I’ve read rumors that many firms are actually in a hiring freeze, but they keep job reqs open for appearances. Apparently some investors use job postings as a company health metric.
From my contacts, I am personally aware of situations where internally-recommended CVs are ignored by HR, and other cases had open job postings and passed people successfully through the interview process, and then the hiring manager still didn’t pull the trigger. I have no way of knowing how widespread this is, but it is happening at some places.
Is your company like this? If you have real info and not just suspicions, let’s name some names.
I think the founders feel that it is the right posture to signal that the company is growing (external messaging) and that we are doing well (internal messaging).
Not to mention all the economic reporting that is completely messed up by this. Job openings are something that is tracked, and policy can't adapt if literally every company is saying they're hiring like gangbusters but nobody can get a job.
Edit: I can't find the article. Maybe I am confusing it with this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41112855
throwing up a bunch of job adverts up on a low cost platform is comparatively simple and requires no real activity after putting them up; just ignore the emails.
Indeed. And handsome whistleblower bonuses (i.e. enough to retire on) should be paid to individuals who are in a position to report the company principals to appropriate authorities (with easily obtainable evidence of course), so that they can be dealt with accordingly.
Instead of just casually mentioning to others at the water cooler that this is what their client/employer was doing, as if it were just one of those things.
Is this money coming from the government or the company?
Because I’m guessing the startup using fake job postings to signal growth probably doesn’t have enough runway to cover the handsome retirement of a 30-year old.
Much of this tomfoolery will quickly end if you actually start holding people accountable. Giving some corporation a fine is not that.
This is why I don't understand people who are against the death penalty and punishing mandatory minimum sentences. As you correctly point out, harsh retribution is a good deterrent.
Really? I thought death penalty is typically reserved for premeditated acts where the criminal did actually think it through.
The problem with death is you can't undo it. If you mess up, including systemic mess ups, it's over.
Until we can get into the criminal's brain we can't know the extent to which they thought it through.
We're just basically saying, "Anybody would know that they shouldn't kill somebody and it seems like they probably thought about killing this person before they did it."
I doubt there's going to be a stat that satisfies you here, but this one is interesting:
https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/facts-and-research/murder-rates...
I haven't ever seen non-anecdotal evidence (flimsy or otherwise) that makes me think the death penalty acts as a deterrent.
Sure we can, based on their actions. For example, we know that the guy that killed 60 people in Vegas planned it out ahead of time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Las_Vegas_shooting#Prepar....
I'm not the one saying that the penalty works as a deterrent. It probably didn't in this case since the guy killed himself. Although he may have preferred death to a life in prison.
What about a situation where someone kills their wife after work one day? How will you know if he had thought about it for a while or just snapped? Obviously you will look at the evidence and see if there was clear evidence of planning or not. But if there's not how can you be confident in whether it was planned?
> I'm not the one saying that the penalty works as a deterrent.
Good, because it doesn't.
> What about a situation where someone kills their wife after work one day? > Obviously you will look at the evidence and see if there was clear evidence of planning or not
Right, and in this court can choose not to execute him based on this uncertainty.
What are you going to do, rat on your employer to get money from them they know they can’t pay so they just go out of business and you lose your job?
Just because they can't pay it doesn't mean there shouldn't be repercussions. That would be like saying that a person can't be fined because they don't have the money. AFAIK the judicial system will happily levy costs on you that you can't afford, and it is 100% a "you problem".
Not equivalent to the most attractive exit they hope to make (if they stayed with the company and if it paid out), of course -- but enough to make it worth their trouble, to hedge the diminished employment prospects that will be incurred as a price for sticking their neck out, and to convince these companies that they're running a significant risk in pulling shenanigans like this.
Not everything we don't like should be illegal.
This sounds like the kind of thing that is incredibly unenforceable anyway. How do you differentiate between "we're not actually hiring" and "we simply have a very high bar"? How do you do it in a way that doesn't impact the economy too much (like forcing employers to do stupid things like auto-write everyone back and waste even more of their time in order to appear to actually be hiring)?
From a "fraud" angle I could argue that it should still be illegal. You're signaling to your investors that you're growing but you're really not.
Fake numbers are a real thing. 9 openings and only 1 real opening? So you're inflating your employment growth by a factor of 9? How is this different than Wells Fargo opening 9 phony, automatic accounts per customer to inflate their growth?
I'm not saying this behavior isn't bad, to the extent that it actually really exists. I'm just not sure making it illegal is the right move. Why not let the market take care of it? You can usually see if a company is growing or not. If this becomes such a common phenomenon that that's a problem, you can usually explicitly ask, or there will be industry sources that can tell you if a company is growing or not.
The market isn't actually very good at fixing issues like these, and in fact caused the issue in this case (defrauding investors makes number go up which makes market happy but people sad), which is why you would regulate it.
Also some companies keep up generic listings like "Senior engineer" not because they are hiring but because they would be willing to make an opportunistic hire for the right person, and want to collect the names of interested people for when they are hiring.
If talented folks are applying to ghost jobs and never hearing back, aren't they less likely to apply later when real vacancies open?
I know it's an employers market atm since firms don't have the cash flow to scale, but interest rates are coming down and it won't always be this way.
Again, I'm out of my depth, recruiting is not my expertise, etc...
On balance it probably helps more than hurts.
Absolutely feels that way... but it may also be VITAL.
The first (really only) goal of a company is to not die. I call this the SHL rule - as it was recommended several times to SHL that he kill off Gumroad.
Who can kill a company varies over time. Initially, that is likely 100% the founders. Either giving up, feuding or running out of money. Then investors/debtors have the power to kill a company off. Finally, and every company should be so lucky to reach this level, acquirers/bankers/Government can kill off a company. Making sure you don't die - and knowing who has the power to kill you off - should be prioritised at (almost) any cost.
As an example, I once had a client who spent $X0K a month on AdWords for one keyword exact matched. It generated almost no revenue. The main investor would Google this one word, and if the site did not rank 1st both paid and organic, he'd threaten to pull all future funding. The company was loss making at that time, so that would have killed it off. I moved that one keyword into it's own AdGroup, called it "Investor Relations", never talked about it again, and years later the company was sold for $X0,000,000.
From housing, jobs, healthcare, petcare, appliances. Everywhere I look these fucking vultures ruin everything they come into contact with.
> but they keep job reqs open for appearances
People hire for appearances. If you're a manager you need people to manage. It makes you feel important. That job that I had at VMware... The more I think about it, that job was making someone feel important, and feel like they were checking a box. My prior job was about making someone feel important, too. (My boss was promoted to manager so he hired me.)
So I wouldn't go and say that a company is pretending to be hiring. It's more that priorities change, or sometimes the bar for a position is high, ect, ect.
When you're a manager, you need a bench of candidates for areas where you think your team will grow, and for people from your team who might leave.
When I was a manager, I always had a list of potential hires, but it was a spreadsheet I kept, and when I'd talk to people informally I'd let them know - either I have no possible opening for them now, but I'd like to keep them in mind for the future if they were also interested in working for me or, I'd let them know I'd probably have an opening n months in the future. But, I'd never post job listings just to get a candidate list. Or interview random people just for the hell of it. For one, at most (bigger than tiny startup) companies, there's at least some bureaucracy in getting job listings approved - why would you do that work if you don't need to? Also, why would you want to lead people on who you want on your team?
At the line manager level, this theory makes no sense. I'm not saying it doesn't happen, just that it is as stupid for the manager as it is wasteful for the job applicant.
My point being is that you are correct that for line managers it makes no sense to have fake job postings but at a lot of companies the line managers have zero say in whether it happens or not
You're conflating two completely different things here (posting job listings and who decides on which candidate to hire)
WRT to hiring, in my experience, the hiring manager for an IC position was always first among equals in making the final candidate selection. Other people, based on their position in the company, might get to say no, but I was the only person who got to say yes. This was slightly different for hiring non-ICs at the company I worked for - in that case, the functional leader had to agree with the hiring manager, but it was still the hiring manager who ultimately decided whether or not to advance their candidate to the final round with the functional leader.
As for posting job reqs, it ultimately required much higher than director-level approval to post any job req. It typically required functional leader approval and HR/finance approval to get done.
Generally, I and other managers would make the case for why we needed additional headcount to our managers (usually directly to our director and our VP) and the VPs would make the case to our SVP as to why their particular team should get the headcount they wanted. Then, the VPs would figure out where they wanted to allocate their headcount, then the directors would do the same, then the managers would figure out (if they didn't get all of the headcount they wanted) which positions they wanted to fill, then the whole process would go in reverse where we would make the case to our directors why we wanted to fill x position instead of y position, and so on and so forth.
> but at a lot of companies the line managers have zero say in whether it happens or not
I don't doubt that. But, it is a sign of an unhealthy leadership culture and an unhealthy relationship between managers and their directors.
To be entirely honest reading through your process, you don’t have the power to open job req either. That’s the exact same way it would go at my jobs. You are not given a budget to execute with, you need to ask a multi chain group for them to decide if a req is opened.
You're clearly a good manager. (And I suspect I would enjoy working for you.)
Don't underestimate the amount of lousy managers out there. Many of them don't know they're lousy, or are just trying to do what's right without realizing that they aren't doing what's right.
This eventually leads to layoffs. At my old company, when someone in a team moved teams or quit, they reflexively hired a replacement or consultant even if it was not needed. Then they had to be laid off due to budget (me included)
So yes, managers just want a bigger team to look good. It worked when money was free...
It’s all a game of smoke and mirrors. Pump the stock at all costs
The product was cancelled before it shipped. (Basically, the market window ended and the product was my first career example of architecture astronauts and the consequences.)
But, to make it interesting: The HR guy who hired me bumped up my rank to get me a pay increase. They didn't tell me that I was the most experienced engineer on the team, nor did I have the leverage to push back on some serious architectural mistakes.
1 year in, I realized the project was an exercise of "architecture astronauts," although I didn't know the word at the time.
> Or was it a role you could purely coast in
I could have done that. I consider that generally unethical. I did coast a few days before I gave notice; I gave notice the day before a scheduled vacation, and then came in one day after the vacation to meet with HR.
To make a long story short: I decided to quit a few days before the Employee Stock Purchase Plan grant date, and I was afraid if I gave notice, I'd loose the stock. To put things in context, my manager wanted to walk me out the door as soon as I gave notice, and I had to tell him that would make him look bad.
When my project at VMware ended, I was assigned to a team that I really, really didn't like. I was advised to find a new project, which I did: The rewrite of the VSphere UI in Flex. At the time, it was a 1-person exploratory project. I could have been #2 in that project.
Well, we all knew where Flex went. At the time, I was eager to do work in HTML & CSS. I was planning quitting to start a startup in a few months, too.
I spent a few days trying to get a Flex development environment running, and decided that it just wasn't "worth it" to spend any time with Flex, or the VSphere UI rewrite. If it had been HTML & Javascript, I would have stayed, at least for a few months longer, or possibly even longer, because the guy who was starting the project was kinda cool.
Instead, when I decided it was time to leave VMware, I realized that I only had ~2 days before the employee stock purchase plan grant. This was quite lucrative, so I costed for 1-2 days, (also to give me a chance to change my mind,) and gave my notice.
Anecdote: a while back, I did an internship at a YC “darling” company that you’ve definitely heard of. They apparently liked me so much that a couple years ago, the lead of intern recruiting emailed me encouraging me to re-apply if I was ever on the job market.
Well it’s fall 2024, and they automatically rejected my resume without review.
Apparently not even internships are good enough as a hiring signal anymore.
HR and hiring managers aren't the same people, and aren't always operating with the same set of criteria. I was directed to re-apply and answer some of the questions differently (and not quite truthfully...) just to get past the screening system.
I would encourage you to reach back out to intern recruiting and see what's up.
Reach out for sure. Do anything humanly possible to avoid going through HR.
if you literally worked there, and you know the names of people who also work there, to include managers and HR, reach out to them directly. a polite email and a couple of calls and you've got a start date.
They switched to "AI" for efficiency :)
Couple weeks later I pointed out to the person responsible for hiring that the postings were still up. They explicitly responded that they will keep them up. I didn't get an actual reason but I think it was for job market "research" and to keep a steady stream of applicants to threaten existing employees with replacement.
I had a discussion with an HR person the other day, she was claiming things like "oh we would just paste their CV into chatgpt and ask whether we should hire them", "his belt didn't match his shoes so we blacklisted him", "he used forbidden words like 'but', not a good match". Maybe it was just an exception, but I have a feeling like it would be pretty common. Between that and black magic CV filtering software, they have all the excuses. Nothing human about anything in that process anymore.
Personally, I don't think it's very honest, and I'm going to wonder what other honesty they have flexibility about.
I wonder whether any of the third-party job-posting sites has figured out ways to say you're not much hiring -- or only hiring/promoting internally, or only filling a funnel for possible future openings, or only hiring if a rare unicorn comes along -- without that looking negative to people who only want simpleton metrics.
Maybe the cooling of "growth" theatre startups will make it OK to sound like you're not "growing" right now.
Say, the company has a lot of job postings, but the all the applicants say they're auto-rejected. That's a decently clear indicator.
Also, if you link your linkedin/stackoverflow/github or something, there could be a more or less automatic way of evaluating you as a candidate in general and your fit for this/similar position, which could be fed back into the post-interview questionnare processing. Obviously, not that good a way to evaluate candidate fitness, but a way nonetheless.
Rings privacy alarm bells, but oh well. Someone could build a decentralized version of it which would work via a browser extension. And, actually, 3rd party hiring companies have a way better relationship with the companies hiring than with the candidates, so I very clearly can see this mechanism weilded against us.
A certain company (the name starts with "A") is widely known for doing this, you might guess which company I refer to by deep-diving into my comments history.
It looks exactly like in this YT short: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/V5VAN6ldS9o
They are pretty open about their leveling and pay structure.
Although the job listing says they pay "above average", the pay for a Software Engineering role with 5-8 years experience can pay as low as $63k
For the job seekers on HN, avoid companies that engage in this behavior.
Well, in that case sure, I too am a multinational firm servicing the ___ industry just looking to fill a few roles: senior back end engineer, senior front end engineer, senior sales manager, senior accountant, founding product concept... that's all.
Well, if anyone wants to pretend to apply to my imaginary tech startup, we have an exciting product that combines intrusive cameras all over the customer’s house with cutting edge AI to blast a bloodcurdling scream through their smart speakers whenever they bite into a piece of fruit.
This is sort of the flip side of what others have described about having a post listed just in case a unicorn walks in. I don't need unicorns. I just need solid cloud consultants with a few years of client facing experience.
There are a lot of posts like that on HN's Who's Hiring. One of the most obvious examples is MixRank [0].
On the last jobs thread, they reposted [1] the same job advertisement they've been bot-posting for almost 2 years. It is identical.
And HN doesn't even allow us to flag/report this abuse.
Other companies that do the same: Cargado, Aha!,...
HN's "Who's Hiring" is turning into a trap.
> We're hiring continuously for the positions below— they aren't singular positions that will close once filled. Our philosophy on hiring is that the candidate is more important than the position. For each new member of the team, we design a custom role and responsibilities that are specialized to their interests. Other companies will come up with a long list of specific requirements for a position with the expectation that you'll exactly replace someone from the team, or that you'll be the perfect tetris piece that satisfies the job requirements decided by a committee. MixRank is more pragmatic: we'll first get excited about having a unique individual on the team, then we'll figure out the best way to accommodate their specific talents.
It seems to me that finding a job in tech is easier than finding a job in any other professional field (e.g. chemical engineering). I am an electrical engineer myself and it was easier to get a job that paid better doing programming than in EE. Specially for the effort you have to put in.
How is it that HN complains so much about the whole process? Are people only applying to big tech companies or hot startups hoping to get the compensation they have been getting for the past n years?
There must be plenty of tech jobs in non tech industries doing normal, “boring” work like dba or maintaining legacy systems.
I mean, those kind of jobs still pay enough to live a normal, decent life. They might not be exciting but work is work. Although that is my take, coming from a 3rd world country and all.
Or am I just delusional and the “boring” jobs(that pay less but still enough) are nonexistent?
I am not from the US so I really don’t know how the market looks outside of the FAAANG/startup bubble. Heck, last time I checked even the US government needed tech folks. It feels that there are jobs out there but the jobs don’t match people’s expectation. But I could be really wrong.
Y is entrenched in the business of producing monitoring tools for electrical systems (power systems, controllers, rt simulation, etc). Beyond very basic drivers and software to interface with their devices, the actual useful apps to work with them were always written by partner companies that were in the software business.
One day, Y found itself having to compete with a former partner (a software company) that had acquired one of Y's direct competitors (power systems, controllers, simulation, etc). Y then thought it was time they became less reliant on external software for their products and it made sense that they, too, entered the software business. The obvious next step was to reverse engineer and replicate some of the existing apps that were interfacing with their systems.
Y first tried to hire some SE for the job. But faced with the challenge of paying SE salaries, it was reasoned that since Y's existing EE have the academic prerequisite to code, they can probably do the job. A few meetings later, company management and the various EE managers all agreed that code is obviously code. Network, web, desktop, you name it, they can build. They can do it all.
Three years of technical debt later, they tried hiring actual SE who, upon interacting with the code, just kept leaving, for some reason. By the fourth year, those projects were scrapped and new ones started from scratch, with actual SE as project leaders and a few handpicked former-EE-turned-software-devs from the old teams.
All this to say that although EE can technically write code, building software, if done right, is a lot more than about simply spewing logic with a programming language. I'm not saying that an EE can't also become a qualified software dev, but once that happens, they'll want to be paid a software dev salary.
And the "boring" jobs copy their recruiting practices from the FAANG companies. So you have a 5 round interview that could ghost you any time.
The current problem is that huge numbers of companies are in a hiring freeze, but still posting jobs on job boards, so you have to submit countless resumes to get a human to contact you.
So yes, there are a lot more jobs available, but every step seems designed to discourage and frustrate job seekers.
We in tech have it easy: upload your CV to LI and Indeed and hunt the postings there. Everything is concentrated in one place.
This does not sound like someone who has been job hunting for software roles in the last few years.
I applied to ~60 positions that I think I was a strong fit for through linkedin and indeed and only heard back from 3. Only one of those actually followed through to an interview.
I also searched company careers pages manually and applied to 5 companies directly, which resulted in 4 interviews and 3 offers.
5 years of experience and all three offers were for ~$150k fwiw.
My wife was looking for a job earlier this year (non tech), and it was interesting to see the grind from the outside. It seems that we are at the point where job seeker AIs and job poster AIs are just going to have to fight it out. There is no way to tell if a job is real or if you are going to get ghosted. As a candidate you don't have the time to research and write cover letters. It is a numbers game and if you are going to get ignored hundreds of times, you need to send out hundreds of applications, so you have to spam job postings. Job postings get lots of spam, so it is difficult to rise to the top of the pile. Each party needs a better AI than their competitors. It used to be a better CV, or a better job posting, but those days are long-gone.
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Anecdotally, my wife applied to a large European cross-country multi-billion project as an architect. She had the perfect mix of government and private experience in relevant technologies or so we thought. There was no response.
The position remained open for a half year more along with dozens more.
Why would someone waste money advertising (even in print) on these positions, if no interviews were conducted?
Apparently all that happened is that high level management hired HR firm to place advertisements and collect candidates for lower level positions that would actually do the work. Presumably this was done in good faith in that project would be moving forward.
Now two years later the project has 4X ballooned in cost to 25 billion. Those local positions are still not filled.
My experience in looking for work last year suggests that corporate job portals were all ignored. I had employees I knew at Walmart and Fidelity confirm this to me and it was double confirmed by various third party recruiters who struggled to fill positions they knew actually did exist. Most of these openings were legally required in conformance with EEO laws but just weren’t real, at least to the public.
“We are hiring” == “we are always open to consider a special James Bond special one-in-a-thousand special developer”
Edit: Nope. Definitely SPAM.