Now i know why hiring is difficult and why we lack engineers
I’ve got a new-found respect for the Hiring department now that I know how difficult it is to find the right talent.
I’ve been working as a front end engineer in a startup for past 4 years. Ours is a very small team, I handled all the front end needs, 2 of my colleagues handled all the backend needs. A CTO who takes care of the system and requirement as a whole and a CEO who takes care of all other things. You could image the amount of workload that goes on in a small team. When we grew as a company and our vision for the company expanded, so did our need for hiring talent. So the quest began to hire a front end engineer who could support me and help reduce the load.
At first, I had thought that it was a menial task. All I had to do was interview few people and select a right one. It’s then that the horror started. It’s then that I got to know how pathetic most of the workforce in the system is. In this writeup i will mostly try to focus on my experience in hiring a front end engineer but it also applies to hiring in general.
Our process for hiring an engineer:
Our requirements for a front end engineer was pretty simple.
- Understands javascript ( No frameworks but just plain old javascript concepts )
- Is sane in terms of logic
- If he has used some frameworks that’s all well and better
- Has a can-do attitude and always wants to improve.
And then we see so many resumes which looks quite cool.
However, the above requirements were quite far fetched from the original truth that we were about to discover. Most of the people whom we interviewed were mostly of the following types
- They don’t know javascript but claim that they know. All they ever did was just validating a form or making a simple app.
- Some claimed to know frameworks like angular and ember but failed to even write a simple onclick listener on a code script.
- Some who managed to pass our first round were not even familiar with the concepts of classes or private and public variables in javascript.
Even though all I did was interview people whom my CTO selected, I felt a deep pain to think that there was so much lack of talent considering the humongous amount of people who are looking for the job. So i began my search to find out why we lack good engineers even though we produce so many.
Techie Analysis: Why is hiring an engineer difficult ?
I started to dig into data to get to know why we face such lack of talent even though we have such a huge population of youngsters and I found that the problem is not only with front-end, it’s with all domains.
The prospects of education in India (Note that i’m referring to my country but the problem can persist across many countries) is not really bright in terms of engineering mostly due to its huge population. Here’s some information which I gathered through various blogs post and Ministry of Human resources. We have a huge population of engineers but not enough trained institutions to produce quality people.
- According to statistics of National Employability report (link given in next point), 1.5 million students pass out every year with an Engineering graduate degree .
- Colleges and universities are growing in India like wild mushrooms to produce more Graduates. You could visit mhrd for detailed statistics. Here’s a direct link to the AISHE report which shows the number of Universities, Colleges, and Student enrollment statistics. Many of these institutes are not capable of producing quality youngsters and are more focused on the money minting process which comes with this business.
- Post by Gadgets Now says that 80% of the engineers are unemployable. Here is the National Employability Report by aspiring minds pertaining to the above research.
- Most of the inflow of students into engineering is just out of a need to get a graduate degree and secure future without consideration for what the person’s innate talent is. Many change their profession once they find that their interest does not really lie in engineering. Post by Wire highlights how Engineering graduates are crowding out others exams due to a dearth of jobs/ interest in their own field.
- According to U.S. Council of Graduate Schools the number of Indian students applying for graduate courses is increasing by 25% every year unlike 9% by other countries. This means that all the good talents that we produce go to other countries for a brighter future due to our lack of ability to give them good education and brighter future.
- We have a dearth of jobs. Apart from Computer Science, which has ever increased job possibilities all other streams of Engineering seems to have bleak future or very low vacancies in India. This is the reason most of the talent is leaving india.
Note the last point from my research. Computer science is the branch which produces loads of jobs for the majority of people. That’s the reason majority of the people either opt for Computer science or somehow try to enter into this world where jobs are ever increasing. This leads to what I call the rise of chaos. Hopefully, the below diagram shows the point I want to make
The overall situation of a common Indian student is something as shown below.
The above figure tries to tell most of the things which i need to say, but in a gist what i want to say is that we have a huge population but we are not using this population the right way to create great talents.
The problem with existing talent in my space — Front End:
Javascript has become very famous in past few years and front end space had expanded to create lot of jobs. Everything that is/was ever made using anything else is being made with javascript and into a web app. The increasing job opportunity has led to steep growth in the number of people trying to enter into this space . This has led me to the following observations.
- The market is very oriented towards understanding frameworks then javascript. Investment on understanding the basics has become less and this has crippled the quality of front end engineers. You remove/change the framework and these so called front end engineers cannot function and panic.
- Many companies interview process involves very specific framework based questions rather than core concepts. So most of the work force focus more on getting job ready by mugging up things then trying to build a solid foundation. This, in turn, hinders the overall performance of the team leading to unproductive arguments and lack of insights while developing a product.
- All these has led to the development of many training and certification institutes who are trying to monetize over this weakness in the name of company oriented training leading to the creation of poorly skilled resources.
To sum it all up, average undergraduate engineers skill levels have degraded due to very mechanical jobs which has a very narrow focus. Most of the workforce is also just focusing on IT as a livelihood option rather then really diving into it with interest and most of the fresh graduates energies are sucked out by big corporates in menial jobs with long hours giving them little time to grow leading to reduced interest and energy towards the field.
Let me know your thoughts on this article from your comments below and let me know of ways you think this problem could be resolved to create better talents for the future India.