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. justinator · 1790205575 · focus · HN ↗

      >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.

      I'm not confused that's just a red flag not to work for your company.

      1. jarito · 1790206228 · focus · HN ↗

         Umm...why? Consider the alternate approach. What if I listed 10 Sr Software Eng roles. What would job seekers do? If you said 'apply to all of them', you'd be right. In general, the same recruiter will be responsible for all applications for the same role (e.g. all sr software engineers). There is no benefit to anyone in having the same resume in there 10 times.

         1. justinator · 1790277186 · focus · HN ↗

            If you are, for a year, constantly hiring senior software engineers? That tells me you're just throwing engineers at problems, which is not how problems are solved elegantly. That's sliding into Brook's Law.

            1. jarito · 1790478539 · focus · HN ↗

               A quick google puts the tech annual turnover rate at 13% - 25%. Let's assume 10% just to be safe. Let's also define 'senior' engineer to be a Software Engineer 4 and above (so not 1-3) - that seems pretty common in terms of titles.

               If you have a 100 person eng team split into 10 person teams. You will likely need one to two senior engineers per team. That means you are probably replacing 1-2 a year.

               Now scale this to a larger company. Amazon has 100k engineers, Apple has 40k - 50k. Even outside of tech, Chase bank has 60k, even Target has 5k.

               At the low end of that, a 5k engineering team (still assuming 10 per team and 1-2 of those are seniors) will have 500 - 1000 senior engineers. If they are attriting at 10%, then we would need 50 - 100 senior engineers a year. Hiring senior talent usually takes 3 - 9 months, so you'd easily need 10 open recs all the time just to keep your team at the same size.

               This is pretty generous. Given remote work, the % of senior engineers has gone up, a 10 person average team size is still high, and I used 10% attrit which is low according to the average. Most large companies have large eng teams these days :).

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