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Increase the pool of software engineers, specifically in New Zealand, so companies can hire more easily and don't need to increase salaries. Here's a tip for r

Increase the pool of software engineers, specifically in New Zealand, so companies can hire more easily and don't need to increase salaries. Here's a tip for reading PR pieces: if a company is mentioned in the article and one of their executives is quoted, they are almost always the ones who paid for (and probably wrote) the article. Here, it quotes "NZTech CEO Graeme Muller". If you click through the one link in the article, that one also quotes NZTech CEO Graeme Muller, and all the source data is from NZTech. Reading through it, you see that NZTech is an industry trade association of New Zealand's tech companies. They have a pretty obvious vested interest in increasing the pool of tech workers in New Zealand.

hluska 3y ago
Isn’t it more likely that the CEO of an industry wide association would be the best person to comment on trends impacting the whole industry? Edit - I’m a recovering publisher so have a lot of experience being the target of PR and choosing what kinds of articles can be printed.
- nostrademons 3y ago
  Not really. When assessing the credibility of a source, you have two main questions: do they have the information you need, and do they have an incentive to lie? Industry-wide associations usually have significantly worse information than people who are actually performing the jobs at companies in the organization, and they also have a responsibility to their member orgs to get the best outcomes for them (i.e. represent information in a way that achieves member organization goals). If I wanted accurate information on the state of hiring in an industry, I would look for someone who had recently performed sourcing/interviewing/recruiting for one of the big companies in the industry but had also recently retired, left for another field, or become a stay-at-home mom/dad. They have the firsthand information as part of their job, but they also have no dog in the fight and hence no reason to distort that information.
  - hluska 3y ago
    You have never published, have you? Your last paragraph is all about finding impossible sources whose credibility won’t be apparent to average readers.
ryandrake 3y ago
> Here's a tip for reading PR pieces: if a company is mentioned in the article and one of their executives is quoted, they are almost always the ones who paid for (and probably wrote) the article. Here's another one that a surprising number of people still don't realize: If you're reading an article where any company employee or exec is "quoted", the quote is almost always something written by the company's professional PR team and not an actual quote from the person.
- nostrademons 3y ago
  I had a manager once who said that "[famous company] executive, [name]" should be an anti-Hearst pattern that shows [name] is clearly not an executive.

hluska 3y ago

Isn’t it more likely that the CEO of an industry wide association would be the best person to comment on trends impacting the whole industry? Edit - I’m a recovering publisher so have a lot of experience being the target of PR and choosing what kinds of articles can be printed.

nostrademons 3y ago
Not really. When assessing the credibility of a source, you have two main questions: do they have the information you need, and do they have an incentive to lie? Industry-wide associations usually have significantly worse information than people who are actually performing the jobs at companies in the organization, and they also have a responsibility to their member orgs to get the best outcomes for them (i.e. represent information in a way that achieves member organization goals). If I wanted accurate information on the state of hiring in an industry, I would look for someone who had recently performed sourcing/interviewing/recruiting for one of the big companies in the industry but had also recently retired, left for another field, or become a stay-at-home mom/dad. They have the firsthand information as part of their job, but they also have no dog in the fight and hence no reason to distort that information.
- hluska 3y ago
  You have never published, have you? Your last paragraph is all about finding impossible sources whose credibility won’t be apparent to average readers.

ryandrake 3y ago

> Here's a tip for reading PR pieces: if a company is mentioned in the article and one of their executives is quoted, they are almost always the ones who paid for (and probably wrote) the article. Here's another one that a surprising number of people still don't realize: If you're reading an article where any company employee or exec is "quoted", the quote is almost always something written by the company's professional PR team and not an actual quote from the person.

nostrademons 3y ago
I had a manager once who said that "[famous company] executive, [name]" should be an anti-Hearst pattern that shows [name] is clearly not an executive.