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I'm starting to be a bit disillusioned with this whole "we can't find great people" spiel that a lot of startups put up. I have friends who are extremely good

by GuiA 13y ago

I'm starting to be a bit disillusioned with this whole "we can't find great people" spiel that a lot of startups put up. I have friends who are extremely good engineers (i.e., a mix of: contributors to major open source projects used by a lot of SV startups, have given talks at large conferences, published papers at ACM conferences, great portfolio of side/student projects, have worked at great companies previously, frequently write high quality tech articles on their blog, have high reputations on sites like Stack Overflow, etc.) and who have been rejected at interviews from those same companies who say that they can't find talent. (it also certainly doesn't help that the standard answer is "we're sorry, we feel like there isn't a match right now" rather than something constructive. "No match" can mean anything on the spectrum that starts at "you're a terrible engineer and we don't want you" and ends at "one of our interviewers felt threatened by you because you're more knowledgeable so he veto'd you"). Seriously, if you're really desperate for engineering talent, I can give you contact info for a dozen or so of friends who are ready to work for you RIGHT NOW (provided your startup isn't an awful place with awful people, of course) and probably another dozen or two who would work for you given enough convincing. I'm honestly starting to believe that it isn't hard to hire, but that there's some psychological effect at play that leads companies to make it harder on themselves out of misplaced pride or sense of elitism. Unless everyone wants to hire Guido Van Rossum or Donald Knuth, but then a) statistically speaking, you're just setting yourself up for failure and b) you need to realize that those kind of people wouldn't want to do the glorified web dev/sys admin'ing that a lot of SV jobs are.

MagicWishMonkey 13y ago
A lot of times an otherwise great engineer will be passed over due to culture fit.
nqureshi 13y ago
"I'm honestly starting to believe that it isn't hard to hire" If this were true, then engineer salaries would not be rising so much. The demand for good engineers vastly outstrips supply. Also, any explanation that requires you to posit mass irrationality is usually a bad one.
- a8da6b0c91d 13y ago
  Mass irrationality happens all the time.
- djb_hackernews 13y ago
  Do you have any data to back up the engineering salaries rising "so much"? From where I am standing engineering salaries have stagnated for the last 5 years, possibly even 10.
  - gaius 13y ago
    Allowing for inflation, since the dotcom bust.
  - j_baker 13y ago
    You're correct. Source: http://www.epi.org/publication/pm195-stem-labor-shortages-microsoft-report-distorts/ http://www.epi.org/publication/pm195-stem-labor-shortages-mi...
    - russell_h 13y ago
      My observation has been that while average compensation isn't trending upward that much, variance is increasing a lot. I've seen market research which bears this out. Especially among top candidates straight out of school, salaries have gone up a lot in the last few years.
- tptacek 13y ago
  That's true but a sloppy way to say it. A more precise way to characterize his argument is that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Then: is it an extraordinary claim to suggest that the hiring processes used by most tech companies are doing a bad job of selecting candidates? Are engineers hired through these processes but then fired within the first 6-9 months a rarity? Is turnover generally low? Is hiring so risky that companies working in the middle of a "talent crunch" are demanding that candidates take temporary contracting roles so they can evaluate performance? Is the typical startup engineering team staffed by engineers uniformly capable of production? Are tech company hiring practices carefully designed and executed, or is it more the norm that they're delivered by whatever engineers happen to be available for candidates when they show up? If the latter is the case, isn't it instead an extraordinary claim to suggest that these processes could work at all, given that they're essentially stochastic?
rtfeldman 13y ago
Companies often give generic responses like "we feel like there isn't a match" to cover themselves legally. More helpful responses can accidentally open you up to discrimination suits, and given the option of (A) bulletproofing every helpful response to make sure it won't come back to bite you and (B) just giving a generic and safe response every time, you can see why they'd choose the latter.
- wpietri 13y ago
  I will add that people are also very uneven in how they receive feedback. As John Scalzi writes, "[...] there are a lot of people who, when they say, 'I’d love feedback,' actually mean 'I want a hug.'" [1] Even those who actually want feedback are often unprepared to hear it. Thinking back, some of the biggest things I struggled with were things that were invisible to me. If I try to imagine explaining some thing to my younger self, my options are a) explain it politely but in a way that I wouldn't get, or b) being so blunt that I get upset or defensive. E.g., what I once saw as being passionate about getting at the truth is something I now see as me acting like an arrogant, argumentative, know-it-all jerk. Plus, feedback is much harder when it isn't interactive. When I do give feedback, it's always at the interviewee's request, it's always right after the interview, and it's always in person. Then it's pretty easy to gauge their emotional state, give them the feedback that's useful to them, and refer to specific examples that are fresh in our minds. Doing that a couple weeks later in print would be a nightmare. [1] http://whatever.scalzi.com/2007/01/23/what-to-know-before-you-ask-me-to-read-your-unpublished-work/ http://whatever.scalzi.com/2007/01/23/what-to-know-before-yo...
  - johnjlocke 13y ago
    Giving vague feedback to disqualified candidates may be necessary to cover lawsuits against the hiring company, but does nothing to make the would-be candidates grow or improve.
nhangen 13y ago
Agree 100%. In my anecdotal experience, companies put far too much emphasis on finding unicorns that can solve problems on a whiteboard than they do on finding above-average developers that have a strong work ethic, can learn fast, and have shipped something. As it stands, it seems the only people these companies hire are notable SV personalities, or people that excel at the formal interview format. As a result, they are missing out on a lot of good talent. Don't even get me started on working remote.
- Matt_Mickiewicz 13y ago
  You're absolutely right. Remote is a non-starter for 99% of start-ups... and a lot of companies that are selling pants online are searching for PhD-level engineering talent to run their shopping cart.
  - mountaineer 13y ago
    Appreciate you're insight here, if anyone knows first hand, I'd imagine it'd be you with your experience on developerauction.
  - strangetimes 13y ago
    I've noticed this, too, and been baffled by it. My working explanation is that people tend to hire clones of themselves. If the people making the hiring decisions in that online pants company have PhDs, they'll believe they need PhDs to work on that shopping cart.
    - danielweber 13y ago
      > people tend to hire clones of themselves Winner winner, chicken dinner. Ask a company that is hiring "is X important?", where X is one of {open-source coding, algorithm design, Ivy league degree, master's degree, MIT degree, Facebook alum, Google alum, presence in Silicon Valley, under 25 years old, over 25 years old, has a github, has a blog}, and you will get a "yes" for each X that the founder has.
  - joshwa 13y ago
killertypo 13y ago
> one of our interviewers felt threatened by you because you're more knowledgeable so he veto'd you I interviewed at a place and turned them down (located in SF) for this very reason. I could immediately tell that one of the owners did not like me. After wrapping up my entire interview process one of the owners thanked me and told me that they would reach out to me with more information. I went to thank and shake the hand of the other owner (he had wandered off). (They brought me in on a friday and they had a very open layout, engineers wandering about, beers in hand...etc) I opened with a thank you and, "I spoke with XYZ and he said you guys would be following up with more information, i look forward to speaking with you again!" He looked at me and said, in a very short and harsh tone, "Oh - I guess we will then..hm" I was extended a job offer the next day and immediately began receiving terse calls that I needed to forward more information and get it to them NOW (from the one who was quite brash with me earlier). I thanked them and turned down the offer.
- danielweber 13y ago
  It's probably immature of me, but did you say "I have decided not to move forward at this time"?
  - killertypo 13y ago
    Something to the effect of that - unfortunately when they extended the offer I was away at a conference and I had to do it over the phone in a loud hall. I was very unhappy with how the entire exchange went, but overall I am glad I did not take the job.
justincormack 13y ago
Indeed. This article says "if you’re going to recruit outside of your network (usually a mistake, but sometimes there are truly no other options)" WTF? You think you know all the good people already? Such a narrow minded view.
- rqebmm 13y ago
  I highly doubt they think they know all the good people. It's just a much better idea to hire someone you or someone you know and respect have had a good work experience with. Hiring someone off the street opens you up to a lot of unknown, most specifically if they're a good culture/team fit.
  - justincormack 13y ago
    So you think you know all the people who are "a good culture/team fit", and they aren't even particularly good. And then you complain about how hard it is to hire people? Of course its hard to hire people if you limit yourself to the thirty you know. Hiring people you don't know opens you up to opportunities to expand your horizons and go in new directions. If a good culture fit means people you already know then you are incredibly narrow minded about culture.
    - sixothree 13y ago
      I'm sure they have hundreds of facebook friends...
    - rqebmm 13y ago
      I find it ironic you're accusing either me or the author of narrow-mindedness but your responses clearly indicate you haven't comprehended either of our points.
    - s_husso 13y ago
      I do agree that you or your (extended) network don't know all the people worth knowing as there are always gems in random pool of people, but I think the odds are a bit better, at least from my own experience, finding them through the people in your network. How it usually pans out is that you ask your network "we look someone to do X, does anyone know anyone" and they ask their network and the loop continues until a name or a lead to a name comes up.
throwaway022014 13y ago
This 1000x. I have never found it difficult to hire for my dev shop in San Jose and I don't pay anywhere near what I'm told the "market" rate is. I hire engineers fresh out of no-name colleges, self-taught programmers, former freelancers who decided they wanted the stability of a salary and people over the age of 35. Basically I will hire the people who won't get the time of day from a lot of the big tech companies and rocketship startups and who wouldn't make it through the interview process there if they get through the front door. And you know what? Most of my hires turn out to be entirely adequate and the duds are not nearly as difficult to deal with as everyone says they will be. Granted my company is not building database engines or running social networks with a billion users but we do enterprise web apps for good clients and we are profitable. This idea that you have to give every employee 10% of the company and 130k a year to get people who can get the job done is a terrible, terrible myth and posts like this perpetuate it.
- dustingetz 13y ago
  enterprise consulting teams face a perverse incentive to be less efficient than product teams - a consultancy can actually kill itself by being too efficient
  - throwaway0314 13y ago
    That's not always true. Most of our projects are fixed price so efficiency is very important. If the scope doesn't change and we're inefficient I lose money.
- Iftheshoefits 13y ago
  Your post is a bit baffling. You state flat-out that your "dev shop" does "enterprise web apps" (almost certainly of the most pedestrian and easily automated variety) and that you target groups filled with people who are either desperate or unlikely to understand just how much you depend on them in order to take advantage of them by paying much less than you should. There's nothing mythological about that.
  - 13y ago
Balgair 13y ago
I'll shamelessly hijack here: I'm an engineer with microcontroller, python, C++, matlab and java experience (5 years all). PM for more info.
Matt_Mickiewicz 13y ago
I'll take those dozen friends -- http://www.hired.com/recommend http://www.hired.com/recommend :)
incision 13y ago
>"I'm honestly starting to believe that it isn't hard to hire, but that there's some psychological effect at play that leads companies to make it harder on themselves out of misplaced pride or sense of elitism." I expect that a fair portion of "We can't find qualified people!" is actually "We can't find qualified people for what we're willing to pay." Beyond that, I wouldn't say that it isn't hard to hire, but it certainly seems popular to make hiring as hard or perhaps more accurately - to make passing as easy as possible whether it's via veto, "culture fit" or something else. I was hoping that the vote of confidence in "behavioral interviews" [0] from Google over the summer would help things a bit - I guess not. 0: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/business/in-head-hunting-big-data-may-not-be-such-a-big-deal.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/business/in-head-hunting-b...
- baddox 13y ago
  > I expect that a fair portion of "We can't find qualified people!" is actually "We can't find qualified people for what we're willing to pay." Sure, but isn't that implied, since all companies have financial constraints? If you can somehow pay 10 million dollars a year for a software engineer, I'm sure you'll have a lot less trouble finding a great engineer.
- danielweber 13y ago
  If that was the problem, then they would complain not that they couldn't find people, but that candidates weren't accepting their offers. (Of course it's possible they are implicitly or explicitly cutting all the people who cost too much money, leaving them with very few useful candidates.)
  - EpicEng 13y ago
    Would they though? That would be admitting that the problem was with them, something many people are not willing to do.
  - VLM 13y ago
    Only want to hire elite genius rockstars ... to implement a really boring CRUD app ... for median (sometimes lower) wage. Not too surprising this strategy doesn't work out too well.
tdumitrescu 13y ago
"one of our interviewers felt threatened by you because you're more knowledgeable so he veto'd you" does this ever actually happen? it would never fly during any of the interview processes I've helped conduct.
- pmorici 13y ago
  How would you even know when things like that happen people don't usually come out and say it in blunt terms like that.
  - sokoloff 13y ago
    Someone who scores pretty well objectively and is getting subjectively tanked by one person on the loop is something to explore more deeply. 3 out of 4, there's something legitimate there. It's possible to be coached through some of the objective parts of many interview processes, ours included. That's readily true for an internal referral (and could be innocuous rather than malicious), and even someone using glassdoor to prep could maybe skate by a couple questions, but someone will usually sniff it out subjectively. 1 out of 4 it's a "personality clash" which could be code for being threatened by someone's technical superiority, rather than simply being annoyed by someone's superior PITA-ness If the same employee is constantly on the personality clash side of things, it's easy enough to remove them from future loops (and possibly the company, if their inferiority complex is rooted in actual inferiority).
- walshemj 13y ago
  Yep went for a job recently where I had several more years experience that the person in charge of the team :-)
benched 13y ago
I agree with this strongly. What I usually say is I'll believe there's a shortage of great engineers the day that in-house recruiters begin contacting me. My accomplishments are right there on LinkedIn, if you can assume I didn't lie, for one phone call. Until that happens, I have to conclude companies that allegedly can't hire are barely trying.
- karmelapple 13y ago
  How do you list yourself on LinkedIn - as looking for a job? For someone such as myself looking for a talented engineer, unless there is a strong indicator that someone is looking for a position, I've found LinkedIn has not provided too many responses. I tried one of the more expensive LinkedIn accounts awhile back, contacted about 10 people that all had mobile experience (my company makes an iOS and Android app for higher education), and only got 1 response to my message. I assume part of it is that my message was read by these people, but they looked at it as "spammy," even though I wrote it individually to each person and tailored the message for each person. I've gotten messages from random people on LinkedIn, and it's easy to feel messages on there to be spammy. So having my time on LinkedIn essentially feel like a huge waste made me question LinkedIn. Is it that I used their email system, and I should have instead setup a phone call? Perhaps I am communicating a job that is not particularly interesting? I think an iOS and Android app with web backend, using the tech we are using (native languages for the native apps, and NodeJS for web), would be fairly attractive to a variety of developers though.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - hmsimha 13y ago
    I've been listed on linkedin as actively looking for a job for 4 months now. Granted, my profile could use some work, but the few replies I've received didn't mention anything listed on my profile other than my name.
  - nfriedly 13y ago
    I'd be curious to talk offline if you have a few minutes - want to send me an email? nathan@[hn username].com
mamcx 13y ago
+1. Is weird. I have more than +17 years on this job, and when I have apply to some oportunities (online) for the kind of things I could be good some companies expect to hire me testing for the things that are not related to the job itself!. Like testing algorithmic stuff instead of database (I'm a database/crud/backend guy). I could understand the use of some general test, but the weird thing is that nothing at all related to the job is used. I remember from some big internet recruitment agency that use a lot of time with me, but at the end I fail at them because they use the final testing unrelated to all the things hours and hours before we talked about. Is like hire a mechanic, and ask only algebra stuff.
danielweber 13y ago
I have this theory that it all goes back to Joel On Software's article from 2000 that said it you should find any possible reason to not hire people. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000073.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000073.html grep for "no hire" The things in that article that are today considered vastly out-of-fashion (probably too much, the same way they were too in-fashion in 2000) are numerous, but this "
prostoalex 13y ago
Modus operandi seems to be: 1) Incorporate in SF for culture reasons or to allow founders to optimize their commute. 2) Find out it's extremely hard to find people in SF as anybody who lives there pretty much has to stay employed to justify the rent. 3) Find out people from Peninsula / South Bay / East Bay are not as excited about 45-60 minute one way commute as you thought they'd be. 4) Complain about engineer crunch.
starmanjones 13y ago
GuiA wrote: I'm starting to be a bit disillusioned with this whole "we can't find great people" spiel that a lot of startups put up. ---- LOL...it's a scam to depress wages. Immigration always was a scam by the upper class.
azth 13y ago
> Seriously, if you're really desperate for engineering talent, I can give you contact info for a dozen or so of friends who are ready to work for you RIGHT NOW (provided your startup isn't an awful place with awful people, of course) and probably another dozen or two who would work for you given enough convincing. How can I get in touch with you? My email is in my profile page.
suren 13y ago
I have got the "We are not going to go forward with you but we are not going to give any reason for that either" more than few times now. Happens one time, you think it was chance. Happens couple of times, you think you think there might not have been a cultural fit. But you can't help but start questioning your skills as a developer sometimes. Times like those I could really use a reason why I am not a good fit. That includes "We don't think you are a good developer" because knowing the problem, I could try and fix it.
martian 13y ago
The Bay Area is a great place to be if you're an engineer. You get many job offers in your inbox every week. Your friends have long since stopped asking you if you want to work at their startups, but you know just how quickly that would change were you to signal that you wanted a new job. I think the crunch is at least somewhat real. We've hired a couple great people we met through Hacker News -- I couldn't have imagined them working out any better. And recently I've been trying to hire more people at my startup and, frankly, it's tough to find good people. We've worked hard to make our interview process quick, insightful, fun, and accurate. Do we do pair programming? Sure. Do we ask about data structures? Absolutely; any programmer worth anything knows something about data structures. Do we do whiteboarding? Yep. Programmers at our company, it turns out, need to be good at communicating with humans as well as with computers. Do we give people answers immediately, and tell them why we are rejecting them? Yes, we do. We are more humane and reasonable than so many other places. (It drives me crazy how many bad interviewers there are out there. Some of my friends recently interviewed for entry-level positions and some shall-not-be-named companies in SF and were treated terribly: given the run-around by the recruiters, brought back in the office 4 separate times for interviews, and ultimately rejected by at least two companies when they decided they didn't want to sponsor H1Bs after all. Insane. In a war for talent, you'd think practices like this would cease.) Anyway: this is all to say, I'd love to meet your friends or anyone else out there who's looking for a programming job. My colleagues and I are not awful people. We like to brew beer and write code and help make the world a better place. We have a book club and eat good food. Oh, and we pay well and sponsor visas and are generally, you know, warm and friendly folks.
- gizzlon 13y ago
  "Absolutely; any programmer worth anything knows something about data structures" Can you qualify this a little bit? I haven't used data structures since university. What are you expecting programmers to know and why?
  - djb_hackernews 13y ago
    If you haven't used a list, array, map, set, tree, etc since university then you probably aren't writing code for a living. Well, I guess it's possible, but I find it hard to imagine.

by GuiA 13y ago

MagicWishMonkey 13y ago

A lot of times an otherwise great engineer will be passed over due to culture fit.

nqureshi 13y ago

"I'm honestly starting to believe that it isn't hard to hire" If this were true, then engineer salaries would not be rising so much. The demand for good engineers vastly outstrips supply. Also, any explanation that requires you to posit mass irrationality is usually a bad one.

a8da6b0c91d 13y ago
Mass irrationality happens all the time.
djb_hackernews 13y ago
Do you have any data to back up the engineering salaries rising "so much"? From where I am standing engineering salaries have stagnated for the last 5 years, possibly even 10.
- gaius 13y ago
  Allowing for inflation, since the dotcom bust.
- j_baker 13y ago
  You're correct. Source: http://www.epi.org/publication/pm195-stem-labor-shortages-microsoft-report-distorts/ http://www.epi.org/publication/pm195-stem-labor-shortages-mi...
  - russell_h 13y ago
    My observation has been that while average compensation isn't trending upward that much, variance is increasing a lot. I've seen market research which bears this out. Especially among top candidates straight out of school, salaries have gone up a lot in the last few years.
tptacek 13y ago
That's true but a sloppy way to say it. A more precise way to characterize his argument is that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Then: is it an extraordinary claim to suggest that the hiring processes used by most tech companies are doing a bad job of selecting candidates? Are engineers hired through these processes but then fired within the first 6-9 months a rarity? Is turnover generally low? Is hiring so risky that companies working in the middle of a "talent crunch" are demanding that candidates take temporary contracting roles so they can evaluate performance? Is the typical startup engineering team staffed by engineers uniformly capable of production? Are tech company hiring practices carefully designed and executed, or is it more the norm that they're delivered by whatever engineers happen to be available for candidates when they show up? If the latter is the case, isn't it instead an extraordinary claim to suggest that these processes could work at all, given that they're essentially stochastic?

rtfeldman 13y ago

Companies often give generic responses like "we feel like there isn't a match" to cover themselves legally. More helpful responses can accidentally open you up to discrimination suits, and given the option of (A) bulletproofing every helpful response to make sure it won't come back to bite you and (B) just giving a generic and safe response every time, you can see why they'd choose the latter.

wpietri 13y ago
I will add that people are also very uneven in how they receive feedback. As John Scalzi writes, "[...] there are a lot of people who, when they say, 'I’d love feedback,' actually mean 'I want a hug.'" [1] Even those who actually want feedback are often unprepared to hear it. Thinking back, some of the biggest things I struggled with were things that were invisible to me. If I try to imagine explaining some thing to my younger self, my options are a) explain it politely but in a way that I wouldn't get, or b) being so blunt that I get upset or defensive. E.g., what I once saw as being passionate about getting at the truth is something I now see as me acting like an arrogant, argumentative, know-it-all jerk. Plus, feedback is much harder when it isn't interactive. When I do give feedback, it's always at the interviewee's request, it's always right after the interview, and it's always in person. Then it's pretty easy to gauge their emotional state, give them the feedback that's useful to them, and refer to specific examples that are fresh in our minds. Doing that a couple weeks later in print would be a nightmare. [1] http://whatever.scalzi.com/2007/01/23/what-to-know-before-you-ask-me-to-read-your-unpublished-work/ http://whatever.scalzi.com/2007/01/23/what-to-know-before-yo...
- johnjlocke 13y ago
  Giving vague feedback to disqualified candidates may be necessary to cover lawsuits against the hiring company, but does nothing to make the would-be candidates grow or improve.

nhangen 13y ago

Agree 100%. In my anecdotal experience, companies put far too much emphasis on finding unicorns that can solve problems on a whiteboard than they do on finding above-average developers that have a strong work ethic, can learn fast, and have shipped something. As it stands, it seems the only people these companies hire are notable SV personalities, or people that excel at the formal interview format. As a result, they are missing out on a lot of good talent. Don't even get me started on working remote.

Matt_Mickiewicz 13y ago
You're absolutely right. Remote is a non-starter for 99% of start-ups... and a lot of companies that are selling pants online are searching for PhD-level engineering talent to run their shopping cart.
- mountaineer 13y ago
  Appreciate you're insight here, if anyone knows first hand, I'd imagine it'd be you with your experience on developerauction.
- strangetimes 13y ago
  I've noticed this, too, and been baffled by it. My working explanation is that people tend to hire clones of themselves. If the people making the hiring decisions in that online pants company have PhDs, they'll believe they need PhDs to work on that shopping cart.
  - danielweber 13y ago
    > people tend to hire clones of themselves Winner winner, chicken dinner. Ask a company that is hiring "is X important?", where X is one of {open-source coding, algorithm design, Ivy league degree, master's degree, MIT degree, Facebook alum, Google alum, presence in Silicon Valley, under 25 years old, over 25 years old, has a github, has a blog}, and you will get a "yes" for each X that the founder has.
- joshwa 13y ago

killertypo 13y ago

> one of our interviewers felt threatened by you because you're more knowledgeable so he veto'd you I interviewed at a place and turned them down (located in SF) for this very reason. I could immediately tell that one of the owners did not like me. After wrapping up my entire interview process one of the owners thanked me and told me that they would reach out to me with more information. I went to thank and shake the hand of the other owner (he had wandered off). (They brought me in on a friday and they had a very open layout, engineers wandering about, beers in hand...etc) I opened with a thank you and, "I spoke with XYZ and he said you guys would be following up with more information, i look forward to speaking with you again!" He looked at me and said, in a very short and harsh tone, "Oh - I guess we will then..hm" I was extended a job offer the next day and immediately began receiving terse calls that I needed to forward more information and get it to them NOW (from the one who was quite brash with me earlier). I thanked them and turned down the offer.

danielweber 13y ago
It's probably immature of me, but did you say "I have decided not to move forward at this time"?
- killertypo 13y ago
  Something to the effect of that - unfortunately when they extended the offer I was away at a conference and I had to do it over the phone in a loud hall. I was very unhappy with how the entire exchange went, but overall I am glad I did not take the job.

justincormack 13y ago

Indeed. This article says "if you’re going to recruit outside of your network (usually a mistake, but sometimes there are truly no other options)" WTF? You think you know all the good people already? Such a narrow minded view.

rqebmm 13y ago
I highly doubt they think they know all the good people. It's just a much better idea to hire someone you or someone you know and respect have had a good work experience with. Hiring someone off the street opens you up to a lot of unknown, most specifically if they're a good culture/team fit.
- justincormack 13y ago
  So you think you know all the people who are "a good culture/team fit", and they aren't even particularly good. And then you complain about how hard it is to hire people? Of course its hard to hire people if you limit yourself to the thirty you know. Hiring people you don't know opens you up to opportunities to expand your horizons and go in new directions. If a good culture fit means people you already know then you are incredibly narrow minded about culture.
  - sixothree 13y ago
    I'm sure they have hundreds of facebook friends...
  - rqebmm 13y ago
    I find it ironic you're accusing either me or the author of narrow-mindedness but your responses clearly indicate you haven't comprehended either of our points.
  - s_husso 13y ago
    I do agree that you or your (extended) network don't know all the people worth knowing as there are always gems in random pool of people, but I think the odds are a bit better, at least from my own experience, finding them through the people in your network. How it usually pans out is that you ask your network "we look someone to do X, does anyone know anyone" and they ask their network and the loop continues until a name or a lead to a name comes up.

throwaway022014 13y ago

This 1000x. I have never found it difficult to hire for my dev shop in San Jose and I don't pay anywhere near what I'm told the "market" rate is. I hire engineers fresh out of no-name colleges, self-taught programmers, former freelancers who decided they wanted the stability of a salary and people over the age of 35. Basically I will hire the people who won't get the time of day from a lot of the big tech companies and rocketship startups and who wouldn't make it through the interview process there if they get through the front door. And you know what? Most of my hires turn out to be entirely adequate and the duds are not nearly as difficult to deal with as everyone says they will be. Granted my company is not building database engines or running social networks with a billion users but we do enterprise web apps for good clients and we are profitable. This idea that you have to give every employee 10% of the company and 130k a year to get people who can get the job done is a terrible, terrible myth and posts like this perpetuate it.

dustingetz 13y ago
enterprise consulting teams face a perverse incentive to be less efficient than product teams - a consultancy can actually kill itself by being too efficient
- throwaway0314 13y ago
  That's not always true. Most of our projects are fixed price so efficiency is very important. If the scope doesn't change and we're inefficient I lose money.
Iftheshoefits 13y ago
Your post is a bit baffling. You state flat-out that your "dev shop" does "enterprise web apps" (almost certainly of the most pedestrian and easily automated variety) and that you target groups filled with people who are either desperate or unlikely to understand just how much you depend on them in order to take advantage of them by paying much less than you should. There's nothing mythological about that.
- 13y ago

Balgair 13y ago

I'll shamelessly hijack here: I'm an engineer with microcontroller, python, C++, matlab and java experience (5 years all). PM for more info.

Matt_Mickiewicz 13y ago

I'll take those dozen friends -- http://www.hired.com/recommend http://www.hired.com/recommend :)

incision 13y ago

>"I'm honestly starting to believe that it isn't hard to hire, but that there's some psychological effect at play that leads companies to make it harder on themselves out of misplaced pride or sense of elitism." I expect that a fair portion of "We can't find qualified people!" is actually "We can't find qualified people for what we're willing to pay." Beyond that, I wouldn't say that it isn't hard to hire, but it certainly seems popular to make hiring as hard or perhaps more accurately - to make passing as easy as possible whether it's via veto, "culture fit" or something else. I was hoping that the vote of confidence in "behavioral interviews" [0] from Google over the summer would help things a bit - I guess not. 0: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/business/in-head-hunting-big-data-may-not-be-such-a-big-deal.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/business/in-head-hunting-b...

baddox 13y ago
> I expect that a fair portion of "We can't find qualified people!" is actually "We can't find qualified people for what we're willing to pay." Sure, but isn't that implied, since all companies have financial constraints? If you can somehow pay 10 million dollars a year for a software engineer, I'm sure you'll have a lot less trouble finding a great engineer.
danielweber 13y ago
If that was the problem, then they would complain not that they couldn't find people, but that candidates weren't accepting their offers. (Of course it's possible they are implicitly or explicitly cutting all the people who cost too much money, leaving them with very few useful candidates.)
- EpicEng 13y ago
  Would they though? That would be admitting that the problem was with them, something many people are not willing to do.
- VLM 13y ago
  Only want to hire elite genius rockstars ... to implement a really boring CRUD app ... for median (sometimes lower) wage. Not too surprising this strategy doesn't work out too well.

tdumitrescu 13y ago

"one of our interviewers felt threatened by you because you're more knowledgeable so he veto'd you" does this ever actually happen? it would never fly during any of the interview processes I've helped conduct.

pmorici 13y ago
How would you even know when things like that happen people don't usually come out and say it in blunt terms like that.
- sokoloff 13y ago
  Someone who scores pretty well objectively and is getting subjectively tanked by one person on the loop is something to explore more deeply. 3 out of 4, there's something legitimate there. It's possible to be coached through some of the objective parts of many interview processes, ours included. That's readily true for an internal referral (and could be innocuous rather than malicious), and even someone using glassdoor to prep could maybe skate by a couple questions, but someone will usually sniff it out subjectively. 1 out of 4 it's a "personality clash" which could be code for being threatened by someone's technical superiority, rather than simply being annoyed by someone's superior PITA-ness If the same employee is constantly on the personality clash side of things, it's easy enough to remove them from future loops (and possibly the company, if their inferiority complex is rooted in actual inferiority).
walshemj 13y ago
Yep went for a job recently where I had several more years experience that the person in charge of the team :-)

benched 13y ago

I agree with this strongly. What I usually say is I'll believe there's a shortage of great engineers the day that in-house recruiters begin contacting me. My accomplishments are right there on LinkedIn, if you can assume I didn't lie, for one phone call. Until that happens, I have to conclude companies that allegedly can't hire are barely trying.

karmelapple 13y ago
How do you list yourself on LinkedIn - as looking for a job? For someone such as myself looking for a talented engineer, unless there is a strong indicator that someone is looking for a position, I've found LinkedIn has not provided too many responses. I tried one of the more expensive LinkedIn accounts awhile back, contacted about 10 people that all had mobile experience (my company makes an iOS and Android app for higher education), and only got 1 response to my message. I assume part of it is that my message was read by these people, but they looked at it as "spammy," even though I wrote it individually to each person and tailored the message for each person. I've gotten messages from random people on LinkedIn, and it's easy to feel messages on there to be spammy. So having my time on LinkedIn essentially feel like a huge waste made me question LinkedIn. Is it that I used their email system, and I should have instead setup a phone call? Perhaps I am communicating a job that is not particularly interesting? I think an iOS and Android app with web backend, using the tech we are using (native languages for the native apps, and NodeJS for web), would be fairly attractive to a variety of developers though.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- hmsimha 13y ago
  I've been listed on linkedin as actively looking for a job for 4 months now. Granted, my profile could use some work, but the few replies I've received didn't mention anything listed on my profile other than my name.
- nfriedly 13y ago
  I'd be curious to talk offline if you have a few minutes - want to send me an email? nathan@[hn username].com

mamcx 13y ago

+1. Is weird. I have more than +17 years on this job, and when I have apply to some oportunities (online) for the kind of things I could be good some companies expect to hire me testing for the things that are not related to the job itself!. Like testing algorithmic stuff instead of database (I'm a database/crud/backend guy). I could understand the use of some general test, but the weird thing is that nothing at all related to the job is used. I remember from some big internet recruitment agency that use a lot of time with me, but at the end I fail at them because they use the final testing unrelated to all the things hours and hours before we talked about. Is like hire a mechanic, and ask only algebra stuff.

danielweber 13y ago

I have this theory that it all goes back to Joel On Software's article from 2000 that said it you should find any possible reason to not hire people. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000073.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000073.html grep for "no hire" The things in that article that are today considered vastly out-of-fashion (probably too much, the same way they were too in-fashion in 2000) are numerous, but this "

prostoalex 13y ago

Modus operandi seems to be: 1) Incorporate in SF for culture reasons or to allow founders to optimize their commute. 2) Find out it's extremely hard to find people in SF as anybody who lives there pretty much has to stay employed to justify the rent. 3) Find out people from Peninsula / South Bay / East Bay are not as excited about 45-60 minute one way commute as you thought they'd be. 4) Complain about engineer crunch.

starmanjones 13y ago

GuiA wrote: I'm starting to be a bit disillusioned with this whole "we can't find great people" spiel that a lot of startups put up. ---- LOL...it's a scam to depress wages. Immigration always was a scam by the upper class.

azth 13y ago

> Seriously, if you're really desperate for engineering talent, I can give you contact info for a dozen or so of friends who are ready to work for you RIGHT NOW (provided your startup isn't an awful place with awful people, of course) and probably another dozen or two who would work for you given enough convincing. How can I get in touch with you? My email is in my profile page.

suren 13y ago

I have got the "We are not going to go forward with you but we are not going to give any reason for that either" more than few times now. Happens one time, you think it was chance. Happens couple of times, you think you think there might not have been a cultural fit. But you can't help but start questioning your skills as a developer sometimes. Times like those I could really use a reason why I am not a good fit. That includes "We don't think you are a good developer" because knowing the problem, I could try and fix it.

martian 13y ago

The Bay Area is a great place to be if you're an engineer. You get many job offers in your inbox every week. Your friends have long since stopped asking you if you want to work at their startups, but you know just how quickly that would change were you to signal that you wanted a new job. I think the crunch is at least somewhat real. We've hired a couple great people we met through Hacker News -- I couldn't have imagined them working out any better. And recently I've been trying to hire more people at my startup and, frankly, it's tough to find good people. We've worked hard to make our interview process quick, insightful, fun, and accurate. Do we do pair programming? Sure. Do we ask about data structures? Absolutely; any programmer worth anything knows something about data structures. Do we do whiteboarding? Yep. Programmers at our company, it turns out, need to be good at communicating with humans as well as with computers. Do we give people answers immediately, and tell them why we are rejecting them? Yes, we do. We are more humane and reasonable than so many other places. (It drives me crazy how many bad interviewers there are out there. Some of my friends recently interviewed for entry-level positions and some shall-not-be-named companies in SF and were treated terribly: given the run-around by the recruiters, brought back in the office 4 separate times for interviews, and ultimately rejected by at least two companies when they decided they didn't want to sponsor H1Bs after all. Insane. In a war for talent, you'd think practices like this would cease.) Anyway: this is all to say, I'd love to meet your friends or anyone else out there who's looking for a programming job. My colleagues and I are not awful people. We like to brew beer and write code and help make the world a better place. We have a book club and eat good food. Oh, and we pay well and sponsor visas and are generally, you know, warm and friendly folks.

gizzlon 13y ago
"Absolutely; any programmer worth anything knows something about data structures" Can you qualify this a little bit? I haven't used data structures since university. What are you expecting programmers to know and why?
- djb_hackernews 13y ago
  If you haven't used a list, array, map, set, tree, etc since university then you probably aren't writing code for a living. Well, I guess it's possible, but I find it hard to imagine.