Fun fact: I had a career in which I was in charge of hiring other people to fill the expanding roles in my department, and was tasked with hiring ‘more of myself’, but I was not allowed to even consider people with my own qualifications.
I was mostly self-taught, and was only allowed to consider people with at least a bachelor’s degree in a field that didn’t even really exist yet.
There was a viral post from Twitter or linkedin years ago of someone posting saying they wanted to hire someone with “10 years of experience using ruby”, a person replied, was told they didn’t meet the requirements, they said something like “look at my profile” …if you looked at the person’s profile they were the creator of ruby, they literally wrote the language. The language was only 7 years old.
I don’t even remember if it was ruby but the story is basically the same. Impossible requirements written by people who don’t even know what they need.
Also fun fact Tim berners Lee used the job title “web developer”. He is THE web developer… He write http and html. He literally created the world wide web. Yet he only claims “web developer”.
Friend of mine applied for a job where they asked for at least 5 years of experience with Angular version x.y.z (can’t remember the exact version). The friend responded that he had 10 years of experience with versions x-3 to x+1.
The HR person doing the hiring asked back “But do you have 5 years of experience with the exact version x.y.z?” to which he answered “Version x.y.z has only been out for 3 years so it’s impossible to have 5 years of experience with it.” HR wrote back saying that he was rejected because he didn’t have 5 years of experience of experience with that exact version.
Letting HR make such decisions is already ridiculous, because they would have no clue what even working with version x.y.z means. For them it might sound like that you have experience working with win11, but they need somebody that knows win98.
Well, this shows that the people in charge have no idea what they’re running, and are not adding any value. We’ve been brainwashed (by them buying our eyeballs and brains) to think they do.
Agreed, sorta. The one caveat is that people hiring are typically hr, not technical people. In large companies they are there to fill out paperwork and limit company legal liability. They don’t need to know the difference between a unsigned char and a long variable in c.
The people is charge should have hired better people to have those roles. Also whoever wrote those requirements messed up. I learned a long time ago there are basically 2paths forward professionally, technical and management. issues arise when then the needs of those two mix and the person doing so is not up to the challenge.
People can design a 120 to 12 volt power supply on graph paper. Others can talk to 5 stake holders on a new product about what color the plastic container should be and have 1 answer and everyone happy that they won at the end. Both skill sets are valuable. The main issue is we, society, put so much value on the second group and severely limited the potential of the first.
Not sure if this is a major difference between the US and Australia, but the vast majority of jobs I’ve gone for I’ve been interviewed by the people who are the managers of the position they’re hiring for. HR tends to handle booking in interview times and what not and then onboarding once a decision is made, but the only time I’ve been interviewed by someone from HR was in a panel interview where the line manager was also present and interviewing. I’ve never worked for big business, but a lot of government and NGO roles as well as large retail chains, cafes and the like.
In the US, I’m my experience, you typically have 10 to 15 minute conversation with hr(or separate agency) first. Basically this is for ensuring you will have a chance of fitting in. It’s not to test technical skills or abilities. For example and I had one recently where after basic greetings the rep said the job was local for 3 months and then expected about 95% of the time was international travel, was I ok with traveling that much? Long story short basically no. Meeting ended in about 5 minutes, never even met the hiring manager. I’m another case I met with a rep from an agency for a job, after the conversation he told me I would not be a good fit (basically it was a manual labor job and almost everyone spoke Spanish which I don’t). That said, he then said but I have another position you would fit and I ended up at that company for many years.
They shouldn’t (and don’t in my experience) ask specific details. It’s not like “what is the timing offset on a Ford 438 engine?” or “how do you transform a spreadsheet of financial data to a presentation for management?” those are for the hirering manager. They ask questions like are you legally allowed to work here? Are you ok with travel requirements? Will you be able to communicate with coworkers? It’s short, basic and basically a screen to verify you are worth the manager time for the real interview.
Pretty sure that was dhh, the creator of rails being told he didn’t have enough experience in rails. I tried to find it, I found references to it, but the original was in Twitter.
Thanks. I guess it was rails and not ruby but still same idea. Rediculous that a creator doesn’t have enough experience. As I said I understand it’s probably hr and “people persons” writing stuff for “tech people”. Not an excuse just fact. It’s a sad, horrible fact. Anyways thanks for confirming my memory from years ago.
He did https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-Lee and was knighted for it. Just funny that my understanding is his most recent resume claims he’s a “web developer” just like someone fresh out of a boot camp. No, you are THE web developer.
Fun fact: I had a career in which I was in charge of hiring other people to fill the expanding roles in my department, and was tasked with hiring ‘more of myself’, but I was not allowed to even consider people with my own qualifications.
I had a similar problem. Writing JDs for new roles I had to fill I was constantly getting them knocked back by HR.
Finally HR called me and explained that for what the job entailed we couldn’t possibly pay the market price for it.
I was like but that’s the job. Shit I thought I had even made the JDs pretty succinct and austere already.
Nup, apparently we’d be paying upward for $100k for a job the guys in team were only getting $60k.
As you can imagine we got a lot of applications but 90% weren’t even close to what we needed.
I was mostly self-taught, and was only allowed to consider people with at least a bachelor’s degree in a field that didn’t even really exist yet.
Same.
I personally don’t like hiring uni graduates. Their utterly lost and difficult to motivate. And almost always what they learned in university does not help whatsoever in the role. Especially dev roles.
For the work I’m involved in there a lot of exception handling. Solving the bugs and looking at the relationship between the stacks. It’s more of a puzzle.
The execs think they’re hiring someone to churn out code, and some people are better at that, like everything else. They don’t understand that they need someone that can figure out what code needs to be written, and why, and that they need someone that gets what the difference is and that there’s always someone that writes better code.
E: Also why I’m not worried about LLMs replacing devs. It ain’t just code.
Sorry, but this is kinda separate: This is literally what labour unions are for?
I would love it if unions entered my workplace but we’re far to complex and technical. Not to mention in my industry we go through a good 2-3 restructures a year (yeah I know it’s bat shit insane)
In lieu of a union I made it my personal aim to get all my under paid employee bumped to much higher pays. Which was a problem because my team generally only took on existing employees who showed aptitude for technical and complex stuff.
In returned they got a detailed and complex training on everything from sql, to parsecing very large amounts of data, to building complex mappings and results.
Under older management they were often left on their previous pay. I found that really fucking disgusting so I made sure to build a rating system that fairly rated them but made sure that rated/scored/reviewed work automatically ended up on their end of year statement. It was all built using MS stuff. It was cool. I could go in, score their work, it graded them, weighed for complex vs simplex (and different roles) generating a single score. I could do it all year around so if something flag I could easily raise it in our catch ups. I had 3 teams across the entire country (I did a lot of travelling so I could meet my guys and hang, coffee, beers, lunch etc)
It basically meant that everything was documented and very fucking detailed, and because they were meeting the straight forward no sneaky lawyer trick KPIs it meant they were able to smash it.
So at EOY where we did peer review the other managers tried to shoot down my ratings for my guys (which gave them 10% bumps and hit their STI (approx $2-4k bonus) however kept coming up against the documentation.
It should be the number one goal for any manager to make it realistic and possible for their guys to get their bonus and pay raises.
Coz a happy team is a good fucking team. As a direct result of this effort we solved over 99% of all the work on our ledger by EOY.
If anything we were a little too successful. But that’s story for another day.
Thanks. It sounds like our backgrounds are similar.
Writing JDs for new roles I had to fill I was constantly getting them knocked back by HR.
That’s awful. It feels really bad when you feel you’re standing in the way of people getting jobs. When you would normally feel like you might be a leftist, this sort of point can be easily exploited to make you feel bad, right?
I don’t even want to address the rest of your points until we go over this one because it feels so important.
No, I ended up hiring under qualified people who had skills on paper but had no talent for the job, because I had to look at candidates who had ‘book’ qualifications in adjacent fields but not passion or any qualifications that actually meant anything to the specialty itself.
This was a design and engineering job.
e: and to be clear, our company president was famous for saying ‘specialisation is for insects’. Like that was his catchphrase.
I’d rather teach someone with passion and interest on the job vs someone who has neither of those but with a certificate any day, and I’ve done both.
Fun fact: I had a career in which I was in charge of hiring other people to fill the expanding roles in my department, and was tasked with hiring ‘more of myself’, but I was not allowed to even consider people with my own qualifications.
I was mostly self-taught, and was only allowed to consider people with at least a bachelor’s degree in a field that didn’t even really exist yet.
e: You can probably guess how that went.
There was a viral post from Twitter or linkedin years ago of someone posting saying they wanted to hire someone with “10 years of experience using ruby”, a person replied, was told they didn’t meet the requirements, they said something like “look at my profile” …if you looked at the person’s profile they were the creator of ruby, they literally wrote the language. The language was only 7 years old.
I don’t even remember if it was ruby but the story is basically the same. Impossible requirements written by people who don’t even know what they need.
Also fun fact Tim berners Lee used the job title “web developer”. He is THE web developer… He write http and html. He literally created the world wide web. Yet he only claims “web developer”.
Friend of mine applied for a job where they asked for at least 5 years of experience with Angular version x.y.z (can’t remember the exact version). The friend responded that he had 10 years of experience with versions x-3 to x+1.
The HR person doing the hiring asked back “But do you have 5 years of experience with the exact version x.y.z?” to which he answered “Version x.y.z has only been out for 3 years so it’s impossible to have 5 years of experience with it.” HR wrote back saying that he was rejected because he didn’t have 5 years of experience of experience with that exact version.
Letting HR make such decisions is already ridiculous, because they would have no clue what even working with version x.y.z means. For them it might sound like that you have experience working with win11, but they need somebody that knows win98.
Well, this shows that the people in charge have no idea what they’re running, and are not adding any value. We’ve been brainwashed (by them buying our eyeballs and brains) to think they do.
They do not.
I cannot stress this enough:
THEY. DO. NOT.
Agreed, sorta. The one caveat is that people hiring are typically hr, not technical people. In large companies they are there to fill out paperwork and limit company legal liability. They don’t need to know the difference between a unsigned char and a long variable in c.
The people is charge should have hired better people to have those roles. Also whoever wrote those requirements messed up. I learned a long time ago there are basically 2paths forward professionally, technical and management. issues arise when then the needs of those two mix and the person doing so is not up to the challenge.
People can design a 120 to 12 volt power supply on graph paper. Others can talk to 5 stake holders on a new product about what color the plastic container should be and have 1 answer and everyone happy that they won at the end. Both skill sets are valuable. The main issue is we, society, put so much value on the second group and severely limited the potential of the first.
Also the correct color is blue 😋
Not sure if this is a major difference between the US and Australia, but the vast majority of jobs I’ve gone for I’ve been interviewed by the people who are the managers of the position they’re hiring for. HR tends to handle booking in interview times and what not and then onboarding once a decision is made, but the only time I’ve been interviewed by someone from HR was in a panel interview where the line manager was also present and interviewing. I’ve never worked for big business, but a lot of government and NGO roles as well as large retail chains, cafes and the like.
In the US, I’m my experience, you typically have 10 to 15 minute conversation with hr(or separate agency) first. Basically this is for ensuring you will have a chance of fitting in. It’s not to test technical skills or abilities. For example and I had one recently where after basic greetings the rep said the job was local for 3 months and then expected about 95% of the time was international travel, was I ok with traveling that much? Long story short basically no. Meeting ended in about 5 minutes, never even met the hiring manager. I’m another case I met with a rep from an agency for a job, after the conversation he told me I would not be a good fit (basically it was a manual labor job and almost everyone spoke Spanish which I don’t). That said, he then said but I have another position you would fit and I ended up at that company for many years.
They shouldn’t (and don’t in my experience) ask specific details. It’s not like “what is the timing offset on a Ford 438 engine?” or “how do you transform a spreadsheet of financial data to a presentation for management?” those are for the hirering manager. They ask questions like are you legally allowed to work here? Are you ok with travel requirements? Will you be able to communicate with coworkers? It’s short, basic and basically a screen to verify you are worth the manager time for the real interview.
Pretty sure that was dhh, the creator of rails being told he didn’t have enough experience in rails. I tried to find it, I found references to it, but the original was in Twitter.
Thanks. I guess it was rails and not ruby but still same idea. Rediculous that a creator doesn’t have enough experience. As I said I understand it’s probably hr and “people persons” writing stuff for “tech people”. Not an excuse just fact. It’s a sad, horrible fact. Anyways thanks for confirming my memory from years ago.
Well if he did literally develop the web, that would indeed make him the web developer.
He did https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-Lee and was knighted for it. Just funny that my understanding is his most recent resume claims he’s a “web developer” just like someone fresh out of a boot camp. No, you are THE web developer.
So, how long ago did you leave?
15 years ago. Unfortunately not of my own volition (I became unable to work due to disability).
e: I can’t write right
Writing left is better anyway
I had a similar problem. Writing JDs for new roles I had to fill I was constantly getting them knocked back by HR.
Finally HR called me and explained that for what the job entailed we couldn’t possibly pay the market price for it.
I was like but that’s the job. Shit I thought I had even made the JDs pretty succinct and austere already.
Nup, apparently we’d be paying upward for $100k for a job the guys in team were only getting $60k.
As you can imagine we got a lot of applications but 90% weren’t even close to what we needed.
Same.
I personally don’t like hiring uni graduates. Their utterly lost and difficult to motivate. And almost always what they learned in university does not help whatsoever in the role. Especially dev roles.
For the work I’m involved in there a lot of exception handling. Solving the bugs and looking at the relationship between the stacks. It’s more of a puzzle.
The execs think they’re hiring someone to churn out code, and some people are better at that, like everything else. They don’t understand that they need someone that can figure out what code needs to be written, and why, and that they need someone that gets what the difference is and that there’s always someone that writes better code.
E: Also why I’m not worried about LLMs replacing devs. It ain’t just code.
Sorry, but this is kinda separate:
&
This is literally what labour unions are for?
I would love it if unions entered my workplace but we’re far to complex and technical. Not to mention in my industry we go through a good 2-3 restructures a year (yeah I know it’s bat shit insane)
In lieu of a union I made it my personal aim to get all my under paid employee bumped to much higher pays. Which was a problem because my team generally only took on existing employees who showed aptitude for technical and complex stuff.
In returned they got a detailed and complex training on everything from sql, to parsecing very large amounts of data, to building complex mappings and results.
Under older management they were often left on their previous pay. I found that really fucking disgusting so I made sure to build a rating system that fairly rated them but made sure that rated/scored/reviewed work automatically ended up on their end of year statement. It was all built using MS stuff. It was cool. I could go in, score their work, it graded them, weighed for complex vs simplex (and different roles) generating a single score. I could do it all year around so if something flag I could easily raise it in our catch ups. I had 3 teams across the entire country (I did a lot of travelling so I could meet my guys and hang, coffee, beers, lunch etc)
It basically meant that everything was documented and very fucking detailed, and because they were meeting the straight forward no sneaky lawyer trick KPIs it meant they were able to smash it.
So at EOY where we did peer review the other managers tried to shoot down my ratings for my guys (which gave them 10% bumps and hit their STI (approx $2-4k bonus) however kept coming up against the documentation.
It should be the number one goal for any manager to make it realistic and possible for their guys to get their bonus and pay raises.
Coz a happy team is a good fucking team. As a direct result of this effort we solved over 99% of all the work on our ledger by EOY.
If anything we were a little too successful. But that’s story for another day.
And it sounds like everyone doing the role for $60k should have been looking elsewhere.
Thanks. It sounds like our backgrounds are similar.
That’s awful. It feels really bad when you feel you’re standing in the way of people getting jobs. When you would normally feel like you might be a leftist, this sort of point can be easily exploited to make you feel bad, right?
I don’t even want to address the rest of your points until we go over this one because it feels so important.
Oh yeah, absolutely agree. But I was utterly maliciously compliant in getting my guys their pay increases and bonuses.
I replied in this thread to another person raising a similar concern. Check it out.
I went to college to learn to code and barely did
So how did it turn out? You ended up hiring nobody?
No, I ended up hiring under qualified people who had skills on paper but had no talent for the job, because I had to look at candidates who had ‘book’ qualifications in adjacent fields but not passion or any qualifications that actually meant anything to the specialty itself.
This was a design and engineering job.
e: and to be clear, our company president was famous for saying ‘specialisation is for insects’. Like that was his catchphrase.
I’d rather teach someone with passion and interest on the job vs someone who has neither of those but with a certificate any day, and I’ve done both.