If anyone actually believed this they wouldn’t complain about it on HackerNews. If it were true that Google, Microsoft, Apple, etc don’t know how to hire programmers effectively, this would be an incredibly powerful observation which you would want to keep top secret while silently beating the hiring market and building the most successful tech company of all time. We’re all waiting.

The reason people are upset by this issue is that it highlights a misalignment in the incentives of employers and job seekers. And with this I fully empathize: job hunting is hell in any industry, ours included.

But we can’t begin to have a conversation about improving the situation until we have a rudimentary understanding of what is happening today. And all these ”Google doesn’t know how to hire smart people” takes are brutally handicapping the discourse.