Ask HN: Are tech companies becoming more unrealistic in hiring? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Are tech companies becoming more unrealistic in hiring?

13 pointsdiminium18 comments

Yes, we know the problems of hiring the "wrong person" and the disasters they can bring to the team. However, the loss opportunity of being understaffed to not do all the projects you want to do is also an equally difficult problem.

Lately, I've seen the requirements of tech hiring get higher and higher and higher. If it get's any higher, the only people that's available to hire are sociopaths and liars because no living person on earth could ever fulfill these requirements. If the trend keeps going this way, a guy like Dennis Ritchie would be unhireable!

Is it just me or are tech companies becoming more unrealistic in their hiring practices? Is this a good thing in the long run?

View on HN

It would be acceptable if salaries rose along with requirements. I do not see that happening where I am.

This is my biggest gripe with hiring, and it's something that will have to rise as requirements and responsibilities rise for developers.

I might be wrong but salaries in the bay (and I suspect other tech hubs) are ridiculous compare to other areas of the US.

Well, taxes, living expenses (Housing, food, transportation) are equally ridiculous compared to other areas of the US too.

While true, and more so in recent years than a few years ago, I think the cost of salary is way more ridiculous than it needs to be because of the bidding wars. Some are getting above market rate (or what market rate should have been) and stock out the door. That isn't typical for any other place. And college grads from Stanford are getting a premium for entry level salary according to a few TC articles I read that aren't typical for others.

As a person who graduated 10 months back, I am not disagreeing with you that the raw numbers look crazy. However, when you normalize those taking into account environmental factors that I mentioned (housing, food and other expenses), I am not convinced you save remarkably more than you would in a different part of the country. Again, this is anecdotal evidence based on me living in SF and Austin, and knowing what salaries look like in both places.

Sure. I'm basing mine on Portland, Seattle, and SF (areas I've lived in). I'm sure the housing price jump definitely adds to it more now than ever.

Sadly, that's because other areas of the US are trying their best to NOT be an innovation capital. There really should be more Silicon Valleys but most other areas in the country don't have the will to do so.

I am not sure it is that simple. The bay area just beats the crap of other places hands down when it comes to starting companies.

Let us look at one of the closest competitors: Austin. This is a city that has a great cultural scene, no state taxes, cheap living, and a good C.S. school close by to get candidates. Yet, there are hardly any software startups in the Austin area. Most folks who graduated with me moved to the bay area. There are more latent variables in what makes the San Francisco bay area tick. If this is the case for Austin's competition, I am not sure how easy it would be for one to inorganically make a city, say in the deep South, become an innovation capital?

The hard parts (colleges, taxes, money, etc) are relatively easy to get compared to the soft parts. I think those soft parts is what makes silicon valley better than most other areas. My theory is that those soft areas are in the cultural part of society, this is the area which the vast majority of people in the world DON'T want to change.

Take one (of many) soft components - acceptance & praise of failure with learning. For some strange reason, this is a hard concept for most people to accept. Many people are shamed by failure or hide their failures pretending they aren't failures at all. They never learn anything useful from their mistakes. They also won't accept people who had any failures. This causes people to have careers of "no failures" which basically means they pretty much only succeed in mediocre things. I don' know if Austin overcame this one example but this type of thinking is a major roadblock in many areas.

I don't think it's just you. Hopefully enough people get sick of the "Required: 5 years of experience in every programming language created in the last 20 years" bullshit sooner rather than later.

Or 5 years of experience with something that has only been out for 2 years.

They are unrealistic and its been this way for a while. A lot of companies over rate themselves, they want the best and brightest but if the candidate is too good they won't stay at an inferior company anyway so depending on the position someone with less education or experience but is a good learner would probably be just as good if not better.

Not only tech companies. At least here in the Netherlands the requirements for any job have been going through the roof, and border on the unrealistic. I think this is a result of there being a surplus of people competing for jobs so they feel they can make more demands.

Well, nowadays you can see additional C/C++ and Java requirements for Web Developer position. The problem is, that some CEO's (or other persons, responsible for hiring) don't have any idea how to hire a programmer, and what he/she should know.

So much time is wasted by non programmers interviewing programmers.

I don't know if I agree with this. I think it's important for different members of the (small) team to interview someone they potentially, and most likely, will be working with. I'm a designer, but I would want to talk to someone interviewing as a PM, analyst or dev, since that makes up my team on any given client project.

I fully agree with this. In team environments it's extremely important for the team to review potential new members. It's also important for a the group to come to a decision.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com