Comment by smnrchrds | Hacker News Reader

Comment by smnrchrds | Hacker News Reader

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I think the disconnect was not about compensation, but expectations. If you are working for a small business, you have to wear many hats. There are not enough X jobs to fill all your time, so you do X 60% of the time and Y, Z, and Q the other 40%. In a BigCo, there is enough work to go around that 200 people can work full-time just on X. If you get hired for X, you don't have to do anything but X.

The client, if they had to ask an outside consultant to vet a candidate for them, must be a small business. They do not have enough work 5 full-time employees, one of whom works on design. The designer is the verification engineer and the project manager and the customer support person. I don't mean the person works 100 hour weeks. They will work the normal 40, but there won't be enough design work to do 40 hours of it per week.

If the candidate wanted to do one thing and one thing only, they won't find it in any small business. They should focus on applying to large companies. And the client should find someone who is fine with being a "full-stack" hardware engineer, instead of a hyper-focused professional.

All these problems will solve themselves if the companies raise their compensation. You see this in the ML industry all the time. Many non-tech companies and even small to medium sized tech companies expect their data scientists to be fullstack engineers. And yet refuse to offer a similar level of compensation. Then they wonder why all the top talent flock to unicorn and FAANG type corporations.

While remuneration is an important part of job satisfaction, it's not the only factor. If hire someone who hates travelling for a job that requires 90% travel time and give them a generous salary, they accept it, but will be completely miserable in it. They won't quit because of the golden handcuffs, but is that a "solved problem"?

Big banks do this to the juniors: pay them tons of money and work them to death. They have no problem finding talent. But I prefer companies find ways to make their employees lives not miserable instead of saying "here's some money for your misery, you may want to spend some of it on a good psychologist".

I am saying this as someone who has seen what working in oilsands does to people. Some people enjoy it, but some only stay for the money. They are extremely well-paid, extremely miserable, and never quit.

I do agree no one should be whining about being unable to find sufficiently-skilled people to hire when the only real problem is they don't offer enough to get them. But I'm not sure it's fair to hold all businesses to the pay standard of massive tech giants who can monopolize one new product niche after another by leveraging their current dominant positions along with the patent/legal systems. Not to mention their exuberance-driven stock to throw around. Such a business model simply can't be available to all.

However I suspect we aren't talking about FAANG/unicorn-capable top talent here, hence the candidate applied to this job in the first place. I'd also be suspicious the candidate is ducking questions because they can't answer them. Unless it's just interview practice for them and a waste of time for the company anyway.

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