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Comment by Matt_Mickiewicz | Hacker News Reader

You're absolutely right.

Remote is a non-starter for 99% of start-ups... and a lot of companies that are selling pants online are searching for PhD-level engineering talent to run their shopping cart.

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I've noticed this, too, and been baffled by it. My working explanation is that people tend to hire clones of themselves. If the people making the hiring decisions in that online pants company have PhDs, they'll believe they need PhDs to work on that shopping cart.

> people tend to hire clones of themselves

Winner winner, chicken dinner.

Ask a company that is hiring "is X important?", where X is one of {open-source coding, algorithm design, Ivy league degree, master's degree, MIT degree, Facebook alum, Google alum, presence in Silicon Valley, under 25 years old, over 25 years old, has a github, has a blog}, and you will get a "yes" for each X that the founder has.

As someone hiring at a pants-selling company, I'd settle for somebody who can recognize a many-to-many relationship.

Our salaries aren't that uncompetitive, either. I think it's just that pants are un-sexy.

At the very least I'm trying to sex things up a bit by moving us to a semi-modern stack so we match the desires of the more ambitious talent in the marketplace...

Just checked pants-selling tech jobs; none of them (in the bay area, where the majority of them are, at least) have a requirement under 3 years. The majority of them are senior roles. Was your HR person flying by the seat of their pants when they wrote the job descriptions? If not, then I must be unaware that recognizing many-to-many relationships is a skill picked up after years of employment.

And as for remote work?

Is this a disco-pants selling company? That's pretty sexy.

note: before my inbox overflows with resumes, you still need to have j2ee experience.

(As much as I'd prefer to hire bright people who can learn on-the-job (a category from which I emerged), our current delivery schedule means we don't have the bandwidth. The reasons behind this are beyond the scope of this comment :( )

But... that seems a bit of a wrong approach. If it takes you another 6 weeks to fill the role, that's 6 weeks someone could have been "learning on the job", no? And there's always a ramp up period - you're making an assumption that the person coming in without X years experience in tech Y will by definition not be able to learn fast enough on the job to be productive enough to hit target Z. But by not filling that role, you're definitely not hitting target Z. I do also get that there's time that's spent in onboarding any new hire, but that's possibly equivalent to spending more time hiring no?

I understand your main point, but I just think many companies hold fast to that position far too long, when the alternatives might be better than they think.

I agree. But I'm not high enough on the totem pole to change the model.

Yet.

Ah, the ole sets-out-to-demonstrate-that-there-is-truly-a-shortage, demonstrates-that-the-shortage-indeed-lies-in-the-number-of-entry-level-jobs.

The startup I co-founded is exclusively remote, with almost everyone in a different USA state. I've found a lot of the talent in the area we're looking for (Minnesota) find remote to be either a new idea (I've done just a little remote before), and perhaps a somewhat strange concept (many are not sure if they could do it all day long).

Is there any good strategy to finding remote workers in a specific geographic location? Yes, that's kind of antithetical to remote working, but the state offers tax advantages to employing people from the state... and looking through the entire state of Minnesota should find someone who's fine working from a home office... right? Or do those types of people really primarily live in the SV area?

Not exactly what you are looking for but might be something interesting for you to check out: venturepact.com

Appreciate you're insight here, if anyone knows first hand, I'd imagine it'd be you with your experience on developerauction.

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