We Don't Have a Talent Shortage. We Have a Sucker Shortage • Hacker News Board

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

#181

Post by lovich » Sat, Apr 20, 2019, 7:18 PM UTC

areyouseriousxx wrote: post #74

mattnewport wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Anyway... Went in for 4-5 interviews. Took me about 10 hours in total to interview with them. The experience of the poster you are responding to doesn't seem to align with the situation you are describing. Sure posting an online job ad is pretty cheap. The rest of the hiring process, not so much.

Believe it or not, those interviews usually aren't that expensive. You probably have a mix of managers, which spend all their time in meetings anyway, and engineers, which are paid salary so they typically end up putting in a couple extra hours when they fall behind due to interviewing. Sure it isn't free, but remember, this person had made it all the way to the end of the process. The determination was made that the…

>so they typically end up putting in a couple extra hours when they fall behind due to interviewing

Mind letting me know where you work so I can avoid it? Interviewing is part of the job and needs to be accounted for. You don't just make your employees do overtime because you don't want to plan out your companies work well

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

#182

Post by avip » Sat, Apr 20, 2019, 7:20 PM UTC

galfarragem wrote: post #133

I'm not in position of hiring people but, a priori , the maxim - trial most, hire the best - seems correct. I consider CV and interviews to be a waste of time. Any thoughts about this?

The sheer volume of resumes makes this approach impractical. You can easily get 1000 resumes for a sw position.

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

#183

Post by beager » Sat, Apr 20, 2019, 7:21 PM UTC

povertyworld wrote: post #54

mr_cyborg wrote: post #2

One of the things that always surprised me at a previous company was seeing the H1B hiring notices posted for easily-trainable positions. I have nothing against people coming to work in the United States, but I thought those visas were specifically for roles where the skills weren’t available. In this case, by making the skills super specific, like that Home Depot sales portal in this article, they made them rare.

The other possibility is that they are going to hire internally, but for some legal reasons they have to make a public job post. Requiring some super specific thing like "Home Depot sales portal" sounds like a tipoff that this is going to be an internal hire. The place I currently work is like that. The decision makers already know who they want to give the job to before it's even posted, but they still make three ot…

Yep, I’ve certainly seen the same for big companies, but some of them are kind enough to list a requirement that is a dead giveaway, like:

“Candidates for Solutions Architect 4 at X Corp preferably have three or more years of experience as a Corp X Solutions Architect 3”

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

#184

Post by mkurz » Sat, Apr 20, 2019, 7:22 PM UTC

b212 wrote: post #164

revvx wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had the same thing happen to me a couple times. Long and tiring process. Blackboard, make a project, lots of dirty laundry about "long gone incompetent developers" that made the current system a giant mess. Lots of red flags but lots of promises including a large maximum salary, including bonuses and stock options. The final offer, however, was 60% of my current pay. Lower than the average for someone with my exper…

Is this an American thing? I live in Eastern Europe and make decent buck here (close to 5000 EUR/mo after taxes in a country where you can cover all expenses under 1000 EUR/mo). I never had any trouble getting quality work in my country but a few times I got approached by companies from the US and oh boy, weeks of tiring recrutation process and the pay was ALWAYS worse than local. I feel like they do it on purpose ma…

Can you tell us which Eastern European country do you live? What are your skills? Thanks!

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

#185

Post by imroot » Sat, Apr 20, 2019, 7:22 PM UTC

Trisell wrote: post #126

I've been looking for jobs recently. Have a background building pretty robust Node/React apps. At the 4 places that have given me an interview. I've been told that I don't meet their needs. The reason for this. I'm unable to solve their pet coder wars function challenge. Being a self taught programmer, not having a 'learned' background has proven to be a hindrance. Because I don't have the traditional algorithmic cho…

I'm in a similar boat -- my educational background is hardware engineering, but, I've been a Linux nerd/SRE for the last 20 years. I found a great position that would be perfectly in line with what I'm doing now -- specifically managing teams of SRE's for a startup in NYC that would allow me to work remotely, but, during their "technical" interview, I was asked to "humanize" a number using any language that I chose.

Knowing that ruby has a humanize gem (and python's humanize module doesn't get as granular as they wanted their example to be), I mentioned this to the interviewer, saying, "Hey -- why would I want my development team to spend an hour re-inventing the wheel when it can already be done with a code import?" -- while showing him the gem, and providing a sample code.

Suffice to say, he wasn't interested in that, he wanted to see how I'd implement something like that...

...so, I provided my code...which was as clunky as it could be in 30 minutes -- and then was almost certain that I lost this specific position because I didn't interpret my numbers from right to left vs left to right.

Seriously -- if you've booked a hotel room in the US, there's a 50% chance you've booked it on infrastructure that I've designed and implemented from the ground up. I've led teams of 20+ SRE's around the world in a 40 billion dollar company. My references speak for themselves. The reality is that they're going to still be looking for a SRE manager position in three months, and I won't be looking anymore because I would have found something that I'm interested in (and isn't me doing a containerization of a Windows-based ERP system in 96 hours).

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

#186

Post by deegles » Sat, Apr 20, 2019, 7:22 PM UTC

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…

Maybe you’re on to something. Maybe there should be a “recruiting engineer” role who focuses on doing nothing but hiring, and also keeps track of their candidates performance after they’ve started and adjusts their approach accordingly. There could be an element of career coaching/mentoring as a full time part of the job.

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

#187

Post by hopler » Sat, Apr 20, 2019, 7:23 PM UTC

sokoloff wrote: post #156

abledon wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think Resumes made in LaTeX get screwed by the HR robot screening programs that scan documents for keywords? I mean, if your document has some weird formatting going on, I could see the program miss some crucial keywords buried inside a nested table or something

And if this screwing is happening, would that make you more or less likely to use LaTeX to create your resume? It would make me more likely to use it...

Sure, if you enjoy being unemployed because you only want to work at a mythical company that tailors their HR processes to your obscure formatting preferences, or is so undesirable that they have time to read all resumes that come in.

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

#188

Post by meddlepal » Sat, Apr 20, 2019, 7:24 PM UTC

b212 wrote: post #164

revvx wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had the same thing happen to me a couple times. Long and tiring process. Blackboard, make a project, lots of dirty laundry about "long gone incompetent developers" that made the current system a giant mess. Lots of red flags but lots of promises including a large maximum salary, including bonuses and stock options. The final offer, however, was 60% of my current pay. Lower than the average for someone with my exper…

Is this an American thing? I live in Eastern Europe and make decent buck here (close to 5000 EUR/mo after taxes in a country where you can cover all expenses under 1000 EUR/mo). I never had any trouble getting quality work in my country but a few times I got approached by companies from the US and oh boy, weeks of tiring recrutation process and the pay was ALWAYS worse than local. I feel like they do it on purpose ma…

I don't know about the EU business culture, but in the US you are expected to negotiate. You really have to fight for every penny you want...

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

#189

Post by imroot » Sat, Apr 20, 2019, 7:24 PM UTC

huffmsa wrote: post #121

The amount of inflationary BS on "senior engineer" resumes I've read when hiring is astounding. 5 years of this, 4 years of that, 5 frameworks, 3 languages, the whole AWS alphabet soup in the toolbox. But then, 95% of them can't fizzbuzz.

Hire in the DC area -- "Senior Engineer" is nothing more than a title that is used to justify a higher billing rate from the government...

...and they can't write code to count up in increments of five in python.

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

#190

Post by bartimus » Sat, Apr 20, 2019, 7:25 PM UTC

retiredcoder wrote: post #120

Game_Ender wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interviews take 2-3 man days from a company per candidate you end up doing a full onsight interview. That is on the order of $1000’s per interview, and you generally have to do several per role. Then for high demand roles even the best will take several months to ramp up which costs a large fraction, say 25-50% of their total compensation. So replacing a dev can cost you in total $100k+ at least. That is not really c…

I agree with your calculations but some managers seem to not have done this math yet. As result, what we have are poor hiring evaluations, horrible onboarding, etc.

It's exactly those managers that are the problem. They're incompetent and not needed for self-managed agile teams. So they keep rotating developers to safeguard their positions.

Meanwhile those managers are getting the salaries that better be spent on a team of great developers.