We Don't Have a Talent Shortage. We Have a Sucker Shortage

> There are easily several thousand people in the town who are capable of building that business. Get over yourselves and just freakin hire someone. You're running a website, not curing cancer.

I hear you here. I've posted my team's hiring principles here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18586590

At the top:

- Hiring cycles will be structured and as short as possible.

- When we start a hiring cycle, we will finish it by hiring the most qualified applicant who accepts our offer.

But on this point, I'm a little confused:

> So let me get this straight. You want me to bootstrap a multi-million dollar business, from scratch, operating with minimal marketing and operating funding in a highly competitive channel. Or get your consumer product slotted at a major retailer. Or launch your new web application. For $100,000 a year and no equity.

The general advice I come across here is to treat equity as a lottery ticket and focus on salary. Is the complaint here that salary is an insult? In the Bay Area, sure. But Atlanta? This comes off a bit self-entitled to me. At least without more context.

I think there's also signs of what I'll call premature hindsight bias (feel free to offer a better term). You assume, perhaps reasonably, that once hired, you're going to come in, make friends, kick ass and provide value. I want to believe that you can do it at a salary we both find fair. But until you get here and have been on the job for a few weeks or months, it's going to be really hard for me to know if that's what's going to happen. And if you happen to not be a great fit for unexpected reasons, how do we deal with that? That can be a lot of stress for everyone if not a full-scale disaster. In short, you don't want to get suckered, I don't want to get suckered.

There's a lot of risk and uncertainty in hiring and I imagine risk aversion drives a lot of it. I know it does for me even as I do my best to control it. Hence the 4-5 interviews mentioned in the top comment. (That seems excessive to me. I always wonder what a company gets out of the 5th interview that they didn't get out of the 4th, or the 10th hour of meeting with a candidate that they didn't get out of the 9th.)

Here's an exercise I call Black Boxes that I came up with recently for one of our hiring retrospectives. I think we have a pretty good hiring approach but I'm always looking to improve it. I share it here because I'm interested in hearing the ideas of others:

BOX OPTIONS (alphabetical order):

- Car Type (what type of car does applicant drive?)

- Cover Letter (box may be empty)

- Gender

- LinkedIn Profile (box may be empty)

- Phone Conversation (20-30 minutes)

- Resume

PART 1

Ten people have applied for our web application position. You know nothing about them. You have only a black box for each one. Ten black boxes. You get to look into each black box. Then you have to hire one of these ten applicants.

You get to choose the contents of the box from the options above. Which type of box do you choose to make your hiring decision? In a comment below, list your box. You may include a brief explanation if you wish. Example:

> Resume: This is the first thing I always look at. It should contain the most relevant info and is pretty low investment as it's a standard part of application.

PART 2

Now rank the rest of the boxes above in order of utility.

PART 3

What other boxes would you like to have as an option? Consider time/money costs associated with each box.

I am moving to LA from Brazil next month. I am a self-taught frontend developer. I am 39 years old, but still a junior as I changed careers less than two years ago.

I participated in two process with the standard remote technical interview solving a problem live coding in communication with a senior developer.

I realized I won't pass this kind of interview unless I focus on studying solely for it. I am planning to buy "Cracking the code interview" because I cannot afford to not have a job in LA, but it feels such a waste of time. I am almost 40 and tired of pretending that some trivia and practice on a simulated environment is transferable to real jobs.

I am the kind of developer that agrees with the idea that software developers' job is to solve business problems, not coding. That knowing what to code is more important than coding fast. That communication with people in and out of the team, developers and not developers is an essential skill.

But that's not what the hiring game values.

I have no ambitions of being a "real software engineer" that will work on cutting edge technology. I am happy building complex websites that will make a company money.

I hope that once in LA I will meet some entrepreneurial types with promising business models that value what I can do well. But the reality is that I will have to learn to play the hiring game.