Ask HN: Why is it so hard to hire good engineers?

In my opinion this comes down to the fact, that there is only a limited number of people genuinely interested in engineering but unsatiable demand for skilled engineers.

As in any other field requiring dedication to master, only genuinely interested will ever become highly skilled. There is only limited number of these people. There may be many "engineers", but they are not really dedicated to their field. The demand creates an opportunity for people who aren't really skilled and aren't really dedicated but who would like to profit from high wages in the field.

These people may be interested in other fields (maybe they genuinely love cinema or are dedicated parents) but the only reason they do their work is because they have to provide for them or their families and they find engineering the better choice than alternatives that would probably pay less.

It is my observation that only genuinely interested people actually produce almost all of the results of any engineering organization.

Now, if you are an engineer and you love what you do where will you want to work? Will you want to work for large company that has probably a lot of interesting problems to solve and experience to gain or will you want to work for unknown company for roughly the same money?

The issue is that all good engineers already have jobs and due to demand they never stay long on the market. To hire a good engineer you not only have to find a way to distinguish the genuinely interested, you also have to figure out a way to change their mind as to their current place of employment.

If you are a company that has only mundane problems and you don't want to pay extraordinary rates then you really are out of luck.

The best advice I can have for companies who struggle to find engineers in a field is to try and allow fully remote work. That is if the field allows this. Get your systems and company environment ready for fully remote work. You will immediately benefit for being able to choose from people all over the world and not just local to your office.

That is, provided you already have the rest of your hiring process in top shape.

1) Companies have no interest in investing in job skill growth

Which leads to

2) Companies have devalued the role of engineering management

Which leads to

3) The tech interview as it exists today is fundamentally broken

The main reason is that good engineers will be quick to change their jobs when faced with enough bullshit, but the B and lower grades will be all to happy to take any bullshit as long as you pay them the good money you are paying.

You can't make good engineer from bad. Good engineer is a person who is interested in what they are doing. You can't make a person genuinely interested in engineering if they are not.

You can make skilled, experienced good engineer from unskilled/unexperienced good engineer.

You can tell who will be a good engineer even before they start doing professional work. These will be the people who have integrity, who like to learn, have capability to solve complex abstract problems, stamina to deal with complicated problems for an extended period of time.

As other commenters have noted, A boils down to “offer lots of money.” Some really interesting fields may be able to offer less out of “cool factor,” but odds are you’re not hiring for one of those fields- all your potential hires who claim to think CRUD apps are fun and intellectually stimulating are just lying. ....So A is simple, if you’re honest with yourself and bite the financial bullet.

B is a problem that is apparently beyond present-say technology, and quite possibly not possible to achieve at all. There are code-testing sites that go beyond the standard CS interview, but how can a several-hour exam test someone’s ability to manage a codebase over months or years? In particular your company’s codebase, which will have many important idiosyncrasies and be a very different environment than any project the hire has worked on in the past. ...We’ll likely have flying cars before we figure out a halfway decent solution for B.