Comment by nolemurs | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nolemurs | Hacker News Reader

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Firing is never fast or easy. It usually takes months to realize your mistake since it takes that long to get up to speed on a new job, And then you have to hire someone else, and get them up to speed. As a result, you're delayed by months, and out months of salary.

Also, firing is terrible for morale. You really can't do it that often.

Failing to hire a good engineer is only a big cost if you can't find a decent alternative hire. If you're paying a 6 figure salary with massive benefits like Facebook or Google, you usually have a long queue of qualified candidates to choose from. Maybe the next guy will turn out to be better than the guy you passed on.

> You will never get a chance to hire them again, and probably all of their friends.

I happen to know that Google gets lots of repeat applicants. They have an explicit "wait a year before reapplying" policy.

I really doubt many people who want to work for these companies decide not to because a friend didn't get the job. That's just sort of crazy.

>Also, firing is terrible for morale. You really can't do it that often.

If you hired a bad engineer, not firing them is bad for morale, assuming you have a quality team. They will be pissed at picking up the bad hire's slack and spending so much time helping them.

>If you're paying a 6 figure salary with massive benefits like Facebook or Google, you usually have a long queue of qualified candidates to choose from.

But that's the exception, they have what most companies don't: prestige (rightfully or not). You listed the two companies that actually can get away with this without hurting themselves. Few others can.

See, this article wasn't written for Google and Facebook, it was written for everyday company CIOs, and this is very harmful for them for the reasons I stated. Who wants to spend hours writing calculators during an interview for Initech? Almost nobody. Also, a six figure salary is pretty much the norm for good developers all over the country. The main benefit for working at Facebook and Google is stock options and it looks good on a resume.

maybe, but if you trust your friend and he says the recruitment process sucked are you really going to want to go through it?

It's really about blasting advertising and hiring good enough cheap. The engineers with a network will know not to go through your process and would expect a salary appropriate to the job, the ones that developed a lot of skills on their own with no network (or afraid of honest discussions with peers where they might not be the best) will settle for what they are offered.

When I look at who from my network (or really missing from my network) is at the places with these tactics.. Losing time and failing to get the job is not the worst outcome.

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