People want to hire great "engineers" by asking them to write stupid functions on a whiteboard 4 hours in a row. That's after 2 phone interviews of 45 minutes each asking the exact same stupid questions. Are you guys looking for CS students or engineers?
Ask HN: Why is it so hard to hire good engineers?
21–30 of 50 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why is it so hard to hire good engineers?
#22Because nobody wants to train good engineers. It’s not like the people you’re interviewing set out to be bad engineers. It’s just that people like you won’t hire them unless they’re already perfect.
Re: Ask HN: Why is it so hard to hire good engineers?
#23Because 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 1…
I like this Spolsky article that - as well as supporting your point - suggests that there's inevitably a lot of dross in the remaining pool of candidates. Anecdotally this chimes with my experiences from both sides of the interview table! https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/01/27/news-58/
Re: Ask HN: Why is it so hard to hire good engineers?
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
Believe me, it's not as easy as you may think. 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 i…
"B and lower grades"... what? If you have some magical process to separate the "B and lower" from the supposed A, do tell. Even if you had such a process money would be the mechanism to capture and retain the best people, so yeah, money is still the solution to this problem.
That's kind of the problem - no one has a magical process to quickly/easily separate good engineers from the mediocre ones, you can only filter out obvious incompetence.
So simply offering lots of money is not sufficient to hire good engineers, you'll still get a mix of good and poor ones, and will need to figure out to filter them afterwards when you've had sufficient time to see what they're made of.
Re: Ask HN: Why is it so hard to hire good engineers?
#25It 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 a…
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Re: Ask HN: Why is it so hard to hire good engineers?
#26As a person regularly in charge of hiring engineers and being engineer myself I have some observations. 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 t…
> There may be many "engineers", but they are not really dedicated to their field.
What qualifies you to decide someone isn’t “dedicated” enough?
Re: Ask HN: Why is it so hard to hire good engineers?
#27Are you sure the question is not "Why is it so hard to hire good engineers if I do not want to pay them good money?"
Re: Ask HN: Why is it so hard to hire good engineers?
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
"B and lower grades"... what? If you have some magical process to separate the "B and lower" from the supposed A, do tell. Even if you had such a process money would be the mechanism to capture and retain the best people, so yeah, money is still the solution to this problem.
That's kind of the problem - no one has a magical process to quickly/easily separate good engineers from the mediocre ones, you can only filter out obvious incompetence. So simply offering lots of money is not sufficient to hire good engineers, you'll still get a mix of good and poor ones, and will need to figure out to filter them afterwards when you've had sufficient time to see what they're made of.
You're right that there's no process to quickly and easily separate them, however for enough money people will endure a long and difficult process, which is the point.
Re: Ask HN: Why is it so hard to hire good engineers?
#29As a person regularly in charge of hiring engineers and being engineer myself I have some observations. 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 t…
> There may be many "engineers", but they are not really dedicated to their field. What qualifies you to decide someone isn’t “dedicated” enough?
Results are all that matters.
All the top devs I know have had to put the hours in. Same as all the top lawyers and all the top engineers.
If you can be in the top 5-10% of your field while never working more than a 40 hour week and no side projects or out of hours study then more power to you.
But that's rare.
When I was, arguably, in the top 5% I was working 45-50 hours a week at a great job and doing 2 hours a day self study on top.
Re: Ask HN: Why is it so hard to hire good engineers?
#30I'm going to venture a guess:
I think PG's "Blub paradox" [1] applies to all kinds of skills, generally. In very open-ended (multi-dimensional) domains, a practitioner who's achieved level "B" will not generally be able to appreciate the additional value of a practitioner at a significantly higher level "N >> B" -- at least not enough to compensate them at a correspondingly higher level. In a constrained evaluation (like a few hours of interviewing) the probable outcome is that higher-level practitioner will be considered slightly better, with a lot of strange stuff thrown in, of unclear value; after all engineering is a very open-ended domain (unlike athletics for example, where just by watching for a few minutes you can say someone is much much better).
Since engineering skill is so multi-dimensional, one key to hiring well is understanding which characteristics are super important for the specific role, will therefore be compensated appropriately. Looking for generic "good engineers" will probably be a waste of time, or very hard to accomplish. Correspondingly, companies which can compensate well to acquire people with specific skills will probably lure away engineers from other employers who value them as just amorphous "good engineers".
To be able to hire good engineers, the hiring process needs, at the very least:
1. Good engineers as part of the selection team, so that they can select good engineers. 2. People who understand the (additional) value brought by good/great engineers, so that they can make the decision to compensate accordingly.
PS: All this assuming that the business model is functional (i.e. the business can afford to pay a good engineer's market rate) and the work being done actually requires the additional skills of a high-quality engineer.
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[1]: PG's article on the Blub paradox -- http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html