15 ms·

We Only Hire the Best

333 points by braythwayt 10y ago

braythwayt 10y ago
"Everyone thinks they're hiring the top 1%.”—Joel Spolsky, 2005 http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2005/01/27.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2005/01/27.html
- bitwize 10y ago
  Well I must suck then because there aren't companies lining up to just hand me a job like Joel says happens to all good developers. I have to hustle in order to keep food and a roof.
  - pmiller2 10y ago
    Don't worry. I'm sucking right there along side you. 3.5 years experience and I'm not even getting recruiter spam in the volume some of the people here are. :P
    - pascal1usa 10y ago
      You probably would be if you lived in SF. Since the available housing ratio to jobs is 1 to 3, they have effectively guaranteed that not all jobs can ever be filled. Great for the job supply!
      - jakub_g 10y ago
        Never tried but I think it could be an interesting experiment to temporarily change your LinkedIn location to SF and see how much it affects the recruit-o-spam numbers.
      - pmiller2 10y ago
        I work in SF now.
      - galdosdi 10y ago
        Or NYC. Or another major urban area with plenty of tech jobs. Anecdotal but everyone I know here in tech (varying roles, skills, and levels of experience) gets plenty of recruiter spam. By contrast, I do know similar people who have had a tough time with the only difference being they're in a smaller market in the interior and are not willing to relocate. I think location really matters a lot. Telecommuting has not made it irrelevant. There's strong network / market effects for an industry with frequent job hopping and frequent changing of company hiring needs -- employees want to be somewhere with a lot of employers and employers want to be somewhere with a lot of employees, so the top few cities end up taking the lion's share of the tech work. If anything, easier communications maybe has made it easier for companies to just open up an office somewhere just because that place has a lot of prospective employees. Maybe in an earlier era slower communications with colleagues in other offices might have made this less attractive, but it's so easy now. E.g., tech companies starting in SV but then also opening up an Austin, Pittsburgh, London, Seattle, NYC office because there's plenty of prospective hires there. What you don't see them do much is also open a St Louis, Tampa, or Little Rock office. It's just not worth it. DEFINITELY consider trying moving to a major tech hub, or just a bigger city at least, if you have persistently had a hard time finding a job locally.
    - st3v3r 10y ago
      Do you guys put your stuff out there? Recruiters can't really harass you if they don't know you exist.
      - pmiller2 10y ago
        If by "put your stuff out there," you mean "have a LinkedIn profile," then yes. Otherwise, my "stuff" (meaning everything I've written in the past several years) is under NDA and not useful to anyone else.
        st3v3r 10y ago
        While it's always better to have stuff on a Github profile or similar, usually a filled out LinkedIn profile with mention of what kinds of projects you've worked on (usually vague enough to avoid NDAs) is good enough, especially if you're mentioning things that happen to be in demand in the area.
  - restalis 10y ago
    Is your work exposed somewhere to speak for itself or the approaching should have some other reasons?
pigpaws 10y ago
so... they're really just lowering their standards... I was told here on HN that's wrong...
mlvljr 10y ago
So are you ..yourselves, thus? :)
jerryhuang100 10y ago
just like when you see signs "best pizza/hero in town" or "we use best ingredients" at eateries
travjones 10y ago
DHH back at it again, dropping truth on the dev game. This was a timely post because my friend and I were just mocking the phrase "we only hire the best" this past weekend. If you like DHH's writing, check out one of his other recent posts: RECONSIDER [0]. I think pointing out some of the absurdities of software development culture and startups is fun. It's unfortunate that Startup L. Jackson hung up his hat :/. 0: https://signalvnoise.com/posts/3972-reconsider https://signalvnoise.com/posts/3972-reconsider
deedubaya 10y ago
Such a no brainer, but jezus it's about time for someone to call out the hiring posts. Hiring a good employee is like shopping for a car. You don't buy the coup if you have a family of six, a gas guzzler when you're a commuter, or a 2wd when you live in the boonies. It's a balance of values. I've seen "rock star" coders fail in team environments because they can't communicate. I've seen great communicators fail because they were all talk. I've seen really great team players impolode when facing the customer. I'd rather have an employee who is good at a few things than one who is "The Best" at one thing. It's called hiring for employee fit, not so you can tell your buddies how l33t your team is.
- ArkyBeagle 10y ago
  I think the article is more about Dunning-Kueger coupled with that special narcissism we all know and love so much.
- bicknergseng 10y ago
  Definitely reading too much into your comment and not responding just to you but the hiring post trend, but IMO all of those scenarios are conflating mismanagement with bad hiring. Have a rock star coder who can't communicate (I'd challenge whether or not that was possible another time)? Put them in a position that minimizes the amount of communication they have to do or set up a structure for their inbound/outbound communications that works for everyone. Great communicator? Have them figure out how to facilitate that person who can't communicate. Great team player? Have them work with the team and don't make them outbound. Point is, effective team building doesn't end at offer letters. Hire for fit, then fit the hire. Train up. Just because someone is weak in some area doesn't mean they can't contribute meaningfully given the proper resources and support, nor is a strong hire going to succeed without the same carefully tailored support.
blisterpeanuts 10y ago
Thanks for this reminder of basic management practice which needs to be posted about once a year: hire good people and get the most out of them through superb leadership, great working conditions and ample incentives to achieve. "We only hire the best" is a sales slogan, not a true management principle. The "best" aren't usually for hire at any given moment; they're very well employed already, or otherwise occupied. And when a high caliber person decides to move on, someone in his or her network will likely hear of it and snap them up. I'd rather hear them say, "We have excellent hiring practices that filter out incompetence and unpleasant personalities. We have a great team here and we're really proud of the hard work they do." Of course you can make a case for disruption; sometimes what a business needs is someone to challenge the norms, shake things up, rattle the chains, and that can be unpleasant if not downright threatening. An old manager of mine called such people "brilliant assholes". Gotta love'em for what they can achieve, but they're often not much fun to be around!
AndrewKemendo 10y ago
It's signaling 101. What are you supposed to say; we hire mediocre developers? Give me a break. "Best" is such a loaded, nothing term that it doesn't really mean anything without a ton of context. This is a waste of outrage.
- Chirael 10y ago
  It's also a signal to potential hires that "we only use the same hiring phrases and buzz words everyone else uses" At best that can indicate "we copied and pasted the top part of this job description from every other job we've posted", at worst it can mean "we have a very corporate culture, so I hope you're going to bring your 'team player' rock star ninja game" It's not good or bad, but it can tell you something about the company - just like the company will scrutinize resumes and job histories to find clues for what potential hires are like. Signals all around.
- blisterpeanuts 10y ago
  He's just poking fun at some HR jargon. A few years ago, a common thing to say was: "We work hard, and we play hard." I guess some hiring managers still say that, and maybe they even mean it, but to me it's a sign not of innovation but of an overly controlling, paternalistic management style: "Playtime's over, kiddies!"
- mcphage 10y ago
  That wasn't outrage... more disdainful mockery.
- braythwayt 10y ago
  > What are you supposed to say; we hire mediocre developers? That’s a perfectly valid business strategy, and one that is practiced by many big consulting firms. You put someone’s butt in a chair, you are billing for them by the hour, and if they won’t work 90, 100, or 110 hours a week, there’s always someone else who wants their job. They’re not that great, and they know it, and you like it like that.
  - AndrewKemendo 10y ago
drelihan 10y ago
"Losers always whine about trying to hire the best...." - J.P. Mason "The best" is a relative measure. An absolute measure must be set first and gatekeepers put in place to guard it. Then, do all you can to find candidates exceeding that measure and then pick the best FIT you can from there. blisterpeanuts is right on...
asb 10y ago
Corp: "We only hire the very best" Programmer: "What's the salary?" Corp: "Market average. Also, we're looking for people who aren't just motivated by money"
- ryandrake 10y ago
  I can't up-vote this article or comment enough! If you want to hire a top 1% employee, you need to offer a top 1% salary. Not a top 50% salary.
- leroy_masochist 10y ago
  We want people who are motivated by the mission.
  - LargeWu 10y ago
    If the mission is feeding starving children, or curing cancer, or public service, then yes, I want people who are motivated by the mission. But usually the mission, the real mission, is to make the founders exceptionally wealthy, and forgive me if that doesn't get me out of bed in the morning.
    - andybak 10y ago
      This man speaks the truth. :-) I think it's a lost battle but I used to rage whenever I saw a company talk about their 'Vision'. Unless you're a poet, religious mystic or philosopher king - then you're being pretentious and grandiose.
      - tenkabuto 10y ago
        Assuming that I am a cash-strapped philosopher king with a grand vision for my business, how might I sway people to take the vision seriously and work towards the fulfillment of the vision?
        LargeWu 10y ago
leroy_masochist 10y ago
One other aspect of "we only hire the best" that wasn't explored by this article is the practice -- especially common among unicorn companies -- of purposely casting a far wider net than needed, so that their hiring yield on applicants is dauntingly low. The recruiting process is deliberately set up to yield a lot of false negatives -- i.e., applicants who are qualified on both skill and fit who are rejected for some arbitrary bullshit reason. I suspect it's largely an effort to mindfuck the employees who do make it through the process. I'm so lucky to be here! Only 3% of applicants even make it to a five-minute founder interview, and only half of them get hired!
- cortesoft 10y ago
  Well, lots of people have to be rejected for a the not-bullshit reason that there are only n jobs available at the company and n+x people applied. Even if they are all great, x number of people are going to be rejected.
  - querulous 10y ago
    the point is that if you are interviewing 30 people for every hire you are spending way too much time and effort on interviewing. if you had better recruiting funnels you could easily get down to 2 or 3 interviews per hire
  - vonmoltke 10y ago
    If this were the case, there would not be so much whining from these same companies about talent shortages.
  - superuser2 10y ago
    I'm not so sure. My understanding is the big tech companies hire engineers on a rolling basis and basically take everyone they like. They're not approaching it for the frame of satisfying a requisition for a specific role with the best of the N applicants for it on X date, they're picking up talent as quickly as possible and then sorting out where to place people after the hire/no-hire decision is made.
ikeboy 10y ago
https://blog.codinghorror.com/we-hire-the-best-just-like-everyone-else/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/we-hire-the-best-just-like-eve... (discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11223316 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11223316) http://danluu.com/programmer-moneyball/ http://danluu.com/programmer-moneyball/ (discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11326940 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11326940)
- GVIrish 10y ago
  That Dan Luu blog post is gold. It really is kind of sad how arbitrary, capricious, and wasteful hiring in IT is, not to mention the short-sighted thinking about talent. I also really liked the post he did about discrimination in tech: http://danluu.com/tech-discrimination/ http://danluu.com/tech-discrimination/
hashkb 10y ago
> but recognizing the difference between what you’d like to be true and what actually is serves as a prerequisite for closing that gap ...and not recognizing it is a prerequisite for running a company.
stillworks 10y ago
The best line I heard "we don't hire a$$$holes". That's a check-mate statement. I think to myself what if I don't get selected :-( . I did get selected only to realise they hired people down the line whom I'd consider rectal orifices. Can't catch a break really...
- whatever_dude 10y ago
  The "No assholes" rule should really be the #1 rule when hiring. I've heard a lot of complaints from friends and family in the tech industry over the years, as I've had my own issues. While details vary, it always comes down to the acting up of one obvious asshole or another. It infects the whole team/company/project. In the long run, a team of average but positively motivated people more often than not beats a team with an asshole in it, even if he/she is a rockstar/guru/ninja/jedi/whatever. And their lives won't be miserable in the process.
  - jjuel 10y ago
    The problem is an "asshole" is subjective. I might find someone to be an asshole that someone else might not think is an asshole.
    - GVIrish 10y ago
      In any group of people sometimes there are going to be people who don't get along for whatever reason. That doesn't necessarily make that person an asshole. An asshole is who someone who makes like miserable for most people they interact with. Or they make life miserable for a whole group of people (e.g. someone who is shitty to subordinates, treats women poorly, etc.).
    - whatever_dude 10y ago
      At least from my limited sample, more often than not the assholes are considered to be assholes by everyone else. "Well, everyone thinks he/she's an asshole, but he/she does the job, or has been in the company for a long time, or knows someone in the executive team". That's where the problems lie, when everyone the person is an asshole but no one can do anything about it.
daniel-levin 10y ago
"We Only Hire the Best" doesn't have to have any truth to it to be of use to companies. Their purpose in hiring is to extract value from candidates. Convincing people that they'd be amongst the best is all you have to do. The rhetoric comes from existing employees, who may be rationalising their decision to work there. It feels good to be amongst "the best" - I want to be amongst the best! I am sure I'm not the only one with such aspirations. If being 'the best' means over-fitting to the requirements of a company, then the most successful (viz. "best") candidates will optimise for what that company wants. It means by the time they arrive at work they're already largely conditioned into behaving as their new company would like them to. Yes, "the best" is a transparent lie. It doesn't matter though, because it serves the interests of companies who espouse it. DHH is calling a spade a spade here - but I'd hazard that the vast majority of the HN crowd already know. Also, globally, there are lot of extraordinarily shit software people out there. If we define quality by "gets things done and doesn't break things and act in a crappy and deleterious manner", then it is not difficult for "the best" to mean the upper 60% of software people. It is completely reasonable to assume that the companies with this mantra do indeed hire from the top 60%, if only because of how many rubbish people there are.
anamoulous 10y ago
We only hire the best. We are going to consult all the best experts and we'll get the best people in the office to make 37 Signals great again. It will be a beautiful thing.
dmh2000 10y ago
Joel wrote this same post about 10 years ago. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2005/01/27.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2005/01/27.html
- briandear 10y ago
  Ecclesiastes 1:9 -- The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.
  - jamisteven 10y ago
    wtf does this have to do with anything
pjc50 10y ago
One of the chapters of "Parkinson's Law" (the book that among other things coins 'bikeshedding') discusses hiring from a satirical point of view. He makes the point that the easiest kind of hire is when only one candidate applies, so it's good to load down your adverts with as many requirements as possible so as to put applicants off.
henrik_w 10y ago
Another good post on the same subject is: We only hire the best means we only hire the trendiest http://danluu.com/programmer-moneyball/ http://danluu.com/programmer-moneyball/ HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11326940 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11326940
jemfinch 10y ago
Nothing is said here that wasn't better said by Joel Spolsky over a decade ago: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2005/01/27.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2005/01/27.html
- dbg31415 10y ago
  Expected this to be the top comment. Nothing new DHH isn't widely praised for originality, but come on this whole article is like a total re-hash. And he doesn't even bother to mention Joel... to me that means he's trying to take credit, or he doesn't know about Joel... uh, yeah.
  - why-el 10y ago
    > DHH isn't widely praised for originality Unless you have more to say I think this is an unnecessary attack on David's person, especially that one might think of a couple of things he did that are original. ;)
  - dylanrw 10y ago
    Or he's just ranting as he's prone to do. At no point does he make an originality claim, and you don't need to be original to voice disappointment...
- kough 10y ago
  Yeah, I got a weird sense of deja vu.
- up_and_up 10y ago
  Some things are worth restating.
bpyne 10y ago
"First, “the best” is bound to be situational. Someone who can thrive in one environment might get crushed in another. The peak skills that gave them a leg-up in one domain may very well make them unfit for work in another." Key statement here. Some employers need top coding skills in modern technologies. Some employers, like my current one, really don't need a top coder: they need good analysis skills with some coding. Employers need different degrees of executive function and technical skill. My previous employers valued high technical skill, but we had single product/project focus. My current employer doesn't need high technical skill, but a successful person in this environment needs to be able to multiplex across four projects with differing requirements - COTS implementation, soup-to-nuts software development, bridges between existing systems, etc. - while also providing at least second level support for existing systems. In addition to executive function and technical skill, add in social skill. Some employers in my past had no problem with on-edge bright technical people. My current employer values politeness far over technical ability. "Best" and even "successful" have to be defined by each organization according to their mission and values.
johngalt 10y ago
Experience tells me that hiring posts that demand this level of excellence are often covering for weaknesses in their process. "We only hire the best!" The best at what? "The best at everything of course. We want a full stack wish fulfillment genie." Either you have no idea what skills are missing from your current team, or they are all missing, and you want to fill that gap with one person rather than a team. Job postings that ask for excessive skills across multiple disciplines say to me: This hiring manager doesn't want to do their job. The management job of creating a team, process, workflow. Why bother building a team of shared responsibilities? Why take ownership of the team's process? That would be hard. Instead I'll just hire one uber-nerd and make them do it all.
- Yhippa 10y ago
  Here are some of my favorite lazy hiring manager practices: * asking for "everything but the kitchen sink" skills * confusing Java with Javascript * even mentioning J2EE in the requisiton (who on Earth wants to do that in this day and age?) * copy-pasting of the requisition leading to truncation of the posting
  - tomjen3 10y ago
    j2ee makes sense if you need somebody to mentain your existing code.
  - gtk40 10y ago
    I was talking to the product manager for a product we were having issues with from a major player in the corporate software place who, when we told the manager we were experiencing Java exceptions and instability, kept calling them "JavaScript exceptions." I couldn't believe a PM couldn't even keep the language that the product was written in straight.
  - nazka 10y ago
    Or like the 'Spark +5 years of experience minimum' type of offers we had 2 years ago. Now it's Tensorflow.
VLM 10y ago
"You know what the best people I’ve ever met or worked with had in common? ALMOST NOTHING!" I've found the best have interesting hobbies. The not so best have nothing to say beyond "how bout that sitcom/drama/game last night, eh?". The extroverts won't shut up about it and the introverts have to be coaxed, but one way or another if they can tell stories for hours, about something other than TV last night, they tend to be pretty good at their job. Its a weaker argument that it has to be a craft hobby. Beer, carpentry, knitting, playing music, writing poetry, subject doesn't matter. If doing something the right way is important to them as a core value outside of work, then they'll tend to do things the right way at work.
karmakaze 10y ago
In the spirit of going deep, the root cause of the F1 crash was human error (being in the wrong strategy mode) rather than ego.
- protomyth 10y ago
  Yeah, that was a whole different kind of error. Also, the line before that is pretty wrong too, so I guess we're just going to have to ignore the whole paragraph.
DVassallo 10y ago
> (Did you see Hamilton and Rosberg collide in Formula 1 last week? Mercedes probably wish they had more of a Vettel and Webber kind of dynamic right now.) Vettel and Webber crashed as well in Turkey 2010 as they battled for the lead: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vx9zIQvrdZU https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vx9zIQvrdZU
anotherhacker 10y ago
There's no way they hire the best. My company told me they already hired all the best programmers!
valugi 10y ago
define best!
paulclinger 10y ago
It needs to be read as "We only hire the best (we can find)". So the results are explained by the search and selection "algorithms" applied in the hiring process.
devy 10y ago
Although I agree most of what DHH said in this blog post, I am a little disappointed that he only offers Don'ts but not in Do's.
iamgopal 10y ago
Is it just me or svn blog quality greatly reduced these days ?
jklinger410 10y ago
Employer: I want the most work for the least money. Employee: I want the most money for the least work. In the current market Employer > Employee.
quantum_nerd 10y ago
Sometimes I even ask myself: “you only hire the best…at what exactly?” there is difference between having a fancy degree/accolades and actually contributing meaningfully to your work. I have also seen(in my thin years of experience) that at most companies, there is a disconnect between HR and company’s talent needs. Only those who have figured out how to bridge that gap hire “the best”(subjectively).
sandworm101 10y ago
I was looking at a senior position at a "we only hire the best" firm yesterday, a senior position requiring at least a masters plus a decade of experience. But right at the bottom of the qualifications: "Must be proficient in Word, PowerPoint and Visio".
galistoca 10y ago
I see a lot of people on this thread who just say it's bullshit without understanding what's going on. You can live your life that way, or you can enlighten yourself on what really is going on and make the right decision. This "salary cut" works only in this case: The employee is not just looking for money but something intangible from the job (Experience/network/etc.) This doesn't apply to most of you guys who have no intention to start a company or make a huge leap in life. That's why you think it's bullshit. But there are also a small number of people who are really not driven by just money but puts a lot of value on the intangibles I mentioned above. Many startups look for these types of people, so to those of you who are hating on this idea: there's nothing wrong with you hating on them. It's by design, these companies don't want you either. I know from experience because I've hired people who just got in without any specific reason. These people tend to give up very soon because they simply don't care about what they're building. And again, there's nothing wrong with that. It's just that these startups can't afford to hire you. Here's my horror story: I was working on a startup. We were fortunate to have a guy who's extremely talented and wrote the core part of our product. However he switched ship immediately when he realized it was a business that will take time to mature. I really hated that guy for a while because we had to basically abandon our core product the day he just left. Now I understand and also know that part of it was my fault too, but it was a very difficult experience for me. If you look at the world with this lens you'll notice so many "rockstar developers" jumping ship after another when things don't go well for the company (which is totally fine for them but bad for the company). That's why startup companies should care more about the "right match" than "rockstar developers". And hiring a rockstar developer by paying him tons of money when he's not so passionate about the company's vision is the worst thing you can do. An analogy is most girls who don't want guys who are just in it for her looks. When you try to seduce a girl, complementing her looks rarely works unless your social status is extremely obviously high or if your looks are extremely great. In most cases you have to demonstrate that you like her not just for her looks but because of her personality. Most girls don't want a guy to just have fun for one night, never to see again, especially if they like them. I know many girls who gave up on a guy she really liked because she didn't want to be hurt. Startups are like that.
- dmitrygr 10y ago
  I'm not even going to try to reply on the sexist nature of the second half of this comment, but focus on the startup-related one. Your guy switched to another company because you were on track to become rich off his work, and he was not. If you incentivized him right, he'd stay. Did you ask him why he left? Because if not, you really did not learn a lesson.
graycat 10y ago
And what if a candidate has a good background in computing, computer science, AI, and pure and applied math and, then, also a good STEM field Ph.D. degree from a leading research university. Do you want to "hire the best" or do you want to reject anyone with a Ph.D. degree? E.g., how many STEM field Ph.D. holders have you hired to date?
beat 10y ago
This makes me think of an observation an old colleague of mine made to one of the revolving-door CTOs at our former employer. He said there are three things you can offer to get good engineers... high pay, an interesting problem, and a great work environment. If you can't offer at least two, you really need to excel at the last one. Problem with former employer was a lousy work environment for uninteresting work...
xiaoma 10y ago
Isn't the author of this post the primary villain from the big #rubydrama article on HN over the past couple of days?
jamisteven 10y ago
what a shit headline.
20years 10y ago
Sooooo good! I think I may start replying with a link to this article every time a recruiter contacts me with one of these types of jobs. They almost always require moving to the Bay area for some "hot new" startup and a whopping $80k salary + equity. Can't live off that in the Bay area and I have no desire to work for your Uber for X startup, do weekly scrum sessions or work in an open office environment crammed tight. I think a quick reply with a link to this article will do the trick.
notacoward 10y ago
"We only hire the best, because nobody else has a hope of surviving the mess that our previous 'best' made." Seriously, I think WOHTB is an indication that the company doesn't know the difference between selection and training. They want the technical equivalent of Navy SEALs (which is already a questionable goal) so they put in an equivalent of BUD/S, but that's a training program and they're using it for selection. Anybody capable of getting past that is either a faker or doesn't need it, and since the second group will also have little patience for it all you're left with is the fakers. Not a strategy for success. I don't mind, though, because their failure makes things easier for the rest of us.
bretpiatt 10y ago
Places that truly hire the best are not doing it through job postings. The the company / department leadership are actively involved spending time networking to curate a queue of candidates for hard to hire roles. The second thing high performing companies do is have entry level roles where you can mass hire to see who rises to perform as "the best" where you can then promote out of that pool into your "hard to hire" roles where you cannot afford an average or below average player on the team. You'll also need to pay the best at market rates for "best" not market rates for "average". "Pay" breaks down into what I call 'the money/fun dial' -- the dial goes from 0% money / 100% fun to 100% money / 0% fun. At 0% money those activities are called hobbies and everyone has a list of activities they enjoy doing each day they either spend money on or at best break even. At 100% money / 0% fun this is effectively "selling your soul" -- these are the jobs that leave you no time or energy to have hobbies, non-work relationships, or a family. With my company we aim for 50%/50% on the dial -- we pay well, allow folks to work hard on meaningful projects, and give them time for hobbies/friends/family. I view life as a marathon and if you turn the dial up or run a company culture with the dial turned up beyond 50% on money people will work for you until they burn out or make enough to find a long term home.
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solutions16 10y ago
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333 points by braythwayt 10y ago

"Everyone thinks they're hiring the top 1%.”—Joel Spolsky, 2005 http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2005/01/27.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2005/01/27.html

bitwize 10y ago
Well I must suck then because there aren't companies lining up to just hand me a job like Joel says happens to all good developers. I have to hustle in order to keep food and a roof.
- pmiller2 10y ago
  Don't worry. I'm sucking right there along side you. 3.5 years experience and I'm not even getting recruiter spam in the volume some of the people here are. :P
  - pascal1usa 10y ago
    You probably would be if you lived in SF. Since the available housing ratio to jobs is 1 to 3, they have effectively guaranteed that not all jobs can ever be filled. Great for the job supply!
    - jakub_g 10y ago
      Never tried but I think it could be an interesting experiment to temporarily change your LinkedIn location to SF and see how much it affects the recruit-o-spam numbers.
    - pmiller2 10y ago
      I work in SF now.
    - galdosdi 10y ago
      Or NYC. Or another major urban area with plenty of tech jobs. Anecdotal but everyone I know here in tech (varying roles, skills, and levels of experience) gets plenty of recruiter spam. By contrast, I do know similar people who have had a tough time with the only difference being they're in a smaller market in the interior and are not willing to relocate. I think location really matters a lot. Telecommuting has not made it irrelevant. There's strong network / market effects for an industry with frequent job hopping and frequent changing of company hiring needs -- employees want to be somewhere with a lot of employers and employers want to be somewhere with a lot of employees, so the top few cities end up taking the lion's share of the tech work. If anything, easier communications maybe has made it easier for companies to just open up an office somewhere just because that place has a lot of prospective employees. Maybe in an earlier era slower communications with colleagues in other offices might have made this less attractive, but it's so easy now. E.g., tech companies starting in SV but then also opening up an Austin, Pittsburgh, London, Seattle, NYC office because there's plenty of prospective hires there. What you don't see them do much is also open a St Louis, Tampa, or Little Rock office. It's just not worth it. DEFINITELY consider trying moving to a major tech hub, or just a bigger city at least, if you have persistently had a hard time finding a job locally.
  - st3v3r 10y ago
    Do you guys put your stuff out there? Recruiters can't really harass you if they don't know you exist.
    - pmiller2 10y ago
      If by "put your stuff out there," you mean "have a LinkedIn profile," then yes. Otherwise, my "stuff" (meaning everything I've written in the past several years) is under NDA and not useful to anyone else.
      - st3v3r 10y ago
        While it's always better to have stuff on a Github profile or similar, usually a filled out LinkedIn profile with mention of what kinds of projects you've worked on (usually vague enough to avoid NDAs) is good enough, especially if you're mentioning things that happen to be in demand in the area.
- restalis 10y ago
  Is your work exposed somewhere to speak for itself or the approaching should have some other reasons?

pigpaws 10y ago

so... they're really just lowering their standards... I was told here on HN that's wrong...

mlvljr 10y ago

So are you ..yourselves, thus? :)

jerryhuang100 10y ago

just like when you see signs "best pizza/hero in town" or "we use best ingredients" at eateries

travjones 10y ago

DHH back at it again, dropping truth on the dev game. This was a timely post because my friend and I were just mocking the phrase "we only hire the best" this past weekend. If you like DHH's writing, check out one of his other recent posts: RECONSIDER [0]. I think pointing out some of the absurdities of software development culture and startups is fun. It's unfortunate that Startup L. Jackson hung up his hat :/. 0: https://signalvnoise.com/posts/3972-reconsider https://signalvnoise.com/posts/3972-reconsider

deedubaya 10y ago

Such a no brainer, but jezus it's about time for someone to call out the hiring posts. Hiring a good employee is like shopping for a car. You don't buy the coup if you have a family of six, a gas guzzler when you're a commuter, or a 2wd when you live in the boonies. It's a balance of values. I've seen "rock star" coders fail in team environments because they can't communicate. I've seen great communicators fail because they were all talk. I've seen really great team players impolode when facing the customer. I'd rather have an employee who is good at a few things than one who is "The Best" at one thing. It's called hiring for employee fit, not so you can tell your buddies how l33t your team is.

ArkyBeagle 10y ago
I think the article is more about Dunning-Kueger coupled with that special narcissism we all know and love so much.
bicknergseng 10y ago
Definitely reading too much into your comment and not responding just to you but the hiring post trend, but IMO all of those scenarios are conflating mismanagement with bad hiring. Have a rock star coder who can't communicate (I'd challenge whether or not that was possible another time)? Put them in a position that minimizes the amount of communication they have to do or set up a structure for their inbound/outbound communications that works for everyone. Great communicator? Have them figure out how to facilitate that person who can't communicate. Great team player? Have them work with the team and don't make them outbound. Point is, effective team building doesn't end at offer letters. Hire for fit, then fit the hire. Train up. Just because someone is weak in some area doesn't mean they can't contribute meaningfully given the proper resources and support, nor is a strong hire going to succeed without the same carefully tailored support.

blisterpeanuts 10y ago

Thanks for this reminder of basic management practice which needs to be posted about once a year: hire good people and get the most out of them through superb leadership, great working conditions and ample incentives to achieve. "We only hire the best" is a sales slogan, not a true management principle. The "best" aren't usually for hire at any given moment; they're very well employed already, or otherwise occupied. And when a high caliber person decides to move on, someone in his or her network will likely hear of it and snap them up. I'd rather hear them say, "We have excellent hiring practices that filter out incompetence and unpleasant personalities. We have a great team here and we're really proud of the hard work they do." Of course you can make a case for disruption; sometimes what a business needs is someone to challenge the norms, shake things up, rattle the chains, and that can be unpleasant if not downright threatening. An old manager of mine called such people "brilliant assholes". Gotta love'em for what they can achieve, but they're often not much fun to be around!

AndrewKemendo 10y ago

It's signaling 101. What are you supposed to say; we hire mediocre developers? Give me a break. "Best" is such a loaded, nothing term that it doesn't really mean anything without a ton of context. This is a waste of outrage.

Chirael 10y ago
It's also a signal to potential hires that "we only use the same hiring phrases and buzz words everyone else uses" At best that can indicate "we copied and pasted the top part of this job description from every other job we've posted", at worst it can mean "we have a very corporate culture, so I hope you're going to bring your 'team player' rock star ninja game" It's not good or bad, but it can tell you something about the company - just like the company will scrutinize resumes and job histories to find clues for what potential hires are like. Signals all around.
blisterpeanuts 10y ago
He's just poking fun at some HR jargon. A few years ago, a common thing to say was: "We work hard, and we play hard." I guess some hiring managers still say that, and maybe they even mean it, but to me it's a sign not of innovation but of an overly controlling, paternalistic management style: "Playtime's over, kiddies!"
mcphage 10y ago
That wasn't outrage... more disdainful mockery.
braythwayt 10y ago
> What are you supposed to say; we hire mediocre developers? That’s a perfectly valid business strategy, and one that is practiced by many big consulting firms. You put someone’s butt in a chair, you are billing for them by the hour, and if they won’t work 90, 100, or 110 hours a week, there’s always someone else who wants their job. They’re not that great, and they know it, and you like it like that.
- AndrewKemendo 10y ago

drelihan 10y ago

"Losers always whine about trying to hire the best...." - J.P. Mason "The best" is a relative measure. An absolute measure must be set first and gatekeepers put in place to guard it. Then, do all you can to find candidates exceeding that measure and then pick the best FIT you can from there. blisterpeanuts is right on...

asb 10y ago

Corp: "We only hire the very best" Programmer: "What's the salary?" Corp: "Market average. Also, we're looking for people who aren't just motivated by money"

ryandrake 10y ago
I can't up-vote this article or comment enough! If you want to hire a top 1% employee, you need to offer a top 1% salary. Not a top 50% salary.
leroy_masochist 10y ago
We want people who are motivated by the mission.
- LargeWu 10y ago
  If the mission is feeding starving children, or curing cancer, or public service, then yes, I want people who are motivated by the mission. But usually the mission, the real mission, is to make the founders exceptionally wealthy, and forgive me if that doesn't get me out of bed in the morning.
  - andybak 10y ago
    This man speaks the truth. :-) I think it's a lost battle but I used to rage whenever I saw a company talk about their 'Vision'. Unless you're a poet, religious mystic or philosopher king - then you're being pretentious and grandiose.
    - tenkabuto 10y ago
      Assuming that I am a cash-strapped philosopher king with a grand vision for my business, how might I sway people to take the vision seriously and work towards the fulfillment of the vision?
      - LargeWu 10y ago

leroy_masochist 10y ago

One other aspect of "we only hire the best" that wasn't explored by this article is the practice -- especially common among unicorn companies -- of purposely casting a far wider net than needed, so that their hiring yield on applicants is dauntingly low. The recruiting process is deliberately set up to yield a lot of false negatives -- i.e., applicants who are qualified on both skill and fit who are rejected for some arbitrary bullshit reason. I suspect it's largely an effort to mindfuck the employees who do make it through the process. I'm so lucky to be here! Only 3% of applicants even make it to a five-minute founder interview, and only half of them get hired!

cortesoft 10y ago
Well, lots of people have to be rejected for a the not-bullshit reason that there are only n jobs available at the company and n+x people applied. Even if they are all great, x number of people are going to be rejected.
- querulous 10y ago
  the point is that if you are interviewing 30 people for every hire you are spending way too much time and effort on interviewing. if you had better recruiting funnels you could easily get down to 2 or 3 interviews per hire
- vonmoltke 10y ago
  If this were the case, there would not be so much whining from these same companies about talent shortages.
- superuser2 10y ago
  I'm not so sure. My understanding is the big tech companies hire engineers on a rolling basis and basically take everyone they like. They're not approaching it for the frame of satisfying a requisition for a specific role with the best of the N applicants for it on X date, they're picking up talent as quickly as possible and then sorting out where to place people after the hire/no-hire decision is made.

ikeboy 10y ago

https://blog.codinghorror.com/we-hire-the-best-just-like-everyone-else/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/we-hire-the-best-just-like-eve... (discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11223316 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11223316) http://danluu.com/programmer-moneyball/ http://danluu.com/programmer-moneyball/ (discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11326940 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11326940)

GVIrish 10y ago
That Dan Luu blog post is gold. It really is kind of sad how arbitrary, capricious, and wasteful hiring in IT is, not to mention the short-sighted thinking about talent. I also really liked the post he did about discrimination in tech: http://danluu.com/tech-discrimination/ http://danluu.com/tech-discrimination/

hashkb 10y ago

> but recognizing the difference between what you’d like to be true and what actually is serves as a prerequisite for closing that gap ...and not recognizing it is a prerequisite for running a company.

stillworks 10y ago

The best line I heard "we don't hire a$$$holes". That's a check-mate statement. I think to myself what if I don't get selected :-( . I did get selected only to realise they hired people down the line whom I'd consider rectal orifices. Can't catch a break really...

whatever_dude 10y ago
The "No assholes" rule should really be the #1 rule when hiring. I've heard a lot of complaints from friends and family in the tech industry over the years, as I've had my own issues. While details vary, it always comes down to the acting up of one obvious asshole or another. It infects the whole team/company/project. In the long run, a team of average but positively motivated people more often than not beats a team with an asshole in it, even if he/she is a rockstar/guru/ninja/jedi/whatever. And their lives won't be miserable in the process.
- jjuel 10y ago
  The problem is an "asshole" is subjective. I might find someone to be an asshole that someone else might not think is an asshole.
  - GVIrish 10y ago
    In any group of people sometimes there are going to be people who don't get along for whatever reason. That doesn't necessarily make that person an asshole. An asshole is who someone who makes like miserable for most people they interact with. Or they make life miserable for a whole group of people (e.g. someone who is shitty to subordinates, treats women poorly, etc.).
  - whatever_dude 10y ago
    At least from my limited sample, more often than not the assholes are considered to be assholes by everyone else. "Well, everyone thinks he/she's an asshole, but he/she does the job, or has been in the company for a long time, or knows someone in the executive team". That's where the problems lie, when everyone the person is an asshole but no one can do anything about it.

daniel-levin 10y ago

"We Only Hire the Best" doesn't have to have any truth to it to be of use to companies. Their purpose in hiring is to extract value from candidates. Convincing people that they'd be amongst the best is all you have to do. The rhetoric comes from existing employees, who may be rationalising their decision to work there. It feels good to be amongst "the best" - I want to be amongst the best! I am sure I'm not the only one with such aspirations. If being 'the best' means over-fitting to the requirements of a company, then the most successful (viz. "best") candidates will optimise for what that company wants. It means by the time they arrive at work they're already largely conditioned into behaving as their new company would like them to. Yes, "the best" is a transparent lie. It doesn't matter though, because it serves the interests of companies who espouse it. DHH is calling a spade a spade here - but I'd hazard that the vast majority of the HN crowd already know. Also, globally, there are lot of extraordinarily shit software people out there. If we define quality by "gets things done and doesn't break things and act in a crappy and deleterious manner", then it is not difficult for "the best" to mean the upper 60% of software people. It is completely reasonable to assume that the companies with this mantra do indeed hire from the top 60%, if only because of how many rubbish people there are.

anamoulous 10y ago

We only hire the best. We are going to consult all the best experts and we'll get the best people in the office to make 37 Signals great again. It will be a beautiful thing.

dmh2000 10y ago

Joel wrote this same post about 10 years ago. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2005/01/27.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2005/01/27.html

briandear 10y ago
Ecclesiastes 1:9 -- The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.
- jamisteven 10y ago
  wtf does this have to do with anything

pjc50 10y ago

One of the chapters of "Parkinson's Law" (the book that among other things coins 'bikeshedding') discusses hiring from a satirical point of view. He makes the point that the easiest kind of hire is when only one candidate applies, so it's good to load down your adverts with as many requirements as possible so as to put applicants off.

henrik_w 10y ago

Another good post on the same subject is: We only hire the best means we only hire the trendiest http://danluu.com/programmer-moneyball/ http://danluu.com/programmer-moneyball/ HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11326940 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11326940

jemfinch 10y ago

Nothing is said here that wasn't better said by Joel Spolsky over a decade ago: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2005/01/27.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2005/01/27.html

dbg31415 10y ago
Expected this to be the top comment. Nothing new DHH isn't widely praised for originality, but come on this whole article is like a total re-hash. And he doesn't even bother to mention Joel... to me that means he's trying to take credit, or he doesn't know about Joel... uh, yeah.
- why-el 10y ago
  > DHH isn't widely praised for originality Unless you have more to say I think this is an unnecessary attack on David's person, especially that one might think of a couple of things he did that are original. ;)
- dylanrw 10y ago
  Or he's just ranting as he's prone to do. At no point does he make an originality claim, and you don't need to be original to voice disappointment...
kough 10y ago
Yeah, I got a weird sense of deja vu.
up_and_up 10y ago
Some things are worth restating.

bpyne 10y ago

"First, “the best” is bound to be situational. Someone who can thrive in one environment might get crushed in another. The peak skills that gave them a leg-up in one domain may very well make them unfit for work in another." Key statement here. Some employers need top coding skills in modern technologies. Some employers, like my current one, really don't need a top coder: they need good analysis skills with some coding. Employers need different degrees of executive function and technical skill. My previous employers valued high technical skill, but we had single product/project focus. My current employer doesn't need high technical skill, but a successful person in this environment needs to be able to multiplex across four projects with differing requirements - COTS implementation, soup-to-nuts software development, bridges between existing systems, etc. - while also providing at least second level support for existing systems. In addition to executive function and technical skill, add in social skill. Some employers in my past had no problem with on-edge bright technical people. My current employer values politeness far over technical ability. "Best" and even "successful" have to be defined by each organization according to their mission and values.

johngalt 10y ago

Experience tells me that hiring posts that demand this level of excellence are often covering for weaknesses in their process. "We only hire the best!" The best at what? "The best at everything of course. We want a full stack wish fulfillment genie." Either you have no idea what skills are missing from your current team, or they are all missing, and you want to fill that gap with one person rather than a team. Job postings that ask for excessive skills across multiple disciplines say to me: This hiring manager doesn't want to do their job. The management job of creating a team, process, workflow. Why bother building a team of shared responsibilities? Why take ownership of the team's process? That would be hard. Instead I'll just hire one uber-nerd and make them do it all.

Yhippa 10y ago
Here are some of my favorite lazy hiring manager practices: * asking for "everything but the kitchen sink" skills * confusing Java with Javascript * even mentioning J2EE in the requisiton (who on Earth wants to do that in this day and age?) * copy-pasting of the requisition leading to truncation of the posting
- tomjen3 10y ago
  j2ee makes sense if you need somebody to mentain your existing code.
- gtk40 10y ago
  I was talking to the product manager for a product we were having issues with from a major player in the corporate software place who, when we told the manager we were experiencing Java exceptions and instability, kept calling them "JavaScript exceptions." I couldn't believe a PM couldn't even keep the language that the product was written in straight.
- nazka 10y ago
  Or like the 'Spark +5 years of experience minimum' type of offers we had 2 years ago. Now it's Tensorflow.

VLM 10y ago

"You know what the best people I’ve ever met or worked with had in common? ALMOST NOTHING!" I've found the best have interesting hobbies. The not so best have nothing to say beyond "how bout that sitcom/drama/game last night, eh?". The extroverts won't shut up about it and the introverts have to be coaxed, but one way or another if they can tell stories for hours, about something other than TV last night, they tend to be pretty good at their job. Its a weaker argument that it has to be a craft hobby. Beer, carpentry, knitting, playing music, writing poetry, subject doesn't matter. If doing something the right way is important to them as a core value outside of work, then they'll tend to do things the right way at work.

karmakaze 10y ago

In the spirit of going deep, the root cause of the F1 crash was human error (being in the wrong strategy mode) rather than ego.

protomyth 10y ago
Yeah, that was a whole different kind of error. Also, the line before that is pretty wrong too, so I guess we're just going to have to ignore the whole paragraph.

DVassallo 10y ago

> (Did you see Hamilton and Rosberg collide in Formula 1 last week? Mercedes probably wish they had more of a Vettel and Webber kind of dynamic right now.) Vettel and Webber crashed as well in Turkey 2010 as they battled for the lead: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vx9zIQvrdZU https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vx9zIQvrdZU

anotherhacker 10y ago

There's no way they hire the best. My company told me they already hired all the best programmers!

valugi 10y ago

define best!

paulclinger 10y ago

It needs to be read as "We only hire the best (we can find)". So the results are explained by the search and selection "algorithms" applied in the hiring process.

devy 10y ago

Although I agree most of what DHH said in this blog post, I am a little disappointed that he only offers Don'ts but not in Do's.

iamgopal 10y ago

Is it just me or svn blog quality greatly reduced these days ?

jklinger410 10y ago

Employer: I want the most work for the least money. Employee: I want the most money for the least work. In the current market Employer > Employee.

quantum_nerd 10y ago

Sometimes I even ask myself: “you only hire the best…at what exactly?” there is difference between having a fancy degree/accolades and actually contributing meaningfully to your work. I have also seen(in my thin years of experience) that at most companies, there is a disconnect between HR and company’s talent needs. Only those who have figured out how to bridge that gap hire “the best”(subjectively).

sandworm101 10y ago

I was looking at a senior position at a "we only hire the best" firm yesterday, a senior position requiring at least a masters plus a decade of experience. But right at the bottom of the qualifications: "Must be proficient in Word, PowerPoint and Visio".

galistoca 10y ago

I see a lot of people on this thread who just say it's bullshit without understanding what's going on. You can live your life that way, or you can enlighten yourself on what really is going on and make the right decision. This "salary cut" works only in this case: The employee is not just looking for money but something intangible from the job (Experience/network/etc.) This doesn't apply to most of you guys who have no intention to start a company or make a huge leap in life. That's why you think it's bullshit. But there are also a small number of people who are really not driven by just money but puts a lot of value on the intangibles I mentioned above. Many startups look for these types of people, so to those of you who are hating on this idea: there's nothing wrong with you hating on them. It's by design, these companies don't want you either. I know from experience because I've hired people who just got in without any specific reason. These people tend to give up very soon because they simply don't care about what they're building. And again, there's nothing wrong with that. It's just that these startups can't afford to hire you. Here's my horror story: I was working on a startup. We were fortunate to have a guy who's extremely talented and wrote the core part of our product. However he switched ship immediately when he realized it was a business that will take time to mature. I really hated that guy for a while because we had to basically abandon our core product the day he just left. Now I understand and also know that part of it was my fault too, but it was a very difficult experience for me. If you look at the world with this lens you'll notice so many "rockstar developers" jumping ship after another when things don't go well for the company (which is totally fine for them but bad for the company). That's why startup companies should care more about the "right match" than "rockstar developers". And hiring a rockstar developer by paying him tons of money when he's not so passionate about the company's vision is the worst thing you can do. An analogy is most girls who don't want guys who are just in it for her looks. When you try to seduce a girl, complementing her looks rarely works unless your social status is extremely obviously high or if your looks are extremely great. In most cases you have to demonstrate that you like her not just for her looks but because of her personality. Most girls don't want a guy to just have fun for one night, never to see again, especially if they like them. I know many girls who gave up on a guy she really liked because she didn't want to be hurt. Startups are like that.

dmitrygr 10y ago
I'm not even going to try to reply on the sexist nature of the second half of this comment, but focus on the startup-related one. Your guy switched to another company because you were on track to become rich off his work, and he was not. If you incentivized him right, he'd stay. Did you ask him why he left? Because if not, you really did not learn a lesson.

graycat 10y ago

And what if a candidate has a good background in computing, computer science, AI, and pure and applied math and, then, also a good STEM field Ph.D. degree from a leading research university. Do you want to "hire the best" or do you want to reject anyone with a Ph.D. degree? E.g., how many STEM field Ph.D. holders have you hired to date?

beat 10y ago

This makes me think of an observation an old colleague of mine made to one of the revolving-door CTOs at our former employer. He said there are three things you can offer to get good engineers... high pay, an interesting problem, and a great work environment. If you can't offer at least two, you really need to excel at the last one. Problem with former employer was a lousy work environment for uninteresting work...

xiaoma 10y ago

Isn't the author of this post the primary villain from the big #rubydrama article on HN over the past couple of days?

jamisteven 10y ago

what a shit headline.

20years 10y ago

Sooooo good! I think I may start replying with a link to this article every time a recruiter contacts me with one of these types of jobs. They almost always require moving to the Bay area for some "hot new" startup and a whopping $80k salary + equity. Can't live off that in the Bay area and I have no desire to work for your Uber for X startup, do weekly scrum sessions or work in an open office environment crammed tight. I think a quick reply with a link to this article will do the trick.

notacoward 10y ago

"We only hire the best, because nobody else has a hope of surviving the mess that our previous 'best' made." Seriously, I think WOHTB is an indication that the company doesn't know the difference between selection and training. They want the technical equivalent of Navy SEALs (which is already a questionable goal) so they put in an equivalent of BUD/S, but that's a training program and they're using it for selection. Anybody capable of getting past that is either a faker or doesn't need it, and since the second group will also have little patience for it all you're left with is the fakers. Not a strategy for success. I don't mind, though, because their failure makes things easier for the rest of us.

bretpiatt 10y ago

Places that truly hire the best are not doing it through job postings. The the company / department leadership are actively involved spending time networking to curate a queue of candidates for hard to hire roles. The second thing high performing companies do is have entry level roles where you can mass hire to see who rises to perform as "the best" where you can then promote out of that pool into your "hard to hire" roles where you cannot afford an average or below average player on the team. You'll also need to pay the best at market rates for "best" not market rates for "average". "Pay" breaks down into what I call 'the money/fun dial' -- the dial goes from 0% money / 100% fun to 100% money / 0% fun. At 0% money those activities are called hobbies and everyone has a list of activities they enjoy doing each day they either spend money on or at best break even. At 100% money / 0% fun this is effectively "selling your soul" -- these are the jobs that leave you no time or energy to have hobbies, non-work relationships, or a family. With my company we aim for 50%/50% on the dial -- we pay well, allow folks to work hard on meaningful projects, and give them time for hobbies/friends/family. I view life as a marathon and if you turn the dial up or run a company culture with the dial turned up beyond 50% on money people will work for you until they burn out or make enough to find a long term home.

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imelda1 10y ago
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anna420 10y ago
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solutions16 10y ago

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