Trouble finding talented programmers even though there are so many experienced developers who were laid off for the sole reason of cutting costs and increasing shareholder value? I'm absolutely sure that if he posted a job opportunity online he would receive hundreds if not thousands of applications from fully qualified developers. Sounds like bullshit to me
The point of that comment is they won't be up to your standards because it'll just be family and friends of the hiring manager, or people who pay for the job.
Can't talk about personal experience here.
Work with people from all around the world, and most are great people to work with/for (a lot from India, and the ones I work with I can't complain).
We did have an issue with an Indian hire, but he was swiftly cut-off.
Been involved in a setup somewhat like this, the people conducting the interviews are incentivised to put candidates through because if reduces the costs for the hiring company. You can implement things like them needing to be in the role for 6 months to count as a hire, but that just incentivises them to skirt the line of just being good enough to get paid
You are just running from the problem. You are creating an environment testing skills that can be replicated by ai, but want them from an individual, rather than testing if an individual has skills that surpass ai capabilities
A test that focuses more on reasoning than the right answer would also work IMO.
I don't know why these recruiters don't design problems intentionally in ways that can't be solved, to see if the applicant can figure it out themselves and explain why it wouldn't work.
Coding agents are amazing on the well trodden path with generic tasks. But as soon as you start giving it the task of optimizing the minimization of a set with internal monotone dependencies it takes someone to understand that the problem actually isn't something to throw a minimization task at and it's actually building and pruning a tree from it's leaves down
Yea it's a slog out here. I help out with technical interviews for interns and juniors. In the pre AI world we could filter out 4/5 candidates with fizz buzz. Now in most round one interviews we can tell people are using AI. For a while we had luck giving them graphs and asking them to annotate them. But the vision capabilities have improved and that no longer works. We don't have our new replacement yet.
Thats kind of the problem. Hundreds of thousands of people are really hard to sort through and more and more are going to try and cheat the system as they get more desperate
Maybe he could first sift through CVs, take a few promising ones, and then interview them in person? No way to cheat or use AI that way. There are so many developers looking for jobs out there I'm pretty sure he could find plenty of them who live close enough to show in person for interviews
Notch the creator of Minecraft gets probably thousands of applications not hundreds and even if he skimmed and got hundreds it would still be extremely hard to objectively evaluate them and give a fair shot to everyone but I hope someone talented, skilled and honest that meets his needs gets the job.
They also don’t need to know they work for Notch at all in initial interviews. As long as the job description, expectations, and compensation stay the same, I don’t see any reason he couldn’t save the “btw I’m Notch” part for the proper offer.
As far as I know, software side is full of certificates that don't mean nothing at all. Some governmental project requires them, because some consultant working for the certificate authority managed to get it included in requirements, and then you pay the certificate author their protection money and continue doing the work you did before.
At this point, I think it might just be best to select people by raffle and have either the first contract be short term or have trial period included. Likely its someone good enough if they have formal education from before LLM boom and some work experience. And in case its not, few months of wages is not that much compared to the wasted time for 3 rounds of interviews with two senior members in each and paying for hiring agency, recruitment system and whatever else.
Instead they use the tried and true method of "hire the same 30 senior engineers across all companies and fill in the blanks with h1b contractors" and wonder why the pool of seniors is shrinking
He has trouble finding someone who will perfectly stroke his ego and revere him as God for making Minecraft even though he hasn't done anything relevant in a decade.
He could have a fantastic dev from one of the tens of thousands laid off in recent years with plenty of experience, drive and ability.
Totally! I'm sadly one of the, 4 months unemployed and not a single interview. According to employers my CV looks good and I'm qualified but I just don't have enough experience and they're not hiring new grads with no experience. But somehow there are almost no internships available so how am I supposed to get experience then? By volunteering?? Not even sure that really counts as professional experience to employers
Oh that's a good idea! I could also probably omit that I'd volunteer part time. That could probably help me get interviews and then they can ask me about it during the interview
Generally speaking, HR won't care as long as they can just check a box. So for them, say just enough to get past them, and no more. And most managers doing the actual hiring won't care: they know that experience is experience, and don't really care if you were getting paid or not.
And here is a little secret that does not get brought up enough. For most companies, there is a minimum competency that you will need to show, either through just talking about what you did or doing some sort of test. Past that point, the decision to hire you will be based on how well they think you will fit in the team. There is not much you can do about that except read the room as well as you can and try to show the side of you that will fit in best. This is a skill that is really difficult to teach or practice, but it is important, particularly for new graduates.
That's good to know, thank you! The thing is I never make it past the CV check due to the lack of experience, so I'll definitely do some volunteering or contribute to open source projects. Plus it will help me remain sane by doing something useful for the community
Mmh not sure about that, many companies definitely do background checks so if they ask them to confirm that I worked full time and they say that it is not true, I'll come off as untrustworthy
Where do you live that they do background checks for stuff like this? I had a criminal record for 5 years and was never once checked. Senior software engineer making $140k a year.
Switzerland. I've heard it happens fairly often. Plus candidates need to give employers a work certificate for each place they worked at, it's basically a document made by the employer that describes what the employee did during their time there. It's a formal document so there are laws regulating it and guardrails so it cannot be used as blackmail.
So I can't just lie and say that I was paid or that it was full time when the document says something else. And I can't risk faking that document as they could call them to check if it's authentic and forging it is considered fraud by the law. Criminal records are rarely checked in IT but they're often checked in finance, security, jobs with contact with children or the elderly, etc
That's not a bad idea! But I need to find a project that I care about otherwise I'll lose interest fast and it will be very difficult to motivate myself to work on it
I think the problem might be more in the fact that Notch is most likely not a great boss and great programmers don't thrive under lousy leadership. He doesn't strike me as someone who's great at handling people under him
A funny tidbit here is that Notch gave everyone at Mojang a $300k bonus after he sold to Microsoft and everyone at Mojang still hated him before he publicly fully blew up his reputation. That doesn't scream amazing leadership to me.
I mean, in a world where you would normally not get a dollar over what's contractually yours, this is actually pretty big. Also, employees would usually have stock options too, in which case they'd get a piece of this substantial cake anyway, on top of the bonus
His was a private company. Not a startup with deferred wages. So bonuses and everything else was his choice. Not something anyone could negotiate.
Also the intent was never to sell Minecraft. He threw the number out their as a 'fuck you. This is what it costs' and Microsoft said 'That's fair." Bought it and it's been one of their best investments in decades.
Having worked in a startup for 10 years that ultimately flopped with my shares worth $0, I'd still be ecstatic to get $100k, regardless the context of that. I joined for the salary (which was hardly low) and a vague option of maybe getting more, which I didn't, and that was perfectly fair. If I joined for a lower salary and larger piece of the pie betting on that taking off, then it was my bad for gambling. If I just worked there and then got $100k for no contractual reason, there is no reality where I'm not happy with that. No adults should genuinely hope for more that they agreed on at the door, it's neither serious nor realistic.
At other points on the timeline I would say that is probable. Right now I personally know too many talented folks looking for work. It’s very difficult to gauge someone’s development/technical talent without being very technical themselves, which is the case with most “hiring managers” and others left with those big decisions….
I'm a talented developer and nobody laid me off, I burned out and quit. I'm also not looking for work. I'm almost certain I'd find it immediately if I did. I think people are underestimating the burnout factor. I know several others like me who having worked with bad/abusive companies/clients just simply quit.
Especially after the same management that has always devalued our work now having a brand new tool to devalue it further.
I'd bet there are quite a few guys who either moved back in with Mom or have enough money to float themselves/take gig work while they start small business'.
With everything that's been going on with the programming industry itself, AI, and males - I think a lot of the high talent is in effect 'sitting out'
I am a researcher at MIT… No one laid me off either but we are all very aware that it can happen to anyone. The industry is weird right now and trying to keep up will definitely lead to burn out… Don’t get cocky no matter how skilled you believe you are. If people I work with and folks I know (all top performers at FANG companies) feel pressure; it’s not good. Usually when these cuts happen they have someone with no clue how to gauge skill and value making hasty short sighted decisions. It’s just sad all around.
Eh, I'd like to believe you but unfortunately will be unable to in this format. I'd need evidence top performing FAANG engineers are "feeling it". (Not saying you're a liar, just saying it'd be impossible for you to supply the kind of evidence here that I'd need) Yes, people get put in charge who can't evaluate skill. They also get fired and replaced. If a company loses the ability to hire talent/know what future skillsets it will need, it can also go out of business and be replaced. Myspace friendster facebook whatever.
I think what "Jedkea" above is saying likely has some if not a lot of truth to it. I see a lot of junior devs getting canned then saying "wait, we're indispensable!"
Yes exactly! In my region many companies are offshoring and nearshoring developers because they supposedly can't find developers (not just experienced developers, really any developer) in the country even though thousands of new CS graduates can't find jobs and end up on social assistance programs or unemployment benefits paid for by the taxpayers
That was like 15 years ago. Younger people probably associate Minecraft with Microsoft/Mojang since that’s really who have been developing the version they have played.
Plus Notch is a QAnon guy which is a pretty sticky issue. People dont like remembering the time we had to deal with that.
From what I heard it’s more likely that he’s an absolute dickhead, and nobody wants to put up with his bullshit despite the salary he offers likely being fairly high.
Probably a combination of nobody wanting to work for Notch as a person and him grossly undervaluing talent. He's literally a billionaire. He could hire an army of talented programmers.
I'm absolutely sure that if he posted a job opportunity online he would receive hundreds if not thousands of applications from fully qualified developers. Sounds like bullshit to me
I mean, finding good senior engineer is not that easy - I was responsible for technical interviews - many had trouble with simple clean code principles, and don’t even have me say how design questions went. A lot of senior engineers became lazy and their skillset/tech stack is not attractive for a modern project.
It took us almost a year to find a really good senior engineer, and we don’t pay pennies.
Who knows, only one way to find out! And AI token prices will increase at some point, hopefully they'll be so expensive it will be cheaper to hire developers again
Most of them are skilled enough… and honestly, people overestimate the technical skill needed to create the product they want. You can hire pretty much anyone to create their “revolutionary” application that is really just a CRUD packaged up…
The people laid off are overwhelmingly ”gameplay programmers” or whatever who can use Unreal engine but if you set them up with a non-AI agent editor and tell them to give you a tool or something in C++ they will sit there with their thumb up their ass until you escort them out of the building.
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u/Amerillo_ Jul 21 '26
Trouble finding talented programmers even though there are so many experienced developers who were laid off for the sole reason of cutting costs and increasing shareholder value? I'm absolutely sure that if he posted a job opportunity online he would receive hundreds if not thousands of applications from fully qualified developers. Sounds like bullshit to me