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I was also puzzled by this earlier in my career. If tech is so hot why is it hard to get hired? I will now share the answer I spent years looking for with you, perhaps it will help.

There’s an enormous shortage of software developers. What there is not though, is an enormous shortage of software developer applicants. By this I mean people who heard programming was good money, went two weeks to rockstar coding ninja boot camp react JS and are now applying to job postings that say “lead engineer”.

So you are a hiring manager trying to find a team lead for your next project, you put out a job ad and you get 500 resumes for folks who can’t code their way out of a CS1 exam. In reality you need to reject all of them. But you can’t reject all of them, because if we could implement a hiring manager with a mail rule what would we need hiring managers for?

So instead we set up some convoluted method to reject nearly all of them that is not obviously equivalent to a mail rule. Phone screens, coding tests, five rounds of interviews so if in a desperate moment we do hire this idiot at least four other people at the company signed off on it.

Somewhere in this stack of resumes there will be exactly 0.3 people who can code their way out of a CS1 exam. However they will have things to do besides engage a kafkaseque hiring process, like, I don’t know, writing software for a living. Once they realize this they will not participate in the process, self-fulfilling the prophesy that no good candidates are ever in the pile.

Meanwhile in another part of town, someone is leaning on the existing engineers until they cough up a name of an (un)happily employeed lead engineer who can be poached from his dysfunctional organization to work for ours, which is not-at-all-dysfunctional, stop-talking-Jim-don’t-spook-him. Depending on the size of the organization that person will be hired either openly skipping whatever bizarre paper-pusher hiring process is nominally in place, or in some cases “HR makes us do this but it’s just a formality”.

The moral of this story is, if you want to be hired, a) ignore pretty much anything that purports to be hiring process for programmers, b) befriend engineers who will cough up your name under pressure.

That’s a great market for an SAT style exam but the idea has been tried and has failed many times.

Hey I resemble that ninja boot camp graduate! ;)

But I agree, that's largely the jr developer problem / current condition. Nobody wants to hire them because MANY are horrible. I know because I was in camp with them... some can't operate a computer in a professional manner and they graduated with me...

I got lucky and finally got someone to seriously look at me and got a job.

> What there is not though, is an enormous shortage of software developer applicants.

I can't speak to the software side, but in IT there is a deluge of applicants. Lots of folks retraining, or coming in with 2 years of online ITT Tech-knockoff training. On the mid-to-high level that stratifies very quickly -- once we started filtering by (verified) CCNP/CCIEs/other certs the pool of legit applicants shrank greatly, but there was still a lot of noise.

Anecdote from when I did hiring: we needed 1-2 network engineers, low-to-mid-level and posted on craigslist, plus went through a couple headhunters we've worked with. Engineer needed to be in Atlanta, NC, DC, or Philly (though we did consider NYC-based folks in a couple cases). We posted CL ads in those cities 4 cities (not in NYC) and mentioned that we were in the entry-to-mid-level range.

We got something like 600 applications in the first day, couple thousand before the end of the week. Many were from far away from those cities, including several from overseas. Several applicants were clearly under-qualified, though I was surprised to see the number of overqualified folks, easily 30-40 applications; 7-10+ years and related degrees and certs. We didn't hire the overqualified people -- some looked too good to be true, others we worried about jumping ship quickly or being difficult to manage -- but it definitely threw me for a loop. IIRC we settled for a CCNA with a Big State 4-year degree who had the lowest salary requirements; he stayed on for about 2.5-3 years.

> You see tons of jobs out there on websites and even "desperate" listings, but the hiring process takes forever, and these guys just don't get hired. Something seems off.

From the employer side, something seems off to me as well. Our company is really desperate to hire new workers, both skilled and unskilled. But positions are staying open for months on end, despite me interviewing decent new potential hires.... corporate HR is getting really hung up on their qualifications, and are really stingy during wage negotiations.

It seems like there's kind of a collective madness going on among corporate hiring offices, where they're still behaving as though we're recovering from the great recession. And who can blame them? After all, they've spent the last 10 years of their careers in the crash and recovery - at this point, it's an old habit to play hardball with a potential new hire.

There’s academic research that shows a pattern like you describe taking off during the Reagan era of union busting.

Since then, filling important roles (at the grunt level) has taken longer, wages aren’t keeping up.

It’s almost as if it’s stupidly inefficient to have millions of workers negotiating all this on their own.

Open standards in employment make the whole process smoother. Waste less human hours. But also increase worker security, which our system has been trying to undermine to the benefit of corporate masters for decades

(Seriously; Alan Greenspan reported to Congress that growing worker insecurity was good for business during the Clinton admin)

I'm assuming your company isn't hiring because, like so many medium-large corporations, legacy products that require maintenance are driving the vast majority of revenue, and there is no need for new (American - read: expensive) talent to maintain these products. The company can save costs by maintaining these products with a smaller core SW maintenance team and/or doing integration/development overseas.

In many software/services-based orgs, salaries/benefits/pensions etc. can add up to 50-60% of costs. If revenue isn't growing or the company doesn't need "premium" American talent, many (especially large orgs) will set up fake open positions, reject candidates while looking like they are searching, and instead put a hold on hiring, hire H1Bs, or hire overseas.

Just my 2c/observations, may or may not extrapolate out. But gives me a rational framework to explain why unemployment is low (labor market is "tight") and yet employees have little bargaining power and fewer and fewer profits accrue to labor vs. capital.

Edit: Just saw this article about IBM laying off expensive employees on the front page, which fits neatly into this framework - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-17/ibm-is-be...

I think you're describing out situation pretty well, and as much as I hate it, I see the logic. That said: if we don't keep innovating, some newcomer is going to beat us up and steal our lunch money.

Maybe, maybe not. The pace of innovation is slowing to a crawl in most areas of computing technology. Look at how long IBM/Oracle have been able to derive billions from legacy products. And if you're big enough, you'll acquire whatever the "innovative" new tech is.

Yeah at my previous job we went from posting a job to hiring in as little as a week.... and 10 years later posting a job meant almost nothing as far as the time line hiring someone.

I'll echo the sentiment with anecdata: In my most recent job search, I applied to ~5k jobs before getting hired via networking. I know the online ad-boards work less well than spam email, but I mostly used them as lead generation (HN who's hiring too, but that was near useless). Still, it was ~5k jobs that I matched with and applied for over about 14 months. I interviewed at <10 companies, and got 3 offers (not too bad!). The most serious offer was for ~90k on the Peninsula, no health insurance. Due to personal medical issues, that was a hard pass (pills are ~7k/mo w/o insurance)

On the rare chance that I got a rejection from an actual person, I'd email them with a 'resume bounty' request (like a bug bounty); $15 PayPal to tell me where I am going wrong in my applications (basically, I'd buy your lunch). No one took the cash, as they all'd just email me back saying that I was perfect, just that they already hired, I lacked 5 years in skills $XXXX$, I wasn't local, I was overqualified, yadda yadda yadda.

I've really tried to get into the mind of these companies and HR departments, but I can find no logic there. I've taken people at the larger companies in my sector out to lunch, coffee, beers, etc to pick their brains. The only thing I can think of that I have a black mark in some database or another that a lot of people use (credit is near perfect, references are a-ok, career path is a bit of a mess but what Millennial's isn't? ).

I've no idea what is going on.

Yeah there's NO feedback. Even rejection emails were rare. All I got was "ghosting" from recruiters... even those I met in person.

If you met a recruiter in person and then they ghosted you, that means you failed the "sniff test." That's not literal, I'm not suggesting you literally smell, but it means you failed to present well socially. If recruiters place bad candidates they stop getting business and they go broke. Recruiters are totally technically illiterate, so they are all about that social "feel." Something you did put them off and made them not feel comfortable betting their income on you.

No that isn't it - the recruiters don't care about you so why should they reply? It's just a waste of time. Their job is about treating people as things.

I've had several recruiters ghost me, then months later contact me with potential gigs.

Yes, recruiters see you as a thing, a thing they have to try to sell. They have no clue how to determine your technical chops. So how do you think they determine whether you will be easy to sell or difficult to sell? Why do you think they have face to face meets?

That doesn't matter if the other side of the equation doesn't work out. If they can't convince the client to do an interview they will usually ghost you, regardless of your smell.

It's funny because most of them said the opposite socially, specifically saying how they thought I was quite personable compared to other candidates.

I think more likely it was experience as I was in the midst of changing careers. The unfortunate part is they could have seen that on my resume and from our phone calls (not that they pay much attention).

I actually suspect a lot of my meetings were a case where my preference level was low but they were meeting with me to sort of bank a contact they might use in the future.... but not likely now. I suspect this as after I got a job, several have suddenly followed up with me after ignoring me in the meantime....

> recruiters ... I met in person.

That was your first mistake. Recruiters provide little to no value for potential hires.

Refusing to meet them also would seem to close a door when you're looking for any option you can.

My recruiter, who found me on LinkedIn, roughly doubled my compensation.

That means you may have been able to triple it by going directly.

I wouldn't have been able to even get in the door without the recruiter; that's simply how the org operates.

I'll offer my anecdata as a counter-example. Within the past year I was offered a nice 6-figure salary at a prominent banking company after a single phone interview. I'm (just barely) a millennial also with no degree, no certifications, didn't even go to tech school.

I can't speak to your personal situation, but speaking generally I think too many tech people over-value their technical skills. If all a company needs is a warm body that can code or patch servers they will hire a better coder in India for half the price. The number one differentiator is communication and social skills. At my job there are 4 main groups I talk to: local coworkers, India coworkers, management, clients. Being a person who can talk to all 4 of those groups is valuable. Being a person who can churn out code is not particularly valuable.

Communication, of course, starts on the resume. If you're not even getting calls, I would suggest getting some help on your resume. Hire a professional if you need to.

If your job history is a mess take a few crappy consulting gigs and then a year from now you can say, "I've been successfully consulting for a while but now am looking for a place to settle in." That way you at least look consistent.

If interviewing is tough for you, then do it more. If you have stable job put your resume out there and accept at least 2-3 interviews every 6 months. Even/Especially if you are happy with your current job. Not needing the new job takes the pressure off. The practice will be good for you and you never know, you might find an amazing opportunity.

My sector is biotech, so it quite a bit different than tech. Consulting really doesn't happen. Nonetheless, thank you for the tech advice.

What's going on is that there's an oversupply of Skilled labor. They already found someone else. The greater the oversupply, the more qualified candidates they have to reject.

I know one person, she's a data analyst (2 years experience, +5 years of marketing experience) here in the bay area. hasn't been able to get a Data analyst job for 3 years now, even after applying thousands of jobs and interviewing dozens of times. Finally, she was forced to take an after school baby-sitting job for 17$/hour (bay area).

Your friend needs to pretend to be a data scientist. That's what they call data analysis now. If she's any good, then she'll be a whole lot better than any recent PhD grad (if I wasn't 5k miles away, I'd interview her at least based on your description).

Well, she doesn't have a computer science degree. She's an MBA who's learned SQL, tableau, excel, etc (working at a large company 500+ people). She pulls out data with SQL queries and knows how to use excel inside and out. she's made it all the way to the final interview, but everytime they figure out she had a baby, they assume she's going to have a 2nd one.

Isn't that an open-and-shut discrimination case?

Unfortunately no. You can easily not hire someone for "fit" without describing why you didn't think that they fit. You can also say a million other legal reasons for not hiring. Unless they specifically say that you were not hired because you're a momma then you've got a long, long hill to climb.

I strongly encourage her to contact the EEOC. https://www.eeoc.gov/employees/charge.cfm

I'd be happy to explore with your friend if I know of any consulting/contract opportunities for her and provide some guidance on resources for going forwards with that. She may get better traction that way; contractors are treated much differently from employees.

There's definitely not an oversupply of skilled labor, there is just a ton of noise in the hiring process right now.

Our software engineering job posts on LinkedIn & Indeed generate hundreds of applicants per day, the vast majority of which can't code at all. Attempting to sift through them is just too costly so we mostly use alternate sources: tech recruiters, more selective job sites. The problem is those sources heavily filter themselves and don't always use the most fair criteria.

We used to have unique challenge problems online to offer a more level playing field, but solutions were constantly posted to github so even that became quite time-consuming to maintain.

We're still hiring at a decent rate, but do have more headcount than we can fill right now. There are definitely qualified candidates out there but attempting to filter them from the mass of applicants is difficult.

I'd love to know which are the more selective job sites. I'm having trouble finding work and i haven't figured out if it's due to a horrible resume (hired a tech recruiter to do it so I assume not) or if I'm horrible at interviews.

I'm convinced that interviewing for programming jobs and being able to code are two different skills. Making it worse for myself is that I come from the military and IC so i dont have any public blogs or Github activity so i can't pretend to be a "thought leader", which I'm also pretty sure is a bullshit term.

Hired.com, Triplebyte.

Working on a side project and creating a real Github commit stream is also useful.

Eh. Triplebyte only recruits for jobs in like three cities.

As for the 'noise' factor, try red-teaming your hiring processes, though for your particular situation it may not be the best. For example: with the major job sites, make a fake profile that is a 100% match, apply for your jobs, see if the fake person gets through, at what rate, etc. Do it for 90%, 80%, 70% matches too (define the % match as you see fit).

Trying to 'hack/red-team' your own system may reveal weaknesses and flaws you weren't thinking of and help the hiring process. See what penetrates, what doesn't, chat about it over lunch, etc. And yes, it does seem like taking an adversarial approach towards your very own hiring processes is insane, but here we are.

$15 isn't a huge bounty for the risk of potential litigation/getting fired for breaking company policy for telling honest feedback. This is how I see it from HR's perspective. A prospective candidate may not take the feedback as constructive criticism, causing some backlash and issues to the recruiter.

Another reason you are not sent as a rejection letter, is because it looks bad on HR's end if you were rejected, only to get hired months later. It basically says to the candidate "Our first pick dipped out on us, we were desperate enough to go through the 2nd pool, called a bunch of people, you were our backup". HR doesn't care about you, just what works for their company.

Sending rejection letters takes effort and offers no short-term benefits from HR's standpoint. Also, it can get quite messy to manage emails, especially if HR is aggregating prospective candidates from different portals all to one email.(remoteok.io, indeed.com, glassdoor.com, careerbuilder, reactjsjobs.com, etc)

Email responses becomes difficult to manage since you get 100+ emails in your inbox daily, 95% of candidates being unqualified. HR might not be big enough to warrant a dedicated system or tooling for hiring. You can use builtin tools like indeed.com, but from my experience its slower than using email. If you want to get shit done really fast forwarding to an email is time-saving, simple, and cheap.

You can then take the best candidates there, put it in kanban / trello / notion task board, etc if its a multistage interview process.

Companies aren't going to care enough to blacklist you in some database unless you caused some serious offense to warrant this. I can only think of one company that might actually do this, and its Valve.

Also if you apply to the same company more than once, you might be dealing with the same recruiter. They might recognize your resume just from memory though

> Another reason you are not sent as a rejection letter, is because it looks bad on HR's end if you were rejected, only to get hired months later. It basically says to the candidate "Our first pick dipped out on us, we were desperate enough to go through the 2nd pool, called a bunch of people, you were our backup".

Good perspective, I had not thought of that. Thank you.

It's not really conflicting from the perspective of employers. Basically, many companies are still acting as though it's 2009 with respect to hiring practices and expect experienced people willing to work for sub-par salaries. When they aren't able to find such people anymore, they either turn to foreign workers (via visa programs), contractors (to avoid overhead costs), or just reassign more work to existing employees in order to keep labor costs down and profits up.

The net result is what you're seeing - seemingly ridiculous hiring criteria for stagnant (or in some cases dropping) wages in the midst of a "hot" job market that's really hot because the low-wage service and contractor labor segments have soaked up so many people.

> . Basically, many companies are still acting as though it's 2009 with respect to hiring practices and expect experienced people willing to work for sub-par salaries. When they aren't able to find such people anymore, they either turn to foreign workers (via visa programs), contractors (to avoid overhead costs), or just reassign more work to existing employees in order to keep labor costs down and profits up.

They're not even trying to actually find people, they're just putting on a dog and pony show to qualify for H1Bs or to keep their contractors on edge.

It's because inflation where the jobs are is much higher than the national numbers let on (because many regions are stagnant).

The CPI in 2017 lists ~2% .

But then look at housing, more than double that.

Or consider the "burrito index" You cant get a decent burrito <$10 anymore.

I know all of this is not academic, it't not my job so I cannot dedicate the time to truly lay it all out, but even for the tech "working class" we're feeling the pinch of inflation.

Companies dont want to pay rising salaries because they're inflated. Workers demand them because the standard of living @100k is dropping precipitously.

>Or consider the "burrito index" You cant get a decent burrito <$10 anymore.

Seriously? What is considered a decent burrito in this context? I guess I'm eating at all the undecent burrito places then because I've gotten huge burritos for <$10, and I thought they were good.

Naturally this is completely contextual and my point is whereas ~3yrs ago I could get a good burrito for $8 now they're $11 and that's about 33% inflation... Not 2% compounding.

This post is spot on, I work in big data. I get ask to change job on a weekly basis. When you tell them the salary, they usually say it's not possible withn a olot of dumb excuses, even though the job description will list every big data technologies in existence plus all the cloud vendor. They want a senior with experience but with an associate Eng. salary bracket. They'll tell you they can't find anyone though. Also what I've seen, if you don't check one box in your past experience. They don't want to take a chance. I think any employes should consider the ccandidata learn some of his skills, most tech workers are usually looking for another challenge because they want to learn something new. The US job market is filled with employer with impossible criteria to meet. Sad state of affairs.

Yeah big data seems to be a place where this absurdity is amplified. Everyone wants the same small handful of people with those qualifications and everyone is like 10x the number of people... and none of them want to budge on what they offer / will take.

In the meantime plenty of good folks out there willing to get into it, but naw they won't take them.

A more subtle problem, besides employers not willing to pay with money, is that, more often than not, they can't actually "pay" with interesting work (or experience or growth or something similar).

Complaining about companies thinking (or just saying) they have "big data" when all they have is moderately-sized data is more common on HN now. What's more, even the very low bar of "fits in main memory" increases rapidly enough that "big" from a couple years ago might not be any more.

> In the meantime everyone wants a "senior" (I put that in quotes because everyone's idea was absurdly different) and nobody wants anyone who is learning.

One company's senior engineer is another company's junior engineer. People sometimes "graduate" out of mid-level companies and into a Fortune 500 company. There should be a way to rank companies this way - maybe by scraping thousands of resumes to see where engineers spend their late 20s?