Something I tell my software students a lot when they’re looking for jobs is to remember that a shockingly large number of job descriptions are written by people in HR who have next to zero understanding of the industry, the specific team, or the business need.
All they’ve got to work with is fragments they’ve heard without comprehension, coming to them through a terrible game of corporate telephone.
1/
HR: What technology is your team using?
[several intervening information-destroying communication hops later]
Team: Well, it’s a C# project, but what we really need is…
[back through the lossy hops]
HR: Great! This is a mid-level position, so we’ll say “3-5 years of C# experience.” Now to search the web for some random C# quiz we can use for screening!
Job “requirements” aren’t really requirements at all; they’re corporate Mad Libs.
2/
That’s how you end up with job postings like the one that made the rounds on social media a while back that required “5+ years of Swift experience”…one year after Swift was released.
In most cases, of course, those hard requirements on years and tools knowledge aren’t even what the team is looking for in a candidate. They’re looking for •somebody they want on their team•.
3/
Another anecdote I heard: a team kept getting terribly unqualified candidates when they reached the technical interview phase, and couldn’t understand why. They finally looked up and started their own interview process, and found that HR had walled the position with some random tech screening quiz they found online…that had •the wrong answers•. HR was actively screening out candidates with basic knowledge!
4/
What’s the moral of this story?
(1) The hiring process is mostly not about you. That sounds weird, but it’s true.
(2) As an applicant, your job is to jump through nonsensical hoops — or walk around them, if you can — until you can reach the point where you’re having a real conversation with somebody who’s actually involved with the position in question.
(2a) That often means straight-up ignoring clearly stated job requirements.
5/
Let’s sit with 2a for a moment. Getting a job often involves ignoring the stated job requirements.
Who does that benefit? Who does it harm?
6/
We educators call stuff like this “hidden curriculum:” secret knowledge that’s never stated explicitly, but people who are already in-group / acculturated / privileged acquire through ambient experience and/or interpersonal networks.
In my experience, these stated-job-requirements-that-aren’t-really-requirements cause exactly, exactly the disproportionate harm you’d expect: they reward privileged identities and backgrounds. This isn’t hypothetical. I’ve seen it up close, with real people.
7/
I shudder to think how LLMs are going to multiply the harm of everything upthread.
HR departments are already grabbing unvetted crap from web searches to fill out the job descriptions nobody’s given them enough info to create properly. Half of what I wrote upthread is •already• the sort of bullshit that LLMs do: generating formally appropriate text without comprehension of the underlying idea. Now that’s automatable.
8/
Moral: HR is awful and totally the problem, right?
No. I agree with what @grimalkina said here:
https://mastodon.social/@grimalkina/112417767538483847
Teams need to take responsibility for vetting their own hiring processes.
Managers and orgs need to make it •possible• for teams to vet their own hiring processes.
And…
9/
And, just as @grimalkina says here in the replies, companies need to finally get serious about process and methods in hiring.
Hiring people is delicate social science. You can’t slap it together out of prefab parts and expect it just work.
https://mastodon.social/@grimalkina/112417774017693587
(NB: Cat mentions recruiters, which can mean hiring org or 3rd parties. To be clear, I’m talking about companies themselves. Good 3rd-party recruiters are sometimes the ones picking up the slack here. Sometimes.)
10/
I think there’s a sense out there that at some level, companies must be fundamentally competent or they’d have gone out of business, whatever they’re doing must make some kind of sense, and therefore it’s up to job applicants to please •them•, to meet •their• standards.
It takes a decade or two in industry to understand how barely-functional more human orgs are, how much of the world runs on humans scrambling to mop up the slop our own processes create.
11/
Re that last sentence:
https://how.complexsystems.fail
“Complex systems contain changing mixtures of failures latent within them.”
“Complex systems run as broken systems.”
“Catastrophe is always just around the corner.”
“Human operators have dual roles: as producers & as defenders against failure.”
•That• is the reality every one of us is walking into as either a job applicant or a hiring org. As a human in the world.
12/
That sense that it’s the job applicant’s job to please the infallible company is especially keen with students. Trained their whole lives to seek out gold stars, students are always looking for how to get the next A — and feel lost walking into a world where that’s not how it works anymore, where the only people handing out gold stars are people looking to manipulate you.
13/
I’ve seen companies abuse that desire to please. Google in particular recruited on campus throughout the 2010s with the same attitude as the cocky high schooler whose dating strategy is to act like nobody is good enough for them. (That parallel was close enough to make me deeply uncomfortable.) Google was seen among students as the gold star that proved that you’re one of the smart ones, that you’ll make it.
Another reason those layoffs did so much psychological damage.
14/
I don’t think it all has to be this bad.
In a better world, the folks writing job descriptions are good psychologists and good social scientists: neither hiding the hiring process from teams nor dumping in the laps of engineers who have no idea how to run a good one, but instead collaboratively understanding the needs of teams and then using their knowledge of humans and human systems to find the best people.
Is that too much to ask? I’m fairly cynical, but dammit, I don’t think it is.
/end
@inthehands I have very very little patience with teams and managers like this. I have found that most people simply can't be bothered to even be in contact with their HR and participate in their own recruiting enough to solve these issues. Especially in eng, where people feel above "people ops." Yes so much recruiting is bad but so many recruiters are just young people trying to do a good job and paid a million times less than an eng team. Reach out and fix your hiring.
@inthehands hiring must always be thoughtfully designed, and it's very representative of the learned helplessness that eng takes towards its own human processes to just think you don't have to put any effort into designing better evaluation, better recruiting. I have advocated and poured effort into fixing hiring evaluations in every place I've ever been and I've never, I mean never, seen an engineering leader do the same or be an ally for people like me in this.
@grimalkina @inthehands Absolutely this! Engineering "leaders" who just expect HR to do the work. In my last place I worked, engineering managers (up to and including VPs) were pissing and moaning about how long it took HR to hire. I worked with HR to change it all and we were getting staff on in 2 weeks rather than months. Everyone delighted. It's about the incentives, let the people who need the hire most do as much of the heavy lifting as they can bear.
@grimalkina @inthehands We should invite you for a talk or something. Honestly we do way better than most large industry organizations.
And we write (and optimize) our own job descriptions. I never would a non-technical person let do that. Results are terrible and it's unfair to the HR people.
The way HR works in all companies where I've been a hiring manager is that I do a lot of the actual "work" and get an HR assistant to do legal stuff etc. for me.
Writing posts is my job. Talking to candidates is, too. Working on the process is and I expect HR to follow up with what I tell them I need.
@sashag @inthehands so great to hear about people and places that put the care in!
@sashag @grimalkina @inthehands for sure, as a hiring manager you should be doing a big chunk of writing job descriptions for your hires. There will be some aspects that require HR input, but this is a team effort to hire folks. You should also keep a repository of job descriptions as that makes life so much easier!
It also helps to have a career progression framework/matrix to better understand what's anticipated at different levels.
at my last job the engineers had a lot of feedback on the devops job req that HR wrote up (based on something that a totally different devops manager had written) and we were completely ignored so idk if this is a "teams and managers" problem. maybe in some places it is, but IME we were not allowed not fix the job description to reflect what we actually were doing. unsurprisingly we never managed to hire anyone.
@ggggbbybby @inthehands by teams and managers I meant generally, everyone with power in the situation including the HR leadership. I'm very sorry you had this experience and I've had it too.
@grimalkina @ggggbbybby @inthehands My experience is that this experience is the norm, not the exception. And it doesn't come from HR, it comes from management who have the attitude you ascribe to engineering teams (that engineers think they're above "people ops" and so need to be isolated from the process so they don't mess it up). My best experiences have been when the eng. team was allowed to write the job requirements and recommend screening tools and work directly with HR.
@grimalkina @inthehands
I applaud teams, managers and HR with broken recruiting, because it makes MY job recruiting people easier. :D
(No, I don't really, because broken recruiting burns out good people. But it is easy to stand out, though.)
@osma @inthehands I have experienced the same, good lord. People ask me how I manage to reach pools of candidates that are so diverse. Um, I TRY
@inthehands I'm building teams of junior programmers. It actually makes me quite happy that the HR processes are so terrible, because that means there is a huge gap on the market for me. All I need to do is to make sense. Of course I would still need to have connections, because nobody cares about results if they are friends with the CEO, but at least I'd be able to select and train my students better, and make them more efficient, and then I'd have hands full of people who can do stuff well.
@inthehands now that we've survived into our late-career days, we've become aware of how, in an oblique way, we benefited from the abuse we endured as children at the hands of every social system that was supposed to help us...
@inthehands see, because we never felt that desire to seek out a gold star
because teachers didn't view us as human (we were a visibly autistic kid), so they made it very clear that good grades were simply unavailable to us no matter how far ahead of the class we were in knowledge terms
@inthehands so we never connected with the artificial reward system. it never got substitute for the real incentives that come from the heart, curiosity for its own sake.
@inthehands it made things a LOT harder for us in the short term
how could it not? the entire world is social systems. to be entirely outside them, yet not die, is .. absurd
@inthehands since we did survive, since we did walk through the desert of the human soul and come back out of it, we view it as an obligation to help other people learn from that experience
these bullshit artificial rewards - whether it's grades or money - are NOT here to help you. they never were.
@inthehands this is one of those truths that applies across many areas of life
in the context of a job search, it means: don't set your self-worth based on your job title. you have inherent worth, which can never be taken away from you. never, ever let some bullshit set of HR requirements make you believe otherwise.
@ireneista
I’m happy you were able to reach that destination, and sorry for the pain that took you there.
I had the extraordinary fortune of an opposite experience: my elementary school had no grades; we just revised things until they were good, moving through the work at our own individual paces. That vision of better education carried me through everything after, up to and including the present day.
@inthehands oh that's really lovely to hear. we've heard of such schools, but never met someone who's been through them before.
@ireneista @inthehands Learning not to trust was also a valuable lesson.
A friend who was fired from Amazon music (after a long, drawn-out, miserably meaningless performance review process where they'd already decided to get rid of him for no reason but he spent months fighting to keep the job as if his performance actually mattered to them) keeps remarking to me, "Thanks for telling me 'you can leave this abusive relationship'."
@inthehands Another thing I see from new-grads adapting to the workplace is their assumption of what the penalties for asking for help are. If we give you the task, we need it done even if you have to ask 9 people questions to get there; you're not cheating, that's how it works.
@sysadmin1138
OMG yes, I have to have a difficult conversation with some student abut that today. “You should ask for help,” and also equally important, “You should make it possible — comfortable! — for your teammates to ask you for help.”
@inthehands And the realities of working in a codebase that is years old, has no 'done' state by which you will be judged, and "if you build it, then you have to maintain it." Some folk who have been doing private projects for years know all this, but folk who only did computer stuff in school find it a hard transition.
@sysadmin1138
And in that context, the idea that asking clarifying questions is a •positive•, that asking for more information •even when you think you already understand• will help you and everyone, will make people trust you and think better of you. All that is such a hard place to reach from an education full of vulnerability and power-appeasing.
@sysadmin1138 @inthehands It's worth noting that this varies from team to team and manager to manager and company to company.
There are frequently hidden penalties for asking for help in the wrong way, in the wrong forum, about the wrong topic that are not even widely known by most established engineers.
And, sometimes, they're enforced by a very small but influential group.
So, it's true that not asking for help will often lead to failure, asking in the wrong way may also limit advancement.
@watters @sysadmin1138
This is true, and yes, learning how to ask for help well and use it well is a skill. Still, I’d venture that in most cases, “you can’t seek help even if you can’t complete your task” is a sign of an abusive corporate culture, and a cue to leave.
@inthehands @watters @sysadmin1138 even in places that are well run and good i think people in my generation (genx) learned this kind of gatekeeping implicitly from the 90s and early 2000s toxic culture (only good questions are valuable, there are no stupid questions only stupid people, etc).
if you survived in that era you did it by earning the space to admit flaws in your understanding and we have to be vigilant to keep from reproducing that culture today.
@watters @inthehands This is actually true, yes, and is a sign of a toxic culture. "you have to earn your stripes" thinking is where this is based, and academic heads-down works well for it.
What you're referencing is the nonuniformity of working cultures across the industry. Generative, high performance environments are driven by feedback, where help-asking is expected to drive unblocking. Unblocking is more important than credibility. In power driven environments, credibility is more important than unblocking.
@sysadmin1138 @inthehands More than the non-uniformity across the industry, I'm pointing out two things which are true within individual organizations (at least ones of non-trivial size)
1. They can't be categorized as wholly generative XOR bureaucratic XOR pathological as an organization, except perhaps at a point in time for a defined set of contextual dimensions.
2. By definition, the unwritten rules I'm describing are not widely known and are deployed to preserve plausible deniability.
@sysadmin1138 @inthehands I am thrilled for any person who experiences their day-to-day work environment as wholly generative and who is able to grow and advance in a way that feels good for them.
But.
There are not enough such companies and organizations for all of the people employed in the industry.
Until there are, and while working to make things better, it seems to me kinder to be very candid with folks so that they are aware—not afraid—of the real difficulties they will encounter.
@inthehands
Something I've noticed as an employer is many young people have unrealistic expectations of how seriously their ideas must be taken, how they should be praised for a job well-done (or even just done), and how much direction they will receive.
In an internship or volunteer job, they thank you with praise, at a business the thank you is often just your paycheck unless you really deliver.
Many young people have little respect for institutional knowledge or experience. I don't know why.
@Okanogen I’m not sure about your exact experiences here, but everything you describe sounds like a normal part of youth and being new to the transition from the world of school to the world of employement. Lots of culture shifts there.
@inthehands
I get it, but I think they should be prepared, because I've seen a lot of quality people self-sabotage by not adapting.
@inthehands Students - and people on the autistic spectrum. Like me! Who find this "game with unspoken rules" unbelievably stressful. It's hard to put into words exactly how going against stated requirements makes me feel. "Nauseous" and "terrified" cover some of it. I've been looking for a job for months now and don't want to think how many of my applications were turned down because I wasn't aware of a secret game I have to be playing.
@scott
For sure. I have a thought on the topic: https://hachyderm.io/@inthehands/112422940070459459
@inthehands I’ve worked with business and government: equally dysfunctional
@avirr Yup, same. Academia too. Human systems are all human systems.
@inthehands @avirr I find it more and more clear that delivering "good" (good enough) tech (I'm not talking only about software here but all kind of industrial r&d and production) product relies on many people struggling to make things work within interlaced dysfunctional human organisations (as dysfunctional as every human organisations are).
Somehow the most useful skill is perseverance.
This is the fundamental truth of the universe. There's a lot of inertia in a company that has even some repeat customers. So there's room for them to be very bad without going bankrupt.
@inthehands "the world runs on humans scrambling to mop up the slop our own processes create."
Preach !
@inthehands I have bad news for you and your students: the #job-posting pool is full of shallow #recruiters that go *far* below the already low bar set by the worst #HR departments.
And company #hiring managers turn to these outfits because they don’t have firsthand knowledge about how shitty they are, but they *do* know that about their own HR.
@mjgardner @grimalkina @talexb
Oh for sure. It’s all about who you know, knowing who to trust, getting plugged into networks of people where you get reliable information about who to trust….
Applying for tech jobs resembles buying illegal drugs far, far more than it should.