alt Hacker News> If you need to wait YEARS to hire someone with some specific experience, I can guarantee that you really didn't need that person.
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.
This was extremely true when we were working on things that could not be done remote (literal physical devices that had to be worked on with special equipment in office).
Engineers aren't interchangeable cogs.
> I can guarantee that you really didn't need that person.
So what? There are many roles where we don't "need" someone, but if the right person is out there looking for a job we want to be ready to hire them.
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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
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.