Ask HN: What's with the repeated job posts on "Who's hiring"? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What's with the repeated job posts on "Who's hiring"?

86 pointsrafavento41 comments

I've been applying to some jobs (EM) that are posted on "Who's Hiring", getting rejected without even an interview and then see them posted again and again. I'm ok with me not being the best candidate but I can't fathom the idea that not a single candidate was good enough in months.

What's going on here?

View on HN

I've posted on "Who's hiring" for years now, and hired many engineers from those posts. We reject the vast majority of candidates, and to those who we reject, it might seem like we can't hire "a single candidate." That's not true - if it were, I'd stop posting here!

> if it were, I'd stop posting here!

unless you (the royal you) are posting it for other motives other than hiring.

Are you perchance gesturing towards stock owned companies trying to improve their public looks by creating a look of growing via ghost job postings?

No, that couldn’t be it. Yes, the incentive exists for them to do that, but I’m sure their conscious wouldn’t let them lead people on and waste their time like that.

Maybe it's a subconscious motivation?

Also a premium ad spot for free. It would be interesting to see the CTR of these "campaigns".

When I used "we" in my post, it's because I don't make hiring decisions unilaterally.

I was hired by this guy for my first job in Software Engineering after applying via Hacker News in 2018. True story!

Unicorn hunting is probably some of it. I followed up on one that sent me a rejection letter after two interviews and just said "I see your job has been re-posted" Never heard back. =)

I see a lot of unicorn job postings here and elsewhere. Bunch of companies here in the midwest are looking for 5 years experience in AI pipeline engineering. Those people exist, sorta*, but they aren't taking $60/hr contract gigs from bureaucratic hellscape Acme Corp types. Likewise, I see a lot of startups led by technical hustler types (more power to them) who would never pass their own hiring expectations. Your CTO is a webdev with 6 months prompt engineering. Why would an actual expert agree to work for them?

*unclear if experience from 5 years ago is relevant to current practice.

> Your CTO is a webdev with 6 months prompt engineering

Lol, these interviews make me so uncomfortable.

Reminds me of this thread, and this answer in particular.

https://www.reddit.com/r/recruiting/comments/1kzvlau/comment...

Ignoring the contract for low pay part

How else are you supposed to hire people better then yourself?

>Your CTO is a webdev with 6 months prompt engineering.

I was once interviewed by a girl who was probably not much more than an intern, I ended up explaining a couple things for her during our call; she didn't know AWS services had quotas, for instance. She was interviewing me for a Devops job that required 10 years (yeah, 10) of experience with AWS.

After our call, the CTO came back to me (we are somehow acquainted, that's why I applied there in the first place), to tell me the feedback he got from this woman is that I don't seem to know my stuff real well ... It's been two years and their team are mostly the same people, I don't think they ever hired anyone.

Big waste of time. A lot of people on these nu-companies are just LARPing, they do that until money runs out, blame it on "the economy" and move along.

I both got a job through such a thread, and have now seen the other side of the applicant pipeline. The average applicant (in general, idk about HN in particular) is not very strong! Especially true when you consider the alternative of preserving runway and being patient.

I don’t understand the argument for being patient. If you think the new hire will lead to increased profits, there’s an opportunity cost every day you don’t have them on board. And sure, maybe you wait for the best person and they are more productive, but they might be out the door in a few years.

Quality is more important than quantity in engineering, so a mediocre hire can be a net negative. In so many ways:

- consuming time and attention from people who help them

- time spend checking and fixing their work

- additional maintenance costs from poorly thought out solutions

- time spent reproducing and fixing bugs

- lowering morale of better engineers

- creating whatever the opposite of “a culture of excellence” is

- consuming management time in performance management

- inability to interview or saying “yes” to even worse hires

good thing the modern interview process is so efficient at filtering against candidates like this /s

Smells to me that if you can be patient then you’re not after a need. Companies than can hire, hire because they can and not because they need? Isn’t that what got us into this mess?

There is always a need for very good engineers, and you never know when one will come up.

As other posters said, if you get a bad hire (or even mediocre hire), it might be total negative - both because of negative contributions, but also because maybe the management only gave you one spot, and now you've given it to mediocre person, you no longer have a chance to giving to someone better.

Back when I was at a startup, we've were looking for the new people basically constantly. Very few people applied however (we were C++, not web, and in the constrained system...) and even fewer people passed, so we ended up with 1-2 people per year total.

Anecdotal data

As a hiring a manager, I posted a job offer in Who’s hiring, and doubt I’ll do it again anytime soon.

In my field of work, I am looking for skills other than software (maths, physics, engineering…). There were few qualified applicants coming from the thread. Most of them were nice. One candidate, whose background was unrelated to my field of work, got very offended when I told them it wasn’t the right fit.

This never happened when screening candidates that reached out other means (LinkedIn, Lever…)

There's a large number of people who might have the skill. Tech companies have been laying people off, too, which increases the talent pool. That lets them be picky. If patient, they'll get a better employee.

On the other side, techniques recruiting is getting harder. They've long had to deal with applications that have nothing to do with the job, by people with no experience, and people who can't code. Now, AI's might be writing applications or sample code. On busy sites like HN, they might also just get many applications. Even a reasonable, hiring manager might have difficulty trusting an application enough for an interview.

Those are my two theories for most of it. Others include companies prioritizing culture fit, status, or job adds that are schemes. Some of these happen in other places.

Some of the posters even ask you to contact them directly, and then ghost you when you respond.

My workplace reposts the same senior dev ad each month. And we’re not reposting it because no one was good enough last month, it’s is we want all the senior devs, we’ve hired a few from there now.

I got a gig from who's hiring a few years ago. I also interviewed at some other places which were not a fit. Some places never got back to me. It has been a mix.

It probably varies from company to company.

Sometimes the company might set the bar impossibly high. Other companies might be rejected by the candidates.

Given the current economic situation, I think a tech job that stays open for longer then 2-3 months is a warning sign about the company. (Except for jobs that require ultra-rare skills, but most jobs I see don't require them.)

I am on the site because it is full of very thoughtful and intelligent people in the tech industry.

I don't stand a chance in an interview pool made up of a sample of HN readers.

Outside of HN, I am a successful IT director, with a graduate degree and a good career. Here, I am an auto-reject bottom-rung parasitic loser that never went to Stanford.

You're being harsh on yourself.

People are not rated on a single scale. Not everyone on HN is better than you on every type of scale an employer will use.

There are many people who are better than you at some things, but an employer is looking at the complete package, and not any one skill in particular.

Some times they get so many (often low-quality) applicants they just bin hundreds at a time for arbitrary reasons.

Other times the jobs were never real, it's a "growth hack" like other forms of spamming, posted to advertise the company and sell the illusion the company is growing, not slowly sinking.

Tech industry hiring heavily believes in the "fixed mindset." Meaning that people are unable to grow. Combine with extreme risk avoidance, an explosion in the number of stacks, and no appetite for waiting a week for a dev to learn another thing. No hire.

I have seen enough devs being corporate drones and people who say they want to learn but do nothing to be tilting towards “fixed mindset”.

I do have myself as a counter example but that’s small N and as usual always others are lazy ;)

Clock-punchers are similarly represented among other stacks. Sounds like an orthogonal concern.

Parent was nagging that “tech” is somehow stuck on the notion people are of a fixed mindset and was writing like it wasn’t true, because devs would somehow be different - or himself for sure.

I think a big part of this problem is HR non technical recruiters. They really have no idea who to hire and trash people based on dumb voodoo criteria. They however will fight to the death on how important they are for hiring.

I have different experience - usually it is tech people that are toxic and trying to prove candidates are stupid because they didn’t know that one thing person asking lives by and is his bread and butter.

It is like they are never interested in what I do know and experienced but picking some thing they pride themselves on.

Like I never ran into issues with file descriptors on Linux and interview was about C# development well senior level so I guess it is fine.

Other time well I have comp sci degree so for a software dev with C# in web development it is perfectly reasonable to ask math questions I wasn’t expecting and then conclude I wasn’t prepared and wasted their time.

Well one time it was about C# development and writing code using generics that one I most likely should have practiced more often but I don’t use it as much and it would take me couple hours to brush up on it to be proficient - but was shot down as I couldn’t remember the syntax correctly.

I am happy I don’t work in those places so I am happy they did that :)

HR filters I probably haven’t seen from all the ones I never heard back from.

I've seen the same position posted for a YC-backed company for over a year. I commented on it months ago, it's funny to see this topic come up again. We seriously need some legislation in this area. Finding a job as a tech worker is hard enough.

Collecting resumes then upselling you on a service.

That’s also what the Looking to be Hired thread is scraped for.

Hard to prove and I don't want to accuse anyone, but could be just posting for visibility.

People are searching for people. I'm not in the demo. yet it's interesting to look where the interests are.

And if you look further there are enough of people who were actually hired because of this.

Technical and culture fit likely.

Though with a large pool you’d expect it to close.

Hope they are real jobs.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com