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Comment by steven777400 | Hacker News Reader

Right now we have about a half dozen open developer positions that we are so far unable to fill. The problem is the vicious intersection of relatively dull work and relatively low pay. We've had to increasingly go the route of hiring contractors since we can pay them basically anything, whereas actual employee pay is set by the legislature who don't win points with voters when they spend more on state employee salaries...

So, if there was a legitimate tech job shortage, it would be trickling down to more applicants coming to us (which has happened in the past). Right now, I'm not seeing it.

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Do you mean you work for the government somehow?

Yes, an employee of Washington State. The state government is divided into agencies, who can approach hiring differently (some almost exclusively use contractors, other try to use exclusively employees). Contractor pay is negotiated by each agency with the contracting firm; but employee pay is set all the way from the top (the state legislature).

So, for example, if I say "I can't hire anyone that meets your 'expert' qualifications for $65K/year", there's nothing my supervisor, or his supervisor, or the CIO, or the agency director, or even the governor can do; other than recommend we switch to using contractors which has its own downsides.

There's been an increasing push that has been heard for IT salaries to be "re-evaluated", but it's suffering from politics and all the usual high-level government malaise. It'll be at least 2-3 more years before anything happens, and there's a 50/50 chance that the outcome is "we should pay you more, but we won't."

That's the same excuse they've used for not giving "cost of living" increases most years. :)

> but employee pay is set all the way from the top (the state legislature).

Can't fix that broken of a compensation model without significant work (having intelligent representatives run for office).

When I mentioned the problem to one of the state HR folks working on the compensation thing for IT, she said, "Ask not what your state can do for you, but what you can do for your state." Which is a fine sentiment, but doesn't help me actually fill positions with people who won't be a net negative to the team.

Have you thought about hiring people for those positions as full time but actually only working them part time? You could probably find good people who don't want to work normal full time jobs but would like the benefits that usually only come with full time employment.

This does not sound legal to me, though.

Doing that at some of the agencies I've contracted with in the past would take a mile of red tape.

> Have you thought about hiring people for those positions as full time but actually only working them part time?

In state agencies, that's a pretty good way to get yourself and the people involved fired (and possibly worse), since its essentially a conspiracy to defraud the government.

In some/many government agencies, this is the nudge-nudge-wink-wink way things are done. Explicitly planning to do this, however, would probably not end pleasantly for the parties involved.

Any email address where you could be contacted? I looked around your website and blog but only found links to linkedin and facebook. Thank you.

Depending on the content, you can either email my personal email: steve (at) kolls.net

or send official business to my state email: Kollmas (at) wsdot.wa.gov

Thank you, sir. :)

One way to address this is by getting jobs reclassified to higher pay grades. It's not easy, but it might be possible over the course of a few years.

Usually it requires a mission critical task and an inability to hire. If it's important, the leaders will do what it takes to make things happen.

Given that you can hire all the contractors you like... couldn't you just set up an external NGO consulting agency, which you contract work out to, and which has a "deal" to provide their employees insurance/benefits/pensions through you equivalent to what you'd provide—and then making your "hiring" process into a "certification" process that gives people exactly the credential said NGO cares about?

In other words, why not do what the military does, and branch off a civilian subcontractor?

I'm looking for a junior dev position. Does the state hire many junior people?

Some agencies more than others. I've recommended we move to hiring "in-training" positions to enable us to pick up sharp junior devs andd give them rapid advancement (within the very limiting structure we have, of course).

Some agencies hire exclusively junior devs and leave all the higher level architecture, etc, to contractors.

Our agency tries to hire almost exclusively senior devs, and has a real hard time of it. Getting junior devs is easier.

If you're interesting, go to careers.wa.gov and do some searchers. It will show all agencies and you can see salaries and requirements. Entry level developer position is generally ITS 3; ignore the "2 years experience" or whatever. We routinely hire ITS 3 positions with no formal experience, just with either some schoolwork or "learned on my own" programming, or both.

Thanks, I'll check out the website.

Or create your own junior devs and turn them into mid-levels in a couple years. Take a look at the University of Texas's Software Developer Training Program[1]. They have similar problems with respect to hiring, with the additional problem that there is a lot of legacy code in proprietary technologies to maintain. So as a solution they began hiring for aptitude, not knowledge, and putting their trainees through this ~6-month program. The net result is specially tailored devs who know their systems pretty well. They have a strong community of developers who all have a certain background in common. There's a tacit understanding that trainees will stay on long enough to make the University's investment "worth it," but I don't think that's much of a problem. I think most trainees are "grateful," so even though they don't necessarily make what they would in the private sector, they stick around.

I went through this program and ended up working there for three years. Have recommended others go through it as well when they began pursuing careers in tech. Can't speak of it highly enough.

[1]: https://www.utexas.edu/its/analyst-training/

I have a few friends, who can't seem to find any developers on the east coast too.

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