[HN Gopher] Tech Companies Say They Can't Find Good Employees;Co...
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Tech Companies Say They Can't Find Good Employees;Companies May Be
the Problem
Author : lladnar
Score : 29 points
Date : 2021-03-08 19:42 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.wsj.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.wsj.com)
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| I don't know what they are whining about: I've never had any
| issue finding talent in this industry. Part of that is making
| sure the compensation is among the highest for the position, not
| simply in the "local market" or whatever recruiting jargon
| defines it these days, but worldwide (because in this century
| talent is global and so are your competitors).
|
| Then all you have to do is screen a little, to make sure you
| don't hire one of the 199 out of 200 applicants that can't
| program. [0]
|
| For new grads, it's possible to significantly reduce the noise by
| going to a CS program you trust and getting graduates from there
| to interview.
|
| [0] https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/
| jfim wrote:
| What talent are you looking for, though?
|
| FAANG companies and many companies are okay with generalists
| (eg. can code on a whiteboard), but if you're looking for
| specialist expertise (eg. computer vision, control engineering,
| operations research) it's a lot trickier and not always only a
| matter of compensation.
| OldHand2018 wrote:
| > but if you're looking for specialist expertise (eg.
| computer vision, control engineering, operations research)
| it's a lot trickier and not always only a matter of
| compensation.
|
| It's not tricky at all. Those are chicken/egg jobs - can't
| get the job without experience; can't get the experience
| without the job. Hire some people and train them. They won't
| all work out, but the ones that do will be worth it.
| jfim wrote:
| That's definitely doable at big corporations, which is why
| they can afford to hire generalists and assign them
| somewhere, train them, and reassign them somewhere else in
| the company if they don't pan out.
|
| For smaller companies, any given hire has an outsized
| impact, there's a more limited budget for hiring, there
| might not be the resources available to train a new hire
| from scratch for hard to train skills, and there might not
| be enough "bench space" for people that don't pan out.
|
| Many companies don't really need this kind of specialist
| expertise though. I wouldn't be surprised if hiring is much
| harder in the robotics industry than in, say, consumer
| mobile app development.
| spaced-out wrote:
| This is a a lot of words to say running a tech company is
| hard. Big-Ns are willing to pay people with specialized
| skills north of 500K, if you want those skills pay up,
| otherwise find someone who you can pay less that will
| grow into the role. Get more money from your investors.
| If you can't do any of those, then I guess you can't
| afford to run your business.
|
| In my experience in startups, the executive suite is full
| of people who imagine themselves a future
| Gates/Jobs/Musk/etc... Well, being that successful is
| hard.
| hinkley wrote:
| Have you done any experiments to see if you have to weed out
| more people when you post a low range versus a high?
|
| Or do people think to themselves, "Well, I'm not qualified to
| do a job that's paying 40% above market. They want someone
| serious."
| annoyingnoob wrote:
| Can confirm.
|
| Been through a few 'adversarial' interview processes - if that is
| what it is like to work with you then no thank you.
|
| I don't want to report to someone in another city that I never
| even see.
| hinkley wrote:
| I have found myself having this inner monologue about the scary
| implications of the way the question was asked or what question
| was asked quite a few times.
|
| I wouldn't say I've ever 'thrown' an interview (save maybe
| once), but I've certainly 'gotten through' a few after I
| started to wonder if I'd made a huge mistake showing up today.
| shrubble wrote:
| I was shocked at the accuracy of the Wonderlic test, a timed 12
| minute test with 50 questions (not always expected to be able to
| finish them) in terms of how it correlated with other tests that
| I took in the past.
|
| Not sure that layer after layer of tests would necessarily be
| better than Wonderlic plus a short interview in person to get a
| read on personality fit.
| musicale wrote:
| Absolutely. Whiteboard interviews, as practiced by FAANG etc.,
| are largely useless.
|
| I've seen interviewers pose problems that took the likes of
| Dijkstra and Knuth years to solve the first time, yet somehow
| they expect candidates to solve two of them in 45 minutes. Unless
| you are actually Dijkstra reborn or Knuth you're unlikely to
| solve a problem of this type quickly unless you've seen it, or
| something very close to it, before.
|
| So it's essentially selecting for some combination of how
| recently you took an algorithms course or qualifying exam, how
| comprehensive that course of study was, how much experience and
| success you have had in "programming" (aka algorithm puzzle)
| competitions, how much grinding you've done on
| hackerrank/leetcode/etc., and pure luck.
|
| That being said, I suppose much of the content of medical boards
| or the bar exam has little to do with the actual practice of
| medicine or law, so I guess computing is not alone in terms of
| annoying hoops it makes people jump through. I just wish that
| algorithms qualifying exams were a standard thing that you could
| pass outside of a job interview and be done with, rather than
| something you have to suffer through repeatedly.
| tabtab wrote:
| Experience in the _specific_ technology combinations a particular
| organization wants is usually the "bottleneck", not raw
| education. Companies don't want to wait for nor pay for the
| learning curve: they want plug-and-play employees with paid
| hands-on experience matching their tools.
|
| But that's _not realistic_ because the combinations they want are
| too specific. A person having a thousand college degrees won 't
| fit the way companies frame their expectations.
|
| Note that I'm mostly talking about non-IT companies hiring IT
| workers. An IT-centric company like Google or Microsoft may take
| a different angle.
| manfredo wrote:
| First a note on how to read the relevant study. The link to the
| study in the WSJ article is paywalled. This is a non-paywalled
| link [1] is the results [2]. 22 applicants solved a problem
| alone, 26 with a proctor present. Without the proctor present
| about 2/3rds passed, with the proctor present 1/2 passed. Using
| score >= 2 as "passing", 12 out of 16 men passed in private and 4
| out of 4 women. 11 our of 20 men passed with the proctor, and 0
| out of 6 women. The methodology looks robust, but especially with
| the claims with respect to gender I'd want to see a sample size
| larger than the single digits before making any generalizations.
|
| With that aside, my broader thoughts on tech interview processes:
| Companies want an interview process that are,
|
| - Successfully distinguishes between people that have the
| knowledge and abilities required to perform the job.
|
| - Has systems on accountability, consistency.
|
| - Is relatively easy to train employees to administer the
| interview.
|
| - Has a relatively low time-commitment for everyone involved,
| both interviewer and candidate.
|
| In reality, though, there are tradeoffs between each of these
| points. For instance, using a set question bank improves
| consistency and accountability. Rubrics can be more explicitly
| defined, and bias limited. But it means candidates can google for
| questions beforehand. This was a salient issue when I worked at
| Dropbox, there were only about a dozen technical. interview
| questions for a 2,500+ person company. Having developers come up
| with their own unique question helps mitigate this, but reduces
| accountability.
|
| Likewise, I've had some novel interview processes that more
| closely approximate real working conditions. One company's
| interview was conducted over git-hub. It was asynchronous, with
| tasks spread out over a week. After building the first solution,
| the interview came back with further feature requests and
| comments on the first iteration. This tested the candidate's
| ability to refactor existing solutions to meet changing tasks,
| and the ability to integrate feedback. These are things that are
| rarely captured by whiteboard interviews, but are arguably some
| of the more important skills in software development. But on the
| flip side, it was much more time-consuming in aggregate than 4
| hour-long interviews.
|
| No one interview process has all the advantages. I think a lot of
| companies settle into a pattern of 1 or 2 remote technical
| screens followed by a circuit 3-4 hour-long interviews because
| it's logistically robust. It's a format candidates are familiar
| with. It's easy to train new employees to conduct these
| interviews, and there's broad enough set of people participating
| that one biased signal isn't going to be decisive.
|
| > Companies could also drop problem-solving tests as currently
| offered and instead ask candidates to spend five minutes
| explaining how they would perform a particular job-related task,
| Dr. Parnin says. Focusing on communication skills in this way,
| Dr. Parnin says, can reveal how a candidate thinks.
|
| But do we want to hire the candidate that can talk about high
| level ideas for five minutes in a convincing manner, but can't
| code Fizz Buzz? Or a binary search? I get that some people might
| stumble due to pressure, but at the end of the day if you need
| some mechanism to determine if the candidate has the required
| skills or not. And administering a test is an effective way of
| doing this.
|
| This isn't the first time articles like these have been written.
| X group is disadvantaged by problem-solving tests, so don't use
| said tests. But how then do you determine whether or not the
| candidate has the required skills? Usually whatever supplants the
| technical interviews are also subject to unfairness: referrals,
| recruiting alumni from specific universities or companies. While
| far from perfect, I still have trouble seeing what could replace
| problem-based tasks as a means of demonstrating skills.
|
| 1. http://chrisparnin.me/pdf/stress_FSE_20.pdf
|
| 2. https://imgur.com/EIiofkQ
| OldHand2018 wrote:
| > determine if the candidate has the required skills or not
|
| What are the required skills, and how long will they be the
| required skills?
|
| I've yet to have a job where I was doing the exact things they
| hired me for 6-12 months later. Things change constantly, why
| isn't "dealing with change" a highly-ranked skill for job
| candidates?
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > Likewise, I've had some novel interview processes that more
| closely approximate real working conditions. One company's
| interview was conducted over git-hub. It was asynchronous, with
| tasks spread out over a week. After building the first
| solution, the interview came back with further feature requests
| and comments on the first iteration. This tested the
| candidate's ability to refactor existing solutions to meet
| changing tasks, and the ability to integrate feedback. These
| are things that are rarely captured by whiteboard interviews,
| but are arguably some of the more important skills in software
| development. But on the flip side, it was much more time-
| consuming in aggregate than 4 hour-long interviews.
|
| These you can afford to do if you are Google. If you aren't,
| candidate sort the places they want to work at in descending
| order. By the time they get to that take-home, they might
| already be further along the interview stages at better
| companies.
| manfredo wrote:
| Google certainly has more monetary resources. But in my
| experience large companies like Google are the ones that _can
| 't_ afford to do something like this. The logistical benefits
| of white-boarding interviews and the accountability gains are
| much more important to large companies. This interview
| process was for a smaller company.
|
| But you're absolutely correct that the more time-consuming
| the interview process is for the candidate, the more likely
| they'll interview somewhere else. In fact, that's exactly
| what I did: I received an offer partway through this git-
| based interview process, and the offer was good enough that I
| didn't see value in completing it.
| flukus wrote:
| Google is a large well known and well paying company that
| can get candidates to make that sort of time investment,
| smaller companies can't because they're just generic
| companies that no one particular wants to work for, I'll
| skip the elaborate test and apply for the next generic
| company in the list.
|
| Aside from that, I really don't have time for these
| elaborate interviews if I'm already in a job, companies
| that do this are limiting their potential candidates to the
| unemployed.
| leet_thow wrote:
| Can confirm. I'm a senior engineer with a great track record at
| early stage startups as well as publicly traded companies. I'm
| staying put with my current employer because I refuse to put up
| with hiring process horseshit.
| musicale wrote:
| Companies are always willing do do anything in their power to
| attract good employees, short of raising wages.
| mesozoic wrote:
| I assure you not paying enough is the problem.
| cheriot wrote:
| The whole article is about this study if anyone wants to skip to
| the source: https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3368089.3409712
|
| tldr; More students solved the problem when there was no proctor
| in the room. The effect was especially pronounced with women.
| [deleted]
| xmunoz wrote:
| I think the problem is deeper than whiteboard interviews. Too few
| companies are willing to invest in junior talent. Netflix
| famously only hires senior-level engineers, and Facebook has
| recently offloaded many of their internships to Major League
| Hacking [1], an exploitative outsourcing platform for unpaid,
| entry-level labor from developing countries [2]. This is entirely
| a problem of the tech industry's making.
|
| [1] https://news.mlh.io/introducing-the-mlh-fellowship-
| externshi...
|
| [2] A close friend who was formerly employed by MLH
| tabtab wrote:
| Re: "an exploitative outsourcing platform for unpaid, entry-
| level labor from developing countries..."
|
| It hasn't quite happened yet, but the chance of IT going the
| way of factory workers in the future seems quite high. It's
| labor intensive but much of it can be done anywhere in the
| world. If you are lucky, you can be a liaison between
| management and constantly shifting overseas techies.
| flukus wrote:
| > It hasn't quite happened yet
|
| This is certainly not for lack of trying. Outsourcing was
| much more common 10-20 years ago than it is today but a
| combination of wage growth in outsourced countries and
| terrible quality has just about seen the end of the practice.
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