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Discussion: Job seekers can't find a job and Employers can't find an employees
242 points by thisisfatih 5 months ago | hide | past | favorite | 369 comments
As someone who has been on the both sides (recently), I've realized this paradox : Job seekers can't find a job and Employers can't find an employees.

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?

My view as employer: Job posting usually sucks. If you're too specific about the position, you get too few quality candidates. If you keep it too broad, you get swamped with applicants that you don't know what to do. I don't even want to get in people faking their jobs/positions/duties/diplomas etc. Also, job posting and application management platforms are usually quiet expensive. As a bonus: if you are a startup, hiring wrong people will most likely kill your company. The best method that works as per my opinion is working with an agency to give you better first results however again nothing comes for free.

My view as job seeker: 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. 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)

I am thinking to come up with a solution however I am not sure if there is a solution.

I guess my question here is that what else that you have experienced that worked/not worked. Also what would be the dream solution.




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.


Structural unemployment happens when the perceived skills of the workforce don't match the perceived needs of employers, so there is both unemployment and difficulty hiring.

A lot of engineers will tell you that companies are often expecting both too much (precise types of experience) and the wrong things (leetcode-type challenges, unnecessarily specific knowledge...), which leads them to pass over perfectly qualified candidates.


> Structural unemployment happens when the perceived skills of the workforce don't match the perceived needs of employers

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons : when "buyers" cannot distinguish between good and bad due to informational issues, even the good products (or in this case employees) cannot find buyers. Market failure.

It might be improvable by the relevant parties getting together and agreeing on a curriculum and exams so people only have to take a test once, for example. But I think that's a long way off.

Of course, ChatGPT makes this a lot worse since it reduces the cost of fakes on both sides: fake applications and fake job adverts.


Unions have historically solved this problem. Non-union accreditation programs don’t seem to have the same effect, though in some industries they do have a positive effect on salary.


People have fixated on the word "union", but when a group of white collar people get together to set standards and gatekeep them it's called a profession. In the UK, this is usually structured as "chartered". It covers other types of engineers (see the repeated discussion of whether software engineering is engineering; iron rings in Canada; etc) as well as accountants and surveyors.

Older craft professions had guilds. Lawyers go back still further in history and have their "bar" exams.

But in all cases it requires imposing a costly barrier to entry in exchange for not having to prove yourself over and over again to potential employers. Nobody makes a lawyer do fizzbuzz before hiring them.


...because the state Bar Association has required them to pass a test just to show up. In most states the same organization requires a degree from an accredited law school just to sit the test (though I think there are like 2 states that let anyone sit the Bar Exam).

Put another way, everyone has to do the fizzbuzz leetcode test just to be in the industry. But you only have to do it once.


to qualify, unions may have solved this problem in the US. in europe, which has a stronger apprentice culture, unions don't have any role here.

(i am not saying this to criticize the comment but just to point out one of the many differences between unions in the US and europe)

the problem with apprentice programs is that they lag behind the changes in the industry. when i was in school there were none for software developers for example. there are now, but the second problem is that apprentice programs are considered of lower status compared to studying at a university. think blue-collar programmers vs white-collar software developers. the pay is also different.

i don't know anything about union accreditation programs, but i can imagine that they would be targeted at the available jobs, and with unions in the US having more influence at who gets hired, they probably can make sure that an accreditation actually leads to a job.

apprentice programs traditionally also promised that you'd get hired at the company where you learned, but this is no longer certain. together with the status and pay differences it is no surprise then that the number of people starting apprentice programs is declining.

on the other side university studies are not targeted at the industry. which only adds to the perception of candidates not matching employers needs. as an employer it is difficult to tell whether a candidate with a diploma is actually capable of doing the job.


unions are long established in europe, at least in western europe, and are a cornerstone of the social system. even white collar jobs have unions. this is in contrast to the US where unions are almost entirely non existent for white collar jobs like software engineering.


Union Law in a lot of "Europe" (a broad term so very dependent country to country) is much less adversarial with businesses than in the US.

At least in Western Europe, the big Unions won't fight tooth and nail over mass layoffs (eg. Volvo in 2009-12 Sweden versus GM in 2009-12 US) and make it a major political issue, as the Union Leadership has larger ambitions beyond their Union.

A lot of this seems to stem from the influence National Syndicalism had on most European unions in the 20th century compared to traditional Syndicalism in the US+UK in the 20th century.


>Union Law in a lot of “Europe” […] is much less adversarial with businesses than in the US.

US labor law was designed to be adversarial at the firm level because that gives individual firms greater power to crush unions and prevents sectoral bargaining and sympathy strikes. One can see the vestiges of “European” labor organizing in the film industry, which has an exemption to this that was grandfathered in.


can you elaborate on that please?

i don't see how US law wants companies to crush unions. and what is that film industry exemption about? any references?


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taft%E2%80%93Hartley_Act


from where I am in europe, I have different memories... unions were pretty aggressive when it came to companies like Volvo


You didn't understand the context. Unions in Europe are usually not involved at all in accrediting professionals in their fields. Thats what the conversation is about.


The 'guilds' seem to have a similar purpose here in Britain, namely that of providing legally-required accreditation programmes. However, these are only for certain trades, and I put guilds in scarequotes because they aren't as exclusive as the mediaeval form.

Re. universities, it was widely quoted a few years ago that more people graduated with a bachelors in photography during that year than there were practising photographers!


It would only make it harder for new grads, as unions aim to help their constituents increase salaries, which means paying non-union hires waaaaaay less.

Look at the Automotive Engineering industry in Ohio/Penn/Mich for example - a union contract engineer will earn a decent amount, but the majority of new hiring is non-union.


I'm relatively uninformed here, but isn't part of the union's job to propagate itself and ensure that there aren't non-union hires in the same industry and location?


> there aren't non-union hires in the same industry and location

We live in a globalized world where location doesn't matter as much.

Automotive Unions are good at demanding fairly competitive wages for their members, but this pushed margins significantly down, leading to vendors and even manufacturers in the Automotive industry to leave union-friendly states like MI, Ohio, and Pennsylvania for those that are right-to-work (eg. South Carolina).

A major reason companies like GM and Stellaris fell behind on the EV trend was because battery technology and automation doesn't fall under the UAW, so there were constant protests and strikes against EV manufacturing (eg. the UAW strikes a couple months ago).

Meanwhile, the Teslas, Hyundais, DaimlerBenzes, and Fords pivoted manufacturing to right-to-work states like Alabama, Kentucky, and Texas.

Imo, a big reason for the PHEV push recently in the US is because of UAW negotiations to protect legacy ICE builds which can be modified into PHEVs as they use most of the same parts excluding the battery portion [0].

[0] - https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/16/business/electric-vehicle...


Some of those interview questions have ridiculously short time constraints. You need to be perfectly rested and well practiced in order to finish the exercises in time. Some of these tests seem to select for cheaters because only cheaters who either knew the questions ahead of time or who used AI to solve the problem could finish them in time.


Exactly. A lot of the problems asked of people are basically "do this multi week task that a team would probably work on at the actual company, except in an hour or two".

They also make you question whether you'd want to even work at a company with this sort of setup. Like, imagine a software engineering role where your boss wanted each project done within an hour, with no help from other developers or external sources, with a tech stack you're only told about the day the problem is given to you. Would anyone really consider that a good (or even tolerable) working environment?


My last take-home wanted a sudoku solving app coded from scratch in 30 minutes in an unusually restricted online sandbox IDE that would disqualify you if you defocused the window.

I have 28 years of verifiable professional software development experience on my resume.


I would just close the window 1 minute in because that's just ridiculous. Unless you've already done this before and play Sudoku regularly for fun, it would take you 10 minutes just to absorb the problem. Doesn't leave much time for coding. If you can't even minimize the window to read up on Sudoku, how the heck can you complete the task. The company will end up full of Sudoku enthusiasts who can barely code.

For my last online test, I wanted to close it within 5 minutes of reading the first question even though the problem was not particularly difficult, I just knew I couldn't solve it within 40 minutes because it was a problem that I had never seen before and was very disconnected from practical scenarios. I needed 20 minutes just to absorb the question fully. Also it was very late at night and I wasn't in an optimal state of mind.


Leetcode type challenges are just a proxy for logical habilities, which are highly desired for SWE positions. It's not meant to evaluate every ability. Despite imperfect, I don't know of a better indicator that has similar cost. An employer won't spend a lot more to evaluate with perfection how good we are with logic.


It really isn’t. Asking people stuff like N Queens, Trapping Rain Water, and other such questions is really about if you’ve seen the problem before and studied enough to solve them optimally in under 20 minutes while explaining out loud.

It really is about testing how much you prepared for the interview and not the job.


I interviewed at Netflix and Google and not once did I see a question that was on leetcode. I had to think very hard about how to solve each of their coding questions. However, they didn't need any tricky esoteric algorithms either which I think was really well done.

Microsoft on the other hand, did exactly what you said, they just pulled the classics, which I think is less helpful. I guess it filters on people who have a moderately good memory and are willing to study.


leetcode challenges are a proxy for nothing

employers can simply hire based on past projects


> wrong things (leetcode-type challenges, unnecessarily specific knowledge..

I'm curious about the dynamics of this. If leetcoding or requiring some specific knowledge is too much for candidates, those employers will not be able to find enough talent, so they will be forced to lower their standards and the mismatch should be gone, right? Case in point, I'd venture to guess that no more than 10% of the tech workers truly understand AI or stats or machine learning or basic college-level maths, yet magically millions of ML engineers or data scientists have popped up in the past few years just because the market had such high demand.


> If leetcoding or requiring some specific knowledge is too much for candidates, those employers will not be able to find enough talent, so they will be forced to lower their standards and the mismatch should be gone, right?

I'd revisit any train of thought that conflates access to capital with wisdom or intelligence. If someone invents a money printer then everything they do afterwards will be seen in a post hoc ergo propter hoc light as long as the original money printer still works.

For example, your statement assumes feedback loops I see scant evidence for in real life.


If the corporation as a unit were a perfectly rational actor, sure.

In practice, most corporations seem quite happy to collectively hand-wring over how they can't find new talent, squeeze everything they can out of the talent they currently have, and direct their existing personnel at direct profit-earners while letting systems gradually fall apart due to lack of maintenance.


Leetcode (or hacker rank or others) and other algorithmic qualification (have recruiter ask for years of experience in exactly X) is an understandable response to the automated firehose tools that allow applicants to deluge companies with applications with relatively low effort per app. Companies have to find some way to filter out the percentage that have very low likelihood of succeeding.

I hate it, but I don’t see a better way that doesn’t have its own limitations. (Referral of known ex-colleagues is a good one, but that’s limited in scope and has diversity problems).


My observation has been that the causality is the other way around: the pointless mindgames of employers trying to find "the best" people via interviews led to job-seekers finding ways to game a system that was rigged against them.

However, regardless of "who started it" in this round, ultimately, it is unquestionably a situation we can lay at the feed of industry, which abandoned decades ago the practice of actually training new hires for their positions. Sure, there are prerequisites they can expect (eg, in a programming position, you can expect some level of school learning or experience with programming in general, or particular categories of program/lanugauge), but the degree to which employers are willing to train people on the stuff they use has declined precipitously since the late 20th century. This is a well-known phenomenon, and it is substantially responsible for the modern arms race between job-seekers and prospective employers: if you know that whoever you bring on will get 3 months of well-designed training for the role they'll be filling, you don't need to spend 6 months vetting them over 10 rounds of interviews for an entry-level position.


The situation is bad enough that even for a moderate-sized codebase a newly hired employee is expected to contribute within increasingly (decreasingly?) short time. Getting familiarity with existing codebase is one of the most specific levels of training "on position", yet even that training is deteriorating to shorter and shorter times.


Yes, looking at big company interview processes, it can give you a huge unfair advantage if you can know what kinds of technical questions would be asked ahead of time. It's kind of ridiculous and counter-productive that employers are obsessed with selecting developers who can solve problems under time pressure.

The kind of developer who writes code quickly may also be the kind of developer who jumps to conclusions too quickly; this attitude is a huge problem in the medium and long term when working on any decent size project. Choosing sub-par solutions can trigger a cascade of negative consequences for the project over time. Often, it's better to have developers who are really thorough and don't move to the next stage until all reasonable possibilities have been considered.

The people who can solve problems quickly are often not the same people who can solve problems optimally.

The current system seems to favor fast-moving code monkeys with zero understanding of architecture or security.


not arguing this but, the assumption here is a certain kind of production web developer and similar things.. not all coder problems are hired this way.. unfortunately, ranks of new company leadership actually do not know themselves about this, dealing with money and personal power relationships daily.. so they copy others in the hiring practices and so do the personnel and low-level managers, who are vulnerable to termination themselves..

an industry expanding into distant lands with telecommute for ever faster results with ever cheaper workers, appears to be embracing the AI interview and AI CoPilot assistant standard, to further reduce the bargaining power and individual contributions of employees for writing ordinary code


What I find weird is that the kind of people that they're hiring are the kinds of people who are easier to replace with AI.

AI is useless at big-picture reasoning when coding. It's only good for short snippets. Yet companies seem to reject developers who are good at big-picture, architectural thinking.


And architects generally know where security gaps are likely to occur. If their livelihoods are threatened, it won't take long to find alternative funding for their skills.


>he kind of developer who writes code quickly may also be the kind of developer who jumps to conclusions too quickly

I'm the opposite of this, but when I wanted a really high paying job, I just practiced a bunch to code quickly. That was actually my biggest hurdle, sometimes I'd understand the problem but I couldn't bang out actual working code fast enough.

Other times I'd get so nervous that I wouldn't have time to code that I'd stumble on the thinking part. Once I deliberately practiced for speed, I was much calmer in interviews.

And now I have a really high paying job. shrug. Now, it's not the best at finding outright geniuses, but making people solve slightly harder than trivial coding questions is a pretty consistent filter for people who can't code.

If you're good at coding and you can't do it, then it's just a matter of practicing a bit.


Yes but what kinds of people have the time to practice puzzle solving? Not everyone. For example I've been coding for 10 years, I used to be good at solving puzzles under time constraints but I'm not as good at it anymore because I prioritized practical architecture and other code design skills. I'm a much better coder today by all relevant metrics. My problem is that I sometimes run out of time during the tech tests. It's arbitrary... Sometimes I get lucky with the questions sometimes not. An unfamiliar problem will take longer to solve.


>Yes but what kinds of people have the time to practice puzzle solving?

The kind who want to get an extra 100 - 200k a year in RSUs?


That happens anyway - nobody's payroll dataabse is running on leetcode puzzles, so if you hire somebody, they must spend time - sometimes months - on learning the new systems and getting the lay of the land and how the things are done. It's inevitable.


I think there's still training for positions (which often means - the company's specific tech stack) - it's what the "junior" positions are. If, on the other hand, the candidate more or less fits the tech stack and other requirements (domain knowledge etc.) already, the company can skip the training, and offer a "senior" position, for more money.

That's the reality of most software positions - they're hyper-specialized, and key competencies don't transfer between them. It's similar in medicine - a top cardiologist could at best be hired as a "junior" pulmonologist-in-training, even though he may be a doctor with 20 years of experience.


That tracks reasonably well. We have a fair amount of success at hiring college grads, which we obviously have to train to professional proficiency.

We have some success stories, but much longer search times and far more interviews per start when we hire for experience-required roles.


What's your interview process?

As an applicant senior dev, I found a small take-home + a discussion over my solution + just chatting in general has worked best. Chill atmosphere and not going by a checklist helped a lot as well, to both sides.


But when companies would "filter" you out because your resume didn't match some stupid algorithmic quirk, you have no way to even get to an interview without mass-filing to any opportunity that at least somewhat resembles the one you want. You don't know the rules of their gatekeeping, and have no chance to learn them because everyone uses slightly different but equally broken gatekeeping system. You know to have any chance you must pass this gatekeeping system. You know the chances of success are low, because you don't even know what they are looking for, and they can't tell you because that would invalidate their whole system. So, you need to send out a lot of submissions, to have any reasonable chance to even get to talk to somebody. And since you have to do that, you can't spend too much time on every submission. Hello, automated tools. It's a nightmare both employers and employees are trapped in, without any reasonable way to resolve it. Yes, personal referrals help - but what if you want to work somewhere where you don't have anybody to personally refer you?


Quite often perception of reality matches actual reality.

I've found it extremely rare to the point of almost being non-existent that what engineers think a company needs or should do is accurate compared to what a company needs or should do.


Probably to what company thinks the company needs or should do? It's rare - very - when a company really needs to do something unusual, which engineers wouldn't expect.


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.


"You have to be lucky (including knowing someone, ie networking), not necessarily good."

Yes, and the network effects are largely detrimental to minority groups since networks tend to be biased toward similar people.


Are you sure about this?

Seems to me that minorities (Asians) are quite over-represented in tech.

Many people are of course racist and don't count Asians as minorities...


https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40416402


> the network effects are largely detrimental to minority groups

“… detrimental to low socioeconomic status groups, within which minorities are over-represented”.

FTFY, not to be a pedant, but to highlight the fact that many white people from certain backgrounds also struggle with this, while well-connected minorities largely do not.

In fact, connected minorities essentially have super-powered network effects since the demand for minorities who can jump through all of the hiring hoops greatly exceeds the supply.


> many white people from certain backgrounds

Sad Eastern European noises, aka "You are on this council, but we do not grant you the rank of master"


> In fact, connected minorities essentially have super-powered network...

...in isolated pockets where those things exist.

Outside of those places, minorities have their slider set to something-other-than the easiest difficulty level.

As a white guy in generally good condition, my slider was slid all the way to easy. My road was still super hard - but it was easier than it was for women, brown people, etc.

In 1990 I moved to FL and ran headfirst into no connections=no work. I did the Make Your Own Luck thing. Hundreds of brief introductions led to a few relationships. A few of those became potential leads. It was a years long process. The eventual successes hinged on a few, key connections with people who saw something familiar.

If I hadn't been familiar, I wouldn't have been remembered past the introduction.


I'm not just talking about population level racial minorities. It can be things like disabilities, or even white people in areas/industries/ teams with a majority Asian population. It could even be somewhat based on political or religious beliefs and the other cultural-social background that forms what hobbies and other activities you might meet someone at.

Yeah, certain minorities can benefit from programs that value them above others, but the above and beyond results you talk about come after the main connections are made. This doesn't extend to all minority groups either, like those with invisible disabilities (after all, it's mostly about how things look).


I think you may be assuming the parent poster's definition of minority.


Elite is a minority. I don't think minority means a group faces biases.


I didn't say all minorities. But yes, in other contexts elite people may face other biases (eg jealousy, which could even apply if the hiring tech folks feel threatened).


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.


They're almost all cargo culting the same whiteboard algorithm hiring criteria for otherwise humdrum jobs so yeah, they're all kind of unreasonable. An HR fad can cause structural employment just as easily as bona fide requirements not being met.


They are cargo cutting, I was about to make the same point. I am more likely to get a leetcode quiz from a small company trying to emulate a FAANG company than I am from an interview with an actual FAANG company. Leetcode is part a costly signal given the study that has to be put into it, and part IQ test. I think part of the proliferation of leetcode is due to the illegality (edit: in effect even though not explicitly) of using IQ tests. But if someone could have a certified IQ test they could reuse that one test result for the entire job market improving liquidity. It would be no worse than leetcode as the IQ part of leetcode is in effect already an inefficient and arduous IQ test that people have to take repeatedly. The costly signal was supposed to be university but the academies have sold out their responsibilities. I think the effort to democratize university education, instead of lifting people up, has instead dragged universities down. The reason I think the solution is difficult is that we have to chose between a more fair world where just about anyone can get a degree and IQ tests are illegal but we have to keep taking these leetcode tests. Or a less fair world where an IQ test / SAT score and a university certificate is sufficient.


Can we have similar tests for companies, some formalized employment-worthiness?


Yes, it would be very possible. In Brazil for example, several million people each year do the national test for public sector jobs, with the test result deciding who gets hired. So it doesn't matter who you're related to, if you have the same hobby as your interviewer, or if the HR person thinks you're cute or not. It's the test and that's it. At least in theory.

The military branches world wide also generally hires and promotes on merit and testing. So it's nothing strange.


I think previous work history is currently most used as a substitute. As in the hiring company assumes the previous companies have acted as a gatekeeper. Given the amount of money involved it would be difficult to maintain a formalization / certification process that would be both trusted and resistant to corruption.


No, I mean just like companies would like to see a sort of IQ test results for applicants, I'd assume applicants would like to see a sort of employment-worthiness test for the companies. Previous work history here could be the history of that particular aspiring company of hiring people and people leaving the company.


Ah, I see, I think companies being far fewer than people are more able to operate on reputation in a way that would be impractical for general mass of individuals. The companies can and do pay PR to try to influence that reputation, as can individuals, and many high profile individuals do in fact hire PR. Glassdoor is one public source of info, but there is generally quite a lot of gossip around companies. People can reach out to current employees of an company like employers can reach out to previous employers of an individual and I've never had an interview where I was unable to ask the interviewer questions about the company.

Perhaps a proxy for a corporate IQ test would be net earning per employee which is often pretty public information.


It is not illegal to give candidates IQ tests. There are huge firms that do so openly. The practice isn't widespread because it doesn't work well, not because it's proscribed.


Any test that has disparate impact is in effect illegal. Leetcode at least makes this process more opaque which helps limit liability. I have edited my post to note that there is no explicit legislation making IQ tests illegal in the US.


> Any test that has disparate impact is in effect illegal

Nope, it just has to be shown to be relevant to the requirements of the job.

So you call it an "employment skills assessment," make 80% of it indistinguishable from an IQ test, and add some domain-specific questions related to the industry or the position.

P&G has done this for a long time, among other companies.


This has been true for a long time but I would suggest that it's no longer true, or at least less true. Such aptitude tests, the opaque form of IQ tests, are now increasingly and effectively being challenged on the same disparate impact that IQ tests were. Rather recently the NY Teachers aptitude test was demonstrated to have disparate impact resulting in a payout of $1.8B. Perhaps one way to get rid of leetcode would be to demonstrate that it also has a disparate impact. Though I have little hope that what would replace leetcode would be any better, especially since it would have to be even more opaque than leetcode already is.


The teachers aptitude test involved errors in scoring the test, not a conceptual problem with aptitude testing teachers.


As it appears you are more familiar with the case than I am, it would be helpful if you could point out what those errors are?

As best I can tell 'Judge Wood ruled that an older state-certification test, which was intended to measure teachers’ knowledge of the liberal arts and science, was racially discriminatory.'

Elsewhere I'm seeing "The court found that Black and Latino teachers clearly passed these tests at lower rates than white teachers. In order to prove that this wasn't illegal, the defendants had to show that the test actually demonstrated what it promised: that teachers who did well on the test would do better in their jobs."

It seems to me that the error was using the wrong test and it was the wrong test because it had disparate impact. What it does not appear to be is a case that is not about disparate impact because it instead had errors.


That kind of reasoning seems amazing to me. Some people didn't perform as well on the test as the judge wanted, so the test is wrong. It's even racist!

If men get into traffic accidents more often than women, then clearly there is something wrong with the cars and car manufacturers should be sued for their discrimination?

In the Eastern bloc, agriculture was immensely held back because everybody had to follow the ideology and adjust their science and methods to "I god damned said so!" of the rulers. Seems like America is curious about following the same path.


Ahh, I'm looking at a much more recent case in New Jersey, not this one from 10 years ago. The test you're talking about isn't an IQ test; it's a heavily and obviously culturally-loaded literacy test. The whole point of actual IQ tests is to isolate intellectual aptitude from cultural literacy.

(I'm writing as if I think real IQ tests are a good idea, and they are not --- in fact, that's my whole point: there's a mythology that IQ tests aren't used because they're illegal, but they are not that; what they are is ineffective.)


The efficacy of IQ tests are a separate argument and the general abandonment of IQ tests by corporations as a demonstration of their inefficacy would be more substantive if such tests were not in effect made illegal at the same time. I.e. if IQ testing conferred no possible legal liability then the spontaneous abandonment of their use might be evidence of their ineffectiveness.


I'm saying, if you want to cite a case as an example of why IQ tests are legally disfavored, the case should be about an IQ test.


In my view that is not how logic works, I think we've passed the point of productive discussion and I will leave you to your beliefs.


I don't need to litigate this, but they're not "effectively" illegal either. Again: big firms with huge HR departments and lots to lose use then, and brag about it.


Those I assume also have big legal departments, for smaller companies such lawsuits can be extinction events.

This has been previously discussed in detail on HN 12 years ago; https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2414135 I would suggest that times have changed since then and disparate impact lawsuits are now more likely to prevail in 2024 than in 2012, so the in-effect aspect has increased since then.

I know quite a few CEOs who confide in me that they would rather give IQ tests but do not because of their concerns over legal consequences. Clearly this is anecdotal but this sentiment does seem to be pervasive and extensive and repeated throughout the internet over a long period of time.

It would be helpful if you could list some of these companies that publicly state they give IQ tests. I've only heard about this as a practice at hedge funds and even then it was public knowledge / gossip but not publicly stated.

In my brief search for such companies I came across this; https://nypost.com/2022/03/15/silicon-valley-firm-apologizes... which is a company that has now apologized for giving IQ tests and is being warned about the legal consequences for having them.


This NY Post story is speculative; the VC firm that did this (stupid) hiring thing, of asking people to take a free online IQ test and a Meyers-Briggs personality test(!), got called out on Twitter and backed down, blaming the process on an intern. They weren't sued. I'm not saying you won't get dunked on if you, for instance, Wonderlic-test applicants for your tech company. You will. But I don't think you're going to get sued.


I'm grasping at straws looking for a counter example to my overall assertion, that it is not a great counter example does not undermine my case. I made a genuine good faith effort to find them - you could help me out a lot if you could list these companies that boast publicly about administering IQ tests. That would go a long way to demonstrating that such tests are not in effect illegal.

My assertion is that IQ tests are already known to have disparate impact and with laws as they are in effect they are illegal. My next assertion is that aptitude tests will suffer the same fate as IQ test because they too will be shown to have disparate impact for the same reasons. That not all such aptitude tests have been sued already under this law does not make them safe from lawsuits as the burden of proof is on the company using them.


Were that the case, several of the largest employers in the country should be getting routinely sued for hiring discrimination. They are not.


Ok, so what several largest employers are you talking about? If this is pubic knowledge as you allege then there is no need to be obtuse. And again, that list of employers that publicly brag about continued administering of IQ tests would be rather helpful to your case and would allow me to substantively check your assertion. I don't understand why in good faith you would not want to share this information.

You cannot use the absence of lawsuits for a list of companies that you are keeping secret as evidence of absence of legal liability.


Procter & Gamble famously uses “cognitive assessments” for hundreds of thousands of applicants per year.

There are test prep firms for it much like you’d find for the mcat or gre.


As best I can tell P&G is an aptitude test that only resembles fake IQ tests and more resembles a mix of leetcoding and personality tests - probably sharing the same benefit of opacity.

Other info I found on it suggests that it’s easily gamed which is something real IQ tests are designed to be resistant to.

I’m not trying to ‘no true Scotsman’ this but it would be helpful if the company described their test at least as an intelligence test. They seem to describe it more as a personality test; “Discover the PEAK Performance Assessment from Procter & Gamble (P&G) tand get an insight into how your personal profile matches the company's needs.”

My specific focus on IQ tests is to be less opaque alternative to leetcode, the P&G assessment seems to be similarly and perhaps more opaque and thus, for now, confers the same protections from disparate impact lawsuits.


The search terms you are looking for are P&G Digit, P&G Switch and P&G Grid.

Here is official AON documentation (who also use P&G Switch) on Switch calling it a Deductive Logical Reasoning test.

https://assessment.aon.com/aon.assessment/media/files/factsh...


I was able to find those things but I fail to see how they are relevant. My point is the IQ test are in contrast to leetcode tests because the IQ test is transparent and transferable between organizations. These tests are neither transparent nor transferrable. Aptitude tests like this have been safe from disparate impact lawsuits for a long time but not for any legal basis. My point is that while such aptitude test leaves them less exposed than IQ tests it does not eliminate it. That they haven’t been sued yet isn’t evidence of lack of legal exposure.


The extent to which the test is arbitrary and gameable would make it more suspect under employment law, not less, so you're working against your own argument.


Disparate impact is US civil rights law, not employment law, that law applies to employment because it applies to everything. I think I’ve been very clear about which laws and legal precedents I am talking about. When it comes to breaking a law it’s better for the company to do it with opacity than clarity. At least then it would be more difficult to show intent which would instead be disparate treatment which is far worse and more damaging for the company. Intentional breaking of the law is always worse than unintentional breaking of the law.


Nope. Many police departments give IQ tests. Score to high and you can be passed over.


lol, I guess that’s one way to avoid a disparate impact lawsuit. Perhaps we could fix leetcode tests by only hiring people who fail them.


The latest fad appears to be forcing all candidates to be vetted by an external recruiter, even if they are already known to people inside the company. Apparently, this is for reasons of "fairness", but it's yet another segment of an increasingly long pipeline full of holes that drop out candidates somewhat randomly rather than based on the actual required attributes to perform the job effectively. The HR filter was already bad enough but now having a recruiter filter before the HR filter just means even more random rejections of candidates who could have filled the role successfully.


Look at the recent crypto bubble that popped. I'd point to the current potential hype cycle although that's contentious here. For the crypto fad, there was no demonstrated profit beyond speculation, yet lot's of money was poured into it. I have no explanation that can be explained by so-called market mechanisms, it's just chasing hype.


I've gone through a lot of job seeking in the last year (two companies in a row I've worked for have closed). Didn't have a single leetcode challenge. And I'm looking for us companies who hire remotely from other countries but pay at the us level, so it's supposedly about the hardest difficulty setting possible.


Not all of them, no.

But consider: the hiring pipeline looks pretty much the same for all companies? Why is that? Well, they mostly use similar services to manage hiring, and those services all have similar features. But those features aren't great: they've narrowed the hiring pipeline to squeeze all candidates for all jobs down to the same sort of toothpaste that can be squeezed through the pipe.

Are the employers unreasonable? No, they are following what is considered HR best practices for attracting and vetting talent. But that process is broken, therefore the majority of companies are struggling to find talent.

The process is both homogenized across the industry and fundamentally geared towards preventing false positives - hiring the wrong person. That filters out many people that might have been hired, blowing up the number of false negatives - not hiring the right person.

Companies can't find candidates and job seekers can find jobs because the tools and processes for connecting candidates with jobs is both broken and homogeneous across the industry.


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

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

[1] https://layoffs.fyi/

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


> You have to be lucky (including knowing someone, ie networking)

I don't think it's right to consider networking/knowing someone to be luck, exactly. Networking is a skill and a tool, and has consistently been presented as that for my entire career. As a result, I go out of my way to try to make those connections. I go in to the office, I have lunch and drinks with coworkers, I say Hi to people I recognize from chat at large meetings, I make friendly conversations on chat and email. When someone I have made a connection like that with leaves, I say goodbye and pass them my personal email address. It is difficult, I'm not an outgoing person and I have to make conscious effort to start those connections. But it has paid off, I've received several job pings over the years, and when I was ready to move on from a job recently I took up one of those pings on the offer. It wasn't luck, it was a skill and resource I specifically put work in to cultivate over years.

Cold-applying is the absolute hardest route to getting hired. A big part of your career is doing what you can to make that your last resort when job hunting.


"Cold-applying is the absolute hardest route to getting hired. A big part of your career is doing what you can to make that your last resort when job hunting."

Cold applying should be the most fair and introduce the least bias. My entire life has been cold applying.


It should be, I agree, but my entire career of 22 years has shown me that it's not. And I've always cold-applied as well. Only had 1-2 contracts where former colleagues recommended me.


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


I'll throw in my personal example from 2012 when I was laid off. Senior dev, about 30 years experience at the time. A friend knew of an opening somewhere but they wanted GWT experience, I didn't have it so they wouldn't talk to me. 6 weeks later they were still looking. Like I couldn't learn GWT in six weeks? If they hired any decent dev after a good general screening and gave him the docs they could self-learn GWT in less time than that.


The risk is that they hire someone who doesn't know GWT and six weeks later (and six months later) they still don't know it.

The ability to do self directed learning of a new skill / technology is something that is difficult to find (a lot of developers that I know don't know how to learn a new version of Java or framework and are still writing code exactly as they did when they graduated college... and they could put down "Java developer - 5 years experience" and apply for senior positions.)

There are a lot of devs who appear decent with current tech, but lack the ability to learn new tech without someone hand holding them for several months.


The people I have meet who were slower to learn things generally had factors that could be overcome. Burnout is a huge one. If I'm being told to learn this new tech every 3-6 months and not given enough time to become an expert in the thing I previously learned, then why should I put in the effort? Its not a building block in my career. This is how it is for me (plus a disability). It never benefits me, so where's the incentive?


> Burnout is a huge one

Of course, but companies have deadlines to hit and features to release.

It absolutely sucks on the applicant's end, but we can't spend a year helping a new hire work through burnout when most companies are in a fairly competitive market with extremely demanding customers AND much more competitive vendors.


"Of course, but companies have deadlines to hit and features to release."

I mean, they're allowed to be shortsighted if they want. Burn through people and spend time and money hiring replacements.


Companies are well aware of Brooks's law and will instead chose to not hire someone and work with existing known productivity levels (and look to see what can be done to improve that) than to hire a risky person that puts existing deadlines even more at risk.

That companies aren't hiring people (and complaining that there's no one to hire) is what we're seeing rather than burning through people and dealing with Net Negative Producing Programmers ( https://web.archive.org/web/20030517045551/http://www.pyxisi... ).

---

Because people are leaving for greener pa$ture$ at a faster rate, and the higher compensation demanded, companies are mitigating that risk by requiring a person to come in with the expected training rather than spending months training a person who may not be able to preform at expected levels.

The other side of that is that there are a lot of places out there that are moving slow and not updating things quickly. I worked at a retail company a number of years ago where you could make $70k / year as a programmer and be able to work at a more leisurely pace. I currently work in the public sector and things are on much longer timescales.

However, if you want to work in the fast paced and highly paid sector of Big Tech startups, you may need be able to meet the needs that they have. And there its less risky to have one of the existing employees take on another task than to hire someone (and burn runway faster) that might not be able to contribute until after the runway is gone.


This is about new hires. Not existing employers.

The answer is simple - don't burn out your existing employees.


Yeah, but even as a new employee, my past experiences have conditioned me to expect that I will get screwed over the same way even at a new company.


And this is why the job market sucks.

Enough hiring managers and applicants have been screwed over by the other that it's become adversarial.

It is what it is.

-------

My two cents though to you giantg2, the mentality you have is not feasible in the private sector as neither employers nor employees have any loyalty anymore.

Either switch to a government programming job (plenty of those now and they are increasingly remote first - especially Federal) or a new industry.

Or start learning the game (how to market yourself, constantly upskilling with "hot" tech stacks, networking, etc).


Eh, I've been at this job for somethingblike 13 years. Might as well stick at it. There isn't anything feasible for me to switch to anyways. I've tried the marketing shit and it didn't work for me.


The fact that self-directed learning is so rare even among programmers will never cease to baffle me. I got into computers precisely because it was so perfectly suited to self study. It appealed perfectly to the autodidact-venerating Frank Zappa fan in me.


> The risk is that they hire someone who doesn't know GWT and six weeks later (and six months later) they still don't know it.

100% THIS.

If I wanted to fire someone I just hired, it ends up taking 2-3 quarters (1 Q realize they suck, 1-2 Qs managing them out/building a case) AND looks very bad on the hiring manager because you wasted $1.75*BASE_SALARY of company money and have nothing to show for it.

I understand some candidates can learn quickly, but as a hiring manager you learn very quickly to plan and assume for the worst case, because sadly, most people do kinda suck.


Or you know, you can just hire them as contractors and fire them tomorrow if they don't perform. Every company I worked with in the last 8 years does just that.


With contractors you deal with overhead of managing contracts, and American employment law increasing views tech contractors as de facto being FT employees deserving of the same benefits packages as FT employees.

At that point your best option is to open an office in India/Israel/Eastern Europe because at least people don't complain as much, you get similar productivity (depending on what you pay), and you don't need to deal with a lot of these headaches.

The same thing happened to the CPA/Accounting industry in the 1990s.


Well, I'm from Eastern Europe and your observations match mine. There is still a huge amount of skilled devs here but USA companies skip them almost automatically.


> There is still a huge amount of skilled devs here but USA companies skip them almost automatically.

English fluency and/or Employment Laws are a big issue as well.

Most companies have already had an Israeli or Indian subsidiary since the 1990s-2000s.

Most didn't start entering Eastern Europe until the 2010s, and much of that was in Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus thanks to EPAM and the massive Soviet Diaspora in the US.

Poland, Czechia, and Romania are known quantities, but newish (late 2000s/early 2010s), and the larger ecosystem (not just engineers but lawyers, bureaucrats, accountants, etc that you need to run a subsidiary) don't have working English fluency and in some countries are Indian bureaucracy level headaches (looking at you Bulgaria) with the added lack of an English speaking ecosystem headaches.

In all honesty, if the Russia-Ukraine War didn't start in 2014, much of the Eastern EU's tech scene would have been much weaker as it's largely powered by the UKR/RUS/BEL diaspora who emigrated the moment all 3 countries entered an economic and social tailspin.

At a previous employer 5-7 years ago, we had an office in Czechia, but most of the Engineers were Russians or Ukrainians.


As a Bulgarian I completely agree on Bulgaria. :D

But employment laws are not an issue. Last 8 years I didn't have even one employment arrangement, it was all contracts. I get it, you still have to pay some overhead for each country but you can outsource to various services that cover those quite well.


That's what I wound up doing at the job I did get, I got hooked up with a recruiting/contracting firm. They got me interviews and then I was a W-2 employee for the contracting firm, got my insurance through them etc. and contracted at the place I interviewed at first. When they were happy with me the company I worked at hired me as a FTE.


You're basing your entire argument on an arbitrary deadline (six weeks).

I am giggling as I am monitoring several job forums and seeing several companies pop up periodically (once a quarter I'd say) looking for the same positions... 2.5 years later.

So let's change the example. Is it really worth it to be as picky for 2.5 years? I'd wager they lost money because of that. Any senior dev can learn GWT or anything similar in much less than 6 weeks even (though proficiency is another matter).

And ability to self-learn can be somewhat gauged by a take-home assignment.


And let's say that they found their "dream" candidate that knew GWT. Technologies change and improve over time, can you imagine a place that is still using GWT, or jQuery, or backbone? Whoever they hire is going to have to learn new technologies while working there, otherwise they need to fire all their devs and go back out and hire React devs or whatever is the flavor of the day.

Even something as stable as Java has changed dramatically as it has absorbed functional and parallel concepts from Scala and Kotlin. Any dev should be hired on their ability to learn, not, or not just, on what specific tech they know now.


> ... otherwise they need to fire all their devs and go back out and hire React devs or whatever is the flavor of the day.

One of the companies in the area has a strict N year cycle for contractors. After N years all contracts end and they rehire for the next cycle.

If the technology stack changes then they hire different contractors as the projects forecast needs.

I am not saying that this is a good idea - lots of domain knowledge gets lost ever N years... but it is a solution the "we can't require contractors to learn new skills and are unable to hire for the aptitude to learn new things."


It was not about GWT at all. That was exactly my point: passing on a senior just because they don't know $specific_tech that can be learned in 2 weeks is a short-sighted business decision.


> Is it really worth it to be as picky for 2.5 years

Yes as an employer.

> I'd wager they lost money because of that

No. If a role isn't filled in a quarter, that money is in most cases reverted back into the compensation pool used to either help hire a high performer, or give bonuses to the existing team.

99% of a time, an IC Engineering role will NOT make or break a company's entire financial future.

If this is one of those 1% roles, those are hired through internal networks because of how critical they are.


Hm, I think we're talking different scenarios. I was under the impression that the new person is sorely needed and not having them on board would lead to lost revenue.


I’m just getting done with grad school where I spent 2 years learning AI stuff to apply to a real world problem. I have been applying to jobs for months and I literally hear nothing.

I desperately wish I could do my old career still.


Yea this is my biggest issue. I make a point of pushing for hiring green devs in our company. A balance of green and senior. My argument to management is that we’re never hiring people for what they know, we’re hiring people to learn our problems and figure new ways to solve them.


To add another point to this, is that people at different points in their career are interested in different problems. A chore that a senior dev might be an exciting opportunity for a junior. Similarly a daunting task for a junior might might be just the right difficulty for a senior. It is super important to make sure you have mixed experience teams just to help keep morale up, and not stall out on any given set of tasks.


> we’re hiring people to learn our problems and figure new ways to solve them.

I might steal this line in the future if you don't mind. That's a decent way to explain it.


> 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.

Another cause of structural unemployment is workforces aging into retirement, and again there's stacks of money to be made filling this gap.

This applies to Cobol developers. There are a ton of "too big to fail or rewrite" applications written in Cobol, particularly in finance. The people who wrote them are retiring. Finance is generally a great industry to have your hand in the pockets of anyway. A friend of mine has been doing this since shortly after he graduated college in 2010. He was able to start freelancing a lot earlier than I was, and his billing rate in 2012 was something like $125/hour (only slightly less than my current billing rate). Last time I talked to him he was billing $300/hour and had a 7 month backlog of work. I'm not good at keeping up with people, so we haven't talked in a few years, but it would not surprise me if he's billing $350/hour now.

I've largely prioritized time/freedom over stability/money in recent years, but if I ever had a kid and needed stability/money again, I'd be transitioning toward that.


It's not the skills problem. Looking for a job, I know that my skillset would match the employer - in fact, thousands of employers likely - because I have successfully done such jobs in the past. But I have no way to prove it to a potential employer than going through an expensive and friction-laden process which could fail at any stage for a reason totally unrelated to the main question of qualifications - like some random interviewer not liking my answer to a weird question like "tell me about your three biggest failures" or getting some obscure pet detail of a language wrong when nobody actually uses that corner precisely because of how hard it to get right, or not solving irrelevant leetcode puzzle fast enough. Immense effort on both sides is spent to go through these dances - and almost all of it is wasted. I wish there were some good solution for it. So far there's none.


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


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


Unless you're looking to be hired in the US and live in a US territory, in which case you'll be hard pressed to find any employer who will hire you.


Interesting, what makes you say that?


Personal experience trying to get hired as a US citizen in a US territory. Most companies simply reject without any sort of interview and when I ask (and get a reply) it's always because of location.


> Structural unemployment happens when the skills of the work force don't match the needs of employers

I know someone who was laid off from an AI group at a large chipmaker last year- his group was eliminated. But because he wasn't doing LLMs, he was doing CNNs for vision, it took him about a year to find a new gig teaching Machine Learning classes - not his preferred gig or level of pay. He could easily have transitioned from CNNs to LLMs but the algorithms sorting the resumes didn't seem to think so.

Personally, I've worked on optimizing code to make machine learning algorithms run faster/more efficient - also compiler/LLVM work. When I was laid off over a year ago I'd apply for things and it was mostly crickets - had a few interviews which often ended up in ghosting. I gave up looking and am working on a startup with some other who've found themselves in a similar situation - no pay at this point, only equity.

Anyway, I think your premise is flawed: AI/ML skills are in demand, but even people with those skills are having a hard time getting back into the industry. Maybe the companies doing AI/ML are spending so much money on GPUs now that they can't actually afford to hire people?


As an employer you could as a first step even just check if the skill you look for could:

A) be unrealistic. A need for 8 years of experience in a framework that existed for a year is a need zero people can fulfill.

B) if your needs are so special that such an employee doesn't exist. I recall the days when companies would train people to do a job.

C) The job description is realistic but the people who you seek to attract won't do the job for that salary in that location for that company.


I'd also advise employers to not require skills in any application that could be learned in a week or two of use on the job.


> People with machine learning experience are getting 7-figure offer

This sounds like a gross exaggeration. Unless they did something like start a company. For an IC at least, even at FAANG it would be bit crazy to start at more than ~$400k. If a project lead, then its obviously more and you can make bank as you move up the ladder.


They're probably including equity, not just cash. Equity can be worth significantly more than the base pay at higher levels.


Structural unemployment is mostly overstated as a phenomenon. It’s really just a matching problem.


> 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.

Any study on why there would be this kind of mismatch in the tech industry? I'd imagine that tech industry is the most transparently competitive and least regulated sector so there should be a reasonable balance between the supply of skills and the demand. In addition, there are so much resource that teaches people all kinds of tech skills, so people should be able to move from one skill set to another if really needed.


The easy problems are solved. Crud with the preferred language and framework is a known quantity and can be "ok here we are and go" and you can get a boot camp or new grad and have them do that.

Let's say that we need to solve a new problem. The shop language is Scala. Who can learn how to program in Scala? Can the boot camp who learned how to do NodeJS be trained in Scala? If so, how long will it take? If we spend a year to get them to being an acceptable Scala dev, will they get a new job immediately? If we are paying a "we are training you low rates" can we get any applicants? If we are paying a "we assume you to be a skilled Scala dev in a year and we expect to get 2-3 years of productive work beyond training" rate and they leave immediately after getting them sufficiently trained... what then?

As many developers see themselves as a "Java developer" or "React front end developer" rather than a software engineer, the mismatch is akin to asking "why can't we get plumbers to do electrical work?" The people who are Java developers or React front end developers are skilled in the trade rather than as a knowledge worker in software engineering.


This sounds like the trend is good for the incumbents? That is, it's hard for the supply to catch up with the demand in broad scope, so people with solid experience will be marketable for a while.


It is good for people who can, as knowledge workers ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_worker ) are able to continue to gain and market their ability to learn new things within the domain and apply their knowledge.

There are incumbents who are not able (don't have the skill scaffolding to support a broader understanding) or are unwilling to spend time to continue to be able to work or are a "follow instructions".

I've quipped that...

  A junior dev follows instructions
  A mid dev completes tasks
  A senior dev solves problems
In this simplified model, I know a lot of junior devs (even with a decade of experience) who for whatever reason are unable to partition their software development tasks themselves to be able to be given a task to complete. Likewise, I know a number of devs who can be given tasks but if you give a broader "this is a problem that the organization needs to solve" are hopelessly lost and apply and reapply the patterns that they have learned to try to make the problem fit into a solution they know.

I do not believe that everyone has the skills / aptitude to move from one to the next.

Those that do will have the ability to navigate the new market. Those that lack the ability to move up will eventually be overtaken either by younger (cheaper) workers, or improving automation.


> People with machine learning experience are getting 7-figure offers

I’m paid fairly well, but not this much, so I think the threshold is a bit higher than this.


>"it's not any kind of paradox"

It is a paradox, because it is a market where people basically only do one salaried job at a time, meaning they have a fixed 40-60 hours to sell and it shouldn't take long to sell it if they want to move on to another job. (Here "selling" means you've been hired for your next job, since you just took the 40 hours you had available every week starting next month and sold it for money.)

Within reason, people can be retrained to adjacent jobs or basically could do exactly what an employer wants within a low number of weeks. People know what kind of jobs they're capable of or it can be tested for quickly.

Instead there are candidates who spend a year both training themselves and applying for jobs unsuccessfully, while employers spend MORE than the same amount of time on that, if you add up the amount of time recruiters are putting in on behalf of employers and HR puts in and employers put into interviews. It is a market failure for people to want to work, for employers to want to hire them, for them to be able to do the work, but for them not to actually be doing the work. It would be kind of like if people were desperate for any of either tomatoes, carrots, wheat, rice, potatoes, or really anything, whatever they get is fine for them since they can look up recipes for that and make it with a tiny investment of time (this is the demand side), so they are putting in ads for "Want any of: rice, carrots, wheat, potatoes, tomatoes" and willing to pay for it! Just put up a hundred ads, a hundred unfilled jobs. On the supply side meanwhile you have a farmer who owns all the necessary land (hours in the day) and has ALL the equipment (a computer, Internet, transportation, clothes, anything anyone needs to start working) and is really willing to produce anything and can do so on that arable land! There are no capital requirements. Great. So we have the demand side taken care of, people want quite a few different types of food and supply side taken care of, the farmer is willing to farm just about anything. But, for some reason, what ends up happening isn't that the fields are filled, it's that there are farmers spending all day every day selling and nobody is buying. And instead of saying, here try this sample, and it's fine, you have a weird request for "What exactly had grown on these fields since the beginning of time" (this is called a resume) and then you have buyers inundated with answers to their bizarre requests for "what has grown on these fields since the beginning of time" but the buyers still aren't getting the food and the fields are empty, the farmers are trying unsuccessfully to sell all day and the buyers are somehow inundated with sales pitches but aren't actually buying anything, while burning time on putting up advertisements of all the food they want to buy.

Why is this happening? How can people not be working but want to work, when they can train into being productive workers within a few weeks and are more than willing to do so?

It would be like if shoppers spent days at a time at farmer's markets going from stand to stand and buying nothing, and farmers spent days at a time standing at the farmer's market with buyer after buyer asking them questions about the history of their land and not buying any damn potatoes. It's a potato lady you want it or not? If not step aside so someone who actually wants it can see it.

p.s. half of the farmers are asking other farmers to endorse them on linkedin. Buyers ignore this noise completely.

The job market is highly dysfunctional.


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.


I’m with you. It’s hilarious to think back on, but I got a “no” from my present employer after the first technical interview because I didn’t remember the options to one particular tool.

Thankfully a somewhat distant inside connection was achieved, who managed to suggest “maybe that wasn’t actually the correct decision” and I got the chance to continue with the process. It’s all been good since then.

I sure do have an internal chuckle every time I have to use that particular tool… and still have to look up the options. :-)


I recently went to an interview where I was asked some specifics where the real-life answer is "I'd Google and have and answer in 30 seconds". I'm very curious as to whether this will be held against me...

But they also did give me what I thought was quite a good test, which was talking through some working code and suggesting how it could be improved.


Because it has been observed [1] that a lot of people turning up to coding interviews don't know much about coding.

I'm sure in the ML sector right now, it's hell. Seven figure salaries are going to get some optimistic over-reachers desperate to try and get in the door and BS their way through the first few months.

My own experience: I had a CEO and board member of the startup I was CTO'ing push a dev my way. "Brilliant", they said, "just really great attitude, check them out see if we can get them hired, fast". I was excited, and keen to meet them. Turns out their way to code was to find a library (this was a Ruby shop, so technically a gem), that did the thing needed, bolt it in using example code and ship it. "OK", I said, "but we're a startup trying to solve an optimisation problem in the logistics space. There is no gem. We're going to have to be smart and solve this ourselves by reading papers and experimenting and trying things out. How would you do that?". And I kid you not, the exact response was "If there isn't a gem, I don't think it's doable, or maybe we should wait until it's done".

When I told my CEO and board member that this great, exciting prospect they found couldn't code, they refused to believe me until I spelled it out really carefully: if we hired them, we'd have to train them to solve problems in code. Like, give them CS50 or something. Is that right for a senior engineer as 4th or 5th hire in a startup?

So now I ask some trivia for engineer roles. I dress it up a bit so as not to be patronising, but I kind of want to have a conversation about how they code, what they do, what their method and see if it rings true. On a lot of phone screens, it still just doesn't tally up.

[1] This is 2007, but I see no evidence of it having really changed much, TBH: https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/


I once got asked FizzBuzz in a take-home interview, and the tool they were using flagged me for completing it very quickly and with an answer the tool had seen before.

Fortunately they gave me the opportunity to explain that it was a well-known interview question dating back to 2007 (with that blog post as evidence), and that I had previously asked this question in interviews, so I basically had the answer memorized. (I think the fact that I had correct, unique answers for the other questions helped me also.)


This post is absolutely perfect in summing up the state of Software Engineering hiring.


Don’t practice obscure arbitrary brain teasers? No job for you. Too good at the brain teasers? No job for you.


> "If there isn't a gem, I don't think it's doable, or maybe we should wait until it's done".

Yikes. But I have also known many people with this mindset (and it appears to be workable for a certain subset of the tech industry)


Who hired the engineer? It seems like they failed to make a successful hire, but that happens sometimes.

>but I kind of want to have a conversation about how they code, what they do, what their method and see if it rings true.

I think these are great ideas. What kinds of things were you asking in your interviews?


I can't remember where I got this from, but I like to ask them to talk to me about their favourite project. It can be school, hobby or work, just something they are excited about. Then we talk about what made them excited, what design tradeoffs they considered, the problems they ran into, how they overcame problems, what they would do differently knowing what they know now, and so on.

My favourite answer was a guy who replied "I've been working recently on some OpenGPL stuff in Common Lisp for the X window protocol". That was an interesting chat, and I was happy when he accepted the offer I made at the end of it.


> We're going to have to be smart and solve this ourselves by reading papers and experimenting and trying things out. How would you do that?

By reading papers and experimenting and trying things out? Throw in a few books for good measure?

Why are you answering the question you are asking yourself?


Because when I dig further into how to do that, I often get blanks. Saying you will do that and being able to do it are two different things.

You might not understand how low the bar is here. If I ask 100 applicants to write a working function to calculate E=mc^2 for different values of m, 30+ just won't know where to start.

So when I ask how we might solve a problem I am not asking for the abstract 10000 foot view. I'm checking they can write simple code. Filters out a huge number of people, unfortunately.


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.


> 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.


Probably the case, but the iterated version of this is far worse: imagine the process is optimized so that qualified candidates are made offers 25% of the time (vs 100% ideally) and unqualified are made offers 1% of the time (va 0% ideally).

This isn’t a single round N-choose-1 game; the unqualified candidates don’t dematerialize, but rather keep applying and may even engage with automation tools to apply to hundreds of roles every day. So, they become wildly over-represented in the applicant pool for any given role.


One issue is that not everyone loves learning stuff. And since there is no simple way to test for that many instead test for what is simple to test for: trivia. A common issue, people measure what is easy to measure instead of what is actually important.

There are plenty of applicants which are simply awful and you do not have time to interview all of them.

I am not impressed by the people hiring but I also understand why their task is hard.


>One issue is that not everyone loves learning stuff.

Agreed. I do work with some folks who are all "OMG I have to work with this archaic mess." way too often. And I don't disagree with them, but man... not that hard to learn it and code your way out of it. But no they just complain.

Hard to really find out who REALLY has the interest in fighting through the unexpected / rough spots.


I personally love working with most legacy systems. It is so satisfying learning all that weirdness and peering into the minds of the original authors to then hopefully get to clean it up and make it better. But of course a handful are just horrible.


Yup, and once you find whatever that system was good at, leverage that as much as possible, it's not that bad.

You also get a feel for the history of various things too.

I work with a big old Coldfusion system at times. Server side rendering was a thing in the past too ;)


> 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.


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...


After years of software experience i have done more copy and pasting, implementing protocols, fixing old school ui threading issues, troubleshooting rare and hard to find bugs... never leetcoding. and not a single interviewer has ever targeted these skills properly.

The coding tests are specifically designed to hire only recent graduates of computer science. My education was electronics engineering so specifically did not have much "algorithm specific" training (too bad hiring managers have no idea how to change their expectations based on that)

I usually just get underhired in technician and production roles and end up running the entire IT/technical/engineering of small companies in a couple years.No interviewer has ever showed interest in this either.


> Can I just talk to the folks I'll potentially be working with / for right away? No? Why?

I've hired a few people for a small company and been a recruiter/screener/hiring manager. It's _incredibly_ time consuming, and it's one of the many things on my to-do list.


That was my thesis at my current company, and people REALLY love our interview process. I don't understand why so many companies put so little work into something that is so important and will go on to set the tone for the rest of the person's time at the company.

https://blog.readme.com/designing-a-candidate-focused-interv...


> Can I just talk to the folks I'll potentially be working with / for right away? No? Why?

No! As many applicants as possible should be rejected before we start interrupting these people's days.

You might be a great candidate but what about the other 10 doofuses who aren't? Do they all get to talk to the folks they'll potentially be working with/for right away?


I'm not convinced that any filtering is doing any good.

I see doofuses hired regardless.


Same – when I look in the mirror in the morning to shave lol!

Whether you agree w/ the filtering or not, you want people who you aren't willing to hire (and who won't be willing to work for you) to be removed from the process as quickly and cheaply as reasonably possible.

This is why phone screens with a single person who has a general idea of what to look for exist. The key is that this person receives feedback on future interviews and their decisions and can make adjustments to exclude/include the right people.

My belief on this is that if that person isn't being told, "You let a bad one through" occasionally, they're being too strict on filtering, for example. But you don't want to hear that too often.

Think about somebody rejecting a job offer.

In most cases, many hours of people-time will be invested and wasted when this happens. So look at why was it wasted? Was salary, a company policy, benefits, or something similar a dealbreaker? If so, start bring that thing up earlier on – either in that first phone screen or ideally in an email before the first phone screen.

Of course, you're not always going to get a clear answer so this is where instinct and experimentation come into play. This is also why it pays to have a single person specialize in the phone screens – they will get many reps and opportunities to develop that intuition.


> I'll learn whatever anyone wants, I like doing that ... no honestly I do.

The trouble is that _everyone_ will say this during an interview, but few have the ability or interest to _actually_ learn on the job.

How to tell the difference?


Completely agree here. My company interviews for and hires based on soft skills.

Yeah, certain hard skills help. I don't want to teach you excel or basic computer skills.

But we work in data analytics/marketing and my coworkers consist of people like a theater major, an anthropologist, someone that previously negotiated govt contracts for Lockheed, a sommelier, and more. Yeah, we hire mostly at entry level, but our team is highly capable because they were hired based on curiosity, critical thinking skills, etc and taught by the people who possess hard skills


to paraphrase a State Dept. interview I was in: we can't teach communication, intuition, drive, or curiosity -- not when you're 25. those skills can be taught, but if you're not demonstrating those now we can't help you.


> Can I just talk to the folks I'll potentially be working with / for right away? No? Why?

Probably because those people are writing code and don't want to spend more than a couple hours a week interviewing folks.

If a role gets 500 applications in a week, it seems reasonable that there will be some sort of filter before candidates start talking with SWEs whose time is very expensive (compared with that of HR or recruiters). Whether that filter is an HR person doing a phone call, a take home assignment, or an automated code test, all methods are vehemently hated on HN.

I hate job hunting just like everyone else, but I'm also on the other side of it and kind of understand why things are the way they are. It's not a "cargo cult" or a conspiracy; it's just companies trying to balance a lot of different concerns.


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.


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.


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!


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.


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

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


That's a very good point. Over the course of my career, the best people I've seen are those that are really good at educating themselves and keep constantly learning new things. They were a small minority though of the coworkers I've worked with and an even smaller minority of people I've interviewed (the problem is that when trying to hire people who have those qualities, it's hard to avoid false positives).


I think this has less to do with assessment issues in trainability and is rather an economic thought: I don't have to train the employee that has already been trained by my competition. You can see a similar effect in companies pushing more and more training to academic institutions, expecting them to produce full fledged developers from day one (at least it's the case here in europe).


> various pseudo tests

Leetcode fits this too


All people I know who have been good at leetcode have been good at coding (of course they may lack other important skills but that you can assess with other questions). You can't become good at leetcode without being good at logical thinking. But not all good coders are good at it because it also requires skills unrelated to the job to be good at leetcode.

I do not advocate for leetcode tests, but I think they have a bit unfair reputation. There are many worse interview questions.


I agree with you, for what it's worth. I think some of the "easy" leetcode questions are probably a decent filter, they're often contrived enough to force you t handle an edge case or two but simple enough that they should be solvable within a few minutes - they're a step above fizz buzz.

They filter for a few super important qualities - can you solve a simple problem, follow some basic instructions, write somewhat comprehensible code. But most importantly, if you get stuck, how do you react. If your response is to lash out and blame the questions or the interview, that's a huge red flag that you're going to react like that when challenged in the work place. I wish I wasn't speaking from experience.


It would be better to see how many hours they’ve played something like starcraft 2 for logical thinking and working under pressure


I think if you actually selected for this, you would get people who are very low in the conformity and desire-to-please-boss categories


> 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.


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.


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.


I'm recently interested in the question of unions, and I'm wondering, if there any ICT unions somewhere? Or, at least, attempts of creating such? I was also thinking that it can be difficult to officially unite many developers worldwide. But can it be possible to get data ownership back? E.g. collectively crawl job openings from LinkedIn, and leave some personal reviews on them, at some independent platform?


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.


> "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"


coding interviews do not attract the best of the best


> 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.


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.


> Some will find a job before they finish you interview process.

The more this happens the greater the chances your interview process is too long.

A fast interview process has many many benefits.


>Some will find a job before they finish you interview process.

Not if your interview process allows for a good candidate to get an offer in a reasonable time frame. If so, then rare. You could make an offer on spot, for example.

>Some will change their mind.

Not if your interview process allows for a good candidate to get an offer in a reasonable time frame. If so, then rare. You sign a contract on the spot for example.

>Some will have a change on personal circumstances.

Not if your interview process allows for a good candidate to get an offer in a reasonable time frame. If so, then rare.

These first three are all the same. People will bail out if you're too slow with your dumb hiring processes. Don't be slow and the problem mostly goes away.

>Some (many?) will ask for more than you can offer.

Not if you post your salary bands with your job openings like any decent company would do.

>To hire one good person, you usually need many to apply.

Nah, you need a couple of decent candidates to apply, a first choice and a fallback if you want to worry about those rare case of someone changing their mind. If your salaries are public and your process is efficient, you need only one good candidate, maybe two for backup and variety outside of core competency.


> 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.


"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.


> Usually it won't.

But that's the employer's own fault. I was offering suggestions to employers.

> And in most cases, you can't revamp the whole hiring process

In most cases, they should revamp their whole hiring process. The point of this HN submission is that employers can't find employees, and that's also the point of my original comment. "We can't change anything about hiring" is why you can't find employees. It's a poor excuse.


>Some will find a job before they finish you interview process.

It sounds like a different company was able to find and hire talent faster, to their benefit. So the solution is to be more like them.


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.


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.


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.


> 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

Software Development Job Postings on Indeed in Canada: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXCATPSOFTDEVE

Germany: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXDETPSOFTDEVE

UK: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXGBTPSOFTDEVE

France: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXFRTPSOFTDEVE

We are in a slowdown and a serious one.


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.


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.


The job market has collapsed. You need to know someboody.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons


I think this points to the real problem: it is hard to evaluate how "good" someone is during the hiring process

Lots of great coders don't have a big open presence. Years of experience isn't a good sign with the churn in tech, plus you don't know if they wrote code or just watched. Is being able to do a l33t coding exercise in a fixed time a sign? IMHO I'm decent programmer and I've failed them. Can you come up with an exercise that matches the work that will be done and can be completed in a reasonable amount of time?

And the phrase "matches the work that will be done" is doing some heavy lifting: many companies don't really know what they need. I've seen companies that need 99% soft skills that want a ton of niche tech experience. Or advertise for something other than the real dumpster-fire that you'll have to work on.

This is the fundamental reason that knowing someone works: they know your coding skills and they can give you the inside scoop on the position.


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

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


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

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


I have interviewed dozens of people for fairly specialized roles and the number of people with an impressive looking resume that end up being pretenders is probably greater than 90%. I would much rather interview and hire someone that another trusted party can vouch for. I understand that everyone wants to grow in their career, stretch themself, market themself well, etc. but there is a lot of blatant lying and cheating going on in the labor market nowadays.


As a job seeker, this is something that worries me all the time. I think I am a pretty honest person and do not embellish my work. Yet, my resume is going to be sitting amidst heaps of liars who will say whatever is required. How often am I going to be passed over at the initial filtering because of my more modest listed credentials?


The modern application process is a spammer's dream. It works like Google search: optimize based on keywords to drive your resume 'page' to the top. People mastered the SEO game a long time ago, so it should be no surprise that recruiters are getting clickbait resumes.


Im curious if this is true.


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.


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.


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?


Go to Leetcode, look up a bunch of LC hards, and you'll start to get an idea. Even with practicing those well and doing well overall, I am finding employers are looking for something exceptional. You can pass all of those questions optimally but if you don't add something "extra" on top - it seems like they're really ready to move onto other candidates.

This isn't even for top compensation either. I'm finding that the offers overall are meager as well.


I mean that essentially means that if you don't know the hiring manager then your chances of getting the job are one in hundreds if not thousands.

which essentially means you have to know the hiring manager to get the job.


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.


> 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.


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.


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.


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.


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)


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.


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


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.


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


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.


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.


Job seekers’ expectations are hardly sky high my man. People need to pay the debts they accrued to get through the filters that you put up, and they need to put food on the table. They don’t have any alternative.


They did. And they do. Don’t get a degree. Don’t pay for something that is clearly not worth it.


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.


I want university to produce people ready for the work force. This ultimately means less people will graduate. It’s clearer that the paper that said you were ready for work no longer means that. The fix is universes not worrying about pass fail rates and admission stats and focus on creating classes that produce what they advertised they would produce.

It’s so tiring to me people with masters in CS who can’t fizzbuzz or for that matter do basic programming even more simple.

Now days if too many people fail a class or get a bad grade, the students rally and write notes about how they are so smart and the teacher sucked. The. They grade on a curve and get a degree that is suitable for toilet paper.

Most jobs don’t require a degree and we should stop acting like they do.


If you're having trouble finding CS masters grads who can't write a fizzbuzz, your salary band is too low. Full stop.

Which pretty much confirms my point. Stop complaining, stop blaming schools, and start paying more.


Full Stop! Your right! That is it!


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.


I think certification institutions--from universities to bootcamps--have found that it's more profitable to focus on quantity over quality. They are producing dollar store products because the market has shown that employers are dollar store customers, despite what they say.

The more valid the cert program is as a hiring signal, the more it will restrict the quantity of labor supply, and employers don't want this; they want to churn and burn through a pile of young people--or outsource--and then throw them away when their upkeep gets too expensive.


> employers don't want this; they want to churn and burn through a pile of young people--or outsource--and then throw them away when their upkeep gets too expensive

I am an employer and have funded employers. That is a VERY WARPED view of hiring and I hope to god you never ever come near to getting a promotion to EM.

> I think certification institutions--from universities to bootcamps--have found that it's more profitable to focus on quantity over quality

That's BS. There's a reason employers still subconsciously discriminate based on the quality of program you graduated from.

The CS curriculum at Cal beats the CS curriculum at CSU East Bay in almost every single way, and it isn't because of the content alone but also the broad education provided.

We don't need code monkeys (and if you are a code monkey, you job is absolutely going to be automated or outsourced in the next 3-5 years), we need people who deep down understand or can think critically about a specific domain (technical or business).

I don't care if you can code in Cobol or NodeJS - can you deliver an MVP in a quarter, and then have the ability to pivot that MVP to meet changing customer or product demands? Can you architect services to both be cost efficient AND resource efficient?

We pay people in the tech industry good money to THINK. Critical Thinking is the actual blocker, and this is the primary reason why Leetcode and Whiteboard interviews are so popular.

At the end of the day, a Leetcode medium and Whiteboard interview is a puzzle, and if you can solve puzzles, you can think critically about architecture, product decisions, etc.


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.


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.


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.


> but can’t code their way out of a paper bag, fire them.

This is a bit of an inhumane way of looking at it. Sure, it's "business", but asking someone to quit their current job to come work with you should only (IMO) be done if you have the intention of actually keeping them there and not "seeing how it works out"


I’m not talking about hiring anyone and seeing how it works out. I’m talking about hiring people based on experience and stated ability the way every other industry does.

The people I’m talking about firing are the people who represent the stories that people talk about when they insist that tech interviews can’t work the way interviews in other industries work.

Someone who materially misrepresents their ability to do the job.


The tech industry is not a charity, and it shouldn't be financially supporting people who can't do their jobs. Another way of looking at it is that if someone managed to scam their way into their previous job by sweet talking, then you've done their previous employer a favor by getting them to quit. You've also done a favor to the competent but unemployed people who are looking for a job and now have an opening.

I don't want anyone to be destitute, and I fully support social services to help the unemployed, but on the other hand, shouldn't incompetent people be driven out of tech? They can work in some other industry where their abilities and skills are more appropriate and useful. They might not make as much money, but that's the nature of capitalism and competition.


> we need to hire fast and fire fast

You'll end up having more trouble hiring when candidates don't want to relocate or leave their current job because it's too risky to join your company which has a reputation to easily fire its employees even though they passed their tests.

If I were unemployed and I wouldn't need to relocate, sure, I'd be willing to give it a try for a few weeks and see if it's a mutual match, that'd be ideal. If I need to relocate or leave my current stable job, you'll have to pay a big premium over my current compensation to make it worth it.


That’s an easy fix. Don’t require relocation.

As for easily firing employees, I’m only talking about during a probationary period. And then only for employees who misrepresented their ability to do the job.


There's still the "leave their stable job" problem to solve. I've been in this situation more than once. Do I stay with the company I know: where I'm not getting promotions or raises, but it's a known quantity with a 9-5 work environment, I'm not in perpetual crunch mode, I'm not getting yelled at by a boss as he snorts coke in the conference room. Do I leave this nice stable, boring, no-growth company for yours where they're known to fire fast if they happen to think I misrepresented something? Do I do it for a +10% pay bump? How about for a +50% pay bump?


I’ve never left anywhere I didn’t hate for 10%.

If we are comparing apples to apples though—same job with an option for 2 interviews, no coding interview, no take home test, but there’s a 90 day probationary period. Versus no probationary period with a 2 month long 7 round interview cycle, I’d take the probationary period in a heartbeat.


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").


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.


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.


Yes I don’t think long interview cycles make sense at all in the US.

When I say a chat with another dev, I’m not talking about trick questions. I’m talking “hey what’s something you built that you’re proud of” or “what kinds of systems have you been working on for the last few years”.

Trick questions are always stupid.


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.


This is exactly what we're trying to solve with https://Careera.AI - fully automated matching, only 10 best candidates per position. No more CVs. No more job applications.

The candidate is being asked from time to time psychometric questions in small chunks so his/her psychological profile is built. Then its used to help match to the best company and job posting. That's in a nutshell.


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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


I keep being told that the only way I'll be able to get a decent pay rise is by jumping ship once I'm more employable. Maybe people won't do that if the companies don't incentivise it


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.


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


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...


+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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


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!).


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.


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


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.


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"...


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.


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?


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.


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


So the problem is paying them. You want a founder for an engineer's salary.


You mean what we shouldn't offer a salary and only equity?


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?


You need to offer more, not less, bro, wtf.


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.


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.


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.


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.


> 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.


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!


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...


Hi, this is exactly the problem we’re trying to solve with 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!


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).


And thus I have never applied to Google. I’m fine with Google shipping my code though…


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.


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.


Tinder for jobs. Swipe to interview.


I'd risk say the dating market is even more broken *because* of tinder.


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


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.


To extend the metaphor:

As a job seeker, you need to be in the 90th percentile.

As an employer, you need to be there.


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.


Add a social network for people to meet and I think you've just described LinkedIn.


Honestly, build it.

The same thing which makes Tinder a blight on human happiness would make the format an excellent way to pair jobs with job seekers.


What's that thing? Much harm is attributed to Tinder and I don't know how to boil it all down to something that would be a positive for jobseeking.


Turns out recruiters were actually useful to both job seekers and employers.


That's actually true, but they're expensive. This is one of the problems we're trying to solve with https://Careera.AI - the platform acts as a fully automated digital recruiter.

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.

Based on hundreds of data points, the platform pre-matches both sides (companies/job postings and job seekers) 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. So the match is fully unbiased.

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.

Hope that some of you will jump on-board and give us some feedback :) Thanks!


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).


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.


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/


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.


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?


This is exactly what we're trying to solve with https://Careera.AI - fully automated matching, only 10 best candidates per position. No more CVs. No more job applications.


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.


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.


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.


We advertised for a junior developer role in April and got almost ~1700 applications in a week. we gave up after reviewing around 100.


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 ?


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).


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.


I feel like Tinder has similar issues with job seeking and employee finding

In fact after a second thought, its almost identical.


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.


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.


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.


> 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?..


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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


seems like a relevant place to promote my tech hiring company: https://polyfill.work


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)


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.


> 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.


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…


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.


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”


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


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).


I doubt you'd find "an employees" if your job ad has grammar or typography mistakes in it.


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.


Given all the horribly edited resumes I have seen, I am sure there is a match to be made somewhere.


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?


Typographical is an adjective (pertaining to typography). I used the noun on purpose.


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.


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.


A huge part of the problem is that it's very hard to prove and evaluate developer competency.


It's very annoying to begin the discussion without mentioning any country or job market.


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.


I think in some extent there is a problem with HR specialists field.


Sturgeon's law squared, maybe cubed if you include recruiters.


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.


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.


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


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


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...


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


Google interviews always felt like this, even a decade ago.


Yes, but nobody is lobbying for worse interview processes and if anyone has an incentive to make it better, it's employers (for whom it is disproportionally more expensive).

People love to poke fun at it, but employers are not trying to make it bad. It's just a hard problem.


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


Unless you have a novel insight, let's assume that market forces apply. Yes, we all had bad experiences — and they go into the calculus. A company that creates consistently horrible experiences for their candidates will be taxed by the market.


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.


ChatGPT isn't very good for knowing how well or correctly code will run




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