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Comment by lovich | Hacker News Reader

I don't disagree with this articles satire, as it lines up with my experience if you remove a bit of the hyperbole. I am however curious as to why companies continue to do this and seem to be increasing their interview requirements in the face of an inability to hire.

The most reasonable sounding answer I can come up with is that executives are balking at engineering pay and rationalizing it to themselves by demanding ever more from engineers even though the number of people who can pass all these hoops is not increasing. That's based on gut instinct however, so if anyone has some actual insight they could share it would be appreciated.

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Not really. It comes down to the asymmetry in hiring outcomes. It is much more expensive to hire a bad employee than it is to hire a good employee. It’s gotten exceptionally hard to just fire people in corporate America, at-will employment notwithstanding.

Is it really that hard, though? I mean, you say at-will employment notwithstanding, but like, that's not my experience at all. Companies are free to hold you to whatever absurd metersticks they want, and even if they fire you for-cause, it's not like they a) even need a cause or b) will ever properly share that cause with you or c) share it externally at all.

Mind you - not that I actually want them to do C) - but my point is that the law provides zero protection, the culture provides zero protection/accountability, and the only thing that provides anything is whatever weird bureaucratic nonsense the company has imposed upon itself.

My point being, companies have only themselves to blame for making it hard to fire people. Both companies I've worked for have fired really high-performing people for (these are my interpretations, but I do honestly believe they're the "real" reason all these folks were fired, and I was closely familiar with the details in all the situations I mention here):

Chronological order of my witnessing them over the years. Several different companies.

1. My boss didn't like how the guy thought. Literally, the guy got good results and wasn't weird or crazy or anything, but him and my boss always had kind of weirdly unproductive conversations. I liked the guy, personally.

2. He very loosely implied the owner of the company didn't know or like statistics. (Which was correct). This is while the owner of the company was trying to shove his nose way to deep into a system he had designed 20 years ago but had been away from, and in his absence the code and the industry had moved on. He got fired and a complicated statistical modelling system was replaced with one a high-schooler would've built.

3. He was a good performer but a bit brusque, but our newest boss was kind of lukewarm for him, so when my boss's boss's boss's boss decided he was the reason some project failed, he eye-of-sauron'd him and had him fired, and my manager didn't really step up to defend him.

These just off the top of my head. I've also seen droves of people fired essentially because the owner would hired 20-ish new-grad-type folks/early career, then over about a year fire all but 3-5 of them, and those who survived were then kept on for a more normal period of time. The de-facto 1-year trial period wasn't ever explicitly described to them (just a 60-day review that was just a rubber-stamp) or formal. People literally moved hours away (this job was unusually high-paying for our locale) and bought new houses and in some cases moved families (not all were early-career, that was just most of our funnel), only to be fired 1 month later for no (to them) apparent reason other than that they weren't in the small handful the owner decided to keep that year.

Really hard to feel sympathetic towards corporations of any size when being absolutely evil to common folk seems to just be how the game is played.

Is it more expensive than leaving the position open for months though? I’ve seen multiple companies I’ve applied at and my own employer just sit with empty roles which meant the job never got done.

I was under the impression from the startup world and my won engineering experience that getting to market with a substandard product was always better than never releasing because you were aiming for perfection.

I think at big companies that serve millions, it's more the other way. The brand hit of a substandard product or actual defects could result in recalls or lawsuits. It's the problem of scale: imperfect code works for a few hundred users but you need finely engineered code to work for millions. Same with other products as they will be used in every crazy way you can imagine and some you can't.

I get why FAANGs do this, the scale the work at and the salaries they pay make it seem worth the extra scrutiny.

I wasn’t clear in my previous question but I don’t work at FAANG tier, I work at startups and enterprises who struggle to break 200 million/yr in revenue and offer 180k max for principal engineer positions. What I’m curious on is why all these bit players are acting like they need FAANG level talent without paying out the salaries, but more importantly, paying the cost of having this complicated an interview process.

Every position they leave unfilled is an opportunity cost and every extra step they add to their interview process is another few thousands of dollars they add to the acquisition cost of every engineer. I’m struggling to see what the benefit is for them when they do not operate on the scale that requires meticulous engineering

It is easy to imagine it’s more expensive to hire a baddie vs an empty role. Have you not worked with people who were a drain on the entire team? I rather have deadlines pushed back than a bad hire.

I worked with people that I believe were net-negative contributors: it would literally have been better if they did no "work" at all and never showed up. I've seen good engineers quit because they got tired of dealing with these net-negative contributors, two of which were also assholes (almost did myself).

This is of course the extreme; I've worked with three people where this was the case. But in both cases I believe they seriously set back the product and didn't just squander the salary of these people. In less extreme cases, you are "merely" throwing away the salary, but that can be a high cost too for a small company.

Hiring people can absolutely come with a certain risk, especially if you're not prepared (or legally able) to fire people, or otherwise don't have good enough management to reign in people.

Is it that much more expensive? It's mostly opportunity cost imo, but that's basically a nonfactor for big corps that take ages to do anything anyway, and they are constantly hiring replacements.

I can terminate team members with a couple of clicks in workday if I wanted. Seems overblown.

Ha! that's a funny one a company will not hesitate to fire you. Just look at how many companies started layoffs as soon as the stock market started crashing

Makes you wonder if it is some sort of collusion to make it more difficult for current employees to jump ship if they know it will be painful ordeal.

It is super expensive to hire someone. The costs are enormous.

Let's take a hire that will make $10,000 per month, nice round number.

Someone in HR has to write the job description. This takes the HR person's time, the hiring manager, the hiring manager's boss just to get the information for a job description

Job description cost with hiring manager: $500 Job description cost with hiring manager's boss: $500 HR person's time to talk to hiring managers and to write the job description: $1000

Job board postings: $250

Headhunters if found through them: $30,000 (3 month's salary)

Corporate career page posting and social media posting of job description: $500

Interviewing with multiple people, even a few rounds: $5,000-$10,000

Hring temporary/freelance person to cover work to be done by permanent hire before new employee leaves prior job and starts with yours: $20,000

Filling out paperwork and miscellaneous expenses: $1,500

Employee takes 3 months getting up to speed and not really producing, but still being paid: $30,000

Employee decides the job is not a good fit for him or her and quits 9 months later: $90,000 wasted.

*Total cost to hire and then the person quits:* $184,250 wasted

Additional cost: cost of not getting work done because of hiring errors, that needs to be done: ???? you tell me. A lot.

So a company hires 50 people and 20 quit because the were not vetted propertly: that is $3,685,000 in wasted money. Now, realize that this $3,685,000 is in after tax dollars, so if the company's profit margin is 15%, it takes $24,566,667 in product and/or service sales to cover those wasted hiring expenses. Because those 20 employees were fired or quit, it will take another $24,566,667 in sales to cover the next round of hiring, or almost $50,000,000. If those new 20 hires, if 8 of them quit...well, the game goes on and on.

So, a company best be damn careful in one's hiring practices.

(numbers above might or might not be accurate, but it doesn't matter, that's not the point. The point is that it costs a lot of money to hire and then lose an employee after a short time period due to employee quitting, or getting fired for incompetence, anger issues, harassment problems, or whatever. Hiring highly paid employees is a dangerous game.

This is from the company's perspective, not yours. But if you started your own company, would you want to pay $50 million for bad hiring decisions? No. You would make double-damn sure there would be a lot of vetting processes.

And realize, this is not about you for anyone reading this. It's about the statistics over dozens of hiring decisions.

It can go like that. A lot of other times, a trusted dev brings their buddy on after an hour talk with the team and it just works out because one person has directly worked with them in the past and two others have a friend that also vouches for them. Seen this most places I've worked.

Sure. No question about that at all. That's why companies reward employees who bring in new people and they get hired.

That's difficult to control, though, that's the problem. And especially if a company wants to hire 15 devs this quarter, who have the required skill set.

If you have a small company with 5 devs, and it hires 1, maybe 2 new devs over the course of the year and there's no real time frame on finding a new dev, you only hire when you find a good person, well, that is a different scenario entirely.

But like most things, that is only an ad hoc solution. What do you do, as the business owner asks the devs for referral and there are none? What do you do? You have to go to the open market. And as I wrote in my last post:"It's about the statistics over dozens of hiring decisions." So not just a hire here and there, but for a sytem.

I work a lot with people in the trades - electricians, plumbers, dry wallers, insulation installers, etc. Man, you think there's a shortage in devs??? Nobody, but nobody, is going into the trades anymore. There's no one to hire, no one to refer.

Companies give tiny raises to loyal employees. If hiring is so expensive why don't companies make effort to retain employees by giving them raises that make their compensation at least at par with that of the new hires.

Because human nature favors inertia. Some may leave because they don't get pay raises, but most people hate change. So they stay. And the company gets higher profits by keeping payroll down. However, if every single person quit exactly at performance review time, every single employee, due to not keeping up with new hires or comparable pay to the industry, they would change. But they don't do this because all employees don't quit. It's a simple calculation. How many people will quit? if you have 100 tech people, getting paid $100,000/year each, that is 10,000,000 per year. Give them 25% raise and then the payroll goes up $2,500,000 per year, and you have to pay that the next year, too, and the next year, and the next year. Plus bonuses and all that. Payroll taxes go up, too. So a lot more expenses. Also, if you give people a 25% raise, what do you give them the following year and the one after that? There's all kinds of psychological things going on in the game. You give someone a 25% raise this year and a 1.5% raise next year, nobody is going to look at it as bringing them on par to others, they are going to look at being ripped off because they got 25% last year and only a measly 1.5% this year. "Why didn't I get at least 12%???"

But if there are low raises, and 2 people quit because they are not getting paid enough, then the company hires 2 more people to replace them, that's going to be $350K to hire two new hires.

Sibling commenter gave you a complicated answer.

The one-word answer is: Greed. Never under-estimate the human capacity for emotion and character deficiency to get in the way of the rationally correct strategy.

Greed is overly simplistic.

I think my complicated answers are better. :)

> So a company hires 50 people and 20 quit because the were not vetted proper[]ly: that is $3,685,000 in wasted money. Now, realize that this $3,685,000 is in after tax dollars, so if the company's profit margin is 15%, it takes $24,566,667 in product and/or service sales to cover those wasted hiring expenses.

Why would a company's operating expenses be in after tax dollars? The whole point of a "before tax" / "after tax" distinction is that operating expenses are before tax.

And the profit margin is not a constant. If you have a certain amount of revenue, and then your expenses go up... that means your profit margin has shrunk.

None of the costs you list would come out of profit, because... they are operating expenses. By definition, profit is what's left after they're covered.

It's next to impossible to figure out what you're trying to say, but my suggestion to you is to model some cash flows. Don't even think about a "profit margin".

> Employee decides the job is not a good fit for him or her and quits 9 months later: $90,000 wasted.

Interesting philosophy. By extension, if the employee decides the job is not a good fit and quits after 240 months, you just wasted $2,400,000.

Well, I'm looking at it like this, in my own viewpoint:

So what I am saying is that one has to have real actual dollars to pay. So if a business makes $100,000 per year, and out of that is rent, utilities,etc, but not including the hiring expense, you have 15% profit margin, or $15,000 left over. So if hiring a person costs $2,000, then you lower your profit margins to $13,000, or 13%. So to keep the profit margin at 15% you have to make extra sales to cover that hiring expense. This is the same with all expenses, but I'm only focusing on the hiring expense. What I'm saying is that for each expense, extra income has to be generated to cover the expenses and hopefully get a profit margin that is acceptable. There's a cost to each dollar earned. You can't operate a business without a profit, and the more the profit the better, and the best is to protect profit margins. But as I said in my original post, I'm not getting technical and/or exact. I'm giving the overall view on it.

>>Employee decides the job is not a good fit for him or her and quits 9 months later: $90,000 wasted.

>Interesting philosophy. By extension, if the employee decides the job is not a good fit and quits after 240 months, you just wasted $2,400,000.

Amortization. Buy a car for $100,000 and keep it for a month and you wreck it (without it being insured), then that car costs you $100,000 per month, if you just drove it out of the lot and wreck it .25 miles after purchase. If you keep it 100,000 months, and you wreck it on the 100,000th month, then it costs you a dollar (ignoring MACRS for kicks).

Point being that after only 9 months, a company would not have got full value out of the hire because of the learning process, but hopefully after 240 months (20 years), a company should have had that employee up and running, but if not, that's yet another hiring/firing error.

Long and short of it in my opinion: You are taking this WAY too seriously. The point is that companies take a long, long time to hire someone because it is super expensive to make a mistake, in cash. I didn't even mention the morale issue of hiring a suck employee and other non-tangible costs. Do you agree with that or not? All the other stuff is just quibbling.

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