I was wondering if anyone in charge of hiring here has any insights on why its generally so hard to hire a good engineer. I have been brainstorming a startup focused around recruiting, and I am an engineer myself who has struggled with this in the past in small startups. Does it become easier if youre hiring for a bigger company than a small startup?
Because they all have jobs. And if they are looking for a new one they can pick where they want to go because by virtue of being good engineers it's easy for them to find jobs since everyone is looking for good engineers.<p>And if they aren't looking, why not? My best guess (aside from being happy where they are) is that the engineer interview process is broken. People don't want to go sit in a room and grilled on CS 101 level questions for 4 or 5 hours. It's stressful, it's a poor predictor of performance, and it's most likely not what they will be working on. So they avoid it.<p>Just my opinion though.
Are you sure it's not the other way around?<p>Maybe it's hard for good engineers to find good employers and bosses.<p>9/10 of the technical screens I take are bunk. It boils down to what's fresh on my mind that moment; random trivia.<p>I feel the comment I made "It's an employer's market" <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12667346" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12667346</a> rings true.<p>There's no incentive for the employer to apply more thought into holistically seeing if a can perform a role - or learn it if accommodated.<p>Not impromptu, fanciful, hypothetical scaling scenarios and job requirements.<p>> good engineer<p>What does that mean?<p>Those involved in hiring aren't skilled engineers. They lack qualification to determine what a good engineer is. It's Dunning-Kruger.<p>A manager is reluctant to hire a star programmer that could run laps around them and upstages them. A junior programmer will use on-the-spot technical interviews to disqualify - catch them off guard - so they don't hire the person who replaces them.<p>Merit is thrown out the door due to turf protection. So maybe a more correct word would be, an "appropriate" engineer. To suit the political dynamic and lack of incentive to make the company tech-centric.<p>If you've been bossing people around for the last years, you haven't been doing much other than talking while we've been hacking all this time.
This is a myth. It's easy to hire good people, just offer more money. The end.<p>Now, if your question is how to hire the best engineers on some budget, that's a different question. Regardless, the less money you offer, the less likely you'll be able to hire "good people".<p>---<p>A more interesting and profitable question to have the answer to is how to make a bad engineer a good one for the least amount of money possible.
It is hard to hire good anyone because reality has a surprising amount of detail: <a href="http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-amount-of-detail" rel="nofollow">http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-...</a> and many if not most people are poorly suited to abstract symbolic manipulation work.<p>Add to that the difficulty of the profession itself and the constellation of ancillary skills one needs (conscientiousness, the ability to interact with other people, articulateness, the ability to disagree respectfully and intelligently, etc.) and you will find it hard to hire good "x" in general.<p>Finally, it is often hard to hire good "x" unless you are paying at or above the market wage for x. The people who have a hard time hiring are generally not paying the market wage or above it. When they do, they suddenly find it much easier to hire.
A lot of people commented on the pay.<p>Most companies don’t have the option to offer more to the good engineers in the first place.<p>First, they don’t apply at all, and if they do, the company will probably fail to identify them as good.<p>And if they do identity the good engineer, then they will tend to offer below market (for the good engineer), and then lose out because of pay.<p>But it’s not because the company is necessarily cheap: it’s so rare to have a good engineer that they probably don’t even understand the value of one (or can’t make good use of them) in the first place, and therefore can’t justify the offers that the market is swinging at them.
I'm going to venture a guess:<p>I think PG's "Blub paradox" [1] applies to all kinds of skills, generally. In very open-ended (multi-dimensional) domains, a practitioner who's achieved level "B" will not generally be able to appreciate the additional value of a practitioner at a significantly higher level "N >> B" -- at least not enough to compensate them at a correspondingly higher level. In a constrained evaluation (like a few hours of interviewing) the probable outcome is that higher-level practitioner will be considered slightly better, with a lot of strange stuff thrown in, of unclear value; after all engineering is a very open-ended domain (unlike athletics for example, where just by watching for a few minutes you can say someone is much much better).<p>Since engineering skill is so multi-dimensional, one key to hiring well is understanding which characteristics are super important for the specific role, will therefore be compensated appropriately. Looking for generic "good engineers" will probably be a waste of time, or very hard to accomplish. Correspondingly, companies which can compensate well to acquire people with specific skills will probably lure away engineers from other employers who value them as just amorphous "good engineers".<p>To be able to hire good engineers, the hiring process needs, at the very least:<p>1. Good engineers as part of the selection team, so that they can select good engineers.
2. People who understand the (additional) value brought by good/great engineers, so that they can make the decision to compensate accordingly.<p>PS: All this assuming that the business model is functional (i.e. the business can afford to pay a good engineer's market rate) and the work being done actually requires the additional skills of a high-quality engineer.<p>--<p>[1]: PG's article on the Blub paradox -- <a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html</a>
You mean why is it hard to hire engineers at "ok-ish" salaries? Life is (and gets) expensive.<p>Pay engineers $500k a year or more -- they'll be kicking down the door.
Why would any good engineer join you as an employee if you literally have nothing besides a "brainstorm?" Do you have money to pay salary? Sounds like you're looking for a co-founder, not an employee.
> I have been brainstorming a startup focused around recruiting<p>I think the difficulty around finding good engineers is because they hide from the traditional recruiting markets, as recruiting is typically a negative experience for the developers involved. Good engineers don't need recruiters, and likely have a network that is far more valuable when they need a job.<p>> I am an engineer myself who has struggled with this in the past in small startups<p>I assume you mean that it's hard to find a good engineer at "small startup" rates? Offer 1.25x market, and you'll find good engineers.
As a person regularly in charge of hiring engineers and being engineer myself I have some observations.<p>In my opinion this comes down to the fact, that there is only a limited number of people genuinely interested in engineering but unsatiable demand for skilled engineers.<p>As in any other field requiring dedication to master, only genuinely interested will ever become highly skilled. There is only limited number of these people. There may be many "engineers", but they are not really dedicated to their field. The demand creates an opportunity for people who aren't really skilled and aren't really dedicated but who would like to profit from high wages in the field.<p>These people may be interested in other fields (maybe they genuinely love cinema or are dedicated parents) but the only reason they do their work is because they have to provide for them or their families and they find engineering the better choice than alternatives that would probably pay less.<p>It is my observation that only genuinely interested people actually produce almost all of the results of any engineering organization.<p>Now, if you are an engineer and you love what you do where will you want to work? Will you want to work for large company that has probably a lot of interesting problems to solve and experience to gain or will you want to work for unknown company for roughly the same money?<p>The issue is that all good engineers already have jobs and due to demand they never stay long on the market. To hire a good engineer you not only have to find a way to distinguish the genuinely interested, you also have to figure out a way to change their mind as to their current place of employment.<p>If you are a company that has only mundane problems and you don't want to pay extraordinary rates then you really are out of luck.<p>The best advice I can have for companies who struggle to find engineers in a field is to try and allow fully remote work. That is if the field allows this. Get your systems and company environment ready for fully remote work. You will immediately benefit for being able to choose from people all over the world and not just local to your office.<p>That is, provided you already have the rest of your hiring process in top shape.
People want to hire great "engineers" by asking them to write stupid functions on a whiteboard 4 hours in a row. That's after 2 phone interviews of 45 minutes each asking the exact same stupid questions. Are you guys looking for CS students or engineers?
Three interrelated reasons:<p>1) Companies have no interest in investing in job skill growth<p>Which leads to<p>2) Companies have devalued the role of engineering management<p>Which leads to<p>3) The tech interview as it exists today is fundamentally broken
I think a big part of the problem is insufficient agency on both sides of the equation.<p>I was talking to a potential client today and he told me that he'd been considering hiring an engineer with a strong "official" background (Cisco, etc), who had billed himself at $100/hr.<p>"I don't think I can afford that," my friend said.<p>The next day the engineer messaged him saying he'd cut his rate to $50/hr.<p>In other words: No one has any idea what they're doing. It's still very much the Wild West. The in-demand currency, I've concluded, is <i>security</i>. If you're funded to the point of not worrying about payroll: engineers will flock to you. If you're battle-tested in scaling something huge: terrified founders will follow you around.<p>The critical skill, IMO, is finding entities who could be great, <i>with your help</i>. One of FAANG's strengths is that they pay their devs so well that they can stop worrying about money, and feel safe enough to get absorbed in whatever problem is on their plate.
Have had experience interviewing, and exploring similar space.<p>My beliefs that I'm in the process of validating further:<p>-> Poor resume filtering (based on keywords and proxy credentials) reduces the size of the candidate pool - biased to those that have worked at brand name institution, or went to brand name school, which leaves out many talented folks.<p>-> Technical interviews are low accuracy predictors of competence, which means you have to up-weight previous experience & credentials to reduce risk of bad hire. If you do choose to open up doors to interview candidates from non-traditional backgrounds, due to the greater variance in competence, you have to spend more time interviewing before you make a hire, driving up the costs.<p>-> Companies are biased towards cheaper, low-risk interviewing. They want to get the talent to meet the business needs, as long as they can do the job and fit the culture ==> paying more to get the talent that they know has greater chance to deliver is totally worth it.<p>A bigger company has the advantage of having more data about their hiring process, which could lead to more systematic experimentation to improve hiring. They also have a brand that would attract more people - bigger company often correlates with stability, and market rate pay, which are also drawing factors. They also have less risk --> a bad hire, that can be identified relatively quickly and fired, hurts a bigger company less than smaller ones, and they have more money to throw around.<p>Hiring at startups is tough: Your low-risk talent pool has other, great from a financial perspective, opportunities. Your higher risk talent pool is expensive to validate competence for because industry standard approaches are low-accuracy signals.<p>Fix interview process to give a higher signal, which allows you to reduce weight on credentials and experience, which allows you to increase size of candidate pool (because you've reduced the risk and cost to validate).<p>There's a lot of talent in the world that doesn't fall into the low-risk bucket that everyone is competing for.
This is a broad question and really depends on the context and environment.<p>Outside of major tech hubs the answer usually boils down to "insufficient supply of any quality above poor".<p>In the major tech hubs it usually boils down to the glut of CS graduates who think they know everything or that they are smarter than everybody else perpetuating the CS hazing ritual that is the modern interview process. The bar is set too high using a bad method of measuring skill: the bad definition of "good" leads to an artificial scarcity of "good" engineers.<p>Good engineers aren't going to tolerate that crap, and will be able to get positions that outside of the typical hiring process.
Thinking like an engineer: to hire good engineers, you need A) good engineers to apply for the position, and B) to tell which of your applicants are the good engineers. Those two conditions are necessary and sufficient.<p>As other commenters have noted, A boils down to “offer lots of money.” Some really interesting fields may be able to offer less out of “cool factor,” but odds are you’re not hiring for one of those fields- all your potential hires who claim to think CRUD apps are fun and intellectually stimulating are just lying. ....So A is simple, if you’re honest with yourself and bite the financial bullet.<p>B is a problem that is apparently beyond present-say technology, and quite possibly not possible to achieve at all. There are code-testing sites that go beyond the standard CS interview, but how can a several-hour exam test someone’s ability to manage a codebase over months or years? In particular <i>your company’s</i> codebase, which will have many important idiosyncrasies and be a very different environment than any project the hire has worked on in the past. ...We’ll likely have flying cars before we figure out a halfway decent solution for B.
Q: How do you know you're not paying market rate (or enough)?<p>A: Good Engineers are not finding you through their network<p>--------------<p>Other than that, you need to find good engineers -before they are proven - believe in them and ask for their commitment for let's say 3 years.
What is "good engineer"? How can a company tell if someone is a "good engineer"? These are hard questions. And I think you gotta answer them first if you want an answer to your original question.
The problem is you're trying to hire engineers to do business analysis, product management, support and quality assurance. The problem is your lack of engineering culture and process.
Because nobody wants to train good engineers. It’s not like the people you’re interviewing set out to be bad engineers. It’s just that people like you won’t hire them unless they’re already perfect.