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Comment by SilasX | Hacker News Reader

At risk of opening that whole debate again...

Are there really no qualified local candidates, or are there no qualified local candidates who can also solve theoretical CS problems on the spot while pretending they're not doing it from memory?

Or qualified local candidates who refuse to lie and say they only took 3 hours on the take-home exercise?

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I personally think this is the real problem. Companies dismissing qualified candidates as "unqualified" because they are too lazy to evaluate candidates based on their skills, and would rather throw brainteasers at them instead.

For every 100 candidates a CS job gets, probably 80 are truly unqualified, 20 are truly qualified, but only 2 were both qualified and could pass an arbitrary list of brainteasers.

And that lie lets managers run around saying "see, we can't hire enough talent! Skills shortage!" (where "skills" means "brainteaser skills", not software development skills)

I agree with this. I think they are overlooking qualified candidates because they do not meet certain requirements. Especially in the government space.

Then they hire H1B people who look good on paper.

This to me is a huge problem. And it upsets me greatly because its unfair and counter-productive.

In the past, I've done dual-track interviewing where candidates could choose either a (paid!) evaluation project or a traditional technical interview. Even then, the vast majority of applicants could not perform at a suitable level.

Have you actually done hiring? The truth is that there really is a shortage of qualified applicants (at least, at existing prices). I've literally never met a fellow hiring manager who thought there was a surplus of good engineers.

I have never been a hiring manager, but I have been a developer asked to evaluate candidates in interviews for multiple companies, and I've seen my own employer turn away qualified candidates. I've also been an employee at companies who institute hiring policies their own current employees would not pass, and then claim new candidates are unqualified based on those policies. Neither of these are particularly unusual.

I've also been a person applying to jobs, where I know I'm fully qualified (usually because I already do the same thing in the same way for a competitor) and where I'm told "we think your a good culture fit, but we're worried about your technical abilities". I can't know exactly why they said that, but when I've showed working code they say their happy with, but I know I struggled on their brainteaser questions, it feels safe to infer.

So, I've seen qualified candidates turned away because they were "unqualified" (but they really weren't), from both sides of the table. I'm not claiming there is a huge surplus of engineering out there, but there is no real shortage either. There are enough engineers, just not enough employers willing to hire them.

This view is popular to get hashed around, since it makes everyone feel good. But the reality is that many/most algo questions being asked, are very basic. If you don't know how to use binary search or a heap to solve a basic problem, that already raises enough of a question mark that I don't want to hire you.

People always push it to the extreme and mention some very difficult algo question they were asked, and say how it's irrelevant. And if you have been asked a question like that, I agree it's irrelevant and that sucks.

But having a basic understanding of algorithms and data structures is important to writing decent software. Can we please stop pretending like expecting people to roughly know and understand the content of the freshman data structures course is some kind of unreasonable expectation?

Or qualified local candidates who just need a few weeks to months of training with Ruby on Rails because they're used to programming microcontrollers instead?

(That was me a few months ago.)

From the companies standpoint, there is a lack of local candidates who can prove they are qualified. Proving it is important because if the company gets it wrong it will costs $XXX,XXX or more and probably more than a year to figure it out. This makes them understandably risk adverse.

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