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Comment by smil | Hacker News Reader

I would suggest a new term: Employ-unable.

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.

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I cannot upvote this enough.

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.

> I have little sympathy for companies that choose to operate that way.

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!

That's why contract-to-hire exists; to turn an unknown into a known. If a company is serious about getting the best, they'll know that their best shot of getting it is before -everyone else knows how good the person is too-. Unfortunately, most companies are too short sighted to do this (the startup hire fast fire fast mantra applies here too).

> 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 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).

What they're doing mostly makes sense - let somebody else pre-qualify you and then we'll have a look.

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...

>What they're doing mostly makes sense - let somebody else pre-qualify you and then we'll have a look. If they can do that, why wouldn't they?

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.

There has always been the option to hire people, treat them well and retain them. That's what Google and the like are already doing.

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 :)

> 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.

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.

You're right, there's a wide spectrum. It was an oversimplification for the sake of brevity.

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.

when i graduated with CS in 2002, the job market was crazy tough. I searched for so long, it was frustrating. One thing that never really made an iota of sense to me was Lockheed Martin.

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.

Another case of an Employ-unable company.

But that's completely understandable. (Inb4 personal attacks, I'm a drop-out myself, and my first job, that I had for almost a year, paid $500 a month.)

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.

I understand the point you are making, but it feels like employer lazyness to me. A decent employer should be able to see the potential (2) when meeting (1), at least within two or three interviews.

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.

> I understand the point you are making, but it feels like employer lazyness to me. A decent employer should be able to see the potential (2) when meeting (1), at least within two or three interviews.

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.

You are right about minimizing risks and making easier hiring decisions, having a more scalable process.

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.

This is so true, also why you have a defacto ageism that in many cases pushes you out of employment at or around 40 despite having achievements like being published by MIT press. Companies are also so specific about frameworks if you don't have 5 years experience in some completely obscure php framework then obviously you just don't know php. Also the use of tests for language minutia that are irrelevant to production work. On top of that at least in Southern California we have a massive increase in outsourcing going on, still plenty of low paid design jobs but the higher paid development jobs are fleeing from here at least.

Though I'm on Hacker News, I'm not a software developer. I would have thought it obvious that everyone would shift their hiring practices to be community-based, by looking at GitHub.

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.

i dont see huge value added by looking at someone's github, maybe they dont use it, maybe they published someone else's code, maybe it was done in a group project and they didn't really do anything, maybe its private, etc etc. i'd rather see a portfolio of things (end products) they have done, see what they are excited about, and ask them about it.

like 'oh, you learned ROR on your own while doing your undergrad and made site x?' and go from there.

I mean having a community of open source contributors around your product that you already know and have in some ways worked with, and can hire without the adversarial interview process. That way, you wouldn't need to use useless markers like degree, age, location, university, past employment etc.

yeah if you have that you certainly know pertinent information about the would be candidate

I find ageism perplexing. I've had a chance to work with a couple of older engineers that have >20 years of experience, and it's absolutely outstanding. They often have so much to teach you, and they can help point you towards the right direction.

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