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Comment by Apreche | Hacker News Reader

What works is companies not demanding that their employee be the square peg that fits their square hole. The square peg doesn’t exist. You’re going to have to hire someone who doesn’t already have the specific skills you need and invest in training them and educating them. The interview process is just to evaluate if they are capable of succeeding in that process. Yes, it means companies have to take risk. It’s better than the risk of trying to carry on long term short-staffed.

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Unfortunately, the skill of being trainable/educable is very unevenly distributed in the population and very hard to assess from afar. Instead, companies hire based on whether you've already been trained/educated in how to do the thing, which amounts to letting someone else take on the risk associated with your failing to learn something.

If I were tasked with solving this, I'd advocate for more frank discussion and use of various pseudo tests, e.g. SAT or GRE scores. This strikes a lot of people as unfair and non-inclusive.

That's a very good point. Over the course of my career, the best people I've seen are those that are really good at educating themselves and keep constantly learning new things. They were a small minority though of the coworkers I've worked with and an even smaller minority of people I've interviewed (the problem is that when trying to hire people who have those qualities, it's hard to avoid false positives).

> various pseudo tests

Leetcode fits this too

All people I know who have been good at leetcode have been good at coding (of course they may lack other important skills but that you can assess with other questions). You can't become good at leetcode without being good at logical thinking. But not all good coders are good at it because it also requires skills unrelated to the job to be good at leetcode.

I do not advocate for leetcode tests, but I think they have a bit unfair reputation. There are many worse interview questions.

I agree with you, for what it's worth. I think some of the "easy" leetcode questions are probably a decent filter, they're often contrived enough to force you t handle an edge case or two but simple enough that they should be solvable within a few minutes - they're a step above fizz buzz.

They filter for a few super important qualities - can you solve a simple problem, follow some basic instructions, write somewhat comprehensible code. But most importantly, if you get stuck, how do you react. If your response is to lash out and blame the questions or the interview, that's a huge red flag that you're going to react like that when challenged in the work place. I wish I wasn't speaking from experience.

It would be better to see how many hours they’ve played something like starcraft 2 for logical thinking and working under pressure

I think if you actually selected for this, you would get people who are very low in the conformity and desire-to-please-boss categories

I think this has less to do with assessment issues in trainability and is rather an economic thought: I don't have to train the employee that has already been trained by my competition. You can see a similar effect in companies pushing more and more training to academic institutions, expecting them to produce full fledged developers from day one (at least it's the case here in europe).

> It’s better than the risk of trying to carry on long term short-staffed

Companies don’t feel that way. They feel they can just ramp up the workload on existing employees “until we can hire more.” What are they going to do, leave? Where do they think they’re going to go? They’ll be met with the same situation at another company, except they’ll be on the other side of the table this time.

If there are companies with money, no employees, and the urgent desire to hire them, that breaks this equilibrium. The overworked employees jump ship to the startup, the incumbents become more desperate and finally relent.

At some point, your employees don't just magically work harder. And then you fail to meet customer demand resulting in lost potential revenue. By the time this happens you're so far in the hole it's challenging to climb out.

This is the (well, yet another) result of going for decades with such weak labor protections.

If the answer to "What are they going to do?" is "strike", or "leave and take a massive severance payout because that's what their union negotiated in the contract that specifies you can't overwork them by more than X amount", then the company no longer has that abusive option on the table. They have to hire someone to fill that role.

I'm recently interested in the question of unions, and I'm wondering, if there any ICT unions somewhere? Or, at least, attempts of creating such? I was also thinking that it can be difficult to officially unite many developers worldwide. But can it be possible to get data ownership back? E.g. collectively crawl job openings from LinkedIn, and leave some personal reviews on them, at some independent platform?

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