Sounds great, but I'm not sure this will work well for individual contributors. Say the company is small, with a small team. Can you afford the amount of time it will take to find this bespoke unicorn engineer? Say the company is large, with a large team. Is this process going to scale to bring in, say, 50 new engineers?
Maybe it works better with management tiers where their impact is more indirect, and there are fewer of them, which mitigates the problems.
If I have a team in pain and we need more people on it, or different people, I don't know if I can wait six months for the one person I want to hire to become available and willing. Sometimes, you gotta go with who is available.
> If I have a team in pain and we need more people on it, or different people, I don't know if I can wait six months for the one person I want to hire to become available and willing. Sometimes, you gotta go with who is available.
I think the point is that you should be building your network of folks before you need them. And that you should go to your network with a specific ask rather than "who is a good engineer?".
Related, slightly: I had a business idea a few years ago when things were tighter for engineers to build a system that collected interested engineers email addresses and send them content about what the company was building. Basically a drip campaign tool for engineering talent rather than sales. I still think this would work for a company that was hiring regularly but that wasn't sexy enough to have name recognition.
Companies are doing 7-9 interviews now for even mid level engineering and infra roles, and these companies are not doing anything unique. As someone often doing the hiring and firing, I do not understand it. If it takes that make interviews your hiring process itself is the problem.
It does sound like you should have been investigated though. Like, this sounds like the (or a) system working. What would the alternatives be? Don't investigate for money laundering? Or have so much info that they can eliminate you as interesting without even having a visit?
Do they? I mean so much of learning (certainly of school) is along the lines of "this is the way it is, don't worry about first principles just accept this"
If there's learning how to think stuff going on I'm not sure I want the schools doing that, it seems more like the job of parents.
This is exactly the same problem facing people trying to develop new music notations. In order to grasp the domain enough, they have to be experts in the existing music notation, and once you're an expert in it, the motivation to create something new goes away. From what I've seen, the people who want a new music notation are mostly people uncomfortable with sight reading.
Experts have been criticizing SQL since it was a proprietary IBM language. Take this typewritten rant from 1983 [0] as an example. And we've had better query languages for just as long, e.g. datalog. People really love SQL though, which I can only assume is because the vast majority of usecases are slight variations on SELECT * FROM table.
When I was a pretentious high schooler with fantasies of being an intellectual, I considered going there. I ended up not even applying. It just seemed too far out of the norm.
Maybe it works better with management tiers where their impact is more indirect, and there are fewer of them, which mitigates the problems.
If I have a team in pain and we need more people on it, or different people, I don't know if I can wait six months for the one person I want to hire to become available and willing. Sometimes, you gotta go with who is available.
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