Tell Me How Much You Will Pay Me

Please stop wasting people’s time. When you post a job vacancy, please also post the salary range for that role. Do not wait two to three steps into the interview process before telling a candidate how much they will get paid should they sign on. That’s it. We can end the article right there.

How Much I Earn/ed Does Not Determine How Much You Want To Pay Me

Oh wait, there is another one that is much worse. NEVER ask candidates their current cost to company. Why should it matter to your role how much I got paid at my last job? If you are going to pay me based on how much I used to earn, then you are running a scam. The work will always be the same regardless of who is doing it and by that logic, it does not matter who is doing the work, they should be paid equally. If you have some speech about money not being the most important aspect to consider and blah blah, save it.

Introduction

With that out of the way, it seems the tech industry recruitment process is becoming more and more convoluted as we progress. Software developers are in high demand yes but companies have to provide a balance otherwise where we are now will just get worse. After my rant about posting salary ranges and not scamming candidates with cost to company hi-jinks, the next item on the agenda would be inflated job titles.

Director Of Mobile Software Engineering

Inflated Job Title for Android Developer

That there is a very inflated job title. If you look at the requirements, then at the job title, the two do not make any sense. The job is asking for a junior to med level Android developer but they chose to call it Director of Mobile Software Engineering. In a company with only 50 people? I am not 100% sure why companies do this. Maybe they want to call you a Senior Chief Software Architect to make you feel more important. A person with a CS Degree and 2-3 years of experience will not be directing or engineering a whole department. As a software developer be careful what you put on your resume. Joining in this dance and putting these ridiculous titles on your resume can make you appear overqualified for roles that match nicely with your experience and knowledge level.

Who Exactly Are You Looking For?

Are you an experienced mobile developer who has worked on at least one published application on an app store? Yes? Great! Do you also have experience designing UIs in Adobe XD and can you develop SOAP/RESTFUL server side applications using JS? Great, you are the person we are looking for. This is not one job, these are three different roles sandwiched into one and you will likely be paid for one role. The major cause for this is often getting Human Resources people to make technical job postings. They will in turn search buzzwords related to the field and put in on job search platforms. Either get a technical person to make a concise listing or work with the H.R. people to create one.

Speaking Of Buzzwords and FAANG

Story time! After getting rejected by bots that scan for keywords in resumes, someone got creative. Here is their supposed resume:

Fake resume spammed with buzzwords

Have a look at that resume. Rebuilt home page to provide 420 fps screen experience. Usage of VoldermortDb and Charizard (That’s Harry Potter and Pokemon). Slid in the dm’s. If you take a few seconds to just read the resume, you can see its utter BS. But a bot somewhere flagged this resume as really good because of Instagram, LinkedIn, Microsoft etc in its keyword scan. This person’s real resume had a 0% success rate while this buzzword filled fake fest had a 90% success rate. For gosh sake the person gave herpes to 60% of the interns at Microsoft! This fake resume earned them calls from Notion, AirBnB, GitHub among others. A human being read the resume in some cases and still wanted to talk to this candidate. I am sorry. I can’t can. This article ends here. I’m going to play chess.