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You said another job, so I'll assume you've been employed in your field. What part of tech in specific and how many years? Are you in the US? On West coast or East or middle states? I mostly agree with @chrisbennet that a lot of the time there is a "shortage" of people willing to work at cut rate prices, not really a shortage of qualified people. I will add to this, many companies will advertise less than fair wages for a position intentionally and call it market, or take a senior position and mark it as junior with junior wages to intentionally game the H1B and other visa systems. This is because there are some basic (easy to game) requirements they have to file to prove they tried to market and hire a US worker but were unable to fill the position. As a consultant I saw this at almost every mid to large organization I did work at, and I have seen it in a number of startups that have reached a higher funding level over the past 5-6 years too. To be 100% up front, I have no problem with hiring a foreign born engineer, but they shouldn't be paid less than what I would be if hired for the same job. That isn't fair to me and isn't fair to them, if they have the skills to do the job, pay them comparable for living and working in the US. Another factor I have seen over the years. I helped a number of companies go from not filling their open tech slots to filling them by changing the interview process. I was at one company that literally had a guy drive 2 hours to get the the interview, this is after successfully passing a technical phone screen, for his in person interview with 4 individuals (me included). Within 5 minutes the hiring tech lead asked 2 technical questions about javascript and then dismissed the interviewee from the interview saying he wasn't qualified. Well fuck, talk about creating a horrid environment and destroying a companies reputation. I was tasked to help fill positions with qualified people, and so we worked on how to interview people. First and foremost, we got rid of the ego driven interview that most tech companies favor and went to a human based approach. We still asked the hard questions but it is about the persons method of working through the question not whether they gave the right answer. Some of the best engineers I know would flunk most of the ego interviews, but if you get them talking about what they have done and have them describe the details, challenges, coding issues etc you'll find out they are amazing at their jobs and will figure out whatever you put them to. Last point. In general, if you are in the over 1yr of experience but under 5 years of experience that is the hardest time to get a job in a lot of ways. It is still where you need coaching, but also where people start to find their own methods so it is a harder hire for a company to get right. Over 5 years gets easier, over 10 easier still, then at some point we start tipping back into the harder to get past the door category. For an engineer to stay an engineer beyond 15-20 years, the ego based interviews are the worst because they are generally based on CS questions people learned in school recently, or based on things too easily looked up so not worth memory space. For example, asking a web developer to write a hash table in the interview (seen this many times) is fairly useless and will eliminate a lot of good web developers. But instead asking them about the worst performance problem they solved and how will show you what type of experience they have, how they think and what level of understanding they possess. I usually ask a few versions of that question scoped to data structures, loops etc, but I never care about something like Big O overall, again too easy to look up -- what I care about is why they made the choice and what tradeoffs did they consider. Lots of techniques here get you way better data and let you see if you can work with the person, versus just asking them to regurgitate knowledge that is within a few keyboard strokes via a google search. |