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> With HN as the only sample, companies don't seem to be very interested right now in taking good engineers and molding them into great ones, or in building a b

> With HN as the only sample, companies don't seem to be very interested right now in taking good engineers and molding them into great ones, or in building a business structure that can benefit from good engineers. There's a few reasons why this is. The first is that startups are often, if not always, extremely bandwidth limited. It's hard to spend time doing the training, allowing a person to experiment, and giving the freedom and mentorship that is needed to take a good engineer to a great one, or even a mediocre engineer into a good one, when you have only a limited amount of time and limited amount of funds to do so with. Molding engineers is a very long term investment, which suits companies like Google well, but doesn't fit as well into much of the rest of SV. The second is that even where you want to do such molding, you need the base set of great engineers to help with that. Harder still is finding the set of great engineers you know how to teach and train, and are interested in doing so. While there are some people who enjoy teaching as well as engineering, a lot of people in engineering don't like to or want to spend their time training someone else.

thaumaturgy 11y ago
That all makes fine sense, but it isn't without its disadvantages. Those top engineers come with a price tag, and the harder everyone competes for them, the more they realize they're worth. For startups working on particularly intractable problems, the cost is easier to justify, if you have enough money available. But -- again, with HN as my only sample these days -- this hiring strategy seems to be spreading beyond the relatively small number of startups working on technically challenging problems.
- Bahamut 11y ago
  I personally avoid this hiring strategy and hire people I can mentor and build up. Companies that don't want to do this do our society a disservice by only hiring people who already are at the position they want (or less). In addition, it signals to me that they are not likely to promote from within or compensate fairly as time goes on. I have no interest in working for a company not willing to do this.

thaumaturgy 11y ago

That all makes fine sense, but it isn't without its disadvantages. Those top engineers come with a price tag, and the harder everyone competes for them, the more they realize they're worth. For startups working on particularly intractable problems, the cost is easier to justify, if you have enough money available. But -- again, with HN as my only sample these days -- this hiring strategy seems to be spreading beyond the relatively small number of startups working on technically challenging problems.

Bahamut 11y ago
I personally avoid this hiring strategy and hire people I can mentor and build up. Companies that don't want to do this do our society a disservice by only hiring people who already are at the position they want (or less). In addition, it signals to me that they are not likely to promote from within or compensate fairly as time goes on. I have no interest in working for a company not willing to do this.