That and companies are just hilariously bad at finding workers they want to hire for nebulous reasons. I have no doubt even if my company hired 95% of the workers it had marked down as "no hire" they'd be able to squeeze a salary's of value worth out of each of them (well, if management is competent, which it tends to not be). I'm sure those of us who've been around long enough can all attest to some side of seeing form of this dysfunction. I'm more than happy to reject them for selfish reasons, of course, like "I don't want this person on my team" or "this person seems like an asshole" or "I don't want to teach this person their third language after java and typescript". Etc.
I mean there are terrible interview candidates out there, but the people who literally can't code at all tend to be easy to filter out.
I'm curious if there's any way to observe the salary margins that separate the top of the labor market from the bottom. Surely there are. That would probably give a big signal as to how much undue attention is given to, e.g., Senior vs Junior developers and American workers vs H1Bs. I'd put money that some of this complaining about lack of labor is actually not wanting to hire fresh grads and eat the cost of training when they'd be just fine. (Also the H1B thing, but that's already discussed to death)
I have been successful in liberating money from VCs and create jobs, and I want the best people that money can buy. Turns out, there are great American and non-american candidates who are willing to work for the money I can offer. Also in my experience, I hardly even get resumes from Americans for backend jobs. Frontend is different and I get a LOT of American resumes. Our frontend engineering, PS, CX, Sales and Marketing is all-american, and backend is a mix of american, greencard, H1b - because thats all I get in the resume pipeline.
If I have to cut costs, I will have to cut the team in US and move the jobs to a low cost region regardless of their citizenship status.
Me, too. I straight-up disagree; I think interviewing is just so broken it gives a false impression of quality issues in the labor pool. Realistically if you have a handful of core skills you can ramp up to basically any problem with enough time. That's time on the order of months, maybe, not years. Companies just don't want to bother training anyone anymore. Why bother when you can just complain endlessly and hope some politicians throw cheap labor your way? In that sense you're absolutely right, but the whole "quality" thing is completely unrelated.
> I have been successful in liberating money from VCs and create jobs, and I want the best people that money can buy.
I think people seriously overestimate the difference engineer quality makes. Most products can be built with mediocre talent. I'm sorry, that's the truth. We all love to have strong opinions on who we should hire and I say "almost anyone, just throw meat at the problem". Most problems are solved with time and not cleverness.
Startups are definitely more sensitive to quality, but startups don't make up much of the labor pool, and they don't pay competitively with much larger companies that don't need the quality.
I'm being a little hyperbolic here—you do need people with experience and ability to see red flags to lead the flock—but not by much.
I've been in a team where hiring requirements have emerged through the filter of HR almost unrecognisable. Naturally, they're still objective requirements, so qualified candidates are filtered out before ever meeting someone who could judge if they're qualified. It gets noticed, but nothing happens. Of course it doesn't: you're stepping on important toes.
That's how it tends to work. Candidates are filtered out by non-technical staff, including openly using programs that filter out CVs missing keywords. In smaller companies, this even gets farmed out to third-party recruiters that have poorly aligned incentives.
How can we know if candidates are qualified? We never see most of them.
It's hard to imagine many things worse for productivity than bad hiring processes. But it's all just accepted.
I'm surprised that your experience here is so different from mine. The best engineers I've had are capable of things that the average to below average ones could likely have never achieved, even with an order of magnitude more time.
I don't think it comes down to cleverness as it does inventiveness. There are dots that great engineers can connect that often nobody else could spot. They also need less process, and a large number of people with all of the coordination overhead does not linearly scale.
Yes, because given time someone clever would have came in and fixed it.
It's like doing push up in the elevator and believing that arriving at the 100th floor is due to doing push ups.
The GE, IBM, Intel, Boeing are few examples that didn't believe in quality - and not just people apparently, and their problems aren't getting solved with time.
Maybe what you say has worked for your situations, but it really never worked for me over my experience, and it just was a downward spiral over time every single time.
I'd much rather wait for someone I want to work with, than hire the first person that is "good enough".
Because those aren't the same thing. Also don't discount interview stress - I read that psychologically the most difficult thing to do is be on stage in front of people and do complex math problems... which is basically what live coding tests are.
When you hire anyone, there is always some bar of "good enough". It is different for different orgs and even people, but it is there. Otherwise you'd end up hiring the first candidate you encounter, no?
Read that sentence again. If you're hiring an American team in the Us, and cutting in the US, it's not regardless of citizenship - unless you're abusing the H-1B program
Unfortunately you have to take my word for it. Not sure how you assumed I cannot manage with no context.
Not hiring mediocre talent is a key part of management.
What is the basis for your claim? Unless you've followed up with those you rejected in order to gauge their performance on comparable tasks, you're just talking about confirmation bias.
I've never heard of anyone actually producing objective measurements of hiring practices vs. actual worker performance. I've just heard a hundred different versions of confirmation bias. Maybe Google has some useful data. I know that they dropped GPA requirements when they looked at data and found that it had no impact on job performance...
Isn't it ironic that a comment making fun of companies for not hiring workers who can barely contribute above their salary's value, in the very same sentence blames management for incompetence. Well, guess what, managers are hired workers too, so if you apply the same principle to them, this is what you get.
What you suggest makes sense from the "homo economicus" point of view, but the result will be a barely functional hellhole riddled with incompetence (at least this is what it will feel like from within.) Can we blame people for being "selfish" and not wanting to work in this kind of environment?
I didn't comment on hiring "managers", did I?
> Can we blame people for being "selfish" and not wanting to work in this kind of environment?
I did cop to this behavior, right? I do agree. It makes my life easier rejecting candidates. I'm just saying this complaining over lack of quality talent seems like the corporate equivalent of feigned helplessness rather than an actual problem.
