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There isn't a talent shortage. There's a shortage of courage to hire anyone with less then a Google-level CV and of will/ability to mentor them. The 4 * 2 hour

by nir 14y ago

There isn't a talent shortage. There's a shortage of courage to hire anyone with less then a Google-level CV and of will/ability to mentor them. The 4 * 2 hour reviews + coding test + references + logic questions + firewalking culture is ridiculous. It might make sense in places where firing employees is extremely difficult, but not in NYC or SF. %99 of the jobs supposedly in "shortage" could be filled by anyone with an attitude for programming, self motivation and a good mentor. Look at the current products of Silicon Valley - how many of these require much more than basic web development skills?

cgag 14y ago
This is what I imagine is actually going on. I also imagine there's plenty of talent in places in the US besides SV and NYC.
claudiusd 14y ago
There's no economic incentive to hire anyone below the top decile. Assuming you believe the "10x" rule (which says that there is a 10x productivity delta between the best and worse developers), I get the best bang-for-the-buck by hiring the best developer I can find. Even if compensation did scale linearly with productivity, two programmers with productivity X are still worse than one programmer with productivity 2X since communication costs grow as the team size grows. I wouldn't be a prudent businessman if I didn't fight relentlessly for the best developers...
- nir 14y ago
  Of course you should hire the best dev you can find (though I seriously doubt its possible to tell who'll be the best for you - both in terms of skill and, as importantly, personality). Personally I don't believe in the x10 rule. It might have been true when you had to code your own servers in Lisp to build a website, not when you build a Django CRUD app. In any case, when you mentor someone, they may turn out to be that top %10 dev.
rollypolly 14y ago
But..but..Everyone's told me that A players only hire A players, and hiring anyone else would sink my company. I'm an A player and only Linus himself will be good enough to write my CRUD app. I wonder when he'll be available..

by nir 14y ago

cgag 14y ago

This is what I imagine is actually going on. I also imagine there's plenty of talent in places in the US besides SV and NYC.

claudiusd 14y ago

There's no economic incentive to hire anyone below the top decile. Assuming you believe the "10x" rule (which says that there is a 10x productivity delta between the best and worse developers), I get the best bang-for-the-buck by hiring the best developer I can find. Even if compensation did scale linearly with productivity, two programmers with productivity X are still worse than one programmer with productivity 2X since communication costs grow as the team size grows. I wouldn't be a prudent businessman if I didn't fight relentlessly for the best developers...

nir 14y ago
Of course you should hire the best dev you can find (though I seriously doubt its possible to tell who'll be the best for you - both in terms of skill and, as importantly, personality). Personally I don't believe in the x10 rule. It might have been true when you had to code your own servers in Lisp to build a website, not when you build a Django CRUD app. In any case, when you mentor someone, they may turn out to be that top %10 dev.

rollypolly 14y ago

But..but..Everyone's told me that A players only hire A players, and hiring anyone else would sink my company. I'm an A player and only Linus himself will be good enough to write my CRUD app. I wonder when he'll be available..