4 Reasons Good Engineers Aren't Getting Hired

Software Engineering now impacts almost every area of modern day life. The big tech firms dominate the public markets, but really, most companies are tech companies these days (even real estate and mattress companies apparently).

To run a tech company you need Engineers, and for the last 20 years the demand for good Engineers has far outstripped supply. Engineers have become the new rock stars. If you can code you can create a product and impact millions of people’s lives. If you can build a team of Engineers who can code, you can dominate the world.

So, it's surprising that there are so many good Engineers not getting hired. I speak to hundreds of Engineers and Architects a week; people with years of experience in the most in demand skillsets, and many of them can't get an interview. How is it that we have a tech skills shortage, thousands of jobs unfilled, and good Engineers are not getting hired?

Admittedly, hiring Engineers is hard. With few exceptions most companies struggle to get it right. But what is it specifically about hiring for Engineering skills that means good people get missed?

1.) Everyone wants a Rockstar

There is an unhealthy bias in the tech space towards hiring only "The Best". Everyone thinks they need a 10x Engineer / Code Whisperer / Ninja. The reality is that those people are in huge demand and bloody expensive. Hirers should think carefully about whether they actually want to try and compete and pay for that level of skill, or if those people are actually the right sort of Engineers for their business anyway.

Most companies would find that if they did a bit of soul searching, the bar for hiring could be a bit lower than they think. This opens up a huge world of talent. Good Engineers wouldn't be sat on the market, good products wouldn't be stalling in the development process, and companies would be busy turning good Engineers into their next 10x Engineer rather than waiting to hire someone else's.

2.) Everyone wants 100% fit

Candidates are often expected to demonstrate experience with an extensive list of tools rather than being assessed for general engineering skills, attitude and the ability to learn. This is odd when what we expect them to do once hired is to solve problems they probably haven’t seen before; with tools they may not have used before. The mark of a good Engineer is that they’ll figure things out on the job.

Take DevOps as an example. Something that started out as methodology has become a job title. Companies now believe they can get three people in one and create job descriptions that look more like requirements for a whole IT department. Recruiters are looking to match as many keywords as possible, so perfectly good Engineers aren't even getting a phone call because they don't mention Terraform or Kubernetes enough times on their CV. The fact that they could pick up Terraform in a week isn't even considered, because the business never see the profile.

What you probably need is a good Engineer who can solve problems, work well with your team and learn new skills quickly. Word matching for Engineers who have worked with a precise list of tools when AWS release 50 new services a year is futile. By the time they join, the stuff you assessed them on will be out of date anyway.

3.) It's hard to assess tech skills

Humans are complicated and making decisions about their ability is difficult. There are multiple factors that go into making someone an effective Software Engineer and all of them are hard to interview for. Interview techniques haven't changed much in 50 years, and very little about a standard interview process simulates how an Engineer would actually do the job. What Engineers actually do is solve big problems over a long period of time. What they are typically assessed on are very specific problems over a very short time span. They’re also often being assessed against things that the interview knows lots about, rather than things that are actually a good indicator of future potential to do as good job.

Assessing technical skills in an hour is hard. Pressurised face to face competency based interviews or white board sessions are usually not a good representation of how someone would perform in the role. They also sway decisions in favour of confident communicators and "nice people".  

There is a lack of consistency in the process. Most companies aren’t using standardised questions or formats and interviews tend to veer off into unformatted conversational interviews. These types of interviews are nicer for everyone. Asking lots of questions and seeing people struggle isn’t a nice experience for most people, so having a nice chat for an hour feels like a more pleasant experience. It also misses the point. Whilst you are more likely to hire someone you got on with well, you still need to focus on the tough technical stuff or risk hiring a lovely dud.

4.) It's hard to reach a consensus on who to hire

Ask three people in a start-up what skills they need in their next Engineering hire and you'll probably get three different answers. Ask the same three people to read an Engineer's CV and you'll get three different views. Just as worryingly, it appears that there is very little consensus between interviewers on a candidates fit.

The guys at Triple Byte ran the data on the extent to which different interviewers agree on which candidate would be best. It turns out that Interviewers agree on which Engineers are the best at about the same rate as Netflix viewers agree on which films are the best. Which is to say - hardly ever. If you have any chance of making good hiring decisions you really need to let one person make the call.

In Summary

Hiring is hard, but we make it harder by setting unrealistic expectations, not planning enough upfront, and not learning how to fairly assess tech skills. In a market with such a huge demand for Engineering skills, we really shouldn’t be creating hiring strategies that leave perfectly good Engineers on the market and jobs unfilled.

Here are 40 more of my start-up hiring tips - https://daves.blog/blog/40-start-up-hiring-tips