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Comment by brianmcc | Hacker News Reader

I agree this is a phenomenon right now, but I feel that article is vastly overcomplicating it, and not necessarily accurately.

I'd suggest simply:

- software engineers are hugely in demand

- software engineers have worked out they can work well remotely, and often prefer it for a combination of productivity and work/life balance reasons

- software engineers are voting with their feet and finding work that suits their needs - and many firms are losing talent accordingly due to not meeting the needs of those staff

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I would throw in that some percentage of 'the great resignation' isn't a new movement at all, but a one-time backlog of people who stayed longer at their jobs in the middle of a pandemic for income security. Now that things have gotten better (YoY, relatively speaking,) 2021 is full of both 2020's and 2021's resignations.

This x 100. I’m surprised we don’t see this brought up more often. The same effect is happening with many obvious life changes - weddings are way up, and I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a small baby boom in the next year or two as people who waited through 2020 finally felt safe/stable enough to make voluntary life change again in 2021.

Also: more and more job interviews are happening via Zoom. It's far easier to find a new job when you can do it without booking a day off from your current job.

This isn't true for everyone. I'm on site every day and Zoom is a hassle compared to a phone call I can do from my car.

Sure, but how many companies were hiring Senior Engineers with just a phone call? Zoom is definitely less disruptive than having to sneakily drive across town, let alone fly across the country on a weekday or two for in-person interviews.

Don't forget that it's easier to get a raise by changing jobs than asking your boss.

Totally! We are perhaps in the midst of a great levelling-up game of musical chairs too!

Replying to myself - the phrase "the war for talent", coined in 1997, has always been apt for the tech sector and it's just becoming more and more so.

Employers are going to have to compete really really hard for acquisition and retention of talent.

And wishy washy corporate platitudes won't cut it, firms will need to offer both aggressively competitive financial packages and attractive workplace setups - remote, flexible, whatever it takes.

Pretty much. We can do so because the market is in our favor. Not because we have balls of steel unlike in other industries.

I have terrible marketing skills and yet, as a freelancer, I have to refuse work because there is so much demand. This also means I can charge a month of minimum wage for a day of my labor. That's awesome for me, but that's not normal.

Everyone is a genius in a bull market.

Very true.

At the same time, software seems to be able to generate significantly more revenue for clients than other jobs. It makes sense that anyone wants a piece of the automation cake and therefore need software developers.

If you think about the value you're providing, you'll see you're probably creating much more value for the company than for yourself.

Sure, you charged 10k£ to build a dashboard serving 50 millions customers which took you a few days to build. That dashboard may avoid the company 25 millions calls, saving way more money than the 10k they spent on you.

> I can charge a month of minimum wage for a day of my labor. That's awesome for me, but that's not normal.

I’ve been working mostly as a contractor for quite a long time now. This honestly is quite normal. I’ve done contract work through 2 financial crises now, and the longest I’ve been unintentionally out of work was two months, and otherwise I’ve managed to charge high hourly/daily rates the whole time.

I have seen a lot of my contractor friends go full-time during this pandemic though. When it first hit, the place that I was working at converted about 1200 contractors to full-time. The allure of job stability was too good to pass up.

But the risks were an illusion the whole time. There was a shortage of software engineers during the GFC, a shortage of software engineers for the 10 years after it, and there’s been a shortage of software engineers during the pandemic. It’s just gotten so bad recently that people who were previously more risk averse have started to notice it.

> This honestly is quite normal

For our industry, during the last 20 years.

Not normal for most industries. Or in IT before 2000.

> I have seen a lot of my contractor friends go full-time during this pandemic though

Yeah, that's why I think it's important to have an elastic life style if you are a freelancer. So that you can suddenly cut 80% of your expenses. If you have big loans, an expensive car, 2 children in private school and live in a pricey area, if you revenue get shots, you are in trouble.

> But the risks were an illusion the whole time.

It was surprising though, wasn't it? I mean I expected calls to stop, but I got more of them. Now I have people calling me for things that are very far from my specialty.

Software is, indeed, eating the world.

It’s been normal since software and the internet started to become an important part of every area of society. But that’s how economies progress. There was a period in recent history when demand for manufacturing labor greatly outstripped supply. Our skills are simply in demand by the fastest growing areas of the economy right now.

Personally, I wasn’t surprised by this outcome. Temporary instability is what I was predicting. For demand for software engineers to actually tank, demand for software and software services would have to tank. I figured this was possible, but would require the entire global economy to collapse. So I figured it was unlikely, and in either case declining the offer I had to go full-time last year (when my employer at the time said they were terminating all their contractors) was most likely to be the correct decision (because full-time employment wasn’t going to protect me from global economic collapse).

The thing that I didn’t predict at all, is how long travel restrictions would be in place. Which has turned out very well for software engineers in developed economies, because all developed economies import software engineering labor from developing economies.

Sure. Also, we were the industry with the most experience and tooling to work remotely, not to mention the best format for that. That couldn't have hurt.

How did you get started in contracting? Did you just start with a previous employer or do you use an outside firm?

I have 3 main sources:

- my first charity work in africa gave me a lot of contacts that knew what I could do, and that I could take a plane to anywhere to do it

- IT training companies that I spammed to work as a subcontractors. It was easy because they don't check reference and really need a lot of people.

- People that I trained. I can't be hired for training by them because I want to keep a good relationship with IT training companies. But people I trained sometimes contact be for dev work.

I started out contracting through a firm. People complain about them clipping the ticket, but if they’re actually good at their job, then they can be pretty worthwhile to work with. The guy I worked with was great, and I was recruited by him to work a contract role the same way recruiters are constantly reaching out to people for other full-time roles.

I worked with him for a few years, and since then I’ve done most of my work independently, which I mostly find through the network I’ve built up. I have old clients getting in touch with me, people I’ve previously worked with (who may or may not have moved companies), and contractors I’ve previously worked with who know about opportunities at wherever they currently are.

The biggest barrier to working as an individual is the MSA, getting through the corporate procurement process as an individual who’s trying to get put on some large companies list of approved suppliers is very tedious. It can be tedious for both you and whoever is trying to hire you internally, and avoiding this is a fundamental part of the value proposition offered by the contracting firms. It’s the main reason that I still very occasionally do a contract through the firm that I used to work with. I don’t often find myself without a new contract to move to, but I do occasionally find myself roadblocked by due diligence processes (which take months to get through).

In any case, one of the reasons that I feel very comfortable with this working arrangement, even in bad economies, is that I have a long list of people who are happy with the work I’ve done for them in the past.

With the flood of boot camp graduates etc on one hand, cs grads , not being able to find work after sending out hundreds of applications — what would you consider a “software engineer” in terms of merit for being sought after like you mention? Open source ? Have sent a large codebase to prod successfully? Or just have the basics of modern workflows with DevOps /cicd / web / basic leetcode

Do you have some numbers on this? This contradicts what I've been seeing/hearing - that companies are snapping up novices and fresh grads to fill more senior roles.

nah no numbers, just r/cscareers

Is it a bull market or a supply-constrained market? Bull market implies your work is heavily valued in a trendy way, whereas supply constraints mean it's simply very hard to find skilled engineers.

I'd say both, but the quote was not for accuracy, rather convey that we should stay humble about it.

I also suspect there's a personality aspect. Software engineers make good money, but that's not their primary, or only motivator. They're willing to trade a bit of that income for QoL.

And interesting problems.

I'm taking two years to work on a moonshot startup because the problem is interesting and I'm one of the dumber people in the zoom. I took a pay cut of 50% on paper and closer 80% when you price the stock realistically.

Interesting work that I'm ethically OK with is pretty much the only thing I care about. I have taken positions that involved a reduction in pay because the work itself is something I'm particularly interested in, and would do so again in the future.

Businesses are focusing on "developer experience" and burying people in tech tools and abstractions instead of addressing leadership, product, or pay issues.

I would throw in also real estate market that makes them cash in on their homes in the city to move to the rural areas (or back home). I think the are way more factors that just this.

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