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What makes you think that immigration is going to result in an increase in high-quality applicants to your company? This sounds an awful lot like "If you build

What makes you think that immigration is going to result in an increase in high-quality applicants to your company? This sounds an awful lot like "If you build it, they will come." While I don't doubt that you see a lot of candidates who aren't remotely qualified for your positions, one of the harsh realities of this market is that it's hard to attract "great" people, even if you're at or above market in terms of compensation. There just aren't enough "great" people to go around, so other factors, such as technical challenges and business viability, are often taken into consideration by quality candidates. Chances are there are other startups competing for the same talent that seem to be working on more challenging problems and have better prospects than you. Early-stage startups like yours would be wise to consider optimizing their businesses and technology architectures around this fact. Unless you can pay stupid guap or are working on something really, really objectively interesting, one of the best and most underutilized techniques for finding great employees is to hire decent folks with potential and develop them into great employees. A lot of companies will insist this isn't viable ("We needed 15 unicorns yesterday because we're building the world's most advanced analytics platform for selfies!") but most of them aren't being honest with themselves about their real needs. They're intent on building technology for the business they think they'll have and don't want to admit that they don't know how to develop employees.

morgante 12y ago
> What makes you think that immigration is going to result in an increase in high-quality applicants to your company? I don't think immigration is a panacea (in fact, my primary point in this thread has just been to rebuke the argument that salaries aren't rising so therefore there isn't a tech shortage). That being said, we do have some overseas contractors who I'd love to bring in-house if the immigration system didn't make doing so incredibly byzantine and challenging. > Chances are there are other startups competing for the same talent that seem to be working on more challenging problems and have better prospects than you. I do think this is truthfully a big part of the challenges. Despite the fact that our CEO has a great track record (two successful exits, last one for $545M+) and that we're actually building some cool technology (using data & technology to make it easy for writers to understand how their content flows across the web and to adapt their writing accordingly) many are turned off by the fact that we're working in "publishing." Unfortunately, at this point it seems almost impossible to hire good developers unless you're Google—even if you have a viable business model and interesting/new technology (microservices, graph analytics, etc.). > Unless you can pay stupid guap or are working on something really, really objectively interesting, one of the best and most underutilized techniques for finding great employees is to hire decent folks with potential and develop them into great employees. We're very big on hiring based on potential, but there is a certain baseline. Particularly because our engineering team is small as it is, bringing on junior devs would be somewhat unfair to our existing developers—increasing their workload.

morgante 12y ago

> What makes you think that immigration is going to result in an increase in high-quality applicants to your company? I don't think immigration is a panacea (in fact, my primary point in this thread has just been to rebuke the argument that salaries aren't rising so therefore there isn't a tech shortage). That being said, we do have some overseas contractors who I'd love to bring in-house if the immigration system didn't make doing so incredibly byzantine and challenging. > Chances are there are other startups competing for the same talent that seem to be working on more challenging problems and have better prospects than you. I do think this is truthfully a big part of the challenges. Despite the fact that our CEO has a great track record (two successful exits, last one for $545M+) and that we're actually building some cool technology (using data & technology to make it easy for writers to understand how their content flows across the web and to adapt their writing accordingly) many are turned off by the fact that we're working in "publishing." Unfortunately, at this point it seems almost impossible to hire good developers unless you're Google—even if you have a viable business model and interesting/new technology (microservices, graph analytics, etc.). > Unless you can pay stupid guap or are working on something really, really objectively interesting, one of the best and most underutilized techniques for finding great employees is to hire decent folks with potential and develop them into great employees. We're very big on hiring based on potential, but there is a certain baseline. Particularly because our engineering team is small as it is, bringing on junior devs would be somewhat unfair to our existing developers—increasing their workload.