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

• trod123 2y ago
  OP, there is no paradox. A paradox is a circular contradiction and its fact that its gotten a whole lot harder on both sides (there is no contradiction). Honestly, what's happening is a bit more nuanced. It is a purposeful economic attack. I know that sounds controversial but hear me out. Towards the end of 2022, anyone unemployed saw marked increases in difficulty in finding work of all kinds starting shortly after the public release of Chat-GPT. Within 3 months, conversion of application/resume to callback went from roughly 1.5% per 100 for System Engineer level positions to less than 0.0015% just ballpark (from personal numbers). The number of posted jobs greatly increased, but they were not real jobs, and the fake jobs that you used to be able to differentiate between could no longer be differentiated. This is economic interference between employer and employee relations, its purposeful, and; mind you, this is largely before all the layoffs, its continued to get worse. A solid 70% of IT related jobs posted on Indeed, Monster, and Linked in are employers who either have no position available, or are not actually hiring. The platforms do not appear to be removing listings of fake companies nor do they do a proper due-diligence vet on them. Its a free for all, and they are incentivized to make it this way to guide you to paid services. (Parasites) For example, one infamous company that does this is Patterned AI, they used various iterations of that name on LinkedIn, and you get hit by a slew of various spam and advertisements the moment you apply (across all associated devices). I've run across many companies that fail a very basic Secretary of State (SOS) lookup (i.e. they aren't companies who are registered with the SOS to do business in the state, but they advertise in that state (not remote). Many also are companies that appear to be shill companies. They may pass a basic SOS lookup, but it may be a corporation who has only one person on the BOD, with alternating failures to provide the required Information forms, and the on-premise location may in actuality be registered to a UPS store or other type of mail location, any number of other red flags (not going to list them all here, but you can get a good idea of what I look for in terms of it being an operating business). Some are even registered in Google as being present at that physical location (when they aren't). I literally reported 14 companies yesterday that were doing that where there is no public contact/revenue stream that works (i.e. dubious website with contact info that is disconnected and no longer in service), yet job posted that day. The problem is, there is no immediate penalty for companies engaging in this bad acting. Its not getting attention by legislators, DAs or AGs. Additionally, head hunters are incentivized to do this since it makes their services more attractive to both employers and prospective candidates. This includes HR AI based services to algorithmically weed out resumes. There are companies that engage in data harvesting without your knowledge, and thanks to a mail server I set up (unique resume attached to unique alias for each one), I've got a blacklist that I no longer apply to, but in general this is an extraordinary measure just to find out who not to apply to. I've been looking for roughly 2 years now, thousands of resumes, 9 1/2 YOE in IT System's Engineering, a few calls but no offers. Granted its a bad time right now to find IT work in general. There are companies that will even call you in for an interview, but then press you on confidential information you can't disclose from previous employers (I've walked out of several of these, and reported them to my states AG). Overall, as a job seeker, its impossible to find a job. You have finite time to apply and you no longer know if the job actually exists, and the cost to vet companies is borne solely by you, and you really shouldn't have to have an intimate knowledge of Open Source Intelligence (querying various governmental records) to determine a risk score of the company existing or not. As an employer, there are a lot of options to find qualified people which simply are not being done because of laziness or unrealistic expectations. It shouldn't take more than three interviews to get an idea of how the candidate is going to work out. Most employers shoot themselves in the foot by requiring Certifications or Bachelor's Degrees when people have the appropriate experience doing that job. In this respect, it is basically a cult of qualification, where you aren't qualified if you don't have the paper, and that's farcical. Also using that at as a negotiation tactic to lowball suppress wage negotiations, or bait and switch is also a surefire way to weed out anyone that might have the skill. "I see you don't have ..., we can't pay you what we would pay a qualified person but we have another position at (minimum wage, same responsibilities)." Anyone thinking that's not going to backfire spectacularly is just plain stupid and malevolent. Personally, I think it should be illegal and self-enforcing to post a job as being available when no job actually exists, and it should be so severe that it puts any company engaged in that activity out of business. The problem is interference has gotten to the point that no one can find the other party. This effect is known in the scientific community because it happens in a number of other systems, (i.e. RNA interference, USDA agriculture controlling parasites such as the screw-worm etc). The reason why I say its purposeful is, there isn't much money in this. When people cannot find jobs, they stop looking in that sector. There is an understanding that you go where the jobs are. Unfortunately, there is now no good way to retool or even know which sector to go into. Vocational training has been gutted over the past 20 years, and anyone over the age of 25 isn't eligible. College now requires Marxist DEI re-education for graduation (Ethnic Studies). Food stamps currently only provide support for 1 week of food per month at local price levels. When you cannot find a job at all, because of various interference's outside your control, and social support systems fail to the point where you start starving, that historically inevitably leads to violent unrest and rioting. It also doesn't help that I can now theoretically go and take entry level work in retail and get paid almost as much per hour as I could make white collar with a boatload of responsibility as a T2 technician (20-25$/hour) at a MSP. Any solution would require major structural changes, legislation, and regulation of online platforms, and criminal penalties.
• paulcole 2y ago
  > Job posting usually sucks. If you're too specific about the position, you get too few quality candidates. I don't get why more companies aren't reaching out to candidates rather than hoping for applications.
• lijok 2y ago
  I've been in a unique position this year to have been recruiting, and then looking for a new role myself, within the span of a few months, so had experienced the market from both ends. I'm observing a number of trends, some more concerning than others. 1. An explosion in international applicants due to the shift to remote since Covid. This means job posting that used to get an overwhelming number of applicants (100+) are now getting so many applicants (5000+) it's literally impossible to properly evaluate. 2. It has become trivial to apply for a job. Aggregator sites like Otta and Cord send you alerts as soon as they've scraped a new job posting. As such, applicants are spraying their CV to every single job they get notified about. 3. ATS usage has skyrocketed (the ATS startup space has exploded as a result), because of 1. and 2., forcing even early-stage startups to use an ATS just to be able to screen the candidates. As an applicant, if you don't hit the keywords, your CV wont even be seen by human eyes. 4. Because of 3., applicants are polluting their CVs with keywords and resorting to ChatGPT to build their CVs. As a hiring manager, you use the ATS to narrow down a list of candidates, then look at the CVs, and they're useless for actually evaluating the candidate. (Keyword chasing has always been the case, but it's gotten to ridiculous levels at the moment) 5. Fake jobs. There is not a company on this planet that would not want to speak with an ex-Googler if one was interested. As such, in the hopes someone exceptional applies, they keep job posts up even if they're not recruiting, and fewer companies are labeling them appropriately (open role/wildcard/other). 6. Hyper-specialization of companies. We're seeing fewer and fewer companies willing to embrace a multi-product mindset, who are pigeonholing themselves into a very tight niche. 7. So, so much of the work you would need a dev for in the past, has now been delegated to SaaS driven by a non-dev in the company. Think Rudderstack, Mixpanel, Customer.io, Squarespace, etc. 8. The ROI of hiring software engineers specifically has gone through the roof. A single dev is able to provide immense value given the SaaS tools they have access to now. You would think this means companies would want more devs, but 6. and 7. means companies have less and less dev work required to reach PMF and profitability. 9. There is a massive segment of the software engineering talent pool that can only build integrations and simple CRUD applications. Because of 7., demand for them is diminishing. A lot of these devs have been doing integration work for a decade, and are now finding themselves competing for the same jobs with actual computer scientists, leading to very confusing outcomes (someone with 20 years of experience unable to land a job, someone with 2 years of experience doing better at a technical interview than someone with 10).
• Beijinger 2y ago
  The job market has collapsed. You need to know someboody. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons
  • the_real_cher 2y ago
    Im curious if this is true.
    • maccard 2y ago
      It's significantly easier to find a job if you know hiring managers. It's not a gimme, but it will put you ahead of hundreds of applicants.
    • baby_souffle 2y ago
      Yes and no. My sources are telling me they get a few hundred applications per day for just one role. Beating those odds will be a lot easier if you know the hiring manager.
      • bradlys 2y ago
        Only works if your issue is getting through to the hiring manager and getting approved. Ultimately, what I’m seeing is that companies are just more picky when it comes to interviewing too. Everyone is asking harder or less common leetcode questions than before and are evaluating more strongly than before. It’s significantly harder to get an offer these days even if you get an interview.
        • the_real_cher 2y ago
          I mean how bad is it out there if you have 5 to 10 years of experience the degree and a few certs like rhcsa and AWS professional?
          • bradlys 2y ago
• whatever1 2y ago
  Tinder for jobs. Swipe to interview.
  • rafamvc 2y ago
    I'd risk say the dating market is even more broken *because* of tinder.
    • ativzzz 2y ago
      It just changes the game so that people who learn to play it win even more because most people never bother learning. For dating (tinder especially), good photos are important. Many people, and men especially, do not have good photos of them. None of my male friends even take photos, and if they do, they are not flattering or of them wearing nice clothes that make them look attractive. Nor would some of them be attractive because they are overweight and not in shape or dress like middle schoolers And that's just looks. Interviewing is the same. People who play the game (networking, leetcode, etc) win by getting the high salary jobs, and everyone else has to fight for the scraps
      • jeltz 2y ago
        After looking at Tinder both from men's and women's I would say women pit even less effort into photos than men do. But maybe this varies by country. No, I don't want another gym photo of you standing in an awkward pose. And, yeah, I'd like to think I am at least decent at both games if only because I realize they are games.
        • rrr_oh_man 2y ago
          To extend the metaphor: As a job seeker, you need to be in the 90th percentile. As an employer, you need to be there.
  • tkellogg 2y ago
    This is obviously a joke, but I wonder if there's something to it. A recommendation engine to surface interesting jobs to a candidate, and quality candidates to an employer. It seems like recruiters/sourcers are inefficient at doing it. The trouble is getting critical mass.
• Apreche 2y ago
  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 better than the risk of trying to carry on long term short-staffed.
  • teeray 2y ago
    > It’s better than the risk of trying to carry on long term short-staffed Companies don’t feel that way. They feel they can just ramp up the workload on existing employees “until we can hire more.” What are they going to do, leave? Where do they think they’re going to go? They’ll be met with the same situation at another company, except they’ll be on the other side of the table this time. If there are companies with money, no employees, and the urgent desire to hire them, that breaks this equilibrium. The overworked employees jump ship to the startup, the incumbents become more desperate and finally relent.
    • surajrmal 2y ago
      At some point, your employees don't just magically work harder. And then you fail to meet customer demand resulting in lost potential revenue. By the time this happens you're so far in the hole it's challenging to climb out.
    • danaris 2y ago
      This is the (well, yet another) result of going for decades with such weak labor protections. If the answer to "What are they going to do?" is "strike", or "leave and take a massive severance payout because that's what their union negotiated in the contract that specifies you can't overwork them by more than X amount", then the company no longer has that abusive option on the table. They have to hire someone to fill that role.
      • FearOfTheDuck 2y ago
• candiddevmike 2y ago
  Turns out recruiters were actually useful to both job seekers and employers.
  • thisisfatih 2y ago
    It actually works on both ends however recruiter way is prob the most expensive way for especially employers but also in some cases for job seekers. + I am not sure how scalable recruiter setup is.
  • faeyanpiraat 2y ago
    I found my current job (which is the best job I had so far) through a high quality recruiter (not just trying to maximize hires to maximize commission earnings, but they actually cared; E.g.: they suggested specific industry standard trainings which I completed before they would even consider me).
  • makowskid 2y ago
    [dead]
• Phelinofist 2y ago
  I haven't looked for a new job for the last ~3y, but before that it was always the difference in pay that resulted in me and a potential employer not shaking hands eventually. Ofc, that is not universal as some companies pay a proper amount, but most of them just don't. So no shit they have difficulties finding people. That explains both sides, as people do not accept offers that are (too) low. There also a million other reasons why people don't find jobs and companies don't find suitable people, like difference in fundamental values, public image, tech stack, and so forth. But IMHO pay is still the most important thing after all.
  • sigmoid10 2y ago
    On top of that, we've had around 20-25% inflation since pre-Covid times in the US and the EU. And that's just the CPI, which underestimates inflation for most people. So if you made ~80k before Covid and don't make 100k+ today, you salary has effectively decreased.
• tlb 2y ago
  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 people with jQuery experience can't find jobs. As an individual, you can both improve the economy AND make fat stacks by learning the skills that are in high demand. As an employer, you can do better by finding skill sets that aren't in high demand, with enough overlap with what you need that you can retrain. There are a lot of unemployed video game programmers right now, so if you can figure out how to use people with those skills you can hire some smart, energetic people at moderate salaries.
  • toomuchtodo 2y ago
    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.
    • underdeserver 2y ago
      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.
      • toomuchtodo 2y ago
        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/ https://layoffs.fyi/ [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39133028 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39133028
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• the_arun 2y ago
  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.
  • motoboi 2y ago
    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.
    • jollyllama 2y ago
      Google interviews always felt like this, even a decade ago.
    • bogwog 2y ago
      That's genius. Instead of dumping resumes in the trash, dump them into an AI training program (and then dump them in the trash)
    • tayo42 2y ago
      Heh I did a coding interview for one the Ai companies that post here all the time(Imbue i think it's spelt) and when I got rejected I was wondering if it was just some AI training thing...
  • sailorganymede 2y ago
    I always understood it was to filter out dudes who’d succeed at it: people who have a lot of spare time who would use that spare time to grind really hard for some arbitrary coding test. As an employer, I’d look at that dude and think: this dude could defo do overtime and he likes coding! We’ll take him. But that’s my two cents.
  • uoaei 2y ago
    ChatGPT isn't very good for knowing how well or correctly code will run
  • jstummbillig 2y ago
• mgaunard 2y ago
  I doubt you'd find "an employees" if your job ad has grammar or typography mistakes in it.
  • jabroni_salad 2y ago
    Given all the horribly edited resumes I have seen, I am sure there is a match to be made somewhere.
  • c22 2y ago
    I think a lot of people can tell from the writing when English isn't someone's first language and are willing to give them a little break. Also I bet there are ESL business owners who have an English-first speaking friend review their job listings, but maybe not their random forum comments.
  • WhitneyLand 2y ago
    Ok look sorry to mess with you, but the irony may be informative. You’re complaining about someone’s “typography” on a forum that doesn’t really allow a lot of font and layout flexibility. Or did you mean typographical?
    • mgaunard 2y ago
      Typographical is an adjective (pertaining to typography). I used the noun on purpose.
• duxup 2y ago
  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 / for right away? No? Why? Looking for a job should be fun with all the possibilities, and yet it's a bureaucratic, unprofessional, and opaque nightmare. I don't understand what is going on.
  • randomdata 2y ago
    > I don't understand the hiring people industry. Not many do. Especially those doing the hiring. The thing is, there isn't much business value in making it a core competency, so employers just wing it mostly based on copying what they see someone else do, without any attempt to measure effectiveness, combined with plain old hope and prayer. The result is what you have witnessed.
    • duxup 2y ago
      It certainly feels that way. I used to talk to professional / capable recruiters occasionally. I don't hear from those kind of recruiters anymore. I just get recruiting spam. Come to think of it talking to recruiters now seems about as honest, opaque, and enjoyable as going into my email spam folder...
  • nox101 2y ago
    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.
    • cratermoon 2y ago
      > there are too many applicants who can't do the job but apply anyway. So the company needs some way to filter, If we take that as a given, and I don't disagree with you, what happens? The hiring pipeline becomes optimized to prevent unqualified people from getting through the process. It's focused on reducing false positives: hiring the wrong person. As a side effect, it eliminates more people who might be hired before they get far. In other words, the number of false negatives is not controlled. In short, the way the filter works is broken. Good candidates never get to the offer stage. They are incorrectly filtered out by a process optimized for filtering, not discovering.
• schnebbau 2y ago
  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.
  • NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago
    This is sort of like trying to wipe out all the smaller-than-3cm fry, so that you can succeed in catching only the biggest fish in your net. It's so illogical and maliciously counterproductive I fear you may be correct.
  • emptysongglass 2y ago
    Because employers have incentivized this behavior by not paying employees what employees know they'll get when they've attained the skills and experience they need.
    • 1123581321 2y ago
      It's rather because the junior and the company disagree on how skilled the junior should be rated as they grow. At a new company, you get the benefit of fresh perception plus the honeymoon period to finish maturing. Static job slots are also a problem, though. It would be wonderful to see companies hire for a vector/trajectory at the company, but that comes with its own issues if the employee doesn't change as well as hoped.
  • occz 2y ago
    An alternative route would be to just increase the compensation of juniors to make sure that trying to switch is a less lucrative option, though.
  • yieldcrv 2y ago
    In this field, “senior” is a state of mind, there is no point in chasing promotions + compensation increases in your 1 company 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
• thiago_fm 2y ago
  Job market has deteriorated a lot. Most companies are afraid to invest because of a possible recession and AI. Companies are only hiring people that perfectly fit their criteria. No more budget for junior devs and people that needs any kind of training. Most companies keep roles open but don't hire anyone, because typically they have recruiters in house and need to give them something to do. I know this based on mine and other friends that are execs in big companies. It has never been that bad for new grads. Even before software engineering was hyped and paid well, you could expect a job once you graduate, this is no longer the case as so many people have chosen to study CS because of $. And now the big employers aren't hiring that much.
  • adra 2y ago
    Graduating into Y2K, there was definitely a period where new grads and a bunch of experienced devs couldn't find work at least for a couple years. I can only guess that it also happened to some extent during GFC.
    • thiago_fm 2y ago
      But back then we had a much smaller amount of people graduating, you should see numbers how things have inflated towards CS. Lots of people that would instead study another STEM subject picked up CS because of salaries and hype, now are without a job and could be instead an electrical engineer or any other profession that has a real career.
• datadrivenangel 2y ago
  Hiring markets (linkedin/indeed) are broken unless the hiring company pays, and the market incentives drive them to be the least broken experience for the candidate. Medium touch hiring (Hired dot com / trilobyte) doesn't scale like recruiting firms tend not to scale well, so there's good small/medium business there, but technology can't fix the human incentive problems so they end up succumbing to the same issues and the problem comes back.
• uoaei 2y ago
  The solution is to destroy blind techno-utopianism, and realize tools like AI are being used in ways that are harmful to society and hard to see coming if all you think about is generating increasingly realistic-looking videos. The volume of cheating, embellishment, and massive shotgun spray-n-pray imposed by shrewd brokers/job-seekers on hiring teams at nearly every company is overwhelming. Things are moving so fast in the industry that everyone's having a hard time understanding what the other wants to see and hear. And recruiters have so little time to study resumes because of the sheer volume that they are relying on crude heuristics, mainly buzzword lookups, that only seem to benefit the well-established (i.e., those most likely already to have jobs!).
• AnimalMuppet 2y ago
  One more piece of the problem: There are headhunters who have low probability of success, and try to make it up on volume. They find your resume, and they find a job opening, and they say "Oh, hey, this guy does something technical, and that job needs something technical. Let's try it!" No, 40 years in embedded software does not make me a good candidate for a VHDL job that wants 5 years of experience. Stop wasting my time with your incompetence. (That sounds harsh, but a competent headhunter should know better than that.) The way I did it was, over the years I built a curated list of headhunters that I respected. They weren't just low-effort people - they really knew what they were doing. When I was ready for a new job, I broke out the list. Half of the names on it weren't valid any more, but one of the ones that was came through for me. I'm not sure that scales, though...
• CoastalCoder 2y ago
  I was laid off over a year ago, and I should finally be starting a new job in a few weeks once the paperwork clears. I think the following factors contributed to my long unemployment: (1) At first, lousy market for remote jobs. Big layoffs from major tech companies made it an employer's market. (2) Rusty interview skills. I wasn't at all ready for Leetcode-type tests, and I hadn't realized that I suck at live coding tests in general. Practice helped somewhat. (3) Delays from testing the market to determine the new pay rate for my skillset. I.e., for a while I didn't apply to any jobs that paid well below my previous comp. (4) Indecision about my technical focus area. I was doing DL compilers, which didn't really excite me. I wanted to break into traditional compilers. But I also worked on other skills to apply to specific job openings I'd found. In retrospect, I'd have been more successful just picking one focus area and going deep on learning just that. I'm also a little over 50, so maybe there was some ageism at play, I don't know.
  • sroussey 2y ago
    I was never good at live coding tests, and have hired 100 engineers myself and avoided having them do it as well. Of course, that doesn’t help when suddenly on the other side of the table and leetcode live quizzes are the norm. Oy vey.
    • JeremyNT 2y ago
      Hah, I have the same concern. When I started in my career path the leetcode stuff wasn't even a thing, and despite having a long career behind me now I know if I was thrown into the job market I'd need a lot of practice to get past the stuff. It's one thing that we senior (in both senses of the word!) developers should definitely keep in mind about the job market, and indeed I value stability a lot more because of this. The equivalent position that we were hired / promoted into a while back might very well immediately weed us out in 2024 because the interview standards have changed!
• pjkundert 2y ago
  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 corresponding obligations.
  • nisten 2y ago
    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.
• tootie 2y ago
  Assuming you're talking about the tech market in particular my observation is that 2020-2022 was an absolutely wild aberration of runaway compensation driven by low interest rates and VC frenzy. In 2024 there are lots of well-paying line of business tech jobs asking for on-site time that seem like a prison sentence by comparison. Even though they are still high-paying and low stress compared to average workers. Basically, we've got a job market that is very good by any historical comparison, but market expectations are now completely unrealistic.
• mbrumlow 2y ago
  Employers don’t want job seekers, they want people who can do the job. What I am finding of late is most people are woefully under prepared and under skilled. In the other hand everybody has a degree and wants six figures because of it. The job market is tight, but not fucked. When tight it does not have the stomach to employee warm bodies. The fix is lowerred expectations from job seekers and the long term fix is schools need to become hard again and stop being a product. We need weed out classes, the goal is not to graduate as many as we can, it’s to educate. Maybe if they hard class was hard, it was hard for a reason, and dumbing it down so people don’t drop the class is only doing them a disservice when it comes to the work force which will demand results, not attendance.
  • hooverd 2y ago
    On the other hand, employers will work you to the bone if you let them and fire you at the drop of a hire despite prattling on about respect and loyalty. People briefly realized that better things were possible.
  • SantalBlush 2y ago
    So you want universities to act as your vocational training program for free? No thanks. If you want to make demands about college curriculum, you can start paying up. Until then, universities owe employers nothing. Employers have already shifted enough of their job training costs onto universities and their unwitting students. The free ride is over.
    • alephnerd 2y ago
      Universities owe their graduates with 5-6 figure college debt jobs that can pay those debts off. > Employers have already shifted enough of their job training costs onto universities and their unwitting students. The free ride is over. I'm fine with this model, but will applicants be interested in earning a bit above minimum wage for 3 years as we train them from scratch? This is the model that the Indian and Chinese tech industry uses - hire everyone, pay them a pittance, make them work insane hours, and the ones who survive and build relevant skills graduating to European level salaries in Asia.
• RandomWorker 2y ago
  Networking. We need more speed dating with employers and networking opportunities. Every job I ever had came through meeting with people. If every employee would be encouraged to meet with other people once a week it could scale. Maybe you would quickly lose people as well, also a risk.
  • samarthr1 2y ago
    Isn't that what meetups are for? In my admittedly limited experience going to meetups, I found that it was a good place to chat with people without major pressure of moving forward. And the cocktail party esque vibe of the meetups I have been to further enhance that idea?
• apwell23 2y ago
  We advertised for a junior developer role in April and got almost ~1700 applications in a week. we gave up after reviewing around 100.
  • faeyanpiraat 2y ago
    As in you managed to find the hire you were looking for after looking at 100 candidates, or all of the 100 seemed unsuitable, and you decided not to even look at the other 1700 ?
    • beisner 2y ago
      Yeah when you have way more applicants than you can possibly look at, the usual strategy is to just randomly sample 10% to review, and throw away the remaining 90% of resumes without even looking at them. This makes intuitive sense, as you do not want to hire unlucky people. This sounds like a joke, and it is. But this is actually what happens in practice (with less rigorous random disposal).
• stuff4ben 2y ago
  As someone who does a ton interviews and is usually the one who gives the technical thumbs up on hiring decisions in my group, I've summed it up as Joel Spolsky famously did a long time ago... "smart and gets things done" I just need someone who can learn stuff and has shown technical competence at some point in their career (even new grads). It's definitely harder as a new grad because hey, you have no experience. But show me how you've done something technical in school or an internship. Or have gone above and beyond in a class project. For my more experienced roles, I need to see some passion for what you're doing in addition to knowing what you're talking about. I don't do whiteboards or coding interviews. I don't ask those stupid interview questions either. I don't need the best of the best of the best. But I have been pretty successful for what I've been looking for and the quality of the coworkers I've been a part of hiring has been great from my perspective.
  • fatnoah 2y ago
    > "smart and gets things done" This is what I optimize for as well, and it's amazing how much pushback I get from others on this. I've been hiring software engineers and other roles for over 10 years, and not once did I ever lament that someone "just didn't have enough Python experience." That doesn't mean that there aren't cases where zero domain knowledge would be a huge detriment, or that having such knowledge wouldn't be a positive. However, there is a tendency to overindex on "requirements" that are really "nice to haves"
  • b20000 2y ago
    coding interviews do not attract the best of the best
• danielPort9 2y ago
  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 only looking for Java or Kotlin devs, you’re out of the question. Ridiculous.
  • bradfa 2y ago
    They want the best of the best candidates but they won't offer to pay the best of the best rates. As with much in life, you get generally what you pay for. 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.
• GenerWork 2y ago
  You forgot the middlemen: recruiters. I have yet to find more than 2 or 3 recruiters who actually know the space that they're working in, don't make unrealistic demands, and have basic empathy for the job seeker. As an example of this, I was messaged by a recruiter last week asking if I was interested in a potential position, and when I asked him about the position, he asked if I was willing to send over not only my portfolio (I'm a UX designer), but also do some free work on top of that. Nothing about the actual responsibilities, nothing about location, nothing about salary. I responded to him, asked a few questions of my own, and he ghosted me.
  • MisterBastahrd 2y ago
    Knowing the space that you're working in when you're a contract recruiter is far less important than being a good salesperson. I don't care how many technically aligned recruiters you've read articles from over the years, the simple fact of the matter is that the people who are at the top of the leaderboards at these companies couldn't give two shits about the technology. Their job is to land asses in seats, and they are ultimately in a vastly better position if they focus and refine their talents on selling and networking as opposed to learning about the problem domain. I still keep in touch with people from my recruiting days, and the high school dropout with 3 years experience when I joined a company is still a senior manager over the Cornell grad. They both make excellent money, but the dropout is easily the better salesperson. When you've interviewed enough people, you can sniff out the bullshit artists, and virtually all decent to great candidates have a certain cadence to how they describe their roles and responsibilities regardless of the tech stack. I don't need to know the ins and outs of SAP AR and Treasury, I just need to know that the candidate has a consistent work history, is up to date, and can confidently describe their work. Client managers are more likely to go back to recruiters who can consistently put candidates in front of them, which is yet another reason why the numbers / networking game is more important.
  • mock-possum 2y ago
    Yeah I’ve been realizing part of the reason finding work was easier 10 years ago was I had two solid local recruiters I could lean on - agencies headquarters in my city, focused on tech talent, with whom I’d had continuous relationships with when I was contracting. I don’t have anything like that now, and I’m not sure how to get it back again, because all the local talent agencies I used to work with are no longer operating.
• lapcat 2y ago
  > If you're too specific about the position, you get too few quality candidates. What do you mean by too few? I'd say that zero is too few, but one quality candidate might be perfect, because then the hiring process can go very fast. There's no reason why you couldn't or shouldn't hire the first quality person you find. In my opinion, the biggest problems with job postings are: 1) No salary/compensation listed, which can end up wasting everyone's time when there's a mismatch in expectations. "Competetive salary" is BS and often a lie. (This might also be why you're getting fewer quality applicants than desired.) 2) The posting focuses too much or even exclusively on arbitrary "qualifications" that the employer mistakenly believes are necessary but ends up relaxing anyway in many cases. Instead, the posting should describe in as much detail as possible the actual job, what the employee is to do, and then the qualifications will implicitly follow from that.
  • dukeyukey 2y ago
    Out of those quality candidates that apply: Some will find a job before they finish you interview process. Some will change their mind. Some will have a change on personal circumstances. Some (many?) will ask for more than you can offer. To hire one good person, you usually need many to apply.
    • lapcat 2y ago
      > Some will find a job before they finish you interview process. "one quality candidate might be perfect, because then the hiring process can go very fast" > Some (many?) will ask for more than you can offer. This seems to ignore my point 1 about listing salary/compensation on the job posting.
      • dukeyukey 2y ago
        "Can" go fast. Usually it won't. And in most cases, you can't revamp the whole hiring process, and mostly need to work with what you've got.
        • lapcat 2y ago
• GenerocUsername 2y ago
  At my company we have no issues hiring 50 remote Indian nationals who all have the exact same Java based resume, but we will spend a full quarter interviewing for a senior web developer (non Indian)
  • lammalamma25 2y ago
    This matches my experience. The company I’m at spent money on decent developers to get a project stood up and running, but will only hire cheap remote developers for the crud enhancement work that’s needed now. It makes sense until something important breaks or some thing new needs to be stood up. I’m not quite sure what to make of it. I sort of see a parallel in the job market although it might be a stretch. Most of the work is easy to outsource/go cheap on, but a small core is incredibly important to get right. It’s not obvious when a job posting is looking for one or the other.
• dorfsmay 2y ago
  A big issue is FOMO, and the paradox of choice. If only few potential partners are available, you will look for the best match and to settle down quickly. They might be average in look and intelligence, but you'll be happy to having found them. If you have a lot of money, can travel, and have access to a lot of beautiful potential partners, you'll always wonder if the next one could be better looking and more intelligent, and will have a hard time to settle.
• giantg2 2y ago
  Employer problems: evergreen postings not tied to real jobs, high standards while simultaneously not willing to train and retain, poor interview practices. Employee problems: misrepresenting self/skills, job hopping (mostly due to failure to promote/retain by employers)
• rayiner 2y ago
  It’s not paradoxical if you account for the normal distribution in employee talents, and companies are unrealistic about expectations. Big companies still have the mentality of startups, thinking that they can fill their ranks with top 10% people who are super self motivated and able to handle complex tasks with minimal management and training. Maybe that’s possible when you’re hiring three people at a startup, but it’s not possible when you’re hiring 300 people. Tech is now like the car industry. Google and Microsoft and Apple are like GM and Ford and Chrysler. And most of the startups are parts suppliers feeding into that ecosystem. They’re going to have to learn how to execute their core functions by appropriately training and supervising line workers.
• ricardoplouis 2y ago
  Our workforce is more educated now than at any point in history. This means we'll have more and more people competing for jobs they are overqualified for. From a job seeker perspective, it will only get harder as the traditional credentials have lost their value. I've also been on the hiring perspective and I can tell you there is no shortage of candidates, nor do companies have a hard time finding employees. The problem is that they either: A: Want top talent without paying the premium B: Want top talent for a role that doesn't require it If you ask any hiring manager, they'll always prefer the senior talent over the junior one, even if the role doesn't require it. But once they see the rates that senior talent commands, they might adjust their expectations. I don't think there is any dream solution given that the problem is more cultural than anything. If anything, the market will loosen up in favor of the hiring managers in the long run, but continue to squeeze workers given our current trajectory.
• flyingfences 2y ago
  The jobs that I both want and can do are all in places where I both don't want to live and can't afford, either. If I and my cohort could buy a decent home in Boston or New York or California, the equation would be very different.
• kerkeslager 2y ago
  There's some truth to the "structural unemployment" comment, but I'll note that in my recent experience, companies that pay well aren't having trouble hiring.
• JohnMakin 2y ago
  Current job market reminds me of ~2016-2017 when you'd see absurd job postings requiring 5+ years of kubernetes experience (kubernetes wasn't released until 2015). 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.
  • alephnerd 2y ago
    A lot of newer HN members seem to be junior ICs who never experienced the job market in earlier times. I've mentioned this fact multiple times before, and you can see this with the ages that most of the accounts are. Half of the accounts on this thread (and much of HN) are from 2020 onwards now.
    • JohnMakin 2y ago
      Ah, yea, that makes a lot of sense. I guess I don't really consider myself "old" or a graybeard yet but I could see how my perspective could differ from someone 15 years younger.
      • alephnerd 2y ago
        Yea. For a lot of Gen Zs, this is the first "bleh" market they've experienced. Tech has become commodified like how Teaching became by the 1990s, Accounting became by the 2000s, and Law by the 2010s. Everyone pays (relatively) good money for an experienced Teacher, Accountant, or Lawyer but pays peanuts for green talent.
  • joquarky 2y ago
    > I imagine a lot of people will have to learn new skills and adapt I've had quite a few months to ponder this, but I keep looping on what can we adapt to? Specifically, what problem should I try to tackle that is unlikely to be immediately solved by some new emergent property of the latest LLMs? I feel like the only safe bet is to "adapt" out of the tech industry entirely.
• voidUpdate 2y ago
  I got my first job out of university about 2 years or so ago, and it was immensely frustrating. I must have applied to easily over a hundred postings on linkedin, the vast majority of which never replied to me to even acknowledge that they'd received my application. Only two ever replied to me, one of which was my current employer. What would have been very nice was a brief explanation of why I wasn't chosen, what made everyone else reject me. Even just "We are sorry, we found a suitable applicant before we got to you" 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
  • iteria 2y ago
    There's too many applicants for that. You're getting canned responses because a human probably never even saw your resume. The other issue is that there is a small amount of people are _extremely_ unstable. Giving them any kind of feedback encourages them to harrass the company and employees. It's like 1% of applicants, but when you're dealing with this many people it means you are guaranteed to run into someone like this, so it's often policy not to give specific feedback.
    • voidUpdate 2y ago
      I never got any response from the majority of my applications, not even a canned "thank you for your application, unfortunately we have rejected you". It felt like shouting into the void. I did manage to get a couple of responses from directly emailing companies I had an interest in, all of which were "sorry, we don't have any jobs open". I was even introduced to the CEO of a company by my lecturer who knew him well, and his response boiled down to "no, you'll have to apply just like everyone else". So much for industry connections Yes, I applied just like everyone else. Got no response
• marcosdumay 2y ago
  There used to exist a professional attestation market, where people could get useful certificates and distinguish themselves on the job market. 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.
• vitalurk 2y ago
  It's been tough finding a role as a UX designer who is self-taught and has experience despite a lack of degree. Most of what I can find is hourly or small fee gigs that are devoid of any real value (You cannot hire a 1099 to whip up your UX in a week, sorry.) It's disheartening, and I'm about to stop looking for work for 4yrs while I use my education benefits to go to school. I can get paid $2k/mo to study, so I think I'll put together a team and spend 4yrs building micro-SaaS products while studying art history, instead of siphoning my energy and soul applying to tinder-algorithm-powered-job-onboardings. A goddamn waste if you ask me. A product/UX designer who has worked almost 100% remotely as of yet.
• deleted 2y ago
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• tayo42 2y ago
  Companies don't know how to hire. I think that's the biggest problem. The interviewees are subjected to all kind of insane process that shows up as a result of that. HR and third party recruiters make the process worse. They never understand what is going on. Why are they filtering resumes if they have no industry experience? People who have never written code have no business being involved in hiring people who do technical work. With small companies you get subjected to some random engineers line of questioning based on some gut feelings they have. I've been on both sides of this. Manager comes up, "Hey can you interview this person?" And that's it, your let loose. Other companies all cargo culted the same gauntlet of interviewing. 2-4 rounds of live coding. A pointless system design interview where the criteria doesn't make sense. Lets draw boxes and hit buzzwords in conversation? Do you or don't you want to go deep on anything? What exactly are you looking for with these? Its different every time. Some "vibe" check from a manager, probably not even yours? Why is the team not meeting the engineer? You need to hit 100% on this interview too. There's no real data driven approach to hiring that Ive seen. It's all based on random anecdotes. You can see this on any job advice board from the advice people give out. I think a reputable certification would help. It would at least cutdown on the coding interview and system design interviews everyone insists on doing. And get rid of HR and recruiters.
• deleted 2y ago
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• koliber 2y ago
  There is no magic solution here. Nor is this a new problem. If you're on the employer side, you need to define your role well, build a hiring funnel, decide how you will market the role, and then run the pipeline. Vet CVs, pre-qualify, interview, interview, interview, pre-hire, trial-period hire, and then work hard at retaining the people who you like working with. Each step of the pipeline can be debugged. There are solutions to every problem. Not enough candidates? Are people finding the ad? Are people reading the ad? Are people engaging? Why? Why not? Test - reword, change the compensation range, change the perks, or conditions. If you're looking for a job, you also have a funnel. You search for job, read the posting, decide to apply, apply, followup, answer questionnaires, interview, interview, interview, go through pre-hiring, and then try to deliver value. Again, each step can be analyzed and debugged. Doing this from either side is actual work. On the employer side, you have hiring managers, HR, internal recruiters, external recruiters, interviewers, and other roles and services that help you run the hiring show. I've been doing this for a while, in various roles. Sometimes I wear an internal recruiter hat. Sometimes the interviewer hat. Sometimes the operations hat. Right now I provide a service for companies in the US who don't want to deal with outsourcing firms or the intricacies of hiring abroad but want to build an offshore dev hub in Europe. Part outsourcing, part recruiting, part organizational design, part employer of record. At other times, I've managed sizable engineering teams for tech startups. Over time, the problem changes - sometimes it's harder to find devs, sometimes it is easier. But the approach is always similar.
• Mountain_Skies 2y ago
  One of the jobs I've had was due to my employer being a consulting company that had just signed a contract with a company that wanted to use Vignette StoryServer to vastly expand their brochureware site into a full customer service system. I was hired because the consulting company didn't have anyone with StoryServer experience and I had plenty of it. During our first week of work with the client, they decided they weren't going to use StoryServer after all and after some discussion, we all decided to build the site using Java Struts and JSF. While I had Java experience, I'd never used Struts or JSF but I quickly learned them both and was productive. We finished the project ahead of time, which made the client happy and also made our consulting company happy because it got a bonus. The only reason why I got that job was due to StoryServer experience that ended up being worthless. If they had required Java Struts and JSF experience while hiring, I wouldn't have stood a chance of even getting an interview. They accidentally hired a flexible and productive resource, which worked out great for everyone involved.
• samatman 2y ago
  Every open recruitment market is a market for lemons, the problem is especially acute in tech. As an employer, you have a specific position to fill. What would you rather do: sort through a slush pile? Or interview someone vetted by a trusted member of your team? Or say you're looking for your next job. Would you rather hop on a job board and spam your CV, or reach out to some colleagues and get escorted to the front of the line by someone who will vouch for you? The answer in both cases is obvious. So the jobs which end up publicly advertised aren't the best jobs, and the best candidates are getting snatched up on the background through personal connections. Of course, there are great jobs and great job hunters out there, because the process I'm describing depends on small-n network effects. I've had to interview outside of my network, because if the right job isn't there when I ask around, what other option is there? So as an employer you might find your best hire ever through open recruitment, great developers end up in the open market all the time. It's just dicey because there's been a low-pass filter already. I don't have great solutions here, but I non-ironically endorse the sibling comment about Tinder for jobs. It should be more like golden-age OKCupid but it would be an improvement on what we have. No, that's not LinkedIn. You start by researching why it isn't LinkedIn, and when you figure that out, you've got the shape of your MVP.
• nonrandomstring 2y ago
  I've been on both sides of the interview desk and I perfectly sympathise with what you're saying. Having thought about it a lot, it's not mismatches of needs, lack of skills, wages or "structural unemployment". It's the fact that the Internet mediates everything, and the digital world makes other people ssem unreal. "Technology is a way of not having to experience the world" - Max Frisch It's made people afraid and disrespectful of each other. It creates a cloud-cuckoo la-la land of fantasy and non-commitment. Despite investing hours into writing the perfect job descriptions, sifting conscientiously through piles of applications, the chosen candidates ghosted us or turned out to be liars. Linked-in was useless pile of rubbish in my opinion. Finally someone remembered a person we already know who would be a good fit. We called. They were free. We all went to the pub and 24 hours later [0] they were hired. Just don't use "The Internet" for anything serious and inter-personal like that. [0] we did not spend the whole 24 hours at the pub!
• relyativist 2y ago
  Ok, what is problem with matching then, if for +30yo, phd graduate in AI in medical imaging being unemployed for 2 years. Nearly impossible to get a job in big tech.
• b20000 2y ago
  As an employer you can hire people who have past projects they delivered and who can show you code they wrote and talk you through it. You can hire them and fire quickly if they don't work out. Leetcode is useless and experienced people will not waste time with coding interviews. These type of coding interviews ask stupid "trick questions" which have no relationship to day to day software development and attract freshly graduated candidates or people more interested in proving how smart they are instead of people who can build things and deliver. The problem is that once your company is full of these type of people that you will attract more of these useless people (like is the case at google).
  • sroussey 2y ago
    And thus I have never applied to Google. I’m fine with Google shipping my code though…
• sarchertech 2y ago
  What really needs to happen is that we need to hire fast and fire fast. Stop it with the 7 rounds of interviews. Assume after some discussion and basic verification that the person isn’t lying about past experience. Hire the first candidate that passes your bar instead of interviewing and ranking 20 candidates. If it turns out that you have hired every tech employers worst nightmare, a person with great experience who can talk everyone into believing they know what they’re doing but can’t code their way out of a paper bag, fire them. Trust me, it’s faster, takes less manpower than 7 rounds of interviews with 20 candidates, and in my experience produces better results.
  • b20000 2y ago
    you can already hire and fire fast in the US but nobody does it. there is just a bunch of BS talk about "cost of hiring" and "risk". i also found that "verification" consists of "trick questions". if you can't answer the trick question, then people assume you are lying or a fraud. this doesn't work very well and optimizes for people able to answer trick questions and for those who get turned on asking these type of questions (i.e. people who are labeled "smart").
    • sarchertech 2y ago
      I’m not talking about trick question interviews when I say verification. I mean a chat with an experienced developer about past projects and verifying past job history. You’re right that it’s already possible in the US. It boggles my mind how risk averse companies are with respect to hiring compared to nearly every other aspect of business.
      • b20000 2y ago
        I have had experiences where a so called experienced developer "tests" me by asking a "trick question" related to something I created to verify whether I indeed created the thing. If the "thing" you built in the past has any level of complexity, you simply cannot remember all the details of what you built, and only the most recent aspect will be fresh in your memory to recall. So chances are very high you will fail the trick question. This is why trick questions don't work. long interview cycles with lots of coding interviews make sense only when you have someone who has built nothing, and you need to find out if he would be able to build something. as soon as you have built something of any substantial size, coding interviews are no longer necessary especially if you have a CS degree and have reasonably good grades. the interview behaviour we see makes sense for countries where the cost of hiring and firing is very high, and this is not the case for the US.
• codingclaws 2y ago
  A huge part of the problem is that it's very hard to prove and evaluate developer competency.
• deleted 2y ago
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• nrp 2y ago
  People have commented on the rest, but on “Also, job posting and application management platforms are usually quiet expensive”, I haven’t found that to be the case. For small startups, ATS (applicant tracking software) is pretty inexpensive and usually includes integrations with LinkedIn to post jobs automatically. Given the time it saves on the process parts of the candidate pipeline, it’s easily worth it. If you are the founder of an early stage startup, you should also take it upon yourself to do candidate sourcing. Nobody knows your space and the gaps you need to fill in your company better than you do. Get a LinkedIn Recruiter Lite account and cold message people who have the skillset you are looking for.
• belter 2y ago
  > There are million companies and million posts. (especially with remote positions). LinkedIn is the platform that you can find more coverage yes however it doesn't usually represent the reality about the job/market Not really. I would refer you to these very interesting metrics, that even the Fed uses to gauge the economy and jobs: Software Development Job Postings on Indeed in the United States: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUSTPSOFTDEVE https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUSTPSOFTDEVE Software Development Job Postings on Indeed in Canada: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXCATPSOFTDEVE https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXCATPSOFTDEVE Germany: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXDETPSOFTDEVE https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXDETPSOFTDEVE UK: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXGBTPSOFTDEVE https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXGBTPSOFTDEVE France: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXFRTPSOFTDEVE https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXFRTPSOFTDEVE We are in a slowdown and a serious one.
• joshstrange 2y ago
  Full disclosure: I got hired via a "Who wants to be hired" and I have hired people using both "Who wants to be hired" and "Who is hiring" so I'm a little biased. > The best method that works as per my opinion is working with an agency Dear god no. I'm convinced that nearly all agencies and nearly all recruiters are completely incompetent based on candidates they have sent companies I've worked for and my own personal experience with recruiters. In addition, the quality of applicant coming from HN has been higher than the slew of candidates from a LinkedIn or similar IMHO. > My view as job seeker: There are million companies and million posts There are 1000 or fewer posts in this month's Who Is Hiring [0] and keyword filtering will narrow that list down substantially. Yes, this is not representative of the overall job market but there are a number of good companies in that post and I've seen a couple HN posts recently talking about hiring (that weren't throwaways, like OP's account here) but I also couldn't find any posts from those accounts in "Who wants to be hired", and I have all the data local going back to the first post which I can easily search through. I'm not saying "You didn't post/search on HN so clearly you aren't trying" but I do find it interesting to find people complaining on HN while not using a resource that is posted monthly. Also, spoiler, you can look at more than just the current month's post. HN is the solution for myself (for being hired and hiring), it's worked on both sides for me and I'm surprised more people don't use it. Every other service I've seen costs an arm and a leg just to flood you with candidates/jobs that barely match what you want. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40224213 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40224213
• wdiamond 2y ago
  Its not a paradox. Those systems become legacy but still make money. Money has nothing to do with the knowledge, knowledge grows slower; machine instances are fast made.
• rhelz 2y ago
  Germany was abla to overcome its unemployment problems, structural or otherwise, by making it easier to be fired :-) If its not a decision you'll be stuck with, for better or worse, till death do you part, its easier to take chance. Similarly, quitting or moving around should be easy as well. If you are an employee of a very big company, it's kind of like that already--moving from one team to another is a lot easier than finding a new job, new bosses are cognizant of the fact that you might need some training or time to get up to speed, ect, etc.
• smooc 2y ago
  I'm in management, senior to executive level with a preference towards data / ai. I'm also a contributor and committer to some Apache projects and maintain a popular one myself. I've got a background in financial services. I was laid off last year during the major tech layoffs and I had a few interim management jobs since. Nothing permanent yet though and I see myself as a missionary not a mercenary so 'just' contracting doesn't fulfill me. What I've noticed that where there used to be just a few applicants there are now many. This is confirmed by other job seekers. Jobs posted are also sometimes fake. Just window dressing so to say. I've gotten offers from within my own domain of less than half I was earning. For a NGOs I could consider that but for high tech or finance that's stuff I cannot take seriously. I noticed I need to work on my positioning and network harder. I did not have to apply for a job in 15 years so I am a but rusty in that respect. What I think is happing in the industry is that the macro economic developments are still quite uncertain and companies haven't figured out their strategies yet. So they stick to what they know.
• shagie 2y ago
  Companies are risk adverse. The goal isn't necessarily to hire the best candidate, but rather the least risky one. Often one gets a large set of resumes and most of them are clearly unqualified for the position and then upon interviewing many others are also unqualified. The tools to mitigate that risk are things that qualified candidates are adverse to (see the "say no to take homes") and can often find a position through their networks of knowing who has a job open. A person at the company attesting to "my friend John who I worked with before is looking for a job" which in turn drastically reduces the risk of hiring since this is a person who an employee has worked with before. It doesn't always mean a "hire right now" but if company policies allow for it, it can move a person to a short list. With risky hires who turn out to not be qualified, the cost of the hire can be much worse than not hiring anyone in that spot. I have worked with people who have generated negative value and spent a good bit of the next year cleaning up things scattered through the codebase. --- ROI It often takes about a year for a new hire to become a positive contributor. The next year the balance of the slow down of work, training, etc... it then balances out. There are few candidates who can hit the job running. Most people take that year to become productive. When a candidate is hired and leaves within that time, this costs the company money. At some point the company is going to hire people who don't need training (see problem with testing and take home). Even then, it's often cheaper to not hire someone. And so the "we want someone with all these skills since we're not going to train a random person on Oracle PL/SQL only to have them leave in 9 months." --- Expectations Most companies can't spend Big Tech money on salaries. And it is life changing amounts to move to it and furthermore, once you have a lifestyle associated with living in Big Tech compensation, it can be hard to leave - the golden handcuffs are real. If you're working for a big tech company in the 10% of compensation, going somewhere else to work at the median is a big hit. This limits the pool where a person considers. --- Shotgun resumes If you get multiples of the number of people who can reasonably be considered, one of the first / easy passes is to remove resumes that haven't shown an indication that they've read the posting. This also means removing resumes from the candidate pool that appear to be technology packing their resume (more than 1 page per decade of experience, "worked with: list 20 technologies here" on each position. This tends to remove people who are more risky to hire from the pool. The part from the OP: As first step, you start with the companies you like/know with being a bit more selective on the jobs but after some point you basically apply all somewhat related jobs and then want to see what happens after. (which only increase the complexity of the problem) Once you start sending the same resume to everyone the rate of people looking at your resume drops off significantly since it doesn't resemble the position that is being applied for or have any reason why they are applying there... meaning that even if they do get hired, this is a position that they're looking to start searching for a new position on day one and as an employer, you're better off not hiring someone.
• z3t4 2y ago
  It's a market like any other, sure it's very hard to evaluate a software developer. But if prices meet demand the problem will fix itself. Right now the market is flooded with new workers. But employers want people with experience and those are very few and in high demand. Also all those new people without experience are asking for too high salaries. When I started my first engeneering job I worked for 10 bucks an hour, and that was with over 5 years of prior coding experience building games and websites. I wold actually have made the same or more money working in a grocery store.
• WaitWaitWha 2y ago
  I think there are several issues in this area. Certifications are useless and sadly necessary. Certifications are substitutes or proxy to validate one's expertise in the field the cert is in. Alas, most certification organizations concentrating on how to rake in more money, not how validate someone's knowledge. Hiring managers & recruiters often mistake certification for experience versus knowledge and soft skills. (Let's not even talk about the crammers, cert cheats, etc.) The intermediary between hiring team and candidate supposed to be recruitment or HR. As others have noted, often recruitment does not know how to properly translate the requirement, they force-insert themselves into the recruitment process. A MITM attack. From hiring perspective, I have seen a few new trends I have not seen before. AI generated resumes/CVs to match the job offer. I know they were AI generated because some of them will have the left-in tell-tale ChatGPT prompts, or three of four resumes near identical in structure and contents. During video conference call, using the computer to find answers. At 4K, I can see mostly see the applicant's screen reflection in their glasses, I can hear the keys clicking, and see their eyes moving to read the answer. In one instance, jokingly I asked if they are "looking it up on ChatGPT", and the candidate responded, "I just want to make sure you get the best answer"...
• frenchman_in_ny 2y ago
  Unemployed for over a year here. Somewhat of a different job sector vs most here (leveraged finance structuring / investment banking). Have gone both through networking & have applied to over 1,000 LinkedIn jobs, have looked at adjacent industries, etc. Most employers don't even bother to reply to job applications these days... I'm not even sure how to fix it - on either end - but it's depressing as hell.
• avmich 2y ago
  > I guess my question here is that what else that you have experienced that worked/not worked. Also what would be the dream solution. Can we think of decoupling job seekers/employers first and initially having an intermediate who'd assess basic skills and requirements of job seekers and match them with companies passing the filter? I guess we'd need some standardization in how those skills and needs are formulated. A bigger problem is to have that intermediary. Uber for job matching?..
• kjkjadksj 2y ago
  A lot of white collar hiring is rooted in a romantic or even fantastic vision of hiring. Seeking out the good worker before they’ve even worked. Just hire like how blue collar jobs hire and this would be a non issue. In other words: no hoops or tests just hire who is willing to work and either train on the job or fire who doesn’t work out. Problem solved. Cities are literally built from dust by hiring like this. You can build an app like this too.
• jongjong 2y ago
  The market is just retarded. I think it's because many of the people who work for big tech companies aren't smart enough. If you're less skilled than them, you won't get the job because they can recognize idiocy. If you're smarter than them, you also won't get the job because they will feel threatened. They don't want to hire more competition for themselves. You have to have almost exactly the same skill level as them to make the cut and you have to have a certain submissive personality. That's probably partly why age discrimination is rampant; older people are threatening.
  • dsattt 2y ago
    This is it, this was 90% of my interviews so far. People barely smart enough to do the job that have no clue about anything.
• capitanazo77 2y ago
  It’s because the good ones have infinite work and the bad ones are looking for work. I’m super productive and have been full for 20 years. (Freelance) What I need is vacations and good programmers to help me, so back to the initial problem…
• snowpid 2y ago
  It's very annoying to begin the discussion without mentioning any country or job market.
• mkl95 2y ago
  > I want to start an honest discussion here and see 1st if I am alone feeling this way? and 2nd how can we solve this weird situation? I have been job hunting for over 6 months. It has been extremely difficult, but I should be getting a solid offer within the next few weeks. My short term career goals are to slightly increase my zero-interest rate era salary era, and find an intellectually exciting project. In the EU, most "exciting" companies are either wannabe FAANGs with a minuscule fraction of the operational ability and success, or middling startups that took way too much VC money in the zero interest era, and are now micromanaged by those VCs because they want their money back. I've worked for those people already, and it sucks. When the economy isn't good, HR people suffer from some psychosis that makes them ask you all kinds of random or creepy questions that are tangential to software engineering. My guess is that they are looking for people who are as burnt out and soulless as they are. It can be exhausting. My advice is to trust your gut and run away from recruiters and interviews that give you even the slightest red flags. It almost never pays off to be patient, and chances are that you will find dozens of equivalent job ads in the next few days. To make progress in the software industry, you have to learn to navigate the sea of crap.
• dpc_01234 2y ago
  Sturgeon's law squared, maybe cubed if you include recruiters.
• martindbp 2y ago
  Maybe it's similar to Tinder. In the past you got a few local applicants and you made your pick, but now you get hundred of applicants, so you narrow your requirements while probably filtering out good matches, just like girls who filter on 6 feet tall and six figures.
  • thisisfatih 2y ago
    I feel like Tinder has similar issues with job seeking and employee finding In fact after a second thought, its almost identical.
• juancn 2y ago
  It's a market failure. A difficult one to solve, but not impossible. There's a mismatch between skillset in the workforce and what is required by the employers. The way around it as an employer is to hire for potential, not actuality and train the people you hire to become the ones you need. Some companies realize this and get out of the quagmire faster. The issue becomes a lot worse when there's a bubble, such as the current AI gold rush, where finding people with actual experience is very very hard.
• mock-possum 2y ago
  My big thing is there’s no personal contact possible via the application process anymore. Every form I fill out results in the same response from a ‘no-reply@‘ email address: > Thank you for your interest in COMPANY NAME and for applying to the JOB TITLE in LOCATION. > Having reviewed your application, unfortunately, we won’t be proceeding with your application at this time. Due to the high volume of applications, we are unable to provide individual feedback at this stage. We kindly request that you wait 6 months before reapplying to this position. > We wish you all the best in your job search and future professional endeavors. All I ask is 15 minutes on the phone with any technical employee - team lead, cto or vp of tech, engineer team member, even a junior dev - I just want to talk to somebody about what tech your working with, and what the day-to-day looks like on your software dev team. Instead I get a list of demands in the form of a job position, an arduous application process of correcting your AI’s poor parsing of my resume, a few weeks of waiting, and a polite fuck-you-form-letter at the end turning me down. It’s an awful experience. It makes me wonder whether I need to be looking at a different industry at this point.
  • shagie 2y ago
    If you have 100 resumes, and each one wants 15 minutes to talk - that is 3 days of back to back to back phone calls. (Aside: this is a rather soul draining endeavor and means everything else is pushed back a bit... the person who is conducting the calls should have some training / awareness of what is entailed so that they don't accidentally create an HR incident - this pretty much rules out the junior dev and many engineering team members). What if you have 200? or 500? or 1000? How do you (the employer) decide which ones to talk to? How much budget are you willing to allocate to that?
    • makowskid 2y ago
      [dead]
• yebadem 2y ago
  I'm surprised how no one mentions an argument focusing on personality. Back in the day, having a qualification proved to some extend a certain level of understanding of someones character. So the companies went along with your degrees as in accomplishments for a judge of character. This is destroyed by the internet and further demolished with AI. Now with the power of AI and internet, current toolset of that an employee has makes it possible to complete complex tasks, completely breaking the link between someones character and their accomplishments. Hence, you have employees who can solve problems but they have no interest nor passion for the job. Maybe not even good work ethics in some cases. And employers, who keep complaining about new employees not working properly anymore, double down on "picking the best candidate" by looking at their accomplishments which is quite often fake or not as high as they think they are. There is a great video on YouTube by Timothy Cain explaining how a piece of code that should take 15 min to code takes 4 weeks now.
  • makowskid 2y ago
    [dead]
• smsm42 2y ago
  I was just thinking the other day about writing exactly this post. I've been many times on the hiring side as the interviewer, and now also am on the employee side. On both sides, the process looks extremely broken and extremely frustrating. People in the system sometimes help to get it from "screaming eldritch horror" level to "root canal every day for a month" level but I'd still easily nominate this as the worst problem in the industry, without even a shred of a solution surfacing so far. We are wasting an enormous amounts of money and effort. I know that employers spend month to look for a suitable candidate, and I know there are thousands of qualified candidates - myself included - spending months in doing process dances that frequently lead nowhere despite there being thousands of jobs matching them and being unfulfilled. And this is not a temporary phenomenon - this is going on for years and decades, without any shred of a solution. In fact, it's probably getting worse - with the industry growing, the amount of jobs you have to sort through to get some prospects is humongous. You have to reduce the amount of effort you spend to each position. Which in turn prompts the employer to erect more filters because they are afraid of low-effort submissions. And the high-effort submissions are lost in those filters so often that it becomes useless to do anything but low-effort. I mean, how many thoughtful, detailed, well-researched, specific to a position, cover letters can you write in a day? Now many you are willing to, when you know probably nobody would even read it because cheap AI would just scan it for keywords anyway? So, the cost and the length of the process is rising. I really hope somebody somewhere has some ideas on how to fix it...
  • thisisfatih 2y ago
    +1 to everything you've mentioned, well said. These are I believe facts and it makes the solution nearly impossible but I really believe that there must be a solution to this setup.
• veunes 2y ago
  I think in some extent there is a problem with HR specialists field.
• nerder92 2y ago
  At my startup we’ve recently started hiring for a Founding Engineer with Mobile Development skills (Flutter) and some backend. It seems impossible to find a right candidate for us and we are indeed looking at an agency for now even if I was fairly against it as a CTO. It’s most likely a numbers game, but it’s hard to find coders that also have some kind of founders attitude. Either people who are founders are indeed building something themselves or you get 9-5ers who think they can do startups while having 0 stamina/drive. This is hard
  • dsattt 2y ago
    So the problem is paying them. You want a founder for an engineer's salary.
    • nerder92 2y ago
      You mean what we shouldn't offer a salary and only equity?
      • ryandrake 2y ago
        The best candidates are probably the ones already employed, maybe even employed in a cushy 9-5 company making $400K. As an employer, you need to think about what are you offering that's so much better than what they already have in their hand, that would make them willing to walk away from a sure thing and take a risk by joining your company. You gotta give them what they're already making plus a risk premium. You don't have to pay that risk premium to someone currently unemployed, but what are the odds that you find your senior Founding Engineer from that pool?
      • dsattt 2y ago
        You need to offer more, not less, bro, wtf.
• EGreg 2y ago
  Of course there is a solution. The marketplaces suck. For example, I just want to input my resume and see all the jobs that I'm qualified for. I can do this on indeed. But then, many employers don't let me use my indeed resume to apply, I have to actually go to their site, and custom-fill everything out, and then monitor my inbox for who-knows-who might email me, or maybe not. It's a black box, there is no feedback unless they select me, which means I become lazy about filling these out and don't go to the employer's own site. And so on. There are many employers who missed out on people like me even applying, for that reason. By the way, you might well ask why men can't find women they like and women can't find men they like. "Where have all the good guys gone?" At the same time, a woman gets 1000 suitors a week on an app, while a guy gets maybe a few answers back. And the answer is, again, that our dating system and swiping apps are completely broken. People are depressed and unhappy. I'm working to fix it. If read this and like what I'm doing, join me: https://www.laweekly.com/restoring-healthy-communities/ https://www.laweekly.com/restoring-healthy-communities/
• disambiguation 2y ago
  I think employers see labor as an investment, and each worker has a different ROI. The higher your ROI the more essential you are to business. Since the economy is tight for tech, companies can only make room for high ROI workers.
• jacknews 2y ago
  The problem is similar to that of beautiful tall rich women who "can't find husbands". Except the companies are in fact mostly quite plain. Obviously there are plenty of husbands out there, just not so many tall movie-star-handsome kind sensitive smart billionaires. It seems to me the current problem is almost entirely due to companies being too picky, demanding exact skills and experience, and setting up ludicrous obstacle courses of DSA tests, psychology tests, multiple interview rounds, etc, etc, often for rather pedestrian positions. And then on the freelance front you have 'opportunities' like this on upwork: We are seeking a skilled Ruby on Rails Stripe Integration Tester with extensive experience in testing financial software and APIs. Job Summary: Develop and execute test plans for Stripe API integrations within our Ruby on Rails applications. Identify, reproduce, and report bugs and glitches, and verify fixes from development teams. Hourly: $4-$8 I mean, $4/hr, resposible for testing their financial integration? And to add insult, upwork want 21 connects ($3) just to send a proposal (which may not even be read). Excuse me while I don't rush to apply for the role. Or send any money through the fintech marketplace they're building. Recruiting would probably be cheaper and give better results just by picking the top 10 CVs (or even 10 at random), give out 1-week contracts, and hire whoever worked best. I mean, just like having multiple dates, having longer-term relations, even cohabiting, before settling on a marriage partner.
• CM30 2y ago
  One of the main reasons for this is that entry level roles have basically disappeared in many industries. The idea of hiring someone who knows nothing (or a little bit) about the work in question, then training them to get better seems to have become a foreign concept for most companies now. As a result, you've got a lot of people who would probably do better in one of these roles applying for just about everything that pops up online, since they don't really have that many options. Someone who just finished a coding bootcamp shouldn't be fighting for a senior position, but there are plenty of those who are. There's also the aforementioned skill mismatch too. The tech jobs being hired for right now have a certain set of requirements, but many of the people being laid off in this industry (or other related ones like gaming) have entirely different skills. So if your company didn't use the latest tech or used tech that's rather niche compared to the mainstream, good luck getting a job. The places that used your skills are either now outsourcing everything or closing down entirely.
• bilsbie 2y ago
  As an employer does a really simple challenge help weed out bad applications? For example “include the output of this function in the subject line”
• s67 2y ago
  I have 25+ years leading test teams. I've always been the most technical person my team. I've written at 20 least custom test automation frameworks, in various languages, but my preference is Python or test code. I was laid off in early 2023; 15 months looking for work. When I've been able to get an interview, if it leads to a tech screen, it's leetcode. It's never test code, or anything remotely about test theory or practice. If I get scheduled for an interview, I always proactively create a custom framework POC for the company's marketing site, to specifically show coding skills around testing; this is ~3 hours of work. This never impresses them -- actual, working code in a github PR -- and the last two company interview rounds have been: 1. 70 minutes to solve 5 leet challenges (Python, Python, Javascript, Java, SQL) 2. 2 separate screenings, each with 1 leetcode challenge at 30 minutes
• makowskid 2y ago
  Hi, this is exactly the problem we’re trying to solve with https://Careera.AI https://Careera.AI Careera is an automated platform for job matching between companies and job seekers, providing end-to-end recruitment automation. The are NO JOB APPLICATIONS and NO CV FILTERING by the company. Job seekers only need to register on the platform, and upload their CV, which is then parsed via AI to speed up onboarding. Every few days, the platform sends quizzes/tests to build the user’s psychometric profile. Companies create richer job postings on the platform. Based on hundreds of data points, the platform pre-matches both sides automatically and anonymously, guaranteeing a good relative match. Companies are proposed candidates and can see only basic information, excluding name, race, religion, ethnicity, or physical appearance. When both sides hit “LIKE,” they can contact each other and proceed with the interview process. Companies must process up to a maximum of 10 proposed candidates and cannot ghost any candidate. Only then can the platform propose more candidates. The platform is currently in the pilot stage. We would greatly appreciate community feedback. Thanks!
• goddamnyouryan 2y ago
  seems like a relevant place to promote my tech hiring company: https://polyfill.work https://polyfill.work