Hacker News Reader

Comment by dhd415 | Hacker News Reader

Having gone through this process recently, there's a lot of truth in this post. I experienced more companies "ghosting" during the process than slow turnaround times, but it is remarkable how short-sighted companies are during the recruiting phase. It's as if common courtesy has gone completely out the window in tech recruiting. Basic things like not missing phone interviews at times that have been previously scheduled or informing candidates politely that you've decided to move forward with other candidates can't even be taken for granted anymore. Candidates' initial experience with a company is typically through the recruiting organization and negative impressions during the recruiting phase are often applied to the company as a whole. I could see it being a competitive advantage to be known for having a good recruiting process even if it is very selective. For example, I have a very positive impression of DigitalOcean despite not receiving an offer because of the professional and courteous way they handled their interview process.

View on HN

The "ghosting" is just something you have to get used to as a candidate. Most companies do it. It's likely there are far, far more candidates than jobs, and companies simply can't get back to each and every person. Also, a lot of times, the company can't make a clear yes/no decision and will stall and delay on a borderline candidate in order to try to luck into a better one.

Something that I'm seeing more and more these days are companies that are actually not trying to fill the positions they are posting.

I've seen companies fully-contained within 4-person WeWork spaces showing pictures of their non-existant 20+ person team and listing as many or more open positions that don't exist. I've seen companies that list positions that aren't actively looking to hire but want to keep the funnel open in case that 'special snowflake' comes along.

I don't know if it's 'wishful thinking' or something else, but it's fairly poisonous.

If you aren't "actively looking" but would bite if "that special snowflake" came in, aren't you actively hiring?

Maybe you're more like passively hiring, but I'd still consider them hiring.

I didn't want to be obviously derisive in my post. The two companies in question were obviously stroking their own egos.

They didn't have an actual need for someone and it was all about how many/what type of degrees someone had and from where before they'd even consider looking at a candidate. In one of the cases, when the company did actually hire a person, that person had no work to do -- it was purely a means to justify their ask to investors for more money. We hire the best people!

Does that make you angry? They'll soon fail anyway.

Some people don't internalize that this is a sellers market. There are orders of magnitude more open jobs out there than there are qualified people to fill them. You shouldn't concern yourself with a bunch of toxic idiots trying to milk VC for a while.

Not really, actually. I get it. It's the waste/needless entropy and it makes me more sad than mad anyway.

I have to consider that some of the effort I spend chasing what looks like a great job might actually be a complete waste of time with no chance whatsoever.

I've been pretty vocal about my experiences, good and bad, job searching. I usually even like to name and shame and strangely enough it has paid off for me in connecting with the kinds of people I want to work with. I've been happily employed for a year now and have a good network of opportunities available to me.

> Some people don't internalize that this is a sellers market. There are orders of magnitude more open jobs out there than there are qualified people to fill them.

The "shortage of engineers" meme that just won't die. If this were actually true, one or more of the following would be happening:

1. Qualified people would not be having difficulty finding work

2. Salaries would be increasing and low-paying open jobs would decrease in response to short supply until the market went into equilibrium

The market is in equilibrium.

Physics and Math graduate unemployment rates are virtually zero, and practically all of us work in software.

That a lot of CS graduates actually can't do the job may be a pity, but its not our problem. Qualified people don't have difficulty finding work (by definition - if they're qualified, they will get hired).

Shortage of engineers is a meme?

"If you gave us another 100k great engineers we would only hire about 15k of those" - said none of the big 4 ever. They are perpetually hiring and they will absorb any capable engineer who comes their way. You know that. Don't pretend there's a shortage of jobs for qualified software engineers. That's just silly.

> Qualified people don't have difficulty finding work (by definition - if they're qualified, they will get hired).

I know lots of qualified people who went through one or more stretches where they couldn't find work. Most employers wouldn't know a qualified engineer if they saw one.

> by definition - if they're qualified, they will get hired

It sounds like you're explicitly committing the No True Scotsman fallacy.

It's also an example of Goodhart's law: the people getting hired are demonstrably most qualified at getting hired, but the correlation between being good and being hired is quite clearly less than 1.0.

It sounds like you're trying to tell me that its more difficult to be perceived as a competent engineer than it is to actually be a competent engineer.

If you're good at what you're doing but somehow suck at presenting yourself in an appropriate way, retain an executive coach for 5 hours or whatever..

> Physics and Math graduate unemployment rates are virtually zero, and practically all of us work in software.

How many of them are overqualified for what they're doing and would jump if the market were paying more or if there were better opportunities? You can't say much about whether it's an employer's or employee's market merely by citing unemployment %.

> "If you gave us another 100k great engineers we would only hire about 15k of those" - said none of the big 4 ever. They are perpetually hiring and they will absorb any capable engineer who comes their way. You know that. Don't pretend there's a shortage of jobs for qualified software engineers. That's just silly.

Any discussion about a shortage or surplus of jobs/talent is meaningless without specifying compensation. Many companies would gladly take 100K great engineers at a salary of $20K/year. What if the going rate were $1M/year? Would there still be a shortage of engineers? When the bid and ask are far apart, both sides will complain about how hard it is to make a deal.

> How many of them are overqualified for what they're doing and would jump if the market were paying more or if there were better opportunities? You can't say much about whether it's an employer's or employee's market merely by citing unemployment %.

A lot of them are overqualified. But they are handsomely compensated. They could do less boring work, but there's less of a market for it.

> Any discussion about a shortage or surplus of jobs/talent is meaningless without specifying compensation. Many companies would gladly take 100K great engineers at a salary of $20K/year. What if the going rate were $1M/year? Would there still be a shortage of engineers? When the bid and ask are far apart, both sides will complain about how hard it is to make a deal.

I made that statement under the assumption of current market rates. Whatever google/facebook/uber/apple/microsoft are paying. Quit pretending that they wouldn't hire more engineers if there was supply. They clearly are willing to. Sure there's some hyperbole to it. But the entire valley + amazon/microsoft could easily absorb another 100k engineers without that event drawing down salaries significantly.

3. Companies would interact with candidates as if their "hiring experience" reputation actually mattered. And treat candidates accordingly, at all stages in the process.

After conducting countless interviews at my current small company (< 35 employees) with a structured & data-driven interview process, I'm seeing how acutely of a job seeker's market it is in engineering. Finding quality engineers is difficult, and of the last 5 engineering hires, 3 of them being referred by me was the only way we ended up filling almost all of our hiring needs (I have a very strong developer network through my reputation in the Angular community)...and this is including the fact that we let people work remotely across North America. We would have a lot of prospective candidates cancel interviews due to finding better offers or come to other decisions of their choice, even with the company netting such accolades like being in Fortune's top 50 small companies to work for and top 5 workplaces for flexibility.

While the company isn't as competitive in salaries compared to some other shops in the Bay Area, it is extremely competitive in all other facets including supreme work-life balance, and yet even that hasn't been enough in itself.

Please forgive my bluntness, but my takeaway is that you're simply being outcompeted. If the company pays less than others and its candidates are taking better offers, why should that mean it's a job-seeker's market?

Whether one particular employer can find workers at some arbitrary rate is not the same as whether there's a shortage, especially if that employer's rate is not in fact competitive.

If having trouble hiring while paying less than others indicates a seeker's market, what would an employer's market look like?

Exactly. I can't find a new BMW for $5000. Therefore there is a shortage of BMWs.

We're much better than our competitors on just about everything else - the company just can't compete on pure cash against the likes of Google/Facebook/Netflix/Apple/etc., but I know from prior job searches/recruiters that not too many other companies can match what we offer for people who aren't completely money-driven, which we attract a lot of candidates of that profile, and a good number of them being talented. The reasons that any candidates we offer turn us down rarely comes down to money, and more the specifics of each individual.

If it really was an employer's market, I wouldn't be getting up to 10 emails/messages/phone calls/tweets/etc. a day from recruiters trying to entice me to leave, even floating compensation up to $400k as inducement to action. I have walked away from exorbitant offers myself. Some of my friends/acquaintances in the industry also have shared similar experiences - the desperation of employers is obvious & almost ubiquitous, and you don't see that sort of desperation on employers' parts in an employer-sided market. You see them leaning in with aggressive tactics to accept what is given, which you see with some candidates that they deem weaker, but not with anyone half decent because the time & money cost of attracting people is significant.

Very few companies can claim to offer it all, but for the rest, they have to strategize as to what type of potential employees do they want to attract. Most cannot compete with the likes of those big companies mentioned prior because they have some negative that those don't have - for example, while the financial industry is known for sometimes paying very well, it also has a negative stigma to a not insignificant portion of engineers, as well as a reputation for poor work-life balance. Government work often comes with good work-life balance and is often well-regarded, but the reputation is also a two-edged sword (i.e. NSA being famed for their use of mathematicians, but also facing blowback after their overreach was revealed), pay isn't as competitive, and the level of bureaucracy is legendary in some cases. Startups/small companies offer a huge amount of responsibility & impact, but also offer varying levels of work-life balance (most are terrible, but some can be phenomenal) & lower compensation than one can often get in the open market with all industries considered. A company can try to pay more to attract the very top quality engineers, but in software at least, it can get very expensive & comes with a massive cost for a business, especially when competing against the very top revenue generating machines. Therefore, if a company isn't at that level, it needs to compete on other areas - it doesn't make sense to compete on the money realm, because that is a game that those big giants win at.

Being a pro-job seeker market is more than about cash. It's about negotiating power due to being able to easily find an opportunity they can weigh yours against if it doesn't satisfy the seeker.

I've been looking for a remote job lately. Despite having interned at Microsoft and Google, almost nobody seems to be interested, and even if they are, it's for a salary like $30k. I'm in Eastern Europe, but still, that's a really low wage.

So if you're so desperate for engineers, why not hire remotely outside North America, the most competitive market in the world for engineers? I realize it's much more comfortable having everyone in the same timezone, but sure it's preferable to hiring nobody? Also you can probably pay 30% less and still get great engineers.

Companies can usually not "just hire offshore". There are a bunch of legal and tax laws preventing them from doing so.

Not even as a contractor? So I would send an invoice and they pay it. I deal with the tax stuff.

Hiring contractors is easy, but you can't retain them forever, or else the IRS will get bitchy about it. Or so I've heard.

In my experience, it's simply too hard to separate the wheat from the chafe in off-shore hiring. The chance of ending up a with a complete dud is much higher when hiring someone remotely from a foreign country.

Of course, it might also be simple racism. Otherwise I do admit to having difficulty explaining why I, as an American engineer, can make >$100k/yr even when working from outside the US while others make a fraction of that.

There is definitely a surplus of engineering work available, regardless of whatever political spin you want to put on it.

Your "surplus of engineering work" could easily be explained by:

1. Compensation not rising to match demand

2. Overly-picky employers who would rather a req go unfilled than hire a less-than-perfect candidate

3. A recruitment process that fails to match qualified candidates with this engineering work

And both of those things are almost exactly what I see in the market.

1. Qualified people (ie. know useful tech skills and have actual, demonstrated experience with those skills) can find work. Yes, you sometimes have to go through painful tech interviews but if you're actually qualified it is easily possible to secure an offer

2. Salaries are indeed rising, as nearly any salary survey would tell you. Do you think Facebook/Google/Amazon are paying people hundreds of thousands of dollars a year just for the kicks?

> low-paying open jobs would decrease in response to short supply

That's the one part which is incorrect. If there is a shortage then open jobs should increase steadily over time, which is definitely what's happening.

This is especially true because some companies just don't have a clue. So they'll leave up a bad position for months on end but never increase the pay, meanwhile complaining about the developer shortage.

Both as a hiring manager and an engineer, the developer shortage is very evident. We consistently took a long time to find qualified candidates (despite paying a respectably high salary) and on the flip side I have had no problem at all lining up offers any time I've interviewed in the past few years.

This does come with the caveat that the shortage is by far most acute in senior web-oriented engineers. There's no shortage of eager bootcamp graduates. If you don't have relevant experience on your resume or have crippling anxiety with technical interviews then your results will vary substantially.

Maybe we need a different word for it then, because they're not hiring. They're "looking" and maybe "interviewing". A lot of companies who say they're hiring are really just trawling for deals.

I have a hard time believing that companies trying to pretend they are significantly larger than they are in hopes of snagging some super-special hire is a common thing. It seems like the sort of thing that would backfire quickly. I would quit on the first day if I arrived to discover a scenario like you've described - but to be honest I'd probably detect much earlier in the process and never arrive in the first place.

It's also worth noting that the reverse direction of this false-hope scenario does occur frequently: It's extremely common in our industry for candidates to take interviews with companies they would never accept an offer from just to practice their interview skills for later interviews with companies they actually do want to work at.

They're trying to appear larger because they think that it either makes them look better to investors or to customers.

I think it always backfires in any case, but most of these people don't have very much, if any, experience running a successful business.

When a visitor would come, my boss would arrange fake working stations, with piles of files which were in fact white paper, and he would pretend the ghost-employees were on vacation, or on an outside mission.

I have also applied to many job offers I am pretty sure were fake, with no actual position behind.

> companies simply can't get back to each and every person

Honestly, that's nonsense.

Send out a terse, automated email to everyone who applied and was not selected. It could just be something like:

"This job posting has been closed and , unfortunately, you were not selected as a finalist. Thank you for applying. We will keep your application on file for 60 days if there is a similar opening."

I would love to get useful feedback from an actual human, but I know that interviewer time is expensive and companies are worried about liability[1]. However, an automated email pulled from an applicant-tracking database is literally the least a company could do and is essentially free.

If they make it to an on-campus interview, having a real live person copy and paste an email also adds maybe ~$2 to a day that's already costing the company thousands.

[1] Everyone says this, but I've never actually seen a court case where a) the company provided reasonable feedback and b) was sued nevertheless.

I don't think that we should excuse this behavior just because it's common. We push back against this pretty hard at Triplebyte. I can also say (having run a huge number of interviews over that last year) that getting a personal, honest email to every candidate is just a matter of making it part of the process. Writing an email takes a small fraction of the time of doing an interview.

It is not rocket science. Just set up the applicant tracker in such a way that tickets that have not been resolved within a week bubble up to the top of the queue. I've seen this implemented at my workplace and the frequency of ghosting went waaay down. But it is true that a company must make a small but conscious effort to reduce it. Some companies apparently just don't see enough upside in it for them.

It's likely there are far, far more candidates than jobs, and companies simply can't get back to each and every person.

There's a huge difference between not responding to every resume -- and silently dropping (or prolongedly stalling) the candidate after initial contact has made (sometimes even after an on-site visit). The latter is what is usually meant by "ghosting" -- and really, there's no resource-based excuse for it (given that both parties have already made a very significant time and energy investment by that point). That's what's so exasperating (and to some, nearly infuriating) about it.

Most companies do it.

Actually, the widespread observation is that until recently, "most companies" definitely did not ghost candidates after the initial contact stage -- and after an on-site interview, it was basically unheard of. It's hard to get data, but it definitely seems to be a very new thing.

The "ghosting" is just something you have to get used to as a candidate.

One can get used to anything, I suppose. But by the same token: turnabout is definitely fair play; and as long as companies insist on doing this to people -- they're going to have to get "used to" this shitty behavior being talked about on places like Glassdoor and HN.

And of course, being duly and justly called out by name for it.

well sure, if we're talking not responding to the initial application then yea I don't think the expectation is to get a response from every single company.

but if I as much as have a screening call with a recruiter, unless they flat out tell me "no" I would expect some sort of communication at that point.

> It's likely there are far, far more candidates than jobs

Nope. There are many companies and positions who just hire everyone who pass the bar.

More jobs than successful candidates. Yet the companies still suck at interviewing.

I interviewed with Twitter a while back and it was astounding how little concern they had for my time. I had a few phone screens and two of them had to be rescheduled as the person never called me. Then they gave me a take home coding assignment that required coordinating with one of their engineers who then missed not one but two appointments.

I also had a bad experience interviewing with Twitter. No less than 5 minutes into the interview (online), a second candidate comes into the chat. Apparently that interviewee shared my first and last names, and the Twitter recruiter had mistakenly signed us both up for the same interview time. Everything went downhill from there.

I learned in my first two jobs (in restaurants) that the way the company treats its prospective hires is strongly correlated with how well the company is organized. I kept that in mind as I went out into the corporate world, and the rule has held (in my experience) for the last ~30 years. Good starts imply good companies and good experiences. Bad starts... can be safely dropped.

Facebook was the worst. Won't tell you how you did, will call at random times, etc.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com