New data: What developers look for in future job opportunities
stackoverflow.blog
stackoverflow.blog
Yet we constantly lost candidates to our competitor across town because they would pay $5K more than our offers.
The kicker? The competitor had $0 employer contribution to healthcare, so that $5K higher comp was a net loss for anyone taking their family insurance plan.
But nothing mattered except that salary number to a surprising number of candidates.
Really opened my eyes to the difference between what people say they want and what they actually choose come decision time. We had a lot of people come back to us later after realizing the competitor wasn’t that great, but it was a strange experience. I always wonder how much easier hiring would have been if we dispensed with all of the expensive employee perks (private offices and top-tier health insurance are $$$) and instead just put it all toward developer compensation.
Or maybe I'm just way too cynical and people actually got more done in a 10 hour day than they would in an 8 hour day?
- they have strong feelings about it either way: they’ll perform according to their wishes regardless.
- they have demanding commitments to non-work concerns: they’ll perform better with the schedule that fits their other concerns.
- they have free time they’d prefer to spend working: they’ll overperform regardless, at least until they burn out.
The reason I prefer it is that I can just focus on that one thing and keep the context in my head. Even very degraded, I seemingly can get a lot of work done simply by having lots of focus time rather than being interrupted every hour or so.
I've been doing it for nearly 4 years, and it works great for me. The third day of rest is worth its weight in gold, and, on the very rare occasion I do a normal 5x8, I always feel much more drained when I come back.
From a work perspective, I can do 10 hour days of coding without too much of a hassle, but I have a lot of things that pull me away from it: lunch, drink breaks, standup, 1-2 hours a day for meetings (sometimes more, usually lower-bounded), writing documentation, doing code reviews, responding to queries on slack, doing some git archaeology, etc. There's a lot more to the job than just writing code.
Speaking personally, I try to have a decent picture of how much extra I’d need to be offered to make it worth a switch. At a certain point, money will win, though it’d have to be significant :)
Major corporation, still kicking somehow six years later, although I hear they've lost a ridiculous amount of people and my former department is a pale shadow of what it used to be (50 people when I started, down to 5).
Well, there are at least two types of people - those that prioritize pay and those that prioritize benefits, particularly health insurance.
Maybe you were actually competing with public sector jobs in terms of benefits and coming up short.
If someone has a partner who has a really secure job with great health insurance, then it frees them to take more risks and optimize for pay, and vice versa.
It's just so hard to correctly evaluate health care plans, though. Even at the company I work for now, it took multiple evenings of spreadsheets, calculations and hypotheticals to choose from one of the three plans my employer offered, and that's with access to the HR Slack channels and internal docs to help clarify our questions.
I can't imagine trying to do the same calculation from outside the company.
But for people with chronic health conditions or who intend to start a family, there can be a huge difference between private and public sector positions due to health benefits.
There's no need for a spreadsheet and evaluating fine-grained differences, you look around at what your friends, family, and acquaintances do and why.
One of the challenges is that as a candidate, it is hard to know how real the perks are and whether they will stick around. One company I know advertised a choice of dev hardware, specifically a 17 inch PC or a 15.6 inch PC. No real choice. My past company had semi-private offices, until we grew and everyone was put into a new noisy single room open office, with everyone, including execs, taking meetings at their desks.
Sure, you might like one manager over another, but they will probably be gone in a year anyway. In my two and a half year career at three companies, I have worked for 6 people.
With valuing health care plans, at least in Canada, so much of the value comes from the specifics and your specific needs. My employer has unlimited and 100% drug coverage. If you are chronically ill, that could be worth $20,000 dollars a year. Great dental too. But if your need is physiotherapy, I actually have the worst plan I have ever had, capped at 90% reimbursement up to $500. Same with mental health needs. 90% capped to $500 for therapy.
Valuation of these things is messy, so people just go with salary.
HSAs and HRAs complicate the calculations, but that topline % should be something a recruiter or hiring manager knows.
Also if you happen to be dual-income, your spouse's benefits may be better or good enough that you don't care as much the employee premium % vs. an equivalent salary boost.
[1] https://www.peoplekeep.com/blog/what-percent-of-health-insur...
It's strange, the most common - and best in my opinion - advice we give to junior professional searching for their first job is "Don't pick the job/company/role, pick the manager" as the manger is the main defining factor on how good/bad your experience will be. Once you have more experience (usually 2-3 years), you usually start feeling more comfortable picking a role and prioritizing benefits/company values and all that stuff. Of course, knowing if the manager is going to be stable at his job is part of the process of picking the "right" manager. If the guy is brand new at this job or if he has done 5 companies in 5 years, it's a red flag.
Two and half year career at 3 companies working under 6 people sounds really weird. My personal internal clock is that a new employee (junior or senior) reaches his full potential after roughly 6 month of stable environment.
But yes, I can't say I have been at my full potential for more than 3 months as there has been so much team churn and directional change.
I have found the opposite though, but not on new hires.
On new hirers the employee is looking at money, and reputation.
I have seen guys stay in mediocre companies for years because they like the owners, and the managers.
A place can have a lot of perks, but if the employee doesn't feel like they are family/team; you will have an employee that does the bare minimum, or tries to sabotage at worse.
Those middle managers whom are terrible with people are poison to the company.
I used to work for a restaurant consultant firm. I basically got the job because I spent way to much time hiding out in school, and was a cook in high school.
Our job was to go in as customers and find out why the business was mediocre. We also looked at the accounting. (This was before cameras were everywhere.)
I did feel like a weasel, but told my boss employee theft is not part of my job. I will not go to court, or even turn in tap tillers (guys basically stealing). The restaurant industry is rife with theft.
My boss's attitude was basically try to turn over help every six months. It's cruel, but effective.
I noticed a trend. On pretty much every fledgling site I went to, there was one, or two, people who made the staff angry. The employees seemed to take it out on the restaurant.
They were all middle manager types.
I once went into this bar in SF that used to be profitable. I went there a few times. There was this one bartender/manager who was nice initially, but had a very bad side to her. She literally alienated 90% of the staff. Even customers did not want to deal with her.
She was a friend of the owner. She was the queen of Mixology (Her title), and mean. She had something nasty to say all the time, but was cagey. When someone was watching her, she was Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz.
I told my boss the problem, but the owner never fired her.
I left the job after a few months.
Most of the restrants failed because they were in the wrong location, or food wasen't right, but there were places that went down to one, or two, toxic people.
Pay is to attract. Perks and good work environment is to retain.
The weirdest thing I ever saw was an employee turned down their ~$50K bonus due to taxes. Or, likely, their misunderstanding of how marginal taxes work.
I'd hazard to say that different strata of developers may want different things. Those fresh from college may strive for a bigger name and tech stack that looks impressive on the resume. Seasoned but single may look for a larger paycheck and faster career growth. People with kids may look for flexible hours and good health insurance. Etc, etc.
I'd see perks not as tools to improve acceptance of offers, but as tools to improve productivity of those already working. And I bet that some flexibility in hours, or offices for those who ask for them, do improve it, and likely improve retention, too. But you have to check whether the expense is worth the improvement.
With that, I'd say that good processes, right culture, great people around may be a bigger perk than any gym memberships and fancy coffee machines.
On the other hand salary, x < y, is a solid decision point.
> “I always wonder how much easier hiring would have been if we dispensed with all of the expensive employee perks…”
Regarding health insurance, I don’t think employers should be involved in anyone’s health insurance. This is a holdover from a time now gone in the U.S., along with pensions and life-time employment.
That said, why not offer employees the choice to buy into the company plan after hired?
Also, when HR asks you what your current salary is, for your next gig, you can anchor with a higher salary which is insanely important (I wish it wasnt).
I feel like I have just reached the point that whenever someone tells me their "survey says" I just tune out unless they provide those things, as I assume it's either marketing fluff and/or was just gathered to support some predetermined outcome.
This is marketing.
That number sounds low. Asking the other 40%, why would that NOT turn you off?
But there's a distinction between losing access to SO, which shouldn't be a hardship, and losing access to online material in general. The latter would be unreasonable.
I know you're not the person I asked, but if you also find that you don't need to google things regularly while working I'd love to know the actual tech stack.
I've been using HTML, CSS, and Javascript for more than 5 years for example, and I still google things at minimum once a day, and SO usually has a prominent answer.
Also, for some niche languages or recent libraries, it can be hard to find answers for very specific issues.
Even when using libraries I've written I frequently still find myself in situation where:
A) I have questions about the programming languages or frameworks I'm using. In my case Javascript, Typescript, Svelte, React, HTML, CSS, Express, Tailwind, Bash. Even having used Javascript, HTML, and CSS for 8+ years, the core language specs and capabilities keep changing as well as the execution environments (the browser or Node)
B) I run into limitations with the libraries I've written that require improvements, and google (A) as well as miscellaneous patterns while seeking to address those limitations in clean, maintainable, and intuitive ways.
But you can read the language spec/notes when they release a new version, you don't go to SO for that you just read the version update when it comes and learn the new things. And if you miss something you can read the language manual/spec later, it is usually more accurate and complete than SO.
> B) I run into limitations with the libraries I've written that require improvements, and google (A) as well as miscellaneous patterns while seeking to address those limitations in clean, maintainable, and intuitive ways.
This shouldn't happen that much after 5 years, at least not improvements that you can find at SO. SO is good to find "hello world" examples for frameworks and function api's, but it isn't much help once you know how to set things up.
I bet the real reason for the response level here is the difference between "Do you require StackOverflow to do your job?" and "Are you OK with your internet access being censored?". I would guess that most are replying to the latter interpretation, even though StackOverflow was probably attempting to gauge their own importance.
Maybe if you're working in an office.
But working from home, I'd find my job brutal without a tool like Slack/Teams. Long response times from emails and it'd be very dry as the 'IM' style chat allows for a bit of banter like GIFs/'private' chats etc.
We're slowly going back to the office but have been remote almost 2 years now. It's only a few times a year I get or send an email that can't wait 5 minutes and in those rare circumstances a phone call usually does it.
I will admit I do miss the banter and social cohesion chat provided but it's been a revelation how much of a time and energy sink chats were for me.
We can have the same jobs and live in such different worlds.
Surprised not to see "recruiter getting in touch" as an option
Their 2x drip autogenerated email campaigns have grown to 4x recently, clearly all generated using the same software because the cadence is identical though of course they're written to sound like a human sat down and wrote them. I'm sure somebody at that company got a promotion for changing a 2 to a 4 which most have cost them nothing but who is responding to that 4th email that wouldn't have responded to the first?
They've called me during work hours, they've texted me, they've lied about where they got my number. A friend even had an "AI-generated" recruiter cobble together a mad libs email from whatever they must have crawled from his github so they aren't even respectful enough to send humans anymore.
[0]: https://twitter.com/chromakode/status/1463006262950457345
There survey may touch on this later, but looking at the graph above it, it was pretty clear that developers were willing to sacrifice flexibility and opportunities to learn for a higher salary.