It's not any kind of paradox. Structural unemployment happens when the skills of the work force don't match the needs of employers, so there is both unemployment and difficulty hiring.
Structural unemployment is usually high when there's a rapid change in demand for skills, as of course there is in tech. It results in crazy high salaries too. People with machine learning experience are getting 7-figure offers, while people with jQuery experience can't find jobs.
As an individual, you can both improve the economy AND make fat stacks by learning the skills that are in high demand. As an employer, you can do better by finding skill sets that aren't in high demand, with enough overlap with what you need that you can retrain. There are a lot of unemployed video game programmers right now, so if you can figure out how to use people with those skills you can hire some smart, energetic people at moderate salaries.
Structural unemployment happens when the perceived skills of the workforce don't match the perceived needs of employers, so there is both unemployment and difficulty hiring.
A lot of engineers will tell you that companies are often expecting both too much (precise types of experience) and the wrong things (leetcode-type challenges, unnecessarily specific knowledge...), which leads them to pass over perfectly qualified candidates.
> Structural unemployment happens when the perceived skills of the workforce don't match the perceived needs of employers
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons : when "buyers" cannot distinguish between good and bad due to informational issues, even the good products (or in this case employees) cannot find buyers. Market failure.
It might be improvable by the relevant parties getting together and agreeing on a curriculum and exams so people only have to take a test once, for example. But I think that's a long way off.
Of course, ChatGPT makes this a lot worse since it reduces the cost of fakes on both sides: fake applications and fake job adverts.
Unions have historically solved this problem. Non-union accreditation programs don’t seem to have the same effect, though in some industries they do have a positive effect on salary.
People have fixated on the word "union", but when a group of white collar people get together to set standards and gatekeep them it's called a profession. In the UK, this is usually structured as "chartered". It covers other types of engineers (see the repeated discussion of whether software engineering is engineering; iron rings in Canada; etc) as well as accountants and surveyors.
Older craft professions had guilds. Lawyers go back still further in history and have their "bar" exams.
But in all cases it requires imposing a costly barrier to entry in exchange for not having to prove yourself over and over again to potential employers. Nobody makes a lawyer do fizzbuzz before hiring them.
...because the state Bar Association has required them to pass a test just to show up. In most states the same organization requires a degree from an accredited law school just to sit the test (though I think there are like 2 states that let anyone sit the Bar Exam).
Put another way, everyone has to do the fizzbuzz leetcode test just to be in the industry. But you only have to do it once.
to qualify, unions may have solved this problem in the US. in europe, which has a stronger apprentice culture, unions don't have any role here.
(i am not saying this to criticize the comment but just to point out one of the many differences between unions in the US and europe)
the problem with apprentice programs is that they lag behind the changes in the industry. when i was in school there were none for software developers for example. there are now, but the second problem is that apprentice programs are considered of lower status compared to studying at a university. think blue-collar programmers vs white-collar software developers. the pay is also different.
i don't know anything about union accreditation programs, but i can imagine that they would be targeted at the available jobs, and with unions in the US having more influence at who gets hired, they probably can make sure that an accreditation actually leads to a job.
apprentice programs traditionally also promised that you'd get hired at the company where you learned, but this is no longer certain. together with the status and pay differences it is no surprise then that the number of people starting apprentice programs is declining.
on the other side university studies are not targeted at the industry. which only adds to the perception of candidates not matching employers needs. as an employer it is difficult to tell whether a candidate with a diploma is actually capable of doing the job.
unions are long established in europe, at least in western europe, and are a cornerstone of the social system. even white collar jobs have unions. this is in contrast to the US where unions are almost entirely non existent for white collar jobs like software engineering.
Union Law in a lot of "Europe" (a broad term so very dependent country to country) is much less adversarial with businesses than in the US.
At least in Western Europe, the big Unions won't fight tooth and nail over mass layoffs (eg. Volvo in 2009-12 Sweden versus GM in 2009-12 US) and make it a major political issue, as the Union Leadership has larger ambitions beyond their Union.
A lot of this seems to stem from the influence National Syndicalism had on most European unions in the 20th century compared to traditional Syndicalism in the US+UK in the 20th century.
>Union Law in a lot of “Europe” […] is much less adversarial with businesses than in the US.
US labor law was designed to be adversarial at the firm level because that gives individual firms greater power to crush unions and prevents sectoral bargaining and sympathy strikes. One can see the vestiges of “European” labor organizing in the film industry, which has an exemption to this that was grandfathered in.
You didn't understand the context. Unions in Europe are usually not involved at all in accrediting professionals in their fields. Thats what the conversation is about.
The 'guilds' seem to have a similar purpose here in Britain, namely that of providing legally-required accreditation programmes. However, these are only for certain trades, and I put guilds in scarequotes because they aren't as exclusive as the mediaeval form.
Re. universities, it was widely quoted a few years ago that more people graduated with a bachelors in photography during that year than there were practising photographers!
It would only make it harder for new grads, as unions aim to help their constituents increase salaries, which means paying non-union hires waaaaaay less.
Look at the Automotive Engineering industry in Ohio/Penn/Mich for example - a union contract engineer will earn a decent amount, but the majority of new hiring is non-union.
I'm relatively uninformed here, but isn't part of the union's job to propagate itself and ensure that there aren't non-union hires in the same industry and location?
> there aren't non-union hires in the same industry and location
We live in a globalized world where location doesn't matter as much.
Automotive Unions are good at demanding fairly competitive wages for their members, but this pushed margins significantly down, leading to vendors and even manufacturers in the Automotive industry to leave union-friendly states like MI, Ohio, and Pennsylvania for those that are right-to-work (eg. South Carolina).
A major reason companies like GM and Stellaris fell behind on the EV trend was because battery technology and automation doesn't fall under the UAW, so there were constant protests and strikes against EV manufacturing (eg. the UAW strikes a couple months ago).
Meanwhile, the Teslas, Hyundais, DaimlerBenzes, and Fords pivoted manufacturing to right-to-work states like Alabama, Kentucky, and Texas.
Imo, a big reason for the PHEV push recently in the US is because of UAW negotiations to protect legacy ICE builds which can be modified into PHEVs as they use most of the same parts excluding the battery portion [0].
Some of those interview questions have ridiculously short time constraints.
You need to be perfectly rested and well practiced in order to finish the exercises in time. Some of these tests seem to select for cheaters because only cheaters who either knew the questions ahead of time or who used AI to solve the problem could finish them in time.
Exactly. A lot of the problems asked of people are basically "do this multi week task that a team would probably work on at the actual company, except in an hour or two".
They also make you question whether you'd want to even work at a company with this sort of setup. Like, imagine a software engineering role where your boss wanted each project done within an hour, with no help from other developers or external sources, with a tech stack you're only told about the day the problem is given to you. Would anyone really consider that a good (or even tolerable) working environment?
My last take-home wanted a sudoku solving app coded from scratch in 30 minutes in an unusually restricted online sandbox IDE that would disqualify you if you defocused the window.
I have 28 years of verifiable professional software development experience on my resume.
I would just close the window 1 minute in because that's just ridiculous. Unless you've already done this before and play Sudoku regularly for fun, it would take you 10 minutes just to absorb the problem. Doesn't leave much time for coding. If you can't even minimize the window to read up on Sudoku, how the heck can you complete the task. The company will end up full of Sudoku enthusiasts who can barely code.
For my last online test, I wanted to close it within 5 minutes of reading the first question even though the problem was not particularly difficult, I just knew I couldn't solve it within 40 minutes because it was a problem that I had never seen before and was very disconnected from practical scenarios. I needed 20 minutes just to absorb the question fully. Also it was very late at night and I wasn't in an optimal state of mind.
Leetcode type challenges are just a proxy for logical habilities, which are highly desired for SWE positions. It's not meant to evaluate every ability. Despite imperfect, I don't know of a better indicator that has similar cost. An employer won't spend a lot more to evaluate with perfection how good we are with logic.
It really isn’t. Asking people stuff like N Queens, Trapping Rain Water, and other such questions is really about if you’ve seen the problem before and studied enough to solve them optimally in under 20 minutes while explaining out loud.
It really is about testing how much you prepared for the interview and not the job.
I interviewed at Netflix and Google and not once did I see a question that was on leetcode. I had to think very hard about how to solve each of their coding questions. However, they didn't need any tricky esoteric algorithms either which I think was really well done.
Microsoft on the other hand, did exactly what you said, they just pulled the classics, which I think is less helpful. I guess it filters on people who have a moderately good memory and are willing to study.
> wrong things (leetcode-type challenges, unnecessarily specific knowledge..
I'm curious about the dynamics of this. If leetcoding or requiring some specific knowledge is too much for candidates, those employers will not be able to find enough talent, so they will be forced to lower their standards and the mismatch should be gone, right? Case in point, I'd venture to guess that no more than 10% of the tech workers truly understand AI or stats or machine learning or basic college-level maths, yet magically millions of ML engineers or data scientists have popped up in the past few years just because the market had such high demand.
> If leetcoding or requiring some specific knowledge is too much for candidates, those employers will not be able to find enough talent, so they will be forced to lower their standards and the mismatch should be gone, right?
I'd revisit any train of thought that conflates access to capital with wisdom or intelligence. If someone invents a money printer then everything they do afterwards will be seen in a post hoc ergo propter hoc light as long as the original money printer still works.
For example, your statement assumes feedback loops I see scant evidence for in real life.
If the corporation as a unit were a perfectly rational actor, sure.
In practice, most corporations seem quite happy to collectively hand-wring over how they can't find new talent, squeeze everything they can out of the talent they currently have, and direct their existing personnel at direct profit-earners while letting systems gradually fall apart due to lack of maintenance.
Leetcode (or hacker rank or others) and other algorithmic qualification (have recruiter ask for years of experience in exactly X) is an understandable response to the automated firehose tools that allow applicants to deluge companies with applications with relatively low effort per app. Companies have to find some way to filter out the percentage that have very low likelihood of succeeding.
I hate it, but I don’t see a better way that doesn’t have its own limitations. (Referral of known ex-colleagues is a good one, but that’s limited in scope and has diversity problems).
My observation has been that the causality is the other way around: the pointless mindgames of employers trying to find "the best" people via interviews led to job-seekers finding ways to game a system that was rigged against them.
However, regardless of "who started it" in this round, ultimately, it is unquestionably a situation we can lay at the feed of industry, which abandoned decades ago the practice of actually training new hires for their positions. Sure, there are prerequisites they can expect (eg, in a programming position, you can expect some level of school learning or experience with programming in general, or particular categories of program/lanugauge), but the degree to which employers are willing to train people on the stuff they use has declined precipitously since the late 20th century. This is a well-known phenomenon, and it is substantially responsible for the modern arms race between job-seekers and prospective employers: if you know that whoever you bring on will get 3 months of well-designed training for the role they'll be filling, you don't need to spend 6 months vetting them over 10 rounds of interviews for an entry-level position.
The situation is bad enough that even for a moderate-sized codebase a newly hired employee is expected to contribute within increasingly (decreasingly?) short time. Getting familiarity with existing codebase is one of the most specific levels of training "on position", yet even that training is deteriorating to shorter and shorter times.
Yes, looking at big company interview processes, it can give you a huge unfair advantage if you can know what kinds of technical questions would be asked ahead of time. It's kind of ridiculous and counter-productive that employers are obsessed with selecting developers who can solve problems under time pressure.
The kind of developer who writes code quickly may also be the kind of developer who jumps to conclusions too quickly; this attitude is a huge problem in the medium and long term when working on any decent size project. Choosing sub-par solutions can trigger a cascade of negative consequences for the project over time. Often, it's better to have developers who are really thorough and don't move to the next stage until all reasonable possibilities have been considered.
The people who can solve problems quickly are often not the same people who can solve problems optimally.
The current system seems to favor fast-moving code monkeys with zero understanding of architecture or security.
not arguing this but, the assumption here is a certain kind of production web developer and similar things.. not all coder problems are hired this way.. unfortunately, ranks of new company leadership actually do not know themselves about this, dealing with money and personal power relationships daily.. so they copy others in the hiring practices and so do the personnel and low-level managers, who are vulnerable to termination themselves..
an industry expanding into distant lands with telecommute for ever faster results with ever cheaper workers, appears to be embracing the AI interview and AI CoPilot assistant standard, to further reduce the bargaining power and individual contributions of employees for writing ordinary code
What I find weird is that the kind of people that they're hiring are the kinds of people who are easier to replace with AI.
AI is useless at big-picture reasoning when coding. It's only good for short snippets. Yet companies seem to reject developers who are good at big-picture, architectural thinking.
And architects generally know where security gaps are likely to occur. If their livelihoods are threatened, it won't take long to find alternative funding for their skills.
>he kind of developer who writes code quickly may also be the kind of developer who jumps to conclusions too quickly
I'm the opposite of this, but when I wanted a really high paying job, I just practiced a bunch to code quickly. That was actually my biggest hurdle, sometimes I'd understand the problem but I couldn't bang out actual working code fast enough.
Other times I'd get so nervous that I wouldn't have time to code that I'd stumble on the thinking part. Once I deliberately practiced for speed, I was much calmer in interviews.
And now I have a really high paying job. shrug. Now, it's not the best at finding outright geniuses, but making people solve slightly harder than trivial coding questions is a pretty consistent filter for people who can't code.
If you're good at coding and you can't do it, then it's just a matter of practicing a bit.
Yes but what kinds of people have the time to practice puzzle solving? Not everyone. For example I've been coding for 10 years, I used to be good at solving puzzles under time constraints but I'm not as good at it anymore because I prioritized practical architecture and other code design skills. I'm a much better coder today by all relevant metrics. My problem is that I sometimes run out of time during the tech tests. It's arbitrary... Sometimes I get lucky with the questions sometimes not. An unfamiliar problem will take longer to solve.
That happens anyway - nobody's payroll dataabse is running on leetcode puzzles, so if you hire somebody, they must spend time - sometimes months - on learning the new systems and getting the lay of the land and how the things are done. It's inevitable.
I think there's still training for positions (which often means - the company's specific tech stack) - it's what the "junior" positions are. If, on the other hand, the candidate more or less fits the tech stack and other requirements (domain knowledge etc.) already, the company can skip the training, and offer a "senior" position, for more money.
That's the reality of most software positions - they're hyper-specialized, and key competencies don't transfer between them. It's similar in medicine - a top cardiologist could at best be hired as a "junior" pulmonologist-in-training, even though he may be a doctor with 20 years of experience.
As an applicant senior dev, I found a small take-home + a discussion over my solution + just chatting in general has worked best. Chill atmosphere and not going by a checklist helped a lot as well, to both sides.
But when companies would "filter" you out because your resume didn't match some stupid algorithmic quirk, you have no way to even get to an interview without mass-filing to any opportunity that at least somewhat resembles the one you want. You don't know the rules of their gatekeeping, and have no chance to learn them because everyone uses slightly different but equally broken gatekeeping system. You know to have any chance you must pass this gatekeeping system. You know the chances of success are low, because you don't even know what they are looking for, and they can't tell you because that would invalidate their whole system. So, you need to send out a lot of submissions, to have any reasonable chance to even get to talk to somebody. And since you have to do that, you can't spend too much time on every submission. Hello, automated tools. It's a nightmare both employers and employees are trapped in, without any reasonable way to resolve it. Yes, personal referrals help - but what if you want to work somewhere where you don't have anybody to personally refer you?
Quite often perception of reality matches actual reality.
I've found it extremely rare to the point of almost being non-existent that what engineers think a company needs or should do is accurate compared to what a company needs or should do.
Probably to what company thinks the company needs or should do? It's rare - very - when a company really needs to do something unusual, which engineers wouldn't expect.
You can have all the skills and education you want, if employers are unreasonable about their hiring and requirements, you have no control or recourse. You have to be lucky (including knowing someone, ie networking), not necessarily good.
> the network effects are largely detrimental to minority groups
“… detrimental to low socioeconomic status groups, within which minorities are over-represented”.
FTFY, not to be a pedant, but to highlight the fact that many white people from certain backgrounds also struggle with this, while well-connected minorities largely do not.
In fact, connected minorities essentially have super-powered network effects since the demand for minorities who can jump through all of the hiring hoops greatly exceeds the supply.
> In fact, connected minorities essentially have super-powered network...
...in isolated pockets where those things exist.
Outside of those places, minorities have their slider set to something-other-than the easiest difficulty level.
As a white guy in generally good condition, my slider was slid all the way to easy. My road was still super hard - but it was easier than it was for women, brown people, etc.
In 1990 I moved to FL and ran headfirst into no connections=no work. I did the Make Your Own Luck thing. Hundreds of brief introductions led to a few relationships. A few of those became potential leads. It was a years long process. The eventual successes hinged on a few, key connections with people who saw something familiar.
If I hadn't been familiar, I wouldn't have been remembered past the introduction.
I'm not just talking about population level racial minorities. It can be things like disabilities, or even white people in areas/industries/ teams with a majority Asian population. It could even be somewhat based on political or religious beliefs and the other cultural-social background that forms what hobbies and other activities you might meet someone at.
Yeah, certain minorities can benefit from programs that value them above others, but the above and beyond results you talk about come after the main connections are made. This doesn't extend to all minority groups either, like those with invisible disabilities (after all, it's mostly about how things look).
I didn't say all minorities. But yes, in other contexts elite people may face other biases (eg jealousy, which could even apply if the hiring tech folks feel threatened).
There is a very large number of employers. If you want to convince me they're all unreasonable, you'll need to show me some pretty compelling evidence.
They're almost all cargo culting the same whiteboard algorithm hiring criteria for otherwise humdrum jobs so yeah, they're all kind of unreasonable. An HR fad can cause structural employment just as easily as bona fide requirements not being met.
They are cargo cutting, I was about to make the same point. I am more likely to get a leetcode quiz from a small company trying to emulate a FAANG company than I am from an interview with an actual FAANG company. Leetcode is part a costly signal given the study that has to be put into it, and part IQ test. I think part of the proliferation of leetcode is due to the illegality (edit: in effect even though not explicitly) of using IQ tests. But if someone could have a certified IQ test they could reuse that one test result for the entire job market improving liquidity. It would be no worse than leetcode as the IQ part of leetcode is in effect already an inefficient and arduous IQ test that people have to take repeatedly. The costly signal was supposed to be university but the academies have sold out their responsibilities. I think the effort to democratize university education, instead of lifting people up, has instead dragged universities down. The reason I think the solution is difficult is that we have to chose between a more fair world where just about anyone can get a degree and IQ tests are illegal but we have to keep taking these leetcode tests. Or a less fair world where an IQ test / SAT score and a university certificate is sufficient.
Yes, it would be very possible. In Brazil for example, several million people each year do the national test for public sector jobs, with the test result deciding who gets hired. So it doesn't matter who you're related to, if you have the same hobby as your interviewer, or if the HR person thinks you're cute or not. It's the test and that's it. At least in theory.
The military branches world wide also generally hires and promotes on merit and testing. So it's nothing strange.
I think previous work history is currently most used as a substitute. As in the hiring company assumes the previous companies have acted as a gatekeeper. Given the amount of money involved it would be difficult to maintain a formalization / certification process that would be both trusted and resistant to corruption.
No, I mean just like companies would like to see a sort of IQ test results for applicants, I'd assume applicants would like to see a sort of employment-worthiness test for the companies. Previous work history here could be the history of that particular aspiring company of hiring people and people leaving the company.
Ah, I see, I think companies being far fewer than people are more able to operate on reputation in a way that would be impractical for general mass of individuals. The companies can and do pay PR to try to influence that reputation, as can individuals, and many high profile individuals do in fact hire PR. Glassdoor is one public source of info, but there is generally quite a lot of gossip around companies. People can reach out to current employees of an company like employers can reach out to previous employers of an individual and I've never had an interview where I was unable to ask the interviewer questions about the company.
Perhaps a proxy for a corporate IQ test would be net earning per employee which is often pretty public information.
It is not illegal to give candidates IQ tests. There are huge firms that do so openly. The practice isn't widespread because it doesn't work well, not because it's proscribed.
Any test that has disparate impact is in effect illegal. Leetcode at least makes this process more opaque which helps limit liability. I have edited my post to note that there is no explicit legislation making IQ tests illegal in the US.
> Any test that has disparate impact is in effect illegal
Nope, it just has to be shown to be relevant to the requirements of the job.
So you call it an "employment skills assessment," make 80% of it indistinguishable from an IQ test, and add some domain-specific questions related to the industry or the position.
P&G has done this for a long time, among other companies.
This has been true for a long time but I would suggest that it's no longer true, or at least less true. Such aptitude tests, the opaque form of IQ tests, are now increasingly and effectively being challenged on the same disparate impact that IQ tests were. Rather recently the NY Teachers aptitude test was demonstrated to have disparate impact resulting in a payout of $1.8B. Perhaps one way to get rid of leetcode would be to demonstrate that it also has a disparate impact. Though I have little hope that what would replace leetcode would be any better, especially since it would have to be even more opaque than leetcode already is.
As it appears you are more familiar with the case than I am, it would be helpful if you could point out what those errors are?
As best I can tell 'Judge Wood ruled that an older state-certification test, which was intended to measure teachers’ knowledge of the liberal arts and science, was racially discriminatory.'
Elsewhere I'm seeing "The court found that Black and Latino teachers clearly passed these tests at lower rates than white teachers. In order to prove that this wasn't illegal, the defendants had to show that the test actually demonstrated what it promised: that teachers who did well on the test would do better in their jobs."
It seems to me that the error was using the wrong test and it was the wrong test because it had disparate impact. What it does not appear to be is a case that is not about disparate impact because it instead had errors.
That kind of reasoning seems amazing to me. Some people didn't perform as well on the test as the judge wanted, so the test is wrong. It's even racist!
If men get into traffic accidents more often than women, then clearly there is something wrong with the cars and car manufacturers should be sued for their discrimination?
In the Eastern bloc, agriculture was immensely held back because everybody had to follow the ideology and adjust their science and methods to "I god damned said so!" of the rulers. Seems like America is curious about following the same path.
Ahh, I'm looking at a much more recent case in New Jersey, not this one from 10 years ago. The test you're talking about isn't an IQ test; it's a heavily and obviously culturally-loaded literacy test. The whole point of actual IQ tests is to isolate intellectual aptitude from cultural literacy.
(I'm writing as if I think real IQ tests are a good idea, and they are not --- in fact, that's my whole point: there's a mythology that IQ tests aren't used because they're illegal, but they are not that; what they are is ineffective.)
The efficacy of IQ tests are a separate argument and the general abandonment of IQ tests by corporations as a demonstration of their inefficacy would be more substantive if such tests were not in effect made illegal at the same time. I.e. if IQ testing conferred no possible legal liability then the spontaneous abandonment of their use might be evidence of their ineffectiveness.
I don't need to litigate this, but they're not "effectively" illegal either. Again: big firms with huge HR departments and lots to lose use then, and brag about it.
Those I assume also have big legal departments, for smaller companies such lawsuits can be extinction events.
This has been previously discussed in detail on HN 12 years ago; https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2414135 I would suggest that times have changed since then and disparate impact lawsuits are now more likely to prevail in 2024 than in 2012, so the in-effect aspect has increased since then.
I know quite a few CEOs who confide in me that they would rather give IQ tests but do not because of their concerns over legal consequences. Clearly this is anecdotal but this sentiment does seem to be pervasive and extensive and repeated throughout the internet over a long period of time.
It would be helpful if you could list some of these companies that publicly state they give IQ tests. I've only heard about this as a practice at hedge funds and even then it was public knowledge / gossip but not publicly stated.
This NY Post story is speculative; the VC firm that did this (stupid) hiring thing, of asking people to take a free online IQ test and a Meyers-Briggs personality test(!), got called out on Twitter and backed down, blaming the process on an intern. They weren't sued. I'm not saying you won't get dunked on if you, for instance, Wonderlic-test applicants for your tech company. You will. But I don't think you're going to get sued.
I'm grasping at straws looking for a counter example to my overall assertion, that it is not a great counter example does not undermine my case. I made a genuine good faith effort to find them - you could help me out a lot if you could list these companies that boast publicly about administering IQ tests. That would go a long way to demonstrating that such tests are not in effect illegal.
My assertion is that IQ tests are already known to have disparate impact and with laws as they are in effect they are illegal. My next assertion is that aptitude tests will suffer the same fate as IQ test because they too will be shown to have disparate impact for the same reasons. That not all such aptitude tests have been sued already under this law does not make them safe from lawsuits as the burden of proof is on the company using them.
Ok, so what several largest employers are you talking about? If this is pubic knowledge as you allege then there is no need to be obtuse. And again, that list of employers that publicly brag about continued administering of IQ tests would be rather helpful to your case and would allow me to substantively check your assertion. I don't understand why in good faith you would not want to share this information.
You cannot use the absence of lawsuits for a list of companies that you are keeping secret as evidence of absence of legal liability.
As best I can tell P&G is an aptitude test that only resembles fake IQ tests and more resembles a mix of leetcoding and personality tests - probably sharing the same benefit of opacity.
Other info I found on it suggests that it’s easily gamed which is something real IQ tests are designed to be resistant to.
I’m not trying to ‘no true Scotsman’ this but it would be helpful if the company described their test at least as an intelligence test. They seem to describe it more as a personality test; “Discover the PEAK Performance Assessment from Procter & Gamble (P&G) tand get an insight into how your personal profile matches the company's needs.”
My specific focus on IQ tests is to be less opaque alternative to leetcode, the P&G assessment seems to be similarly and perhaps more opaque and thus, for now, confers the same protections from disparate impact lawsuits.
I was able to find those things but I fail to see how they are relevant. My point is the IQ test are in contrast to leetcode tests because the IQ test is transparent and transferable between organizations. These tests are neither transparent nor transferrable. Aptitude tests like this have been safe from disparate impact lawsuits for a long time but not for any legal basis. My point is that while such aptitude test leaves them less exposed than IQ tests it does not eliminate it. That they haven’t been sued yet isn’t evidence of lack of legal exposure.
The extent to which the test is arbitrary and gameable would make it more suspect under employment law, not less, so you're working against your own argument.
Disparate impact is US civil rights law, not employment law, that law applies to employment because it applies to everything. I think I’ve been very clear about which laws and legal precedents I am talking about. When it comes to breaking a law it’s better for the company to do it with opacity than clarity. At least then it would be more difficult to show intent which would instead be disparate treatment which is far worse and more damaging for the company. Intentional breaking of the law is always worse than unintentional breaking of the law.
The latest fad appears to be forcing all candidates to be vetted by an external recruiter, even if they are already known to people inside the company. Apparently, this is for reasons of "fairness", but it's yet another segment of an increasingly long pipeline full of holes that drop out candidates somewhat randomly rather than based on the actual required attributes to perform the job effectively. The HR filter was already bad enough but now having a recruiter filter before the HR filter just means even more random rejections of candidates who could have filled the role successfully.
Look at the recent crypto bubble that popped. I'd point to the current potential hype cycle although that's contentious here. For the crypto fad, there was no demonstrated profit beyond speculation, yet lot's of money was poured into it. I have no explanation that can be explained by so-called market mechanisms, it's just chasing hype.
I've gone through a lot of job seeking in the last year (two companies in a row I've worked for have closed). Didn't have a single leetcode challenge. And I'm looking for us companies who hire remotely from other countries but pay at the us level, so it's supposedly about the hardest difficulty setting possible.
But consider: the hiring pipeline looks pretty much the same for all companies? Why is that? Well, they mostly use similar services to manage hiring, and those services all have similar features. But those features aren't great: they've narrowed the hiring pipeline to squeeze all candidates for all jobs down to the same sort of toothpaste that can be squeezed through the pipe.
Are the employers unreasonable? No, they are following what is considered HR best practices for attracting and vetting talent. But that process is broken, therefore the majority of companies are struggling to find talent.
The process is both homogenized across the industry and fundamentally geared towards preventing false positives - hiring the wrong person. That filters out many people that might have been hired, blowing up the number of false negatives - not hiring the right person.
Companies can't find candidates and job seekers can find jobs because the tools and processes for connecting candidates with jobs is both broken and homogeneous across the industry.
What data would satisfy you that employers are being unnecessarily picky? Provide the criteria. Their costs are sunk, they can push candidates through as many cycles as they want until they can find the cheapest unicorns pushed through their pipelines. There is also strong evidence that some employers are cutting anyone with a developed world wage and pushing that work to cheap countries (Google, very publicly, but there are others).
My hot take is the labor market was very tight, employers thought they were going to get a deal on folks with the layoffs [1] that took place over the last 2 years, but the labor market still remains tight so they continue to search for "diamonds in the rough" at lower costs (which leads to this mismatch at scale). Offshoring is cost optimization to continue to realize desired profits in a high capital cost macro, and there is probably some knock on effect from software development tax code changes [2].
> You have to be lucky (including knowing someone, ie networking)
I don't think it's right to consider networking/knowing someone to be luck, exactly. Networking is a skill and a tool, and has consistently been presented as that for my entire career. As a result, I go out of my way to try to make those connections. I go in to the office, I have lunch and drinks with coworkers, I say Hi to people I recognize from chat at large meetings, I make friendly conversations on chat and email. When someone I have made a connection like that with leaves, I say goodbye and pass them my personal email address. It is difficult, I'm not an outgoing person and I have to make conscious effort to start those connections. But it has paid off, I've received several job pings over the years, and when I was ready to move on from a job recently I took up one of those pings on the offer. It wasn't luck, it was a skill and resource I specifically put work in to cultivate over years.
Cold-applying is the absolute hardest route to getting hired. A big part of your career is doing what you can to make that your last resort when job hunting.
"Cold-applying is the absolute hardest route to getting hired. A big part of your career is doing what you can to make that your last resort when job hunting."
Cold applying should be the most fair and introduce the least bias. My entire life has been cold applying.
It should be, I agree, but my entire career of 22 years has shown me that it's not. And I've always cold-applied as well. Only had 1-2 contracts where former colleagues recommended me.
It's also not helpful when employers refuse to train and demand folks with the skills they want. If the supply of folks you want doesn't't exist, you need to do your part to grow them.
I'll throw in my personal example from 2012 when I was laid off. Senior dev, about 30 years experience at the time. A friend knew of an opening somewhere but they wanted GWT experience, I didn't have it so they wouldn't talk to me. 6 weeks later they were still looking. Like I couldn't learn GWT in six weeks? If they hired any decent dev after a good general screening and gave him the docs they could self-learn GWT in less time than that.
The risk is that they hire someone who doesn't know GWT and six weeks later (and six months later) they still don't know it.
The ability to do self directed learning of a new skill / technology is something that is difficult to find (a lot of developers that I know don't know how to learn a new version of Java or framework and are still writing code exactly as they did when they graduated college... and they could put down "Java developer - 5 years experience" and apply for senior positions.)
There are a lot of devs who appear decent with current tech, but lack the ability to learn new tech without someone hand holding them for several months.
The people I have meet who were slower to learn things generally had factors that could be overcome. Burnout is a huge one. If I'm being told to learn this new tech every 3-6 months and not given enough time to become an expert in the thing I previously learned, then why should I put in the effort? Its not a building block in my career. This is how it is for me (plus a disability). It never benefits me, so where's the incentive?
Of course, but companies have deadlines to hit and features to release.
It absolutely sucks on the applicant's end, but we can't spend a year helping a new hire work through burnout when most companies are in a fairly competitive market with extremely demanding customers AND much more competitive vendors.
Companies are well aware of Brooks's law and will instead chose to not hire someone and work with existing known productivity levels (and look to see what can be done to improve that) than to hire a risky person that puts existing deadlines even more at risk.
That companies aren't hiring people (and complaining that there's no one to hire) is what we're seeing rather than burning through people and dealing with Net Negative Producing Programmers ( https://web.archive.org/web/20030517045551/http://www.pyxisi... ).
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Because people are leaving for greener pa$ture$ at a faster rate, and the higher compensation demanded, companies are mitigating that risk by requiring a person to come in with the expected training rather than spending months training a person who may not be able to preform at expected levels.
The other side of that is that there are a lot of places out there that are moving slow and not updating things quickly. I worked at a retail company a number of years ago where you could make $70k / year as a programmer and be able to work at a more leisurely pace. I currently work in the public sector and things are on much longer timescales.
However, if you want to work in the fast paced and highly paid sector of Big Tech startups, you may need be able to meet the needs that they have. And there its less risky to have one of the existing employees take on another task than to hire someone (and burn runway faster) that might not be able to contribute until after the runway is gone.
Enough hiring managers and applicants have been screwed over by the other that it's become adversarial.
It is what it is.
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My two cents though to you giantg2, the mentality you have is not feasible in the private sector as neither employers nor employees have any loyalty anymore.
Either switch to a government programming job (plenty of those now and they are increasingly remote first - especially Federal) or a new industry.
Or start learning the game (how to market yourself, constantly upskilling with "hot" tech stacks, networking, etc).
Eh, I've been at this job for somethingblike 13 years. Might as well stick at it. There isn't anything feasible for me to switch to anyways. I've tried the marketing shit and it didn't work for me.
The fact that self-directed learning is so rare even among programmers will never cease to baffle me. I got into computers precisely because it was so perfectly suited to self study. It appealed perfectly to the autodidact-venerating Frank Zappa fan in me.
> The risk is that they hire someone who doesn't know GWT and six weeks later (and six months later) they still don't know it.
100% THIS.
If I wanted to fire someone I just hired, it ends up taking 2-3 quarters (1 Q realize they suck, 1-2 Qs managing them out/building a case) AND looks very bad on the hiring manager because you wasted $1.75*BASE_SALARY of company money and have nothing to show for it.
I understand some candidates can learn quickly, but as a hiring manager you learn very quickly to plan and assume for the worst case, because sadly, most people do kinda suck.
Or you know, you can just hire them as contractors and fire them tomorrow if they don't perform. Every company I worked with in the last 8 years does just that.
With contractors you deal with overhead of managing contracts, and American employment law increasing views tech contractors as de facto being FT employees deserving of the same benefits packages as FT employees.
At that point your best option is to open an office in India/Israel/Eastern Europe because at least people don't complain as much, you get similar productivity (depending on what you pay), and you don't need to deal with a lot of these headaches.
The same thing happened to the CPA/Accounting industry in the 1990s.
Well, I'm from Eastern Europe and your observations match mine. There is still a huge amount of skilled devs here but USA companies skip them almost automatically.
> There is still a huge amount of skilled devs here but USA companies skip them almost automatically.
English fluency and/or Employment Laws are a big issue as well.
Most companies have already had an Israeli or Indian subsidiary since the 1990s-2000s.
Most didn't start entering Eastern Europe until the 2010s, and much of that was in Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus thanks to EPAM and the massive Soviet Diaspora in the US.
Poland, Czechia, and Romania are known quantities, but newish (late 2000s/early 2010s), and the larger ecosystem (not just engineers but lawyers, bureaucrats, accountants, etc that you need to run a subsidiary) don't have working English fluency and in some countries are Indian bureaucracy level headaches (looking at you Bulgaria) with the added lack of an English speaking ecosystem headaches.
In all honesty, if the Russia-Ukraine War didn't start in 2014, much of the Eastern EU's tech scene would have been much weaker as it's largely powered by the UKR/RUS/BEL diaspora who emigrated the moment all 3 countries entered an economic and social tailspin.
At a previous employer 5-7 years ago, we had an office in Czechia, but most of the Engineers were Russians or Ukrainians.
But employment laws are not an issue. Last 8 years I didn't have even one employment arrangement, it was all contracts. I get it, you still have to pay some overhead for each country but you can outsource to various services that cover those quite well.
That's what I wound up doing at the job I did get, I got hooked up with a recruiting/contracting firm. They got me interviews and then I was a W-2 employee for the contracting firm, got my insurance through them etc. and contracted at the place I interviewed at first. When they were happy with me the company I worked at hired me as a FTE.
You're basing your entire argument on an arbitrary deadline (six weeks).
I am giggling as I am monitoring several job forums and seeing several companies pop up periodically (once a quarter I'd say) looking for the same positions... 2.5 years later.
So let's change the example. Is it really worth it to be as picky for 2.5 years? I'd wager they lost money because of that. Any senior dev can learn GWT or anything similar in much less than 6 weeks even (though proficiency is another matter).
And ability to self-learn can be somewhat gauged by a take-home assignment.
And let's say that they found their "dream" candidate that knew GWT. Technologies change and improve over time, can you imagine a place that is still using GWT, or jQuery, or backbone? Whoever they hire is going to have to learn new technologies while working there, otherwise they need to fire all their devs and go back out and hire React devs or whatever is the flavor of the day.
Even something as stable as Java has changed dramatically as it has absorbed functional and parallel concepts from Scala and Kotlin. Any dev should be hired on their ability to learn, not, or not just, on what specific tech they know now.
> ... otherwise they need to fire all their devs and go back out and hire React devs or whatever is the flavor of the day.
One of the companies in the area has a strict N year cycle for contractors. After N years all contracts end and they rehire for the next cycle.
If the technology stack changes then they hire different contractors as the projects forecast needs.
I am not saying that this is a good idea - lots of domain knowledge gets lost ever N years... but it is a solution the "we can't require contractors to learn new skills and are unable to hire for the aptitude to learn new things."
It was not about GWT at all. That was exactly my point: passing on a senior just because they don't know $specific_tech that can be learned in 2 weeks is a short-sighted business decision.
> Is it really worth it to be as picky for 2.5 years
Yes as an employer.
> I'd wager they lost money because of that
No. If a role isn't filled in a quarter, that money is in most cases reverted back into the compensation pool used to either help hire a high performer, or give bonuses to the existing team.
99% of a time, an IC Engineering role will NOT make or break a company's entire financial future.
If this is one of those 1% roles, those are hired through internal networks because of how critical they are.
Hm, I think we're talking different scenarios. I was under the impression that the new person is sorely needed and not having them on board would lead to lost revenue.
I’m just getting done with grad school where I spent 2 years learning AI stuff to apply to a real world problem. I have been applying to jobs for months and I literally hear nothing.
I desperately wish I could do my old career still.
Yea this is my biggest issue. I make a point of pushing for hiring green devs in our company. A balance of green and senior. My argument to management is that we’re never hiring people for what they know, we’re hiring people to learn our problems and figure new ways to solve them.
To add another point to this, is that people at different points in their career are interested in different problems. A chore that a senior dev might be an exciting opportunity for a junior. Similarly a daunting task for a junior might might be just the right difficulty for a senior. It is super important to make sure you have mixed experience teams just to help keep morale up, and not stall out on any given set of tasks.
> Structural unemployment is usually high when there's a rapid change in demand for skills, as of course there is in tech. It results in crazy high salaries too. People with machine learning experience are getting 7-figure offers, while people with jQuery experience can't find jobs.
Another cause of structural unemployment is workforces aging into retirement, and again there's stacks of money to be made filling this gap.
This applies to Cobol developers. There are a ton of "too big to fail or rewrite" applications written in Cobol, particularly in finance. The people who wrote them are retiring. Finance is generally a great industry to have your hand in the pockets of anyway. A friend of mine has been doing this since shortly after he graduated college in 2010. He was able to start freelancing a lot earlier than I was, and his billing rate in 2012 was something like $125/hour (only slightly less than my current billing rate). Last time I talked to him he was billing $300/hour and had a 7 month backlog of work. I'm not good at keeping up with people, so we haven't talked in a few years, but it would not surprise me if he's billing $350/hour now.
I've largely prioritized time/freedom over stability/money in recent years, but if I ever had a kid and needed stability/money again, I'd be transitioning toward that.
It's not the skills problem. Looking for a job, I know that my skillset would match the employer - in fact, thousands of employers likely - because I have successfully done such jobs in the past. But I have no way to prove it to a potential employer than going through an expensive and friction-laden process which could fail at any stage for a reason totally unrelated to the main question of qualifications - like some random interviewer not liking my answer to a weird question like "tell me about your three biggest failures" or getting some obscure pet detail of a language wrong when nobody actually uses that corner precisely because of how hard it to get right, or not solving irrelevant leetcode puzzle fast enough. Immense effort on both sides is spent to go through these dances - and almost all of it is wasted. I wish there were some good solution for it. So far there's none.
This is definitely it. The problem is that the job market has positioned it that coming with "gumption" and no real world skills (in past positions) there is a low chance that the company will take a risk on you. So doing these shifts are extremely hard.
My experience has always been that if you take 6 months to contribute to open source centered around the new thing you want to work on, you'll quickly meet people that will allow you to get a job.
Personal experience trying to get hired as a US citizen in a US territory. Most companies simply reject without any sort of interview and when I ask (and get a reply) it's always because of location.
> Structural unemployment happens when the skills of the work force don't match the needs of employers
I know someone who was laid off from an AI group at a large chipmaker last year- his group was eliminated. But because he wasn't doing LLMs, he was doing CNNs for vision, it took him about a year to find a new gig teaching Machine Learning classes - not his preferred gig or level of pay. He could easily have transitioned from CNNs to LLMs but the algorithms sorting the resumes didn't seem to think so.
Personally, I've worked on optimizing code to make machine learning algorithms run faster/more efficient - also compiler/LLVM work. When I was laid off over a year ago I'd apply for things and it was mostly crickets - had a few interviews which often ended up in ghosting. I gave up looking and am working on a startup with some other who've found themselves in a similar situation - no pay at this point, only equity.
Anyway, I think your premise is flawed: AI/ML skills are in demand, but even people with those skills are having a hard time getting back into the industry. Maybe the companies doing AI/ML are spending so much money on GPUs now that they can't actually afford to hire people?
> People with machine learning experience are getting 7-figure offer
This sounds like a gross exaggeration. Unless they did something like start a company. For an IC at least, even at FAANG it would be bit crazy to start at more than ~$400k. If a project lead, then its obviously more and you can make bank as you move up the ladder.
> Structural unemployment happens when the skills of the work force don't match the needs of employers, so there is both unemployment and difficulty hiring.
Any study on why there would be this kind of mismatch in the tech industry? I'd imagine that tech industry is the most transparently competitive and least regulated sector so there should be a reasonable balance between the supply of skills and the demand. In addition, there are so much resource that teaches people all kinds of tech skills, so people should be able to move from one skill set to another if really needed.
The easy problems are solved. Crud with the preferred language and framework is a known quantity and can be "ok here we are and go" and you can get a boot camp or new grad and have them do that.
Let's say that we need to solve a new problem. The shop language is Scala. Who can learn how to program in Scala? Can the boot camp who learned how to do NodeJS be trained in Scala? If so, how long will it take? If we spend a year to get them to being an acceptable Scala dev, will they get a new job immediately? If we are paying a "we are training you low rates" can we get any applicants? If we are paying a "we assume you to be a skilled Scala dev in a year and we expect to get 2-3 years of productive work beyond training" rate and they leave immediately after getting them sufficiently trained... what then?
As many developers see themselves as a "Java developer" or "React front end developer" rather than a software engineer, the mismatch is akin to asking "why can't we get plumbers to do electrical work?" The people who are Java developers or React front end developers are skilled in the trade rather than as a knowledge worker in software engineering.
This sounds like the trend is good for the incumbents? That is, it's hard for the supply to catch up with the demand in broad scope, so people with solid experience will be marketable for a while.
It is good for people who can, as knowledge workers ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_worker ) are able to continue to gain and market their ability to learn new things within the domain and apply their knowledge.
There are incumbents who are not able (don't have the skill scaffolding to support a broader understanding) or are unwilling to spend time to continue to be able to work or are a "follow instructions".
I've quipped that...
A junior dev follows instructions
A mid dev completes tasks
A senior dev solves problems
In this simplified model, I know a lot of junior devs (even with a decade of experience) who for whatever reason are unable to partition their software development tasks themselves to be able to be given a task to complete. Likewise, I know a number of devs who can be given tasks but if you give a broader "this is a problem that the organization needs to solve" are hopelessly lost and apply and reapply the patterns that they have learned to try to make the problem fit into a solution they know.
I do not believe that everyone has the skills / aptitude to move from one to the next.
Those that do will have the ability to navigate the new market. Those that lack the ability to move up will eventually be overtaken either by younger (cheaper) workers, or improving automation.
It is a paradox, because it is a market where people basically only do one salaried job at a time, meaning they have a fixed 40-60 hours to sell and it shouldn't take long to sell it if they want to move on to another job. (Here "selling" means you've been hired for your next job, since you just took the 40 hours you had available every week starting next month and sold it for money.)
Within reason, people can be retrained to adjacent jobs or basically could do exactly what an employer wants within a low number of weeks. People know what kind of jobs they're capable of or it can be tested for quickly.
Instead there are candidates who spend a year both training themselves and applying for jobs unsuccessfully, while employers spend MORE than the same amount of time on that, if you add up the amount of time recruiters are putting in on behalf of employers and HR puts in and employers put into interviews. It is a market failure for people to want to work, for employers to want to hire them, for them to be able to do the work, but for them not to actually be doing the work. It would be kind of like if people were desperate for any of either tomatoes, carrots, wheat, rice, potatoes, or really anything, whatever they get is fine for them since they can look up recipes for that and make it with a tiny investment of time (this is the demand side), so they are putting in ads for "Want any of: rice, carrots, wheat, potatoes, tomatoes" and willing to pay for it! Just put up a hundred ads, a hundred unfilled jobs. On the supply side meanwhile you have a farmer who owns all the necessary land (hours in the day) and has ALL the equipment (a computer, Internet, transportation, clothes, anything anyone needs to start working) and is really willing to produce anything and can do so on that arable land! There are no capital requirements. Great. So we have the demand side taken care of, people want quite a few different types of food and supply side taken care of, the farmer is willing to farm just about anything. But, for some reason, what ends up happening isn't that the fields are filled, it's that there are farmers spending all day every day selling and nobody is buying. And instead of saying, here try this sample, and it's fine, you have a weird request for "What exactly had grown on these fields since the beginning of time" (this is called a resume) and then you have buyers inundated with answers to their bizarre requests for "what has grown on these fields since the beginning of time" but the buyers still aren't getting the food and the fields are empty, the farmers are trying unsuccessfully to sell all day and the buyers are somehow inundated with sales pitches but aren't actually buying anything, while burning time on putting up advertisements of all the food they want to buy.
Why is this happening? How can people not be working but want to work, when they can train into being productive workers within a few weeks and are more than willing to do so?
It would be like if shoppers spent days at a time at farmer's markets going from stand to stand and buying nothing, and farmers spent days at a time standing at the farmer's market with buyer after buyer asking them questions about the history of their land and not buying any damn potatoes. It's a potato lady you want it or not? If not step aside so someone who actually wants it can see it.
p.s. half of the farmers are asking other farmers to endorse them on linkedin. Buyers ignore this noise completely.
Structural unemployment is usually high when there's a rapid change in demand for skills, as of course there is in tech. It results in crazy high salaries too. People with machine learning experience are getting 7-figure offers, while people with jQuery experience can't find jobs.
As an individual, you can both improve the economy AND make fat stacks by learning the skills that are in high demand. As an employer, you can do better by finding skill sets that aren't in high demand, with enough overlap with what you need that you can retrain. There are a lot of unemployed video game programmers right now, so if you can figure out how to use people with those skills you can hire some smart, energetic people at moderate salaries.