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And we're having a hard time finding experienced and skilled engineers... trying to hire for a senior nodejs role, over a thousand applicants (most people just
by h02 3y ago
And we're having a hard time finding experienced and skilled engineers... trying to hire for a senior nodejs role, over a thousand applicants (most people just hit apply without reading the description, over half are disqualified for not meeting the basic requirements), dozens interviewed, and we've only managed to hire 1 person that seemed close to being qualified, and he quit after 2 months of barely working. We're around a ~600 person company.
- laCostly 3y agoIm going to guess pay isn’t commensurate with the ‘basic requirements’ and or something else is wrong with your interviewing process if they bolted after two months.
- Waterluvian 3y agoWhat does the job pay? Fully remote?
- h02 3y agoFully remote. Salary range is 100 - 170k.
- cvhashim04 3y agoAre you hiring freelancers?
- ebcode 3y agoHere ya go: https://ebcode.com https://ebcode.com
- cpursley 3y ago[flagged]
- geuis 3y agoShoot me an email. I ran and scaled a nodejs api supporting about 1.5 billion requests per month up until December when I sold it. I have many, many years of experience in the node ecosystem and am currently looking for a new role.
- bb88 3y agoYou're first question should be, "How much are you willing to pay?". And if they dodge it, it's not a good sign. Edited to add: Sure, be polite, but don't be trapped into 8/16/24 hours of interviewing over the course of a week/month/months before only to get a below average offer
- geuis 3y agoMy first question is usually "Hey, how are you? Good to meet you." Politeness usually leads the way.
- tharkun__ 3y agoI swear I'm not making this up. I read Politeness as Pointless until I re-read it a third time.
- bb88 3y agoI saw that as well.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- dwaltrip 3y agoThis is a perfect response, well done good sir. Stay classy
- machomaster 3y agoSo you ask a question, but don't allow for it to be answered (because you don't actually care how the person is) and interrupt him. This is anything but polite.
- davidgerard 3y agoIs there room to up the pay? Bolting after two months suggests something of concern.
- h02 3y agoNot my call. I just interview people.
- cvhashim04 3y agoProbably an awful messy code base and the new hire couldn’t deal with that headache.
- afavour 3y agoI hope that person got an exit interview. It might well be that they’re just useless but someone quitting after two months ought to be a warning sign for the company, clearly something went awry.
- drewcoo 3y ago> we're having a hard time finding experienced and skilled engineers... trying to hire for a senior nodejs role Experienced, skilled engineers are rarely the same as specialists in your languages/frameworks/libraries/etc. > quit after 2 months of barely working So between this and inability to hire, it smells like you have a management problem, not a problem with bad strangers from the Internet.
- whstl 3y agoSame situation on the hiring side. I understand that people gotta hustle to eat, but we get hundreds of applications, and so many resumes are fake and just an attempt to get through the screening... plus lots of cheating, sometimes just good old ChatGPT or someone whispering behind the screen, other times with people giving perfect memorized answers but not a peep when I go off script. Makes me want to hold on to this job...
- skeeter2020 3y agoSame. I used to really like interviewing, but the AI cheaters combined with development as just a job has destroyed the experience. I did participate in interviewing an intern a few weeks ago who showed some passion and energy, and they got the role, so a small victory.
- timeon 3y ago> development as just a job Hobbists are discarded at the first pass I guess.
- whstl 3y agoThose are much better than the hustlers.
- nytesky 3y agoMy impression is that lots of developers are now much more motivated by money than tech passion (I entered the field in the Office Space era where programmers were considered nerdy accountants who love computers). Instead over the last 2 decades, we’ve seen the finance bro pipeline diverted to tech bros.
- rhelz 3y ago> So many resumes are fake Its a classic vicious circle: if your resume gets auto-dinged if it doesn't have the right keywords, applicants are highly motivated do lard up their resumes with keywords. And then the companies observe they are getting tons of bogus resumes, and they think they can fix it by making the filters even harder to get through.... Everybody is incentivized to race to the bottom.
- rhelz 3y agoNot to put too fine a point on it, but...out of a thousand applicants--who presumably had college degrees/and or years of experience programming for other companies--there just has to be some who would have been successful at your company. I mean, if you lined up 600 random people grabbed from off the street, you'd find 6 to 10 of them with a genius level IQ. In fact, you'd have a good chance of finding somebody smarter than anybody in your company. You are obviously filtering too much. And it would be one thing if the system merely filtered out too many good people, but the ones the system let's pass are not the ones you are looking for! Its bad in every possible way a filter can be bad--filtering out what you want, and letting through what you don't want. > disqualified for not meeting the basic requirements What is a basic requirement? If a basic requirement is something like "5 years of Java experience" its filtering out topflight c++ and c# programmers. Good programmers can make anything work; bad programmers will remain bad programmers no matter what programming language is used. > dozens interviewed Over my 40-year career, programming interviews haven't changed at all, basically testing how much of corman, leiserson, and rivest you have memorized, and how much oof the book "Cracking the Coding interview" you can regurgitate. That was ok 40 years ago, when programming was largely creating new systems from scratch. But these days, with all the frameworks, not so much. There's 40 more years of infrastructure which has been created, and to be a successful programmer, you need to be able to leverage other people's code. But who interviews to test that skill? Again, the fact that the one person the system let through didn't thrive in your company just screams that it is not testing for what you really need. Such a "stringent" process shouldn't be a point of pride.
- ThrustVectoring 3y agoThe applicant pool is not randomly selected, though. The 6-10 randomly selected geniuses are likely all happily and productively employed elsewhere, there's a competitive filter against high-level talent that you have to also get through.
- bb88 3y ago> Over my 40-year career, programming interviews haven't changed at all I think they've gotten worse actually. A lot of times they're led by 20-somethings that are looking for only the skills that are limited to their own shallow experience. "Oh so you wrote compilers in C? Too bad, we're coding node.js here. Have any experience with npm?"
- skeeter2020 3y agoI've had a similar time trying to hire an ML developer with any experience. What I suspect the market has gotten tougher, but not uniformly. If it's bad for experienced people with some form of personal network, it's extra bad for those who were already terrible when the market was tight. I also love how all the responses blame you and the company; maybe we've developed some unrealistic expectations over the past few years? I don't hear this sort of response outside of development.
- ryoshu 3y agoLook for people at banks. We made our first ML Engineer hire a few months ago and almost all the candidates came from people working at banks. The salaries aren't FAANG and the talent is there. The person we hired was a former ME to boot.
- h02 3y agoYup. Too much context to give on a HN thread, don't really care to defend it. I'm sure the process isn't perfect and I'm looking for ways to improve it, but it's certainly not an easy problem to solve.
- esics6A 3y agoBecause you're looking for a very specific language or tool experience and not capabilities. This is a common mistake. Many developers might have loads of experience in the problem domain your company needs but not a specific language or framework. Like you do integrations for banking clients. You look for a Java developer and find someone who knows the framework you're using but they've only ever developed APIs for mobile apps. Instead look for the person who might have done some Java a lot of Cobol and has worked with mainframes and banking systems. That person might have even been a sysadmin and learned coding but they'll hit the ground running.
- nradov 3y agoIf you're literally trying to hire for a "senior nodejs role" then the brutal truth is that you're simply incompetent and going about recruiting entirely the wrong way. Hiring should be done primarily based on aptitudes and understanding of fundamentals. Experience with a particular language or framework is a "nice to have" at most. I've done plenty of engineering hiring and never had a hard time finding candidates who were good enough to get the job done. Relax the qualifications, increase the compensation, and improve your company's reputation as a good place to work. Easy.
- gentlesoulcarp 3y agoI’m working on a product that can help regarding the issues you’ve been discussing. Is there an email I can reach you at and we can chat?
- lubujackson 3y agoAnd here I am with 20 years experience, founded multiple companies, hired and managed engineers, been acquired, worked full stack on B2C and B2B with multiple tech stacks, worked on many of successful projects as an IC... and maybe 1 out of 20 job applications make it to an intro call. Even for sub-200k roles looking for 3+ years experience. But I only have a CS minor, so...