I'd be so, so interested to see the breakdown here, and what causes these types of numbers. Are there just enormous numbers of applicants for every job? Are people applying for jobs they aren't qualified for? How does this compare in tech vs the rest of the job market?
The signal/noise ratio must be absurdly low if this is possible.
I recruited for several years for my companies too. First thing I noticed, there is huge variability in CV for each country. When I receive a CV from an indian person (from India), I don't know if I should expect 100% lies or what, even from qualified seniors. On the other end, I could put my hand on coal if the same CV was written by most germans. Which is bad, because the CV or cover letter become essentially useless as a metric.
To reduce the number of applications we introduced simple tests to submit along with the CV. It does wonders, but I personally hate it. As a senior dev, I keep asking: would I apply to my current application? I have to answer that no, I wouldn't. I have plenty of public projects to investigate my abilities if needed, and I do expect some minimal amount in investment from both parties when hiring.
We also raised the requirements from applicants ridiculously, essentially expecting them to work on core features from tomorrow. Again, completely unrealistic. And again, by our own wording, I would be afraid to apply. We are definitely selecting over-confident candidates (or desperate).
And it's sadly also true that the industry has no apprentice jobs anymore, although there is plenty of need. There are some career paths where I would jump ships despite my lack of expertise to follow my interests. Starting from zero doesn't stop me, but there are simply no opportunities: junior jobs are not really junior anymore. They are simply paid less.
FOR LOTS OF APPLICANTS
Send every single applicant a nice, warm email with a link to a coding assessment[1]. Doesn't have to be anything particularly in-depth: just something that requires an hour or two's work from the candidate.
Result: all the people who put slapdash applications together will self-select out at this stage (you won't even hear back from them) and you don't have to send rejections. This will probably eliminate 95% of candidates right out of the gate for you, and when you have 500 applicants in a single month this is going to make your job a lot easier. You'll be left with 25 people who are genuinely interested and, depending on what you're looking for, you might have 10 that are worth interviewing.
IMPORTANT: for the relatively small number you reject at the assessment stage, you should send them some real, and reasonably detailed, feedback as to why. This will generally take around half an hour per applicant. People don't do this out of fear of getting into an argument with the candidate (and, of course, because they don't have time): in practice this seldom happens, and can be diffused quickly when it does. Most candidates appreciate the feedback and, key point, you won't start dehumanising applicants and turning yourself into a worse human being.
FOR FEW APPLICANTS
If you're not doing an up-front assessment, which we don't at the moment because we're a relatively unknown company so we want to make it as easy as possible for people to apply, send everyone a nice email inviting them to a 20-30 minute telescreen.
Your email should lay out the format of the telescreen: we'll spend some time finding out more about your experience, and do a screenshare (or Google Doc share) on a short programming task.
Result: all the lazy or uninterested applicants will again opt out, doing most of your work for you.
KEY POINTS
- In both cases you can focus your finite time and energy on the better candidates, rather than on sifting out the worst.
- You can give every applicant a more positive experience overall (think how many times you've heard the complaint, "I applied for X job and the company never even got back to me"). You also avoid ever having to send out those crappy two-line pro forma rejection emails that just about everyone hates.
- It'll keep you more positive and energetic because you're not spending loads of time having to be critical and negative about swathes of applications, and the people you do end up interacting with, you actually have the time to invest in ensuring that they have a positive experience, whether you offer them the job or not. This is hugely important because I think, of all the jobs I've done - and, granted, this does depend somewhat on your personality and temperament - recruitment is the one with the greatest capacity to turn you into the kind of person you wouldn't like very much (I realised it was happening for me when I did a long secondment in recruitment for a previous employer).
- By giving everyone a positive experience you'll gain a better reputation for your company, which should translate into attracting better candidates. Certainly, the other way, word travels, and if you offer a ghastly candidate experience people will be put off applying. If you're Google you can get away with it because so many great people want to work for you regardless of how drawn-out and overwrought the process is, so it doesn't matter that some great people will be put off because of the process (still I don't recommend it, and I question the value of all the hoop-jumping). If nobody's heard of you, making the process straightforward and pleasant is the way to go.
[1] This might sound cynical but you can totally automate this process, and if you're getting that many applicants it's probably worthwhile: just make sure the emails go out within business hours, and that there's at least a few hours lag between an application being submitted and the email response going out, so it feels like it's from a human being. Also, and this goes without saying: use the applicant's name. Lots of ATS's don't (or didn't) have APIs, but since you'll only need to target (say) Firefox, browser automation with something like Selenium can work really well here.
They all look the same.
There is now way to tell if a position is any more than remotely relevant, because job postings are all the same.
If you want a group (prospective employees) to sift itself (only apply to jobs they want or are qualified for), you should make a concerted effort to give them the information needed to do that. Unfortunately, no one really does.
Recruiting sucks, so let's focus on making it better, rather than just complaining about the userbase.
Not the ones you 'don't like' - the ones that don't even make sense.
That process of filtering out folks using the blacklist should be automated and the blacklist should be public.
I wonder if that'd make recruiting jobs almost pointless in a large number of cases however. It sure would make one think twice about spam-applying, knowing you might get blacklisted for spam.
2) Yes. Half or more of the applications I've reviewed are totally unqualified. Either they ignored the requirements or fudge it and flop on the interview.
3) Tech has even more noise than my personal experience due to higher pay scales and increased interest in "working in tech" (without any personal interest / passion in technology)
I mean if you are calling something "entry level position" and have "requires 3 years experience in the field", I'd expect people to apply anyway. I remember when I was fresh out of college all the entry positions I saw required several years of experience. If you don't apply to those positions then you really aren't applying to anything.
Common advice is that job posters put insane requirements on their posting because they don't really expect an entry level applicant to have 15 years experience in HTML5, Joomla, C++14, Bootstrap, Hypercard, Quechua, nuclear physics, and Go, just a little bit of exposure to half of them. It's not surprising that unreasonably underqualified people respond to job postings with unreasonably high expectations, and that all job postings end up not being taken seriously.
Can I not work in tech without being passionate?
If they want 10 years of Ruby/Rails experience with a focus on performance/scalability, maybe your 5 years of Python/Django is not applicable.
But if they want 3 years of Ruby/Rails experience and you've got 5 years of Python/Django, and feel comfortable with the transition to Ruby, absolutely you should apply for that position.
Be upfront about it and be prepared to demonstrate your ability, but that's what the interview is supposed to be about in the first place.
We did an analysis on this awhile ago, specifically about # of days to get a job, but it also has some analysis about # of applications:
https://talent.works/blog/2017/09/22/how-long-does-it-take-t...
The trouble is, they so not like to give out salary brackets.
Something to note there is, how much attention is being paid to each listing. For the jobs you've applied and gotten, you probably were a really great fit.
Having reached a point of being on the other side, looking for people to hire, I think there are really warped perceptions all around. If your hiring, you aren't swamped with great candidates but with resumes. Basically, most resumes go in the trash, but because most of them are hollow, there was nothing there to start. If you're actually skilled and can demonstrate it in any way then its far easier to find a job. I think most of the people who apply to 200+ jobs to get one either are not skilled or don't know how to demonstrate that they are.
This has led me to actually be nervous about the prospect of having to interview, because was my success a fluke? Or had I found great fits for jobs? Both interviews I remember getting in to quite technical but off the topic conversations with the interviewer so I presume that was the success bit?
I'm at ~700 jobs and only had 1 offer that was pretty bad. (Optics and/or Bio-tech)
When I was in highschool I did not understand that it was really about who you know (I was homeschooled, so I didn't have a school network to reach out to for jobs), and went applying for typical highschool retail/fast food jobs willy nilly and never got an offer. It's because I was lacking someone who could "intro" me in to the organization. Now I can't really imagine trying to apply for a job cold.
My last half dozen gigs have taken 0-2 emails to secure. The 2 was a genuine job search where I identified two possible fits and reached out. The zeros all were people seeking me out.
Contrast that to the guy applying for your Sr. Developer position who can't FizBuzz. He has applied to 1000 such jobs already. Every one he's seen. All over the country. Every once in a while a company will make the blunder of hiring one of those people (they make up 99% of the applicant pool, because they are always on the market, whereas skilled devs are not), he will skew your number.
So yeah, that guy averages a couple hundred applications before scoring.
But you don't want to emulate his tactics, or you'll find yourself lumped in with him and filtered out of every job you apply to.
In my case, I got hired at an "entry" level position for a huge company along with other "new college grads" types, many with masters degrees but no experience. I was promoted within a year to the mid-tier position while my less experienced cohorts spent 2-3 years getting there. From mid-tier, it becomes more about what you actually know and what you've done rather than "years since graduated from college", so getting to senior level with only 3-4 years "full time" experience is not impossible if you play your cards right (and really do get good experience during college).
Four month work terms alternate with four month school terms. Do six of them before you graduate and you have two years of work experience.
In New Zealand it's mandatory for Software Engineering (and other engineering), but not for Computer Science, as it's a science degree.
It means 3+ years with a technology. It means don't walk in the door out of a Java college having used nothing else and apply to work on a Triple A game written in C++. It means don't show up after a weekend html course and apply for a job using Node/React. And before you say "well that isn't me for so and so reason", it happens ALL the time to employers.
An entry level position does not mean you get to learn on the job from scratch or near scratch. It means that you are at least capable enough to work on small or easy problems and features and an employer or other devs can coach you along the way and you'll know what they are saying to you.
That's all it means (to any reasonable employer).
I know a Github profile shouldn't necessarily be required to count as experience. But if your only experience is non-work related then you're probably going to want to back it up with something tangible.
In fact, they stated nothing to suggest they were looking at tech firms specifically. You seem to be reading into this what you want to see.
> An entry level position does not mean you get to learn on the job from scratch or near scratch.
These are just number made up on the spot by people who can't be bothered to think about it.
When a job lists a requirement for 2-3 years experience, it means 2-3 years of industry experience.
I don't have 10 years of Python experience because I started coding when I was a teenager.
I learned more about programming in Ruby from 6 months on the job than I learned about Python from 3 years of using it at university.
There's the rub. Early in my career when I had little working experience this CONSTANTLY bit me. It didn't matter that I did consulting on the side or that I worked with the technology or even that I went to school and used the technology there.
In my experience almost all of non-tech companies and maybe half-ish of the tech companies would require the experience be on the job at a company.
Now I don't know how indicative my experience is. I don't know if this type of information is tracked anywhere.
As an aside I'll never forget the one company I applied for who was looking for a developer with 5+ years experience in using .Net Framework... in 2003.
I then went ahead and hired another guy with literally zero job experience, but with interesting academic pursuits and who contributed to Compiz. Guy turned out to be amazing.
Don't lie. If a company won't listen to you because you don't have an arbitrary number of years of experience in your CV (what's this, the aviation industry?), then it is not a company you want to be talking to anyway.
EDIT: I should have said "Don't lie during the technical interview"
Jailbreakers figured out how to build native apps almost immediately, so it's not impossible. But it sounds like that's not what he was talking about.
Perhaps lying to get past the know-nothings in HR is acceptable. Probably not a good idea to lie to tech people you would work with.
Do not treat the years of experience as a barrier to entry.
Beyond disqualifying yourself, there's not much in terms of risk and the reward (getting your career off the ground) is quite good, especially when faced with writing >200 job applications.
Easy solution: distinguish the stuff that you have "exposure" or "light experience" or whatever (translation: I screwed around with Django for a weekend) from the stuff that you are actually claiming serious experience with ("I've built multiple apps in this technology, successfully submitted a patch to their dev branch, and if pressed could quote various parts of its documentation"). Result: filters and HR people check whatever boxes they need to, and any remotely competent technical person sees what you're actually saying. No lying necessary.
Is there a specific unfair mechanism at play that would prevent supply and demand from finding its balance?
I'm on the supply side of the labor supply-and-demand curve. I set the price that I'm willing to sell my time at. Nobody else sets my price, and I don't set anybody else's price. On the demand side, there are a bunch of employers who each have their own price for what they're willing to pay for a certain set of skills. Each sets their own price. Nobody else sets it for them. In particular, nobody on the supply side can possibly set the price the demand side is willing to pay.
Now, all of what I just said presumes a functioning supply-and-demand market. It breaks down if there's collusion between employers, or in a single-employer situation. Unions may well be needed in such situations. But in a working labor market, demanding more than market price for labor will result in lower demand for labor.
The balance is that in some ways, we have economy-wide collusion-by-default to keep wages artificially low. I know this sounds ridiculous, but I think we've hit the point of increasing returns on job growth depression.
When one looks at the rate of underemployment and the employment rate writ large, it seems like the number of jobs is just few enough that the pay doesn't have to go up, regardless.
Furthermore, many industries don't seem to really pay attention to using wage as a lever. Often, this is because individual companies have difficulty justifying hiring someone at 20-30% more than their counterparts, and their counterparts haven't received a significant wage increase in years, often decades.
When combined with the rate of inflation not being matched by wage growth, it begins to look "normal" to many employers that wages should be particularly low.
For example, if women don't apply for jobs unless they meet 100% of the listed requirements [1], and men are much more willing to fudge it, that means this particular market won't clear in a fair manner. This hiring data isn't public, so a company won't lose sales over it, so the market can't correct it on the other end, either.
And that's probably not the only way to slice the set of job-seekers into people who will/won't apply for a job based on the requirements. Essentially, impossible-sounding criteria do filter your set of applicants, but not by the criteria you claim to care about.
[1]: https://hbr.org/2014/08/why-women-dont-apply-for-jobs-unless...
Toronto, Canada: all job offers when I was unemployed were advertised+2k. All job offers while employed were at least 5k over current salary (and up to 20k).
To assume that markets sort everything out is folly. Nature tends towards entropy.
Lets bring back the apprentice system.
It is an entry level job - it's the lowest tier in their ranking, it's the starting place, it's literally the level where new people enter the organization; it's the lowest paid and least respected position they have, filled with the least experienced and least tenured people in the whole company. It's just that they (want to) start with people who have worked (somewhere else) for a few years already; but that does not and can not make it a mid-tier job, that would require them to have other, even lower jobs.
Furthermore, saying that 3 years might be a senior level position is stretching definitions - assuming an average lifetime career of 30 years, someone with 3 years experience has less "seniority" than 90% of the workforce.
A company is losing the opportunity to train employees. And if they don't put the effort in early.. They are probably losing their top talent and don't even realize it.
If your company thinks short term (e.g. next 2 years) like most tech startups do, hiring juniors and training is out of the question.
For what's termed higher apprenticeships you either did a craft one first or joined later on at 18 or so.
The problem will come is that higher apprentices learn the fundamental building blocks and tech employers want people rote trained in " latest shiny tech"
Btw traditional apprentices where not guaranteed a job at the end, it was possible to sack an apprentice but you'd sack them on grounds on breach of contract. As they(or their parents) signed a biding contract - you could not make the redundant though.
Modern apprenticeships are normally direct employees now though - not sure about Germany though.
a) Expectations of 'Entry-level' actually being greater than 'junior/apprentice'
b) Mentors not part of the role
Both of these issues have arisen from a lack of willingness to have a long-term view and wanting immediate ROI, which I imagine has come about from the perceived view that staff don't stick around anyway.
Set up proper trainee/cadet/apprentice programs, provide mentors and support and these staff will probably a) take the low pay at the start, b) appreciate the learning and support, c) stick around and d) create greater ROI in the end.
Seems not to be how business operate now, and I feel it's painfully evident when I observe how many 'experienced' managers there are in charge of things that have no idea what they're doing. They also appear to often actually have no idea what capabilities they require and so just create industry 'roles' with the hope some experienced person will know what to do.
And that's because of the decades of employers destroying the relationship between them and labor. I'm never going to see a pension, and there are almost no more apprenticeships. Why should I as an employee invest in my company if the company treats me as a replaceable cog.
The lack of employee loyalty can be directly linked to the Reagan-esque destruction of the labor movement, IMO. I have to watch out for myself, and therefore if push comes to shove, my needs are more important than the company's.
This is the core of your comment, and the rest of it describes the whole mess more concisely & articulately than nearly anything I've read.
It's indisputable that being willing to train less experienced people leads to wasted money in the many cases where it doesn't work out. To those with attention spans longer than 6 months, however, it's equally indisputable that when it's done properly and does work out, it tends to more than make up for all the 'wasted' cases where it did not.
There is a ton of untapped, eager talent out there just waiting for a chance. You may have to wade through a lot of duds to get a good hire, but in my view there is no better way to acquire dedicated employees who actually care about the longer term well being of the company.
According to https://taketheexit.de/ 55% of developers feel heavily underpaid and that's something I can believe easily.
I recently doubled my salary, and I still feel underpaid. In reality, I earn above median wage for my age and experience, and live a comfortable life. But we can always do with more cash.
"Entry" means "to enter the workforce". It means you have pre-work experience such as a specific degree, speak a certain language, etc.
If you advertise an "entry level web development" job and I just boot camped for that, I am qualified and will apply.
If you want "Junior Developer", say so.
(Comment by someone that this is a gimmick to reduce salary sounds pretty right on.)
Sadly title inflation is also a thing.
"Senior" implies "Highly Experienced" meaning "lots of years of experience".
Whereas it's completely possible for a person with 3-4 years of experience to be a "Very Good Engineer" within their specific domain and be as valuable, respected, listened-to, etc. as a "Senior Engineer". It doesn't happen often, but it happens.
If we had titles more like "Apprentice", "Journeyman", and "Master" Software Engineer, then we wouldn't have this issue. Someone could be a Journeyman after 2 years or 4 depending on how rapidly they progressed through their "apprenticeship" phase, and to "Master" as soon as they had completed sufficiently complex work to have completed a "masterpiece" equivalent.
61% of "Entry-Level" Jobs require 3+ years of Experience
In the Bay Area culture, 3 years is enough time to jump jobs once:
year 1 = figure out how to navigate tech corp
year 2 = figure out that it's a sh!t show.
year 3 = jump and find greener pastures. repeat year 1.And my lifelong experience is that such pepole have pretty good careers, better then humble more self aware people.
As a qualifier, it is a demotion from “Developer” alone. A Junior Developer is less than all the other ordinary, plain old general Developer roles.
It’s basically a paid intern role.
The only people who would ever accept such a title are kids who don’t mind being marked, appropos of nothing, before first impressions are made, as a lesser subordinate, untrusted with serious decisions.
When a recruiter, hiring manager or HR contact offers a Junior role, it means you get paid less.
In a world where business cards and email signatures serve as pretext for introductions, you see a title with Junior in it, and it reeks of green college grads.
I.e. 3y+ is just a shortcut way to sort CV's, not a requirement.
Until very recently I was frontend lead for a fairly large UK site, and one of the best hires I ever made was a 32 year old former-recruiter with no commercial programming experience, and no CS background.
However it was far from plain sailing. We had mutual friends and whilst chatting in a pub, and they won me over with their passion and enthusiasm for what I discovered was their dream job.
I brought them on as a jr, into a small talented team with measures in place to ensure there was the opportunity to learn on the job and appropriate tasks to work on, but it quickly became apparent they were out of their depth. I worked on mentoring in work and and pointed them in the direction of stuff they might look at outside of work to dodge the bullet.
My work started to suffer because I was spending so much time mentoring, fixing code that had become irrevocably tangled and trying to manage a very stressed & frustrated jr dev.
Eventually I had no choice but to move them into a different team where the work was less technically demanding and more html/css focused, with a small salary cut. Everybody was disappointed with the situation but the alternative was letting them go.
Three years later, that dev rejoined the core engineering team a more experienced developer, passion intact, and having learned their trade in a lower pressure environment, comfortable they could handle the role. I'm incredibly proud of them for the way they handled the situation and am absolutely confident this time will be a success.
That said, it'll probably be the last time I hire a dev with zero development experience. As an investment in an individual it's incredibly worthwhile, but despite the happy ending, the whole experience was fairly disastrous.
An understanding of basic concepts obtained in the ways described above is very different from 0 experience. And on paper to a recruiter, what I've listed above counts as 0 real-world business experience.
edit: it is nice to hear this situation worked out for you though!
Hiring college grads without a lot of real world experience gives you the opportunity to mentor and train in good methodologies that I find older developers will refuse to implement without incessant fighting.
It is more work initially but the long run payoff has been fantastic in my experience. When you manage based on yearly expectations that are attainable life is so much more enjoyable.
The biggest key is management and upper management buy-in. Sadly that's exponentially more difficult to get when most places see IT as a sunk-cost instead of an opportunity to deliver more efficient workflows internally and externally.
I'm on the fence about working with developers that don't have college degrees. The gaps in their skill-set frequently causes issues no matter how much experience they've had.
Also, we're hiring. :) If you're sick of spending all your hard-earned education and experience to help Facebook, Google, Amazon, etc. increase ad CTR by 0.001%, we're working on some pretty cool technical problems. Just email me at kushal@talent.works.
j/k, but I am curious how much time you think is average for a job search in terms of both hours spent and days/weeks before finding something. You talk about "time and stubbornness" but I'm interested just how much time and how much stubbornness. I realize this varies widely by industry, but I would expect there's some sort of white collar average.
To your specific Q, yes, it does vary dramatically by location and specialty. In fact, we did an analysis about exactly that a few months ago! Even for white-collar positions, it ranges from ~14 weeks (software engineers) to ~90 days (HR specialists) to >>90 days (mechanical engineers):
https://talent.works/blog/2017/09/22/how-long-does-it-take-t...
When you dig in, even specialties that take the same time have very different reasons. For instance, mechanical engineers see a pretty high interview callback rate to job applications, it's just that there aren't _enough_ mechanical engineer job openings out there! OTOH, there are tons of HR specialist job openings but you need to apply to a million jobs to even get one reply.
something I learned at an HR training. So that is useful to prune your search.
Even if someone has a Bachelors in CS, I wouldn’t hire for an entry-level C++ gif without 3 years’ experience with the language: I expect them to pick it up during their time in academia - especially as many (of the best) start coding in high-school or earlier. So in fact, I’d be alarmed if an applicant with a CS degree didn’t claim at least 3 years experience with a common instructional language like Java.
Which speaking as an aside; I was denied an internship back in college because I didn't have three years of professional experience in Java. Needless to say I found it absurd at the time.
You also assume that the best people are coding earlier or have the ability to code earlier. Some of the best developers I've worked with didn't start coding until later in their life.
A couple asked for 1+
One said 0-3 years
You need to demonstrate that no candidates with skills are available to get a visa waiver. It’s called compliance advertising. There’s a whole industry of body shops that do this stuff and collude on rates. The folks they hire are the foot soldiers of banks and government.
When companies say 'entry-level', they seem to be referring to around 2-3 years of working experience. Not just college + internships, but actual professional experience. It's an extremely silly market to be in right now if you're a fresh grad.
All this talk about passion or numbers aside, I've had the opportunity to experience things from the other side and see how many senior-level developers with 10+ years of experience couldn't write an if-statement in their choice of language to save their lives, or even elaborate on basic design choices/decisions.
Once you have guaranteed interviews, from there it's just a matter of finding a company with the most lax interviews or one where you can fake it the easiest. At least that's my best guess; I don't fully understand how someone can work for a company for over a decade yet can't understand basic OOP or fizzbuzz-level challenges. It became a serious issue at my company because most of the senior-level candidates we got were utterly useless.
The catch-22 is, if you're not careful, now employers may think you are NOT senior and so you may be able to get a job, however, it might not be appropriate for your skill level. It can be frustrating for an experienced person.
Although, I've found that, once you have a job, generally typical employers don't really care what you've done before and forget your past experience (which is a shame for them!). Depending on the employer, most of them care, "Can you do what I want from you when I ask it of you?" and that's about it.
I've also heard the advice that says, if you have the experience, and you want a job, your resume should be explicitly tailored to no more and no less than what a job posting requests. I think the advice of obscuring your information to make yourself difficult to gage from an age perspective is an interesting approach, but it probably fits into the same category of advice.
I know this article is likely just a promotional piece for the author's business, but, I have to admit, a number of points felt pretty accurate based on my personal anecdotes.
And while it's nowhere near peer-reviewed academic paper quality (we won't be submitting to Nature or NIPS anytime soon), my personal background is ML — everything we write is backed by cold, hard internal data and we try to stick to the facts.
All of that said, yes, people really like our data-driven insights and it does drive traffic. :)
The job board should say something like "to apply for this job, please show up at our next hiring event on XYZ date".
Thoughts?
They are primarily used as a pay-scale indicator. It's not that recruiters are dumb and looking for fresh graduates with 3 years of industrial work experience, it is that they are looking for people with 3 years of experience that will accept working in the 'junior' pay-scale knowing that it will be 2-3 years before they move up to the 'medior' payscale.
Many/most companies in the IT industry fail to have a decent technical 'ladder', so upping the 'label' once every two years while basically not changing the job is way of pretending that your developers are having a 'career'.
Traditional 'entry level' does not exist at most places as the bulk of companies don't want to pay for the training/mentoring phase. Too much overhead given the projected short career span.
To me, this makes sense, as it allows easier access for people re-training or coming in outside of school without a degree. Graduates come into junior roles due to their degree, whereas school leavers or those that have re-trained spend some time as an entry-level developer.
I've worked with a few entry-level developers, and they've worked their way up through companies to land senior-level roles in a few years. Sure, it took them a bit longer than a university graduate, but there was a route into the industry for them. It was a bog-standard job (agency dev for clients) but when opportunities are few and far between it's a great way to get passionate people in.
> 3, 5 and 8 are your magic numbers. After 5+ years of experience, you (officially) qualify for most mid-level jobs. After 8+ years, you qualify for senior ones. And 3+ for entry-level, obvs.
Waterluvian commented below about the hiring markets self-optimizing themselves to efficiency.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16702612
In short, we see so many market inefficiencies in hiring, it'd be hilarious if it weren't folks' lives we were talking about. There's no practical difference between someone who has 4.750 years of experience and 5.250 years of experience, but the market dramatically prefers the latter.
What this actually does: bias you toward hiring people who are comfortable lying
https://tudorbarbu.ninja/message-to-recruiters/
most notably "This is how most job ads sound nowadays:":
We’re looking for a person with more than 100 years of experience in software development, coding everything from BIOSes to cloud applications, knowledge of all past, present and future operating systems and setting up secure networks. The applicant must also be able to juggle up to twenty balls and read hieroglyphs, be fluent in Swahili and dance like Michael Jackson (especially moonwalking – nice to have at corporate Christmas parties).
If they only wanted a few summers worth of internships etc they should say that, 3 years experience is commonly interpreted as 3 years continuous on the job experience.
Yeah, its jaded. I've been around the block a few times. Of course nobody outright says these things. They never really have to. The policies enforce those decisions.
Plus, those years of experience requirements are dumb and nobody, not even large corporations, even enforces them in my experience. The closest thing you'll get to having this kind of requirement be enforced is people that are sticklers for college degrees.
This article rings true to me.
My wife ran into this after college only for her industry (biomedical engineering) it is 5 years for "entry level" and they didn't even count her paid college jobs even though they were relevant experience.
Robotics is even worse. Unless you've been building robots as a hobby for the last 5-10 years (which is a VERY expensive hobby btw) it doesn't matter how much other engineering or programming experience you have, they won't take you.
I got lucky with the opposite. I started paid programming in high school and employers counted my high school and college jobs as experience and I had three competing mid-level offers at graduation. So I skipped entry level entirely. And this was in 2007 right before the recession really kicked in so companies were already starting to hold back on hiring.
On the flip side, an actual entry level coder we just hired expects to be working on fun new R&D stuff even though he has 0 experience and I thought we set expectations during the interview. We have him working on bug fixing and client change orders (he will eventually get to R&D but someone needs to fix the bugs, we can't all work on just the "fun" stuff).
In a matter of fact all jobs I had, have basically been thanks to people I know who worked at those companies.
In a company I worked for, I saw a LinkedIn ad for an intern with experience in a lot of specific tech that would have been more intermediate to senior level. For around a tenth of what I was being paid. I know in that case it was the company owners trying to be cheap and not having much clue about IT.
I am somewhat entertained every time a see jobs requiring 10+ years of experience with Go or Typescript or Swift. It's a sign of just how well-thought-out these postings are.
Is there any truth to this? Or is it just FUD?
But having hired people, I see this from the other end. I have precisely one person under me. It's all we can afford and I'm in municipal government, so positions are not easy to create. Given that situation, and how hard it is to get rid of someone, I have to be really careful who I hire and that means favoring experience. I expect more supervisors than not are in my position, wanting to mentor but not being able to take the risk.
61% of Entry-Level Jobs "Require" 3+ Years of Experience. (They almost never do in practice)
The US went from being the land of opportunity to the land of overqualified uber drivers and warehouse workers.