Comment by ironjunkie | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ironjunkie | Hacker News Reader

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This.

I find it very difficult to complain as a coder given the conditions at the moment. Companies battle to hire people and the pay is globally extremely good. Most of the time it is easy to get time off or to accommodate "errands" during the day.

As you said, I think a lot of us are out of touch about what it is to get a job outside of tech (and a couple other high demand privileged examples). You want to work from home one day a week ? Need 2 approvals of your N+2 manager. Coming late 3 times in a row? Let's talk about your "behavior". That coffee you just took over there ? It will be 1$ deduced from your paycheck.

I feel a lot of us live in the utopia that a job must be fun at all time and that we should always do what we like. Sorry but the world doesn't work like that.

Edit: I'm not saying that we shouldn't demand good condition. It is an "offer and demand" economic system after all. We should get what we can negociate to get in the market. I wanted to make the point however that >90% of regular jobs are not pleasant and fun at all time.

The churn rate is also high on most software teams. In some cases, successful companies struggle to find candidates because all the good people have worked there before and ran away.

One of the brightest developers I've worked with quit after 3 weeks at my company because they were underpaying her and wouldn't give her a raise. This same company complained regularly of not being able to find good talent.

Employers think they hold all the leverage and can treat developers how they want. They really don't. Why do you think half of software projects fail to deliver?

> Why do you think half of software projects fail to deliver?

A number of reasons:

1. Bikeshedding over the tech stack

2. A glut of CS grads who see a bunch of nails to hit with their textbook and data structures and algorithms knowledge failing to engage in a proper engineering process

3. Poorly defined requirements (blame aplenty to go around here: product development giving insufficient thought to the product details, sales over promising, and "engineers" failing to contribute by treating partnering with these folks as an onerous chore rather than a necessary task)

4. Insufficient resources

And many more, I'm sure.

Developers aren't blameless, here. In fact over the last couple of years I've come to see them as being at least as much to blame as non-technical people, perhaps even more so.

>quit after 3 weeks at my company because they were underpaying her and wouldn't give her a raise.

Why would she have accepted an offer she felt was too low?

Why wouldn't she? Maybe she wanted to get her foot in the door.

The point I'm trying to make is that the company needed her more than she needed them.

>Why wouldn't she?

Because it's unethical to agree to work for a rate you're not actually willing to work for. She wasted a lot of people's time and resources to bring her on board for those three weeks.

>The point I'm trying to make is that the company needed her more than she needed them.

I wouldn't want to work with a person who accepts an offer and then THREE WEEKS later starts demanding raises, no matter what their skill level.

Like I said, maybe she knew her worth and just wanted to get her foot in the door. I never said she asked for a raise. She just found a better offer elsewhere, and probably would had stayed for the right counteroffer.

I wouldn't want to work with a person who puts their own ideas about when it's appropriate to expect a raise over keeping bright people.

She didn't waste anyone's time; unlike most, she was productive from day one to the day she left. The company was wasting their own time by optimizing for low compensation and not engineering acumen.

Companies have no problem staffing projects they know will be canceled soon, or projects that are underfunded. It's a dog eat dog world, I'm afraid.

Counteroffers are widely regarded as a terrible thing to offer -- it sets a precedent that anyone, at any time, can attempt to hold your company hostage for more money. Most organizations with much industry experience will pass on any sort of counteroffer.

And it's likely that she _absolutely did_ waste people's time -- the company may have passed on other candidates to hire her and had to start over.

How are they holding the company hostage? You either agree to a salary or you don’t, and if you want to mitigate the risk of even having to discuss salary, you overpay. I realize from a mgmt perspective it sucks to lose someone you invested a decent chunk if change searching for, but it’s on you to mitigate that risk.

In some sense, they wasted their own time by not overpaying.

You might have a point on a longer time scale. This is three weeks. She likely hadn't even gotten her first pay check. Her market value did not change that much in three weeks.

It's possibly more complex than that? Maybe she was willing to work for less given other soft-factors; when she arrived, perhaps she found those soft-factors illusory (different boss; different project or work scope; coworkers aren't so fun after all, etc). In that case, asking for a raise is pretty reasonable.

Also, she may have simply gotten an offer she couldn't refuse from another company. You could argue that this shows poor ethics, but don't delude yourself, everyone has a price. She may have been generous asking her company to match.

Let's not judge people based on thin second-hand accounts.

Given the fact that "she" is completely anonymous in this case, no one is judging a person, we're judging the situation as described. Get off your high horse.

Oh, no no no.

If they can fire us at any time, we can leave at any time.

There should be absolutely nothing in anyone that says "work for less than what you're worth".

Whatever her reasons for going for and getting what she wanted, good for her. And any ethical system that says "work for less than what you're worth in an at-will environment" is a bad ethical system, full stop.

You're arguing against a straw man. If she felt she was worth more than the salary she was offered, she shouldn't have accepted it in the first place. Simple as that.

Who can say what was going on in the inner world of this hypothetical second-hand story person's mind?

All we know is she took a job and then took a better one.

You're claiming that's an unethical act, and I'm saying, "it's the free market, baby!" They pushed for at-will, they got it, consequences and all.

And, more broadly, I grew up in the transitionary period from "one job for life" to "throw 'em to the wolves," and I have absolutely zero sympathy for employers, in this world their policies have wrought.

There's a local employer here that is a household name. They have a history of doing things like offering positions to entire teams of people and then laying them off before their first day at work. In spite of the fact that they are one of the largest employers in the area I refuse to work with them because of their unethical behavior. Just because there are not laws which ban unethical behavior does not mean there are no consequences. I'd generally rather not work with someone who has shown a history of quitting after 3 weeks.

A bit of anecdata: my second software only gig (started in IT) was offered a very lowball rate with a '90 day eval' to bump my pay that came and went. 12 weeks isn't 3 but it took getting another offer to get a raise I more than rightly deserved. I was killing it and everyone knew it.

While 3 weeks sounds like a very short evaluation period, there very much could've been an arrangement like this. I hesitate to use the word 'unethical' primarily due to how pervasive Hanlon's razor really is. She gave them 3 weeks of seemingly extremely productive work and gave them a taste of the caliber of developer they could hire if they just threw enough money at the problem but it sounds like they didn't learn. Every experience like this is a chance to learn something but some companies just fold churn into the equation without properly evaluating what they could do to prevent it. Usually its those companies that think developers are just equal cogs capable of performing all the same tasks at the same magically high productivity level. They rarely learn that you sometimes actually do get what you pay for.

She might have ended up liking the job enough to stay, just as the employer might have liked her enough to keep her. That's the extent of the obligation between employer and employee -- so called "employment at will." Companies have fought vigorously to maintain this arrangement.

Yeah I thought the same thing why would someone accept a position at a given rate and expect a raise in 3 weeks? The only logical way I can comprehend that sentence is that HE was there for 3 weeks and SHE was already working there and after being there for X amount of time realized she wasn’t being paid what she’s worth. X being at least 6 months but realistically a year or more there.

I can totally understand why people wouldn’t enjoy being a software developer and would leave it for better opportunities if they could, but they should at least be aware what an amazing privilege it is, in the world today and in the history of the world to earn a living from thinking.

No they compete for unicorns. Normal developers who were privileged enough to be born in silicon valley and go to mit/Stanford/Caltech and aren't willing to work 16 out 24 hours of the day might as well not apply because you just get told to fuck off in every application

For the past decade I made it very clear during interviews that I value work-life balance and that in fact it increases my overall productivity. I was never told to fuck-off (And I'm in SV).

In fact any company that "requires" (explicitely or implicitely) employees to work more than 8-9 hours a day should be seen as a huge red flag IMO.

This supposes you can afford to get a job elsewhere. Most people need a job now.

Having and enforcing personal boundaries will change your life. People will respect you for it too, not turn you away.

You will not respect yourself even when your wallet is empty.

That said, it is currently reasonably easy to switch the job in our area.

That's why you (a) interview in batches, and (b) even after you have taken a shitty job that you needed _now_ you keep interviewing.

In the longer run: build up some emergency funds; and always keep interviewing as a low intensity background activity, so you have offers before you need them.

I've always felt that interviewing is a pretty high intensity activity. At least the ones I've been in, which are a parade 5-6 of interviewers asking you to do problems at a whiteboard in hour intervals. At the end of those days, I'm physically and mentally exhausted, and often hungry, as they tend to make me talk right through lunch. I really dread interviews like this.

You are right. My choice of words was confusing:

By low intensity background activity I didn't mean that interviews are easy. I meant to suggest, interview at one company every quarter (or a similar rate).

(Though interviewing does get easier with practice. I usually batch up a lot of applications to different companies when I'm about to seriously look for a new job, and when I'm properly in gear, I breeze through those full day ordeals without too much loss of sanity. After all, there are only so many different technical interviews questions in common use amongst the companies.)

I disagree with your point even if it's exaggerated. I'm a HS grad with about a decade of experience. At least for the past five years, I can find a decent job at a startup making well into the six figures at will. Last time I got laid off, I had multiple competitive offers a little over a week later. This was all from cold online applications, and I was not living in a strong market like San Francisco or Boston. I have no LinkedIn or references and I don't network. Granted, I'm pretty good at this and interview _really_ well, but what I just described would be impossible in most other white collar-ish industries, and a total pipe dream for a HS grad.

Unicorns definitely have it easier, but eg Google hires so many people these days that they have long exhausted the supply of unicorns. Nine to five and cushy job is definitely possible in today's job market---especially if you are willing to move cities or country.

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