Why is it so hard to find good engineers?
Why is it so hard to find good engineers to hire?
Because being a good coder (which seems to be called engineer for prestige these days) needs thousands and thousands of hours to be good at
Not any harder than finding a good teacher, chef or whatever.
I can ask the same thing from the other side, why is it so hard to find a good company? What are you hiring? I am searching.
What kind of opportunities are you looking for?
FANG take all the good ones, in addition to plenty of average ones.
Do you feel that once FANG hires all the good ones, the engineers feel comfortable in their jobs where they can coast and then they dont have the drive to do more or less than asked?
No I think they keep driving improvement in their respective field, which is what makes them great. But it is hard for non-FANG to hire those people.
Fair enough
Offer better pay and you will find them. Also make sure you process applications timely, I applied to many places few months ago and never received good or bad feedback.. it is just like companies advertise jobs that they have no openings for.
Our process is 7 business days from start to offer. We have competitive pay and an awesome product. Just having a hard time finding engineers that have built end to end web apps that have shipped, worked or built with apis and have experience with unit or automated tests and believe in have high code coverage. Is that asking too much?
When you say "competitive pay" what do you mean? What do you expect to pay 2-5 year experienced talent with the sort of skill set you describe?
In my experience the best hires have been people that dropped out of their CS degree (note: after they had taken the core CS classes) and went to a bootcamp or an alternative school in SF and then entered industry. They immediately had the fundamental DS&A down and knew modern frameworks/languages/tools. These engineers learned faster and were more self motivated.
Thanks for the tip!
Some people argue against this but the key here are software engineers that GOT INTO good CS schools and basically saw that they could “double dip” knowledge pools to be a more valuable engineer. I’m not kidding they’re great engineers.
There is no shortage of good engineers. There is a shortage of engineers willing to work for your shite company at the compensation you’re willing to pay
Yes it’s hard but worth the effort. As Bill Gates said, good engineer is 10,000x more valuable than bad engineers. Not sure the exact words but he said st similar.
Yes. Bad engineers are counterproductive. Their work often leads to financial losses.
Shortage of Engineers is a lie. Most can be trained to fit the needs.
If you are a startup, it is hard to hire people who can competently code in the Bay Area at the wages you can afford. You pretty much have to import talent, people who will buy the dream in exchange for the chance to relo here. Hiring local talent is only possible if you can give huge amounts of equity or pay competitively with the big boys.
How many Startups have you worked in to state this? It is not true. A lot of folks exclusively want to work in Startups for the sense of ownership and the cause for which it stands. Money is not incredibly bad in Startups as it used to be, heck folks are getting regular paychecks even.