Out of necessity, tech startups are changing the way workers are hired

Sure, you still have to be able to fit the role they want or replace someone else that can fit the role, but don't overestimate the importance of the requirements.

There might be a case to take them really serious if the job posting really differentiate between what the candidate have to know and what they wish for. Other than that, don't take them too hard.

Then for WHAT work? Writing device drivers? Tweaking the TCP/IP stack? New, tricky things in video? For WHAT?

Here is the general situation: A successful information technology startup is a RARE thing, among entrepreneurs, businesses, and even information technology startups. So, you are trying to do something RARE. So, being rare helps you attack a part of the market not attacked well now and have a barrier to entry, etc. But the 'flip' side of this is that getting people to do the work for you will be difficult.

Or, if very many people knew how to do what your startup is doing, then your startup would be in serious trouble.

Net, if you have a good startup, then hiring people to do the technical work will be from difficult to impossible.

To be more clear, your 'idea' where you want all the technical work done by others doesn't amount to much.

Here's what you are missing: You need to do the hard technical work yourself.

Uh, for the person you want to hire, they didn't just sit around studying for the past 15 years getting ready for your startup. And if they are deep into the internals of the kernel of some operating system and not a company founder, then they about have to be in a big company where they are likely reasonably well valued and compensated.

A long, very general lesson in computing is, if you want someone expert in just the topics you have in mind, then basically you have to PAY them to LEARN those topics. Sorry 'bout that.

Back to Mother Goose, you look like The Little Red Hen who wants to hire the other chickens to do the clearing, plowing, sowing, cultivating, harvesting, threshing, brick laying, milling, mixing, rising, and baking while you own the business. Nonsense. The Little Red Hen did all her own work -- do yours.

For the Slate article, that was written by a 'writer' who writes on law, etc. So that writer likely doesn't know much of anything about computing. So, likely all the writer did was find the two startup persons, interview them about their struggles, and then make a 'story' out of it.

But the 'story' doesn't make much sense; nearly all the comments to the story make more sense.

For the recruiters, sure, they don't know dip squat or jack sh!t about computing. That's a special case of the more general situation: If you want to hire specialists, then you need specialists to evaluate people. Then both the people you want to hire and the people to do the evaluations are rare. So, basically the evaluation has to be done by the hiring manager, and that manager needs to know the technology quite well or make the new person a co-founder.

This whole subject just reeks of a nasty attitude: For any project, there are rivers of highly qualified people, with whatever specialities we need, who spent the last 15 years becoming expert in what we decided last week we need, and they will be grateful to move half way across the country for our semi-, pseudo-, quasi-promising job.

The really rich one was when Java first came out and the recruiters were looking for people with five years of Java experience! Gee, just call up Gosling, although then he may not have had such experience!

Nonsense. Special case of, mostly there is nonsense. Necessarily high success is rare.

For my startup, I am doing ALL the significant technical work myself, with my own ten fingers. I am making sure that any people I will have to hire will need only very routine qualifications. The good news is that I know in fine detail, documented in fine detail, ALL the significant technical work. Some bad news is that doing all the work myself takes longer. But, nearly all the work is just learning the tools: So, read for a week and write code for half a day, and document for a half a week. Sorry 'bout that.

Just do it yourself.

Finally, you are writing about essentially the subject of 'concurrency' in operating systems. I've never written an operating system, but I have done some significant work on concurrency, enough to understand monotone locking protocols, deadlock detection and resolution, and 'fairness'.

For your "cooperative and preemptive multitasking" it seems to me your terminology is not both well defined and common. So, it looks like you are deliberately asking tricky questions. I could guess at what you mean and answer that, but still your question is vague.

Also, any significant chunk of software that wants to do much with concurrency needs something of a well designed 'architecture' for concurrency. So, just what such architecture a particular operating system has is open to question; can't expect one person to know them all.

Similarly for your "kernel preemption. A blocking mutex and a spinlock". Again I can guess, but I doubt that your terminology is both well defined and common. I remember what a spinlock was in MVS, but that was a long time ago, and I have no idea if any other operating system ever did any such things.

Gee, you omitted Dijkstra semaphores!

If you want people who understand some things about operating system software development and concurrency, for specific parts of a specific operating system, then focus on those topics.

Are you looking to build a business or to pump up your own ego by claiming that no one else is qualified to do your work?

That's a very highly 'mixed' situation: I hold a Ph.D. from a top research university in some very technical material, with a lot of connection with computing, and have published peer reviewed original research in some topics where, thus, I am a 'world-class' expert in those topics, and I can absolutely, positively guarantee you that (1) in a 'job interview' in such a topic I will totally blow away the interview questions and (2) really know so much that the interviewer will feel 'rejected'. So, I won't get hired.

Uh, we're still back 100 years ago where the person hiring insists on knowing more and won't hire anyone who doesn't know less. In particular, the person hiring wants the new person to look just like the person hiring wants, including what the hiring person does NOT know.

This situation is very general: For a person with "very high technical skills", there is essentially no way to get interviewed or hired. There is no way for that person to expect someone else to understand those skills or have a job for them. The academic solution is for such a person to publish papers and, then, have others just count the papers, prizes, grants, whatever -- never try to read the papers. In business there is really just one solution: Have the person with such skills start their own business.

So, there really are people with "very high technical skills", but they essentially can't be hired, that is, they are unemployable.

For a hiring manager to insist that their particular list of skills, some good, some actually 'bad', are just the 'right stuff' is a mistake of the hiring manager.