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Do Tech Companies Ask For Way Too Much From Job Candidates?
Nerval's Lobster writes The short answer: Yes. Many employers' "required" skill sets seem to include everything but the ability to teleport and build a Shaker barn; the lengthy requisites of skills and experience seem achievable only by candidates who've spent the past four decades using a hundred different programming languages and platforms to excel at fifty different, complicated jobs. Why do a lot of tech companies do that? Dice asked around and discovered a bunch of different reasons. Companies want to make investments in talent, but the inherent costs of that talent also make them wary of hiring anyone but the absolute best. The need to find the right talent, and the concern over cost, often leads to employers producing job descriptions too broad for the actual position. There's also pure idiocy: PHBs don't know what they want, don't understand the technology, and throw just anything into the description that pops to mind. Is there any way to stop this scourge?
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Betteridge's Law... does not apply here.
We all use Adblock, you are not getting any money out this.
So, Dice, are you fearful?
I'm not... why isn't H1-B scams listed as a reason?
The post was done by a mindless HR drone. Once you actually get to talk with people actually heading that section you realize the requirements are more reasonable.
The longer the list of requirements, the more likely it's going to be a 3-month or 6-month crappy temp job.
I see resume's for people with less than 5 years experience with "expert" level knowledge in 200+ things. Meaning that they saw it once.
It really seems that it's the HR departments that are using this stuff as checkbox gatekeepers. In a perfect world I want to see some of your code but thats nearly always locked up under contracts. But as long as the list of checkboxes gets longer so does the list of lies.
No sir I dont like it.
The short answer is "No"
They want everything, but when someone who has everything applies, they don't want to up the ante with high pay.
Democracy Now! - your daily, uncensored, corporate-free
Heck - where I work (a big technology company), they expect too LITTLE. Broad-sweeping statements are almost never universally true.
Offer top quartile salaries to get top quartile employees.
I worked with a guy who was the best materials scientist in our industrial research group. His degree was in biology.
This is one way they support the claim that there are not enough skilled people, totally bogus.
Obviously, we just need more H1-B visa's.
Just move on to another opportunity. You probably don't want to work at a place like that.
For the sake of completeness, also steer clear of any description which constantly mentions how "exciting" their space is.
Only an idiot would think that "Required Skills" means anything but "The sorts of stuff we're going to ask you to work on."
Stop pretending that people aren't getting jobs because companies are holding the line for somebody with 7 years of Swift experience, 23 years of Android development experience, and at least a decade of work on Amazon EC2. The "requirements" in a job description are a wishlist - "we'd like somebody with all of this expertise."
to lower your expectations
the average job offer these days is a toilet brush of bullshit, especially coming from established corporations asking for immediate and deep expertise in 15 year old nearly defunct software only they have heard of and that is made mandatory for consideration. and startups, oh man. The constant "what do you LOVE about us?" and "explain why YOU want to work here" crap is an insult to intelligence. ive once answered "what makes YOU the best devops engineer?!" For starters, I have the power to condense an entire resume, into which i have invested considerable time and effort, into a single textbox entry on a broken website soliciting engineers with an alphabet soup of industry buzzwords lifted from a dell sales brochure and a TV remote instruction manual.
the interview process isnt a lot better. Google waterboards candidates with a barrage of questions that betray just how much money they make off you. 'how do you build a datacenter on the moon' and 'how many hard disks fit into a schoolbus' are questions that, in any other corporate interview paying airfare and hotel, would send HR managers through the roof. GoDaddy once asked me, in an interview, if i 'felt lucky.' Considering Im not paying for the hotel sauna or food, yes, i and my lobster thermador feel very lucky indeed. other job interview questionaires have included questions about what was the most "constipated" technology id encountered.
Good people go to bed earlier.
They are more likely to get people who lie about their skills, then people with the actual skills they are looking for.
This is fascinating to me, inasmuch as I just hit a landmark birthday (the Big Five-Oh). Theoretically, I've got all the accumulated talent that one would be looking for in my field.
However, the reality is that the industry likes youth. I'm one of the oldest people at the company where I work, and absolutely the oldest sysadmin.
It was also extremely difficult finding this job. I had to be clear that I'm very negotiable on salary, and in fact I took less than I've earned in 20 years.
But it was the only job for someone my age.
Where do old geeks go? We can't all go into management -- I know I lack the temperament for it. Many of us do.
So where are all the people who theoretically could meet the exacting standards of experience that some employers require?
Honestly: where do they go? Where are all the people I started out with in my 20s? They're not at any company I've worked for in the last ten years.
Microsoft leads to Bluescreen; Bluescreen leads to downtime; downtime leads to suffering.
I think the biggest issue is just lazy use of job requirements.
A company is hiring here are some of the reasons.
1. They are replacing someone who had left the organization. (Chances are he was a valuable employee) So they just blindly rebrand the guys resume as a job requirement. Not this is stupid, because for one, you will probably not find an exact match, but more importantly, the person who left, means with his skills he could find a better job. It is better to bring back your requirements, to core skill sets and figure the rest he can learn on the job.
2. The company is growing and trying to add additional employees. Now you may make requirements that is trying to fit your growth model. However the issue is if your company has any competitive advantage, your growth model is unique. So you will not find anyone with skills in your unique growth model.
3. The company thinks it is cooler then it is. There are a few companies that people will jump to join, such as Google, where people are willing to compete so the best and brightest can make it past its multi-colored gates. Now google isn't taking away all the superstars out there... However... People won't be jumping in to join you because you are you, and in reality you may not need a super star. You just need a good dependable person. The superstar just may not fit into your organization, so you get the guy with 6 PHD in computer science and having then make access forms, just may not be a good fit.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Companies very often do NOTHING to retain top talent.
I have this exact problem right now where I work: one of my co-workers was a top notch cloud/orchestration ace.
He left last week, after his request for additional training and a pay raise was denied for the third time in a row by our boss.
The stupid idiot who did that is now scrambling to fill in my co-worker shoes. And, surprise, surprise, after three years in the fscking company, I also gave him my resignation, just as we were going to talk about diving into all the Puppet rules and configuration files my co-worker programmed to run our in-house cloud.
All in all, out of four Linux admins, three of them resigned in the space of three months. And the one guy left has already told upper management there is no way he'll be able to do the job of four guys.
Here is a hint to all PHBs and HR drones everywhere: when you have top-notch talent, just remember they can find job elsewhere pretty much whenever they want. Listen to your guys, for fsck sake, or suffer the consequences!
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
Dear Slashdot editors,
Don't forget your journalistic rigor. I know it's so very often forgotten these days, but I've chosen Slashdot as one of my last "traditional" news outlets (in the sense that it the editors, including Nevral's Lobster, are paid to curate the content) because it used to be better about this. It is irresponsible of Slashdot to omit the fact that Dice owns Slashdot in the article summary.
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
I remember one that required 5 years experience on a particular software package. Too bad it had only been available for 2 years at that point.
If you think you are going to find a job by replying to specific job postings on a jobs board (an internal company board, a site like Monster or Dice, whatever), you are probably wrong.
A very large chunk of tech jobs are filled through referrals (a.k.a. "Networking") most of the rest are filled by companies trolling career sites, (and LinkedIn is huge here.) A vanishingly small number are filled by looking through resumes submitted to public postings.
I know that I was referred to the job I have now (from one division of my company to another.) The only person that could have possibly fit the qualifications the official posting called for was somebody that had already been doing the job for about five years. I was explicitly instructed to simply check all the "skills" boxes saying I was able to do all those things, and then submit an accurate resume with my real experience. Even though I didn't actually have any experience in this specific position, I not only got the job, I got a promotion into the top salary band for the position (it had a range of my current band and the next one up.)
Is this a good system? It depends... decent referrals will certainly be a better source of adequate candidates. I guess the public postings are structured to get only somebody highly likely to work out to submit (okay, that and pathetic liars.)
TFA mentioned ROI. An employer needs to make at least 45% over your total cost. Meaning, if you are being compensated $100,000 total (salary, benfits,etc ...), they need to make a minimum of $145,000 on you. Yeah, interdepartmental accounting comes into play and if you work for a software shop like Microsoft, the cost structure can be even higher - like they need to make a $1,000,000 on you. So, the lower you are compensated, the less of a threshold for profitability. And when you are competing with Third World countries, well you get the idea.
And when it comes to skills, on the job experience is everything. And it really sucks if you work in an environment when your job is just - say - UI and you apply for jobs that expect you to know not only the UI, but many other things. See, I have been in an environment where we had UI guys, back end server guys and the DBA/SQL developer.
I do not know much about SQL because that other guy did it and I had no time to get involved because I was buried in my stuff.
I see too many times companies demanding an esoteric skill set or combination and then bitching how they can't get qualified people. Well, I want a woman who is 25 and worked her way through medical school as a super model and just loves short overweight middle-ages bald guys.
I can't find any decent women!
Here is what my employer does when he needs someone. He says in a meeting, "I need someone. You know what we do and I don't care if he's out of work."
And if someone doesn't have exactly what we need, we know they will get up to speed. We get qualified people within a week or so.
The last guy was out of work for almost a year, and he was rock'in in less than a week.
no, no cure for stupid... ..."
however you can see that, and play the game.
if they want ".net and java and php and c++ and ios and linux and windows
just add it to your resume.
for you have used all that before, you just have to be liberal with the 'experience with/have used' terms.
Required should be no more than a handful of things unless you are willing to pay a kings ransom' Beneficial/Favorable can be a mile long. Also in tech the education requirement needs to ALWAYS have 'Or Equivalent' experience. Otherwise you will interview the the Doctorate who hasn't touched a computer in 10 years and ignoring the self taught whiz right out of the box. A handful of employers have skipped over me because I lack a degree as if a degree in technologies from 25 years ago would be beneficial in some way?
(If at first you don't succeed, do it different next time!)
Having faced these huge walls of product names, operating systems and languages as a job candidate, it can be very intimidating and scare people away from applying. No one is a complete expert on everything. What I do offer is the ability to be flexible, learn what is needed and pick it up as I go. Companies don't like that because they want a drop-in replacement for whoever left, plus someone they don't have to train. This is why the consultant market is so lucrative for those who don't mind the vagabond lifestyle.
And, having sifted through resumes and conducted interviews, now that I also have a say in hiring, companies often have the reverse problem. Candidates put a "wall of experience" on their resume because (a) they know that's the only way to get past the zero-clue HR filters, and (b) they see what companies are doing, and feel that if they've seen something once it needs to go on the resume. Also, I know there's a lot of debate about the skills shortage, but in some sectors there really is one. It takes a lot of sifting through resumes to find a group to interview, and it's very frustrating to bring someone in only to find that they have grossly misrepresented their familiarity with a requirement of the job. I'm in the systems integration world, so we hire a lot of system admin types. One of the most common misrepresentations I've seen is someone with Windows administration experience, who lists scripting and automation on their resume. When you bring them in, you find out that they were just running other people's scripts, and don't have any background or knowledge to build on. Last year I interviewed someone with 10+ years of Windows Server experience, who proudly proclaimed "I don't do scripts."
I'm not sure how to solve it. Recruiters aren't the answer -- they're often the offenders in this case, editing the candidate's resume. I think the only "solution" would be to guarantee at least a phone interview to everyone who applies, just as a basic BS filter. That doesn't scale, but if candidates can't trust job descriptions and employers can't trust candidates, what's the fix?
The irony is that sometimes they **can** find a person with a huge laundry list of skills, but quite often won't hire them because they're too old and cost too much.
You can no longer be hired just for the job. You must show "passion" for the company and whatever the hell it happens to be doing at the moment. If you are not "passionate" about your work to the point of putting in 60-70 hour weeks, then we can find someone more "passionate" than you.
Note that this is a good cultural barrier to keep old people out, too, as their "passion" has been tempered by years of experience and thus, they are not seen as "passionate" enough by hiring manager. We like 'em young, stupid, and cheap in out industry and "passion" is a good way to weed out anyone who might derail corporate planning and say something negative about a proposed product, project, or plan which might be flawed. Your job is to code without commentary, monkey boy.
Excuse me - your "passion" is to code without commentary, monkey boy..
That is all.
It is no surprising. I've been on both side of the fence working for a certain semiconductor company. Typically the manager wants someone who can walk on water and hoping they could get it and scare off people who are less confident about their ability. Most of the time they would settle for less.
Don't waste your time submitting your resume to postings like this. This is a sure sign that they already have selected who they want for the position. May organizations make it mandatory to post all new positions. Managers will take the resume of whoever they have already selected for the position and create the job requirements based on this individual's experiences. This way, their pre-selected person will automatically be the best candidate for the job.
When company HR departments blindly insist that candidates need "5+ years" of experience in some technology that didn't even exist as a recreational github repo 5 years ago. Specific examples I can think of include Java in 1999, and .Net circa 2004. I mean, *seriously?!?* 5 years?!? I don't think James Gosling had 5+ years of experience with Java at that point (and if he did... most of Sun's own Java development team probably didn't). Oh... the punch line... the position was for "entry-level web developer". Ummm... r-i-g-h-t.
It's important to understand the politics of the HR department. The ability to learn and adapt is indeed usually more important than a check-list of past paid tool skills.
However, that's difficult to quantify objectively. If a candidate can't figure out a given tool, HR can potentially be blamed for not verifying paid experience in that tool. But if the candidate doesn't work out for some other "team fit" kind of issue, HR is generally held less responsible.
Thus, HR protects against issues they are more likely to be blamed for. This does tilt the emphasis toward a check-list of skills over more nebulous factors such as adaptability and personality fit. But, bureaucracies do have a degree of waste and bias built in due to the way rewards and punishments are measured and doled out. HR is not "evil" per se, they are just surviving in their environment as they encounter it.
That's just life in the work world. Without re-engineering humanity, I don't know if a real fix. One must understand this bias and learn techniques to work with it as-is as a job seeker.
Unfortunately, it may result in having to lie about your background to compete, especially during IT recessions. Sometimes you just have to counter BS with more BS. If you want to be an "honest angel" and "go to heaven", then you may have to struggle professionally. It may be one of the reasons why the Bible de-emphasized wealth. I'm not preaching theology here, only bringing up a potential moral dilemma that you'll have to work out in your own way via your own belief system.
Table-ized A.I.
I have found (while reading through resumes trying to find candidates) that the response of most applicants to this phenomenon is to just apply for jobs for which they aren't really qualified at all, because no one is completely qualified. Which leads to probably the exact situation employers are trying to avoid (having tons of unqualified people apply) And for me personally, when I'm looking for work, it has the opposite effect - I try to not apply for something unless I really look like a fit, but with these Les Miserables-sized qualification lists, I'm not qualified for anything at all. So I think I end up under-applying for jobs.
Beyond the laundry list of things that better-paying software development jobs require, the salary is utterly abysmal. I recently spoke with various people in other careers choices and I was shocked at how much some of these careers paid relative to the much more difficult and value-producing software product development. In one case, a comptroller (accountant) was making well over $100,000 and this is a person who does not even know how to calculate compound interest.
It's incidents like this that make people like me seriously consider resigning from the field forever and I'm actually very good in my field. (I've worked in enough places in enough industries that I am self aware enough to know who's better and where I don't know what the hell is going on so I think my self-assessment is accurate.)
It's the six hour interviews that they want. I meet for three hours with the tech staff and then meet for another three hours with management? It just getting ridiculous. By the way, every object in Java extends Object. There. It's out in the open. Quite asking that damn question when I'm interviewing for a senior developer position.
Has anyone ever answered a technical question with this?
It's not that hard to learn something new on the job or refresh some obscure piece of knowledge you don't use everyday (such as a shell command parameter or some obscure unix command you haven't had the occasion to use)
Seems in the last couple of years tech companies have adopted the notion that a Developer's time has no inherent value and that a job candidate has nothing better to do with their day than spend 11am till 5pm at their offices in an "interview" and that somehow offering "lunch" make it ok. Hell, I've even seen one or two companies state that they put all candidates through a 3 or 4 hour "coding test"! Seriously, it's disrespectful, demanding and FUCKING DEGRADING. It presumes that I as a person have nothing better to do with my time. It presumes that I want a job so much that I will be wiling to do ANYTHING to get it. It presumes that somehow by making someone waste their entire fucking day in your offices, that you'll somehow be better equipped to make a hiring decision. Being that I only casually consider FT jobs with companies WHO APPROACH ME and am happily SELF-EMPLOYED, yes, I do have better things to do and any company who expects me to spend more than 2 hours at their offices for an interview is promptly given an immediate decline. And no, coming back around to "try to work something out" is off the table, because I've already seen your culture, and it's toxic. No amount of beer kegs and ping pong can hide the vile cesspool that is your company's core. But, seeing that this practice is fast becoming the norm, I shall probably remain independent since it seems a lot of tech companies are just fucking toxic with abusive management.
When are they going to rename the HB-1 visa to the Indian Visa...?
Companies post ridiculous job requirements because the economy is bad enough that they will get several applicants who meet the requirements. If they lowered their requirements to a reasonable level, they would be so flooded with applicants that HR would be unable to handle them all.
I live in a suburban area with a total population around 300,000. A company once posted a help-wanted ad for a simple junior programmer position. They filtered the results down to 57 applicants before bringing people in for a first round of interviews.
I've seen an ad for a $12/hr Drupal developer. I applied with examples of having hacked on the Drupal codebase and did not merit a callback. Evidently there were many more qualified people.
After taking nearly every technical course offered at the local community college, transferring out and getting a degree, and having a few years of help desk experience behind me, the HR department at that college tells me that I am not among the most qualified applicants for an entry-level help desk position. This type of position used to be filled by a second-year student.
tl;dr, there are enough out-of-work experts to fill all of the specialized positions and enough out-of-work journeymen to fill all of the entry-level positions.
Skill on the other hand, can be easily teach, but they can also easily measure how much skill you already have.
So what ends up happening is they look for their keys directly under the streetlight, even though they lost them in the dark area on the other hide of the street.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
...they want everything, in return for nothing.
I am not really here right now.
We give one simple test so that the programmer can prove his skills; divide by zero. We are dooers here at Inatech, don't tell us it can be done.
I remember seeing something very much like this - http://www.gshotts.com/HUMOR/f... - billed as a "system programmer's exam" back in the '70s.
Among my favorites:
21) Sketch the development of human thought; estimate its significance. Compare with the development of any other kind of thought.
and
23) Define the universe in detail. List three examples.
Did the author ever interview for these jobs or post any? Basically they want someone with NO EXPERIENCE and hire people with NO ABILITY or EXPERIENCE, and if you match the requirements, you do not even get interviewed. The long list of skills are all super trivial for any programmer.
And not much else. Look, I've walked out of interviews where they asked me goofball, irrelevant questions. As for job description listing requirements like "5 years of Windows 8.1 programming" (no joke), they don't even get a look. I no longer have to work for irrational crazies.
This, by the way, explains your "talent shortage." Want good employees? Fine. CUT THE BULLSHIT! Ask relevant, job-related questions - and nothing else. You don't need to know my community activities, why manhole covers are round, or my favorite band.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Your list is good. I also suggest that if you are a young person thinking about preparing for the ageism you will face, do so by reading "personal finance for dummies" (seriously, it is very good), and start investing everything you can avoid spending. Live below your means to accomplish this. That way, you will be able to retire early, so you won't have to worry about where to find work (and you will be free to pick up whatever open source projects interest you).
The place where I currently work has hired a 50-something technician exactly twice in the past ten years. The first guy decided he didn't like management and left after a few months, having a long list of prior consulting clients to fall back on. The second guy interviewed like a superstar but then completely failed to be able to accomplish anything, and was let go. They feel that hiring senior level talent is too high a risk, given how much they invest upfront just to have them not work out, so there is a natural preference for younger talent which, for whatever reason, tends to work out better.
It isn't fair. But that unfairness does swing both ways.
There are some reasons for the unrealistic job descriptions, they are a lure, and are generally loosely associated with the role (ie: 80%). We're hoping for a purple unicorn, but know that they don't exist. But would settle for a winged horse, a unicorn, a purple horse or more realistically a good horse. But occasionally one of the unrealistic mix of experience does come through.
It has been almost a decade since I last went through an applicant list for a particular role.
What happens most times now is an application is added to an applicant tracking system. This parses the resume (from word, pdf or text) and creates a database of candidates matching keywords. This meatgrinder approach means that when I am looking to fill a position, I don't actually look for applications - I might - or the HR might quickly review the actual applications. What I do is search and screen. Search for a set of keywords, and from that list look for obvious issues (applicants to every job, rejected candidates, age of resume, etc). And then the HR recruiter will screen down from there.
I'll typically get 20 or so resumes to review. The recruiter may review 100 to 200 resumes. There pool of candidates may be 2000 to 3000 of which only a small portion are for my position.
This is part of the reason that resumes have gone from minimalistic to more fully descriptive with keywords sprinkled throughout them.
Reposting as a non AC.
There are some reasons for the unrealistic job descriptions, they are a lure, and are generally loosely associated with the role (ie: 80%). We're hoping for a purple unicorn, but know that they don't exist. But would settle for a winged horse, a unicorn, a purple horse or more realistically a good horse. But occasionally one of the unrealistic mix of experience does come through.
It has been almost a decade since I last went through an applicant list for a particular role.
What happens most times now is an application is added to an applicant tracking system. This parses the resume (from word, pdf or text) and creates a database of candidates matching keywords. This meatgrinder approach means that when I am looking to fill a position, I don't actually look for applications - I might - or the HR might quickly review the actual applications. What I do is search and screen. Search for a set of keywords, and from that list look for obvious issues (applicants to every job, rejected candidates, age of resume, etc). And then the HR recruiter will screen down from there.
I'll typically get 20 or so resumes to review. The recruiter may review 100 to 200 resumes. There pool of candidates may be 2000 to 3000 of which only a small portion are for my position.
This is part of the reason that resumes have gone from minimalistic to more fully descriptive with keywords sprinkled throughout them.
Dice left one of the big reasons out- plausible deniability.
In the US, a company can be sued by an employment candidate if there is any hint of discrimination during the hiring process. If the process finds more than one candidate that perfectly matches the job description, and the final decision comes down to soft qualities like personality or team fit, that opens the door for legal action by the candidates who were passed over. The more matching candidates you have, the more your risk of hitting a litigious one goes up. If no candidates exactly match the requirements posted for the position, then the risk to the employer goes down. The employer can show that the hiring decision was based on skill set match, instead of defending that it wasn't the candidate being a different gender or race than the hiring manager.
Additionally, US companies that hire H1B employees may have to prove to the department of labor that there are no suitable US citizens available for the position that was filled. This is also much easier to do if there are no exact match candidates to be found.
I believe that most employers do the right thing, don't discriminate in hiring, don't abuse the H1B system, and don't really need the deniability- but putting a little bit of requirement padding onto a job posting is such a simple insurance policy that it is unwise not to write them that way.
your personal information is not your own. i've been kicked out of the job-seeking process by my refusal to turn over my SSN or submit to a credit check. my poverty shouldn't bar me as a candidate but companies have zero fucks to give.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
And I have to say - it seems crazy to me. Firstly, they seem to expect you to know everything about the technology that they happen to be working with. The thing is, the field has become so vast that I can't imagine that there is anyone who knows all of these things off the top of their head. Second, the interview process has become extremely stretched out. First you generally deal with a headhunter. Then you deal with HR. Then you spend a few hours on the phone talking with engineers - half of whom you can actually understand. Then if you make it past that, you go to the office and spend about 5 hours interviewing with another handful of people that are generally difficult to communicate with. All the while, the questions that people ask seem to be getting more and more obscure - presumably because the field itself continues to widen and the different technologies and tools continue to grow. People are using so many different languages, tools, OSs, etc... All the while, they seem to expect you to know everything that they're using right off the top of your head. It doesn't make a lot of sense to me.
Bad credit != poverty. Lots of rich people have bad credit, and lots of poor people have good credit.
The GM automobile assembly plant in Arlington, TX. Nearly closed down because they only looked for “the absolute best.” Suddenly their absolute best are all retiring and there are no “absolute best” to fill the positions. GM scrambled to the local high schools and trade schools. Offering full coverage of tuitions and above average pay for the new automotive technicians. The hiring of the “absolute best “ philosophy is a disaster waiting to happen.
"We ask for god in person, hoping to get the prophet, and usually we only have the faithful"
So yes, the requirements are not realistic, and they don't expect anyone to meet them at the price they are ready to pay. In fact these just give an idea of the profile they need and serve as a starting point for the negotiation.
I've noticed this a lot too and often you can tell some non-tech, HR person scribbled this out because some of the technical requirements are competing positions such as a job requiring OPs skils versus one requiring CISSP certifications and knowledge. Granted for most techies we know there is a lot of overlap, to some degree, but not as much as some of these job descriptions would seem to imply. I totally agree that if any of these companies were to find this ideal candidate with the dozens and dozens of skills and decades of experience and so on...these same companies would pay or couldn't pay for that talent anyway. I stay away from positions that just have a giant laundry list of requirements because they clearly have no focus or direction for the job and you will likely be putting out fires and under some other middle manager's beck and call...fetch me coffee, set up a projector, clean the data center...you know how that goes ;-)
If you have bad credit, then you are labeled as a probable thief.
Seriously, if you know your stuff, it's a sucker play.
If you can hack, learn to hack the system, man.
Build a network of customers slowly, deliver what you say you will, on time, and your dance card will be filled in no time. Dividends are paid out at substantially lower tax rates than salary in every part of the western world I'm aware of.
This is an answer. It's not the answer a lot of people want to hear, but it certainly addresses most of the challenges.
Ultimately, the companies can't be doing so bad with their model, because stuff gets done, and they make money. If they don't, they go away, and new players step in.
Rinse, lather, repeat.
..don't panic
Many employers' "required" skill sets seem to include everything but the ability to teleport and build a Shaker barn.
Sure, mock the few things I actually can do.
I was recently presented with a job description that included a lot of web dev. stuff like Angular as well as niche EE dev. experience in the VHDL language. This was a former DJIA listed company. It was completely baffled but let the recruiter submit me for the job just for kicks (I'm an EE). Needless to say I "wasn't qualified" for the job.
When I see this crap it's a signal to run away fast. It's clear that the the person who wrote the job description is a clueless moron and the person who approved it is too. One of them probably works in HR and such confusion would be partially understandable but the other must be the manager you'd be working under.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
More general, it makes it easy to hire the person you want while fulfilling the legal obligation give equal opportunity for a position. I recall in the late 90's I would occasionally see ads asking for 10 years of Java experience.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
I'm surprised no one has mentioned the obvious here. First of all, how many people have actually worked with any of those geniuses who know every technology under the sun? Now, how many people have worked with people so incompetent you can't imagine how they were ever hired and then despondent because those same people also hired you? It doesn't add up, does it? The interviews are designed to legally discriminate. They are used to turn candidates into rejects. There is no law that says people who are hired must have all of those skills. But anyone who doesn't have every skill is legally a candidate for rejection. This allows employers to hire according to race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, personal acquaintance, or just about any other criteria. That is the way the system works people.
Never take requirements too literally. I've done a fair amount of hiring, and been involved in writing job descriptions of this sort. If it says, "Requires 5 years C++ experience", what we really mean is, "Requires C++ proficiency typical of someone who has been doing it for several years." If you've only been doing it for 3 years but your skills are solid, that's good enough. It's also kind of a wish list. If it lists four required skills, that means we'd really like someone with all four skills. But if the best candidate only has three of them, that's not a deal breaker. A competent person can pick up the last one fairly quickly.
If you think you can do the job, don't let "requirements" prevent you from applying.
"I'm too busy to research this and form an educated opinion, but I do have time to tell everyone my uninformed opinion."
It also lets them reject people for arbitrary reasons, citing insufficient qualifications as the overt cause. After all, you tend to lose lawsuits if you tell people that you're rejecting them because they mentioned they're married to someone of their own gender, or because the person is capable of becoming pregnant, or their skin color is an unpopular one.
This kind of nonsense is fairly rampant across many fields and pay levels unfortunately...
We need a new version of the classical "Those who can" saying. I would like to suggest the following:
Those who like to do, have already done.
Those who want to do, are already learning.
Those who can do, are already doing.
Those who can't do but have done, teach.
Those who can't do, manage.
Those who have no clue, use Apple.
Those who will never have clue, work HR.
That young CS grad who didn't get the job using one language to do one thing because they don't have experience doing thirty other things that aren't in the job description just might have cost less than the four decade cyborg who can manage to hum COBOL in their sleep. Just sayin'....
...a dumping ground for illiterates who are utterly helpless when confronted with anything that has moving parts.
If you can make stuff, you're a chemist. If you can build things, you're an engineer. If you can't find the power switch and don't understand any of the big words, you're "a people person," welcome to HR.
I am just a Windows/AD/Network Admin, and I get "headhunter" emails all the time. To read the position descriptions nowadays is hysterical. Most describe the duties of a full on DBA, a Network Engineer, a Help Desk Tech, and a Programmer. Not to mention specific SAN and Virtualization mastery. They want a 4 year degree (understandable for a large organization), and it's usually understood that you end up doing some Help Desk type work on occasion. But they only want to pay for a level 1 Help Desk tech. It is laughable that they make their offers with a straight face like there is a thousand IT Admins out there chomping at the bit to work for $40,000.00 a year. They may have gotten spoiled after the tech bubble burst years ago, when many of us were out of work and starving. But those days are long gone in my opinion. They may get some young kid fresh out ITT Tech for that, but you only get what you pay for. That's not to say there aren't some serious prodigy's out there, but most of us older guys with much more field experience, and usually a better work ethic just won't work for that kind of money.
Things were so much simpler 25 years ago. If you knew C, C++, and/or Pascal and were willing to relocate, you could find a job fairly easily. Nowadays, there are so many niche tools, APIs, and languages that universities can't teach a broad enough curriculum to allow graduates options.
I really encourage people to read more about negotiation and understanding people. Also read up on political ideology and try to really get a sense for understanding how others could have believed stuff that we now so obviously know is wrong now (such as eugenics or the flat earth).
The reality is as a technical person you have an incredible capacity to walk around and all over anyone you really want, because most people cannot think more than one step ahead or in a strategic way. It really is true. MBAs are even worse, as you can get the steps they are going to take out of whatever was popular in last year's Harvard Business Review. The trouble with most smart people is they see this sort of game playing as pointless and want to believe the world is rational and logical. This produces all these complaints about a broken system. You're not going to be able to change the system, and even if you could, you're not going to to dedicate your life to improving HR processes for other people.
I spent a decade as a smart but ignorant tech person, wondering why the world didn't work like a big rational machine. When I finally found out that the world never has and never will work in such a way, I could finally start to learn out what irrational forces move people around. Oddly, these are actually quite logical.
Realise you're in a big game. Learn how to play it, and then you can ponder what the whole meaning of life is anyway once you have conquered the money side of things.
The last job I got from a cold ad was 22 years ago. I have had 9 jobs since then. Every one of them I got through the hidden job market (was never advertised) and through close people and direct contacts in my network. I never had any unreasonable requirements and I knew exactly whether my skills fit the bill or not after a 5 minute conversation.
If you want a good job, bypass HR and talk direct to hiring managers. The way to do that is to know someone who is hiring through your network. Yes. use your network.
Otherwise your just another number in the crowd and stacks of resumes and will never get past the HR screening unless your overqualified for the job and then you probably don't want it anyways because you will be bored.
-- Mean People Suck
The old advice I learned and tried to apply as a manager was, "hire for attitude, train for skills". In short, quality people - solid basics in their field, with specialization appropriate for their seniority, and always with a great attitude - are the right people to hire because they will improve themselves to meet the needs of the company, maybe with some additional specialized training. People like I've described are harder to screen for online than simply having a list of required buzzwords, and many HR folks and managers can't or won't take the time. That's ok - most companies die before they are 20, and that's just how the market works.
I use a company's hiring practices as one indication of the overall quality of the management. If you see job ads that rub you the wrong way, chances are you'd see more things if you worked there. Don't apply to ads like that: you'll be happier, and so will the company.
What is going on is that companies are afraid of being sued for discrimination and so they write job descriptions that no one could possibly fill. That way they (theoretically) will be able to defend themselves when they hire whomever they want to and don't hire that other person because they "weren't qualified".
In practice this isn't really very effective, but lots of HR people believe it is.
My two favorite examples of this were a requirement of having a grad-level CS degree and being a graduate of the University of Hawaii ... ironically UH didn't have a CS program at the time, as the person writing the job description knew. The other one was requiring five years of experience in Java ... in 1995.
People with bad credit have other problems in their lives. Problems that they are likely to bring to your business.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Definitely. It is equivalent is asking for someone who speaks fluently all the languages of Europe, Africa, and Asia. Most companies offer a very narrow range of opportunities and few people are allowed to change lanes. The primary reason for this seems to involve justifying the use of H1B visa candidates. The secondary reasons are basic stupidity. The HR morons add every buzzword they have ever known to a req. The management morons are business majors, not tech majors so they know less than nothing of what is needed. It is common knowledge that HR and management are the reason tech people cannot find jobs. And the H1B thing is the only way they have to cover the fact they are clueless.
Maybe some tech companies do, but where I work we have strong needs for certain skills and they're impossible to find.
If the people I have been interviewing are any indication, most of the candidates I interview are not qualified. Many fail basic C coding and algorithm questions. We need specific skills but in a broader sense just good software engineers who can deal with low-level code and hardware and understand basic stuff with modern microprocessors. We're looking for people who can work with multi-core CPUs in C and have no problem working on stuff like the Linux kernel or embedded systems. Usually the requirements we put in the positions are skills we need. And frequently the candidates lie on their resumes, claiming skills they lack when asked about them. We're even having trouble finding qualified people for positions like a lab assistant to deal with racks of Linux servers (running ARMv8) with networking knowledge who can handle an Ixia tester. For one position I need I've basically given up for someone to help with the bootloader code, involving dealing with a lot of different hardware drivers, especially dealing with 10G Phy chips who understands things like the need to follow certain coding practices (i.e. the Linux kernel coding standard).
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
That company is hopeless. Claim to have opened a data center in Roswell GA. Lots of advertising of positions. Lots of publishing, reworking, and re-publishing of job postings. The point seems to be wear out the local talent so they refuse to waste any more time applying for their supposed positions.
If they create a BS requirement that no one can meet unless they lie, they won't find a local to fill the job and can then go shopping for an H1B candidate. If a local candidate lies, they'll call him on it and use it as a reason not to hire. If an H1B candidate lies, they'll let it go and hire him/her anyway because they then have a slave that can be worked for 80 hours per week and is unable to do anything about it.
It's all about driving the pay downward. The guys at the top won't be happy until they have it all.
'nuff said.
If you have bad credit, then you are labeled as a probable thief.
Or you submitted your SSN to a site with inadequate security. Possibly a site looking for someone to secure that very site, or maybe just to the many fake sites designed to get that SSN in the first place.
I've seen job listings that are asking for a Masters in Comp Sci for... wait for it... quality assurance analysts; don't get me wrong, I'd love to work with people who devoted six years of their life to understanding a broad range of things that go into creating software, but you're only paying $14 an hour in Seattle, WA. I'd be surprised if you could get a high school graduate for those prices.
I'm an IT development contractor, and if I had a dollar for every ridiculous req I've seen come across my desk I would have retired long ago.
It's common to see a requirement for 10 years of experience in a technology that's only existed for 5. It's equally common to see requirements for proficiency in technologies that, when actually examining the architecture, have no business being on the req document (i.e. asking for additional proficiency in VB when the entire codebase is in Java. I mean, sure, there's an argument to be made for skills-flexibility and such, but at the end of the day you still need a Java programmer)
Sometimes it's just naivete on the part of the req author - they got a project from some technical folks they're told to help staff, they don't understand the project needs, and they punt. Programmers know the difference between Java and JavaScript; your average HR person may not.
Often, it's politics and/or money - the project leads have grand plans for upgrades and improvements, but the budget and timeline ends up being tight and the edicts from management-on-high become "just paste over the cracks for now" - and then "for now" balloons to 10 years.
Worse still, it often comes down to ego. A requirement could be perfectly acceptable - hey, you want someone with Hibernate experience? Awesome. But then some lead developer who's owned the non-hibernate ORM code for a decade gets butthurt and blocks every attempt to change things, as though it was some personal attack.
The upshot is that it ends up costing a lot of money for people - they write these outrageous requirement documents and end up paying the hefty sums that someone who fits the bill can command, and then have him or her doing the kind of work that a much cheaper junior dev could be doing.
----
"I used to listen to Null Device before they sold out."
First:
I can sorta see the employer side, if you view vacancy advertising as a negotiating ploy. Ask for the Sun, Moon and the Stars. It's all negotiable in this view, and so the requirements definition is little more than fanciful marketing.
However when the candidates reply, their resumes are supposed to be scrupulous and factual. Yeah, I know, everyone has a story about resume padding, but really now. Any candidate caught doing that is accused of a heinous crime. If they've already been hired they can be summarily fired.
Perhaps this is why the job market has such a jaundiced view of the recruitment ads for "Candidate must be in the Top Quartile for skills and willing to accept Bottom Quartile pay". Where's the moralizing and immediate repercussions for the employer engaged in that? They get a little polite "tut-tutting" and that's it.
If they don't know what they want, they should talk to an executive coach. An executive, or life coach will be able to help them figure out what they want, what information might be missing, and who they need to talk to , as well as what they need to say. The fee for the executive coach ultimately saves the company a lot of money because they will be able to hire the person they need right away, since they have now clarified their needs. Disclaimer - I am a life coach.
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