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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'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.
@inthehands and thank you for the kind words. the meaning of our pain is that it teaches us how to help other people with theirs.
@ireneista
Common responses to pain: to shrink from ever feeling it again, to make others feel it too, or to prevent others from feeling in too. To find the third is a great blessing.
Yes, the school was extraordinary! I was fortunate beyond belief.
@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
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.
I used to work in HR, and one of the reasons I quit was because I couldn't cope with writing job descriptions/adverts for managers who felt they didn't need to input into the process because it was HR's job. The worst was having to write an entire application pack and process for a deputy head in a school because I was the closest thing there to a trained recruiter (I was an HR advisor who had worked in a recruitment company for 6 months at one point)
There's no point blaming LLMs for what people do. If your HR department is incompetent and dysfunctional, then your company as a whole, is incompetent and dysfunctional; or else upper management would have reigned in HR by this point.
Here's another disturbing thought. You work at a company where HR and the other departments are dysfunctional but only your department is filled with capable and sane people? No. If all the other departments are obviously incompetent, your department is not the sole exception, you just don't see it.
@rastilin
Please note the verb tense in which I spoke about LLMs.
@inthehands protip: Stated job ‘requirements’ are often a wish list that will bear little to no relationship to the successful candidate’s skill set or role.
yes yes yes.
absolutely this.
Even when managers or team members write their own job ads they get loaded up with HR high level requirements:
like "12 years + masters or 18 years without a masters".
When anyone who has ever worked can tell you that after about 1-2 years the masters no longer has any weight if it ever did.
But the masters is in there because of the social privilege filter that it applies. It keeps out qualified staff who aren't part of the right social circles.
================
And you see people retroactively complain that it wasn't applied. "Oh you don't have a bachelors in this subfield? I wouldn't have hired you" being said to staff who are fucking ROCKING it in the position and getting accolades from their peers but who didn't come from the desired... background.
@inthehands
I'm having some trouble with this. My experience, along with counsel I've been given over the years, is that one MUST attend to the clearly stated job requirements. That unless someone's flagged your application to ensure it passes, they must be addressed if one's to make it through the initial screen.
& that in an annoying number of cases, the requirements literally CAN'T be ignored, because the screen is automated.
@FeralRobots Yes, that happens. And it happens even in cases where the stated requirements are bullshit.
There is no correct answer.
It generally harms women. They often pass on job listings where they don’t absolutely meet all requirements.
We guys often fall back on our overconfidence, thinking “well, how hard can it be” and wondering why there are so few women in this industry.
@airwhale
Yes. Women. First-gen students. Minorities. Students from blue-collar families. The list goes on: anyone who’s coming from a position of vulnerability, who’s been told their whole life that one step out of line means they get punished.
And this at a time where we desperately need diverse voices and views on our teams.
I am at 34 years in this business and with a 100% score, projects and teams that were well mixed with genders, ages, ethnicities etc. have ALWAYS performed better AND been more fun to work for.
We scare away the people we need the most.
@airwhale
Yup. There’s even research that successfully reproduced that better performance in a lab setting: more diverse teams able to find a better solution to a team puzzle in the short span of a research session than homogenous teams.
I don’t think it’s quite saturated public understanding the extent to which companies are •incapable• of acting in their own self-interest. Not even evil. Not competent enough to be evil. Incapable!
@inthehands Honestly, it's gettting to the human that matters. GO AHEAD AND APPLY INTELLIGENTLY.
@inthehands definitely need to do more of this
@inthehands ...(2b) BUT ALSO there are certain employers (e.g. often government) for whom the job requirements are in fact mandatory, and if you ignore them you will irritate people!
(2c) no you cannot reliably tell from the outside which is which
@inthehands 2 and 2a are a main reason autistic people don't get hired often (that and allistics tend to interrupt distrust us for some reason). I've tried ignoring job requirements and never got any responses, so I'm clearly doing something else wrong.
@StarkRG
It’s especially hard on autistic folks. A thought:
https://hachyderm.io/@inthehands/112422940070459459