Why can't a software engineer find a job?

Without an offer, most people will blame themselves: "I've been rejected by three companies in a row, so I might be a bad engineer." Since I've been in a technical recruiting job for a while, I can tell you that random factors and other disturbing factors (false positives) also play an important role. Rejection is often due to random events and irrational causes (real negativity).

Reason 1: The candidate is rejected because of the framework

Because of the need to recruit a front-end engineer, I selected an interviewer who has made a great contribution to ECMAScript and open source. It took me weeks to find this person and spent a couple of hours on the right assessment of him, including video interviews. One of the agency's engineers reviewed the code he submitted for 10 minutes and then turned him down. The company sent him an e-mail that did not positively reject him:

“[...] Although your resume and cover letter are very competitive, our recruiting team has not chosen to consider the application after reviewing your applications. ”[...]

This is a very bad email reply because no cover letter has been submitted. After reading this, I dropped everything and drove to the office to talk to the engineer who had turned down the best front-end candidate I'd interviewed in 2017.

First of all, the interview engineer can't really tell me why he turned down the candidate, he just said "code over design", even though its structure is correct, all the ES6 operators and short functions are correct. After 10 minutes of discussion, the reason for the rejection became clearer: The candidate used an unknown MVC framework from the interviewer. I was so impressed with the frame that the candidate used in the coded interview that I couldn't understand that it might be a problem.

Some background information can explain why we use an unknown MVC framework: The recruiting company is an institution looking for repeatable processes, and the chief Engineer (not the interviewer) complains to me that they tend to "reinvent the wheel for each customer." The candidate I recommended used his free time to set up a custom framework to address some of the problems facing the agency.

Because the interviewer who refused the interviewer didn't read my notes or my video interview record, he didn't take into account why the candidate used the framework, but wrote a "no" in the ATS. And, at that moment, the team leader (who supports the candidate) is on vacation, unable to intervene.

Tip: In general, it is a very bad behavior to look at other people's opinions about candidates before the assessment, but in some cases it makes sense to get a little more information about Beijing.

The story is particularly sad, because the CEO has given me another pay, let me bring them "the best person". So, I redouble my efforts. However, employees and recruitment engineers did not really evaluate the candidate I recommended. The engineer who rejected the candidate even told me, "Recruiting is the least important to us". If you get a job as a recruiter, it makes you more responsible, but if you lack the support of the entire team, it's worth a little.

To make things worse, the candidate did not want to communicate with other Swiss employers after receiving this treatment (human resources responded with no feedback and waited two weeks for submitting the code).

Reason 2: The reason why the former Google engineer was rejected is because I don't know the Bayesian formula

A start-up company that needs a Python engineer interviewed a programmer who spent four years at Goog le Zurich branch. Because everyone thought he would ask Google for compensation (almost more than 200,000 francs, almost twice times the average wage), I had a problem recommending the engineer to the start-up.

However, he is more reasonable in his request, just want to stay in a harmonious team, responsible for some interesting technical challenges. So he was very happy with every interview and most of them were impressed. He passed the four rounds and the last round he talked to everyone in the team on a one-on-one basis.

But after the interview, a person stood up and made it clear that the engineer could not be employed because he did not know or could not explain the Bayes formula.

Everyone is indifferent except the technical director. He's like the only one with skin in the game. He reported to the CEO that they hadn't hired anyone for months. So he uses his veto power to make it clear how stupid it is to reject him for not knowing the details. In the end they hired the man. It turned out that the engineer was the most valuable resource in the company's recruiting staff for so many years.

The technical director's results were correct: the time the engineer installed the development environment broke the company's record and resolved three errors on the first day. Everyone was impressed with the matter and was pleased to have hired the man.

Google can use these challenging algorithms when recruiting, because these big brand companies have the capital-they can reject many candidates who are supposed to be good employees, because engineers who want to enter Google are countless every year (Google has 3 million jobs every year). As Erin Ptacek once said, "What Google does is define madness." ”

Reason 3: Programmers are shut out of the Human resources department

I usually keep a close eye on the interviewer and what happens in the hiring process. When I was on vacation, a CEO said he would hire the engineer I recommended. But at this time the human resources in a foreign country did not follow. Since I was on my vacation, so I did not follow up, the interviewer has been waiting for weeks to be heard, he thought he was rejected, because no one to follow up (so if no one to follow up, this does not mean to be rejected). This situation is a typical engineering error.

Two months later, I contacted the engineer and asked what was going on. Neither he nor the Human Resources department understood why no one had followed him further. So I copied all the people involved by email and asked if we could complete the process.

Human resources generally pay relatively low, the work is also more chaotic. Internal recruiters are often responsible for other administrative tasks other than recruiting. These people usually don't know much about the technical role. They may take only 15 minutes to get a quick look at what the hiring manager is looking for and then do some proper "filtering". Because of the lack of context and understanding of the role, the results are often not very good.

Reason 4: The candidate was rejected because he was better than the interviewer.

Someone commented on the article in Hackernews, some of which mentioned that the reason the applicant was rejected was because it was too good. So, I wrote a story with me:

I've also met a situation where the interviewer is better than the interviewer. The interviewer was a 22-year-old prodigy programmer who made a lot of contributions to open source, but was rejected by someone at the code review stage, and we called him "Jon" for the time being. I was shocked by the reason for the rejection, so I immediately organized a conference call to discuss the issue. Conference call a total of three people: Hr,jon and me.

Jon's explanation of why he turned down the prodigy at the meeting sounded a little funny, but I couldn't tell if Jon was serious. In addition, Jon's contribution to GitHub is poor, but he is responsible for the code review, so I have to listen to his feedback.

Jon pointed out some of the problems in the Prodigy's code, and we even looked at them on the shared screen. In fact, all the questions he mentioned are just different styles, but they are not really problems. The other things he criticizes are just because he doesn't realize it, so he thinks it's bad, but there's a good reason for it (writing complex try-catch blocks because the API for code interaction is not clear). Then I got a temper. These criticisms have made me wary and have made me realize that the quality of the candidate's code is better than Jon's on GitHub. So I threw away my gentlemanly temperament. HR stopped me there and told me, "We're not here to evaluate Jon." This sentence is very right, I am not good at what to say, so I changed the topic, the end of the call.

You can write another article about why people secretly hire people who are slightly less intelligent and/or weaker than themselves; individual interviewers and the entire company may be afraid to hire candidates who are more familiar or proficient than themselves. It is not acceptable because the candidate is too good to refuse; so one way is to focus on a field that the candidate is not good at. Here's an article on how to try this approach in academia in the Soviet Union.

Lessons learned

Job openings are more confusing than you think. If you are rejected, this does not mean that you are a poor engineer because there can be many reasons for rejection.

If you ask yourself why there is a recruiting agency, well, now think about the reason why these institutions exist to prevent some of the things that are mentioned in this article from happening. We match people to work, and besides the founders, we have the most skin to remove obstacles and get people to work.

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