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Comment by dep_b | Hacker News Reader

It's kind of fascinating to see companies I've interviewed at, where I did well enough in my honest opinion to get something of an offer in yesterday's market where they didn't even went for a better candidate but simply reposted the job the same week.

What is the idea? They just have it up to find that one 0.1% developer that happens to walk through the door?

I can't imagine companies simply want to wait to roll out features they are planning to build in such a dynamic market. Something you think of today is launched by your competitor tomorrow. If you have an unfilled vacancy for two months more stuff will be rolled out two months later.

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Having been on the other side, hiring is really hard, and it's usually worse to have a bad developer in place than it is to have no developer. So the smart thing to do in most situations is err on the side of not hiring in marginal cases.

> I did well enough in my honest opinion

At a previous employer, I helped design the developer hiring process. The first step in the process was to ask candidates to pass a "do you even know C?" test. Simple stuff like writing a little string handling program from scratch and identifying coding errors in an existing file. It wasn't a lot of candidates, but a significant minority would actually argue with us when they failed these super basic tests, even after we pointed out their errors. I'm definitely not saying you are doing this, but it was not at all uncommon to have applicants that way overestimated their own skill.

Hiring is just hard, from both sides. There's a lot on the line for all involved, and a wrong decision, in either direction, is costly for everyone.

I'm not delusional there are quite a few better programmers out there, but I know I'm in the upper ranks within my field worldwide. I hired plenty of people both as developers for me as for other companies I worked at. There were a few people that really blew me away, but usually I was just glad to find somebody near my capabilities.

At one company they gave me a "PR from a junior member" to review. I thought it was great. You were challenged to both find issues but also how to communicate them in a constructive way.

Every new feature is built by one developer doing 90% of the work and a dozen others doing the last 10%. As long as the company has the 90% developer on the project, it really doesn't matter whether the new hire happens today or 6 months from now. The feature is going to remain on track.

I don't know, on a lot of projects the last 10% seems to take 90% of the time.

Exactly. I consider myself to be one of those last 10% developers who enjoys the work it takes to get good, valuable projects from mostly done to actually done (software is never done but you know what I mean). The geniuses have already moved on to the next project. You need a mix of both at any company.

Same experience. BBC links an article about exactly that phenomenon:

https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20240315-ghost-jobs-dig...

I think that often it actually is about the 0.1%, it's the simplest explanation (but the ghost jobs article gives a few other explanations that are also good). Software development does not have a minimum headcount, everything you can build with four you might also be able to build with three, it's not like you need a well defined number of chairs to be occupied.

And it's actually worse than a naive look at the numbers suggests. Some of those forever openings aren't just listed by the would-be hiring company, but also by a happy flock of companies from that cottage industry of recruiting middle men, some disguised a little through different wording, others not disguised at all. Five companies looking for skill xy, and they are all the for same position that is only ever filled if the 0.1% happens to pass by.

Not every company is urgently looking to fill a role. It might be more acceptable for them to wait for a candidate who is a better fit, than to hire someone they're not thrilled about, and increase the costly risk of it not working out.

Managers keeping their budget alive.

That may be true in ZIRP era. Now a days, there's no budget for empire building. The bigger your team the more that you are accountable for delivering and the higher the expectations.

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