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Comment by nir | Hacker News Reader

There isn't a talent shortage. There's a shortage of courage to hire anyone with less then a Google-level CV and of will/ability to mentor them.

The 4 * 2 hour reviews + coding test + references + logic questions + firewalking culture is ridiculous. It might make sense in places where firing employees is extremely difficult, but not in NYC or SF.

%99 of the jobs supposedly in "shortage" could be filled by anyone with an attitude for programming, self motivation and a good mentor. Look at the current products of Silicon Valley - how many of these require much more than basic web development skills?

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There's no economic incentive to hire anyone below the top decile. Assuming you believe the "10x" rule (which says that there is a 10x productivity delta between the best and worse developers), I get the best bang-for-the-buck by hiring the best developer I can find.

Even if compensation did scale linearly with productivity, two programmers with productivity X are still worse than one programmer with productivity 2X since communication costs grow as the team size grows.

I wouldn't be a prudent businessman if I didn't fight relentlessly for the best developers...

Of course you should hire the best dev you can find (though I seriously doubt its possible to tell who'll be the best for you - both in terms of skill and, as importantly, personality).

Personally I don't believe in the x10 rule. It might have been true when you had to code your own servers in Lisp to build a website, not when you build a Django CRUD app.

In any case, when you mentor someone, they may turn out to be that top %10 dev.

But..but..Everyone's told me that A players only hire A players, and hiring anyone else would sink my company. I'm an A player and only Linus himself will be good enough to write my CRUD app. I wonder when he'll be available..

This is what I imagine is actually going on.

I also imagine there's plenty of talent in places in the US besides SV and NYC.

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