I think I know why you can't hire engineers right now • Hacker News Board

Re: I think I know why you can't hire engineers right now

#811

Post by twic » Thu, Jan 13, 2022, 4:40 PM UTC

salawat wrote: post #730

commandlinefan wrote: post #704

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Here's the root cause of your bug Hang on, don't blame the agile manifesto here. Blame the management that adopted the agile manifesto as "do all the exact same things we used to do that didn't work, but call it 'agile'".

>That's not real Agile If I hear that damn mantra again, I'm going to puke. Xtreme Programming had it right If you aren't writing the damn manual, you aren't delivering an entire dimension of product to your user. I sat down a little while ago to an old 80's handheld digital business organizer. The device itself was meh. The manual tho! My God, I'd forgotten what it was like to read a primer on a product that had act…

Keep a bucket handy, because you are going to hear it again, because it often isn't. The fact that a million people are acting entirely contrary to the spirit and text of the agile manifesto, but calling it agile, does not change that.

Re: I think I know why you can't hire engineers right now

#812

Post by avgcorrection » Thu, Jan 13, 2022, 4:42 PM UTC

jdavis703 wrote: post #720

devwastaken wrote: post #259

The cause is companies refuse to fund education and refuse to take on graduates. The system is meant to be that new engineers learn from experienced engineers. This doesn't work when all the company wants is experienced engineers. It naturally leads to applicants abusing the hiring process. This is the plain fact that those well off with their jobs just don't understand. Education is far too expensive, causing anyone…

I call BS on this, at least in America. I went to community college and a middling state university. Pell Grants combined with various STEM and achievement-based scholarships covered my tuition and then some. When I graduated I applied for two jobs and had three offers (my current employer at the time also wanted to keep me).

I love these anecdotes. The only way to disagree with these is to tell the OP that they are too talented and skilled and that the average person wouldn’t make it in their shoes.

Re: I think I know why you can't hire engineers right now

#813

Post by gyulai » Thu, Jan 13, 2022, 4:44 PM UTC

konschubert wrote: post #747

gyulai wrote: post #521

Companies nowadays seem to have a fixed expectation that if they're not rejecting 99 candidates for every candidate they hire, they are somehow not doing it right. Looking at it from the candidate's point of view: Being rejected is actually something that psychologically kind of sucks a lot. Even if at the level of higher cognition you are perfectly aware that it's just a numbers game, and that you shouldn't let reje…

Rejecting 99% of candidates doesn't mean that the average developer gets rejected 99 times before being hired. It could equally well be that some candidates get rejected 1000 times, while others get hired pretty quickly.

I knew that someone was going to pick up on the scent of Bayesian fallacy here ;-) ...though I think there's probably an economics-style-argument that can be made here that a market where companies reject a lot of candidates won't be in equilibrium if there are a lot of candidates who seldom get rejected. -- Whether the exact number is 9, 99, or 999, and what kind of measure of central tendency that number represents, whether it's a mean, a median, a mode, or whatever, has no real bearing on the argument I was making.

Re: I think I know why you can't hire engineers right now

#814

Post by fourthark » Thu, Jan 13, 2022, 4:47 PM UTC

kristopolous wrote: post #539

jmchuster wrote: post #504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if FAANGs are so deserving of such vitriol. I would probably say that big companies overall just fundamentally have a set of issues, and FAANGs are probably above average in many aspects relative to the rest of the big ones. Now, if you prefer certain small companies, or other humanitarian or mission-focused ones, that's not a FAANG-specific complaint, in my mind. And just product-wise, it's just way too…

> google, gmail, chrome, iphones There's four excellent examples of things that were better 10 years ago before this practice was instituted. The youngest thing on that list (chrome) is 14 years old. Both Apple and Google used to not hire in this 3-4 interviews of canned programming question way. Then they did. Those products are now stagnating and deteriorating so much that it's obvious to everyone. If you think it'…

I doubt the stagnation is the fault of poor hiring practices.

More likely has to do with monopolization and business models that favor advertising over users.

Re: I think I know why you can't hire engineers right now

#815

Post by loeg » Thu, Jan 13, 2022, 4:49 PM UTC

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #320

anonporridge wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The absolute value of your salary doesn't tell you anything about how long it takes to get to retirement (or more accurately, financial independence). That's exclusively a function of your spending and saving rates. https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/01/13/the-shockingly-si...

Forecasting your spending rate far enough into the future, however, is a very tricky problem if you're trying to retire at 30, especially if you're living through turbulent times. I'd rather work 3 days a week until I'm dead then let my skills start deteriorating now and live the next 60 years in fear that my fixed income won't be able to sustain me.

The riskiest years are the first few after retirement. I.e., your skills should still be pretty relevant, even if you go full luddite in retirement.

I would also love to work 3 days a week, but no employer I've encountered is interested in this.

Re: I think I know why you can't hire engineers right now

#816

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jan 13, 2022, 4:50 PM UTC

janandonly wrote: post #557

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forecasting your spending rate far enough into the future, however, is a very tricky problem if you're trying to retire at 30, especially if you're living through turbulent times. I'd rather work 3 days a week until I'm dead then let my skills start deteriorating now and live the next 60 years in fear that my fixed income won't be able to sustain me.

As someone who's been working for +10 years now for 3 day's a week I can say: spot on! I've got savings enough for fun projects or holiday's, and my 3 day job simply pays the rent/gas/electricity bills.

[deleted]

Re: I think I know why you can't hire engineers right now

#817

Post by Dave3of5 » Thu, Jan 13, 2022, 4:50 PM UTC

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #478

voakbasda wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What?! Age discrimination in the software industry??? Say it isn’t so!!! Seriously though, your insight is astonishingly spot on: LeetCode is a perfectly legal means of practicing age/lifestyle discrimination. Yet another innovative Silicon Valley dark pattern. Why is this the first I’m hearing it characterized this way?

That's just it, it's stuff you learn in computer science, then forget about because you don't use it in your day job. Your day job is writing CRUD services. That's the job. Our tech interview - ~8 hour take-home assignment, it was well-paid consultancy - asked people to basically demonstrate they could write a CRUD service. It had reading XML, some business logic / calculations, a REST/JSON API and a front-end. Ten y…

8 hour take-home ? Shesh that's terrible.

Re: I think I know why you can't hire engineers right now

#818

Post by ModernMech » Thu, Jan 13, 2022, 4:50 PM UTC

voakbasda wrote: post #768

ModernMech wrote: post #727

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like by the time you’re in your 40s, you should be able to leverage your network to bypass the technical interview. What are you doing at 40 going through the same hiring funnel as 18 year olds with no discernible reputation or experience? Maybe if you’re doing a career switch, sure, but if you’ve got 15-20 years under your belt then that’s a different story.

You are proposing substituting a nepotistic process as a substitute for a discriminatory process? Personally, I do not think that would yield any improvement.

No, I’m just saying at some point your reputation should precede you, otherwise what have you been doing for 20 years?

Re: I think I know why you can't hire engineers right now

#819

Post by Hermitian909 » Thu, Jan 13, 2022, 4:51 PM UTC

erwincoumans wrote: post #288

Hermitian909 wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Companies mostly care about whether you fit some pre defined funnel and can pass their interview hoops they don’t care about how interested you are or “how much value you can bring” like you read online. I think this is overly cynical. Companies do want these things but at large companies you: 1. Cannot maintain a network of trust amongst people making hiring decisions to keep the bar high. 2. Want a plausibly "obj…

I doubt about skipping interviews at Google. I've been at Google for about 8 years, but never met any Googler that joined after skipping interviews (except for acquihires or people who join after a company merge/acquisitions).

This is unsurprising, the network of trust I'm describing at Google isn't large while the company is huge (~27,000 engineers). Additionally, bypassing the interviews expends cultural capital, so you'd expect those who can make it happen to not usually do so. If I haven't been lied to, at least one person in the last few years joined as an IC without the standard interview process because someone near the very top of the org chart said they absolutely needed him on their team ASAP.

Re: I think I know why you can't hire engineers right now

#820

Post by fourthark » Thu, Jan 13, 2022, 4:52 PM UTC

ModernMech wrote: post #727

kristopolous wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They ask questions that kids are taught at 18/19. It's almost shocking; this is how you're selecting? People that are in their 40s aren't confused by the question but are more confused by why it's the question as being able to answer it is so disconnected from any metric of competency or quality. It'd be like saying "so you have an engineering degree, oh a masters from 20 years ago. Cool, remember Lagrange multiplier…

I feel like by the time you’re in your 40s, you should be able to leverage your network to bypass the technical interview. What are you doing at 40 going through the same hiring funnel as 18 year olds with no discernible reputation or experience? Maybe if you’re doing a career switch, sure, but if you’ve got 15-20 years under your belt then that’s a different story.

Networking is a non technical skill. Hard to say how well it correlates.