Is the Market for Hiring Developers a Market for Lemons?
Some people in the profession of hiring believe that great developers are impossible to find which means that if you can find someone, they’re not great. Joel Spolsky writes that great developers are usually the ones who prospective employers recognize as great swiftly, which means, they get to work wherever they want, so they don’t send out a lot of resumes or apply for a lot of jobs. This should sound like the kind of person a hiring manager wants to hire because the corollary of that rule — the rule that the great people are never on the market — is that the bad people — the seriously unqualified — are on the market quite a lot. They get fired all the time because they can’t do their job. Their companies fail — sometimes because any company that would hire them would probably also hire a lot of unqualified programmers, so it all adds up to failure — but sometimes because they actually are so unqualified that they ruined the company.
Spolsky further argues that the average “great” software developer will apply for, total, maybe, four jobs in their entire career. He outlines the trajectory of a typical “great” developer follows: “The great college graduates get pulled into an internship by a professor with a connection to industry, then they get early offers from that company and never bother applying for any other jobs. If they leave that company, it’s often to go to a startup with a friend or to follow a great boss to another company, or because they decided they really want to work on, say, Eclipse, because Eclipse is cool, so they look for an Eclipse job at BEA or IBM and then, of course, they get it because they’re brilliant.”
The two main statements being made here are that “great” developers won’t have that many jobs compared to “bad” developers because companies will try to keep “great” developers and that companies can recognize prospective “great” developers easily. However, it’s not easy to reconcile these two statements. If it’s so easy to identify prospective “great” developers, why not try to recruit them? You could just as easily make the case that “great” developers are overrepresented in the market because they have better opportunities and it’s the “bad” developers who will cling to their jobs. So the central question that arises in this context is should “good” developers be overrepresented in the market or underrepresented? In other words, drawing from what we studied in class, is the market for developers really a market for lemons?
Joel’s model for the market for hiring “great” developers is different from the market for lemons theorized by Akerlof’s Nobel prize-winning 1970 paper that used cars and the one we learnt about in the course. Joel’s model assumes that “great” developers are sticky — that they stay at each job for a long time. This comes from two assumptions; first, that it’s easy for prospective employers to identify who’s “great”, and second, that once someone is identified as “great”, their current employer will do anything to keep them (as in the market for lemons). But the first assumption alone is enough to prevent the developer job market from being a market for lemons. If you can tell that a potential employee is great, you can simply go and offer them twice as much as they’re currently making. You need an information asymmetry to create a market for lemons, and Joel posits that there’s no information asymmetry.
So is developer-hiring a market for lemons? The answer to that question is not straightforward and depends on what you mean by that. Both developers and hiring managers have incomplete information. We know how the hiring manager might have incomplete information. But the applicant does not know everything (or even anything) about what the job or the team is going to be like. The fact that joining a new job is uncertain makes developers less likely to leave existing jobs, which makes it harder to hire developers. But the fact that developers often take jobs that they dislike makes it easier to hire developers. It’s not obvious if having a market for lemons in one direction makes the other direction better or worse. It could swing both ways.