As always I love your posts. I think this discounts one variable. The idea that especially at a startup, you're hoping at minimum to reach your cliff and at maximum join on the ground floor, so you can get opportunities that are greater than you could have otherwise gotten on the open market. It takes really confident leaders to listen to the message and not the messengers, so usually, even talented people need to build trust with the decision makers. The other thing this requires usually is the experience from both the business and engineering to know that sometimes the lead time of someone learning a language or framework is better than the churn of not having good problems solvers. I have experienced this problem over and over - a big benefit of being a consultant. I agree that over longer time horizons, your premise is 100% accurate, in my experience. Unfortunately, we live in an inefficient world, where often symptoms alleviation is valued more than cure. : (
Edited
As always I love your posts. I think this discounts one variable. The idea that especially at a startup, you're hoping at minimum to reach your cliff and at maximum join on the ground floor, so you can get opportunities that are greater than you could have otherwise gotten on the open market. It takes really confident leaders to listen to the message and not the messengers, so usually, even talented people need to build trust with the decision makers. The other thing this requires usually is the experience from both the business and engineering to know that sometimes the lead time of someone learning a language or framework is better than the churn of not having good problems solvers. I have experienced this problem over and over - a big benefit of being a consultant. I agree that over longer time horizons, your premise is 100% accurate, in my experience. Unfortunately, we live in an inefficient world, where often symptoms alleviation is valued more than cure. : (