What a bizarre way to begin a working relationship.
Employers demanded applications instead of resumes, so candidates used copy machines. Then they wanted block lettering, so candidates used type writers. ATS systems could search for keywords, so candidates flooded their resumes with them. Then employers allowed online applications, and the floodgates opened proper - applications from all over the world, desperate for good employment. So they made you create an account, and applicants wrote or used bots to automate it - which became site features like “Quick Apply” on LinkedIn and Indeed. Practical interviews used to be a single round for only the most senior roles, but then employers wanted everyone to be as qualified as those roles but not pay them that much, which started the cheating arms race.
Ultimately, the problem remains a glut of qualified talent demanding salaries to pay the bills, and employers who want to pay as little as possible. The two sides are adversaries by default, and few companies do the work of mending the relationship into something more cooperative.
I hope the folks we hired are paid enough to retain because there were was absolutely no glut of talent. It was hard to find the folks we wound up hiring. There was a glut of applications, yes, but the vast majority were totally unqualified.
My perspective on this issue is that the reason there's an abundance of candidates in any given application pool is because of a mismatch of expectations between employees and employers, even today. Employers have cultivated an environment where candidates must job hop frequently to grow their earnings, because internal advancement has dried up and employers haven't respected loyalty in decades. This results in a plurality of the workforce "always looking for work", because they see no potential in their current role for growth or advancement; in fact, the whole reason they applied to your role is because they wanted that growth or advancement, and now they have it, so it's time to apply elsewhere for the next step up.
I get that this environment totally sucks for both parties, but it's important to note that employers are the only ones who can change the system, since they hold the bulk of the power in individual negotiations. Unfortunately, the current attitude seems to be more of the status quo: more technology to "make it easier to find the best candidates" (thus removing humans from even more of the hiring process), forcing existing workers out (thus increasing the applicant pool), and then bemoaning about their problems on Business News ("too many unqualified applicants") or forums.
Applicants didn't create this mess, and we can't fix it.
Applicants don’t have to apply to Google or Facebook for jobs they’re not qualified for, and if they stopped, the mess you’re referring to would disappear. At least at Google and Facebook’s doors, anyway. It might move somewhere else simply because there are a lot of people (literally everyone) looking for jobs that pay well.
It’s funny to tell someone on the other side of the interview table that they’re confused, when they’re giving you information that can help you. Knowing that there is an abundance of low quality applications is useful information. Mismatch of expectations might be an accurate generalization, but arguing the expectations of applicants isn’t part of the problem is not accurate at all. Applicants definitely aim high and spam companies with resumes for jobs they’re not qualified for. I even tell new grads to aim a little higher than the exact job description, but within reason. To be fair, a lot of people don’t know what’s reasonable and don’t know how competitive their cohort is and they have little to lose by taking their chances.
The lore about having to job-hop has always existed, it was true 30 years ago, and it’s still a story people tell today. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t. Don’t get confused by hearing stories. Neither the number of stories you hear, nor the story-teller’s confidence in their take, proves anything about how the business world works. You need more first-hand knowledge of how many people don’t have to job hop. Companies do promote people, and some companies do respect loyalty. Instead of insisting it’s a fight and wallowing, go find the good jobs at good companies working for good managers and figure out how to stand out from the applicants who are less qualified than you.
Counter-point: employers don't have to pay garbage wages while demanding FAANG-quality candidates, thus focusing the talent pool on the few companies that do pay wages that might help candidates reach into the bottom of the Middle Class.
> It might move somewhere else simply because there are a lot of people (literally everyone) looking for jobs that pay well.
That is the (unspoken) point I've been trying to make, without being so overt about it. People need more money. Prices keep going up, productivity has skyrocketed, but wages have stubbornly refused to keep historical pace in the long view. The need for ever-growing sums of money just to survive is a key driver in the constant glut of applicants for jobs, one that is exacerbated by the staunch refusal of businesses to pay appropriate wages outside of the tech sector.
> It’s funny to tell someone on the other side of the interview table that they’re confused, when they’re giving you information that can help you.
They're really not, though. Employers whine about a lack of qualified domestic candidates as justification for outsourcing jobs or importing migrants on precarious visas, but then also refuse to engage with local Higher Education institutions to "properly train" the candidates they need or contribute to on-the-job training. As the age-old HR koan goes: The CEO asks HR, "What if we pay for job training and they leave?", while HR replies, "What if we don't pay for training and they stay?" There is no zero-sum game being played, here, and the actions of employers do not align with their verbal complaints about the state of job applications and the labor market. They're complaining the basement is flooded while leaving the firehose turned on.
> The lore about having to job-hop has always existed, it was true 30 years ago, and it’s still a story people tell today.
Yeah, nah. This is a recent trend, and a very recent narrative. In the 2000s and early 2010s, I was still being actively penalized for the appearance of job hopping, in the form of lower salaries and limited upward mobility. That really only began changing in the 2014-2016 window, when suddenly it became more acceptable as most millennials and Xers hadn't exactly had stable careers like our predecessors. In less than a decade, that shift from "job hopping=bad" to "job hopping=acceptable" accelerated to "job hopping=required if you want to survive and thrive". That attitude only came about because the cost of everything kept going up, and up, and up, while our wages and upward mobility stagnated if we stayed put. Loyalty hasn't been rewarded since the 80s, but especially in a post-2008 world, it's been a hindrance to individual success and is solely the fault of employers, not employees.
> You need more first-hand knowledge of how many people don’t have to job hop.
I have plenty of first-hand knowledge from my own career, and have second-hand knowledge from the careers of my parents' circles compared to the careers of my senior mentors (Xers), colleagues, and juniors. Add in the data curated by all the other groups trying to sell their own narrative, data gathered by governments, and just casual observations of both domestic and global employment trends, and this isn't exactly a difficult conclusion to reach by anyone reasonably well-informed and suitably objective about it.
> Instead of insisting it’s a fight and wallowing, go find the good jobs at good companies working for good managers and figure out how to stand out from the applicants who are less qualified than you.
It is a fight, though. A fight for everyone to be able to make rent, pay bills, and have a decent quality of life on a full-time job. That's the fight. Such a lifestyle has increasingly been constrained solely to those in Big Tech, especially in urban areas, and it's why there's such a fierce resistance to arbitrary RTO mandates and a willfulness to cheat on exams. Your retorts to me essentially boil down to the age-old propaganda of, "Workers should know their place and follow the rules for their own good," which only works when the rules ensure their basic needs are met. That is not the case, as can be evidenced from even a casual glance at current global events. Populism doesn't arise from peace, love, and good times for all, it arises from a broken system that doesn't satisfy the needs of the masses. That is why hiring is broken, in a nutshell.
A good leader understands the system they operate within, its flaws as well as its strengths, and what is or isn't within their ability to fix or improve upon. Individual managers and employers simply cannot fix what amounts to a broken system rooted in short-termism. Sure, working with recruiters can ease the burden, but that also comes at a substantial cost. The point is that the usual refrains in self-help books or "visionary thought leaders" don't work when the system itself is at fault, and that's very much the case here. It's not possible to eliminate cheating solely through discipline; rather, the system must be amended such that there's little to no incentive to cheat in the first place. Right now, there's every incentive to cheat the system when it could lift you out of poverty or give you a substantially improved quality of life, and that's why it's on the rise professionally today, just as it was in academia not a decade ago.
Desperation is the root cause of a multitude of negative outcomes. To reduce those outcomes, you must reduce the amount of desperation in a society.
I do agree that for any given job a large chunk of applicants are people who have no business applying (IE barely capable coding themselves out of a paper bag or didn't read the job description), but there's always a long tail of plausible applicants if the job isn't a trash posting.
Except you don't always simply know they weren't qualified. Only that they didn't pass your filter.
I know, I know: In many cases, it's reasonably clear the candidate simply isn't even ballpark qualified. But when we get to "maybe" territory, the recall-precision gap, and hence room for false negatives, is also quite large.
Where my sympathy dissipates, though, is the knowledge that workers are merely responding to the ever-increasing demands of employers. It's ultimately up to the employers to fix this mess, because they're the ones who created it in the first place. It might mean an in-person career event to weed out remote candidates, if you're adamant about a local hire, with humans reviewing resumes in-hand, in real time, absent ATS and AI systems getting in the way. It might mean forgoing practical interviews entirely, in favor of better verbal interviews that assess skills and competencies, with hypothetical questions AI can't quickly or reliably answer.
And it also might mean rebuilding company loyalty and incentivizing people to stay instead of leave. It might mean reducing the amount of jobs you're posting externally by resuming promoting internally again. It might mean dangling carrots that keep workers from jumping ship every two years to grow wages in a meaningful way.
Point is, there's a lot of ways to address this, but the current attitude is "MOAR TECHNOLOGY", which doesn't seem to address either side's core grievances around the hiring and employment processes.
The only way to stop people from blasting resumes is to make it cost them something, for example charge $5 — which goes to charity — to apply for the job.
That's just more short-termism. It ignores the desperation of the masses for the Middle Class lifestyle they've been promised, in favor of yet-another-hurdle to be jumped over for a chance at a job they need to survive. All you'll end up doing is encouraging further fraud with such a proposal.
So what can we try instead? Well for starters, we can focus on reducing the need to seek external applicants in the first place. While labor mobility is critical to a healthy workforce, it's also worth noting that most workers would rather have stability over mobility, all else being equal. People want to work to live, not live to work - and having a reliable job, with a reliable wage that keeps pace with inflation, that enables them to buy a home and pay the bills and maybe take a vacation every year, will keep them from seeking other opportunities elsewhere, thus reducing the overall applicant pool for new positions. Workers are surprisingly fine with their excess value going to Capital, provided they're not having to decide between paying for insulin or rent this month because they haven't had a raise in three years.
In addition to decreasing applicant pools by improving job stability and longevity, we can also stop placing arbitrary requirements irrelevant to the position at hand. This sounds counter-intuitive - if you remove the degree requirement from a role, you'll have more applicants - but the reality is that oftentimes workers will pass up roles not requiring a degree because they'll perceive it as being more "junior". This isn't a great idea for every role or business, obviously, and YMMV, but it can be a different way of thinning the herd.
Then there's the tried, the true, the oft-reliable:
> A lot use recruiters to reach out to talent, that is how I got my current job.
Look, in case my comment history doesn't make this glaringly obvious, I'm not great at the whole social networking thing. Recruiters connect highly-effective introverts like myself, with employers who don't want to rely solely on word-of-mouth referrals (especially in an era where said referrals are openly traded or sold on forums like Blind). All of my big career moves came through external recruiters, of whom I'm profoundly grateful to for opportunities I wouldn't have had otherwise. While I'm generally against outsourcing as a practice, the fact is that a good recruiting firm will save your teams time they can use on meaningful work, and only present candidates to you they feel will meet your needs. Whether or not the employer will trust the recruiter is a topic for another day (I've lost count of the number of times my recruiter, myself, and the customer's PoC all thought I was perfect, but a Director somewhere didn't want to trust outsiders), but it's still arguably one of the better investments a company can make in talent acquisition.
As an employer, I’m flummoxed that a recruiter with a human fibre is required. It means instead of paying higher salary, 20% goes to the pocket of the intermediary the first year.
How do you plan to defraud the banking system when you need to pay $5 to send in your application?
The issue is that it takes almost zero effort to apply for a job so there needs to be proof of work on the applicants side. The easiest proof of work in through our banking system because there is massive amounts of effort to prevent fraud and ensure interoperability.
Alternatively that proof of work could be that you need to physically drop off your resume like in the pre-internet days.
The same need to go for the company side, they need to have skin in the game too when interviewing a candidate. This is why I am against automated tests which are used at places like Amazon.
And if the employer posts a real job but the candidate doesn’t get a response, or is immediately rejected, will the employer get accused of wire fraud?
Sounds like a nightmare for employers.
Oh are we talking about minimum wage jobs, labor & the proletariat now? I thought we were talking about software engineering, where the average salary is very comfortably in the 6 figure range in the US. If you’d rather be a plumber or a teacher, go for it, I hear the interviews are shorter. ;)
Why would charging a small fee for applications encourage fraud? I don’t see the logic. The problem you complained about is the low-effort spam applications, like LinkedIn’s 1-click apply-all button. If that was no longer free, it would certainly reduce the spam and make applicants think more strategically about their budgets.
Companies already use recruiters. Recruiters are expensive and many provide low quality leads, partly because of the way recruiting is incentivized, and partly because good software engineers don’t have to move around that much.
That said, I suppose I should amend my conclusion: no single employer can fix this either, as this problem is the collective result of businesses forcing shorter cycles of tenure in general; short-termism, in other words. Your company can make it easier on yourselves by retaining a great recruiting firm or retaining good hires for longer, but you'll still be inundated with a glut of paperwork until and unless other firms do the same thing in large enough quantities to affect real change.
If everyone is struggling to keep their heads above water, those dwindling few manning the lifeboats are undoubtedly going to get swarmed.
I know the price: Instead of an ad on LinkedIn (100€ per recruit in 2019), we now pay recruiters 20% of the yearly salary.
In France the “salaire brut” is 60k€ → We pay 12k€ before an employee starts working, excluding the time WE spend in interviews. That’s a 12.000% increase over a simple ad.
> no single employer can fix this either
Yes, thank you for diagnosing the problem! For me, it’s due to LinkedIn. They know perfectly well that bulk-apply-in-1-click is hell. They could fix it in one day.
Hiring low-level employees requires less vetting. Upskilling for more senior roles within your own company means you get to skip things like cultural fit (because they presumably already are), work history (it's in the employers own records), and references (that would be the coworkers and managers they already have).
Pay enough to keep the ones worth keeping (and increase it with time, to match inflation at minimum), upskill employees, and promote from within, and this problem should pretty well fix itself
This is the natural state of a competitive environment, and interviews will get “better” for candidates when there are more jobs than good candidates. But be careful what you wish for; if the job market gets less competitive for candidates, salaries and benefits and working conditions go with it.
While there might be some truth it to, framing it as an arms race is a mentality that will not help the average candidate, and might do them harm. Employers always have and always will want to pay as little as possible, obviously, that’s the definition of a company. But they do actually compete with each other for good talent, and they do pay a lot relative to other jobs, and some companies’ definitions of pay as little as possible is still to pay enough that employees are well compensated and don’t leave.
We're called freelance consultants. And we charge a high price for that service.
It was, by far, the most boring interview I've ever had to participate in. The leetcode problem was easy (detect if two strings are anagrams; solved with O(n) solution in < 10 LOC; then aggregate sets of anagrams). System design was easy because it is to the point that it is largely "formulaic". It feels like those rhythm games where you need to know when the trigger is coming and the pattern to hit those triggers (talk about functional requirements -> talk about non-functional requirements -> write some API routes -> draw a load balancer (because of course, there's always a load balancer) -> draw a service -> draw Redis/Memcached -> draw a database). It's comically laughable how it's just like a rhythm game at this point.
What I don't understand is why teams don't just "get to the point". A lot of times, the assessment is looking for specific notes. Why not just ask about those notes directly? A friend recently went through an interview where he was docked for not using C# `yield` when implementing an `IEnumerable`. But had the interviewer asked "What is `yield` and why would you use it?", the interviewer would have gained the same exact insight in 15 seconds with one question.
I think what's also striking is how slow orgs are to adapt their interview process to account for AI. There's a distinct lack of focus on code reviews as part of the assessment. If the future of coding is AIs for productivity, then teams should be adding code reviews into their process (check for correctness, check for defects, check for performance, check for security, etc).
"Writing code is easy, reading code is hard"
An interview based on reading, explaining and critiquing complicated code would give a better window into a candidate's skills than having them solve the kind of coding challenge that can be completed in a short interview.
Also, being able to identify which algorithms would be useful in solving a unique problem and explain what the pros & cons are would go further than implementing an algorithm abstractly.
The guy gave me 30 lines of code, and asked questions about it. Including finding the questionable constructs in it.
Interviewer had a small API. Found missing error handling, missing validations, poor choice of ID column type, missing index for a high volume read query, possible XSS vector.
Loved the format so much I ended up making a small FOSS tool for code review as interview: https://coderev.app
"Imagine that this code was written by a junior dev; review it and tell me how it can be improved, where the problems are, and other feedback".
"We just hired a new intern and he pushed this PR. I need you to help me review this code for issues and make sure it's production ready".if not Counter(str1) - Counter(str2): # success, they are anagrams
str1 = "a"
str2 = "ab"Counter(str1) - Counter(str2) | Counter(str2) - Counter(str1)
That ought to work. I'd hope Python's caching doesn't recompute the Counter for long strings.
And these are all candidates with 5+ years experience, sometimes 10+. I hate the leetcode gauntlet, but I also am really surprised how much worse candidates are now on average that they used to be (I’ve been around for about 25 years now), and how the minute you try to dig a little deeper to see if they know how things really work, the more it seems that they have no understanding whatsoever of the basics and somehow treat computers as magical black boxes.
I do understand I am privileged by having grown with the technology, starting in the 8-bit era, through an electronic engineering degree, and now in k8s etc. but with so much educational material available for free you’d think that even people in their 20s/30s now should be able to have a better idea of how things work.
But the catch is... the people doing the hiring must themselves ideally be talented, energetic, skillful mentors who envisage building a positive culture.
On the other hand, from my perspective and experience on both sides of the interview table, to me it seems like the perception that this is adversarial is coming primarily from young candidates whinging on the internet in large numbers about interviews being unfair or “broken” or doing it the wrong way. Every time this comes up on HN, there are hordes of comments demanding we stop whiteboarding in interviews, or claiming anything not exactly in the job description is out of bounds, or decrying the abuse that coding live inflicts. There are blog posts every week about how to fix the problem, where the problem is usually the interviewee’s comfort, and not the company’s efficiency or effectiveness.
The truth is that companies need people, and the employees there do want new colleagues. If you truly understand that, and also that the selection process is unavoidable and working as designed, then it will help you navigate the selection process and appeal to the company, it will help you get the job.
I’m well aware of the fears young candidates have, since I was one. Getting a job can be hard, and it might even be getting harder over time. But to me it’s also funny that software engineers looking for 6-figure salary jobs complain about interviews and competition and having to demo their skills for an hour or two. Don’t forget to look around at other industries and ask whether it’s really better over there. People in music and films and advertising and art have to grind for years, suffer low-wage or historically unpaid internships. Doctors have to do residency, grad school, and get licensed. Most people make less money, many people have to do labor. Most jobs have much bigger downsides than what we have to do in our interviews as software engineers.
We have opportunity and privilege and with the right practice and attitude and with reasonable expectations, it’s really not that hard to do well in interviews and land a good job. Many kids are hearing stories of FAANG and million dollar salaries and expecting to somehow land their first job out of school in one of the top 5 most coveted and competitive companies. I know this because I just spent a day at a university career fair a few weeks ago talking to hundreds of graduating seniors, most of whom are all expecting to shoot the moon for the same 3 jobs, and most of whom are not very eager to consider the idea of starting at a smaller company and working their way up for a few years. FAANG feels adversarial only because it’s actually legitimately super competitive, but as a candidate, figuring out how to have a non-adversarial approach is the key to getting the job. Tools like this are the opposite of what they need.
these aren't justifications for the confrontational interview filter, but some upstream factors that are worth picking at to see if something better could become a solution to them.
Suck it up, it’s part of the job. If you can’t do it, you don’t belong. Simple as that.
You say that as if there's The One True Interview Routine™ and it doesn't change from team to team, person to person, month to month. I actually would bet that no single organization interviews with the consistency you're describing, not even FAANG with their holier-than-thou grinders
If it wasn't such a monster drain on human productivity, I think it'd be funny if there was "rolling interviews" where each new hire got to send prior hires though "the process" on the yearly anniversary of those prior hires