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Comment by birdyrooster | Hacker News Reader

We’ve been trying to hire these people for ages locally and remotely and we still couldn’t find them so I have no idea where you think all the talent was hiding until covid 19.

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> no idea where you think all the talent was hiding until covid 19

The talent isn't being converted from potential - as was recently said, "You can't be what you can't see".

I was in Kansas City meeting people in Jan and it's pretty clear that there's a lot of talent hiding out there in downtown Missouri.

The talent there tops out at SSE because there's no vertical space without jumping to management & two years down the folks know are "mid-west-nice" managers with an iron fist behind it.

Several people who should've chased down the principal engineer roles have become these sorts of managers who never made it to directors because they're always been better devs than they were managers. And this seemed twice as bad for the young uns to have a dev-heavy manager squash a few of their attempts to actually own decisions, instead of just proposing them & see that role as a way to get that ability.

Most folks though things would be different if they had moved to SFBA, but all of them hit this point when they already had kids in school with stable single-income households (house all paid for).

In fact, I'd be one of those people in Bangalore if I had a bit more skills as a manager (completely sucking at management is a good way to be forced to chase the dev side).

If they could hired as a principal dev via remote out of being promising senior se, then this process would actually convert a lot of the talent into actual productivity in the industry.

To clarify, you're saying that limited career growth opportunity at satellite sites is stunting the talent development at that locale?

Not satellite offices, I was specifically talking about employers who are entirely local.

Yes, the strong incentive is to stay put, stick to the local employer as long as you can and still get a role that pays more money. The skills you get from sticking around just make it harder to shift as well sometimes. The output gets equated to talent - "built my sixteenth monolith .NET CRUD web app" is not as well respected as it should be.

For example, there's folks in Portland who are looking at the Nike CEO situation with great trepidation - talented people who would do very well in a new job, assuming they don't need to move.

> The talent there tops out at SSE

That was my experience at an F500 in the midwest. I wasn't a senior engineer but I was doing the same type of work as the seniors on my team. And I felt like my role could have more ownership. They did have team leads, a few architects, and agile related roles. But there wasn't much else for devs who didn't want to be managers.

My current company in the bay area is a lot better. I feel like I have more ownership, and the IC roles are more granular. I think technically senior can be terminal, and staff/principal roles here require influencing other teams. But my company has thought about promoting ICs, and I clearly see how staff/principals have a more challenging job.

I agree with this. I cannot find talented and senior folks who fill the niche of my team (deep understanding of Linux systems, containers, and operating distributed systems). There seem to be a lot of SWEs in the world and very few SREs, let alone vanilla systems administrators for hire who are really good.

I think as an industry everyone is pushed towards software engineering and the large clouds have vacuumed up everyone worth their weight for operations. We make it happen but it’s so stressful because our team and workload balance is so far out of whack.

SREs get treated like a cost center and no career progression. The majority by volume of sysadmins were automated out by the wave of cloud vendors, leaving over a decade now of undertraining. Those who are left are mostly mission critical unfireable greybeards.

SWE get to work on new products and get career growth towards bigger and more interesting projects as reward for delivery

Of course people focus on where the opportunities are. It's not the fault of an individual company but an overall industry mindset. "Reward it or lose it" should be a mantra of availability in technical industry expertise.

It's really unfortunate. Cloud allows rapid iteration, but doing a bit of self-hosting/colocation is such an insane cost savings that I think a lot of folks are really missing out on. I know at least 1 startup I worked at that would've had a more comfortable runway had they not went wholesale into AWS instead of playing it smart with hybrid. Paying a small team of folks even an astronomical salary to keep a small number of servers up 24/7 and use cloud where it makes sense (S3, elastic CI/CD with EC2) should still be saving some companies 6+ figures a month.

You train them, remember that? :D

This is legitimately what we're doing. We're bringing in really junior folks and spending years training/improving them. Unfortunately that doesn't help now. I thought it would be easier this year to hire due to COVID and layoffs, but it just hasn't been.

Did you post in Who’s Hiring? :)

The company I work for did. I asked to edit the post to add my specific posting and they said it couldn't be done. It'll be there next month though!

It helps now if you started a year or two ago. ((sad trombone))

The same talent will be hired, they'll just be paid far less if they aren't in a HCOL area because they can be. Businesses don't want to pay more money than they have to and are ultimately in a much, much better position to play hardball than individual ICs, "rockstar" or no.

The fact that some folks think so highly of themselves that they don't believe this to be true in their case is just hubris.

A lot of people, myself included, have been quite hesitant to work remotely until now. I've been pleasantly surprised how well it's gone and would consider a remote position in the future but I think it'd have to be a fully remote team. When offices do return, being one of a few remote workers means you will likely be left out of a lot of teambuilding, conversations, etc.

Every team I've been on since 2015 has been distributed, even when my job is "onsite". Sometimes we're in multiple offices, or we have people in the office & people working from home, but the net effect is almost no one can count on going to an office and only working w/ people in the same physical office. We're all largely working remotely anyway, but we're just not being honest about it.

This may be the biggest societal contribution from the pandemic, if and when we survive it

The bigger problem that I've run into is that most employers don't know how to recognize talent.

It seems that wages are a lot lower in lower cost of living areas. So what makes it that a developer in SF is much more expansive than the one in, let's say, Chicago?

Or let's flip it around, move the same developer from Chicago to SF and they will suddenly make more money.

I can only imagine that cost of living is the main factor. Naturally there will be a tiny minority of truly brilliant builders and engineers, but we are not talking about them as they are outliers.

>> So what makes it that a developer in SF is much more expansive than the one in, let's say, Chicago?

One is more likely to have more experience with startups/trendy new tech.

The other could probably work with it, but the other one already has.

Tech hiring is broken, more than likely they were right under your nose the whole time.

I think for Ops / sysadmin work this is probably more true than general software engineering. Ops people tend to cluster in the bay area more. Probably because Ops work used to be more "physical hands" dealing with physical servers which requires being onsite.

From my own experience, it's just not a good time to change a job no matter how enticing it sounds.

I started a new job in April. Between when I interviewed and when I was started, offices shut down. It's been great.

The fact that everyone is remote is actually a great 'leveler', since the company has a 'main office' and a few satellite offices in other cities. I'm not affiliated with the 'main office', but I actually am concerned that I'll suffer career-wise once the company goes back to in-office, since I'll be in a satellite office missing out on casual-but-important lunch/coffee/hallway conversations.

So, from my perspective, it's a great time to change jobs. YMMV.

Sorry for not understanding, but I still don't quite get why is it a good time? From the description of your situation it looks like any new job right now is a temporal job. At least that's how I read it.

I mean that everyone who wants to work remotely, now actually has the opportunity to do so, and since everyone is working remote, you are not at a disadvantage based on your remote status. That may change in the future, it may not. But right now, changing jobs doesn't seem like a 'bad time', which is what the parent poster was claiming.

Ah, I see. But I was trying to say that I do not want to change a job right now because of the global uncertainty, not that it is harder for me to do it.

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