Comment by coliveira
14 hours ago
> some specific job listings we had open for years
If you need to wait YEARS to hire someone with some specific experience, I can guarantee that you really didn't need that person. You're doing this just to check some specific artificial goal that has little to do with the business.
>If you need to wait YEARS to hire someone with some specific experience, I can guarantee that you really didn't need that person. You're doing this just to check some specific artificial goal that has little to do with the business.
There's a difference between "critically needing" and "would benefit from."
If you can find the specialist who's done what you're doing before at higher scale and help you avoid a lot of pain, it's awesome. If not, you keep on keeping on. But as long as you don't start spending too much on the search for that candidate, it's best to keep the door open.
So this is not a job that you need to fill, it is a wish you may have and that is mostly impractical. If you really needed that person, you would go find them and pay way more than they're making now or give them something else they want to join immediately.
> So this is not a job that you need to fill,
There is no requirement that every job opening needs to be urgently filled.
You keep repeating this like it means the job opening shouldn't exist at all. Not all job openings are for urgent demands that must be filled right away or not exist at all.
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> If you need to wait YEARS to hire someone with some specific experience, I can guarantee that you really didn't need that person.
I've worked in specialized fields where it takes YEARS for the right candidate to even start looking for jobs. You need to have the job listings up and ready.
This was extremely true when we were working on things that could not be done remote (literal physical devices that had to be worked on with special equipment in office).
Engineers aren't interchangeable cogs.
> I can guarantee that you really didn't need that person.
So what? There are many roles where we don't "need" someone, but if the right person is out there looking for a job we want to be ready to hire them.
So what did you do when those devices broke for years while you had no local/physical person on site? You either didn't need to employ the person bad enough or didn't need the devices to function bad enough.
Engineers aren't cogs, but they are able to travel and you can hire them by other means that full-time employment. So I suspect that was probably what you were meant to do for your situation.
Nothing about this was mission critical or even all that important or you would have found a way to solve the problem or you did and it wasn't a problem to begin with. I'm in a field where people often want to hire me for some special thing like this, but it often turns out, most of my life would be spent idle because no one company has enough demand for me. I can consult instead and be busy all year, or I can take a job for someone that's OK with me being idle for 80% of my time. I prefer the former for multiple reasons but just making an example of why hiring for specialized roles that aren't mission critical is often not the thing you should be doing.
> So what did you do when those devices broke for years while you had no local/physical person on site? You either didn't need to employ the person bad enough or didn't need the devices to function bad enough.
I don't know why you assumed that. We had teams. We just wanted to grow them.
We weren't sitting there waiting.
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> I've worked in specialized fields where it takes YEARS for the right candidate to even start looking for jobs. You need to have the job listings up and ready
If this is true then those shouldn't even be public job postings. That sort of critical position is for headhunters
> If this is true then those shouldn't even be public job postings.
Why? Not everyone is on LinkedIn or has an updated profile.
Some of the best candidates I've hired were people who were in other states who were planning to move, but waiting for the right job opportunity to come up.
We also used recruiters.
Why does it make people so angry that we posted job listings for real jobs that we were really hiring for?
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Or... your company should be training potential replacements. This is what the US military and "white shoe" consulting companies do. While expensive, it guarantees that critically needed skilled staff are always available.
I recommend the article "Up or Out: Solving the IT Turnover Crisis" [0] which gives a reasonable argument for doing exactly that.
Notes:
0 - https://thedailywtf.com/articles/up-or-out-solving-the-it-tu...
> If you need to wait YEARS ...
Imagine working on voyager II .. or some old-ass banking software that still runs RPG (look it up, I'll wait), or trying to hire someone to do numerical analysis for the genesis of a format that supercedes IEEE float .. or .. whatever.
There are many applications for extremely specific skillsets out there. Suggesting otherwise is, in my opinion, clearly unwise
Exactly. Hire someone 80-90% there and invest in their training FFS.
Answered elsewhere: If we're investing in someone's training we'll promote someone from within who is already familiar with the product and then backfill their simpler work.
So you had a talent pipeline, you just didn't like how hands on it was or how it took time to develop. We'd all prefer a magical unicorn applicant that checks every box but it's never possible especially the more you're required to know about specifics that are best learned internally to begin with. The whole hiring angle you describe seems silly in terms of process and expectations
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How do you know if someone is 80-90% there without having the job posting for the profile up, and interviewing candidates who come along?
That still takes a long time if random Senior Engineer X who's looking on LinkedIn is only 10% of the way there for what you'd need for a very specialized role.