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Experienced engineers are struggling to get hired

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Re: Experienced engineers are struggling to get hired

#241

Post by rhelz »

h02 wrote: post #232
rhelz wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you can build me a tool ... I'd like to start a company with you and we can make a lot of money together. If you can't tell how good a programmer is by his resume, then....why the hell does everybody use resumes to try to do it??? The kicker is you can't sort good programmers from bad programmers by keyword filtering. Asking for specific languages, or specific frameworks, is a particularly egregious sin. If one…

> If you can't tell how good a programmer is by his resume, then....why the does everybody use resumes to try to do it??? I'm wondering at this point if you've ever hired for an engineering position before... Lots of assumptions here, but we don't use keyword filtering. > you'll filter out all geniuses who decided that 4 years at Amazon is enough for anybody and wants to make a move. Geniuses with 4 years of experien…

> lots of assumptions

Well, I'm not a mindreader, so perhaps you are right. Can you at least help me clear up the bad assumptions, and tell me, if resume's are not giving you the information you need, why are you using resumes?

> we don't use keyword filtering.

If your policy is to reject anybody without nodejs experience, you are using keyword filtering. It is what it is man.

> filter out more good ones.

I have sympathy here; its not clear exactly how to improve the filter, but if you reviewed 1,000 applications and found nobody, its impossible to filter out more good ones :-) There's no change you could make which would filter out more good people.

> You have to prioritize time

I have sympathy here too :-( Honestly, I can give you guesses as to how to improve, but I have no clue. Its one of the reasons I didn't go into management: I didn't see any way of doing it any better than it was already being done. You wonder if I've ever hired for an engineering position: no, I haven't, because I didn't think I'd be able to do a good job of it.

But one thing I do know, is that if a system isn't working, it needs to change, whether you know exactly how it should be changed or not.

Re: Experienced engineers are struggling to get hired

#242

Post by nradov »

h02 wrote: post #14

And we're having a hard time finding experienced and skilled engineers... trying to hire for a senior nodejs role, over a thousand applicants (most people just hit apply without reading the description, over half are disqualified for not meeting the basic requirements), dozens interviewed, and we've only managed to hire 1 person that seemed close to being qualified, and he quit after 2 months of barely working. We're…

If you're literally trying to hire for a "senior nodejs role" then the brutal truth is that you're simply incompetent and going about recruiting entirely the wrong way. Hiring should be done primarily based on aptitudes and understanding of fundamentals. Experience with a particular language or framework is a "nice to have" at most.

I've done plenty of engineering hiring and never had a hard time finding candidates who were good enough to get the job done. Relax the qualifications, increase the compensation, and improve your company's reputation as a good place to work. Easy.

Re: Experienced engineers are struggling to get hired

#243

Post by jimbokun »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #156
rossdavidh wrote: post #52

So, as a 56yo who's been programming professionally since 2004, currently having trouble finding enough contract work, a bit of perspective: When there are more openings than qualified people, even when you reduce qualifications to what is actually necessary, it seems like there's "nobody" available. Now, when the shoe is on the other foot, it seems like "nobody" is hiring. It's harsh, but it also doesn't take that m…

"There is no kind way to put this: a lot of stupid stuff got done with a lot of smart programmers in the last ten years." Any reasonable person would agree, but would the people in Silicon Valley agree.

They would agree most of all, except for the projects they worked on.

And some of them would agree even about those projects.

Re: Experienced engineers are struggling to get hired

#244

Post by francisofascii »

rossdavidh wrote: post #52

So, as a 56yo who's been programming professionally since 2004, currently having trouble finding enough contract work, a bit of perspective: When there are more openings than qualified people, even when you reduce qualifications to what is actually necessary, it seems like there's "nobody" available. Now, when the shoe is on the other foot, it seems like "nobody" is hiring. It's harsh, but it also doesn't take that m…

Good observation. A few of my previous employers simply stopped hiring in house developers. They feel more comfortable relying on either outside vendors or off the shelf software. One reason is the lack of available talent to come in and support legacy in-house software. Maybe that trend will reverse or slow a bit. So much of the off the shelf software is overpriced and inflexible.

Re: Experienced engineers are struggling to get hired

#245

Post by dysoco »

memset wrote: post #66

I am actively looking to hire - either freelance or full-time - an engineer to write open source golang code for my YC startup. However, I literally cannot afford FAANG salaries at my stage. It would literally bring my runway from n to n/5 years. And many candidates are asking for 400k+ salaries. I’d love to hire someone who knows what they’re doing but I’m just not able to find people who are both qualified and inte…

Consider hiring remote if possible from South American countries like Argentina; just don't go super cheap on the salary, $100-150k/yo still is a lot to us and I'm sure you can get some really good engineers, PhDs, whatever with that salary. You can go lower if you don't need expert-level.

I'll not apply because I doubt I'm qualified but if you have a link with the job posting I'd be glad to share with my circle.

Re: Experienced engineers are struggling to get hired

#246

Post by pdimitar »

gamblor956 wrote: post #209
pdimitar wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Instead of calling people you never met bad, maybe you can share your techniques of tweaking the resume? I've never in my life worked for more than $110K annually and I have 22 years of experience. Can do practically anything on the backend and quite a lot in terms of system administration. This is also VERY sensitive to location, even if I'm working remote ever since 2011.

There are only a handful of companies in the U.S. willing to pay 200k+ for contract programmers, and these invariably involve highly specialized needs. And if they're in a specialized niche, then their numbers and experience aren't relevant outside of that niche. Note that the parent poster was saying he is a "low level" programmer, meaning close to the hardware, which is niche role. If you know someone claiming to m…

Thank you for the perspective, I admit I never thought of that.

My life and career being the disaster that they were/are, I never stopped to think about specializing for more than a minute, 5-10 times maximum. Always seemed extremely risky because I also have zero network. Even if I found a very lucrative job and stayed there for 2-3 years the change inevitably comes at one point (especially post COVID) and then if I lose the job I'll be out of luck and severely f_cked.

Hence I always tried to cast a wide net. I started regretting that decision in the last few years though; being treated as an interchangeable cog even if you are the best programmer in the team left a lot of marks on my mental health and I wish the world became a little bit more kind but alas.

Re: Experienced engineers are struggling to get hired

#247

Post by ptero »

rhelz wrote: post #235
feedforward wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I spent much of 2020 trying to find things like bread in US supermarkets. It's funny how people harken back to Russia 40 years ago as if I was not walking through empty supermarkets four years ago.

There was only a shortage because it wasn't a free market, i.e. nobody wanted to make the dick move of raising the price of bread or toilet paper, because it would cause hardship. If the prices had been allowed to rise, supply would have equaled demand very quickly, and the shelves would have been stocked as ever. Of course, some people wouldn't have been able to afford them, so we needed some external, non-market me…

There is no such thing in the US as a truly free market.

While rising prices for the toilet paper would have quickly solved the shortage situation it would have elicited the wrath of local and national authorities. And those authorities can make life hell for anyone trying to charge whatever the market will bear.

Re: Experienced engineers are struggling to get hired

#248

Post by itsoktocry »

light_hue_1 wrote: post #54

For the past year the most common topic whenever I go to any conference or meetup has always been that the economy sucks and that economists have no idea what they're talking about. I hardly know anyone under 65 who is particularly well; certainly not in comparison to even 2 years ago. Many people who used to be financially secure are in much more precarious situations now. It's not just anecdotal. I see it at a larg…

>In my neck of the scientific woods we would be publishing papers about how our metrics are totally wrong and we need to reform our science because we're disconnected from reality.

But...you're the one using anecdata?

Re: Experienced engineers are struggling to get hired

#249

Post by ensemblehq »

memset wrote: post #116
bb88 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I had one person today - with lots of FAANG experience who’d recently gone freelance - tell me that they weren’t willing to work with me to write code but they were willing to do advising for $450/hr. We just weren’t on the same page. I don't know. If you're not hiring them full time, it might be a bargain, and save you a bunch of money. Particularly if you're trying to architect services from the ground up. Some p…

It’s always a question of ROI. It’s hard for me to identify any form of technical advice that would be worth that much at my current company stage. I’ve already allocated n% of shares to investors and advisors. Before spending money I must identify a specific need. I can give a very specific need for code (features, launch dates, customer requests) but frankly do not have a need for technical advice by itself.

I wholeheartedly agree that technical advice isn’t needed at this stage and likely the main thing to solve for is how fast can you iterate to an MVP and PMF-solution that could allow you to fundraise further. I’ve worked with some startups where they outsourced on a solution basis to alleviate the risk of building the wrong thing. Architecture was ok but not the most important issue at the current stage.

Disclaimer: I run a consulting firm with fractional CTO services for startups and previously founded a startup.

Re: Experienced engineers are struggling to get hired

#250

Post by rhelz »

mr-ron wrote: post #237
rhelz wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but...out of a thousand applicants--who presumably had college degrees/and or years of experience programming for other companies--there just has to be some who would have been successful at your company. I mean, if you lined up 600 random people grabbed from off the street, you'd find 6 to 10 of them with a genius level IQ. In fact, you'd have a good chance of finding somebody smar…

My take is the reason why there is such an emphesis on specific experience (and not just being smart) is modern web apps today are very sensitive with a slew of libraries and frameworks built on top of each other, in a multiservice environment each with different flavors of technologies. Someone coming in fresh without any experience with all of the libraries and tech are just not going to success.

No doubt you have carefully curated and assembled the stack you have because it gives you a competitive advantage. But everybody else is also trying to get a competitive advantage, so nobody is going to have exactly the same stack, used in exactly the same way, as any other company.

Its true, programming has changed: we are building on top of frameworks and incorporating services today, and not doing so much development from the bare metal. But that doesn't mean that you can't hire anybody who isn't a clone of you: it means that the we have to train ourselves to have the ABIITY to just jump into a new stack, at a new company, and quickly familiarize ourselves with it.

THAT is the key skill going forward. The crucial skills are not can you remember how red-black trees work, or how to use dynamic programming to implement this algorithm. And its not whether they can put the right keywords on their resume. It's can somebody dump 100,000 lines of code in your lap and have confidence that you can handle it.

And also, if somebody can't join your team and be productively "plugged into the matrix" in a few weeks, that means your stack has some architectural problems: lets face it, even code you wrote 6 months ago might as well be brand-new code to you. The code base has to be such that it's easy for people to quickly read it and figure out what is wrong and how to fix it.

Otherwise, even people who have been there for 10 years using that exact same stack are not going to have any success.

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