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Comment by programmertote | Hacker News Reader

I interviewed ~30 people total between 2018 and 2019, and I have to agree with you. There is no shortage of applicants. Just the shortage of qualified people.

Side note - I do NOT use whiteboard technique in my interviews. I ask the candidates questions about the stuff they mention in their resumes and go deep in the technical discussion based on their responses (or I told them to walk me through one of their recent projects be it a work project or their side project). Using that 'simple' technique, you can easily filter out so many pretenders (as I'd like to call them, who have splendid resumes but little to back things up when grilled the details about their resumes).

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This is the method I like to use as an interviewer.

But asking about work projects specifically can be tricky, since you have to avoid any proprietary bits, to avoid any possible appearance of IP taint.

If they don't have open source projects to dig into, hypothetical plausible system problems (not leetcode exercises, nor puzzles) are an option.

You still have to watch out for people who know a lot of the right engineering things to say, and/or have done prep memorizing and drilling, rather than speaking from experience. (Example from one of the links in this thread, which had an example of a repetition flash card app, saying that UDP is connectionless. I don't know what good purpose would be served by having that info on a flash card for interview prep, other than to help someone who knows absolutely nothing about it to bluff their way through an interview that asks about it.)

Very similar experiences here. And I was interviewing people we've tried to pouch from best paying companies like Google, and had stream of newgrads from the top-notch schools. So I'm assuming candidates I've been dealing with were far above the average.

From what I can tell, there's a sea of people who can barely do anything with some hand-holding, then each level of knowledge, competence and experience you want to go higher, you have to slice the pool by 100. By the time you get to level where people can competently drive non-trivial projects, there's a severe shortage.

If you find yourself rejecting most candidates from Google and top notch notch schools, maybe the problem is not the candidates but your standards.

We weren't "rejecting most of candidates from Google" - I never said that. We were trying to pouch some really good people from them. The standards weren't the problem because we were hiring a lot of SWEs. Literally hundreds in few years. And companies like Amazon, Google, Facebook, etc. do have a large pool of above average pool of engineers. But it's not like just because someone works there makes them necessarily a hire. Same with schools.

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