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You also have so many hiring tokens. Not every company can have market beating comp, or high likelihood of super profitable stock, or world class super nice off

You also have so many hiring tokens. Not every company can have market beating comp, or high likelihood of super profitable stock, or world class super nice offices. Having exciting tech can be an actually cheap way to attract top talent.

0des 4y ago
I can see how we got here though. There's so little exciting tech out now, compared to so much money and so much talent available.
rossdavidh 4y ago
Absolutely true that, but it can also be a way to make your maintenance needs require exotic skills you didn't need before, such that your already-scarce hiring tokens are stretched even thinner once that new person builds their thing and moves on. Which doesn't mean your point isn't valid, just that there is a flip side to it that it should be balanced against, and it is possible to err in either direction.
thomascgalvin 4y ago
Only tangentially related to your comment, but I've seen a very clean pattern where "the tech I'm going to use on this project" maps very neatly to "the tech I want to have on my resume the next time I'm looking for a job." I think someone called it resume driven development.
coffeefirst 4y ago
Sure, but if that's the appeal, it tends to attract the kind of person who looks at an old Rails app, and decides rather than cleaning it up the thing to do is replace it with a sea of graphql-fronted microservices that's nearly impossible to work on. There's other extremely cheap ways to compete: be family-friendly, open to remote, have sane processes, etc.
- gampleman 4y ago
  Codebases in old tech and new tech can both be bad. I don't think that's necessarily an argument against either. Part of getting good people is getting people who want to build maintainable and solid stuff. > There's other extremely cheap ways to compete: be family-friendly, open to remote, have sane processes, etc. Of course. Depending on how badly you're struggling to hire, you might need to do a bunch of these.

0des 4y ago

I can see how we got here though. There's so little exciting tech out now, compared to so much money and so much talent available.

rossdavidh 4y ago

Absolutely true that, but it can also be a way to make your maintenance needs require exotic skills you didn't need before, such that your already-scarce hiring tokens are stretched even thinner once that new person builds their thing and moves on. Which doesn't mean your point isn't valid, just that there is a flip side to it that it should be balanced against, and it is possible to err in either direction.

thomascgalvin 4y ago

Only tangentially related to your comment, but I've seen a very clean pattern where "the tech I'm going to use on this project" maps very neatly to "the tech I want to have on my resume the next time I'm looking for a job." I think someone called it resume driven development.

coffeefirst 4y ago

Sure, but if that's the appeal, it tends to attract the kind of person who looks at an old Rails app, and decides rather than cleaning it up the thing to do is replace it with a sea of graphql-fronted microservices that's nearly impossible to work on. There's other extremely cheap ways to compete: be family-friendly, open to remote, have sane processes, etc.

gampleman 4y ago
Codebases in old tech and new tech can both be bad. I don't think that's necessarily an argument against either. Part of getting good people is getting people who want to build maintainable and solid stuff. > There's other extremely cheap ways to compete: be family-friendly, open to remote, have sane processes, etc. Of course. Depending on how badly you're struggling to hire, you might need to do a bunch of these.