Ask HN: What Roles/Skills Do You Struggle to Hire For?

[rio517]

Managers? Architects? Backend? Rails? Javascript?

I'm curious which roles / skills others find most difficult to hire and details on why.

[newaccount74]

So the biggest problem I had was hiring my first employee. I needed help with a lot of things -- development, graphic design, web design, sales, accounting, product management, etc.

But the people looking for jobs are looking for a very specific role. Eg. they want a job as a developer, or as a graphic designer, and it's kinda hard to find someone who can do more than just one thing. But as a small company I don't really have enough work for a full time employee who does just one thing.

Most of the people I met who are good at more than one thing had their own business or startup and weren't looking for a job.

[david38]

This is because people are told to specialize if they want to move up. I’ve known lots of people who wanted to be generalists, but couldn’t get promoted because as soon as you have promotion ladders, the first thing added is “deep expertise” in something narrow.

[leroman]

Taking into account the risk/reward ratio, I suspect said generalists wouldn't want to join at that point.. get low wage, "first employee" little equity, and most chances not worth anything..

He's better off getting a job with some BigCorp really.. can't blame them.

[akudha]

I’d love to have a job with multiple roles. I’d guess there are many people like me.

The reason it is hard to hire such people is low pay. Why would I want to wear multiple hats (and take on extra stress, even if I love the job) when I can walk across the street and get higher salary for a bit more boring role?

Of course I don’t know how much you’re paying, I am just pointing out the general case here.

[sdrothrock]

That's really interesting to hear; as a generalist, I've had a hard time finding positions that aren't super spiky!

[osullip]

Find someone who has/is running their own business and partner with them. Forget the employee/employer relationship for this kind of skillset.

I have done this several times in my life - it's amazing when two people, willing to do literally any job that is needed, get together. Pretty powerful combination.

[hackerfromthefu]

You save a large amount of time and energy by having one point of contact for multiple disparate services/skills.

In other words such a person delivers a higher amount of value, above the individual tasks done, by saving you time on coordination and hiring.

I'm wondering if your offers are reflecting this value that a multi-skilled person would provide you? Or do you expect to get the benefit of their extra skills for free while they don't benefit from their own skillset, which they must have spent a lot of time learning?

[topicseed]

300% agreeing with this... In a small company, finding the right "right arm" is incredibly tough. So much so that I still have not despite multiple attempts.

[notRobot]

Are you (or anyone else reading this) by any chance looking to hire a generalist right now? I do development, graphic design, web design, writing, marketing, and a bunch of other stuff.

If this sounds interesting, please share your contact info, or drop me an email (address in profile)!

[elwesties]

Honestly it's not technical things that are hard to hire for its finding engineers who show initiative and can communicate well with stakeholders. Its like finding gold especially now in remote working.

[Apreche]

I not only am good at communicating with stakeholders, I enjoy doing so. But every place I’ve worked doesn’t even allow it. There is always a product team to act as a go-between/wall between stakeholders and engineering.

[specterhead]

This has been so true in my experience recently.

[lbriner]

For us, I would say in the UK, all are hard to hire.

The main background issue is a lack of supply if you are not in a place to hire worldwide remote (which many companies are not).

As a small company, doing the communications required for doing recruitment all in-house, as well as getting your job listings out to where people will find them is hard. However, using Recruiters is expensive and they have less ability to do quality filtering of applicants, especially since they are driven by commission more than quality so I think they would rather get us to interview someone who isn't a great match "just in case".

[Nextgrid]

> I would say in the UK, all are hard to hire.

I always say that when it comes to lack of candidates there's this magical thing called "money" where if you throw more of it on the table the problem suddenly resolves itself.

Recruiters and getting your job ad in front of more people is only needed when it's a hard sell; if it's an offer most people can't refuse then you just have to show it to a handful of people before you get someone who agrees.

[phekunde]

In the UK, it is notoriously difficult to team-up with someone to build a startup. The mindset is very different. If you go to US, India or China, engineers are willing to take risk. In the UK, the conversation starts something like this:

Me: "I am looking for a tech co-founder; the startup is at an ideation stage, and I have already talked to people who have shown interest in the project. I think having a tech co-founder at this stage will help a lot."

Listener: "How much are you paying for the role?"

Me: "This is an equity-based role because the startup is at an early stage."

Listener: "So you want people to work for you for free??"

This doesn't matter if the listener is an engineer or not. In the UK, there is little understanding of how very early stage startups work. It is equity based, that concept does not go down very well with the population.

[tsm]

I just moved from Chicago to Edinburgh, and have about ten years of experience doing full-stack webdev at various startups. I've looked into a few UK jobs and they all seem to pay about a third or at best half what I was making at my previous job with a SV startup.

At some point my hand will be forced if I need a visa sponsorship, but for now it's a pretty tough sell.

[pyb]

The new reality is that UK companies will never be able to hire SW engineers as cheaply as they were able to in the last 15 years.

[sshine]

> if you are not in a place to hire worldwide remote

What prevents you (or others) from hiring remote?

[sage76]

Waiting for hiring managers to jump in with their tales of woe, about how nobody is able to meet their 'hiring bar' aka 5 rounds of leetcode hard grilling.

[GianFabien]

Hiring managers read HN ? Recruiters I have come across think that all "hackers" are people in dark rooms, pilfering state secrets and mining cryptocurrencies.

[ManOfLand]

<Early stage start-up.>

A founder-mentality developer. A great developer who's willing to take a pay cut for a larger amount of equity. Competition is fierce, and we're not in crypto :'(

[jamil7]

This sounds like you want a co-founder not an employee?

[drudoo]

Architects for sure. We permanently have open positions and it is impossible to find qualified candidates.

[sam_lowry_]

Software Architect is a difficult job, many skilled developers deliberately forego higher pay to calmly work on tickets from the current sprint and not worry about the big picture.

I switched been Software Architect and Individual Contributor roles a few times. the pay difference does not really match the increase of responsibility for this position, you have to be willing to communicate, lead and challenge others and have fun doing it to be a successful Software Architect.

[hackerfromthefu]

I've been doing principal dev and architecture with teams ranging in size to 30, for many a year in Australia.

May be looking for a new role in a few months time should I find one fully remote with US level pay, if this might be a good match should I get in touch with you?

[Fire-Dragon-DoL]

Open-minded Rails developers with strong SQL skills (ideally Postgres).

By open-minded I refer to the ability to evaluate and challenge everything that "the community does this", evaluate it in the context of a team/company and suggest the best approach given the specific team conditions, without the presumption that the Rails community is right by default fir every usecase in the world.

Bonus points if the person is interested in software design and even system architecture.

[Agingcoder]

People with broad technical knowledge ( from system programming / asm to Javascript/browser stuff, networking, algorithms, etc). And if they don't know everything ( which is ok), I expect them to want to learn what they don't know. It's also ok if they're not experts everywhere (broad vs deep) , but having a good understanding of how software systems from first principes makes solving lots of problems much easier. It also allows them to help other people.

These people are invaluable, but are very hard to come by.

[gremlinsinc]

I'm deep on laravel+vue and very very broad w/ some varying levels of deepness on go, rust, and devops stuff as well as I used to be deep on SEO/Marketing and have interests in growth.

Programming is burning me out, I'd kill for a position where I can just take a salary and/or stock to basically work on writing technical docs/blog posts, deployment systems for devops, or figuring out features or setting up systems to track user feedback to figure out what users want added.

I mean, I'd still jump in and code, I just would like some options to expand my horizons. As a freelancer I haven't been able to find that and I'm tired of applying/interviewing for remote positions.

Maybe I'd be a better CTO than developer or a Project or Product Manager. Hell, I've even thought of just jumping to devops or QA just for a scene change.

[jitl]

I (think I) am one of these people, and all I want to do is hire more of them. The company I work for runs a collaborative editor on top of a tree-like data model [1] - so any role, front end or back end, needs to consider offline changes, distributed convergence, and recursive traversals. Vanishingly small numbers of people will come in with these skills so we need to find learners who can go up and down the stack and up and down the layers of abstraction in a stack to find the best designs.

(If this sounds interesting to any readers, send me an email at [email protected] or twitter DM @jitl)

[1]: https://www.notion.so/blog/data-model-behind-notion

[Apreche]

This is me. The problem is all the jobs I see just want me to use one specific part of my large skill set. A lot of the things I know go largely unused at my job.

There’s also a corollary problem. The few places that do want my depth almost always want it because they are understaffed. They want to overwork me, and I refuse to ever work more than 40 hours a week under any circumstance.

[hackerfromthefu]

That sounds like me, combined with good communication and omnidirectional stakeholder management, and I may be looking in a few months for a fully remote role paying US levels and I have a contracting company to make billing easy. Could this be a match for you?

[arboghast]

Blue Team positions, junior or senior. There’s no shortage of decent penetration testers but when it comes to the other side, whether it’s incident response, detection engineering, security operations, etc it’s been very difficult.

I’m talking months to find someone. Many candidates apply and look good on paper but turn out to just lie and made us waste many hours of interviews.

As for the why, I suspect one of the following:

- good candidates already have a job they love

- people are not willing to relocate (job is remote but inside one of the countries we are operating in, which is 80)

- there is simply not enough people in the field, which goes back to my first point

[SCHiM]

My view on this is that, unfortunately, blue team positions are seen as entry positions. In general blue team members have little autonomy. They don't chose the suite of tools, protocols and have little mandate in a company to change a single thing since they're a cost centre.

The job is frustrating because many socs are beholden to central IT to fix even high severity issues, this generates a lot of friction. Most organizations have a big feed of alerts that trigger on everything from ransomware, to a user plugging in a razor mouse... This makes the job frustrating and boring. Contrast this to red team positions. If they're lucky they get to cowboy all through the network never asking permission after initial sign-of. And why would they? Nobody spots what they're doing anyway, as long as you don't create problems in prod.

[LAC-Tech]

- people are not willing to relocate (job is remote but inside one of the countries we are operating in, which is 80)

If you hire contractors you can hire people from anywhere - you don't need a business presence.

(This message is brought to you by a contractor living in the middle of nowhere).

[MattGaiser]

Unlikely to switch careers as I am an SWE already, but for my own learning, how does one learn the blue team side? Any recommended courses? I see far more penetration testing material out there.

[machiaweliczny]

I think people don’t want to work in blue team as it’s harder than red team. You need to keep watch 24/7 while red side just needs to get lucky

[t3ssel]

This, and the sibling answer, actually quite resonate with what I could be looking for! Is there any way to know more about the role(s)?

[MattPalmer1086]

I've found architects to be extremely hard to find (both software and security). A good architect needs both wide technical experience (even if they have specialities) and great communication and documentation skills. Attention to detail and also big picture thinking.

It's not that hard to find architects, but it's insanely hard to find good ones. Although, that probably applies to pretty much any role.

[hackerfromthefu]

Are you looking now as I will be soon, I've posted a bit about myself in this thread at this link https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30372383

[joker99]

Windows Kernel devs... They seem to be a rare breed

[the_only_law]

I’ve tried a few times to wrap my head around the windows driver model, the KMDF/UMDF and related things a few times.

I’m guessing it’s an overall supply issue. It kinda seems like you have to accidentally end up working for an OEM or MS early on in your career, I’ve seen very few kernel dev jobs and almost always very senior

Otherwise, it’s not particularly amenable to hobbyists, while you can download the WDK, write and test drivers, you’re still kinda limited by the EV cert requirement and the fee communities out there with knowledge in this subject can be less than helpful sometimes (to the contrary Thou, I’ve gotten help from actually MS guys working on NDIS over on stack overflow and they were great).

Docs are ok, but depending on where you are can degrade pretty badly. There are a few things that aren’t well introduced. I didn’t actually understand INF files until stumbling across an ancient blogpost that spelled them out and I was rather horrified by what I learned.

[hackerfromthefu]

What kernel work are you doing?

[mooreds]

We'd love to hire a few senior java devs, especially folks who want to go soup-to-nuts (front to back end). We were trying to hire in Denver, CO, USA, but eventually expanded to all of the USA because we weren't getting the candidates we needed.

$CURJOB has a downloadable product, which is a different world than the SaaS jobs that are prevalent these days.

[relaunched]

Security roles are really hard.

Assessor's that aren't just tool operators. Security architects that can threat model and deliver requirements, in the design phase. Anyone that has intersectional experience between security and external compliance is also a problem.

[igetspam]

Engineering in APAC. India has become a competitive market, much of Asia has been capitalized by financial industry players and Australia has gone to the FAANGs. As a Us based startup with not shallow pockets, we still can't compete.

[phekunde]

Tech co-founder for XR simulation project. I am looking for someone with 3D graphics/Virtual Reality/games experience on Android platform who will be comfortable with NDK and Godot engine.

[ramoz]

Devops/cloud engineers that can do both.

Sr Frontend Engineer that can solve for complex logic as well as make things look good.

[revskill]

CSS developer!

Because it's hard to master the CSS systematically.

[kureikain]

good front-end engineer that can do 2 things:

- ui - logic

good devops engineer that can do 2 things:

- dev - ops

[gleenn]

Clojurists.