Thoughts on hiring – show me the money
Previous “Thoughts on hiring” articles
The first article in this series referenced Hamilton developers switching to working in Toronto, and one reader put why this happens succinctly in the comments: it’s the money.
And for the most part, that’s it right there. If you’ve got “infinite” money, and you’re looking for a common enough skill set (e.g. much of web development), solving the problem can be as simple as paying more money. If a Hamilton firm pays as much as a Toronto firm, they’ll generally speaking find someone who will be happy to leave the Go Train commute life behind them. Factor in that cost of living is still a lot lower, and it’s a slam dunk.
There’s not much to write about this though. It’s kind of a no brainer: sometimes throwing enough money at a problem can solve it.
The two situations that I find interesting to talk about are:
1) The firm doesn’t have money to throw at the problem.
2) Money isn’t solving the problem.
It may be surprising, but 2) does happen! I’ve seen Hamilton firms that are willing to pay very high salaries still have a lot of difficulty hiring when the skill set is “uncommon”. And by uncommon I don’t mean knowledge of a new-ish web framework like Angular 2 or full-stack expertise, though these hold as well to a lesser extent, I mean expertise like AI, optimization, parallel programming, and software architecture. Expertise that’s rare even in tech hotbeds is super rare in Hamilton, and seems harder to attract too.
I’ll stick to these two situations in this series… but definitely, the obvious point is true: if the skill set is common enough, then generally speaking a high enough wage will attract great talent from the GTA/Waterloo/elsewhere.
