Yeah, to some extent you have to be willing to deal with this stuff in recruiting, which is why I've taken on the clients under discussion at all.
In my Triplebyte postmortem (also on the blog), one of the mistakes I talked about was that Triplebyte was aggressive about trying to dictate terms. We told people how they had to hire.
Otherbranch takes a softer approach: if you ask for my opinion, I'll tell you what I think. Otherwise, I'll do my best to find you what you asked us for, with the understanding that some sets of constraints reduce the probability of success to ~zero.
That goes on the candidate side, too. I get a fair number of people who will come in and tell me "I only want a remote job where I can take a day off whenever I want and only want to work on a super clean codebase and also get paid 250k a year" - and those people are almost never going to end up with jobs. But the tradeoffs they want to make are their business, not mine, until they ask me to do otherwise.
In my Triplebyte postmortem (also on the blog), one of the mistakes I talked about was that Triplebyte was aggressive about trying to dictate terms. We told people how they had to hire.
Otherbranch takes a softer approach: if you ask for my opinion, I'll tell you what I think. Otherwise, I'll do my best to find you what you asked us for, with the understanding that some sets of constraints reduce the probability of success to ~zero.
That goes on the candidate side, too. I get a fair number of people who will come in and tell me "I only want a remote job where I can take a day off whenever I want and only want to work on a super clean codebase and also get paid 250k a year" - and those people are almost never going to end up with jobs. But the tradeoffs they want to make are their business, not mine, until they ask me to do otherwise.