Nobody is unemployable
mattwest.io
mattwest.io
Many if not most firms are unable to identify intelligent, motivated people, outside of the typical CV pedigree of Ivy Leagues and corporate brands.
As a result, they have created a cargo cult recruiting process that promises, in a few easy steps, to tell them the essence of the applicant's very being, and to accurately predict their future performance within the organization.
A child knows that this is impossible, but the need for control and risk minimization means firms force themselves to believe in it.
That is why the entire job seeking and interview process has degenerated into a tragedy and a farce.
In Europe and North America, there are tens if not hundreds of millions of people unemployed because businesses are not able to employ them; they lack the competence to recruit well.
I spent 2 1/2 years unemployed after leaving a top graduate program in math - I didn't lack for motivation the whole time and I ended up teaching myself programming out of frustration over the process. I then was able to find a job after 3 months of searching after an arduous almost 2 1/2 years searching beforehand. All of the big companies passed up on me, as well as anyone else out there, despite going out of the way to apply to all sorts of jobs. After a few months of work, companies started contacting me. After my first job switch and some open source contributions, the floodgates started to open up - only then did companies start to recognize talent. The sad thing is, any one of them could have netted my loyalty and at a cheaper price overall if they were savvy at recruiting.
I have little sympathy for companies that choose to operate that way.
They were 'having hard time finding talent' so they were recruiting kids out of high school. they'd spend years on them doing internships (on what you can learn your own in a few weeks) and then pay the students tuition in college so that they would work full time for LM once they graduated.
or, they could have hired someone like me and not have to spend years on training on basic stuff and save all that money on tuition. LM wasn't the only one doing things like that.
Consider asymmetry of information. There were two versions of you: (1) fresh uni drop-out, and (2) uni drop-out with programming experience and open-source contributions. These descriptions summarise information that potential employers had about you. You also was a hard-working and intelligent person the whole time; however, employers didn't have this information per se, because they had no simple way of being sure of these characteristics.
However, these characteristics are what employers are looking for. Now, information (1) gives almost no certainty that you have these characteristics: there are a lot of top programs drop-outs out there, and an employer would have to go through hundreds of them and spend a lot of time and effort on evaluating them to find one you. On other hand, if employer limited search to someone who fits (2), the odds of finding a person with these characteristics would be much higher, and the interview process would be easier.
> I have little sympathy for companies that choose to operate that way.
Are you really surprised that (2) got a lot more offers?
Do you really think that employer should be "fair" to potential employees, if that decision costs him (and his shareholders) more money? In other words, do you think that for a for-profit business, social obligations (in this case, to an intelligent drop-out) should be more important that obligations to their investors and shareholders?
Essentially, that's one of the reasons experienced developers get so much money: it's actually _cheaper_ (consider not only the cost of hiring process, but also the potential cost of a bad developer working in your team) to hire someone you can be relatively sure from other factors is intelligent and hard-working than trying to find such person from a wider pool.
That lazyness can be appropriate if as an employer you have an infinite supply of very good candidates. But IMO that's a pretty rare case, and even then you have to weed out good candidates from not so good ones, and pay attention to a mountain of other non obvious factors.
Like, past performance is not everything. You might get better work from someone stepping up to a new position than a burned out veteran holding that same position for years already.
Or someone unemployed for a long time seeking back a job might stay longer than the freshman already choosing between a dozen of other companies. And even if the candidate inps not the best fit for the job, you might want him/her for diversity in your team, etc. etc.
There's so many things that could impact how an employee is doing in your job, focusing only on 'proven' skills when choosing candidates is usually a bad choice IMO. The exception would be if you don't intend to keep the new employee for too long anyway, but then that's a bad sign for you business I think.
It's not lazyness, it's a different strategy. Some companies decide to spend a lot of resources on hiring, and they are able to find great candidates where others wouldn't look, and thus they get a strategic advantage. Usually, that's a part of their overall strategy. But other companies decide that they are in a different situation, and would spend their resources on different areas. These companies don't want to find a special superstar; instead of increasing reward (in hiring) they look to minimise the risks. And adjusting for correlating factors (degree, experience, etc), they get just like that: the minimise the risk.
> Like, past performance is not everything. You might get better work from someone stepping up to a new position than a burned out veteran holding that same position for years already.
You might. But we're speaking about company strategy here. The company will make hundreds, thousands of hiring decisions. So we should think about them in terms of a statistical sample. What these companies want is not to increase the probability of high reward, but to reduce a standard deviation on these results: even if the results will be worse on average, it's important that they won't reach a certain low limit.
Overall, I'd like to suggest you to think about the process differently: don't think about it as a decision that applied in your particular case, but think about it as a set of principles that should carry the company through the years, while it hires a lot of people. I think all this makes a lot more sense this way.
But this strategy only works if you don't intend to keep employees for a long time and these employee don't individually hold much of the value you produce. They might stick for years, but it's not the case you'll be optimizing for.
I think well fit employees don't stay if they don't grow with the company, but these employee won't be easy to find with a risk averse hiring process (or you have entry jobs with very low needed qualifications, but then you have very small hiring risks anyway)
Then if you're ok with only keeping a decent performance in average, it will harder and harder to even keep your hiring bar at the same level, as you'll have more and more unmotivated employees in your rank, and you'll have to give more and more perks for really motivated people to come in and work for you.
In my experience, even companies hiring hundreds of people every year actually spend quite a lot of time reviewing profiles and care a lot about getting the right people for the job, at least for any non entry level position.
If they can do that, why wouldn't they?
That it makes it quite difficult for newcomers to get their foot in the door and leads to all sorts of resume shenanigans is not 'their problem'. That's business-think for you :)
Sad thing is - there is no employer/employee loyalty or community, or anything. It's hop hop hop to get your paycheques to where you want them. Since hopping seems to be the only way to up your paycheque and everyone knows that - nobody wants to hire a junior, spend at least half the time training them to be proficient and then they'll proclaim to be intermediate and leave you.
With web dev or mobile dev (only fields I'm familiar with personally), I can also see that the deadlines are very slim. Nobody's ok with a 1 year deadline for a mobile app and that's how long it'll take a junior dev until he/she can ship something half-decent. So...
Because recruiting knowns, that are often already employed, means paying higher wages, as well as losing the competition for skilled labor.
Right now, there is an enormous opportunity for businesses to higher well and treat employees well, in order to recruit the most competent employees, create continuity, a strong brand, higher efficiency and quality in work performed, and thereby higher profitability.
Employers are simply incompetent--Employ-unable.
The question is what about the 80% of the people who are not ninja/wizard/superhero-like? They just do their work and go home?
They don't care much about work, they want to get paid as much as possible, work the fewest hours and fuck off.
The people having trouble recruiting are the small-ish companies who want those top 20% that google is taking, except they can't compete on price, perks, or anything frankly.
They're the ones screaming 'omg impossible to find good developers!'
What they should be yelling is 'given my slim shitty margins, I can hardly get by and can be out of business in a year or two, so it's do-or-die mode every quarter.'
But that'd be being honest. Instead, let's complain about lack of talent :)
> They don't care much about work, they want to get paid as much as possible, work the fewest hours and fuck off.
I find that false dichotomy offensive. The vast majority of people are not $BUZZWORDs who just want to do their work and go home, but who do care about their job and doing the best they can. This idea that you have to blow off your job and do the least possible to skirt by is toxic bullshit.
I consider myself part of the 80%, so it is not like I am putting anybody down. There's parts of the 80% who care, but not care so much that they are at google.
I am one of those people, I do good work, I just don't devote my life to programming. Then there's the other parts of the 80% who can't even program and bullshit on their resumes.
What the 80% have in common is given the choice, they'd MOSTLY take fewer hours and bigger paycheques. The 20% would likely not take fewer hours but would still take the bigger paycheques.
That's the difference as far as I can tell - some people devote their life to work, others see it as a big part of life, but not all-encompassing.
A known product is more valuable than an unknown one. And you did "switch" from your first job when your value was more realized, so it cuts both ways!
I just want to mention here, that he did say that he would have had a sense of loyalty towards employers, had he been treated differently by one (to that effect at least).
I suppose most companies, even in the so "progressive" tech industry, are closed systems with little connection to anything in the outside world. In reality, Silicon Valley startups are just small corporations in the digital era. There is no disruptive about them at all.
For the intelligent business person, the lesson to learn here is that design, development and production processes need to be integrated with community. Either like with Automattic and Wordpress, or by going open source on GitHub.
All but a few closed companies will die over the next decade because they are unable to hire well.
like 'oh, you learned ROR on your own while doing your undergrad and made site x?' and go from there.
In the larger sense, there are plenty of people who are unemployable (though it can be geographically or temporally limited in scope -- not always ,though): Zero Marginal Product workers: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/07/zer...
To his point, though, the market in the US is still hot, and we're not /terribly/ far off from the first dot-com wave situation of "if you know HTML you can get hired in this market." Now it's more like "if you know Rails or one front-end JS framework decently, you can get hired." So if you have any skill, yeah, you're not going to unemployable here for a while, and whether or not you failed at your own company will probably not be relevant.
Just because you have an engineering degree does not mean you actually know anything you were supposed to learn.
I am engineer, a geek, a hacker, whatever you want to call it when you love working with machines all day, but the most important thing is that I take my own decisions. I won't be happy working on machines for someone else.
When you study in the University they train you to obey the decisions of others. Everyday I am shocked when people obey me without resistance.
The best people I had did not obey me: When I ask something stupid, they just told me fast how stupid it is. They were a pain in the ass to work with, but the resulting work is outstanding.
I think the belief that you need to work for someone else is wrong, society trains you for that as it is the only alternative. It is not. You can work on your own just fine and partner with other people.
Working on your own is not for everyone, but also being employed is not for everyone.
Don't be afraid of going back if you decide or need to. In my mind, I'm still a consultant and always will be. My current customer is my employer and I only have one customer. The only thing that can get to me on occasion are all the petty gripes the other employees constantly bicker about. They don't know what it's like to do everything on your own.
The idea that working for yourself makes you unable to be an employee is a serious one. I have alternated over the years between self-employment and working for others and at this point I doubt anyone would ever hire me again even if I wanted to be hired.
Self-employment is not for everyone (it does come with a huge amount of stress), but if you can get used to this then it make working for someone else hard to accept.
However, I don't fit the profile for VC, so the only way I can get to that point is by bootstrapping.
1. Have you heard this question before?
or
2. What number am I thinking of?
I.e., any answer other than the one the interviewer is expecting is wrong. I had a recent interview with some SQL/Linux questions. I gave a correct answer, but one that wasn't on the interviewer's script. He wasn't able to accept my answer as correct. So I'm left trying to guess what answer the interviewer is expecting.