
Hiring and the Market for Lemons (2016) - weinzierl
http://danluu.com/hiring-lemons/
======
poulsbohemian
This industry spends way too much time thinking about top producers (IE, the
mythical 10x developer) and not enough about the support to turn one of those
competent but humble developers into a top producer. Are there a few
legitimate "The One" developers in the world? Yes, I'm sure there are. But you
can take an average player, put them in a super supportive environment with
good tools and make them look like a super star way easier than you can find
or pay, or in some cases put up with the prima donna antics of a "super star."
Put in the wrong environment too, you can turn a super star into a lemon super
quick.

~~~
taneq
Your last point is a huge one too. I read something ages ago which stuck with
me ever since - a scalpel is sharper than a bread knife, but that doesn't mean
it's better. Sometimes you just need to cut bread.

A lot of companies chase highly skilled, creative, motivated developers and
then stick them with routine, grindy jobs until they quit or lose the will to
live. It doesn't matter how sharp your scalpel is if they're being wasted
maintaining some enterprise CRUD app.

~~~
shostack
Without trying to push the analogy too far, I think the point holds without
ascribing superiority to any particular job (or cutting tool).

Case in point, I have a nice Japanese knife set. My chef's knife (your
scalpel) sucks at cutting bread compared to the set's serrated bread slicing
knife.

Both of those knives such at spreading peanut butter and jelly to make a
sandwich.

The right tool (or person) for the job is what matters.

------
underdeserver
I think Dan's missing two important points:

1) Great devs want to work with other great devs. If you want to blast forward
you don't want to spend days debugging really crappy code someone else wrote,
or explaining ideas to someone who's significantly slower than you. (We've all
been on both sides of that particular situation - the good ones put in the
work to get faster.)

2) People don't quit jobs, they quit managers. Also, at least for everyone I
know, people generally _quit_ jobs first, and _look for_ jobs later, meaning
that if they have a good team to work with and a good manager, you're never
going to get them.

This means that the great developer is not a standalone creature; great
developers will _cluster_ under a great manager, and then that unit will be
immensely productive and inseparable. Building that should be a tech CEO's
goal.

~~~
wojciii
I agree on your second point. Bad managers were the reason why I either quit
or got fired (after stoping to care and just doing the minimum amount of work
possible) because I could not see any change being made to the development
methods used which relied heavily on people instead of software tools that
could speed things up for me and minimize the amount of bugs that I was adding
to the codebase.

Bad managers which are set in their ways from 10 years ago and unable to
change are really bad for business.

------
brownbat
> At the last conference I attended, I asked most people I met two questions:

> 1\. Do you know of any companies that aren't highly dysfunctional?

> 2\. Do you know of any particular teams that are great and are hiring?

> Not one single person told me that their company meets the criteria in (1).

Reminded me a lot of Ribbonfarm on the Gervais Principle:

"Hugh MacLeod’s cartoon is a pitch-perfect symbol of an unorthodox school of
management based on the axiom that organizations don’t suffer pathologies;
they are intrinsically pathological constructs."

[https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-
principle-...](https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-
the-office-according-to-the-office/)

~~~
cbsmith
Not that the Gervais Principle is wrong, but you gotta think bigger.

If you're at a conference where no one knows of a functional company with good
teams that are hiring... maybe you're at the conference that attracts all the
people stuck in a world of terrible teams and dysfunctional companies? I mean,
doesn't it make sense that if you can't identify good teams or good companies,
you'd also suck at identifying good conferences? ;-)

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andrewstuart
>> The great software developers, indeed, the best people in every field, are
quite simply never on the market.

This is flat out wrong. It's not true. It's false.

I've recruited hundreds and hundreds of people and they were ALL on the market
and I know for an absolute fact that many of them turned out to be really
really outstanding developers.

So it's wrong.

In my experience as a tech recruiter and some-time searcher for employment in
development - the real lemons are the recruiting processes of many companies.
Vast numbers of people/companies simply do a flat out bad job of assessing and
interviewing and selecting developers.

------
throw1592381471
Whenever I read something written from Joel Spolsky I think back to the time I
attended the first CalHacks hackathon. Joel gave the keynote talk which I
pushed into as a starry-eyed young technology enthusiast. He told us to work
hard so we dont end up like the construction workers out there (referring to
the construction happening outside of the Berkeley stadium at the time). Oh. I
had hardly entered the software industry and that was my first moment of being
jaded about the out of touch characters the bay/valley had to offer. I better
get coding or else I'll have a shite life like those construction workers...

I can get some interviews and get through some rounds. But no one here is
talking about LeetCode which is all that really matters.

Using a throwaway because obviously I'm mediocre and I don't want to end up
woefully hopeless like those horrible people applying to every open job in
Palo Alto.

~~~
fxtentacle
This article and this discussion is about people competing for $200k cash +
$200k equity annually jobs or something similarly far out of the ordinary.

So I'd assume that by applying to lots of normal jobs and doing normal job,
you'll still be able to have a good normal life. I mean IT is well paid, even
in the more junior positions.

It just won't be enough for a yacht ;) which is what the 10x crowd is aiming
for.

------
fxtentacle
"If it's so easy to identify prospective great developers, why not try to
recruit them?"

1\. Who says that companies don't try. We can only observe that they are not
too successful at it. But that might also just mean that there's many
companies competing for few employees. And if you can get the same salary
somewhere else, who would still go to Facebook?

2\. Great at work doesn't mean great character. I'm pretty sure that the
original team building Android was highly skilled. But their personalities
also appear highly controversial. Not every company can stomach the fallout
from hiring someone like that.

3\. There is an incentive to keep quiet if you succeed. Once you publicly
announce that you succeeded in hiring a truly outstanding employee, you are
pretty much guaranteed to have recruiters try to steal your employee away from
you.

4\. The best jobs for these people are research and prototypes for future
products. As such, you can be sure that companies will have draconian NDAs in
place to prevent their top employees from taking about what they do. So
they'll be mostly invisible on the internet.

5\. If you look around in indie circles, you'll find many companies where one
person does legal, marketing, and all product development. I'd guess those are
the 10x-ers who value freedom higher than money.

~~~
poulsbohemian
>5\. If you look around in indie circles, you'll find many companies where one
person does legal, marketing, and all product development. I'd guess those are
the 10x-ers who value freedom higher than money.

This point and to some degree your #4 point are really key: Being a
potentially great worker* is relative to the company, product, project, IE:
the environment. An indie may not have been a very successful developer at
BigCo, but when faced with sink or swim, will strive to find ways to be ultra
productive.

* I didn't write developer, because I've seen this phenomenon with testers, with technical consultants, with project managers...

------
Swizec
> When I worked at a small company, we regularly hired great engineers from
> big companies that were too clueless to know what kind of talent they had.

This is an easy trap to fall into when you’re online a lot. Everyone around
you is always doing something fantastic something you wish you thought of
something new and amazing and innovative.

But remember: most people are normal, just about average. You’re just
surrounded by outliers online because average doesn’t spread.

------
z3t4
The software job market is "interesting". You have companies complaining about
it being hard to find developers. Then they pass on really good ones. I think
one reason is that these companies started in a time where it was easy to find
developers and developers was basically working for free as it was also their
hobby.

------
sanxiyn
No, it is not a market for lemons. It is a market for silver bullets!

[https://iang.org/papers/market_for_silver_bullets.html](https://iang.org/papers/market_for_silver_bullets.html)

~~~
zwaps
Programmers tend more toward knowing their own productivity than being
completely clueless about it. Seems more like market for lemons to me.

~~~
sanxiyn
We wouldn't hear about Dunning-Kruger effect if that were the case.

------
yadadoodadee
"But the first assumption alone is enough to prevent the developer job market
from being a market for lemons. If you can tell that a potential employee is
great, you can simply go and offer them twice as much as they're currently
making (something that I've seen actually happen). You need an information
asymmetry to create a market for lemons, and Joel posits that there's no
information asymmetry."

Not necessarily. Suppose you can identify good developers after you have
worked with them. Then, as in the used car model, lemons will be discarded
("resold") and good developers will be kept and driven.

------
raverbashing
Yeah I used to believe there were "great" developers as if every developer
could be given a score of greatness.

I was a bit naive in that assessment.

Every person is different. Not everybody that knows the big O of all sorting
methods by heart is the person you need. Or even want.

There are multiple dimensions, technologies, experiences of fitting someone in
a company. Some people move more slowly but surely, some move faster and are
more hands on.

(That being said, I've met a - thankfully small - number of people that were a
net negative in team productivity)

------
brooklyn_ashey
Interesting piece. Two things: 1\. How do these few absolutely spectacular
developers blossom into such impressive specimens of the lot? Why not get them
before this happens and help them over the greatness threshold? 2\. Isn’t
there a kind of giant group of buried truffles that don’t fit the trad idea of
what a great dev smells like? — so much so that you could identify this set
with a couple of simple queries— a kind of sifting activity that would yield
lots of truffles per square foot?

~~~
9nGQluzmnq3M
1 is why large companies have massive cohorts of interns. They don't expect to
get much/any useful work out of them, they just fill up the interns on Kool-
Aid, identify the ones that aren't completely hopeless, and hire them full-
time as junior devs.

~~~
brooklyn_ashey
Right, but then every company would just grow uberdevs and be chock full of
awesome at some point, but it seems like that isn’t happening w these interns
as often as would make the intern thing “worth it” for identifying future
wonderdevs.

------
blizkreeg
Who has read the best description of a 10x developer? I'm curious if there's
genuinely read-worthy thinking on it.

~~~
ramraj07
Yes!
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21508870](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21508870)

------
ddjobs
I think What we really need is a piece about a tree full of lemons trying to
sell a bunch of secondhand cars that they don’t actually own. Possible
suggestion for the lemons: the LinkedIn-based recruitment agencies.

Oh dear, I think I’ve stretched that analogy too far.

------
kuharich
Prior comments:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12671290](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12671290)

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swader999
Projects end, especially great ones and the people from them move on.
Developers get better from exposure to different people, different technology
and domains.

