post by paulie_a »

austincheney wrote: post #5

You can eliminate all kinds of selective bias and incompetence by first filtering candidates based upon a battery of personality tests. You don't have to know anything about the candidates until this pass through the initial filter.

Personality tests are probably one of the worst ways to filter. It is actually a signal the company has no idea what they are doing and more than likely has terrible management.

Re: You Only Need 50% of Job “Requirements”

#157

Post by JustSomeNobody »

was_boring wrote: post #48
itronitron wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there is an assumption that if a candidate doesn't have experience in 'Y' but they have ten years of 'X' (which is similar to, or a precursor of Y) then the candidate is somehow biased against Y or unwilling to work with it. Two decades of OpenGL experience?, sorry we are looking for someone with Vulkan experience. Two years of OpenGL experience? when can you come in?

As someone who does hiring, I have a different interpretation. Let's say I'm a rails shop and I'm looking for mid to sr. level candidates and someone has 10 years of experience working on Java 1.4 spring based application. I think to myself "this is great, they are willing to do some grunt work but I need to know they haven't stagnated". It's the stagnation that leads to lower job offers. You need to convince me that…

Really? You can't just talk to the person and gauge their enthusiasm? I talk to devs all the time and they typically wear their tech bias on their sleeves. You know who is hard core C# and wouldn't touch java w/ a ten foot usb cord after just a few moments.

Re: You Only Need 50% of Job “Requirements”

#158

Post by naasking »

was_boring wrote: post #48
itronitron wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there is an assumption that if a candidate doesn't have experience in 'Y' but they have ten years of 'X' (which is similar to, or a precursor of Y) then the candidate is somehow biased against Y or unwilling to work with it. Two decades of OpenGL experience?, sorry we are looking for someone with Vulkan experience. Two years of OpenGL experience? when can you come in?

As someone who does hiring, I have a different interpretation. Let's say I'm a rails shop and I'm looking for mid to sr. level candidates and someone has 10 years of experience working on Java 1.4 spring based application. I think to myself "this is great, they are willing to do some grunt work but I need to know they haven't stagnated". It's the stagnation that leads to lower job offers. You need to convince me that…

> You need to convince me that you were a dedicated employee for 10 years (which you are), but you also need to show that you're willing to learn something completely different.

Have you actually had examples where this wasn't the case? This seems like a common sentiment that I myself have thought, but I honestly can't think of a single instance where a candidate with good experience or knowledge wouldn't actually be willing to learn something new, or wouldn't model code they write along existing idioms.

Re: You Only Need 50% of Job “Requirements”

#159

Post by logfromblammo »

mbesto wrote: post #137
logfromblammo wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Applying for a job costs time and effort. All other things being equal, I will prefer to apply to a job posting where I meet more of the requirements than one that is a looser match. Adding requirements that aren't actually requirements is a good way to get your posting sorted to the end of my applications queue indefinitely, or ignored entirely. I will apply to the closest matches first, and stop when I pass a time…

I don't blame you and I agree with you. My point is that this is not how the market works. You argument is like asking for women to stop being so demanding about all of the qualities they want in a man. Sure you can take a stand against that and say "I'm only going to meet women who match my exact profile and seek those who have realistic set of expectations". This is just simply not how it works and anyone who has i…

What argument? This is what I actually do. I read job postings sometimes, and if a posting looks like it might involve too much bullshit to be worth the effort to apply, I forget about it forever. If the posting is crap, I don't apply. It's not my problem to contact the company and tell them why their advertisement failed to draw my interest.

This strategy works perfectly fine when I already have a decent job and wouldn't be averse to trading up, if the opportunity is right. If nothing seems good right now, I can still go to work. There will probably be more opportunities in the future.

But even when I need to find new work now, or run out of money to pay bills, I still shove the lowest estimated payout/effort prospects to the back of the queue. There is nothing any individual company could do to change my behavior. I will always pick the ripest fruit whenever I get hungry. I will always avoid wasting my own time with snipe hunts and wild goose chases.

Your dating analogy crumbles in a lot of very reasonable cases. Job hunting is only superficially like dating. Getting hired is not very much like getting married, unless you are in a cult featuring polygamy/polyandry for the leader (and maybe their top disciples), with chastity and celibacy for everyone else.

But in some sense, it is apt. If your profile says you're looking for someone who is:

  - rich
  - pretty
  - single (never married)
  - faithful
  - sane
  - attentive to my every need
  - definitely not an axe-murderer
  - also not a con artist
  - has a garish tramp-stamp tattoo featuring Yosemite Sam
  - minimum height 190cm; maximum weight 100kg
You are still going to get pinged by chat-bots and the desperately thirsty, but anyone fitting your bill has probably already overfilled their queue with prospects that are only asking for:

  - able to cook dried pasta correctly
  - not a *complete* asshole
And that's because those other people have requirements, too.

Re: You Only Need 50% of Job “Requirements”

#160

Post by jbob2000 »

wil421 wrote: post #40
mszcz wrote: post #19

https://dilbert.com/strip/2008-03-01 I'm not a fan of HR in general and it's frustrating that they are often the clueless gatekeepers.

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.

Here's a life hack: put every keyword possible in white text on the last page of your resume. A human will think it's a blank page, a computer will think you've hit every keyword possible.
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