Tech companies can't find good employees, and it's their own fault

I suspect at least half the problem is that their recruiting and filtering practices are utterly broken. Like, you go for a job that requirements wise you seem like a perfect fit for, then get rejected for seemingly no reason? And then the job you meet maybe 1 requirement for offers an interview? While a bunch of others just ghost you altogether?<p>I&#x27;m not sure how CVs are being filtered out, but it feels like it&#x27;s completely broken to the point of absurdity.<p>It doesn&#x27;t help that the interview process is often ridiculous, and feels more strenuous than the actual job. Like, I&#x27;ve had take home tests which were basically &#x27;build a minimum viable product&#x27;, of the kind that would take a good week or two of work at the actual company. Or times where a very junior job was throwing Hacker Rank type puzzles at people for a job making WordPress sites.<p>Meanwhile, if it&#x27;s not too hard its too easy, or completely divorced from the work required, or run on a platform that&#x27;s so paranoid that any sort of window change flags the user as a cheater or the interview process takes weeks on end...<p>Is it any surprise companies are struggling to find employees so badly? How many great engineers are going to put themselves through this sort of crap?

There&#x27;s the pain of having an unfilled position with work that isn&#x27;t getting done. There&#x27;s also the pain of making the wrong hire and having to let someone go.<p>Most of the people I&#x27;ve spoken with on this issue find the latter to be much more painful. Therefore, they end up over-correcting with an overly arduous hiring process.<p>I think what they aren&#x27;t giving enough weight to is the fact that the hiring process might actually scare away the best candidate.

As another example of how whack the job market is, recently I wrapped a year-long job hunt. When I tally my offers, I got offers from mid-level to Staff, and the highest offer was 2.5x higher than the lowest one.<p>The fact that different companies can have such a radically different opinion of the same person tells you how much of a crapshoot hiring in tech is.

RTO hasn’t helped.<p>4+ rounds of interviews, panel interviews to make sure coworkers like your personality and you look a certain way. Take home tests, no feedback on why they didn’t pick you, and stupid questions like what’s your hobby, what book did you read last, do you watch sports.

Speaking as someone who is currently hiring, you have to go through a vast number of resumes from completely unqualified people via sites like LinkedIn. Too easy for people to just push the button to apply on the off chance. Working with a good recruiter is better since they do some of that filtering for you.<p>Once you have some candidates, most of them are exaggerating various aspects of their experience. The only way to figure this out is to talk to them, so interviews are necessary.<p>First is just a quick screening call to see if they have any idea what they&#x27;re talking about. If they pass that, you need more of a deep dive with an SME. This takes time from your talented SMEs (they have a job to do!) so you only want to pass them actually possible candidates.<p>After that (depending on role) the company may want interviews with senior management, and HR usually want to weigh in on one too.<p>After all that, it still does not produce reliable results, although I suspect they would be even worse without them.<p>Open to other ideas on how to do this effectively.

While I agree the hiring pipeline has become much more difficult, employers have also become much more risk averse because a bad hire can absolutely slow down deliveries and have a net negative result org-wide.<p>It&#x27;s a low trust situation on both the employer and employee fronts with bad actors tainting each other&#x27;s opinions.<p>I&#x27;m not sure there&#x27;s a way to fix this aside from relying heavily on referrals and hiring known quantities within your network.<p>That said, I absolutely agree with his opinion about not cargo culting BigTech style interviews - they are in a position where they can use it to choose candidates. Other companies may need to tailor interviews to meet their own needs (and most do ime).<p>And finally, we are now in an actually global hiring market. This isn&#x27;t like 25 years ago when tools like high bandwidth internet, Zoom, Slack, Confluence&#x2F;Notion, GitHub, and other productivity tools for asynchronous teams didn&#x27;t exist, and more critically - plenty of hires from CEE, Israel, and India who worked in the US have started moving back to the Old Country, meaning there are now employees who can bridge the management gap across the globe.<p>The downside is now the labor market has become globalized and Ron in SF is competing with Radosław in Warsaw, Ramon in Costa Rica, Ra&#x27;an in Tel Aviv, and Raghu in Hyderabad.

Geeze. Imagine that. Could it have anything to do with their brutally medieval interviewing cycles?

I’ve hired at a tech company, and it’s definitely weird. The problem may be non-tech employees involvement in the process.<p>For example, we needed a part time dev. A few days later we had a skilled candidate with a decade of experience in our exact tech stack. No brainer hire, right? Nope. HR and finance person thought he was too expensive ($20k&#x2F;yr too expensive) and scared him away with clumsy negotiating. Months later and several failed offers later, that job wasn’t filled. How much money did that non-hire cost the company? Far more than the little bit extra compensation they should have paid.<p>Another piece of the puzzle is where and how job listings are posted. LinkedIn, Indeed, and the others are good at generating a massive pile of resumes. The question non-tech employers need to ask is if great candidates are even on those sites looking for work. They aren’t part of the culture, so they wouldn’t even know to post on HN “Who’s Hiring” threads, or sponsoring a local meetup, or one of the more tech-focused job boards. Great technical employees aren’t commodities, and you don’t get them the same place you can hire forklift drivers, dental assistants, and office managers.

I understand that companies need some sort of SAT&#x2F;ACT-like method to rank candidates. I completely understand that part since there aren&#x27;t really licenses in software engineering like other engineering fields. But I feel like a better way would be to present candidates with questions and problems actually related to the job. For example, if the job requires an understanding of Pandas, perhaps giving candidates actual tasks in Pandas would be better than asking them to traverse a binary tree.

I truly believe if you were trying to invent the WORST possible way to hire people it would look very close to what they&#x27;ve implemented.

Is it their fault? I regularly see college students cheating on their CS homework&#x2F;projects using LLMs. They probably use them on interviews as well. In response I think companies will have to make the process of getting a job more difficult and drawn out.

Agreed. The hiring process is a total nightmare these days.<p>Broken job boards, A.I-CV-scraping, soulless video interviews, ridiculous noob “tests” for experienced folks, endless interview rounds + bad communication.<p>It’s really no surprise most tech companies can’t find anyone.

Few notes:<p>- from the first part of the article I feel a sort of hidden critic of automation and it&#x27;s outcomes, well, while people should ALWAYS remember the Ironies of Automation by Lisanne Bainbridge [1] it&#x27;s obvious that as much as we automate as less humans we need to do something and similarly that we loss diversity&#x2F;leveling anything toward some &quot;standard solutions&quot;. This is to be corrected with openness and experimentation, meaning investing more in research and development, with long terms goals, without managerial practices, not to be avoided trying to stop the history course;<p>- from the conclusion, well, I read only a simple point: to get works done companies need to know how to work, this it not much a single policy fault, it&#x27;s the byproduct of modern universities and schools with their target to create replaceable useful idiots instead of technicians because they are more manageable. It&#x27;s WAY TOO LATE to correct the course changing policies, we need SOME GENERATIONS growing in new-old schools whose target is forming Citizens not Ford model stereotypical workers and we should remember a thing very clear: intelligence alone is like an engine, useless without fuel&#x2F;energy. It&#x27;s easy to loose and very hard to make. So the actual situation can&#x27;t be corrected quickly nor easily nor without an IMMENSE effort with a gazillion of false start and issue before reaching the goal.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ckrybus.com&#x2F;static&#x2F;papers&#x2F;Bainbridge_1983_Automatica.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ckrybus.com&#x2F;static&#x2F;papers&#x2F;Bainbridge_1983_Automatica...</a>

Sounds like Darwin will solve the problem!