Exactly. Our recruiters aren't tech recruiters, they handle recruitment for the entire company (and we're not a tech company). As a result, a lot of our candidates have flashy resumes, but no actual skill. As in, I asked someone to write code in whatever language they wanted and they couldn't do it. And it wasn't some difficult assignment, this was a first round weeder task. The candidate straight up lied about having any development experience whatsoever. I even had an Information Systems background candidate say straight up that they're not interested in a dev role, which they were explicitly applying for.

And that's unfortunately far more common than not. People think that because they paid for a bootcamp that they're now competent enough to write code professionally, but it turns out, a lot of them didn't apply themselves at all.

There are good candidates in that mix, it's just hard to find them. We're happy to train a promising candidate, and we've hired interns that we've offered full-time positions to. We don't even particularly care about age, we had someone internally decide to transition to tech from a blue collar background, so we funded their education and now they write code for production on the side of their main job (they're our support person for our blue collar users, and they're really good at it).

If you're not a big flashy tech company, you're not going to get as much attention from qualified candidates, and you'll get a bunch of trash applicants who are looking for easy marks on the job boards.

I rag on those too.

Our "coding challenges" aren't all that hard, they're similar to what you'd do on the job.

For example, we use React on the FE and Python on the BE, and here's what we do in the first round:

• FE - basic React state use - store input from an input tag, and render in a label
• BE - write a SQL statement to join two simple tables to query something; just a SQL playground, no Python needed

And here's what the more in depth second round looks like:

• FE junior - array functions (lots of examples with tests) or moving data between multiple components
• BE junior - simple web server (or fake one, just need a function that takes opaque data) with somewhat complex logic; we're looking for code style (do they separate controller logic from service layer logic?)
• FE/BE senior - structure an app from scratch given very limited requirements; the point is to see what questions they ask to clarify requirements

For BE, we let them use whatever language they want, because Python is simple enough that they can learn on the job. That's actually why we picked it, our BE requirements are simple enough that the language doesn't matter, so we went with something familiar to ease hiring (performance-sensitive code is written natively and wrapped).

The first round is designed to take 5 min and we allot 20 min, the second round is designed to take 20 min and we allot an hour. They are asked follow up questions about changes they would've made if they had more time, and getting the right answer is secondary to any explanations they make. We've hired people who failed the challenge, provided the code was clean and the expansion was reasonable.

We're not looking for rockstars who nail some complex challenge, we're looking for competent professionals who can write decent code under pressure, because we will have sev 1 prod bugs and we want people who can diagnose and fix them while feeling confident enough in their fixes to make the call on whether it can go to prod that day. The challenges merely confirm what they've given as answers to the questions (most of which are way more complex than needed, we just want to gauge breadth of knowledge).

Yet we keep getting applicants who are surprised that we ask them to do basic coding in a technical interview. Some can't even write syntactically correct code in a language they picked...

It is not hard to hire someone, it is hard to hire someone who doesn't give you more work than they solve. I am not against hiring juniors, but they have to show initiative that they are passionate and able to improve. I don't want a person who will be junior for the rest of their career, because juniors usually require babysitting and that that away work and attention from competent people (the chads who actually build the core features and have to attend business meetings on why it is so good for customers to see additional offers during checking out).

It is a combination - incompetent HR, incompetent candidates, or bad hiring process. I am yet to apply to a company with a hiring process I'd call pleasant on all angles.

It's really not. Hiring was much easier 3-4 years ago as the pandemic nonsense was ending and people were bailing on companies forcing people to be back in office 5x/week. The competent devs knew they could do better, while the less competent devs held on to what they had.

Now with a bunch of layoffs, the candidate pool is completely flooded, and since we're not a big flashy tech company, we seem to get a ton of drive-by applicants who aren't qualified at all.