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Comment by zgluck | Hacker News Reader

Making software is a bit special in that you can't really make use of people like that. In e.g. a supermarket you can.

That is exactly the problem. Business assumes highly technical people are fungible. They are not. There are very few highly competent people on the market. Not enough to cover realistic requirements for business. So they hire anyone who makes duck noises assuming they are ducks.

> So they hire anyone who makes duck noises assuming they are ducks.

Isn't it more accurate to say they hire anybody making duck noises assuming they are wolves? Technical interviews in no way identify the skills developers are going to use in their daily work.

Finding technically competent people is easy. Finding people who continue to give a fuck the moment their trial period is over is difficult.

> Finding technically competent people is easy.

This is not what I've been told by many, many hiring managers over the past few years.

> Finding people who continue to give a fuck the moment their trial period is over is difficult.

Well... yeah? I've been saying for years now that if passion is a hard requirement to getting a job, then you're begging your applicants to lie to you.

It's really easy. The problem they have is finding technically competent people in the desired budget.

Disagree. Openly offer a million dollars a year and the extra competent people you get will be buried under a neigh uncountable number of additional pretenders. So no matter what you pay it's never easy.

AND then the HR sociopaths filter out anyone not neurotypical who wouldn't have any issues doing the job, but is otherwise weird.

The fact that they accept most of the pretenders because they do a better job of acting normal is the worst part, because there are many more. dropping half the qualified isn't many people, letting half the pretenders through is a large number.

> Well... yeah? I've been saying for years now that if passion is a hard requirement to getting a job, then you're begging your applicants to lie to you.

Caring about the work is not passion. Most of the time work involves politics, paperwork and dealing with all sorts of things that people don't like. I doubt anyone is passionate about this type of thing.

Used to be "You can pay people to show up but you can't pay people to care" now it's more "You can pay people... they might show up"

It's demotivating when you know you're doing 80% of the work, but getting paid the same as the other 5 people on the team. When a company finds a great dev, they seldom have the sense to pay that person enough to make them feel motivated to outperform their colleagues.

Of course you can. Managing people mean having to deal with people of various skill levels and with different things motivating them. You have to find way to make it work and that means finding way to get something out of people who are not intrinsically motivated. No one said it was easy.

Eh, can, sure. Should, meh.

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