[icedchai]

This is the opposite of my experience, both as a candidate and a hiring manager over the past couple of years. There are many openings, not enough competent people to fill them. We are essentially at peak employment for tech.

[fenwick67]

It's funny how companies / hiring managers always say they have trouble finding good candidates, and the people looking for jobs always say they are no jobs.

It's probably an axiom of some sort.

[kevin42]

I have talked to hiring managers who complain about the lack of candidates. Then I ask to see their positions and what they are willing to pay and it's way too low. No wonder they can't find an experienced C++ developer for $70k/year. The companies complaining about the lack of qualified people would have no problem if they paid more.

On the other hand I've talked to an unemployed Java developer who didn't seem to want to learn anything new beyond what he learned at college 15 years ago complaining about the job market.

In my 25+ years of experience, I think that demand for software engineers has always been high. But what's in demand keeps changing. I saw COBOL and RPG IV programmers in 1992 complaining about the lack of software jobs. It'll always be hard to keep up with the jobs that are in demand unless you look at what's in demand and work on the side to stay relevant.

[jfrisby]

It's a combination of two things:

1. We're bad at hiring, as an industry. We just aren't very good at identifying good candidates.

2. We're an industry where the average skill level is below the minimum threshold of competence for even low-level roles.

I.E. there are lots of people looking for jobs, but most of them either couldn't code their way out of a wet paper bag -- and identifying the good candidates is time consuming and error prone.

[bsvalley]

Exactly. I think companies are looking for great candidates and great candidates are looking for jobs. Problem is - Interviewers are screwing things up! big time!

One single person (an engineer of the hiring team, sometimes fresh out of college) is responsible for evaluating a candidate. That is extremely wrong. It's like a bottle neck, how can you evaluate a candidate in 45 minutes when you only have 1-2 years of experience working for the exact same employer on the same project? This just doesn't make any sense. Interviewers end up asking very specific details they've been exposed to, or they simply google for the "hardest XXX interview questions" an hour before the phone call. You, as a candidate, get judged and often eliminated based on something completely worthless. I bet you %50 of the rejected candidates would do the job better than their interviewers as soon as they would get up to speed at work.

Solution - They should create a new role in every engineering organizations and hire (or should I say - pick internally) extremely skilled software engineers who would interview candidates. That would be their full time job. Staying up to date with the latest technologies as well as learning how to evaluate a candidate properly. Right now it's completely random because interviewers aren't interviewers, they are resources allocated to projects and don't have time for that stuff. Crazy to see in 2017 that the actual hiring process is still at the very bottom of the priority list. I think it's the biggest problem in 2017.

[flukus]

> I.E. there are lots of people looking for jobs, but most of them either couldn't code their way out of a wet paper bag

I wonder if the average skill is that low (kind of) or if it seems that way because only the most desperate are willing to jump through the elaborate hoops we create for hiring.

[jfrisby]

i suspect that even without the ridiculous hoops, the incompetent will always spend a disproportionate percentage of their time job hunting, and thus making the hiring process challenging.

[fspear]

>1. We're bad at hiring, as an industry. We just aren't very good at identifying good candidates

How do we fix this? It seems that everyone who claims to be actively working to fix hiring in tech is only exacerbating the issue (see hacker rank, codility, etc).

[jfrisby]

I've now worked at two companies in that space -- a startup I cofounder in 97, and a much later-stage startup I recently joined -- and all I can say is... shrug

The company I'm currently at is certainly making things better for a subset of candidates, but what we do is largely orthogonal to these issues.

[greyostrich]

Unfortunately, I've been trying to find my first job of university. I wish I knew how to be competent enough. What do you look for?

[taneem]

Send me a link to your resume/LI profile and I'll be happy to try and give you some pointers (I'm a PM and I work with devs and have hired devs before).

[bcbrown]

If you're looking for a job, where do you live, and why don't you have your email in your profile? If you're in Seattle, send me an email; my email's in my profile.

[greyostrich]

I don't like associating the posts I make on this account with my name. I'm in NYC. I sent you an email, in case you're interested in finding out more about me.

[smt88]

I'm not looking for a job, but if you're looking for employees, why do you limit your search to a small, expensive city like Seattle? What are the downsides of remote work that are keeping you away from it?

[bcbrown]

I am not my employer, and that policy is not mine to set.