I’m not surprised. Just look at how many “eng hiring is broken” threads on here.
If software could help you hire candidates that are 10% more productive and stay 25% longer (numbers pulled out of my ass) than the candidates you hire now, how much do you think your company would pay for that?
Given the tons of companies who barely seem to make any attempt to hold onto employees, talk to them, listen to them, support them, treat them like humans, give them effective tools, and the number of unhappy-at-work people, I'd have to guess..
.. that companies love spending money instead of changing anything, so I think they'd spend loads of investor money on it.
How hard could it possibly be to get 25% longer than all the people who say you have to change jobs every 12-18 months? To be nice enough that people stay /four months/ longer??
You want me to be passionate about making rich people richer? How laughable. I show up for work and do my job to the best of my ability because if I didn’t, I’d starve on the streets with no health insurance.
A company I worked at ran out of money. All my people stayed.
1 month, 2, 3 went by. I found guaranteed positions for them based solely on my recommendation for more pay then if we had money, the people still stayed.
They came in for work the same. Everything kept going. We eventually had a successful product, made money, and were able to backpay.
If I was a disorganized manager giving meaningless drudgery and absurd requirements divorced from product and purpose they would have all left.
There has to be a deeper mission, purpose, and vision that keeps people around and focused. That's the managements job.
People aren't generally in tech for the money, there's better money in real estate, sales and finance with less work. Drive the passion and you'll drive the work.
Programming is like movies, art, and music: great things rarely happen when people are just chasing dollars.
You make the real money here as an IB analyst (100+ hours a week in the office — definitely NOT less work than the average SWE job), or as a financial advisor, i.e. sales.
So, yeah, if you go into sales, sales, or sales, you can make more money that way than in tech as a SWE. But, honestly, do you think the average engineer would do well in sales?
Nah, that's not the point. I forget who it was, maybe Oxfam did a study on the "American dream" income requirements, I think it was:
Family of four, one breadwinner, property owner, annual vacation, eating out once a week, two cars, college education for children...
You know, baseline idyllic suburban living. For the bay it was I believe north of $200K.
That's what I'm talking about. Someone making 250K in Mountainview isn't in it "for the money", they are just trying to live a life that frankly, most other countries can tender for about $75,000 but because of decisions we've made in how we structure society, it takes a quarter million a year.
This is the real equivalent to the 1950s idea of "middle class", it's just gotten so out of reach for most people, we construe people looking for it as greedy.
They aren't. Once you understand that, you can align incentives ... A $5,000 reward doesn't mean much for these people since 250k doesn't mean they're chasing dollars, instead a challenging rewarding job where they can work from home whenever they want, that's what keeps them around.
I'm a little surprised. In that same comment, he says he took a swing at it and missed. He spoke about the failure of starfighter at length at the time[0]. He made it sound like there would need to be a fundamental social shift in the industry for large scale changes in hiring practices to occur.
To a certain extent, I think there is truth both ways. There is a huge amount of opportunity, but it's a bit like developer training: badly needed, but basically impossible to scale effectively. What you really want are agents, rather than recruiters, really. Developers change jobs every few years and are always on the look out for either better or newer opportunities. Having an agent that is skilled at assessing those opportunities, good at negotiation and good at matching opportunities to a list of clients would be amazing. But you can't hire 20-40 sales people and bang random people off the internet into jobs at scale. It's an opportunity for an individual, or a small team, not for a VC.
And, yes. Boy would I like an agent to negotiate my next raise and find me a better job if my current employer says no....
If software could help you hire candidates that [...] stay 25% longer
This is a very cultural thing. For example, in Germany it is frowned upon to switch companies too often. If your CV shows that you switch jobs every few years, this is considered a red flag since this candidate will not be very loyal to your company.
I also ask myself whether the "company incentive structure" is the cause of switching jobs; if it is easier to get more pay by switching companies than by staying, then of course candidates will be prone to switch. So perhaps not what is broken (in terms of loyality) is "eng hiring", but the incentive structure of the companies that want to retain the engineers.
In addition to hiring new engineers, another challenge companies have is to get existing hires who have more context for the company's problems either get better or get more current with newer technologies.
Comments
Interesting, he still sees fixing engineering hiring as the biggest opportunity in SaaS: https://capiche.com/q/whats-the-biggest-opportunity-for-a-sa...
I’m not surprised. Just look at how many “eng hiring is broken” threads on here.
If software could help you hire candidates that are 10% more productive and stay 25% longer (numbers pulled out of my ass) than the candidates you hire now, how much do you think your company would pay for that?
Given the tons of companies who barely seem to make any attempt to hold onto employees, talk to them, listen to them, support them, treat them like humans, give them effective tools, and the number of unhappy-at-work people, I'd have to guess..
.. that companies love spending money instead of changing anything, so I think they'd spend loads of investor money on it.
How hard could it possibly be to get 25% longer than all the people who say you have to change jobs every 12-18 months? To be nice enough that people stay /four months/ longer??
Honestly it's the wrong problem. Having passionate, eager, focused, organized, willing workers is essentially the only job of management.
If that's not happening, switch out the managers.
You want me to be passionate about making rich people richer? How laughable. I show up for work and do my job to the best of my ability because if I didn’t, I’d starve on the streets with no health insurance.
A company I worked at ran out of money. All my people stayed.
1 month, 2, 3 went by. I found guaranteed positions for them based solely on my recommendation for more pay then if we had money, the people still stayed.
They came in for work the same. Everything kept going. We eventually had a successful product, made money, and were able to backpay.
If I was a disorganized manager giving meaningless drudgery and absurd requirements divorced from product and purpose they would have all left.
There has to be a deeper mission, purpose, and vision that keeps people around and focused. That's the managements job.
People aren't generally in tech for the money, there's better money in real estate, sales and finance with less work. Drive the passion and you'll drive the work.
Programming is like movies, art, and music: great things rarely happen when people are just chasing dollars.
Sales.
You make the real money here as an IB analyst (100+ hours a week in the office — definitely NOT less work than the average SWE job), or as a financial advisor, i.e. sales.
So, yeah, if you go into sales, sales, or sales, you can make more money that way than in tech as a SWE. But, honestly, do you think the average engineer would do well in sales?
Nah, that's not the point. I forget who it was, maybe Oxfam did a study on the "American dream" income requirements, I think it was:
Family of four, one breadwinner, property owner, annual vacation, eating out once a week, two cars, college education for children...
You know, baseline idyllic suburban living. For the bay it was I believe north of $200K.
That's what I'm talking about. Someone making 250K in Mountainview isn't in it "for the money", they are just trying to live a life that frankly, most other countries can tender for about $75,000 but because of decisions we've made in how we structure society, it takes a quarter million a year.
This is the real equivalent to the 1950s idea of "middle class", it's just gotten so out of reach for most people, we construe people looking for it as greedy.
They aren't. Once you understand that, you can align incentives ... A $5,000 reward doesn't mean much for these people since 250k doesn't mean they're chasing dollars, instead a challenging rewarding job where they can work from home whenever they want, that's what keeps them around.
Eeehhhhhh, if the overall company doesn’t have a good culture or vision etc, there only so much management can paper over
Executives and founders are also managers.
I'm a little surprised. In that same comment, he says he took a swing at it and missed. He spoke about the failure of starfighter at length at the time[0]. He made it sound like there would need to be a fundamental social shift in the industry for large scale changes in hiring practices to occur.
Or maybe I read too much into it.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11691568
To a certain extent, I think there is truth both ways. There is a huge amount of opportunity, but it's a bit like developer training: badly needed, but basically impossible to scale effectively. What you really want are agents, rather than recruiters, really. Developers change jobs every few years and are always on the look out for either better or newer opportunities. Having an agent that is skilled at assessing those opportunities, good at negotiation and good at matching opportunities to a list of clients would be amazing. But you can't hire 20-40 sales people and bang random people off the internet into jobs at scale. It's an opportunity for an individual, or a small team, not for a VC.
And, yes. Boy would I like an agent to negotiate my next raise and find me a better job if my current employer says no....
This is a very cultural thing. For example, in Germany it is frowned upon to switch companies too often. If your CV shows that you switch jobs every few years, this is considered a red flag since this candidate will not be very loyal to your company.
I also ask myself whether the "company incentive structure" is the cause of switching jobs; if it is easier to get more pay by switching companies than by staying, then of course candidates will be prone to switch. So perhaps not what is broken (in terms of loyality) is "eng hiring", but the incentive structure of the companies that want to retain the engineers.
Why would you be loyal to a company?
In addition to hiring new engineers, another challenge companies have is to get existing hires who have more context for the company's problems either get better or get more current with newer technologies.
pay more.
Is this really that groundbreaking of an opinion? Hiring has and will likely always be an expensive challenge for every industry.