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Discussion: Job seekers can't find a job and Employers can't find an employees

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Discussion: Job seekers can't find a job and Employers can't find an employees

#51

Post by thayne »

Beijinger wrote: post #2

The job market has collapsed. You need to know someboody. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons

That isn't quite the same. In the job market, leaving the market isn't really an option for the seller (employee), unless you are independently wealthy. So you generally have to settle for a price that is lower than your worth.

There is also insufficient information going the other way. Unlike buying a car, there is more to the buyer's side than just money. There is the work environment, how well employees are treated, the probability of future raises, probability the company will lay you off or cut pay or force you to relocate in the future, etc. And that assymetry impacts the market as well. For example a company might be a really great place to work, and that would compensate for a lower salary, but the prospective employee doesn't know that.

Re: Discussion: Job seekers can't find a job and Employers can't find an employees

#52

Post by setgree »

Apreche wrote: post #5

What works is companies not demanding that their employee be the square peg that fits their square hole. The square peg doesn’t exist. You’re going to have to hire someone who doesn’t already have the specific skills you need and invest in training them and educating them. The interview process is just to evaluate if they are capable of succeeding in that process. Yes, it means companies have to take risk. It’s bette…

Unfortunately, the skill of being trainable/educable is very unevenly distributed in the population and very hard to assess from afar. Instead, companies hire based on whether you've already been trained/educated in how to do the thing, which amounts to letting someone else take on the risk associated with your failing to learn something.

If I were tasked with solving this, I'd advocate for more frank discussion and use of various pseudo tests, e.g. SAT or GRE scores. This strikes a lot of people as unfair and non-inclusive.

Re: Discussion: Job seekers can't find a job and Employers can't find an employees

#53

Post by bogwog »

motoboi wrote: post #19
the_arun wrote: post #10

From jobseeker point : We need better interview process. I don’t understand leetcode style of interviews when we have ChatGPT to generate code. Even OpenAI has tough coding rounds.

Friend of mine interviewed there. Left the coding part of the interview with the strong impression that they were using him to train some kind of code LLM.

That's genius. Instead of dumping resumes in the trash, dump them into an AI training program (and then dump them in the trash)

Re: Discussion: Job seekers can't find a job and Employers can't find an employees

#54

Post by nisten »

pjkundert wrote: post #25

Hire (and work) only in High Trust environments. Until this general expectation is restored in "western civilization", you'll need to apply ideological filters to where you seek employees, and where you are willing to work as an employee. Some in society may find this ... undesirable. However, one may ask whether these are the same people who wish to enjoy the benefits of High Trust environments, without the correspo…

I thin it's the other way around, most western companies, especially older small businesses are actually high-trust environments and treat employees like family, or at least try to.

I'd make the argument that authoritarian civilization work was a low-trust environment.. i.e. most professionals in post-communist countries ended with a very stingy untrustworthy personality due to the constraints and incentives of a highly bureaucratic environment with non-genuine pretentious loyalty.

Re: Discussion: Job seekers can't find a job and Employers can't find an employees

#55

Post by toomuchtodo »

underdeserver wrote: post #41
toomuchtodo wrote: post #33

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.

There is a very large number of employers. If you want to convince me they're all unreasonable, you'll need to show me some pretty compelling evidence.

What data would satisfy you that employers are being unnecessarily picky? Provide the criteria. Their costs are sunk, they can push candidates through as many cycles as they want until they can find the cheapest unicorns pushed through their pipelines. There is also strong evidence that some employers are cutting anyone with a developed world wage and pushing that work to cheap countries (Google, very publicly, but there are others).

My hot take is the labor market was very tight, employers thought they were going to get a deal on folks with the layoffs [1] that took place over the last 2 years, but the labor market still remains tight so they continue to search for "diamonds in the rough" at lower costs (which leads to this mismatch at scale). Offshoring is cost optimization to continue to realize desired profits in a high capital cost macro, and there is probably some knock on effect from software development tax code changes [2].

[1] https://layoffs.fyi/

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39133028

Re: Discussion: Job seekers can't find a job and Employers can't find an employees

#56

Post by surajrmal »

tlb wrote: post #8

It's not any kind of paradox. Structural unemployment happens when the skills of the work force don't match the needs of employers, so there is both unemployment and difficulty hiring. Structural unemployment is usually high when there's a rapid change in demand for skills, as of course there is in tech. It results in crazy high salaries too. People with machine learning experience are getting 7-figure offers, while…

It's also not helpful when employers refuse to train and demand folks with the skills they want. If the supply of folks you want doesn't't exist, you need to do your part to grow them.

Re: Discussion: Job seekers can't find a job and Employers can't find an employees

#57

Post by sparker72678 »

Beijinger wrote: post #2

The job market has collapsed. You need to know someboody. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons

The best way to get a job _has always been, and will always be_, knowing somebody.

Networking is an essential life-skill, and worth all the discomfort it takes to get better at it. (You don't have to be the top 1% of networkers to be successful).

Re: Discussion: Job seekers can't find a job and Employers can't find an employees

#58

Post by nox101 »

duxup wrote: post #13

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…

Because on the other side, there are too many applicants who can't do the job but apply anyway. So the company needs some way to filter, otherwise they'll waste huge amounts of time and money interviewing people that can't do the job. They have no good way to filter, so they'll left with only bad ways.

Re: Discussion: Job seekers can't find a job and Employers can't find an employees

#59

Post by yau8edq12i »

jstummbillig wrote: post #29
the_arun wrote: post #10

From jobseeker point : We need better interview process. I don’t understand leetcode style of interviews when we have ChatGPT to generate code. Even OpenAI has tough coding rounds.

Yes, but nobody is lobbying for worse interview processes and if anyone has an incentive to make it better, it's employers (for whom it is disproportionally more expensive). People love to poke fun at it, but employers are not trying to make it bad. It's just a hard problem.

Even a single person can be hypocritical or self-sabotaging sometimes. And "an employer" is often not a single person but an organization with a bunch of people pulling in different directions. Some people making hiring decisions or deciding on hiring procedures may not necessarily care about the procedure being "bad". Maybe they e.g. care about maintaining "standards" or whatever justification they came up with.

Re: Discussion: Job seekers can't find a job and Employers can't find an employees

#60

Post by nicolas_t »

dbdoskey wrote: post #46
tlb wrote: post #8

It's not any kind of paradox. Structural unemployment happens when the skills of the work force don't match the needs of employers, so there is both unemployment and difficulty hiring. Structural unemployment is usually high when there's a rapid change in demand for skills, as of course there is in tech. It results in crazy high salaries too. People with machine learning experience are getting 7-figure offers, while…

This is definitely it. The problem is that the job market has positioned it that coming with "gumption" and no real world skills (in past positions) there is a low chance that the company will take a risk on you. So doing these shifts are extremely hard.

My experience has always been that if you take 6 months to contribute to open source centered around the new thing you want to work on, you'll quickly meet people that will allow you to get a job.
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