Why has IT Hiring become so Complicated?

Ten years ago, I started my first job as a programmer. I was 23 years old then. I was a young man like any other who believed that after obtaining his chemical engineering degree, he would conquer the world. Quickly, I realized that after doing what I was supposed to do, things would not go according to the pre-established roadmap.

What was an IT hiring process like in 2014?

It was easy to get a job if you had a technical or scientific degree. You didn’t need to know how to program. You applied to all the job offers through a job portal. Some company would call you, and you would have a 10-15 minute phone interview. The first, second, third… they didn’t call me back. Finally, I passed the phone interview, and after a few days, I had a group interview. They saw my enthusiasm and hired me.

What is an IT hiring process like in 2024?

It’s complicated. It helps if you come from a professional background. Now, you need to know how to program. You must apply to all the job offers through every job portal you know. They contact you via LinkedIn with a template. You respond, expressing your interest, but ask about the salary and work location. The first, second, third… they didn’t respond and left me on “seen”.

Months go by. I pass a phone call. Then a technical test that I spent 3 days developing. Great, now a good cop/bad cop interview discussing the lines of code. All good. How about a final “cultural fit” interview? (random people from the company who fill an hour to get to know you and not work on a Friday).

New Paradigm

A paradigm shift is a change of scene. Just like in theater, a scene change involves characters and the environment. I am not qualified to give you a global answer regarding the environment. It will take years of subsequent study to extract all the details of what is happening today.

The good news is that I believe I know the main actors who have caused all this to change:

• Immediacy
• Cost-Based Hiring
• Super Programmer
• Artificial Intelligence
• Quality of Life

Immediacy

Our 2estern society is characterized by immediacy. The prime example of a company with this value proposition is Amazon. The company is known for delivering products quickly and easily.

We add fuel to the fire with smartphones designed and programmed to trap us in their flashes of light. Messages, news and viral videos flow nonstop. Everything must be immediate and error-free, or bad reviews on Google and toxic comments on X arrive immediately.

What about IT work?

The product must reach the customer as quickly as possible, and we place the customer at the center. Programs and lines of code never stop flashing. Development, production deployment and Agile meetings flow. Everything must be immediate and error-free, otherwise long faces, pressures and layoffs soon reach the CTO’s office.

In a world where there is no margin for error, there is no room for learning. Therefore, entering junior positions is very complicated. In 2014, enthusiasm for learning was trusted. It was believed that through trial and error, one could achieve the competencies to become a good professional.

Cost-Based Hiring

We must earn as much money as possible. Shareholders first. If the company’s activities generate inefficient code, it can be resolved with a bit more computational capacity. IT marketing says that hiring cloud servers is good practice and much cheaper compared to having contracted employees.

If we are a large consulting firm, we must sell profitable and competitive projects. If the competition does it in 1000 programming hours at €50 per hour, we do it in 800 hours at €60 per hour. The 200 hours that are really needed we will cover with false responsibility and unpaid overtime. If the programmers don’t finish the work, we attack their ego. They are bad professionals because they leave things unfinished and don’t meet the deadlines set by sales team.

Regarding the benefits we offer employees, we can allocate a negligible part to certifications and charge clients more. Twice a month, we can offer pizza in the office. Tell HR to post job offers with texts that seem like kindergarten. More funny emojis are needed. Doctors and architects would be scandalized, but these are programmers.

Super Programmer

Speaking of programmers, we could reduce the current staff. We group tasks from other satellite areas and let them handle it. What do you think if the programmers we have do the following?

• Program code and unit tests
• Replace QA with e2e tests
• Application architects
• Database design
• Security experts
• At least 2 years with Kubernetes

Thus was born what I call the super programmer. They will end up super burned out. The lack of personnel and inefficiencies throughout the design, product, development and operations chain will end them. All this responsibility in a single point is what in software architecture is called a single point of failure. If this point fails, the situation is critical.

Ten years ago, areas were part of isolated knowledge. Each department was responsible for one or two functions. Those who knew about systems didn’t know about development, much less how to design a database. With the boom of cloud services, we understood that we didn’t need to be experts to create an application.

Cloud services have evolved in such a way that we add more layers of abstraction to the knowledge we have. We delegate it to an external provider.

This is good. It allows bridges to be established between departments and knowledge is even more understandable. The problem is that we are forgetting and losing specialties to reduce costs. When things get really complicated, no one knows what’s going on. We don’t have specialists.

Finding a programmer who performs all the mentioned tasks is practically impossible. If you find one for the salary you offer, you won’t hire them, or they will leave soon either due to salary or work stress.

Artificial Intelligence

Generative artificial intelligence products reached society on November 30, 2022, when the GPT-3.5 model inaugurated a new paradigm. Machines are now capable of understanding our syntax and language, a fact that represents a pivotal change.

Software developers had focused on learning the language of machines; a necessary knowledge to achieve a comprehensive understanding of topics related to hardware, low-level communication protocols and software applications.

Currently, artificial intelligence is transforming this dynamic. Algorithms learn about our language, behaviors and needs.

This evolution leads to a decrease in the demand for developers, a fact that many resist acknowledging. However, the reality is that developers are still necessary. Even so, we will need critical thinking to know if artificial responses will be applicable to the real world.

Quality of Life

Last year, I attended an HR talk. There, a business management expert explained that people in the workforce are driven by three motivations: power, recognition and money. This is perfectly valid perhaps for other generations like my grandparents’ and part of my parents’ generation. I don’t know. I’ve never asked them.

Mine is different. We are a society that I believe considers itself lost. We have been deceived. Doing what we were supposed to do has not guaranteed success. We reached the rainbow and found that there wasn’t even a treasure chest. We no longer believe in the aforementioned values and add a new one: quality of life.

This new value can have many connotations. For me, quality of life means spending time with the people I love, doing activities that fulfill me and not spending unnecessary time in traffic jams or waiting for a bus that arrives 15 minutes late.