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Mid market is where the best value is. Give someone with promise a shot and mentor them and you'll end up with a great employee. The guy that works at Facebook,
by dave_sullivan 14y ago
Mid market is where the best value is. Give someone with promise a shot and mentor them and you'll end up with a great employee. The guy that works at Facebook, used to work for google, went to Stanford--might they be more likely to jump ship as soon as there's a new game in town?
I guess it depends on what you're going for, but I don't think the "best and brightest" mantra is all its cracked up to be. People can become better and brighter with the right guidance--only hiring the best and brightest and considering it an all or nothing proposition is lazy.
Edit: to be fair, as has been pointed out, there are engineers that are literally 1000x more productive, and they don't cost 1000x as much. That rare bird truly is best and brightest and is worth every penny. Trouble is, it's really tough to tell, and I don't know that the traits to look for are necessarily correlated with credentials typically attributed to "best and brightest". That is, those people don't all work at Facebook et al
- alaskamiller 14y agoAt the top level it's also a game of keep-away. Google is more than willing to pay a premium sucking up all the brains in the valley and letting them sit around twiddling thumbs so that competitors don't get to them.
- bmohlenhoff 14y agoTop engineers probably wouldn't be content merely sitting around, twiddling their thumbs. They want to build things.
- munin 14y agohave you seen the food in the cafeteria? also did you know that they'll do your laundry here, and also every smart person who went to school with you works down the hall? oh yeah, and you can bring your dog to work? did I mention the food?
- coopdog 14y agoNo matter how good the benefits, if I'm not doing something meaningful I'm gone "20% time" could go along way toward solving this at Google though
- sliverstorm 14y agoliterally 1000x more productive Are we saying 1000x more productive than top-5-percentile engineers, or 1000x more productive than the worst engineers?
- shanelja 14y ago1000x more productive is too many orders of magnitude in individual performance for me to really process, perhaps he means 1000x more productive than 1,000 monkeys with typewriters?
- sliverstorm 14y agoI presume you can think of it as this legendary engineer does what would take a normal engineer 3 years to do, each day.
- slurgfest 14y agoWhen you put it that way, it sounds absolutely ridiculous. Almost 3 years of normal work every single day: do people really believe that??
- sliverstorm 14y agoIt certainly appears they do believe that.
- guard-of-terra 14y ago1000x more productive when charged with the right tasks. Can't be 1000x more productive building CRUD forms.
- dave_sullivan 14y agoWhen I said "literally" I may have been exaggerating to make a point... dangerous on HN :-) Call it 5x if it makes you more comfortable, the basic argument still stands.