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Comment by paxys | Hacker News Reader

I can definitely attest that "open position" is a much more abstract concept in the tech/software industry than people think. It is rare for a company to have a slot on a specific team that they have to fill immediately. Hiring is instead more about finding generally smart people and holding on to them. So companies can afford to take as little or as much time as they want in hiring and also can hire 0 - N people for a single open position.

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That's not been true in my experience. Engineering figures out how many people they want, finance tells them how many they'll get, and that number of people gets hired. But maybe it's true at really small early-stage companies.

On the other end, that's also extremely true at large companies. My last job, all hiring was functionally locked in at the fiscal year rollover. There was no emergent need so large that the budget could allow you to hire anyone new until the next year. Didn't matter if the entire team was about to quit (and then nearly did) because of understaffing. Budget was budget.

Yes but that's the number they will hire department-wide over the full year vs for one position in the next two weeks.

I’ve worked at a few companies that also are just super slow about removing job listings that get filled. There is not much incentive to drop it, and lots of different incentives of leaving it up.

Yeah this is my experience - or even: we definitely need to hire for position x (go through all the approvals etc., post a job) then something changes and maybe we don’t need to hire the person ASAP, but maybe in ~ 6 months, and it ends up easier to leave the posting up and see what comes in with a tighter aperture (since this is now went from high to low priority) - there is actually an open rec but it’s like a 1% chance of getting hired today vs maybe a 5% chance in a few months…

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