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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?
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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Indeed.
Most decent companies, HR is just a first hurtle. Make sure you specifically use all the key words in the job description exactly as they appear (don't use networking if they asked for TCP/IP .. say TCP/IP), use phrases like "I've been involved with x and similar technologies for <number of years they want> when x is something that has only existed for a year, etc. The project manager/team lead who ultimately interviews you probably has the same level of respect for the HR technical evaluation as you do.
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.
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.
Skills to Salary converter... That is what is needed... So mindless HR drones start to plug in all these "requirements" and they see the salary for the person they are looking for skyrocket and come to the realization they are asking for the moon at a walmart payscale... Hiring offshore labour with a HB1 seems to significantly lower the requirements oddly enough...
Who needs WiFi when we can have Packet Over Sheep! http://datacomm.org/PoS-InternetDraft.txt
Most HR is done by the unqualified.
It really is as simple as that. Staffing is key. If you have an HR department you are, more or less, fucked.
HR should be about benefits and legalities. Hiring should be done by team leads who should have 'executive assistants' to do initial resume sorts under close supervision.
A 'qualified' HR person isn't going to be cheap, if they exist at all, but (s)he will be much cheaper in the long run then the average checklist monkey.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
It's hurtles all the way down.
Momentarily, the need for the construction of new light will no longer exist.