14 ms·

What good cash-strapped hiring looks like

• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• dsoftware234 4y ago
  [flagged]
• spacemanmatt 4y ago
  This article makes me feel so seen. I started out a self-trained junior developer and now I'm hiring selectively for that same basic capability. I thought it was just required for the career, but now I'm surprised at how hard it is to find.
  • pyb 4y ago
    What do you mean? Can you no longer find candidates who learned to code by building things at home?
    • spacemanmatt 4y ago
      Well, I'm sure they're out there, but many have optimized for salary and I'm not hiring into a VC/startup type environment. They're harder for me to find, given that constraint.
  • onion2k 4y ago
    I started out a self-trained junior developer and now I'm hiring selectively for that same basic capability. Hiring people using the criteria of 'people who are like me' leads to immensely myopic teams who fail to implement even basic and obvious features in my experience. Recognizing that there are many routes to becoming a great dev is very useful because it creates a team with a breadth of knowledge and experience that you just don't get if you're laser-focused on specific criteria.
    • tomp 4y ago
      It’s not “hiring people like me”, it’s just a way to separate the wheat (people who are intrinsically interested in programming) from the chaff (people who picked programming instead of law/finance/medicine because it pays better right now) Literally all other personality features are irrelevant, hence definitely not “people like me”.
      • onion2k 4y ago
        Some people who studied compsci at university chose that because they'd been coding since they were 6 years old and they absolutely love it and want to master it. They're not all there because they decided it pays better than law.
        • brabel 4y ago
          Amazing what someone wanting to see "something" will see "something"... if anything , going through the pain of a CompSci degree and not giving up (more than half my class gave up in the first 2 years) is about the best proof you can get the person is interested in programming. Self-taught people may also be truly talented and interested, but it may just well be that they studied for a few months and now claim to "know programming" exactly because they noticed the profession pays very well (I know someone exactly in that situation right now, and she's already looking for some other path after just 2 years in it as clearly she has zero aptitude).
        • ghaff 4y ago
          CS overlaps with but != programming. Students will often gravitate to majors that have some overlap between "This is pretty interesting" and "I can probably make a reasonable living doing this." Outside of the arts, programming is rather unusual in that some have an expectation that this is something that you've loved since you were 6. (And, again, CS only overlaps to some degree anyway.)
      • lapcat 4y ago
        > it’s just a way to separate the wheat (people who are intrinsically interested in programming) from the chaff (people who picked programming instead of law/finance/medicine because it pays better right now) Why would you assume that self-trained developers are intrinsically interested in programming?
• neilwilson 4y ago
  This can be summarised as "don't follow the crowd". You can take the same approach with being hired, which I call "The A Team" approach. "If you have a problem... if no one else can help... and if you can find them... maybe you can hire... The A-Team" Those who know what you can do, know where to find you.
• username_my1 4y ago
  One thing I would say from personal experience (because I've been hiring on budget for 6 years now). Don't go for the big names / nba level, don't even go for the second league candidates, go for 3rd and 4th and find people who're looking to do a great job (there is a lot of them) and give them the environment to do so. I think Microsoft had a study about creating effective teams from ordinary people, and I've seen it a lot at my company. make sure that you have a good engineering culture and people who want to learn and do a good job, you will end up with superstars. also, there is loads of engineers doing shit jobs and dying to work on something a bit more interesting or more rewarding.
  • livinglist 4y ago
    but do you lowball them though?
    • username_my1 4y ago
      no ... we pay market salary ... but we can't pay VC money, every 3 months company retreat, spa ... and we can't pay FANG
      • murderfs 4y ago
        > we can't pay VC money > we can't pay FANG So you're not paying market salary.
        • username_my1 4y ago
          lots of people think that vc money rates are market rates.
          • mattcwilson 4y ago
            Do they also think that Lamborghinis are “market cars?”
        • sokoloff 4y ago
• soco 4y ago
  And the other way around, when you read a job ad heavy on the vision thing, you should expect that other aspects of the job will be struggling. But what exactly, you won't be able to figure out until asking.
• goldcd 4y ago
  I was a bit cynical when I started the article, but actually seems to make sense. I think the TLDR is: "The job you're offering is likely not to be the best job available - so find a target audience where it's the best job available to them"
• ggeorgovassilis 4y ago
  Last year I landed two great hires who fell through HR's sieve for lack formal of qualifications. I made up my mind quickly after giving them a few hands-on tasks (w. screen sharing).
• CraigJPerry 4y ago
  Having seen this happen several times in my social circle over the past 5 years or so, there’s a high end talent pool you can tap with limited resources. I know a few folks maybe 5-10 years older than me (so mid to late 40’s) who have had impressive careers (e.g. their names are associated with popular industry techniques or otherwise recognised as heavyweight contributors) but are just burned out doing the same boring problems. Several have taken massive pay cuts to go work in tiny firms. These folks by virtue of their commercial history can be useful in ways beyond just coding too - some of them can add a level of glitz, glam and respectability to your firm that you might struggle to figure out for yourself (they’ve seen it all before - they know what kinds of small firms are attractive to people with budgets in big firms). You can get these folks for a song by: 1. Giving them something interesting to work on 2. Showing them that they won’t gradually be asked to take on BS assignments over time 3. Letting them take every friday to go fishing or whatever it is they do
  • justsomeguy123 4y ago
    The odd thing is... this works for senior talent too! The biggest road block I saw with recent job ads is they want 8 hours / day. Companies just don't have the flexibility to take a senior dev at 4-6 hours a day.
    • jstx1 4y ago
      Sure they do, they just aren't explicit about it.
      • jrochkind1 4y ago
        Say more. I'm not sure if you mean mean they'll accept that even if it's not in the job posting; or if you mean they'll tolerate you working for less than you are supposed to without being above-board about it.
        • ryanbrunner 4y ago
          It's always worth talking about. I think most companies avoid putting part time explicitly on a job posting because that sends a message that this is a side gig vs. something you should be focused on. I know for sure for the right candidate I'd be open to 30 hours a week or something like that (less than 20 to be fair is where I'd probably draw the line).
• gadders 4y ago
  I think this is advice is a great approach for finding under-valued people and hiring them. I would say, though, that once you have trained up your developer and they have gained experience, they will begin to realise their value. You will either have to bump salaries up for the experienced people, or have a continuous pipeline of hiring of the undervalued people to replace them.
• moss2 4y ago
  Article aside, that font is awful. At 100% zoom on 1080p it looks like someone took their thumb and smudged the newly inked text. Anyone else notice this? I'm using Edge v101 with 100% zoom on a 1200p screen.
  • ryanmercer 4y ago
    The font is definitely less than desirable for a smooth read.
  • Wildgoose 4y ago
    It looks blurry to me as well.
  • wccrawford 4y ago
    I'm not seeing that on Firefox or Edge, personally. I'm not sure what's up, but it looks pretty crisp here.
  • richardwhiuk 4y ago
    Suspect it's the Caluna font that's the cause - it's got exaggerated serifs.
• lordnacho 4y ago
  The thing to remember is not everyone thinks of themselves as a superstar, and thus not everyone has superstar expectations. A reasonable salary with reasonable prospects, a mission that is interesting but not world changing, pressure that's moderate not 996, a lot of people will be in that market. So market yourself that way and you'll definitely find someone. There's an iceberg effect here too. We know who the glamour businesses are, we see them all the time. Most shops are not the ones in the media, but they still somehow find staff.
• trhoad 4y ago
  TLDR; If all you can afford is the B-team then you'll get the B-Team
  • madmax108 4y ago
    LOL... the irony being that for a lot of folks whether they are A-Team or B-Team or C-Team depends a lot on the company culture, impact of work they are assigned on, problem statement, team (esp. foundational team), exec alignment and a tonne of other factors that may or may not be in their control. A supposed "A-Team" Engineer at FB who was part of the early team that built out a messaging platform that is used across FB Engineering will still be seen as a "B-Teamer" at a 20 person startup if she's unable to create similar impact (again, not because she's intrinsically a different person between FB and the new company). Heck, the easiest way to be considered a 10xEngineer/A-Teamer today is to bring 15% increments to 10 teammembers' productivity rather than be some insanely productive, busfactor=1 developer. We really need to stop with this silly ranking of devs
    • ghaff 4y ago
      In addition to agreeing with your points in general, hiring processes are also sufficiently random that it's not like the big SV companies are capable of actually skimming the cream of prospective employees--even if everyone who could get a job there actually wanted to.
    • indymike 4y ago
      > We really need to stop with this silly ranking of devs Or realize that past performance isn't indicative of future results.
    • amusedcyclist 4y ago
      The reality is almost all of the best devs work at top places and get paid top money. If you need that quality of dev you need to pay that kind of money, now theres a strong argument that in some cases mediocre devs are fine and I'm sympathetic to that argument but from my experience the FAANG+ devs are better than others on average (maybe even most of the time).
• langsoul-com 4y ago
  Cash strapped? No worries, just pick a low wage country and send them to Singapore to work for a bit. Not exactly THAT cash strapped...
  • allcentury 4y ago
    Not in today's high fuel costs world but those flights are very cheap, it be like going from LA to Vegas on Southwest. It be $100
• bigbacaloa 4y ago
  It might help your communication to use far less jargon instead of onboarding ...
• jrochkind1 4y ago
  This essay is about: how we do we get talent if we can't pay at the top of the scale? It says that the conventional wisdom is you have to instead attract people with "vision", some really exciting thing that the company is targetted at. But suggests instead, basically (this part is more my interpretative summary, what do you think?) that you can identify the people who couldn't get those top of the scale jobs (for example don't have a degree), but nevertheless are well-suited for your particular company/roles. OK, sure, that makes sense, just on an economic basis. It's a kind of "hiring arbitrage" -- and at it's worse may be treating the employees as much as commodities as that phrase sounds like. Like, I'm not sure the people will stick around if working at your company for a couple years makes them now more competitive for higher-paying jobs, and all you had to attract them was that you were willing to hire them when others weren't. But maybe that's fine, there will be more where they come from. But how about instead considering what could attract an employee in addition to top-scale salary or "vision"? How about "quality of life"? This could be internal -- you will like your co-workers, our managers are good at managing, we have a non-toxic work environment, you will feel like you have the support and freedom to actually do good work here toward understood organizational goals. (It's amazing how rare that is, right? I think a lot of people would take a salary drop for it). This could be work/life balance -- our hours are reasonable and predictable, our time off is flexible and plentiful. Or, even take a risk and offer 4-day weeks for the 'full' salary you can afford to offer -- you'll honestly probably be getting nearly as much productivity as 5-day week. Etc.
• fasteddie31003 4y ago
  I think engineering onboarding is one of the most overlooked ways to increase organizational productivity. I'd guess that the average tenure of an engineer is about 3 years. From my experience I feel confident in my abilities at a new company after 6 months. That gives 2.5 years of good work per engineer. I've been working on an engineer onboarding tool to reduce new hire ramp up time. I'd love to hear your feedback https://gainknowhow.com/software-companies.html https://gainknowhow.com/software-companies.html
• MikeCapone 4y ago
  There's a podcast interview with the author, Cedric Chin, here: https://www.libertyrpf.com/p/cedric-chin-what-operators-can-teach https://www.libertyrpf.com/p/cedric-chin-what-operators-can-... Covers the study of expertise and a bunch of different topics (operators vs investors, etc). It doesn't cover hiring specifically.
• tristor 4y ago
  After my first proper full-time job, every single position I've taken was based on being interested in working on the product. I've taken pay cuts, changed roles from engineering to product management, and in the future may change back to engineering (I keep my chops up). At no point have I ever taken a job because of the pay, and I don't see that ever changing. I think many people are like this. So, my advice is that you should focus on having a compelling and interesting product. If you have this, you can hire high-quality people for a reasonable rate of pay. I'm still invested in my current role, but now I often get reached out to by recruiters looking for early hires for new startups where I know I'd mostly be taking equity not pay, and I'm in a position where I can afford to do that. That's likely what I'll end up doing in my next role. Nobody wants to work on boring stuff. Boring stuff is just a fact of life that we all have to do some of the time. But the main thing is, to make sure that the product is compelling and interesting enough to make the boring stuff worthwhile when it happens in between the bouts of interesting stuff. If a job is just non-stop boring stuff and bureaucracy at a high rate of pay, people who are longer in tooth are going to leave and you're going to have brain drain.
  • tacitusarc 4y ago
    TFA explicitly mentions this is about companies that do not have an interesting product.
  • deleted 4y ago
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• matchagaucho 4y ago
  The lede is buried, but the premise is "Hiring in Vietnam". We had similar results in the Philippines, where working from home was unheard of. You give an employee back 2 hours of their day in commute time, pay their monthly Internet bill, and support a 4-day work week, then you suddenly have access to top-tier talent in countries where competing employers still impose Manufacturing, 9-to-5 labor laws on IT workers.
• bdcravens 4y ago
  Allow remote. Give autonomy. Give them good equipment. Pay well for their area. "Cash strapped" doesn't have to mean you hire cheap. It means you've gotta make it count.
• caffeine 4y ago
  Have a look at this comment I saw on here previously, it’s a great example of the article’s idea in practice: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31451536 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31451536