Until now, my career path was fast. In 2008, I started working as a full-time programmer at
Junior Developer . There was a glorious boss and cool colleagues, and I learned how to use Java and .NET, along with my first rewarding experience. After working for a couple of years, I felt that it was time to move on ...
I contacted the recruiters and finally got a suggestion: the post of
Systems Analyst , along with a decent salary and with pleasure from the fact that the word
Junior will disappear from the title of my post. No matter how you look, it was a good deal, and I accepted the offer.
Several years passed, and I again began to look for opportunities for career growth. At the current job, my skills were assessed as
Systems Analyst , and they were going to offer the position of
Developer . However, I changed my position to
.NET Developer in another company. As in previous cases, a change of job brought with it an increase in salaries and bonuses. There I spent 3 years and was upgraded to
.NET Development Team Lead - rising even higher as a programmer. I led a small team of 4-5 people and things went very well. In the end, having reached a ceiling in development in that company, I moved on, becoming a
.NET Architect with the corresponding salary and bonuses.
I note something: throughout my career, personnel specialists (both from third-party agencies and full-time ones) were engaged in “calling” candidates and communicated about vacancies commensurate with the current position (becoming more sociable as I moved up the career ladder) . Being a
.NET Development Team Lead , I received job offers from
Senior Developer to
Team Lead and
Architect . And working as a
.NET Architect , I was offered positions from
Team Lead to
Architect and
Manager . Until now, it seemed reasonable.
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About 5 months ago, I got a job at the Stack Exchange - a company that I really like. Things are going great, and they have never done so well with me throughout my development career. I have first-class wages and bonuses, my work benefits are incredible, and my boss is really a competent specialist and a decent person - like all my colleagues. At the moment, this is the top bar in my career.
And what becomes interesting is the name of my new post. In Stack Exchange, I am
Web Developer . This is the full name. Not
Manager , or
Team Lead , or
Architect , but
Web Developer . Because Stack Exchange is not the company that cares about titles and titles. We hire intelligent people, such that they bring their work to the end (their words are not mine), and the developers here control projects from beginning to end. This means that we sometimes act as managers, sometimes as team leaders, and often as architects when we discuss the best way to solve a particular problem, or the design of a particular system.
Until I got this job, I didn’t understand how flawed the current hiring industry was. Just 6 months ago, I received calls and offers to be interviewed for the position of
Team Lead ,
Architect and
Manager (with the corresponding salary). What do you think, what positions offer me now?
Junior Developer and
Intermediate Developer . With a proportional decrease in salaries and bonuses. Offering me such positions is a waste of both my time and recruiter time.
The reasons for what is happening are quite obvious: as a rule, recruiters do not contact me, having first studied my career and goals. Recruiters communicate with me in the same way as with any other out of 10-50 other candidates whom they write or call in a day - this is a haphazard approach, comparable to shooting at random.
Of course, I am not so selfish as to be offended by the offer of work and pay, which do not correspond to my current skills. However, I’m worried about the fact that
I can’t convince most of the recruiters to offer something else . I took the liberty to explain to one personnel manager that
Web Developer at the Stack Exchange is the equivalent (I think) of
Team Lead or
Architect positions in many other companies. The answer was: “If this were true, your position would be called that way.” I was stunned.
Since there are no standards for job titles for developers, it is obvious that Developer in Company A can be anyone in Company B, from Junior Developer to IT Director. This is unpredictable. Especially considering the fact that some companies overestimate the rank of their employees as a free reward (instead of paying them properly, for example).
I do not know how to correct the shortcomings of the existing system of hiring, but the current situation allowed me to realize the full value of
Stack Overflow Careers . We select candidates based on experience, interests, and participation in open source projects, not titles and titles. We ban companies sending spam with job offers. This means that every message sent to you will be written by the recruiter personally for you. Very few recruiting companies can say something like that about themselves. We are continuing to develop this product, and I hope that one day it will set a new standard for recruitment, in which people don’t offer a blind job comparing with your current position.
The lack of standards is a difficult problem, and I do not pretend to solve it. But now I know exactly how you can be working with incompetent people.
For example, John Doe is an incompetent developer who works in a small office for a modest fee, but who has the proud title of
Senior Developer there . The recruiter ultimately offers this developer a vacancy not only with the same name, but also
with the corresponding salary . John changes jobs and thus makes a giant leap forward. What happens next, many have seen more than once ... John fails and after 3-6 months leaves the company. He was deceived by the ranks system (Eng. Credentialism - approx. Transl.). Any of us will say that John swung at an overly large piece of cake.
This flawed system wastes a lot of money, time, and harms corporate culture. No one will like working with a person who knows 10 times less than you, performs an even smaller amount of work and at the same time earns as much, if not more. Therefore, good developers will scatter, and the vacant places will be taken by other "johns."
The hiring industry is in a deplorable state. Most recruiters will hire anyone anywhere to get their fee and complete the plan. The question arises: how do we, with the help of Stack Overflow Careers, completely destroy the system and build anew? Time will tell, and I am in anticipation of the results.