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Comment by ethbr0 | Hacker News Reader

Good review sites suffer the same problem as government: from a financial standpoint, you cannot afford to pay people competitively vs their alternatives, for the skills you really want.

So it becomes a labor of love. But that only goes so far, for so long.

IMHO, in an industry like that, you have to be honest about what you're bringing to the table for employees in lieu of compensation: an opportunity for increased name recognition and networking in a public role, and the fun of being a public face!

But! You also have to continually deepen the bench with new prospects, because you know you're going to be continually hemorrhaging top tier talent to job switching.

Credit to AnandTech that people stay for as long as they do. 10+ years is damned impressive!

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Journalism is one particular problem. I expect most halfway decent tech journalists could head to many tech companies to do content marketing and make a lot more money--though they might well find the work less interesting.

Arguably, pay disparities in the industry exist more broadly even if you just restrict the conversation to developers/engineers. I suspect that the big tech companies are sucking a lot of the oxygen out of the room at least in the US. Some people may not want to work for those companies and others, whether because of lack of skill, poor interviewing, or just bad luck, can't get an offer. But if someone can get in, it will be hard for a lot of other companies to match the comp.

Big tech SWE interviews seem to be just tests that are very poorly administered. With practice and some luck a large segment of the developer population can pass within a few years of really diligent effort. Some need a lot more practice than others though.

I don't know why they don't just administer real tests. Probably some kind of demographic or legal nightmare?

If people are spending a few years to prepare, that’s probably enough time to self educate to actual competence.

Given enough optimization and no upper limit on prospective hire annoyance, any interview test series eventually evolves into an undergraduate degree program.

Preparing people for jobs with targeted education and a test? The horror!

The interviews are very approximate. Plenty of people get an offer, go to a startup, interview again for the exact same job with exact same interview, and get declined. Or they get an offer from 2 FAANG and miserably fail the phone screen on the 3rd. This is not what any statistically minded person would consider to be a solid measure of competence

Well, for one thing, if it's a standardized test, it will be leaked even if there are a few different versions. "A few years of really diligent work" also seems a pretty high bar to improve odds of getting a job at a handful of companies.

Same techniques apply to many companies. And two hours a night for two years to get 100k in stock options that few can offer sounds like a good deal to me and many others.

I remember joining the anandtech forums in the very early 2000's. I'm continually surprised how great a resource it's remained for over 20 years now. Certainly impressive!

Perhaps there's just different waves of 'good review' organizations in the space? I feel like the newer wave might be the youtuber realm of things, where things like Linus Tech Tips recently announced an expansion seeking industry professionals: https://youtu.be/pt3-6BsWlPk?t=669

I thought this was spot on so I quoted it, with credit, at the /r/hardware discussion.

https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/svk7m4/dr_ian_cut...

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