There’s been no lack of pixels pushed talking about the current job market, and I don’t know how much I’ll add to it. But Im enjoying writing again, so… talking with people on all sides, there are some interesting, and weird, things at play. Everyone is acting in their own best interest and doing things that are reasonable, meanwhile it is not working well for anyone.
Locally rational, globally dysfunctional systems are tough to solve.
An acquaintance in recruiting said they didn’t believe there should be a hiring manager anymore. That shocked me. But unpacking it, their frustration was simple enough. The hiring team couldn’t articulate why candidates weren’t a good fit. The recruiter believed they were bringing in people with the requisite skills, but candidates kept getting rejected without specific gaps. There was no feedback loop to improve the funnel.
It reminded me of hiring a developer years ago for a system written in Perl, a venerable and somewhat famously inscrutable programming language. During intake, the conversation focused heavily on keywords and questions to determine whether candidates knew Perl.
Perl mattered a little because it was uncommon, but mostly I cared whether someone was interested in working in that environment. But that was not what I was hiring for, and generally it’s never been what I’ve hired for.
I’m hiring for the problem solving. Software is a fantastic way of delivering that problem solving, but it’s still just one of the tools we have available. The best software engineers I’ve worked with were often annoyed when their solution space was limited to creating or modifying code due to organizational silos.
General problem solving is hard to hire for, hard to demonstrate, and hard to acquire when opportunities to practice it early in a career are limited. But I think we’re going to have to get more comfortable with that difficulty as the cost of acquiring, or at least borrowing, technical skills drops dramatically, at least on the surface.
Call them “builders” or whatever name we land on. We’ll still have platform-focused people, application-focused people, and specialists, but many of the hard lines we’ve organizationally drawn around tool usage are fading quickly.
A simple, probably oversimplified analogy is Excel. We solve a huge number of problems with it, from calculations to data wrangling, but few people say their job is Excel. The job is to deliver an outcome, and Excel happens to be the tool. Just like software, spreadsheet quality varies wildly. Some are clean and extensible. Some have “DO NOT CHANGE OR EVERYTHING BREAKS AND I DON’T KNOW WHY” comments. Others are scratchpads meant to be thrown away. A lot, though certainly not all, software is going the same way.
The good news is that those of us fortunate enough to work in outcome based organizations only have to adjust to the new words we’re using to describe it. The bad news is that we’re quite uncommon.