
Hiring Is Obsolete (2005) - marceee0901
http://www.paulgraham.com/hiring.html
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jillesvangurp
I would say hiring is dead for a different reason: permanent employment is
becoming a meaningless deal in many places. Especially in the US, you can be
out on the street in 15 minutes with little or no protection against that.
It's a very one sided deal where you shovel shit in exchange for a lower
income. So, people treat their employers as customers and have less
reservations about firing their customer. The average tenure at several of the
big SFO monopolists (lets just call that out) has allegedly (I lack a good
source) dropped below a year. That's what happens in a scarce market.

When starting a startup, employment is also meaningless because if you are in
grow fast/fail fast mode, long term employment is not a thing. Your company
could end up being acquired, killed, or simply be fizzling out.

A lot of companies are now relying on recruiters and agencies to supply them
with what is non essential staff where the person disappearing is less of an
issue. This kind of recruiting works great for no-tech startups (any kind of
saas or marketplace type company). Lots of buzzwords, but mostly hiring full
stack. That kind of company. All they need is generic skills. Hiring is still
a problem for actual tech startups that need access to the best and brightest
in their fields. You're not going to find those people through some shitty
recruiter or head hunter. They are not likely to be actively looking at all,
ever. You need to court them and sell them the notion of working for you.
Acquihires are a thing for bigger companies but they often backfire when
people simply sit out their 2-3 years while they are considering their next
startup.

~~~
bluejekyll
> (I lack a good source) dropped below a year.

I suspect this is not true for tech jobs. It can take 6 months for engineers
to become productive members of teams, especially ones with large software
codebases.

On top of that, almost all cliffs are set at a year for compensation packages,
so I doubt people would ditch before getting that.

~~~
jandrese
This is one of those cases where taking the mean distorts your view of the
market, because there are some outliers who switch jobs like they change pants
who drive up the numbers for everyone. A median look at how often people
switch would probably be more illustrative.

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madprops
Or maybe give people time to live before they decide to participate in "the
economy". Not everything is jobs. Actually I would argue that hiring is, or
should be soon, obsolete because of a gradual change on mindset that clarifies
what jobs really are, schemes. There's no reason to dedicate most of your
waking life working on selling products where the end product is just
maintaining frivolous life styles. And if having to pay for basic things like
a roof and food is the factor here, then there are bigger issues at the root
level.

~~~
bluGill
How does the labor to build the basic things like a roof happen? How does the
labor to grow food and get it to you happen? Those are called jobs, and like
it or not somebody has to do them. Society has been getting more efficient at
them, but even still some amount of human labor is required!

People have jobs because they need things that can only be got via human
labor. This is not a bigger issue at a root level, it is a basic fact that you
are trying to deny.

~~~
keiferski
The overwhelming majority of jobs in the modern economy have nothing to do
with basic needs. Most of them simply exist to feed the consumerist/financial
complex.

~~~
bluGill
The overwhelming majority of people want more than the basics. They don't just
want a roof over their head, they want a nice roof - one they can stand up
under, maybe with a kitchen, running water, separate rooms for their various
games... They don't want to eat just rice and beans, they want more.

You are one of them: if you were not you wouldn't be reading this forum.

~~~
keiferski
All of the things you mentioned can still be categorized as "the basics."

This forum is a particularly bad example to use, considering that it's more-
or-less built on technology that is over two decades old (i.e. an online
forum.)

~~~
bluGill
What are the basics. Every time you expand the definition - as you just did -
it takes more labor time to make it. You can put the line between basics and
luxury anyplace you want, but the amount of labor it takes to make basic
society possible goes changes with each change.

~~~
madprops
I agree with you. There's almost never a free meal, nor a reason why there
should be. I still think a lot of jobs today are unimportant and exist due to
people's lack of options.

I also agree with loh's comment here: "I dream of a future where everyone has
all of their basic needs met through technology, giving people the capacity to
focus on doing the things they are naturally good at doing, things they enjoy"

It would seem that the current system in place is what's required to get
there, but maybe it's just slow to change for good.

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cryptica
I think investing in 20 year olds is a bad idea because at that age, they
haven't had the time to properly fail. This makes them arrogant and unwilling
to listen to advice from older people who are smarter but not financially
successful.

~~~
onion2k
_I think investing in 20 year olds is a bad idea because at that age, they
haven 't had the time to properly fail._

You're right _on average_ but investors aren't looking for average people to
invest in. I was on an accelerator with a very talented founder who had
started a company, built it up to something significant, and subsequently
cashed out _before_ he was 20. Some 20 year olds are on their second or third
business by then. They're exceptions rather than the rule, certainly, but
that's exactly who investors should be looking for.

The only thing investors need to remember is that age isn't an indication of
anything very interesting. People will have amazing ideas and the drive to
execute them at 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70 80...

~~~
optimuspaul
But have they failed? The arrogance will be even stronger in someone who has
had success so early. Risk is much higher with such an individual.

I think that you are partially right however, age isn't an indicator but
combined with other metrics is an indicator. I'll take a 20 year old who has
tried and failed over a 20 year old who has tried and succeeded. My gut tells
me the former has learned far more. But those are generalizations, everyone is
different, the failure case could actually be ineptitude and they haven't
learned anything.

~~~
pjc50
I'm reminded of the joke about the guy who threw away half the CVs he recieved
because he didn't want to hire unlucky people.

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carlsborg
Well, it was 2005.

Poll: In your opinion was is far easier to gain traction and scale in the
early 2000's compared to now?

Feels that way to me. For example, I had a basic website on a billion dollar
industry and we were page rank 1 for years for that industry keyword with zero
extra effort.

~~~
dunkelheit
> In your opinion was is far easier to gain traction and scale in the early
> 2000's compared to now?

Looks like it was but a lot of goodwill has been burned since. PG writes "On
the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog. And more to the point, nobody knows
you're 22. All users care about is whether your site or software gives them
what they want. They don't care if the person behind it is a high school kid."
But today every sane person would ask "Why should I depend on your service?
Where is the guarantee that you won't go out of business or get acquired in
six months with your service sunsetted?"

~~~
dkersten
That last point makes me very wary of using a startups services these days.
Too many startups fail and out of the ones that don’t, a huge amount get
shutdown after acquisition. Too risky.

I’ve also experienced a number of cases in my own work where pretty great
services were passed over for exactly those reasons. As somebody who has
founded startups in the past, this makes me sad because it means my next
attempt will be much tougher (and it’s already hard), but on the other hand,
I’ve also learned that I don’t really want to run a venture backed startup
anymore and would rather run a smaller lifestyle business that’s in it for the
long term. I suppose it comes down to how that’s communicated to the potential
customers.

~~~
mrfusion
It’s counterintuitive but to counter this fear as a startup make it really
simple for your customers to get their data out of your service. And advertise
that fact heavily.

~~~
dkersten
That’s a good point, yes. I definitely feel more at ease when I know there’s a
migration path should it become necessary.

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pjc50
Shorter PG: hiring is hard due to market informational inefficiencies, acqui-
hiring is the future!

> What's an especially productive 22 year old to do? One thing you can do is
> go over the heads of organizations, directly to the users. Any company that
> hires you is, economically, acting as a proxy for the customer. The rate at
> which they value you (though they may not consciously realize it) is an
> attempt to guess your value to the user. But there's a way to appeal their
> judgement. If you want, you can opt to be valued directly by users, by
> starting your own company.

I wasn't expecting Paul Graham to recite orthodox Marxism. This paragraph is
only missing the word "exploited", because he's effectively saying that young
good workers are undervalued because a large employer makes more money from
them than they are paid.

> Buying larval startups solves that problem for them: the acquirer doesn't
> pay till the developers have proven themselves. Acquirers are protected on
> the downside, but still get most of the upside.

The downside of this is of course that the "downside" flows to the not-chosen
workers. It's effectively like doing a trial shift, except instead of just a
day you have to spend six months on building a business. And during that time,
how do you fund your food and rent?

> The math is brutal. While perhaps 9 out of 10 startups fail, the one that
> succeeds will pay the founders more than 10 times what they would have made
> in an ordinary job.

So .. what happens to everyone else?

Sure, I like the message that young people should go out in the world, try
things, be imaginative, and try to find an employer that will value their
skills. And that it's easier than ever to disintermediate the economy. But it
needs to come with a recognition of how that's actually funded on the day to
day level, and which people are and aren't going to be able to succeed in that
environment.

~~~
username90
> I wasn't expecting Paul Graham to recite orthodox Marxism. This paragraph is
> only missing the word "exploited", because he's effectively saying that
> young good workers are undervalued because a large employer makes more money
> from them than they are paid.

No, the point was that at a big company you get paid the average value of the
work your and your peers does, while when you work for yourself you get paid
the value you yourself does. This means that for strong performers going alone
is better, and for weak performers going to a company is better. Nothing
exploitative here, just natural consequences of scale and imperfect
productivity measures.

~~~
tomgp
"the average value of the work you and your peers do"... minus whtever the
bosses feel they can cream off the top.

~~~
shantly
Yeah you get paid the average _cost_ of having that work _done_ , not the
average value _at all_. That may well be 10x what you're paid for the work, in
some positions.

~~~
username90
The surplus value wasn't provided by you though, the people who built the
company added it. I know that I wouldn't make enough contributions to warrant
my current salary if I worked for most other companies than the one I work for
now, so they actually give me more money than the value I bring. Sounds like a
pretty good deal to me.

~~~
shantly
I don't think it makes much sense to assume that all of what's not "surplus
value" (the "due" return of capital, I take it?) is already captured by labor,
which is what the claim that all the value one creates over one's compensation
is "provided by [...] the people who built the company" means, I'm pretty
sure. In fact I think things get pretty messy and unhelpful when we start
trying to attribute the "proper" due of anyone involved in this. You get what
you get, and if your employer's not getting more than that they should
probably look at hiring someone else, and if they _could_ pay you less for
exactly the same return on your labor _they absolutely would_ , even though
the value you're creating is the same, which tells me that no, capital _is
not_ somehow responsible for all that extra value, and I don't think it makes
much sense to put things in those terms, even—like workers, they just get
whatever they can manage to get.

[EDIT] point remains, your wage is the cost of having that work done by labor
in the market, unrelated to the value (return on investment, say) it provides,
except that same value puts a _de facto_ cap on the wage. If capital can get a
10% return paying $20/hr, they'll do it. If they could find a way to do the
exact same thing but pay $10/hr, they would. "Value" remains constant.

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IAmEveryone
Hiring is alive and well, and thinks Paul Graham is obsolete...

"Investing in people" wasn't even a new idea in 2005. It's totally obvious
once you get over post-enlightment drivel like individuality and innate
rights, and focus on what's real: people are matter, matter can be owned,
ownership can be fractional, (...Ayn Rand died for our sins...)

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Jemm
I think the article downplays the role of people with Aspergers or who are
otherwise on the spectrum. These often very high functioning people can act in
a way that a collection of people never could, particularly when one considers
focus.

