In technology we hire by shallow skills. I don’t know exactly why, but we do.

Over the years I have been following up closely, hiring, and directly interviewing candidates in many sectors related to technology: financial engineering, computational trading, software engineering, hardware engineering, biotech, academia, you name it. Not that I actively and intentionally follow hiring, as a recruiter, or anything along those lines, but it is just a side effect of dealing full time with technology and its most important asset: humans, the human talent.

All these sectors have in common a strong reliance on human talent, requiring several years of specialized training, and the only one that stands aside by being absolutely fascinated by shallow skills in software engineering. Don’t ask me why. I don’t know, but it is a fact. Ask any software engineer and after a roll of eyes, they can confirm and tell you many tales. And they probably don’t know the reason either. Recently, I started to puzzle myself with the waste and the apparent economical non-sense of the hiring industry. That’s when I started observing another non-sense: the prevalence of shallow skills assessing in hiring, specifically in software engineering.

A shallow skill is a skill that does not require much training, and can be easily inferred from a short previous experience, or checked by a quick search…