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It's not a talent shortage, it's a hiring problem

fredandrandall.com

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Re: It's not a talent shortage, it's a hiring problem

#101

Post by pyre »

joe_the_user wrote: post #94
mwd_ wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just the other day I saw a job requiring "3+ years iPad experience". I understand the appeal of hiring somebody who needs minimal training, but they may still not be the best pick. When it comes to a long-term position, it is better to hire the great developer who takes two weeks to get up to speed with some language or technology than it is to hire the mediocre developer who happens to have used Node.js or whatever.

But that in itself isn't new... When Java was young, I remember many tales of Java job advertisements demanding experience extending back before the language existed. My impression is that the current insanity isn't so much the absurdity of the bureaucratic demands but the degree to which people take them seriously...

I'm pretty sure these instances (which I remember hearing about too) are just example of how out-of-touch HR is. Someone says:

  I need a developer with 10 years of professional
  experience, and he needs to know Java.
HR hears:

  Developer with 10 years of Java experience
That, and we all know that sometimes the job listings are just there so that they can say that they tried to find other applicants, but the friend-of-a-friend is actually the 'best fit' for the job (i.e. those job applicants are designed to fail).

Re: It's not a talent shortage, it's a hiring problem

#102

Post by alinajaf »

yason wrote: post #70
kenjackson wrote: post #8

Yes, there is something wrong. I had a good friend put himself on the job market six months ago. He has the total package -- has worked on and shipped well-known products, has reviewable open-source projects and contributions, great academic pedigree, nice guy, even good looking -- I said something like, "You'll have five offers at the end of this week". Three months later, no offer. What was most interesting was how…

But the fact that someone who I would actually describe as top 1% of devs I've worked with can't get a job without relying on his network is kind of scary. Isn't it expected and the way things have worked? Friends give friends who give you jobs. Applying blind is like the shotgun approach because the relationship between you and the candidate company is nonexistent and has no context. If you're a friend of Jack's fro…

> Applying blind is like the shotgun approach because the relationship between you and the candidate company is nonexistent and has no context.

I don't know, in my (albeit limited) experience this has worked every time. Once a year in a row for the past five in fact. A nicely worded cold email highlighting relevant experience with links to code samples usually gets an interview.

I am definitely not your 1% super-developer, I think I probably sit right in the middle of the bell curve.

Not to lower the value of networking though, do it. I've learned much from just talking to people and keeping in touch, and so far I've helped set up a couple of deals that went well.

Re: It's not a talent shortage, it's a hiring problem

#103

Post by jarek »

eshvk wrote: post #67
ef4 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I used to wish there was a way I could talk to an engineer in a company over coffee There is. You offer to buy them coffee. In practice, this is actually how much of business (and that includes hiring) gets done. The whole "Send resume, pass phone screen, do interview, get offer" thing is more the exception than the rule, especially for really desirable jobs.

It's kind of hard to be a struggling grad student in Austin and offer to buy engineers in San Francisco coffee. :-) However, having said that, what you say does make a lot of sense.

I hear there's an event in Austin around this time of year and you can find a lot of people from Bay Area there...

Re: It's not a talent shortage, it's a hiring problem

#104

Post by tomjen3 »

earl wrote: post #44

I personally hate graph algorithms and all the stupid associated questions. I have to spend two weeks reviewing all that stuff every time I change jobs to go ahead and never ever use it again. It simply never comes up in the type of work I do. At my current place of employment, one of the engineering managers was complaining that an interviewee bombed a graph algorithm question. I asked, "Where -- if anywhere -- in o…

What the fuck made you use java if savimg memory was your concern?

Re: It's not a talent shortage, it's a hiring problem

#105

Post by tomjen3 »

jerickson wrote: post #18

We often find that there are plenty of technically qualified people out there, but what you can do isn’t the only factor in hiring. The most important thing about hiring talent is finding talent that works well with your existing talent. In other words: finding a good CULTURE fit. There are LOTS of smart people out there, but only a small percentage of those people are sociable enough to really do an exceptional job…

Bull. Being part of a team is easy. Shower regulary, say good morning to people, be polite and don't backstab (or don't let them know) it.

Re: It's not a talent shortage, it's a hiring problem

#106

Post by shareme »

RandallBrown wrote: post #75
sheraz wrote: post #51

From the comments here, and in other similar posts, the HN community seems to think only one side of the interview process is broken. I posit that all sides are broken -- yes -- the recruiters, the hiring companies, and YOU, the engineer/marketer/whatever you are. I'm only going to address the one part that matters -- you. Who cares how qualified you are? You think that entitles you to a job? Gimme a break!!! Do me a…

You can't just "skip HR" at lots of companies. You can't get a coffee with someone that lives across the country. These techniques work GREAT for some jobs, but not at all for others. I don't feel entitled to work somewhere because I'm qualified. I feel that if I'm qualified and would be a good fit, that the company should want to hire me. The problem is that they often don't get a good picture of how qualified I am…

Yes you can in fact skip HR..

Shh..little secret..od you know how programmers skip FB or Google HR?

They submit a product to FB or Google that gets a buyout offer..

Smaller firms its much easier to skip HR..you just get a hld of the engineer manager

Re: It's not a talent shortage, it's a hiring problem

#107

Post by wr1472 »

tomjen3 wrote: post #104
earl wrote: post #44

I personally hate graph algorithms and all the stupid associated questions. I have to spend two weeks reviewing all that stuff every time I change jobs to go ahead and never ever use it again. It simply never comes up in the type of work I do. At my current place of employment, one of the engineering managers was complaining that an interviewee bombed a graph algorithm question. I asked, "Where -- if anywhere -- in o…

What the fuck made you use java if savimg memory was your concern?

That's a disproportional response based on just one aspect of whatever solution the OP is working on.

What is so offensive about JVM memory management? Out of interest what is better in that regard?

Re: It's not a talent shortage, it's a hiring problem

#108

Post by tomjen3 »

wr1472 wrote: post #107
tomjen3 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What the fuck made you use java if savimg memory was your concern?

That's a disproportional response based on just one aspect of whatever solution the OP is working on. What is so offensive about JVM memory management? Out of interest what is better in that regard?

Java is pretty well know for being a memory hog.

One of the problems is that nearly everything is an object so you end up with a lot of pointers which takes up additional space. Garbage collection isn't free either.

In this case it would have made sense to go with C++ and allocated as much as possible on the stack. It is cheaper memory wise (because you don't have to keep whatever malloc requires around and because they are removed as soon as you are done with it) and it gives better performance too.

For what you can't allocate on the stack, you a smart pointer.

There are of course pitfalls here -- smart pointers (via reference counting) can be slower than garbage collection and they have trouble dealing with cycles. You may also have to take special care if they are shared across threads.

Re: It's not a talent shortage, it's a hiring problem

#109

Post by eshvk »

jarek wrote: post #103
eshvk wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's kind of hard to be a struggling grad student in Austin and offer to buy engineers in San Francisco coffee. :-) However, having said that, what you say does make a lot of sense.

I hear there's an event in Austin around this time of year and you can find a lot of people from Bay Area there...

I already bit the bullet and moved to SF.

Re: It's not a talent shortage, it's a hiring problem

#110

Post by _delirium »

pyre wrote: post #97
smsm42 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect this has a lot to do with recruiters/HR being the intermediate. If I hire a programmer, I'd prefer him of course to know the platform he's working on and hit the ground running, but I'd much rather have a good programmer that can learn a new platform and become productive in a month than a mediocre one which knows the platform but will be mediocre forever. The problem, however, is that if I am a software en…

It's not just an HR issue. I've come across a number of situations where developers are making hiring decisions and using arbitrary criteria to base them on. E.g.: * The fire storm over Deviant Art's 'we only hired 0.0000001% of people' blogpost/HN discussion. * I went through the application process at a start-up where they were "really excited" about me after the first interview, but dropped me after the second bec…

On the trivia-questions angle, I do think developers who've been working with a particular set of technology for a while tend to highly value deep knowledge of the particulars of that technology, and under-estimate the competence of someone who doesn't come from exactly the same background. It's not so much that they feel the detail is important, but that it becomes a heuristic of, if you don't know X and call yourself a Y-programmer, you must be incompetent or faking. Which is a tough call to make with all these permutations of experience people could have, and excludes anyone whose technology/stack experience is even slightly different.

The traditional example is interviews for C coding jobs, where when developers interview, they gravitate towards standards-lawyering type interview questions. That at least has the advantage of being a fairly stable community, though; being a "C coder" has a certain set of cultural assumptions, and it might even be true that if you don't know certain trivia questions, it's a reliable litmus test for whether you're "really" a C specialist.

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