So I founded a couple hiring-related businesses a year or so before TripleByte

> The folks that do tend to populate the open job market often have one or more dysfunctions that make it hard for them to slot into the corporate job market, the most common of which are not wanting to slot into the corporate job market and not being able to define yourself enough to identify where you should slot into it. I think this is a pretty good reason to have an org that "speaks corporate job market", but that doesn't evaluate candidates the same way the corporate job market does. A person who is skilled but doesn't want to/doesn't know how to/has moral objections to selling themselves the way employers often want benefits a lot from having an agent who can vouch for them. As for the market-for-lemons thing, yeah, absolutely! It's a good framing. And in that analogy, I'm betting on the idea that a team of mechanics that can identify the good cars is valuable.

< The folks that do tend to populate the open job market often have one or more dysfunctions that make it hard for them to slot into the corporate job market, I think the set of people employed at corporations provides overwhelming evidence against this.

It's a market for lemons but it's also an incredibly inefficient market for lemons. It's amazing just how much gold is randomly lying on the ground on the lemon market you can just occasionally pick up. The classic story is some engineer who got picked up by a company when they were 22, did well and got promoted a few times and then runs into a terrible boss that makes their tenure untenable at 29 and goes out onto the market any interviews exactly like a 22 year old again by just shooting off random resumes from LinkedIn. I've had to slap so many of my tech friends on the head and be like, no, look, there's a so much more pleasant path you can now go down. But like, why wouldn't it be that way? The median number of hours any engineer spends thinking about how to get hired in any one year is zero, there's an extreme minority who love the system and think about it all the time and they al…