Something I tell my software students a lot when they’re looking for jobs is to remember that a shockingly large number of job descriptions are written by people in HR who have next to zero understanding of the industry, the specific team, or the business need.
All they’ve got to work with is fragments they’ve heard without comprehension, coming to them through a terrible game of corporate telephone.
[several intervening information-destroying communication hops later]
Team: Well, it’s a C# project, but what we really need is…
[back through the lossy hops]
HR: Great! This is a mid-level position, so we’ll say “3-5 years of C# experience.” Now to search the web for some random C# quiz we can use for screening!
That’s how you end up with job postings like the one that made the rounds on social media a while back that required “5+ years of Swift experience”…one year after Swift was released.
In most cases, of course, those hard requirements on years and tools knowledge aren’t even what the team is looking for in a candidate. They’re looking for •somebody they want on their team•.
Another anecdote I heard: a team kept getting terribly unqualified candidates when they reached the technical interview phase, and couldn’t understand why. They finally looked up and started their own interview process, and found that HR had walled the position with some random tech screening quiz they found online…that had •the wrong answers•. HR was actively screening out candidates with basic knowledge!
(1) The hiring process is mostly not about you. That sounds weird, but it’s true.
(2) As an applicant, your job is to jump through nonsensical hoops — or walk around them, if you can — until you can reach the point where you’re having a real conversation with somebody who’s actually involved with the position in question.
(2a) That often means straight-up ignoring clearly stated job requirements.
@airwhale
Yes. Women. First-gen students. Minorities. Students from blue-collar families. The list goes on: anyone who’s coming from a position of vulnerability, who’s been told their whole life that one step out of line means they get punished.
And this at a time where we desperately need diverse voices and views on our teams.
I am at 34 years in this business and with a 100% score, projects and teams that were well mixed with genders, ages, ethnicities etc. have ALWAYS performed better AND been more fun to work for.
We educators call stuff like this “hidden curriculum:” secret knowledge that’s never stated explicitly, but people who are already in-group / acculturated / privileged acquire through ambient experience and/or interpersonal networks.
In my experience, these stated-job-requirements-that-aren’t-really-requirements cause exactly, exactly the disproportionate harm you’d expect: they reward privileged family backgrounds. This isn’t hypothetical. I’ve seen it up close, with real people.
I shudder to think how LLMs are going to multiply the harm of everything upthread.
HR departments are already grabbing unvetted crap from web searches to fill out the job descriptions nobody’s given them enough info to create properly. Half of what I wrote upthread is •already• the sort of bullshit that LLMs do: generating formally appropriate text without comprehension of the underlying idea. Now that’s automatable.
(NB: Cat mentions recruiters, which can mean hiring org or 3rd parties. To be clear, I’m talking about companies themselves. Good 3rd-party recruiters are sometimes the ones picking up the slack here. Sometimes.)
I think there’s a sense out there that at some level, companies must be fundamentally competent or they’d have gone out of business, whatever they’re doing must make some kind of sense, and therefore it’s up to job applicants to please •them•, to meet •their• standards.
It takes a decade or two in industry to understand how barely-functional more human orgs are, how much of the world runs on humans scrambling to mop up the slop our own processes create.
“Complex systems contain changing mixtures of failures latent within them.”
“Complex systems run as broken systems.”
“Catastrophe is always just around the corner.”
“Human operators have dual roles: as producers & as defenders against failure.”
•That• is the reality every one of us is walking into as either a job applicant or a hiring org. As a human in the world.
That sense that it’s the job applicant’s job to please the infallible company is especially keen with students. Trained their whole lives to seek out gold stars, students are always looking for how to get the next A — and feel lost walking into a world where that’s not how it works anymore, where the only people handing out gold stars are people looking to manipulate you.
I’ve seen companies abuse that desire to please. Google in particular recruited on campus throughout the 2010s with the same attitude as the cocky high schooler whose dating strategy is to act like nobody is good enough for them. (That parallel was close enough to make me deeply uncomfortable.) Google was seen among students as the gold star that proved that you’re one of the smart ones, that you’ll make it.
Another reason those layoffs did so much psychological damage.
In a better world, the folks writing job descriptions are good psychologists and good social scientists: neither hiding the hiring process from teams nor dumping in the laps of engineers who have no idea how to run a good one, but instead collaboratively understanding the needs of teams and then using their knowledge of humans and human systems to find the best people.
Is that too much to ask? I’m fairly cynical, but dammit, I don’t think it is.
@inthehands I have bad news for you and your students: the #job-posting pool is full of shallow #recruiters that go far below the already low bar set by the worst #HR departments.
And company #hiring managers turn to these outfits because they don’t have firsthand knowledge about how shitty they are, but they do know that about their own HR.
@inthehands This is going to get so much worse with outsourced services job descriptions banks and, especially, LLMs to give false confidence that the listing, screen questions, etc. are okay because they have fewer glaring errors. The obvious grammatical or technical errors were embarrassments but they did at least give readers a cue that there wasn't a skilled reviewer in the loop at that stage.
Now ever penny-pincher is going to think they can pay HR even less because the tools do the work.
@inthehands Ah, yeah, that's what I get for leaving the reply window open while I got lunch. Sorry about the redundancy but I'm glad to see more attention to the root cause vs. just ragging on HR.
@inthehands (and to be clear, I've dealt with some incredible HR incompetence but in each and every case that was a known problem senior management created and maintained. It's not like nobody had ever noticed that they weren't getting good candidates through the process before.)
@inthehands I have very very little patience with teams and managers like this. I have found that most people simply can't be bothered to even be in contact with their HR and participate in their own recruiting enough to solve these issues. Especially in eng, where people feel above "people ops." Yes so much recruiting is bad but so many recruiters are just young people trying to do a good job and paid a million times less than an eng team. Reach out and fix your hiring.
@inthehands hiring must always be thoughtfully designed, and it's very representative of the learned helplessness that eng takes towards its own human processes to just think you don't have to put any effort into designing better evaluation, better recruiting. I have advocated and poured effort into fixing hiring evaluations in every place I've ever been and I've never, I mean never, seen an engineering leader do the same or be an ally for people like me in this.
@grimalkina@inthehands We should invite you for a talk or something. Honestly we do way better than most large industry organizations.
And we write (and optimize) our own job descriptions. I never would a non-technical person let do that. Results are terrible and it's unfair to the HR people.
The way HR works in all companies where I've been a hiring manager is that I do a lot of the actual "work" and get an HR assistant to do legal stuff etc. for me.
Writing posts is my job. Talking to candidates is, too. Working on the process is and I expect HR to follow up with what I tell them I need.
at my last job the engineers had a lot of feedback on the devops job req that HR wrote up (based on something that a totally different devops manager had written) and we were completely ignored so idk if this is a "teams and managers" problem. maybe in some places it is, but IME we were not allowed not fix the job description to reflect what we actually were doing. unsurprisingly we never managed to hire anyone.
@ggggbbybby@inthehands by teams and managers I meant generally, everyone with power in the situation including the HR leadership. I'm very sorry you had this experience and I've had it too.
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