Ask HN: A need for talent, a need for jobs, and the chasm between | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: A need for talent, a need for jobs, and the chasm between

3 pointsdigitalsushi4 comments

Some of my closest gradeschool friends and I met for dinner last night in Concord NH and started to talk about work. We're all about 39 years old, all in unrelated high tech domains, and all recently tasked with interviewing for the first time. One is an analog chip designer, another is a database guy for GIS, and I'm an OS orchestration/pipeline person for some place.

We came to the point that there is a serious lack of available talent - we all have some very well paying open job positions that we're responsible for helping to fill. But people are not finding their way in to get interviewed. On the flip side of this, I know that a good portion of people I know are always passively looking for new positions, generally at other companies because this is the only apparent way to get promoted. People want new jobs. We want people.

It doesn't add up. There's some black hole that we don't have any insight into. I had mused it was the glut of automatic resume application software available. I've heard that a quarter of a thousand applications are sent for each new position. Automatic systems only allow the few through that have the proper incantation of the same general information.

This sort of haphazard Ask HN is really just an attempt to understand this - is our perception wrong? Are we oblivious? Or is there indeed some new obstruction that everyone is still learning how to navigate?

My guess is that this is market failure. Employers make job hunting so unpleasant and expensive that potential candidates are strongly deterred from seeking positions.

For background, I'm an experienced generalist Linux programmer. I could explain strace output to you in detail, parallelize your software, etc.

I did a lengthy job search last year, after having taken a few months off due to life circumstances. I did maybe 20 phone screens, 10 tech screens, 5-6 on-site interviews. Even passed an on-site at Google. As you might imagine, this takes a ferocious amount of time and energy.

The result? No offers. Hard to say why. My skills are pretty solid. There's nothing about me or in my background that'd be a plausible red flag, aside from my age (50s).

My interpretation is that there's simply too much supply. Employers will regularly interview dozens of people for positions. (One job I was previously hired for bragged that they had a 1200-to-1 ratio of inquiries to hires.) Why do this? Because you can. Imagine interviewing 20 plumbers to redo your drain lines. Would they think you were being a jerk? (Would they be wrong?)

Looking back over my career, the best jobs I've had had remarkably non-selective hiring processes. They'd post a listing, collect resumes, choose three to interview, and hire one. The interviews weren't quiz-like--they were just conversations. It might seem like a recipe for mediocrity, but somehow it just worked. I did my best work for them, and they were very happy indeed.

My advice, spread your req far and wide, with as much honesty about what the job entails as you can muster. Wait for 20 resumes or a month. Pick two or three to interview in person. Hire one.

  aside from my age (50s)

Bingo.

Employers, if you haven't widened your pool to consider people already beyond their 30s, you have no business complaining about a "talent shortage".

It cracks me up looking at companies' "About" pages to see them bragging about how "diverse" they are, juxtaposed with pics of assorted employee gatherings showing their workforce as uniformly white and Asian and age 22-35.

You often hear or read things like "The job market is broken.", "Job search is broken.", "The interview process needs to be fixed.".

While those statements probably are true I'd say that for knowledge / engineering (particularly software engineering) work there's something larger at play here and even the concept of 'job' itself is broken.

Although it requires a different mindset and approach that kind of work essentially is still treated like industrial age assembly line work:

- People are evaluated in terms of fitness for a position according to their resume and qualifications on paper.

- They're expected to work a certain amount of hours per day.

- They're mostly still expected to work at a specific location.

- Their output is measured in terms of time spent rather than value created.

- Especially with larger companies there often is a lot of cargo cult or management for management's sake involved because that's the way it's been done before and - agile or not - we haven't really figured out how to organise knowledge work in terms of knowledge work at scale rather than falling back to how we used to organise factory or clerical work.

Because spot markets are a terrible way to do anything but sell commodities.

And because they are the easiest to model economists have turned everything into a spot market.

Companies used to have pensions which locked employees to companies so companies could invest in employee training.

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