This is not unusual. My spouse works for Glassdoor. Entry level programmer jobs in Texas will get 2000 applications (not bots) within about 72 hours. Desperate people from all over the US.
I think at one time the advice to “play the numbers game” was correct for online job apps. Not anymore.
Even more saddening, Glassdoor uses a temp/test sample job ad. It’s for cat sitting. $15/hr. That will get hundreds of apps in 48 hours if someone forgets to take it down (is only supposed to go up for 60 mins max but things happen).
Not to hijack, but do you or your spouse have an opinion on the WSJ story about companies intensely curating their reviews (maybe even paying/threatening the employees and/or Glassdoor)?
I noticed a local company I follow had fluctuating review counts between 30-45. I wrote a web scraper to see if reviews were being taken down, and for this company, over 20 1 or 2 star reviews have been taken down, but any new 5 star reviews stay.
It’s worth mentioning that sometimes there are legitimate reasons for removing reviews.
Our company had a slew of negative reviews suddenly. Upon closer look, the reviewers were working in positions we had never employed anyone for. They were posting about an office they worked at in Israel (we are in the USA).
Turns out there was another startup in Israel who had a very similar name to ours. That company closed a big seed round and started hiring a bunch of people (and apparently they don’t treat their employees well, based on the reviews mistakenly left on our page).
The process of getting the reviews removed was a major pain. It requires multiple emails and phone calls with Glassdoor. Ironically, Glassdoor sales reps started up selling us on a premium Glassdoor account after we had a sudden uptick if views on our company (which were actually from people trying to see reviews for the other company in Israel) so we also leveraged the sales process to push Glassdoor into looking at the legitimacy of the reviews.
I definitely wouldn’t say it was an easy process. Glassdoor was, by default, resistant and skeptical about any complaint relating to a request to remove a review. It took multiple months (and persistence) to convince them the reviews were not for our company.
It’s easy to jump to conclusions about Glassdoor moderating reviews and removing bad ones. But also remember there are cases when reviews are not legitimate and should be removed.
(In addition to the example I provided above, another example is competing companies leaving negative reviews on competitor profiles to sabotage their hiring efforts).
If you received a load of erroneous and accidental negative reviews, would you honestly just ignore it hoping and assuming that it'll be levelled out by the erroneous and accidental positive reviews?
I can confirm this. I personally know of two companies were accurate but negative reviews were taken down by Glassdoor. One was the company I worked for. In this case it was triggered at the request of the CEO, who was heavily criticized in the reviews. He made HR sign up for a Glassdoor Premium account, so that they took the reviews down.
All negative reviews were 100% accurate from my point of view and not insulting in any way. So if you see the "managed account" flag at Glassdoor, be careful ;)
It seems the trick is to say that the reviews contain "company internal information",...or something like that.
Just like Yelp. Quite tragic that this is the business model that seems to succeed.. if the law protected individuals over corporate greed, this tactic would be illegal.
Contrary to what the GP is saying, Glassdoor seems EXTREMELY resistant unless the review is actually fake and/or contains proprietary information. It's absolutely nothing like Yelp.
I do understand that they have their "own" system that automatically reviews posts and removes them. Sadly that hasn't worked out fantastically at my employer, they mostly remove these 5 star reviews.
Another reason why Glassdoor takes down negative reviews is that often the 1 or 2 star reviews don't follow their content guidelines [0].
- [Your review should be truthful and constitute your own personal opinion] -- Any review that contains false information that the company can easily prove is wrong can be removed.
- [Each individual is allowed one review, per employer, per year, per review type.] If the company can prove a review is a dup, it can be removed
- [We do not allow reviews that include negative comments about identifiable individuals outside of this group.] - A review saying "My coworker Alice was a real A Hole." can easily be removed
- [We realize talking about work can get emotionally charged, but we don't approve reviews that include certain profanities] -- Anything that's aggressively worded "I worked at this company, it fu* sucks" will be removed
I'd guess than 90% of Glassdoor reviews removed blatantly break their guidelines. There is probably another 10% that consist of companies trying to game the system, but it's impossible to know for sure.
Great points, and some of the 20 reviews in my anecdotal sample meet this criteria. However most do not break any of these rules, and are simple, factual (as far as I can tell, I dont work there) reviews about why they do not recommend working at this company, yet they are removed - sometimes in as little as 12-24 hours.
The company I am referencing is a premium member with a “marked” post (5 stars) at the top of their page.
So, why does Glassdoor apparently listen to CEOs an lawyers when they claim employers cannot have reviews removed, when they appear to be doing just that?
Have a paid contract with Glassdoor and they're exceptionally strict and make it known they'll only take down reviews containing blatant falsehoods or proprietary information.
You can flag them, and they'll get looked at - and their definitions of falsehoods or private info are obviously subjective, but it's been made clear to us they can't do anything just because we've paid.
Will see how the contract plays out, but I'm minded to believe them, part of the sales patter is that negative reviews actually help you weed out people who wouldn't fit in so they're already lining you up to think about having negative ones up.
That being said, and though I find their business model disgusting, we definitely weren't a hard sell for them.
I used to work for a place where, during the 60 or 90 day check-in with HR after you got hired, HR would put a hard sell on you to write a Glassdoor review.
It had the effect of flooding it with 4 and 5 star reviews from people who hasn't been around long enough to see any downsides to their job.
Meanwhile, as the company began imploding, the folks jumping ship mostly didn't bother to write a 1 star review on the way out.
I experienced this too. In fact it was within the first couple weeks of being hired that you were encouraged to post to Glassdoor (and a Linkedin post that they curated).
Definitely rubbed me the wrong way, but besides that they were really great people. I don't know if they realize what bad taste this is, just don't care, or if it's really just one person with too much influence creating policy.
This was a while ago, so I can only imagine it's become more prevalent. I've come to believe this is pretty much accepted behaviour for SV companies, and I wouldn't put much weight into Glassdoor reviews beyond just checking for red flags.
I've also definitely sorted by date on Glassdoor and ignored any reviews that looked like they were posted all at once.
On more than one occasion I've seen a blistering one star review, followed by a bunch of positive reviews that all came in within days. It was clearly a situation where someone at the company saw the low score, had an "uh-oh moment," and called in the cavalry to write positive reviews.
Anyone trying to push me into leaving a review would be a massive red flag that'd instantly make me look for a new job and ensure I'd leave a 1-star review once I had one...
I have a theory that this happens in Amazon to cheap products (e.g. it's great the first couple months and breaks after 6, but the review is made several weeks after the first product). The reviews mean less as a result, and the only good signal is a heartfelt review from someone who has used the product (or in Glassdoor's case, has worked there a while) a while (and it's worth scrolling pages of the meaningless review to find them).
In my experience, it's far easier and more common for companies to simply flood their review pool with bogus positive reviews, rather than bother about negative reviews.
Plenty of startup founders boosted their rating by telling HR, family, friends, and foreign clickfarms to post 5 star Glassdoor reviews.
It's extremely easy to inflate your rating this way. Glassdoor does nothing to prevent it. There are small startups with more 5-star Glassdoor reviews than employees.
As long as your bots also upvote every other 5-star reviews, anyone looking at your review pool, sorted either by recency or "most helpful", will have to scroll through dozens of these bogus 5-star reviews before they get to any real negative review. By that point, the negative review will seem like a biased exception posted by a disgruntled employee - if they even get to it.
The worst aspect of this is how easy it is for truly terrible companies to royally screw their employees yet retain an eye-popping 4.2+ rating on Glassdoor. I've seen a couple of cases where companies badly mistreated employees, got a well-deserved torrent of 1-2 star reviews as a result, then flooded their pool with hundreds of fake 5-star reviews. Now these terrible companies, that truly do mistreat and abuse their workforce, have a Glassdoor page and review pool disguising them as a top 1% employer.
I had been contacted by a glass door rep about two years ago who "vaguely promised" they could remove our bad reviews if we signed up for one of their paid services.
> I think at one time the advice to “play the numbers game” was correct for online job apps. Not anymore.
Are you sure about that? Most of the posts I see from devs who just got well-paying jobs show them applying to 20+ companies. Usually more. Then they'll get interviews at several, offers from 1-5? It's absolutely a numbers game on both sides.
This just seems so strange to me. When I look for work, I look for companies doing things I find interesting, then narrow that down to maybe half dozen at most and send them my resume. I don't look for mostly generic developer work, though. I'm pretty specific with the industries and technologies (RFID, HW control systems, etc) (but not necessarily the developer stack; that's easy to get up to speed on).
This is the difference between a person who has an established career already and a junior getting their first job. I take my time with job searches and pick companies I like, but getting my very first job was difficult and it wasn't a great job.
i just find it funny that theres posts about shortages of it people, and posts about a quarter of a million ppl applying to one company. who's lying. :D
You're missing an adjective from your observation: qualified.
For any given position, even when you're pretty specific on the requirements, you will get an onslaught of applicants who have absolutely no business trying to apply for said position, but they do it anyways just because it vaguely matches a skillset they have and they need a job.
This isn't a criticism of such persons; it's foolish for people to think that a word for word perfect job exists just for them, and kudos to those willing to be a bit flexible on what they previously felt were non-negotiable aspects of jobs (I am referring to things I personally consider trivial, in this case, but I feel that when it comes time to start negotiating, said items are thrown out first as bargaining chips)
We have many employers seeking a specific type of qualified person; we have qualified and unqualified people all looking for jobs; it can be a bit messy to sort the two. This is why the interview process exists.
Sometimes HR is too specific, and even though you are missing one core requirement you match the other criteria very well. Anyways, it’s low overhead to submit an application, and low overhead to reject them. I’m still very picky about what jobs I apply to.
The best jobs still require an inside recommendation. It is very rare that you’ll be able to score those just by applying online (if the JD even goes up at all online).
You definitely need to know someone to get your application to the top of the pile. Perhaps the legal industry is an extreme outlier but aside from my very first job as a “summer associate” (read: intern) I haven’t gotten a single job from blindly applying. And even the summer program was an “inside recommendation” of sorts since the school organizes the whole OCI process.
Blindly sending email to managers who might hire you works better than sending an application off blindly to HR. Of course, the former is often seen as SPAM though can work if you have the right qualifications and they have the right needs.
As a manager who might hire you, I would tack on some caution to this advice.
This works for smaller businesses that can be flexible and are not really liable/viable targets for anything.
Once a business gets even some traction and size, this becomes a wasted effort, if not an annoyance to the manager. Most of the time I choose not to respond as it's just the safest option for us, or I redirect the email to our HR.
Most of the managers making the decisions do not do hiring as a full time job, it's just an aspect of their job. While it can be enjoyable, it's also very emotionally draining and physically taxing (non-stop interviews on top of regular responsibilities) and when people go outside of the normal process like this (and worse, raise a stink if you don't respond to their deviation well), it just adds more headaches for me.
So the above advice might work sometimes, but be aware there is another side.
I believe it's also due to unspecific job ads. Ads for "experienced developers" could require anything from 2-20 years of job experience. Sometimes job titles give it away but quite often, candidates won't really be able to judge if they're actually qualified.
If they are on unemployment or receiving welfare benefits, they may be required to apply for a minimum number of jobs... in which case if they want to stay in their current situation, picking jobs you are obviously not qualified for is a way to meet the requirements without much risk of getting a job. Of course, if you do happen to get the job, at least its a much better one than you thought you could get!
This is a very cynical and broad statement that enforces the common myth that people on welfare are somehow lazy or don't want to work. Also a general disregard of people who are working and receive said benefits to make ends meet.
Whaoh! I apologize if I gave that impression. I certainly did not mean to imply that everyone on welfare does those things, or even a majority. I was only pointing out that there is a motive, and that it is an action that some people take. I grew up on welfare as my mother was just one of those "working poor" you mention. I would never want to disregard the plight of people like my mother, and certainly did not intend my comment to do so.
This seems to be very relevant. I have double BSc and MSc degrees in STEM fields and am still struggling to find a proper job. On my first job I made less than 2k (for 4 days a week, but still). I've had offers which were even lower as well.
I've seen people in other fields with a lot less education do a lot better. It really makes me sceptic about the shortage of developers in Europe. If there really would be a shortage, surely developers would get paid more.
He means 2k per month, but with a 4-day work week, so probably 32 hours. Not sure if that is supposed to be before or after taxes tough, if it's before taxes, ouch.
Are you claiming that there are a large number of qualified applicants that are currently unemployed because there are no openings paying as much as they believe they are worth?
Or are you saying that if they paid more, already employed applicants would jump from another company, leaving a job opening at their current company? If this is the case, it still means that there are fewer qualified candidates then openings, and no amount of raising pay will (in the short term of ~4 years) mean there are enough qualified candidates.
I suspect the imbalance is greatly over-egged by companies whose problems lie their business model, but who yearn for a quick fix of lower wages rather than (gasp) actual innovation.
how do you qualify if someone is qualified? how do you know what percentage of these people is unqualified? do you go by the rate who is not hired? i know there's people out there applying for jobs they don't have the required skillset for, don't get me wrong. but these numbers which are posted say nothing about that, and so no observation can be made on that point? Or am i missing something further?
They announced they were hiring 30,000 people. Having even 10 people apple for 1 job isn't highly unusual. So having 200k apply for 30k jobs doesn't seem odd. Plus because its a big announcement from a huge company, it will draw in far more than the usual random job ad on monster.com. I don't see anything surprising about this. One of the largest companies on earth had a huge hiring blitz and it brought in applicants from all over the country (and world, probably).
Applicants are not necessarily qualified. There could be thousands of unqualified people applying for a job and at the same time a shortage of qualified applicants.
There are two reasons for that wide distribution:
1. Lack of preparation/expectation management. I have seen people apply for development jobs with no skills or experience thinking the job is there to train them. It is no surprise (except maybe to the applicant) that they are quickly disqualified. It is absurd how commonly this occurs.
I have also seen college educated computer science graduates get a job and completely struggle. There is some expectation among some of these guys that they deserve an awesome job, because they went to an awesome school, and everybody has always showered them with praise. The worst is when one of these guys get a job writing JavaScript only to discover it isn't anything like the Java they were taught at school. Instead of accepting reality it is simply easier to blame the language and do everything possible to make it behave and look like Java. epic fail.
2. Selective bias. How do you define competent or qualified? This is completely subjective and varies by organization. I have encountered several organizations where the developers cannot read code. They compensate with assertion testing, frameworks, external packages, layers of tooling and so forth. The unwillingness of a candidate to accept that stupidity is certainly an incompatibility and can be seen as a lack of competence. If the interviewing party likely struggles with literacy it is not something they are likely to test for, for example.
In my experience under-confident hiring teams always want super competent applicants until they see what super competence actually is. It sounds absolutely fantastic in theory until they see it in practice. Then the insecurity sets in. What is really tragic about that is not that incompatibilities happen, but that insecure teams often don't see it until far after they have wasted people's time or after they have hired the applicant only to wish they hadn't.
My recommendation for experienced developers is to always identify these incompatibilities as early as possible. Unless equity is attached this is so much more important than compensation.
---
In a perfect world people would learn to read and write code before applying for jobs, which implies literally reading and writing (not tooling or dicking around with layers of abstractions). We don't live in a perfect world as evident by many applicants and employers.
It's crazy what people think is acceptable. At least half of all the people that apply to our junior positions cannot answer simple question such as "how would you find the first "42" in an array of integers, and give me the index". If they don't have an idea of how to count with a for loop and write an if statement, they're not qualified for programming. Some even ask if they can take the "assignment" home and get back to me.
Well I don't know, I recently interviewed on a phone interview and then they wanted me to do some coding during the phone call through some shared codepen solution, what they wanted was not much more complicated then what you describe and something I should be able to do with eyes closed.
Really it was exactly in my wheelhouse where I do things a thousand times more complicated every day to general acclaim of the people I work with.
And I had the panic/freezing thing I've read about other people having before but never experienced (at least not that extreme) and as a result I totally flopped. I mean I sort of did what was wanted but not completely. I'm not explaining exactly what it was they wanted because it is too embarrassing to even talk about.
This has made me consider that maybe the number of applicants I hear about who cannot do the simplest thing has to do with some sort of personal panic/problem/not liking the particular testing method and not some actual permanent incapacity.
on edit: and not just embarrassing but also distressing like a guitarist suddenly unable to play guitar. It is actually hard to describe what the experience was.
The term is stage fright, and most do not believe in it until they feel it.
The trick is to reassure yourself that your judgement is way good enough, and that you can't do worse than try your best. Of course you need to be fine with presenting unclean/broken/bad code. Train with non-code situations, if you can find them. They are less rigid than code, and thus task your judgment much more, so code won't push you as hard.\
I am sorry you had to go through that, it sound truly awful. I however get so many applicants that I need to reject the majority, and that is about the simplest initial litmus test I can think of. I am rather confident that the majority are not panicking, and those that are get significant slack - I'd rather spend 10 minutes more establishing some trust and comfort if they express the need to me, than outright dismiss them. I'm too emphatic for anything less.
If it's any comfort, stage fright is something you can overcome. It's not easy, but it's doable.
yeah I'm not sure if it's really stage fright. I am familiar with stage fright and I hate giving presentations and similar things. At any rate I'm not saying it isn't the case that some of the people who are bad in the interview are actually bad, I just wonder how accurate the whole X% of applicants can't code really is.
At any rate I do pretty well for myself and while it was unpleasant, it is past, just - made me wonder.
> Some even ask if they can take the "assignment" home and get back to me.
The amount of cut-and-paste I've seen on "take home" assignments is just staggering.
I've only ever used it for pre-screening before scheduling phone interviews, and so only a handful of very simple questions as I'd have considered it unfair to ask anyone to put much effort in that early in the process. I always cut and paste a few sentences into Google. One hiring round in particular stands out to me, as a substantial majority of candidates had cut and pasted answers. There were always some, but that was extreme.
The worst thing was that many of them got the answers wrong. I'd have been open to considering them if someone honestly told me they didn't know the answer but was able to find an answer on Google, and showed me they'd been able to look up the correct answer.
But we got things like someone trying to pass of a one page cut and paste from an Oracle manual to a question about MySQL that required a one sentence answer as their own. And someone who cut and pasted a reply to the same question from a forum post, but who failed to read on to where other commenters had explained at length why the answer they'd cut and pasted was wrong.
I mean, I often search for solutions to things I don't know by heart. Knowing how to find the right solution by search is a skill itself and a developer that knows how to learn can be valuable, but the combination of dishonesty and apparent failure to be able to ascertain the quality of the responses they found was terrifying given that many of these applicants had believable CVs that included years of working as developers elsewhere. (Of course given their willingness to lie about their answers, I can't really trust CV's either given we never got far enough in the process to request references; I'd like to think their CVs were fake too, because the alternative is worse)
If a developer can do simple programming, and then are honest with not knowing the answer to a question "but here is what I found searching for an answer and I think it's x, because y" - would get so many point in my book. That is the spirit of learning.
But it doesn't list those projects? Or does nobody take a closer look at them before inviting them? I mean if they can't solve a problem like that, they couldn't have made anything remotely useful, right?
It's less work to spend 20 min on them for an initial interview, than verify their CV. And even if we did start to call around the only thing a previous employer can tell us is if they did indeed work there or not, no specifics.
If you're not a scrub, go through non-scrub recruiters, and manage to get through a handful of high-vis projects relatively unscathed, word travels extremely quickly and from then on out you can pretty much coast mostly on reputation.
I've gotten at least a phone interview from almost every place I've applied over the last half decade, even when I was an entry level programmer. I'm not sure what the deal is. I guess I've just been extraordinarily lucky.
6 years. At my current company you have to demonstrate leadership abilities and also technical ability to get it. It isn't given to people for just existing for a certain amount of time in a specific career. At least not where I work, a lot of places do that which leads to incompetent seniors.
When there are 20 qualified applicants per job you can apply to dozens or hundreds of jobs and beat or negate the unfavorable numbers. When there are hundreds or thousands of applicants for jobs, you can't apply for tens of thousands of jobs. The listings just don't exist. Your only real chance is to find an inside connection and skip the anonymous application portal.
>Entry level programmer jobs in Texas will get 2000 applications
There are some major Corporations here in DFW, some that have hired 1000's of H1B's (Car companies, Airlines, etc). It doesn't surprise me that Americans are desperate for work.
What does hiring qualified h1b visa holders have to do with anything? The desperate Americans are not qualified for the job. If they were it would be in the company’s best interest to hire the American.
The h1b program requires paying a local market wage. Even if you don’t believe it does the effect would be to just lower wages, it would still be better to hire the qualified American at reduced wages rather than sponsor an h1b.
>What does hiring qualified h1b visa holders have to do with anything?
Because as surprising as this may sound to you there are plenty of qualified talent already in the USA that can't compete with the lower wages companies can pay H1B employees. I see plenty of H1B employees who will literally eat shit from management over the fear of losing their status.
I'm not against bringing in hard to find talent that we don't have, what I'm against is bringing in cheap labor to replace US Citizens/IT Workforce which is the norm with these companies.
They can't compete? How can they not compete? The link you're showing me shows average wages for the H1-B group near $80k for all occupations. That's well above the median income for Texas, and well well above the poverty line.
So if this large pool of workers in the US can't "compete" what are they doing? Refusing to work and therefore making $0 rather than making $98k? That doesn't make sense. You seem to be implying these workers are displaced into other industries. These industries must clearly pay into the six figures, otherwise these workers are still better off competing with their h1-b friends. What industry are all these displaced American software engineers pushed into, pray tell?
Your link doesn't prove shit about market wage levels, as often H1-B offers are skewed towards more entry level positions, so of course the H1-B wage of all workers in broad job category may be lower than all native workers of all experience levels.
I'm not going to argue the point of whether H1-B's are offered lower pay. As I said, that merely lowers the market price of labor where the H1-Bs are allowed. If the companies were really saving money they could use the mere fact that they have access to H1-B workers and offer that pay level to natives. It would be cheaper and easier.
Please explain to me, if there is such a large pool of qualified workers, why they don't work for the reduced H1-B wages that you claim are setting the market rate. What is their better negotiated alternative?
>The link you're showing me shows average wages for the H1-B group near $80k for all occupations.
You might not understand how things work. The wages are representative of what the staffing firms who contract out the labor charge for the H1B employee. They make substantially less than $80k even though that's the rate a company pays to avoid hiring a US employee.
that doesn't change the economics at all.
the money paid to the worker through a middle-man has no bearing on the labor market as seen by the company and their bottom-line. You could send your paycheck into the incinerator every month... it makes no difference.
as you say the $80k is the rate to avoid hiring a US employee. maybe that's lower than what it would be with no h1-b, but then what are these displaced american workers doing for more than $80k?
>what are these displaced american workers doing for more than $80k?
Being unemployed and making 0k. Avoiding hiring US employees for over $80k doesn't mean they're hiring those who accept below $80k. They're not being considered for those jobs at all in the first place. I assure you there are legions of very smart lawyers who work very hard on the process for employers - I would know, I've prepared the petitions, and the sham job postings with intentionally obscure and unnecessary skill requirements placed in print newspapers when the H-1B worker was our client and already chosen for the job ahead of time. There is often no intention to consider American workers. There are entire IT departments at companies like Disney, for instance, that are de-facto off limits to American workers. H-1B workers are very attractive to employers not just for the low wages, but also for the fact that they're dependent on the particular company sponsoring them and will often stick around forever and endure the shitty wages, hours, and work environment.
The lack of perspective and basic reasoning on this is staggering.
> shitty wages, hours, and work environment.
A "shitty" wage is better than being unemployed and making 0k. Perhaps not if we were talking about at or near minimum wage. But we're not. We're talking nearly double the median income of the location in question and well beyond the poverty line.
If there were really this untapped market of native talent to replace H1-B imports, that are on average making $80k (actually $100k for tech), then that immense pool of workers can settle for $70k, $60k, $50k, $40k, $30k... and why wouldn't these companies take them at some low price between $100k and minimum wage? Why would these companies insist on hiring H1-Bs at a $100k a head if there was this large population of native, qualified, unemployed workers making $0 that would be lucky to get a measly $40k (to throw a number on it).
"Legions of smart lawyers" also sounds expensive. You don't need a legion of smart lawyers to hire from this large, unemployed, qualified, bonafide American talent pool that you insist exists.
The mental gymnastics H1-B paranoiacs go through does not fail to impress. During the first dot-com bust and post-recession at least it had a whiff of plausibility. But tech employment is at all time highs, it's beyond ludicrous.
And another thing that doesn't add up, the average for non H1-Bs in that pdf was close to $200k. And the unemployment rate in Texas is lower than the national average which is already low. In tech heavy cities like Austin it is even lower (near 2%!). So I have seen no strong evidence that H1-Bs are pushing American tech workers out of the middle class, the opposite in fact.
If you really know someone in tech that is unemployed and making nothing, then either they are not qualified or they have some other limitation making them unemployable. There are plenty of job listings at all levels across the US that are not open to H1-B sponsorship and some that are open just to US citizens (and do not require an existing clearance). Scapegoating H1-B programs in this economy isn't even offensive, it's just sad.
> You don't need a legion of smart lawyers to hire from this large, unemployed, qualified, bonafide American talent pool
true, but I think the point is that the lawyer fees are less than the extra costs and risks associated with hiring from the existing pool of local US workers (i.e. losses from employees who freely leave the company after a short period, transfer knowledge to competitors, shop around for higher salaries, and confidently exercise the fuller collection of employee rights which H1Bs may lack)
> If you really know someone in tech that is unemployed and making nothing, then either they are not qualified or they have some other limitation making them unemployable.
That's certainly one interpretation of the matter. Here's another: If the labor pool lacked exogenous labor inputs, it is possible (though far from guaranteed) that corporations would be willing to use their resources to hire more from the existing pool of US candidates and then train them and/or help them to overcome other limitations.
I'm staggered that you accuse me of lack of perspective and basic reasoning, then posted this. Why pretend as if I wasn't talking about a shitty wage relative to the market rate of the skills in question?
Most tech workers wouldn't take a $40k job because they realize that's a gross undervaluing of their skillsets. It's a much smarter decision to continue applying and hope somebody recognizes your ability and pays you what your labor is worth, rather than tie up your schedule and possibly relocate to work the low-paying job. You can ask these bad-faith questions all you want, and they might be helpful for confusing and misleading people online, but I assure you, employers have thought about them more than you, and have long since found their answer.
It seems to me that you're in outright denial about companies getting cheaper labor through the H-1B system. Instead of asking these "if companies really want to save money, why don't they just x" questions, I'd ask you why Disney DID lay off hundreds of IT workers at a time and had them train their H-1B replacements who often lacked the same skill level as their predecessors if it wasn't a significant cost savings? These aren't allegations, they're reality. What was found in court wasn't that Disney isn't guilty of replacing workers, it's that they did do it and it's perfectly legal! Wages have dropped, many Americans have switched to other professions they wouldn't have otherwise, and profits for IT firms have gone through the roof due to the H-1B program. Try reading rather than theorizing all by yourself. https://www.nber.org/chapters/c13842.pdf
And go tell the Disney workers they didn't really lose their jobs.
Business executives and politicians endlessly complain that there is a "shortage" of qualified Americans and that the U.S. must admit more high-skilled guest workers to fill jobs in STEM fields: science, technology, engineering and math. This claim is echoed by everyone from President Obama and Rupert Murdoch to Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates.
Yet within the past month, two odd things occurred: Census reported that only one in four STEM degree holders is in a STEM job, and Microsoft announced plans to downsize its workforce by 18,000 jobs. Even so, the House is considering legislation that, like the Senate immigration bill before it, would increase to unprecedented levels the supply of high-skill guest workers and automatic green cards to foreign STEM students.
As longtime researchers of the STEM workforce and immigration who have separately done in-depth analyses on these issues, and having no self-interest in the outcomes of the legislative debate, we feel compelled to report that none of us has been able to find any credible evidence to support the IT industry's assertions of labor shortages.
...
If a shortage did exist, wages would be rising as companies tried to attract scarce workers. Instead, legislation that expanded visas for IT personnel during the 1990s has kept average wages flat over the past 16 years. Indeed, guest workers have become the predominant source of new hires in these fields.
From your own citation: "Counterfactual simulations based on our model suggest that immigration increased the overall welfare of US natives, and raised workers’ incomes by 0.2% to 0.3%."
So they found that H-1B, etc increased native worker incomes overall.
So they mentioned some distributional issues ...
"wages for [high-skilled] US computer scientists would have been 2.6% to 5.1% higher in 2001"
Oh that kind of blows a little bit. But let's put this in perspective. 2.6%-5.1% higher in 2001 would be the difference between 100k and 103-105k. Sure I would love to have had that dough... but this 1) fails to demonstrate a substantial savings to firms 2) completely burns your argument workers making $0k.. they're doing quite fucking well. (100k was close to the average for mid-level software engineers in my neighborhood in 2001). This is not standard of living altering stuff.
And overall the economy did better with immigration.
> Most tech workers wouldn't take a $40k job because they realize that's a gross undervaluing of their skillsets.
What do you define as "undervaluing?" What sets this number? What makes $80k a fair wage vs $40k? Well the ultimate is the market. It is absolutely true that the mere act of bringing in more labor via H-1B will lower wages. I will not dispute that, that's basic microecon.
But how do you determine what your "labor is worth?" Because your labor is worth whatever that market price is, there is no "hope" to it. If a population is refusing to work for offers of $40k, because that "undervalues" their skills then that implies that the market has jobs that are correctly greater valued. If this were not the case then these people should just stop and take the $40k job, why continue applying for something that doesn't exist?
Of course not everything is smooth. The lag in filling these positions is what contributes to frictional unemployment. This is a good chunk of what makes up the unemployment figures. The fact remains, and what you just ignored... the unemployment rate in all industries, but especially IT and most engineering disciplines is the lowest it has been in years.
The Disney issue ultimately displaced not much more than 100 workers which is less than 0.2% of their tech and IT workforce, if that is the worst of the "bad news", it doesn't diminish my point.
Again, there is no disputing that a foreign worker program will lower certain wages in the short-term, possibly longer. There is plenty of evidence that this has not affected employment on higher skilled jobs.
The other weird thing that is always mentioned by H-1B foes is how shitty these Indian workers with no experience are (it was mentioned multiple times in the article you linked). So how does that square? If these workers are truly that crap, then why would anyone be surprised that Disney or anyone would want to get rid of expensive workers that can be replaced by these crap workers. Why should Disney or anyone pay top dollar for someone that can be replaced with the human equivalent of a shell script. If these crap workers really don't work out (and yes this has happened), well then the market isn't really harmed then is it?
What about automation and consolidation of services. Both have had tremendous effects on the IT industry. There were well paying jobs for "Computer Operators" a few short years ago.. now there are literally a handful and they pay barely above minimum wage. The influx of H-1B holders had little to do with this.
Finally, I'm not going to argue this, this is just a question: What do you feel gives you more entitlement to a job that an immigrant will willingly bring themselves over here and do for less?
after it says in the absence of immigration, wages for US computer scientists would have been 2.6% to 5.1% higher in 2001 the NBER study's abstract continues US workers switch to other occupations, reducing the number of US born computer scientists by 6.1% to 10.8%
we can't really know the detailed impact of the immigration policy without also knowing how those occupation switchers fared. did they get jobs that paid the same, more or less? what were their new working conditions like? and, if their new careers are outside of STEM fields, would they have been better off majoring in something else in the first place?
it's possible that the economic efficiency gains of the corporations resulted in reduced efficiency in the individual lives of these job switchers. it's quite possible that these workers paid the price and corporations reaped the benefits.
anyway, economic, labor and immigration policy are determined by factors that go beyond corporate efficiency and profitability. and corporations advocate their own narrow interests, not just the interests of "the overall economy" or GDP maximization or some other umbrella. it seems reasonable that a sector's workers bear as little obligation to advocate for the "overall economy" as corporations bear.
workers who feel severely impacted by these changes are certainly free in a democracy to advocate for policies that benefit them. after all, that's precisely what corporations do. this is a political balancing act more than it is some sort of ethical argument.
Historically there's been a lot of anti-foreign bias and discrimination from US workers and companies, which in part goes under the heading of "cultural fit." But I've often wondered about it going in the opposite direction too. In an office where most of the workers have come from the same country (outside the US), is there ever a bias against US based, English-only speaking workers?
So what. F-1s, OPTs, H1B, are people too and as a rule are taking an enormous risk in life uprooting to a new country and a different language. Most of them have advanced degrees. Hundreds of them apply to open jobs too. They are human beings, and there are a lot of human beings - regardless of arbitrary imaginary lines that divide us - who are looking for work.
But when hired, they become tied to a company in a way that the average worker is not, pushing down wages. If they have a rare skill set the US is missing, it is better for both them and the workers they compete with if they are allowed to move over here without being tied to the specific employer, so the employer cannot use that as leverage to push down their compensation, and thus market compensation.
So you believe they have more rights to work in the USA than US citizens? A US Citizen can't even apply for the job the company slated for an H1B applicant.
"So you believe they have more rights to work in the USA than US citizens"
What are you even asking? Do you know how many hoops they have to go through to get an H1B in the first place, and how many conditions they have once they are here working on one? Do you understand what it's like to be a month or so away from being deported if you get fired and can't find a new job, and living with the pressure every day?
To answer your question: no they don't, and the situation reflects that. Why did you capitalize "Citizen"?
>Do you understand what it's like to be a month or so away from being deported if you get fired and can't find a new job, and living with the pressure every day?
That's the biggest reason why H1-Bs cause problems for American workers: people on those visas are under immense pressure to accept deals that natives and more secure immigrants would not. The pressure on American workers would be reduced if all H1Bs were converted to citizenships.
In my experience, roles are not "slated" for H1B applicants. Rather, companies have to evaluate whether or not the applicant is worth burning an H1B visa to hire them. The result is that the hiring bar is higher for foreign workers.
There are 1.5 billion Indians and as a society they push their children towards education strongly.
They don't make any less than other H1B hires.
I am not Indian, but I am not going to tolerate your vile, racist shit about being "overrun" and "indians bring down the standard of living wherever they move to".
I have found immigrants to the US, regardless of origin and regardless of culture of prior social status, take citizenship a hundred times more seriously than most native born Americans, because they don't take it for granted.
And that isn't the reason at all that 200k people applied to Amazon, either. H1Bs aren't the problem, they are a scapegoat.
I'll just mention to the sadly racist and ignorant nikofeyn since I can't reply to his post:
If groups of Indian immigrants tend to bring down the "standard of living" in your experience it probably has much to do with the fact that these are often young, unmarried men.
Anyone that has visited a college dorm knows that this low standard of living has nothing to do with race.
It would be nice if we could criticize this as a shitty hiring practice that hurts US citizens without someone strawmanning the critique into being a personal attack on the character of H-1B workers. I wish them all the best, and would love to compete with them on an even playing field. And I wish all the worst to big companies that use them to replace and devalue vast swathes of American workers.
No matter the strength of the economy, there will be people who are not good at applying for and getting jobs. That’s who most of these applications come from.
Great clickbait. The first sentence provides crucial context - Amazon wants to hire 30K. So they had, on average, about 7 applications for every job.
That actually doesn't seem so great.
It's even less impressive when it's incredibly easy to get a ton of low-quality matches when recruiting.
So if Amazon execs wanted to tout a big number of applications they could just advertise these positions in a wildly aggressive way so as to get a ton of poor quality matches. And I'm willing to bet this is exactly what they did.
This actually makes me a lot less inclined to work at Amazon - it seems like they're just playing a numbers game, not really trying to recruit for cultural fit.
I wonder how many of these people will be laid off within 3 years of being hired.
They were hiring in 6 cities, so that's an average of 30k applicants per location. That's a heck of a lot for a single community, even in a large city. How many businesses get tens of thousands of job applicants at a single location?
One of the locations is Arlington Virginia, the future location of HQ2, but they're only hiring 400 there now. In future they expect that will go up to 24k, which is about 10% of the population of the city!
Amazon has a huge amount of churn. Most employees only stick around for 2 years and then leave shortly afterwards (once the cash bonuses stop and they start dribbling out stock instead).
but were all 30k jobs listed? I'm assuming the positions listed were nowhere near close to the positions they need to hire for. As in, they probably havent even listed for a lot of the roles.
What benefit would they have to do that? They need to hire 30k people, if more roles evolve as they interview and realize they need them they'll make them but then again, if you're hiring 30k people at once you probably have a good idea of who you need to hire all the way up and down the management chain.
on the other hand - I can't imagine I'm the only person to have been getting quite a few "come work for us" emails from Amazon via LinkedIn recently (two in the last month, six in the last year). The solicitations do not appear to be very carefully targeted - they seem to mention everything from machine learning to mobile app development.
I figure it's similar to applying to colleges. Stanford, Yale, etc send you info packets and ask you to apply but then reject you. Although some schools figure that if it takes $20 to acquire someone's attention and get them to apply to you (and pay a $90) fee then they can pocket the $70 (minus reviewer expenses) and look more exclusive when it comes to acceptance rates, but that's not the case with companies.
I get so many solicitations from recruiters that clearly didn’t look at my profile (i.e. “looking for Java architect” and I have zero java experience) that I’ve started reporting and blocking them.
The narrative that the labor market is full and therefore wages must remain low must be preserved at all costs.
200k people applied for 30k jobs that's less than 10/1 anyone who has done hiring in IT knows that roughly 1/10 applicants are even qualified for a particular position.
Current media recycles headlines to save on work cost. When you have to churn out 20 articles per day, you don’t have many options left.
This doesn’t prove anything.
That doesn't seem strange at all to me. Some news stories come from 3rd party news agencies that sell the articles with non-exclusive rights. E.g. in Germany basically every local newspaper is built on top on articles sourced from dpa (Deutsche Presseagentur), and usually marked accordingly.
Of course there are also less reputable methods like just scraping articles from your competition.
Either way, it doesn't really _prove_ anything regarding it being a seeded PR piece, though my gut also tells me that it's likely.
Sounds more likely jobs offered in one of the rural areas. I love shopping Amazon and I love their technology even more but their work/life balance is terrible. Their tech guys live in fear, real fear, of being someplace without WiFi. I’d probably only last a year - I go to all the parent/teacher conferences at my kids school and that clearly goes against the grain at Amazon.
Everyone I know at Amazon works 8 hour days, completely disconnect when they finish with work, and have tons of flexibility for working from home when family related issues arise.
I don't doubt that you know specific people who are having the opposite experience - Amazon culture varies a lot based on which vp/director you work for. But your friends' experience isn't indicative of all tech employees.
I worked for Amazon until earlier this year. They worked everyone hard as fuck. Even principal engineers worked nights and weekends. It was the worst experience of my life.
For people reading these comments you need to understand these people who say it's blown out of wack and FUD (lmao no) it isn't. And typically the people who get themselves into positions where their job is butter at Amazon is because they threw a bodies on the fire to get there.
It's an awful company to work for if you're a deg. It's even worse if you're a warehouse employee.
When people go on the record stating they have to piss in Gatorade bottle because they don't get sufficient bathroom breaks it's not FUD it's a shitty employer. /Rant
Why do you think that your anecdote should trump someone else's? I know a large number of people working at Amazon, and they have had the opposite experience as what you're describing. Making vast generalizations like "They worked everyone hard as fuck. Even principal engineers worked nights and weekends" are so ridiculous, they just make you sound silly to anyone in the know.
I work at Amazon and this is basically my experience. I don’t know why there’s so much FUD about it, and it’s been the same on other teams I’ve worked on as well.
I'm not here to help you with your pay research. Just telling you my experience. There are many threads on Reddit and stats on levels.fyi to compare your offer with others. You clearly like being on-call and seem to be happy with your offer as well. Best of luck !
I mean, I've made those posts on /r/cscq and contributed my standard offer to Levels.fyi. I'm fairly aware of what the range is - what I'm curious about is what you think is a good or bad offer.
Assuming TC means Total Comp yes thats way lower than what Facebook and Google pay. Over 4 years salary + stock / 4 + signing / 4 is what I count as TC. Also no food and the horrendous equity vest schedule just makes Amazon lag behind in the list of prospective employers.
Thanks for your clarity in saying this, usually people take great pains to be politically correct about who they consider to be “lesser”. I’m a little taken aback that your line would be making $145k a year (the best liquid compensation I got across ~5 different offers when I graduated) though!
Again this is "lesser" in terms of an offer I would expect from F&G. Not lesser in terms of a person. You're taking this personal for some reason. I'd stop engaging now, best of luck at Amazon !
Only slightly related: If I open the link on my iOS device, music playing stops (Spotify). Somehow CBS manages with their useless auto play videos to kill my background music playing. Should this be possible? I thought there is no auto play video on IOS?
On Android, in Firefox, they cover the bottom third of the screen with a permanent notification that you can't close and contains two links: open in CBS app, and open in Chrome.
Looks like they don't really want my traffic. Oh well.
What's funny is actually that "chrome" option was just a stand in for "browser". I was also in Firefox and I clicked "continue in chrome" and the notification just went away. IIRC Reddit was first site to do this.
In chrome you can often force auto play by playing a sound (and having that fail) and then playing another sound right after that. Maybe IOS has a similar loophole?
Is there some kind of legitimate reason it has to work this way that this workaround takes advantage of, or is it just an oversight/bug?
How you're describing it it sounds like they only block the first sound you try to auto play - if the latter is the reason then that's really surprising.
That is actually a surprisingly good ratio. I work for a company that deals with this kind of data and the applicant to hire ratio at some companies, especially in retail or unskilled jobs can easily hit much, much higher than that.
When I see people complaining about the hiring processes for many low qualification jobs they often have no idea just how many people they are up againt. They get annoyed because they didn't get an interview, but if you are getting 50 applicants for every position you're not going to interview even half of them.
As my boss likes to say, bulk recruitment is an exercise in saying "no" as efficiently and quickly as possible, whilst pissing off as few as possible (you want them to reapply or not hold a grudge against your brand).
Honestly the rules aren't that difficult (applying them might be). You just have to answer quickly (either with "sorry no" or even with "you're in consideration", really anything), not hearing from people for weeks is the worst. And ideally, provide a reason for why you weren't hired and what they would like to see from you. That's really all. If you do that, people most likely won't hold a grudge. Casually mentioning that there were 50 other applicants probably helps, too. ("Out of the 243 applicants, we are only able interview 10.")
People do hold a grudge, I see it all the time in our data and feedback. People applying for entry level jobs angry because they were rejected quickly based on their CV.
You can do all the basics right, but a lot of people are still going to be pissed off when they get automatically rejected based on a computer scoring the 100 candidates for the position, even if you explain why that is necessary.
I do think more companies need to be more honest about applicant to hire ratios, but the reality is that a lot of people treat anything short of hand-written letter from the hiring manager explaining in detail how they could have done better as a slap in the face.
I think my best experience as a (student) job seeker was McKinsey. They called me to provide me some detailed feedback about why they wouldn't hire me. I was very grateful and it is true that it contributes to their brand. The students they turn down may be their client in a distant future.
My friend’s wife took almost 8 months to find a production support job. Why are jobs so hard to get these days? Is it because competition is so high and for a single job there are 20 applicants?
- H1Bs are cheaper to hire and take the place of American jobs (though to a far lesser degree than you'll hear during this upcoming election
- Everyone is preparing for a recession (for the last three years now)
- Jobs are posted online and get tons of applicants now. That makes it easier to switch cities and not have to go through a period of unemployment but that also means they get tons of applicants. Are many of them bots? You bet.
I don't get it either. I found myself involuntarily out of work a couple years ago (company shut down), and it took a month before I finally found something after > 20 applications. Out of at least 20 applications, I only ended up interviewing with two - and I'm qualified as hell for software development. One thing I wonder, though - there's some anecdata that certain qualifications can actually work against you. For example, this lady (http://blog.alinelerner.com/how-different-is-a-b-s-in-comput...) suggests that you consider rejecting anybody with an MS in CS. I've seen many people on here and on Slashdot suggest that they would never consider hiring anybody with an MS certification, for example (and some even saying they'd never hire somebody who went to college!). You never know what weird filter somebody is applying to your resume.
I assume it looks bad if a candidate someone hires ends up being a terrible fit. This is basically how it goes everywhere else at larger companies. Visibility is more important than getting things done.
Like, I'm staffed at a company that isn't Arthur Anderson right now on an internal project and our SM/PO came back from scrum of scrums and said everyone was massively overestimating tasks to make sure they got them in on time. If you finish early you get pushback on starting something else because it looks 'so bad' if work goes from one sprint to the next.
Slow work and hitting metrics > everything, I guess.
Great question. No one seems to know why. The worst part about the job search, is not even getting a response. most companies don't even have an HR function so it's cheaper to just not answer. It's also cheaper not to get into a lawsuit by giving an answer as well which kind of sucks. I wish there was a way to protect companies in their speech so that's not discriminatory to tell them why we didn't choose the candidate.
She applied for 800 job postings. That was the only thing she did the whole day - apply job after job. She maintained an excel file with all the details. Which company she applied for, who responded, who rejected. It was demoralizing. She got a job now but she started the job hunt last November.
> Amazon said all of the openings are for full time positions and come with benefits. And the company said the openings are not related to the usual increase in hiring it does to prepare for the busy holiday shopping season.
That's what I thought, I live near one of the Big Amazon distribution centres in the UK and adds for Amazon Christmas workers are all over the Busses and billboards at this time of year.
I had a recruiter reach out to me 3 times now about the job in the new HQ at the alexa team. I'm not interested but I am not surprised so many are applying. Amazon is hiring really aggressively right now.
I'm just glad their new headquarters isn't in New York or California: that would've been terrible. Arlington housing prices are already at 500$/sq foot. i really think they could've still picked a better place.
People are listening to too much government propaganda. The percentage of Americans employed is actually EXTREMELY low! The gov press releases EXCLUDE all those unemployed pesky minorities with a category called "discouraged"(= non white) workers! Excluding this recovery, employment is at a 35-year low!
Even in Virginia they only forecast 25 jobs related to the new HQ next year, and maybe, just maybe if their PR magic ball says yes, there might be 25k jobs.....over the next decade PR firm fingers crossed
> But Craig Newman, who also lives in the area, said he's looking forward to the increase in commuters. "One of the jobs I'm working at now is an Uber driver. I hope Amazon comes to the area and brings in a lot more traffic."
Wish for MORE traffic? The race to the bottom is over, and...no one has won.
I think at one time the advice to “play the numbers game” was correct for online job apps. Not anymore.
Even more saddening, Glassdoor uses a temp/test sample job ad. It’s for cat sitting. $15/hr. That will get hundreds of apps in 48 hours if someone forgets to take it down (is only supposed to go up for 60 mins max but things happen).