Thread

28% of job postings on company career sites have been open over 90 days

302 points · 364 comments · rubatrejo

Aurornis · 1790183094 · focus · HN ↗
This statistic constantly confuses people who haven't done hiring.
If we decide we're going to grow headcount by 10 senior software engineers, we don't copy and paste the same job listing 10 times. We leave it open and collect resumes through that. At a large or fast growing company, we might never stop interviewing and hiring senior software engineers. The listing stays open for a year or more.
There are also specialty roles where hiring takes months. I've had niche roles open where we didn't get any applicants with any experience on the topic for over 90 days on multiple occasions.
1. alightsoul · 1790183192 · focus · HN ↗
  So you should apply to old job postings? Consensus in LATAM seems to be, they just forgot to take them down and they already have someone or in Latin America if you repost the same opening over and over the consensus seems to be the company is toxic they have a turnover problem, maybe you should say outright you're looking for 10 people
  1. Aurornis · 1790183493 · focus · HN ↗
    Some common sense goes a long way. If the job listing is from a company with 10,000 people, you can assume that they're always hiring. Submit away.
    If the listing is generic like "senior software engineer" and all of the requirements are generic like being able to program or do teamwork, it's probably a generic listing.
    Applying anyway is a safe bet, but I wouldn't invest as much energy into tailoring your resume if it's a 6 month old posting from a 50 person company with a website that looks like it's from 2009. That company probably forgot to take the listing down.
    > maybe you should say outright you're looking for 10 people
    This wouldn't help because you have no way of knowing if they've already hired 9 people or 1 person.
    The target can also change constantly. At a large enough company you continuously lose people for natural reasons, like retirement, moving for a spouse, moving to be closer to family. Past a tipping point you're just always hiring.
    locknitpicker · 1790184558 · focus · HN ↗
    > Some common sense goes a long way. If the job listing is from a company with 10,000 people, you can assume that they're always hiring. Submit away.
    Common sense would dictate that a company with 10,000 people has a need for a diverse set of roles, and it would be completely stupid to recycle the same template pretending the role was always the same. In fact, repeating a stale advert suggests the company does in fact not have positions opened and either forgot to pull an old advert or some recruiter is trawling for applications to pretend to be productive.
    Sharlin · 1790187209 · focus · HN ↗
    I don’t think common sense suggests that at all. It’s like saying that the US armed forces requires soldiers with many specialized skillsets (which is true) so clearly it should recruit to every individual role and post separately.
    A large company may have a handful of actually-very-special-role positions open for every hundred generic "our tech stack is this and isn’t going to change" developer roles.
    platevoltage · 1790192479 · focus · HN ↗
    Perhaps the armed forces are doing something right, and the tech industry is not.
    shagie · 1790194453 · focus · HN ↗
    The armed forces have a service commitment of several years (if I read this correctly, US Army is 8 years). People will sometimes change jobs within months.
    They have the time to train someone into a role and typically don't have to worry about going to work for a competitor after they get out of AIT or A school.
    platevoltage · 1790196659 · focus · HN ↗
    People used to spend their entire careers at a single company. Something changed, and it wasn't worker attitude.
    shagie · 1790198051 · focus · HN ↗
    One of the biggest changes since then is that there are companies that a different scale of revenue per employee ( <a href="https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%28google%2C+meta%29+revenue+per+employee" rel="nofollow">https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%28google%2C+meta%29+re... ) and pay accordingly.
    While there's nothing wrong with those companies paying such, it drastically changes the incentives for the regular employee. Going to work in Big Tech can be like winning the lottery (in the dot com boom, I had about 6 million on paper... that I didn't sell before the crash).
    That there is drastically different industries with correspondingly different levels of compensation has incentivized the person who can change jobs to move from a $60k job to a $120k job to a $250k job to do so.
    In the 90s I was making $50k/year ($50k '95 -> $109k '26 <a href="https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm" rel="nofollow">https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm ).
    The companies where people used to work a decade or two or three are still there and in many cases, largely unchanged.
    bluecheese452 · 1790209134 · focus · HN ↗
    This is so out of touch
    shagie · 1790212307 · focus · HN ↗
    There are companies out there where managers, mechanical engineers, marketing, and all the other non-technology roles work at for a decade or two. It's the software developers and IT people who switch jobs after two years working there.
    What's the difference between those job types? It's that software development and IT have a multimodal salary with much greater discrepancy between the companies that fall into the distribution around the lowest mode and the highest mode.
    <a href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/trimodal" rel="nofollow">https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/trimodal
    If you switch from working at a local area company to Big Tech, you significantly increase your salary. For other careers, going from the local job to the national big company will likely give a much smaller boost.
    Here are the stats for tenure: <a href="https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/tenure.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/tenure.pdf
    Table 6 (last page) shows the median tenure by job classification. Computer and mathematical occupations are the ones that were going down between 2014 and 2020. The others were holding fairly constant.
    Table 2 shows 21% of people 35 and older have 10 years or more of tenure at their employer. At 45 years old, it's 45%.
    I still hold that software development is the outlier for shorter tenure and the largest factor driving that is that you can quit your job and get a new one that pays twice as much.
    Do you have an alternate explanation for this data or published data that contradicts this?
    braj0 · 1790284866 · focus · HN ↗
    What an incredible contribution to the discussion!
    locknitpicker · 1790231195 · focus · HN ↗
    > People used to spend their entire careers at a single company. Something changed, and it wasn't worker attitude.
    The US-style neoliberal attitude towards decimating the workforce at a drop of a hat for PR purposes does have a chilling effect on any employee's trust.
    But don't fool yourself: one of the most important tools anyone has to improve their life and wellbeing is the ability to switch jobs. It can create career opportunities you would otherwise not have, and even unblock career progression by sidestepping your current job's corporate constraints.
    red-iron-pine · 1790271588 · focus · HN ↗
    > unblock career progression by sidestepping your current job's corporate constraints
    no shit I work with multiple people that dipped out of their old gig, did 2 years somewhere else, and came back at a much more senior level to their old job because HR limits how often you can get promoted or increases inside a bracket.
    jumping matters, as does the potential threat of jumping.

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