Why is it taking longer and longer to fill open jobs?

http://www.vox.com/2015/6/20/8815561/job-vacancy-duration

by jrs235 • 11 years ago

115 175 11 years ago

th0ma5• 11 years ago

I think this misinterprets something deliberately, and misses some things entirely.

It mentions that wages have been stagnant as proof that it isn't that people aren't applying for jobs that have low pay, but only uses wage statistics as evidence for that, which doesn't really indicate one way or the other that such is the situation.

I think the thing it really misses is the increased conceptualization of open positions that makes it so about the only person in the entire world qualified for a job the way it is posted is either the person that had the job previously, or the exact skills of some other team member.

I assisted in hiring a technical person at a previous job over a decade ago, and after finding no one with the skills we wound up just hiring the most enthusiastic person, and they wound up over achieving.

After harassing HR at my company, I finally made a lateral move where my manager told me he thought at the time of hiring that they needed someone and they thought I might be able scrape by, but now they want me to find someone else just like me.

I've read other studies drawing parallels to online dating and in the face of abundance you keep holding out for something better.

Either people have to do the hard work to generalize the description of the kinds of skills they are looking for that doesn't wind up into yet another set of impossibilities, or the entire hiring process needs a complete reset in some other way. While we're at it we should probably throw degree requirements out the window, and the silly hiring puzzles everyone has been upset about.

draugadrotten• 11 years ago

I assisted in hiring a technical person at a previous job over a decade ago, and after finding no one with the skills we wound up just hiring the most enthusiastic person, and they wound up over achieving.

It is good to hire for attitude. You can always teach new team members new skills but it is next to impossible to change their attitudes.

After harassing HR at my company,

Ah, yes. HR. Could they be part of the problem.

jrs2352• 11 years ago

I know that when a certain global HVAC company brings in a new "fresh" class of salespeople, they bring them in all at once about 20 to 30 at a time. The will go through weeks of training. Some make it, some don't.

The majority, if not all, of the incoming (just of of college) class did not major or obtain a degree in anything sales related (business, management, accounting, marketing, etc.). Most of them graduated with mechanical engineering degrees. Why? Because it is easier to train and teach someone how to sell than it is to teach some the technical details (physics) of HVAC systems. It is also easier to sell when you know and understand the product you are selling. Most of the units sold are custom built for the particular building they are being used on/in.

Likewise, it is easier to train or teach someone a new programming language than it is to change or modify someone's attitude and personality.

mc323• 11 years ago

In my experience what you say rings true; the job descriptions are such that its hard for a single person to hit all the reqs and if the company is underpaying, it's going to be hard filling that position.

With regard to internal hires, yes, the jobs are posted to meet some HR criteria and are merely a formality and thus get filled quickly.

But.... This is in tech which accounts for a minute part of all jobs opps, so what applies to tech may not necessarily apply to non tech jobs.

smil3• 11 years ago

As a recent graduate for whom it took a year and a half and a move to a different country to find another job, I think I've developed job searcher's PTSD. Applied to lots of jobs I was very excited about, only to get degraded during interviews or not hearing back at all. I wouldn't dream of asking for a lateral move as that might make my boss think I don't like my current job, and as they can fire my with 48 hrs notice, which would cost me my week visa, I can't take any chances.

GreenPlastic7• 11 years ago

In my experience, a lot of new grads don't know how little they actually know and expect the degree itself to qualify them for the job.

pyre2• 11 years ago

developed job searcher's PTSD

I currently (somewhat) interact with people that have rejected me for jobs in the past (within the local tech scene). I find it difficult, but such is life. It is easier to handle when you're not still looking for work and interacting with the person that rejected you for what (to you) was a petty reason.

ryandrake10• 11 years ago

Extreme pickiness. Every hiring manager is convinced that they must only hire A+++ players or their business is doomed. They'd rather a position go un-filled for 6 months than take a risk on someone simply hungry and enthusiastic. Companies are holding out for that unicorn employee (but, strangely enough, not offering unicorn salaries).

dba7dba2• 11 years ago

They need to wake up. They are not google or apple.

memracom3• 11 years ago

It is a sign of incompetent management that they demand only A+++ players. A good manager would hire only B players, then train and mentor them. A really GREAT manager would hire only C players that have the right attitude, and still end up with the best team in the company.

Before the MBA scourge hit the land, managers tended to hire the first B or C players that seemed to have the right aptitude and attitude. They would fire fast too, when they made mistakes. In the end they got long term productive employees and, I MUST point out, they did successfully build the modern world that we marvel at around us.

ionforce4• 11 years ago

A lot of companies want productivity NOW and aren't willing to tank the cost/risk of training someone junior. Also, some skills you can't/don't want to train into.

hkmurakami• 11 years ago

I've read other studies drawing parallels to online dating and in the face of abundance you keep holding out for something better.

Commonly referred to as the "secretary selection problem" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem

ryandrake10• 11 years ago

From that Wiki (interesting by the way, thank you):

5. Immediately after an interview, the interviewed applicant is either accepted or rejected, and the decision is irrevocable.

Many companies actually think this is the way things have to be done in the real world!

I once worked somewhere they were trying to hire a software engineer with a very particular technical skill. They interviewed a few people and then interviewed Candidate X. He was very good, but not a "unicorn A++++ hire" so the company decided to hold out for a better candidate. 6 months pass, and none of the subsequent applicants were better than Candidate X, so they finally swallowed their pride and called him back. Luckily, he was still looking to change jobs and we got him, but that was 6 months we could have had another person powering our (then) 3 person team.

commandar3• 11 years ago

After harassing HR at my company, I finally made a lateral move where my manager told me he thought at the time of hiring that they needed someone and they thought I might be able scrape by, but now they want me to find someone else just like me.

I so relate to this.

I was specifically poached from one department by another for a new position within my company. HR process requires internal transfers to apply for the posting on the company website. I did so overnight, and about 15 minutes after HR got in for the day the next morning, I got an email telling me thank you for the application but I would not be considered or interviewed for the position.

My new manager had to fight with HR to even get them to send the application she had requested from me on to her because I didn't precisely tick all the checkboxes on the posted job description. This despite the fact that A. she'd specifically gone after me because her people knew the work I was already doing and knew I'd be a good fit with them and B. the position had gone unfilled for months, was badly needed, and the apps HR had passed on were a far worse fit for the job.

I mean, I had the odds about as stacked in my favor as you can get and it was still an uphill battle to get me hired on. Makes me cringe to think how many solid people we have to have missed out on because HR rejected them out of hand.

gcb02• 11 years ago

A. you were enough to get the job done but wasn't the person to change the game. B. they knew that person was out there but they were failing to reach out to then

makeitsuckless• 11 years ago

With my current employer, hiring the "most enthusiastic" people instead of the finding people with the necessary skills backfired hard.

We're now stuck with serious inefficiencies in the organisation and people that under local labor protection laws are hard to get rid of and replace holding key positions.

This may be easy to overcome in a larger organisation in which the underskilled enthusiasts are surrounded by more senior appropriately skilled coworkers, but in a smaller company it's a disaster.

venomsnake• 11 years ago

I think this misinterprets something deliberately, and misses some things entirely.

Well it is Vox.com

The skills requirements are absurd. And for me they are a bit like a red flag - every job that has 3 pages of technical abbreviations is not worth applying for. Good jobs are always by personal contacts first.

alister• 11 years ago

What's changed over the past fifteen years is that the internet has dramatically decreased the cost of identify in an open job listing and sending in an application. The stack of resumes you need to read through in order to start scheduling interviews has just gotten longer. The easier you make it to apply for jobs, the slower the hiring process becomes.

The above explanation of why it now takes employers longer to fill open jobs isn't convincing. Perhaps it would make sense if you received:

(a) 10,000 resumes for a single opening (but that doesn't happen)

(b) 50 resumes from 50 different Nobel laureates and you were torn trying to decide which one is best (but that doesn't happen either)

My experience is that if you got 5 resumes pre-Internet, you'd get 50 post-Internet. But the additional screening is negligible. I found that I can immediately reject 45 of the 50 resumes after looking at them for a minute each because so many of the resumes are unqualified.

You might say that that is 45 minutes lost, but even a single interview will take longer than that. It's insignificant to the overall hiring process.

Maybe what really happens is that in large HR-driven companies, the HR department forces the hiring manager to interview many more incompetent or unqualified people because they got so many resumes to choose from.

GreenPlastic7• 11 years ago

Posted a senior iOS dev position to Indeed, LinkedIn, Glassdoor where the company is paying 25%(maybe 40% if you include RSUs) above market here (although we don't put comp in the job listing) and only got 3 applicants in a month.

hayksaakian• 11 years ago

Try posting the same exact thing in Craigslist. There's too much tangential noise in those websites.

xeni2• 11 years ago

Any chance you could link the listing (or paste the description)? Just curious to see what sort of things you're looking for. I'm currently 5 months into my first full-time iOS dev position. I'm also really curious to know what sort of questions you ask during your interview process (both pre-screens and onsite). I understand if you don't want to share info on that though :)

smil3• 11 years ago

So compensation is not relevant to your point at all since you didn't list it. Or were you looking for mind readers? The low response rate makes sense in that case.

GreenPlastic7• 11 years ago

Can't post the exact description but the jist of it was:

Strong understanding of objective C and iOS SDK Swift experience a plus Passion for design / UX Proven track record of quality apps in app store

That's literally all I had under qualifications.

logicallee4• 11 years ago

How is your interview process? people would rather get a job using their skills within a few days, rather than go through an inappropriate interview process that does not select them

This is just a guess, of course :) Is your HR/interview/hiring process easy for people to go through, who can do and have done the job?

WWLink2• 11 years ago

Some recruiting sites (and recruiters) are pretty careless with the way they contact candidates too, though. I mention having done iOS related stuff on my resume, but I occasionally get an email or call from someone that is looking for a 1 man iOS development team lol. And they usually are offering a short term contract that pays much worse than my full time job does.

It's funny because they get REALLY persistent about it too. Like a pissed off "I've been trying to reach you for the past week!" type of attitude.

walshemj7• 11 years ago

So from my perspective for job search linkedin would be a second tier site I wound't even search on glassdoor and indeed is considered where the "shit" jobs go and that is a direct quote from a director of one of the big UK job sites.

Animats2• 11 years ago

How often do you see "Help Wanted - Will Train"?

mc323• 11 years ago

That is more likely to happen if the employer can legally keep the worker after training, like say when the gov pays for your med school and gets you to commit x years at below market rates in exchange for paying your tuition (and training) otherwise the employee has little incentive to stay in the face of better offers given the added skills the prev employer paid for.

ryandrake10• 11 years ago

So, make sure there are no better offers out there. If you think your employees are going to leave after you train them, that's a problem you can solve.

icelancer2• 11 years ago

A lot by smart employers. When I ran a data science team, we hired mostly physicists and math majors who had only secondary knowledge of CS. Best bargains on the market and they don't come with baggage.

Now I work in sports science. I try to hire brilliant people who have never played the sports in question. Still very, very hard.

eropple3• 11 years ago

I occasionally, casually interview for sports gigs (NBA, NHL) and I see it the other way - the needs are not that technically difficult, but the folks doing the hiring are rarely qualified to be doing the interviewing and most are very cheap relative to market so an established, skilled person is infeasible for them. Literally everyone I've met in the industry is super nice, though, and I've made many friends in the process.

caseyf7• 11 years ago

I would like to see someone quantify how many job listings are posted to meet H1-B requirements where there is no intent to hire. I've been hearing more and more stories of people trying to get interviews for jobs they see online only to find out the listing was to meet visa requirements for the person in the current role.

arkem• 11 years ago

Job postings that are aiming to satisfy visa requirements are generally easy to identify.

Here are some indicators:

* They're usually listed in a Sunday newspaper rather than online.

* They will not be posted to the company's website.

* They'll require a specific education level

* They'll require experience that is oddly specific

mrspeaker• 11 years ago

Like this one: https://twitter.com/mrspeaker/status/525650833174978560

I thought it was the most hilarious thing I'd ever seen until a co-worker on a H1-B told me what it really was.

dba7dba2• 11 years ago

It seems no one is mentoring anyone in professional setting anymore. Stackoverflow.com is nice but sometimes face2face mentoring can't be beat.

And no company seems willing to offer 'apprenticeship'. You are working on a hard problem with latest methodologies and tools? Then it's very likely you won't find anyone out there who has the experience in the methodologies and tools. You just can't hold out looking for the perfect candidate. You are not google or apple. So just give up and hire the best you can find in the pool. Don't wait till you find the ONE. Again, you are not google or apple.

The other problem I think is HR department itself. How many small/mid HR departments keep track of hiring process like SEO metrics are kept/measured? Do they know which manager seems to hire the most duds? AFAIK, HR department is the least automated piece of a tech company. I can tell because they are still scheduling interviews using emails.

And lastly, please take a look at your Job desc/requirement. Is it real or are you just copying/pasting from some other job postings?

mpdehaan22• 11 years ago

Pretty much most job positions want a pony. It's the old "10 years experience in J2EE" thing, when a technology doesn't really take that long to learn, or a group of technologies that someone uses, that are impossibly incommon in combination.

People want developers in Foo, not Bar, when Foo and Bar are basically the same.

I prefer hiring smart people that can learn, and that are good to work with, but I do feel people don't believe that as much when there are are a lot of people on the market.

It's somewhat similar to how it's hard to get an employer to fund a conference trip, classes, books, and all of those kinds of things.

And because you can't really move and grow at work, I think that's also why people change jobs more, we're in a very creative professional that desires knowledge - and the system really wants us to hire someone who already knows X or has built X before, and crank out more of the same many times.

resoluteteeth• 11 years ago

I think another interpretation is that it's become easier for companies to keep jobs "open" and collecting applicants without really having to put in effort to find people. Or, to put it another way, the idea of an "open job" has become meaningless, if it was ever meaningful in the first place.

As a metaphor, we can imagine many people wanting to buy apples, but not being willing to pay the 1$ the supermarket will charge. They could create an "apple opening", posting on an apple selling site looking for people who are willing to sell them apples with certain qualities for a given price that depends on the individual, for example 5 cents. Then, we could poll consumers to see how many have apple openings. Perhaps we could find millions of such unfilled openings, but would this tell us anything about trends in the quality of apples or actual apple consumption?

d4nt2• 11 years ago

This aligns with my person experience in a startup incubator. If I was a ruby/php/js guru willing to work for £25,000/year plus a bit of equity, I could take my pick of 100s of jobs.

golergka• 11 years ago

That's a reasonable theory, but it doesn't correspond with the stats about "labor quality" problem.

XorNot• 11 years ago

Sure it does. There's a problem in that there's not enough quality labor willing to work for peanuts and then watch their life get destroyed when a major medical event happens.

hebdo• 11 years ago

A relevant read: Whaddaya Mean, You Can't Find Programmers? http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000050.html

arenaninja• 11 years ago

I finished reading the article, and only then realized that it's from 15 years ago. Incredibly relevant still, and in my experience companies still pinch pennies when hiring developers

myhf• 11 years ago

It's amazing how much has changed since the time of that article. I can't remember the last time I saw cubicle walls.

Too• 11 years ago

The same is happening with real estate, people have started to post apartments "soon for sale" without any starting price or fixed bidding time, years before they are ready to move, just in case some crazy guy happens to drop by and put a bid that is higher than the actual market value. The cost of advertising to a wide audience has simply dropped so much that you can constantly keep fishing even though you don't have anything actually ready, and to beat the competition everybody has to do it, its just a race to the bottom. MVPs are also a good anlogy to this, present a half working website just to see if people are interested and if enough are you can continue with development.

jfoster• 11 years ago

The attention is not endless, though. Consumers will eventually respond with scepticism, I think.

mpdehaan22• 11 years ago

I've seen it happen with some startups that jobs are posted as "open" to attract applicants when they are not really hiring, or not removing those postings once filled to passively collect resumes and make it look like the startup is bigger than it is.

I really don't like this as it hurts the applicants time and distracts them from finding a place that does want to hire them now.

jacquesm• 11 years ago

And sometimes to be seen to be in a growth phase when in fact they are stagnant.

It's pretty easy to puncture that though, simply ask how many open positions they have for each department and when the last hire was for each department. That will show quickly whether or not they are actually growing and at what rate. (You can't lump them all together because with a larger company one department may be growing while another is declining).

sjbase• 11 years ago

Great point. One corollary is that with the increase in volume (and churn) of places to post a job, single openings & fuaxpenings are likely to be double/triple/N counted.

gcb02• 11 years ago

by that graph, hiring:openings is finally at 1.0.

that actually sounds perfect, and it seems inflated before. when it was over 1.5

so, what's the problem?

colechristensen• 11 years ago

* Employers overvalue experience, forgetting that a human is a fantastic machine and with appropriate training and management, most people will be able to do most jobs.

* Communication is hard: both writing resumes and job descriptions – it becomes this strange difficult-to-play game that both sides engage in often having little to nothing to do with the actual job

* Education is poor: at all levels actual learning is not emphasized. Especially learning how to do things. From preschool to graduate school, the game of education far surpasses actual learning. Students aren't interested in learning and teachers are only interested in grades and tests.

VLM• 11 years ago

"Employers overvalue experience"

Only at hiring time. One of the execs reads a journalist article in a trade rag about any random fad and "we" need to have it implemented yesterday. Which is not a problem because successful employees are really good at OTJ training and learn by experimentation. Unfortunately no one has told HR that, and they think they're hiring for tax audit avoidance accountants in the most conservative and uncreative criteria possible.

The ideal candidate has 20 years of experience in a field 10 years old (that only takes 6 weeks to learn of course), in other words focused entirely on the past. The ideal employee on the other hand is an expert at learning "6 week" technologies and making them produce once they're hired. There's going to be friction and failure and massive wastes of money.

There is also the extremely low social status issue. It would be possible to micro-specify (nano-specify?) any management or executive job, but they're not going to put up with it, as an industry, so instead we get "good judgment" type of hiring criteria. The reason why programmers have incredibly low social status is the oversupply (nationwide, anyway) requires them to be talked down to or replaced by someone who will tolerate being talked down to. The extremely low social status permeates the rest of the field too, call center like work environments, crazy disrespectful deadlines, poor management techniques (most modern fads, really), so its not going to be as simple as some sort of union saying "no" to disrespectful job advertisements.

memracom3• 11 years ago

Don't well written cover letters help employers quickly evaluate a large number of applications?

And don't complain that you don't get them along with the resumes. 1) Ask for a cover letter explaining why you are a fit for the job. 2) Discard applications that don't include them. 3) Resist the urge to look through the resumes anyway.

And if you directly ask for a cover letter, and you get anm application that doesn't have one, send the applicant a form letter that says. "This is a form letter. Apparently you do not care about finding a job because you failed to follow the instructions in the job posting. We have deleted your application/email. If you still want to be considered for the job, apply again WITH A COVER LETTER that explains why you are the right fit for the job".

If Employers want Job Applicants to do the right thing, then they need to be proactive and teach. Nobody else trains job applicants how to apply for a job, how to help the employer see quickly that you deserve to get an interview.

slyall• 11 years ago

Ask for a cover letter explaining why you are a fit for the job

How does this help anything. Plenty of these out there which the applicant can attached to the application.

"I am very enthusiastic to leverage my [INSERT HERE] skills to help [COMPANY] transform the [WHATEVER] industry "

raverbashing2• 11 years ago

This

99% of cover letters will just be, self-importance exaggeration, prospective employer excessive praise, etc.

pluma2• 11 years ago

Cover letters are worthless unless you're looking for salespeople. You don't want applicants that can convince you they're obsessive fans of your company, you want applicants that are interested in their work and whose interests line up with the job you're offering.

For many jobs, you don't even need that. There are a lot of jobs where any given applicant will have applied to dozens if not hundreds of companies. The only thing an enthusiastic cover letter tells you in those cases is that they are lying.

Unless you're looking for co-founders or C-level managers, they don't have to have big ideas about how they can make your company better. But they should know how to do their job and be interested in finding ways to help you help them do their job better.

Job applications are for coarse filtering based on vague qualifiers. Two years experience as a C# drone at a bank? Too bad, we're looking for Clojure greybeards. Shoddy formatting and everything is misspelled? We need people that care about the quality of their deliverables. And so on. It's a first impression, not a hiring decision.

Of course this all depends on the number of applicants, the number of openings and the size of the company.

But yes, if you expect certain things to be in a job application, be explicit about it. If you want the cover letter to answer some interview questions ahead of the actual interview, say so.

d4nt2• 11 years ago

My theory is that people are shopping around for better employers and better cultural fit, and that it's not just a question of taking the highest offer any more. That would explain why wages are not rising.

PythonicAlpha3• 11 years ago

If the problem would be just employees "shopping around" that would not explain, why wages are not rising. If they would shop around, wages would also rise, even when they are only marginal interested in wages ... (show me 3 employees that are not interested in wages)

hodwik4• 11 years ago

Tech wages are very inflated as is, expecting them to rise is pretty silly.

When I was looking for my current job, I forgot to even ask about wages. So maybe what they gave me in pay is "flat" from five years ago, but it's still twice what any of my friends my age are making, while they have degrees and I do not.

logicallee4• 11 years ago

Wages only rise if the demand curve doesn't drop with the higher price. In other words, just because something is scarce won't automatically drive its price up. Strawberries might be scarce in the winter, but that doesn't mean their price will be $10 or $20. It just means the volume at the normal price is negligible.

Likewise, programmers are quite useful as they can automate things and so act as a lever on requirements. But that doesn't mean companies have $500K to pay to someone to do that. It just means the volume at the normal programmer salary is very low compared to the demand at that same salary.

gizi• 11 years ago

I am busy already. I already have a job that I like. So, I am not even remotely looking at what other jobs are around, because at the moment I consider that to be a distraction, a waste of time. Now you can generalize this: you can safely assume that anybody who is even just remotely good at what he does, is already busy. He already has a job and he is not interested in your job advert. In other words, above a certain treshold of skill level that is not even that high, you must approach the candidate, because the candidate will not approach you. Besides the fact that he considers your approach to be a distraction (he does not need it right now) the most important question on his lips will be: How much more are you offering than I am getting now already?

vonmoltke2• 11 years ago

This attitude is so wring, and hearing it so many times has contributed to my perceptions of myself as a shit engineer.

There are plenty of good engineers like myself who are at times actively or semi-actively looking for a job. I'm in Dallas, and I have a lot of hot keywords associated with myself that are not my core competency. What that means is over 90% of the jobs I get approached about are inappropriate, sometimes wildly. I only get approached by the highly active recruiters, since so many seem to have limited geographical areas and I am not in a position to network with non-recruiting people. These recruiters frequently misinterpret or misunderstand my background.

Thus, I am forced to actively apply to openings if I want something new. Hearing things like this gives me the impression that I will be viewed as inferior just because I had to stoop to the level of applying like the rest of the plebs.

PythonicAlpha3• 11 years ago

One of the problems IMHO is, that employers get more and more demanding.

There is this joke, that fits very good: "If Carpenters Were Hired Like Programmers" [1]

In former days, the readiness to take people and train them on the job was much higher. In Germany this is a really ugly trend. The licence for truck drivers is very, very costly but the earnings of the drivers are very low. In former days the transportation companies educated their own drivers. Today, they don't. They just expect, that the drivers somehow have to have the education and come from somewhere. What is the result: The state is in more and more cases educating unemployed people that they can become truck drivers. They pay tax money, that the transporting companies don't have to pay for it ...

I don't think, that a "free market" has to mean that more and more costs have to been taken over by the state, but that is, what is happening.

Today, when you apply for a job, they search for exactly those skills needed. They are not ready to train you on the job or take people that have to do a lot of learning on the job. And also in Germany: They are not ready to take people above a specific age.

[1] http://www.jasonbock.net/jb/News/Item/7c334037d1a9437d9fa650...

PhantomGremlin• 11 years ago

I've read that joke before. It's great. It should be re-posted every time one of these "jobs" discussions comes up on HN. It very clearly summarizes what's wrong with the hiring process.

spacko2• 11 years ago

Maybe HR tends to complicate the process to expand its power and justify its existence.

There is this "law" that proclaims this is what happens in bureaucratic organisations - hierarchies tend to be grown for that purpose.

walshemj7• 11 years ago

Exactly read the laundry files

analog312• 11 years ago

Parkinson's Law -- an amusing read, even if quaint. The same book also gave rise to the contemporary term "bikeshedding."

spacko2• 11 years ago

Parkinson's Law states that work is expanded to fill the available time. The law I refer to is that the time itself with work to be filled is expanded - for the purpose of requiring more human and non-human resources - which again requires expanding the hierarchy - which expands the power of those who cause this process (as the newly hired people will be added below those "managers").

dublinben• 11 years ago

This seems highly related to Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy.[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Pournelle#Iron_Law_of_Bu...

anti-shill• 11 years ago

it's not--it's just propaganda...I never trust any stats promulgated or hyped by the gov't, the media, corporations or nonprofit foundations. They all have an agenda, and agenda that portends no good for the average american.

thrillgore• 11 years ago

I mean, the solution is simple to fix right? Raise the wages for these positions.

hodwik4• 11 years ago

It's not about wages being too small, it's about offices not being pleasant places to work.

I have never heard a programmer complain about not enough pay. They do, however, complain about incompetent bosses, not enough vacation, and having to deal with non-programmers.

known• 11 years ago

interview != quiz

njloof• 11 years ago

What's also missing is that most resumes are culled mechanically by grepping for keywords. Nobody reads every resume they receive. That's why they ask for digital documents -- and then ask you to submit them again in plain text elsewhere on the form.

autokad• 11 years ago

I wonder if part of it (besides keeping positions open just to see what is out there) is that companies can use job openings as analytic data. you find information that re-affirms how much you should be paying employees, expectations of employee turn over, and more interestingly what the competition is doing.

I mean, imagine I am google, I fain interest in a job posting to get some facebook employees to apply. I even give them an interview. between the resume, cover letter, and interview I might be able to get lots of information on what projects facebook is working on and then just turn down the candidate after 3 interviews and say: google is quirky, if one person dont like you, you dont get in no matter how good you think it went.

ChuckMcM• 11 years ago

Historically long lead times to hiring has been a leading indicator of wages rising. The mechanism is pretty well understood.

Employer A decides that if they can get an employee at a low wage, they would hire another employee and they create an advertisement for the opening. If the economy has moved up, they don't fill it and it remains open.

Meanwhile employer B loses an essential employee for some reason and they go out and actively try to recruit a replacement (generally from other employers in the same industry / space) They find employer A's top performer and offer them a raise to come work for B (which A takes because they have had really poor wage increases over the last 5 years)

Now Employer A has a problem, they are down a key employee and they had an "opening" already so they are in danger of losing income if they don't replace their employee. In order to do that they raise what they are willing to pay the "right" person who walks in the door. And they may try to recruit out of other employers.

"Nice to fill" job openings are an indicator that the business is profitable enough to add labor, which means that the labor it is employing is at or above the productivity rate needed to succeed or expand. In that environment some firms will seek to grow more aggressively than others and that will result in opportunities to be employed at the entry level.

That is a good indicator for folks who are coming into the workforce. How the rest of the economy responds will be interesting indeed.

Animats2• 11 years ago

Here's a famous recruiting ad for "Super programmers" from Autodesk, in 1986.[1] It includes two things you seldom see today. First, there's no list of narrow technical skills:

"Relevant experience is nice, but if you're as good a person as we want, you'll be able to pick it up in a week or two."

And finally:

"We'll pay you more than anybody else in the industry."

That worked. Autodesk ended up owning the CAD industry and the animation industry.

If your company is complaining that it can't find programmers, try that.

[1] https://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/www/chapter2_43.html

fsckin• 11 years ago

It'd be awesome if AutoDesk unleashed some super programmers on their online store and subscription management portal. Both are an absolutely abismal experience.

kayge• 11 years ago

Are there any companies out there today with that mindset? I've received 4 rejections over the last couple of months that all seem to boil down to me not having "enough brown". One would think having a bachelor's in computer science, 7 years of broad IT experience, and an easygoing attitude might excuse me from being a little rusty with the latest RoR after not touching it for 3 years :) Sorry for the rant (and minor self-promotion), but this topic has been weighing on my mind a lot recently.

sopooneo• 11 years ago

Because it seems there are many people commenting who might know: is it heard of for a potential employee to negotiate compensation also in terms of amount of paid time off? And if so, has anyone ever heard of a US dev getting European levels of vacation? Like eight weeks?

Because that is my ideal, and I would be willing to give up a lot to get that sort of thing. I need stability, but live pretty frugally, so I would only be interested in an otherwise traditional full-time position. Any input greatly appreciated.

dhd415• 11 years ago

I've heard of people negotiating 4 or 4.5-day work weeks for 80% or 90% of the position's full-time salary. In the few cases where I've seen that happen, someone in the company had prior work experience with the candidate and knew that they would be worth bringing in even on a part-time basis.

jrs2352• 11 years ago

This might explain it too: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ByFCtZfCcAAg_A3.jpg:large

Why is it taking longer and longer to fill open jobs?

Related Stories