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Comment by dcolkitt | Hacker News Reader

> One frustration I've had recently is the number of companies encouraging or requiring code in the public sphere.

As someone coming from the hiring side, I don't understand how these companies are finding enough candidates that they can afford to put up all these arbitrary requirements.

Right now in the US, software engineers are one of (if not the the most) in-demand position in one of (if not the most) tightest labor markets in economic history. To find engineers we've had to scrape the bottom of the barrel, throw piles of money at recruiters, and literally beg candidates just to come it to talk to us.

Are these companies requiring things like 1000 Github stars or a resume with experience exactly matching twelve different super-hot tech stacks actually finding people? Because if so, it boggles my mind?

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One possibility would be you're not trendy enough to get the trendy candidates.

There might be an alternative approach that is more suited to non-trendy businesses.

What you can do is write an ad that is trawling for anyone who is at all useful as a problem solver without tech requirements. Then you look at the best of who that brings in, and maybe you find people that others are overlooking and will work for less, with a better attitude than someone who might be tricked into thinking you're trendy and then leave.

Edit: Something I think is key whenever you're trying to select the best of something from a large population, is not to decide up front what the important criteria are. First, figure out how many you need in your pool to evaluate in more detail, and then construct your criteria to get that size pool. At that point, you select the top 10% or 1% or 5 or whatever, for the next level. And then, if you end up with something other than you expected, consider that may not be a flaw in the process, but a sign that you need to adapt to the output and utilize it opportunistically.

You can't just say "these 5 things seem like reasonable requirements" and commit to that because multiple filters can exponentially reduce the results.

> As someone coming from the hiring side, I don't understand how these companies are finding enough candidates that they can afford to put up all these arbitrary requirements.

Well, they're not; that's one reason why there are so many stories of "not enough qualified developers".

If I give in to my conspiratorial side, I'd say having these arbitrary requirements is entirely intentional, so a company can either: a. not have to hire anyone at all b. lobby for H1B or c. resort to offshoring, outsourcing, etc.

Where you are, what tech stack you use, how senior you're trying to hare and how known your company is will have a large impact on this.

I've been on the hiring side in many organizations and have had hiring pools as little as 0 and as high as thousands.

How long is your list of requirements? Are they all absolutely necessary from day one or are some of them things a good developer could learn in a reasonable amount of time?

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