

Ask HN: What is the most annoying part about finding a new job in tech? - tomdepplito

Is it spending the time to search for good positions?  Dealing with recruiters? Phone screens and interviews?  Something else?
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canadiancreed
\- Useless HR droids that know nothing about the industry, yet are somehow
qualified to filter resumes based upon useless things such as the amount of
jobs per year, or if you have x years of skill at y tech (even if x years is
greater then y tech has even existed)

\- Recruiters that are almost stalker like to get your resume....and then
disappear into the ether.

\- Companies/recuriters that constantly are looking for employees for months
at a time, yet won't budge on requirements, salary, or working conditions.
Found this especially in the maritime provinces, but it does come up in larger
markets as well.

\- Lack of communication. I get that some places are pretty busy, but at least
a simple "hey if you hear nothing by x time, you probably didn't make the
cut", or feedback after an interview to say "hey you didn't make the cut, this
is the reason(s) why". We're (mostly) adults, and having a timetable and
constructive analysis is always handy. Plus you never know, you could be
hiring again, always good to leave potential future employees with a good
memory of you. :)

\- Saying one thing during interviews, then completely another if you get a
job offer. Like say, twenty thousand less a year, or remote work is not
allowed even thought every other developer in the company is working off-site.

\- Over interviewing. Unless your'e applying for a C level position, or
leading a large team at a megacorp, one interview is all you need. Having a
three hour grill session for an intermediate developer position only to be
told that there's more interviews after this is wasted effort. You're hiring a
developer, not the next CEO of IBM.

\- Remote work is verbotin. This is probably just mine, but have found that
employers that I qualify for, react to an inquiry of being able to telecommute
akin to a first date after saying you have syphilis.

\- Finding a great job, in a tech you want to use, in an industry you'd be
very interested in, that pays well and has great benefits, only to find that
you don't have the right citizenship. (Happens all the time with me when I
search for remote gigs. Tons of work out there.....if you're American)

As you can tell, I've been looking around for a while :)

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mrlyc
Clueless HR. For example, I'd been writing air traffic control software for a
contractor of Lockheed Martin. When that contract finished, I applied to do
the same at Thales and was turned down on the basis that there were "too many
jobs" on my résumé. I explained that there were a lot of jobs because I was a
contractor but they still refused to even see me. That was a big shock as I
was told I got the LM job because I had a lot of experience. They wanted
someone who had been programming for more than twenty years, which is fair
enough when you're trying to avoid flying one plane straight into another one.

~~~
Lifebot
Unrelated but out of curiosity, what language is most air traffic control
software written? (or what language would you be writing in do you think?)

~~~
mrlyc
We did ours with Linux and C.

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michaelmior
Dealing with recruiters who don't understand what a company is actually
looking for can be pretty frustrating.

~~~
yulaow
No more that dealing with recruiters who don't know how and who really recruit
(aka without any modern technology knowledge)

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geebee
The all day (perhaps even multi-day) technical screening, covering data
structures and algorithms, threading, sql, database transactions and locking,
and often a few branches of math, getting shuttled from interviewer to
interviewer for a fresh grilling.

I don't like this, and I don't consider it a good use of anyone's time, but
the deal killer is the "homework assignment", which forces me to spend 4-8
hours but allows them to screen me out in 15 minutes if they don't like my
code.

As my high school history teacher said to a class of unmotivated late second
semester seniors - "I'm not going to waste my time on you if you won't waste
your time on me."

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beat
Recruiters bombarding you with crap jobs.

I wonder if there might be a market for a recruiting board that has a "Do not
contact me about" feature...

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duiker101
startups that look for "superstars", "ninjas" etc... thinking they will be the
new Facebook starting from tomorrow.

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sathley
HR's don't recognize talent and tell you they have fixed salary bands which
are solely based on years of experience.

~~~
vladimirralev
Yes. What if the talent starts making their own bands on the performance
solely based on how much the company pays. How would they feel about that?
Most of their tactics can be reversed.

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alok-g
I think it is the weaknesses of the screening process at the other end. A lot
of good applications go nowhere because they get little to no attention. It is
still too hard to separate good candidates from the plethora of the
applications received. This partly comes from missing good indicators of
performance (See [1] for example).

While performance lacks good measures, compensation is quantitative as it is.
This leads to misjudgements on quality-vs.-cost tradeoff impacting both the
potential employers and good candidates.

[1]
[https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20130620142512-3...](https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20130620142512-35894743-on-
gpas-and-brain-teasers-new-insights-from-google-on-recruiting-and-hiring)

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ghostdiver
Because of your current job you are not up to date with latest stuff.

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petervandijck
1\. People not getting back to you quickly.

