Hiring managers, which type of engineer is hardest to find nowadays?

I sort of understand where this question is coming from, but as someone who's spent a fair amount of time browsing software job postings recently, the real question isn't specialization, it's seniority.

I routinely have found organizations that have, literally, dozens of open listings for "Senior Software Engineer, Sub-field", but few (if any) explicitly non-senior positions available. My very non-scientific estimate would put this ratio at well over 10:1, and probably closer to 20:1 for many of the organizations I've looked through. I actually sort of wonder if they ever take them down, or if demand for senior candidates is just so high that they're basically evergreen listings, where the organizations assume they'll always have positions available for engineers who meet those listings' criteria.

The hardest "engineer" to find "nowadays" is the same as it was 10, 20, 40, 100 years ago: the one who can communicate what [s]he wants to do in a way that non-engineers can grok

And, the flipside of that: the one who can take what [s]he is given in magic, hand-waving, bafflegab statements from non-engineers and convert it into something someone else can actually use

If you can communicate to and understand from others what you want to do and what they want, you're going to get hired

Every

Dang

Time

One that is cheap.

Every org I know is interviewing engineers fairly regularly, but some have maybe one offer accepted in 10?

Is leetcode a type of engineer? In terms of ROI in finding a new job that’s what I recommend specializing in.

A junior engineer with some (but not too much) experience. Im not sure what exactly has been causing this lately but we have had serious issues at my current org as well as others that I help, finding junior engineers with 2-4 years of relevant experience. We run a fairly straight forward stack (postgres, python/node depending on the service, react front end), our packages are pretty competitive and we have not had a lot of (read basically none) good stuff come across the wire. Recently we have been inundated with resumes from boot camps, college kids, "self taught" people, and just people looking to change careers and expecting us to foot the bill to train them, none of them can hack it on even simple coding challenges or basic architecture questions. At this point ill take someone who can look at a common stack dump and have a fair idea of whats going wrong...

The best analogy I can think of is that we dont need Frank Gehry, but we need someone know knows the studs should be 16 inches apart, and all we are getting is people who know that 3 inch screws might be involved in the job but that is the only screw they have ever seen and the only screw they are comfortable using.

Almost none of the more common ones are hard to find for the right price. The issue is that no one wants to pay.

I have friends trying to do some computer/robot vision stuff. They need people who specialize in that field. It's a bit niche but they know plenty of people. You can imagine someone with that expertise likely has a PhD and has worked in the field for some time. Problem is: They don't come cheap in SV because that person could easily get a job doing something similar at a huge company with a big offer. So, you're going to struggle as a startup who is trying to pay very low $.

And if they didn't do some machine vision stuff then they'd easily be able to transfer to some typical role. So, therefore, you gotta still pay top dollar... It's a real issue for folks who can't raise huge rounds.

Past a certain level of seniority (Principal Engineer and above), you get recruited by headhunter types.

They take a lot more time and effort to figure out who you are before even reaching out.

My guess is that these are the hardest ones to fill, which involve some sort of leadership in the role.

In my observation, Data Engineering leadership is the hardest skill to find recently. There is a good amount of entry-mid level individual contributors in the market, but at the Manager+ level the market is insanely competitive .

I dont think there is any one type of engineer that is hard to find, rather the difficulty is finding them within your company's budget. There is a lot of talent out there, it just doesn't come cheap. The catch is that the companies that have to the budget to lock up top talent generally have large bureaucratic departments where their best engineers are really bored and/or working only 3 hours a day, and using the job to fund their lifestyle while they launch their side project.

Security Engineers that know how to secure applications running on a cloud platform are rare as hen's teeth. We've tried and failed to hire one for almost two years now.

All the candidates are either "cloud security experts" who will run through a checklist of AWS best practices while remaining wilfully ignorant of the application itself, or on-prem dinosaurs who want to talk to us about the ports on our corporate firewall.

Agreed with the senior engineer sentiment. Finding entry level is difficult, but doable. Especially with a good intern program, etc.

But finding _any_ senior engineers is hard right now. With FAANG paying so much, it's just hard to compete.

IMO it gets even worse when you end up in specialized ares. Eg CV, ML, etc. Pretty much anything that requires a masters degree (or a heck of a lot of self motivation)

Technical skills are only part of the equation. You personality is more important. If you are a perfectionist then you are a problem. If you are high maintenance then you are a problem. If you can't work with the team then you are a problem. All these things are just as important to finding the right developer.

Should SRE and DevOps be grouped together? I thought they were separate.

Can code, communicate, and understands data are an impossible combo to find. Good luck - there’s only a handful of such people in the world.

Self-starting generalists

In my experience: the FE engineering fields (web FE, Android, iOS) are probably (very slightly) less in demand than most others. I think that's primarily because: the technology has calcified (in a good way), and there's tons of bootcamps that churn out pretty high quality associate-level engineers which specialize in the FE world.

These bootcamps will also advertise as having covered backend stuff, but its very rarely in any level of depth beyond "spun up an express NodeJS app as a razor-thin layer in front of Firebase" or something; thirty minutes of interviewing will expose this gap, and they get hired on as a FE.

BE/DevOps is in higher demand, thus harder to find. DevOps is a weird one, because its a field that's extremely striated between platforms. Whereas a Java BE engineer could ramp up on NodeJS or whatever very quickly, an Azure specialist will take longer to match their skillset to AWS, not to mention the large body of individuals coming in with traditional linux server maintenance experience that will have a hard time matching their skillset to cloud-native serverless-like roles. It shouldn't stop a hire, but it does make finding well-matched qualified candidates more difficult.

Actually, I'll give props to a lot of the modern Azure skills DevOps peeps can develop; they're very big on their state-of-art being open source CNCF stuff; ex, Kubernetes, DAPR, KEDA, etc. So, a skillset there can transfer to a ton of places (including a GCP-esque shop, or even an AWS shop on less managed tooling). Glad to see some modernization/standardization in this space, but AWS is very antiquated and stuck in their ways.

Less from a hiring manager angle and more from an engineer angle: bonafide actual full stack devs are insanely valuable. Every once in a while you get a candidate that can apply to any role, but will apply to a specialized role; then they meet the engineering manager and the manager realizes, they're a candidate among a pool of candidates who are specialized enough for the role, but they also bring that full stack experience. Very few teams/roles are actually "100% backend" or "100% whatever"; the team may settle for someone who meets the job description, but will prefer breadth over depth, in nearly all cases.

Rarest quality: seniority. Not skill based. Just time, and more-so a demonstrable breadth of experience on a handful of projects, tech stacks, etc. Can't fake it. Can't stress how many roles we've posted at a Senior level, then settled for someone more mid-level because there's no-one. We're remote; competitive salary; small team; cool tech; cool product; maybe one in fifty candidates feels demonstrably senior.

One who is capable of effectively explaining why they are performing an action, not just how.

I don't think frontend is a problem since there are so many bootcamps around nowadays...every body is claiming to be a full stack dev now...

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