[roenxi]

The perspective here is subtly baised - look at the diagram down the bottom and realise that they were always only going to hire 1 person, so all the reasons that they give for not hiring the person are, in fact, not reasons that the person filtered out wasn't hired. They are processes to rank the applicants. If there were more candidates they'd add more reasons not to hire most of them, if there were less candidates the reasons not to hire would start to disappear.

In particular, companies are in some sense bluffing with the "Didn't Qualify" category. I've seen hiring situations where nobody qualifies but they actually need to fill the position - they hired someone who didn't qualify and trained them up. They did a great job. "Didn't qualify" is only a real category for the most demanding jobs. Software is just not one of them, nobody has any idea if dev is going to be good or not before they hire them. Companies often have a hard time picking which devs are the productive ones when they've already hired the dev.

So we've got an article about a process used to rank devs, and no particular evidence of whether the dev hired is actually very good. Which is fine, still an interesting read. But it is good to keep a clear perspective. This is one of those situations where doing big parts of the process by fair dice roll is not necessarily an inferior approach.

[ludicrousdispla]

I think the article was more about the gates in the applicant 'funnel' rather than describing their method of ranking applicants as suitable developers.

The best dev for the job may have been 'unqualified' given that they were looking for "a generalist who can do both Unity and services coding."

[keeganpoppen]

this is a very keen observation about most hiring processes. even places that make noises about “hiring good people and figuring fit out later” seem to mostly, anecdotally, reduce the process to “hire the person least likely to fail at following the exact job description”.

[gedy]

Yeah I'm reminded of the military on this Veteran's Day. You join and you aren't qualified for anything at that point. But they take a chance, they train you, and most rise to the challenge.

[k__]

To be fair, "outside of budget" and "didn't qualify" are pretty much catch all.

[c0balt]

There's also team culture fit, which depending on (mis)application can be very broad too.

[creer]

> companies are in some sense bluffing with the "Didn't Qualify" category.

This is to the point that it's not "bluffing" but simply "how the world works." What's unfortunate is that many new grads (and some veterans) live with the impression that they need to meet (or lie about) all these "requirements". When the real world never operated like that.

Still, some job ads are written to show both "essentials" and "nice to have".

[floor2]

Often, there's a recruiter or HR person (or piece of software) that's doing an initial screening against those "requirements" though, often with zero understanding or context.

Recruiters hiring for a Java role will pass on a candidate with 10 years of C# experience, or other similar tech-stack-swapping scenarios where the skill set is 95% transferable because they don't know anything about the actual technologies or understand the work.

And of course, the lack of honest feedback makes the whole system inscrutable. Did you get ghosted because the job was fake? Because your resume lacked some key words? Because they had a referral? Because they preferred more diverse applicants? Because they never even looked at your resume? Because you have too many years of experience? Too few? Who knows!

[staticautomatic]

Eh, kind of. Right now I'm hiring for a role where nobody remaining in my applicant pool is qualified (all have only some of the experience I need) but I'm probably still going to hire one of them. Does that "qualify" them? No. It just means I'm probably going to hire despite it.