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Comment by ryanSrich | Hacker News Reader

"Talent Shortage"

I feel like that's a big misunderstood thing in our community. There is a talent shortage - in the sense that companies are always ready to hire someone in the top ~10%. That's what talent means in this context. Google and Facebook will always be more than willing to hire the people who build frameworks in their spare time or contribute to the Linux kernel. There is however no shortage of one trick pony PHP developers, because by mathematical definition they are the bottom 90% (see http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2005/01/27.html).

(the question of whether companies actually need employees of that caliber for building mobile apps is a entirely different one)

"Wanted: Someone with the time-management skills to get to the top 10% of developers. Must be willing to show up for 8 rounds of on-site interviews and be prepared for deep philosophical discussions on the merits of mergesort."

Well, there have been a few instances in the past where I've been desperate to hire and I've brought people in against my better judgement. I can tell you it sucks having to look someone in the eye and let them go because they couldn't keep up with the rest of the team. Once you've had to do it a few times as a manager, you become more conservative with your hiring.

Sure, pushing pixels around is easy, but when you're up against a deadline and the app is crashing in a subtle way, you need engineers who have solid debugging chops. Not everybody does.

When you're up against such a deadline, your manager has failed you, not the other way around.

Companies shouldn't have deadlines?

No, that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying it's the manager's job to secure enough time for a product to get developed by the team or reduce the scope of what's going to be developed by working with whomever is setting these deadlines. If you need to magically speed up your development to meet the deadline or work extra hours, the manager has failed at doing the above, something that's a core part of his job. In some really bad companies, the manager won't have a choice in doing either, and you're in a situation where the deadline was simply unreasonable. In those cases, I can excuse the manager. Mostly though, deadlines are artificial and it really doesn't matter if they're met or not. Even if it does matter, the manager is getting paid a whole lot of money to manage both the team and the expectations of those who care about the deadlines. Making the team work overtime is thus a complete failure on his part both to the team and to those above him.

I don't disagree with you that death march schedules are bad, but I don't think I was making a case for them. :)

Another way to put it is that the manager's job is also to hire the best team possible, and there is a wide variance in skill levels of engineers. All other things being equal, hiring engineers who are more adept is a big advantage to the company.

Well, it doesn't sound like the author is out on the street, desperate for work. He accounts for his time at 400 pounds sterling per hour.

That's his day rate, not hourly rate. It's pretty standard for senior, competent contractors in London.

Whoops, duh, you're right.

My point was that he's not hurting for work in general, so this story doesn't really have bearing on the talent shortage.

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