Comment by c0deporn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by c0deporn | Hacker News Reader

I disagree with "In most cases, the “best and the brightest” already have jobs, so you’re really just on the lookout for the best available.". Just because one is employed does not mean one is taken. If you want the best you have to work at it. Appeal to their desires and they'll come to you. Looking for the "best available" is no better than settling. In my opinion you'll end up doing a disservice to both your company and the new hire.

If you have a situation, which I believe we do now, where the number of engineers who fit the "best and brightest" category as defined by the companies looking is less than the number required by these companies, somebody is going to have to either "settle" or work with a hole. It will also make some of these engineers overpaid. I don't see how this benefits your company. Yes, in this system some companies will be "winners" in the sense that they get an awesome team for a good price, but most will lose. I would not be surprised if the high rate of failure in the startup community is related to this.

For the record, I do not see hiring the "best available" as settling unless they do not meet some minimum requirements of the business. The purpose of hiring people is to help execute a product, service, or whatever else your business is trying to make money off of. Anyone who can increase your chances of succeeding or increase your level of success is a good hire. Yes, that includes looking at intangibles like team and culture fit, work ethic, etc. But this person does not need to be the "best" to provide this boost to your business. In fact, it is effectively impossible to hire the best, because there will always be someone better.

"over paid" what is this concept that you speak off - there is no big guy with a big white beard sitting on a cloud who's going to reach down and say "you yes you with a third in media studies from Luton university should be paid X and those cheeky blue collar train drivers or miners who have scarce skills should be paid less than you".

The PHB might think they are over paid but like it or not this is Laissez-faire capitalism pay is determined by scarcity and bargaining power.

ps for those outside the UK Luton is the unfortunate University that props up the bottom of the university league table - though to be fair they do rank well for Nursing degrees.

Paid more than one standard deviation higher than average for that level of competency, scarcity, and bargaining power.

What are the levels of competency, scarcity, and bargaining power? How do you place a particular candidate in her appropriate levels?

If you could have hired someone equally competent for less money, why didn't you?

If you couldn't find such a person, the person you hired is hardly overpaid.

Quite thats the point I was making there is no God given "correct wage" just the market unless saraid216 thinks we should move to a fully communist model where the state says what job you get and how much you get paid?

No, no. The fully communist model is where you have listings of every single worker in existence and choose your hires based on that so that you have an accurate estimate of scarcity.

Lets be honest Amazon is an online shop the best and brightest are either going to be working at tier 1 RnD or on wall street or the city.

Let's be honest, Amazon has a massive infrastructure supporting a very large number of very diverse customers, tonnes of products and projects, and lots of active development on them.

Re Wall Street: It's unfortunate that some of our brightest are tempted into playing multi-million dollar poker, rather than focusing their energy on producing any significant long-term value.

I believe software engineering wages will continue to rise over time, and will eventually reflect the true value the industry produces.

Experience from other branches of engineering compared to other equivalent professions over the last 100 years suggests otherwise.

I have no shame in admitting that I would rather use high-level mathematics and programming to play "multi-million dollar poker" on Wall Street than join half of the startups and big tech companies and have a boring job churning out insignificant apps at a desk.

In fact, the way you phrased it, being a quant sounds really fun :) you don't want to play multi-million dollar poker?

I mean, sure, meaning and existentialism and all that, but I bet it's at least somewhat exciting.

That's the fundamental problem. The function of the finance system in a healthy economy is to ensure efficient allocation of capital. Playing poker has a neutral to negative effect on the system.

Well you're the one who used the word poker, so I guess it depends on your definition here...but the financial system somewhat revolves around poker.

Valuations of companies are only important to investors because of the inherent gambling. If you purchase capital at a single valuation that never rises or falls, what's the point? Even an index fund pursues gradual increases over time.

...Or am I building a strawman here? Is this not where you were going?

Which is why I work for a large bank, in toxic assets resolution, where the stakes are still in the billions of dollars.

I think I'd rather use my tech skills to play multi-million dollar poker on Wall Street then create yet another beautiful, responsive, flexible, tweet-able, location-based, modular MVC library API component framework backbone architecture.js.

Also, who wouldn't want to play high-stakes poker with someone else's money!

"It's beautiful! It's disruptive! It's agile and lean!"

"What does it do?"

"It revolutionizes the way you share pictures of your cats!"

...Yeah. Playing multi-million dollar poker on Wall Street sounds a lot sexier than the shiny startup veneer put on another photo sharing app.

down voted eh the truth hurts doesn't it there is a world of difference between working at JPL MIT etal and some me to start up using the latest shiny new thing copying some existing SM type solution of which there are dozens already.

cough http://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/nasa-jpl/ cough

Sorry, caught a nasty flu..

I didn't downvote you, but calling Amazon a startup is pretty ridiculous -- and your spelling/grammar isn't lending your argument any favors. (Though, ironically, it does fit into PG's description of "a company optimized for growth.")

I think it should have been obvious from the context that I was talking about a substantial number of the HN commentators who are working at me to start ups (nothing wrong with that but its not world changing rocket science)

Soory if you have problems with reading as a literate dyslexic I had no problem with reading writing not so much :)

Have you heard of a little thing called Amazon Web Services?

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