The War for Talent (1998)

"In my day," we tended to have very few applicants that actually had schooling for computers. Over the years, I have worked [with|for|over] physicists, marketers, designers, astrophysicists, writers, teachers, high school dropouts, technicians, biologists, artists, salesmen, carpenters, medical doctors, lawyers, etc. Very few CS people.

And it's been a wonderful experience. Made for challenging interviews, though.

With CS and SWE curricula, it is now possible to have a "rote" set of skills and education, and we can assume/test for that.

I do feel that some of the "magic" has gone from the field, but there's no arguing with the torrents of money, sloshing around.

Smart people are everywhere, in small percentages - they can learn to do most things.

I think part of the problem is, recruiters are (on average) less smart than greedy, and there's a layer of them before you even get to HR.

Then you get to HR, and they're generally more concerned with ticking skill boxes than hiring for intelligence (despite the fact that smart people can learn this shit on the job).

A bit of an off topic: I've noticed a few older articles being posted around here lately and I must say I've enjoyed them very much.

The insights, learning their original contexts, and having hindsight due to the time passed makes them particularly valuable to me.

And I believe we can learn a lot by reading them. However most of what gets posted in HN and other aggregators is new content.

Is there any place where these sort of "most influential" articles of previous times can be found?

Talent is an ambiguous term. To me, it means someone who is capable solving the almost-impossible problem or solving a hard problem in a unique way. It is someone who has the potential to give a competitive advantage to a company or initiate a major change to society if given a chance.

In my experience, talent needs to be challenged and grown. There are clear signs of talent but they are not the ones that are typically focused on in a technical interview. It is not what do you already know. It is rather how do you approach a problem where you don't have all the information or what conventions bother you? Or someone who has deep insights from outside the standard areas.

Talent is not currently as valued as much as people claim. What is valued is productivity and someone who appears to add value. Talent usually means being able to claim credit for a key problem being fixed or a standard trend getting successfully implemented at a company.

I've been in the industry for a long time. There is so much latent talent in discriminated groups that I once thought that pure greed alone would cure racism and sexism in the tech industry. That has not been the case.

>"We are competing with startups, not General Electric. There is a whole raft of talent that we simply do not get access to.”

But startups compete with FAANMG. And worse is semiconductor industry, where there is less EE fresh grads than with software engineering fresh grads graduated every year.

> people are willing to change jobs often

People are willing to changes jobs often because companies aren't offering meaningful paths for advancement. People aren't going to wait around forever, and will write their own promotion if it comes to that. I did, after watching people half as qualified as me interview for "Senior Software Engineer" with alleged years of experience as such.

I've watched corporations make blindingly obvious $100M mistakes, and then layoff the rank & file — the "talent" — who had no say, and if anything, disapproved of the decisions that led to their ultimate layoff. You can't get attached to a company, as the winds will shift tomorrow.

> almost all of the companies we studied are starting to take nontraditional approaches to recruiting

And yet there doesn't appear to be a recruiter out there that can put a competently written email into my inbox. Of the jobs I've held, I've self-applied to two, my own network for one, and the last was a recruiter.

> We don’t have a retention problem! In a sense, they’re right. At the senior level, the attrition rates at these companies are often quite low – 4% or 5% a year.

… 4%–5% attrition YoY would be low, IMO. My experience is closer to 30–50% YoY.

> They have good ideas, they have money – they just don’t have enough talented people to pursue those ideas. They are “talent-constrained.”

If you have the money, and you're "talent constrained", it is either because you don't have the money, or you're not willing to loose the purse-strings enough to get the talent.

> What do talented people get at startups? For one thing, the opportunity to make a lot of money.

Please. Lottery tickets similarly offer the opportunity to make a lot of money, but I suppose this is 1998 and the bubble hasn't imploded just quite yet.

> “Does your company make improving its talent pool one of its top three priorities?” In many companies, only 10% or 20% of corporate officers said yes.

And the truth comes out. "Talent, talent, talent" as a marketing message, but … it isn't an actual priority.

Mid-way through this alleged war for talent, Adobe, Apple, Google. Intel, Intuit, eBay and others would be sued for antitrust violations around suppressing wages by non-poaching agreements. They would later settle at various points for a collective $435M. Still, "[one of the plaintiffs] said the [earlier, slightly smaller settlement] represents only one-tenth of the $3 billion in compensation the 64,000 workers could have made if the defendants had not colluded".