Comment by safog | Hacker News Reader

Comment by safog | Hacker News Reader

I don't buy the argument that we will have such a leap in software development productivity that we need way fewer people to solve all the things that need technical solutions. You can unravel abstractions we build on all the way to the bits and bytes and 90% of software is just gluing libraries together. Infact, you could probably describe the entirety of several of big tech cos as "just" gluing libraries together.

Anyway, the other argument about salaries is more interesting. Most people seem to agree that there's a huge untapped crowd of qualified developers in small / mid sized US cities who would love to join $BIGCO but the only reason they aren't is because it involves relocation. As an example, a Sr Dev in Orlando, FL makes $100-120k in total comp while one in SF / NYC makes $350k+. I limit my search to Sr Devs because I assume college kids are happy to move to exciting cities like NYC / SF / Seattle on fat relocation checks.

My suspicion is that supply and demand have converged already and big tech has mined out the supply of talented devs in the US already. The other datapoint here is that companies have made it as easy as possible for folks to move by opening dev centers wherever there's talent - NYC as a tech hub wasn't a thing in 2012, but it's huge now for all the people who don't want to leave the east coast. Boston is pretty big. Colorado, Austin as well.

The only way supply of devs is increasing here is if:

* Sr Devs who did not move to tech hubs because they preferred to stay where they are. (Personally think this is unlikely)

* Qualified Bootcamp graduates

* CS Enrollments hitting pretty high numbers, so maybe we'll start graduating lots of CS folks.

* Immigration reform / Outsourcing

* Interviewing change so we skip the algo problem solving shenanigans.

I personally think if big tech wants to hire in the US and still pay lower $ than they currently do, the only lever they have left to pull is the interviewing format / bar.

>Sr Devs who did not move to tech hubs because they preferred to stay where they are. (Personally think this is unlikely)

You would be surprised at how many people value their hometown or where they have settled. Technical only equates to high aspiration in SF. There are smaller slower more steady tech companies (probably using the Microsoft stack) outside of the tech hubs that offer stable jobs with decent pay and good work life balance. Being a software engineer in SF means constantly learning new tech and 'keeping up' but if you're not building a massively scalable consumer facing product that doesn't matter so much. In SF even B2B SaaS is built like this but it doesn't have to be.

> Being a software engineer in SF means constantly learning new tech and 'keeping up'

No, it does not.

> You would be surprised at how many people value their hometown or where they have settled.

I would love to see actual data about this rather than articles from hometown newspapers and posts by hometown residents, enthusiastically praising their way of life. It's easy to argue the counterpoint as well, right?

1). There are many jobs that have to be done in person 2). Many people prefer to live in large cities and accept the downsides in order to get the benefits

So, next time you want to make a claim like this, can you share anything objective about this? Thanks.

I know this is more anecdata, but I'm from Ohio and worked on a joint project with a couple of New York devs at #{famous company}. They were very good, and I learned a lot from them, but I could definitely hold my own with them technically (as could another senior dev from my company). We're both family men in the Midwest with no desire to move. Even if you offered me $350,000 or whatever I'm still staying here. But I would obviously take a remote job with #{famous company} if it paid 60-70% of that and I felt like I wouldn't be a second-class citizen as a remote dev.

Chiming in as a Midwest engineering manager here (Michigan). There's no lack of talent in the Midwest, although it's certainly a different calculus to try and match hiring to the supply/demand of engineers here and not everyone does so appropriately.

>>Being a software engineer in SF means constantly learning new tech and 'keeping up' >No, it does not.

Maybe you consider Kubernetes an old technology by now? Maybe you consider React.js an old technology by now? What about docker? How about ES6?

People at slower tech firms are still building working B2B web services with ES5 jQuery and ASP.NET. The engineers there have been working with jQuery since it's inception. They know it inside and out and have the skill and depth of knowledge to work around the drawbacks and design flaws.

This is from my experience working at smaller tech firms. I've moved to the city now and I can see the difference in tech and I can feel the difference in attitude too. I'm not going to link you a study or any data because no one is out there studying this stuff. This is opinion not science.

>1). There are many jobs that have to be done in person 2). Many people prefer to live in large cities and accept the downsides in order to get the benefits

Both of these statements are true but I don't see how they are relevant? I'm not denying either of these facts but it doesn't stop the small town engineers from existing.

> Maybe you consider Kubernetes an old technology by now? Maybe you consider React.js an old technology by now? What about docker? How about ES6?

My father (and many others like him) has been programming in C at a prominent SV company for the past 15 years (OK, it's based in the South Bay). I know many people in SF doing similar jobs, just coding away in Java or C++. Those people come to work, do their work, then go home. They don't tweet, or write Medium posts, or have dark green GitHub activity profiles. They don't work with you, so they don't talk to you. You aren't aware they exist. However, these people build many of the systems that make our day-to-day lives possible.

> I'm not denying either of these facts but it doesn't stop the small town engineers from existing.

I'm not saying they don't exist, I'm just saying that there just aren't that many of them.

Fair enough and I agree there aren't that many of them.

I have a lot of respect for people like your father. That's why I wanted to represent the small town devs who are similar in many ways. I personally am a little sick of the whole scene and constant newness.

I'm learning C++ in my free time because I've become disilusioned with life as a JavaScript developer. I know there are C jobs in embedded systems and OS dev but I didn't know there were still a lot of C++ jobs around outside of games.

Yeah, but the best of the best? Most of those people relocate.

I think you're confusing 'competitive' with 'skilled'. They are correlated but not the same thing. The best of the best who want to be the best relocate. The best of the best who don't care to be the best stay where they are. People in the second category are driven by an intense interest in their subject and their work rather than competition.

> I personally think if big tech wants to hire in the US and still pay lower $ than they currently do, the only lever they have left to pull is the interviewing format / bar.

The fact that big tech has not yet changed the format of the interview I believe shows that this convergence has not yet happened. This system is designed with tolerance for false negatives (qualified grads who will be rejected). At some point if these companies had a true demand for more graduates, they would revise the way they evaluated candidates to limit the number of qualified rejections.

If supply is tapped, then the risk of a mis-hire also increases (higher wages, more difficult to replace in a timely manner, etc). This might counteract any downward pressure on the hiring bar.

However, they do push hard for H1-B visas.

Also Europe you can get very good developer for 5000-7000 euros per month.

That's a pretty healthy salary in most parts of the US as well. I'm still young and make around $5k/mo USD before taxes as a web developer in Texas. Take home is around $4.4k

My SO and I have $30k left of student loans to pay off and then we're throwing our entire salary at buying a house before our city becomes even more expensive. We're hoping to be able to buy that house before the end of 2021.

Luckily we aren't in Austin or we'd be screwed already, but many parts of our city are already too expensive to own property in unless you're making $200k/yr or if you're comfortable leveraging more of your salary towards housing.

Now, we could move and I could keep my salary since I work for a fully remote company, but my SO's job is here in the city and she wouldn't make the same salary in a smaller market. We'd also be leaving our friends/family just to save some money on housing costs so the benefits aren't really worth it. It's dumb to have a really nice house in the middle of nowhere if we don't have visitors to share and enjoy it with.

So even with my healthy salary in a lower cost of living city, we're still struggling to get ahead due to student loan debt, healthcare costs, and housing costs. I would love to move to Europe and even take a slight pay cut to live in a more cohesive society, but from what I've researched, getting a visa without having $$$ in assets is difficult.

Idk where that was all going, but thanks for listening :)

Getting a visa and work permit for a programming job is pretty easy in many European countries once you have the job offer. There are coders from all over the world working in places like Berlin and Amsterdam.

A big breakthrough can be in finding ways to use contractors instead of employees, or in other words allowing people to contribute when they want rather than being tied in a full-time employment contract.

Obviously there are big, possibly insurmountable, obstacles related to the cost of onboarding/learning bespoke tech stacks, the need to preserve trade secrets and serial dependencies that require work to be performed quickly.

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