<story><title>What If Cars Were Rented Like We Hire Programmers?</title><url>http://highscalability.com/blog/2013/1/16/what-if-cars-were-rented-like-we-hire-programmers.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Hovertruck</author><text>This analogy is backwards... Hiring a programmer is an exchange of company money (or equity, benefits, etc) for a service (programming skills). Renting a car is an exchange of one&apos;s own money for a service (use of the car).&lt;p&gt;In this case, the person renting the car would be &quot;interviewing&quot; the car rental company to determine if their service is worth their money.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>arscan</author><text>&amp;#62;&amp;#62; In this case, the person renting the car would be &quot;interviewing&quot; the car rental company to determine if their service is worth their money.&lt;p&gt;It goes both ways... the rental car agency interviews the person to make sure she is trustworthy of driving the car.  The author is asking you to think about the relationship a little more abstractly than simply who is giving money to whom.&lt;p&gt;Having said, that, I think this is a poor analogy because I don&apos;t find it particularly illuminating and the situations just don&apos;t seem very... analogous.</text></comment>
<story><title>What If Cars Were Rented Like We Hire Programmers?</title><url>http://highscalability.com/blog/2013/1/16/what-if-cars-were-rented-like-we-hire-programmers.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Hovertruck</author><text>This analogy is backwards... Hiring a programmer is an exchange of company money (or equity, benefits, etc) for a service (programming skills). Renting a car is an exchange of one&apos;s own money for a service (use of the car).&lt;p&gt;In this case, the person renting the car would be &quot;interviewing&quot; the car rental company to determine if their service is worth their money.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dlss</author><text>Maybe this is me having spent too much time thinking about econ, but I don&apos;t get why the analogy is backwards here. What is special about the person spending money? A car rental company is filling a large number of slots, and the renter would like to fill one. Why is that not as natural an analogy point for you?&lt;p&gt;Instead of &quot;whoever is giving up money should do the due diligence,&quot; I would suggest you consider &quot;both sides should do increasing due diligence as the importance of a decision increases.&quot;&lt;p&gt;From this perspective, the article is pointing out the dumbness of some due diligence methods currently being used at software companies.</text></comment>