I mostly agree with the article, but I’ll say that hiring based solely on resume experience is really hard for software. Experience honestly translates poorly to ability in my… experience.
I find it amazing how few companies don’t even give people a chance. I’m tech-inclined, but the only thing I have to my name is a Comptia A+ cert. However, I’ve also done a lot of things that are well beyond that skill set in a multitude of ways, and I also learn quite quickly. It’s tough to put ‘Hey, I managed a MYSQL database for a modded Minecraft server and I set everything up myself.’ on a resume. Nobody even bothers to read that because it mentions Minecraft, never mind the amount of actual work it takes to run a public-facing server like that with hundreds of active players logged in at once. It certainly isn’t ’just playing a video game’.
Don;t mention Minecraft. You implemented and adminstered a MYSQL database system which supported N concurrent users and Y transactions per minute with 99.xxx uptime over Z years, you also developed a custom front-end etc etc
I didn’t write a Discord bot, I wrote a chat-accessible service used by tens of thousands of users. It’s funny how wording things differently helps on your resume.
The cool thing is, you’re right that you’ve got marketable skills that employers want, you just gotta present them in corporate lingo that sanitizes it of any humanity and fun, lmao. You could rephrase that part about the Minecraft server to something like “Actively maintaining a high-uptime server with [X amount] of daily clients by utilizing [insert type of tools/languages here, e.g. MySQL databases].”
I’ve always hated the process of “translating” real life experience into the marketable buzzwords that employers like to see, but until it seems like hiring managers on a wider scale are willing to listen to words that normal people would write, I’m gonna keep trying to speak their language.
Sometimes, the less you say, the better. You have to manipulate them and do not worry about if it’s bad/wrong. In the corporate world, most are just greedy assholes who don’t care about who you are.
Don’t ever lie on your resume, just make it glittery on how THEY want to see it, not how you feel about it.
It’s a sad world we are living in right now, good luck don’t ever give up !
Also, they often don't read more than a few lines. I applied as a dev for a company which I had many friends inside. They all knew my skills. The problem was the high-level managers because they didn't read the memo (and didn't even read my CV), assumed I can't do engineering because I was an academic at the time.
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.
Damn, out of a job since last year is rough (unless the benefits are rolling in 🫰 ). Things are different in the EU, so if you don’t mind moving or possibly working remotely with a large time difference, you can give that a shot.
You’re exactly right. I didn’t read the article yet, but you can build a to do list app in a handful of minutes if you know your way around. I’m still green as a coder, but have been through dozens of tutorials, one of which was a simple to do list in JavaScript. I managed to complete it in about an hour. Seeing that someone thinks it takes weeks to do, that makes me wonder about them.
you can build a to do list app in a handful of minutes if you know your way around
No you can’t. You’re mistaking a “hastily thrown together prototype”, for an “actual app” with all its requirements, tests, multiple target support, hundreds of tiny features, QA for all that, then deployment, and ongoing support.
Depending on where on the scale between “prototype” and “final product” you look at, it’s going to be anywhere from less than an hour, to a full team working for years.
Now, arguably, showing whether you know the difference, can be the real test.
This could very well be a test to see if the applicant has an idea of how a project scales or how they need to interact with other departments or track down compliance information. It could also test the applicant’s ability to provide a sanity check to a boss’s idea before they pitch something that the team can’t actually do
I do a lot of dev interviews. We do require a BS in computer science… it’s just a good way of filtering out the hordes of terrible candidates. Beyond that, the most important thing we look for is honest representations on the resume, and the ability to clearly show competency in the required areas. Ramblers, people who make shit up and can’t say “I don’t know” are filtered out quick. We do a 1hr tech screen, after which I make a recommendation and if good, the candidate is brought in for a second interview that is pretty much a formality.
It’s not a litmus test, it’s just a basic filter. You don’t understand the time wasted (for both parties) when recruiters present “self starters” and “driven” and “passionate” candidates. It’s not our goal to give people a chance, it’s our goal to find a great fit for the position.
Let me rephrase, to make myself crystal clear, because you didn’t get the tactful approach: that’s a shitty filter. By excluding people without a degree, you’re saying that ability to afford university for 4 years is more important than skill, experience, or knowledge.
It shows that you’re ignorant. It shows that your company has a toxic workplace.
It’s probably one of the dumbest flexes I’ve ever seen.
No, you’re right. Being fun at a party of techbros is totally a sign of superiority and not at all a sign of sociopathy 🤮
Tbf you’re probably not a terrible person, but that is a bad take. Rejecting someone based entirely on education, and not allowing for other factors (as is implied), is just bad for both your company and society.
We both have issues. But as I said, at least I have a modicum of self-awareness.
I don’t expect you to go back and check, but I think you know that’s not how the hostility started.
Anyways, I’ll lay off now unless you ask a question or say something wildly out of line, but I’d like to part with this: your take here doesn’t seem to align with other things you’ve said in your (public) comment history on your (public) profile. We’re all forced to play the capitalist game, but you’re not going to be rewarded for this kind of devotion to your boss.
He’s right; you can’t be pro-paper ceiling and anti-elitist.
Degrees as a filter is useful due to the willful dismantling of our secondary education system, in order to gatekeep higher-paying jobs.
Rich elites want college to be too expensive or exclusive for regular people, so their rich kids who can go get to be first in line at jobs.
Rich, private high schools have advanced subjects like comp sci, pre-med tracks, pre- law, etc, while the people who can afford to send their kids there are lobbying state governments to cut public school funding and programs.
I did 3 years of comp sci, including 600-level courses in OS design, architecture, and even Assembly. Literally nothing in those courses is useful to my IT career. Everything useful that I learned before working in IT, that was IT-related, I learned independently from my college courswork.
That’s wild that people are still pushing the paper ceiling like this. I’ve been working in my industry for 11+ years, progressing from engineer to tech lead to architect, with several (very) large-scale, public projects successfully under my belt.
I don’t have any degree.
Requiring a comp sci degree is a terrific way to filter out people who had to actually learn their shit and prove their worth, instead of relying on a name on a piece of paper to get them a job interview.
I’m facing this as well across the board, not just where a CS degree is expected. I started off in CS, then a year in discovered I liked working at my school paper enough to drop out after hitting managing ed and having no one left to learn from because the J-school had been gutted in the '80s … in 2000.
So, no degree. Which now means no job. Not even interviews. I never had any pure development titles that AI would pick up on, so the coding I’ve done also doesn’t count. Your basic bottom-of-the-barrel “and then we were able to lay off half the team” automation that then got me pushed out for providing a useful but unrequested solution that made me a threat.
I determine my needs and then choose my tools, so sure, I’ll get back up to speed in Python for a visualization project, but I’m not going to spend a couple of weeks trying to retain things with zero goal.
I saw a job posting for Senior Software Engineer position at a large tech company (not Big Tech, but high profile and widely known) which required candidates to have “an excellent academic track record, including in high school.” A lot of these requirements feel deliberately arbitrary, and like an effort to thin the herd rather than filter for good candidates.
Don’t like hiring pregnant women? “Your academic track record doesn’t reflect the standards of excellence that we expect our candidates to display.”
Don’t like hiring minorities? “Your academic track record doesn’t reflect the standards of excellence that we expect our candidates to display.”
Don’t like hiring people with natural hairstyles, religious garb, or other ‘unprofessional’ but protected appearances? “Your academic track record doesn’t reflect the standards of excellence that we expect our candidates to display.”
The only scenarios where I’d think I wouldn’t require one are
I want cheaper labor
I am really desperate to fill a position
The skills I need in a candidate are incredibly niche, thus I want to widen the applicant pool.
#1 and #2 are indicative of other problems in your company. I get that you can be a good dev without a degree, but from an employer perspective, it seems like an easy way to save time and money on hiring. I am convinced that a lot of money is wasted on recruiters who throw everyone under the sun into the hiring process just so they can justify their existence.
it seems like an easy way to save time and money on hiring
If you are seeing this change based on whether you exclude people without comp sci degrees, what you’re really seeing is your recruitment firm/ team’s lack of effort or expertise. It’s literally the job of recruiters to separate the wheat from the chaff. If you’re doing it yourselves by putting hard restrictions on the recruitment team to remove the bad results they are letting go through, you should be taking a hard look at that company or team.
It’s even more evil: they’re shifting their recruitment firm/team’s job, to the candidates themselves, requiring them to pay to prove their worth at a third party (college).
Wouldn’t you argue that putting hard restrictions would have the benefit of shrinkjng your recruitment team? To be clear, I’m coming from an extremely anecdotal point of view, but to me it seems like tech is full of imposters jumping from job to job, playing up their experience. Recruiters cannot spot these people, because they know all the jargon despite having none of the skills. This is why these technical interviews exist, but now those are even being gamed by people by studying leetcode. I’d be really curious what a high quality tech recruiter does vs the average.
I’m not sure I agree with this premise at all, but if I’m roleplaying some bloodsucking shareholder who cares more about my own money than the livelihoods of people, or their work/life balance, etc, then I would say that shrinking the recruitment team should only happen once you have senior-level recruiters who know the products, tech stack, teams, and roles well enough that they can quickly and accurately assess resumes against what the company needs, just as fast as a larger but less-experienced team of recruiters could.
it seems like tech is full of imposters jumping from job to job, playing up their experience.
This is played up, in my opinion. I’ve done a decent amount of interviews in the past 5 years (more than 40 candidates, less than 100, but don’t have an exact number), and only one of them I would say gave me ‘impostor’ vibes. There are plenty of candidates who talk up their game, but that is more the fault of companies listing every position as needing far more experience than the roles actually do. People are just optimizing to metrics.
Recruiters cannot spot these people, because they know all the jargon despite having none of the skills. This is why these technical interviews exist, but now those are even being gamed by people by studying leetcode.
This sounds more like someone who “knows enough to be dangerous”, as it were. Forgive my ignorance of leetcode, but a quick glance makes it seem like it’s a Learn to Code website? Is studying coding really gaming an interview, or just studying for the role? Unless your tech interviewers are asking questions directly off of there, doesn’t a candidate answering the questions correctly just mean they learned how to do it? If the questions are about things unrelated to your actual work (like asking people to write a linked list, or a recursive function, etc etc), and people are able to answer those questions but not do the actual work, you should probably stop asking those kind of questions.
There is never going to be a way around having technical interviews; they’re not even primarily there to weed out liars, they’re there to make sure the skills the candidate does have are the right ones for the role. Even if every candidate was 100% honest, you’d still need technical interviews, because 2 completely legit and very skilled backend devs can have vastly different skills or specialties within that realm.
I’d be really curious what a high quality tech recruiter does vs the average.
First and foremost, they work directly with the hiring manager to understand the role, the tech stack, etc. They know the company and their “culture”, and they do their own early vetting of candidates before things reach the interview phase, but after they have reached out to the candidates; asking about salary expectations (or ideally sharing the range for the role), asking candidates how many years of experience they have in ‘x’ maybe top-3 technologies for the role, etc.
FYI, leetcode is not a “learn to code” website it is a “practice problems that will be asked at tech interviews” site. A lot of these problems are inspired by (or maybe are even literally from) interviews at “top companies” like Google, Facebook, etc. They are almost completely algorithmic or data structure problems, i.e. “unrelated to your actual work” (well, most of your actual work for most people).
My stance has been that, just as long as I’m interviewing with someone, I’m happy to do it, up to an undetermined time threshold. A screening interview, a tech screen, and then a bunch of panels is what I expect from a solid firm. Just as long as I’m interviewing with someone, I have a lot of opportunities to learn myself. I will also occasionally do a take home if and only if there’s a novel problem I want to solve related to that take home (eg I want to learn a library related to the task) but this is very rare.
As a hiring manager, I try to keep things to a hiring screen, a tech screen, a team interview, and a culture interview. My team is small. I don’t want to spend more than three hours of someone’s time (partially because I can’t really afford to spend more than that myself per candidate or lose more team hours than that). My tech screens are related to the things I actually need people to do, not random problems you’ll never see.
My assumption is that a good dev has lots of opportunity and I am in competition with everywhere else. I need to present the best possible candidate experience. Big companies with shitty employee experience telegraph that by presenting a shitty candidate experience, which is where the employee experience begins. You can’t have a good customer focus without starting from a good employee focus.
It is completely crazy that businesses mainly do not have strong internship/apprenticeship programs in place. It is hard to predict who is going to be good at tech (or probably most jobs) until given a chance. Some of our most brilliant have been high school dropouts. Even those with credentials and experience will do better with time to learn the company systems and culture. “We need someone who can hit the ground running…” ug, grow up.
Collectivly, we need a major commitment to building the workforce not leeching off of disposable labor.
The problem is that there’s no incentive for employees to stay beyond a few years. Why spend months or years training someone if they leave after the second year?
But then you have to question why employees aren’t loyal any longer, and that’s because pensions and benefits have eroded, and your pay doesn’t keep up as you stay longer at a company. Why stay at a company for 20, 30, or 40 years when you can come out way ahead financially by hopping jobs every 2-4 years?
An internship isn’t a magic bullet that cures all ills but it does improve thing meaningfully in several ways.
To address your point, I agree with you in part but giving people a chance who otherwise would not, does build loyalty making it more likely they will stay longer (on average). You still have to be a good company to have a chance of retaining people, it isn’t just a cynical ploy to fool people into working for you. There is a middle ground between your example of 20-40 years vs 2-4 that is very meaningful because it takes a lot more time than people give credit, to get good at a job. So that >2 years time frame is very valuable.
I do think a lot of companies, but crucially not all, effectively treat even highly skilled labor as a disposable asset to leech off of. I also think an employment system that expects career advancement to require changing employers, is crazy shortsighted. Just as is degrading the public education system and putting young people into massive debt with college. The system has problems all over the place but an internship is a very practical way for a company to do better.
Couldn’t agree more. IMO, the perfect talent is the kind you grow yourself.
No number of interviews or tests will lead you to a magical perfect candidate 100% of the time, but those with less experience are great because they’re eager to accept a lower salary and will attack just about any problem you throw at them enthusiastically because every challenge is a new chance to prove their mettle.
Obviously it takes time to build a program where mentorship is valued and more senior folks help to develop newer teammates, but if you want the highest quality talent, it’s hard to beat homegrown.
This has been ramping up for years. The first time that I was asked to do “homework” for an interview was probably in 2014 or so. Since then, it’s gone from “make a quick prototype” to assignments that clearly take several full work days. The last time I job hunted, I’d politely accept the assignment and ask them if $120/hr is an acceptable rate, and if so, I can send over the contract and we can get started ASAP! If not, I refer them to my thousands upon thousands of lines of open source code.
My experience with these interactions is not that they’re looking for the most qualified applicants, but that they’re filtering for compliant workers who will unquestioningly accept the conditions offered in exchange for the generally lucrative salaries. It’s the kind of employees that they need to keep their internal corporate identity of being the good guys as tech goes from being universally beloved to generally reviled by society in general.
Probably by design, to be honest. Jobs tend to be very anti-parent, especially in US states where FMLA is legally protected.
I’m fortunate to work for a company that has a culture of prioritizing real life so you can do your best work. Sadly, that’s antithetical to next quarter thinking, so it’s not the norm.
The dumb thing is (in my experience) parents seem to work harder and stay at companies for longer than childless folks. They’re just shorter on free time and need some basic flexibility to address emergent issues. Not to mention being better at teaching and managing in general.
I have worked at two different start ups where the boss explicitly didn’t want to hire anyone with kids and had to be informed that there are laws about that, so yes, definitely anti-parent. One of them also kept saying that they only wanted employees like our autistic coworker when we asked him why he had spent weeks rejecting every interviewee that we had liked. Don’t even get me started on people that the CEO wouldn’t have a beer with, and how often they just so happen to be women or foreigners! Just gross shit all around.
It’s very clear when you work closely with founders that they see their businesses as a moral good in the world, and as a result, they have a lot of entitlement about their relationship with labor. They view laws about it as inconveniences on their moral imperative to grow the startup.
Thanks. Yeah, it definitely seems bleak. I just keep making things though while trying to basically get a CS degree without the actual piece of paper. Lots of resources online and I have family and friends in the industry, so that helps keep me motivated.
Same. I’m in a bootcamp and college and I have 3 years experience being a sys admin for the gov. I think there’s a serious chance I’ve been rejected for every tech job on the internet.
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