Atlanta, Seattle, Chicago Desperate for Software Engineers, Says Job Search Firm | Hacker News Reader

Atlanta, Seattle, Chicago Desperate for Software Engineers, Says Job Search Firm

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35 pointsteklaperry69 comments

It's amazing how employers seem to think they're exempt from supply and demand.

The real problem is that employers in those areas can't find employees in those areas at the rates they want to pay—and not just in monetary terms. Employers outside California often demand onerous non-compete agreements, and claim they're "standard." Employers outside California often lowball candidates, and claim "that's the average pay here, besides that the cost of living is lower!"

Guess what? If you want to hire now, you're competing with employers in an area with beautiful weather, high pay, AND state law prohibiting non-compete agreements that actually gets upheld regularly in court. That means you need to actually make at least as attractive an offer just to keep up.

Generally speaking, we don't advertise the salary range for positions.

So when we find it difficult to fill a role, it's not because we're not going to pay a competitive salary. It's more likely because the candidates that are applying aren't the right fit. When that happens, we revamp our sourcing approach: change the JD, tweak the keywords we filter on, etc.

> Employers outside California often lowball candidates, and claim "that's the average pay here, besides that the cost of living is lower!"

With websites like Glassdoor and Payscale it's pretty trivial to determine the market rate in a given location.

It's probably a variety of factors, but I believe one factor is a lot of the companies (at least in Seattle) are companies you haven't really read about in Techcrunch, Re//code, or even HN. While the big-cos: facebook, msft, Amazon, Google, have their share of open job recs, they at least have the brand name recognition to recruit engineers. Silicon Valley probably has their share of off-brand software companies, but by and large, there are many more house-hold names there.

> Generally speaking, we don't advertise the salary range for positions.

That's your clue, right there.

Many people (myself included, but this is not me saying that I would clear your bar or be the right fit) won't even consider applying to "competitive salary" job ads, because that claim is just as easy to make and just as empty as "miraculous weight-loss dies pills".

I just quickly checked Netflix, they also don't advertise salaries.

(disclaimer my own thoughts here)

It's not my policy, but I suspect it has to do with finding people who want believe in what we're doing vs those who are only applying because of the salary.

We usually ask candidates to tell us their salary requirements before continuing the interview process with them. I personally haven't had a candidate come with an requirement that we couldn't accommodate.

If you are a for profit company, I "believe what you are doing" is trying to make money. Why would you think I would want to do any less?

You're making a straw man argument.

We (like many other Seattle companies) pay competitive salaries, we just don't advertise them in our job postings.

My goal is to maximize my job satisfaction, and salary is only a part of it.

Define 'right fit.' (Asking the question in earnest, not to be snarky.)

Usually the candidates being seen don't measure up or match the intended position.

As an example, "we want to hire a devops person"; okay, you start getting people who do a lot of on premise stuff with Ansible/Chef/Puppet, and have to be told explicitly what to do. What you really wanted was someone familiar with AWS, setting up cloudformations, autoscaling, VPC configuration, etc, and who could be given an app, said "here's how it runs", and then figure out what needs to be done on their own.

Right fit usually means one of two things:

1. culmination of all non-technical skills in aggregate

Example: general disposition, humility, collaboration, confidence, hygiene, professionalism, and so forth.

Collaboration being the highest weighted one.

2. JD is poorly written and is too broad, and the technical skills the candidates have don't match what we're looking for.

FWIW: Employee laws are nearly as engineer-friendly in Illinois as they are in California.

Non competes:

http://www.lawpmh.com/are-non-compete-agreements-legal-in-il...

Side Project intellectual property:

http://ilga.gov/legislation/ilcs/ilcs3.asp?ActID=2238&Chapte...

I'd love for this to be true, but my sense is that it isn't.

Regarding non-competes: they have enough teeth in IL for a claim against you to be difficult to dismiss, which is pretty much all the teeth they need. Lawsuits are riotously expensive.

Regarding side-project IP: even in California: I'd read everything 'DannyBee has to say in this thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11484852

(DannyBee is, among other things, an IP lawyer).

I looked at the cities with average salaries and saw that they were at an average of $110k. Why would you bother with that kind of salary when you can work for a SV based company remotely for probably more cash and better growth opportunities? It's rather rare to get stock options or grants to begin with. Then add in how unexciting the companies are typically (can someone even name a tech-heavy company from Kansas City that's not an onshore outsourcing center like a lot of NC's RTP area or much of the Southeast?).

Unlike the FB or Googler comparisons often cited I'm nobody special or talented and managed to get $130k+ from miserly employers in not very tech friendly areas, so I can't see how anyone with decent talent taking local jobs in places with as horrible traffic like Chicago or Atlanta with solid career prospects would want to go there. Lack of locally grown talent from universities certainly isn't a problem for most (Georgia Tech is pretty solid, for example). So doesn't that mean they're suffering from brain drain to a fair degree?

comparable quality of life at 110 in chicago is ~180 in sv and probably much higher elsewhere. also, traffic in a place like chicago is an experience very few people in tech ever deal with, given the mass transport.

Can confirm. I work in Atlanta and most people I know don't deal with traffic. Maybe a little but not crazy. There are lots of places to live on public transit and lots of companies hiring on those lines.

Really? When we returned to Atlanta, we bought a pretty expensive house in Morningside, so that we can be close in and not deal with traffic. Most people I know in Atlanta have to deal with terrible amounts of traffic.

I think it depends on where you're working, and what age your coworkers are.

If you're working in the city with a wide range of ages, you have people who are more 'settled' living out in the suburbs and commuting in.

But if you're working in, say, Alpharetta, with mostly young people, a lot may have moved to be close to work (or if they're fresh out of college, taken an apartment near by anyway).

Because, yeah, everywhere I've worked in Atlanta, a majority of people have had some pretty lousy commutes.

Second this. The sheer volume of employers means that finding something that meets your salary, interest, and commute is almost always possible.

Not to mention the 60% savings in cost of living over SV. http://www.bestplaces.net/cost-of-living/san-francisco-ca/at...

And, at the end of the day housing is so cost effective it is almost not crazy to move for a job, even within the metro.

The distribution of jobs around there seems to be non-obvious and may require a lot more effort to find certain market sector jobs. For example, I literally just looked 30 min ago in Atlanta for jobs at Google and there's not a single software engineer / operations engineer job listed. Meanwhile, there's a hundreds, maybe thousands in jobs for well-known software companies in SV while in Atlanta I can see pretty generic jobs at Coca Cola, GE, or a smattering of entertainment. Otherwise, I've only seen cost-cutting outsourcing jobs (typical for technology dinosaurs) that are likely for customers that are terrible at software by executive decision.

Despite the dollar utility value difference I'll still assert that the most optimal career path for ambitious, diligent tech workers regardless of whether you're looking for money or for long term life balance is to go for as high as you can comfortably go in the Bay Area or maybe NY when young and with few expenses and go somewhere lower cost of living to settle down. Finance people aren't being stupid by going to NYC early in their career I'd imagine. This career pattern is supported by a study linked on HN a while ago (sorry, can't find link at the moment) with a report on expected earnings when going from the Bay Area elsewhere - starting with as high of salary as possible helps negotiate your pay when going to a lower cost of living area. Your marketable skills should have grown better working at a tech company doing cutting edge projects than for the usual enterprise shovelware projects that are the bread and butter of tech companies outside tech hubs as well.

The Chicago devs that work downtown ride public transit or commuter rail. The ones that don't work downtown don't have much traffic to deal with.

Traffic is a problem if you live in the suburbs. Otherwise, it isn't.

It's a problem if you work in the suburbs and your work isn't across from a Metra station.

I'm a homegrown Chicago developer who moved to NYC last year and I haven't looked back.

By "homegrown" you mean?

I'm from Chicago and learned to program at school in Chicago.

By school do you mean "high school". I took "home grown" to mean that you learned programming yourself, not via a degree in college.

I am always in awe of how well-paid SW Engineers in the US are, like, I know SAP developers in my country with a salary of $7k per year.

Curious, what country? And do you think the $7k developer is a similiar quality as the US $100k developer? Crazy that the difference in citizenship can matter that much.

By the way, I'm from Chicago, and knew many talented folks with 2-3 years post college getting in the $70k's. Much lower than the easy $100k quoted here.

Someone I know in Chicago with 2 years post-school experience has entertained several offers in the 90k range for front-end dev positions this past year, and this is with a 2-year degree. I assumed back-end/compsci grads were pulling much higher than that, am I missing something?

Lower cost developers regardless of talent / skill typically don't work for companies that prioritize highly skilled, productive engineers in their budgets and plans. Enterprise software companies like SAP, IBM, HP, etc are notorious for this and prioritize relatively few, rare roles that match market rates for a lot of technology leaders.

Software that is really slow to release and change due to its customers being slow and bureaucratic have less business need to hire the top tier developers that can keep them competitive - their primary levers in driving business are now sales based, and if you want a career in sales I think those companies are excellent. When HP acquired the company I worked for, they compared themselves in compensation and growth to IBM, SAP, etc. - no mention of Google, Microsoft, or even Yahoo. Furthermore, software developers in the US have so many options that can result in lots of churn when they get assigned really terrible technical work while there's fewer options or a different management approach that treats human labor as a commodity (competes primarily upon price, not much else - it is inefficient to have John Carmack write a bunch of REST calls for a CRUD app, but maybe a team of 12 very cheap developers that are poorly managed can be thrown into a basement and figure it out). It's just globalization at work.

American living standards are high (and should well be as the world's largest, richest economy) IMO and salaries are adjusted for the socioeconomic expectations. I grew up here as a child of immigrants and a father used to being abused as an employee relatively (in the bottom 30% of compensation for experience and skill). The kind of luxuries that people expect all the time in terms of housing and leisure activities is a bit myopic though even among Americans that grew up in poverty decades ago I've noticed. "Country people" driving Mercedes SUVs and living in 2500 sq ft houses that need maids is evidently something that exists.

I lived perfectly fine by my ideas of adequate living for years after college on less than $1k / mo because I didn't have many interests that required much money but this is around the poverty line it seems. I'd love to live with such a simple life and bank the rest of my income but it'd be a lonely road.

I'm in Chicago and I'd jump in a second if someone was offering a competitive salary. Nobody is budging here. They're trying to find senior devs with junior salaries.

how are the consulting opportunities there?

Chicago consultancies won't pay you market rate either

Working as an FTE for a consultancy isn't consulting.

I co-founded and co-managed a decent-sized consulting practice that served NYC, Chicago, and SFBA simultaneously.

Chicago is, I think, a better city to consult from than SFBA is (it's close, though). There are more opportunities to do contract dev for tech companies in SFBA, of course, but contracting jobs in SFBA tend to allow remote workers. Meanwhile, the business community in Chicago is much more diverse, so if the kind of work you do is amenable to solving problems that "Fortune 500 companies that don't employ 1,000 software developers" have, Chicago is full of prospects.

What are you targeting? I'd love to chat tomorrow at 4:30PM.

Edit: Email me. taylor.dorsett@jobspringpartners.com or dorsetttaylor@gmail.com Linkedin page for proof that I'm real: https://www.linkedin.com/in/taylordorsett

Yeah. I've talked to your crew many times (usually when they call me unsolicited at my desk during office hours) Thanks anyway.

PS: Tell your client in DuPage county that they should take a break from trying to fill that GUI developer role. It's been what, 2-3 years now? It's embarrassing.

No problem. Your likely somewhere in a pile of old resumes that new people call when they start. If you want I can mark you as do not contact in our CRM.

Edit: Sorry. I believe the gui role is for a contract client that is nearly always hiring. We've got two out there that are similar roles so I believe the C++ team keeps the roles posted because when they find someone with a good fit the company will always talk with/hire them.

Your likely somewhere in a pile of old resumes that new people call when they start.

Oh, cool. Thanks for bringing my other gripe about the Chicago scene.

Not to pick on your firm specifically, because I see this at other places like SEI and Aerotek too, but everyone is literally just out of college. And with zero tech experience. And nobody stays more than a year or two. I realize it's pretty easy to fill webdev jobs these days so maybe a tech/engineering background isn't quite necessary anymore but, MAN, you all really could benefit from some people with some experience and connections.

There's exactly one guy in the Chicago area whose calls I'll physically take because he knows his shit and has been doing this for 30 years. The rest of them are just...gone.

>The rest of them are just...gone.

This is with all recruiting, maybe with the exception of in house recruiting. The % of turnover in the recruiting industry is estimated around 70% within 2 years. It's a high pressure job that depends a lot on luck (contacting the right people, they're interested in the role, they want to change roles, they pass the interviews, etc). Output (number of reach outs) is one of the few things they can control, so a lot of people go with the spray and pray method.

Yeah I'm with you man. 99% of recruiters are really bad. You should see the recruiters that recruit recruiters. I get as many shit emails and phone calls as you do.

My advice to everyone who is working with a recruiter is look at their linkedin page, see if people have actually recommended them, and make sure they have been there for more than a year. Like you mentioned... There are good recruiters out there but most people who are good move into a higher paying sales job or go internal where there is less stress.

I would love to have a convo, contact info in my bio.

Sure didn't feel desperate in Atlanta last fall when I was looking for a job. I left the state and got a job elsewhere.

That comment is a surprise. The demand in ATL is pretty crazy. That being said, if you are not wanting to go downtown things can get pretty scarce in a hurry.

On a side note, Atlanta is very much a recruiter town. The size of even the smaller firms lends them to recruiter models. Other than the startups in the incubators, the "small" software companies are 100+.

Not surprised about Chicago and Atlanta but Seattle seems odd to be on that list. It's a great town that I'd love to be stuck in.

I'm from Chicago and currently in Austin. My wife and I would be happy to move back, if anyone has 110K for me. Fork that over with no on-call rotation and I'll join your devops team.

Why is Seattle odd? Tech is booming here! Largely fueled by Amazon at the moment. But all the big software companies are growing their Seattle presence.

Many companies are hiring in the Seattle area. And there's always Microsoft . . . or Amazon, if you're hungry (in several senses of the phrase :-) ).

As to the climate: I spent 20 years in Silly Valley, have lived in the Seattle area for 12 now, and I don't miss the Bay Area at all.

I updated the post, I meant it's odd that it was on that list. Seattle is one of my favorite places.

it's the weather. in the past i frequently spent up to a 3 weeks at a time there and i couldn't live there unless you paid me way, way more than what a software engineer could make.

Rain, Rain and more rain.

we represent chicago fairly well in the whoishiring threads. plenty of places have what you're hoping for!

As a long time Seattlite it seems perfectly obvious - this place went software crazy during the dot-com bubble and has only been getting more so over the last decade. Amazon appears to be single-handedly redeveloping a long-neglected neighborhood adjacent to downtown; big glass towers and everything. It is visible, significant, and not a new trend.

I'm actually surprised to hear Atlanta and Chicago have enough of a software industry going on to be noticed - from around here you'd think the software industry consisted of Silicon Valley first and Seattle second with New York ignoring Seattle and pretending to be a big deal because they can't imagine being anything other than the center of the universe, while basically failing due to their terminally uncool preoccupation with big money.

Austin shows up on our cultural radar as a lesser tech center sometimes; I spent several years working remote for a company based there. Influence seems to have ebbed somewhat as the web has become ascendant.

I've been in Austin for 3 years now working my same job remotely back in Chicago- my takeaway is that Austin is fueled primarily by California money. I love the meetup communities here, strong Python and a larger Elixir meetup than most areas have.

It's a pretty good place and I think its influence is growing. I like to see 'middle of the map' locales like Austin and Chicago doing well.

We liked it so much in the NW that we were actually going to move to Portland or Seattle a few years back, but learning the facts about the Cascadia Fault has permanently spooked us. Other than that and maybe the weather it's fantastic (my wife prefers that dreary weather so it would work). While the midwest vibe is something that is intrinsic to who I am and I love the midwest, the PNW is my favorite part of the country. An absolute no brainer without that fault line. Civilized, clean, well-educated populace, strong economy.

I'd love to talk to you about our devops team. What's the best way to get in contact?

Hm, I haven't been looking for years.. but why not. Let's chat. forumemail123 at g mail dotcom. Thanks!

Just saw a bit on the news this morning about how Facebook is still looking to hire 1000 more people to fill up their big new campus here, plus Google's campus in Kirkland is perpetually growing and I think they're building a big new office in downtown Seattle as well.

They just finished it - I dropped by last week to have lunch with a friend who works there. Nice place.

Can you talk tomorrow at 4:00PM cst? If I cant get you interviews at four companies willing to pay 110K I'll be incredibly surprised.

Edit: Email me. taylor.dorsett@jobspringpartners.com or dorsetttaylor@gmail.com

Linkedin page for proof that I'm real: https://www.linkedin.com/in/taylordorsett

Where are those Junior: DevOps Engineer, general software engineer, and front-end developer jobs?

Is it the responsibility of the job market to allow people to gain the experience needed to fill the mid-level and senior level jobs. Overall, how are we as aspiring developers supposed to gain the needed experience to fill the demanding roles?

I have several years of experience in IT via System/Network Administration and I've been teaching myself programming after my work hours (mostly JavaScript over the last 8 months). I've taken the Microsoft Virtual Academy for Introduction to Programming with Python, Getting Started with PowerShell 3.0, Advanced Tools & Scripting with PowerShell 3.0; Codecademy for HTML/CSS, JavaScript, Python even college for C# and a myriad of other free online courses to push my knowledge further.

As an individual that lives in Seattle, I'd love to fill an engaging and exciting opportunity to round out my experience while growing my skill set. Sadly, I'm just not seeing the opportunities out there that would allow me to move forward. I know that there are some that would say, create the opportunities to move your career forward. But, as an individual that is bound by an employment contract that has an "Employment Exclusivity" clause and broad reaching "Ownership Of Intangible Property" clause. That is extremely difficult. There's also the other side of the thought process that states if companies are truly desperate for talent, that they'd find a way to curate and grow the talent in those areas to fill the demand. I don't know if that is even happening. Hell, I'd even be willing to work at sub-standard wages if I was able to find an organization that is willing to work to mentor a candidate to solidify their skills and experience. (No, my current employer doesn't do that.) Average wage is what 89k/yr ... I'm pretty sure that several people would be willing to work for $54k to $60k if it meant the opportunity to grow their skills, knowledge and work on exciting projects. But, maybe I'm just thinking of myself here.

I feel like this will be controversial to this thread but what about companies that do match SV wages? I am sure there are several in all these cities, there are many in Chicago.

it is super difficult to find the talented candidates that are passionate, curious and are down for solving complex issues at the seniority we want to higher at.

Maybe I am wrong to think its not a salary thing, the market doesn't currently have / isn't pulling in enough talent to feed the demand.

Do the HN economists think if the salaries were raised 20% in a market it would correct the problem?

Tech Recruiter here in Chicago. It depends on the field/tech stack. Looking for a Windows DevOps engineer? Good luck. Need a senior .net developer? No problem. Enterprise .net and java have been in chicago forever so there are plenty of developers. Mobile, Automated QA, DevOps, even Ruby developers are all a lot more difficult to find here. I think that's quickly changing though. I've helped two guys from Florida and another from Nashville relocate here this year. Those type of people hit the ceiling in their smallish tech community and gravitate to a legitimize tech hub like Chicago.

Edit: I'll add a self promotional bit here... I read hackernews on my own for fun but I am a tech recruiter in Chicago. I am confidant that I cant help almost any 2-8 year software developer looking for 80K-120K find a new job. I don't code but I can promise you I am better than most the recruiters that message you every day. If you are interested in chatting, even if you are not looking right now, i'd love to talk.

Proof I'm a real person: https://www.linkedin.com/in/taylordorsett

I got a couple reviews on there from some people you may know if you are local to chicago.

Email me at taylor.dorsett@jobspringpartners.com or dorsetttaylor@gmail.com

I'd love to hear HN readers' explanations of the differences between these terms:

- mobile engineer vs. mobile developer

- software developer vs. general software engineer vs. software architect

About 30% in pay...always call yourself an engineer if you're a developer.

LOL. I think you're on to something.

developer only writes code for a component (maybe to a spec), engineer has responsibility for either operations, or individual component/solution design. Architect is responsible for a comprehensive set of solutions.

Not sure everybody delineates that way, but that is how I've seen it play out.

I'm graduating from a Seattle area college on Saturday. This is exciting news to hear.

I'm desperate for a Ferrari. But I'd rather not pay for it...

I'm constantly getting lowballed by recruiters in NY. The truth is these places aren't paying enough to get the talent. I.e trying to pay good local rates, when software development is increasingly remote and world wide.

Translation: Companies idea of "Market Rate" is not, in fact "Market Rate".

The situation is beyond hopeless

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