Tech companies are famous for coddling their workers but after mass layoffs the industry's culture has shifted. Engineers say that getting hired can require days of work on unpaid assignments.
Just to put out the other side of this, you’re competing with a lot of people with more visible credentials. If the hiring manager can look through the stack and pick out 10 people to interview all with easily understood credentials, they have no reason to consider anyone else. Interviewing isn’t free for the company, every additional candidate to consider is probably at least an hour or more of time the company is paying someone for.
That… Isn’t what I’m saying? I’m saying they won’t bother to go to the interview phase with those people most of the time because they have higher probability options to try instead.
Usually getting in front of a human for an interview is the hardest step. Once you’re talking, you can generally show your expertise, and most interviewers I’ve known are receptive to any sort of past experience that’s techy and related enough, or even just problem solving related.
Thinking about it a bit more, I think it’s more like the metrics used to get in front of a human (the automated/hr part) aren’t well matched to the actual goals. We end up interviewing a lot of people who are good on paper according to the first sort, but actual good hires within that aren’t as common as we’d like. But none of the engineers ever know about any of the people who were disqualified due to having an unimpressive resume…
So in the end, the initial sort does indeed end up wasting time and money, but no one’s gotten around to making a good solution for this yet. The alternative so far is to interview a bunch more people, which is also really expensive anyway.
Basically, we have no efficient way to find people who are bad on paper but are actually quite skilled.
Just to put out the other side of this, you’re competing with a lot of people with more visible credentials. If the hiring manager can look through the stack and pick out 10 people to interview all with easily understood credentials, they have no reason to consider anyone else. Interviewing isn’t free for the company, every additional candidate to consider is probably at least an hour or more of time the company is paying someone for.
And every candidate that isn’t picture perfect that they deny a position to is that hour gone to complete waste.
That… Isn’t what I’m saying? I’m saying they won’t bother to go to the interview phase with those people most of the time because they have higher probability options to try instead.
Usually getting in front of a human for an interview is the hardest step. Once you’re talking, you can generally show your expertise, and most interviewers I’ve known are receptive to any sort of past experience that’s techy and related enough, or even just problem solving related.
Sounds to me like there is a total glut of software engineers.
Which makes it really difficult to fathom why they are paid so goddamn much.
Thinking about it a bit more, I think it’s more like the metrics used to get in front of a human (the automated/hr part) aren’t well matched to the actual goals. We end up interviewing a lot of people who are good on paper according to the first sort, but actual good hires within that aren’t as common as we’d like. But none of the engineers ever know about any of the people who were disqualified due to having an unimpressive resume…
So in the end, the initial sort does indeed end up wasting time and money, but no one’s gotten around to making a good solution for this yet. The alternative so far is to interview a bunch more people, which is also really expensive anyway.
Basically, we have no efficient way to find people who are bad on paper but are actually quite skilled.