This happened to me - got a call from a recruiter who said client needed 10 years. I replied 'I was a teenager back then' to which she said 'so you don't have enough experience?'. I responded 'Well I helped create the thing, it hasn't been around 10 years'. Silence followed, I was thoroughly dis-interested after that.
Why? The experience and intelligence of the recruiter has almost zero correlation to the experience and intelligence of the people you'd be working with.
Recruiting people / HR are just an administrative barrier to get through. Once you speak to the actual team you'd be working with, you can start being more discerning of the quality of the people.
> Why? The experience and intelligence of the recruiter has almost zero correlation to the experience and intelligence of the people you'd be working with.
Good recruiters are able to match a candidate's skills with the skills required for the role they're recruiting for. If they can't do that, they are bad at their job and are more often than not wasting the time you could be spending with a recruiter who knows the industry they're working in.
If they got that aspect wrong, what else are they getting wrong? Are you willing to waste time and money going through the interview process just to find out that the role isn't a good fit, even though the recruiter said it was?
> Are you willing to waste time and money going through the interview process just to find out that the role isn't a good fit, even though the recruiter said it was?
You should pretend the recruiter - any recruiter is a compulsive liar, and put exactly zero value on whether or not they claim the role is a good fit. They are never going to interact with you again, they may not understand you or the role, and they are financially incentivised to bullshit to you.
Ignore what they say, and judge whether or not the role is a good fit for yourself. I wouldn't hold a good recruiter as a positive sign for a job, nor would I hold a shitty recruiter as a red flag.
Recruiters have different levels of experience: same as software engineers. Some are just starting their career, some have more experience. Most recruiters didn't go to school for recruiting; they usually landed the job based mostly on their inter personal skills. Most lack any context around technology. In that light, making a judgement call about a team based solely on the recruited seems suboptimal. If they make mistakes, most would be happy if you point it out to them.
Everyone is trying to help each other; don't let go of potentially great opportunities due to these misconceptions.
Recruiters often doesn't have the role. They try to stir up an interest in you, so with your nice CV they can approach the - just prospecting - client.
No, never this. If the hiring manager won’t be your manager or in the same tree, run. If they cant be bothered to read the job description they put out, run. If the technology is critical enough to need previous experience managers should know enough about it to not make this mistake.
Hiring is the most important thing managers do. If they suck at that it really doesn’t matter if they are great at other things.
its shocking how many people here totally misunderstand the role and daily job of inhouse recruiters
they churn out these job requirements daily
the person you speak with on the phone wasn't involved with writing it, just correct them and get to the first technical person as soon as possible.
this is done at companies of all sizes, whether it is IBM, Google, Uber, Pinterest, as well as expected in non-tech companies.
you guys are in for a rude awakening if you think this is still an employees market in choosing companies based on the smallest, most irrelevant and nuanced signals of operational efficiency
I am fairly certain it wasn't the recruiter who put in the experience requirement. My dis-interest wasn't due to the recruiter but to do with whichever manager thought they needed needed more experience than the age of a product - either they are careless or don't care about a persons skillset.
Could I have been wrong? Of course. All I said was I was dis-interested, I had better opportunities with people who I understood and who understood me.
> I had better opportunities with people who I understood and who understood me.
That's really lucky.
There are a lot of people who don't value my skillset who I thought should, and it isn't clear if people reach out to me because they like something I brought to the world that has caught on now, or if it is a totally random recruitment bot sending transactional messages.
All while the things I was working on over the last decade were not respected at the time I was working on them.
For employment, seems better for me to use variations of my name and more generic experience. Otherwise people just seem to want to have me in the room but not really interested in hiring me, or like they expect a more mythical and profound experience.
> I am fairly certain it wasn't the recruiter who put in the experience requirement.
Really? Because I've seen them copy/paste job requirements and just spitball the "years exp" number. They're just trying to fill as many roles as possible, and getting IT folks to put together job requirements is time consuming, so they often re-use old requirement and only update the language/tech on it.
> I am fairly certain it wasn't the recruiter who put in the experience requirement.
I've seen multiple job postings for my teams where somewhere in the HR->recruiting pipeline the (correct) job requirements were replaced with "standard" requirements.
I don’t think a lack of concern and thoughtfulness around hiring is an irrelevant or nuanced signal.
Having been both a manager and an IC I strongly believe that hiring is of the utmost importance. The same thoughtfulness, care, and responsibility that goes into leading engineering teams that are in charge of mission critical systems must extend to the hiring process or else everything else is at risk. A single bad or even just not great hire can be devastating to a team. A company with a culture that is just recruiters funneling candidates thoughtlessly is guaranteed to fail over time.
Sure if you need a job or aren’t in an employees market you might have to suck it up and take that job. I get that. I would advise saving a lot more than usual as that charade of hoop jumping is going to result in layoffs/bankruptcy in the mid to long term. Also, don’t expect them to be any more thoughtful in the layoffs than they were in the hiring.
Sure a lot of big companies do thoughtless hiring and that might work for awhile when you just need to scale thoughtlessly but a lot of big companies also get their lunch eaten by smaller companies with more thoughtful managers (ex. IBM, MSFT pre Nadella, possibly Google now)
> The experience and intelligence of the recruiter has almost zero correlation to the experience and intelligence of the people you'd be working with.
How do you figure? If you're perfectly qualified for a job and they don't seem to recognize that, what are they selecting for? You don't think that incompetence would have an impact on the quality of the team you'd be joining?
If you have infinite choices and time, sure. ...but if you're looking for the best jobs/pay/environment/company, then those are the only things you should be selecting on.
> Why? The experience and intelligence of the recruiter has almost zero correlation to the experience and intelligence of the people you'd be working with.
It shouldn't. A well-run company should refuse to work with recruiters who lack experience and intelligence.
Having never worked in a large enough company to have an hr department, this confuses me.
My assumption is, a team needs personel and so the team manager makes a request to hr with a list of requirements for said recruit. Or at least that's how it seems like it should be.
Along the way, should not someone who put together that list of requirements have some idea of what they were asking for?
I've only worked at small enough business we had one general manager in charge of hiring. If one of the sections of our work needed employees, job postings would be created with those specific positions in mind, with the specific requirements of that position figured out by usually the most experienced person in that position and passed along to the manager.
Again, this may just be my ignorance, but, if it wasn't the hr person that wrote the requirements, wouldn't it have been someone that should have known better?
People say this about spammers (“there’s always some other sucker”) but scam-baiting still seems to work to diminish the number of scams/spam in the world.
Perhaps we need recruiter-baiters: people who will, as a hobby, intentionally get recruiters to pass them on to companies, at which point they will (under an assumed identity) say or do something so egregious that it will poison the recruiter’s relationship with the company.
Hmm, I wonder if I’ve been looking at these requirements all wrong then. If a year of work experience is about 2000 hours, maybe what they’re really saying is they want someone with 8000 hours of experience, which I guess is possible in 1.5 years.
It's worse than that, HR is hiring for someone else. I think there are valid cases where someone doesn't know what they want, but can't think of an example when it's acceptable to "not know what is wanted" when that's the sole purpose of your job.
Ah, this is standard python. For instance, «5 < x < 8» converts to «5 < x and x < 8». So «5 years experience and experience in FastAPI» is the pythonic reading of that job ad.
I think @tiangolo likes to write like that, because there are other places in the FastAPI doc where he writes a "little story" (for instance to illustrate concurrency) and overuses emoji. I think it's just his style ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I found myself stopping after each line trying to understand the inscrutable images. A tie I get, as it's related to business.
The nervous laughing face and recycling symbol are beyond me.
The third line’s emoji is conciliatory false embarrassment masking amusement, e.g. the emotion on your face after you intentionally lose in arm-wrestling to a five-year-old.
That’s a pretty standard meaning for that emoji, despite the subtle shade of its meaning, because it’s quite common on Twitter or Instagram that you want to humble-brag about “what they missed out on”, but you also want to make it explicit that you realize that you’re doing so (a bit like sarcasm-flagging.)
The fourth line’s emoji is presumably a substitute for a “refresh” (or more precisely, “recompute”) icon, since we don’t actually have one of those.
...which is rather uncommon usage; but the proper emotion (“knowing but non-judgemental stare, as if a parent waiting for their child to figure out that they’re supposed to close the fridge after taking something from it”) isn’t a standard Unicode emoji... yet. (But nearly every Discord group I’m in has a custom one for that purpose!)
They are annoying because they are facebook emojis and everyone is using them so you are linking them to contexts as you used Facebook. ie: the smile emoji is the most hated because it's kinda related to a fake smile/malice.
Recruiters putting silly time requirements on skills is nothing new. My favorite moment of this type was at a meetup for .NET, where a recruiter came in and asked for too many years of experience, and the entire room burst out laughing. She just smiled, accepted the grief we all were giving her, and changed the job description to be accurate. I forget the exact wording she used, but I remember the gist of her response was, "Thanks for correcting me - if I was an expert in the technology I'd be doing it, not looking for people to do it, so I appreciate it when you all help me understand it better."
I get that she was actually a nice person who simply didn't know when .NET was invented. But I do not accept that she made a harmless and easily fixed error on the job requirements because of this.
Frankly, I'm not that concerned that the job requirements demanded more years of .NET experience then it was possible to have. I am more concerned about all the other requirements that were listed on that job description which were just as wrong but in a way that was not obvious.
Consider the analogy to all of the exonerations of convicted prisoners we have had since DNA analysis became possible. The minor problem is that hundreds of innocent people were held in prison for years before DNA analysis proved they were innocent. The bigger problem is that we have now demonstrated that the legal process has a significant rate of error, meaning that there are tens of thousands of innocent people serving years in prison whose cases didn't happen to permit exoneration by DNA.
That line in the job requirements that specifies you must have a college degree -- is that unnecessarily excluding a lot of qualified candidates? The general tendency to request more expertise and years of experience than are really needed -- is that driving off candidates with lower levels of self-aggrandizement? If it is, does that have anything to do with the deplorable number of women succeeding in our industry?
Asking for 12 years experience in Kubernetes isn't just a silly error: it is an unmistakable sign of a much deeper problem.
> That line in the job requirements that specifies you must have a college degree -- is that unnecessarily excluding a lot of qualified candidates?
Outside of careers requiring vocational degrees (like engineering), yes - but for any job posting simply requiring a degree (any degree) has a valuable selective effect of eliminating swathes of objectively unqualified and less-qualified candidates and thus shrinking the pool of people you'd need to call-in for an on-site interview - even though many objectively qualified but non-degree-holding candidates would be eliminated unfairly.
It's a trade-off based around how much value you assign to your recruiter's time.
I totally agree.
There are many fields and situations where the cost for a certain type of error is negligible or non existant.
This inevitably creates a system biased towards making gambles that end up create such errors.
If for example, a case where a person is discovered to have been wrongly accused and incarcerated would trigger a very serious investigation of the specific people that were involved in that decision (judge, jury, lawyers, experts etc), the system would be much more careful with such acts.
I do feel that everyone who has been around the block knows that job requirements are nice to haves rather than need to haves. Otherwise no one would get hired.
On the other hand, I do think there are issues with how recruiters use descriptions that imply expectations that candidates have certain qualities like obsession with coding outside of work, being a tech bro, etc. And I do think some of the job requirement stuff overlaps. It makes it difficult for people who can do the work to feel comfortable applying and obviously is a negative for people who feel excluded from hacker culture which obviously does include minorities and women.
The problem is when resumes get filtered into trash because the computer determined that you don't fulfill the stated requirements (no matter how silly). Which is a common practice these days, especially in hiring agencies who are hired to do pre-screening of candidates for a company.
Add the outright dishonest recruiters ("Oh don't worry about that ultra short start date, I have only put that in there so that people apply faster!" - one 20something HR dude trying to rope me into a BS job ...) to the mix and then companies are wondering why they "can't find talent" and why skilled people have difficulties to find jobs.
I am sure perfection cannot be reached. I am hoping that we can recognize how far from perfection we are and adjust our systems to take account of that.
For the criminal justice system in the US, one of the clearest implications is that we should allow lawyers -- or at least judges -- to inform jurors about the basics of what we know about witness reliability. Because a huge portion of those we now know to have been falsely convicted we're convicted solely or primarily on the basis of witnesses.
For hiring, I think it means we should deemphasize filtering out candidates using some basic thresholds (like X years experience with Y) and emphasize opportunities for the candidates to demonstrate the skills they will use on the job.
Therefor, out of all the 360 directions one can choose to walk, we should not even bother trying to figure out in which direction perfection lies, let alone pick that direction to walk. Got it.
I mean, that’s cool, and better than nothing. But why don’t they ask someone that is qualified to determine those kinds of things before posting the job.
At least, that’s what the recruiters at my company do.
Asking or not asking a dev doesn't really change anything. The problem that I'd worry about is it signals (rather clearly) that the hiring manager isn't in charge of setting the requirements for the position. Who knows what a hiree is walking in to.
> But why don’t they ask someone that is qualified to determine those kinds of things before posting the job.
Because they don't want to. The recruiter's point stands from the other perspective too: if the technical people wanted their job requirements to be perfect, they'd spend time writing them and not hiring recruiters to do it instead.
I mean it also puts a bad light at the company. If they don’t even know when the software they want someone to be experienced in was released, how world they even judge if the applicant is competent in it?
The software jobs requirements (where I work) are written by team leads/software engineers, pretty much the same people that would be doing the interviews.
I worked at a company (who shall remain nameless) where the recruiters would "pad the requirements" asked for because it would draw in "more qualified candidates and people lie on their resumes anyway". I shit you not. I was aghast at this statement when I asked.... Needless to say, I just walked away from that particular conversation.
This is obviously the correct way to do it. I say "obviously" sarcastically because you'd be surprised how many companies just don't understand this or have policies that disincentivize reality.
Maybe she could have a hiring manager proof what they’re looking for so it actually makes sense? This just means the first introduction to your company by a potential hire showcases a broken process.
At most jobs I've had the recruiters pretty much always work with the hiring manager on editing the job requirements and all that. Sure it could still just be a mistake, or it could mean the hiring manager wasn't in the loop.
Your assumption that the room was full of men and one female recruiter perpetuates gender inequality as much as your assertion that everyone should refrain from good natured ribbing at ridiculous requirements just because the person dictating the requirements is a woman.
Gender inequality in tech is a much deeper issue that starts much earlier in life. And it's possible the ridiculous requirement of 12 years of kubernetes itself perpetuates the issue because it immediately preferences people who came up with the OG attitude.
At first approach I wanted to agree with you, but after trying to imagine a room full of women vocally laughing at a male recruiter who’s made a similar mistake I must concede that the matter is not so black and white.
Although I suspect that may be bait, when you look at everything from that perspective everything looks gender related. Just because they hired a woman to do the job has nothing to do with it.
Tribalism around gender, race, nationality etc. serves only to divide us into smaller and smaller groups.
A lot of very young people on HN. From my jaded older perspective this is VERY common when they want no external applicants.
So we can't call it a corporate reorganization for Dilbertian process reasons and we're only transferring one person anyway, so we'll abuse the hire/fire/transfer process and put in hilarious requirements like a decade of experience with javascript react framework or this K8S ad.
Or the bosses nephew intern'd with us and we have been ordered to make sure the nephew and only the nephew get hired full time and his resume hilariously listed he's been "doing computer stuff for more than ten years; also does react framework" and we'll translate that into a minimum of a decade of react experience LOL.
This also shows up in stealth ageism. The last I18N guy doing the Spanish L10N project acted too childish for a professional office causing expensive chaos; OK then the next hire "needs" at least 30 years of experience in Spanish language I18N and L10N projects; really all we wanted was a bilingual translator who was not childish by nature of being at least 30 years old. The world's full of 30-something children but the odds are better than 20-something children. We already decided to hire one of the dev's friends who was 35 so all we need to do is make sure nobody else applies. So this project "needs" someone who's spoken Spanish for 30 years to translate stop and go to pare y siga, LOL. Well L10N always ends up being a lot more than merely translating words but whatever.
True, if there's a H1B audit, its much easier a drone to prove to its auditor-drone that there were no local applicants for a job, than to explain the technical details of how there chronologically could not have been any applicants.
How to spot "This posting was tailored for/against one particular applicant" listings
- Arbitrary number years of experience required.
- Absolute requirements on very specific tools and environments.
- Minimum Masters degree, even though the work isn't anywhere near that.
- Strong preference for applicants that are well known with the industry.
- Very short deadline.
If it's also a gov. job, then that almost definitely seals the deal that it's for someone internal.
Sadly, with a lot of gov. jobs, there's so much bureaucracy and laws/regulations to navigate around, that it's often impossible to "just" promote someone internal to a new position / title. The job needs to get posted around, and often times there are external boards that will have the final say.
This is obviously to fight and a CYA process against nepotism etc., but also makes it a real pain to get people.
Or, they are simply gaming H1B and/or employer-sponsored Green Card application process that requires submitting a proof that they couldn't find a US citizen.
Overstating requisites, or asking for far too many requisites for a particular job and then settling for less has been a widespread practice since for as long as I can remember in technology fields.
When I was younger, I never thought of it as a bad thing, since it scared away those who weren't bold enough to apply for the job - ultimately reducing the competition for the jobs that I've applied for.
Over the past 3 decades, I've never met the qualifications for any job that I've landed, and I always tell others to apply for tech jobs even if they only meet a small number of the requisites for this same reason. Most are surprised to see how many times they get contacted for an interview.
Of course, this practice is slowly changing today since many talented applicants don't feel comfortable enough to apply, which ultimately equates to lost opportunity for the organization. For example, an HR manager recently told me that she doesn't put the word "rockstar" on developer job ads anymore because HR studies show that the term turns off the female and Gen-Z demographics.
Well, seriously, if some HR drone puts "rockstar", "full-stack" or similar buzzword on the job posting, it tells me one thing - the HR person is incompetent, most likely has no idea what the real needs of the company are and is filling the job advert with meaningless filler, especially since at one point everyone wanted only "rockstar" developers.
And if it is a company itself advertising like this, that reeks of the "bro" culture, crazy hours and similar problems.
That's pretty big red flag for me and I am certainly neither female nor Gen-Z (up in my mid-40s now).
Full-stack always has been a buzzword. It means everything and nothing. I've seen full-stack mean "assembly code to screen pixel", I've seen it mean LAMP, I've seen it mean three or four specific technologies that the candidate is presumably meant to guess are the technologies being used.
Almost no full stack developers are expected to work with assembly (unless explicitly stated) so that seems more than a little hyperbolic.
Full-stack in its common usage doesn't mean "everything and nothing." People might disagree about where the exact boundaries are, but there are a lot of people who definitely don't count by any definition so it does convey information.
Those who only work with HTML & CSS & client-side javascript are definitely not doing full-stack development. Nor or those doing purely server-side work, database administration, cloud computing, systems/network programming, etc. that never involves a UI with user interaction of any kind. That's quite a lot of people who would immediately understand that they don't meet the qualifications for a position that requires experience as a full stack developer.
> Almost no full stack developers are expected to work with assembly (unless explicitly stated) so that seems more than a little hyperbolic.
In the embedded world, a full stack developer would be someone who can read electrical schematics, write drivers, write libraries, and by the time you've done all of that the UI part is, comparatively, trivial.
Been there, done it, would 100% recommend it. You feel much closer to your code than when 10 abstraction layers are in the way.
there are a lot of people who definitely don't count by any definition
That is the typical answer I see; the opinion of anyone who disagrees with your opinion is inherently invalid. YOU know what "full stack" means, anyone who thinks it's something else is wrong.
It can be both accurate and a buzzword. What is so hard to believe about a buzzword that started out as a merely descriptive term? It's definitely an over-used and mis-used term now. A dog whistle.
> When I was younger, I never thought of it as a bad thing, since it scared away those who weren't bold enough to apply for the job - ultimately reducing the competition for the jobs that I've applied for.
Sometimes it reduces it too far, though, and the company fails to fill the position.
I did not apply to a job that seemed otherwise an ideal fit because they wanted a master's degree in CS, and my degree was a mere bachelor's in mathematics from Caltech. (At the time, Caltech's CS program only offered graduate degrees. They had all the usual undergraduate CS courses, which I had taken, but simply had not yet set up a degree program for the bachelor's so all us would-be CS majors actually got our degrees in something else. Usually math or physics or EE).
Six months later they were still looking and a headhunter sent them my resume. I was quickly hired.
By asking for more than they actually needed, the position went unfilled for at least 6 extra months and they had to pay a headhunter 10% of my salary.
This is definitely one of the biggest things holding back female applicants, as they are statistically more likely to have imposter syndrome.
However, it holds back a lot of people who simply do not know that job descriptions are bullshit. Being bold is one thing, being a compulsive bullshitter is another. You probably do not want the latter on the team, unless you work at IBM specifically.
Ugh. Compulsive bullshitters are so very common (and draining) in the tech industry. Over the past 2 years, one of them has cost our company a lot of money and lost revenue. Hopefully better HR practices can help curb this problem in the future.
Obviously a typo, they probably meant 1-2 years, which is realistic. While this is probably not actually the case here, I see it quite often that companies have unrealistic expectations when it comes to work experience with technologies like k8s. For example it is quite common here in Berlin to expect 4+ years of k8s experience. Which is unrealistic to find taking into account that k8s initial release was 6 years ago. It is paradox that companies want to use the latest technologies and require years of work experience at the same time.
Yes, you are right, that might be a reason. But work experience is a huge factor in infrastructure engineering. From my perspective it is what counts the most. Companies usually would like see that a candidate already worked on a similar stack, so that she/he won't make stupid beginner mistakes on your payroll and potentially ruining your business.
I can see missing a single keystroke as quite a believable typo.
Alternatively, I can also imagine recruiters just following familiar patterns for increasing "required" experience levels as they "level-up" the job description as a crutch for articulating requirements. But the problem here isn't the recruiters, they are just instruments. They often shouldn't be drafting the initial baseline JD at all and should never be posting the final one without approval.
I’d assume it’s a ”typo” as well. Most likely it’s not the same person hiring and writing the job ad. So a qualified guess would be that a character got lost during communication/translation.
Speaking of dubious recruiting practices, can anyone explain why applicants frequently get ghosted? I mean some companies give zero reply after the workflow system acks receipt of an application.
I feel this reflects poorly--in public--on a company's culture. The glossy "work here" page means nothing if there's no follow through in practice. A human may have spent days researching your company and preparing a cover letter, and you can't even click the "no" button?
The workflow system, at the very least, should provide state feedback: received, in review, no, or "let's talk".
After I had worked as a software engineer for about 5-6 years, struggling with impostor syndrome during portions of that time, I decided to apply for a job at Google mostly just to see what would happen. Guess what happened? They ghosted me. Nothing. No 'thanks, but no'. Just nothing.
I remember that it I felt embarassed and was frankly a bit ashamed that I hadn't received a reply. It took a while before I realized that I had in fact gotten ghosted as well. I waited for a reply from them for weeks. My self esteem took a definite hit from that. This was about 5 years ago now, so I've since gotten over it - but it changed my perception of Google as an employer from a place I'd be lucky to work at, to a place that I would have a really hard time applying for a job at again.
Yeah, no, I know. Google is a big company and my application probably got lost, overlooked or buried in a sea of applications. Still, I think it reflects poorly on a potential employer to ghost candidates.
No, I know it wasn’t anything personal. Google is a big company and my application probably got lost in a sea of applications. Still, I think it reflects poorly on a potential employer to ghost candidates.
I personally would respond to an email. Or, rather, ask the recruiter to send an email to the person I rejected to even meet.
The common answer to this question is, it would take way too long to answer these thousands of candidates that are applying to your position. Obviously, that's nonsense unless you're Google or Facebook.
At huge companies, I suspect CVs just get lost in the system somewhere when they don't have the correct keywords for automated parsing. In that case, you'll hear no response because no human has seen the CV.
At smaller companies, I honestly don't think that a response of "we decided not to go further with the CV, but thank you for applying, and please, feel free to apply to any other positions for different consideration" would be too much to ask.
Small companies can get thousands of applications, no need to be Google. There was a time when you could see how many people applied to a listing on monster and linkedin, the numbers were pure madness.
As a manager, you probably only see applicants that were filtered by HR and applied for your team or department specifically, while HR has to view all the applicants across the entire company, that's a whole order of magnitude more.
Which is fine, but here's what I think should happen:
You apply to Position P. Recruiter hires someone for P and closes the req. At that point, the bot should send everyone in the wait bucket for P a mail saying "thanks P has been filled, feel free to apply to similar roles R and S".
Recruiters and employers who disappear are burning bridges. Next time they have a position to fill, are you going to apply or to dismiss them as a waste of effort?
I think you don't properly appreciate how many job applications somebody can get, and just what a large percentage of those are just spam disguised as applications -- "let me recruit for you", "hire me on contract", "I'm in <country>, sponsor me", "fire your team and hire my offshore consulting firm", ...
Exactly, on the other hand to be certain it's possible to write again or directly call. Sometimes it will be a clear rejection, other times it becomes an invitation to the next step in the process. At least that's my experience, but motivation and thinking this is a good fit is necessary though
Yeah, I try to be good to even the cold applications. But, definitely if I've proceeded to even a phone screen, I'll personally followup with a rejection.
> Speaking of dubious recruiting practices, can anyone explain why applicants frequently get ghosted? I mean some companies give zero reply after the workflow system acks receipt of an application.
I've noticed more companies following up with their rejections this year than I did a few years ago. Those that go out of their way to reply get a thank you from me no matter what the outcome is.
22 years in-deep Kernel development NOT older than 30 years.
Fluent English (please Scottish accent), Chinese (Teochew) and Yarawi (written and spoken)
Additional bonus >22y in a DevOp leader position.
We welcome you in a team of hard working individuals, we are a startup so please bring your own chair and table and computer, but we have a really good coffeemaker (bring your own beans/milk/sugar)
This is so painfully accurate. The company will also say you need to be “passionate about their mission” and “ready to disrupt the future” - for a company that makes cell phone cases or an app to subscribe to your favorite candy.
I recently reviewed some resumes a recruiter (clearly) wrote for their candidates.
The recruiter must have thought that listing every tech the applicant ever used was a good idea. Even long discontinued products. And they seemingly added typos, turned things into acronyms incorrectly, listed tech under incorrect categories, etc. They were so painful to read and I'd imagine would have embarrassed the candidates if they ever saw them. I was going to give a "no" for all of them before I caught on that the recruiter was butchering them. With that context, some were OK and some of those passed the interview.
I suspect the reason for this is that some companies just do keyword matching, so the resume becomes tech jargon word salad to survive poorly written filters.
Seeing this process has convinced me that engineers should review resumes (and in the context of the IBM post, write/review job descriptions). I've gotten fast at it, but only when the candidate writes their own. I think next time I'll ask the recruiter to send a resume the applicant wrote, or just default to "no".
Yes, but since so far they had success, how would they really know? And computerized search is getting more smart, not less, so .. even less incentive to be precise.
I attended a testing conference in 1990 (might have been 91) where John Ousterhout gave a talk on Tcl and Expect. His opening slide was on how Tcl "had arrived" and showed a job posting looking for 5 years of Tcl experience, to which he quiped, "in 2 more years, I'll be the only one qualified for the job"
I'm sure Gosling, Stroustrup, etc. have all been in the position to make similar jokes.
I was in a CS class with Paul Gosling at Johns Hopkins circa 2000, and the professor read out a particularly egregious example, finishing with “and maybe Mr. Gosling's father would qualify for this entry-level position...”
(By the way, he never went on about who his father was, at least not that I heard, though occasionally wore Java logo stuff, because who wouldn’t...)
As obnoxious as postings like this are, I actually miss the era when the interviewing process was based on evaluating job experience and references rather than forcing people to answer skill testing questions, write code on a whiteboard, and having people with 15, 20 years of experience "prove themselves" to the interview panel by playing games with linked lists and for loops.
And so if it means there's recruiters asking for dumb things like this, sure, that's bad, but at least they're looking for experience and skillset rather than mental gymnastics. Though I suppose they could be looking for both. That would suck.
Some are also designed to be impossible to satisfy so that they can bring non-local talent to satisfy Labour Market tests. Not sure if it is in this case, but there have been plenty of such cases in the past.
Given 12+ years requirement with tech that was initially released 6 years ago, the only "non-local talent" this listing would bring in are time travelers from the future.
I'm not sure how exactly it works but if I had to guess, the non-local talent would have fudged resumes showing they had the relevant experience. It's not like the relevant Labour departments would actually do the background check on hired candidates. All the companies/consultancies need to do is to show that they couldn't find a relevant candidate locally to satisfy the sponsorship requirements.
Note that I'm not just talking about US. Most countries in Europe have the Labour Market tests requirement before a foreigner can be sponsored for the position.
You have to provide evidence to USCIS (letters from past employers) that you worked on kubernetes for 12 years. They don't simply take your assertions at face value.
Do they take the letters at face value, or do they do some basic sanity checks to make sure the technology has been around as long as the experience you claimed to have?
Well, maybe this time there'll be more interest. The immigration services officer who fines IBM millions for this kind of illegal immigration scandal should expect a good career.
Yeah it's a crime, but what use is it if nobody checks? Do they at least audit a certain % of the applications? Or do they do zero checking whatsoever, and will only use it to tack on more charges when you're already under investigation? eg. questions like "Have you EVER knowingly engaged in activities designed to overthrow the U.S. Government by force?" that appear on US security clearance applications
I understand what you're concerned about. Yeah they randomly audit a certain % labor condition applications by requesting more detailed evidence.
It's not like people don't lie on these forms and get falsified evidence. There are cases of people getting caught, and people who did attest to the falsified evidence have had their green cards revoked and deported.
I was just thinking about this. Since a job must be advertised locally is there any requirement that the h1b holder actually has to satisfy the requirements for the job. If not, what is the purpose of the advertisement anyways?
At first I thought "Even if you excuse this gaffe, who would consider a job with IBM these days?" But then I noticed it was in India, to which IBM has been outsourcing all their positions. Maybe a job at IBM in India is actually a relatively safe career choice? Definitely not in the US though.
Edit: Reread this and realized it might sound like I'm anti-India. I'm not. I'm American but if I was in the job market and could get a work visa I'd consider moving to India. It's a beautiful country and it's a lot cheaper than the US.
India is definitely a beautifully and diverse country. But living in urban centers where these technology jobs are located is becoming tougher day by day. Crazy traffic, high real estate prices, air pollution, etc affects quality of life negatively.
This sounds like 4-5 years longer than Kubernetes has existed, and is definitely in the 40+ aged senior developer sphere. And at the same time they're busy doing damage control on multiple accusations of age discrimination against older employees. Bra-vo.
Almost as silly is to demand kubernetes administration as a primary skill at all from someone whose main job is (apparently?) to use "an ensemble of Deep learning and LSTM models" for "anomaly detection".
I wonder how this squares with job application disclaimers that try to convince you that:
a) You must not apply unless you meet all of the minimum prerequisites as stated on the listing
b) Lying in any way on the form is tantamount to committing a felony
If IBM realizes their mistake and corrects the listing, are they obligated to immediately reject all of the previous applicants who knowingly submitted false information on their application because the claim was, by definition, impossible?
No doubt someone is gonna update their CV to show 12 years of Kubernetes, apply, and get the job being the only suitable applicant with the required experience.
Isn't the whole X years of experience with kind of silly anyways? You grow as a programmer by exposing yourself to new ideas and ways of doing things, but this pretty much gives you a low number of years in a bunch of stuff, not impressive on a resume.
I have become less and less convinced on this. Most recently I had choices for what would ostensibly be a Go-centric job between generalists who had a little Go experience, and people really good at Go, but not as much at the rest of our stack.
We went with the generalist under the theory you’re advocating and it was a disaster. The people we hired learned Go, but it takes a while to grok the paradigms and really develop a mental model for what’s going on under the hood. Those hiring choices cost us a lot of grief and probably several months of development time as they made choices that were ostensibly reasonable in other languages/frameworks, but didn’t necessarily hold in Golang.
In the future if I require someone for something specific, say k8s, I’m hiring someone with direct lengthy experience in k8s and not a devops expert who has some experience with k8s.
The optimal strategy depends on the timeframe in which you're looking for the employee to provide a net contribution and how long you expect them to stay, among other particulars.
If you're scaling up quickly or employing a bunch of people to immediately work on a new project, and expect them to stay an average of 2 years, you need preexisting experience.
If you're in a company where people stay on average 4-5 years and, and there's already a well established team with a good set of conventions and technical leadership, a generalist is probably a better call.
Well there is no silver bullet right, and there are many factors in a situation like yours.
Lets say you're hiring for a Java position to make web apps. Is a better candidate someone with lots of desktop Java experience, or someone with lots of Django experience? The answer is of course, it depends. On the person, the job etc. I'd interview both and it's probable the second person has more relevant skills.
The problem with putting emphasis on years of experience is that the second person might not get through the HR filter.
Obviously it is better if the candidate has experience in the specific work, but you didn't chose between two generally good candidates but with and without that experience did you?
Silly and in the UK, quite possibly illegal. It can be discriminatory against younger applicants, so you need a really good reason to be asking for x years of experience.
Some people drive cars their whole lives and still get nervous in parking lots, freeways. Some kids are competent sliding on snow at 60 mph on mtn passes. Time doing is ridic.
While I agree, that example isn't very accurate. They're not saying they just want experience in programming, but k8s. So that'd be like them saying they don't want x years driving, but x years drifting on snowy mountain passes.
Going fast is not the only metric to use to hire someone. To use your example, you might be a great driver that can go 60mph on the snow but you drive the same way when there's traffic on the street, you're basically unaware of the problems you can cause.
This is true in the same way on engineering. Too many kids deploy feature and release it in production without testing or without accounting edge cases that at scale cause massive problem to the user base. While this could not be a problem in a startup it's a big issue in traditional corporation and where error are not an option (you wouldn't consider giving the software of a medical device to somehow who has demonstrates skills but don't know what issues may cause)
Like an African proverb says: If you want go fast, go alone. If you want go far go together
Since that job advert hasn't been removed yet, I'm guessing it's not by accident.
That being the case, I imagine that sometimes these things get lost in translation in large corporations and don't literally mean what you think they mean.
I imagine what they are looking for is someone who can demonstrate how their 12+ years experience can be applied to that technology.
This problem of such a mad job description arises because of the disconnect between the hiring manager and the recruiters/sourcers (often aided by extremely broken tech).
Hiring Manager: I need a person with 10+ years of exp
Sourcer/recruiter: Ok, what skillz?
Hiring Manager: Cloud, Dev, Ops, SysAdmin - 10 years
Sourcer/recruiter: mhmm, what else?
Hiring Manager: Oh, also, someone with good k8s experience will be great!
Sourcer/recruiter: so, that's like, how many years?
Hiring Manager: one or two on top of the ones I said before
Sourcer/recruiter: Got it!
This "12+ years with k8s" "15 yrs with React" "10 years with Powershell 5" situation is because of such disconnect. Having worked in that industry sector has made me so aware of how broken hiring is, it is such a dark and gloomy present and future - aided by more tools that get put by people who do not really want to solve the problem but just make it someone else's.
I recall field-engineer lore about a particularly bullshity salesman claiming in a meeting back in the day that our company had “been doing Java for years!”
Field engineer stares at table and wants it to swallow him up.
That job listing doesn't give specific credentials for it, but it seems to also involve:
"...anomaly detection solutions ... leveraging an ensemble of Deep learning and LSTM models. Natural Language Processing for entity, topic clusters
and relationship extraction. Text Analytics in human generated tickets and correlation with event tickets for event noise reduction. Apply Natural
Language Classification and RNN algorithms to automatically route tickets... Text mining, message clustering / templatization, Logs to metrics,
anomaly detection, event annotation and sequencing... for each mainframe batch job ... Identify Anomalies ... using sequence mining techniques"
In all it is an interesting product but it is going to take a lot of people with different skills to make that happen. Many of those areas such as "entity and relationship extraction" and "anomaly detection solutions ... [for] event noise reduction" are still almost pre-paradigmatic from the viewpoint of a working engineer.
The best interpretation I have is that they are hiring a large platoon or small company of software developers, data scientists, project managers, you name it. They are probably using a distributed version of UIMA that spins up at least one container per dev in the production system (because "microservices".)
The person they are hiring here is in charge of keeping that monster going at the K8s level. They may need to settle for hiring 12 people with 1 year of experience, but that would blow their budget -- if the whole team worked that way it would get bloated to a mid-sized or large battalion.
I don't see why they don't just run the system on one of the mainframes it is monitoring. With Parallel Sysplex, Workload Manager, etc. IBM had better stuff than VMWare, Docker, K8S, Zookeeper in the 1990s when they made the transition from bipolar to CMOS and had to go parallel to make up for the single-thread performance loss. z15 mainframes are just crammed with PCIe slots so they should have no problem attaching a tensor accelerator to one.
Trouble is, people who know how to administer mainframes are even harder to find than K8S experts.
I interned at IBM my 4th year of college. I was hired directly by the team I was working for but still had to submit an application through their external hiring board.
Took 5 tries with my new manager filling it out for me because even he didn't know the requirements. This was an internship that assumed the applicants were in college but still required 4+ years in java and c++ - neither of which I touched the entire time I was there.
Rookie recruiter mistake. They should demand 20 years to get someone who has appropriate deep-level experience that can fulfill their mission-critical need for requisite synergistic juxtapositional operational efficacy.
This will pre-select suitable candidates that can spout as much gibberish and misunderstandings as their bureaucracy is obviously already used to.
If I wanted to apply, I’d just evaluate the definite integral of Km(t), the number of Kubernetes systems I managed at time t, over my lifespan so far and put that on my resume as my years of experience.
E.g., if I had 6 systems for 3 years, that’s 18 years experience on the resume.
PS: I'd only do this on resume copies sent to companies with obviously impossible experience requirements like this one. For companies with experience requirements that are actually obtainable, I'd just put the usual number of years of my lifespan I've worked with the technology.
I went through a resume building seminar once, and the instructor mentioned years of experience are often inflated to deter people from applying. She worked in HR for over 20 years and she said, if a job is looking for 1-2 years then it really means entry level. 5 is more like 2-3 years. I'm not surprised anymore nor do I let the years of experience stopping me from applying. Also, just a tip to those looking for jobs. Most places will bring you to the front of the list if you know someone at the company.
If you work 16 hours a day for 6 years on Kubernetes, you would have the equivalent of 12 years of experience of a normal person who works 8 hours a day. ;-)
This. To all the people who call this job post "silly", imagine how silly it is if a simple mistake of missing "-" like in "1-2 years" is overblown out of proportions and half the internet is discussing it. I've stumbled upon this "news" a few times during past 2 days. What a waste...
I assume it's on the front page because the majority of HN applicants have at one time or another seen job listings with impossible requirements as prerequisites. "Minimum 12 years Rust experience", etc.
The unstated half of this is that the honest programmer would say, "Well that's clearly impossible, I should either let them know or not apply," while the sleazy programmer tells the recruiter with a straight face that yes, he has the requisite 10 years' Swift experience, and gets the job.
It's like asking for ten years' experience with Swift.
The job descriptions (especially in hidebound companies like Big Blue) tend to have mandated experience levels.
HR folks aren't engineers, so they should not be expected to know.
However, this should be highly embarrassing to the hiring manager, who I'm sure, was handed the ad text for approval, and probably rubberstamped it without thinking.
It would be trivial for someone to Google it, then make a canonical list for the entire HR department. You’re talking about maybe 30 minutes of work to prevent your company from looking like corporate clowns.
You're underestimating the amount of friction at most companies. For all your recruiters to use your measly google sheet, it has to be encoded somewhere on your intranet, a memo has to be sent by the director (whom you have to persuade that this is the correct thing to do) that there is this sheet, and you then become the point person to approve all the job ads because "you took initiative in the area."
Or, you could hand the ad copy to the hiring manager, and assume they would take responsibility (part of the job description for "manager" -I know. I was one for a long time) for approving the copy.
> HR folks aren't engineers, so they should not be expected to know.
If you job description is to find someone to fill a position you should know what that position is. This is middle management "I don't need to know exactly what I'm managing" levels of cow manure.
We engineers tend to apply a "raised baseline" to non-engineers. We seem to assume that everyone "just knows" the "basics" of tech; especially if we are in a tech environment.
The vast number of employees at corporations over a certain size are non-tech, with specialties in Marketing, Sales, Finance, Administration, Support, Manufacturing, etc.
I see that a lot of tech companies have recruiters that are quite close to their teams. I know that Facebook and Apple do this, as they have contacted me in the past.
Those types of recruiters wouldn't make the same mistake, but they are not common in many corporations.
>HR folks aren't engineers, so they should not be expected to know.
Yeah, so make the engineers produce the requirements for the particular jobs. HR should not be in the business of defining technical requirements for jobs.
On the employee’s side, I always tell external recruiters that they do not have permission to modify my resume in any way outside of replacing my contact information with their heading.
I’ve seen too many horribly mangled resumes from the hiring side and I spend time at least once per quarter keeping my resume up to date.
Seen this so many times in my LI feed and people point out that kubernetes wasn’t even out 12 years ago.
So that’s the joke of course but to make this even more sweeter I’d point out that even Go wasn’t publicly available. Wikipedia mentioned that first remarks about Go where from 2009 :)
I'd like to add that I find it scary that this basic info can't be found, neither by a cursory web search, nor on wikipedia. Makes you worry about a future generation raised in naive march-of-progress narratives wondering about how things came to be during the "dark ages" (= today) of the web
All of the patterns and default code referenced there were things I wrote or helped write or reviewed, and while a certain “java patterns” mindset was common in early devs, I can assure you we didn’t transcribe it from Java, we simply used patterns we were familiar with from previous languages. None of the open-source Kube project was “transcribed from Java” to the level being described here.
Kris isn’t wrong, but the details are far more nuanced than that. This talk is a non-primary source :)
Similar anecdote, I started developing apps for the iPad as soon as it came out (2010). Around 2014, a recruiter didn't want to give me a senior position since "they usually look for people with 8+ years of experience". ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I just hope companies get rid of the "hr recruitment" team. These people are utterly clueless folks, who hardly know anything about technology and worse these people call the shots when the time comes to settle on pay package.
Im sure some fake resume from Indian owned sweatshops will have an H-1B visa holder with the non-existent 12 years kubernetes experience. Isn't it how they operate for any position anyways ? Good grief IBM...
Does anyone know why the recruiter vigorously tries to reduce the salary one is asking for? Do they get a portion of that “saved” amount as a bonus from the company? I had a hard time negotiating the salary.
I don't understand what so hard about looking up this kind of stuff. And someone who is not in HR requested this resource, at least the should now what they're doing.
These discussions go alongside MacBook trackbar discussions in my mind. Everyone has stories of clueless recruiters. It’s sad. I also interview about 1 utterly unqualified candidate per month at a big tech co that has this pretty well streamlined. There is need for filtering. That’s what recruiters are paid for, and it’s not at all surprising that they’re terrible at it.
It seems to me a real licensing process with GRE style in person exams is needed to solve this problem.
Maybe we could even include sections on standards in the licensing process so I don’t have to spend my days fixing needlessly “creative” code.
Passing an exam or getting a degree proves only one thing - that you can pass exams. It doesn't prove the ability to think and actually solve real-world (as opposed to often contrived exam) problems.
It also doesn't prove anything about the individual's abilities today, only about what they were able to do at the time of passing the exam. How do you know that they didn't become sloppy and aren't spending their days high producing BS?
A successful exam has pretty much zero correlation with the (non)appearance of "creative code". E.g. if you expect a developer hired freshly out of school with no experience to write reasonable code, you are being completely unrealistic (and have already forgotten your own career start). But they did pass all their exams, right?
Yes, there are many incompetent fools in the field. But most of them likely hold degrees already and one extra exam wouldn't solve anything there. E.g. I know a civil engineer who has passed all the required exams, holds all the required diplomas and professional certificates, has 20+ years of experience - and one of his buildings has collapsed and two more had to be torn down because of fatal design mistakes in them.
This is why one hires for a trial period and asks for references and work portfolios at the interviews.
Because id rather apply to a job at a company that pays enough respect to write a useful and information rich job description before asking me to spend time researching them, writing a cover letter, and tailoring my cv to highlight relevant experience for their needs.
Cover letters are sometimes requested, you look like a dick if you ignore the request, more so if you copy and paste without atleast a basic find and replace.
As for tailoring your cv to the role, I have 15 years of work experience, and I limit my cv to one page so it stands out, interviews are required, and my age doesnt show easily. In the half or so page I have available for work experience examples, I have to show relevance. Its pointless me talking about that time I wrote embeded software if Im applying for a react/node gig.
What does your cv look like if you can just send the same thing everywhere?
My resume is two pages - nothing before 2008 on it.
I only started taking my career seriously in 2008. Since then, I’ve been very focused about which jobs I will target and which technologies I will work on. Both my resume and my job search focus on that. Anything mentioning my C bit twiddling days got removed by 2012. Of course I didn’t mention my stint writing FORTRAN on Stratus VOS mainframes.
2008 - I was an “expert beginner” and I did have to massage my resume to get a mid level C# enterprise Dev job. The next two jobs after that were focused on staying in the “full stack developer role”
2015 - My focus was getting a job where I could lead a project so I focused on the projects that I had led. My resume focused on that for the next two jobs.
2020 - I was focused on getting a job as a “digital transformation consultant”, “enterprise architect”, or a “cloud consultant”. My resume was very targeted toward that. I only applied for one job - Amazon/AWS. By the time I was looking post Covid, every other decently paying consulting job had disappeared. I didn’t have to tailor my resume to AWS - that’s where all of my experience was on that side.
Correct. Years of experience requirements are there to filter out people who aren't confident in their skills and keep them from even applying.
Though I did get bounced later in a hiring process because my "total years of experience didn't qualify for the amount we require for this level of job".
Us programmers tend to be very literal-minded, but my understanding is that in some parts of the Middle East, it is common to exaggerate numbers to provide emphasis, where it’s understood that it’s not to be taken literally. So maybe they just wanted someone with “a lot” of experience in Kubernetes.
(Strange idea: Maybe writing it this way even acts as a filter for literal-minded people).
It probably works better in-person though :)
I see it as coming down to honesty. When a job requisition has a quantitative requirement that I cannot meet, then absent any ability to double-check and see if there's any wiggle room there (or it's a mistake), I'd have to pass it up. They need x, I lack x, OK, I'll move on, because I won't claim I have what I don't.
From the hiring company's point of view, this is bad, not just because of the people who they miss out on who are still highly skilled, but because those who do interview might not be the most honest. If they are willing to claim they have experience that they can't, then how will they be as an employee? Will they give trustworthy status information, or honest estimates? Will their interactions be customers be forthright? How will their social interactions with their coworkers go?
If a hirer won't take the time to be quite sure they have accurate and realistic requirements in their requisitions, they may end up with quite a problem on their hands down the road.
This has little to do with IBM but much more with HR.
Based on my experience, the second most stupid people work in HR. Most stupid people? Real Estate.
I am not saying that people in HR or RE are stupid by definition, I am sure some very smart people work in these fields. But it is a question of entrance barrier. You can get into HR from nearly any background. Yet, some kind of degree is required in most cases. In RE you do a few weeks training and you are ready to go.
Other fields have tremendous entrance barriers. Lets say a professor in a STEM field. You can find average people there but stupidity is rare.
> It required 4+ years of experience in FastAPI.
> I couldn't apply as I only have 1.5+ years of experience since I created that thing.
https://twitter.com/tiangolo/status/1281946592459853830