We Don't Have a Talent Shortage. We Have a Sucker Shortage
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resumeskills.us
They're aren't many expects in my field with my background and skill set and they said the right things to get me to interview (compensation won't be a concern).
Anyway... Went in for 4-5 interviews. Took me about 10 hours in total to interview with them.
Kept hearing that they have a difficult time filling the position. Reports directly to the CTO, etc, etc.
They came in at 1/2 my current salary. It was about 30-40% of what you would pay a decent engineer with experience.
I told them my salary level BEFORE the interview...
Gave them a hard now. They came back and said they can offer more stock and remote work.
Why in the heck would I turn down a bird in the hand for 1x in the bush?
Part of the problem is that if you're interviewing you need to know what you're buying!
You can't go to a ferrari dealership and offer to buy one or $20k.. that's just not how it works.
[1] https://hbr.org/2018/07/research-the-average-age-of-a-succes...
Where they get comfy, rationalize that they know their job, and the company never has to spend more than 98k on this person for the next 35 years.
Weirdly enough, it seems like Fortune 500 pays best for the brightest and they have them working on high level concepts and paying suppliers to perform the nitty gritty engineering.
I don't quite understand the rationale behind this hiring phenomenon.
Executives like to work with people that they "like", so its frequently people who went to similar schools, have a similar sense of humor, don't say stupid shit etc. Even if these people are totally ineffective and have no skills, they will keep getting hired. Then, they make use of the new labor markets, where you can just outsource everything and hire consultants/contractors to do the actual implementation.
If the project succeeds, the hired person is a star and gets showered with money, poached by other firms where they try to replicate a similar, completely short sighted way of building business value.
If the project fail, blame the contractors get new ones.
Until we can show that there is something more effective (and possibly transparent) I fear we are doomed to continue repeating this cycle.
Benefits are not worth 2-3x the pay. I find myself being a contractor due to the better pay.
- Contractors don't always get the best projects. Often the coolest, most strategic projects go to employees. Of course, if no one internally is qualified, contractors then get the best projects.
- When cuts happen, contractors are at the front of the line, and when cuts need to go deeper, employees then are at risk.
- It is a pain to collect. You are often not the primary contractors, there is usually a pass-thru company that is well-connected and gets the receivables and then pass them onto you. Sometimes they delay payments 45 days. Sometimes 60 days. I've had some months paid 4 months late. On rare occasions you never get paid.
- You pay the employer payroll tax if you are in the US and on 1099 (on W2 you only pay half the payroll tax).
- Benefits you purchase are often not the best benefits. The benefits you would get at a large company are often well negotiated and much better and much cheaper than what you purchase a la carte.
Obviously for a contractor premium high enough, none of the above really matters. But contract work isnt worth it, for say, a 40% premium IMHO, especially with a family. At higher premiums (250%, 300%) it can make sense assuming you like what you will be doing.
They’re unhappy because they let other people control their sense of self-worth.
There's generally threads online where recent grads say what offers they've gotten from companies and websites like www.paysa.com that try to aggregate them but those are all biased.
Equity is a gamble not in your favor, read up on how many startups fail outright, how many sell for basically nothing, and how much you're going to get diluted in funding rounds. Founders will say otherwise but it's their job to sell you so don't trust them. So if you do want to gamble on a startup make sure to heavily discount the value of equity when negotiating.
Isn't that a given with equity? You're literally saying that you're a residual claimant in the enterprise. Yes, with stock options and such things you might be even "more" residual than others in the capital structure, but it's not a "scam".
I just measure positives and negatives and once exceeds the other, I'm done.
My biggest mistake as a new grad PhD was local cost of living. I wanted the prestige of working at a well known university. Turns out I didn't have the safety net or family wealth to work there.
Use an online calculator to estimate after-tax take home pay. Look at home price per square foot. A good offer nationally will pay 300 sq ft of real estate (take home pay) per year. My salary has varied from 110 to 1800 sq ft per year. I quit the 110 sq ft job after 2 years I just couldn't afford it; that is unsustainable! The 1800 sq ft job was in Phoenix; one house (new) per year! My current salary is ~250 sq ft a year which sucks nationally but is good for one of the most expensive cities in silicon valley (400+ sq ft just a few blocks away in a lesser school district); I am very Senior with 30 YOE.
> They're aren't many expects in my field with my background and skill set
contradicts the title of the submitted post.
If there aren't many people that meet the requirement, but there are at least as many as jobs that need to hire them, then there's no shortage - that small number could even be too many, if some of those people are overqualified for the jobs they end up doing.
So in technical roles there are a lot of companies that are always hiring. Recruiters work for free until they find you someone and placing job listings online is so inexpensive it barely registers as a cost.
On top of that, most states are "at will" employment, so even if a company does not have any openings, if they find someone better, and cheaper, than another employee that is currently working at the company, they can hire them and then eventually let that other employee go.
For example, I'm not in the market for a new laptop, but if a brand new, top of the line laptop came up for sale at half price, I'd probably buy it.
Its so cheap to look for new talent due to automation, so most companies will shop around in case they get lucky and land a fantastic bargain. Many are not seriously looking to fill an immediate need.
With that said, there are still plenty of companies out there with an immediate need, so please do not get discouraged by that group of companies that are "always hiring".
The experience of the poster you are responding to doesn't seem to align with the situation you are describing. Sure posting an online job ad is pretty cheap. The rest of the hiring process, not so much.
Sure it isn't free, but remember, this person had made it all the way to the end of the process. The determination was made that they represented such a large gain, for the low salary they were paying, that it was worth the risk of that small cost to get an employee at a 30% reduction in salary.
If you are going to save 30% of $140k, that means you will save $42k. It would take a lot of interviews to make up that gap.
Mind letting me know where you work so I can avoid it? Interviewing is part of the job and needs to be accounted for. You don't just make your employees do overtime because you don't want to plan out your companies work well
If their other work falls behind because they spend too much time interviewing, well that is the company's problem. I have never worked with anyone that would stay late because they interviewed someone that day. That is ridiculous.
And as for staying late "to get the work done", what job do you work in where the work is ever "done"?
That is not really cheap, I am sure technology has helped reduce the amount of man administrative man hours, and helped fill a pipeline, but you still need to train new hires and actually interview them, which is no cheap.
Either way, the effect on hiring is the same.
So it's not easy to actually hire. I'm not at amazon, but we do offer reasonable rates - example, new college hires get 130k+stock, benefits at our company.
Yes, we are in seattle and/or sf. Don't want to say the name.
* don't care if you have a CS degree (we have hired plenty of bootcamp grads)
* are 100% remote which is super valuable to some folks
* aren't looking for super specialized skills--we build websites and web applications on some common open source stacks.
* explicitly don't pay top dollar. As the CEO says in the typical hiring conversation, every so often we'll be talking to folks who are also talking to Microsoft and Facebook, and we'll quietly back away--we choose to compete on different axes than dollars.
But maybe we're on the lower end. We definitely pay above that band for folks with 1-2 years of experience.
So I'd consider 60k low for any urban area.
Not the poster,although I've found a lot of people will take 50% pay for fully remote jobs.
I was suprised just how valuable fully remote is to so many people.
If you are having this much trouble hiring, are you 100% sure your interview process is correct?
What is the KPI for your interview process?
What I was trying to say that lot have been said about hiring metrics and standards around here and elsewhere. Yet, at the end of the day still like arbitrary in both ends and makes the job transaction cost higher than what could possible be.
Anyways, as I read your company’s interview process. Something came to my mind, why not let the candidate decide which questions to pick? I say so because I find the a lot of interviews are so hit or miss but if I was given a bit of control over the process, things could be different (or at least I would like to think this way).
But what metric are you determining that those 5 or 6 questions are correct?
For example, have you put together a pool of current workers that are successful at your type of work at different companies and seen how many can pass your interview test? Its pretty easy to find a recruiter that will reach out to their network and you pay 10 employed quality engineers $1,000 that do similar work to attempt the questions. If you find a significant amount of successful engineers cannot do it, then you may want to recalibrate.
I have helped several different companies fix their hiring process, purely by recalibrating their interview test questions to their specific needs. This sometimes actually means, more difficult or simply different types of questions. But very often people just do some Google searches for interviewing at FAANG and repeat those questions without tailoring them to their specific roles.
With that said, in the case of your company, it may very well be the case that the work you do requires particularly high IQ candidates, which is actually what most interview questions at the big tech companies test. In that case, you will always have a difficulty finding candidates as there are only a limited amount of high IQ people in the world. So changing your interview questions may not apply. But when that is the case, you can often save yourself quite a bit of time by asking potential hires to take an IQ online. This will cost your organization almost nothing and will likely screen out the vast majority of people that will not be able to pass those types of interview questions.
As result, what we have are poor hiring evaluations, horrible onboarding, etc.
Meanwhile those managers are getting the salaries that better be spent on a team of great developers.
Interviewing at all companies is always "free", because once your an employee, your time has "no cost", irregardless of what anyone's wages are, and regardless of any opportunity costs for the time.
I also wonder how much of it is also #1 data gathering, #2 advertisement, and #3 slightly counter to what you are saying - bad tools/people using said tools.
for point one, I can learn a lot on what microsoft is doing by pulling resumes from microsoft workers, even more if I interview them. you can quickly glean direction, head count, tech stack, etc.
for point two, tech companies especially have to remain relevant in the news. Imagine if you post positions for great ML shiny positions, that gets seen by tens of thousands of people for 0 cost. "Did you see that great posting at company X? wow they have an impressive Y team"
point 3, I have seen recruiters get thousands of resumes for a position they posted on the web, really want to hire someone, but instead send people through the hiring loops because of direct contacts. Its like they search for skills, the resumes on the website dont get searched well so they assume there are no matches. its baffling to me this happens given the tools you mentioned
Yes, just like Tinder and other assorted dating apps and sites have made it incredibly easy and efficient to search for a mate, but relatively few people end up in a relationship because of it. The act of swiping endlessly appeals to people, apparently. I vaguely remember hearing that once you are given 2 or more options, it induces strong paralysis, whereas if you have one option you tend to just jump at it and move forward with your life. I imagine the dynamics of dating and hiring are quite parallel.
You mean 3 or more? Because saying 2 or more just means you have options and therefore any options induces paralysis
The reality is outside of very early resume screening very little of the process is automated. Recruiting spends most of their day contacting people on sites like linked-in trying to find talent as not nearly enough shows up at our door.
My colleagues at FAANG companies tell me similar stories.
The cost of replacing an existing employee is also very high. In most domains can’t just plug that cheaper developer in, they need training and expertise building.
Outside of some very simple domains I don’t think your hypothesis holds up.
There is actually a Dutch site that tries to do something like that [0], but those recruiters are not even remotely as bad as these stories. They may be annoying parasites, but at least when they mention a number, it's fairly reliable.
As more recruiters offers their services to employers the employers starts to feel like there are more potential hires than there actually are.
As a thought experiment we could assume that there used to be two recruiting firms for each employer but then costs went down and now there are ten. This gave the illusion that there are five times as many potential hires even if everyone should take a step back and realize that the recruiters are still all trawling in the same pool in their search for talent.
Eg when we post a senior eng job on eg glassdoor, stackoverflow, or linkedin, we are deluged with resumes. Just the ad easily costs $250. Then we get applications who ignore that we don't sponsor visas, clearly don't have the skills required (6 year SAP programmer who wants to be a senior fullstack eng? No thanks), or are junior eng trying to make a huge jump. 1.5 years experience does not make you a senior SE who can be trusted to design and land large features with minimal oversight.
The first problem is an eng manager reviews all those resumes. It easily requires 10 minutes per, including writing nice rejection letters. And that's just for inbound. Outbound can take 30+ minutes per.
If someone passes the resume filter, we do a phone screen with one of our senior eng shadowed by a junior. A 45 minute call plus prep plus decision afterwards costs me 2 hours of eng time.
If you come in, we do about a 3.5 hour interview across 6 people. We cover travel expenses and lunch if an interview runs over lunchtime.
The whole thing easy costs us $1.5k, plus tons of eng time. And that's if we source. If a recruiter sources, we're looking at 20%.
I'm sorry, but this sounds very strange from someone claiming to know about interviewing and hiring.
You need an engineering manager to filter out SAP programmers who want to be a senior full stack engineer? You need an engineering manager to figure out someone only has 1.5 years of experience?
How many people are you interviewing? How many positions are you filling? Seems like you would realistically need about 5-10 phone screens plus 1 or 2 in person interviews to fill a position. 3 if your phone screens were really off the mark.
I'm actually curious who hired you. Because this sounds like dismal operations management. Seriously, you seem to be a great example of how much a bad hire can cost a company.
Also in this thread: piles of people complaining hr runs hiring. We have an eng manager run hiring for our eng. You: bring back hr to review resumes!.
We're hiring on the order of 15 eng over the next calendar year. Ask anyone who has actually done this (say, for example, the folks at yc) hiring is incredibly expensive. I saw an interview where an Asana founder said he spent perhaps 20% - I can't recall, but significant percentage -- of his time hiring. That's super senior executive time focused on getting employees in.
"Seems like you would realistically need about 5-10 phone screens plus 1 or 2 in person interviews to fill a position. 3 if your phone screens were really off the mark." Just curious what your thought process is to arrive at these numbers?
Which part of senior full stack are they missing? Front end, back end , API?
https://cloudplatform.sap.com/capabilities/technical-asset-i...
>1.5 years experience does not make you a senior SE who can be trusted to design and land large features with minimal oversight.
Yes and 25 years experience doesn't make them one either, especially if it is the same 25 years.
You could find a 2.5 jr with the skills required.
I mean if they started their own start up they could be designing and landing features with no oversight within 18 months.
>The first problem is an eng manager reviews all those resumes.
Yes it's better to have actually engineers do the initial review. They understand the job, will see through the BS and scale better. The more people you hire, the more resumes you can review.
The ultimate problem is that people want "unicorns for peanuts". Google, Facebook and a few other large tech companies have hired most of the top of the labor market, the "ferraris" in your analogy. Most companies want the ferrari but can't afford the price when others are willing to pay much much more.
The only way to really balance the market is for more of the talented engineers to start their own companies (reducing labor supply and possibly increasing demand). Arguably the proliferation of one-person or small bootstrapped startups is a reflection of the state of the labor market.
The final offer, however, was 60% of my current pay. Lower than the average for someone with my experience and position.
I had good rapport with the HR recruiter and flat out asked why they proceeded, even though she knew I was already getting more, at a better company, with more benefits.
The answer: they assumed I was lying about my current salary and I was just bluffing. Recommended me that I lie in my next interview.
My non-negotiable requirement was 20% more than I was getting. I gave a hard number and they said "yeah we can give that" before the interview.
However the recruiter just assumed I was bluffing and went ahead with that colossal waste of time.
What a bizarre way to run a business.
"we can give X" is not a promise to give X.
They were unprofessional.
Recruiters make money as a percentage of your hiring salary, why on earth would they try to place you somewhere that you are making less? They should be shopping you to whoever will give the most money.
I agree about the incompetence part, though. Terrible waste of time for everyone involved.
Key take a way from this: never let your recruiter negotiate on your behalf. Once you are at the stage, tell your recruiter to F off and get the best deal you can for yourself.
If that is the case: screw those guys. If you can’t trust a company with _writing an employment contract_, how can you trust any future interaction.
If your skills are in demand, move on. Not worth your time and being able to walk away is the single most valuable card one can play during a negotiation.
I knew the CEO from a previous effort. After much discussion, I thought they had something interesting, though I was hard pressed to find real differentiators. I thought I could help, and the senior leadership of the company did as well. We talked over a number of projects.
Started negotiations, I was asked about what it would take to get me over. I gave them realistic sets of numbers and conditions.
CEO's response to me was priceless.
"But that's more than I make."
Um ... yeah. And this matters ... how?
I know, startups push the equity side hard, as they tend to be cash poor and stock rich.
He then suggested a number that was under half of my minimum acceptable (covering costs, maintaining something that looks like a quality of life). And not so much equity.
Yeah. Didn't go there. CEO was out within a few months.
or see this dilbert cartoon:
This from a very profitable mid-large sized established tech company in the US.
> Objection: “This form needs a number.”
> What you should think: “You’re lying to me to attempt to get me to compromise my negotiating position.”
> What you should say: “Give me git access and I’ll fix it in a jiffy! both people laugh No, seriously, speaking, I’m more concerned at the moment with discovering whether we’re a mutual fit… Oh, it’s physically impossible? Put in $1 then to get the ball rolling, and we’ll circle back to this later.”
https://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/
related: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2016/06/03/kalzumeus-podcast-episo...
> they don't trust candidates
...which is a great tell for what kind of relationship you would be starting if you did take the offer.
The way it's supposed to work is that you and your employer (who represents the capital) generate a return from your joint venture.
But the actual return is hard to predict. And there is no fair and obvious way to divvy up the return. So it comes down to negotiation power.
There also may not be any condition where you and the capital agree to join. The capital may have better options to generate a return and you may have better options to get a salary.
How about x% of average revenue per employee. Usally around 100k to 300k. So ARPE minus expenses = average salary.
Probably around 60k to 70k for most companies.
This particular scheme means you are paying janitors as much as people who went to school for a decade or more. Some people would not find that equitable and fair. Few academics would find that offer competitive.
And depriving the executives of large salaries also means you are increasing the incentive for corruption. If somebody has the power to squander a billion Dollar, you better pay her more than 100k.
And you forgot to include capital gains, or you included it with expenses. Whoever owns the equity will want some return, otherwise they will invest elsewhere (or not at all).
It was a problematic company from the get go. I was cold called and the recruiter was very insistent. Their engineers were very unprofessional during the technical interview and complained A LOT about technical debt left by past co-workers during the interview.
Now, when I tell recruiters my minimum salary I refer recruiters to Glassdoor, just in case they doubt me.
IMHO it should be irrelevant. The question is, what is the market rate for someone w/ your skills and experience?
The inevitable result of that is the people making bank will be sure to tell you, and ones making low salaries will not. The employer will therefore still know if you're making above or below the usual salary.
Businesses don't like risk (just like employees don't) and hiring a new person poses a lot of risk. It's expensive, and the employee may not work out at all. The more risk there is in hiring someone, the lower the salary offer will be to compensate. Salaries are a proxy for one's value when hiring. Removing that piece of information increases risk, and hence will lower the salary offers.
Thats still way better than being forced to give an exact number. Now the employer has to kinda sorta guess. Instead of getting underpaid by 30%, you might only get underpaid by 20%.
Also, if you wind up getting a salary that's more than you produce for the company, you'll be first in line to get laid off.
An employees current salary is only barely correlated with a employees skill. They have a multitude of other, much much better factors that they can use to determine if someone is a "risk" or not.
> Also, if you wind up getting a salary that's more than you produce for the company
You are describing something that is close to impossible to measure, for the vast majority of situations. A company does not go around making exact measurements on programmers, and thinking to themselves "Is this person *really 18.2% more effective than the lower paid employee?".
Thats just not how it works. Instead, a person might be 3 times more effective, or half as effective, as the other employees, and salary will be almost entirely unrelated to how much they "produce", which can't really be measure very well anyway.
And this is without even getting into more complicated things, such as sunk costs, and the replacement costs. IE, you may be 10% less effective, but the costs to replace you are equal to 6 months of your salary, so in reality, it makes zero financial sense to do so.
And finally, you are ignoring the fact that an employee can just lie about their previous salary, and there is basically nothing the employer can do about this. I have never, in my life, had someone demand my tax returns, or call up a previous employer to verify my salary, and in many places this can even be illegal. I can just lie about my current salary, and easily get away with, as I have done so multiple times in the past, as well as has many other people that I know.
You're not fooling employers, they likely know you and your friends are lying, and discount the offer accordingly. Try bringing a paystub next time, your prospective employer will appreciate it. It's worked out well for me.
There have been some high profile cases of people who've worked for decades for a company, rose to the top echelon, and were discovered to have lied on their resume. They were out the door without their severance package.
It's worked out pretty damn well for me and my friends, actually. I've gotten multiple 25% raises, each time by doing that. (Along with a healthy dose of job hopping)
> were discovered to have lied on their resume
I've never lied on my resume. Only about salaries, while talking to someone in negotiations.
That's just how the negotiation games goes. The employer makes blatant lies all the time in negotiations, also.
For the record, I've gone from a starting salary of 100k, when I just got out of college 6 years ago, to where I am today, which is 270k total comp, at a big 5 tech company.
I am pretty happy with those results. Especially so, because I've only ever considered myself to be an average engineer.
Or are you going to try and flatter me by saying that I could have been doing even better than going from 100k to 270k in 6 years? Perhaps. But I'd hardly say that I haven't done alright for myself.
I've heard such justifications for submitting fraudulent college applications, cheating in college, doping in sports, etc.
I've done significantly better than my peers with salaries, without lying about it.
Remember that fable about Steve Jobs' dad painting the back of the fence that no one would ever see? My father once told me that honor is what separates men from animals. Honor is what you do when nobody is looking. How much is your honor worth to you? I'm no saint, but wanting my father to be proud of me is worth a lot to me, even though he's passed away.
Thats great. But the other strategy, of engaging in successful negotiation tactics, has also worked out quite well for me.
So it seems like the strategy can be successful.
Actually if you work a while and are lucky enough to have done well, you may want to pick a place to work for reasons other than it has the highest salary. In that case you may not want to advertise your salary history because it can scare away employers. It shouldn’t but it does.
Then again if it's illegal to find out, how will they check if your lying or not?
There are obviously problems with a reliance on salary as a signal of quality/value produced. But I don't understand the impulse to pretend that there isn't nontrivial signal in a previous salary.
They didn't actually give me any answer until I asked them to give me one - then they said my attitude with the top management made it clear I wasn't a good candidate for the position.
Dodged that bullet.
That was them just warning you: "Dude you won't hear it fom HR and I am not allowed to tell you directly but you most likely don't want this job."
In Germany, I had salary negotiation closer to what I was used to in the US (e.g.: two competing offers, etc).
In Denmark, very little room to maneuver. I had no luck negotiating salaries in big corps here (Final comp in DK mostly from salary). Every attempt I made to initiate a salary discussion/negotiation seemed to make the hiring managers uncomfortable as in “we don’t do this here”..
About the only thing I could see you getting in Denmark is a cost of living raise or maybe something to the whole department or team.
Some EU countries have a much stronger emphasis on sectoral bargaining. (Often there's a formal mechanism for everyone to work together to negotiate more pay)
It varies much more than the American one does.
happened to me in Italy, about same script. salary expectations set from the start, two phone and two on site interviews with stellar feedback then they offered 2/3rd of current total comp.
like, thanks for waiting me three vacation days.
Very well written and exposes the brutality and destruction resulting from focusing on short term profit at any cost.
However, such actions are also detrimental to sustainable/thriving business. So smart people find more constructive and humane ways to be profitable. The book ends on a high note and carries the potential to help leaders correct course before self destruction.
>...wages were artificially lowered — an estimated $9 billion effectively stolen by the high-flying companies from their workers to pad company earnings — in the second half of the 2000s...
All these firms settled for a measly $334 million to make this problem go away, despite damning evidence.
So your $5K after taxes wouldn't even register on my radar.
5000€ is $5623. You can maintain a "normal" life standard around here for about $800 (renting a studio / two room flat in the city centre + all the expenses, no car but I never needed one - the subway takes me to the furthest parts of town in 25 minutes, walking to work is not unusual). So you're saving more or less 5000$ every month.
How much do you have to earn in SV to rent a place for your own next to your office and still save 5 grand a month? :)
Anyway I get your point and in general yeah, US salaries are of course on a whole new level and I won't even argue with that.
I'm not trying to say Warsaw is better for programmers than SV because it never was and never will be - yet we still managed, within last 5 years or so, managed to do something you somehow can't do - we trained HRs, agencies, recruiters etc. And they willingly act as we please. Because there's an incredibly high demand for programmers and no one has time for games like US companies play. And I still can't wrap my mind around this - if company Y or X is so desperately seeking for employees and pays them bazillions of dollars - why they even consider burning so much time on the process of hiring? Hiring is hard, I get that, but it's much easier if you disclose the salary. And in Poland right now hiring is impossible if the salary is unknown. And it's not even required by law (though it is supposed to be).
A potential cause for this effect might be that widespread bargaining reduces a market's efficiency, since prices are less transparent for buyers and sellers.
It's a leverage thing. Companies in high cost of living locations can just wait for someone else and they will. That doesn't work in a low cost of living locations, since their isn't much urgency from the perspective of the applicant.
After 10 years of experience, you are looking into buying a house. Granted, the price of the house is exhorbitant compared to its size, but that's the market.
The salaries are also low in my opinion. At just under 4 years experience I'm making 225k yearly in TC, over 170k of that is salary.
If you want a nice 1BR apartment ($3000) + a very generous budget for monthly expenses ($3000), you need to earn $11000 after tax to save 5 grand a month - i.e $132k a year.
A total compensation of $200k as a single person gets you that much after tax: https://smartasset.com/taxes/california-tax-calculator#BKf2k...
Take a look at these sources to see what top companies are paying software engineers in SV (spoiler: it's more than 200k, and you can add ~60% of each dollar above that to your savings): https://www.levels.fyi/ https://www.paysa.com/salaries
According to Numbeo living in SF is about 2 (groceries) to 5 (rent) times more expensive compared to Warsaw: https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...
A 7 weeks holiday allowance has more than a monetary allowance.
The (many) issues with US health care do not affect upper/middle class professionals.
From a "patient perspective", as long as you are employed as a software engineer in SV, health care is not a concern at all (insurance is covered by the employer). If anything, it is superior to anything I experienced in Europe.
The issue in America is essentially that the system is paid by piecework. So the entire system optimises for the number of tests/procedures/operations etc. that can be performed. And that might not be so bad in and of itself, if 21st century medicine was reliable. But it's not, and the sad truth of the US system is that many of the (very expensive) procedures it performs have worst outcomes than leaving the patient alone.
In the Netherlands, a patient should not expect from a doctor to conduct any tests at all. I had no experience with the Dutch healthcare myself, but I've heard horrendous stories about it, for example how Irish expat went to a doctor with a problem of pain while swallowing, received nothing more than an advice "well, swallow less, then" (like in a bad joke about doctors), went home to Ireland a got diagnosed with a throat cancer there.
(How to use asterisks here?)
This is all gross, pre-deduction salary; not salary net of taxes, deductions, etc.
There is a Unicode small asterisk: ﹡
And some other variations: ∗ ＊
If you surround an asterisk by spaces it works fine: a * b * c * d
Well, a number of people use Eastern Europe location as a filter for 'cheap labor'. And SV startups tend to have crap wages to begin with, but offer equity to compensate. I could imagine a few startups seeking to crimp further.
> Meanwhile no developer in my country even responds to offers if the salary is not given ... before the interview
Posting salaries is rare in the US. It's becoming the law in California, but this is hardly universal. There's an expectation that you'll negotiate, but they're really hoping you won't. And plenty of US engineers assume if you don't post a salary, it's because the budget for the position is low.
Thanks for the idea. As East European I'll use this opportunity to improve my English speaking skills (on the phone).
Citation needed on that. I really hope you’re right and I’m ignorant here, but I think you may be confusing it with the recent state law that makes it illegal for prospective employers to ask about salary history and theoretically requires them to give a salary range to an applicant when asked. I say “theoretically,” because there’s no way for anyone outside the company to verify that the salary range they give is in any way related to the budgeted range.
It's particularly hilarious when you realise that some eastern Europe places outsource to the US Midwest because it's cheaper....
I hope that helps!
Well, here in SV, everyone kinda knows what other companies pay. You just didn't have friends in SV to tell you before the interview how much that company pays.
In general, there are top-tier companies, FAANG + Uber + Lyft + AirBnB, that pay X. Then there are lower-tier companies and startups that pay roughly X / 2. So, you're unlikely to get FAANG total comp at a no-name startup.
You have crafted a strange model. What are the upsides to such a system, to you, the employee?
You get to learn first-hand why being a non-founder at a startup is almost always a bad deal in terms of compensation.
For example, I used to work for a big company in Denmark that has a sattelite office in Bucharest.
It is questionable to see that even the equipment the developers get there was subpar. The fulltimers there were treated as contractors (e.g.: no career incentives), expendable (high turnover).
The office just existed because when the company was smaller and needed more than now cheaper labor, they made it so that remote managers could be there as a proxy.
Joke aside, what you said above also applied in my case to my ex German employer in Eastern Europe. We got cheap machines with half the specs of the German counterparts but the management in The Mother Land expected the same productivity as the German colleagues.
Now, having migrated West to Austria(similar culture to Germany) tings don't get better an all accounts, even if you speak German. Sure, now you get nicer machines, and even if you manage to negotiate a salary close to local levels, your career development opportunities are close to zero as management will only propose the locals for promotions and trainings as those are the guys managers spend their lunches and cigarette breaks with, even if they're mildly incompetent. You'll be left as that guy who just needs to sit as his desk, do what he's told and be grateful to his masters he's been given a job as if you're coming form a country of goat hearders.
This horrible discriminatory culture in EU countries is not something the EU can't fix unfortunately and it's one of the reasons countries like Germany or the EU as a whole will never catch up to the US on innovation or salaries in tech.
I am not in a stage of life for pursuing promotions to give more anedata on that, but I can see that a lot of senior managers here in Denmark are not immigrants. I do see however that there is a wave of immigrant founders here. Let’s see if the economic environment will perdure long enough to see a greater change.
As I mentioned in another comment, I personally prefer just setting a salary range I’d be willing to accept. I walk away if given an offer below that range. It gives me the initiative of anchoring the negotiation to a number I want.
It also saves me a lot of time by screening out companies that aren’t willing to actually negotiate.
"Yeah thanks, but that offer is not enough for me to leave my current job. I need at least X more. Let me know if you're interested."
(In fact, you can negotiate even AFTER you accept it!)
I thought to myself...that's not how it works. I'm sure I could have negotiated higher. But I wonder if he thinks I inflated my salary and those said match.
Keeping in mind my current company has some of the best benefits I've seen outside of Silcone Valley...
I think he was just honest.
In those cases, I'd answer with "Ok but I need X% more because of the commute and the hassle of changing jobs".
Never make that mistake. Never ever disclose your salary information to someone that you potentially could work for.
I think a situation where we were required by law to disclose, or a company where such a thing was common (GitLab) would be exceptions. But otherwise, I've found it to be a huge mistake to disclose your exact salary or numbers to anyone.
This practice favors the employer so much that it is illegal in California (and a few other states) to ask for salary history.
That's interesting....when submitting resumes for US Federal government (GS) jobs, their resume guidelines include salary, hours worked, and points of contact for each position. I wonder how positions advertised in the State of California can be reconciled with what you've shared?
They do sometimes even ask for pay stubs to prove salaries claimed
My understanding of federal employment is that the pay scales are published and public record, and job postings state which scale it's on. This level of disclosure seems to minimize the possible harm here, as there's far less room for negotiation for anyone.
It does not benefit you to disclose the information, even if you think your number is high. They might assume you are lying, or they might already be anchored at an even higher number - you don't know.
But otherwise I agree. The company always has such a strong hand that it’s in your best interest to play every one of your cards as strategically, carefully as possible.
I've heard two stories about car dealers that each say different things.
One story was about a car dealer that told its salesmen the actual wholesale price of the cars they were selling. The salesmen would deal from that price upwards and would always sell the cars close to that price. They changed to only telling them the retail price of the car and then sales from that point on were much higher as the selling prices clustered nearer to retail.
But the other story was from a friend who used to work at a car dealer. The top sales guy would move an enormous number of cars. He would sell them for $250 over invoice. My friend said he was amazing, and it was common for other salesmen to spend hours haggling with a customer on one car, and meanwhile the top guy would move 4 or 5 cars.
In general I agree, except he did say the person was his friend. My close friends and I all know what each other makes. It helps a lot when negotiating for a new job, because I now have additional data to know that what I'm asking for is not crazy.
One of these friends I have worked for in the past and could work for again, but he readily admits he can't afford me right now.
EDIT, I read colleague as most likely a friend now. Perhaps not, but my above point still stands about friends.
With that I might or might not consider it.
I've made a simplified version for recruiters here: http://erik.itland.no/step-by-step-instructions-choose-your-...
If anyone likes it they should feel free to adapt and customize it for so it can work for even the most annoying recruiters :-)
A much simpler solution: if lots of programmers would strongly avoid to take jobs at companies that do not tell the salary upfront, the problem would disappear by itself.
That's commonplace, I've heard many engineers say they overstated their current salary. When I'd apply for jobs, I'd include a copy of a paystub, because I knew the companies knew about the practice and would discount the offer accordingly.
So, California employers won't be able to avoid a complaint if they press for a current (as opposed to desired) salary number and disadvantage or reject the candidate on that basis, but they can still check for honesty.
While I definitely don't want to discriminatorily let low salaries have a bad knock-on effect at subsequent jobs, I also don't want to hire or work with liars.
So I just sidestepped all that bs by including a paystub. And the resulting offer was a nice raise.
> I also don't want to hire or work with liars
I'm with you there. Lying on a resume is an automatic "no hire" from me. By including a paystub, I don't feel forced to lie, and the employer doesn't feel forced to assume I'm lying. It's a good start to the relationship.
Verifying any pay history info that is provided, however, seems fine to me. This could certainly be via pay stub, or it could be by contacting the former employer with candidate consent after the official offer letter is issued and accepted (worded to be revocable if the verification fails).
You may not "want" the discrimination, but if you don't allow everyone to say the magic words that get them treated fairly, "I was paid the market rate", you're encouraging the discrimination.
I think it's pretty easy to make a moral defense for telling a lie about what group you're in purely to avoid discrimination.
Employers in California (and NYC and a few other places) cannot ask about salary history, but they can ask what salary the candidate wants, and the candidate can decide on their own initiative to share salary history info. If candidates share such info voluntarily and unsolicited, employers can use (and verify) it.
So any candidate who wants to can say those market rate words you quoted. Similar phrasings that answer the still- permissible "what salary are you looking for" question also work fine.
One of the most likely wordings to get a good outcome without losing respect is: "I want whatever number is market rate for someone with my skills and experience at an employer like yours. I'll make inquiries through my professional network to learn what's appropriate so that I can consider your offer in the correct context, and I'll try to be fair to the company as well as myself in the resulting negotiation."
Notice how that doesn't depend on salary history info at all.
For California specifically - not currently the other places with this type of law - employers must also share the "pay scale" with "applicants" upon their "reasonable request" (these phrases have been clarified legislatively in sensible ways). So that's even more help in avoiding discrimination while staying honest.
Does that get you the same salary as showing off your previous good pay stub?
If it does, then we're fine.
If it doesn't, then it doesn't matter that it's voluntary, the system still strongly encourages discrimination based on previous pay.
Imagine a similar system with a protected class. "You don't have to tell us your age, but if you prove you're under 45 we'll treat you better. If you say the wrong age, you're a dirty liar and don't deserve to be hired." That would be blatantly illegal and universally shunned.
I'm not saying this kind of discrimination is anywhere near the same magnitude. I'm just saying that whether it's voluntary or not is a distinction without a difference.
> For California specifically - not currently the other places with this type of law - employers must also share the "pay scale" with "applicants" upon their "reasonable request" (these phrases have been clarified legislatively in sensible ways). So that's even more help in avoiding discrimination while staying honest.
Good, that sounds much more effective.
If you were overpaid, and want to try to keep being overpaid, see below for a scenario that you can mentally adjust from fixing underpayment to preserving overpayment (in which case verification is even more important if the employer decides to bite that bullet).
Underpayment of disadvantaged colleagues is so much more common and so much more long-term impactful than overpayment of anyone involved in this style of negotiation; I care more that the law addresses the former than that it prevents the latter. People have useful indirect ways to signal high pay anyway even if they were forbidden from saying it explicitly, far more than underpaid people.
The prior pay information is illegal for employers to solicit in these jurisdictions, even if they are willing to make it voluntary by accepting no for an answer. The only way the info will make it to a law-abiding California employer is if the candidate decides it's to their advantage to volunteer it, as they probably would if the initial offer is a low-ball. If the candidate doesn't volunteer it unsolicited, the info can't legally come up (and if it somehow does [e.g. turns up in a third party background check] the employer can't use the info during the hiring process).
As for why that needs to be allowed, consider this scenario:
Company: What salary are you looking for?
Candidate: Market rate.
Company: How about $X? We like you and it's the highest we usually offer for this position to a new hire.
Candidate: Hm. While I agree $X is within the market rate range, I currently make $X+10k which is also within that range. Can you at least match that?
Company, after consideration: Hm. Yeah given that we don't want to force you to take a pay cut, we'll make that exception.
Or, even more compelling last two lines:
Candidate: Hm, my current company is already paying me $X, and has been doing so for 3 years now despite my skills growing significantly in that time. Can you recognize that growth with a modest pay raise?
Company, after consideration: Hm, we realize you won't trust our willingness to support you if we keep your compensation stagnant for a fourth year and counting. We can't break our salary band, but we'll at least give you $10k/year extra in restricted stock units [assume a public company].
In such scenarios, verification makes sense to require and allow.
Also note that these jurisdictions generally have explicit bans on paying differentially based on protected attributes like old age or gender, and that these laws about salary history (which are just a tightening of their former greater permissiveness that still prevails elsewhere) don't override those rules.
1. Bob voluntarily supplies paystub for his last job.
2. Fred gives no hint about his previous salary.
Other things being equal, which is the less risky hire?
I.e. don't be too surprised if the law doesn't work out as intended.
Other things being equal, neither Bob nor Fred is more likely to be a liar. Should I want to verify salary history, I'd seek permission to verify directly with the former employer (a routine request for any HR department assuming employee consent). If anything, it might feel suspicious that Bob was proactively trying to give me the easier form of proof to render fraudulent; but that alone wouldn't seem concerning in the absence of other signals, I expect.
Note that before the new law, the employer could legally have insisted that both Bob and Fred give their salaries or refuse to consider them. If Fred was severely underpaid and Bob was not, the employer would almost certainly have given Fred a lower offer than Bob. Since persistent underpayment also correlates with a more precarious personal financial situation, and since any other employer could legally have insisted on the same policy, Fred would probably have ended up accepting a comparatively low-ball offer for lack of a better option, thus staying underpaid.
The law still helps.
Because the person not giving salary information likely believes such will negatively affect their offer (as you say), and the one who does likely believes it will positively affect their offer.
Sure, a lower salary may have nothing to do with job performance. But it is an indicator, and a good one.
BTW, paystubs are "stubs" because they are on the same paper as the check which is more difficult to forge.
> The law still helps.
Not providing salary info makes one a riskier candidate, and risk means a lower offer.
It's like buying a car. The less you know about the car's condition, the less you're likely to be willing to pay for it. That's why having receipts for work done on the car by a reputable shop, being the original owner, owner is a grandma rather than a teenager, etc., commands a higher price for the car.
I mean, sure the correlation is nonzero, but it's low enough as to not be usefully predictive for hiring. The correlation is much higher between relative pay and relative privilege, which is not at all about who would be a good employee.
Also, most of my pay stubs throughout my recent career have actually been electronic-only pay statements, and my pay is usually electronically direct-deposited too.
Therefore, any employer-provided pay statement which I pass along would be in the original PDF form, printed from the original, or redacted in a visible and non-fraudulent way by me to remove any irrelevant sensitive info (e.g. before the accepted offer stage I might redact any full bank account number or SSN).
If I were a fraudster, the modified PDF I would share would look just as credible as the original. Far safer to just obtain permission and ask the former employer.
My first interview for a job after law school, first interviewer. Guy begins to look at my resume, tosses it aside, and says “I don’t read resumes. Everyone lies in their resume. Hell, I lie on my resume.” After that, the whole time I’m thinking to myself “what kind of moron lies on a legal resume? The bar calls every employer you’ve ever had since high school.”
I've had a few short interviews that quickly turned into a sales pitch on why I should work for them. I've also had the same you experienced: they act like they really want you specifically then feed you into the human resource machine. Basically made me feel scammed so I bowed out after the first 30 minutes.
I get the sense that a lot of tech companies' hiring playbook is all about making you feel special and elite then feeding you into the machine.
I was interviewing with the CTO/CEO etc and some of them were out of town. Normally I would agree btw.
I guess I could understand it if I REALLY wanted to work at company X and company X happened to have annoying interview practices. But is that the condition for most people seeking jobs? Or is there some selection bias of who is posting about their experiences?
not everyone is negotiating from a position of strength.
I'm certainly not widely known in the industry. I don't have any public projects/repos. I've been doing this for almost 20 years, so I do have a pretty extensive resume. But I didn't have extensive resume when I was starting out in the early 2000s just after the internet bubble burst and times were relatively rough in the industry. And I wouldn't have done 4-5 interviews or homework projects even then.
We don't need to accept this kind of treatment from potential employers.
After one instance of that routine I learned to unashamedly [at least loosely] state my asking rate, and ask about salary up front (or early) after hearing the interview process.
It's saved me. I would have faced the same interview length for [same as you] half of my current salary, and would have had to share a machine as a matter of principle. For an intermediate->senior role. With longer hours, and fewer benefits (but there would be a ping pong table and exposed brick walls...).
Though the situation I experienced seems especially endemic to Toronto's dev mills. I've since learned to recognize them at the outset and stay away.
People buy that line of reasoning. It is sad but they do, and I have colleagues who have worked in several such positions and failed to increase their 401k savings by much (given the low base pay) and after 10 years of work and haven't seen a dime from the so-called "valuable" equity. Worse they are now considered 'old' so they are pushing headwinds when they even get to an interview (much like the original author).
When I talk with newly minted engineers today about compensation I will often recommend that they "do the math" which is to say they compute their living expenses and assume they are going to save the maximum allowable 401k and they are going to pay taxes at what ever the current rate is. To take those numbers, try to plot them out with inflation and the stock market return, take a million off the top for each kid they expect to have if their future spouse isn't working, a half million if they are working. And then see if they exit 20 - 25 years with enough to live on or not.
Once you have the basic model you are in a much better position to understand how the base salary you are being offered helps or hinders your future self.
I finished an interview in London, UK and they start umming and ahing over a measly five grand. It happened in Toronto too last year.
They offered me 15% below what I wanted alongside a very uninspiring business in advertising. I was honest and said I was interviewing elsewhere and wasn't about to accept that offer quickly, though it wasn't off the table. They waited one week and pulled the offer. I accepted a better offer pretty much the next day.
The recruiter got back in touch with me a week or two later and said quite frankly that they regretted their decision as they've struggled to find anyone comparable in my salary range. Because, as it finally dawned on them, my salary expectations weren't even that high - I intentionally put them in the mid-range for my skill-set because I care deeply about work/life balance and I'm picky about tech stack.
Unrelated, but I also had a similar experience last year when buying my first home. First place we put an offer in with was poorly advised by their agent, and they came back begging a few months later by which point it was too late. It's only two anecdotal data points but it does seem to be that people are willing to lose a lot in order to gain a pittance.
After the housing bubble burst I decided it was time to buy a new house. I made an offer on a house and we went back and forth but we hit the ceiling I was willing to pay so we went our separate ways.
After the seller had an agreement with two other families fall through they called me 9 months later asking if I was interested. I went back to my first offer from the start and told them I'd close in two weeks. Deal was done.
Had a software company offer me a position, tech support + some maintenance of existing codebase. I have a demonstrated capability to meet the requirements. Remote + onsite work at client premises. Existing employees doing the roll are way overloaded and obviously stressed.
The person I'd report to travelled to interview me. This person admitted they hadn't received a pay rise in four years.
I told them my current pay grade BEFORE the interview.
Their offer: $45,000 BELOW my current pay, then another $5000 per year I'd spend paying for my dependants to be cared for during the time suggested I'd be at clients premises.
As far as salary goes, I absolutely cannot afford to compete and hire at market rate prices so I rely on:
-People who are motivated by other factors than money (everyone at our company took a pay cut to join). We have schedule flexibility, we are like-able, our tech is interesting, our mission and vision are inspiring I hope, we are good at selling ourselves.
-People who like the gamble of stock options
-People who are unaware of their market value
This is how every startup in seed round works pretty much.
That said, I don’t go around complaining that there is a talent shortage. I’m well aware of the situation we are in.
maybe you need some funding then
Well, maybe..
First of all it sounds like there was some really dishonest communication and there is no excuse for that.
With this one:
People who are unaware of their market value
Sometimes it's worked out; the company gives them a big raise, a lump sum in the key of "Sorry!" and the person remains a happy and productive -- and wiser -- member of the team.
Usually they're gone within months, though. And often other people follow ("You got /how/ much at OtherCorp?").
Honestly, we're not SKU's. Once you get some experience, the main difference between, say, a $100k developer and a $150k developer is that the latter simply decides that's their price and interviews longer until they find it.
Also people are complex I don’t necessarily know why the engineer accepted the job for 70% of what I think they could earn elsewhere. It could be an intangible reason.
Then how do you do competition market research?
Are you okay with it if it turns out that the offer you make is either 3x or 1/3 The market rate?
>The employee has mobility to reject my offer, or leave and seek a better job.
As long as you never whine about a 'talent shortage' when they reject the offer or leave, that's fine.
You made the offer, they decline or leave because they can get better elsewhere.
You look at that information and decide if you want to raise wages or not. Then put out whatever adverts you wish.
Simple and easy. No need for press,PR,H1B, lobbyists and the like.
If everyone was running like that, these kind of articles wouldn't exist.
1) every company I have interviewed with has lied to me at some point in the process. Sometimes those are small lies, sometimes they are very big ones. I get that hiring is a complex process but a company's recruiters and hiring managers should make an effort to not over-promise and under-deliver to people that want to work there.
2) I have never received an offer from a company that asked me my salary expectations. I consider that question a loud signal that I am just being regarded as a data point by the recruiter, and I basically write them off.
Oh lol. I just applied for a job that asked for salary expectation. Well I guess its ok. I spent minimal amount of time uploading my resume and entering data into 4 webpage.
Been there. But lies cut both ways. Once a company is dishonest with you, it is 100% fair game for you to be dishonest with them:
- Side consulting gigs
- During work consulting gigs, especially if you have "unlimited vacation"
- Sneaking off during the day to do whatever
That said, that isn't healthy for either party. The best situation is where both sides are honest and both sides work their hardest to reach a shared goal.
You could if you were willing to take rawer unproven talent.
You chose another option and that worked for you and that's great. You could have perhaps hired a student at market rate.
The asked how much I was looking for, I told them X, which was 25% more than I was getting now and on the high-end for a similar role. They say ok.
Interview goes great, everyone loves me, offer time. They offer me X-20%. WTF? That’s basically what I’m making now and they didn’t offer big company perks like 401k match, stock grants, etc. So in fact, the offer was less than I was currently getting. They were willing to go up to X-15%, but no higher.
Why say ok when someone says they want X, then make an offer way lower than X?
If the only thing you have to offer is equity (risk) and a lower salary than what I was getting/market salary why don't I just save me some time and risk it all by starting my own company.
Interviews went well, liked the people I met; things looked good. As a condition of the offer, the recruiter told me they needed my current salary. I provided that, and they dropped their offer ~$15,000 below the low end of their range because my income (in another state and a different industry) was lower.
I told them, "that's not how this works. You base your offer on what the work is worth here, not on what I was making in another role."
Walked, and got an offer two weeks later - $30,000 above their original range and no bullshit trying to tie it to my current income.
It is a startup. That is what they do. They offer low comp but with more stocks. How is this a surprise to you?
Most startups and new businesses fail. Part of that is a lack of funding and a lack of information/knowledge about the specifics of the markets they are working in.
They may not know that they are looking for a Ferrari or what the market for Ferraris looks like.
If I start a business that sells Ferraris for 20k, then complain how I cant buy them cheap enough wholesale, there isn't a shortage.
The idea that job applicants get offered wages which they perceive as too low does not mean that there is not a shortage of similar talent on the market, even at reasonable wages, if there even is such a thing.
The analogy with the Ferraris breaks down for developers and engineers because their qualifications are hard to quantify and their added value is hard to predict.
Employers will especially talk about talent shortages when they can't hire additional talent at the wages of their existing workforce. That may be because they got lucky and found very cheap engineers ("suckers"), but it also may be that they are running against the wall of the talent shortage, meaning they can only hire new people if they embark on a potentially ruinous wage competition with other employers...
If wages are perceived to low compared to profits, than I'd rather question the potential collusion among employers. There have been dramatic cases of such sollusion in silicon valley, as I recall. Less drastically labor market regulations and workforce protections will also play a role.
In the Bay Area, I rarely hear friends complaining of wages "perceived" as too low, usually it is more absolute in terms or it wont pay rent. This isnt usually the case for entry level or medium level jobs. But I constantly hear of this so called shortage of experienced engineers. The fact about experience engineers (10yrs, 15yrs, whatever) is that experience is also correlated with age, family, children and throwing $150k at someone with family simply doesnt work. It isnt a perception issue, you literally cannot fit a family into a studio apartment and afford braces, health premiums, co-pays, etc.
Unless they prefer to be unemployed, or work outside the industry (and Silicon Valley), their turning down a job offer because of too low compensation does not preclude a real talent shortage. Usually they are already employed at a wage that pays rent, right?
All this talk about low wages seems to assume recruiters and employers are stupid. But they aren't, for the most part. If they think they could make a higher profit by doubling the wage offer and thus hiring an additional engineer, they would do it. Stupidity or stupid greed is not a smart way to reject that basic economic imperative for an industry as a whole.
>or work outside the industry (and Silicon Valley)
There are plenty working in the industry outside of silicon valley there are more bootstrapped SaaS than before.
The young developers fed up of silicon valley looking for a family are a great snatch for these kinds of companies.
>All this talk about low wages seems to assume recruiters and employers are stupid
I think it's more about the combination of low wages and complaint about talent shortage, either is fine but both is pretty stupid.
>If they think they could make a higher profit by doubling the wage offer and thus hiring an additional engineer, they would do it.
Yup,which tells us that they are not really that concerned about the hiring of another engineer.
Again: Individual movements, individual market mismatches, don't disprove a talent shortage.
Your arguments only make sense if you assume the worth of an engineer to be virtually limitless, or else there is no shortage. That companies should ruin their business models by treating engineers like kings and handing them all the profits.
There are certainly localised shortages (hence the popularity of remote work)
>they can only hire new people if they embark on a potentially ruinous wage
Or cut profits or lower CEO wages to fund it, or move the company to a lower cost of living area.
If your a software company your biggest expenses are probably staff and offices and well cheaper areas also have excellent connections to cloud services.
You can pay half as much in salary in 1/4 area and everyone is better off.
From a supply/demand perspective, there is no such thing as a shortage. At least not without further qualifications. Prices adjust so that the demand meets the supply. In theory that should always be possible. Concept of a shortage per se does not have a place in this theory. You can only speak about a shortage/oversupply at a certain price level but such a thing has no significant meaning because that price level is just an arbitrary number.
Thus to speak about a shortage you must add some other components to your model. Those other components will always be partially subjective (i.e., what you want to maximize?) and fairly complicated. (I believe.)
In any case, one could for example argue that there are not enough engineers to fill the roles "needed" in the economy at a sustainable price. (What is "needed", though?) But I am very sceptical about such a claim, considering the huge profits many US companies are making, even the software companies for that matter.
All it does is displaying for everyone to see their indecisiveness and wasting other people's time. They obviously couldn't make up their mind even after the first four rounds and that's just bad in any businesses.
If I ever had to go through a five-rounds interview and they ended up turning me down, I will not care if it burns bridges as I will track down their boss and he/she will receive some nice hand-written letters from me to let them know how their company performed. A working relationship always goes both way and they obviously have not valued much of your time.
She replied that she was pretty sure this was an organization she had interviewed at some time before. They found her qualified, and made her an offer substantially below what she had clearly said she required. They said, Well, we thought you'd find the work so interesting that you'd be willing to work for that. They thought wrong.
That's how employers work though. Next step is to whine about a Ferrari shortage and bribe (I mean lobby) the goverment to increase immigration of Ferrari knock of builders in order to reduce the shortage.
Then when the locals get indignant about all these new Ferraris depressing sale price of Ferraris, if your the UK you blame the EU and have a vote on brexit.....
There is NOT a shortage of software developers. That myth was developed by big tech, and pushed all the way up the ladder, to the top of government. The goal? Reduce labor costs.
Big tech has always been 1 step ahead of the employee, just like coal, and metal working was. They saw the huge need for developers and realized their costs would increase unless they actively pursued ways to prevent that from happening.
And that's how you get organizations like code.org. That's how you get President Obama on the big screen, telling everyone to learn to code. That's how you get a GREAT job, and make it BLUE COLLAR.
The field of software is growing. It will change. That change may be for the better or worse.
But I feel it’s unethical for those of us privileged to be in this field to act as gatekeepers and prevent others from having the same opportunities I (and I suspect many others had) when I entered it.
If you want to keep making the big bucks, continue to provide meaningful value and skills that justify it.
It’s also funny because this creates a problem where wages have been driven down to a point where skilled workers can barely afford to support a family in tech zones. So because of these depressed wages in software engineering, there are fewer skilled workers living in these regions. Make no mistake this is software engineering specific. Otherwise show me roles in tech where there are lots of H1B visa employees.
You create a website with a list of job skills that 'slave wage companies (SWC)' are claiming to need to fill.
You collect resumes from unemployed U.S.candidates with these skills and send them to the SWCs. If the candidate gets hired you keep a recruiters fee.
If the candidate is rejected your startup lawyers sue the pants of the SWC for violating U.S H1B law. You pass on the settlement money to the rejected U.S. candidate keeping a percentage for your lawyer and your retirement fund.
US H1B law is clearly explained online [0], there are searchable databases [1] and most recruiting/HR people will gladly spill the loophole secrets that they have (posting jobs in obscure local newspapers, tailoring job description to an existing known foreign candidate etc).
[0] https://www.uscis.gov/working-united-states/temporary-worker... [1] https://h1bdata.info/index.php
You will be protecting American jobs and making money in the process.
Is this an easily winnable lawsuit? Can't the company just show that the candidate failed their interview process suggesting they lacked the actual job skills required?
- Set high minimum wage for H1B ($150,000+ annual salary, set to increase in response to inflation in technology salaries)
- Incorporated an automatic green card "path to citizen" into the process, which will be portable between employers (with a decent provision for unemployment or family leaves).
Seems like:
- Dramatic improvement in living conditions for higher end H1B roles (less beholden to employer, more career mobility)
- Immediately eliminates abusive lower-tier H1B roles (you could grandfather existing arrangements for the duration)
- Opens up entry level tech roles to native-born trainees
- Opens up unencumbered path to citizenship for top talent
I'm sure there's a way for politicians to screw this up... but seems like this might be a good first step towards ending the current abuses within this system...
Talent shortage, also known as cheap labour shortage.
Did you know that in Australia, overseas people are hired to deliver mail?
https://www.smh.com.au/national/post-turning-blind-eye-to-45...
Also capitalists: I refuse to raise my wages in response to a low supply labour market for my labour demands. I will instead lobby the government to let me hire wage slaves that I can abuse from overseas labour markets where living costs are much lower.
Normally supply shortage --> higher costs.
Let's be absolutely clear the goal was simply to bring in foreign workers to reduce salary costs.
God forbid we open that up to people who should be resigned to whatever you think "blue collar" means?
There's nothing wrong with trades and blue collar work. There's a reason you can't outsource plumbers, electricians, and other technicians who must be on site to practice their craft. But there's also a reason that work is so expensive: the skills required take time to acquire, and there's a limited pool of talent with those skills.
Disclaimer: My personal stance is I want the labor market as tight as possible, for as long as possible, to push wages up for as many people as possible, while using government policy to put backstops in place that are progressively ratcheted forward.
Why is it your choice to make? Shouldn't it be the new people trying to get into the computer science industry who get to make that choice?
It feels like what you're saying is "God forbid someone else tries to join your industry and tries to make a better life for themselves, and god forbid others for trying to help them."
It's not my choice. It's the technology industry's collective choice to decide how welcoming the technology industry is to newcomers. I hope you have a more compelling argument than, "It's not fair." Life ain't fair; people have mortgage payments to make, kids to feed, and aren't likely to be willing to support emotional appeals that are going to decrease their quality of life, without any benefit to them.
My argument is that getting more people into tech increases opportunities and raises the standards of living for everyone. When entire industries are disappearing due to automation I think it is rather ridiculous to try to restrict people from becoming programmers.
You are right, it is not your choice, and thankfully society is making a very different choice.
By your own logic, every time I help someone learn something to do with coding - for free - I undermine the wages of everybody else in the market whose job that person is going to be able to "steal" now.
And yet it is my choice to do so.
As coding difficulty drops, and supply increases, the net effect will be a much higher demand for jobs than supply. And that's exactly where big tech wants it to be.
edit: here comes the javascript developer downvotes.
It's classic expert talk, "oh, that's easy." Perhaps to you :)
Sorry is this a joke? Because I'm missing it.
- crashes under load,
- cannot scale to even 5% the traffic,
- doesnt have all the myriad required compliance and transnational side systems
- has underinvested in accounting and all support systems
- is un-maintainable, etc. etc.
And that is when serious businesses realize you get what you pay for and that you need to pay for real experience to real systems.
Yeah, that could definitely happen. /s
Anyway it's important to note that coming up with the business idea and then executing it well is kinda where the money comes from, not from the app itself per se. A business may have a website; it might even use a web app to deliver its core business value; but having a website or web app doesn't necessarily mean you have a business.
1. Enzyme, the current top used React testing library 2. NVM, kind of the only game in town for managing node versions 3. qs, a tool for converting search to json objects and back 4. tc39 proposals, the committee that determines new JS features
This is all in addition to his developer work at Airbnb. I would like to see a high schooler have that kind of maturity, drive, and focus.
You've drawn attention to an Airbnb engineer with a bunch of other interests that don't seem directly related to the infrastructure behind the company. I'm sure they use these things, but they aren't going to be critical to the success or failure of the site. That suggests the technical challenges of Airbnb aren't enough to keep someone with a large amount of maturity, drive and focus busy and interested.
I actually love it when a developer says something like this, because it tells me way more than even 2 full days of pairing or interviewing could: They know absolutely nothing about software at scale, and are probably extremely arrogant to boot.
Jokes aside - the biggest error this software developer makes is not realizing that software is not the crtitcal part of AirBNB success. It is the thousand manyears of boots in streets promoting the app and getting people onboard.
It informs me that you're probably a JQuery developer, personally offended because you believe that your work is incredibly advanced and challenging. In reality, what you do is probably some of the easiest "coding" to have ever come to fruition. Yet, you toss out the "at scale" comment ad nauseam because you think it'll make you sound important.
Just by the fact that you denounce anyone who recognizes the simplicity of it modern development tools shows me you probably fail to recognize the simplicity yourself. Or you don't want to admit the simple fact that programming has gotten much easier. That's been intent of so many modern languages, yet we're always going to have someone like you who claims we all don't know what we're talking about because we've never built anything "at scale".
Your 10,000 hits / day blog isn't "scale" buddy.
Edit: Also, I'm not your buddy, pal.
For example, "Chart.js" makes it really easy to create beautiful charts in a web app. Because of tools like that it's much easier to learn how to build a feature rich app now than 20 years ago.
Still, the guy who can create "Chart.js" (an artist) should be getting paid a lot more than a guy who can only use it (a craftsmen).
Why? One without the other is pretty pointless. I can accept the roles are different but not that either is particularly harder.
It's one thing to code what you see in front of you, another to think about problems and solve them thoughtfully, research, debug, and etc. Troubleshooting(debugging) in particular is a hard thing to learn.
Stop blaming other people.
Start blaming other people, because they are out to get you.
I've been paid quite a bit for coding... but the premium was due to the projects requiring: a) statistical expertise, b) finance & pricing knowledge, c) transaction system design, d) discretion to deal with HR / restructuring information, e) quality assurance required for contentious BOD projects, and f) willingness to accept a fair amount of uncertainty, screwed up schedules, and outright abuse from senior level leaders without snapping back or ripping their heads off.
Good luck finding that at boot camp!
What if we could outsource this to some magic 3rd world slave mine? What if we could hire some recent graduates or interns instead? What if we could get someone on an H1B and chain them to the desk?
It’s the natural result of being labor. Don’t like it? Be an owner.
The only alternative I can think of is for software to become a true profession with licensing and standards. This makes a lot of sense in a world fraught with security risks and ethics concerns about the usage of data.
In the meantime, I’m getting ready to hang up the keyboard. All the dynamism and potential has been ground out of this career path. What’s left is crushing demands and compensation that just doesn’t cut it anymore.
After two cycles, they started treating their local employees well. This was a big firm with much momentum. A small firm could be ruined by this. Sometimes the firm just needs to see the grass isnt necessarily greener on the other side. I got paid well and my business counterparts always know that when I said 3mo, I meant 3mo.
The longer term, better solution is to be owners. Worker owned tech companies only don't exist because they're not our currently accepted default. If people stop defaulting to the venture backed capital model we can turn this industry around.
What would have to be true for you to agree that there is a shortage of software developers? Big tech cos have total comp of ~$600k/engineer. Would you think there is a shortage if they had to pay $6m/engineer? $60m? How do you define "shortage"?
So it is currently at a 50/50 split of the value created between the employee and the company.
I would expect, in a skills shortage, that the employee would be able to demand a much greater share, something closer to -- or even temporarily above -- 100%.
The absolute number, $60,000 or $600,000 or $6,000,000 doesn't seem relevant.
It would be really interesting to compare salary/profit ratio of the tech industry to recognized labor shortages in other industries.
You are of course right that the ratio of profit per employee and salary is irrelevant.
How are you defining market rate if not by how much someone thinks they need to pay an employee to stay?
Industry today wants a solution on a silver platter but the universe doesn’t work that way.
What is the line of reasoning than goes from 'there is a shortage of developers' to 'therefore, we need to pay less.'?
But “don’t wanna pay” (when companies and 1%ers are hoarding like never before) doesn’t equal a shortage.
If they want to pay less, they should be out saying that there is an over supply and they can get workers for whatever wage they actually want.
You haven't explained how a shortage can lead to paying less on the part of companies... I still don't understand this logic.
There is no shortage. They promote the story of the shortage to pressure government to let in more indentured foreigners, with the slower goal of encouraging more locals to pursue those careers.
You'll notice that "paying more" (the classical/rational economic solution) doesn't seem to be an option.
I have been running a successful business, but it's not "tech". I want to get back into the software industry. I didn't have a software business idea, so I explored some tech company jobs.
I am well-qualified at the VP/Director level for startups and even larger companies.
I did go so far as to do an on-site interview for one company. I have verifiable proof that I can generate huge returns in their exact industry.
They didn't want to give away any equity, even though hiring someone at this high of a level would generate huge returns for their business.
They had a completely undefined budget not only for this role, but for the 4-6 people who would be underneath this role starting out.
They weren't even sure they wanted to hire someone full-time, but they knew this position was a clear gap in skillsets of their current executive team.
And the kicker to all of this was that they were already doing 8 figures a year in revenue. This wasn't a broke startup.
I rapidly came to the same conclusion as the post's author. There are so many companies that want to hire a "VP of X", but they really don't understand what that means or how to pay someone who doesn't just want a 6-figure a year salary for the rest of their lives.
I'm now starting a software company.
I'm starting a company, but want to retain 100% ownership. I don't want to give equity as I don't want to lose control. Been there, done that. I'd much rather go down the road of profit sharing based on the results.
One way to solve for both preferences, in tech, is to create an option pool. I broached this with an executive. He said they were looking into it, but it wouldn't be available until next year at the earliest. My interest in working full-time for them declined to 0 at that point.
I couldn’t make them realize it was part of my compensation expectations and for that I wanted to know company valuation and dilution, even if a ballpark.
Profit sharing means money in the pocket for me. Actual hard, green cash.
I'm only saying that profit sharing sounds better than equity, of an unknown unproven startup; not that it'sa guaranteed key to making you rich.
edit: Also, incentives people to think short term and pump us revenue at all costs (then find another job when it comes crashing down) which is not a great environment to work in.
You certainly don't want to retain 100% ownership. You need partners who treat this business as their own and share your burden. I think cofounders are vastly overrated, while hiring key personnel and granting them significant options is not emphasised enough.
When u say equity - do u mean they wouldnt offer u a standard options package ? Or was it too low ?
Or do u expect to get couple of % of a $10M ARR company?
I am curious because HR is hard and broken for everyone. But expectations are also very high.
So ok, you have proven track record, how are you proving that again? I mean just coming in off he street and promising rainbows and money to fall out of the sky is easy.
If you don't know how to do background verification on people then you have far bigger problems than your fears of being gamed.
What I am saying is: I think you know and you have an agenda.
If you truly don't know then this is really something you should know if you are doing the job you are saying you are doing.
To use an analogy: I would not waste my time explaining how type systems work to someone who is arguing rabidly against them in an online forum.
If they care then it's something that is so important they should actually go out and educate themselves before getting into conversations about it.
The corrolary of this is: not everyone knows this, so _after_ you're done negotiating salary, equity and benefits, it might be a good idea to inquire about a grandiose title to go with all of that. "Head of Javascript" if you're junior, or "VP of Backend" if you're senior, stuff like that. :-)
I know people becoming principal eng at FAANG who are just playing their cards right.
However what I have noticed recently is that title inflation has arrived to big companies too; mostly to increase retention. So, when I mention played their cards right, I wasn’t referring on how they leverage the soft skills, etc. It was more on individual ability to do salary negotiation each perf review, bluffing/threatening to leave, etc.
At the end of the day I guess it is good for them and everyone who is in those markets. But again, my main point was around title inflation is not exclusive to startups, although director level and above seems still to be hard to get in FAANG (at least in the companies I worked for those require board approval) while in startups they are given more freely.
These statements don't exactly follow. Revenue is not a profit. It's possible they are broke with a great revenue.
While this may earn respect at the very top of the company from another founder or former founder, there more typically a lovely process of watching an insecure middle manager do the math about what you did and freak out....
So are you going to
a) hire the best developer you know and pay them whatever they ask, or
b) hire the best developer who falls within your budget (which, I presume, cannot be very high when you are starting)
If you answered b), then I guess you already know the problem. No matter how qualified you personally think you are (and you are, I am not doubting that) - the only thing that matters is whether you fit into the plans of your employer, which includes whatever nebulous salary range they have in mind.
I suppose you will say that you are already running a successful business. But IMO that doesn't actually amount to much when you are creating a software business. Why? Because you are now competing with the FAANGs of the market. And there is already a lot of talk that FAANGs are actively hiring to take the best labor off the talent pool even if they don't need the services of those hires. So suddenly you have just lost almost all opportunity you had to create arbitrage - that wonderful and probably mythical situation where you buy labor low and sell the output high and take home a handsome profit.
So you recalibrate your expectations and go one rung lower. And you do grow your company quite successfully, because, lets be honest, if you can "do things which do not scale" at first to grow companies, it pretty much follows that you can make plenty of money despite hiring ordinary talent in the beginning stages if you have a good business background - which you do. And at some point, because you grew so fast, you will face a similar shortage for some kind of skillset, only to find that you suddenly cannot really afford to pay what the very well qualified person wants because that isn't even a part of your culture anymore.
And ironically, said person then goes and writes a post about how your company completely lowballed them :-)
As an inteviewer, you're job is not to stump the candidate. Your job is to figure out how well they can do the job. The questions you come up with should reflect the actual job, and the actual tasks that will be assigned (that's where you should draw your questions/inspiration from), rather than some random data structures question you remember from college or some random questions you found on a google search.
It's pretty clear what kind of work someone will do when you can look at work they've done.
I typically want to see how people use resources and deliver with real IDEs and collaborative tools like git
I agree that the most valuable thing is not seeing how the solution was implemented (we want to keep the total hours expended to less than 20 for the senior engineer challenge and less than 5 for the junior challenge) but seeing how someone navigates their environment and how they talk through how they arrived at the solution. It's especially interesting to ask about alternatives, areas for extension and tradeoffs.
Candidates arguing about the amount?
Comp for a take home interview assignment isnt common yet so the social more doesnt exist.
I agree with the DRY intuition though: making coders repeat code challenges/assignments is stupid. Some sort of verification or credentialing after completion of assignment, signed by a 3rd party, would be really cool.
All you have to do after that is listen.
Never be proud of anything that you created - since it probably is not of "top of the world quality". Even in the rare case that it is - it is very likely that even "top of the world" can still be improved.
The rest of it is suggesting to the population at large there's such a high demand for these positions they should enter the market and pursue that career. The idea is to flood the market with labor to drive labor costs down by pretending there aren't people qualified to do the work.
After enough people couldn't be found locally they'd have a legal justification for a work visa.
When it's not used for visa indentured servant games, it's arguably a relatively decent way to to do things (don't put applicants through a charade of being considered, and you're already certain who you want to hire), but better would be to not post the job at all in that situation.
Also, the notion that H1b's are cheap is not always true. With the added costs of filing H1b visa and green card, the true costs are much higher, especially in a cutting edge industry.
My question is why not spend that money developing smart local folks.
> Super Narrow Selection Criteria
e.g. "We need nodejs, mongo, grpc, golang, etc - decades of experience in software is not what we need. We need exactly those things - and we are going to give you an online code challenge to solve an irrelevant puzzle while a 27 year old sits there watching you." And then when you get the job its nothing more than spending hours upon hours updating a web front end, tweaking a database, and watching logs.
> Outright Age & Lifestyle Discrimination
I'm only 36 and I feel old sometimes. I apply for jobs where I have to talk to a panel. It looks like everyone on the panel is less than 30. You can feel the lack of experience exuding from their pores. Everything this panel says sounds like some misconceptions I had sever years ago when I was their age and only had experience working on small projects. Where are the older more experienced workers? I mean are people over 30 not applying for jobs?
> What Are Your Salary Requirements?
Someone tried to hire me for 85K after decades of experience for a very early stage startup. They were offering equity but equity doesn't mean anything if the company folds in 2 years. I need more than that.
> Stop wasting people's time and make experienced candidates a real offer.
When I was a new developer many moons ago, I worked with many old guys and gals who would always let me know how green I was (no matter how much I studied and tried to impress them). Now, if I was to look for a job, I would be working with very young guys and gals who think experience == 2 weeks of reading a book on Facebook's React framework. Hey times have changed.
They apply to different jobs. Larger companies and so on. Some move into management or consulting. Startups in general make little economical sense and the downsides are rather high if you have a family.
If I owned a company I would never let some inexperienced fresh grad interview a senior engineer. They are letting some kid take part in one of the most important parts of their business.
It's yet another area of software development hiring where all logic and reason have gone out the window.
No disrespect, but what you are saying borders on unreasonable. You would trust a Jr. developer to interview a more senior developer? That is laughable. Think about that in the context of a law firm, or a federal agency, or the military, or basically any other context.
It was too early - I didn't have the technical expertise yet to judge someone else, but much more than that, I didn't have the soft skills or indeed any idea how the hell to interview another dev. I shouldn't have been doing it, but at the time I was the only dev at the company. I look back now and cringe at my naivety.
Wow. That's how much someone ought to make after a few years. You ought to have straight up told them why their company is going to be dysfunctional in a few short years.
Don't put box tickers in charge of a critical function unless you want every thing they touch to be turned into an exercise in box ticking.
HR professionals (and the c-suite) are the cause of bad HR policies.
Bad HR policies perpetuate bad HR policies after that.
HR is just an easy scapegoat. I'm sure that often HR is primarily responsible, but often HR just works with what they're given.
The practice is that a culture had been subscribed to across the board and there's no shortage or urgency because if there was, these positions would loosen or employers would be more aggressive and even offer training instead of leaving needed positions unfilled.
IMO, that's just a symptom. The real problem is that the hiring managers/engineers find the job of "recruitment" beneath them.
All of us know the recruiter might not really understand the difference between "java", "scripting" and "javascript". But then, why should that role exist? That role exists because the engineers/managers/leads/architects (generally, the tech folks) just don't want to do the grunt work (search and source candidates, co-ordinate and schedule interviews etc). The actual folks in need of teammates/additional people want a piece of the action alright, nobody wants to miss being an interviewer where one gets to go on a power trip asking the poor candidate to balance B+ trees or some such thing, while letting out tch-tch noises like a lizard watching the poor candidate struggle on the whiteboard.
All that needs to be around is a tool/system that can make the job of searching/sourcing/co-ordination easier for the actual hiring managers/leads who are looking to add people to their teams and have got the necessary budgetary stuff covered already.
If you have time to do that, and do it well, and still hit your numbers, congrats.
What you think of the hire shouldn't matter because you are looking to perserve your place on the team and that taints your judgement. You shouldn't hire your own boss for similiar reasons. You should never hire your peer.
The feeling of autonomy is quite important for a lot of modern knowledge workers. There's more than one lever, but if you force enough of them, it becomes a crap place to work.
Two way street.
If you make it one way, it is all on you, and when that team says that, you get all the credit. Good or bad, and the team knows it. Will definitely throw you under a bus, given cause.
If you make it a balanced discussion, everyone taking shared ownership, then it is on everyone.
The difference shows up in two places:
One, bad call. The team can come together, own it, and letting the bad call go is not so rough. The follow on discussion is rational and productive.
The other one is getting that different point of view. Having that discussion sets great expectations. Being challenged, getting better, all that is welcome. A team that does this successfully tends to congeal and do extremely well.
Play it how you want to play it, but I definitely prefer to have it all on the table, open, team discussion, frank, high value.
Mix in a reluctance to blame and shame, favor choices outcomes and data and you get a team that can weather the good and bad, everyone helping everyone too.
The lead is responsible for cultivating that culture, empowering people, resolving conflicts, etc. Also owns team business meetings, data, all that.
Just saying.
If the team lead owns it they should take the blame and give credit to the team. If the team kind of owns it then everyone is off the hook or on. It also invites the owner/vp to talk directly with the programmers which undermines the lead.
No one mentions this but the lead in development is one of the rockier jobs. You rarely have power to hire/fire without a manager, all development problems come your way, credit goes to developers. You have very little power compared to other industries.
Given that in higher dimensional finite spaces all the points are close to the edges of the space you would expect the most unbalanced teams to be the most successful ones because they can explore the parts of the solution space where you have the highest chance of finding a profitable solution.
Unix was not build by well rounded people. Xanadu was.
Non-well rounded people would do less well if the decision was up to peers.
I imagine that everyone is expected to dedicate a significant chunk of their time to the recruiting process. I don’t see how else they could pull it off. I suspect the arrangement is something like “everyone must dedicate one day every (other?) week to recruitment efforts.”
Moreover, they had a fixed set of well-thought-out questions and exercises. For programmers, you write code in an actual IDE with one of their programmers sitting beside you. You can bounce ideas off them, you can consult the interwebs (as you might in real life), etc. The questions and programming challenges were relevant, and reasonable.
It was an extremely well oiled machine, and it showed.
But doesn't that support what the article says? It suggests he applies a filter with very few false positives, which generally can only be done at the expense of a lot of false negatives.
(1) An HR employee is hired to cover certain areas (recruiting in this case) of expertise that the individual manager may not have or may be biased towards.
(2) Manager(s) may look to outsource a segment of their work.
In most cases, it is a combination of the two that leads to HR being the gatekeeper. I would argue that if there was no HR, society would simply blame the next person in charge of the hiring segment.
Maybe they actually aren't doing either. Perhaps they are simply building a log of candidates for a position that does not exist currently but may exist or another future hypothetical position related or unrelated. In other words doing the legwork way in advance and figuring if they dangle a large enough offer (at that time) someone will leave what they are doing and join the company.
That said, in general, all of these efforts to "learn to code" etc. are all just trying to increase the supply and lower wages. The challenge is that there often is a difference between the developers what will accept the lower offers and the ones who will hold out for more. Many still believe the a larger number of cheaper people is better than a few top devs... Despite the fact that this was proven be a bad strategy over 30 years ago in "The Mythical Man Month".
(Granted, you get funding / talent lift from the Bay Area)
Is there a name-and-shame list of these kinds of companies some where?
I have nothing against people coming to work in the United States, but I thought those visas were specifically for roles where the skills weren’t available.
In this case, by making the skills super specific, like that Home Depot sales portal in this article, they made them rare.
The "opening" was essentially a copy of my resume. The more specific requirements (details from my resume) the better.
Either way, if listings are that specific, I ignore them for both reasons.
“Candidates for Solutions Architect 4 at X Corp preferably have three or more years of experience as a Corp X Solutions Architect 3”
The guy I knew only got out because my then employer promised to endorse his visa and deal with any legal stuff.
What I find interesting is that if you point all of this out to HR/management, sometimes they don't believe you!
I just left a company for which I was the random unicorn (perfect intersection of 3 different skillsets and relevant past experience) after one year. I was referred because someone at the company knew I had the exact skillset they needed, and ended up joining right as they were planning to expand to several other states.
Two months in, I brought up the rarity of finding someone with such an intersection of skills. Looking for an exact match would not be realistic. Especially when trying to expand to states with a much more competitive job market that requires a higher salary than what they offered me. Of course, my concerns were shot down with such confidence that I thought, "maybe they already have the perfect set of candidates lined up."
One year later, expansion plans have completely 180ed because they simply cannot find the personnel that they need. They cannot even entice those who are capable of learning and performing in the role because they aren't willing to pay market rates. And now I left because they weren't willing to give me a reasonable raise or additional benefits like more equity.
This experience has made me wonder if cognitive dissonance plays a larger role in blinding HR/companies.
Obviously this isn't the ideal way to handle cognitive dissonance. However, it is a way of handling and one that you often see. Another bad way of handling it is when you see people "explaining things away" without ever really addressing anything of substance.
In my case, I saw it manifest in the sheer confidence they displayed all year despite our rollout plans failing. It did not matter how many market signals they received either. There was always another excuse as to why things will eventually go smoothly.
> This experience has made me wonder if cognitive dissonance plays a larger role in blinding HR/companies.
I think cognitive dissonance was also at play in the case I'm referring to. There's probably a lot of biases at play when people are trying to estimate what skills someone has. Also its easier to delude yourself into thinking the Bayesian priors are different when you have someone who has the rare combination of skills on staff, I remember hearing a few versions of: "how rare could it be when we already have this manager on staff?".
Because over 95% of them are completely random and do not meet even one single criteria of the job. Or, are fake resumes from H1B consulting shops.
Post a senior software developer job in New York? Get ready for over half of the applications to be from a Burger King employee in South Carolina, a security guard in Florida, a mechanic in Idaho, etc. They spam their resume to every open job in America. The next 25% will be from grad students desperate to get an H1B sponsorship before their OPT runs out. They will, yes, spam their resume to every open job in America. The final 24% will be fake C2C resumes from H1B consulting shops. "Yes, he is my consultant, how can you pay on the corp to corp for this job?" They, yes, spam their resume to every open job in America.
Out of those 1000, I bet you over 95% do no match one single qualification posted
I changed careers and was inundated with recruiters contacting me..... a total n00b. Nice huh?
Not really, every one of them just seemed to be sweeping up resumes and names and faces and not paying attention.
I'd talk to them on the phone "no I don't have 5 years experience, just like it shows on my resume"...
One after another, total waste of time.
Then I'd get a bite, or even interview and ... some would just go radio silence. Man how hard is it even to send a cookie cutter "we went in another direction" email?
I wish I could have only talked to people who actually looked at my resume first and wanted to talk to that guy. Maybe it wouldn't be many but it would save a lot of time, looking for a job is hard enough as it is.
Meanwhile every job does require 5 years experience but I'm pretty sure they don't. I'd hear the actual job and no man a n00b could do that just fine.
Meanwhile my last job now requires a CS degree where really a high school grad who is mildly capable with a CCNA could do just fine, but they're still looking to fill my position a year later... They could have brought on two people for like 6 months to just try them out and but they'd rather not.
I'm fairly sure there's just a lot of busy work being made by HR and head hunters who have no clue anyway.
Whaddaya Mean, You Can't Find Programmers? https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/06/15/whaddaya-mean-you-...
(Repost from five years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6454140#6455545 and 7 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17946388#17948113)
After a week I reached out to the recruiter, and she replied with a curt, "You're not qualified for this role so we're looking elsewhere." I was a bit surprised as the reqs they described in the job listing were exactly what I had been doing for the last 3 years. But it got me thinking whether the company (HR, Hiring Manager, etc) had made the decision or if the recruiter had?
In addition, there was no additional offer from the recruiter to work with me? It was literally that one line. It got me thinking that maybe my experience(s) wasn't valued by the recruiter as someone worth pursuing, as I may be more "work" to land a job than she would want to invest?
Anyway, with my pride slightly dinged, I immediately wrote off the recruiter (and cybercoders as a whole) as someone I wouldn't want to work with in the future. I got a job at a larger company and a few years later, enjoyed responding to the SAME recruiter asking if I was interested in some jobs she had to offer (nothing bridge-burning worthy, but it felt great saying "NO THANKS")
A few weeks later, I get a call from a retained recruiter I had worked with previously, after having had my resume sent to her by the company. She basically proceeds to "force me" out of the running for the position by talking it down. She clearly had some firm favorite sitting in the wings...
[in reality, I was out as soon as they asked me to relo my family for a lower total comp package than I was currently receiving. Yeah right.... not that hungry yet...]
They initially contacted me and indicated that they just raised a funding round and now have to staff the position ASAP, potentially with a freelancer for some time. So I thought: "Great, I'll freelance for them for a few months and they can kick me out once the found someone to employ!" This is unironically one of my favourite scenarios, so I went for it, and let the recruiter set up a meeting.
I was a bit surprised that HR was also invited for the meeting, as I usually haven't seen that done when bringing freelancers on in other companies, but tried to not interpret to much into it. So the meeting rolls around, and voilà, it is a full blown job interview! I went with it, acing the interview, but when they asked "Why are you looking to switch away from freelance?", I had to tell them that I don't, and it turned out that the recruiter told them something completely different.
WTF WOULD A RECRUITER THINK THAT THIS WOULD EVER WORK??? Do they think that 1 in 10 freelancers just resigns to his new fate during the interview and accept to work as an employee now? Truly one of my strangest recruiter experiences.
Why? Pricing Leverage? (which makes sense - you can set a shorter term price and most of surprises should be upside)
I was doing an interview with their head of ML and brought this subject up in general without mentioning that I had already solved it. His immediate response was: "that's impossible." And it was totally concrete, not some sort of challenge. He had no interest in discussing the topic at all.
Those kinds of people are out there. Best to detect them early and move on.
That is, sometimes the claimed "impossible" is indeed just that and the speed of response comes from the experience rather than ignorance or arrogance.
E.g. https://www.talospace.com/2019/04/broadcom-bcm5719-libre-fir...
The last job I applied for was open from February 1 - March 1. After that, they pulled it down and began interviewing candidates. Six weeks later, I have an offer letter for a specific role with a well-negotiated compensation package.
Personally if HR treats you the way OP is saying, my guess is you don't want to work for that company anyways. Interviewing experienced people is more the company needing to sell themselves to the candidate, rather than the candidate sell themselves to the company.
My last job hunt (signed a new contract just a few weeks ago) has taken me 3 months and I've seen all of the issues OP (and some of the comments) mentions, not only in startups, but also in fortune 500 companies and everything in between (including quite a few companies in the "best place to work" ranking). I've probably sent about 60-70 cv's and most of them have gotten me at least a phone interview (about 50? I lost count but in the document I was using to keep track of open processes I have 30 companies).
One of my ex-managers (and one of the best I've ever had, at that) is also job hunting (after taking a year off after being made redundant in a merge). He's in his 50's and the stuff he tells is even worse than my own experiences.
Genuine question: why are you applying to so many companies? Are you just coming out of school or unemployment?
That seems like a ton of work to juggle and you can't possibly be interested in them all. In this hot market it seems like you should be able to be a lot pickier, especially if you've already got a job.
In my most recent round of "should I get a new job" I only applied with 3 good companies that I knew I was interested in and even that felt like a lot to juggle on top of a day job.
- Yes, I was employed. In a startup paying me about 60% of the current market salary, no benefits of any kind (they promised shares and many other stuff, never delivered), with incompetent managers and going downhill towards bankrupcy (I don't understand why the only investor they have keeps giving them money). Obviously I wanted to leave.
- I joined said startup because of my personal situation. I was diagnosed with leukaemia in 2015 and spent almost a year in the hospital. When I finished that part of the treatment, even thinking was difficult (chemo brain is a real *&%#) and I still had 2 years in front of me of daily chemo ("only" tablets) and weekly visits to the hospital. Even after I finished the chemo, it took me almost a year to go back to normal. The founders of this startup were friends of a friend, gave me a lot of flexibility and the minimum salary that I needed to live (pay rent, utilities, food...). I started going to the office to help with database queries and ETL processes, ended up managing the data science and data engineering teams and looking after most of the infrastructure of the company. But neither my salary or benefits changed.
- I made many mistakes in my first interviews. I hadn't done an interview in 9 years and even then I used to interview for engineering roles while now I was going for senior manager/VP level roles (basically, what I've been doing for the last 7 years). It took me a while to learn the lingo, to identify the red flags and prepare good answers for all the common questions. Funnily enough, not many people asked me about the obvious 1 year gap in my cv.
- Hot market depends on your location and what roles you look for. Developers with a couple years of experience? Sure, way more companies looking to fill in roles than people wanting to move. Specialists in a niche field? Might have problems finding a new job. 40 year old generalists looking for management positions? Not that many open positions that are posted online and not filled in by personal recommendation (and yes, most of the jobs I've applied to have been through my network).
- Many of the companies I interviewed with had all the issues OP mentions and a couple more. Some gave me topcoder-style interviews, where I had to come up and code efficient algorithms for complex problems. I understand (and welcome!) a technical test to prove that I'm not lying and I do have a technical background, but asking a VP of engineering to code an efficient solution for the knapsack problem in 1 hour is stupid, any way you look at it. Personally, all the code I've written in the last 6 years has been either a) as a hobby, b) small, non-critical-path tasks that helped me maintain some familiarity with the different environments and reduced a bit of load from my team(s) or c) stuff that no one else in the company understood (mostly around infrastructure). Ask me about sofware architecture, data storage, distributed systems and machine learning and I can easily argue with you pros and cons of different stacks and approaches. Ask me how to manage fully remote/distributed teams and I'll talk about lessons learnt, things I tried and worked and mistakes I made. Ask me about hiring, mentoring, budgeting, project managing, investor relations... Whatever you want, and I'll be completely honest about what I know, what I've done and what I don't know/haven't done. But ask me to write a java class and I'll need to google the correct way of declaring a constructor ("public void"? "public static void"? How did you declare the args parameter? an array of Strings?).
- Why I applied to so many? Because I had to. I would have loved to get an offer from the first 2-3 companies I applied (and I applied and got interviews from some really cool companies, including the one I've signed with). But I didn't. So I had to continue searching in a race against time before the place that I was working at imploded. After how my life has been the last decade, I have no safety net and can't afford to be unemployed.
- Interested in all of them? Of course I was. I didn't apply to any company I disliked, for example consulting companies, offshore/nearshore and most of fintech. Either you are much pickier than I am (at the end of the day I mostly look for a few things: Good, professional people, a company that values its employees and a decent compensation package, anything else is a bonus) or seriously underestimate the amount of companies out there that are doing interesting things even in the most boring environments.
- A lot of work? Well, yes and no... I've spent most of my vacation days on half-day offs to go to physical interviews and working evenings to recover time spent in phone/video interviews. But in general it's being easy managing the latter and if you look at it as a time management problem, there's plenty of tools out there to help you keep track of everything (calendar, trello, job alerts...).
Of the companies you apply to, 10% will get back to you.
Of those 10%, 10% will result in an offer.
My last job search (conducted 2017) bore this out: I applied to about 90 or so companies, got 8 interviews, and one offer. I have about 20 years of experience in tech.
They made me work 60-80 hour weeks and didn’t pay me overtime.
When I criticized them, they fired me after a month.
I’d love to expose them here, but I’ll be the better person than them.
Second off - I am the type of individual who believes karma will come back to people. I have a very very comfortable position at the moment somewhere else and I personally just don’t want to stir up any trouble.
I’ve been through enough in the past year, from sexual assault to the passing of my mother, to add the trauma of lawyers chasing after me for an HN comment to boot.
The lawyer chasing you for a HN comment sounds like a movie. Somehow it would be fitting if it was over spaces vs tabs.
I saw the same thing happen in the same city to another developer. In the fitness space though but didn't get paid at all.
The company that I ended up accepting an offer for started off with a recruiter who talked to me about my background and then asked a few technical questions to screen whether or not I knew the technologies that they were hiring for. Passed the recruiter screen.
Interviewed with a hiring manager and then interviewed with the team with some technical challenges that were more to see how it would be like to work together. Talking to the team made me feel excited to work with them and the technical challenges were straight forward. I was able to look up and use some code that I had written previously to solve part of the challenge.
I ended up with an offer higher than what I asked for. Part of me feels as though this is almost too good to be true but I don't know if I am just really jaded by the entire hiring process.
I faced so much rejection that landing the position that I am starting soon makes me feel like I am either extremely lucky or maybe I'm just another sucker; however, this company definitely set the standard for me as far as interviewing/hiring process.
> I may not want to assume the risk of startup business right now but if you're going to offer the deal on those terms...
The author is asserting that a company needs him or her more than they need the company, then confesses to being reluctant to take the risk of starting a business themselves. As such they're actually depending on the company to shoulder the risk they're not willing to take; they actually do need the company to create value.
The author should decide which of the two statements quoted above has precedence. Either they depend on some other company to shoulder the risks, or they start one themselves.
In short, if this post is representative of the way workers are thinking and communicating, then we do have a talent shortage, it's just not the talents you're thinking of.
Accept that people work for money, not because they believe in your company.
Disclaimer: my job is basically making sure our customers can send you commercial email spa... sorry, interesting product offers from their line of business. It's also making sure the tracking is properly working and detect if opened the email/clicked on a link.
It's really hard to get motivated about that. One, ecologically minded for example, could even see it as damaging for the environment as it pushes people to buy things they don't really need.
However, it's also where a lot of the the money is, and also some of the interesting technical challenges, for which an engineer could be motivated.
How do you continue to justify to yourself working in that domain? Do you struggle with the question each day or perhaps have a philosophical framework to rely on? (maybe just /r/NatureIsMetal is enough?)
At my previous job, I was working on things like Nuclear plants systems or on military systems (not something to "evil" however, it was a part of their ATC system, not something meant to kill people).
And it could be worse, I could work for the finance industry.
Technically, it's quite interesting, it's a large infrastructure, it also permitted me to have my first taste of AWS and Azure and other cool bits of technology.
It was also a big change from my last job where, because of lack of budget, I had to scavenge for old disused servers for the dev infrastructure (yay, Compaq Proliant G1 with dual CPUs Pentium IIIs and 512MB of RAM, I had to use a floppy disk to install Debian on these... in 2012).
It's also not as clear cut as purely sending spam, our system can also be used for password resets, order confirmations or newsletters for example. I am also not completely 100% against marketing (hey, if I create a new product, it is useful to make people know about it), even though I think the world could do with ~90% less marketing. Maybe it's the way I trick myself, that, and simply not thinking too much about it.
It also pays relatively well, not that I'm that attached to having a big pay, living quite frugally, but I'm currently hunting for an apartment, and a big paycheck helps to get the mortgage.
It was also an opportunity for me to work for a big US company and see how it was to work with people all over the world. And it also confronted me with the American Optimism, which is really fascinating, at time annoying because it feels a bit fake, but also at time because it de-inhibits people from not attempting difficult challenges as opposed to a more cautious and critical European mindset. Not sure which mindset I prefer, but still, fascinating.
I'm also not the kind of guy switching jobs every 6 months. I also feel I'm kind of letting other people down if I leave (not completely rational I know). Also, a job is bit like a book, an (almost) never ending book, even if it's not that great, you are still curious about how it will unfold, and it's really hard (at least for me) to leave it in the middle.
At one point, I will probably search for a new job. And finding a job I at least find "neutral" but if possible "benefic" (from my moral point of view) will be high in my priority list.
If I'm ineffective at making you money but fit your business culture, you should hire me on principle then!
I don’t come to work because I care about your business, I care because you pay me. I’d like to work with others who have the same rational outlook, not with a cult.
In other words, "get over yourselves, you're not curing cancer". If you need employees to "care", because the company supports their livelihood - don't worry, they already do. If you need them to "care" more than that, you need a better justification.
Just want to point out that this point is entirely back-peddling your original point (an objection to "get over yourselves").
If the point of a given company is that it supports a person and maybe dependents, then you really don't need to ask someone why they want to work at the company or whether they believe in the company, because the answer is obviously "because you will pay me." I mean, corollary to the value of most companies being that they support people via the salaries and wages they pay, is the companies shouldn't be injecting the implication that their employees should sacrifice and work for less given the importance of the work the company does (and that ethos is widespread).
Is it not possible to identify those people without paying them less to prove it?
I'm not really sure what you're getting at here otherwise I would think if someone is a perfect fit with the org and the org isn't willing to compensate that person accordingly then all you're doing is picking up suckers who may not even be worth the reduced pay rate. A good engineer knows what they are worth.
It's often a "well, I need a job, you're hiring, and what you guys are doing looks at least marginally interesting to me" - I ought not need to find whatever product/service/market they're doing/in inspiring - I should just want to do it for the pay offered.
"Well, your construction firm is well-established and routinely delivers projects on time and under budget, but for this job, we need to know that you believe in our mission -- that deeply impacts your ability to frame walls and pour concrete!"
Why can't I just be a professional tradesman?
... so the reality is that I need to lie at the interview to get the job, this is so sad.
Given two candidates for a Phd, which do you accept:
- the one who needs a Phd because that earns more money (duh!) - the one who has been obsessed with X for years, did research into X, has burning questions and wants to dedicate some years to answering them, and found your place to have the researchers who publish the most relevant, interesting and insightful papers over the last few years.
I ought not need to find whatever product/service/market they're doing/in inspiring - I should just want to do it for the pay offered.
You don't need to find it interesting. But if another candidate will do it for the pay offered, /and also/ likes the product and has a clear plan for their life, expect them to get the job instead of you.
And, expect you'd do better if you /did/ find a job offering where you were also interested and motivated.
Cute and snarky, but lets not misdirect. The article isn't a representation of how people communicate to REASONABLE employers, so your comment doesn't make much sense. Its in response to the pervasive disconnect that is prevalent in the current hiring industry.
And if after that clarification you still think the article takes an unjustified tone, I'd say you are just as much a part of the problem.
If anyone is interested in trying out this process at their company, my email is in my profile.
I think the challenge is that you need to have related experience in order for this to work; if you don't, you will be scrambling for an answer. I didn't even realize I was doing this when I started directing the hiring manager to my related experience until after the interview.
It worked out that I didn't have direct experience with what they were looking for but have a lot of related experience in the same language but different domain as well as with other languages, all of which was visible on my github profile.
I do not find most people know how to adequately fill in the dots for people on the other side of the table because businesses aren’t always terribly forethcoming about what they are looking for. If you’re not an excellent communicator (which many people in IC roles are not) it can be easy to not pull sufficiently the information needed to position oneself sufficiently.
I like doing unit testing even though my current employer doesn't; in that regard, when I was asked about testing experience, because I spent time writing packages in python, php, node, and ruby with full unit tests, it was really an easy question to answer.
I think a better term may be "culture fit" as the company I will be working at is more engineering focused than my current gig. It was simple to refer to related work because I believe automated testing is important which is very much in line with the needs of the role.
These companies hire every engineer that meet their criteria.
Most engineer given an offer from one of them would accept it since that is the highest possible offer they can get.
If there is no talent shortage, these companies should have no open recs or fill them as soon as they're opened because they are the best possible jobs for any engineer.
Since they have open recs (sometimes open for months), there is a talent shortage at the skill level they require.
Please let me know what is missing in this logic?
It's not.
> These companies [FAANG] hire every engineer that meet their criteria.
They don't hire anywhere close to that. Their hiring practices are notoriously capricious.
> Most engineer given an offer from one of them would accept it since that is the highest possible offer they can get.
I had an offer like this and turned it down because they wouldn't let me work on my open source project.
> If there is no talent shortage, these companies should have no open recs or fill them as soon as they're opened because they are the best possible jobs for any engineer.
These companies have more money than they know what to do with, and more is coming in all the time. The more they hire, the more things they make, and the more they want to hire.
He is technically correct, the number of attractive ladies who want to date him is much lower than the number of dates he is available to go on.
But no one is going to be sympathetic to that shortage, why should anyone be sympathetic to this one.
I am moving to LA from Brazil next month. I am a self-taught frontend developer. I am 39 years old, but still a junior as I changed careers less than two years ago.
I participated in two process with the standard remote technical interview solving a problem live coding in communication with a senior developer.
I realized I won't pass this kind of interview unless I focus on studying solely for it. I am planning to buy "Cracking the code interview" because I cannot afford to not have a job in LA, but it feels such a waste of time. I am almost 40 and tired of pretending that some trivia and practice on a simulated environment is transferable to real jobs.
I am the kind of developer that agrees with the idea that software developers' job is to solve business problems, not coding. That knowing what to code is more important than coding fast. That communication with people in and out of the team, developers and not developers is an essential skill.
But that's not what the hiring game values.
I have no ambitions of being a "real software engineer" that will work on cutting edge technology. I am happy building complex websites that will make a company money.
I hope that once in LA I will meet some entrepreneurial types with promising business models that value what I can do well. But the reality is that I will have to learn to play the hiring game.
You can choose not to play the game, which significantly reduces your chances and opportunities Or choose a different game, like
> I will meet some entrepreneurial types with promising business models that value what I can do well
which is still a game, but a game you are willing to play.
Can you imagine that if on hiring a new truck driver the company was passing him trough 50 different routes on snow, ice and wet road. Or forcing a construction worker to build a house or something.
Yet if one of these two professions fucks it up - people might die, if a coder fucks up - he'll be fired and someone will remove 10 lines of code boo hooo.
What I didn't know at the time, was that in those two years I'd obtained experience and knowledge that at any other company would have warranted a 25% pay increase from what I was getting at this start-up.
The excuse? You have "options". That you can "exercise". And maybe eventually be worth something. Maybe.
Except this company had gone well past Series B. And had no exit strategy.
Given what I know now, I've resorted to telling recruiters and HR people that I'm not interested in "stock" or "bonuses" or anything else of the sort. The company pays me for my expertise and my hours, I give them what they pay me for. No promises, no gimmicks, no dice-rolling.
TBH, people in high-school and college looking to enter the workforce need a series of workshops on compensation, benefits, and HR before they start their first "real" job.
Had I known that the "options" I was being given access to would: A) "vest" over time, B) not be worth anything even 5+ years later, C) be IMPOSSIBLE to sell on the secondary market, and D) would result in a deflation of my take-home wages... I'd have told them "skip the options, bump my pay by 10%, and maybe I'll take you more seriously".
People need to realize that equity != pay. Equity is so dependent on so many other factors that you have ZERO control over that the risk-reward ratio is heavily slanted toward the former.
I don't see any larger conclusion here. Let's assume HR talent falls on a normal distribution: just like you'll meet some absurd engineering candidates you'll also meet some absurd HR people.
I imagine companies that make really bad hiring decisions are put under selection pressure and are less likely to continue to exist. It's a problem that I think can be fixed by the marketplace, but I don't know if a post makes any tangible impact.
Apparently my ability to answer some random function that in no way shows my ability to do day to day engineering work disqualifies me from employment. Yet these same companies are posting month in and month out looking for engineers and complaining that they are unable to find viable employees.
Knowing that ruby has a humanize gem (and python's humanize module doesn't get as granular as they wanted their example to be), I mentioned this to the interviewer, saying, "Hey -- why would I want my development team to spend an hour re-inventing the wheel when it can already be done with a code import?" -- while showing him the gem, and providing a sample code.
Suffice to say, he wasn't interested in that, he wanted to see how I'd implement something like that...
...so, I provided my code...which was as clunky as it could be in 30 minutes -- and then was almost certain that I lost this specific position because I didn't interpret my numbers from right to left vs left to right.
Seriously -- if you've booked a hotel room in the US, there's a 50% chance you've booked it on infrastructure that I've designed and implemented from the ground up. I've led teams of 20+ SRE's around the world in a 40 billion dollar company. My references speak for themselves. The reality is that they're going to still be looking for a SRE manager position in three months, and I won't be looking anymore because I would have found something that I'm interested in (and isn't me doing a containerization of a Windows-based ERP system in 96 hours).
That may be the case, but I've also worked with a programmer who said he'd never needed hash tables.
As you can imagine, this said more about the solutions he arrived at than the usefulness of these data structures.
It sounds as though you have some basis of where you need to improve, I would continue to look for jobs but also try to improve in those areas (recursion and algorithms).
I spent the last year looking for jobs and it's definitely a weird market right now. I got offered a position that another company told me I lacked the relevant experience for.
You would be surprised by how a company may value your talents. It seems like the companies you've interviewed for don't require the talents that you have which is a good indicator that you probably would not want to work for those companies.
Keep looking for the company that values your talents and shares your values, but make sure to learn more in the areas that you have identified as needing improvement.
It requires there to be a large pool of highly qualified candidates who don't work in the industry right now (and more likely completely unemployed) who would want to work in the industry if the conditions were "just right".
But such a pool just doesn't exist. All employers can do, especially considering wages, is to try and poach candidates from competitors, other industries, other countries.
There clearly is a perception of depressed wages. I believe this mostly is an issue of a distorted labor market. There seems to be an issue of collusion among employers not entering into mutually harmful wage competition. Maybe regulations don't give employees enough power in the process. Unionization is also rare, and may not work in any case.
The problem is a limited supply of labor for them, and they just haven't figured out that their business plans will not come to fruition until they change their assumptions.
I see this in healthcare all the time:
Healthcare MBA doesn't want to pay market rate for nurses. Experienced nurses quit and take jobs elsewhere with sign on bonuses. Hospital hires inexperienced nurses to fill gap. Inexperience causes burdens on surgeons and physicians and other nurses. More experienced nurses quit, surgeons and physicians quit, ad nauseum.
Saving some money short term leads to the inevitable destruction of the institution. Who gets paid bonuses for this clever trick? Healthcare MBAs who move onto the next victim.
I know this because I have gone through this process several times.
Then once I was done with the interview, I went to the near by restaurant and casually asked if they knew anything about the company and luckily, a person from the accounts dept was there. So, he told me how the company initially had 12 members in the IT department when 6-8 would be enough. Then on a cost cutting sphere, they axed 6 on 1 day and then it thinned out to 3. Of which, the IT manager has resigned leaving just 2 members, both related to the owner. While the owner's son, a 1st yr cs grad student is the IT manager.
This is an extreme tale and I couldn't verify the story. But now this trend of making 1 person do the job of 2-3 for the salary of 1 seems common nowadays.
Personal story ahead. I've been looking for a job for around two months already. I'm Ruby/JS dev, so there are a few offers I can choose from. The problem is, half of that offers pay very little. Based on my experience, related to working with other people and to my previous salaries, I'd be a sucker to apply to those cheap offers. What I'm even more afraid is the people I'd work with. I'm pretty young and ambitious and I learn fast and I want to learn a lot, but if you don't have a good mentor you are not gonna learn that much.
Unfortunately, the offers, that interest me, require much more experience than I have. I doubt that I'd have a real problem with adapting and doing the job unwell. But I don't even get invited to any interview from that offers, because my CV has one year or two years of experience less than they expect :( How can I show that I could be a good fit then?
I know it's not that much related to the topic, but I've been a bit frustrated.
The hiring manager should already have an idea what level of experience is needed, what kind of budget exists, and how quickly the hire needs to be made by. Winnowing down from a stack of resumes to an offer is the art of compromising on those three axes. If your job opening can actually legitimately be kept open for that long (i.e. for a year plus, with no consequences), you should probably reassess whether you need to hire for the position in the first place.
If anything, it would seem to me that the more you put down on paper, the more legally exposed you are if you don't follow it to the letter. Of course, this doesn't absolve companies whose hiring managers do stupid things in interviews that are almost guaranteed to get their company sued; but that's a concern to be trained against regardless of how discerning your textual job posting is.
What's going on here? What we have here is a min-max problem. In one case, the hiring manager would like to reduce risk of a bad hire and reduce amount of time needed to train an engineer. On the other side of the scale, the hiring manager needs to hire someone and get a butt in seat to get the work done. So what to do?
A couple of things come to mind. First, there is an algorithm for this, the optimal stoppage problem. That is you review a certain amount of candidates, lets say X, then pick the best one after X. The problem comes down to solving for X. I forget the solution, but there is one out there that is based on how long you want to wait.
Second thing that comes to mind is relying on core attributes, like hard work, motivation, overall intelligence, team-player, etc... versus overly specific skills.
Yes in both cases a lot is still left up to subjectivity and can still lead to long lead times in filling a position.
There is either an internal candidate already identified or there is a h1b candidate who needs their work authorization. Either way, that job was never going to be yours regardless of your qualifications.
“Yes, ten other companies are doing the exact same thing our company does, and there is open source that almost does what we want but we’ve hired fifty developers to reinvent that wheel because reasons.”
There are too many people out there who could cut and paste most of my job descriptions onto their resume. That’s only partly a failure on my part. Most of my bosses don’t value my specialized skills (or only 3 months out of the year), and there are too many people repeating my work or vice versa.
There are a lot of custom CMS systems out there. If we refused to build them or insisted on making them thinner layers over standard modules, we would have plenty of people to go do other things. And I bet HN could name at least three other tropes that repeat all over the industry like that.
Super Narrow Selection Criteria in particular however is not absurd; it means they have a specific candidate in mind. I don't mean to defend the practice (it either means the company has a screwed up hiring process or more likely they are trying to hire a specific domain expert from overseas and want to minimize the number of interviews of less qualified people) however I do believe this one case doesn't support the thesis.
I did manage to navigate through completely retarded 45 minute HR conversation and got invited for the interview with the director of UX. From the moment I walked in the guy was ultra uncomfortable and shy because he was obviously 15~20 years younger than myself. Also clearly never interviewed people before. I never heard back from them, but I see that the position is still open...
I'm reaching 40 next year, 20 years of code experience. What's bizarre about the whole thing is that I would be consider to be reaching my productive peak in the next 10 years in any other field.
In tech you are treated like a dinosaur, as if not knowing what the latest hipster JS framework of the week makes you obsolete.
>Are you people complete morons?
Yes.
Is not about me being a "ninja" is about me doing this computer science thing for over 20 years
1) The majority of companies don't understand what they want and/or need in terms of personnel. Why that is can be a discussion some other time.
Of course there are exceptions. Typically they are the successful companies, the industry leaders, etc. Those who fail to make this cut believe these companies are auccessful because of open floor plans, ping pong tables, etc.
Collins said "Get the right people on the bus."
That's kinda true but also incomplete. It's actually: "Get good people on the right bus and get rolling in the right general direction. No ping pong tables required."
2) What most job posters don't seem to realize is that better / great people typically have a well serviced bullshit detector. Post your nonsense all you want. The ones you wish you could get can smell your turd-scented confusion and won't bother. It's not them. It's you. Suck it up and deal with it already.
That is bound to manifest itself in the generally quality of prospective employees. The term "idiocracy" takes that idea to the extreme...but unfortunately is not far from the truth. In my experience, a general rule of thumb in Fortune 500 HR (and even large federal agencies) is that a star will almost never apply directly through the front door. There will be either recommended by a trusted insider or will find an ingenious way to demonstrate their talent. For all the rest, the assumption (mostly correct) is that they are junk or at the very least significantly overrating their self-professed abilities/talents/worth/salary/etc. So, what looks like a sucker shortage is simply the trend for lower value default offers most HR departments will put out there based on the (reasonable) assumption of the (low) quality of the person up against them.
But there are also good reasons why companies are often extremely careful hiring new staff. Many companies are desperately seeking the right dev's because they know that the wrong pick can cost them tons of money. The mess a wrong dev can create can do so much damage to the product while it often has to be released within a certain timeframe. I've seen a startup failing because of that.
That suggests problems in management and organization. Likely also with existing seniors and their communication with management. If not having developer causes less issues then hiring average one, then the company really needs to rethink their processes and onboarding.
Check out this job posting: metaltoad dot bamboohr.com/jobs/view.php?id=103
> 90k max salary
> 9 years of industry experience
Totally clueless. Good luck with that.
Recently talked to a certain Beaverton, Oregon based shoe company. APPARENTLY, they hire a lot of their new hires as "contractors" and dangle the "full time" carrot in front of their face for a year. Swear up and down you are not a second class citizen... except you can't use the gym. Or go to the holiday party or use a lot of their facilities. And your badge is a different color.
Yeah, go sell that to someone else. Good luck finding a competent engineer.
But then, 95% of them can't fizzbuzz.
...and they can't write code to count up in increments of five in python.
It's simple economics - if there truly is a shortage of drivers, offer a higher salary. Yes, it really is that simple.
There's no shortage of drivers - or of people who would become drivers. There's a shortage of people who will accept a low-ball wage, whereas with an autonomous truck you don't have to deal with inconvenient things like salary, health insurance, union dues, etc.
A lot of this may be due to the H-1B -> Green Card application process. I think the company has to prove their existing H-1B employee is the only possible person who can fill the role by posting the job publicly, so the lawyers will craft the req as narrowly as possible. As a result, many of these listings were never intended to be filled with external hires.
They promised me to be partner, I felt bad leaving there for my colleagues. But I would never return, as their promise was just for keeping me interested.
Just 1/5th of the stress of before now. Thank god, sometimes being a sucker is doing too much.
Eg. Night calls because one of my applications ( e-commerce) was for fast-food, who did their orders at 01:00 am. Guess who had to fix other's people's sync services at night.
Even when I went swimming, I had to check phone calls. Urgh
Show continuity of experience over a long time (even if it's just a project, list it in your experience section) and put "Javascript" or "Python" in your headline. Talk about some of the things you've done, and skip the video game references imo. Don't let it get you down, 5 months is not really that long, and definitely don't give up.
Can you add any bullet points to the experience you have on your LinkedIn? Talk about what role you had and what things you have accomplished in those roles even though they are relatively new.
One has to be on serious drugs (or profoundly ignorant on the not-very-bright-kindergartener level) to think somebody 45 years old working in tech is ignorant about tech or social media. This is the generation who had computers since they were 10. And back then computers required real investment of time and knowledge to use.
Is it a real thing that happens? Are there recruiters like that?
this pretty much describes the landscape, even for positions at companies like Google
I couldn't get beyond this sounding like: Old Guy Yells at Cloud https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/019/304/old...
Coming from an older guy myself.
Most companies will say 'no', the tiny minority that say 'yes' are the ones that are serious.
Clearly only works if you have enough 'dealflow' to end up with nonzero takers
Maybe simply a barrier to someone who is not knowledgeable enough to know the true intent of that question. Let's take an extreme. Say there was a job listing and part of the listing said 'must be able to cook hotdogs at barbecues'. Nobody would take that seriously and a vegan would still apply. Right? Or perhaps a vegan would not apply because they are not able to figure out what the intent of the 'trick' question was.
A 'sales director' is someone who understands sales and is above all not afraid to get past some sales barrier 'sorry we aren't interested right now' but will keep pressing on even after 'no' is the repeated answer (if of course they deem the opportunity appropriate).
I buy high end good. You don't know how many times I get back a reply which says 'sorry it's not for sale at any price'. That always means the same thing 'show me the money'. Of course there are things that are 'not for sale at any price' but typically not what I have found to be the case. What they are saying is 'I don't think someone will offer a price I would ever consider accepting' or 'I don't know the current market enough to even know what I have is valued at' and so on.
Good or bad, i think its debatable. but most of the experience and "meta" these days is to wait for a great candidate.
you can need the job done, and need it done very well, in order for it the opportunity to change to succeed.
This would seem to indicate that there is a huge oversupply of coders. The fact that knowing how to code wasn't even considered important in the "Startup School" curriculum does as well.
"Sucker" is a pejorative that implies you can beat the system if you're smart enough. You can only beat the system by breaking rules and becoming what you hate.
> There are easily several thousand people in the town who are capable of building that business. Get over yourselves and just freakin hire someone. You're running a website, not curing cancer.
I hear you here. I've posted my team's hiring principles here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18586590
At the top:
- Hiring cycles will be structured and as short as possible.
- When we start a hiring cycle, we will finish it by hiring the most qualified applicant who accepts our offer.
But on this point, I'm a little confused:
> So let me get this straight. You want me to bootstrap a multi-million dollar business, from scratch, operating with minimal marketing and operating funding in a highly competitive channel. Or get your consumer product slotted at a major retailer. Or launch your new web application. For $100,000 a year and no equity.
The general advice I come across here is to treat equity as a lottery ticket and focus on salary. Is the complaint here that salary is an insult? In the Bay Area, sure. But Atlanta? This comes off a bit self-entitled to me. At least without more context.
I think there's also signs of what I'll call premature hindsight bias (feel free to offer a better term). You assume, perhaps reasonably, that once hired, you're going to come in, make friends, kick ass and provide value. I want to believe that you can do it at a salary we both find fair. But until you get here and have been on the job for a few weeks or months, it's going to be really hard for me to know if that's what's going to happen. And if you happen to not be a great fit for unexpected reasons, how do we deal with that? That can be a lot of stress for everyone if not a full-scale disaster. In short, you don't want to get suckered, I don't want to get suckered.
There's a lot of risk and uncertainty in hiring and I imagine risk aversion drives a lot of it. I know it does for me even as I do my best to control it. Hence the 4-5 interviews mentioned in the top comment. (That seems excessive to me. I always wonder what a company gets out of the 5th interview that they didn't get out of the 4th, or the 10th hour of meeting with a candidate that they didn't get out of the 9th.)
Here's an exercise I call Black Boxes that I came up with recently for one of our hiring retrospectives. I think we have a pretty good hiring approach but I'm always looking to improve it. I share it here because I'm interested in hearing the ideas of others:
BOX OPTIONS (alphabetical order):
- Car Type (what type of car does applicant drive?)
- Cover Letter (box may be empty)
- Gender
- LinkedIn Profile (box may be empty)
- Phone Conversation (20-30 minutes)
- Resume
PART 1
Ten people have applied for our web application position. You know nothing about them. You have only a black box for each one. Ten black boxes. You get to look into each black box. Then you have to hire one of these ten applicants.
You get to choose the contents of the box from the options above. Which type of box do you choose to make your hiring decision? In a comment below, list your box. You may include a brief explanation if you wish. Example:
> Resume: This is the first thing I always look at. It should contain the most relevant info and is pretty low investment as it's a standard part of application.
PART 2
Now rank the rest of the boxes above in order of utility.
PART 3
What other boxes would you like to have as an option? Consider time/money costs associated with each box.
Though I suspect, much like the age bias noted in the article, it's a factor that, consciously or unconsciously, influences a lot of interviewers.
I sometimes get pings from Japanese and European recruiters, and it's not uncommon to see the ranges in those. They're usually pretty hilarious by US standards, though, so I politely decline without wasting anybody's time interviewing (even though I wouldn't mind spending a few years in Europe or Japan). At the very least, this is respectful of my time and effort.
There are people who just want a decent job with decent pay and a decent place to work. They will do consistently decent work for stability, neat stuff to work on. They are not heavy negotiators, and maybe don't realize they could make '40% more elsewhere' - or frankly are not willing to move their wife/husband and 3 kids.
Real 'market value' is what you are being offered, or rather, what people are accepting. So if people are accepting those supposedly low-ball numbers, well, that is 'market value'.
Markets for labour are obviously clearing - we're seeing tons of hiring (and laying off) - so people are getting hired.
Many companies are also looking for specialized talent, for specific jobs, which are actually hard to fill. In some areas there is definitely a 'shortage' for opportunity cost.
One could argue 'they could just pay more' - but it's not like industry will boost wages for some job by 30% in the hopes that more people will start to study and train for that subject! It's a short-run/long-run problem.
For broader industry trends, this happens: software is a 'good paying job' in many places, ergo, more devs. But for specialization it's hard. And often it's difficult to clearly justify the ROI. This ambiguity is tantamount to just a lower real value due to the inherent risk.
The offers being made for most jobs are ballpark near 'market wages'. Companies have a lot more data than individuals.
"Talent shortage" is the language employers use to imply that rather than this just being an eternal truth and their current situation being the current market equilibrium, there is some kind of societal problem that society should help them solve (at society's expense of course).
The situation was this: I had two former managers and one co-worker all advocating for me for the one job they knew was available--my old job!
I have not been able to get any response from the company at all.
of the people looking for jobs........ ?
I agree with most of the sentiment, but not this one.
Someone with the right experience, skills, maturity, 'get go' and initiative ... there are not 'thousands' of people like that in a mid tier city. More likely only a handful.
I posit the big VC-backed or FAANG companies 1) can offer huge initial salaries to not have to deal with competition 2) hire juniors at high salaries because they can afford to spend 1-2 years training them. Combine with the sheer volume of hiring they all perform, and it starts to set some false expectations. Maybe smaller companies are failing at capitalism by not competing?
Anecdotally, I have seen engineers refuse pretty good gigs because they were expecting to be treated like royalty without much to back it up. This industry is skewed, in many ways.
By not having money?
This is capitalism working as expected, the only reason you would word it that way is out of ignorance.
These companies just have profit margins high enough to afford to blow everyone out of the water with their offers. They’re competing with each other for the top talent, and it makes it really hard for companies in other industries to retain their best and brightest.
I always though Netflix was a odd company next to the giants. MS is a better one. Maybe IBM should be included as well.
"FAGAMI" ... maybe "FAMAGI" to be less profound.
On the other hand, Microsoft is still quite relevant to the future; Azure is getting a lot of traction in the enterprise world as an alternative tech stack to AWS. VSTS is rapidly displacing the whole Jira ecosystem and VS Code needed 6 months to become one of the most popular development tools.
Is VSTS any good? Or is it from the ash into the fire? I would love to get rid of Jira at work.
And yes, VSTS is good. The interface and tools are easy to use, the defaults are way better than Jira and it integrates with damn near everything (even tools it replaces, like Jenkins).
The Microsoft of the late 2010s is almost the polar opposite of the late 1990s Microsoft. It’s all about open tools that link together via proprietary orchestration platforms. Those platforms provide the bulk of the business value, so I’m ok with them not being as open.
My personal anecdote is that I took the first tech job that was offered as a junior, a little bit before this reversal started taking place, and as a result, I left a lot of money on the table. Years later, I realized that if I had just said no, and extended my search a little bit longer, or had role models telling me my knowledge at the time was worth a lot more, I might be worth a lot more right now (factoring in compound interest with sensible investing of excess profit from work + modest lifestyle).
> Maybe smaller companies are failing at capitalism by not competing?
Pretty much. It makes sense for employees to land where they can create the most value. If FAANG can get 4x the value out of a junior engineer than your small company can, of course they are going to outcompete you in hiring top junior engineers.
Figure out how to extract more value or set your sights lower (and regardless probably want to keep your contempt to yourself).
When you have companies attempting to produce goods that cannot be profitably produced, below market wages are a common earmark. Whatever widget the company is selling only has a market at $X, but has a cost under current market conditions of $2X, so they are trying to pay people half market salary to bring the two numbers together.
"Must have experience with the Home Depot vendor system"
I mean, what if someone fulfilled all my "musts"?!? That'd be the perfect person.
But you hardly ever find rock stars. And so you hire the best person who doesn't have all the required skills. Don't let job requirements stop you from applying. And don't think that I'm being unrealistic for asking for what I probably won't get.
Because both parties should already be aware that it's a negotiation between people and not a blockchain contract to be mechanically evaluated according to a spec.
Especially if x isn't something very useful like experience with a framework you use, but something relatively trivial like knowledge of a CRUD app they periodically do a bit of data input into.