Yes, it's super hard to hire good people, but most of the time it's because "good enough" isn't good enough anymore, and while we may think our company is a 9 and we deserve 9s, we are probably more of a 4 based on what people are actually working on.
Yes, interviews suck, but that's because we all want to get paid the big bucks so we can afford the prohibitively expensive COL and actually do better economically than our middle-class parents. My background and resume legitimately qualifies me as a 9 on the high end, but really I'm probably just a 4.
Cascading causal relationships thus expand both upwards into the capital markets and downwards into your grocery stores.
If we can all take a chill pill employers+employees and stop 49er'ing around so hard, then I think most everyone can be happily employed.
I don't see us getting there on our own though, since that next door neighbor ain't gonna stop and I'm sure as hell not getting left behind /s.
I hope we can find a bit more maturity in our industry, but I'm not holding my breath.
So much this. When hiring in this field, people seem to expect candidates to know anything and everything software wise, yet reality is software is more complicated than it ever has been.
The problem isn't alone to this field however, it's fundamental to all fields and the progress of civilization. Discover or invent something new and suddenly everyone else is illiterate about it and must learn it. The build up of knowledge is so immense that we don't expect any one person to know all that there is to know in society, hence why people specialize in what they do. It's why doctors have areas of expertise (feet/skin/teeth/neurology etc), why engineers have areas of expertise (mechanical/electrical/nuclear), why doctors aren't expected to know what engineers know. Why physicists aren't expected to know everything that chemists know, etc...
The software field is just a rapid microcosm of this progressive knowledge problem as software is invented at rapid pace. Yet some reason people seem to expect potential candidates to know everything...
Additionally, IDK how many times I've found people using different lingo to describe the same thing in this field. It's like a bigger version of this: https://hbr.org/2018/07/what-to-do-when-each-department-uses...
Companies need to be honest about the reality of their product. You’re building a straight forward web app most of the time, you know? You might not need that Stanford CS grad. If companies feel the ‘need’ it, it’s just aggrandizement and a very bad trend for this industry.
You're essentially implying that companies like FAANG can get by just fine, even if they hired "average" programmers, as opposed to "exceptional" ones. If this were the case, they wouldn't need to pay anyone 250-350k compensation either - they can just hire some average programmer for 70k and call it a day. Or better yet, hire someone in a country with much lower COL, pay them 30k, and everyone walks away happy.
I don't think this is true, for the simple reason that companies are far too greedy to pay people 200k a year, unless they really need to. Do you honestly think that a company like Amazon is going to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on someone, if they can get someone else for a fraction of that? Maybe I'm wrong and one day, some startup will grow to be a unicorn while paying their developers sweatshop rates. I'll believe it when I see it.
I don't think that there is necessarily a causal relationship between the salaries and the competence, but that line of thinking is common in those companies.
You're describing a good manager, who costs a lot of money, even more than a good SWE.
Maybe the high salary is to compensate for something else (poor work environment, boring job, etc) rather than attract very skilled people?
Look at CEO pay, most CEOs are clueless. They are way overpaid. Google is a perfect example, that business is a cash machine, it could be run by a ham sandwich, and they are paying people $100m+ to run it...lul. Jokes.
Btw, this also shouldn't matter. If your business relies on hiring these 1 in 1000, super-smart individuals (ignoring the fact that it is statistically impossible to actually do this if you are hiring thousands of programmers), you will fail. Every time. You get into a bidding war, and your budget depends on the intelligence of others to not overpay. If you can work out how to turn average employees into good ones, you will print money because no-one wants average employees...supply is infinite, you will never overpay (I know companies that have done this...they usually end up acquiring the companies that hire the "boffins" and fire everyone on day one).
In tech, the opportunities for this are basically limitless. It is pretty easy to teach someone how to code, the main challenge is really all the stuff you learn "on the job"...and guess what? You have a job to teach them. Why doesn't this happen? Try telling a coder he has to help a junior guy out one day a week and stop fucking about with Haskell/burning cash. Try telling HR that you want to hire unremarkable people. Try finding an executive who wants to work somewhere where they hit singles...he has an MBA you know, he swings for the fences every time. You are vastly overestimating, ironically, the intelligence of most people who work in companies (I worked in equity research for a while...Buffett's dictum of a company that could be run by a ham sandwich has much wisdom).
Applicant: 600,000 golf balls
Recruiter: What about a coffee?
Applicant: Because the man hole is round
> I hope we can find a bit more maturity in our industry
Me too
Technology is so diverse anymore and so dependent on specific sets of technologies a business chose mixed with internal work tailored around a specific business and its processes/problems that I think it's completely unreasonable to expect someone to walk in and solve the specific types of problems under the specific constraints any arbitrary group is faced with--especially in the span of an interview.
All these factors mix to make very unique problem spaces. Factor in that positions evolve by folks who formerly filled a role and that their specific set of skills are likely unique. You should be expecting to train people from the start to some reasonable degree unless the role is doing incredibly vanilla work (in which case I find it hard to believe there aren't qualified candidates).
I agree that there is definitely a bit/lot of tunnel-vision that happens within companies where they don't realize how much cumulative knowledge is just specific to the particular evolutionary path of their development team.
IMHO, so much of success is based on ability to learn that it would be better for candidates to be evaluated on their ability to acquire new skills or integrate new knowledge.
Oh, and I’ll just leave off ‘software development’ experience from that list too, since they also all come from non coding backgrounds.
What’s the rationale behind this one, anyone got anything? I’m stumped.
The company was almost entirely men, many with quite obvious and malignant ego issues. Their method for making technical decisions was to get all ~20 of them into a conference room and argue about how things should be done, with the loudest, most forceful arguments tending to win. The entire time I worked there, the socially dominant clique was primarily concerned with moving their stack into Kubernetes, despite having almost no traffic that I could discern. I wouldn't say I was impressed overall, people who didn't fit the mold had little chance of making career progress, and I personally felt I had more experience and could code circles around the majority of them.
A lot of non-technical positions I have seen and heard about (including non entry-level positions) require a video of the candidate to describe themselves and why they would be a good fit for the position. That just sounds awful to me.
This was for a software engineer position. I didn't even bother going on the interview. I feel like the purpose was to see what they could get you to do.
One benefit of a cover letter is it is easier to re-use the base story and update the details as appropriate. Unless you want to spend time editing (which depending on your skill impacts the quality) you have to re-record the whole thing.
The one time I recorded a video I had to redo it like 10 times and I eventually just submitted it because I was tired of the shit.
cover letters are terrible anyway. the signal to noise ratio there must be comical.
- ask for a very specific thing in the cover letter. In our case, which version of the specific IDE they were familiar with. - specify that we care about relevant skills, and having the legal right to work here. nothing else.
Of the 50-odd responses who survived a 10 seconds each filter (ie, did you answer the question), I skimmed the CVs and picked 10 I liked and 10 more I thought would be ok. I did this via a 5-bucket sort - as I read each email I dragged it into a numbered folder. Then I created folder 1a,1b and put 10 in each. Sure, that's about an hours work but it's easier than doing an online test and trying to make it non-gameable.
Interviews were a five minute chat then we dumped them in front of a computer with our development setup on it, and a series of programming tasks. Starting from "this button. Make it so when the user clicks it a dialog pops up saying 'click'" and going up to "there is a memory leak in this ~100 line command line program. Find it and fix it". They were asked to talk me though what they were doing, and while most problems followed each other from the same based, they started with a "perfect" solution to the previous ones at each step so that we didn't deviate too far.
I was pleasantly surprised at how effective the "brown M&Ms" question was, and how predictive the series of programming tasks was.
https://www.insider.com/van-halen-brown-m-ms-contract-2016-9
I've been on both sides of hiring at this point. On the applicant side, I have never seen any indication that anyone has ever read my cover letters. Writing them is a chore. And though my sample size is very limited, I have never had success with bespoke cover letters/cold emails/etc.; the time has always been better spent on reaching more people.
On the hiring side, I've read a few cover letters. Nothing has ever stood out. I read it over once and that's that. Honestly I feel like it can only hurt you. What kind of powerful, moving statement could you possibly write that would persuade someone to give you a chance when you otherwise had none? I'm sure it's happened, but to force people to write these things at the cost of millions of man-hours, just to cover this absurdly rare and mythical case? And on the other side, there are so many things you could do in a cover letter that would give a _negative_ impression. Maybe the tone is inappropriate, or there are inadvertent grammatical errors, or it's written poorly, and on and on and on. Just more exposed surface area for the naturally critical interviewer's mind to attack.
What about providing a proper job description? Without it your company is a "maybe", till I talk to an engineer who can describe the job properly. Would it make sense to write a cover letter after that?!
Edit: just wanted to say I am a partner/founder at my company and we deeply give a shit about what we do and who we work with. Our turnover across 7 years is very, very low. We strive for a good work life harmony with everyone that works with us. You have to have some process to fit people into a company and that means you gotta talk to people and get to know them. The goal is to eliminate interviewer bias as much as humanly possible after the technical screening. So it goes. Not everyone can be pleased and I would defend our hiring practices as very reasonable and humanistic in an otherwise crazy tech interviewing system at the FAANGs of the world.
Where it gets tricky is with people like who are older and have "done interesting things". I did short contracts for more then a decade and interspersed them with cycle touring. So my full work history is a thing of joy and beauty, but asking me to go through it and re-locate one person from each company, contact them, and get a reference... you've just asked me to do 100 hours work at the very least. Even leaving out the non-technical jobs only halves the number. When a major bank wanted a list of every place I've lived for the last ten years they eventually decided that "no fixed address" was acceptable.
But I expect that if I applied to you and said "here's the last ten" you would be happy with that. And FWIW I have a number of quite enthusiastic referees available on request.
And as others have said, while I could provide references going back quite a few years, it definitely wouldn't be every job since high school--even every professional job.
I'll also add that it's not hard to vet candidates. I've hired dozens and dozens of great people and never ask for references. Interviewing is a skill all managers should develop and excel at.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/915182.Topgrading Is the best book on it. I would just say to use common sense when reading it and think about how you would feel in the interviewees shoes. There is also top grading for sales which has some good stuff in it too. We don’t collect detailed salary info (legal minefield anyway these days). We usually just do one interview and not multiple. There are decent videos in YouTube. They try to sell you on their website and branded materials, but it’s pretty simple for a small company to keep it light and in text documents or whatever you prefer.
Thanks for dropping in the defense here, I've never heard of this process.
If the hiring process seems designed to find the very best people who are willing to put up with being abused, yeah, it seems pretty likely that it's a horrible place to work.
Very large online retailer is 100% this.
It's a recipee for fake.
For science I tried an blatant lie, and it was the most horrendous experience I ever felt regarding work. I was gutted and never want to do it again. But factually, I don't think it mattered to them, it was just smalltalk to them. Although I'm not 100% sure they didn't see through.
Oh and ironically, some recruiters casted doubt on very factual and true parts of my resume.
I mean what stupid game is this.
It is absolutely definitely not the actual top grading of multi hours of interviews , phoning references etc.
Ever heard of top-grading? It's the most oppressive interview technique of all time. A series of grueling multi-person interviews. A retrospective of all work experiences since high school. You also have to get multiple prior employers as references. Apparently top-grading is used to weed out "liars". Imagine what kind of place optimizes to find liars; maybe one with a problem with a lot lying? I've heard Twitter uses this technique (or did last year when my friend interviewed with them).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topgrading