Comment by nostrademons | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nostrademons | Hacker News Reader

So I founded a couple hiring-related businesses a year or so before TripleByte. I eventually decided to get out of the space for reasons that are touched on in this article, but I would sum that up even more bluntly:

Hiring is a market for lemons.

The really good employees are almost never on the market [1]. They'll get one job, stay for years, and then if conditions change so that that job no longer fits their needs, they have enough of a network that they'll get snapped up by some other company in a jiffy. The folks that do tend to populate the open job market often have one or more dysfunctions that make it hard for them to slot into the corporate job market, the most common of which are not wanting to slot into the corporate job market and not being able to define yourself enough to identify where you should slot into it. Software can't fix this; it's all about making internal emotional choices and then doing what you need to do to make this apparent to other people.

As a result, successful hiring strategies often don't look like hiring strategies. They include things like:

  1. Internships
  2. Contractor conversions and contract-to-hire roles
  3. Sponsored conferences and competitions
  4. Employee networking
  5. Open-source projects
  6. Paying more
  7. Being the only one left hiring in an economic downturn
  8. Investing in retention
  9. Ex-employee outreach

This article seems to make a mistake I made early in my entrepreneurial career, of misunderstanding your competition. The competition for a hiring startup is not resumes, recruiters, and job boards; these are generally terrible ways of finding new employees. It's personal references or open-source projects, which are the actual good ways of identifying new talent that isn't already snapped up by an employer.

[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/09/06/finding-great-deve...

It's a market for lemons but it's also an incredibly inefficient market for lemons. It's amazing just how much gold is randomly lying on the ground on the lemon market you can just occasionally pick up.

The classic story is some engineer who got picked up by a company when they were 22, did well and got promoted a few times and then runs into a terrible boss that makes their tenure untenable at 29 and goes out onto the market any interviews exactly like a 22 year old again by just shooting off random resumes from LinkedIn. I've had to slap so many of my tech friends on the head and be like, no, look, there's a so much more pleasant path you can now go down.

But like, why wouldn't it be that way? The median number of hours any engineer spends thinking about how to get hired in any one year is zero, there's an extreme minority who love the system and think about it all the time and they all talk to each other so they think everyone else is an idiot but the majority of good engineers spent most of their time getting good at engineering, not being hired.

I have an alternative theory which I call the "5th most important problem syndrome". At any company/department/team/individual, we have all the aspirations in the world but we really only have the bandwidth to work on our 1st & 2nd and maaaaybe 3rd most important problems. Getting better at hiring usually slots somewhere around the 5th most important problem which is a dangerous space to be because we oh so aspirationally want to get around to it this quarter but life inconveniently gets in the way so it gets pushed onto the backburner where it will forever be the 5th most important problem.

Startups have to be super careful to make sure they're not solving the 5th most important problem in their user's lives because the initial feedback will be overwhelming that this is definitely one of the top 10 most important problems the company/user faces and everyone is gung ho about fixing it but every time it's time to make forward progress, some "unexpected" emergency appears that derails the project.

Working on technical debt is a classic 5th most important problem which is why it's a perennial topic for debate in engineering circles. Startups that aim to optimize your cloud cost, IMHO, also run into this quite a bit. I've seen so many of them come and go throughout the years and my conversations with them tend to all follow this same trajectory.

So, what's the more pleasant path? I'm well more than 7 years in at this point. And I've spent precious little time in the job market at large. But if my current employer had a problem, it's occurred to me that I don't really know how to find a job. What do people do?

I would assume the answer is 'just network bro', as if that's supposed to actually be helpful.

> The folks that do tend to populate the open job market often have one or more dysfunctions that make it hard for them to slot into the corporate job market, the most common of which are not wanting to slot into the corporate job market and not being able to define yourself enough to identify where you should slot into it.

I think this is a pretty good reason to have an org that "speaks corporate job market", but that doesn't evaluate candidates the same way the corporate job market does. A person who is skilled but doesn't want to/doesn't know how to/has moral objections to selling themselves the way employers often want benefits a lot from having an agent who can vouch for them.

As for the market-for-lemons thing, yeah, absolutely! It's a good framing. And in that analogy, I'm betting on the idea that a team of mechanics that can identify the good cars is valuable.

IIRC TripleByte was supposed to be that org - I thought I remember some of their framing being that they'd be like a Hollywood talent agency for developers.

The big problem with the model is again misunderstanding your competition and how the industry actually works. The market for skilled developers already functions largely like this. The "talent agents" are engineering managers, both on the sell-side (through references, and bringing over good engineers they've worked with when they join a new company) and on the buy-side (through identifying and recruiting good talent that may not be trying hard to sell themselves). This is a core EM skill - many teams will live or die by how well their managers can identify actually-talented devs, even ones who may not be slick or polished, and bring them onto the team. It's also the EM's responsibility to understand the recruitment process at their company well enough to shepherd candidates who won't look impressive to recruiters through it.

< The folks that do tend to populate the open job market often have one or more dysfunctions that make it hard for them to slot into the corporate job market,

I think the set of people employed at corporations provides overwhelming evidence against this.

I'm including small corporations and startups in this, not just the faceless megacorp. You still have an employer and it's still a corporation even if it's just a half dozen guys who all enjoy each others' company, code up some great stuff, and go out for beers together after the workday.

You have to know yourself well enough to understand what type of environment you want to work in. Some people perform better in startups; some in big multinational corps; some in small mom & pop shops. Some would even do better as independent contractors, although if you're smart you're still an employee of an LLC that you own to shield your professional liability from your personal assets. The dysfunction I'm referring to is in not making a choice, or not having enough definition of the types of work available to understand that you could be very happy at some places but miserable at others.

> You have to know yourself well enough to understand what type of environment you want to work in. Some people perform better in startups; some in big multinational corps; some in small mom & pop shops.

This really is a huge factor, and one that is REALLY personal to me. I went from "can barely get out of bed to do the small amount of part-time work I could get" to "enthusiastically hammering out 50+ hour weeks" once I got into the startup environment, which was stunning to me. If I hadn't stumbled into that world, I'd never have known the version of me that exists today was even possible.

Thanks for clarifying :)

Maybe we can add: 1. going remote and support remote; 2. set up offshore offices.

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