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So what did you do when those devices broke for years while you had no local/physical person on site? You either didn't need to employ the person bad enough or didn't need the devices to function bad enough.

Engineers aren't cogs, but they are able to travel and you can hire them by other means that full-time employment. So I suspect that was probably what you were meant to do for your situation.

Nothing about this was mission critical or even all that important or you would have found a way to solve the problem or you did and it wasn't a problem to begin with. I'm in a field where people often want to hire me for some special thing like this, but it often turns out, most of my life would be spent idle because no one company has enough demand for me. I can consult instead and be busy all year, or I can take a job for someone that's OK with me being idle for 80% of my time. I prefer the former for multiple reasons but just making an example of why hiring for specialized roles that aren't mission critical is often not the thing you should be doing.

by Aurornis10 hours ago|

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> So what did you do when those devices broke for years while you had no local/physical person on site? You either didn't need to employ the person bad enough or didn't need the devices to function bad enough.

I don't know why you assumed that. We had teams. We just wanted to grow them.

We weren't sitting there waiting.

by conductr10 hours ago|

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It's implied by you wanting more people, that you had more demand than could be fulfilled. Even if you have teams, it stands to reason that the device repair would have been running into backlog territory that had negative implications of some sort. If not, why hire?

by Aurornis10 hours ago|

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> it stands to reason that the device repair would have been running into backlog territory that had negative implications of some sort. If not, why hire?

I don't know where you're getting these ideas. We weren't hiring people to repair a backlog of devices. Warranty and repair work typically goes to the contract manufacturer, for what it's worth.

Companies like to grow and develop more products. You need more people.

by bluefirebrand10 hours ago|

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> I've worked in specialized fields where it takes YEARS for the right candidate to even start looking for jobs. You need to have the job listings up and ready

If this is true then those shouldn't even be public job postings. That sort of critical position is for headhunters

by Aurornis10 hours ago|

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> If this is true then those shouldn't even be public job postings.

Why? Not everyone is on LinkedIn or has an updated profile.

Some of the best candidates I've hired were people who were in other states who were planning to move, but waiting for the right job opportunity to come up.

We also used recruiters.

Why does it make people so angry that we posted job listings for real jobs that we were really hiring for?

by bluefirebrand9 hours ago|

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If your real candidate pool is so small that you're effectively targeting a handful of people worldwide then you aren't "really hiring"

by Aurornis8 hours ago|

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Yet somehow we really did hire people.

If only we had listened to HN comments and given up instead

by Tangurena29 hours ago|

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Or... your company should be training potential replacements. This is what the US military and "white shoe" consulting companies do. While expensive, it guarantees that critically needed skilled staff are always available.

I recommend the article "Up or Out: Solving the IT Turnover Crisis" [0] which gives a reasonable argument for doing exactly that.

Notes:

0 - https://thedailywtf.com/articles/up-or-out-solving-the-it-tu...