And it's been a wonderful experience. Made for challenging interviews, though.

With CS and SWE curricula, it is now possible to have a "rote" set of skills and education, and we can assume/test for that.

I do feel that some of the "magic" has gone from the field, but there's no arguing with the torrents of money, sloshing around.

There are some positives. When I grew up, I was bullied and made fun of for being a 'nerd'. The nerds certainly won!

I feel this, too.

It's so odd, to see a company crowing about being "disruptive," yet explicitly filtering for conformance and mediocrity, in their interview process.

I guess that’s called “ professionalism”

I think part of the problem is, recruiters are (on average) less smart than greedy, and there's a layer of them before you even get to HR.

Then you get to HR, and they're generally more concerned with ticking skill boxes than hiring for intelligence (despite the fact that smart people can learn this shit on the job).

The demand side is also completely unwilling to admit the problem might be them making horrible strategic choices for the long term health of both their own company and the job market.

That leave us with mostly less than good job openings and less than good pool talents, just a little part of good talents and openings.

So what the recruiters got in hand usually are, less than good openings and talents.

Because what if a new employee steps in with incompatible skills, starting to teach everybody about new tools X, Y, Z, that are so much better?

The insights, learning their original contexts, and having hindsight due to the time passed makes them particularly valuable to me.

And I believe we can learn a lot by reading them. However most of what gets posted in HN and other aggregators is new content.

Is there any place where these sort of "most influential" articles of previous times can be found?

In my experience, talent needs to be challenged and grown. There are clear signs of talent but they are not the ones that are typically focused on in a technical interview. It is not what do you already know. It is rather how do you approach a problem where you don't have all the information or what conventions bother you? Or someone who has deep insights from outside the standard areas.

Talent is not currently as valued as much as people claim. What is valued is productivity and someone who appears to add value. Talent usually means being able to claim credit for a key problem being fixed or a standard trend getting successfully implemented at a company.

I've been in the industry for a long time. There is so much latent talent in discriminated groups that I once thought that pure greed alone would cure racism and sexism in the tech industry. That has not been the case.

But startups compete with FAANMG. And worse is semiconductor industry, where there is less EE fresh grads than with software engineering fresh grads graduated every year.

People are willing to changes jobs often because companies aren't offering meaningful paths for advancement. People aren't going to wait around forever, and will write their own promotion if it comes to that. I did, after watching people half as qualified as me interview for "Senior Software Engineer" with alleged years of experience as such.

I've watched corporations make blindingly obvious $100M mistakes, and then layoff the rank & file — the "talent" — who had no say, and if anything, disapproved of the decisions that led to their ultimate layoff. You can't get attached to a company, as the winds will shift tomorrow.

> almost all of the companies we studied are starting to take nontraditional approaches to recruiting

And yet there doesn't appear to be a recruiter out there that can put a competently written email into my inbox. Of the jobs I've held, I've self-applied to two, my own network for one, and the last was a recruiter.

> We don’t have a retention problem! In a sense, they’re right. At the senior level, the attrition rates at these companies are often quite low – 4% or 5% a year.

… 4%–5% attrition YoY would be low, IMO. My experience is closer to 30–50% YoY.

> They have good ideas, they have money – they just don’t have enough talented people to pursue those ideas. They are “talent-constrained.”

If you have the money, and you're "talent constrained", it is either because you don't have the money, or you're not willing to loose the purse-strings enough to get the talent.

> What do talented people get at startups? For one thing, the opportunity to make a lot of money.

Please. Lottery tickets similarly offer the opportunity to make a lot of money, but I suppose this is 1998 and the bubble hasn't imploded just quite yet.

> “Does your company make improving its talent pool one of its top three priorities?” In many companies, only 10% or 20% of corporate officers said yes.

And the truth comes out. "Talent, talent, talent" as a marketing message, but … it isn't an actual priority.

Mid-way through this alleged war for talent, Adobe, Apple, Google. Intel, Intuit, eBay and others would be sued for antitrust violations around suppressing wages by non-poaching agreements. They would later settle at various points for a collective $435M. Still, "[one of the plaintiffs] said the [earlier, slightly smaller settlement] represents only one-tenth of the $3 billion in compensation the 64,000 workers could have made if the defendants had not colluded".

50% is fast food level attrition. 12% is bottom tier in tech.

> Attrition can be 0, but headcount doubles year over year and you have half your employees with <1 year of tenure.

I really should have stated it more clearly. It's a contrived example. I suppose a better way would be "of the people who started ahead of me, how many remain?" or so; the hard part is that the company has all the data, and often doesn't release it.

4%, though, corresponds to an average tenure that's preposterous when nobody stays for much over 2yr, and particularly much over 3yr.

At one employer I worked at, I know that when I hit the 3yr mark, there were 5 people that remained who were there when I started. I would estimate there were ~60 people at start. That attrition, over 3yr, corresponds to a rate of ~56% YoY.

And that employer is not at all unique or distinguished in that regard. People leave — why would they stay?