Paul Cantrell
Something I tell my software students a lot when they’re looking for jobs is to remember that a shockingly large number of job descriptions are written by people in HR who have next to zero understanding of the industry, the specific team, or the business need.
All they’ve got to work with is fragments they’ve heard without comprehension, coming to them through a terrible game of corporate telephone.
1/
Paul Cantrell
HR: What technology is your team using?
Team: Well, it’s a C# project, but what we really need is…
HR: Great! This is a mid-level position, so we’ll say “3-5 years of C# experience.” Now to search the web for some random C# quiz we can use for screening!
Job “requirements” aren’t really requirements at all; they’re corporate Mad Libs.
2/
Paul Cantrell
That’s how you end up with job postings like the one that made the rounds on social media a while back that required “5+ years of Swift experience”…one year after Swift was released.
In most cases, of course, those hard requirements on years and tools knowledge aren’t even what the team is looking for in a candidate. They’re looking for •somebody they want on their team•.
3/
Paul Cantrell
Another anecdote I heard: a team kept getting terribly unqualified candidates when they reached the technical interview phase, and couldn’t understand why. They finally looked up and started their own interview process, and found that HR had walled the position with some random tech screening quiz they found online…that had •the wrong answers•. HR was actively screening out candidates with basic knowledge!
4/
Paul Cantrell
What’s the moral of this story?
(1) The hiring process is mostly not about you. That sounds weird, but it’s true.
(2) As an applicant, your job is to jump through nonsensical hoops — or walk around them, if you can — until you can reach the point where you’re having a real conversation with somebody who’s actually involved with the position in question.
(2a) That often means straight-up ignoring clearly stated job requirements.
5/
Paul Cantrell
Let’s sit with 2a for a moment. Getting a job often involves ignoring the stated job requirements.
Who does that benefit? Who does it harm?
6/
Paul Cantrell
We educators call stuff like this “hidden curriculum:” secret knowledge that’s never stated explicitly, but people who are already in-group / acculturated / privileged acquire through ambient experience and/or interpersonal networks.
In my experience, these stated-job-requirements-that-aren’t-really-requirements cause exactly, exactly the disproportionate harm you’d expect: they reward privileged family backgrounds. This isn’t hypothetical. I’ve seen it up close, with real people.
7/
Paul Cantrell
I shudder to think how LLMs are going to multiply the harm of everything upthread.
HR departments are already grabbing unvetted crap from web searches to fill out the job descriptions nobody’s given them enough info to create properly. Half of what I wrote upthread is •already• the sort of bullshit that LLMs do: generating formally appropriate text without comprehension of the underlying idea. Now that’s automatable.
8/
Paul Cantrell
Moral: HR is awful and totally the problem, right?
No. I agree with what @grimalkina said here:
https://mastodon.social/@grimalkina/112417767538483847
Teams need to take responsibility for vetting their own hiring processes.
Managers and orgs need to make it •possible• for teams to vet their own hiring processes.
And…
9/
Paul Cantrell
And, just as @grimalkina says here in the replies, companies need to finally get serious about process and methods in hiring.
Hiring people is delicate social science. You can’t slap it together out of prefab parts and expect it just work.
https://mastodon.social/@grimalkina/112417774017693587
(NB: Cat mentions recruiters, which can mean hiring org or 3rd parties. To be clear, I’m talking about companies themselves. Good 3rd-party recruiters are sometimes the ones picking up the slack here. Sometimes.)
10/
FeralRobots
@inthehands
I'm having some trouble with this. My experience, along with counsel I've been given over the years, is that one MUST attend to the clearly stated job requirements. That someone's flagged your application to ensure it passes, they must be addressed if one's to make it through the initial screen.
& that in an annoying number of cases, the requirements literally CAN'T be ignored, because the screen is automated.
Paul Cantrell
@FeralRobots Yes, that happens. And it happens even in cases where the stated requirements are bullshit.
There is no correct answer.
Paul Cantrell
I think there’s a sense out there that at some level, companies must be fundamentally competent or they’d have gone out of business, whatever they’re doing must make some kind of sense, and therefore it’s up to job applicants to please •them•, to meet •their• standards.
It takes a decade or two in industry to understand how barely-functional more human orgs are, how much of the world runs on humans scrambling to mop up the slop our own processes create.
11/
Paul Cantrell
Re that last sentence:
https://how.complexsystems.fail
“Complex systems contain changing mixtures of failures latent within them.”
“Complex systems run as broken systems.”
“Catastrophe is always just around the corner.”
“Human operators have dual roles: as producers & as defenders against failure.”
•That• is the reality every one of us is walking into as either a job applicant or a hiring org.
12/
Paul Cantrell
That sense that it’s the job applicant’s job to please the infallible company is especially keen with students. Trained their whole lives to seek out gold stars, students are always looking for how to get the next A — and feel lost walking into a world where that’s not how it works anymore, where the only people handing out gold stars are people looking to manipulate you.
13/
Paul Cantrell
I’ve seen companies abuse that desire to please. Google in particular recruited on campus throughout the 2010s with the same attitude as the cocky high schooler whose dating strategy is to act like nobody in particular is good enough for them. (That parallel was close enough to make me deeply uncomfortable.) Google was seen among students as the gold star that proved that you’re one of the smart ones, that you’ll make it.
Another reason those layoffs did so much psychological damage.
13/
Paul Cantrell
I don’t think it all has to be this bad.
In a better world, the folks writing job descriptions are good psychologists and good social scientists: neither hiding the hiring process from teams nor dumping in the laps of engineers who have no idea how to run a good one, but instead collaboratively understanding the needs of teams and then using their knowledge of humans and human systems to find the best people.
Is that too much to ask? I’m fairly cynical, but dammit, I don’t think it is.
/end
Paul Cantrell
@dsalo
I would be interested to hear more about that!
Dorothea Salo
@inthehands Yep. I lean on this HARD when I teach Code and Power.
Tormod Halvorsen
It generally harms women. They often pass on job listings where they don’t absolutely meet all requirements.
We guys often fall back on our overconfidence, thinking “well, how hard can it be” and wondering why there are so few women in this industry.
Paul Cantrell
@airwhale
Yes. Women. First-gen students. Minorities. Students from blue-collar families. The list goes on: anyone who’s coming from a position of vulnerability, who’s been told their whole life that one step out of line means they get punished.
Paul Cantrell
@dsalo
That sounds awesome. I’m so glad you’re doing that. One of my colleagues teaches a CS and Social Justice course that sounds loosely related, and is similarly student-driven. It’s great. And of course social and sociological considerations should be present throughout the curriculum, but good to specifically spotlight them.
I have a special anger for CS depts getting turfy like that, •especially• when it’s combined with narrow ideas about what counts as “computer science.”
Dorothea Salo
@inthehands Originally it was our way of teaching a super-basic web-development course without getting CS's knickers in a twist. (CS was SUPER-turfy, even about stuff they hella didn't want to teach.)
So we added sociology cooties and CS backed off.
But we now HAVE a web-dev course (in collab with CS!), so C&P morphed into 100% sociology-of-race-gender-sexuality-and-ability vis-a-vis high tech.
I let students prioritize topics this spring. Worked pretty well, I thought.
Mark Gardner
@inthehands I have bad news for you and your students: the #job-posting pool is full of shallow #recruiters that go *far* below the already low bar set by the worst #HR departments.
And company #hiring managers turn to them because they don’t have firsthand knowledge about how shitty they are, but they do know that about their own HR.
Paul Cantrell
@mjgardner @grimalkina @talexb
Oh for sure. It’s all about who you know, knowing who to trust, getting plugged into networks of people where you get reliable information about who to trust….
Applying for tech jobs resembles buying illegal drugs far, far more than it should.
Paul Cantrell
@airwhale
Yup. There’s even research that successfully reproduced that better performance in a lab setting: more diverse teams able to find a better solution to a team puzzle in the short span of a research session than homogenous teams.
I don’t think it’s quite saturated public understanding the extent to which companies are •incapable• of acting in their own self-interest. Not even evil. Not competent enough to be evil. Incapable!
Tormod Halvorsen
And this at a time where we desperately need diverse voices and views on our teams.
I am at 34 years in this business and with a 100% score, projects and teams that were well mixed with genders, ages, ethnicities etc. have ALWAYS performed better AND been more fun to work for.
We scare away the people we need the most.
Paul Cantrell
@acdha Yup. Yup. (Right there with you downthread!)
Chris Adams
@inthehands This is going to get so much worse with outsourced services job descriptions banks and, especially, LLMs to give false confidence that the listing, screen questions, etc. are okay because they have fewer glaring errors. The obvious grammatical or technical errors were embarrassments but they did at least give readers a cue that there wasn't a skilled reviewer in the loop at that stage.
Now ever penny-pincher is going to think they can pay HR even less because the tools do the work.
Paul Cantrell
@acdha
Redundancy in this case is warranted and welcome.
Chris Adams
@inthehands Ah, yeah, that's what I get for leaving the reply window open while I got lunch. Sorry about the redundancy but I'm glad to see more attention to the root cause vs. just ragging on HR.
Paul Cantrell
@Okanogen I’m not sure about your exact experiences here, but everything you describe sounds like a normal part of youth and being new to the transition from the world of school to the world of employement. Lots of culture shifts there.
okanogen VerminEnemyFromWithin
@inthehands
Something I've noticed as an employer is many young people have unrealistic expectations of how seriously their ideas must be taken, how they should be praised for a job well-done (or even just done), and how much direction they will receive.
In an internship or volunteer job, they thank you with praise, at a business the thank you is often just your paycheck unless you really deliver.
Many young people have little respect for institutional knowledge or experience. I don't know why.
Paul Cantrell
@avirr
Yup, same. Human systems are all human systems.
Avi Rappoport (avirr)
@inthehands I’ve worked with business and government: equally dysfunctional
Paul Cantrell
@dpnash @airwhale
This strikes me as one of those times when society messes with Autistic people by making it seem like “oh, you were supposed to know this, if you didn’t know that means you’re broken,” when in reality •nobody• can see these hidden nonsense rules that exist in other people’s heads, including neurotypical people.
David Nash
@airwhale @inthehands This has also been a bit hard for me as an #ActuallyAutistic person who's worked in software development and adjacent fields for a while.
I know exactly what sort of knowledge and skill indicated by "X years of experience doing Y" tends to look like in practice.
I have also seen, or have been in, situations where not *literally* having the exact specified experience (or more) would be anywhere from extremely unpleasant to disastrous, even if the rest of the job was fine. So there are times where it's safe, and even desirable (if the rest of the job looks like a good match to skills and experience) to ignore them ... and other times where it very much isn't.
For me at least, the #ActuallyAutistic barrier here is not one of failing to understand that job applications have hidden or at least not-made-very-explicit conventions, it's of not knowing *which ones* can be safely bent or ignored outright when applying for a given job.
rastilin
There's no point blaming LLMs for what people do. If your HR department is incompetent and dysfunctional, then your company as a whole, is incompetent and dysfunctional; or else upper management would have reigned in HR by this point.
Here's another disturbing thought. You work at a company where HR and the other departments are dysfunctional but only your department is filled with capable and sane people? No. If all the other departments are obviously incompetent, your department is not the sole exception, you just don't see it.
Paul Cantrell
@rastilin
Please note the verb tense in which I spoke about LLMs.
Paul Cantrell
@scott
For sure. I have a thought on the topic: https://hachyderm.io/@inthehands/112422940070459459
Scott Martin
@inthehands Students - and people on the autistic spectrum. Like me! Who find this "game with unspoken rules" unbelievably stressful. It's hard to put into words exactly how going against stated requirements makes me feel. "Nauseous" and "terrified" cover some of it. I've been looking for a job for months now and don't want to think how many of my applications were turned down because I wasn't aware of a secret game I have to be playing.
StarkRG
@inthehands 2 and 2a are a main reason autistic people don't get hired often (that and allistics tend to interrupt distrust us for some reason). I've tried ignoring job requirements and never got any responses, so I'm clearly doing something else wrong.
Paul Cantrell
@StarkRG
It’s especially hard on autistic folks. A thought:
https://hachyderm.io/@inthehands/112422940070459459
Paul Cantrell
@zmeysa @grimalkina
The biggest features of the landscape aren’t carved by clever insights or sudden fixes. They’re the result of forces sustain over huge amounts of time: water, wind, tectonic plates. Sometimes we don’t get to be anything more than another drop of water carving the canyon.
xebiche
@inthehands @grimalkina on a job seeker side this isn't really actionable
and from the inside. argh where to get the energy to go and push the fix
Paul Cantrell
@PH7831 @avirr
Perseverance, empathy, creativity, and patience.
PH7831
@inthehands @avirr I find it more and more clear that delivering "good" (good enough) tech (I'm not talking only about software here but all kind of industrial r&d and production) product relies on many people struggling to make things work within interlaced dysfunctional human organisations (as dysfunctional as every human organisations are).
Somehow the most useful skill is perseverance.
GNU social JP is a social network, courtesy of GNU social JP管理人. It runs on GNU social, version 2.0.2-dev, available under the GNU Affero General Public License.
All GNU social JP content and data are available under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.