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by hogFeast 2319 days ago
Dear God, I wish companies were run like this. Everyone refers to these faceless "companies"...no, you are being hired by employees just like you who almost always overpay for staff. They overestimate their ability to assess talent, HR usually link their own salaries to the people they hire...it is a shitshow.

Look at CEO pay, most CEOs are clueless. They are way overpaid. Google is a perfect example, that business is a cash machine, it could be run by a ham sandwich, and they are paying people $100m+ to run it...lul. Jokes.

Btw, this also shouldn't matter. If your business relies on hiring these 1 in 1000, super-smart individuals (ignoring the fact that it is statistically impossible to actually do this if you are hiring thousands of programmers), you will fail. Every time. You get into a bidding war, and your budget depends on the intelligence of others to not overpay. If you can work out how to turn average employees into good ones, you will print money because no-one wants average employees...supply is infinite, you will never overpay (I know companies that have done this...they usually end up acquiring the companies that hire the "boffins" and fire everyone on day one).

In tech, the opportunities for this are basically limitless. It is pretty easy to teach someone how to code, the main challenge is really all the stuff you learn "on the job"...and guess what? You have a job to teach them. Why doesn't this happen? Try telling a coder he has to help a junior guy out one day a week and stop fucking about with Haskell/burning cash. Try telling HR that you want to hire unremarkable people. Try finding an executive who wants to work somewhere where they hit singles...he has an MBA you know, he swings for the fences every time. You are vastly overestimating, ironically, the intelligence of most people who work in companies (I worked in equity research for a while...Buffett's dictum of a company that could be run by a ham sandwich has much wisdom).

1 comments

Actually most software business use that business model. Eg. buy low, sell high. The difference between market rates and wages are their profit.
That is true. It occurred to me after that I had seen that in consultancies...that works, it is possible to do this sustainably and with less churn.