100% agree. In my previous role, I had a very small dev team, and recruited a young guy pretty much out of college. He had nearly no experience at all, but had zero comprehension of “don’t know”… he just googled, asked dev communities, read tons of blogs, and just f*****g worked it out. In 18 months, he nailed several new techs we were exploring, and became a hugely valued contributor of new ideas, performance gains and architectural level decision making. He will be an astoundingly good dev and earn a fortune. By fortune I mean, someone with great skills, lots of experience, and the right attitude might well earn a 6 figure salary at 35. And we all know, that’s not a common income despite what you read in the media!
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Very much depends on the hiring people
IMO, If your hiring people don’t see that a strong positive on a CV, you’ve either got the wrong hiring people, or you’re working for the wrong organisation!
In fairness, there are some orgs where FANGS people won’t fit…. but they wouldn’t attract those kinds of devs to start with IME.
Yes. The only time I wouldn’t see that as a positive is when I’ve worked in tinpot organisations where I would think someone of that calibre would be bored and underused and would last a couple of weeks and then resign. In fact I would see that in the interview and probably try and put them off.
They have the toughest recruitment procedures in the world. If you’re a serious tech player and you have someone coming from that background in front of you, if you’re not:
At them , then you have made a big mistake
I would love to chip in but had to Google FANGs - no irony there!
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The two reasons HR managers (not in my company) I’ve talked to are not wowed by it is:
That they are not good recruiters, they pick people just like them, they all have serious diversity problems, so the method for both recruitment and retention has some flaws
Others question retention - they all have aggressive scoring/review policies for advancement, the people who are looking for jobs elsewhere are not the high performers, why are they leaving is the question? If you’re good, there are internal opportunities to move to what you enjoy, why would you be seeking outside?
HR people are almost universally bad at talent recruitment anywhere anyway, but they have biases just like any others, and I’ve met lots biased against such roles, others as you note who think their great. For me they’re all just people, met lots of people in those companies who I wouldn’t trust with the simplest change, and lots who are geniuses of course, like anywhere.
(oh and on personal bias, I would never trust or work for a company that did a coding challenge over zoom or anything else)
as someone who spent most of their working life owning and managing a recruitment company (along with Mrs FB), we saw this so many times with some very large international companies. a few of them would do online personality questionnaires as the first stage of interview - if you didn’t fit their stereotyped profile, you went no further. no chance for a candidate to do a face to face interview - simple as - screened by a personality score.
fully agree 'cept for a few HR people who were very good - but usually been embedded with the company a long time. leave the talent side to the line management doing the hiring - it’s their team, and it should be their choice who they pick.
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Oh yes, like everything there are always good people doing anything, sorry for being a bit extreme on that one.
In the past, stuff like this would usually be done in an invigilated room, as part of the graduate recruitment day.
Or at least the ones I’ve been involved with have.
I loved doing the grad recruitment days in the past, the people we see applying are totally different to the Gen-X / Millenial seen in the media, but I guess the type of people applying to us are a bit different to the norm.
As MC and IW have said, I’m glad to hear he enjoys it, that’s what you need. I’ve been doing it for 17 years now and still enjoy it 
At my ripe old age, learning “new” languages and the “new” cloud stuff is cool, too.
Hard, but good.
The pay is great and there are currently tonnes of jobs out there, plus it’s often very little stress.
Good luck to him 
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When I have been recruiting for my team (DBAs) in previous roles, HR didn’t do any sifting. They would do the work of getting the advert out with recruitment firms and sites and then pass the CVs to me. I would then go through and decide who to interview not HR. HR would want to have someone in the interview but as backup for answering/asking HR type questions.
ETA:
Me too
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I do my very best to keep HR well away from any recruitment. Go direct to an agency, look at the CVs and interview myself. I generally get so few CVs for engineering roles that sifting CVs is not too onerous
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Data engineering?
I know there’s loads of jobs out there, but didn’t realise it was that bad!!!
Software engineering, and cloud engineering. When you do find someone you inevitably end up in a bidding war with other people.
It’s getting worse each year. 15 years ago development was for many companies of secondary importance. During a down turn they were the first to go. These days deva are the life blood of so many companies and you can’t be without them, demand grows and grows and there just isn’t enough people.
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I’ll second that. Good devs, especially those with good cloud or containerised environment skills, or knowledge of integration with environments like Dynamics365 or Salesforce are like rocking horse droppings!
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@Poet If we just stick a job on a job site, even a tech focused one, most times, the only applicants we get are from Indians looking for a job with a visa attached. We have to go out and proactively headhunt to even get any applicants, and even then its tough. Once we’ve got people into a process, we lose at least half along the way to other offers in bidding wars. Its as bad as i’ve ever known it at present. And good Solutions Architects, which traditionally have been the career path for devs who wanted to move on and grow their income are virtually impossible to find, as they can earn the money as devs now instead!
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On the theme being discussed further up, my brother-in-law works for Google, or maybe X, or one of their other R&D companies.
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PhD from Cambridge, research into growing more efficient organic photovoltaics.
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Decided academia didn’t pay enough, didn’t like McKinsey from his internship even though they flew him round the world a couple of times to different conferences and sent extravagant gifts.
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Taught himself to code in 6 weeks by listening to lectures and podcasts at 3x speed and then got a dev job at Google.
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His wife ‘only’ works for BCG.
Does everyone have someone in their family which makes them feel stupid and/or like a failure?
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Aaaah but can they haul their massive craniums around a triathlon course in under xx hours?
no that doesn’t help much does it 
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Him, I don’t think so. She was on school CX team, so with a bit of swim training…
Then again, she is the stupid one with only a 1st and a masters from Cambridge, so had more time to exercise.
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Probably all qualified for Kona multiple times.
Just take a look at the start list there.
Loads of people working 60+ hour weeks in Type A / C-Suite roles and qualifying.
@jGav - No. builder, social worker, two head teachers, an accountant and biochemist in mine.
All pretty normal.
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