81–90 of 381 posts
Turns out recruiters were actually useful to both job seekers and employers.
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…
Leetcode fits this too
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.
I have a lot of experience and job hop too, I just never put the 3 month stints on my resume and keep the 2+ year engagements on it
Its an adaptation. I don’t think avoiding juniors helps you
The job market has collapsed. You need to know someboody. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons
Lots of great coders don't have a big open presence. Years of experience isn't a good sign with the churn in tech, plus you don't know if they wrote code or just watched. Is being able to do a l33t coding exercise in a fixed time a sign? IMHO I'm decent programmer and I've failed them. Can you come up with an exercise that matches the work that will be done and can be completed in a reasonable amount of time?
And the phrase "matches the work that will be done" is doing some heavy lifting: many companies don't really know what they need. I've seen companies that need 99% soft skills that want a ton of niche tech experience. Or advertise for something other than the real dumpster-fire that you'll have to work on.
This is the fundamental reason that knowing someone works: they know your coding skills and they can give you the inside scoop on the position.
Companies want “the best of the best”. I’m not talking about faang. Any tech company out there believes they can only succeed by hiring the best only. It’s unrealistic. But I don’t see the paradox (companies say they “can’t find talent “ but what they mean is that they can’t find top talent according to some dubious tests). On top of that, if you have years of experience in, let’s say Go or Python, but the company is…
Anyone who can pass a drug test can likely go get a $20/hour job at McDonalds/Walmart/Target/Home Depot this afternoon and you're offering new college grad engineering positions paying $50k? Yeah, that is why you're having trouble hiring. You're not going to get the best of the best for a small increase in pay over the bare minimum.
I suspect it'll shake out, but I imagine a lot of people will have to learn new skills and adapt - that's how it's always gone in tech. The fact that people seem blindsided by it is a little surprising to me, we've seen this cycle before.
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.
But consider: the hiring pipeline looks pretty much the same for all companies? Why is that? Well, they mostly use similar services to manage hiring, and those services all have similar features. But those features aren't great: they've narrowed the hiring pipeline to squeeze all candidates for all jobs down to the same sort of toothpaste that can be squeezed through the pipe.
Are the employers unreasonable? No, they are following what is considered HR best practices for attracting and vetting talent. But that process is broken, therefore the majority of companies are struggling to find talent.
The process is both homogenized across the industry and fundamentally geared towards preventing false positives - hiring the wrong person. That filters out many people that might have been hired, blowing up the number of false negatives - not hiring the right person.
Companies can't find candidates and job seekers can find jobs because the tools and processes for connecting candidates with jobs is both broken and homogeneous across the industry.
I'm not an amateur to programming or anything, at the time I had been coding for about 6 years, was studying a programming degree and had a portfolio of my previous coding experience in a variety of fields, a lot of which was self-taught, which was linked in my CV and everything. It would have been very helpful to know if I was making an elementary mistake that resulted in no reply from anyone, or it was simply them finding someone else first
Nowadays that mutated into some certification institution running money-grab schemes, and anybody hiring someone just ignoring them because the only thing they attest is that the certified person felt for a scam.
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…
One issue is that not everyone loves learning stuff. And since there is no simple way to test for that many instead test for what is simple to test for: trivia. A common issue, people measure what is easy to measure instead of what is actually important. There are plenty of applicants which are simply awful and you do not have time to interview all of them. I am not impressed by the people hiring but I also understan…
Agreed. I do work with some folks who are all "OMG I have to work with this archaic mess." way too often. And I don't disagree with them, but man... not that hard to learn it and code your way out of it. But no they just complain.
Hard to really find out who REALLY has the interest in fighting through the unexpected / rough spots.