[deeptote]

Yeah true, but this coming from the likes of Facebook and Google, two companies well known for warehousing talent... it mostly just comes across as tone deaf and naive.

For years they've literally hired very smart and capable people, and then shoehorned them into working on some ad-tech engine that an intern could do, just so they didn't work for a competitor. And now they're angry that their employees "don't work hard?"

Holy fuck, for being Google, they sure have some idiots in leadership.

[origin_path]

The idea these firms hire people just to stop them going to competitors is popular on HN but I never saw any evidence of it when I was there.

Trophy hires? Sure, occasionally, but they were all doing stuff for the company. And the idea there was some sort of policy is wrong. It may look like that from the outside though, because there was never a strong connection between hiring and need.

[TheAceOfHearts]

This sounds plausible, but I'd love to hear if others agree with this claim.

Isn't this a failure of the free market? This leads to the obvious question, which is: what could be done to improve optimal talent distribution?

It seems bad to society if rich companies can monopolize talent to control development and output in order to ensure greater political power and control.

[paganel]

> but I'd love to hear if others agree with this claim.

I'm one of those that agree with that claim, I've said something similar a couple of times during the last few years on this forum (I remember that once I even used the term "golden handcuffs" in order to describe the whole situation).

As to why and how this came to happen in relation to the free market? The short answer is that both Google and FB are de-facto monopolies. In a way that can also be extended to Apple and MS. Of course that these companies will make tons and tons of a money during a period when software is eating the world (I know it sounds marketing-ish, but it's the reality). As such, they can use that money to "park" the best developers available among their ranks, so that no real competitor can emerge.

[fathrowaway12]

In addition to a surplus of great people, they have lots of mediocre people too, just like everywhere else. There may have been a time where this wasn't true, but now anyone who passes a day of tricky tech interviews is in, and that doesn't always correlate with good performance. At least that's my take having worked at Google.

[deeptote]

It's nice to hear someone admit that Google hires a lot of mediocre people. I'm also not shocked, their interview process invites people to gamify.