
Longtime tech recruiter shatters the engineering shortage myth - Avalaxy
http://venturebeat.com/2012/09/25/startup-stories-recruiter/
======
CoolGuySteve
In my experience, a lot of interviewers ask some pretty esoteric computer
science or language errata questions in order to hire someone who will write
what are essentially CRUD wrappers with a pretty GUI.

Even if you scoff and rattle on about all the awesome hard problems you face,
firstly, only a couple of people in any team actually need to solve those
things, and secondly, you're probably lying and write everything on top of
some already asymptotically slower abstraction already.

At one company, we churned through several dozen candidates for a position
that was incredibly dull because they couldn't recursively divide and conquer
a hypothetical infinite data set or use dynamic programming to optimally
subdivide a two dimensional space. None of these things were relevant to the
endless property plumbing we did all day. It just made us feel smart and
distracted us from the dismal day-to-day that was wasting our advanced
degrees.

The window dressing justification was that a smart person gets more done, 10x
programmers and all that, but smart people also quit when they're bored, and
smart people make boring jobs more complex than they need to be to stop from
getting bored.

Anyways, after that debacle and now that I've moved to a smaller company, I
started giving out a programming test that mimics what we do. If the candidate
hands in something that is clean, complete, and doesn't have a dumb design,
I'm totally for them.

So far it has still been difficult to find people, but the ones who pass seem
a lot more capable than those we found using the pointless trivia method.

~~~
goldmab
CRUD wrappers with a pretty GUI are actually really hard to do well. Think of
all unusable and unstable CRUD apps you've used. I wouldn't drill someone on
dynamic programming for that kind of job, but I _would_ want them to be smart
enough and dedicated enough to do it well. In my experience that's rare.

------
untog
Not really "shatters", more "claims to have an insight into".

I'm a little torn. It's interesting that he describes finding engineers as
like "detective work". My first instinct (as a developer) is that if someone
is difficult to find, it's quite possible that they're not interested in being
found. If they were looking for a job, they'd be visible. Does he consider it
his role to 'educate' engineers about the possibilities available to them?

I've just been through the process of finding a new job. I expressly avoided
using any recruiters, and am very happy with the result. Maybe engineers are
hard to find because they're used to hiding from recruiters. I negatively
judge startups that use recruitment agencies, but maybe I'm part of the
problem.

~~~
joe_the_user
No, it is a myth, there are lots of qualified, competent programmers out
there:

 _"But again and again, he points out that qualified engineers do exist, and
they’re being shut out of companies for what amounts to a cultural stigma
about what sociologists would call “the other.”"_

This is the point.

Edit: I think is important say that the "there's a terrible programmer
shortage" belief is a myth, in the sense that it is a dramatic story that
impels people towards certain behaviors and to say that this myth is wrong, in
the sense that it excludes many people, in order to add some kind of sanity to
the hiring process.

~~~
dos1
I agree that the programmer shortage is overblown. I'm a contractor and am
currently putting out feelers for my next gig. My resume and background are
"very good" from a recruiter's perspective, and even I have issues getting in
the door at some of these places. The sad bit is that most of the time I find
out the job is something a junior dev right out of college could do, and the
rate is $65/hr.

Along that vein, almost no place is interested in paying for talent. I
consistently get incredulous responses from recruiters when I tell them my
rate. Many companies cap their reqs at $90/hr or $100/hr. This seems like a
decent rate, but a major part of the problem is that the recruiting firm wants
to take 30% of that hourly rate. If the maximum cap is 100, that means the
contractor is getting (at most) $70/hr. Companies either need to up their
rate, or cut out the middle man completely. The vast majority of recruiters I
encounter today have a premium LinkedIn account and just spam everyone that
matches keywords. Are you telling me a company couldn't have an intern do that
kind of thing for a lot less than the recruiters are getting?

------
nradov
It always irks me when someone refers to a "shortage" of potential employees.
There is no such thing as a shortage in a free market, by definition. No
external force is artificially constraining the supply of engineers or the
wages that employers are allowed to pay them. Thus there is no shortage. QED.

Sometimes recruiters and employers use the word "shortage" as a code to
indicate that they can't find highly qualified employees who will do excellent
work for low wages. But that's just a mismatch in expectations, not a true
shortage. I've done a lot of hiring over the past few years and have always
been able to find the engineers I need.

Despite that flaw it's a good article with some helpful insights. Although it
kind of comes across as a bit of a PR puff piece and advertisement for that
particular recruiter's services.

~~~
necubi
This is a flagrant simplification of economics and it's unfortunate that this
is often allowed to stand on HN. A sure sign someone is making something up in
economics: using "QED." Economics is about the real world, and the real world
is messy. Even good mathematical economic theories rarely map well to the real
world, and yours is hardly that.

Shortages certainly exist in a free market, and they occur in cases where the
supply is relatively inelastic. This is obviously the case in the short run
for engineers, as it takes some amount of time for engineers to be trained
(four years if they go the normal university route). If the demand outstrips
the supply presently in the market (which appears to be the case), employers
cannot magically increase the present supply.

Furthermore, humans are not perfectly rational economic actors. Not everybody
will choose to become an engineer solely because that is the most economically
rational thing for them to.

If employers offer higher wages (which has clearly been happening; starting
salaries are above $100k these days in the valley) they can at best hope to
attract employees from other employers that are offering less (although there
may be non-monetary factors at work as well) but that does not change the
fundamental imbalance between supply and demand.

I could go on in this vain, but seriously, pick up an economics textbook
before spouting off this nonsense.

~~~
nradov
Not nonsense at all. The article specifically mentioned a "shortage" of
engineers in San Francisco. In the USA there are an effectively unlimited
number of qualified engineers who could do those jobs. Many of them are either
living in other areas, or have moved on to jobs in other fields and could get
back up to speed with minimal training (much less than 4 years). If employers
offered significantly higher wages then plenty more supply would quickly
appear to clear the market. Of course humans are irrational but they will
still respond when presented with a strong enough incentive.

And yes, I have read the economics textbooks.

~~~
jseliger
>If employers offered significantly higher wages then plenty more supply would
quickly appear to clear the market

This is really a housing supply question as Matt Yglesias makes clear here:
[http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2012/05/face...](http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2012/05/facebook_george_lucas_and_nimbyism_the_idiotic_rules_preventing_silicon_valley_from_building_the_houses_and_offices_we_need_to_power_american_innovation_.html)
and as others have written (see, for example, Ryan Avent's _The Gated City_ ).
Housing costs in Silicon Valley are insane, which prices out lower skill
workers and forces companies to pay more for highly skilled workers. Allowing
to higher building heights and reduce setback requirements alone would do a
lot to improve the jobs situation.

------
confluence
> _There is no shortage of engineers, but there is a shortage of engineers
> willing to work for very little money._

I hate startups/companies that decry an engineering shortage when they aren't
willing to pay for it - we make your products, your money and your fortune
either pay us more, work on more interesting problems or have a better working
environment. Engineers will gladly come to you if you do so - see Google or
Valve.

Otherwise - shut up.

------
shawnee_
_And the truth he’s seen in the past decade is that our insecurity is getting
the best of us. “The big problem in general is fear,” he says. “To counter
their fear, companies make their standards too high and turn down people who
would be great at their jobs. ... “Everyone wants the next Steve Wozniak to
walk through the door, but really, they should be asking to see if they can do
the job. … They want to populate their entire staff with engineering geniuses,
and you don’t need the whole staff to be engineering geniuses. You need a
couple really bright people who know what they’re doing, and then, just don’t
turn down people who can do the job.”_

There's definitely a misconception out there that a company can make it on
"great engineers" alone. I've been thinking about this lately, trying to come
up with a good way to describe to people what I do. So far, the best thing
I've been able to come up with is that it's akin to being a load balancer: the
person who takes on the tasks that can and will be optimized, but that are
(for whatever reasons/ priorities) not yet able to optimized.

So maybe part of "the engineering shortage" is related to the shortage of
people with enough technical competence to take on the tasks that the
engineers _could_ do, but don't want / like to do. So far in my experience,
I've seen far more of a dearth of support people who know what they're doing,
than a shortage of good engineers.

------
therealarmen
This guy didn't shatter anything. It's basically a big advertisement for his
services. Those of us on the ground know there is a real shortage due to the
current tech boom.

~~~
mattlong
To be fair, he says exactly that:

 _“Oh, there’s definitely a shortage of people as the tech industry expands,”
Marcus says. “The economy is expanding here, and they need a lot of engineers.
You just need more and more people to code all this stuff.”_

~~~
jdbernard
Right, which contradicts the title of the article.

------
tisme
All that work and not one mention of this: Engineers usually really don't like
recruiters.

Not being found by recruiters is a feature, not a bug.

------
tnuc
>“Everyone wants the next Steve Wozniak to walk through the door, but really,
they should be asking to see if they can do the job. …

Most interviews have a combination of the following.

a) The interviewer wants to talk about himself/herself.

b) Talk about how great the company is and how much of the kool-aid they
drink.

c) Ask one tech question and base their decision on that.

d) Ask a few very obscure questions.

e) Talk about big-O / Binary search / your education.

f) Code samples... What could a code sample possible mean to someone who has
no idea what the pitfalls of the code/problem/database is. Useless. Hiring is
based on commenting ability?

g) Play the game of are going to scrape and bow for them. Alpha males.

h) Don't have a clue what they are talking about, got the job because they
know someone. They ask questions from some article they read.

i) Haven't read your resume.

Less than 25% of interviews actually bother asking you questions about if you
can do the job. Write some code.. ha, one in ten.

------
MaleKitten
Is there any falsifiable evidence in this article? All I read was a big
advertisement for a recuiter named Jon Marcus, with a bunch of assertions
about how companies could recruit better if they only lowered their standards.
Of course you can increase your yield if you accept lower quality. That's as
true in manufacturing as it is in human resources.

"He’s interviewed Ivy Leaguers and dropouts; and as a result, he has helped
shape countless “A teams” and every other kind of team, then watched those
teams suceed or fail."

Really? I've never seen a recruiter follow up with any candidate whatsoever,
and I've interviewed hundreds of candidates from the employer side. So I have
serious doubts about his ability to shape or understand how a candidate can
affect an organization. The feedback loop just doesn't exist - companies don't
provide outside entities (recruiters) feedback about their hired employees.
The legal risk alone is too high.

Case in point: "[Y]ou don’t need the whole staff to be engineering geniuses.
You need a couple really bright people who know what they’re doing, and then,
just don’t turn down people who can do the job."

really, I only need a couple of people who know what they're doing? What
exactly are the rest of the engineers doing? They don't know what they're
doing, but can follow instructions from those who do? I'd rather just not hire
those people to begin with. According to Jon Marcus then, I'm part of the
problem. Except, he has a real financial incentive to place marginal people,
since he gets 20-25% of the first year salary. What do you think that does to
his opinion of hirability?

------
yyyt
I see the situation regularly from both sides.

I know exactly why I get rejected: for having Masters in Economics (read:
Applied Maths), not CS, for not knowing by heart all normal forms till the
6th, for using but not knowing the formal definition of Dependency injection
pattern.

I see how it works on the other side. I was the first guy at a new project in
a wealthy company. We needed a genius, and we hired one from the first try. He
solved all the Python puzzles I gave, and knows a lot just out of university.

The problem is that we need to extend the app, which is boring and a bit
repetitive, which takes discipline, not rare talent. So we see such guys
coming. They learned Python on their own, out of joy, don't know many things.
But our boring work will be a challenge to them. So, why not hire?

My superstar fellow says they're retards, the management asks to not bother
even calling them back, and I have no strong point in their favor.

------
lilsunnybee
I really like this article. There are a lot of unconventional candidates out
there that could do great work if any established business or startup would
give them a chance, but since they're not the perfect resume candidate, or
close to it, they can't get in the door to show their chops. It's basically
classism, because the candidates most likely to have that perfect resume or
flawless work history would have come from a privileged background, where they
had all sorts of resources available to them, were never forced to get a job
outside their field to earn a wage, and were never hurting for connections.

Take me for example. I graduated in 2008 with a computer science degree from a
pretty good state school. I resigned from my first job after feeling extreme
burn-out and anxiety from a broken process and constant missed deadlines.

If you have any gap in employment though that throws up huge red flags for a
lot of employers, as well as being anxiety prone and not interviewing so great
because of it, or not being fully knowledgeable about whatever particular
software stack that business is using.

And i know you can lie on a resume but some of us aren't so comfortable doing
that. So it ends up if you have any red flags, you're basically never getting
employed again. Fired unfairly from your last job: good luck explaining that
one. Family or personal emergency create a hole in your resume: that's not
gonna look good. Have other concerns that take up your free time besides
building up your Github: you must just not be dedicated or in love with the
field (which is not the same as not being able to do the work).

I sort of long for the early days of programming back when you could just walk
in the door and take an IQ test with an employer to see if you were capable of
being a programmer, regardless of your current / past employment, personal
history, etc. Now to do any sort of work you have to have already done the
work, which is exceedingly difficult if you are currently working full time in
a different field (out of financial necessity), and aren't a lone white
bachelor who has loads of free time to spend on personal projects.

So what do i do now: i clean houses. It's fine work if you have nice clients,
but i'm also underemployed and very low income. It's easy to get discouraged
about even trying to interview, when you're pretty sure once they see your
resume, any effort you've put in would have been a waste. No one seems to want
to hire a housecleaner as a programmer (classism), regardless of my education,
high SAT / GRE / college GPA. I'm damaged goods, and it doesn't matter if i
can do the work or not, i'm just not an attractive candidate.

Sorry for the rant. But i can't be the only one out there. I bet there are a
lot of capable workers out there that are either unemployed or underutilized
because of discrimination of one type or another.

~~~
anon987
Here's my view as a veteran UNIX / Linux guy who's almost done with his
search:

>> “They like to hide,” he says. “Marketing people, sales people, product
people will network. Engineers, they’re very timid about giving out contact
information for themselves or anyone else.”

Rule #1 about posting your resume on Dice or Monster: Your phone number is
000-000-0000 - screen via e-mail. I don't enjoy multiple interruptions in my
day because you either A) matched a couple keywords or B) e-mailed me and I
haven't responded. Don't be "that guy" who e-mails a person, calls them and
says "did you get my e-mail??" I have got most of my jobs from Dice, they've
been good to me, but there's no way I'm exposing myself to recruiter spam via
telephone.

Same goes for references: I make it 100% clear that when I give out references
they are ONLY to be used as references for this position and nothing more. If
my references start getting calls from your company about 'opportunities' they
contact me, I call the company, start chewing people out, AND I've got it in
writing.

A tip for newer job seekers: Provide references after the interview, not
before. The recruiter or company contacted you on the strength of your resume
and not who your references are.

On another quick note: References are obsolete. Managers from larger companies
can't give good or bad references due to fear of being sued and what are you
gonna do - give your worst enemy as a reference?

>> “It’s the fear of the unknown,” he says. ”Everyone is afraid of hiring the
wrong person, and if they would just trust that they know how to ask the right
questions, then everyone wouldn’t be complaining as much about recruiting.”

Get your fucking interviews in order, take time and actually do it. I've had
so many interviews where it's clear that the interviewers did not read my
resume and did not have questions ready to go - they just played it off the
cuff. I took the time to tailor my resume to your organization but you can't
get your interviewers together for 15 minutes to read my resume and create
questions to ask? You're showing me right off the bat that your company either
can't or doesn't plan for a six figure investment (me, the candidate, the guy
that will be sitting next to you).

>> But instead of asking the right questions and hiring a candidate who’s
qualified, Marcus says that startup founders will take a candidate in based on
a personal recommendation or an impressive company name on a resume, usually
branching outside the original specification they wrote and usually regretting
the decision in the long run.

This is very true because it's easy to hide and do nothing or know nothing at
a large company. At a 10 person startup if you don't know what you're doing
people are gonna figure it out - fast.

>> And the truth he’s seen in the past decade is that our insecurity is
getting the best of us. “The big problem in general is fear,” he says. “To
counter their fear, companies make their standards too high and turn down
people who would be great at their jobs.

Job descriptions are getting stupid and out of control - they seem to be like
a child's wish list at Christmas. Nevermind positions with low salary but do
you really expect people to know C/C++ and be a Linux guru? Both a Windows pro
and a Cisco wizard? Take 30 seconds and think about it: How many of those
people REALLY exist in the world? 500? How many are looking for a job? 1, 2?
And last but not least, are they really going to want to work for your random
company for 90k a year with skills like that? Unless they are completely
insecure and clueless the best of the best techies know their worth.

The other thing is listing requirements for the wrong reasons. I don't know
Ruby and shy away from jobs that want it, but if you really just want someone
who knows Ruby for Puppet then that's easy - it's just copy existing manifests
and update the variables / settings for the new host, but you scared me off by
projecting that you want a sysadmin + programmer when you listed Ruby + Python
+ C + perl.

Companies are also forgetting the root of IT: Adapting to new technologies.
C'mon, I know ABC App is what you're looking for but I've been doing this for
ages and changed with the times. Do you really think I can't read vendor docs
and other web resources to come up to speed when I meet 80% of your other
requirements? That and the old "everything old is new again" saying. Unless
it's something completely new a mindblowing chances are I can use my knowledge
of older systems to understand the fundamentals of the new ones - you won't
need to teach me the fundamentals of high availability from scratch.

>> “Everyone wants the next Steve Wozniak to walk through the door, but
really, they should be asking to see if they can do the job. … They want to
populate their entire staff with engineering geniuses, and you don’t need the
whole staff to be engineering geniuses. You need a couple really bright people
who know what they’re doing, and then, just don’t turn down people who can do
the job.”

I always laugh at places where almost every position wants something like
"leadership skills." What happens when you have an organization where everyone
has strong leadership skills? You have too many cooks in the kitchen, that's
what. Understand that most people are better suited to a follower role - I
know I am.

>> The great mystery and the core principle of recruitment, Marcus says, is at
once simple and nearly impossible: Find a better candidate. The elusive
“better candidate,” he tells me, can come from anywhere.

This goes hand-in-hand with the first quote about great engineers not making
themselves known. While you look for that "better candidate" he's interviewing
with and getting offers from other companies.

Lately I have been flat out telling recruiters "I get 10 or 15 e-mails per day
so I'm not putting my entire job search on hold for one possibly maybe
nothing-in-writing-yet opportunity. If your company wants me, they need to
step up and come get me." Seeing as how recruiters and employers love to keep
potential employees in a holding pattern for weeks or months I'm not going to
let life pass me by, sorry.

Expanding on that, I also take the "send it and forget it" approach because I
never know how quick or slow a company will respond - low expectations make
for a happier life.

PS: Hey dumbass recruiters and employers: Make REAL job descriptions. Oh your
only requirements are Linux and VMware? Sounds incredibly vague and doesn't
grab my interest unless the job is in Hawaii. We have an interview and you go
into all sorts of technologies that you expect me to design / admin but the
job description didn't mention them? Lose/lose because I don't get any time to
review them and you're getting bad candidates. Recruiters who can't provide
detailed job descriptions? That's like going to Taco Bell and saying "give me
food."

PPS: DevOps a buzzword, the old term is "teamwork." You probably shouldn't
keep sysadmins that don't want to interact with the devs or are so insecure
that they can't let devs control when and how they deploy their code...

------
idunno246
worked with a recruiter by that name. Creeped everyone out in the hitting on
candidates sort of way.

------
scotty79
Title: Startup Stories: Longtime tech recruiter shatters the engineering
shortage myth

Interview: So the Great Engineer Famine of 2012 is — what, a total myth?

“Oh, there’s definitely a shortage of people as the tech industry expands,”
Marcus says. “The economy is expanding here, and they need a lot of engineers.
You just need more and more people to code all this stuff.”

Mismatch?

------
sowhata
"recruiting is a balancing of fears"

"the other"

Pretty much spot on. There is no shortage of people who can do the jobs. That
is certainly not the fear being balanced (=Joe Candidate can't do the job).
Rather, the fear is that Joe Candidate is not "like me", and that he might
change the culture. He is "the other".

But this is not as silly as it sounds. It makes a difference who you have to
work with everyday. It's not just about work. In many cases, monkeys could do
the work. (In other cases, only a very few people could do the work.) What
it's about is being surrounded by "your kind of people". Work environment.

This doesn't just apply to startups.

So being a good recruiter is not just about finding qualified people, it's
about understanding "cultural fit" and the particular pyschology (however
irrational it may be) of your clients.

------
jdbernard
The first twelve paragraphs boil down to:

* Qualified software engineers are hard to find, it's like hunting or detective work, but they do exist. _Not really a myth-shattering revelation, I think we all agree with this._

* People are afraid of the unknown. This applies to hiring practices. _Sure, nothing new here._

* Interviewers do not ask the right questions. _OK, what kinds of questions are "not right", why, and what would be the better approach?_

* Companies standards are too high. They do not need a team full of geniuses. _Not sure I agree, have any evidence or supporting arguments? It is admittedly hard to measure, but most of the evidence from people who actually work with them points to the 10x or 100x engineer being a reality. Hiring that guy is a much better investment._

The next section (10 paragraphs):

* Candidates can come from anywhere. _Sure, nothing new about that._

* Networking and legwork are the staples of a successful career in recruiting. _Nothing new here either._

And the next (14):

* For a recruiter, finding an engineer is like finding the "very few really big fish" among a whole bunch of sharks. _Wait, doesn't this contradict what we said earlier?_

* Those looking to hire need to drop their false requirements like Ivy League schools, moral character. _Hm. OK. Other than obviously exceptional anecdotes, why are these bad? Any other false requirements? How are we supposed to filter candidates?_

The final section (8 paragraphs):

* Startup culture is often unhealthy. Run it like a business. _OK, I suppose I agree with this in principle. But the opposite it true too: business environments can be unhealthy too (Office Space-esque?). What makes each unhealthy and how do we combat this?_

* People are afraid of the unknown. _Did'nt we already do this one?_

* Ageism and sexism are related to this fear. _OK, sure. What do we do about it? How do we combat that fear? Also, not new or myth-shattering._

\----

The title reads like it should be a persuasive piece, but I think it is mostly
fluff and history. It has a number of unsupported positions and suppositions
thrown in, but many of the ones that ring true are nothing new and do not
"shatter the myth".

What about the real issues that created this so-called myth? How do you
address FizzBuzz problem: a majority of applicants fail to meet the most basic
of "can you do the job" type of requirements? How do you account for
atypically high salaries? What about the large amount of head-hunting
happening at places like Google and Facebook? If there is no shortage of good
engineers why can't these extremely attractive companies seem to find enough
of them?

I have been in several teams full of both, the 10-100x engineers, and the
good-enough engineers. The former have outperformed the latter in profit and
productivity every time. My experience is that it is very hard to find the
engineers that make up the 10-100x teams and this article has done almost
nothing to shatter that "myth".

------
eli_gottlieb
So every company wants a social proof that the person they're interviewing is
Really, Really Good -- often even before the person gets the interview.

Problem is, social proofs are purely relative and zero-sum. If everyone
graduated from Stanford or worked at Google, having Stanford or Google on your
resume would become worthless (and, in fact, this has happened with some
technologies that got very popular).

Sounds like a rather contradictory environment, tough to crack.

------
waterlesscloud
Re-reading the PG essay on creating wealth and came across this- "The top 5%
of programmers probably write 99% of the good software."

Probably somewhat exaggerated for effect, but also probably true in general
concept.

Which hiring folks probably know at least subliminally. Of course, there's
also the fact that the vast, vast majority of them are hiring for bad projects
to begin with.

------
michaelochurch
I've been on both sides of this one. I'm going to speak mostly from the side
of one doing the recruiting, because that was where I had the chance to
actually learn why people were sought or avoided, accepted or rejected. When
you're a candidate, you only have your own conjectures about why you get yeses
and nos, but when you're involved in recruiting, you get a front-row seat for
how stupid companies can be.

Companies think that if they set requirements 3 levels above the actual work,
they'll get it done really well, very fast, and reliably.

That's not true. It doesn't work that way. It's the opposite.

Companies are afraid to hire at-level because they can't admit the truth about
the quality of work they have to offer. Most of what they are doing is not
very interesting, and their environments are often broken, but they're
terrified that if they hire at-level for that work, they'll poison the
environment with inferior programmers. Reality: the culture was already
damaged by the crappy work. It's a sunk cost if that's the kind of work you
have to do, so fucking accept it and hire at-level.

There's also a social-climbing element to it that is pretty disgusting. I've
seen this with startups. They hire the people they can get-- a few are bad, a
few are great, most are OK-to-good-- but then, after they're more established
and richer, they decide that none of those people are "good enough" to grow
with the company, so they decide to upgrade their crowd and hire shiny, new
people. Familiarity breeds contempt, so eventually they are used-up shoes and
newer, shinier people need to be brought on. (This is why, if you're an early
startup hire, you need to lock in a VP-level title even if you're a full-time
programmer. You can never get full assurance that people won't be hired above
you from outside, but the title makes it harder. It puts a limit on that sort
of shit.)

There's also a ridiculous pansy-ass risk aversion involved. "We can't do
machine learning unless we hire a machine learning expert with 20 years of
production experience." Bull-fucking-shit. So many companies refuse to get out
there and do something interesting until they can hire a Messiah, and people
anything like that Messiah want to work for companies that are _already doing_
interesting work.

~~~
icelancer
"Companies are afraid to hire at-level because they can't admit the truth
about the quality of work they have to offer"

Everything else you said is absolutely true, but you could have stopped here.
Perfectly summarized, and dead right.

------
pootch
The tech industry is heavily reliant on the recruitment model. Its actually a
great model, how many people can say there is an entire industry out there
dedicated to getting you hired? But it has its underbelly. Spam, lowballing,
misrepresentation, and some of that results in a lower than expected best
match scenario for filling positions. I agree that many developers dont want
to deal with the noise of job boards, and that may be a sense of hiding, but
its also a sign that a high percentage of recruiters are not selling you into
a good job, they are just resume bombing a hiring manager they have no
relationship with, have never talked to and will probably never fill a seat.
These kind of shops are to be avoided like the plague and only reinforce bad
hiring practices because they submit consistently low quality candidates for
positions which the candidate does not match.

~~~
fecak
You really think the recruitment model is a great model? Just curious, great
for who? I've been a recruiter for 15 years, and there are some glowing flaws
with the model that are being exposed right now. I've written two articles
about it recently, both here on HN. Search 'disrupt recruiting' and you'll
find them. Here is the first <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4555165>

