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by jacques_chester 3651 days ago
> to achieve our vision for Joist, we need the best talent in the world

This is a standard mantra of startup lore, but if I put on my nitpicking hat, is it strictly true?

I mean we're not talking about the Manhattan Project here.

Plus it's not as though there isn't intensely fierce competition for talent in the valley. Just because a lot of talented people are there, doesn't mean you'll get to hire them. The "best talent in the world" is already bid up to high levels by those few companies in the Bay Area who are straddling rivers of gold.

Where I work, we have offices all over the world, including one here in NYC and another in Toronto. Because of the timezone alignment and relatively short travel times, we're now experimenting with more and more remote pairing to share projects between the two offices.

In Joist's position I might have considered opening an NYC office instead. It's not as though this city lacks for talent either and if they feel like paying a lot for it, the finance folks have kindly bid up top performers for them. They can get all the difficulties of hiring in the valley, but much closer to home.
2 comments
johan_larson 3651 days ago
The question to ask anyone who claims they only hire the best is, "How do you make sure of that?"

They should have an answer, and it needs to be a good one.

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p4wnc6 3651 days ago
Well, we make them do a really hard HackerRank test, and then write syntactically correct code to print a binary tree in raster order on a whiteboard. And then we don't hire them because their salary demands are too high so we get someone cheaper with less experience.
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jacques_chester 3651 days ago
We used to have a question for interviewers where I work: "Will this person raise the average?"

I used to detest it. I left no shortage of smartarse remarks about infinite limits in a finite world.

In fact nobody really liked that question and it was eventually removed in favour of variations on the core question: do you want to work with this person?

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johan_larson 3651 days ago
> "Will this person raise the average?"

"Do half of you think you're dumber than this guy?"

It's a great question.

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e5india 3651 days ago
Yeah this really stuck out to me. Why does Joist require top talent anyways? It seems to me that the technical work they'd need is pretty routine web application building. I really don't see Joist attracting top-talent in SV anyways. Unless they're planning on offering top dollar why would any top talent go work for a startup in the home improvement space?
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