U.S. Employers Struggle to Match Workers with Open Jobs | Hacker News Reader

U.S. Employers Struggle to Match Workers with Open Jobs

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190 pointshappy-go-lucky382 comments

Recently had a recruiter call me, interview me over the phone once, in-person once, and via skype once. The job seemed to be a great fit, the pay was there, everything seemed to be lined up. The recruiter called me again to tell me that they were going to be taking the next steps with me very shortly. A week of silence goes by, then another.

I email, inquiring about the position. "Oh, we gave that to someone we had been interviewing for months, but we'll keep you in mind for the future." Unprofessional disconnects and other encounters like this have taken place several times, in my experience. It turns out I knew the person who did get the job I was all but promised. After talking to them, the company had contacted them three days after its last interview with me, and the successful candidate had been asking for $10,000 dollars less and had less experience than myself. A month later, that candidate emailed me and told me they were let go for "being unable to meet the requirements of the position."

Anecdotal experience like this really makes me skeptical when I hear employers bemoaning that they cannot find employees. Can they really not find employees or good talent, or do they just not want to pay the wages that people are asking for?

how does that random candidate get a hold of you?

"It turns out I knew the person who did get the job"

They were in my Linkedin network, and a college friend coincidentally. I simply pinged them and asked them a few questions about the new job and interview process. I disclosed that I had also interviewed for it. They were a bit leery of their own skill level upfront, so even they were surprised when it was offered. An interesting situation.

Sounds like they simply took the job for less.

> It turns out I knew the person who did get the job I was all but promised.

You should have another cup of coffee.

i tend to skim-read manifestos

I think it pays more to be observant than to be butthurt on the internet.

The latter, hands down. I quit college to startup an IT support company, and despite going back in spurts, never finished. I got quite a few jobs after I left the startup though, and in retrospect I think the primary factor that got me those jobs, despite my many years of expertise, was the fact that since I didn't have a degree they could pay me less vs most of the other candidates. The most recent one, that promised 6 month pay raise, turned into a year, then more, and finally, having spent at least a year working late nights and weekends salary exempt (no OT), getting the infrastructure out of enough technical debt that I no longer needed to work the excessive hours, the company tried to make me go hourly...

Companies simply don't want to pay what they should for the level of talent they want. They are trying to find the edge case that can still get the job done but that they can also underpay so they have more money for the company/execs.

For what it's worth, I quit the sysadmin game and am now pursuing my degree in data science using my GI Bill, which I think will compliment my many years of senior sysadmin knowledge quite well. I'm there to learn, and am very excited about my classes, but I have to admit, a large part of me just wants the degree so I don't suffer the same poor pay not having a degree set me up for, mainly through weakness in the negotiation process.

I generally agree with your premise, but wages are sticky, economically speaking. There might be a few people here who'd be okay with fluctuations of 10 or 20 percent in their salary on an annual basis, but by and large, most people would expect that there's not a decrease in their salary over time.

I feel like I'm missing something here, could you elaborate more? I didn't say anything about wages decreasing over time, unless you are referencing the part of my comment about an employer trying to make me go hourly.

> ...most people would expect that there's not a decrease in their salary over time.

So why don't companies give more aggressive bonuses then? It would help with retention if nothing else.

Unless you have a good track record of awarding bonuses people are skeptical that you will actually pay bonuses.

> They are trying to find the edge case that can still get the job done but that they can also underpay so they have more money for the company/execs

That would be people eternally stuck in the Green Card queue.

You should have started looking after they reneged on their 6 month promise (which for the record is BS usually anyway, as you've discovered).

I feel like there's two tiers of the software industry: those employable at AmaFaceGoogFlix or a competitor, and everyone else; but the "everyone else" is completely unaware that the first tier exists. It's like if minor league baseball had no idea about major league baseball.

You even see it on HN. Someone will come along and talk about how a senior dev at Google can expect $250k a year. You'll get two categories of replies: "I don't believe this at all, Glassdoor proves you are wrong, nobody I know makes that, blah blah" and "bro that is totally normal". $250k is honestly on the average-lowish end for a senior eng at a major SV company in 2017. Much of the industry is not only unaware of reality but refuses to believe in it. This includes real engineers who do real work at real companies and comment actively on Hacker News. $250k for a senior engineer is just completely outside their reality.

On my last job search, my best job offer was about 2x as high as the worst one. The guy who made the worst one--which was about 30-40% below my minimum stated range, depending on how you valued the equity, so he had been stringing me along, but anyway--he started arguing with me about my unrealistic expectations, and wouldn't stop talking until I told him I was going to hang up if he kept trying to talk me down.

I know it's considered bad negotiation, but if I can't figure out the salary range of a job opening, I'll name my requirements up front. Over 50% of the time the conversation ends there. I know at least twice people assumed I was over-highballing as part of some misguided negotiating tactic when I actually was a little conservative.

Yeah I see this as well. Some recruiters will name a number less than my current comp, and be completely astounded that I am already making that much.

The main reason for this is RSU. The base salary at those companies is not much more than rest of industry. But at senior levels the RSU matches or exceeds the entire base salary.

Other companies have a hard time matching this. Startups try but the common wisdom now is to value those at zero. It seems only public traded companies stock is now considered as having value. And only public SV tech companies give these massive RSU to engineers. Other public companies don't do this. And they are not willing to match the RSU amounts with cash. It's possible this situation will only exist as long as this bull market. When the stock market bear comes, will these tech companies continue the massive RSU? And if not will they replace it with cash?

There's a point to this if you get a good startup job offer, but probably 95% or more of startup job offers are terrible. "You'll earn 50% below market, but if we make billions, your options will be worth a few hundred K per year once we have a liquidity event." No thanks.

For big companies that pay market rates, stock can be valued, and GAAP actually requires it. So they're not saving any money on paper paying you in stock. Your total comp is their total comp.

Usually, when you get a good offer including stock, it's from a company with worthwhile stock. Most startup offers aren't worth it even in wildly good scenarios.

But they are totally taking on all the risk and hard work. YOu just have to work insane hours for half of your worth with the risk of getting fired. That's no risk at all compared to being a founder, you should be grateful they gave you that (pre-dilution) 0.015% as employee number 1. After all you get ot build something great!

Which is funny, given that much of their risk is probably just to reputation, if they are funded from angels and operate as a LLC, or whatever.

I always assumed founders put at least some of their own money into the venture. Isn't that the norm?

Were I a VC I wouldn't back someone without skin in the game.

When you are north of 150k in base that's already considered pretty high for a lot of these other companies.

Then you add in stock, bonus, etc... Adds up to a huge package.

RSU = Restricted Stock Unit, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restricted_Stock_Unit

$250k base or $250k INCLUDING stock??

The second one, but if you're not thinking about salary in terms of total comp, you're doing it wrong.

Sure, but $1 of stock isn't worth $1 of liquid assets. It may be worth more than $1 in the long run, but when you're first handed it, you have to undervalue it, compared to hard cash.

I'm a theoretical millionaire several times over, from stock options in startups that suffered the fate of the 99%. You can obviously put more value in the stock of a SV megalith, but even then, you're putting a lot of eggs in one basket.

Stock from a public SV firm is almost as good as cash, and comes with a large amount of lifestyle intangibles.

If you sell it as soon as you get it then it's good as cash. As for the lifestyle intangibles, does having to live in Los Gatos or Gilroy if you want to raise a family count as a perk?

> $1 of stock isn't worth $1 of liquid assets

Er, why not? Only difference is I have to pay a $5 trading fee on Schwab to turn stock into cash. So I guess $10,000 in stock is worth $9,995 in liquid assets.

> even then, you're putting a lot of eggs in one basket.

Only if you hold the stock. Which nothing forces you to do. I can (and do) sell all of my tech company stock on the day it vests and buy other assets instead.

I think you must have the wrong mental model of how RSUs work. Nothing forces you to hold the stock once it vests. It's yours, you can sell it and do whatever you want with the money.

Usually when people at a public company say "I make X", X is the sum of base salary, cash bonus, and the value of RSUs that vest in a year.

You can hold it to reduce taxes right?

Not that I'm aware -- how would holding it reduce taxes? I'm not sure I understand.

Long Term Capital Gains Tax treatment when you sell (20%) after at least one year vs regular Income Tax treatment if you sell right away.

Yes, but that's only on the capital gains. You still pay income tax on the value of the equity when it's granted.

If the stock is $100 when it vests, you pay income tax on $100 per share, whether you hold or sell. It's exactly the same as if you got paid that money in cash and then decided to buy shares (after paying tax).

If you then hold and it goes above $100 while you held, you pay capital gains tax (short or long-term, depending on how long you hold) when you sell.

Again, exactly the same as would happen if you bought those shares yourself with a cash bonus. Getting shares really is the same as cash, for tax purposes.

No. RSUs are not stock options. They're taxed at their current value when they're given to you.

Right, I was assuming sjg007 was talking about tax treatment of the capital gains if you hold onto the stock after the RSUs vest.

I still don't get how there's any way holding it instead of selling it reduces taxes.

If you sell on vest, you pay income tax and 0 capital gains. If you sell after vest, you pay the same amount of income tax, and possibly nonzero capital gains.

Yes, I think the clarification needed was that you can reduce capital gains tax rates but not income tax rates.

But you don't have to hold $company stock to do that. You can sell on vest for 0 capital gains, then buy diversified index funds and hold those long term.

And that's indeed what I do! ;)

There is no clarification to be made. There is no way to reduce taxes on RSUs by holding onto them longer. When $100 of RSUs vest, you get taxed on $100 of income. You can either keep the stock or immediately sell it with no further tax event related to that initial $100 whichever of the two options you choose. If you keep the stock, it is equivalent to having bought $100 of stock at that instant. Psychology aside, the hold versus sell-on-vest decision should be predicated entirely on whether you would have bought that amount of stock with your own cash at its vest price.

Well... if it's worth $X when it vests, you pay income tax on $X. If it's worth $Y when you sell, you pay capital gains on $(Y - X), presuming you held it longer than a year. If it was less than a year, you pay income tax on $(Y - X).

At least, that's my understanding. I'm not a tax accountant, though. This is not financial advice.

THat's not as true when we are talking about stock from Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, etc... The risk is dramatically lower.

Ahhh, that explains it. When the market crashes, you become plebs like the rest of us. Except you'll be living in the most expensive place in the country.

right, because RSUs go to 0 in a stock crash.

Not really. At worst you lose a couple of years of growth in prior equity grants but your yearly refresher will be bulked up significantly to account for the diminished value of the stock and voila, pleb no more...

Yup, if the stock goes down, and you get a bigger (# of shares, not $$) refresh, if it goes back up to where it was before, bam, you've got it made. If you're lucky, you'll have enough for a down payment on a house....

Only for people who didn't sell on vest... stocks are a liquid asset just like cash; nothing forces to keep the shares you're paid with.

It really reminds me of a power law distribution : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_law

Some are very well paid/employable/competent, but the vast majority are not. Many people think the job search should be like a normal/Gaussian distribution, most people rambling about the mean. But it's not that for the searcher nor the employer; the employees you want are to be paid on a power law, and the jobs you want are as a common as a power law.

Curiously, this works for populations of cities, star luminosity, start-up success, and many other things.

> I know it's considered bad negotiation

it's not. the more assertive you are with your compensation requirements, the more likely you are to get paid what you want.

i don't know where this crazy idea of "don't tell anyone what you want to be paid" came from, it sounds like some real amateur hour nonsense that will get you passed up in favor of someone who is more straight forward with the entire process.

imagine trying to buy a product or service, but nobody will tell you how much it costs, but instead tries to subtly hint that you should name your price.

> imagine trying to buy a product or service, but nobody will tell you how much it costs, but instead tries to subtly hint that you should name your price

There are tons of products that don't have a listed prices, just a "call our sales representatives". Heck, the job listings don't list salary expectations, even when they're cold calling you.

"call our sales representatives" means they'll tell you if you call. i'm guessing you never call, because you don't actually want to talk to anyone, which is exactly what they're trying to do: filter you out.

It can mean: "you want to know the price? Well, that depends... How much is it worth to you?"

Among plenty of other things

Value-based pricing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value-based_pricing

Best way to increase margins when the perceived "worth" is variable and it's a seller's market. Not so optimal in a market where you as a seller are in a buyers market.

> they'll tell you if you call

...or they expect you to haggle. Or the price depends on who you are. Or the price depends on how close they are to getting their sales bonus.

They'll make you offers going from most expensive to cheaper, also it's a filter in order to lure in people who believe the product has value. You could say is a subtle way of asking people if they value the product highly, basically asking people to name the price even though not directly.

Slightly related. I openly share my salary information with all of my friends in tech, 90% share their history back with me. I refuse to let social mores depress my wages or those of my friends. I recommend all engineers do the same.

Ok, how much?

I make ~$200k in an affordable city not on the coast. I could make $300k - $400k in NYC. I write and maintain programs for finance.

How do you get a job in finance while not on the coast? Remote work? Work in a branch? Work for a regional outfit?

My money is on Charlotte NC, or perhaps Austin or Dallas if Charlotte is considered the coast somehow.

200k in those areas is obviously quite good but not life-altering money. You'll need to work 5-10 years before you become a millionaire.

Anesthesiologists in that area can make up to 600k.

live on the coast for a while, build/augment your career and social circle, and then move somewhere else and keep your job(s).

note this plan actually involves dedicating years of your life to something without a guaranteed payoff or clearly defined steps, which is why it seems like such a mystery to most people.

Yes, I think that "rule" came about to have people avoid price anchoring against their own best interest. However, why not use the price anchor in your favor? It does take some confidence and ability to walk away, so in a compromised position I see the merit. But generally engineers are in a great position in the marketplace.

It's not crazy if you don't have a good idea of your market value. It's not "don't tell anyone what you want to be paid", it's "make the other side go first, just in case I'm wildly undervalued and the range is higher than I can imagine".

And I've been part of many enterprise software purchases where getting to a cost depends a lot on budget and perceived depth of pockets. Final prices are usually 50% of the first price you can drag out of the vendor, but I've seen up to 90% discounts.

You're right on both counts, as long as the market values are relatively well known to all parties. When it's murky, you're better off letting the other side go first. Sounds like you're very in touch with your own personal market value, so it's not an issue for you.

That tier distinction is way too fluid in my experience to claim it as a real thing; a large (not small) number of people I know who've worked at or work at Google easily belong in the 'minor leagues', but it's just an over the top confidence even arrogance, often combined with a lot of years of sticking with tech, that got them their job. Seriously, a lot of mediocre developers if you add a bunch of years (or a post grad degree), maybe a month of leetcode if they haven't already, and double their ego can a get a job there. (New hires get assigned to the uncompetitive, boring projects at Google, so there's that negative compensation too).

Btw talking about total comp and not base salary is highly misleading. Yeah sure, by that standard with recent valuations I'm making >250k at a post Series A startup.

Yeah well, that's what happens when you base your interview around algorithm trivia.

It is only misleading when you are talking about startups that give non-liquid equity. The difference between you and me is that I can sell my stock literally the moment it vests at pretty predictable price, while you can only use valuation to price it, are probably affected by liquidation preferences, and don't have buyers lined up for your stock.

I'm in the first camp, and there are people who think we are ridiculously underpaid. "If you're so good, how come you haven't hit seven figures?" is something I've heard a couple of times already. So there is a tier above us too. Go figure...

I've heard of several engineers at the bigger companies who make 7 figures, but basically they are not only engineers working on active projects but are also putting their names on patents.

I still don't believe the $250k figure :)

I make exactly half of that here in Florida (a fairly low cost area) as a senior dev and my salary has definitely plateaued (and I haven't had a raise in a few years).

I know I make more than most of my peers and local recruiters scoff when I tell them my current pay (I had to talk my current employer up about $30k just to match my salary at my previous employer to get me to switch -- and they only did so because they were quite obviously desperate).

H1B data is public. You can see exactly how much they are offering H1Bs, which most people assume to be lowballing. The median for Google is $127K, but that includes junior engineers. Sort by salary to see the senior roles.

And then remember that this is just base salary. Usually, the RSUs are almost equal to the salary when granted, and sometimes double in value over the four years they vest.

http://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=GOOGLE&job=SOFTWARE+ENGINEE...

This is a good data set to calibrate in larger orgs or an industry. You should be within a std deviation I would say for your role. Software engineers are lucky in that we can work across industries.

Do you mean that you actually don't believe it? As in, "I think that's a false statement"? Or do you mean that you're jokingly in "a state of disbelief", as in… surprised or taken aback?

I have friends in low cost areas that make around what you're describing. They don't continue doing that because of willful disbelief, they understand that they could move and make 2.5x their current income. They just like the lifestyle. Which, totally makes sense to me. It's an amazing lifestyle.

Perhaps somewhere in between. While $250k sounds high for a pure code-slinger, I'm willing to believe a few companies (Google, Microsoft, et. al.) choose to pay a small number of their top devs that kind of money.

On the other hand, competition for dev jobs in general is so fierce (as in the supply of great devs outstrips the demand by a large margin) that I can't imagine it would be difficult to fill those same positions at a significantly lower salary (or total comp, whatever -- I've never held a job that pays equity or bonuses in any non-trivial amount).

The competition is fierce? Must only be a SF phenomena. My side of the country doesn't feel that way at all. Seems like there's way more jobs than qualified applicants over here.

Still the same problem of most being unwilling to pay for talent, but those who are still aren't having THAT easy of a time.

Nope, most senior devs at such companies are pure code slingers or small team leads. The "select few", which I interpret to mean people who can architect or lead large projects, start at 400k or so and top out at undisclosed millions.

Believe it. I'm based in Austin, and a few years ago was making about $125k as a senior dev when Apple came calling. They wanted me to move out to California which I didn't want to do, so to blow them off, I did a small calculation (cost of living, california taxes, etc) to arrive at the conclusion that at the very minimum I'd need $180k for that move to even start to make sense for me.

The recruiter explained how they could easily pay me a $140-160K base and give me about $40k in RSUs to get me up to $200k if I was the right candidate. I'd never heard of RSUs before that and he had to explain what they were to me.

The easy with which it was offered definitely helped me understand why $250k in total comp was definitely something that could be done at the bigger tech companies

> On the other hand, competition for dev jobs in general is so fierce (as in the supply of great devs outstrips the demand by a large margin)

This is so much the exact opposite of everything I've experienced that I have a hard time believing it. Finding good developers is near impossible, we regularly interview people for months before finding someone halfway decent. And the last time I looked for work I had several offers for remote positions at east coast companies, which makes it hard to believe this is a regional thing.

What sort of work are these great devs doing that is not in demand?

Is your company one of the hot ones right now where developers are lining up?

Assuming not, what's the compensation for the job? Have you tried posting the compensation for the job publicly?

The reason I ask is because as someone who works for one of the big 5, I don't even consider companies outside of the big 5 or top startups. As "cynicalkane" said: "Much of the industry is not only unaware of reality but refuses to believe in it. This includes real engineers who do real work at real companies and comment actively on Hacker News. $250k for a senior engineer is just completely outside their reality."

Are you offering 250+ for senior engineers? If so, broadcast it and people will interested. Else, I'll assume you are going to just offer non-market rates and waste my time.

I agree fully. It may look like there's fierce competition to someone who has failed repeatedly, but here's what it looks like from the inside: In my experience at three of the big tech companies, we extend offers to everyone who meets the bar. It's never a case of "we have 3 strong candidates, so which one do we choose?". If we have 3 strong candidates at the same time, we attempt to hire all 3 - attempt meaning in competition with other potential employers. If we have 3 weak candidates, we don't settle for the best of the current options - we hire 0 and we wait for more candidates. If you're not getting hired at AmaMicroGoogBook it's not because there's a surplus of great SDEs and some other candidates edged you out for a limited number of seats - it's because you simply didn't make the hiring bar.

Absolutely true. Of those I've interviewed at Alphabet, only about 1 in 7 has gotten an offer. You'd be surprised how many people do really terribly in onsite interviews. Phone screens are even worse.

Where I used to work in the Midwest, we tried to have a similar hiring bar, but just couldn't get as many people. The best we hired were as good as anyone I've worked with in SV, but the worst... well, I won't get into that.

as in the supply of great devs outstrips the demand by a large margin

No, no, no. Not even close. At my last gig, we would interview for months to find a decent candidate. We were no AmaFaceGoog, but our pay was decent and the work was interesting. The supply (here in the Upper Midwest), definitely does not outstrip the demand!

I don't know a single person at Google who makes less than $180k in total comp, and that includes new grads. If you are more senior in any way (e.g. graduated college 2 years ago instead of just now), you're looking at >$200-220k, and if you're actually Senior Software Engineer, you're looking at $250-300+k total comp in a year.

Really, don't let the base salary numbers fool you. RSUs is where it's at.

> I don't know a single person at Google who makes less than $180k in total comp, and that includes new grads.

I assume this is MTV/SVL/SFO/NYC? I'm sure you can find new grads who make less than that in other offices. At least I make less than that as an L3 in SEA

SEA is in pretty much the same bracket when it comes to compensation. I've heard some rumors that recent new hires have been getting less stock than people in the past. Are you also including bonus (15-20% of salary)?

Sadly, yes =[ Comes out to be ~150k total. Honestly I don't mind I feel I am lucky to work at Google =]

"here in Florida (a fairly low cost area)"

Let's say you work in downtown Tampa and live 30-40 minutes away. You can get a 4 bedroom 2500 sq ft house for $350K. That's about 3 years salary for you.

Now let's say you get a job at Facebook and want to find a similar house, about 30-40 minutes away. I think it will cost you upwards of $2M. You need to be making $670K or more to make housing the same fraction of your living expenses.

Your quality of living and long term economic prospects are probably significantly better where you are.

> to make housing the same fraction of your living expenses

And when housing is the same fraction, the disposable income after that fraction is removed is far, far higher. As Bill Gates says, once you can afford the $30 burger, there's nowhere to get an even more expensive burger.

Bill Gates needs to update his quote, I don't think $30 is where burger-technology has topped out these days

More than that. If you make that kind of money you're going to pay a higher percentage of it in taxes.

FWIW I'm roughly at the mid-point between those two figures and not at a Big 4 or similar. I have no RSUs, stock, bonuses, or other such things, it's all base salary. My base salary is higher than any of my developer friends who have full time jobs, but my total compensation is roughly upper quartile due to their add ons.

Perhaps it's the major league baseball that doesn't believe in the minor league baseball ;)

Who are the competitors to AmaFaceGoogFlix? I'm based out of nyc, and the common logic here is that dev salaries start maxing out in the 150-170 range. If you go to a hedge fund, you can get more, maybe pop 200. But for more than that? You have to go to AmaFaceGoogFlix.

If you're working for finance total comp (if not base salary) is definitely going to rival the biggest tech players. From what I've seen 150-170 base is the minimum for senior devs then you talking bonuses or stock for at least another 25-50%. If you're working for a hedgefund you're talking bonuses of X00% so it almost doesn't make sense to compare base salaries.

The startup story, at least in nyc, is pretty different. Best I can tell few of those players are willing to even try to compete on a base salary (or total comp) with any of the larger players.

This is a relatively small sample size, ymmv etc.

> Someone will come along and talk about how a senior dev at Google can expect $250k a year. You'll get two categories of replies: "I don't believe this at all, Glassdoor proves you are wrong, nobody I know makes that, blah blah" and "bro that is totally normal".

That's the thing. On one side, you have people who at least have a bit of publicly available data to point to (although sure, one could point out flaws in salary.com and glassdoor.com). On the other side, you have random people saying "Bro, you're totally wrong, lots of people make $400k." Even if I didn't have a dog in this race, I know which side I'd believe.

I know people who are making mid six figures working for Google-tier companies. But I don't think there are very many of those kinds of people - hundreds, maybe. And these are people with highly specialized skillsets in addition to their software development skills - pattern recognition, for instance. You're not going to get a job like that because you know Python really well.

Asking a software developer "Why aren't you making $400k?" is a lot like asking a random mid-level manager why he isn't the CEO of a Fortune 100 company.

> I know people who are making mid six figures working for Google-tier companies. But I don't think there are very many of those kinds of people - hundreds, maybe.

This is the thing that annoys me the most about these conversations. Some people take a few outliers and use them as proof that the rest of the bell curve is [ bad at negotiating | incompetent | lazy ]. Drives me nuts. I can name several multimillionaire business owners. Nobody's going around saying your bootstrapped one man startup should be raking in multiple millions of dollars a year or there's something wrong with you.

These "HN salary" threads would be a lot less annoying if those guys would just admit "Yea, $300K or $400K is super rare, for outlier folks out outlier companies who have outlier skills," rather than the usual "Lots of people make that! Just negotiate better, bro!!" bluster.

I make $400k as a software engineer, and I can tell you it's pretty rare. We're probably talking top few percent of engineers (in terms of compensation) living in a select number of areas.

I think it's possible only a few dozen companies can do this.

These are median numbers for Amazon/Google/Facebook/Microsoft https://blog.step.com/2016/04/08/an-open-source-project-for-...

And then there is a third that those in AmaFaceGoogFlix are completely unaware that the tier above them pwned them long ago, governments.

The latter. At the market clearing price the market clears - that is what market clearing means.

Of course most companies are filled with people who don't get micro economics.

That's it in a nutshell.

There are people here who'll do the work, do any work, for the right money.

Employers don't want to pay, though. You've seen those charts about productivity graphed against worker pay, and how for the last 40 years, the productivity has gone up while the worker pay has stayed mostly flat?

That's the problem.

And why pay more, when you can sink a tiny fraction of what you would be spending on labor, to fund a congressional campaign and have the laws changed in your favor?

If there's an answer to this besides unionization and better pro-worker laws, I'd love to hear it.

And the "everybody needs to learn how to code" meme taking hold in society will ensure that this doesn't change.

Labor costs being essentially 0 outside the developed world ran down wages for over a decade.

If OPEC embargoes the US, you would still be able to buy a gallon of gas for $10 or whatever but that doesn't mean there wouldn't be a shortage.

"They're just asking for the moon, and not expecting to pay very much for it," Cappelli says. "And as a result they [can't] find those people. Now that [doesn't] mean there was nobody to do the job; it just [means] that there was nobody at the price they were willing to pay."

In my opinion, this is the key paragraph in the article. I see this all the time when recruiters send me job postings, and they want someone with 5 years of experience for the salary of someone with 2 years of experience.

Indeed, I think something like it should have been the title.

I feel like that would've made the title too politicized, as it is it's quite neutral.

But maybe the job isn't economically worth it at the higher salary? You seem to be assuming it's worth doing at any price, as does the article, and that's untrue.

Besides, I don't know about others, but I've recently put out multiple job ads for one vacancy. Our app, Noctacam, uses computational photography to take great photos at night. I was looking for someone with computational photography knowledge and/or iOS. And/or Android, since we plan to make an Android app in the future. I found it convenient to post three job ads, so that I can clearly organise the dozens of applicants based on their skills. Two of them went unfulfilled. Which is exactly as was intended. Someone who doesn't understand the background may say, "Oh, no, tons of positions aren't being filled." In other ways, it may a counting problem, not a real problem.

If they need to fill this job and it is not worth the higher salary and it cannot be filled at this salary or lower then this job should not exist as a job: the owner of the company, the manager of the company, the HR person of the company can either do that job themselves or that job should be eliminated.

But why? Does having the position open harm anyone?

As long as they don't bitch about being unable to buy a Porsche 911 for $100, they are welcome to advertise it.

It needlessly wastes peoples time.

If employers were required to pay for someone's time for an interview, you would see this fixed right quick. But because an employer can leave an unreasonable job req out there and interview as many candidates as they want, with the only cost being their own time, this continues.

Sorting resumes and conducting interviews is not free.

So, you still need a cost benefit analysis.

Cost of doing business.

Wasting resources for zero gain is never just a cost of doing business.

Yes, not all jobs will be filled quickly. But, unreasonable salary expectations cause needless waste.

In sufficiently large bureaucracies the departmental budget is someone else's money, but meanwhile the departmental middle manager has to prove his need for existence, so why not advertise for a position. You see this often in universities: someone leaves, the duties are distributed amongst those that are still there, a job is advertised and goes unfilled for several terms because none of the applicants are to the taste of the committee.

Here's something I wrote on a different discussion about hiring:

Imagine I cost my company $50 an hour in salary, and earn them $150 an hour (revenue of 3-5x salary is ballpark for most companies, we'll go for the low end for some perspective). As a senior dev, I have to sit in all the interviews of people potentially joining my team. Imagine we have 10 people that make it through the HR round. I have to participate in 10 interviews, and then likely 3 more for the final round.

My cost for round 2 is: 10 people x 2 hours x (150 lost revenue + 50 salary paid) = $4k

My cost for round 3 is: 3 x 8 x (150 + 50) = $4.8k

My company has already dropped $8.8k on my involvement solely in the interview room for your typical entry level position. This doesn't even include my involvement in onboarding, training, pre-interview prep, post-interview review, etc. This is also JUST ME, and a very lowball figure at that. Now factor in the cost of the HR round, recruiters, background checks, the other devs in the interviews with me, etc. It adds up very, very quickly.

The "costs of doing business" can easily be reduced by not interviewing for shits and giggles.

I think the problem is that the company's budget and the hiring managers are different things - both in terms of resources and how people are willing to think about them.

smaller companies avoid interviewing like this out of pure practicality, it's only the larger ones that can afford to waste $100k filling a position.

I don't get why companies can't just hire a bunch of more "questionable" applicants at a lower rate, say $45k - $60k or so for junior devs in most cities.

No need to spend much effort on the interview process, just make sure they can solve a couple standardized problems, and then "hire" them as contractors for a 90-day trial.

Put them onto teams and throw them in the deep end, then get rid of all the ones who can't swim, which will probably be like 75%. But you'll also find quite a few unexpected gems that way.

I mean, that's exactly what we did in Call Center management and it worked great. Hired people at $10 / hour for the first 90 days, then a $2 raise up to $12. We did have super high attrition for brand new employees (since we didn't technically do a contracting period,) but who really cares.

We just kept on filtering and eventually had dozens of shockingly intelligent and competent call center employees for like, $13 / hour. (This was in the Midwest.)

Quite a few companies are doing exactly what you describe to fill dev positions. The real cost comes when the systems designed and built by those junior devs are so brittle it becomes very time consuming and expensive to add new features. Most of the time, however, those systems built by the junior devs are so buggy there's no time to build new features in any case because everyone is too busy dealing with issues in prod.

That's because these companies management loves to develop by committee that comes with agilie, points, IPMs and standups. When a voice of expert is assigned the same weight as the voice of a Joe Random Developer and there are more Joe Random Developers than experts, you end up with garbage fire of systems.

It isn't just junior devs. It's also senior ones with a sophisticated grasp of CS trivia and little expertise outside of it.

I think a lot of firms already do something like that through internship programs.

I don't know how it is in your business, but if I was given a new batch of team members every 90 days in the expectation that 75% of them would be gone in three months, I would also be gone in three months.

yes.

it also adds noise to the information provided by the market, confusing job seekers who may adopt sub-optimal strategies

e.g. in reaction to a real job posting, the potential applicant may erroneously think "this listing is bullshit. i won't waste my time applying."

There's a range of salaries for a given level of competence. I found one candidate earning ₹4 lac a year who was way more competent than another earning ₹14 lac a year. That's a 3x variation. So, no harm keeping it open for a while to see if it can be filled.

> But maybe the job isn't economically worth it at the higher salary?

As in, their business doesn't even generate enough revenue to afford hiring the kind of people who can keep it running?

The task that they are hiring for does not generate enough revenue to be worth at price X. The business may not stop from operating if these tasks are not done, or not done on a priority basis.

But, in the standard perfect markets interpretation, that would mean that the task shouldn’t be done. Right?

If there are no takers, then the task should not be done, yes. What a lot if people seem to imply is that these jobs should not be advertised in the first place, which I disagree with.

Advertising is not free. Having a few unfilled jobs is natural but it's wasteful to have significant market disconnects.

That said, a lot of 'jobs' are simply H1B fodder or resume bait etc.

Unless they people causing them waste incur costs greater then they benefits, it won't change. Hiring has gone digital, reducing costs, so of course garbage job postings have increased.

So... the business doesn't even generate enough revenue to afford hiring the kind of people who can keep it running well, or at least not as well as its owners would want it to be running?

Should workers be doing charity work now?

No, you are free not to accept inadequate pay, just as the companies are free not to accept excessive pay. It's a marketplace, just think in terms of bids and asks.

It's a marketplace until the business starts using a nonexistent "shortage" to lobby government to add more visa slots and create programs to funnel more students into the jobs it wants to pay less for.

It's also a marketplace where one side has much more information and negotiating power than the other.

Of course you are free to do whatever you want, it's the entitlement that pisses me off. Somehow, employees charging "too much" is not ok and totally not the companies' fault, whereas offering too little is great management. Then they wonder why there are six million jobs that they can't fill.

>As in, their business doesn't even generate enough revenue to afford hiring the kind of people who can keep it running?

Even businesses which generate enough revenue to be able to afford higher salaries don't want to pay more for labor. They want to pay less for more.

And workers seek higher salaries. Through both entities acting in their self-interest, the market discovers an equilibrium.

Until the entity with more power starts bending the rules of them game in their favour.

Until the class which does all the work decides to get rid of our parasites.

Except they won't/can't. And the parasites are actually working very hard.

They just get inordinately rewarded for their work, because most of their work involves maintaining the status quo, with them on top. It's their families that don't work.

Moreover, so far the only thing revolution has been good for is shuffling the parasites. I strongly suspect there are biological reasons behind our feudal support of strongmen.

Historically, that hasn't been very successful. Purges never seem to be a good solution.

I always find this an interesting argument; while company foo has more power than a random job seeker, they certainly don't have more power than all the other companies seeking that employee. In order for companies to wield their supposed salary-depressing power there would have to be massive collusion. For an example of how (in)effective that is, look how much salaries increased while Apple Google et al were colluding.

I think this is more simple: units of production are less obviously attributable to FTE count or difference in skill in software than in other fields. Therefore, management is less sure how much developer they actually need to purchase.

Companies are certainly beholden to the market: one of the ways the power asymmetry is unfolding is in their successful manipulation of H1 visa legislation.

None of this is all-or-nothing. Companies use their power over the individual applicants as a response to the vagaries of the market. However, the basic logic divide and conquer ing means that they always have more power than individuals selling their services to them.

Even the H1 program pits corporate interests against each other. The biggest companies have to enter the same lottery as WIPRO Jr. DBAs.

There has been exactly this type of collusion in the past and I would argue it's still ongoing, just better covered up. http://fortune.com/2015/09/03/koh-anti-poach-order/

If the market clears that's the equilibrium.

If the market is free, eventually it gets sold. In this case, that means legislating artificial surplus in the form of increased H1 visas.

Even then the market clears. The equilibrium under H1 is different than without H1 but there's still an equilibrium.

I'm not sure what your point is: that it is the preferable state of affairs simply because it has found stability?

This is a great point. One can think of a job posting as a bid on the market. Not every bid results in trade. Similarly, not every job posting is a job, like your example demonstrated.

But I don't think that's how job openings are calculated - they're mostly derived by asking employers, not just counting up postings.

How many market bid values are covered until you go through a vetting process so extended that you can realistically only look at a relatively tiny number bids before making a decision?

So what's the job-market-equivalent of a HFT or broker to reconcile the bids and asks?

> I found it convenient to post three job ads, so that I can clearly organise the dozens of applicants based on their skills. Two of them went unfulfilled. Which is exactly as was intended.

I always wondered why 50% of job listings were totally fake. "Selfish hiring practices" being the reason makes a lot more sense than "appearance of growth" that usually gets stated.

It's also pretty common that the job is already basically filled internally or (less commonly at the moment) by H1B but for various legal or procedural reasons there has to be a job posting.

> But maybe the job isn't economically worth it at the higher salary?

That would means the company is dysfunctional and only desperate people are going to join this wagon.

How does that follow? You seem to be assuming a lot. If they're peripheral, optional tasks, like an extra service you could upsell to your clients for a small margin, it may not provide enough income for a market-level salary.

So you are incapable of hiring. When you don't have the money for a ferrari, you don't buy a toyota because of the lack of available ferraris.

People are not objects, and your analogy is not accurate (or maybe just unclear). People (at least in our industry) are free not to accept jobs with low pay. You are also free to seek clients rather than employers.

In most cases, you don't want to take a job that's worth say $100k, but not $150k to an employer.

Either the value you're bringing to the company is somewhere less than $50k, or the company is irrationally tied to not paying more than $100k.

So what if the value is less than $50k?

You want to work for a company where you cost them $150k in salary and benefits and only add $50k in value? That's a very insecure position to be in, it doesn't leave much room for growth, and it means you have very little leverage overall.

Six months ago, I was making about 1/6 of that working as a software developer, and I wasn't badly paid for the area. I'm pretty sure most of my colleagues would sign up for that in five minutes.

I'm assuming you mean 1/6 of $150k (150k was salary plus benefits, the salary was only 100k).

25k is very badly paid for any area in the US (outside of a few territories) as a software developer. If you're not in the US, then obviously that changes things.

Yeah, not in the US :)

Then there's not a heck of a lot of room for error or raises. In a now deleted reddit thread someone was bitching that $150k for programmers was absurd, and they have all kinds of applicants, so nobody's worth that kind of money.

My rebuttal was pretty simple: major tech companies have profits per employee north of $100k. That's $100k in compensation left on the table, by companies reputed to be among the highest paying out there. In contrast, IBM has profits of $30k per person and is constantly in layoff mode. That's what happens when the value is less than $50k.

Unless you're currently making $50K, in which case why would you turn down a 100% raise?

If your choice is only between your current $50k job and the $100k job then of course.

For most people looking at a $100k a year job, that's not the case.

That's a fair point.

>But maybe the job isn't economically worth it at the higher salary? You seem to be assuming it's worth doing at any price, as does the article, and that's untrue.

In that case, something's got to give. Either the wage has to go up, or they'll have to accept the fact that they won't find anybody who's willing to work for that wage and the job will remain unfilled.

If the job isnt worth the salary, then the business isnt fungible

I wonder if this is a hangover from the recession. Hiring managers expectations have been anchored to market conditions that simply don't exist anymore but which lasted so long that no one in hiring recognizes the issue.

In my opinion this have nothing to do with circumstances.

Companies that would prefer to pay less (that would be most of them) always say that there are not enough qualified people, they never complain that they have to pay too much.

If there are not enough qualified people the answer is obvious: allow more emigration or educate more people in the field faster.

The real goal is to reduce wages and improve profits.

If there was not enough qualified people wages would keep growing. So, yes, there are not enough qualified people for the wages that we would like, but this is always going to be the case.

In the same vein, employees never say they are overpaid.

It's just unfashionable to say that there is an inherent conflict between labour and capital.

You are correct, it is about labor costs.

Yup, see this all the time in the UK.

Businesses complain they can't find the skills they need, but what they mean is they can't the skills they need for a derisory price. Particularly in the UK there seems little appteciation that software is a valuable thing, created by professionals. Too often the MBA types consider it just another form of generic office work, and seek to pay in line with that. Then they wonder why the technical departments they put together are so incompetent...

Technical staff, even those with multiple degrees from Russell Group universities will always be treated as blue-collar by the management class, in the UK. Private or public sector is the same.

Then they should unionize like blue-collar staff. Seize the means of computation!

I occasionally peruse job listings for other countries (I'm in the US, but sometimes entertain delusions of emigrating). I came to the conclusion pretty quickly that the UK has got to be the absolute worst place in the western world to be a software developer.

Not sure about worst, and you can make a decent living as a contractor, or going into coding for a financial firm.

But in terms of money on offer for a generic development job, yup, the pay is peanuts and they do indeed end up hiring monkeys.

Just remind them that both The Office and the IT Crowd were British shows.

or 5 years' experience in something that has only been around for 2 years.

There is a shortage of workers in as much as there is a shortage of BMW 7-series sedans for under $30k. I looked everywhere at that price. Massive shortage.

This is true in certain cases, but not all. I just offered an unemployed family member (and recent computer science grad) a freelance opportunity worth $100 an hour to build out a simple e-commerce site. They didn't want the work.

I think part of the problem is that you can have a lot of "fun" these days for very cheap (video games, YouTube, etc). Maybe it's time for us to reexamine why people don't even want high-paying jobs.

"I'll pay you $100/hr but the whole budget is 5 hours"

Is there a word for laugh-cringing..? So spot on.

>why people don't even want high-paying jobs.

I'm gonna guess there's two sides to that story

I'm in a pretty small secondary market and was recently advised by someone who knows what he is talking about to never accept less than $200/hr for contract work. That is the going rate around here and accepting less signals that you don't know what you are doing.

Perhaps the $100/hr isn't as much as you think it is. More so if you are somewhere expensive like San Francisco or New York.

Many shops I know that charge $200/hr charge $200/hr to a customer and pay a developer $50/hr and then proceed to subtract value from the project because of agency considerations.

Care to share which secondary market you're in?

Can you hint at your market? I'm in a sizable market and my competitors are in the 125-150 range. I think I produce better work, but my first few major projects that lasted a few years are only now winding down and I'm out seeking new work. I'd like to experiment with different pricing strategies with the positive reputation I've accumulated.

I'm in Richmond VA.

Its all fun and games until you have a family...then it is difficult to have 3 roommates to an apartment, you have massive healthcare premiums, deductibles and you find that 70% of the tech jobs are in a metro area where your salary doesn't pay for more than a 1br apt for your family.

...but yes, our entertainment costs are fairly inexpensive. Too bad there are so many other things to pay for.

This.

Now i'm divorced, but I got to keep the rent controlled apartment in Russian Hill, with the roommates. Ex and kid moved to Sacramento and commutes in to her grad school classes at SF State.

> then it is difficult to have 3 roommates to an apartment

Well technically you still have the roommates, they just make a mess everywhere and you have to cover their rent every month.

It's entirely possible this person just felt like they have other, better, options. Maybe they don't want to be a web dev, maybe they want regular work vs the uncertainty of consulting, maybe they felt like they weren't up to the job.

> I think part of the problem is that you can have a lot of "fun" these days for very cheap (video games, YouTube, etc).

Not even really sure what that means? Isn't this like talking about pro athletes or rock stars?

We need to bring in cheaper, more desperate H1-BMWs from overseas.

We need to start bringing back more American-BMWs. Those foreign BMWs are taking our cars!

I recall Buick trying that about a decade ago without much success.

If going to the doctor for a checkup costed you 20K out of pocket, would you consider there to be a "shortage" of doctors?

How about if it costs a 100$ per loaf of bread?

I'd considered that to be a shortage. Even if supply is technically meeting demand.

No, and I'm not sure why. Maybe because doctors have unlimited demand and are considered more highly skilled?

How about 100$ bread? Is that a shortage? People literally starving to death, because they can't pay for food?

But supply is meeting demand at that point, right?

  But supply is meeting demand at that point, right?

It implies a shortage, because of the price point. Because demand far outstrips supply, which drives price up.

And now to bring things full circle, if tech salaries are very high, doesn't this ALSO imply a shortage of programmers, as demand is far outstripping supply?

I'd say no. We can't compartmentalize things like this. I fully support bringing in foreign talent but the logic is flawed. I want lower wages across the economy but the conversation must start in the board room. Nobody, other than the investor, should be making more than a certain multiplier of the minimum wage. The CEO who got fired from HP and went on to be the CEO at Oracle? Is there a shortage of CEOs? I'm sure if you look within your organization, you'll find at least one person willing to bite the bullet and become your next CEO if you need.

Sorry if this was a little off topic. I feel uneasy about our growing inequality in our economy but we can't fix it outside of the boardroom. Did you know that board members get paid? I surely didn't until not too long ago. Why do they get paid? I mean I'm not talking compensation for travel. I'm talking six figure compensation. Do we have a shortage of people who are willing to sit on your board?

I'm okay with CEOs making more money, but what I can't stand is the golden parachutes and lack of responsibility.

Apparently they do that because otherwise CEOs would never take risks, for good reason.

You can't be CEO of several companies, so a CEO is fully invested in the success of that one company. From the point of view of a CEO, it makes sense for the company to not take risks.

On the other hand, investors can invest in diverse companies and expect some of them to fail and some of them to win big. From the point of view of an investor, it makes sense for the company to take risks.

Therefore investors pay CEOs a lot and give them golden parachutes to prevent CEOs and investors from having opposite incentives.

I am not ok with a golden parachute at all, especially for people like John Thain but also for all publicly traded companies.

What exactly is risk here? That the person is looking for another job (which tends to be succesfull) and the he is not super uber rich, just very rich?

I give you that being good ceo is hard and all that. But seriously, calling it financial risk is ridiculous.

Shortages are irrespective of the severity of price. Shortages imply their is enough demand that normally price would increase to match supply at a given price point but cannot due to outside forces such as price controls.

What you and a bunch of other people confuse as a shortage is just basic market dynamics. Price is high but costs are also high (not a lot of people are willing and capable of being programmers). Cheaper developer prices would be great for businesses but price has to balance with cost and it is useless to call things a shortage for demand that is unsatisfied at a non-market price.

Example: would you say there is a shortage of Tesla model S's since I only am willing to pay $30,000. No, because the costs for a model S is higher than that and then everything would be considered a shortage at a low enough price point.

That is a terrible example. Above a certain wage, jobs disappear because there is not enough value created to pay a higher wage. That's quite different from a consumer buying a luxury good.

> Above a certain wage, jobs disappear because there is not enough value created to pay a higher wage.

Exactly my point! Economists don't call situations where costs (wages for developers) exceed what the market will pay (value created) "shortages".

Whether a good is "luxury" or not makes no difference.

That might be the way that economists describe shortages, but it is not the way that normal people describe shortages.

Personally, my definition of a shortage is "There is not enough of X, and it would be a very good thing to increase X".

Using my bread example, if bread cost 100$ a loaf, and people were literally starving to death because they couldn't buy bread or other food, then there IS a shortage of food.

It does not matter if "supply is equaling demand", because it is a very bad thing for food to cost 100$ a meal.

People would start baking their own bread.

Remember: The price of the good rises until it becomes profitable to produce more of the good or substitute the good with something else.

An economic shortage refers to a market failure and not a lack of resources and is only possible because of external factors like price controls, zoning laws, etc.

>There are almost always willing buyers at a lower-than-market-clearing price; the narrower technical definition doesn't consider failure to serve this demand as a "shortage", even if it would be described that way in a social or political context (which the simple model of supply and demand does not attempt to encompass).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shortage

You've avoided the fundamental issue.

If bread costs 100$ is it a good thing or a bad thing for society?

If the "market clearing price" for bread results in people starving to death, is this good or bad?

In this hypothetical situation, would it be a good idea or a bad idea for the government, or charities, or society/individuals in society to try and solve the high bread price problem?

Also, if people are literally starving to death, even if markets "clear", does it or does it not fit a normal person's definition of a "food shortage"?

Personally, my definition of shortage is "there isn't enough of X, and it would be a good idea to increase X".

Doctors are a somewhat different case, at least in the US, because medical boards (per specialty) control supply by limiting the number of new doctors being trained (via annual limits on Residency seats.) It is more of a cartel in that respect. Imagine if we only trained 100 Java engineers a year and the existing Java engineers themselves decided on how many they train per year...that would be the analogy.

Totally off topic, but isn't it bizarre how our politicians nor anyone else in the overseeing agencies/industries can seem to understand why "healthcare" is so expensive...until we actually open up the market for entry of new physicians there will be no solution. Yet I never hear this in popular media.

> until we actually open up the market for entry of new physicians there will be no solution

You do realize that tens of thousands of people graduate from med school every year and go on to do 6 years of residency where they make about $15 / hr right? Maybe the reason you don't hear 'popular media' talk about it is that they would look ridiculous.

> How about if it costs a 100$ per loaf of bread?

If bread cost that much, we'd start eating more rice, pasta, and potatoes. We'd change our meal plan.

Likewise, if the employees you need to hire to execute on your business plan are too expensive, you need to adjust your business plan. Maybe hire different kinds of employees, maybe pursue higher margin opportunities, maybe cut your losses and try something else.

> If bread cost that much, we'd start eating more rice, pasta, and potatoes.

Or maybe we'd import bread from other countries where it goes for $5/loaf? Nah, let's just protect our virtuous $100/loaf domestic industry at all costs and blame the greedy consumers for being selfish and cheap ;)

s/consumers/employers

s/loaf/programmer-hour

I was under the assumption that the $100 price included the prices of imports.

At some point the analogy breaks down, since importing people isn't the same thing as importing things. The points were that these kinds of pricing shifts can and have happened before, reactions can be varied, and reactions usually affect things on the demand (i.e., employer) side of the equation.

> If bread cost that much, we'd start eating more rice, pasta, and potatoes. We'd change our meal plan.

Or people would realize the ingredients for bread cost < $1, bakeries would pop up, and the price of bread would drop back to normal.

Similarly if software developers are all charging $1,000,000 / year, it gets cheaper to find smart people who aren't software developers (yes, there are plenty of smart people in other professions) and train them.

And what if those other things ALSO cost 100$ a meal? Is there a shortage of food?

Even if it is just bread, is it a good thing or a bad thing for society if bread costs 100$?

during my first real salaried job out of college, a coworker told me that they thought they could have done their work with nothing more than a high school education. that was true about my job as well.

companies have been spoiled with degreed employees who do routine coding and testing. in a lot of cases the degree is unnecessary.

but hiring processes can't break out of this pattern, this groupthink.

I think this is totally right on. Additionally, I'd blame a big part of this problem on organizational refusal to hire and support remote employees. I am mentoring one person right now that could take jobs being offered in my city, but they live elsewhere in the country. Butts-in-seats management style is also part of the problem.

Oh I totally agree. I can't even tell you how many times I have had degreed folks or people with certification do the dumbest things that break stuff that someone who didn't go to college but spent age 8-25+ with computers, and hacking, and living technology come up and go, "um that breaks X because of Y".

I've always personally favored self taught over degrees.

And also

"we still don't see lots of employers being willing to take people in right out of school and train them for jobs"

As a person that's only one year out of school with debts, I couldn't afford to be doing side projects when I was using all my free time to make sure I didn't miss a bill.

Indeed: here we see that the 'efficiency' of the market or its ability to solve problems as an organic optimzation machine is a myth. The market is a collection of many dictatorial kings of fiefdoms called small and large businesses, and it expresses the collective will of these kings. Theory says if there is a labor shortage that wages should go up, but the owning class does not wish to raise wages, rather they prefer to keep their proportion of the profit for themselves, and when theory conflicts with the will of the powerful, well...

That is NOTHING new. This was going on in 1990. Recruiters wanting you to pad your resume, "Oh you've only used x for 2 months, put it on your skills section!", and employers wanting you to be a DBA, network engineer, security engineer, Unix admin, developer and yet only pay you for one of those jobs.

This has been the norm. There has NEVER been a shortage of qualified American labor. The problem is, just like farm workers in California, everyone refuses to pay what Americans demand. So you get "let's just go hire some Indians at 20 cents on the dollar and have them beholden to us because we control their visa, and make them do all those jobs for one person's salary! Screw Americans! BRILLIANT!"

So there is no shortage of qualified American labor, corporate america just refuses to pay market rate for americans.

The tech sector is the worst at this. The skills we test for are the ones that can be figured out in about a month, and the ones we don't test for are the ones that need to be learned over a lifetime

Well said. I've been telling people for years that tech sector interviews select for the wrong skill sets.

What skill sets should they select for?

Having done a good handful of interviews, I tend to look for "generic problem solving" (not in the sense of trick questions, but in the sense of running through ambiguous engineering and mixed social/engineering scenarios to see how they'd move forward) communication skills (the ability to communicate the above effectively, talk about past work, problems, successes) and frankly track record. (this is obviously harder for new hires so you look for things like coursework, projects, even successes in other lines of work can demonstrate someone's professionalism and capability)

You may note that these are all primarily "soft skills" and I would hope this is the takeaway from my ramble. My experience has been that it's often easier for a hire to pick up the technical rather than the nontechnical side of things. Depending on the level of the job, of course you have to filter for a certain level of competency as well, but I can usually get a good sense of that within the questions I ask above. When I get someone to really start talking about "what have I succeeded/failed at; why; what would I do different" I tend to find I can get a decent read on if they're bullshitting me or not.

Are you hiring programmers/developers or people like sys admins? It sounds like the latter, I can't imagine anyone hiring the former claiming dev skills are easy to pick up.

I think they are talking about picking up unfamiliar tools and languages that are reasonably close to their existing skillset rather than 'learning to code'.

Maybe, evaluating a dev is tricky, judging them on soft skills alone would lead to many false positives and negatives.

Sure. I think the parent is implying that this evaluation is what is flawed, and overly driven by a focus on the superficial layers of technology.

So, for instance, a Reactjs developer fresh out of bootcamp gets considered over a veteran Angular developer, 'because they know React.'

I use a similar criteria for programmers/developers, if you have sound fundamentals in troubleshooting and working through a (technical) problem on your own you are more useful than someone who after hiring lacks those skills. The learning curve of any dev job is a sequence of problem solving steps to get to the technical knowledge required to speak of the code accurately. If they are not willing or able to do that work without handholding and you don't have time to handhold it's probably not going to work as well than someone who can do this independently.

If you haven't encountered someone who is unwilling to even look at a makefile/build/ide setting page without assistance you might not see the use of it.

The industry chases away all the talented people with soft skills by telling them those skills aren't "merit-based".

And vice versa, chases out many with the hard skills, because they are socially lacking. They want some weird in between that doesnt seem to exist in nature.

It is possible to have both. There is no contradiction between those those two types of skills.

That's why it's essential to have a well-rounded education, even if you're a technical wizard.

I really hope that more people would look at it that way.

Just my own personal experience, but I've honestly seen the trial-by-fire method used either at the sole exclusion of, or weighted more heavily than actually talking to the candidate about their past work. I can't count the number of times in the past where I've encountered this.

At most points when this occurs and it seems there is no end in sight, I typically state: "You know, I've solved some pretty interesting problems over my career, why don't you ask me about that, I think problem xyz it is similar to what you are looking for; let me tell you why". Subsequent laughs and eye-rolls later you get a canned: "I don't care about that, I care about things that matter to me" response.

When you start selecting "problems" for candidates to work through, you add additional layers of interference into the activity: 1) Have you selected the right interviewer for this type of questioning line? Can they describe a the problem adequately? Can they ask probing questions? Are they only able to follow one line of thought? Are they patient? Are they arrogant? 2) Does the problem test for what you think it does? 3) Is the candidate able to think on their feet on a minutes notice on a topic they may not be familiar with in front of an audience?

Where I work (aerospace, embedded systems) interviews are ~75% behavioral and ~25% "technical" with a major focus on having the candidate work through problems they have solved in the past, with the interviewer asking questions not to break but to really learn about them.

I have family members that work at various levels within the medical profession, none of them get the "generic problem solving" trial-by-fire experience when interviewing. (Yes, I realize there is a higher level of trust there, certifications, boards and all. I just think it is a bit crazy that we cannot find a better way).

This reminds me of an data science interview I had early in my career that was exactly along these lines. Several "case studies" that turned out to be semi-guided math/cs interview problems. One guy started off on a variation of the secretary problem, I recognized the general form of it and pointed out that there is a straightforward way to derive the optimal solution, which we could tweak for our situation. No no, we have an hour to kill. I want you to explain my way of solving the problem back to me. Cue an hour of frustrating whiteboarding where neither I nor the interviewer seemed to really grok the intuition for the steps we were taking. I went through 3 more situations like this over the course of a grueling 8 hour day, probably about an hour of which I had the chance to talk about my own background. Didn't get the job, and was specifically called out for my "poor technical performance". I had been through so few interviews at that point I had no idea it wasn't the norm. I legitimately wondered if I was cut out to be in the profession. Felt like major shit.

A little while after I had an interview more like what you describe. It was night and day. We did a brief technical portion that was mainly to ensure I wasn't bullshitting my experience level, then a few hours of discussing my past projects with various current team members. I actually enjoyed it, found myself relating to my interviewers, and easily got the job.

In my experience, a lot of skill tests in the tech sector look for a specific set of skills that a CEO has read about, that are the new skills du jour, and not the skill set they actually need. It comes down to money people coming in the tech sector because there is money there and putting their trust in other money peoples, while treating the people that make the tech sector run like an inexhaustible, cheap resource. People have heard that there is a "gold rush" in the tech sector without actually understanding the product. It's an obvious money grab and isulting when you go into a job interview that needs a small subset of programming skills and they "require" a math degree, programming experience, design experience and are willing to pay a junior developer salary (even though you are managing a team of two or three) because you "get resume cred for working at our big name company/get in on the ground floor of tgis awesome start up"...... well, that's the west coast anyway. The ego over here is truly amazing.

What skill sets a person has (provided it's related in some way to the open position) is less important than how quickly they can adapt and acquire new skill sets.

By this logic, no one should hire senior developers as they are just a waste of money.

Being a senior dev is more about high level soft skills and architecture skills, as opposed to knowing the intricacies of whatever programming language the company uses.

Coding syntax can be learned to master level in a couple weeks. "designing software" and "managing a project" skills cannot.

Just to pile on, I have had people who complained that they should have been a senior dev because they knew the most about algorithms and the internals of compilers, languages, libraries, and CPU's. Those same people couldn't communicate that knowledge to others and couldn't design complex systems containing multiple independent components, but they felt since they had strong technical skills that was all they needed.

Implementing small algorithms in a vacuum.

Google and FB know this, the problem is that its far too inefficient for them to screen for those hard earned skills. The algorithms tests are pretty close to IQ tests that you can study for. For mass hiring of decently intelligent employees, they are actually very effective. Worst comes to worst, you put the bad employee on a PIP or boring project and just hire someone else. Large corporations have definitely thought through this.

In my mind this is screaming for apprenticeship programs like in Germany.[1][2] Companies need a more streamlined process to get employers early in their career so employees have the necessary training and then get promoted within. All the while employees get paid to learn and work.

This one-size-fits-all 4-year college track that every U.S. citizen is being pushed through is failing miserably.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/10/why-ger...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apprenticeship#Germany

Even for people who go to college, more work experience is a huge plus. Waterloo's coop system (4 months of school, 4 months of internship, repeated) provides a great mix of practical experience and academics. It would be great if all majors could have an experience like that.

It was somewhat unbelievable how much my jobs working at Gamestop and Walmart helped in college when so many people around me had never worked a job in their life. Time to rethink minimum wage?

Rochester Institute of Technology has a similar program - Co-op experience. All students are required to complete a specific # of semester work experience before obtaining a degree.

I've heard often from employers that they love hiring RIT graduates because of this.

I've heard great things about Waterloo's program. Just wanted to give a shout out to Northeastern for its coop system as well. I've learned tons of things on the job that I never would have come across in the classroom. Also, almost every student in every major participates in the program!

I graduated from college 30 years ago and every engineering major at every state university I ever heard of had a coop program.

Waterloo places much more emphasis on it. The program is built around every student doing coops.

That part I did not know, most of our professors in our first year engineering classes strongly recommended it, though. I co-oped at a company only about 100 miles from my university, though other students were from out of state schools.

The other thing I just thought of was I co-oped at IBM for three semesters which was the max for a location but they had openings in a different country, I probably should have done that instead of staying in the USA for my last co-op, are most of the Waterloo students going to Canadian companies?

A lot go to SF bay area. I met a large group of them in 2007 when I was doing my coop. My school, University of the Pacific, also had a mandatory coop program, although they started to make it optional sometime after 2009.

Not all CS grads come from engineering colleges or departments. A lot liberal arts colleges have CS programs and a lot of CS programs are part of the math/"arts and sciences" department. In that case, the college may not require co-op.

Yes and it would be great if they were extended to non-engineering majors. Also even in engineering co-ops are far from universal; at my university, not everyone did a co-op and many did only one. There would be a lot of value in people doing multiple co-ops (even 4 or more like Waterloo).

I know of an employer that has an apprenticeship program. They hire probably 20 or 30 master graduates in to it every semester. It's used as a holding pen for foreign student graduates on OPT while the company gets them an H1B visa. The apprenticeships require a masters degree but the work doesn't. This essentially guarantees they don't get any applicants that are citizens and also helps avoid the h1b dependent designation.

I suspect internships are filling that void. My company (and quite a few others) only offer internships to juniors to increase the new hire pipeline.

Insert comment about requiring 5 years of experience in a 3 year old language

HR gating really is the worst thing going in American hiring practices today.

"Do you have multiple years of experience with 99.9% of the skills listed as requirements, which only a handful of people in the country have? Yes, but I see that on our web form that you had to use to submit your resume you didn't check the box next to 'Degree in X', so you're automatically disqualified."

Or in the software world...I see you have essentially built my exact company before and have tons of experience, but what I really need to know before I hire you is...Can you show me how many queens you can put on a chess board in code!

queen_count = lambda(board_width): board_width - (board_width in [2,3])

let numQueens = 64;

H.R. Interviewer: "Now Mike, may I call you Mike? Pope Julius II is looking for someone to paint the ceiling of the new Sistine chapel. Frankly, I passed on you initially because you didn't have any ceiling painting experience but I've been told to talk to you anyway.

To start, I'd like to ask you to take a test with some Egyptian art history questions..."

I've had a interview like this. It was for a web dev position at a local business, but the interviewer had used a copy/paste algorithms question from Leetcode that reeked of CTCI influence and "Google used it, so it must be good at filtering candidates".

I suspect HR does gating because it works. HR’s goal is to fill the interview pipeline with as many “reasonable” candidates as possible. They can’t spend much time looking at each candidate since there’s so many. But if it sends down an obviously bad candidate, they’ll get yelled at. HR Gating is applying some naive statistical thinking. 80% of our employees have trait X. Therefore by filtering for trait X we increase the odds of sending reasonable candidates down the pipe. Filter by enough traits, and you’ll be sending only “reasonable” candidates through to the next stage. Cheap and rarely obviously wrong.

The problem, of course, is that trait X could be anything. Technology, trivia, personality, Microsoft Excel Whiz, X years of experience, Causation, correlation, it doesn’t matter. “Reasonable” does not mean “fair” or “logical” or “causative.” It’s just a statistical trick.

I suspect that the “CS Trivia Interview” is just a more nuanced version of this. Knowing now to invert a binary tree doesn’t make you a better programmer (no causation). But many good programmers happen to know how to do it (or want the job enough to learn it just to please you). So it’s an easier metric than trying to define what “good engineer” means.

This is really not an exaggeration. When I was looking for android jobs a few jobs had requirements that only aosp google or amazon kindle people would really have.

I think it's interesting that few/none of the "Technical hiring done right" startups I'm aware of deduplicate the process of attesting that a person can accomplish some software development. So far as I can tell, they outsource the process of screening, but they don't provide the same screening to multiple companies.

I may be lucky, or I may be ignorant, but thus far not having a degree at all hasn't particularly impaired me.

I think it's interesting that there's nothing equivalent to a professional engineering qualification for software. Worst case, hiring people for a few months to do some software development and being able to say "They developed some software" would be a useful thing to look up rather than conducting the spanish whiteboard inquisition every time.

Part of this comes from executives being taught to think of employees as expenses rather than assets. "Less money to employees = more money to me." This attitude is part of a larger systemic problem: A great deal of American business is now more about gaming the system than about building products. Take the VC money, build nothing, and cash out. Sell customer data to ad networks and cash out. SEO the hell out of that thing and cash out. Cook the books and cash out. Sell bundles of subprime loans and cash out. Buy your competitor, harvest its assets, kill their product, and cash out. Pump and dump and disappear. "What, you still have seed corn? Eat that shit!"

It's all just bullshit short-term arbitrage. It has nothing to do with adding value, which is what sustainable business is based on. It works well in an environment where such behavior is not punished, and where business executives are rewarded for "maximum profit in minimum time" and penalized for long-term thinking. It's certainly not sustainable, but alas, that's exactly where we are in the U.S.

An underrated comment. It sounds harsh, but It's institutionalized get-rich-quick. A lot of it is the hyper-focus on efficiency. Which gets interpreted as efficiency of time, which turns to "get money back out as quickly as possible". And as people look for faster and faster ways to get money out at some point the only route/scheme that can keep up is "create an illusion of value and sell that."

And all of this is a drain for society, not a net plus. Even though you'll inevitably hear the argument "Creating an illusion of value has societal value. Obviously it does, otherwise people wouldn't pay for it." A which point you're reaching peak irony. And then you begin the inevitable arms race of smarter minds working on better ways to hide the illusions, and smarter minds on the otherside working on better ways to sniff them out. This is pretty mucb equivalent to having your best and brightest optimize better ways to predict horsetrack betting (but at least in that case if an Einstein invents an accurate weather prediction machine that value is transferable to society at large). These minds are bust develiping non-useful, non-transferrable non-useful abilities instead of becoming the next Elon Musk. It's a train wreck in slow motion, but those on the inside are so deep in it they're unable to see it.

I love what Joel Spolski said about this "problem" in his article "Whaddaya Mean, You Can’t Find Programmers?" back in 2000. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/06/15/whaddaya-mean-you-...

"Now, let’s review some microeconomics. In a free market, it is almost axiomatic that the market always clears. That’s a technical term that means that when somebody tries to sell something, if they are willing to accept the market price, they will be able to sell it, and when somebody wants to buy something, if they are willing to pay the market price, they will be able to buy it. It’s just a matter of both sides accepting the market price."

But, when the price of other labor sources is cheaper (eg H1-B, interns, your nephew, etc), economics dictates that you should use those instead of the local population.

The solution, imo, is to raise the price of the other sources somehow. That way, the local population is cheaper.

If a company can find "other labor sources" then they really don't have a reason to say "we can't find labor".

Employers are saying "there is a shortage of workers" when what they really mean is "the market price for workers is more than we want to pay" or "we don't want to share more of the profits with the employees (who actually make the product) then we used to". To "fix" this, they want some sort of special treatment that will decrease the cost of employees - like being allowed to employ more indentured servants (H1-B) at below market rate.

If bread costs 100$ per loaf, and people are literally starving to death in the streets because they can't pay for food, is this just the "market clearing rate" for bread where supply is meeting demand, or is there a shortage of bread?

Wouldn't more bakeries enter the market in this scenario?

You could have a point if it cost $10 million to hire a senior competent software engineer. It does not.

You could have a point if bread cost $75 to produce. It does not.

Many of the companies complaining about a shortage of people are posting record profits. Workers are receiving the smallest share of the pie in many decades.

In many cases this really is just stingy employers complaining because they want to keep most of the profit for themselves.

In other cases businesses can't raise prices because their customers don't have any money (because wages are so low and the 1% captures so much economic surplus, stashing it away in investment accounts, causing investors to dash around shoveling tons of cash at anything that looks like yield). In this case hiring workers at higher wages wouldn't be sustainable without raising prices. The "solution" in this scenario is not to suppress worker's wages even further; that only makes the problem worse. The solution is much higher taxes on the ultra-rich to filter the money out of investments and back into the economy where 10: it can be spent by workers, raising profits, leading to expansion, higher pay, more spending, more profits, goto 10.

If we were in a capital-constrained environment then it would make sense to cut taxes to make more capital available for investment. We aren't. We haven't been in decades. Taxes on income & capital gains >10m should be much higher.

Are you a stingy asshole if you refuse to pay $50 for a loaf of bread even though you're making $200k a year and can easily afford it?

Of course not. You'll buy a cheaper loaf or you won't buy bread at all or you might even whine in the media about the shortage of bread. All of which would be understandable irrespective of how high your income is.

> The solution is much higher taxes on the ultra-rich

I was with you up until this part. This has been tried for decades and it clearly doesn't work. What we need now are tax breaks specifically for small businesses. We want people to be able to work for themselves or work for somebody more willing to share more of the profits with their workers. More businesses willing to pay market rate means more employment, more competition and more pressure on the companies who like to underpay.

Neither idea (tax breaks for SMB, more taxes for rich) are going to happen anytime soon. Nobody with deep enough pockets to lobby for it would want either idea to become law.

When was this tried? I'm really interested in data that shows taxing the ultra-rich at the same rate as the middle class (~30%) and "clearly doesn't work"

Pay. More. Money.

There, I solved it for every single one of the "struggling" employers. Money is a proxy for everything.

Though with unemployment around 4.3% you may be paying up for mediocre employees you are then stuck with for a long time.

That's simply pay inflation.

Which over a long term can attract more people to the field.

Which in turn creates a supply pressure which allows companies to lower the pay.

If you want better than mediocre employees then guess what the solution is? More money!

Although mediocre employees can often become great employees with some training and coaching.

> Although mediocre employees can often become great employees with some training and coaching.

Although mediocre employees can often become great employees with some MORE MONEY!

True, but it's often the case that the money is spent inefficiently or on the completely wrong things. More money + proper spending = worker growth.

> stuck with

Huh?

> you are then stuck with for a long time

Not in the US? I've heard this cited as a reason for very slow recovery in countries like France with strict firing/closure laws, yeah. But in an at-will state in the US, it's not so tough. Sure, firing 20% of your workforce will make the news, but if you're just firing bad employees you can do it on a rolling basis or otherwise avoid the issue.

You don't get to demand a free market out of one side of your mouth and complain about it from the other. When there is less supply and there is more demand prices generally go up.

Well yeah. Because unemployment of 4.3% means your stingy self is competing with a whole lot of less-stingy people for the good employees.

I would do that...for money!

Maybe they should allow people a little time to learn the exact skills needed? These days you need to have done already what you will be doing on the new job. No time for learning anything even if it would take only a few days or weeks to get up to speed. How are people actually learning new stuff?

If Uber had looked for a CEO that way they would have rejected any candidate that hadn't run a fast growing ride sharing company with HR problems and an extremely high valuation and no clear path to profit. They would also complain about not being to find suitable candidates.

> How are people actually learning new stuff?

on their own time. companies want to avoid investment in people if possible.

this is probably a false economy.

    > How are people actually learning new stuff?

You just do it. On the job. Without asking for permission.

This doesn't work for all skills, unfortunately, and some people have jobs where they are project-managed to a degree that every minute needs to be accounted for. But mostly, there's some slack to pick up new skills.

" You just do it. On the job. Without asking for permission."

That's what I generally do and I recommend doing it to others. But there are limits to the size of things to learn that way.

> You just do it. On the job. Without asking for permission.

And hope your boss is forgiving.

Perhaps, but I have NEVER heard of somebody getting fired for "up-skilling" while still getting work done.

I have seen people squeezing in a whole new stack just because. Like instead of adding two new web APIs to the existing server suddenly you have that weird beast that's half Node and half .NET.

I think that's one of the gaping flaws to that method of skill acquisition. It's a great way to introduce politics and negative-sum-games to the workplace.

Suddenly people are picking projects and stacks based on personal aggrandizement rather than professionalism.

Maybe companies should start hiring a chief behavioral (economic?) officer to go with the chief culture officer.

I don't blame this on the people doing it. There are some idiots but in general it's mainly because a lot of people don't feel challenged and therefore look for something interesting.

Managers should encourage innovation but control it. I see so many projects where management rejects every kind of change without discussion. Either only losers will stay in that environment or you get this kind of underground projects. If management looked at something more than only deadlines and budgets the whole climate would improve.

That's hilarious.

But that's what people do when there's no "boss-sanctioned" way to up-skill and learn new things.

I think lots of smart folks get started by cargo-culting an oversized solution/platform onto their sad boring projects, then gradually step into bigger and better things at other employers.

The two-headed monstrosities are a necessary evil to get started for many people.

I'm literally working one something that's exactly that, right now. Connected by HAProxy joining APIs from both sides. Weird.

> jobs where they are project-managed to a degree that every minute needs to be accounted for

Having been in such a job, I can say without reservation that the manager demanding such precise accounting has no idea what you do or how you do it, and is ultimately relying on you to be both honest and supernaturally accurate with respect to estimates.

What ends up happening is that you pad an hour of actual work out to a week, because you can justify any amount of delay by pointing at the spaghettified, debt-riddled code base, and start looking for a new job immediately. That boss will make a show of keeping an eye on you, but you quickly learn that they have no idea whether you are working or slacking just by looking at you, or looking over your shoulder at your screen. The incumbent lead developers have already developed a system for maintaining the status quo indefinitely. You can follow them down the primrose path, to the complete destruction of your professional ethics, or you can become the squeaky wheel that gets fired.

Even if you can't generate some slack yourself, you can certainly pick up new skills at your next job, which you should be seeking without further delay.

Go and read "Weapons of Math Destruction" by Cathy O’Neil.

This has an excellent chapter of the use of ATS software the majority of recruiters use these days.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Applicant_tracking_system

Resume optimization to get the foot in the door, take home assignments, automatic platforms verifying programming skills, algorithm and data structure teasing. This is getting inpenetrable. I wonder how many of those smartasses inventing another question or an assignment would be able to get a job again.

I would argue that the reliance on technology have made people worse off and enables them to do the worst/laziest behavior.

The ATS are that bad because people spam their resume out. It's basically a spam filter. People skills matter. Most people don't want to do the work to get to know other people.

> automatic platforms verifying programming skills

Somewhat related, I withdrew from an entry level physics course in college after only two weeks since the professor insisted on using an automated homework platform that cut your grade in half if you couldn't figure out the problem on the first try.

This problem isn't exclusive to tech.

I've been watching this tension grow for a while (otherwise qualified workers unwilling to work for the pay offered). I keep expecting the system to crack and boost pay, and then we'll see some more severe inflation in the US economy as a cycle of product costs go up rather than down. And yet it is stubbornly hanging in as employers try ever more intricate ways to avoid having that cost bump.

It is very much a prisoner's dilemma sort of situation. If one company boosts their pay (and their product prices to cover that pay) then they lose market share. If both boost pay they both make a bit more money as their prices go up simultaneous (no change in market share). If neither boost pay they continue to operate at a restricted level which doesn't allow them to do additional development or increase sales.

That dam has burst years ago. Facebook, then Google, significantly increased their pay to software engineers and it lifted all the salaries in the bay area.

What's interesting is that this tide hasn't propagated very far outside California yet.

Are you sure? Google participated in an anti-poaching deal that would result in lower pay because of less competition. Even if they did increase pay, it could still be below what they would have paid if they had not had this policy in the first place. I'd need to see something that takes this into account before I believe it.

Exactly. It began at least a dozen years ago and the case lasted a long time:

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-requires-s...

http://fortune.com/2015/09/03/koh-anti-poach-order/

Most likely the $5K payout per employee was 5-10 times lower than what was lost by all the employees collectively. Maybe that's not true and the tech giants wouldn't have hired as many people but I think all those companies collectively could've easily afforded an extra $5 billion over that timespan. Perhaps they would've innovated even more! I expect the effects of this to last a lot longer.

Edit: I changed "nearly a dozen" to "at least a dozen"

Not the tension I'm seeing. I'm seeing it in the rank and file all across the country as the article points out. Office admins, waitstaff, hospitality positions, janitorial, etc. These generally blue collar positions have had negative wage growth between 2009 and today but that has slowed or nearly stopped according to the labor statistics put out by Bureau of Labor Statistics[1].

As an example, at some point the customer complaints about room cleanliness will force hotel chains to increase their wages offered to fill positions that have gone unfilled for too long. That change will be reflected in higher hotel rates. Restaurants that can't keep all their tables open during 'peak' times will have to raise prices to add staff Etc.

It isn't a 'big deal' for Facebook or Google to raise wages because it just slows the free cash flow into their bank accounts. But it is a big deal for business models where personnel costs are a material factor in the company's operating margin.

[1] https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/realer.pdf

And then all of these new janitors and clerical staff will have paychecks, which they can use to play for hotel rooms on their new paid vacations...

There's a strong argument that the wage stagnation in the middle and lower classes in the US is slowing down the economy across the board.

In fact, I wonder if the increasing concentration of profits in a handful of companies is contributing to the inability of companies further down the food chain to pay workers market rates.

> In fact, I wonder if the increasing concentration of profits in a handful of companies is contributing to the inability of companies further down the food chain to pay workers market rates.

You would not be the only one wondering that :-). A friend of mine who used to be an economist working at Google and I were discussing what the impact of having over a Trillion dollars locked up in 'cash and cash equivalents'[1] by the top 50 international companies.

By its nature, cash equivalents can't be lent out by banks for longer term investment (they are required to be able to exchange the investments for cash on short notice) so that hoard just sits there.

[1]https://www.gfmag.com/magazine/september-2016/global-cash-25...

>And yet it is stubbornly hanging in as employers try ever more intricate ways to avoid having that cost bump.

Innovation is a thing. If your business model depends on low labor costs, then ultimately, your business model depends on having a perpetual economic recession to suppress wages. Or Pinkertons to just shoot anyone demanding more money.

When the economy is actually growing, don't shoot everyone in the foot to keep your costs down. Just pay more money and innovate.

And if you can't, go bankrupt. Such is life on the free market.

I've recently started mentally comparing tech companies that complain about the "lack of talent" to SUV drivers who complain about the price of gas.

There is so much low hanging fruit in terms of improving engineers productivity, but the companies refuse to even consider the possibility. If you offered private offices or remote work and the opportunity to use more productive tools, candidates would line up to apply. And would need fewer workers because they would get more work done.

There is flood of American outsourcing centers in post-Communist EU countries. Top salaries for software devs/eng, including seniors, are USD 40k gross annually. They can treat the employees in the worst "corporate America" ways - their offices, available hardware, policies, laughable benefits, annual leave, create a perfect package for miserable professional and private life.

Thomson Reuters did this using Belarus. Any systems in "maintenance mode" get sent to code monkeys in former Eastern Bloc nations. The quality is fair, but a lot better than what happened with India (sorry, India, I still love some of you guys, but the frustrations have left deep scars, too).

It's not like American developers are faring much better in those items you listed--offices have become crap, hardware middling, policiies, Ha! Whatever they can geta away with, typically mental torture. Benefits and time off have been historically good but are dropping, pure misery, you betcha!

What quality are you expecting?! The salaries aside, the policies (VPN only with permission, only Windows allowed, problems with remote working, getting paid to sit on chair 9-5, some weird virtual machine setups motivated by "security") are killing creativeness in the most talented people.

The complaints being so specific, it feels like you're having some discontent with your workplace and feeling that you're trapped there because "there's nothing better out there anyway." Well, don't despair, look around more, you might find that there are places you could actually like.

In the conditions you described, it may be worth it to take a small pay cut to get away from a soulcrushing job that makes you question your existence. Money really isn't everything.

I agree with you, but unfortunately not everyone who is qualified can work for a good employer.

Why?

If x is the number of dev jobs available in the world, and 0.4x is the number of dev jobs that are not laden with bullshit...

I'm willing to bet the number of qualified devs looking for work is more like 0.8x, implying 50% will be SOL

Do you have source about post communist programmers being exploited by American companies and presumably unable to change job?

The other opportunities are not any better. Better opportunities are in more developed EU countries. It's a perfect environment for corporate America to thrive in. You will not find any exploited programmers there because the signs of underperformance are picked up early (mid level management is so efficient!), the employee labeled as "unhappy", and let go. There are only fulfilled and happy people working there.

You still didn't provide a source, so you may as well be pulling this out of your ass.

Honestly, these are quite extraordinary claims, subpar as Eastern EU social infrastructure might be, I cannot imagine large foreign companies cutting benefits and eschewing work practices that are required by local and EU law. If anything, in my experience multinationals tend to scrupulously follow regulations to the letter, sometimes paralyzingly so.

The super efficient middle management in EU companies is even more extraordinary claim then the exploited poor eastern European programmer.

Middle management is oftentimes remote, in another EU country with higher salaries and job security (Sweden, Germany, Netherlands). "Efficient" is sarcastic - meaning more "manipulative" and "micromanaging".

Out of curiosity, are you talking about Accenture? Cause they have quite bad reputation around here ...

> their offices, available hardware, policies, laughable benefits, annual leave, create a perfect package for miserable professional and private life

I am from an Eastern European city with a major outsourced IT industry, and I often associate with these IT workers and I visit their offices for local programming language or Open Street Map meetups. I don’t agree with your comment. Available hardware is fine. Benefits include generous private healthcare in addition to the universal public healthcare, as well as reimbursement for taxis so no one ever has to use public transportation or drive. For lunch, companies order good food from local restaurants. Furthermore, the employees all get the minimum holiday set by European Union and local law, and they do use it; I have never heard of a culture here of not being able to take holiday like in the USA. Yes, salaries are smaller than in the USA, but by local standards they are very generous and people are starting to complain about the IT sector pushing up prices of housing and restaurants beyond what most non-IT workers in this city could pay, just like your San Francisco.

I agree that local call centers, another big outsourcing industry, are exploitative. But devs? No. Maybe that is only further away, outside the EU. Within EU countries, if you don’t treat your devs well, they won’t stay; they will leave for Western Europe.

Absolutely. I also live in an Eastern European country with a large (and growing) IT outsourcing industry, and from my experience here, that statement couldn't be farther from the truth. These companies are some of the best employers in the country, with far above-average benefits, salaries and work conditions. Of course, some are worse than others, but that's true for any industry.

? Total misinformation. As applicable to Ukraine salaries are US salary - US tax -(20-30)% take into account cost of living and special tax treatment (3-4%). Workday is normal workday and not some unknown number of hours offices are way nicer then in US minus the usual suspects (Google FB etc.). You get way more time off plus there are like 3X official holidays in Ukraine. Running recruiting biz. on the side we had real trouble finding people for senior java dev. remote product work 60K/year (tax rate 3%) + all the usual benefits good candidates wanted 70K.

> As applicable to Ukraine salaries are US salary

> remote product work 60K/year

60k USD gross anually in Ukraine? No. Sorry, but it doesn't exist. An unicorn salary, dozen of those lucky perhaps have.

To reiterate we had trouble hiring at that rate good senior Java engineers. Not sure what you are basing your opinion on I lived and worked there for over 10 years including running my own company and working for other companies. I also know good number of founders/owners of the top outsourcing outfits.

> good senior Java engineers

duh! they left for Germany

Some did, but they did not win as far as after tax $, it's mostly for better infrastructure and security. At the time we were trying to fill the positions a large UK based company closed down dev. office in Ukraine they had 120 dev's about 40 were senior scala/java within 1.5 weeks only one was without a new job he didn't take 60K offer either as he got a better competing offer.

Compensation is also heavily tied to the stack Java & C# -highest (outside of niche things)

Ruby

Python

PHP

Good Java middle can make more then good senior PHP

"Java pays the most" is the curse of the industry. That's why we have plenty of these dull corporate Java projects possible to setup only in Eclipse and people neurotically sticking to them with a hope for this fat salary.

Another cool thing about Ukrainian market due to competition interview to job offer is generally few days often offer is made on the spot and you will have in person interview most often same week you applied. Another cool feature all recruiters have bonus structure so they created informal skype channel where they "trade" candidates and then split bonuses. So even if you were not a good fit for a particular position or company their recruiters will often find you an appropriate position in a different company :)

Given that USD 40K is a pretty decent salary in most of Southern and Eastern Europe, as other people have pointed out, US companies tend to be pretty good employers, and why not ?

They can pay a fraction of what you would pay US based engineers, have more or less the same quality of work done, and still have happy employees.

These are salaries much below the market rate. The same companies oftentimes have massive profits in these countries, profits which are tightly funneled out through IE/NL/LU/British overseas regions.

"These are salaries much below the market rate."

Are you really comparing US market rate, which even varies inside the US, with that of Eastern Europe ?

Or are you saying that USD 40K is much below market rate in Eastern Europe ?

In the latter case I'll have to ask for sources, because my experience differs greatly.

So Eastern Europe deserves low salaries? Mind you - cars, clothes, petrol, electronics there are more expensive (sic) than in US and cost the same as in more developed EU countries. Social security net and healthcare in Eastern Europe are awfully underfunded and are more comparable to American than to those from more developed EU countries.

We (actually you) are talking about "market rate".

The Eastern Europe "market rate" is lower than the US because cost of living is.

I assure you that people earning USD 40K in Eastern Europe have a quality of life comparable to their "market rate" paid US engineer (as people in the same thread are saying).

As quality of life improves (also helped by US companies paying above-average rates, compared to the local ones), so will wages and cost of living in general.

It's basic economics, it has nothing to do with "deserving" something.

If you expect US companies should pay US wages where the market rate is well below that, your expectations are simply not realistic.

This sounds like a recruiter/HR person/manager: "in Germany we would have to pay you 60-80k EUR, in the country you are currently in 40k USD is generous... why? look at Numbeo - it cannot lie!"

> The Eastern Europe "market rate" is lower than the US because cost of living is.

It's the other way around.

> Mind you - cars, clothes, petrol, electronics there are more expensive

But housing is much cheaper, and that leaves a lot of money left over to buy all those other stuff. In my Eastern European city, I can rent a three-bedroom house with garden for 300€/month. I probably would struggle to do the same with an IT job in Western Europe. Furthermore, it’s strange that you talk about cost of petrol, because IT firms here generally reimburse employees for taxi fares, so that they never have to drive (or use public transportation) unless they live unusually far away.

> Social security net and healthcare in Eastern Europe are awfully underfunded

Which is why most IT firms here attract employees with nice private healthcare.

> three-bedroom house with garden for 300€/month

This is not a major eastern European city, certainly not one where IT jobs are available.

> here attract employees with nice private healthcare.

These private health insurances are hoax. The only thing they cover is a consultation and high five with the doctor, for anything serious involving a stay in the hospital one fallbacks into public health insurance.

> This is not a major eastern European city, certainly not one where IT jobs are available.

Cluj is Romania’s second city and home to buzzing IT sector. Granted, my house is a little farther away than the most popular suburbs for those wanting a whole house, but it is still possible to easily and fairly quickly commute into the city centre each day. Rents will rise even here at some point, but they haven’t yet, and for the IT sector (though unfortunately not for most local people) rises in rents tend to keep pace with rises in salaries.

> These private health insurances are hoax. The only thing they cover is a consultation and high five with the doctor

Getting even a consultation here from the public sector is unpleasant enough that an opportunity to freely visit the much nicer private clinic is a wonderful thing.

There are a lot of comments in this thread about how recruiters are bad at their jobs, they want X years of experience in framework Y and they want to pay for X/2 years of experience.

What can we really expect from recruiters though? They get paid a fraction of the salary of the jobs they are recruiting for, and they're asked to evaluate someone's potential competency in a field that's complex and rapidly changing. So of course they pick proxy metrics. They just ask "do you have 10 years of C++ experience" because it would be impossible for them to, say, read your GIthub code and see that you're really good at C++ even without the years of experience.

The only way you're going to have a good experience with a recruiter for a technical position is if the recruiter has the technical aptitude to make judgement calls on your qualification.

So maybe we need to pay recruiters more and then convince people with software engineering degrees to become recruiters? Of course the companies would have to be willing to invest in their recruiters, and they won't do that.

"A players hire other As, B players hire Cs..."

"The cost of a bad hire is higher than a false negative..."

"... culture fit.."

"We solve hard problems so we need the best.."

It's pretty clear that hiring in technology is a cargo cult that mostly serves to waste time and haze newcomers.

But I think the hiring ritual in general of 'post requirements -> get resumes -> interview' is ineffective bullshit. Each filter is progressively more error prone than the last and you mostly get noise out the other end.

    > post requirements -> get resumes -> interview' is ineffective bullshit

I agree, but that's not necessarily the way many (most?) jobs even get filled. There are other channels, professional networks and word-of-mouth, etc.

At the low end, few people will move to take a $8-$17/hr job. Moving costs are too high, and selling a house in a declining small town doesn't provide enough cash to buy a house in a town with jobs. This is why there are so many people stuck in small towns with no jobs.

Moving to a place where there's one big employer, the case in too many small towns, is signing up for indentured servitude. You can't quit without moving. Employers like that situation - it's called having a a "compliant workforce". It's common in the southern US.

From the employer perspective, hiring for low-end jobs means first filtering out the druggies, the crooks, and the crazies. Druggies alone are about 20% of applicants. The U.S. Army says that only about 25% of young men meet Army recruiting standards today. The Army won't take fat people, druggies, crooks, or anyone requiring frequent medical care, and they require a high school diploma. It's scary that only 25% pass that basic screen.

The reality is that you need your job more than your employer needs you. We're all replaceable, and this is further exacerbated by technology and outsourcing. Hiring in the tech industry where senior engineers have to go through multiple rounds of answering data structures & algorithm riddles is probably the epitome of this absurdity.

As long as this is the case, employers are always going to demand the moon, only hire the "best", and offer as little money as possible. If employers really needed you, they wouldn't be holding out for the diamond in the rough willing to work for peanuts.

It boggles my mind that we as a society still cling on to this notion that everybody must rent themselves out to somebody else to survive. Wage slavery should not be the backbone of our economy. Something like a basic income would go a long way towards evening the playing field, so that desperate workers can walk away from this nonsense.

To sum up the article, businesses are making ridiculous demands and expecting to pay prospective employees marginally above nothing. Aside from the people posting these job ads, nobody is really surprised.

Don't forget the steady reduction of benefits in addition to a base pay. I've spent time at fortune 500 engineering firms where the annual deductible for health insurance was $8,000.

That's a good thing. Non-cash or non-equity remuneration needs to be separated from employers and employees. It will help employees not be beholden to the employer, help comparing different offers easier, and help smaller employers compete with larger employers by leveling the advantage larger employers have from huge HR departments.

Job postings are ridiculous, but one would think employers would gradually learn a lesson when not enough applicants come forward and relax puffed-up requirements.

But if anything, job "requirements" in postings have been getting even more absurd and persnickety in the last 10 years or so. Are employers simply not adapting or is there something else more complex going on? I suspect the latter.

Don't forget visas. Many of these puffed-up requirements are just to show regulators that company "can't find" a suitable candidate in a local market so they must bring somebody from abroad (usually that somebody is from 3rd world country who agrees on worse pay/conditions).

I believe many companies want to portray the image that they are successful, growing, hiring. Job listings are cheap. What is the real cost of advertising for many positions and hiring the good people that come along irrespective of the advertisement?

> What is the real cost of advertising for many positions and hiring the good people that come along irrespective of the advertisement?

If by "good people" you mean desperate workers willing to work for peanuts, then the cost is almost nonexistent. And that's the problem. Since real workers don't like to be fished.

IME, especially at larger organizations, the job posting passes several different groups, from upper management to HR, before it sees the light of day, each with an opportunity to add some junk to an otherwise clean and reasonable post. What one not infrequently gets is a crazy mix req for Go/scripting/web design/databases/UX/algorithms/office productivity/jira/scrum/independent contributor/team player/...; pick any 7.

Folks doing the interviews know what they want and ignore the rest when interviewing, but as the text of the job posting is a poor way to gauge real requirements in an automated / statistically significant fashion. My 2c.

You can partly blame the tech elites like Apple, Google, Intel, and Adobe for this. They were found to have a no poaching agreement [1]. This kept wages down, and because their wages were down, other companies benefited by not having to pay as much compared to them. They could remain competitive even with these companies.

You cannot pay "competitive" salaries and "only hire the best."

1. http://fortune.com/2015/09/03/koh-anti-poach-order/

Most of the commentary here is focused on the high end, but there's a bigger problem on the low end of the labor market.

Our government plows tons of money into job services, training add, and other programs at the state/local level. There are some really successful agencies, but there is a hell of a lot of waste where the system just helps enough to "check the box" that you're trying to find work and eligible for unemployment.

A huge part of the problem is that the workers don't trust the system. And why would they, when massive data breaches happen due to poor handling of data. See http://www.securityweek.com/joblink-breach-affects-job-seeke...

Unfortunately, this problem is only going to get worse as more data is accumulated by state agencies unqualified to watch over it. I firmly believe that if we reformed the data systems and the programs relying on them at the state level we could make a lot of progress on the lower end of the labor market to get people re-engaged, more productive, and start growing skills.

As those people increase skills and responsibilities shift to them, the people who are freed up will be able to become more productive and move up-market as well.

Which sounds like a pipe dream - but what person in IT hasn't been tied up with "junior work" they would be happy to unload if there was anybody to do it? And once that task finally goes away, you go on to do better things.

This is largely a problem of "informational asymmetrics between agents," as Nassim Taleb would describe it.

Or Gharrar as describe in Sharia law. "It is an extremely sophisticated term in decision theory that does not exist in English; it means both uncertainty and deception –my personal take is that it means something beyond informational asymmetry between agents. It means inequality of uncertainty. Simply, as the aim is for both parties in a transaction to have the same uncertainty facing random outcomes, an asymmetry becomes equivalent to theft."

The employer sees the entire talent pool and can therefore leverage this informational advantage to drive prices (wages) down.

http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/equality.pdf

It's possible for there to be a shortage of people AND millions of unemployed people if they're unskilled.

That's certainly the case in India, where the majority of "software engineers" can't tell me the maximum value an 8-bit integer can have, or claim that an object's instance variables can continue to exist after the object gets deallocated. One clown even wrote an if statement with two else clauses, the second one "just in case the first doesn't execute".

http://indiatoday.intoday.in/education/story/engineering-emp...

Employers always struggle to to fill openings. It's the same thing as selling a product - you have to work on marketing, promotion, advertising. This says nothing about the state of the job market.

Employers are unwilling to invest in employees. Then they wonder why the (good) employees they do have don't stick around.

U.S. labor market: Everyone running around, looking for "something for nothing." We had a couple decades of outsourcing and off-shoring, coming from this perspective (and law and regulation effectively neutered on its behalf).

Let's hope the MBA's and short-term-focused executives find out just how fungible they are. (A suit is, after all, just a suit.)

A better title would be, U.S. Employers are cheap and if they don't cut it out; unions might be on the rise in America.

If this happens is not due to lack of candidates bur rather because of extraneous and extravagant expectations.

This article has little relevance to the kinda professionals on HN. They're talking about relatively low paying labor.

I think the problem boils down to vanity. Companies want to post glamorous jobs, and figure they'll hire if the glass slipper fits. Conversely, job seekers aren't too hungry.

...for the price they are willing to pay.

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