Solving the Tech Worker 'Shortage' Is Easy: Just Pay Them More

... or accept having your fancy schmanzy startup outside the San Francisco Bay Area. VCs insistance of 'you HAVE to be here' and often moving companies/founders across the globe for it is silly to no end. Prices go up like crazy, investment money (especially Seed) doesn't last as long, you spend an enormous amount of time hiring/trying to find people etc

Really, not enough applicants?

That's a choice. Pay more, and will might give up our contracts. Maybe..

... or just hire remote workers. It will be healthier for your processes anyways.

Having been on both sides of the table, where I have been rejected from consideration for no good reason, and also watched my organization turn down awesome candidates for no good reason, I have come to the conclusion that pay is only part of the story. Most places suck at hiring, and some of them even know this, but most don't suck the way they think they suck. If you have a hiring process that can start with 100 applicants, and whittle that number down to one, that doesn't mean you're getting the best candidate out of those 100 - few companies seem to recognize this. Most places will be lucky if they can say they got a candidate in the top 25, in spite of having such a process.

As an example, if I can finish a two-hour coding quiz with time to spare and nail it, impress the hell out of two subsequent interviewers, only to fail on the third with a poorly-prepared interviewer who has already canceled twice at the last minute, via a teleconference at 11PM my time, then something has definitely gone wrong and it isn't on my end. And this is a well-known company that has itself convinced that it has wonderful, data-driven hiring practices. It does not.

Talk to hiring managers about this and they will say 'oh well we have a lot of applicants'. Well then, we don't exactly have a shortage then, do we?

It seems in the mid-to-late 00s there was a meme going around, probably in reaction to the hiring practices during the dot-com era (which were, admittedly, oftentimes pretty terrible in the opposite way), that you should take extra-special care to hire only good candidates. A lot of tech companies have taken this advice to heart, which is great, but they have also mistaken processes that merely weed people out due to mostly random or hard-to-control factors, for ones that select for good candidates. (Chiefly, many hours of interviews with any single interviewer having absolute veto power is a huge red flag.) They are not the same thing.

I mean, read what this idiot company recruiter does in this article:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8660819

and then tell me we have a talent shortage.