Ask HN: What Roles/Skills Do You Struggle to Hire For? Managers? Architects? Backend? Rails? Javascript? I'm curious which roles / skills others find most difficult to hire and details on why. |
Ask HN: What Roles/Skills Do You Struggle to Hire For? Managers? Architects? Backend? Rails? Javascript? I'm curious which roles / skills others find most difficult to hire and details on why. |
But the people looking for jobs are looking for a very specific role. Eg. they want a job as a developer, or as a graphic designer, and it's kinda hard to find someone who can do more than just one thing. But as a small company I don't really have enough work for a full time employee who does just one thing.
Most of the people I met who are good at more than one thing had their own business or startup and weren't looking for a job.
Me: "Whatever helps bring value to the customer. I've done it all and [gives examples]"
Them: "We have a frontend role and a backend role. Which do you want?"
"Neither. Bye"
He's better off getting a job with some BigCorp really.. can't blame them.
The reason it is hard to hire such people is low pay. Why would I want to wear multiple hats (and take on extra stress, even if I love the job) when I can walk across the street and get higher salary for a bit more boring role?
Of course I don’t know how much you’re paying, I am just pointing out the general case here.
Seems to me recruiters are only interested in people already doing exactly the job being advertised. As if somebody with lots of experience in lots of technologies suddenly can't come up to speed with a different product/tool.
I have done this several times in my life - it's amazing when two people, willing to do literally any job that is needed, get together. Pretty powerful combination.
In other words such a person delivers a higher amount of value, above the individual tasks done, by saving you time on coordination and hiring.
I'm wondering if your offers are reflecting this value that a multi-skilled person would provide you? Or do you expect to get the benefit of their extra skills for free while they don't benefit from their own skillset, which they must have spent a lot of time learning?
There was one guy who declined my offer because it was too low who later started their own business, so maybe you are right that people with multiple skills just want more money.
If this sounds interesting, please share your contact info, or drop me an email (address in profile)!
It was EXHAUSTING!!
Working the responsibilities of a team of 5-7 while having to communicate with admins and execs ruined the experience for me, I'm a programmer, I like to sit down for 5-6hrs a day and code. You need me to do something, assign me the issue I'll make it happen. And I feel like there's a lot of people who think like me. Specializing to move up in your company is important, but it also feels good. Focusing yourself on one thing that fulfills you and getting good at that is way more rewarding then having to work through the frustration of switching gears to another job.
To all who think that you can start a company by collecting a tonne of venture capital and hire one dude to do all the work, cease. You can't do it. It doesn't work. That's not how you win.
The main background issue is a lack of supply if you are not in a place to hire worldwide remote (which many companies are not).
As a small company, doing the communications required for doing recruitment all in-house, as well as getting your job listings out to where people will find them is hard. However, using Recruiters is expensive and they have less ability to do quality filtering of applicants, especially since they are driven by commission more than quality so I think they would rather get us to interview someone who isn't a great match "just in case".
A founder-mentality developer. A great developer who's willing to take a pay cut for a larger amount of equity. Competition is fierce, and we're not in crypto :'(
I put their product on the side and talked to them about the company and this is what I learned:
Q: how many employees work here
A: it's just the two of us (2 founders)
Q: do we already have some product
A: no
Q: is this a paid position
A: yes (press x to doubt here)
Q: how much?
A: we can pay equity
Q: how much investment do you have
A: none
Q: how much equity do you want to give me?
A: how much do you want?
* wtf kind of a question was that, I thought I was interviewing for an internship*
Q: how is this an internship? This sounds to me like you're looking for an investor.
A: some mumbojumbo about what I'll learn running a company virtually by myself
Is this a common thing? Companies trying to 'hire' investors?
I switched been Software Architect and Individual Contributor roles a few times. the pay difference does not really match the increase of responsibility for this position, you have to be willing to communicate, lead and challenge others and have fun doing it to be a successful Software Architect.
May be looking for a new role in a few months time should I find one fully remote with US level pay, if this might be a good match should I get in touch with you?
By open-minded I refer to the ability to evaluate and challenge everything that "the community does this", evaluate it in the context of a team/company and suggest the best approach given the specific team conditions, without the presumption that the Rails community is right by default fir every usecase in the world.
Bonus points if the person is interested in software design and even system architecture.
These people are invaluable, but are very hard to come by.
Programming is burning me out, I'd kill for a position where I can just take a salary and/or stock to basically work on writing technical docs/blog posts, deployment systems for devops, or figuring out features or setting up systems to track user feedback to figure out what users want added.
I mean, I'd still jump in and code, I just would like some options to expand my horizons. As a freelancer I haven't been able to find that and I'm tired of applying/interviewing for remote positions.
Maybe I'd be a better CTO than developer or a Project or Product Manager. Hell, I've even thought of just jumping to devops or QA just for a scene change.
I’m talking months to find someone. Many candidates apply and look good on paper but turn out to just lie and made us waste many hours of interviews.
As for the why, I suspect one of the following:
- good candidates already have a job they love
- people are not willing to relocate (job is remote but inside one of the countries we are operating in, which is 80)
- there is simply not enough people in the field, which goes back to my first point
It's not that hard to find architects, but it's insanely hard to find good ones. Although, that probably applies to pretty much any role.
I’m guessing it’s an overall supply issue. It kinda seems like you have to accidentally end up working for an OEM or MS early on in your career, I’ve seen very few kernel dev jobs and almost always very senior
Otherwise, it’s not particularly amenable to hobbyists, while you can download the WDK, write and test drivers, you’re still kinda limited by the EV cert requirement and the fee communities out there with knowledge in this subject can be less than helpful sometimes (to the contrary Thou, I’ve gotten help from actually MS guys working on NDIS over on stack overflow and they were great).
Docs are ok, but depending on where you are can degrade pretty badly. There are a few things that aren’t well introduced. I didn’t actually understand INF files until stumbling across an ancient blogpost that spelled them out and I was rather horrified by what I learned.
$CURJOB has a downloadable product, which is a different world than the SaaS jobs that are prevalent these days.
Assessor's that aren't just tool operators. Security architects that can threat model and deliver requirements, in the design phase. Anyone that has intersectional experience between security and external compliance is also a problem.
Sr Frontend Engineer that can solve for complex logic as well as make things look good.
Realistically for max pay they will learn less about design and up their coding game learn the next NZXT.js thing and Watnot and stay sharp for interviews as just a full stack dev doing just 5 different jobs.
Because it's hard to master the CSS systematically.
- ui - logic
good devops engineer that can do 2 things:
- dev - ops
The primary problem is that nobody knows what quality looks like. As a result everything is extremely beginner, based on the framework flavor of the moment, and then qualified against leet code nonsense or use of a million different tools. If that is the path you were taking the failure is predictable as the desired target is somebody too immature for writing a product and you not understanding why or caring for the difference.
You, as the hiring manager of the startup have to overcome biases if you want to be successful. Frontend stuff is still software. Treat it as such and look for maturity first before quibbling over technical minutiae. Can the candidate write software? Can they even write at all? Only then evaluate if they have frontend skills.
Only once your startup gets bigger and revenue is both certain and predictable can you relax and hiring the more commonly available immature developers.
I am surprised this is not universally understood. There are people that would "code for food" if only it was in Elixir, Haskell or Forth.
I always say that when it comes to lack of candidates there's this magical thing called "money" where if you throw more of it on the table the problem suddenly resolves itself.
Recruiters and getting your job ad in front of more people is only needed when it's a hard sell; if it's an offer most people can't refuse then you just have to show it to a handful of people before you get someone who agrees.
If we had loads more money, we would probably pay for more specialist recruiters but nothing we have tried so far has been brilliant. We are looking at the whole package though, I think there are things that are relatively easy to do that make a job look appealing like duvet days or free posh coffee and stuff like that.
In the past few years, developers’ salaries have increased significantly in the continent. In Germany they are almost on par with London. So to convince somebody to move to the UK and go through the immigration checks, you have to pay more than the average British employer can afford. For 80-90K£, you are far better off getting 60K€ in Germany or Austria. I wouldn’t advise a EU citizen to move to the UK if they aren’t going to earn more than 120K£.
Me: "I am looking for a tech co-founder; the startup is at an ideation stage, and I have already talked to people who have shown interest in the project. I think having a tech co-founder at this stage will help a lot."
Listener: "How much are you paying for the role?"
Me: "This is an equity-based role because the startup is at an early stage."
Listener: "So you want people to work for you for free??"
This doesn't matter if the listener is an engineer or not. In the UK, there is little understanding of how very early stage startups work. It is equity based, that concept does not go down very well with the population.
Hearing the word ideation would cause an allergic in people who are sensitive against Americanisms.
British are also notorius for their indirect way of expressing their thoughts and feelings. Instead of saying they do not believe in your idea or your ability to execute it, they'd prefer to use compensation as a get out.
At some point my hand will be forced if I need a visa sponsorship, but for now it's a pretty tough sell.
If you move first, then look for a job, you just have to accept the local market conditions.
I converted all to us$
What prevents you (or others) from hiring remote?
(If this sounds interesting to any readers, send me an email at jake@makenotion.com or twitter DM @jitl)
There’s also a corollary problem. The few places that do want my depth almost always want it because they are understaffed. They want to overwork me, and I refuse to ever work more than 40 hours a week under any circumstance.
The job is frustrating because many socs are beholden to central IT to fix even high severity issues, this generates a lot of friction. Most organizations have a big feed of alerts that trigger on everything from ransomware, to a user plugging in a razor mouse... This makes the job frustrating and boring. Contrast this to red team positions. If they're lucky they get to cowboy all through the network never asking permission after initial sign-of. And why would they? Nobody spots what they're doing anyway, as long as you don't create problems in prod.
I work for a large multi-national in the entertainment industry with a really good work culture. We leave a lot of autonomy (we in fact expect people to become autonomous) and trust that we all know how to do our job. It has been very rewarding so far.
On the technical side, very few of our positions are entry level, some are but most are more advanced.
For example, we reached a maturity level where we don’t only build detection but we also build unit tests for them, either by making our own payloads or use and contribute to projects like Atomic Red Team. This requires excellent knowledge of OS internals, cloud security, system programming, etc.
Your comment makes me think we should try to reflect all of this in the job description to make the positions more appealing. There might be good candidates out there hesitating, thinking it’ll be like life in an MSSP SOC.
And companies looking for experienced people somehow expect the pipeline of candidates that often come from such a typical environment to have all kinds of advanced skills already. Which obviously doesn't work, and thus they compete for the same small-ish talent pool (which has skills also applicable in plenty other roles too) instead of building that pool.
If you hire contractors you can hire people from anywhere - you don't need a business presence.
(This message is brought to you by a contractor living in the middle of nowhere).
1. I had my own consulting business (small, 2 of us plus some outsourced support). I didn't like the sales part of the business. Met a client who loved selling and needed support in other areas. I wrapped up my business and took a role as it was more focused on what I love.
2. Currently working with an individual whose business closed during Covid. They think at a high level and are helping with BA work, documentation, client comms etc. It's not so much a hire/employee and more an understanding that they can add value with less direction. They get paid a contract rate.
Maybe something like retaining 25% of their time for your projects could work. If you need more than 25% of a person's time, then maybe find two people with different skillets (although coordinating could be more difficult).
I expect a lot of US founders will emerge from working remotely from a LCOL area for a couple of years, and then launching with a war chest.
There's an easy solution to that, 10 MORE rounds of leetcode hard level questions.
That's around €95K-€107K. How is getting that in the UK (far) worse than €60K in those places?
In any case, the parent's point stands: throw enough money at them and they will come.
The cheapest nursery in inner London cost more than 1600£ per month, so if you have a child you’ll need 4000-4500£ per month (or 75-80K per annum) just to put a roof over your head. If you want to live like a professional or save some money, you’ll have to multiply that by 2.
Later I wrote that you get a better lifestyle in Germany with 60K€ than in London with 90K£.