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He says 33% of hiring managers admit to creating job reqs and advertising them with no intention of filling them so that the existing people on the teams those new hires would go to feel that help is on the way and they don't quit.

But it's a trick to keep people from leaving and to be able to continue to overwork their employees and squeeze out a bit more before burnout.

I'm a witness of that. Both to threaten that you're being replaced once we find someone and to make you think there is someone coming to help. I know for a fact it's the former. Since there was no hiring manager nor HR where that happened, I believe this is a common practice which is being advised to startups at some level. I've seen three or four YC startups do that which makes me wonder if someone is spreading this terrible practice among their network

I thought that's because Corporate wants to show that they are doing good, in fact so good that they look for employees.

Probably Hanlon's Razor applies: «Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.»

In other words, it's a mixture of laziness, some need for employees but not following through, rigid software for job applications, corporate politics and plain stupidity.

I imagine one example how it might happen more or less like this:

- A product owner sees that their team is overworked

- They ask for a job opening or just enter the job description in the software

- They get shot down by someone higher up or they are replaced or fired themselves

- The process starts anyway and nobody is responsible for incoming applications

Has anyone here ever seen this done, in any job they worked?

Yes. About five years ago (so, not new), and for a smaller company. After months of carrying multiple projects myself, including one that deserved at least three more devs on it, I had run out of all the nice ways to plead with management to actually hire someone. So, during a companywide meeting, I loudly and firmly said I'd be out the door in 30 days if they didn't have someone started by then.

They hired someone, I handled the technical interview, I trained him, and then they suggested maybe I should find a new job.

> So, during a companywide meeting, I loudly and firmly said I'd be out the door in 30 days if they didn't have someone started by then.

Why on earth would you do this in a companywide meeting?

Maybe it was a 10 people company, then it might be the right place. Otherwise, lol.

If it's anything more than a 2 person company, it's still not the right place.

Well, let's see, I had met with my boss, I met with my boss's boss, who was also the CEO, I met with my boss and the CEO, I met with my boss and the CEO and the cofounder. I wrote emails and had hallway chats and met in person. I asked, asked again, more formally outlined the situation, pleaded, asked for an update, and then said they weren't leaving me a lot of options.

Throughout this period they kept promising they were trying to hire but I hadn't seen a single resume or interview.

Most jobs, I'd just bounce and leave 'em hanging at that point. But, I actually liked most of the people I worked with, they just had a terrible CEO that had a bad habit of seeing devs strictly as cost centers. I wanted them to fix it, and this was an appropriate move for that company and the company's culture.

Thanks for your judgement though, wish you'd been there to tell me how to be better.

> Well, let's see, I had met with my boss, I met with my boss's boss, who was also the CEO, I met with my boss and the CEO, I met with my boss and the CEO and the cofounder. I wrote emails and had hallway chats and met in person. I asked, asked again, more formally outlined the situation, pleaded, asked for an update, and then said they weren't leaving me a lot of options.

> Throughout this period they kept promising they were trying to hire but I hadn't seen a single resume or interview.

So, they were clearly lying. Pointing this out publicly like you did probably feels good for the ego and your principles BUT as you experienced, it's not a wise move if you want to actually stay at that company. Nobody likes to be pointed out in public, and unless you are in a position of power, you will be in the receiving end afterwards.

In any case from what you say that company wasn't a good place to be for you, so I hope you found another place.

It's a business though, and devs need to contribute to the bottom line. How would you have management treat devs other than an operational cost?

The case we're discussing is one where they had exactly one developer doing the work of multiple developers, and he was about to quit. He did them a favor by not only staying around to train his replacement, but giving them advance notice of his intent to leave. Considering they hired someone new once he did this, it sounds like he was probably contributing to the bottom line!

Treating devs as people would be a good start.

Of course you treat devs with total respect and as people who sometimes get sick, or worries or tired- with the presumption that they're contributing to the generation of profit for the business over the long term.

It's not a social club, there's a requirement for devs to do work. Sometimes this work is boring or drudgery and as people we might say we don't want to do this and rather go sit in the sun and chill.

But the social contract is to either submit to both the interesting and unpleasant aspects of the work or go and be some free spirit elsewhere.

I disagree. I worked at a 20 person company where this type of discussion would be acceptable. Granted, the fact that people could bring these topics up without risk, meant things rarely got to that point.

I left for family reasons, but it remains the best place I’ve worked. Its product was leading the field because they actually had open discussions about things and built what people cared about.

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Sorry, you didn't say this: were they advertising openings the whole time you were there, but not interviewing?

It seems like the ruse would depend on there being interviews for the role, but interviews are so expensive and disruptive that I don't see someone scheduling them if they're not going to hire

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You can often see this even on HN Who's Hiring threads - people post the same exact blobs again and again over the years. I tend to believe that this is a form of masked advertising as well.

EDIT: This is also why candidates should spend as little time as possible when applying for jobs, omitting cover letters and refusing to fill huge forms. The legit job poster companies should understand this and stop requiring cover letters and so on.

DrChrono was "hiring" a developer for years

I’ve never seen (as far as I know) the whole lying to your own team about hiring intentions, but I’ve been on small teams that aren’t actively hiring but leave stock job descriptions posted from the last time they were.

I've seen one case where a job ad must have stayed up for years, though I only noticed it after the company closed down.

Yes. Interviewed someone that the team loved. We said definitely hire.

HR said they didn't accept the offer and went elsewhere. What they didn't know is that the person LinkedIn messaged me saying they enjoyed the team, and were disappointed we passed, respectfully asking what I would recommend to work on for their interviewing.

Opinions on whether to reach out after a rejection aside, it highlighted what I already suspected; the job was never going to be filled, and even as the team lead they were lying to me and the team.

When there was yet another round of layoffs months later, the spot remained, unsurprisingly, unfilled.

That is wild. Let me get this straight - the company actively lied to the team in an effort to get their hopes up that help was coming... by actually giving the extra overhead of sourcing a new hire?

Were you guys actively trying to fill the role (screen dozens of candidates, several went through final rounds, etc), or was this just some passive thing where recruiting tried to push someone who looked great?

We ranked candidates out of four, and this candidate was a four across the board. Experience in our tech stack, demonstrated competency, passed the lunch test, etc. The team was eager to get them started because we were desperate for more hands on. The team was at one point 6 and we were short handed, but through people resigning we were down to 4, with me taking the role of senior engineer and team lead.

This was an unequivocal HR lied and kept the mirage of "help is coming don't worry!".

Yes there's overhead of us spending time doing the interviewing, but a few hours here and there once a month is enough to keep the charade going. The applications site would go first to HR, then they'd put resumes in front of me. I always wondered why I couldn't just see everyone that applied and why it had to be filtered first; after this event I understood why. I suspect there was plenty more applicants than I was told of.

At my current job, we had a position that an absolutely stellar candidate supposedly ghosted HR on. Same thing; candidate reached out to me asking about next steps, and I was like, "let me check". Went and asked HR, and was told they'd handle the rest, and not to talk to candidates outside of HR-scheduled interviews. Never heard back again.

That was 3 months ago (and 3 months into the position posting), and the position is still unfilled.

Same question - were you and are you continuing to actively interview candidates?

That's the mystery for me, why put the team through a charade that actively harms their productivity?

The only thing I can think of is the candidate disclosed something that would be a legal red flag and can't really divulge that is an issue without threat of a lawsuit. Or something came up in a background check, but I imagine it didn't get to that point if the candidate reached out to you directly.

The "why" is because people quit environments that are toxic, but hold out if there are signs of improvement. People don't want to quit - it's a large investment of time and investment to job hunt. It's annoying as hell. So if you can string together promises:

- We'll hire more people, it's just so hard to find candidates! - We're doing bonuses right after evaluations, but we're doing a new evaluation system that's taking a bit longer than we expected this year - We're just finalizing talking to a customer we'll have them signed next month, we swear

That delays people looking, delays that large investment, and you can extract engineering time with little investment.

If you ran a company that couldn't afford another engineer for a team that desperately needed another engineer, are you going to paint the bleak picture for your team and risk losing those engineers that you have, or lie? If you have morals and say you'd be upfront, great; but that's unfortunately not a universal answer.

Honestly, the weird thing is we don't need another person at all.

Yes, were still interviewing.

Harming productivity only matters for hourly staff (in the minds of bad executives leaders). Salaried folks have to finish the with no matter how long it takes, and it doesn't cost the company more.

Sometimes this can happen if the candidate is outside of the position pay and the company is willing to make it work if they are a perfect fit.

If your interviewing notes were simply a, "would recommend to hire" they'll pass.

No company I ever worked for did this but I have seen this once when looking. A job posting that is basically perpetual for a single role by a relatively large company with a bad hiring reputation. The posting is always up, for this single role, I think for more than a year now, when there's no way you can't find many people that could do that role. I applied and I had to go through some silliness before they told me they have a better candidate. A year later, that job is still posted.

I would guess this practice is pretty rare. There can be stale postings e.g. when a large company pauses hiring but nothing along the lines of what parent is describing.

I've definitely seen evidence of this from a few big name tech employers. Revolving job postings that are regularly re-posted with the exact same details, and it appears that they never actually filled any positions. It's possible that they are hiring a lot of the same job description but these are sort of specialized roles with highly specific job requirements. I have a hard time believing that they are constantly hiring people for a very specific job description and continue to have openings for the same. Seems especially unlikely after they recently had big layoffs.

More likely ghost jobs. I think that they aren't planning to fill unless a highly qualified candidate comes along that happens to be desperate and willing to accept a low offer. When that happens, I wouldn't be at all surprised if they hire them to replace someone who is earning significantly more. Potential for big cost savings at the expense of intangible accumulated institutional knowledge and team cohesion/morale.

I haven't personally seen that. I've seen us open a job and get really bad applicants, or one good applicant who ends up taking another job for whatever reasons, and have it go unfilled for long periods of time. I think we probably could have made the hire with a higher salary or looking in other regions or both, but the company wasn't flexible on those things.

I've also seen my company open applications for a job that is almost definitely going to be an internal promotion rather than a new hire, but for the sake of "fairness" they interview a handful of other people.

Hiring is expensive. It takes a lot of time and energy to do interviews and screens and stuff like that, and usually some higher ups are involved in the process, so wasting their time is probably worse than just not posting the job if you're not going to hire.

As an ML consultant, I’ve seen it happen. It’s hard to find good people and most want to work on impactful things that require big teams, CEOs will tell you to stick around because they plan to hire, soon.

Yes. The tell is when the req has been open for a few weeks yet no one has been interviewed in person (or video) yet. The manager will claim they have, but have they really?

> so that the existing people on the teams those new hires would go to feel that help is on the way and they don't quit.

I don't buy the reasoning/justification.

The HR folks I worked with threw out fake job adverts to gauge the quality of applicants, salary expectations, and ability/speed to fine new hires. Essentially lets you create a few action plans if Jimmy in Accounting gets a better gig, or gets fired for sexually harassing people. Also generates plans / forecasting for layoffs, or windfalls that demand many new bodies.

The video's description, channel and host trigger so many "this is a scam" alarms that I'm prevented to watch more than 2m.

Does the guy at any point provides any kind of substantial proof that companies are actually doing that ? I'm curious what it could be.

But maybe it's because my gig has a hard time _actually finding people to hire_ ...

> my gig has a hard time _actually finding people to hire

lots of ppl have a hard time finding a gainful employment; seems there is something wrong with expectations (probably on both sides)

Pretty sure I found a bunch of fake jobs in my previous research (H2 2023). Best exemple was an SRE job where I'm a 95% match on the (long and specialized) job description, the 5% being some xp in HPC but they have a dedicated team and a separate job offer for HPC specialist, so that sounds fine.

They tell me I "don't have enough experience with debian" and offer me to apply for the HPC job. I go and list them all the experience I have with every bullet point of the job offer, and mention that I've been using debian for 20 years and ask what specific skillset they are looking for. No answer except "all we can do is start the process for the HPC job".

I ended up finding something else where I'm not particularly interested, have no prior experience, but I'm paid way more than my previous job and they seem to love my work despite it being very slow and frustrating. So I'm just going to stick to that, and give up on the idea of finding "the dream job". More recently I found an offer where they told me they have a "multiple month hiring process" and I stopped answering to emails, pretty sure it's fake as well.

Are you still looking?

Not really, I burned out on interviews and I'm going to sit on this one for a bit ; I'm in France btw in case you had an opening.

> seems there is something wrong with expectations (probably on both sides)

It’s pay, on both sides. Maybe remote working too.

People work for money, fake company “benefits” are a scam and people have caught up.

Surprisingly, skill plays a part in recruiting, too ;)

You're not _always_ looking to fill a position where good junior people can fit - that reduces the pool of acceptable applicants.

(In theory, the market dynamics are supposed to eventually match expected skills vs desired benefits.

I hope I'll soon get my passport to go live in theory.)

I actually saw a job posting that said at the very end "this is just an example". Previously it didn't have that line. So I'm guessing someone complained about being replaced and they had to put that line in there. Unfortunately they have since removed the job posting، It's a YC startup too

Resume culling has been going on forever. It’s just a part of the game. This is why you need to make connections with actual people. Not networking. You need to build relationships and those relationships will automatically expand your ability to find work.

There also used to be Triplebyte. It filled a niche of talented people who have bad resumes and don't know anybody. Found a great job through them when I was starting out.

Real shame there's nothing to replace it, there's huge arbitrage in the market of good people who don't know people. If I were starting out now I don't know what I would do, how do you even meet people.

How did triple the identify those people? I remember the name, but not their service.

They did tons of open tech interviews for basically anyone who could pass an online quiz, and if they thought they found a good candidate Triplebyte would provide them as higher quality / prescreened candidates to other tech companies looking to make a hire (for a recruiting fee).

I got my first job through Triplebyte actually. I think I would have gotten one without it since I was getting interviews and getting better at them. Even though I had passed the Triplebyte tech screen I got very few company "matches" or opportunities through them, but one ended up working out for me to get my foot in the door.

I recall that they were on HN previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23279837 (I haven't looked at their service and don't have plans to.)

They shut down in 2023. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35184546

I'd take this advice with a grain of salt. The best jobs I found in my life (n=1) were outside of my 'connections'. They were in other countries, continents and with some degrees of separation between the people involved and anyone I've ever built a connection with. Connections are important, but if you want to be seen, you need to put yourself out there, perhaps more important than making a connection with Ricky.

I'd add the caveat that relationships matter more as your career matures. If you're in the beginning or middle, regular job postings are probably a larger target.

I got my current job few years ago by just responding to a public posting, but I have noticed that nowadays most of new hires actually come recommended by someone. I wonder why the switch happened. Is it the community responding to lower demand for IT professionals?

IMHO, not lower demand but higher supply, especially with all the big tech layoffs, and so we have a glut of applicants who know enough about tech in general to make it tough to tell if they're lying about their specialized experience until after you hire them, and they're desperate to get hired because either they were laid off, or they know they're competing with all the people who were, so they're more likely to take a job they're not really qualified for because it takes at least 6 months to let a new hire go, and that's 6 months of rent and food, so it's an easy choice.

The first 5 years at my current job (7 years total), my team had *one* person join and leave. The past 2 years, we've had 3. No change in team leaders, style, nothing. In one case, they were just straight not doing anything. Like legitimately just not online for a whole week, except to pop into the daily standup on Friday, with their camera off and muted.

They were given a task to complete as basically a "complete this or you're out" ultimatum, and they came to me to help them with doing it because they were totally lost. I tried to give them advice, but when they saw I wasn't going to do it for them they just went AWOL, and quit the next week.

I'm lazy AF, and that shit was *wild*.

Wow! What do you work on? Is the problem the ability of the candidates -- do you think it's possible for a "good" engineer to get productive on six months?

The entire market is a game and sham according to my experience:

When employers actually need labor they hire who comes along and train them to fit the needed roles while managing attrition.

But what I'm seeing is all about arbitrage. When an employer prefers to leave positions unfilled without facing the costs of constructing skilled labor, they're just scalping.

Employees are expected to self fund training in branded products to be "competitive".

"Growth" / "innovation" become PR terms for automated scalp removal.

What's weird is that internally at fat corps they don't know what to do with the skilled staff they have.

For example Intel has a perpetual purgatory they literally call "the pool" where they send skilled staff to tread water before being laid off. They've had the pool for 35 years but have no internal equivalent of LinkedIn. They don't even bother to curate the staff they already have while endlessly seeking greenwood. The training is more than half outsourced to the community while the firm enjoys humongous tax breaks because it's "employer of choice". But weirder still, they'll help arrange for a PhD then dump the staff member a few years later.

It's this incredible selfishness to process absent of purpose that leads to a community corroding pathos which explains why the Bay Area is one of the most stratified and regressive regions in the world. It produces churn where the only feature of the landscape that represents stability is in "Defense" contracts and a culture that produces policy like this:

https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/monographs/2008/R...

Underrated comment, especially the part about companies not knowing what to do with the skilled employees. A lot of what I observe is about a lack of ideas from the management which in turn puts breaks on the existing velocity and morale.

I'm sorry that's been your experience. I have the good fortune to be able to say that it is not like that at many, many places.

I also suspect that the state of affairs at Intel that you described is largely due to incompetence as opposed to selfishness.

There's no need for condolences, it's not personal. Business is churn and crisis.

If you've never seen it yourself, it's only that it hasn't occurred to you -yet-.

It's in the news every day with reports like Tesla lays off thousands to cut costs while board gives CEO $50 billion payout.

I do not see this as explainable through any idea of incompetence. It's about some wiley edge of control over profits.

It's not contradictory that firms depend on skilled labor but are incapable of producing the conditions for constructing the needed labor force. Business has a long track record of enslaving labor and prefers to wreck labor as a force. Even at business's very best, it's widely understood that business / community partnerships are required to meet needs, where the community funds the training from which business cherry picks "talent" and while negotiating tax breaks that get passed on to investors executives.

This can't be explained as incompetence, it's explained through organized contention between specific vested corporate interests and the broader community who bears the costs of cultivating the labor force.

It's a story of business competency that led to Michael Moore to write about his stories about Flint Michigan, which became emblematic of US corporate culture.

Within corporate enclaves you can always find a small population who have never endured the ongoing existential crisis which is business churn: People for whom the crisis of labor hasn't occurred... yet.

For the special few who get to the grave in business having never seen any pathos... Is this good luck or a curse? There's no shortage of evidence!

Look around your community and the commons, do you see decay? Is it explainable through "competence" or "incompetence?"

It seems some other language is needed to explain what we see.

I feel like your analysis is painting with way too broad a brush. Not all businesses are aligned, not even all large businesses are aligned.

Also, I admit I was specifically looking at tech with my statement about not having seen it, given the platform and your comment about Intel. I think there are many, many, many truly great places to work in tech where there is not this petty short-sightedness.

However, zooming back out, my opinion in general is that scenarios like the one you described at Intel is pure incompetence. Much corporate decay and malfeasance is due to incompetence.

What the presenter here chimes absolutely with my recent/ongoing experience. I've interviewed for a mix of permanent and contractor positions where supposedly everything has gone well with interviews but there's some BS or other, including:

- Position withdrawn midway through interviews

- Position withdrawn after final interview

- Rejected on a minor skill component when employer has re-advertised this and several similar/associated positions repeatedly each week since

- Repeated requests for 'one more interview' (did one, they decided they didn't need another) . Got 'verbal confirmation they want to take you' and told that 'everyone in the company at every level says they want to go ahead' but mysteriously they somehow haven't been able to commit that to writing.

Matches ChatGPT summary of transcript for this video:

To recognize signs of fake job postings, the presenter advises looking out for certain red flags, such as:

- *Vague Job Descriptions*: If the job description lacks detail or is unclear about the responsibilities and requirements, it might be a ghost job.

- *Repeated Postings*: If you notice the same job posting recurring over several months or even years without apparent updates, it could indicate that the role is not intended to be filled.

- *No Response or Ghosting*: If you apply and even proceed through several rounds of interviews, only to be ghosted or told the position is no longer available, this could be a sign of a fake posting.

- *Prolonged Hiring Process*: Companies that keep stringing along candidates without clear timelines for hiring or giving vague excuses might be using ghost job tactics.

The presenter advises job seekers to be cautious and not take rejection personally, as these practices are often due to the company's strategies, not because of the candidate's qualifications. Ultimately, these signs help job seekers avoid companies that might be toxic or engage in unethical practices.

It seems like this practice of always having job listings posted, even if you don't intend to fill them, effectively hides the internal status of a company from the public. This signal -- "the company has more or fewer job listings compared to the past or compared to other companies" -- could have a marked effect on current employees, investors, analysts, etc. But the company may want more control over how these groups perceive it, so it masks this internal state by adding noise to the signal.

Probably an inevitable consequence of valuations being based on information and speculation, and not bottom line economics. The companies that don’t project an exterior of “we’re doing great” end up losing to the ones that do, regardless of what’s actually going on inside.

somewhat like ppl that oversell their sexual availability in order to always have options and never be in need.

it's a way of life, but not everybody can do it

Aside from it just being a tough job market, the rise in remote work means there are now an order of magnitude more candidates for any position that isn't explicitly hybrid or in-office, and there ends up being a paradox of choice.

In my experience office jobs in general seem to get a lot of applicants per opened position. Majority of them does not even pass requirements for the job, but they try anyway (recruiting is SO exhausting in that aspect).

Doesn't seem to be enough jobs and too much people needing one.

I filled a job role that had been up for a year once, they weren't happy with the candidates until they saw me, this was in a less populated area.

This can’t happen in companies where you’re part of the hiring process.

Every company I’ve worked for in the past several jobs has had me interviewing candidates directly. I’m part of the decision making on whether the candidate is hired, or which candidate from a panel is hired.

> Every company I’ve worked for in the past several jobs has had me interviewing candidates directly.

That doesn't mean you (or other employee interviewers) are seeing all the candidates. There are almost certainly a lot that are getting screened out before they reach that stage.

This isn’t about whether all candidates receive a response.

This is about whether positions are being created without ever planning to fill them.

I think it’s perfectly fine to screen out candidates and not interview them. And while ideally they’d still get a response, I can see how volume can make it hard to receive a handcrafted personal response.

But again, this is about companies creating positions strictly to improve the morale of the employees still around.

> This is about whether positions are being created without ever planning to fill them.

Right. And what I mean is that, if your hiring department is posting job "openings" which they don't intend to fill, they probably aren't allowing any of the applicants to advance to an interview.

Can you also see if every job position was filled in the end?

Fake job postings have existed for the entire 27+ years I've been in the job market.

A big part of it is recruiters just trying to build their CV database for the future.

Another big part is recruiters and companies doing market research to see what skills are out there and compensation levels to make sure their employee compensation and candidate offers are in line with market.

The final part is companies fulfilling the regulatory requirement to be able to say "we tried to find Americans and couldn't" before bringing on the H-1B's they always planned to bring on from the start.

I see it as free brand advertisement. The company appears "active" and "growing" in google searches.

Head hunters have started doing it as well.

I feel a large part of it is that companies are getting regular employees to do more of the interviewing, so it's like they get people in simply so they can train those employees interviewing skills.

I know at the previous company I worked at you couldn't get promoted unless if you were partaking in interviews, so I feel that might be a potential reason.

Isn't "it's not your fault" some kind of positive affirmation?

What's the purpose of this question? It's also a statement of fact in many cases.

Of course, why wouldn't it?

Another reason I could imagine for fake job postings: the company looks more successful if it has a lot of open positions listed. Kind of like a free advertising.

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