I was wondering if anyone in charge of hiring here has any insights on why its generally so hard to hire a good engineer. I have been brainstorming a startup focused around recruiting, and I am an engineer myself who has struggled with this in the past in small startups. Does it become easier if youre hiring for a bigger company than a small startup?
Ask HN: Why is it so hard to hire good engineers?
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Re: Ask HN: Why is it so hard to hire good engineers?
#2This is a myth. It's easy to hire good people, just offer more money. The end.
Now, if your question is how to hire the best engineers on some budget, that's a different question. Regardless, the less money you offer, the less likely you'll be able to hire "good people".
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A more interesting and profitable question to have the answer to is how to make a bad engineer a good one for the least amount of money possible.
Re: Ask HN: Why is it so hard to hire good engineers?
#3Are you sure it's not the other way around?
Maybe it's hard for good engineers to find good employers and bosses.
9/10 of the technical screens I take are bunk. It boils down to what's fresh on my mind that moment; random trivia.
I feel the comment I made "It's an employer's market" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12667346 rings true.
There's no incentive for the employer to apply more thought into holistically seeing if a can perform a role - or learn it if accommodated.
Not impromptu, fanciful, hypothetical scaling scenarios and job requirements.
> good engineer
What does that mean?
Those involved in hiring aren't skilled engineers. They lack qualification to determine what a good engineer is. It's Dunning-Kruger.
A manager is reluctant to hire a star programmer that could run laps around them and upstages them. A junior programmer will use on-the-spot technical interviews to disqualify - catch them off guard - so they don't hire the person who replaces them.
Merit is thrown out the door due to turf protection. So maybe a more correct word would be, an "appropriate" engineer. To suit the political dynamic and lack of incentive to make the company tech-centric.
If you've been bossing people around for the last years, you haven't been doing much other than talking while we've been hacking all this time.
Re: Ask HN: Why is it so hard to hire good engineers?
#4Are you sure it's not the other way around? Maybe it's hard for good engineers to find good employers and bosses. 9/10 of the technical screens I take are bunk. It boils down to what's fresh on my mind that moment; random trivia. I feel the comment I made "It's an employer's market" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12667346 rings true. There's no incentive for the employer to apply more thought into holistically…
> A manager is reluctant to hire a star programmer that could run laps around them and upstages them.
I don't think so. I have seen something of the sort, but it was an engineer purposefully not hiring too good people.
Management is a quite different skill, good programmer is not threat to manager.
Re: Ask HN: Why is it so hard to hire good engineers?
#5You mean why is it hard to hire engineers at "ok-ish" salaries? Life is (and gets) expensive.
Pay engineers $500k a year or more -- they'll be kicking down the door.
Re: Ask HN: Why is it so hard to hire good engineers?
#6The problem is you're trying to hire engineers to do business analysis, product management, support and quality assurance. The problem is your lack of engineering culture and process.
Re: Ask HN: Why is it so hard to hire good engineers?
#7This is a myth. It's easy to hire good people, just offer more money. The end. Now, if your question is how to hire the best engineers on some budget, that's a different question. Regardless, the less money you offer, the less likely you'll be able to hire "good people". --- A more interesting and profitable question to have the answer to is how to make a bad engineer a good one for the least amount of money possible…
If you’re a company with a lousy reputation, you’ll still lose out on good people to a well-funded company with a good reputation.
I mean, you could try to outbid your competitors on every hire, but that’s not a sustainable strategy.
Re: Ask HN: Why is it so hard to hire good engineers?
#8Why would any good engineer join you as an employee if you literally have nothing besides a "brainstorm?" Do you have money to pay salary? Sounds like you're looking for a co-founder, not an employee.
Re: Ask HN: Why is it so hard to hire good engineers?
#9Because they all have jobs. And if they are looking for a new one they can pick where they want to go because by virtue of being good engineers it's easy for them to find jobs since everyone is looking for good engineers.
And if they aren't looking, why not? My best guess (aside from being happy where they are) is that the engineer interview process is broken. People don't want to go sit in a room and grilled on CS 101 level questions for 4 or 5 hours. It's stressful, it's a poor predictor of performance, and it's most likely not what they will be working on. So they avoid it.
Just my opinion though.
Re: Ask HN: Why is it so hard to hire good engineers?
#10It is hard to hire good anyone because reality has a surprising amount of detail: http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-... and many if not most people are poorly suited to abstract symbolic manipulation work.
Add to that the difficulty of the profession itself and the constellation of ancillary skills one needs (conscientiousness, the ability to interact with other people, articulateness, the ability to disagree respectfully and intelligently, etc.) and you will find it hard to hire good "x" in general.
Finally, it is often hard to hire good "x" unless you are paying at or above the market wage for x. The people who have a hard time hiring are generally not paying the market wage or above it. When they do, they suddenly find it much easier to hire.