Experienced engineers are struggling to get hired

I was too young and dumb to understand that meant that the owners of companies that needed software engineers wanted cheaper labor and that I was to play a part in the devaluation of engineering labor by helping supply exceed demand, thereby allowing company owners to commodify software labor to ultimately pay wages proportional to hours worked rather than offering a share in company ownership, which allows for compensation proportional to company success.

If H1B's were legitimately about labor shortages, it would be required that all companies fire/layoff their H1B's first. I am pretty liberal, but market dynamics are market dynamics, and I am surprised I haven't seen more anti H1B sentiment to bring scarcity (and therefore leverage) back into the labor market.

A lot of the history of racial atrocity has been a direct result of desperate (and therefore exploitable) foreign labor de-valuing incumbent labor and the following retribution to the weaker vulnerable foreign laborers, rather than the harder work of solidarity and demanding a fair share via things like trade unions/guilds.

However, I literally cannot afford FAANG salaries at my stage. It would literally bring my runway from n to n/5 years. And many candidates are asking for 400k+ salaries. I’d love to hire someone who knows what they’re doing but I’m just not able to find people who are both qualified and interested in the work. (If this is you then message me!)

I had one person today - with lots of FAANG experience who’d recently gone freelance - tell me that they weren’t willing to work with me to write code but they were willing to do advising for $450/hr. We just weren’t on the same page.

I don’t know what’s going on, and I hurt for people who are looking for work. I’m launching more slowly than I’d like because I am not able to find a partner to build things with who is willing to work for less than what they made after 10 years at Google.

I read Politeness as Pointless until I re-read it a third time.

In fact, you'd have a good chance of finding somebody smarter than anybody in your company. You are obviously filtering too much.

And it would be one thing if the system merely filtered out too many good people, but the ones the system let's pass are not the ones you are looking for! Its bad in every possible way a filter can be bad--filtering out what you want, and letting through what you don't want.

> disqualified for not meeting the basic requirements

What is a basic requirement? If a basic requirement is something like "5 years of Java experience" its filtering out topflight c++ and c# programmers. Good programmers can make anything work; bad programmers will remain bad programmers no matter what programming language is used.

> dozens interviewed

Over my 40-year career, programming interviews haven't changed at all, basically testing how much of corman, leiserson, and rivest you have memorized, and how much oof the book "Cracking the Coding interview" you can regurgitate.

That was ok 40 years ago, when programming was largely creating new systems from scratch. But these days, with all the frameworks, not so much. There's 40 more years of infrastructure which has been created, and to be a successful programmer, you need to be able to leverage other people's code. But who interviews to test that skill?

Again, the fact that the one person the system let through didn't thrive in your company just screams that it is not testing for what you really need. Such a "stringent" process shouldn't be a point of pride.