I'll add a reason: you're looking for someone you don't need.
Not every startup is Google. A lot of companies have CRUD applications of minimal to modest complexity which, even if actively used, are nowhere close to facing performance and scalability barriers that would require deep technical expertise.
These startups don't necessarily need "engineers" with computer science backgrounds, but that's what many of them are searching for.
Well, most young founders would NEVER admit the startup they are building may not require top of the line computer science talent since that's admitting the technical aspect of their startup isn't as cutting edge as the most demanding projects of everywhere else.
Sometimes I wonder if it's a case where ego > pragmatism, founders who graduated from top schools, got accepted into top programs (i,e YC), who raised money from top investors, would naturally want "top talent". And it's easy for an inexperienced founder to pursue cargo cult like "google style interviews" when it comes to that.
The technical interviews & hiring criteria are often not aligned with what the company fundamentally needs in order to accomplish its goals. The founders/CTO are often rockstars, and they refuse to acknowledge that what their company needs is productive employees, not clones of themselves.
This leads to an enormous amount of time spent interviewing people in search for these rare "unicorns".
Their background was impressive enough that they where able to raise venture funding for their start-up.
Many times they have built or worked on something technically impressive, that became big & well known (Google Maps, Facebook timeline, Founding engineer at start-up with Billion dollar+ valuation).
Quite true. A lot of companies get it in their heads that they need "ninjas" or "gurus" or "rock stars", in other words world class talent. But why would a top 1%, or even 10%, developer work for a company that is using boring technologies in a boring business that pays only the industry average? Actual top developers are going to find truly exciting places to work and they're going to be paid well above market rates.
If you need to hire somebody you need to be realistic. A while ago it used to be possible to find well above average developers for almost any role, but today the industry is too mature for that sort of thing to happen.
Exactly... There's very few people left who are getting paid under market.
Google alone has 900 recruiters who scour the entire world with an open checkbook for the best talent, while offering some of the highest comp packages in the industry.
This is true even for many software development roles at places like Google, Amazon, Facebook, etc. Equally true is the corollary that the interview process for these positions is laughably out of sync with the duties for the positions to be filled.
Very few software engineering roles actually require "deep" technical expertise. What you describe is pointing out yet another way in which the corporate cliche of "we only hire the best" is so pervasive.
Someone said something to this effect in one of those "Why I left Google" blog posts, and other Googlers were calling him/her out because they believe that even a CRUD app at Google is exceptional because it is a Google CRUD app (meaning they solve problems with CRUD apps that other companies don't have, I think).
So, so, so true. I've been looking for jobs in a city outside of the typical developer hotspots (Dallas) and it is absolutely insane for me to see every ad seeking something like a "programming virtuoso" (an actual quote) for fairly basic web dev. I got an email from a recruiter looking for a "top-level web developer" and then saying they would be recruiting at a nearby college job fair. (A tiny, rural college.)
Why does every business need to pretend that they are getting the best of the best? Obviously, I want to get there someday, but I'm still early in my career. I know I'm not top-level anything. It would be disingenuous and frankly delusional for me to claim such!
Absolutely. Another thing is the "rock stars" these companies are looking for would never work at a Fortune 1000 company doing CRUD applications on an old, poorly-written code base in class B office space. They're not finding the candidates they're looking for because those candidates would never apply there.
Not every startup is Google. A lot of companies have CRUD applications of minimal to modest complexity which, even if actively used, are nowhere close to facing performance and scalability barriers that would require deep technical expertise.
These startups don't necessarily need "engineers" with computer science backgrounds, but that's what many of them are searching for.