Why employers don't want to hire less experienced and skilled programmers [closed]

Question

I came across this question: How can I overcome "years of experience" requirements when applying to positions?

Last week one fat MNC (a big Multinational Company like amazon, accenture, caterpillar, capegemini, Deloitte, ebay, etc.) interviewed me. 3-10 was the expected experience. I had 33 months exp. Out of so many (older) candidates, very few candidates including me successfully impressed the technical personnel.

Few days later a HR person called my phone and offered me a shocking package. It was just a 5% hike from my current salary.

This is what she said:

We are happy with your performance during the interview. However your experience falls under 2-3 years category. Hence, we can NOT offer you more than XXX salary (which is about a 5% hike).

I was totally silenced by their response. Therefore I had to reject the offer.
^{FYI In my country 30-40% hike is very normal}

I had been job hunting for 2 months and received a couple of decent offers from smaller companies. But this organization was one of my dream organizations, but I was shocked and embarrassed by their response.

^{My current company is also a fat MNC and you can't find many people whose skills surpass the experience.}

So the questions are

Why don't employers want to hire skilled, yet young employees?
Why employers prefer "experienced old people" over "talented young"?

Answer 1

Firstly there's a very big difference between skilled and experienced. You may be the most talented young developer in Asia but with only three years of experience you will have been exposed to less technologies, high stress situations and clients than someone who's been writing code for ten years.

In current times I've seen more and more employers taking the safe bet, the person who's been doing the job for a lot longer and has a proven track record. Clearly this is based on my own local experience.

To me it sounds like your disappointment stems from the lack of a raise. If you're genuinely unhappy with the offer then you need to negotiate. Someone with a little more local knowledge will be far better suited to guiding your expectations there.

Answer 2

Are we really so shocked that people doing the hiring at many companies don't know what they're doing? They don't know how to identify a good programmer (in this example), so they'll hire the person that someone else was dumb enough to give a job for a few years. Most companies never last more than 5 years probably because they repeat the same mistakes.

Expected Experience They explicitly stated 3-10 years, but offered someone with less. Don't take job postings literally. I don't know why they play this game, but they always "wiggle" on requirements. Personally, I think that is a good thing, but why post these numbers if you're not going to stick to them? It's a game. They think it will weed-out all the people who will take a random shot at a high-paying job even though they know nothing about it.

Time Factors I've seen companies that base the pay-scale on number of years at that company. Other experience was not given much weight. In their mind it's just easier to do this and avoid negotiations and conflicts. Why wait a year to determine raises? What's so magical about 365 days?

Skill Sets Same as expected experience. They shot-gun blast 25 different technologies and end up hiring someone who has a little over half of them. What does "understand" HTML really mean? Do I get to Google it? Am I expected to write it fluently? I've had interviews where answering "yes" was acceptable. They probably had the last programmer make this list before she left and all these skills were used for clients/projects that you'll never work on, but HR doesn't know that.

Look for the company and most importantly team and leader that fits your style. Don't take the hurdles you have to jump over too seriously. Many companies mean well even if they don't really understand how to manage programmers. The princess has to kiss a lot of frogs sometimes to find a prince.