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Comment by pg | Hacker News Reader

The article doesn't mention one of the most important reasons companies do HR acquisitions: competition forces them to. If company A offers to acquire a startup and company B merely offers to hire the founders, all other things being equal the founders will take company A's offer.

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That explains why companies pay more during an acquihire than they'd pay for a normal hire. But it doesn't explain why acquihires happen instead of just paying a higher salary.

The article and the paper it discusses talk about that.

It would seem buying up talent is like buying up land. There is only so much of either to go around, and the price is just going to get higher and higher.

Actually there are several efforts to increase the number of programmers, e.g. http://hackerschool.com, http://insightdatascience.com, etc.

And http://devbootcamp.com/, we've graduated and got jobs for 15~ programmers so far. Another 40 graduating next week.

My impression of hacker school is that it mostly makes talent more visible, not really increases the pool. But maybe this is a distinction without difference.

We're definitely focused on increasing the pool. We've had a number of students come to Hacker School with minimal (e.g., ~2 months) of programming experience and leave as professional devs.

In general, the goal of Hacker School is to help people become dramatically better programmers, regardless of where they start. Some people come in without much programming experience, and some people come in with substantial programming experience. Across the board our students report that Hacker School is one of the most educational and productive periods of their lives (here's what a very experienced student wrote about her time in the current batch: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4335460)

Great to hear!

Can I hijack this thread to ask -- seems like everyone who participated and posted about it wants to come back. How do you manage the exponential/fibonacci growth?

How do you manage the exponential/fibonacci growth?

We actually had exponential growth for our first four batches, but that's not super impressive when you consider our first batch only had six students :)

In truth, every batch is an experiment, and each time we're terrified we won't get enough qualified applicants.

It's quite similar to the patent arms race, disparate companies buying up anything that could become a threat as a preemptive measure.

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