Also some companies keep up generic listings like "Senior engineer" not because they are hiring but because they would be willing to make an opportunistic hire for the right person, and want to collect the names of interested people for when they are hiring.
> but they keep job reqs open for appearances
People hire for appearances. If you're a manager you need people to manage. It makes you feel important. That job that I had at VMware... The more I think about it, that job was making someone feel important, and feel like they were checking a box. My prior job was about making someone feel important, too. (My boss was promoted to manager so he hired me.)
So I wouldn't go and say that a company is pretending to be hiring. It's more that priorities change, or sometimes the bar for a position is high, ect, ect.
Anecdote: a while back, I did an internship at a YC “darling” company that you’ve definitely heard of. They apparently liked me so much that a couple years ago, the lead of intern recruiting emailed me encouraging me to re-apply if I was ever on the job market.
Well it’s fall 2024, and they automatically rejected my resume without review.
Apparently not even internships are good enough as a hiring signal anymore.
Couple weeks later I pointed out to the person responsible for hiring that the postings were still up. They explicitly responded that they will keep them up. I didn't get an actual reason but I think it was for job market "research" and to keep a steady stream of applicants to threaten existing employees with replacement.
I had a discussion with an HR person the other day, she was claiming things like "oh we would just paste their CV into chatgpt and ask whether we should hire them", "his belt didn't match his shoes so we blacklisted him", "he used forbidden words like 'but', not a good match". Maybe it was just an exception, but I have a feeling like it would be pretty common. Between that and black magic CV filtering software, they have all the excuses. Nothing human about anything in that process anymore.
Personally, I don't think it's very honest, and I'm going to wonder what other honesty they have flexibility about.
I wonder whether any of the third-party job-posting sites has figured out ways to say you're not much hiring -- or only hiring/promoting internally, or only filling a funnel for possible future openings, or only hiring if a rare unicorn comes along -- without that looking negative to people who only want simpleton metrics.
Maybe the cooling of "growth" theatre startups will make it OK to sound like you're not "growing" right now.
A certain company (the name starts with "A") is widely known for doing this, you might guess which company I refer to by deep-diving into my comments history.
It looks exactly like in this YT short: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/V5VAN6ldS9o
For the job seekers on HN, avoid companies that engage in this behavior.
Well, in that case sure, I too am a multinational firm servicing the ___ industry just looking to fill a few roles: senior back end engineer, senior front end engineer, senior sales manager, senior accountant, founding product concept... that's all.
Well, if anyone wants to pretend to apply to my imaginary tech startup, we have an exciting product that combines intrusive cameras all over the customer’s house with cutting edge AI to blast a bloodcurdling scream through their smart speakers whenever they bite into a piece of fruit.
This is sort of the flip side of what others have described about having a post listed just in case a unicorn walks in. I don't need unicorns. I just need solid cloud consultants with a few years of client facing experience.
There are a lot of posts like that on HN's Who's Hiring. One of the most obvious examples is MixRank [0].
On the last jobs thread, they reposted [1] the same job advertisement they've been bot-posting for almost 2 years. It is identical.
And HN doesn't even allow us to flag/report this abuse.
Other companies that do the same: Cargado, Aha!,...
HN's "Who's Hiring" is turning into a trap.
It seems to me that finding a job in tech is easier than finding a job in any other professional field (e.g. chemical engineering). I am an electrical engineer myself and it was easier to get a job that paid better doing programming than in EE. Specially for the effort you have to put in.
How is it that HN complains so much about the whole process? Are people only applying to big tech companies or hot startups hoping to get the compensation they have been getting for the past n years?
There must be plenty of tech jobs in non tech industries doing normal, “boring” work like dba or maintaining legacy systems.
I mean, those kind of jobs still pay enough to live a normal, decent life. They might not be exciting but work is work. Although that is my take, coming from a 3rd world country and all.
Or am I just delusional and the “boring” jobs(that pay less but still enough) are nonexistent?
I am not from the US so I really don’t know how the market looks outside of the FAAANG/startup bubble. Heck, last time I checked even the US government needed tech folks. It feels that there are jobs out there but the jobs don’t match people’s expectation. But I could be really wrong.
My wife was looking for a job earlier this year (non tech), and it was interesting to see the grind from the outside. It seems that we are at the point where job seeker AIs and job poster AIs are just going to have to fight it out. There is no way to tell if a job is real or if you are going to get ghosted. As a candidate you don't have the time to research and write cover letters. It is a numbers game and if you are going to get ignored hundreds of times, you need to send out hundreds of applications, so you have to spam job postings. Job postings get lots of spam, so it is difficult to rise to the top of the pile. Each party needs a better AI than their competitors. It used to be a better CV, or a better job posting, but those days are long-gone.
Anecdotally, my wife applied to a large European cross-country multi-billion project as an architect. She had the perfect mix of government and private experience in relevant technologies or so we thought. There was no response.
The position remained open for a half year more along with dozens more.
Why would someone waste money advertising (even in print) on these positions, if no interviews were conducted?
Apparently all that happened is that high level management hired HR firm to place advertisements and collect candidates for lower level positions that would actually do the work. Presumably this was done in good faith in that project would be moving forward.
Now two years later the project has 4X ballooned in cost to 25 billion. Those local positions are still not filled.
My experience in looking for work last year suggests that corporate job portals were all ignored. I had employees I knew at Walmart and Fidelity confirm this to me and it was double confirmed by various third party recruiters who struggled to fill positions they knew actually did exist. Most of these openings were legally required in conformance with EEO laws but just weren’t real, at least to the public.
“We are hiring” == “we are always open to consider a special James Bond special one-in-a-thousand special developer”
I think the founders feel that it is the right posture to signal that the company is growing (external messaging) and that we are doing well (internal messaging).