I keep seeing on the news that 80% of SWE jobs are unfilled, companies are desperate, etc. etc. However, based on all the posts here about rejections and the fact that even the most meager of start-ups and non-tech companies have a process with 5 interviews and leetcode, I think that the SWE shortage is overblown. If companies were actually desperate, wouldn’t they have an interview process that reflects that? Would love to hear your stories on both the hardest and easiest interview cycles you’ve been through. #tech
It's more complicated; the number of good engineers is low and the number of positions for good engineers is high. On the other hand, there are plenty of mediocre and poor engineers and not enough roles for them. The SWE shortage is very real but only for the best of the best.
^^ this! This is very real.
isnt this true in most industries? best of the best are always in demand, be it lawyers, doctors, plumbers, or sales
There were 250+ applicants on LinkedIn alone for my current job ..
weird flex
You boasting bruh
There isn’t a labor shortage, but rather oversupply with no elasticity in wages. Companies are on a cheap buying spree for talent since all of the layoffs in tech. All you hear about on Blind is the sheer volume of interviews and lowball offers. The shortage is only perceived and spun by tech PR. If they were really desperate you’d see TC’s going up.
You clearly haven’t been in the tech industry long. Look up tc in the 2000’s in early 2010’s. We could only wish for this kind of tc increases.
Compare with tech market cap
If there was a real shortage you would atleast see more meaningful interviews than some idiotic program not running in an interview and reject. Is that even any thought put into evaluating a candidate ? Just blatant apathy as there is another candidate waiting.
Market doesn’t allow companies spend time and resources doing meaningful improvements in hiring pipeline. It’s a meat grinder.
Oh the market allows for everything, its the oversupply of candidates, if you have to burn thru 10 and hire 1 , the process needs to be much quicker. But if there were 3 they would spend meaningful time and see that all 3 were qualified
I have 3 yoe and I have been writing optimal solutions in every coding challenge and yet after every final round companies go for "someone whose skils are more aligned".
I wonder how much of this is resume. I haven't failed an interview since I started at Amazon, and part of me wonder if its just because I have Amazon on resume, lol.
Communication skills maybe?
There is a shortage of good developers. Any job posting will get hundreds of applicants but most suck
How would you define "good developer?"
A good developer is one that doesn't "suck"
Our org has lot of open opportunities
Lol
I wonder why
Speaking as someone who's worked in FAANG and thus qualified as among the "best of the best", this take on software interviewing is bull. Some of the worst code I've ever seen has been perpetrated by these self-touted "best of the best" who were apparently screened in rigorous fashion. That said, the SWE shortage is very real. The key to understanding the SWE hiring process is realizing that hard interviews aren't about competition or selection, they're about retention. What do you do when your most valuable workers are in such high demand that they can literally double their salary every few years by switching companies? Do you treat them exceptionally well? Do you increase their pay regularly to match their market value? Hell no! You just make it hard for them to leave. How do you do that? Well it takes a level of industry collusion unprecedented in the history of labor, but that was the genius of the first companies to adopt modern SWE interviews like Microsoft and Google. If you perpetrate the myth that hiring the "best of the best" is the key to success for the world's most successful software companies (it's not), then every slack-jawed, mouth-breathing, "I got this job because I'm tall" executive will immediately start interviewing just like the big boys. And now you've created a labor environment were wages are successfully suppressed for all but a small minority of SWEs who have the time to study for these interviews, primarily early-career folks who don't cost a lot yet anyway.
That’s so sad. Explains a lot, though. I have a lot of former colleagues who are very skilled but are too scared to leave because of interviews.
What's even more sad is how bought-in most SWEs are to this paradigm. It's a lot more attractive to say to oneself, "I got this job because I'm the best of the best!" and not "I got this job because I got lucky with my interviewers and/or I had lots of spare time to study and perform loops." It's a best-case scenario for tech employers when you've spun your vehicle for artificial wage suppression into an actual badge of honor for the poor saps who are getting screwed by it.
My biggest pet peeve is recruiters and HMs who reach out and sound all desperate like “We took a look at your resume, the eng leader is very eager to talk to you and wants to move forward quickly because they think you’re a great fit for this role” only to be slapped with like a take-home project, 3 coding screens, and a half-day onsite. Like really? What kind of great fit needs that much screening? Also, how the heck do you even do this while working full-time?
It's more brutal and disheartening for new grads like me. I have been reached out by recruiters, did well on coding rounds with optimal solutions only to be rejected for not having skills in xyz tech when they clearly know from my resume I don't have that skill. And this happened multiple times after multiple interviews.
Yeah, I love it when you tell them upfront that you don’t have the experience in X (I’ve done that) and then later the same recruiter now coldly informs you that you got rejected because you don’t have experience in X. I also explicitly tell companies I’m junior and still get put into senior engineering queues. I don’t know if recruiters just get bonuses for interviewing as many people as possible, or if they need evidence that they interviewed a diverse person for their internal diversity metrics.
The issue is that the bad candidates don't get jobs and thus keep interviewing while the good candidates are immediately snapped up. And a bad SWE is worse than none at all.
So then maybe encouraging all women/kids/etc to go to STEM citing the shortage is a bad idea, since only the good ones will hack it.
Good and bad are extremely subjective. For example, I’ve seen bad candidates from Microsoft get rejected here at Amazon yet I’ve been denied by Microsoft every time I’ve applied. Who is the good/bad swe here? Interviews are mostly luck