Ask HN: Finding tech talent is getting harder. It's not a Bay Area problem only

Pay more.

The usual HN refrain here is 'pay more'.

And as a developer in NYC, I'd say this is accurate, but simplifies the problem a bit too much.

Companies like their salary bands. Companies like to hire people at around the same compensation as current employees in the same role with around the same experience.

The problem is that demand has recently gone up and pay should go up with it, but companies are refusing to adjust their bands and greatly increase pay for their current employees across the board.

So, instead of addressing the pay issue head on, we're seeing a few really really bad practices:

- Lose candidates at the offer stage

  - Try to get comp expectations out of the way earlier.

    - Losing candidates to Big Co. for big pay discrepancies is likely tolerable
    - Losing candidates over $20k salary band issues is absolutely unacceptable
  - DO NOT let HR takeover the closing process. 
    - Don't try to give an exploding offer
    - Don't say an offer is 'best and final'
    - The CTO or VP eng should give the offer and 
      make it a priority to close the candidate

- Giving pay increases to current employees only when they have other offers or explicitly ask for it

- Giving regular title bumps to justify pay increases

  - Your 'senior' engineers will be involved with hiring. 
    It's better to give junior/mid-level engineers big raises 
    than title bumps that will make hiring talent more difficult

If these points sound obvious, they're not. As a candidate, I have not seen a single company that follows them.

And this post just addresses issues around compensation. I haven't even begun to touch on being honest around your interview process. But let me put a few questions out there as well:

- How many rounds do you have?

  - 3 is probably a maximum. Never have more than one on-site

- What is your accept rate at each round?

  - the accept rate should increase from round to round

- For testing candidates

  - be very clear about what questions you're asking and why
  - know, objectively, what is considered a pass vs a fail for every question

Pretty much.

I live near London and get calls from recruiters on a regular basis telling me my CV is literally amazing and they have these awesome opportunities paying half of what I'm currently on.

Went for a coffee with a couple of them and they're telling me they have positions open for a year because neither the clients nor the staff will budge.

This is the contract market, and this includes both companies looking for experts with experience and just bums on seats in a team although, this is usually working for non-experts team leads.

I'm not whining, like I said, I have work. It's just interesting that the client side market hardcore trying to halt at £800 per day.

If your business is essentially burning VC money for a decade to buy a ticket in the Unicorn lottery, then the easy answer is to spend a lot more money. You can do this by poaching expensive people, by offering more, or by hiring lots more people than you need and keeping the ones you actually want. The result will be more manpower faster, at significant expense.

You can also, as many companies default to, ration yourself by imposing very grueling hiring requirements (months of fly-in interviews and hours-long take-home assignments) and "competitive" (as determined by some non-market mechanism like an industry survey) pay. The result of the latter will be long hiring times for good-enough talent that is willing to work for whatever you've pre-determined to be fair.

It's really no different from looking for a car: you can have a known high-quality thing right now (buy new from a dealer/pay $$$ for top talent), or you can buy a lot of potential lemons for cheaper until one happens to last (grabbing random by-owner cars from Craigslist/hire-fast-fire-fast), or you can just wait things out until you find the perfect deal (trawl Craigslist a couple times a week until something jumps out as an incredible deal/pay "market" rates and have a long hiring process).

There are tradeoffs to be made, and you have to make them according to what you actually need and the resources you have. There's no physical law that says you're entitled to unlimited world-class talent at bargain rates to build your adtech startup.

I'd estimate (without bothering to sit down and crunch the numbers) I've had a 30% success rate interviewing for programming jobs. I usually get about 2 rejections before I get an acceptance (and, of course, when I get accepted, I stop interviewing). Based on that, I'd be led to conclude that I was a _dismal_ programmer, probably not fit for the industry at all. If there was as tight a tech shortage as they keep insisting there is, I'd expect it would be pretty near impossible to be rejected for a programming job. Yet I find it happens to me with alarming regularity and based on what I read here, I'm not alone. It's almost as if the "talent shortage" is imaginary...