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We Don't Have a Talent Shortage. We Have a Sucker Shortage

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Re: We Don't Have a Talent Shortage. We Have a Sucker Shortage

#141

Post by notahacker »

unreal37 wrote: post #61

When I was hiring developers, I wrote the job role hoping for the perfect rock star candidate. "Must have experience with the Home Depot vendor system" I mean, what if someone fulfilled all my "musts"?!? That'd be the perfect person. But you hardly ever find rock stars. And so you hire the best person who doesn't have all the required skills. Don't let job requirements stop you from applying. And don't think that I'm…

There is scope for putting "experience with x an advantage/bonus" instead of "must have x" if don't want to put off the vast majority of well-qualified applicants that are not likely to have x, but would like to be noticed by the people that do.

Especially if x isn't something very useful like experience with a framework you use, but something relatively trivial like knowledge of a CRUD app they periodically do a bit of data input into.

Re: We Don't Have a Talent Shortage. We Have a Sucker Shortage

#142

Post by scottlegrand2 »

When a company wants to hire a specific person and they have already found that specific person, to comply with employment law, they have to write up a job description so other people can apply for that job. By making that job description so specific that only one person in the known universe satisfies it, they comply with employment law and get to hire the person they want.

I know this because I have gone through this process several times.

Re: We Don't Have a Talent Shortage. We Have a Sucker Shortage

#143

Post by eps »

vetelphon wrote: post #22

I had an interview with a company working in the ML space. There is a semi-difficult problem that their particular industry needs a solution for so I spent a couple hours in the hotel the night before writing up a solution for it. I was doing an interview with their head of ML and brought this subject up in general without mentioning that I had already solved it. His immediate response was: "that's impossible." And i…

At some point I was working for a shop that did smartcard-based payment systems. I was patching some smaller bug when I noticed a call that was suspiciously close to an assert() that was accidentally left in. Merely commenting it out made the payment handshake complete 50% faster. Being an eager junior as I was I went to the principal dude who wrote this part (and pretty much the rest of the core) and he dismissed me with exactly that - that's impossible. I decided to push it a bit and went to PM with my demo, he was equally awed and summoned the dude... to which the dude said, and I'm paraphrasing to soften, "this fucking bonehead just commented out the RSA sig verification for the handshake."

That is, sometimes the claimed "impossible" is indeed just that and the speed of response comes from the experience rather than ignorance or arrogance.

Re: We Don't Have a Talent Shortage. We Have a Sucker Shortage

#144

Post by enjo »

areyouseriousxx wrote: post #43
burtonator wrote: post #5

I had a recruiter call me a year ago with what sounded like a really amazing offer. Working for a well funded startup on a problem in which I happen to be a domain expert. They're aren't many expects in my field with my background and skill set and they said the right things to get me to interview (compensation won't be a concern). Anyway... Went in for 4-5 interviews. Took me about 10 hours in total to interview wit…

I find it strange, as software developers, that we discuss the effects on automation all the time, but no one seems to understand that automation has made searching for new employees incredibly inexpensive and efficient compared to the past. So in technical roles there are a lot of companies that are always hiring. Recruiters work for free until they find you someone and placing job listings online is so inexpensive…

This isn’t right. The cost of finding an employee at my current company (which Is considered an excellent company in the games industry) is near $70k.

The reality is outside of very early resume screening very little of the process is automated. Recruiting spends most of their day contacting people on sites like linked-in trying to find talent as not nearly enough shows up at our door.

My colleagues at FAANG companies tell me similar stories.

The cost of replacing an existing employee is also very high. In most domains can’t just plug that cheaper developer in, they need training and expertise building.

Outside of some very simple domains I don’t think your hypothesis holds up.

Re: We Don't Have a Talent Shortage. We Have a Sucker Shortage

#145

Post by Frost1x »

EduardoBautista wrote: post #48
loteck wrote: post #40

As an employee, it is valuable to me that my company will not hire someone who doesn't think our business does something important ("get over yourselves, you're not curing cancer"), or who thinks the right way to ask business decision questions is to ask if "you're morons", or who has a problem with the company asking very basic probing questions, such as confirming you've thought through the challenge of changing fr…

Well, I believe there is a surplus of companies who think they are doing something important. Can you imagine answering "Why do you want to work here" if you apply to a company like Marlboro? Sometimes requiring people to believe in what your company is doing is not that important because the majority of startups just aren't that interesting. Accept that people work for money, not because they believe in your company…

So many times, I wanted to ask back why their company does what they do. Businesses exist primarily for earning potential. Why do you expect your employees to be different? I could understand determinjng if the candidate may hate your company, that's useful to find out but the vast majority of people are neutral to your business practices or they wouldn't even apply. If they happen to truly love some aspect of your business then that's great but it doesn't make much difference when so much weight is put on functional requirements... so why pretend you care about anything but the functional requirements.

If I'm ineffective at making you money but fit your business culture, you should hire me on principle then!

Re: We Don't Have a Talent Shortage. We Have a Sucker Shortage

#146

Post by ranci »

detaro wrote: post #131
unreal37 wrote: post #61

When I was hiring developers, I wrote the job role hoping for the perfect rock star candidate. "Must have experience with the Home Depot vendor system" I mean, what if someone fulfilled all my "musts"?!? That'd be the perfect person. But you hardly ever find rock stars. And so you hire the best person who doesn't have all the required skills. Don't let job requirements stop you from applying. And don't think that I'm…

Why write "must have" when it's not a "must have"? Why not admit that you'd consider people not ticking all the boxes?

So that it weeds out rational, reasonable, honest people and the company can continue to receive people who are prone to overconfidence, lying, and other pro-social psychopathic traits.

Re: We Don't Have a Talent Shortage. We Have a Sucker Shortage

#147

Post by wolco »

SamuelAdams wrote: post #11

It sounds to me that this might be a problem with startups. I've been working in the enterprise space for 5 years, and I've never come across this sort of hiring. The last job I applied for was open from February 1 - March 1. After that, they pulled it down and began interviewing candidates. Six weeks later, I have an offer letter for a specific role with a well-negotiated compensation package. Personally if HR treat…

Startups. They are afraid to hire or to get it wrong. They would take someone recommended over qualified anyday.

Re: We Don't Have a Talent Shortage. We Have a Sucker Shortage

#148

Post by burlesona »

wrestlerman wrote: post #140

Based on my experience this is very true. It's very annoying when you want to find a job, but you don't want to be a sucker, so you end up looking for a job for a long time. I don't get it. You want to hire someone talented or smart, obviously, you are gonna have to pay them good money. What's the problem with that? I'm sure they will bring much more value than a usual sucker. Personal story ahead. I've been looking…

Where are you located?

Re: We Don't Have a Talent Shortage. We Have a Sucker Shortage

#149

Post by bitcoinmoney »

burtonator wrote: post #5

I had a recruiter call me a year ago with what sounded like a really amazing offer. Working for a well funded startup on a problem in which I happen to be a domain expert. They're aren't many expects in my field with my background and skill set and they said the right things to get me to interview (compensation won't be a concern). Anyway... Went in for 4-5 interviews. Took me about 10 hours in total to interview wit…

Are you like earning 500k? 200k might be really pushing it for the startup but yeah that was bad overall.

Re: We Don't Have a Talent Shortage. We Have a Sucker Shortage

#150

Post by mooreds »

pascalxus wrote: post #60

But HR isn't the only problem. In my experience having worked for a company that hired heavily for several years, it was the engineers who lacked the talent necessary to conduct proper interviews. Great candidates were being rejected by the truck load. Us engineers, we're great at engineering but many of the junior and mid-level ones don't have much experience interviewing people and usually no training whatsoever. S…

We switched from a random set of questions to a take home coding assignment (that we compensate for) and a discussion of said coding assignment.

It's pretty clear what kind of work someone will do when you can look at work they've done.

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