| >[T]he burden is on the company to understand what skills they need to hire for well enough to hire for the role It's best not framed as a burden, but a tradeoff. Companies who understand better what skills they need to hire for quite reliably higher higher quality candidates, or are able to get away with paying them less, or both. Take McDonald's as an extreme example. I am certain McDonald's has paid good money to figure out exactly what someone needs to be able to do in order to be an able burger flipper. That's a big part of why they're able to hire such folk quickly, at scale, at $10 an hour. Most software companies face economic conditions which incentivize them to take the other end of the tradeoff. The work often is percieved to span such a vast possibility space it's nearly impossible to precisely specify the requirements a software engineering job has, in a way anything like the McDonald's position can be. One of the mechanisms they choose to employ to minimize false positives despite this huge uncertainty in their own requirements is "Offer a lot of money and let the cream rise to the crop via pre-hiring competition". Hiring someone at $100/hr who is obviously and clearly very smart and hardworking is a much safer bet than hiring someone at $85/hr who you think could probably handle the job with a lot of effort, assuming nothing in their personal life derails them over the next 6 months or anything. Final aside: >This is surely how you find the best plumber because only the best will take the time to really understand what they are doing when they fix a sink right? Nobody's ever looking for the best. They're looking for good enough, within tolerances. I do have an uncle who did become a plumber after a long career as a chemical engineer. He is extremely sought after, and charges to match. He doesn't usually take "change my sink" jobs. |