Follow-up to “The dystopian world of software engineering interviews”

Re:Follow-up to “The dystopian world of software engineering... by jlokier on Sunday February 23, 2020 @01:14PM (#22398465)

> There’s just too many high quality candidates and too few positions.

That can't be true simultaneously with "companies are having trouble finding good enough candidates", which is often said these days.

What can be true: There are many high quality candidates, and many positions looking for high quality candidates, but they cannot find each other and overcome matching hurdles.

So you have candidates applying to a large number of positions, and positions seeing applications from a large number of candidates, just because the matching process is so inefficient. Then both sides can legitimately complain about the large amount of work and time it takes.

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Re:Follow-up to “The dystopian world of software engineering... by RichardCA on Sunday February 23, 2020 @05:30PM (#22400003)

When two contradictory ideas are true at the same time we call that a paradox.

There are reasons why the current IT hiring status quo seems to be so paradoxical.

https://itnext.io/the-cloud-skills-shortage-and-the-unemploy...

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Re:Follow-up to “The dystopian world of software engineering... by jlokier on Monday February 24, 2020 @01:50PM (#22407069)

I agree (and I'm fond of the word "paradox" too).

Interesting link, thanks.

I've tried to reconcile that paradox by seeing it as a matching problem which requires both candidates and companies to be overwhelmed with attempts to find a good fit with each other.

However, reading the linked article gives another perspective on it. Which is, frankly, a worrying perspective for candidates, in that it suggests the labour market is shrinking and bifurcating (just like everything else these days) into "haves" and "have nots", where crossing from the latter to the former group may be getting more difficult with time.

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