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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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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.
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.
They want everything, but when someone who has everything applies, they don't want to up the ante with high pay.
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This is one way they support the claim that there are not enough skilled people, totally bogus.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
Salaries are important, but that's not all that matters, especially when you get up to senior positions, since most senior positions will pay more than enough money to live comfortably off of. To me, working hours are quite important. I know people who make more than me (and less than me for that matter), but they often have to work evenings or come in on weekends. I don't want a job that I'll have to work tons of extra hours. Once you get beyond the the first 5 or 10 years of your career, having an enjoyable working environment is much more important than your actual salary, assuming a reasonable salary.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
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.
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.
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.
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.