This is it in a nutshell, good summary.
So many of these companies have built an arbitrary interview process that takes pride in rejecting nearly everyone, regardless of actual skill in building products. So with that criteria, yes, it is hard to hire anyone. Which doesn't mean there aren't tons of perfectly competent people available, it's just that none of them can pass the silly interview because they haven't spent 10,000 hours memorizing leetcode.
Typically someone will say "the bar is high", but that's not at all the case. The bar is in the wrong zip code. Because that kind of interview process measures nothing relevant to job performance. So the best developers, who are busy building successful products, will inevitably fail because who has time to spend on irrelevant interview prep.
Interview for the job based on actual experience and you'll find, like I do, that it's not hard to hire competent people.
The size of the company didn't matter - in fact, the smaller the company, the more difficult and onerous the process was. One place with six employees asked for a full day's work (offering $150 compensation). One place turned me down because I didn't have enough Scrum experience and the Scrum Master - a real job title apparently - didn't think I'd be a good fit.
So, "false negative" is right.
A recent project required some work in jquery. All of the other developers stated that it would be difficult and take them too long because they were not familiar with it - being react devs themselves - so it was left to me. I was shocked. The idea that jquery could possibly be described as being more difficult than react is amusing at best. Sure, it was largely an excuse on their part, but I was left speechless nonetheless.
I guess my point is that nearly 20 years of dev experience leaves me with the ability to do the old and the new. I wish this was more respected by companies in general.
You don't get experience with Scrum ceremonies, or other any kind of “ceremonies” unless they happen to be in the application domain rather than the dev process, working in a place that values “Individuals and interactions over processes and tools”.
As a new grad, was I supposed to feel lowballed at getting an offer quite a bit less than that? I know senior devs who make less than that. Is this just for stanford/mit grads?
$97,750, $118,000 $129,000 for 25th, 50th, and 75th percentile respectively
IIRC this number is typically just the base salary so you can roughly double it to include bonus and stock.
Click Employment tab then Page 9 in https://capd.mit.edu/resources/student-outcomes-and-salaries
Not that I doubt there are jobs which pay this, but from what I've seen of the market, if money is all you're concerned with you should not be turning your nose up at a 200k TC offer.
200k is very high for new grads.
I think the 200k figure is inflated by FAANG companies, basically.
Edit: This is to say, the cost of housing has grown faster than the compensation available to new grads.
Is this just a perception issue or have they actually tried interviewing a few times with negative results?
It might have something to do with increasing property prices.
What's the median NYC houshold income for investment bankers and radiologists?
SEs are educated, highly-skilled individuals and should thus be compared to the VALUE the NYC society places on other highly skilled, in-demand individuals.
Be assured that NYC lawyers, radiologists, and bankers don't compare their remuneration to an average that includes dustmen, baristas, and hot-dog salesmen.
e.g. Lotus 1-2-3 was probably far easier to develop than Google Sheets presently.
Lotus 1-2-3 was 40 years ago, not 10, but still. The Lotus devs, of which there were only a handful, were writing in ASM, for an insanely memory constrained platform. I bet Google Sheets is insanely complicated too, and has all the multiuser requirements. But those devs have all the resources of Google backing them up. I’d call it a push.
Hasn't that been the case for decades now?
I don't agree at all. Pre pandemic I worked as a professional software engineering interviewer for a largish recruiting company. I did 400+ ~2hr interviews over about a year. We did not put forward the vast majority of people I interviewed.
Lots of people on HN, and certainly lots of people who get rejected time and time again seem to have the perception that:
- Most candidates (their friends in collage) all have reasonably similar aptitude
- Doing programming interviews doesn't offer a lot of signal, and there are lots of false negatives.
- The hiring bar is too high
Aka, "I passed all my CS classes! Why will nobody hire me!? It must be something wrong with interviews, not me!!"
All of these points are wrong. There is a massive difference between strong and weak programming candidates. Weak candidates can barely program at all, no matter what their background would suggest. We did multiple quantitative assessments. The various assessments all end up strongly positively cross-correlated. So we can tell we're getting a clear signal through our interviews. Weak candidates generally wouldn't fail just one part of our assessment; they'd fail all of them. And most strong candidates would demonstrate that in almost every section of our interview.
We passed / failed based on a ML system which tried to guess who we could place. After a couple of months I was calibrated enough to be about 95% accurate at guessing what the AI would say. Its surprising how little ambiguity there is. Only about 1/10 people were "on the fence". Almost everyone I interviewed was either a clear yes or a clear no. If I interviewed you and I didn't recommend moving forward with the hiring process, its probably not because I didn't like you, or because the interviewing process is broken or the hiring bar is wrong. Its probably because your programming skills just aren't strong enough yet. My notes were filled with "This person is amazing and I love them to bits. But we can't move forward because when push comes to shove, they just aren't very good at programming."
The harsh version of this is: The hiring process is fine. If you keep failing job interviews, the problem is probably you.
I think there's two real issues with interviewing. One is that some candidates get massively stressed out, and can't perform under pressure. Secretly my job was all about trying to help candidates relax. After 1 year I still wasn't good at it. I bet most interviewers at most companies are terrible at this.
The other issue is that most companies have no interest in hiring junior people and training them up. They can't afford it. You could hire a junior, spend 9 months paying them a (low) salary while they're net-negative to your company's productivity only to have them leave and work somewhere else as soon as their skills are up to snuff. Companies are incentivized not to bother doing that at all - which in turn narrows the funnel of people who can make it to high quality mids and seniors.
> I personally know many people at great companies like Google and Twitter who are _desperate_ to change, but they are too afraid to interview.
You know you can start a job hunt before leaving your current role, right? I personally recommend everyone interviews around every 6-9 months, no matter how much you like your job. There's a huge peace of mind from knowing how much you're worth at other companies, and keeping your resume and interviewing skills fresh. As covid shows, you never know when you might need to look for a new job.
What I can think of:
* be selective where to apply
* prefer job advertisements on companies web pages, as they give often much more information on the role, than a typical recruiter will give out
* do not apply to job descriptions which are not at least a n 80% match with the own qualifications and interests
* a job offer is not entirely different from a requirements specification, so a good engineering company should be able to write something quite specific
* if one stated requirement is not matched in the application, explain and point to an equivalent qualification (say, no years of experience in Go, but 10+ years experience with each of Java, Python, and Ruby).
* as a reasonable coding task should not require preparation by experienced people, do not prepare for them
* Interviewers have a reasonable interest to learn about the candidate's skills in programming. But it is hard to measure that with coding interviews, especially since since like architecture and design decisions become much more important for actual senior work. It might be more efficient for the developer to put some personal programming projects on github, and put the URL in the resume - qualified interviewers can then ask about the code and gain insight from the reasoning behind it.
And, another question, how should one handle recruiters and interviewers which apparently have not read the resume? Or the ones which ask one to apply even if the specified required qualifications do not really match? (e.g., have never worked extensively on Windows, a lot of experience with embedded C++, but recruiter asks to apply for a C# job?).
For HR people it would certainly help them if there were more information about the company, tools, actual tasks, and some words on what the core of business is - and how software relates to that.
> be selective where to apply
100%. And talk to your friends and get warm leads when you can. You can learn much more about what its like to work at a company by talking to people who already work there. Go in for lunch. Get a sense of the company culture. If you have skill, everyone is hiring. Ignore the recruiters and choose where you want to work.
> do not apply to job descriptions which are not at least a n 80% match with the own qualifications and interests
I disagree with this actually. Again, if you're a senior developer with skills, figure out what the company is doing and decide for yourself if you want to be part of that. Technology match matters here; but job ads are pretty uniformly terrible. Nobody knows how to write them well. I certainly don't.
> architecture and design decisions become much more important for actual senior work
Yes; from the people I interviewed, I found senior developers were competent but still a bit slower than mids at raw programming tasks. (This makes sense, because they often don't do it as much). In comparison, senior devs were much better at debugging problems and at architecture whiteboarding style questions.
> And, another question, how should one handle recruiters and interviewers which apparently have not read the resume?
The first thing to know about recruiters is they don't work for you, because you don't pay them. The way recruiting should work is like acting - you get a manager (recruiter) who knows your skillset well. They talk to lots of companies and find you a stream of good gigs you like. You pay them $10k for that service, or 2% of your salary or something. But programmers hate paying for this, so instead all the recruiters work for the companies. They get the same cut, but our experience of working with them is awful.
I'd avoid most recruiters whenever you can. Use HN's job board and things like that, and skip to talking to the actual team managers and engineers as quickly as possible. Recruiters hunting C++ devs for C# roles is just lazy people being lazy.
And who cares if your interviewer has read your resume? Its disrespectful, but it doesn't matter. Roll with it.
I'm not sure how to reconcile a recruiting company well-known for doing rigorous technical screening having a 40% placement rate, most candidates being a clear yes or a clear no, the hiring process being completely fine, and the hiring process not producing many false negatives.
Technology firms have grown astronomically. They’ve also built processes and systems to onboard new developers and enable them to generate a lot of value. Developers are being compensated higher to reflect the efficiency gains made my technology firms.
Is it unfortunate that firms that are unable to generate that much value suddenly can’t hire developers? Must be for those firms.
But there’s nothing wrong with compensation growing astronomically and nothing moral in it being low.
>Is it unfortunate that firms that are unable to generate that much value suddenly can’t hire developers? Must be for those firms.
yep. Our BigCo generates paltry $350K/employee/year. Looking at our salaries - we're relatively cheap engineers, and the company wastes our time in a myriad ways, and it is no wonder that we can't hire anybody here really - one can say we do experience the shortage of engineers. In SV we regularly lose people (who get 2-3X increases at new places, and only morons like me (even when i got an offer from Google it was just L5 and a very low one, basically just a match of what i have here) are still sitting here), and we're able to hire only in cheap remote locations.
I don't think that's unique to software engineering, and I don't think its more pronounced in our industry.
The standard tenure of most engineers is about 3 - 5 years, a very short amount of time. People try and leave all the time. How long it takes someone to leave is likely a good proxy for their risk aversiveness. But people do switch a lot.
My experience is that even the best engineers wont catch up for a year or something, to an mediocre one with years of experience in the project/field, if the project is somewhat complex and not routine. In 17 months it is really hard to do anything magnificent.
When I graduated with my CS degree, I was _thrilled_ to be offered 50k. Now new grads feel lowballed at 200k TC. So hard not to say that the market hasn't adjusted somewhat.
At the same time, part of the reason companies even have to pay so much is because they've made interviewing so damn hard. I personally know many people at great companies like Google and Twitter who are _desperate_ to change, but they are too afraid to interview. They feel they got lucky and got through the process once and are unlikely to be able to repeat it, and they might be right. The industry has taken "false negatives are better than a false positives" to an absurd extreme and then complain there's a shortage.
It's one or the other. If you're saying "a false negative is ok" you are implicitly saying "it's totally fine if we fail to hire good developers", and you can't say that then turn around and complain it's too hard to hire good developers. Which is _exactly_ what all my recent employers have done.