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Tell HN: Employers are not desperate to hire developers

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Re: Tell HN: Employers are not desperate to hire developers

#341

Post by giantg2 »

chrisseaton wrote: post #319
giantg2 wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't call it cronyism. I asked what cronyism would be called if the qualifications were met. The point is that giving preference to someone you know reduces or even eliminates the other person's opportunity. This is especially important for minority groups that may not have as many connections in a given industry. Sure, people do what they need to for work, but people skipping in line...

> but people skipping in line... But picking someone to join your team isn’t taking the first person who appears in line.

No, but it is timeboxed and it's supposed to be taking the best candidate. Even internally at my company, you have people being selected for positions before the position is even posted. So yeah, you have someone skipping the process while you're standing in line for something that isn't even available.

Re: Tell HN: Employers are not desperate to hire developers

#342

Post by anon50118810 »

ihaveabeardnow wrote: post #314
anon50118810 wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OP here. I agree with not customizing the resume, that's not sustainable for a necessarily high-volume job search. I'm lucky enough that my background is in a relatively popular field, so it's a much better strategy to just apply to places that are already a good fit for my existing resume. Definitely not going to do micro-tweaks to a resume based on whatever happens to be in the listing. Keep in mind recruiters spen…

I wrote above that I don't understand _not_ customizing the resume, but I understand why it would seem not sustainable for a high volume job search.... can't say I wouldn't force myself to do it though as I think not doing it increases the chance of having to apply to more jobs.

It depends on what we mean by customizing. If you're strong in two different areas, for example both web development and devops, and you're open to both types of positions, you should have two resumes. However once you have these resumes, you should look for positions that fit the resumes and not vice versa.

Beyond that I don't think it's worth tweaking a resume for each ad, for example modifying word order. Nothing wrong with it exactly, but the gain is minimal because no one reads your resume that closely, and I think it encourages the wrong mindset for what is unavoidably a numbers game.

Re: Tell HN: Employers are not desperate to hire developers

#343

Post by anon50118810 »

chrisseaton wrote: post #321
anon50118810 wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that how it works? Imagine your typical 51-200 person company with your, I don't know, mobile, backend, product teams, whatever you call them. Is there some unspoken rule you pick up at FAANG or the Ivy League that the front door is for the unwashed and people in the know use back channels to get an invitation? If someone reached out to me and I redirected them to the careers page, would I be committing some kind…

> Is there some unspoken rule you pick up at FAANG or the Ivy League that the front door is for the unwashed and people in the know use back channels to get an invitation? Err yeah kind of. I always recommend people find someone in the team they want to join and reach out to them personally or via a mutual. If you fill in the form without someone on the other end waiting to pick your application out of the firehouse…

At smaller places the HR mystery machine is one or two people with names and faces. If they're not passing resumes down to the tech teams then there is some problem that should be sorted out. The dynamic would have to be pretty broken for me to help some random stranger bypass the system everyone in the company has agreed to use. Plus, accepting back channel applicants could mess up relationships with external recruiters, or DEI hiring initiatives.

Also the teams in smaller places are not anything spectacular, just backend, frontend, data, whatever, with a lot of overlap, so the idea that someone would be aiming for a particular team, meaning whoever is working on that part of the stack this month, is also strange.

What you're saying makes sense with big, complex companies with huge HR processes and teams of varying levels of prestige and expertise. Probably a good idea if you're aiming particularly for a team at Google that works on a particular thing you like.

Re: Tell HN: Employers are not desperate to hire developers

#344

Post by anon50118810 »

ghaff wrote: post #329
anon50118810 wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that how it works? Imagine your typical 51-200 person company with your, I don't know, mobile, backend, product teams, whatever you call them. Is there some unspoken rule you pick up at FAANG or the Ivy League that the front door is for the unwashed and people in the know use back channels to get an invitation? If someone reached out to me and I redirected them to the careers page, would I be committing some kind…

BTW, this isn't a FAANG/Ivy League thing. In fact, I expect that it's even more common in a lot of other areas. Friend of a friend jobs are incredibly common. If you're just trying to navigate the system from the complete outside by handing your resume around, you're at an incredible disadvantage.

My understanding is that GP wasn't talking about a friend of a friend situation, but approaching strangers on the team purely to bypass HR.

Re: Tell HN: Employers are not desperate to hire developers

#345

Post by ruh-roh »

ryandrake wrote: post #49
guessmyname wrote: post #33

I work at Apple and my team has been “hiring” for the last 2 years with no offers so far. Why? Because even if you are a good candidate, hiring is not as easy as people think. Among the many challengues we have I can list the following: 1. The people interested in your profile have minimal influence in the process, 2. There are people who are always chasing for the shiny new object (or person, in this case), 3. There…

A lot of companies say "we're hiring" but are not hiring , defined as actually extending an offer and actually employing someone. They're fishing, but not catching, or they're catching and releasing. We need a more precise word than "hiring". Everyone can say they're hiring, but they're not actually hiring anyone--they're just fishing.

This is interesting - I have been passively monitoring LinkedIn and a few others for senior engineering management roles for the last year or so (VPE, DoE). I am not really looking, I have only pursued a couple of them, but my feed/inbox is noteworthy. Many of the "openings" have been out there for multiple months, some a year+. A good handful are tweaked slightly every few weeks to appear new.

I can understand fishing for individually contributing junior-to-senior developers, but for senior management roles? Would a company really troll waters to find a senior leader that they don't really need? "Hey, look what I found, let's find a spot for him/her!"

My theory has been either (1) those companies are super picky, which is understandable given the impact of those roles, or (2) they don't really know what they want, and they are using the interviewing process to figure it out. But regardless of 1v2, those companies likely have people fulfilling those management responsibilities today that they have otherwise deemed unqualified, or are very-senior C-level folks that are too busy to do it well.

Re: Tell HN: Employers are not desperate to hire developers

#346

Post by [deleted] »

John23832 wrote: post #265
fdschoeneman wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"You can't speculate that a specific tree was felled with an axe rather than a chainsaw when you weren't in the woods to see it happen." -- on the contrary, I'm pretty sure a rational person could speculate that a specific tree was felled by an axe vs a chainsaw depending on what she knows about loggers in a given area from a given culture and during a given time period. It's a question of probability. It's normal an…

> I'm pretty sure a rational person could speculate that a specific tree was felled by an axe vs a chainsaw depending on what she knows about loggers in a given area from a given culture and during a given time period. It's a question of probability. It's normal and rational and fair to discuss probabilities when speculating. Given that you know nothing about the hiring practices of the OP's company, it's safe to say…

[deleted]

Re: Tell HN: Employers are not desperate to hire developers

#347

Post by fdschoeneman »

John23832 wrote: post #265
fdschoeneman wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"You can't speculate that a specific tree was felled with an axe rather than a chainsaw when you weren't in the woods to see it happen." -- on the contrary, I'm pretty sure a rational person could speculate that a specific tree was felled by an axe vs a chainsaw depending on what she knows about loggers in a given area from a given culture and during a given time period. It's a question of probability. It's normal an…

> I'm pretty sure a rational person could speculate that a specific tree was felled by an axe vs a chainsaw depending on what she knows about loggers in a given area from a given culture and during a given time period. It's a question of probability. It's normal and rational and fair to discuss probabilities when speculating. Given that you know nothing about the hiring practices of the OP's company, it's safe to say…

Ad hominem? I don't know if you know this, though you probably don't, but 'ad hominem' is a category of logical fallacy, committed when one argues that one's opponent's argument is wrong because he is, por ejemplo, an asshole or a pedophile or a loser or a dildo. At no point have I argued that your position is logically incorrect because you are an asshole. I've only ever argued that you are incorrect because your logic is dumb.

Move along.

Re: Tell HN: Employers are not desperate to hire developers

#348

Post by anon50118810 »

type-r wrote: post #331
sefrost wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tailoring your CV, in my experience, simply means looking at the job description and then rearranging your achievements so that the things they are specifically asking for are mentioned at the top. Also make sure you use the same language as them and specifically mention the exact technology they put in the job description. I do this, then I make a copy of the CV as MyName_CompanyName.pdf in my Documents directory so…

I second this. I find that the investment here is well worth it -- in general it takes me 15-30 minutes to read the job description, read up a bit on the company itself, and adjust the resume. I haven't personally tried the spray-and-pray approach. It's also not something that requires a bunch of mental energy, so you can do it in the late evening when your brain is tired from the full day anyway.

From this comment and your other comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33606053 I think what you're missing is that a lower base rate of acceptance also lowers the advantage you get from tailoring your resume.

From your other comment at the low end you suggest a 50% application -> interview conversion and 40% interview -> offer, in other words 20% application -> offer. That's a 90% chance of an offer after 10 applications. Maybe tailoring your resume gives you a 1.5x greater conversion rate, 30% overall, and now you only have to submit 6 applications for the same 90% chance.

All this is with FAANG credentials and presumably some other advantageous stuff correlated to that: good socioeconomic background, good education, no serious health or legal issues. Now suppose you don't have FAANG or you do have some other problem and your base conversion rate is 10 times lower, 2% application -> offer, 110 applications to 90%. With tailoring, 75 applications.

If it takes you 15 minutes to tailor your resume for each application, then in the first case with 6 applications that's 1.5 hours, but in the second case with 75 applications, it's almost 19 hours.

The point is that this is a rich-get-richer scenario where the extra work takes less time and is less necessary for the advantaged candidate than it is for the disadvantaged candidate.

You might argue that someone who is unemployed has all the time in the world, so why not. To that I'd say you should ask yourself how you'd feel about tailoring your 75th resume to increase conversion from 2% to 3% or if you'd rather just treat each application as disposable and keep moving on.

Re: Tell HN: Employers are not desperate to hire developers

#349

Post by [deleted] »

yrgulation wrote: post #87
neon_electro wrote: post #56

Been on the grind 9 months now, totally seeing what you're seeing. I'm looking for full-stack Web development work, strongest with Ruby, but flexible to hop into any environment and be productive within 2-3 months.

Ruby is in low demand, always has been.

[deleted]

Re: Tell HN: Employers are not desperate to hire developers

#350

Post by anon50118810 »

yrgulation wrote: post #87
neon_electro wrote: post #56

Been on the grind 9 months now, totally seeing what you're seeing. I'm looking for full-stack Web development work, strongest with Ruby, but flexible to hop into any environment and be productive within 2-3 months.

Ruby is in low demand, always has been.

I don't know about always has been but Ruby is definitely not where I'd stake my career today.
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