In the link above Semil gives ten tactics for hiring in a world of extreme competition for engineers.

He also links to Dan Portillo's slide deck on hiring:

http://pandawhale.com/post/16574/dan-portillo-of-greylock-on-leveraging-your-network-invite-someone-to-eat-and-invite-himher-to-give-names-of-great-people

To me, hiring is only one of four reasons why it's harder to build a company today than ever:

1. RELEVANCE. It's harder than ever to get a critical mass of people to care about your company, because there are so many companies and so much noise.

2. ATTENTION. It's harder than ever to get attention of customers and users because their time is already fully accounted for.

3. MONEY. It's harder than ever to get funding for your company because investors currently have more fear of losing money than fear of missing out on the next big thing.

4. HIRING. Once you have enough people who care about your company, traction with users and customers, and money to pay people, THEN you cannot find enough good candidates quickly.

In the history of PandaWhale, our biggest problem has never been relevance, attention, or hiring. It's always been money.

I think we've now turned away a dozen great engineering candidates because we couldn't afford them. And it hurts. And no, I can't send those engineers to (other company) because engineers want to sign up for a mission, not work on Social-Cloud-Analytics-Mobile-Video-BigData blah.

I look forward to the day when PandaWhale's biggest challenge shifts to hiring.