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Comment by mc32 | Hacker News Reader

Since a few of these firms already over-hire for positions (where talent is underutilized), can we expect eventually it will morph into hiring people to simply keep them from being available to competitors and thus pay some people to simply stay home?

So cut-throat.

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"Google, Facebook and Amazon alone probably hire around 30% of all American computer-science undergraduates, reckons Roelof Botha of Sequoia, a venture-capital firm."

This is far more pervasive than the cream, they are getting at best the top third. That is just high demand for programmers, not a talent war.

And with a single quote, all of my worries about finding a job after graduation disappeared. That is amazing.

There is no way that is even close to true

Maybe 30% of graduates of top 30 universities. There are lots of CS grads from lower ranked schools that are definitely not getting fought over by the likes of Google/FB/Amazon...

Agreed. I've got an MSc, and the only contact I've ever had was a practically spam message for an Amazon recruiter (who contacted half the province I live in, as near as I can figure).

They get the best who _want_ to work with those companies.

For anyone who is looking for a since of scale. There are only around 52,000 total employees @ Google, and there are 3 million+ software engineers. So this quote is either out of context or wildly inaccurate.

around 30% of all American CS graduates

That can't be right -- various sources but the number of CS graduates at 40,000 per year. So that'd be 4k CS hires (apart from math and other engineering hires) per company, per year. Sounds a bit high. But like a lot of other things VCs say, it's probably not meant to be taken "literally".

It's actually right in line.

This only makes sense if hiring people who are truly unique. For this, I imagine the strategy would be to put them into R&D rather than have them get bored and quit.

Actually, for Google and several other companies, it's reasonably well established that if you're a high achiever who gets bored and quits, the door is always open for you to come back. Supporting this revolving door is a smart thing for companies to do, and some (like Cisco) have even codified the practice.

http://www.businessinsider.com/why-cisco-showered-three-men-...

I'm sure that this is already a factor in some cases.

As the article notes, companies are likely to maintain lists of specific companies they don't want people moving to and will offer retention bonuses to prevent it.

It's been said that's why Google hires the best of the best, only to assign a lot of them to do mundane tasks like A/B testing and the like.

But that gets very boring so then you have people whiling time away talking for an hour about the best way to grind and then pour drip coffee or what the best spoon they ever used was and citing studies to explain their preference for the most mundane things [I use this rice paper because I read over at blah that it's the best given the weather conditions and water mineral content at growing location and our local humidity and...]

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