11 ms·

Hiring and the Market for Lemons (2016)

52 points by weinzierl 6y ago

yadadoodadee 6y ago
"But the first assumption alone is enough to prevent the developer job market from being a market for lemons. If you can tell that a potential employee is great, you can simply go and offer them twice as much as they're currently making (something that I've seen actually happen). You need an information asymmetry to create a market for lemons, and Joel posits that there's no information asymmetry." Not necessarily. Suppose you can identify good developers after you have worked with them. Then, as in the used car model, lemons will be discarded ("resold") and good developers will be kept and driven.
brownbat 6y ago
> At the last conference I attended, I asked most people I met two questions: > 1. Do you know of any companies that aren't highly dysfunctional? > 2. Do you know of any particular teams that are great and are hiring? > Not one single person told me that their company meets the criteria in (1). Reminded me a lot of Ribbonfarm on the Gervais Principle: "Hugh MacLeod’s cartoon is a pitch-perfect symbol of an unorthodox school of management based on the axiom that organizations don’t suffer pathologies; they are intrinsically pathological constructs." https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
- cbsmith 6y ago
  Not that the Gervais Principle is wrong, but you gotta think bigger. If you're at a conference where no one knows of a functional company with good teams that are hiring... maybe you're at the conference that attracts all the people stuck in a world of terrible teams and dysfunctional companies? I mean, doesn't it make sense that if you can't identify good teams or good companies, you'd also suck at identifying good conferences? ;-)
brooklyn_ashey 6y ago
Interesting piece. Two things: 1. How do these few absolutely spectacular developers blossom into such impressive specimens of the lot? Why not get them before this happens and help them over the greatness threshold? 2. Isn’t there a kind of giant group of buried truffles that don’t fit the trad idea of what a great dev smells like? — so much so that you could identify this set with a couple of simple queries— a kind of sifting activity that would yield lots of truffles per square foot?
- 9nGQluzmnq3M 6y ago
  1 is why large companies have massive cohorts of interns. They don't expect to get much/any useful work out of them, they just fill up the interns on Kool-Aid, identify the ones that aren't completely hopeless, and hire them full-time as junior devs.
  - brooklyn_ashey 6y ago
    Right, but then every company would just grow uberdevs and be chock full of awesome at some point, but it seems like that isn’t happening w these interns as often as would make the intern thing “worth it” for identifying future wonderdevs.
- ptr 6y ago
  A hypothesis could be that these great developers became what they are due to an extreme internal drive at a young age; they already have tons of experience and the right attitudes/thinking patterns when joining the work force. If they continue learning (and why shouldn’t they, given their internal drive), how can anyone compete with them? This intrinsic motivation implies that companies really can’t “grow” great developers, nor “pick them before they’ve blossomed”; what they can do is step aside and not create obstacles.
poulsbohemian 6y ago
This industry spends way too much time thinking about top producers (IE, the mythical 10x developer) and not enough about the support to turn one of those competent but humble developers into a top producer. Are there a few legitimate "The One" developers in the world? Yes, I'm sure there are. But you can take an average player, put them in a super supportive environment with good tools and make them look like a super star way easier than you can find or pay, or in some cases put up with the prima donna antics of a "super star." Put in the wrong environment too, you can turn a super star into a lemon super quick.
- corporateslave5 6y ago
  Honestly, the longer I work in this industry the more I think the 10x developers are real and just so valuable. 90% of devs just aren’t worth that much.
  - poulsbohemian 6y ago
    >Honestly, the longer I work in this industry the more I think the 10x developers are real and just so valuable. 90% of devs just aren’t worth that much. I don't disagree with this, but I also came to the conclusion that it is just raging against the machine to think that it is fixable. So long as there is money to be made, no barriers to entry, and no economic incentive to improve the situation, it will only continue to get worse. I'm of the same opinion now that I was in the 90s - the fix is to mature the discipline to a true profession of licensed, qualified, software engineers. But, it's a pipe dream to think that will ever happen in a meaningful way.
  - throw73744 6y ago
    I think current corporate culture is just toxic. It requires people to work in inadequate environment, in large dirty cities, without basic infrastructure like transportation, security and accomodation. 90% people would not be productive in this job.
- ponker 6y ago
  Nah. There are some people who can fix any bug and build any system from scratch. You can’t manufacture those people.
swader999 6y ago
Projects end, especially great ones and the people from them move on. Developers get better from exposure to different people, different technology and domains.
underdeserver 6y ago
I think Dan's missing two important points: 1) Great devs want to work with other great devs. If you want to blast forward you don't want to spend days debugging really crappy code someone else wrote, or explaining ideas to someone who's significantly slower than you. (We've all been on both sides of that particular situation - the good ones put in the work to get faster.) 2) People don't quit jobs, they quit managers. Also, at least for everyone I know, people generally quit jobs first, and look for jobs later, meaning that if they have a good team to work with and a good manager, you're never going to get them. This means that the great developer is not a standalone creature; great developers will cluster under a great manager, and then that unit will be immensely productive and inseparable. Building that should be a tech CEO's goal.
- wojciii 6y ago
  I agree on your second point. Bad managers were the reason why I either quit or got fired (after stoping to care and just doing the minimum amount of work possible) because I could not see any change being made to the development methods used which relied heavily on people instead of software tools that could speed things up for me and minimize the amount of bugs that I was adding to the codebase. Bad managers which are set in their ways from 10 years ago and unable to change are really bad for business.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
throw1592381471 6y ago
Whenever I read something written from Joel Spolsky I think back to the time I attended the first CalHacks hackathon. Joel gave the keynote talk which I pushed into as a starry-eyed young technology enthusiast. He told us to work hard so we dont end up like the construction workers out there (referring to the construction happening outside of the Berkeley stadium at the time). Oh. I had hardly entered the software industry and that was my first moment of being jaded about the out of touch characters the bay/valley had to offer. I better get coding or else I'll have a shite life like those construction workers... I can get some interviews and get through some rounds. But no one here is talking about LeetCode which is all that really matters. Using a throwaway because obviously I'm mediocre and I don't want to end up woefully hopeless like those horrible people applying to every open job in Palo Alto.
- fxtentacle 6y ago
  This article and this discussion is about people competing for $200k cash + $200k equity annually jobs or something similarly far out of the ordinary. So I'd assume that by applying to lots of normal jobs and doing normal job, you'll still be able to have a good normal life. I mean IT is well paid, even in the more junior positions. It just won't be enough for a yacht ;) which is what the 10x crowd is aiming for.
- feteru 6y ago
  Yeah Joel's comments are pretty bad...at best. No one here talking about LeetCode? what do you mean.
Swizec 6y ago
> When I worked at a small company, we regularly hired great engineers from big companies that were too clueless to know what kind of talent they had. This is an easy trap to fall into when you’re online a lot. Everyone around you is always doing something fantastic something you wish you thought of something new and amazing and innovative. But remember: most people are normal, just about average. You’re just surrounded by outliers online because average doesn’t spread.
sanxiyn 6y ago
No, it is not a market for lemons. It is a market for silver bullets! https://iang.org/papers/market_for_silver_bullets.html https://iang.org/papers/market_for_silver_bullets.html
- zwaps 6y ago
  Programmers tend more toward knowing their own productivity than being completely clueless about it. Seems more like market for lemons to me.
  - sanxiyn 6y ago
    We wouldn't hear about Dunning-Kruger effect if that were the case.
ddjobs 6y ago
I think What we really need is a piece about a tree full of lemons trying to sell a bunch of secondhand cars that they don’t actually own. Possible suggestion for the lemons: the LinkedIn-based recruitment agencies. Oh dear, I think I’ve stretched that analogy too far.
fxtentacle 6y ago
"If it's so easy to identify prospective great developers, why not try to recruit them?" 1. Who says that companies don't try. We can only observe that they are not too successful at it. But that might also just mean that there's many companies competing for few employees. And if you can get the same salary somewhere else, who would still go to Facebook? 2. Great at work doesn't mean great character. I'm pretty sure that the original team building Android was highly skilled. But their personalities also appear highly controversial. Not every company can stomach the fallout from hiring someone like that. 3. There is an incentive to keep quiet if you succeed. Once you publicly announce that you succeeded in hiring a truly outstanding employee, you are pretty much guaranteed to have recruiters try to steal your employee away from you. 4. The best jobs for these people are research and prototypes for future products. As such, you can be sure that companies will have draconian NDAs in place to prevent their top employees from taking about what they do. So they'll be mostly invisible on the internet. 5. If you look around in indie circles, you'll find many companies where one person does legal, marketing, and all product development. I'd guess those are the 10x-ers who value freedom higher than money.
- poulsbohemian 6y ago
  >5. If you look around in indie circles, you'll find many companies where one person does legal, marketing, and all product development. I'd guess those are the 10x-ers who value freedom higher than money. This point and to some degree your #4 point are really key: Being a potentially great worker* is relative to the company, product, project, IE: the environment. An indie may not have been a very successful developer at BigCo, but when faced with sink or swim, will strive to find ways to be ultra productive. * I didn't write developer, because I've seen this phenomenon with testers, with technical consultants, with project managers...
blizkreeg 6y ago
Who has read the best description of a 10x developer? I'm curious if there's genuinely read-worthy thinking on it.
- ramraj07 6y ago
  Yes! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21508870 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21508870
kuharich 6y ago
Prior comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12671290 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12671290
andrewstuart 6y ago
>> The great software developers, indeed, the best people in every field, are quite simply never on the market. This is flat out wrong. It's not true. It's false. I've recruited hundreds and hundreds of people and they were ALL on the market and I know for an absolute fact that many of them turned out to be really really outstanding developers. So it's wrong. In my experience as a tech recruiter and some-time searcher for employment in development - the real lemons are the recruiting processes of many companies. Vast numbers of people/companies simply do a flat out bad job of assessing and interviewing and selecting developers.
raverbashing 6y ago
Yeah I used to believe there were "great" developers as if every developer could be given a score of greatness. I was a bit naive in that assessment. Every person is different. Not everybody that knows the big O of all sorting methods by heart is the person you need. Or even want. There are multiple dimensions, technologies, experiences of fitting someone in a company. Some people move more slowly but surely, some move faster and are more hands on. (That being said, I've met a - thankfully small - number of people that were a net negative in team productivity)
z3t4 6y ago
The software job market is "interesting". You have companies complaining about it being hard to find developers. Then they pass on really good ones. I think one reason is that these companies started in a time where it was easy to find developers and developers was basically working for free as it was also their hobby.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

52 points by weinzierl 6y ago

"But the first assumption alone is enough to prevent the developer job market from being a market for lemons. If you can tell that a potential employee is great, you can simply go and offer them twice as much as they're currently making (something that I've seen actually happen). You need an information asymmetry to create a market for lemons, and Joel posits that there's no information asymmetry." Not necessarily. Suppose you can identify good developers after you have worked with them. Then, as in the used car model, lemons will be discarded ("resold") and good developers will be kept and driven.

brownbat 6y ago

> At the last conference I attended, I asked most people I met two questions: > 1. Do you know of any companies that aren't highly dysfunctional? > 2. Do you know of any particular teams that are great and are hiring? > Not one single person told me that their company meets the criteria in (1). Reminded me a lot of Ribbonfarm on the Gervais Principle: "Hugh MacLeod’s cartoon is a pitch-perfect symbol of an unorthodox school of management based on the axiom that organizations don’t suffer pathologies; they are intrinsically pathological constructs." https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...

cbsmith 6y ago
Not that the Gervais Principle is wrong, but you gotta think bigger. If you're at a conference where no one knows of a functional company with good teams that are hiring... maybe you're at the conference that attracts all the people stuck in a world of terrible teams and dysfunctional companies? I mean, doesn't it make sense that if you can't identify good teams or good companies, you'd also suck at identifying good conferences? ;-)

brooklyn_ashey 6y ago

Interesting piece. Two things: 1. How do these few absolutely spectacular developers blossom into such impressive specimens of the lot? Why not get them before this happens and help them over the greatness threshold? 2. Isn’t there a kind of giant group of buried truffles that don’t fit the trad idea of what a great dev smells like? — so much so that you could identify this set with a couple of simple queries— a kind of sifting activity that would yield lots of truffles per square foot?

9nGQluzmnq3M 6y ago
1 is why large companies have massive cohorts of interns. They don't expect to get much/any useful work out of them, they just fill up the interns on Kool-Aid, identify the ones that aren't completely hopeless, and hire them full-time as junior devs.
- brooklyn_ashey 6y ago
  Right, but then every company would just grow uberdevs and be chock full of awesome at some point, but it seems like that isn’t happening w these interns as often as would make the intern thing “worth it” for identifying future wonderdevs.
ptr 6y ago
A hypothesis could be that these great developers became what they are due to an extreme internal drive at a young age; they already have tons of experience and the right attitudes/thinking patterns when joining the work force. If they continue learning (and why shouldn’t they, given their internal drive), how can anyone compete with them? This intrinsic motivation implies that companies really can’t “grow” great developers, nor “pick them before they’ve blossomed”; what they can do is step aside and not create obstacles.

poulsbohemian 6y ago

This industry spends way too much time thinking about top producers (IE, the mythical 10x developer) and not enough about the support to turn one of those competent but humble developers into a top producer. Are there a few legitimate "The One" developers in the world? Yes, I'm sure there are. But you can take an average player, put them in a super supportive environment with good tools and make them look like a super star way easier than you can find or pay, or in some cases put up with the prima donna antics of a "super star." Put in the wrong environment too, you can turn a super star into a lemon super quick.

corporateslave5 6y ago
Honestly, the longer I work in this industry the more I think the 10x developers are real and just so valuable. 90% of devs just aren’t worth that much.
- poulsbohemian 6y ago
  >Honestly, the longer I work in this industry the more I think the 10x developers are real and just so valuable. 90% of devs just aren’t worth that much. I don't disagree with this, but I also came to the conclusion that it is just raging against the machine to think that it is fixable. So long as there is money to be made, no barriers to entry, and no economic incentive to improve the situation, it will only continue to get worse. I'm of the same opinion now that I was in the 90s - the fix is to mature the discipline to a true profession of licensed, qualified, software engineers. But, it's a pipe dream to think that will ever happen in a meaningful way.
- throw73744 6y ago
  I think current corporate culture is just toxic. It requires people to work in inadequate environment, in large dirty cities, without basic infrastructure like transportation, security and accomodation. 90% people would not be productive in this job.
ponker 6y ago
Nah. There are some people who can fix any bug and build any system from scratch. You can’t manufacture those people.

swader999 6y ago

Projects end, especially great ones and the people from them move on. Developers get better from exposure to different people, different technology and domains.

underdeserver 6y ago

I think Dan's missing two important points: 1) Great devs want to work with other great devs. If you want to blast forward you don't want to spend days debugging really crappy code someone else wrote, or explaining ideas to someone who's significantly slower than you. (We've all been on both sides of that particular situation - the good ones put in the work to get faster.) 2) People don't quit jobs, they quit managers. Also, at least for everyone I know, people generally quit jobs first, and look for jobs later, meaning that if they have a good team to work with and a good manager, you're never going to get them. This means that the great developer is not a standalone creature; great developers will cluster under a great manager, and then that unit will be immensely productive and inseparable. Building that should be a tech CEO's goal.

wojciii 6y ago
I agree on your second point. Bad managers were the reason why I either quit or got fired (after stoping to care and just doing the minimum amount of work possible) because I could not see any change being made to the development methods used which relied heavily on people instead of software tools that could speed things up for me and minimize the amount of bugs that I was adding to the codebase. Bad managers which are set in their ways from 10 years ago and unable to change are really bad for business.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

throw1592381471 6y ago

Whenever I read something written from Joel Spolsky I think back to the time I attended the first CalHacks hackathon. Joel gave the keynote talk which I pushed into as a starry-eyed young technology enthusiast. He told us to work hard so we dont end up like the construction workers out there (referring to the construction happening outside of the Berkeley stadium at the time). Oh. I had hardly entered the software industry and that was my first moment of being jaded about the out of touch characters the bay/valley had to offer. I better get coding or else I'll have a shite life like those construction workers... I can get some interviews and get through some rounds. But no one here is talking about LeetCode which is all that really matters. Using a throwaway because obviously I'm mediocre and I don't want to end up woefully hopeless like those horrible people applying to every open job in Palo Alto.

fxtentacle 6y ago
This article and this discussion is about people competing for $200k cash + $200k equity annually jobs or something similarly far out of the ordinary. So I'd assume that by applying to lots of normal jobs and doing normal job, you'll still be able to have a good normal life. I mean IT is well paid, even in the more junior positions. It just won't be enough for a yacht ;) which is what the 10x crowd is aiming for.
feteru 6y ago
Yeah Joel's comments are pretty bad...at best. No one here talking about LeetCode? what do you mean.

Swizec 6y ago

> When I worked at a small company, we regularly hired great engineers from big companies that were too clueless to know what kind of talent they had. This is an easy trap to fall into when you’re online a lot. Everyone around you is always doing something fantastic something you wish you thought of something new and amazing and innovative. But remember: most people are normal, just about average. You’re just surrounded by outliers online because average doesn’t spread.

sanxiyn 6y ago

No, it is not a market for lemons. It is a market for silver bullets! https://iang.org/papers/market_for_silver_bullets.html https://iang.org/papers/market_for_silver_bullets.html

zwaps 6y ago
Programmers tend more toward knowing their own productivity than being completely clueless about it. Seems more like market for lemons to me.
- sanxiyn 6y ago
  We wouldn't hear about Dunning-Kruger effect if that were the case.

ddjobs 6y ago

I think What we really need is a piece about a tree full of lemons trying to sell a bunch of secondhand cars that they don’t actually own. Possible suggestion for the lemons: the LinkedIn-based recruitment agencies. Oh dear, I think I’ve stretched that analogy too far.

fxtentacle 6y ago

"If it's so easy to identify prospective great developers, why not try to recruit them?" 1. Who says that companies don't try. We can only observe that they are not too successful at it. But that might also just mean that there's many companies competing for few employees. And if you can get the same salary somewhere else, who would still go to Facebook? 2. Great at work doesn't mean great character. I'm pretty sure that the original team building Android was highly skilled. But their personalities also appear highly controversial. Not every company can stomach the fallout from hiring someone like that. 3. There is an incentive to keep quiet if you succeed. Once you publicly announce that you succeeded in hiring a truly outstanding employee, you are pretty much guaranteed to have recruiters try to steal your employee away from you. 4. The best jobs for these people are research and prototypes for future products. As such, you can be sure that companies will have draconian NDAs in place to prevent their top employees from taking about what they do. So they'll be mostly invisible on the internet. 5. If you look around in indie circles, you'll find many companies where one person does legal, marketing, and all product development. I'd guess those are the 10x-ers who value freedom higher than money.

poulsbohemian 6y ago
>5. If you look around in indie circles, you'll find many companies where one person does legal, marketing, and all product development. I'd guess those are the 10x-ers who value freedom higher than money. This point and to some degree your #4 point are really key: Being a potentially great worker* is relative to the company, product, project, IE: the environment. An indie may not have been a very successful developer at BigCo, but when faced with sink or swim, will strive to find ways to be ultra productive. * I didn't write developer, because I've seen this phenomenon with testers, with technical consultants, with project managers...

blizkreeg 6y ago

Who has read the best description of a 10x developer? I'm curious if there's genuinely read-worthy thinking on it.

ramraj07 6y ago
Yes! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21508870 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21508870

kuharich 6y ago

Prior comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12671290 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12671290

andrewstuart 6y ago

>> The great software developers, indeed, the best people in every field, are quite simply never on the market. This is flat out wrong. It's not true. It's false. I've recruited hundreds and hundreds of people and they were ALL on the market and I know for an absolute fact that many of them turned out to be really really outstanding developers. So it's wrong. In my experience as a tech recruiter and some-time searcher for employment in development - the real lemons are the recruiting processes of many companies. Vast numbers of people/companies simply do a flat out bad job of assessing and interviewing and selecting developers.

raverbashing 6y ago

Yeah I used to believe there were "great" developers as if every developer could be given a score of greatness. I was a bit naive in that assessment. Every person is different. Not everybody that knows the big O of all sorting methods by heart is the person you need. Or even want. There are multiple dimensions, technologies, experiences of fitting someone in a company. Some people move more slowly but surely, some move faster and are more hands on. (That being said, I've met a - thankfully small - number of people that were a net negative in team productivity)

z3t4 6y ago

The software job market is "interesting". You have companies complaining about it being hard to find developers. Then they pass on really good ones. I think one reason is that these companies started in a time where it was easy to find developers and developers was basically working for free as it was also their hobby.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]