[_m8fo]

This is a myth. It's easy to hire good people, just offer more money. The end.

Now, if your question is how to hire the best engineers on some budget, that's a different question. Regardless, the less money you offer, the less likely you'll be able to hire "good people".

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A more interesting and profitable question to have the answer to is how to make a bad engineer a good one for the least amount of money possible.

[lmilcin]

Believe me, it's not as easy as you may think.

The main reason is that good engineers will be quick to change their jobs when faced with enough bullshit, but the B and lower grades will be all to happy to take any bullshit as long as you pay them the good money you are paying.

You can't make good engineer from bad. Good engineer is a person who is interested in what they are doing. You can't make a person genuinely interested in engineering if they are not.

You can make skilled, experienced good engineer from unskilled/unexperienced good engineer.

You can tell who will be a good engineer even before they start doing professional work. These will be the people who have integrity, who like to learn, have capability to solve complex abstract problems, stamina to deal with complicated problems for an extended period of time.

[_m8fo]

"B and lower grades"... what? If you have some magical process to separate the "B and lower" from the supposed A, do tell. Even if you had such a process money would be the mechanism to capture and retain the best people, so yeah, money is still the solution to this problem.

[PeterisP]

That's kind of the problem - no one has a magical process to quickly/easily separate good engineers from the mediocre ones, you can only filter out obvious incompetence.

So simply offering lots of money is not sufficient to hire good engineers, you'll still get a mix of good and poor ones, and will need to figure out to filter them afterwards when you've had sufficient time to see what they're made of.

[_m8fo]

You're right that there's no process to quickly and easily separate them, however for enough money people will endure a long and difficult process, which is the point.

[freyir]

If you’re a company with a lousy reputation, you’ll still lose out on good people to a well-funded company with a good reputation.

I mean, you could try to outbid your competitors on every hire, but that’s not a sustainable strategy.