Hacker News Reader

Comment by smil | Hacker News Reader

>What they're doing mostly makes sense - let somebody else pre-qualify you and then we'll have a look. If they can do that, why wouldn't they?

Because recruiting knowns, that are often already employed, means paying higher wages, as well as losing the competition for skilled labor.

Right now, there is an enormous opportunity for businesses to higher well and treat employees well, in order to recruit the most competent employees, create continuity, a strong brand, higher efficiency and quality in work performed, and thereby higher profitability.

Employers are simply incompetent--Employ-unable.

View on HN

There has always been the option to hire people, treat them well and retain them. That's what Google and the like are already doing.

The question is what about the 80% of the people who are not ninja/wizard/superhero-like? They just do their work and go home?

They don't care much about work, they want to get paid as much as possible, work the fewest hours and fuck off.

The people having trouble recruiting are the small-ish companies who want those top 20% that google is taking, except they can't compete on price, perks, or anything frankly.

They're the ones screaming 'omg impossible to find good developers!'

What they should be yelling is 'given my slim shitty margins, I can hardly get by and can be out of business in a year or two, so it's do-or-die mode every quarter.'

But that'd be being honest. Instead, let's complain about lack of talent :)

> The question is what about the 80% of the people who are not ninja/wizard/superhero-like? They just do their work and go home?

> They don't care much about work, they want to get paid as much as possible, work the fewest hours and fuck off.

I find that false dichotomy offensive. The vast majority of people are not $BUZZWORDs who just want to do their work and go home, but who do care about their job and doing the best they can. This idea that you have to blow off your job and do the least possible to skirt by is toxic bullshit.

You're right, there's a wide spectrum. It was an oversimplification for the sake of brevity.

I consider myself part of the 80%, so it is not like I am putting anybody down. There's parts of the 80% who care, but not care so much that they are at google.

I am one of those people, I do good work, I just don't devote my life to programming. Then there's the other parts of the 80% who can't even program and bullshit on their resumes.

What the 80% have in common is given the choice, they'd MOSTLY take fewer hours and bigger paycheques. The 20% would likely not take fewer hours but would still take the bigger paycheques.

That's the difference as far as I can tell - some people devote their life to work, others see it as a big part of life, but not all-encompassing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com