> There's a lot of anger in this thread at companies for making obvious choices.

Elsecomment and on Reddit, you'll see the attitude that their years of experience should be sufficient assurance for their prospective employer that they can pick up whatever other technologies are out there.

This is often coupled with the "you shouldn't need to learn new things outside of your 9-5."

Here, you are presenting a situation where a company would rather promote from within (counter job hopping culture) and would penalize someone who is not learning about new things that their current employer isn't using in the hiring process.

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And you've mentioned it elsecomment too - it's about the risk. A company hiring an individual who isn't familiar with the technology and has not shown the ability to learn new material is more risky a hire than one who is either familiar with it professionally or has demonstrated the ability to learn new technologies.

That runs counter to the idea of the "best" candidate being the one who is most skilled but rather the "best" candidate being the one that is the least risky of a hire.

You probably don't realize that there are several thousands of people without a job who could work for a company that is instead just "waiting years" to find an imaginary worker. That's what people complain about. The more companies think the way you do, the more useless open positions are listed because companies will not hire anyone unless it's the perfect candidate in their dreams.

> You probably don't realize that there are several thousands of people without a job who could work for a company that is instead just "waiting years" to find an imaginary worker.

I screen hundreds of resumes a week when hiring. I know this very well.

Hiring the wrong person can easily be a net negative to the team. Hiring too fast and desperately hiring anyone who applies is doubly bad because it occupies limited headcount and prevents you from hiring the right person when they become available.

Building teams is a long game.

Shame how the cost of the long game is paid by the future employee having to be lying in wait, applying to you and 300+ of your colleagues openings, praying for a bite.

The best applicants aren't lying in wait or filing hundreds of applications. They're happy where they're at, ignoring the dozen people a week who reach out trying to recruit them, until eventually they decide it's time for a change. Then they apply or get referrals to the handful of companies they find most interesting, and at least one is going to give them an offer.

So if you don't have a job opening posted on the day they're sending out applications, you may miss your shot to hire them.

Life is always good for the 1% of anything

The whole thing is this perfect candidate doesn’t exist. How can they? You are dealing with imperfect information. A resume, yours and theirs assumptions about eachother. That is it. All the interview hoops attempts to make ourselves the hirer comfortable with the fact we are fundamentally taking a leap of faith. Because n=1. Because we aren’t simulating this hire 1000 times and modelling the distribution of performance. Because we haven’t accounted for all latent factors that may intersect between our work model and the hiree. Because we can’t ever know anything at all about the future for certain.

I think we could all be a little more mindful of that in hiring. That waiting for perfection is itself a fallacy for all these reasons and plenty more.

I have to say I appreciate your aplomb in these responses. The whole thread is littered with shocking (and unsurprising?) tech-bro overconfidence that they can manage a situation they literally know nothing about better than someone who's already done it. Cheers to you and have a good weekend.

FWIW I don't think these are techbro responses. They're from people who are scared because the industry is changing. I think software folks were quite lucky that the job didn't change much from 2016-2022, due to the SaaS-ification of the old economy, so the skillset and working practices the industry sought was mostly standardized, and candidates mostly competed on salary. This is why there was so much job hopping both by companies offering high packages to new hires and employees who hopped every 1-2 years.

From 2022 this all changed as markets became more FCF sensitive, ZIRP went away, and AI started automating a lot of the dev practice. I know a sadly high amount of people (though in my circles not too many) who built up lifestyles predicated on high software salaries and a static set of requirements. A lot of these folks are angry and scared and desperately trying to navigate this changing world.

I know a lot of developers who have learned their skillset by rote from the early 2010s and have not progressed in competency (they still write code with the same issues as they did a decade ago) or technology (haven't been able to pick up technologies that they lacked when they started).

That puts them in a precarious place since the organization that downsizes would be looking at them first ... and that they haven't been able to attain any mastery of the newer technologies that are coming into play in the system.

For many of them, they're finding themselves leaning on AI to make up for the lack of learning new things (and without learning those new things). They're also realizing that any candidate who is more skilled than they are would be a stronger candidate (and that their job is increasingly becoming entering prompts into an LLM that is easily replaced).

Why they got to that spot and stopped? That's an open question. Some might have gotten comfortable at that spot. Others forcefully reject the idea that continuous learning outside of the 9-5 is needed (spend 40 hours a year learning a new technology). Others may lack the problem solving capabilities to go beyond that spot. I know I've seen all three of those. There are probably other reasons too.