Hiring and the market for lemons

Joel Spolsky argues great developers rarely appear on the job market because employers spot them fast and keep them. Dan Luu points out that this assumption contradicts itself: if greatness is that easy to spot, any competitor could just offer double the salary and poach them. Akerlof’s market-for-lemons model, built on used cars, requires information asymmetry to work; Spolsky’s own premise reduces that asymmetry.

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• Information asymmetry frequently runs the other way. A developer doing unglamorous but critical work (the “Bob” case) can be underrated internally while their reputation outside the company is strong enough to get them a job at market rate.
• Good teams don’t spring into existence on demand. A team with a hostile lead can bleed away three of seven engineers in a year while a well-run team fills up and stays full, so joining “a random team” mostly means joining a churning one.
• Polling developers at a conference for companies that aren’t dysfunctional, or teams that are great and hiring, turned up almost nothing.
• Low pay is the most common and simplest to fix: companies consistently believe they’re paying competitively while sitting at the bottom of the range for their region.
• Filtering out good candidates is the second: interview processes select for pedigree and interview performance, both loosely correlated with job performance, so the same 30 “safe” resumes get fought over while good candidates from outside that mold go unhired.
• Needing a narrow, rare combination of skills is solvable by hiring for a fraction of it and training the rest; dysfunction itself is the one problem the author admits he doesn’t know how to fix.