[lief79]

I agree with the basic idea, but the reality is more complicated.

Hiring someone has a lot of tangential factors that will come into play. Most hackers have a personality that tends to be strongly focused at the task at hand, often at the expense of paying attention to others things around them. This means that while they might be technically capable of functioning as an office assistant, it will be a very poor use of their skill set and others are likely to be able to do a better job with it, as they enjoy using the skill set required for the job. If the sole responsibility of the role is a tour guide, or PR individual, then there is a good chance that they are the hacker is the wrong individual for the job. On the same note, if there is a lot of repetitive work that requires an intense focus and can't be automated, quite often the hacker personalities may lose interest.

Just because one is qualified to do the job does not mean that you'll be meeting the companies unspecified needs. If you aren't agreeing to work for X amount of time, the company may lose out solely because the costs of hiring and replacing you are greater then the benefits you'll provide.

In summary, there are occasions where HR is required and does it well. Just because most companies err too far in one direction does not mean that there aren't legitimate reasons hiding in the original guidelines that will need to be addressed. For a specific instance, I have friend who is looking to go into coding from QA. We had a QA opening at my current employer, but the desire to leave QA means after X amount of time means that my friend was not the right candidate for that job.