
Ask HN: Finding tech talent is getting harder. It's not a Bay Area problem only - hichamin
If you&#x27;re a CTO for a growing startup, this might be a familiar challenge for you.<p>On top of building the product, finding product engineers is becoming one of the hardest things for a CTO to do in 2019, especially in tech hubs like NY and London due to higher demand and competition.<p>This problem is no longer exclusive to the Bay Area. Hiring is time-consuming and expensive, and many startups feel that they can’t compete with some of the top salaries and perks offered by deep-pocketed alternatives.<p>It makes sense to rely on your network to hire the initial few developers, but this approach is not sustainable in the long run.<p>Job boards are getting crowded. Recruiters are generally worse.<p>I&#x27;ve read a lot of stories about using recruitment platforms. Few are great, but many are unpleasant. The flaw with many recruitment companies is they don&#x27;t reliably deliver enough good candidates to build trust.<p>Asking for profile A and getting profile B is a common frustration. For startups, this tends to be a deal-breaker because hiring the wrong candidate has a significant cost and impact on backlog and team.<p>Is it that most recruiters or on-demand marketplaces aren&#x27;t highly technical? Is it that they also suffer from talent shortage?<p>Remote work has been getting a lot of love in recent years to bypass the talent war. Although it has come a long way, it&#x27;s still hard to pull off, especially for companies that are trying to do both local and remote but are not remote-first (think infrastructure and payroll primarily).<p>With that being said. How do startups in hubs currently find great engineers quicker? What&#x27;s an approach that you have been investing in recently to hire product hackers?
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edhowzerblack
As a developer who has recently been through the hiring process, I think the
problem is not a shortage of talent, but rather that companies are awful at
hiring. Here are a few of the main issues:

1\. Don't limit your potential talent pool to the miserable and the
unemployed. In theory, any developer who is currently employed might be
interested in leaving their job to work for you. Perhaps you will offer them
more money, or perhaps a better quality of (work) life. However, most
developers won't bother to talk to you if they already have a job. Why is
that? Simple, if they do talk to you, you're going to offer them a homework
assignment. You're going to tell them that it shouldn't take more than an
hour, but it will actually take two full days to do right. Giving someone a
homework assignment isn't a way to woo them away from their current job. So
you are left with a candidate pool that consists mostly of people who are
desperate enough that they have to agree to jump through your hoops (i.e.
unemployed, miserable in their current job, etc.)

2\. Don't discard capable people. The average interview begins with a remote
code challenge whereby the candidate, who is probably nervous, has to pair
program a completely contrived problem with a complete stranger watching them
over a webcam. There are tons of developers who are good at coding solutions
to real world problems in real world situations but simply don't perform well
in this type of situation. This type of scenario is not really assessing a
candidate's skills. It's assessing their familiarity with specific contrived
interview problems and their ability to perform under duress.

Of course, the points you raised are fair as well. Recruiters are not
technical people, they are sales people. You will have to find a good
recruiter. They are out there, you just have to find the right ones. But my
point is, once you find the good recruiter(s) don't waste the human capital
they can being to you by having a terrible interview process. Here is my
advice. Once your recruiter has a handful of resumes you like, carve out half
a days worth of 30-minute sessions to meet with them at the recruiter's
office. Ask them about projects they've worked on. You'll find out much more
about what they know and what they're like to work with than you would with
the typical remote code challenge. One you narrow the pool down a bit bring
them in for on-sites.

Best of luck!

~~~
commandlinefan
I'd estimate (without bothering to sit down and crunch the numbers) I've had a
30% success rate interviewing for programming jobs. I usually get about 2
rejections before I get an acceptance (and, of course, when I get accepted, I
stop interviewing). Based on that, I'd be led to conclude that I was a
_dismal_ programmer, probably not fit for the industry at all. If there was as
tight a tech shortage as they keep insisting there is, I'd expect it would be
pretty near impossible to be rejected for a programming job. Yet I find it
happens to me with alarming regularity and based on what I read here, I'm not
alone. It's almost as if the "talent shortage" is imaginary...

~~~
edhowzerblack
The talent shortage is absolutely imaginary. The hiring process is run by
incompetent internal recruiters and competitive developers with Aspergers
whose goal is to reject as many people as possible in order to prove that no
one is as smart as they are.

------
aantix
_This problem is no longer exclusive to the Bay Area. Hiring is time-consuming
and expensive, and many startups feel that they can’t compete with some of the
top salaries and perks offered by deep-pocketed alternatives._

Offer to teach the developer something.

"Java developers - want to learn Node and React?"

"Rails developers - want to learn Elixir?"

Get one senior person on staff who really knows the stack well and require
that they pair program every day with a different member of the team.

Good developers are grateful for the opportunity to level up their skills,
contribute, and still make a living.

Andres Camacho in SF has been VP of Engineering and CTO at several startups
and is king of this strategy.

~~~
daveFNbuck
If good developers want to level up their skills, how do you keep the senior
developer who you've turned into a tutor happy?

~~~
murph
Mentorship and teaching are also valuable skills. Many good senior engineers
would love to focus on them if their employer recognized it as valuable.

~~~
silveroriole
Is that really true? Maybe some, but I don’t know about “many”. I’d imagine
when most people start on their dev career, they don’t imagine their dream job
to be “teaching,” they imagine it to be coding. I think you’d have a tough
time getting responses for a “senior engineer” job ad that says you’ll
actually be a full time mentor.

~~~
mbrameld
I'm just an anecdote, but if I could earn the same salary teaching and
mentoring as I do as a tech lead I'd do it with very little hesitation.

~~~
amorphous
This route exists, it's called training and you can earn even more doing that.
Absolutely doable, but it's a long road to get there (salary- and lifestyle
wise).

------
malvosenior
It's funny because people keep saying this yet I've noticed something... The
interview process for developers is about 10X harder than it used to be a
decade ago. It used to be that you'd chat with a couple of people about tech,
projects you'd worked on... then get a job offer. Now there are multiple
rounds spread out over weeks with a massive number of team members, live
coding challenges galore, non-tech screening for all manner of sketchy things
(culture fit, dedication to diversity...).

I think a lot of this is based on they myth of: A bad hire causes _tons_ more
damage than not hiring a good person.

I call BS. To me this is just weak management. It's actually not that
difficult to fire someone. If you're in doubt, put an explicit probation
period in the contract. I think being able to effectively fire is management
101 but looks like it's becoming a lost art. I'm not sure if this is because
people are afraid of confrontation or they're just cargo culting the story
they've heard about bad hires.

Easy in, easy out and you'll see your dev shortage problem start to solve
itself.

~~~
dkersten
> A bad hire causes tons more damage than not hiring a good person.

I think it is true, but only if you don't identify it quickly and/or don't
reassign or fire them as necessary. I'm a firm believer of a holistic and
lightweight interview process followed by a trial period. The only way to
really understand if someone will work well in the position is to let them
give it a try.

------
weliketocode
The usual HN refrain here is 'pay more'.

And as a developer in NYC, I'd say this is accurate, but simplifies the
problem a bit too much.

Companies like their salary bands. Companies like to hire people at around the
same compensation as current employees in the same role with around the same
experience.

The problem is that demand has recently gone up and pay should go up with it,
but companies are refusing to adjust their bands and greatly increase pay for
their current employees across the board.

So, instead of addressing the pay issue head on, we're seeing a few really
really bad practices:

\- Lose candidates at the offer stage

    
    
      - Try to get comp expectations out of the way earlier.
    
        - Losing candidates to Big Co. for big pay discrepancies is likely tolerable
        - Losing candidates over $20k salary band issues is absolutely unacceptable
      - DO NOT let HR takeover the closing process. 
        - Don't try to give an exploding offer
        - Don't say an offer is 'best and final'
        - The CTO or VP eng should give the offer and 
          make it a priority to close the candidate
    

\- Giving pay increases to current employees only when they have other offers
or explicitly ask for it

\- Giving regular title bumps to justify pay increases

    
    
      - Your 'senior' engineers will be involved with hiring. 
        It's better to give junior/mid-level engineers big raises 
        than title bumps that will make hiring talent more difficult
    
    

If these points sound obvious, they're not. As a candidate, I have not seen a
single company that follows them.

And this post just addresses issues around compensation. I haven't even begun
to touch on being honest around your interview process. But let me put a few
questions out there as well:

\- How many rounds do you have?

    
    
      - 3 is probably a maximum. Never have more than one on-site
    

\- What is your accept rate at each round?

    
    
      - the accept rate should increase from round to round
    

\- For testing candidates

    
    
      - be very clear about what questions you're asking and why
      - know, objectively, what is considered a pass vs a fail for every question

~~~
lwhalen
I'd like to add on to that: "Pay more" and "Hire remote". Don't disregard the
consultant firms either. Many times I've seen a big push to hire an FTE (or
series of FTEs) to do a Big Project(tm), only to have to let the FTEs go after
Big Project(tm) is completed because there was no more work for them to do.

------
CamTin
If your business is essentially burning VC money for a decade to buy a ticket
in the Unicorn lottery, then the easy answer is to spend a lot more money. You
can do this by poaching expensive people, by offering more, or by hiring lots
more people than you need and keeping the ones you actually want. The result
will be more manpower faster, at significant expense.

You can also, as many companies default to, ration yourself by imposing very
grueling hiring requirements (months of fly-in interviews and hours-long take-
home assignments) and "competitive" (as determined by some non-market
mechanism like an industry survey) pay. The result of the latter will be long
hiring times for good-enough talent that is willing to work for whatever
you've pre-determined to be fair.

It's really no different from looking for a car: you can have a known high-
quality thing right now (buy new from a dealer/pay $$$ for top talent), or you
can buy a lot of potential lemons for cheaper until one happens to last
(grabbing random by-owner cars from Craigslist/hire-fast-fire-fast), or you
can just wait things out until you find the perfect deal (trawl Craigslist a
couple times a week until something jumps out as an incredible deal/pay
"market" rates and have a long hiring process).

There are tradeoffs to be made, and you have to make them according to what
you actually need and the resources you have. There's no physical law that
says you're entitled to unlimited world-class talent at bargain rates to build
your adtech startup.

------
systemtest
The cheapest way of finding talent is retaining it. I currently work on a
project with an empty backlog and a sprint full of impediments. We are all
looking for new jobs.

Hiring a good product owner would've meant retaining the team. Now you have to
have to find six new developers.

------
wrestlerman
I'm from Europe, so I will say why I don't want to work in London (and I get a
lot of offers from there!)

The salaries that are offered are a joke in London. The expenses are so huge
there! Even if the salary is a bit higher than my current one, I would spend
much more.

There are a lot of joke startups, some new cryptocurrency or blockchain
startups... Nope, I'm not gonna join anything like that.

Also, I'm not a huge fan of big cities and London is too crowded (for me).

Allow remote and I'm sure you are gonna find someone.

------
hc91
Man, there is NO shortage of tech talent, stop lying to yourself. You are just
not paying enough for people to even consider interviewing for your company.
Period. This is actually a very simple problem. Throw money at it and stop
complaining.

------
mattkrause
I'm not sure I believe this.

Find a random research university near you. It is chock-a-block full of
people, most of whom are very smart and many of whom can code. Since everyone
other than tenured profs has a precarious, low-paying job, this should be a
fairly easy pool to recruit from.

Nevertheless, I, a staff scientist in a computational field, get messages from
(maybe) 3-4 recruiters a year, all of whom are from huge companies. It would
be good to hear from more places and it would _great_ to hear from places that
are willing to consider my actual experience (look at my code, hear about my
data analysis) instead of asking me to dredge up half-remembered tricks from
my undergrad data structures class.

------
mnm1
Shortage my ass. These companies are not paying enough, not looking for remote
workers, and generally not offering enough attractive packages. There's no
shortage. Start paying more. Offer remote work. Stop being a shitty workplace.
Qualified developers will start pouring in. If you think a ping pong table and
beer keg are going to attract quality talent over a proper salary and remote
work you're delusional and shouldn't be in a position to hire.

------
stakhanov
Of the dozen-or-so companies that I've been through at this point, there were
only three where I would say they put a decent effort into trying to retain
the talent they ALREADY HAD. So if finding "fresh meat" is becoming more
difficult, maybe there is some good in that, if it incentivizes more to
adequately value the talent they already have and put a decent effort into
trying to retain them.

------
andy_adams
When I look for a job, I spend time investigating companies who align with my
experience, goals, etc - regardless of whether or not they're actively hiring.
Consider doing the inverse: Contact developers who may not be looking, but who
align with your company well.

It's flattering to hear from someone who is genuinely interested in hiring me
- if you're interested in _me_, I might consider you even if I wasn't planning
on leaving where I'm at.

Admittedly, it's time-consuming. But it's also "doing things that don't
scale".

~~~
wool_gather
This seems similar to the "hire from your network" that was mentioned in the
OP. Or, to rephrase, how do you find/target these developers?

~~~
andy_adams
I mean outside of your network - people you wouldn't normally get referrals
for. LinkedIn in a starting point, then researching an individual (Github
profile, Twitter, personal website, etc) to learn more. This will obviously
only work if the dev has a public life.

------
SJMosley
As a product manager, I have gotten to the last round of multiple interviews
(3 or more, meeting full teams and different departments).

Then been turned down as they are "going with other candidates", only to see
the job reposted. This has happened on multiple occasions.

Maybe I wasn't the right person for the role. One specific role has now been
up for 5 months. Which likely means the company is looking for an unrealistic
set of requirements that no one can meet instead of training appropriately.

In my opinion, the person that will come in and solve all your problems
without training does not exist. Make a decision and be okay with letting a
new employee get familiar with your company and industry.

~~~
Salesdude
Some companies post "non-existing jobs" for the following reasons:

1- Gather information from candidates about how other companies are doing the
same job or about their strategies

2- Go deeper into discussion with candidates who work for a competitor.

3- Look to be hiring for investors/competitors..etc

~~~
masonic
4- Fulfill a "we really looked for domestic candidates, honest!" checkbox
before hiring on visa.

------
JSeymourATL
> Job boards are getting crowded. Recruiters are generally worse.

It seems that most (young) recruiters these days rely primarily on Linkedin as
a sourcing tool. But that's not where the best talent is found.

The Hack to finding talent is to truly learn the recruiting process. That is
to say, can you identify, assess, and ATTRACT decent people on your own?

Start by asking: Who would know know my ideal candidate?

ON this subject, Lou Adler is masterful >
[https://youtu.be/9KLR6rteoOU](https://youtu.be/9KLR6rteoOU)

~~~
dkersten
> ATTRACT decent people

This reminds me of a recent post that rings pretty true: _" When hiring senior
engineers, you’re not buying, you’re selling"_

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18955731](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18955731)

------
protonimitate
I don't think the problem is a shortage of talent. I think the problem is that
the expectations for the amount of work a single employee can produce are
unrealistic.

Everyone wants to hire the 10xer. The problem is that they're a) expensive, b)
not always easy to work with, c) usually already employed.

If companies stopped focusing on getting the "best of the best" to produce
results overnight, and instead spent energy in investing in young/less
experienced candidates, things would be a lot easier for everyone. Of course,
this means that companies need to come up with ways to retain talent so they
don't "waste they time" on developing someones career to just have them
poached.

I find it funny how posts like these alternate between "why can' I find a
job?" and "why can't we hire anyone?". Obviously there's a disconnect
somewhere. There is absolutely no shortage of talent, it's just mismanaged
expectations (on both ends).

~~~
itronitron
Something to consider, if every company told every candidate that had an on-
site why they were not offered a position then the pool of candidates would
more easily adapt, over time, to the needs of these positions. That would be a
win for everyone involved.

------
rajacombinator
Pay more or be more willing to work with people who don’t have all the skills
you want. (Yet.) A lot of startups want to hire senior FAANG type talent and
pay them less than entry level at those companies. Good luck. You have to be
scrappy as a startup and that includes how you find talent.

------
vonmoltke
> This problem is no longer exclusive to the Bay Area.

When people question why so many companies start or stay in the Bay Area,
"density of talent" inevitably comes up as one of the reasons. I can't
reconcile that assertion with this one here.

~~~
hichamin
I agree, Silicon Valley is the mecca of engineering talent. However, the
demand for that talent greatly outranks the supply. With that being said, how
can a seed or even a Series A startup stand out and be able to attract
engineers when Facebook & Google are next door? Even better, how can a startup
retain its engineer that's probably getting x10 inboxes a day from other
companies with better packages?

I'm not challenging you here, but it's common questions I hear that can
complement your perspective...

~~~
malvosenior
You have to pay competitively. If you can't afford to pay FB level salaries
then you either didn't raise enough money or you have to be willing to part
with _serious_ equity. I think the days of founders retaining as much stock as
they traditionally have are over. You'll need to start compensating your
developers like you would execs. If you think about it, it actually makes
sense. Execs add value by scaling up an organization of people. Devs add value
by scaling up an organization of code and machines. In fact if you think about
it like that, devs should probably be getting paid _more_ than non-technical
executives.

------
quantumhobbit
Many here are commenting that you should pay more and that is true. But how
about not wasting the talent you already have?

I’ve had several jobs from startups to big companies and I have never been
utilized at anything close to 100% of my potential.

Try getting rid of pointless meetings, distracting open offices, insane IT
policies, and needlessly overcomplicated architectures. You may not even need
to hire any more enigineers if the ones you have are more productive.

------
cirgue
>Asking for profile A and getting profile B is a common frustration. For
startups, this tends to be a deal-breaker because hiring the wrong candidate
has a significant cost and impact on backlog and team.

This sticks out: the hiring process is really bad at making this judgement
effectively. We face this problem at my company, most of our best and worst
team members have been surprises.

~~~
hichamin
That is very relatable, and results primarily from failing to identify false
positives and false negatives in the hiring process.

An interview can result in a bad engineer being hired and later fired (a false
positive). And an interview can disqualify someone who could have done that
job well (a false negatives).

In order to keep the false positive rate low in the face of this noise,
companies have to bias decision ever farther toward rejection. The result is a
process that misses good engineers, still often preferences credentials over
real skill, and often feels capricious and frustrating to the people involved.
If everyone at your company had to re-interview for their current jobs, what
percentage would pass? This is a scary question. The answer is almost
certainly well under 100%. Candidates are harmed when they are rejected by
companies they could have done great work for, and companies are harmed when
they can't find the talent they need.

------
ykevinator
And by the way of the 30 or so engineers I have hired in the last 10 years,
exactly 1 would have been correctly filtered by a homework assignment and 7 or
8 would have been incorrectly filtered. Technical hiring in my opinion is so
poorly done by most people because they think developers are commodities that
can be standardized and quantified.

------
cletus
There is no such thing as a labour shortage. There is only an unwillingness to
pay. If you can't afford to attract talent at market rates then your business
model as it is exists isn't viable.

A big aspect to this is that the equity lottery of startups is largely gone
because companies going public is increasingly rare, companies stay private
longer (which presents real problems for the liquidity of employee options)
and there are just so many ways an employee can get screwed out of their
equity value that as the time a startup is private increases the value of the
equity inevitably approaches zero. Down rounds, liquidity preferences, that
sort of thing.

Equity is a pretty terrible deal for employees. Great for VCs. Great for
founders (mostly). Horrible for employees.

~~~
LoSboccacc
> There is no such thing as a labour shortage.

bullshit. we are looking for talent as hard as we can and we pay premium rates
compared to market.

90% of the people that enters the door can't code a for loop. a lot of the
candidates, especially those on the younger side, have terrible work ethics,
like they find hard to work in a team or under direction and to follow
instructions; they won't listen to anything and they'reso set into their own
way of doing things they will dismantle working software even after being
directed precisely to where and how to implement/fix stuff. and it doesn't
stop in the work are either, we got one that tried watching cartoons off a
pirate streaming site.

there's a huge shortage of people with brain, agency and will that can fill a
10x position, leaving company that don't do the umpteen iteration of the
average vertical tiered enterprisey app short and longing for employees.

~~~
masonic

      we are looking for talent as hard as we can 
    

... and yet you neither mention details nor have any contact info here or in
your profile.

~~~
LoSboccacc
...yes? people can talk about their situation without being living
advertisement.

------
pooya13
It seems to me that there is more talent going to software than ever and the
Junior dev starting salary has been steadily declining over the past decade.

------
RickJWagner
I can't imagine it's really that difficult.

I work remote, and love my job. But if something ever happened to change that,
I'd be glad to work for another company.

The other company just has to allow remote workers. Given that, I think
there's probably a big pool of talent to draw from.

------
sharemywin
Curious what your definition of an A versus B profile is?

~~~
amarraja
Not OP, but during a recent hiring process we asked for backend engineers
(e.g. java/golang/databases etc). Half of the CVs we received were for
Angular/React developers.

I'm unsure how this could happen with any sane vetting process.

~~~
hichamin
Wow, is that even true?

I do believe the "technical" layer in a recruiter is the most important thing.
Amarraja, how do you go about vetting your recruiter? Have you had any set of
criteria to identify a solid talent acquisition partner?

------
fucking_tragedy
Pay more.

~~~
fucking_tragedy
To add on to this: offer remote, and if you have an office, don't have an open
office setup.

------
mariusz331
Tech salaries have gone up faster than founders/VCs expected and it's becoming
more expensive to run a startup. Perhaps startups should wait a little longer
to raise money. It seems more important than ever to find product-market fit
before hiring.

------
nakedrobot2
Hey y'all,

there's a huge tech talent shortage in Prague, which has approximately 1000x
higher quality of life than the bay area. You can make a high salary here and
live extremely well. Bonus: no human feces on your front doorstep!

