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

#331

Post by toomuchtodo » Sat, Apr 20, 2019, 9:17 PM UTC

cardine wrote: post #328

toomuchtodo wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you increase supply, wages decrease. Wages will decline if you open the field up to everyone. Understandably, not everyone in tech wants wages to decline. If you want your wage to decline in the name of opportunity, that is your choice to make, but it is not your choice to have someone else's wages decline. What you're saying is, "God forbid you care about your quality of life so much you're not willing to keep…

>If you want your wage to decline in the name of opportunity, that is your choice to make, but it is not your choice to have someone else's wages decline. Why is it your choice to make? Shouldn't it be the new people trying to get into the computer science industry who get to make that choice? It feels like what you're saying is "God forbid someone else tries to join your industry and tries to make a better life for…

> Why is it your choice to make?

It's not my choice. It's the technology industry's collective choice to decide how welcoming the technology industry is to newcomers. I hope you have a more compelling argument than, "It's not fair." Life ain't fair; people have mortgage payments to make, kids to feed, and aren't likely to be willing to support emotional appeals that are going to decrease their quality of life, without any benefit to them.

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

#332

Post by rdiddly » Sat, Apr 20, 2019, 9:17 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…

If there are 10 hours of interviews, and each one is attended by an average of 1.5 current employees, who make, on average, $100K, then the labor cost (not including opportunity cost) of that round of interviews with that candidate is on the order of a few hundred to a thousand dollars. So you might have a point there.

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

#333

Post by legohead » Sat, Apr 20, 2019, 9:18 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.

The more senior I've gotten, the more I've removed from my resume. I used to stuff it with everything I had learned over the years. But my real profession is just "software engineer." You give me a language and a problem, and let me figure out the rest.

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

#334

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Apr 20, 2019, 9:18 PM UTC

WrtCdEvrydy wrote: post #270

riazrizvi wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1000X yes. It’s the result of a PR campaign to increase the H1B Visa allotment. Love H1B employees, they are just delicious! Low wages and zero bargaining power otherwise it’s out of the country with you. It’s also funny because this creates a problem where wages have been driven down to a point where skilled workers can barely afford to support a family in tech zones. So because of these depressed wages in software…

> Low wages and zero bargaining power Yeah, I also make a lot of money fixing their fuckups. They don't care, and as soon as they get sufficient grounds to become a citizen, they'll fuck off :)

[deleted]

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

#335

Post by castratikron » Sat, Apr 20, 2019, 9:19 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…

One time after I was hired I learned that one of the engineers didn't want to hire me because I didn't wear a tie to the interview. This was a few years ago.

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

#336

Post by externalreality » Sat, Apr 20, 2019, 9:20 PM UTC

This is very relevant in software these days

> Super Narrow Selection Criteria

e.g. "We need nodejs, mongo, grpc, golang, etc - decades of experience in software is not what we need. We need exactly those things - and we are going to give you an online code challenge to solve an irrelevant puzzle while a 27 year old sits there watching you." And then when you get the job its nothing more than spending hours upon hours updating a web front end, tweaking a database, and watching logs.

> Outright Age & Lifestyle Discrimination

I'm only 36 and I feel old sometimes. I apply for jobs where I have to talk to a panel. It looks like everyone on the panel is less than 30. You can feel the lack of experience exuding from their pores. Everything this panel says sounds like some misconceptions I had sever years ago when I was their age and only had experience working on small projects. Where are the older more experienced workers? I mean are people over 30 not applying for jobs?

> What Are Your Salary Requirements?

Someone tried to hire me for 85K after decades of experience for a very early stage startup. They were offering equity but equity doesn't mean anything if the company folds in 2 years. I need more than that.

> Stop wasting people's time and make experienced candidates a real offer.

When I was a new developer many moons ago, I worked with many old guys and gals who would always let me know how green I was (no matter how much I studied and tried to impress them). Now, if I was to look for a job, I would be working with very young guys and gals who think experience == 2 weeks of reading a book on Facebook's React framework. Hey times have changed.

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

#337

Post by cosmodisk » Sat, Apr 20, 2019, 9:23 PM UTC

enjo wrote: post #144

areyouseriousxx wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 companie…

And yet, despite all the difficulties, most job ads just look more or less the same- 3 pages of tech requirements, a ton of self praise about the company and 3 lines about what successful applicant would get: bean bag in the corner, Foosball and a spot in an open space office...

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

#338

Post by sundaeofshock » Sat, Apr 20, 2019, 9:23 PM UTC

ohyes wrote: post #196

revvx wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that's exactly what I did? Sorry, I didn't phrase it right. My non-negotiable requirement was 20% more than I was getting. I gave a hard number and they said "yeah we can give that" before the interview. However the recruiter just assumed I was bluffing and went ahead with that colossal waste of time.

Sounds like an incompetent recruiter. Recruiters make money as a percentage of your hiring salary, why on earth would they try to place you somewhere that you are making less? They should be shopping you to whoever will give the most money.

The incentives don’t always work out that way. There comes a point of diminishing returns for the recruiter; trying to get an extra $20k a year for you, might take time away from them closing two or three other candidates. Also, a recruiter does not get any real benefit out of negotiations that involve things other then salary. Extra vacation, bonuses, guaranteed severance packages, etc.

Key take a way from this: never let your recruiter negotiate on your behalf. Once you are at the stage, tell your recruiter to F off and get the best deal you can for yourself.

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

#339

Post by fma » Sat, Apr 20, 2019, 9:23 PM UTC

negamax wrote: post #249

fma wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've posted this elsewhere (forgot here or reddit). I'm gainfully employed. A former colleague who is now in a hiring position at a new company reached out to me. Said they have several openings and are having a hard time hiring good people. It would be a much longer commute, working/rewriting some older tech to be cloud ready (I did that at my current and previous employer). We started talking about salary. I told h…

Make sure you don’t end up in the same hierarchy as your friend

I woulda been reporting to him :)

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

#340

Post by itronitron » Sat, Apr 20, 2019, 9:23 PM UTC

dangero wrote: post #313

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 want to give a slightly different perspective on this as a cofounder of a startup. First of all it sounds like there was some really dishonest communication and there is no excuse for that. As far as salary goes, I absolutely cannot afford to compete and hire at market rate prices so I rely on: -People who are motivated by other factors than money (everyone at our company took a pay cut to join). We have schedule f…

I have noticed two things,

1) every company I have interviewed with has lied to me at some point in the process. Sometimes those are small lies, sometimes they are very big ones. I get that hiring is a complex process but a company's recruiters and hiring managers should make an effort to not over-promise and under-deliver to people that want to work there.

2) I have never received an offer from a company that asked me my salary expectations. I consider that question a loud signal that I am just being regarded as a data point by the recruiter, and I basically write them off.