I think I know why you can't hire engineers right now
Purely anecdotal: In my experience as a hiring manager seeing trends change over the past 10 years, and selecting from the top 10% of candidates by some vague metric, it&#x27;s primarily about &quot;does it pay a lot&quot; and secondarily &quot;does it offer full-remote&quot;? A lot of my friends, former colleagues, and candidates I&#x27;ve failed to hire end up going to either a FAANG or a very successful brand-name company (typically a SV company) because<p>1. The TC is a lot higher, like 1.5-2x.<p>2. They don&#x27;t have to move; or they <i>do</i> want to move, just not for a job.<p>It doesn&#x27;t matter that the work is boring (really fungible cog low-impact stuff). It doesn&#x27;t matter if the colleagues are meh. It doesn&#x27;t matter if the company has a reputation for lay-offs&#x2F;churn&#x2F;etc. If you have those two items above, you&#x27;ll likely have a good hiring success rate.<p>Even stronger: many of the &quot;fads&quot; (like cool programming languages, toolkits, frameworks, etc.), moral&#x2F;virtue-discussions du jour (like hating on: FB, crypto, commercial spying apparatus, AMZN work conditions, etc.), etc. also don&#x27;t appear matter in the large. Someone boycotting AMZN one day will be happy to accept a very healthy salary + benefits package writing legacy Java 6 backend code if it means a good double- or triple-digit percentage in compensatory promotion.<p>For this thread, I just asked an extremely talented programmer ex-colleague (Linux kernel hacker, expert at C) how his job is at Oracle and why he chose it:<p>&gt; Ex-Colleague: Funny you ask, because I was stuck on-call over the holidays. I&#x27;m basically a plebe to Larry Enterprises. Mostly that and having a side gig. Not writing any cool code for sure.<p>&gt; Me: Why not go elsewhere where things are a little more interesting for you? You have no shortage of talent.<p>&gt; Ex-Colleague: Pay is great. Not a lot going on. Not a lot of fuss on the job. I easily own a house and pay a mortgage and have a lot left over. Definitely put in less than 9-5 worth of effort. Probably can retire early at this rate.<p>This type of attitude doesn&#x27;t appear to be so uncommon, at least among people I know.<p>In my case for the company I hire for: Extreme stability (check; been around and stable for ~60 years), excellent work-life balance (check), really cool work (check; cutting edge research and engineering), and really good and diverse colleagues (check; gender balance and representation, stable personalities, highly interdisciplinary skills, sometimes world renowned), open-source and conferences (check), education and 20%-of-9-to-5 time benefits (check). Those things may matter to some extent, but contrary to the article, they don&#x27;t seem matter as much as an <i>extra</i> $50k to $250k pretax compensation in the bank and being able to do so from a low CoL area at your comfort.<p>The good news for me at least is that we aren&#x27;t a mega-growth-kind of company, so we can take our time. Ultimately the candidate that values the above <i>does</i> find us (or we them), considers it a dream job, and tends to stay for 5-25 years.