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Comment by pacman2 | Hacker News Reader

"The whole recruitment process seems broken "

The IT market is pretty good compared to other fields but in the and, the market might have collapsed already.

""The Market for Lemons: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism" is a well-known[1][2] 1970 paper by economist George Akerlof which examines how the quality of goods traded in a market can degrade in the presence of information asymmetry between buyers and sellers, leaving only "lemons" behind. In American slang, a lemon is a car that is found to be defective after it has been bought."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons

So most good candidates and most good companies have long exited the official job market and work with referrals or whatever. And all what is left is that now shitty companies are receiving shitty applications. And if a non shitty company offers a job in this market or a good applicant applies to a job, the other side will never believe it.

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In Johnathan Swift's “Gulliver's Travels” (published 1726) it is stated that fraudulent behavior needs to be punished systematically since the erosion of trust will eventually destroy a market. Your comment describes a situation where exactly that happened. It is frustrating to see such an important (and simple) lesson, known literally for centuries, get forgotten or ignored.

> fraudulent behavior needs to be punished systematically since the erosion of trust will eventually destroy a market

Can you expand on the quote from Gulliver's Travels? It's been decades since I read it and I can't think of where in the book it could have been from, I don't remember much economics being in the book...

They look upon fraud as a greater crime than theft, and therefore seldom fail to punish it with death; for they allege, that care and vigilance, with a very common understanding, may preserve a man’s goods from thieves, but honesty has no defence against superior cunning; and, since it is necessary that there should be a perpetual intercourse of buying and selling, and dealing upon credit, where fraud is permitted and connived at, or has no law to punish it, the honest dealer is always undone, and the knave gets the advantage. I remember, when I was once interceding with the emperor for a criminal who had wronged his master of a great sum of money, which he had received by order and ran away with; and happening to tell his majesty, by way of extenuation, that it was only a breach of trust, the emperor thought it monstrous in me to offer as a defence the greatest aggravation of the crime; and truly I had little to say in return, farther than the common answer, that different nations had different customs; for, I confess, I was heartily ashamed.[330]

[330] An act of parliament has been since passed by which some breaches of trust have been made capital.

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/829/829-h/829-h.htm

What a gem this quote is. We index so much on punishing even fake violence in situations where there is real risk to both parties, and as a result, we incentivize fraud on a massive bubble scale level.

That's the book from which the term endian comes, right?

Worth a read?

Yes, on both accounts.

Probably some of that, plus the factors mentioned in Joel's old blog post:

In an over-simplified world of Good Developers and Bad Developers, the Good Developers generally don't get fired or quit much, and if they do, can usually get another job through references they made at their last one. If they happen to not have any references who can get them a new job and enter the general recruiting market, they usually get snapped up quickly.

Bad Developers tend to get fired or forced to quit a lot. Nobody who has experience working with them wants to hire them. They spend a lot of time on the general market applying for tons of companies that reject them. They keep doing this until they either finally learn some skills or figure out that development just isn't for them and find another line of work.

Ditto for terrible companies to work for.

> In an over-simplified world of Good Developers and Bad Developers, the Good Developers generally don't get fired or quit much, and if they do, can usually get another job through references they made at their last one. If they happen to not have any references who can get them a new job and enter the general recruiting market, they usually get snapped up quickly.

They will also get snapped even before they end-up on the open market. For college hires, might be more than a year before they graduate or accepting a full time position at the end of an internship.

I've had the same job for 9 years, but I'm not marketable. I guess I fall into the bad developer category.

I'd say that puts you in the good developer category, or someone with a job they like. Hopefully both!

I hate my job. I'm unmarketable because I became an expert in two obscure stacks.

Hey, I said it's oversimplified. Don't get hung up on trying to categorize yourself as one or the other. You CAN get into another stack or another company if you really want to.

Do you think this would explain the status of places like LinkedIn? Long ago, it was an OK place to have an online CV. Now it is a place people use show off with non-relevant _stuff_.

LinkedIn is a weird place indeed. Every couple months or so I pop in to check something or somebody out, and my eyes briefly skim my "feed". What I've noticed over the past year or two is that people who I know personally that have much more clout and much better network than I do, particularly the ones I know from the local startup culture - the people who have no reason to visit the site - they seem to be posting and reposting a lot of _stuff_ there recently.

I have two competing hypotheses for it. One, they're just bored, and LinkedIn is the new Facebook for middle/upper-middle class people. Two, there are signalling to and chasing people with access to lots of money, who for reasons unfathomable to me, also hang out on LinkedIn.

Unemployed middle class people who suddenly have a lot of time on their hands -- more than job hunting can possibly consume -- not to mention that many people mope around a bit (dealing with a kind of minor depression) just after fired and take a couple of weeks to get their mojo going again.

I think the "middle-class" comes from the fact that such people have cash savings to weather a job hunt, whereas people without savings have to start working pronto on whatever if they're going to be eating and roofed in two weeks.

> I have two competing hypotheses for it. One, they're just bored, and LinkedIn is the new Facebook for middle/upper-middle class people. Two, there are signalling to and chasing people with access to lots of money, who for reasons unfathomable to me, also hang out on LinkedIn.

Here's a third one: It's curated to folks with similar professional interests and isn't political.

Though I don't really use it myself, it's apparently very effective for companies to use to post stuff. So there's a fairly systematic effort at a lot of places to get employees to post recommended articles/posts on LinkedIn.

I don't know. I deleted my Linkedin Account long time ago.

People receive a lot of BS on Linkedin but for some people it works. This being said, the people I know whit 8-9 fig net worth, you wont find on linkedin.

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