[strlen]

The bit about hiring contractors, especially for vital functions such as infrastructure and support is bad advice. A high quality contractor charges a very high hourly rate (it also usually isn't feasible to give them a sizable equity grant in its place), so you're left hiring people who would prefer a full time job but can't get one. This creates a poisonous and unpleasant atmosphere, which makes you even less likely to hire strong people full time.

I understand that "war for talent" is a popular narrative, but you note that those writing about it are almost always journalists who aren't programmers themselves. Non-technical writers don't understand quality developers want something more than a paycheck: they want to work on challenging problems, with people who they can learn from and in a company that has a shot at making an impact on the world. If you want to hire quality people than you should take hiring (all steps: from employment branding to interviewing to closing) a top priority: give employees time to interview candidates (expect each engineer to interview at least two or three candidates each week), be willing to let a position go unfilled for a _long_ time until the right person is found.

In short, be ready to reply "we'd like to do Y, but either we must strip out a feature X from Y, spend more time working on it or transfer an engineer working on Z to work on Y". If you're working on a hard technical problem, then your investors and customers shouldn't have a problem with that. If you're not (and there's nothing wrong with that), change your hiring strategy appropriately e.g., if you're building CRM software, stop trying to go after TopCoder finalists and ex-Google Search Engineers and instead look for engineers who are interested in business and product design/development. The former aren't going to be interested in joining you (other than at an exorbitant rate) until you're ready to use their talent, the latter will help you build the business to the point where you will need their help scaling it.

To use a vulgar analogy, the strategy of hiring a contractors to "move faster" is analogous to a man having nine one night stands hoping to conceive a baby in a month ("because I can't find the right long-term partner, and nine months is too long to wait anyway"): it's wrong on many levels and will poison your culture. It's long been known (Brooks' Law) that adding more "bodies" to a project to a project that's at risk of being late will only make it more late. Creating a company full of dubious quality contractors (with no loyalty, no "fire in the belly" about the product) will make your company look toxic to engineers used to working at "talent brand" companies where engineers are passionate about what they're working on and are confident in their technical abilities.

The CEO's real job is to manage the managers ("no, we don't have the resources to ship X at time T"), and sell the company (including to prospective employees). The blog post doesn't read "wow, this is a company worth leaving or turning down an offer from {Google, Facebook, Microsoft, etc...} for!".

[jimbokun]

"...and instead look for engineers who are interested in business and product design/development."

Isn't this the same as the generalists she recommends hiring?

[strlen]

Wasn't direct at her in particular. Also note that she isn't building CRM software. The example wasn't about her. In addition, generalists may actually not be appropriate for _some_ kinds of software development: it depends on your application.

Generally heavy complaints of "it's impossible to hire engineers" comes from a dissonance between engineers you're trying to hire and the engineers you actually need to hire (or at least the engineers that are interested in your product).

[alnayyir]

I don't approve of her leaning on contractors so much, but HN comments have be to the most well written exemplars of armchair quarterbacking I have ever seen.

[nitrogen]

Surely you've been reading HN long enough to know that some of the quarterbacks here (to abuse the metaphor) have an actual game or two under their belts.

[alnayyir]

Yeah, not the OP though. Which is the point I was obliquely getting at.

Conversations are not algorithms, you don't be default consider the most general or pathological case. I'm not saying this to PG.

[strlen]

For what it's worth, I've worked in multiple start-ups that relied on or made extensive use of contractors (one for the same reason: it was difficult to hire designers and engineers) and have seen this very dynamic. I've also worked at a company that made heavy use of "perma-temps", have contracted myself (when I was a full time student) and have heard (anecdotally, from many contractors) what the different reasons for going into contracting are (tl;dr top ones do it because the hourly pay is higher or to bootstrap their own business, but the majority do it because they can't find anything else).

That's the primary cause for this comment: bringing in unknown quality contractors makes it difficult to retain and hire quality full time employees.

I've also worked at companies that have built a talent brand and a big company that has squandered its (looking at my resume, you can probably guess what they are).

I don't claim to be a quarterback, but the idea the article suggest is just egregious. I would not want to work at that kind of a company. I am not suggesting whether or not that approach will do what the corporation intends to do: generate profit for their shareholders. There are many cases where poor quality engineering teams have created outsize returns on investment: the market, the timing, the business models matter too. I am not making suggestions on any of the other points in the article.

[alnayyir]

I don't want to work at that kind of company either. I agreed with you, remember?

The point is that there is excessive armchair quarterbacking here from people who haven't actually headed companies.

You could've just said, "I wouldn't work there for such and such reason" and left it at that.

[strlen]

One doesn't need to have headed a company to understand the impact this has on culture and engineering hiring. The author of the article, I believe, is fresh out of college and hasn't actually _worked_ in an engineering role in many companies herself. That's fine, indeed Facebook (also founded by an inexperienced CEO, this isn't really bad in it of itself) has made the same mistake early on: hiring dubious quality contractors. Their status as an "technology brand" didn't come until mid-2007 or so (despite the culture becoming much better and attracting some strong engineers by 2006/early 2007) due to mistakes like this.