Hacker News Reader

A big one I have to add is time off. I've rejected a lot of companies that tell me, "All new employees start with two weeks off per year." Yea, I'm sure the new CFO starts with 2 weeks vacation, too. I've been doing this for 25 years, and if you offer me two weeks, we're done.

> Yea, I'm sure the new CFO starts with 2 weeks vacation, too.

LOL

I would add that if the company has "unlimited vacation time" it's really important to press and find out how much time people actually take. I like to ask for averages or how much time <executive not doing the interview> has taken off in the last few years.

That'll tell you what the limits really are.

"unlimited vacation time" is just really an accounting hack. It allows the employer not to have to track that stuff and on your way out, owe you nothing for vacation time. It also allows them to say, well, it's unlimited, take it when you want; then the only option to take time off is around federal holidays. It's basically a scheme to rip you off....

I've had unlimited PTO at 4 companies and 3/4 were truly unlimited. I've taken an international trip for 14 days every year + 5-6 days off for 3 days weekends + any fat hoidays like taking off Christmas eve. I'm sure there are shit companies but it seems like most companies respect it.

I feel like the onus is on the employee to ask off. Most people are just too afraid or too much of a workaholic to take off.

Uhhhhh... so you took under a month off? That's not a strong argument. If unlimited is actually unlimited then I would be taking 2 months a year at least.

I have no need for more than that though. I could take off more if I wanted but I'd just be bored. lol

Yes, we have about 8 weeks off in France by law. I feel it could be 12 or 15 and it would be great (what children have at school, at least)

Yeah I was thinking to myself, people in Europe get 5+ weeks off per year so if my employer is saying unlimited then I would be crazy to not take at least that much time off. Then again maybe this guy just loves working but I definitely prefer being paid to not work.

That's a very important point. My company has always had unlimited time. We just had an announcement from our HR head that managers are going to start making sure you take at least 2 weeks a year, ideally in a big block. I've never had trouble taking my vacation, but I'm really pleased that we're going to be enforcing a minimum, to help folks who are more hesitant to take theirs.

The legal minimum in the EU (and many countries) is 20 days.

I've seen this enforced once, and everyone was amazed that our colleague hadn't used the minimum 20 days. (We had 30 days according to our contract, but the requirement was for him to take 20. The other 10 were up to him.)

Yeah, I think the average European probably takes more time off than even Americans that think they take a lot of time off.

We get 32 days + public holidays, so you could take something like 7 weeks off with careful planning. Most people do. Because most people do, it isn't looked down upon at all.

A friend at a US firm said they told him if someone could take 3 weeks off then clearly the company didn't need them and there wouldn't be a job to come back to. Here it wouldn't be anything unusual at all.

i remember years ago my wife's friend (we're in US, she was in the UK) commented about how crappy US 'vacation' policies were. She'd been at a place for ... several years, and now had seniority for... at the time it was 11 paid weeks off. It seemed a bit excessive, because it didn't include some national holidays as well, so... basically she had > 3 months 'off' every year. The biggest problem she/they had was trying to figure out stuff to 'do' during that time (visited us in the US for a bit). I think another issue was trying to coordinate her 'time off' with her husband (IIRC he 'only' got 8 weeks paid vacation).

This is good for the company, too. It's a form of fraud detection. When employees take two weeks away in a block, the company can more easily detect ongoing fraud or other funny business going on. That's how a French rogue trader was finally caught:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10000872396390444914904577615...

Yeah, my mom works at a bank in the US and within her department they have to take off at least 2 weeks consecutively and only that one person in the department can be off during that time for just this reason. They use it as a yearly check to make sure there is no fraud going on.

We have unlimited vacation time I have taken 4 days holiday and 6 days sick leave in the past 12 months (4 days because i was on my ass with the COVID vaccine doses).

I would have normally taken at least 20 days holiday but it seems pointless to take time off to sit at home and do nothing.

This year i have 2 weeks in July and 2 in October and a week for thanksgiving and a week for Christmas.

Take a break!

I took 26 days leave last year (4 pre-Covid), and carried over a few extra. Even with Covid, there were opportunities to take trips locally, or just have a day out of the house with no obligations. I used a few days to work on hobbies when friends were working.

When it's use-it-or-lose it (or, in my case, use-it-or-be-forced-to-use-it-in-crap-weather-December), why work?

Uber had/has unlimited vacation time. When I worked there I took no less than 6 weeks a year and one year took 8 weeks. The formula is one week every quarter and then 2 weeks at Christmas. That already brings you to 6 weeks.

Yup I have interviewed at a lot of companies with unlimited time off, every single one of them seems to have taken less than 4 weeks off. This is what I get at my current company with no unlimited vacation. And at our company, sick time and mental health days are separate and not counted against your regular PTO.

In California at least, if you have X days of vacation time and you don't use it in the year when you leave, they have to pay you for these days. If it's "unlimited" time, you get bupkis.

thats the rub, the companies dont need to pay you on exit and they can manage against the average they would have granted in the first place and prune employees taking more. net win.

Also, unlimited vacations[0] are a trap. People end up taking less than market norms (US - 2 weeks) or informally/tribally decided what is the normal amount of time to take off. It also means people work while traveling.

[0] - if you're an employer and offer unlimited vacations be honest about it: set guidelines about how many days people typically take, if people are expected to be responsive / working while on vacation, etc.

I counter-act the unlimited vacation thing during onboarding (if not interviewing) by setting expectations: "I consider a reasonable amount of vacation to be X(=3) weeks, does that sound reasonable to you?". Then I track it myself and make sure I take every day. (A very good sign, and really the only way to ethically do unlimited, is when a company sets a minimum amount of time off.)

Isn’t 2 weeks the standard within the US? If you’d like longer vacations then Europe is your best bet

It's a pretty standard thing (US) to start with for entry level jobs. What the GP is claiming that is that policies that: "everyone starts here with 2 weeks, you get a 3rd week after N years, a 4th after M" are kind of bs for senior employees. They have a point; this rarely applies to senior management, for example - and effectively you are asking people to take a major quality-of-life hit when changing jobs.

This can lead to conversations like: "You've asked for N weeks vacation but policy is strict everyone starts here with 2 weeks". "I can probably live with that for an extra X k/year." ... "We can do N weeks".

I think in tech 2 week is becoming rare though. More likely either longer, or so-called "unlimited" (which itself is nonsense).

The more weird thing I find in US corporate culture is a tendency to not take the vacation you are allotted. In some countries this is legally at least problematic, in the US it's sometimes a badge of honor.

Three weeks is becoming pretty normal. A lot of places like to combine that with holidays and say 25 days (standard US is 10 holidays).

At most small places where HR is flexible, the PTO package is highly negotiable and I usually leave that to last and tack on an extra week, as they know they want me by that point and it doesn't cost them anything extra.

The conversation does go like you describe at some places, but others are absolutely rigid. One place where I actually accepted an offer, they increased everyone's vacation after my negotiations (small company). That has to be the most goodwill I've had when joining a team of people I didn't know.

But you're right, I never say now. I price it all accordingly, so they can say no.

In a discussion of "it's so hard to attract employees", you probably should consider doing things that are better than "standard".

Standard for many companies? Probably. For tech? I don't think so. We start at 10 days the company picks (the typical ones) plus 19 days that "you pick"* and add 1 day per year of tenure for the first 5 years and that feels "competitive but not exceptional" for tech to me.

We also offer an additional 4 weeks (contiguous) once every 5 years, which is not standard for tech and is an enjoyable perq.

* - plus sick time which you aren’t paid out if you’re fortunate enough to not need to use, plus parental leave

My impression is that allowed vacation days has increased a lot in US tech companies over the past 10-15 years. Salaries and bonuses too.

Not in tech. We aren't anything special and we start with ~30 days holiday + vacation on day 1, up to 49 after a decade.

20 days is standard in the UK but most companies will give you 25. Some also give you the option to buy more.

> I'll take interesting work over tech stack any day. I don't give a rat's ass about language wars

For me, having a Windows (Server) environment is enough to kill my interest. I know several shops in my area (mostly medical field adjacent tech) that are entirely Windows. That's probably more because of my extensive *nix background than anything. Language doesn't matter, but platform can/does to some

Yeah, my preferences for tech stack are less "I must have X, Y, Z" and more "I refuse to work with X, Y, Z"

I'm kinda the same, except one further: I don't think I ever want to use Visual Studio again.

I cut my teeth on Emacs and find VSCode a decent compromise but Visual Studio is just such a clunky editor. Extremely limited UI customization and code highlighting options and such. I don't like it at all

VSCode is fine IMO. I'm a vim guy and I'd take vim without plugins in PowerShell before I even go through the install process for VisualStudio again.

> Language doesn't matter, but platform can/does to some

Very much this. I can put up even with FORTRAN - hell one of the most interesting challenges I had recently was figuring out how to call C++ from FORTRAN.

But I've been living in Emacs for almost two decades, and longer than that in Linux. I have to insist that my personal development seat is Emacs on Linux. Yes, I can target Windows and probably anything else from Linux (iOS is a challenge, but I'm looking into it), so I don't see the "need" to develop natively.

Yeah, after developing on linux for the last 17 years or so I would never go back.

I also prefer non-Win environments but generally my higher concern is whether the hardware specs and configurations are sufficient for the loads that are placed on them.

18 years experience here. I have recently converted to startup employee (again), giving up a lot of money in the contract market exclusively because I am motivated by the business case and have a deep respect for one of the founders, who is an actual domain expert and proven leader from the industry our customers are in.

What I find the most difficult, by far, is "coaching up". Coaching down and motivating junior and intermediate developers comes easy by leveraging the inherent mutual respect that craftspeople have for expert colleagues who are fair and supportive. But coaching up is really hard. Because it often requires convincing superiors with less technical understanding and experience in building teams.

In contract world, it is easier to be accountable for the Whole Project™ because that's how liability works and we have full power to get it done. As an employee who might have to report to nascent technical and product managers, that initiative can be perceived as stepping on toes, and can invite being thrown under the bus for their mistakes. I don't have a solution, but any company that can solve this issue and is good on the other material benefits should have no problem retaining talent IMHO.

This is my pain at the moment. My co-founder is new to startup but seems to think that because I can code, I should just focus on that. I've been working in startups for >10 years now, have run Startup Weekends, and have a bloody MBA. Trying to coach him on what should be happening with the marketing funnel is proving impossible.

If I was contracting I would be counting the money while watching them mess it up with a wry grin on my face.

Why are you putting up with it then?

This is a very good question, that I keep asking myself.

Mostly because loyalty and friendship, and the continual hope that it'll turn a corner soon.

But I've put a date on my willingness to tolerate this. If it doesn't turn a corner by July, I'm out.

> 5. Raises that matter. Not some 1 or 2 pct insult. There's no excuse for that. None.

Is a big one. I am very unsure why companies seem so reluctant to do this when the cost of hiring and training a replacement are non-negligible.

I think a big reason is because that "1% to 2% base pay raise" gets hidden behind bonuses that (usually, but not always) seem bigger, plus stock-based pay that tends to be bigger every year (until it isn't).

For me, it's not as gigantic of a deal because as long as my raises cover the rising cost of rent--which it might not this year due to where I live becoming even more massively popular in the wake of COVID--then I am fine with this trade because I hate interviewing and I hate change even more. I used to spend the bulk of my annual bonus and stock grants and saving a little; in recent years, I've flipped that.

If I was seeing a consistent 10% YoY gain in my total compensation, you're right--I probably wouldn't care much about the 1-2% base increase.

But that wasn't the case, at least for me.

Because it works?

With those 1 or 2 percent raises being a norm almost everywhere, it's hardly a reason to actually leave the company. And saving for not doing 5 to 10 percent on everyone every year are much bigger than an occasional hiring and training costs.

>With those 1 or 2 percent raises being a norm almost everywhere, it's hardly a reason to actually leave the company.

But it is a reason to leave the company because you can easily get 10% or more switching jobs.

>occasional hiring and training costs.

Hiring and training costs are enormous, and they aren't occasional when you're talking about software companies with very high turnover. If you're incentivizing job hopping every few years, the average programmer at your company could be spending 25% or more of their tenure ramping up to full capacity.

>But it is a reason to leave the company because you can easily get 10% or more switching jobs.

Depends on the company. Mine is 100% remote since COVID, has generous benefits, a strict 9-5 M-F culture, and plenty of interesting work to do as much (or as little) as I have an appetite for. I make maybe 10% under market rate, but it would take at least a 50% raise to get me to leave. That's never happening, as it would be well over what anyone short of FAANG would pay for a senior dev, so there are definitely intangibles about a work environment that are worth more to me than another $15-$20k a year.

Right but there's an assumption of all else being equal when making a comparison like that.

Obviously you can get away with paying below market rates if you provide some other benefits to make up for it.

What if there are identical "intangibles" at the place offering you a 10% raise?

Unless you know someone inside the company I'd guess that's pretty hard to judge from the outside or through a few interviews.

Seconding this. I was in my previous position at a little under 5 years, with in fact substantive raises (8-10%) each. But still I jumped 15% immediately in base salary by joining to another company.

> Because it works?

Only if you have people who crave stability more than they need/want more compensation or who are invested in the work with you (i.e. they find it _really_ interesting). Otherwise it just creates churn, as people need to leave to get much of a bump up and leave the next place next time they want a bump up too.

So it only works overall if most people are in the "wanting stability" group.

This is probably part of the driver towards contract work rather than perm: if you need to switch jobs regularly to keep improving your conditions, then why not have the extra flexibility and/or extra compensation of working contract?

It becomes a reason over time. The raises are less than inflation, so over time the external jobs are more appealing since those postings have to stay competitive. That's why people jump from company to company every 2 years for the pay bump.

> 5. Raises that matter. Not some 1 or 2 pct insult.

IMO, pay or raises don't matter much (as long as it's enough to live without worries).

If the company culture is bad then yes, it's all about money. Pay me top of the market or I'm looking to move. But if the job is a pleasure and I'm respected, I don't much care for the pay.

What does it take to make job a pleasure? In a summary: respect expertise.

I wouldn't dream of telling our legal or accounting departments how to do their job, they're the experts in their fields. But for some reason engineering no longer commands any respect (pay != respect) so has lost all autonomy. (I say no longer because it wasn't always that way, in the 90s engineering expertise was highly valued.)

Here are three sure fire ways to make me leave ASAP:

"Agile". If you treat everyone as a replaceable cog kept under the daily whip of constant status reports then don't expect me to stay very long.

Lack of autonomy. If engineering decisions are being made by a product manager with a BA in Arts instead of principal engineers, you can bet I'm interviewing behind your back. (Sadly this is most silicon valley companies these days.)

"Unlimited vacation", aka might get 2-3 days per year. Instead, align compay interests with mine, accumulate vacation days and I can take everything I've accumulated. No less than 20 days per year + holidays.

Yeah, this is pretty much it. Be a place I want to work. That means interesting work, good people, sane management, and good pay. (You don't have to pay more than contracting, but you have to pay well. I might take somewhat less money to work at a place I like, but if you're pay is lousy, I won't like it no matter how nice the people are.)

This. I was going to write out my own list, but you covered everything I wanted to say.

I would counter that most companies can't attract or retain talent because they don't really want it. Most of the work that needs to be done in the world doesn't require the top 5 percent of the pool.

This is a difficult thing for companies and people to accept, but it's very true.

Maybe we should rephrase OP's question as

"How to attract perm Snr Engs when there are so many companies where there is: 1. Interesting work. The day to day is not a slog. ..."

You get the idea :-)

> 5. Raises that matter. Not some 1 or 2 pct insult. There's no excuse for that. None.

This x100.

I don't understand why companies see this as acceptable, especially when market rates might be so much higher.

The top 3-5% of software engineers do not work at startups. They work via their own S Corporation... Why? To copy the same way most doctors and high end professions get paid...

1. solo 401k - hit maximum contribution limit (57k-63.5k)

2. cash balance/defined benefit plan - your solo pension plan up to 3 million For year 2021, the maximum compensation is $290,000 to contribute to your defined benefit plan...

As governments grant corporations better preference in tax treatment, you really got to ask yourself why anyone would want to be a W-2 employee anymore... (w-2 employee of your solo S-corp is the exception)

Nothing stopping any company from giving you options as well...

Some extra rules and costs arise with defined benefit plans but well worth it.

SV wants capitalism and free markets but when forced to do so with workers the hesitation comes up... but but but you gotta come a play foozeball at work on the weekends... and we gotta share a beer and tell me about your dev friends..

https://www.manning-napier.com/insights/blogs/research-libra...

https://saberpension.com/defined-benefit-plans-self-employed

https://www.dedicated-db.com/one-person-plus/

Are they hiring? :)