In this case the company hired the recruiter because "they couldn't find any candidates".
Hiring your own recruiter can be kind of a scam - if you do it on your side they'll want ~10% of your first year's salary. But if you're interested in such a thing, all you have to do is so much as wag a finger on LinkedIn and they'll come swarming.
Most tech companies have a:
- recruiter screen
- tech screen
- multiple interviews during an "onsite" round
Job is posted. You apply along with hundreds of other people. The recruiter/hiring manager needs to spend some time sifting through them along with juggling all the other tasks they have going on. Let's say that this takes 1-2 weeks. Some places may let the opening sit longer to get more applicants.
Several candidates are identified as possible fits. Recruiter reaches out to them to schedule the recruiter screen. Schedules need to line up. This likely takes 1-2 weeks until the recruiter screen happens.
The recruiter needs to schedule the tech screen after a successful recruiter screen. Again, schedules need to line up. This could take another 1-2 weeks.
Feedback needs to be submitted and then the onsite round is scheduled. This could take another 1-2 weeks.
The onsite round will have multiple interviewers. This means more people to collect feedback from which likely increases delays in getting that. A debrief is normally scheduled with everyone who interviewed them. But let's say one week to gather this and make a decision.
An offer is made. It takes some time to prepare and get sign off. There will be time to discuss with the recruiter to explain the details, plus some time needed for negotiation and thinking it over. This could be another 1-2 weeks.
Additionally, some candidates may want to ask for more time during these phases in order to prepare better or align their schedules. This pushes back the process for all other candidates if the company is hiring for a specific job in order to give all candidates a fair assessment against the pool.
This absolutely sucks if you don't have networking skills, but this is exactly why it pays of to network. You're basically able to skips 50 - 90% of the recruitment "pipeline" is you know the right people and they want you specifically.
The person I responded to said that filling a role in 90 days would be "relatively quick" so you've already improved theoretical hiring efficiency by up to 50%.
But it still doesn't sound like a very effective process typed out like this.
I can't speak to their experience but the bigger the company, the more process and people involved usually. That causes delays here and there that add up. It's also a matter of how much of a priority the company makes it. If they're large and well-known there's really no incentive to change anything. They'll always have a stream of candidates applying and being available to hire.
So it's not that they can't, it's that they won't. Seems crazy to me.
>What would you do to make it more effective?
I'd ask companies who have managed to get the process down to 2-3 weeks what they're doing, and then do that. It sounds like you're saying they don't actually care to, though.
I've had a Claude max plan that I've been using daily for about 6 months now. This month I decided to turn off auto-renew and moved over to Codex to try it out. There's virtually no switching costs. Of course there are some slight differences I'm noticing between the two but nothing that would keep me loyal to one over the other.
Also, Claude Code is the agentic harness with the underlying models being the anthropic ones. If it's the harness you're worried about, try out Codex or any of the open source ones like OpenCode, Pi, Goose.
This will never go away. Instead it will become more local. In the future, it's more likely that you have a model running on your computer. These companies have no moat. You don't need to worry about it going away or them charging beyond what you can pay.
Yes, but I think it still behaved weirdly with external changes. It's been a few years now, maybe it discarded any unsaved changes and just re-read the version from disk, or maybe it auto closed any editors for files that didn't exist after a branch change. Awkward behavior like that. VSCode and Sublime Text are much better in this regard.
They still needed to invest time and other resources into this. It's listed clearly in the 2nd paragraph. Mathematicians, or anyone for that matter, don't figure out everything from scratch. They lean on the work that others have done before them to save time. How is this any different?
This reminds me a lot of Y2K. There were dire warnings about planes falling out of the sky, financial system meltdown, all systems being broken, etc. In the end nothing happened.
You could argue that's because of the prep work people put into avoiding that. The same thing will happen here. The HF incident was a warning sign and people will put better guardrails in place as a result.
Let's not forget that the competitive race happened because of them. Most of the initial AI research from the past decade started with Google Deepmind. Elon Musk was invited for a preview of it and ended up spinning up OpenAI when Demis turned down his investment offer. Dario was originally at OpenAI and left to start Anthropic.
This seems like a case of "save me from my own mistakes/ambition"
I actually think everyone should still code a little. Maybe 30-60 minutes per day. While the majority of code is generated by agents, I've found that with even a little coding I catch stuff that I miss by just doing code reviews of agentic-written code. But yeah, the majority of my day isn't coding now.
Of course it would. Supply and demand. Some companies would decide not to bother. Others would decide it was worthwhile. The limited pool of supply (app developers) would be distributed across demand.
>> Some companies would decide not to bother. Others would decide it was worthwhile.
The parent's point is that AI lowers the cost/benefit ratio drastically, by reducing the cost. So companies that would have shied away from projects like this pre-AI are now pulling the trigger without much hesitation.
And what a lot of people seem to miss is that with AI, there is going to be (already is?) orders of magnitude more software in this world. I'm sure a lot of jobs will be eliminated, but new jobs will be created as well. Hopefully enough to balance things out, but we'll see.
I agree that AI is suppressing developer wage growth and taking real jobs. The opposite argument is being made elsewhere in the thread, and I think that argument is wrong.
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