I know a guy with three degrees and decades of experience on a resume littered with well-known companies and astounding projects.

2.5 years out of work.

This is the guy who should be fixing slopper code and he's working volunteers and startups so his resume isn't toxic from an Uber or Amazon gig.

This has why I’m happy to work in public service. It’s very stable but the salaries aren’t as high.

On the flipside, we had a senior position open for something like 2 years before we finally got someone we're happy with. We fired two before we found someone would would actually do work and not cuss out our external partners.

We're still having trouble hiring mid-levels. Most of the candidates are surprised when we ask them questions about React when the job position clearly states it's for React, and they're also surprised when we ask them to write a few lines of code in an interview (nothing crazy, should take a competent dev 5-10 min, and a nervous one 15, so we allocate 20 min). I don't think our expectations are unreasonable, here's how we delineate between tiers:

• junior - needs help from a mentor to deliver feature work
• mid-level - needs direction on larger features, but can deliver independently
• senior - manages larger features, consults w/ architect on high-level design considerations

But all the senior applicants are mid-level at best, mid-level applicants are recent college grads, and junior applicants just finished a coding bootcamp and think they're hot stuff because they built a rails app by following step-by-step instructions.

We're not a flashy tech company, we manufacture niche products for a niche field, and our software does simulations and reports. It's a complicated product, and we're totally willing to train people, we just want people who can demonstrate that they can ask proper questions and translate that into easy to understand code. The interview questions aren't hard, but they are intentionally incomplete because we're not testing coding ability but instead the ability to recognize vagueness and ask clarifying questions (i.e. ask before you assume).

We're not anyone's top pick, but we do have a lot of interesting problems to solve and people tend to really like it here. So the candidates we tend to get are desperate people who aren't getting bites at the flashier companies, which often means they're not all that competent. During COVID, we'd get maybe 5 applicants for a role after it has been open for a month, and now we're getting 200-300 in the first few days of the position being open. A lot of those applicants are incompetent and I'm surprised they were offered their previous role, but there are some diamonds in the rough.

Did I apply to your position as that sounds like me. Just passed the one year point.