Ask HN: What is the most annoying part about finding a new job in tech? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What is the most annoying part about finding a new job in tech?

22 pointstomdepplito14 comments

Is it spending the time to search for good positions? Dealing with recruiters? Phone screens and interviews? Something else?

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- Useless HR droids that know nothing about the industry, yet are somehow qualified to filter resumes based upon useless things such as the amount of jobs per year, or if you have x years of skill at y tech (even if x years is greater then y tech has even existed)

- Recruiters that are almost stalker like to get your resume....and then disappear into the ether.

- Companies/recuriters that constantly are looking for employees for months at a time, yet won't budge on requirements, salary, or working conditions. Found this especially in the maritime provinces, but it does come up in larger markets as well.

- Lack of communication. I get that some places are pretty busy, but at least a simple "hey if you hear nothing by x time, you probably didn't make the cut", or feedback after an interview to say "hey you didn't make the cut, this is the reason(s) why". We're (mostly) adults, and having a timetable and constructive analysis is always handy. Plus you never know, you could be hiring again, always good to leave potential future employees with a good memory of you. :)

- Saying one thing during interviews, then completely another if you get a job offer. Like say, twenty thousand less a year, or remote work is not allowed even thought every other developer in the company is working off-site.

- Over interviewing. Unless your'e applying for a C level position, or leading a large team at a megacorp, one interview is all you need. Having a three hour grill session for an intermediate developer position only to be told that there's more interviews after this is wasted effort. You're hiring a developer, not the next CEO of IBM.

- Remote work is verbotin. This is probably just mine, but have found that employers that I qualify for, react to an inquiry of being able to telecommute akin to a first date after saying you have syphilis.

- Finding a great job, in a tech you want to use, in an industry you'd be very interested in, that pays well and has great benefits, only to find that you don't have the right citizenship. (Happens all the time with me when I search for remote gigs. Tons of work out there.....if you're American)

As you can tell, I've been looking around for a while :)

Clueless HR. For example, I'd been writing air traffic control software for a contractor of Lockheed Martin. When that contract finished, I applied to do the same at Thales and was turned down on the basis that there were "too many jobs" on my résumé. I explained that there were a lot of jobs because I was a contractor but they still refused to even see me. That was a big shock as I was told I got the LM job because I had a lot of experience. They wanted someone who had been programming for more than twenty years, which is fair enough when you're trying to avoid flying one plane straight into another one.

Unrelated but out of curiosity, what language is most air traffic control software written? (or what language would you be writing in do you think?)

We did ours with Linux and C.

Dealing with recruiters who don't understand what a company is actually looking for can be pretty frustrating.

No more that dealing with recruiters who don't know how and who really recruit (aka without any modern technology knowledge)

The all day (perhaps even multi-day) technical screening, covering data structures and algorithms, threading, sql, database transactions and locking, and often a few branches of math, getting shuttled from interviewer to interviewer for a fresh grilling.

I don't like this, and I don't consider it a good use of anyone's time, but the deal killer is the "homework assignment", which forces me to spend 4-8 hours but allows them to screen me out in 15 minutes if they don't like my code.

As my high school history teacher said to a class of unmotivated late second semester seniors - "I'm not going to waste my time on you if you won't waste your time on me."

Recruiters bombarding you with crap jobs.

I wonder if there might be a market for a recruiting board that has a "Do not contact me about" feature...

startups that look for "superstars", "ninjas" etc... thinking they will be the new Facebook starting from tomorrow.

HR's don't recognize talent and tell you they have fixed salary bands which are solely based on years of experience.

Yes. What if the talent starts making their own bands on the performance solely based on how much the company pays. How would they feel about that? Most of their tactics can be reversed.

I think it is the weaknesses of the screening process at the other end. A lot of good applications go nowhere because they get little to no attention. It is still too hard to separate good candidates from the plethora of the applications received. This partly comes from missing good indicators of performance (See [1] for example).

While performance lacks good measures, compensation is quantitative as it is. This leads to misjudgements on quality-vs.-cost tradeoff impacting both the potential employers and good candidates.

[1] https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20130620142512-3...

Because of your current job you are not up to date with latest stuff.

1. People not getting back to you quickly.

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