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> some specific job listings we had open for years

If you need to wait YEARS to hire someone with some specific experience, I can guarantee that you really didn't need that person. You're doing this just to check some specific artificial goal that has little to do with the business.

> If you need to wait YEARS to hire someone with some specific experience, I can guarantee that you really didn't need that person.

I've worked in specialized fields where it takes YEARS for the right candidate to even start looking for jobs. You need to have the job listings up and ready.

This was extremely true when we were working on things that could not be done remote (literal physical devices that had to be worked on with special equipment in office).

Engineers aren't interchangeable cogs.

> I can guarantee that you really didn't need that person.

So what? There are many roles where we don't "need" someone, but if the right person is out there looking for a job we want to be ready to hire them.

> I've worked in specialized fields where it takes YEARS for the right candidate to even start looking for jobs. You need to have the job listings up and ready

If this is true then those shouldn't even be public job postings. That sort of critical position is for headhunters

> If this is true then those shouldn't even be public job postings.

Why? Not everyone is on LinkedIn or has an updated profile.

Some of the best candidates I've hired were people who were in other states who were planning to move, but waiting for the right job opportunity to come up.

We also used recruiters.

Why does it make people so angry that we posted job listings for real jobs that we were really hiring for?

If your real candidate pool is so small that you're effectively targeting a handful of people worldwide then you aren't "really hiring"

Yet somehow we really did hire people.

If only we had listened to HN comments and given up instead

Or... your company should be training potential replacements. This is what the US military and "white shoe" consulting companies do. While expensive, it guarantees that critically needed skilled staff are always available.

I recommend the article "Up or Out: Solving the IT Turnover Crisis" [0] which gives a reasonable argument for doing exactly that.

Notes:

0 - https://thedailywtf.com/articles/up-or-out-solving-the-it-tu...

So what did you do when those devices broke for years while you had no local/physical person on site? You either didn't need to employ the person bad enough or didn't need the devices to function bad enough.

Engineers aren't cogs, but they are able to travel and you can hire them by other means that full-time employment. So I suspect that was probably what you were meant to do for your situation.

Nothing about this was mission critical or even all that important or you would have found a way to solve the problem or you did and it wasn't a problem to begin with. I'm in a field where people often want to hire me for some special thing like this, but it often turns out, most of my life would be spent idle because no one company has enough demand for me. I can consult instead and be busy all year, or I can take a job for someone that's OK with me being idle for 80% of my time. I prefer the former for multiple reasons but just making an example of why hiring for specialized roles that aren't mission critical is often not the thing you should be doing.

> So what did you do when those devices broke for years while you had no local/physical person on site? You either didn't need to employ the person bad enough or didn't need the devices to function bad enough.

I don't know why you assumed that. We had teams. We just wanted to grow them.

We weren't sitting there waiting.

It's implied by you wanting more people, that you had more demand than could be fulfilled. Even if you have teams, it stands to reason that the device repair would have been running into backlog territory that had negative implications of some sort. If not, why hire?

> it stands to reason that the device repair would have been running into backlog territory that had negative implications of some sort. If not, why hire?

I don't know where you're getting these ideas. We weren't hiring people to repair a backlog of devices. Warranty and repair work typically goes to the contract manufacturer, for what it's worth.

Companies like to grow and develop more products. You need more people.

Exactly. Hire someone 80-90% there and invest in their training FFS.

Answered elsewhere: If we're investing in someone's training we'll promote someone from within who is already familiar with the product and then backfill their simpler work.

So you had a talent pipeline, you just didn't like how hands on it was or how it took time to develop. We'd all prefer a magical unicorn applicant that checks every box but it's never possible especially the more you're required to know about specifics that are best learned internally to begin with. The whole hiring angle you describe seems silly in terms of process and expectations

> So you had a talent pipeline, you just didn't like how hands on it was or how it took time to develop.

There's a lot of anger in this thread at companies for making obvious choices.

If the perfect applicant happens to be looking for a job and it can save us the time and churn of switching someone internally, then yes: I would prefer to hire that person.

> The whole hiring angle you describe seems silly in terms of process and expectations

I think the silly part of this thread is all of comments from people who think they know better how to operate a company they know nothing about the people who were in it.

I have to say I appreciate your aplomb in these responses. The whole thread is littered with shocking (and unsurprising?) tech-bro overconfidence that they can manage a situation they literally know nothing about better than someone who's already done it. Cheers to you and have a good weekend.

FWIW I don't think these are techbro responses. They're from people who are scared because the industry is changing. I think software folks were quite lucky that the job didn't change much from 2016-2022, due to the SaaS-ification of the old economy, so the skillset and working practices the industry sought was mostly standardized, and candidates mostly competed on salary. This is why there was so much job hopping both by companies offering high packages to new hires and employees who hopped every 1-2 years.

From 2022 this all changed as markets became more FCF sensitive, ZIRP went away, and AI started automating a lot of the dev practice. I know a sadly high amount of people (though in my circles not too many) who built up lifestyles predicated on high software salaries and a static set of requirements. A lot of these folks are angry and scared and desperately trying to navigate this changing world.

I know a lot of developers who have learned their skillset by rote from the early 2010s and have not progressed in competency (they still write code with the same issues as they did a decade ago) or technology (haven't been able to pick up technologies that they lacked when they started).

That puts them in a precarious place since the organization that downsizes would be looking at them first ... and that they haven't been able to attain any mastery of the newer technologies that are coming into play in the system.

For many of them, they're finding themselves leaning on AI to make up for the lack of learning new things (and without learning those new things). They're also realizing that any candidate who is more skilled than they are would be a stronger candidate (and that their job is increasingly becoming entering prompts into an LLM that is easily replaced).

Why they got to that spot and stopped? That's an open question. Some might have gotten comfortable at that spot. Others forcefully reject the idea that continuous learning outside of the 9-5 is needed (spend 40 hours a year learning a new technology). Others may lack the problem solving capabilities to go beyond that spot. I know I've seen all three of those. There are probably other reasons too.

> There's a lot of anger in this thread at companies for making obvious choices.

Elsecomment and on Reddit, you'll see the attitude that their years of experience should be sufficient assurance for their prospective employer that they can pick up whatever other technologies are out there.

This is often coupled with the "you shouldn't need to learn new things outside of your 9-5."

Here, you are presenting a situation where a company would rather promote from within (counter job hopping culture) and would penalize someone who is not learning about new things that their current employer isn't using in the hiring process.

---

And you've mentioned it elsecomment too - it's about the risk. A company hiring an individual who isn't familiar with the technology and has not shown the ability to learn new material is more risky a hire than one who is either familiar with it professionally or has demonstrated the ability to learn new technologies.

That runs counter to the idea of the "best" candidate being the one who is most skilled but rather the "best" candidate being the one that is the least risky of a hire.

You probably don't realize that there are several thousands of people without a job who could work for a company that is instead just "waiting years" to find an imaginary worker. That's what people complain about. The more companies think the way you do, the more useless open positions are listed because companies will not hire anyone unless it's the perfect candidate in their dreams.

> You probably don't realize that there are several thousands of people without a job who could work for a company that is instead just "waiting years" to find an imaginary worker.

I screen hundreds of resumes a week when hiring. I know this very well.

Hiring the wrong person can easily be a net negative to the team. Hiring too fast and desperately hiring anyone who applies is doubly bad because it occupies limited headcount and prevents you from hiring the right person when they become available.

Building teams is a long game.

Shame how the cost of the long game is paid by the future employee having to be lying in wait, applying to you and 300+ of your colleagues openings, praying for a bite.

The best applicants aren't lying in wait or filing hundreds of applications. They're happy where they're at, ignoring the dozen people a week who reach out trying to recruit them, until eventually they decide it's time for a change. Then they apply or get referrals to the handful of companies they find most interesting, and at least one is going to give them an offer.

So if you don't have a job opening posted on the day they're sending out applications, you may miss your shot to hire them.

Life is always good for the 1% of anything

The whole thing is this perfect candidate doesn’t exist. How can they? You are dealing with imperfect information. A resume, yours and theirs assumptions about eachother. That is it. All the interview hoops attempts to make ourselves the hirer comfortable with the fact we are fundamentally taking a leap of faith. Because n=1. Because we aren’t simulating this hire 1000 times and modelling the distribution of performance. Because we haven’t accounted for all latent factors that may intersect between our work model and the hiree. Because we can’t ever know anything at all about the future for certain.

I think we could all be a little more mindful of that in hiring. That waiting for perfection is itself a fallacy for all these reasons and plenty more.

Or, it’s the kind of place or situation where it’s not about the job/role as some abstract commodity “function,” it’s about specialist > internal generalist > external non-specialist.

“We’re making do, but we’re kind of figuring out X as we go. That’s working for now, but the problems keep getting knottier as we grow and change—it works, but it’s expensive in terms of avoidable mistakes.

Nothing’s on fire, but if we ever got the chance, we’d value authentic expertise in this niche. But if it’s just ‘I could probably figure that out,’ we’ve already got plenty of that internally.”

Where a good hire ends up helping those internal people as they develop experience and expertise, and one that’s not right is worse than none at all.

How do you know if someone is 80-90% there without having the job posting for the profile up, and interviewing candidates who come along?

That still takes a long time if random Senior Engineer X who's looking on LinkedIn is only 10% of the way there for what you'd need for a very specialized role.

>If you need to wait YEARS to hire someone with some specific experience, I can guarantee that you really didn't need that person. You're doing this just to check some specific artificial goal that has little to do with the business.

There's a difference between "critically needing" and "would benefit from."

If you can find the specialist who's done what you're doing before at higher scale and help you avoid a lot of pain, it's awesome. If not, you keep on keeping on. But as long as you don't start spending too much on the search for that candidate, it's best to keep the door open.

So this is not a job that you need to fill, it is a wish you may have and that is mostly impractical. If you really needed that person, you would go find them and pay way more than they're making now or give them something else they want to join immediately.

> So this is not a job that you need to fill,

There is no requirement that every job opening needs to be urgently filled.

You keep repeating this like it means the job opening shouldn't exist at all. Not all job openings are for urgent demands that must be filled right away or not exist at all.

When I was a team lead at a big tech company, any requisition that was not filled at the end of each quarter was cancelled and required a fight to be reinstated. Many job listings became conflicts between:

Option 1) Hire someone sub-standard and deal with either an intense drag on the team while they came up to speed or worst case having to manage them out if they couldn't cut it.

Option 2) Give up the requisition which looked like an admission that we didn't really "need" the position, and also fails to help with senior management and director promotions tied to org size.

This always seemed pathological to me and I would have loved to have the ability to build a team more slowly and intentionally. Don't let all this criticism get to you.

> If you need to wait YEARS ...

Imagine working on voyager II .. or some old-ass banking software that still runs RPG (look it up, I'll wait), or trying to hire someone to do numerical analysis for the genesis of a format that supercedes IEEE float .. or .. whatever.

There are many applications for extremely specific skillsets out there. Suggesting otherwise is, in my opinion, clearly unwise

> When I was doing a lot of hiring we wouldn't take the job posting down until we were done hiring people with that title

It's a small engineering org, allegedly head-hunting one principal engineer for the whole org, so it's a single opening. 10 months later they are still hunting for their special snowflake.

> I can recall some specific job listings we had open for years because none of the people we interviewed really had the specific experience we needed

This is exactly what I mean. If you can go for years without filling a role, it's non-essential , and are in effect, "seeing what's out there". More and more companies are getting very picky on mundane roles, such as insisting on past experience in specific industries: "Oh, your extensive experience in low-latency comms is in telecoms? We prefer someone who's worked in TV broadcast, using these niche standards specifically, even though your knowledge is directly transferable. We don't want to waste 5 days on training"

You expect more nonessential roles and slower hiring in a slower growing economy, especially if companies only hire for full-time roles.

For example, your company might need a full-time network admin once its network grows to a certain size and complexity. You won’t hit that level for three years but you’d hire the perfect person now if you found them even though they might be spending a lot of idle time scrolling Hacker News for the first year or two. At 5x the growth rate, you’d need that person within less than a year, and you might be less picky about whether they are coming from a TV or telecom shop.

Honest question. Were these super specialized roles with such specific skill requirements that it took such a long time to find the right person? Looking back, do you think the team would have been better off hiring someone who came close enough, and supporting them to learn on the job?

> Looking back, do you think the team would have been better off hiring someone who came close enough, and supporting them to learn on the job?

More specialized.

If we wanted to train someone, we'd start with an internal candidate who was familiar with the other parts of the job and then train them on this one thing.

Hiring an outsider who doesn't know the subject matter and then teaching them is less efficient and more risky. It was better to have someone in the team learn the new subject as an incremental step and then backfill the simpler work they were doing.

Some academic departments do this... put a job ad every year in case there's a superstar.

I assume that this means you're sending out rejections that include a mention of "we've hired someone else for this role".

If your hiring model is hiring multiple people through one posting, then you will probably get a lot fewer angry ex-candidates being weird (because they think you've lied to them since the posting is still up) by just sending out rejections that don't say that and just get the "we're no longer interested in you for this role" message across.

Nicer/more corporate language for both, of course.

> I assume that this means you're sending out rejections that include a mention of "we've hired someone else for this role".

No, this isn't possible unless you delay rejections letters until you hire someone.

We send letters as soon as the decision is made not to continue with that candidate.

Honestly it would be cruel to string them along any longer.

From applying places recently I'd much rather get these fast. One company sent me them, the rest either reached out or I never heard from them.