Thread

1. 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.

         1. mort96 · 1790184039 · focus · HN ↗

            > 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.

            As an analogy it's kinda like hard drives: when one of my hard drives dies, it's An Event which I need to deal with specifically; I need to order a replacement for that specific drive. At Google's server farms, hard drives dying is just a statistic, you continuously buy hard drives just because you know existing drives are gonna die at some semi-predictable rate.

            1. Sharlin · 1790186621 · focus · HN ↗

               Or a more morbid analogy: military casualties in a war.

               1. evilduck · 1790187366 · focus · HN ↗

                  It's not really an analogy, it's just facts of life. In a large enough company or over a long enough time period at a job or in your career, realistically people actually will eventually die and cause vacancies. I've had two coworkers die, one because of illness, the other because of an auto accident. I stopped using the "bus factor of one" phrase as a result even and use "redundancy or succession planning" since it's not outside the realm of possibility that someone might get hit by a vehicle.

                  1. gchamonlive · 1790197637 · focus · HN ↗

                     "Lottery factor" works, though it's more of a mouthful

                     1. arcanemachiner · 1790201164 · focus · HN ↗

                        That, and nobody knows what you're talking about.

                        1. gchamonlive · 1790207251 · focus · HN ↗

                           Just the first time

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