General SE hiring comment: One thing I realized, for most IT/SE jobs, the more accurately you describe your current stack in the requirements (or maybe the person you are replacing), the smaller your candidate pool is. You might even find that your candidate pool is exactly the people you are already working with.
Which makes it problematic when we make HR people do the initial screening. They would filter out a lot of good candidates just because they used Python instead of Java, or had been working on a C++ project one year less than the person leaving the team.
Could it be then that this is a communication problem between the Engineering team and the HRD? After all, the Eng'g team writes the requirements for the job post, HRD just checks it and makes it look attractive.
(Though honestly, I don't think this general comment applies to the job post in Carmack's tweet. Honestly I can't fault the job post for the way it was worded. I say the higher you are in an SE-org chain, the less this is a problem.)
> Could it be then that this is a communication problem between the Engineering team and the HRD? After all, the Eng'g team writes the requirements for the job post, HRD just checks it and makes it look attractive.
It depends on the HR department. Some are under pressure to "add value" to hiring, so they insist on rewriting job reqs and screening all applicants. At a Fortune 50 company I worked at, my boss got in trouble because he sweet-talked someone in HR to print out all the resumes they rejected and secretly deliver them to him. He resorted to this after he informally recruited a new hire, wrote a job description specifically targeted at them, and then, after waiting two weeks for their application to filter through the system, found out that HR round-filed it because they supposedly weren't qualified.
HR refused to collaborate with him on editing job descriptions, so every time he submitted one, he had to check every day until he found out what garbage they posted so he could go beg them to fix it. They would randomly add technologies and "change the wording" of desired qualifications (how do you "change the wording" of proper nouns and jargon from somebody else's field?) and they were especially fond of turning nice-to-haves into absolute requirements because we supposedly didn't have enough. My boss was convinced they were under pressure to filter out a target percentage of applicants, because he begged them to just pass all the resumes to him, and they refused, hence his cloak-and-dagger tactics to get his hands on them.
That just happened to me! I have been a contractor at a Fortune 50 company for a while and they opened a position for the job I'm doing. I applied and was rejected by the HR algorithm (the rejection email came about 2 minutes after I submitted my application so I seriously doubt that any humans were involved). The job site I had to apply through was taleo.net.
Centralized HR is for managing benefits and setting policies. They never help with the hiring process, in my experience.
I had a similar experience years ago. I was bootstrapping a startup and using consulting to pay the bills in lean months. Eventually I decided that I wasn't going to reach my market without massive investment to keep up with the PR of the 800lb gorillas, and I didn't want to go that route.
One of the engineering managers I had been working with as a consultant had tried to recruit me more than once, so I decided to accept. But shortly after a mandatory HR screening call, I got an apologetic rejection email from the engineering manager.
I did, of course :). But eventually the product revision I was consulting on was discontinued, I didn't feel like being a salesperson and a dev anymore, and I slowly found my way back into the traditional job market.
I once applied for a position at a company a friend worked at, and got a rejection less than a day later. I told this to my friend and he presumably got in touch with someone to assure them of my competence, and I got an email with steps to move forward to interviews the next day. HR filters are weird.
This also happened to me. Was seeking promotion for the job I was already doing. But university rules required the job be posted for 30 days. So I wrote the job description and requirements sent it to HR. And submitted my CV, which the job description was based on, into their portal. And was roundly rejected, automatically. My manager spoke with HR to ask what the hell was going on. And found out some politicking was involved and my CV was dumped for a better connected candidate.
This is one of the hardest things for me to grapple with in my career. I hate that there is realistically a hard ceiling to how successful I can be because I don't have strong network effects working for me.
I'm from a pretty small town, low income family. Edit/ I also did my Computer Science degree at a small university that was a community college when I started my degree. /Edit. Making my way in the world often feels like being a small fish in a vast ocean. People from wealthier families, or who have built-in connections from growing up in the big cities or going to prestigious universities don't really understand what an advantage their networks are.
I have some similarities in background as you and I _hated_ networking but I've been very happy with my career trajectory. You need to make sure you filter out highly political jobs during your job searches, do the best work you can, and maintain touch with the good people you've worked with. For the latter I email/text folks I want to work with again every quarter (using a calendar reminder to prompt me) just to keep the connection warm. For the first one, asking questions like "How do key decisions get made at this company?" or "Can you tell me about the last project that didn't go as planned, what happened afterwards?" will give you reasonably strong signal.
> You need to make sure you filter out highly political jobs during your job searches
I think this has been a big source of my grief so far. I keep winding up in heavily political companies.
Thank you for the advice. Networking is definitely something I intend to take more seriously. It's become much more clear to me how important it is as my career progresses.
Understanding social hierarchy is a skill that can be learned and you can raise your position in that hierarchy using that skill.
When people say "I'm not political" they're really just confessing to low social status and acumen. I personally wish things were different, but as you note they're not. So one may as well accept reality and play the game as best as one can. One can have a very successful career as a follower if one recognizes the traits of good leaders and the traits that good leaders are looking for.
Maybe. They could be fearing being disliked, estranged, or an argument for having the "wrong" beliefs. (Politics, religion, computer languages.)
Much like gossip, politics is pack violence and order by other means, and is usable by people who have less physical power but more social influence. If you don't have either physical and social power, then you're dismissed as not a threat and ripe to be stepped-on. Gossip is often a political attack technique to take-down a physically-strong leader.
I would agree that almost all companies are political to some degree, but I wouldn't agree with heavily political. It's a sign of poor leadership if they end up in that state because you can minimize the impact of different goals and incentives, be they personal, professional, or organizational which is what drives basically all of politics.
I was in a similar situation to you and through work I've developed a pretty good network of former colleagues. After about 10 years, it my network ended up stretching so far that I had contacts at basically every major company my city.
I mean, very few of my former colleagues ended up in the upper echelons of businesses, but almost all of them are in senior IC roles for which a recommendation carries a lot of weight, especially for an opening on their own team.
It takes time. Some people have a jumpstart, it is true, but there are ways for us who didn't, to build a network of trust.
Be good at what you do, genuinely help people, without expecting or calculating whether it'll be beneficial to you, stay close with those who help you, and who you helped.
Eventually, you'll find your way into a good cluster. Some start in the middle of it, we started in the periphery. Accrue good faith and trust and it will only keep growing. It's non linear. Something something preferential attachment.
Don't get me wrong, I do quite well compared to a lot of people. I'm not unhappy with my career. I am just not great at networking.
I have also had bad luck with jobs so far. Everywhere I go, people above me seem more inclined to try and keep me where I am than help me improve and grow. I always have very good relationships with my teammates though, so I know I'm doing something right.
I feel ya, people are hard, and bosses really influence how we experiences work. Advocating for oneself IS hard, more so when we are relatively comfortable.
This happened a lot at the university I went to. Most jobs were civil service and applicants got extra points for veteran status, disability status, etc such that they were always the first in line for a position. To counteract this hiring managers would construct job requirements such as X years of experience in a combination of Y homegrown or highly customized applications and workflows so that basically only one person in the world (the person they wanted to hire) was qualified to fill the position. I'm not sure this was illegal but it seemed very unethical.
I have been on the other end of that. Applied for a network engineering job at a university, as the role was publicly announced. Ended up having the internal "designated candidate" on my interview panel. Not entirely surprisingly, I did not get the job.
I don't think I was supposed to know the name of the internal candidate, but having friends who worked for the uni, I knew the name and, well, the internal candidate would certainly have had a better culture fit.
>At a Fortune 50 company I worked at, my boss got in trouble because he sweet-talked someone in HR to print out all the resumes they rejected and secretly deliver them to him.
I did exactly this, though I'm pretty sure I'm not your boss.
As a side note, HR's insistence on doing the initial resume review and phone screens usually skews the entire recruitment process. I've had situations where HR gave me 20 resumes and didn't even look at the rest.
Our HR just checks if they completed the application correctly, i.e, included a CV and (if requested a covering letter). If they fail this bit they don't get to the sift. The sift of CVs/resumes (to whittle down for interview) is done by developers and so are the interviews.
Our HR was like this too! They were amazing. They sent a spreadsheet with each applicant in it, greyed out the ones who didn't follow instructions, and bolded the ones that they thought I should read first based on how close their applications were.
I read all of them, even the greyed out ones, until I'd read enough to trust that the HR team's filter was well-calibrated, and I also let the HR team know when they got it right/wrong so they could improve their filtering process.
Overall it worked great but I understand that such functional HR teams are the exception, not the rule.
They could be meaning a resume as used in the US. Outside of the US (or at least in a number of European countries) what is called a resume in the US is referred to as a CV (though my understanding is that it's generally a few pages long, not a single page). Though this comes not from first-hand experience, but a lot of in-depth conversations with friends/coworkers from overseas, so I might be wrong here.
How else can i whittle down 30 applicants to 5 or 6 to invite to interview?
edit: saw another response which said a cv was a resume, this is correct. In the UK we use Curriculum Vitae (CV) instead of resume. They are the same thing. Not sure what you may have thought a CV was, however I would be interested to know.
In the US a CV is a comprehensive list of all previous work in the field, while a resume includes only the most recent/relevant experience. The term is primarily used for academic positions, where it includes a listing of all publications.
I worked at a company where the DevOps team was having a hard time retaining employees. New engineers were staying on average for less than 1 year, and that was when we'd actually get candidates, oftentimes going months without a single person applying. This was a large employer in a small town that paid extremely well and had the best benefits I've ever had so I couldn't understand it. That's when I went on the website and read the job posting. Minimum requirements were several years of experience each in Java, Python, and JavaScript. The team didn't write code in those languages, why were they mandatory requirements? The people that did have those skills were unhappy once they realized they weren't going to be doing any coding on this team. It made more sense to me to only list things like Ansible or Terraform or Docker, things the team used on a daily basis, and be up front with candidates about the job responsibilities.
On the same team there were a couple people who came from non-coding backgrounds like Unix systems administration and production support, they loved the job and had been at the company for many years. Why weren't we looking for more of those people? My boss told me that HR was judged by the qualifications of the candidates they allow to proceed in the process. No one would ask questions if you raised the hiring bar, or you might even get kudos. This made no sense to me as that would be like an engineer who only did work one day per month, not taking any chances on touching systems or code that had any chance of introducing a bug.
This was my first job out of school and it taught me that in these large Fortune 100 companies, through no malice at all, silos can create policies that make complete sense to them that don't actually accomplish anything.
FB job reqs are drafted in collaboration with engineering, not imposed by HR (but really they are often copy-pasted and slightly modified from existing).
If you look at FB job reqs in prod network engineering (network in title, infrastructure is area of work), the qualifications should be reasonable. This covers most roles that are not pure SWE or rack and stack (SWE and "deployment and support" cover those roles).
~3-4 years ago a director shared a req and asked that we pass it on to our friends / anyone that might be interested. Some of us asked why specific items were in the req since they didn't reflect the team or our work. We also noted how it reinforced bias (women tend not to apply if they do not meet _all_ quals. men tend to apply if they meet _any_ quals).
Response was "good point, we'll remove them" and our reqs got a lot shorter and less exclusionary.
You might note that we tend to not have any education requirements. At one point the req listed university degrees. This was funny because we had a bimodal distribution of uni drop-out (maybe no high school diploma) on one side and MS or Ph.D on the other.
HR at a previous employer would write the job descriptions in partnership with the hiring manager. Unfortunately, the descriptions had to apply to everyone in the position because they were also used for compensation research.
It took one manager months to get “Windows NT” removed from the description for a network position.
It's a joke and you're getting downvoted, but that is exactly the kind of reasoning the HR team I was describing would use. Lots of "common sense" like that, but they would use their own "knowledge" to do things like replace "OOP" with "Java." Harmless stuff if they had been working collaboratively (preferably in real time) with hiring managers who could double-check their work, but they were unwilling to do that. They wouldn't even let hiring managers view a req before they published it. And if you suggested that they not change technical terminology and not promote nice to haves to must haves, they acted like you were attacking their professional ability and their right to earn a living.
Yep, we used to do this dance on almost every job posting. Manager sends out the requirements, job posting goes up with completely different requirements, manager spends weeks getting the wording updated to something approximating the original... meantime, all our referrals have been rejected for not meeting the (incorrect) posted requirements.
> Which makes it problematic when we make HR people do the initial screening. They would filter out a lot of good candidates just because they used Python instead of Java, or had been working on a C++ project one year less than the person leaving the team.
Companies paying top dollar for the best engineering talent aren’t having inexperienced HR drones or automated software filter resumes. They have dedicated recruiters who have a proven track record of being able to properly interpret resumes and work with candidates to accurately understand their backgrounds. They’re also very good at working with engineering hiring managers to understand the actual requirements of the job.
That’s more or less what John Carmack is trying to say here: The requirements aren’t being used internally as a strict pass/fail criteria before anyone is considered for the position.
I’ve only worked for one company that had inexperienced HR people screen resumes. It was standard practice among engineering hiring managers at that company to use external recruiters for this reason.
Hiring managers aren’t dumb. Companies paying high six figures or more for engineers aren’t dumb. We don’t want to miss out on good candidates. I personally read every single resume that comes through applications to my job postings, and I know I’m not alone. Hiring is hard, and it’s not worth letting someone else screw it up just to save a little bit of time.
On the other hand, if you’re applying to a local dinosaur of a tech company that pays below-average compensation and takes 3 months to respond to candidates, all bets are off. You could indeed be up against automated hiring software and people who don’t know how to read resumes. But you also don’t want to work there if you can avoid it.
My brother has a very senior role (non-IT). Probably in the top 5 in the UK, possibly even top 3, out of perhaps 30-35 jobs? Proven long-term record.
He was going to transfer to a different company and was told that company rules meant he had to go through HR "as a formality".
He was blocked by his HR interviewer on the grounds that he was too successful and therefore wouldn't be "hungry" enough for such a competitive position.
He couldn't believe it. They didn't want someone with a proven record of repeated long-term success?
The person who was trying to recruit him was furious, but as my brother said, this was indicative of a wider problem, and so he declined to move there. Instead he won his Industry Award for the following year at the company he did move to....
I would interpret that as a face-saving way for the HR person to say: you're too good to work here, and will feel alienated and alone surrounded by comparative mediocrity and incompetence. Then, as a cherry on top, they demonstrated the truth of the implicit assertion.
In the end, I'd say that HR person did your brother a solid.
Based on the story it's also entirely possible that the HR person just disliked the guy for some unrelated reason, or had someone else in mind for the role, and came up a plausible excuse for the rejection.
I'd interpret it differently as well - that the HR person realized that the compensation they could pay would not match what was required and they didn't want to deal with woo'ing the candidate only to offer a lowball offer they would refuse.
I've interviewed people before and thought "I'm going to reject you, and you should thank me".
To be clear, not all of the jobs I've hired for sucked. But there was one project that was designed to chew up your soul (mine included), and we had very specific requirements- and people that had "extra" skills weren't qualified. I learned A LOT from that project.
I was working for a small department inside of a large company. The large company was migrating databases (it was a 2 year journey), our department was TRYING to get sold.
In our area, we had 2 teams racing VERY FAST to 2 different objectives:
1) migrate ALL code and data to the new system (because it needs to be available on the new system) AND
2) archive everything (because we might sell all of our stuff and be unemployeed)
It was gut wrenching to look at code that I put my heart and soul into and know it would never run again. Or to look at code with comments like "I just threw this garbage together - it needs to be fixed, circa 5 years ago" and know it would never be fixed.
Probably thr HR representative wanted to hire their friend or family. Lots of companies dont screen for hiring family members that and dont have any policy against it.
I had a similar personal experience. I was hired by the technical team at a very big company(after 6 interviews; 3 face-to-face and 3 remote), but the HR was not sure. All my experience before that was working for smaller companies. The argument the HR made was that I will not survive in the big company as most of my experience was with smaller companies. The HR was right. In a year I just could not stand the inefficiency and waste of talent at the company. I moved to another division within the same company. The same story repeated. I left the company after 2 years. Interestingly I was not the only one. This was a major problem at the company. But the company is so big that it does not even care if people leave as there are a lot of engineers knocking at the door every single day to get in!
> That’s more or less what John Carmack is trying to say here: The requirements aren’t being used internally as a strict pass/fail criteria before anyone is considered for the position.
Then remove them? It says “Minimum Requirements”. It’s already proven that women, minorities and others on the outside don’t apply when they don’t meet these qualifications. You thinking that recruiters know what they’re doing at these companies, then we can only conclude they’re doing it on purpose.
I'm not in those groups but I also don't apply, because applying to jobs sucks ass, and I want to minimize the number of times I do it. So I make a judgment call every time - "How likely is it that this will be a waste of my time?" I screen them harder than they screen me. If I don't meet the stated requirements I don't waste time on it. I don't allow for the "real" requirements being different from what's stated, because I'm not going to waste time on guesswork, deciphering, or dealing with incompetence, lies or mere bullshit. Move on, move on. Responding to postings is a low-yield activity anyway. Jobs come from knowing people.
> It’s already proven that women, minorities and others on the outside don’t apply when they don’t meet these qualifications.
On the other hand, taking jobs that are a bit outside your comfort zone is how you grow. I agree that more realistic requirements would helps (especially if they're called "minimum"), but you also have to teach to people how to be ambitious.
> you also have to teach to people how to be ambitious.
You need to train people to leave their ethics at the door and lie until they make it?
They say these are "minimum requirements". You called them "qualifications". They're not suggested capabilities that you should have to feel comfortable in the job. They have a separate section for "Preferred Qualifications", so these aren't just preferences, they're requirements if you're not willing to break the rules.
A certain subset of the population is willing to check the box that says "I meet these requirements" and then later push around the interviewer and say they don't actually meet them but that they ought to be considered anyways. This brash, often narcissistic, overconfident group is over-represented in management circles not because they're "more ambitious" than others but because they're willing to sacrifice their morals to cheat the system.
I don't think it's dishonest to apply for a job you don't meet the listed qualifications for. As long as you don't represent yourself via your résumé or in your other communication as having experience or qualifications that you don't have, it's the equivalent of saying, "I know you want AAA, but would you take AA instead?" It's the same as offering a lower-than-asking-price bid on a car or house.
Nearly all business interaction is a form of negotiation. If you look at a job description and feel that you'd be able to succeed at it, that's usually enough to get started. Clicking "Apply" doesn't mean you are certifying that you meet the minimum requirements. It simply means you'd like to be considered for the job. The worst that could happen is you've wasted somebody's time (which is true of probably 90% or more of all interviews anyway).
In my 15 years in software, I've interviewed at probably a couple dozen different places. Not once have I been asked to promise that I meet the listed minimum qualifications prior to submitting an application.
It may be that de facto these are not requirements, but for some of us who take things at face value and feel dishonest if we apply to something that has requirements, it is not that simple. It becomes more complex when you are of deontological preferences where you may have a universal rule forbidding you to do anything that you may deem misleading or dishonest.
Although, I do not engage in judging others much, I would feel a strong disdain toward disregarding the minimum requirements because it supposes that I suppose that the other person is not 100% honest/clear in their intention and certain set of values may forbid some people in what I guess may be called ''bad faith'' i.e. presupposing that people are dishonest without having a viable reason for thinking so.
Well these are just some thoughts but I have a huge mental block in going against requirements, rules etc based upon the idea that the you presuppose that the other person is dishonest because then it would follow that one lives by the presupposition that everyone is being dishonest until otherwise.
Of course, for more utilitarian oriented people there may be more room for flexibility. However, in a pluralistic society I would value a wide array of ethics compatible in a free and fair market which respects fundamental human rights.
> they're requirements if you're not willing to break the rules
It's an application. You're applying. It's one thing to say the job description is misleading. It's quite another to presume someone applying while not technically qualified is being dishonest.
I don't know precisely how that job platform works specifically, but in general, I don't see anything wrong with it as long as you're honest. In the comment chain I was replying too, people are saying that John Carmack is saying that you should not take the requirements as a strict pass/fail: "That’s more or less what John Carmack is trying to say here: The requirements aren’t being used internally as a strict pass/fail criteria before anyone is considered for the position.". The comment I replied to proposed to removed them completly because they cause discrimination based on confidence. I added that even if you remove discimination in the applying process, the same exact problem will manifest itself everywhere on the job, which is why removing the requirements is not a complete solution to discimination.
Is your conclusion still that I'm suggesting to "train people to leave their ethics at the door and lie until they make it?"? Are there any points that I can clarify for you? Do you have any suggestions to protect the systems from people that exploit it by sacrificing their morals?
My conclusions remains that a nuanced flexibility between honesty and fraud is advantageous for competitive job seekers.
I'm aware that the world isn't black and white, someone who submits a truthful resume to a job posting where they don't technically meet the qualifications has only made a little white lie that's almost universally forgiven, you're correct that they'll likely look ambitious and confident if they tell the interviewer "if you want to be super technical about it I don't meet this one little qualification but I think you should ignore that because factors X and Y make me a great candidate".
It's this culture of pervasive little white lies which is harmful. Be brutally correct, not just sufficiently honest to brush off these occasional inconsistencies. When someone does make a little white lie, call them on the lie and take the mandated action. Otherwise people who are most flexible with what's acceptable will advance more than those who require correctness.
I would still apply for it if I had most of the requirement but not all. They are not dumb and would see that on my resume and on a cover letter I would write explaining how I'm really eager to join them and that I would dedicate my time to catching up with whatever tech I'm lacking.
It's crazy to assume people would be stuffing their resumes instead of they making it clear the position is exciting to them and they would work hard to get up to standards.
>A certain subset of the population is willing to check the box that says "I meet these requirements" and then later push around the interviewer and say they don't actually meet them but that they ought to be considered anyways.
Yeah, I'm honest in interviews. Getting past Automated Resume Sorting Equations (ARSE) is tough. As soon as I talk to a real human, I'm honest and explain what I know and don't know.
I’d agree with @LeifCarrotson on this. If an app says “minimum requirements: 8 GB RAM” any PC which reports that it meets the minimum requirements but actually has 4 GB RAM is making a false claim.
Ambition is what you can become, not what you are.
The only way of applying without dishonesty would be to do so while openly saying “I don’t tick all your boxes, but I still think I’d be a good fit because XYZ”. I might like this if I saw it in a job application, because it means the applicant was paying attention and not just applying to everything… but that doesn’t work so well when there’s already a “Preferred Qualifications” section, and might even have the opposite effect.
> If an app says “minimum requirements: 8 GB RAM” any PC which reports that it meets the minimum requirements but actually has 4 GB RAM is making a false claim
If a job says you need 8 years of experience and you say you have 8 when you have 4, that is lying. If you apply to a job that says you need 8 years of experience and you only have 4, that isn't lying. It isn't dishonest. It would be like the person selling that PC asking, "hey, might 4GB work if we throw in a better processor?"
Whether or not it's "moral" to apply to the job, this whole argument shows the problem with listing minimum requirements like that: in this very thread, you've got people saying "I'm not going to bother," so you've shrunk your candidate pool.
Is "doesn't want to waste our time when we tell them not to waste our time" really an important attribute for you to reject candidates on? Or would more accurate "minimum" requirements be better?
Applying for a job isn't claiming that you meet the requirements, it's testing whether you meet the requirements. So the closer analogy would be installing an app that claims to require 8 GB RAM, just to see if it'll run anyway on your PC with only 4 GB RAM. Maybe the installer will block you, or maybe not, as long as you aren't tweaking your PC to report to the installer that it has more RAM when queried.
> “I don’t tick all your boxes, but I still think I’d be a good fit because XYZ”
That's exactly what I meant by being ambitious. I think you shouldn't lie when applying for a job, but on the other hand there is a shortage of applicants in tech. You could recognize this as an opportunity if you're confident that you can "grow to the desired level" of the job offer.
You are correct, of course, but the context of this thread is applying to a job without meeting the minimum "requirements". Arguably the lie is the "requirements".
But what is a candidate to do? Skip the job, because they don't have the required qualifications? Assume the requirements aren't real? Dress up the resume with some fake barely there qualifications to fit?
Different cultural backgrounds will have different responses, and very few will really be lying.
The worst thing, though? The knee-jerk response to the ones that dress up the resume is often to want to add even more requirements...
A "job outside my comfort zone" and "lying that I meet the minimum requirements" are entirely different things and it's a shame the business world tries to conflate the two.
Applying for a job that I don't meet the minimum requirements for feels like somewhere between “fraud” and “stupidity”. They're literally called “minimum requirements”.
Exactly. When they create fake requirements the goal is exactly to weed out anyone they don't like. Because if they find someone of the "right" group they'll give the job anyway even if the requirements aren't met.
Well, you're in good company, because describing them as "minimum requirements" when they clearly aren't also feels like somewhere between fraud and stupidity.
Except that women and minorities tend to be easily discouraged, not "ambitious" and confident. Expecting candidates to push the boundaries of their qualifications is a bias in itself.
Except that women and minorities tend to be easily discouraged, not "ambitious" and confident.
As someone from a rural background where the best case was usually HVAC repair and the not-too-uncommon case was addiction and stagnation, and who came into tech from far outside the normal path, this is the problem to fix, and tech company job requirements are way too late in the pipeline to exert much leverage there. This needs to be solved culturally, across years and generations.
> This needs to be solved culturally, across years and generations.
That would be great, but if we can substantially reduce the impact of the difference in confidence by being honest about minimal job requirements right now, shouldn't we also do that?
> Except that women and minorities tend to be easily discouraged
This reverse-sexism/racism reads as if you believe on an ideological level that women and minorities have inferior character defects and need special accommodations.
That's why I keep applying for jobs as a structural engineer; eventually somebody will just assume I'm credentialed. I'll just figure it out on the job.
Call me when you need some surgery done! I've never been to med school or anything, but I both am really good with a knife in the kitchen, AND I've got an excellent track record following instructions on DIY Youtube videos.
If you know those are your only options why are you putting out a job description asking for something that doesn't exist?
If you didn't know ahead what your options were, and you were willing to accept someone who isn't an actual surgeon, maybe you would have preferred the person who whittles, has a biology degree, also is great with DIY videos, was a combat medic, AND isn't squeamish at the sight of blood, unlike me? Because she was turned off by the fact she didn't meet your listed minimum requirements; all you got applying are me and your nephew.
The only reason I can think of is as a smoke screen for hiring whatever candidate I feel most comfortable with, regardless of qualifications! If no one can live up to the standards then I no longer have to trust qualifications, everyone understands that I now must use my best judgement.
Extrapolating on this further, if it’s _proven_ that certain demographics won’t apply given this “mechanism”, a company could likely open themselves up to a very tenable lawsuit if they post a position with requirements they don’t really follow. It would be quite easy to make the argument the company is doing so to filter in white males.
It strikes me that there is some kind of market effect to embellishing the requirements. If a company is honest about requirements in an environment where everybody else exaggerates, applicants who don't meet your more honest but lower requirements will think they're embellished, because everybody does that, and apply.
Maybe they are using it as argument for wage negotiations. Kind of "you are clearly under qualified but we can still make use of your meager skills if you work twice as long for half the money". Don't quite remember if Facebook was part of that wage dumping agreement Google and Apple participated in.
I guess I've heard of another type of gaming of requirements: the H1B thing. The story here goes that they need to demonstrate they looked for someone with the same skills as somebody hired under an H1B. So they post job listings that are extremely specific to the person they hired, that no one can match.
No idea if that's true. I heard it claimed by many. I guess it sounds kinda implausible for a large company, they would need to create possibly thousands of fake job listings.
What if we helped minorities, women, and others on the outside meet the qualifications instead of lowering the standards? And yes that also includes rewriting some of the qualifications to be more realistic, I am not discounting that.
This comment is coming off as incendiary, judging by the quick clapback style of response to simply the first clause. I want to emphasis I also believe requirements should be rewritten to be more realistic and pertinent to the job. The solution in my view is to cater to the people who do take job requirements seriously (which to my understanding is the reason why women for example are excluded more) rather than just throw your hands up and say "job requirements are a joke"
The issue is that people in the industry have been trained to know that minimum requirements are bullshit and apply anyway. So if women and minorites are underrepresented behind the gate, and see the gate as far more impenetrable than the groups which have already made it in, then setting these requirements aspirationally is keeping them out.
John Carmack is arguably one of the most qualified people in the industry for this role, and he doesn't meet the requirements.
So it's not the case that there's piles of white men who _do_ meet the requirements that get it instead, and we just need to help minorities get to that level, it's that there's piles of white men that recognise the requirements are nonsense, so apply and get it without meeting them. Setting the requirements to what the recruiters actually require isn't lowering the bar as a result.
Additionally, as mentioned elsewhere in the thread, fake requirements can be used as a reason to arbitrarily reject otherwise good candidates (for example to provide cover for rejection over being a minority). So it's not unreasonable to suspect that minorities have learned to ignore those listings as they just waste time.
It seems like it would be an much easier task to simply broadcast this knowledge to women and minorities than it would be to change the practices of every HR department, no?
Sure, and I've personally been in charity events for economically disadvantaged groups where that's been one of the more important pieces of advice we gave, so such approaches are ongoing, but still the studies indicate the message hasn't gotten through with current levels - so you'd need to either significantly scale up such efforts to reach more people at a personal enough level to convince them, or try another approach.
If that even works. Do white guys who apply say to themselves "those requirements are BS", and minorities say "I don't meet those requirements so I shouldn't apply"? Or is it white guys are more likely to not read them as closely? Or white guys are more likely to feel "I'm good enough to do it regardless of what it asks for"? Or something else? Because just telling minorities "the requirements are more suggestions than requirements" isn't going to help if it's any of those.
You know how peoples used to have folklores and stories that got passed down? Well, we still do, but the culturally transmitted information is now stuff like "Oh, yeah, those requirement lists are bullshit".
Of course not. There are even certain minorities which are known to extremely exagerrate their abilities and accomplishments (even when they wouldn't last a day on actual job).
I really think it's as simple as having friends/peers in the know-how or not. Some people have family members, classmates, maybe even majority of their social circle working in IT which obviously exposes them to inner workings including this issue with job requirements. And then there are people whose social circle is far from IT so they just don't have confidence to (pretty much) lie on resume.
In my experiences of mentoring underrepresented groups in the industry, it’s a matter of morality. Many see it as straight up dishonest to do so. It’s not just some secret hack they can just employ; you’re asking them to cast their morals aside and do something they believe is wrong.
I actually think this _worse_, let alone _much harder_ than simply telling HR to chill with that shit.
So there are two options: tell all minorities to do something they don't know about, or tell people on the top to write realistic requirements. And you think that the right thing to do is to go around and teach this to every minority group. This tells a lot about your position of privilege.
Is it somehow secret knowledge reserved to "privileged" people that minimum requirements on job ads should be interpreted as a wish list more than a list of hard requirements?
It's commonly talked about in a lot of places online, including here.
It's also something you very quickly learn when searching for your 1st job. If you take minimum requirements at face value, there's almost no jobs anyone straight out of school would qualify for.
> Is it somehow secret knowledge reserved to "privileged" people that minimum requirements on job ads should be interpreted as a wish list more than a list of hard requirements?
It is definitely cultural knowledge that not all people have, and, more to the point, an understanding of what parts of a particular job ad that are stated as MQs are likely to be nice-to-haves and which are real MQs and which are nice to haves behind which are hiding real MQs (such as “Ph.D. in <field>” really meaning something like “a Ph.D. would be nice but a Masters is a hard minimum”), and therefore, how to evaluate whether it is worth expending effort applying for a job is non-universal cultural knowledge.
This often requires understanding of the hiring cultures of the particular job-field, industry, employer, and sometimes organizational subunit. Which is, for people just starting out (or looking outside of their past experience), highly network dependent. And equally substantively qualified people from underrepresented demographics arr likely to have weaker, in terms relevant to the task at hand, networks and therefore less access to this cultural knowledge.
> It's also something you very quickly learn when searching for your 1st job.
Or not, in part because there are lots of places where its not true and if you act like it is you will learn hard.
Lying about requirements in hiring may be common, but it is not a universal norm, and calling it out and denormalizing it is a good thing, even outside of discriminatory impact, but its also very much a practice that has particular adverse impact on underrepresented minorities.
When HR creates fake requirements the goal is exactly to be able to weed out anyone they don't like. If someone is not from the "right" group they'll just let them know that they don't meet the "minimum requirements".
That’s a different thesis from what we’re discussing. To clarify, we’re assuming the interviews are fair and the min requirements are being munged by an HR department that doesn’t understand the list that engineering has given them and potential applicants are not even applying based on these garbled job postings. If you think that HR departments are biased and are making up fake requirements, that very well could be the case in some situations, but it’s not what we’re talking about here.
If John Carmack doesn't meet the standards, then you probably shouldn't worry about 'lowering them.' As if making tech more accessible requires lowering any standards, anyways.
I think these can actually mean the same thing here, it depends if the thing you're passing judgement on is interpreted to be the requirements, or the act of lowering the requirements.
You should worry about the requirements because they're bad and need fixing.
You shouldn't worry about the consequences of lowering the requirements because you weren't enforcing them anyway.
And why are women and minorities unaware of the wink and a nod? What else are they not aware of?
Are they not able to reason through the fact that the requirements must logically be not realistic? Are women known to not question authority to the same degree as men? Why not endeavor to fix that about women.
It is about who assumes rules will be bend for them. If you apply for role where you dont fit requirements, it can be interpreted as ambitions or arrogant or stupid.
I don't understand why being seen as arrogant or stupid by a faceless HR robot in a company you don't work for should matter to a person. It feels like a confidence issue that somebody should look into resolving so that they can live a more fulfilling life.
>You could indeed be up against automated hiring software and people who don’t know how to read resumes.
I was interviewed by MedTronics in 2015 by a HR fellow who asked me if I used 'C++11'. He had trouble believing that the 'C++11' was a language standard (adding features to the language) & not a language by itself.
Why did you feel the need to be pedantic about that? It's not a strange question to ask if someone has experience in Blub 7 or its popular framework Blubbimate.
I think where things fall down is on hiring junior candidates, or people re-entering the job market after years out of it (like my wife). "Minimum requirements" in those cases actually have a very deleterious impact because they filter out people with intrinsic motivation or talent but slightly different experience backgrounds. Either by the HR person themselves (who usually doesn't care much because it's a junior position, etc.) or the candidate (who gets put off by the min requirements label).
> On the other hand, if you’re applying to a local dinosaur of a tech company that pays below-average compensation and takes 3 months to respond to candidates, all bets are off.
The key word here is tech company. There are many other sectors that employee below average labor for HR recruitment but the work an engineer can do there can be quite amazing, especially when the engineer realizes there is lots of room to innovate and optimize their workforce and what/how they output.
Companies paying top dollar for the best engineering talent aren’t having inexperienced HR drones or automated software filter resumes. They have dedicated recruiters who have a proven track record of being able to properly interpret resumes and work with candidates to accurately understand their backgrounds.
Like using Leetcode popular at these top places you mentioned.
I work super closely with recruitment and HR to ensure this doesn't happen. If they are unsure of a candidate, they just send a quick note on slack asking for a thumbs up/down on them. Honestly, after a year or so of experience, they kind of learn what technologies are analogs to the ones we use.
We recently had a person who did COBOL apply, which through recruiting for a loop.
I do get frustrated with the way our engineering manager write job descriptions. Especially since they can be wishy-washy on what they actually want (early on, candidate is good, but later on, mgmt wants more experience). It's been even worse recently as they've been just throwing out seemingly random job titles in order to just get candidates to bite. So I go for an interview and see they are applying for a job title like "data science engineer," and when I ask the manager wtf that is, they say, oh, that's your position (def NOT data science), but that job title gets more applicants.
I used to think HR was the problem, but the more I make sausage, the more I realize that engineering managers are a big part of the problem.
I'm not sure the answer to that could be generalized, probably depends on the company and HRs in question. I, for one, had a very difficult time explaining to HRs that I don't care if a candidate had any experience with PHP whatsoever (it was the "main" language in that company), given he is simply ready to use it in a future job. I'm pretty sure they felt like they know better than me. Apparently, the idea that being good in programming and being proficient with a specific language are quite tangentially related skills is difficult to grasp.
I can only hope that other HRs in other companies are a bit more useful.
I wonder if the problem is calling them programming 'languages'.
Learning a new human language is hard, learning a new programming language not so much.
You wouldn't hire someone for a job requiring Spanish if they spoke Russian instead.
For non-technical people the metaphor around
'languages' might be confusing.
For example, when dealing with accounting jobs, they'll sometimes ask for specific certifications.
We've ended up just basically saying "3 years experience with developing software" and shoved everything else into "some of the following would be nice".
> You might even find that your candidate pool is exactly the people you are already working with.
We once had an open position on a team that was tied to our office in a lower-population city in a low-population US state. The wording of our listing made it clear that the list of technologies was mostly "nice to have" and not strictly required.
The first recruiter just punched in all the technologies into LinkedIn search and sent a form message to everyone that matched and already lived near the office. The result: My entire team got emails offering them to interview themselves for their own jobs.
This is very common. I work as a contractor, and recruiters (for permanent and contracting work) very often contact me to work in projects I am already in. I mean it makes sense, living close by is one of the major bonuses when I decide to take a project; the farther away the less likely I'll take it - especially since the companies usually have a fixed hourly rate in mind, and the farther I live away the less likely I would be able to compete with local contractors that can offer lower rates - so I don't even waste time to go through the application process.
You mention accurate description reducing the candidate pool, which I can agree with when it gets long.
Another big issue is the lack of precision in the description. When can you claim you know or are an expert in tech X? And then do that for 10 out of the 10 listed competencies/technologies? Who determines if I'm highly motivated? The specs they list are simply not realistic and ask for everything and the kitchen sink. Candidates have seen through this BS and just apply to anything that might possibly fit them. This means that companies get a ton of underqualified candidates. If they were just real and cut the BS, that could make the whole process more efficient. Dont even get me started in "5 years experience" in a tech that's only been out for 3 years or less.
Reading job posts is probably something I hate even more interviews. At least in interviews you can have a conversation and get some questions answered.
> Which makes it problematic when we make HR people do the initial screening. They would filter out a lot of good candidates just because they used Python instead of Java, or had been working on a C++ project one year less than the person leaving the team.
Part (but not all) of the problem is resume spam. There's a small amount of people who apply for every job under the sun, even though they aren't qualified.
That, IMO, is what HR resume filtering should be: Making sure someone isn't just spamming their resume. Otherwise, the "We use FooLang, so your X years of experience with BarLang is okay" really is a decision the hiring manager needs to make. [Edit] Ideally, HR should know enough to not pass along a resume from someone who just completed a 3-month coding bootcamp for an architect-level position.
The missing step can be that in a large company HR needs to assign a grade/job type to the role before they advertise it and these are standardised typically with respect to both education qualification and years of experience. The combination of the hiring managers spec and the HR grade/type definition is what gets posted. This is usually the cause of a job asking for pointless qualifications or more years of experience than a given technology has existed.
I'd like to point out that that is exactly what you want to do sometimes. Our HR department absolutely refuses to put out reqs with anything more specific than a generic software engineer description, because they rely on having a general pool of applicants that they can shuffle around to different teams.
While that might work for most software teams, my team has a couple of specialties that are not just hard to hire for, but also hard to train for, and sometimes take years to learn. If we hire someone with general software engineering expertise, we typically consider their entire first year to be a training year with extremely limited productivity...even if they are a well experienced senior level engineer.
So we try to put out more specific requirements: Experience with geospatial information systems and standards. Or experience with constraint programming or other forms of mathematical optimization like LP, MIP, IP, or QP. Or experience with spectrum licensing regulation or 3gpp standards.
And because they don't put out easily searchable reqs, we never get candidates that we wouldn't need to train extensively, unless we do their job and seek them out ourselves.
> General SE hiring comment: One thing I realized, for most IT/SE jobs, the more accurately you describe your current stack in the requirements (or maybe the person you are replacing), the smaller your candidate pool is.
Perhaps the solution is to not always aim for the narrowest possible fit. There are many people who would like an opportunity to learn new things and grow.
I understand that this thinking can't be applied to all positions. If, for example, you want to bring in someone new to your company and put them in charge of "everything Foo-related", then you need someone with suitable experience in Foo. However, too many companies tend to extend that too far down the ladder.
As much as we all love to blame HR it is unfair to put this on HR.
The hiring manager writes the job description and comes up with the requirements. In many cases these job descriptions are written by a senior IC and the hiring manager just massages.
I find it insane that HR is interfering with engineering hiring.
In all my jobs we ALWAYS sidestepped HR to do any form of hiring, even though we used recruiters which had their own ways of sourcing candidates (that was mainly useful to get candidates of a certain race and gender to fill in diversity quotas).
The CTO has the budget and agrees benefits with HR. After that the job post and ways of sourcing candidates is through the engineering team.
Once we do an offer, the ball is back to HR and they finalise the contract / bureaucracy.
> You might even find that your candidate pool is exactly the people you are already working with.
I call this fingerprinting.
If there’s 5 different choices for each layer and there’s 5 different layers, assuming an even distribution, there’s 3k combinations right there. If you require that combo, you’ve just eliminated 99.97% of candidates.
It’s not just an IT problem.
“We want someone with experience in (already niche industry) but uses our (unusual choice of) system”.
I get the problem you’re trying to solve with a shovel-ready candidate, but…
I am trying to find front end devs to work on an Electron app, using react. Recruiter is ignoring people with Node/ React or Vue, angular etc and just replying that there are no candidates!
I was turned down in screening interviews last week for not enough experience in tools - hr thought were critical but they clearly weren’t. Why use non technical hr?
Here's your mistake. Now you have your product engineers screening a thousand resumes every week and doing endless phone interviews.
Yes, HR is bad at hiring engineers. Nonetheless hiring engineers is a lot of work, and engineering departments need someone somewhere to take that load.
The solution is hard[1], but at the end of the day needs to be something much closer to "better HR" than "don't involve HR".
[1] And something very few large companies have cracked. Small outfits can usually get by with networking via their existing staff, but that doesn't scale well and leads to feedback effects like toxic monocultures.
Which makes it problematic when we make HR people do the initial screening. They would filter out a lot of good candidates just because they used Python instead of Java, or had been working on a C++ project one year less than the person leaving the team.
Could it be then that this is a communication problem between the Engineering team and the HRD? After all, the Eng'g team writes the requirements for the job post, HRD just checks it and makes it look attractive.
(Though honestly, I don't think this general comment applies to the job post in Carmack's tweet. Honestly I can't fault the job post for the way it was worded. I say the higher you are in an SE-org chain, the less this is a problem.)