

Solving the Tech Worker 'Shortage' Is Easy: Just Pay Them More - ArtDev
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/11/25/tech-worker-shortage-low-pay_n_6218444.html

======
ulfw
... 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

------
ArtDev
Really, not enough applicants?

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

------
scotty79
... or just hire remote workers. It will be healthier for your processes
anyways.

------
deciplex
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](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8660819)

and then tell me we have a talent shortage.

