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Comment by always_good | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how much of the shortage is due to there only being a relatively small portion of jobs that developers actually want.

Every time I've worked at a small company that had obvious perks (using a cool language, building a cool product), we had a bunch of applicants to pick from. We could be picky.

But the few times I worked at a company on soul-sucking work like internal legacy tools in VBScript for a non-tech company, they were the ones complaining about the great dev shortage.

They paid well but you also had to jump through hoops to see what it was which is too typical in our work culture. So if the job description doesn't compel someone to apply, GG.

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I never see a shortage of people applying. I usually see a great shortage of people I want to hire.

Mid-level position, asking for 5 years of related experience? 85% of the resumes have no related experience. Fresh out of school, that is. The virtual pile gets much shorter when minimal criteria are applied.

Have you tried developing your junior talent instead of driving them away so you need to fill a gap at mid-level?

Are there companies where people don't periodically move on? The culture right now is to hop between companies. It's not necessarily a bad thing. People get tired of their work and need novelty.

Yes, not crappy ones that pay well. I worked at a company where everyone automatically got a week and a half off at Christmas. This was above and beyond our normal PTO. I would have worked there forever, but we got acquired by a soul sucker. That was the first perk to go.

People frequently jump SE jobs for pay raises since many companies don't seem to see the value in retaining talent through raises.

When you say you require 5 years of related experience as a minimum bar, most applicants read we don't train or invest in our employees. It's not surprising you don't get the best candidates applying.

If I want a junior person, I place an ad for a junior person. We do quite well with those.

If I want somebody with 5 years of experience, it's because I need someone who has already got familiarity with the tools and can apply good judgement.

I have had both positions open simultaneously on occasion, and discovered the same people applying for both. Some of them were even qualified for the junior position.

You removed the word "related" in this reply.

I think our contention centers mainly around this word. When I see the word related I envision most standard job offers that have a laundry list of 10+ technologies, not all of them particularly related.

Software engineering is such a wide field with such a huge array of available technology options that if you're limiting to 5+ years in a specific stack you're already massively narrowing down your field to a small percentage of the available workforce. If you aren't offering significant advantages to offset that huge initial filter you're not going to get many candidates you find acceptable.

At the company I work at we hire for "general software engineering ability". You can pick whatever language or tool you want to get through the interview, we don't care. Most strong candidates will ramp up on whatever specific stack way more quickly than you expect.

To clear this up:

If I ask for five years of related experience, I mean that if my list includes an object-oriented language with a well-known framework, I expect to see someone who has worked with an object-oriented language with a well-known framework and has perhaps dabbled in the particular one I mentioned.

Instead I get many resumes from people who have never used an object-oriented language to contribute to any software project that wasn't assigned by their professor. They haven't got five years of experience, period.

Does that help?

When I was fresh out of University I had to send at least 2 resumes per week to get my unemployment money. Sometimes there were no positions open that matches my criteria, so I just send it to what I could find.

The worst I could get was a no :)

same here, looking for a local web developer, getting people that can't spell the difference between the various css positioning. 8 in 10 couldn't pass a javascript version of foobar test and 3 in ten even got some basic stuff from the assignment wrong (like, printing 0 to 99 instead of 1 to 100)

That's probably because the rest of the job posting doesn't sound that difficult.

And you may even say you want "rock stars", completely forgetting that actual rock stars don't need 5 years of experience to do an exemplary job with a new tech stack.

Most job postings are complete BS, cut through that and the quality of candidates will likely improve.

If you pay 'market rates,' expect the best applicants to be average.

Yes! If the best thing an employer can come up with to say about their compensation and benefits is that they are “competitive“ this is a huge red flag for any candidate who is (or believes they are) above average.

Thing is with red flags people can see them left and right, but the need to put food on the table and pay the bills results in color blindness fast.

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