Follow-up to “The dystopian world of software engineering interviews”

“If you run into an asshole in the morning, you ran into an asshole. If you run into assholes all day, you’re the asshole.”

This pretty much sums up my impression of these hiring managers that crank the bar sky-high: they are assholes through-and-through, and are full of shit to boot.

If you crank the bar sky-high, all you will get are two kinds of people: those that interview/test well, but fail at the job, or those who can do both but will put a crater a mile wide into your payroll due to their high demand garnering an equally high paycheque.

Anyone who isn’t quite at nosebleed levels of competency can grow into their roles and skill sets. Yes, they won’t be able to hit the ground running, and yes, they will have a higher than comfortable drag-to-thrust ratio, BUT THAT CLEARS UP IN TIME, WITH SUFFICIENT GUIDANCE AND MENTORSHIP.

All of this is well orchestrated by large tech companies in an effort to drive down labor costs. The problem is, there's an assumption that the current labor market is just asking too much.

I think looking at the current labor market landscape, practices in place industry wide (e.g., agile, interview processes, etc.) were starting to see labor market feedback that this simply isn't the case. Development is hard, it's time consuming, expensive, and requires a lot of active practice--no matter how much you want to drive labor costs down.

Ultimately I hope the entire strategy backfires and we turn away talent industry wide to other sectors and then there truly are shortages resulting in businesses pushing these practices unable of maintaining their businesses and forcing them to scale back--wishful thinking though.

Edit: if anyone wants to be a story reviewer, find 3 submissions that got posted to HN but didn't get attention, which you think the community might like and which gratify intellectual curiosity (i.e. aren't interesting just for sensational reasons). Oh, and which you're not personally connected to. Then email them to us at hn@ycombinator.com.

For examples, you can see a partial list of stories that were picked in this way here: https://news.ycombinator.com/invited. Those are ones where we invited a repost because the original submission was too old to re-up, but the criteria are the same. We'll publish the full list at some point.