101–110 of 381 posts
Juniors keep jumping ship to better offers as soon as they graduate to mid-level and become useful. Eventually employers have caught on, and now skip step 1.
HR and third party recruiters make the process worse. They never understand what is going on. Why are they filtering resumes if they have no industry experience? People who have never written code have no business being involved in hiring people who do technical work.
With small companies you get subjected to some random engineers line of questioning based on some gut feelings they have. I've been on both sides of this. Manager comes up, "Hey can you interview this person?" And that's it, your let loose.
Other companies all cargo culted the same gauntlet of interviewing. 2-4 rounds of live coding. A pointless system design interview where the criteria doesn't make sense. Lets draw boxes and hit buzzwords in conversation? Do you or don't you want to go deep on anything? What exactly are you looking for with these? Its different every time. Some "vibe" check from a manager, probably not even yours? Why is the team not meeting the engineer? You need to hit 100% on this interview too.
There's no real data driven approach to hiring that Ive seen. It's all based on random anecdotes. You can see this on any job advice board from the advice people give out.
I think a reputable certification would help. It would at least cutdown on the coding interview and system design interviews everyone insists on doing. And get rid of HR and recruiters.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can have all the skills and education you want, if employers are unreasonable about their hiring and requirements, you have no control or recourse. You have to be lucky (including knowing someone, ie networking), not necessarily good.
"You have to be lucky (including knowing someone, ie networking), not necessarily good." Yes, and the network effects are largely detrimental to minority groups since networks tend to be biased toward similar people.
If you're on the employer side, you need to define your role well, build a hiring funnel, decide how you will market the role, and then run the pipeline. Vet CVs, pre-qualify, interview, interview, interview, pre-hire, trial-period hire, and then work hard at retaining the people who you like working with.
Each step of the pipeline can be debugged. There are solutions to every problem. Not enough candidates? Are people finding the ad? Are people reading the ad? Are people engaging? Why? Why not? Test - reword, change the compensation range, change the perks, or conditions.
If you're looking for a job, you also have a funnel. You search for job, read the posting, decide to apply, apply, followup, answer questionnaires, interview, interview, interview, go through pre-hiring, and then try to deliver value. Again, each step can be analyzed and debugged.
Doing this from either side is actual work. On the employer side, you have hiring managers, HR, internal recruiters, external recruiters, interviewers, and other roles and services that help you run the hiring show.
I've been doing this for a while, in various roles. Sometimes I wear an internal recruiter hat. Sometimes the interviewer hat. Sometimes the operations hat. Right now I provide a service for companies in the US who don't want to deal with outsourcing firms or the intricacies of hiring abroad but want to build an offshore dev hub in Europe. Part outsourcing, part recruiting, part organizational design, part employer of record. At other times, I've managed sizable engineering teams for tech startups. Over time, the problem changes - sometimes it's harder to find devs, sometimes it is easier. But the approach is always similar.
The only reason why I got that job was due to StoryServer experience that ended up being worthless. If they had required Java Struts and JSF experience while hiring, I wouldn't have stood a chance of even getting an interview. They accidentally hired a flexible and productive resource, which worked out great for everyone involved.
As an employer, you have a specific position to fill. What would you rather do: sort through a slush pile? Or interview someone vetted by a trusted member of your team?
Or say you're looking for your next job. Would you rather hop on a job board and spam your CV, or reach out to some colleagues and get escorted to the front of the line by someone who will vouch for you?
The answer in both cases is obvious. So the jobs which end up publicly advertised aren't the best jobs, and the best candidates are getting snatched up on the background through personal connections.
Of course, there are great jobs and great job hunters out there, because the process I'm describing depends on small-n network effects. I've had to interview outside of my network, because if the right job isn't there when I ask around, what other option is there?
So as an employer you might find your best hire ever through open recruitment, great developers end up in the open market all the time. It's just dicey because there's been a low-pass filter already.
I don't have great solutions here, but I non-ironically endorse the sibling comment about Tinder for jobs. It should be more like golden-age OKCupid but it would be an improvement on what we have.
No, that's not LinkedIn. You start by researching why it isn't LinkedIn, and when you figure that out, you've got the shape of your MVP.
I was laid off over a year ago, and I should finally be starting a new job in a few weeks once the paperwork clears. I think the following factors contributed to my long unemployment: (1) At first, lousy market for remote jobs. Big layoffs from major tech companies made it an employer's market. (2) Rusty interview skills. I wasn't at all ready for Leetcode-type tests, and I hadn't realized that I suck at live coding…
Having thought about it a lot, it's not mismatches of needs, lack of skills, wages or "structural unemployment". It's the fact that the Internet mediates everything, and the digital world makes other people ssem unreal.
"Technology is a way of not having to experience the world" - Max Frisch
It's made people afraid and disrespectful of each other.
It creates a cloud-cuckoo la-la land of fantasy and non-commitment. Despite investing hours into writing the perfect job descriptions, sifting conscientiously through piles of applications, the chosen candidates ghosted us or turned out to be liars. Linked-in was useless pile of rubbish in my opinion.
Finally someone remembered a person we already know who would be a good fit. We called. They were free. We all went to the pub and 24 hours later [0] they were hired.
Just don't use "The Internet" for anything serious and inter-personal like that.
[0] we did not spend the whole 24 hours at the pub!
I don't understand the hiring people industry. The questions thrown at me are trivia, if I knew the answer, or not, it doesn't mean anything. People are looking for weird specifics for things that ... really don't need it. The job inevitably doesn't even rely on those specifics. I'll learn whatever anyone wants, I like doing that ... no honestly I do. Can I just talk to the folks I'll potentially be working with / fo…
I've hired a few people for a small company and been a recruiter/screener/hiring manager. It's _incredibly_ time consuming, and it's one of the many things on my to-do list.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can have all the skills and education you want, if employers are unreasonable about their hiring and requirements, you have no control or recourse. You have to be lucky (including knowing someone, ie networking), not necessarily good.
"You have to be lucky (including knowing someone, ie networking), not necessarily good." Yes, and the network effects are largely detrimental to minority groups since networks tend to be biased toward similar people.
“… detrimental to low socioeconomic status groups, within which minorities are over-represented”.
FTFY, not to be a pedant, but to highlight the fact that many white people from certain backgrounds also struggle with this, while well-connected minorities largely do not.
In fact, connected minorities essentially have super-powered network effects since the demand for minorities who can jump through all of the hiring hoops greatly exceeds the supply.