I think I know why you can't hire engineers right now
cushychicken.github.io
cushychicken.github.io
>Is an extra $10k per year worth learning a new org, a new skillset, a new set of expectations, a new set of coworkers, and a new boss?
For many engineers, the answer is: “No.”
Yes I could quit and get a ~20k raise by shopping my resume around, but I don't need the money. I have enough for a down payment on a house, I meet my expenses for the month with 1/2 of one paycheck, I can buy a new car on a credit card if I wanted to. More money would be _nice_, and I imagine I'd be singing a slightly different song if I had kids, but it's much less important than knowing the work that I do has meaning and an immediate impact on the world, and about as important as working with new/interesting technology. I imagine there are a lot of early career (26-30 year old) software engineers who are in a similar boat. If money was a motivator I'd be serially founding companies and striving to be The Next Big Thing. I'm just not. I'm happy being hire number 13, or 99, and working with people I like doing work I find value in.
Edited for spelling
Depending on the person, that may be a good motivator for them to not seek more money, but to seek more time instead. I'm certainly there. I've turned down more money when the position would mean that I was responsible for an awful lot more and it would take time away from my kids. When they're older and possibly out of the house, that may change, but for now? I'd rather have the time than the money because, like you, I have "enough." It's just not a limiting factor at this point in what I care to do, but time is.
If you look outside of coastal cities, there are plenty of job offers for engineering jobs that pay less than 6 figures. Over in Europe and East Asia, $50 to $60k salaries are the norm. And people job hop frequently for a few extra $k because that corresponds to a significant increase in quality of life for them. The difference between a 2 br and 3 or 4 br apartment, between another kid or not, etc...
People will absolutely leave your company if they think they can get paid more elsewhere. People will absolutely pass over your job offer if they think they can get more elsewhere.
You also see the reverse phenomenon which is that you'll find plenty of engineers doing soul-wrenching, boring jobs in toxic environment who still say because they are very generously compensated (hello FAANG).
Considering that each of these tech companies are trying to hire in the order of hundreds of engineers, and willing to accommodate remote work from locations that they previously did not consider, is it really a surprise that other companies with less competitive compensation packages are struggling to find talent?
I used to work at Google too (in Mountain View). Believe it or not I liked working at Google and I also like working at Microsoft.
I don't need to chase top tier compensation. I just do things I enjoy where I'm learning and my career can progress. Right now I'm mostly writing in Go working on an OSS project managed by the Cloud Native Compute Foundation.
As an aside, early retirement is not a goal of mine.
For a public big tech company, USD 250k total compensation for a L5 in Bay Area is pretty low ball. For a pre-IPO company, you might be looking at USD ~200k/yr cash, and if you're lucky to go through an IPO while holding RSUs, you'd see a huge income spike on the IPO year. Note that pre-IPO companies still count paper equity in their TC numbers, so a 300k total compensation number might actually just be 200k cash + 100k paper money.
How realistic is it really to get such remote jobs for that salary. My skill set, attitude, passion, professionalism and devotion certainly isn't the issue. From what I remember from some job hunts in the past the issue seemed to be mostly that I needed the following conditions:
- Live in US and have permission to work there, OR have a US passport;
- And on top of that be in or around the same time zone as the company's location;
So how feasible is it really to live in Europe and still earn such salaries remotely? I do not mind do the work or hours, sign me up for it, but so far it mostly looks like dreams to me. At the moment my best best to earn that kind of money in the future is to become an indie consultant while also making some software of my own on the side, I haven't found any realistic way so far to earn such money in a stable full-time permanent employee job.
Anyone who can point to some real data on such opportunities rather than just the usual statement that they earn "easily" 200k+ in the bay area and around. I can only dream of it, and while money certainly isn't my main motivator, it would be nice if I could actually have a home and land of my own at some point...
A thing to note is that even though tech companies are now more open to hiring outside of SV, in the grand scheme of things they still represent only a minority of employers as you travel further out the globe. Which is to say: the opportunities do exist in Europe, but they're not going to come on a silver plate for everyone. As a software engineer, you'll need to put some work in a) finding these employers and b) preparing for their interview structure (which is often said to be difficult to pass)
It is true that these companies used to prefer relocation to US (which require a visa w/ bachelor degree requirements, in addition to the actual willingness to relocate), but now thanks to covid, companies are often willing to hire in Europe (and even as far as India) even despite the timezone challenges. This was brought up by a combination of market dynamics, internal pressure from employees looking to leverage LCOL areas to maximize personal gain, as well as a related shift in the job market overall based on the emergence of tech pockets like in the Netherlands (because real talent grows and eventually needs to grow teams to support their ongoing success). With this said, there are logistical challenges that prevent companies from being truly remote-from-anywhere (e.g. the need for tax entities in the countries where they hire) so there's still going to be some amount of magnetism towards specific tech-oriented locations (albeit better than Bay-Area-or-nothing).
As for real data: one of the most cited resources is the levels.fyi website. It's heavily skewed towards Bay Area, but you can also find information on other tech hubs, correlated to their respective gravitational pull for talent (e.g. Toronto, Canada has a pretty decent amount of data). Another thing to keep in mind is that job postings are often stale (sometimes by years) and they may be more open to remote than they seem.
Compensation is not equal everywhere, and a 200k bump isn't necessarily a given. It's more of a ballpark. The context is that a L5 role (roughly a 5-10 yr senior developer) pays a salary of USD ~150-200k/yr in the Bay Area. For comparison, a similar position for the same company in Bangalore might pay USD ~80k/yr, but Toronto might have very similar pay to the Bay Area pay range. Note that this is only the salary portion. A typical job offer from these companies usually also has an equity portion (i.e. stocks), and equity packages of 100-200k/yr are fairly normal in SV. Adding the salary and equity numbers plus a yearly bonus amount is typically referred to as "total compensation" (or TC) and is what these 300-400k numbers refer to.
In these conversations, typically we talk about L5 as the baseline because that's the level at which there are the most number of job openings for big tech, but there are also opportunities at L4 (junior level) as well as L6+ (staff level), with corresponding adjustments in pay. L6+ roles can in fact pay well north of 500k/yr TC, but needless to say, these are significantly harder to land roles, even in the Bay Area.
I've been speaking to recruiters recently and a lot more companies are open to fully remote, even across borders. 10 years ago if you wanted the best salary in Europe you would need to go live in London, now there are plenty of companies hiring remotely across Europe and paying salaries close to what you'd get in London.
I interviewed for a similar senior role in London and Berlin companies this week, and was really surprised the German company was paying more. Even working for local companies in Eastern countries you can often get good enough salaries, so that relocating to traditional tech hubs in Western Europe isn't really worth it, once you take into account cost of living adjustments.
* London : >100k pounds = ~120k E
* Berlin : >90k E
* Sofia : >50k E
but, when applying the taxes thereof:
* London : >120k E - 45% taxes -> 66k E
* Berlin : >90k E - 45% taxes -> 50k E
* Sofia : >50k E - 10-15% taxes -> 45k E
Which means.. it mostly depends where you (want to) live.. as differences in price/culture of life are much more than above differences.
And once you apply the CoL adjustments, the numbers further skew in favor of Eastern Europe.
Here, the calculation: https://listentotaxman.com/?year=2021&taxregion=uk&married=f...
120K EUR is 79.7K E
PS: Also 120K EUR in the UK is NOT very senior.
> Read any publication that cares about business, from the NYT to the Wall Street Journal, and you’ll see a ton of hand wringing about The Quittening, and the accompanying talent shortage.
These publications aren't talking about the workforce in general, they're pseudo-gossip articles about the wealthy top engineers and how well-off they are that they can focus on things other than how much they put into savings each paycheck.
This is also what a lot of europeans do with FAANG jobs.. get a FAANG job, move to america, live there for 3-5 years in a 4 bedroom apartment with 12 roommates, eat ramen, come back home, and buy a house.
There's also a question of how much more money do you get... 5% more to do something shitter than now... not worth it... but 50% more, is enough to think it through, if nothing else, how much sooner can you retire with that.
Yes, and we have plenty of nice stuff that goes along with it
Healthcare, 30 paid holidays, unions, paid overtime, weekends and calls off work come extra (it is 40h week period, want more pay for it), retirement, flex time, ...
Like the OP, my expenses are more than covered, getting more isn't worth the hassle to change.
Ah, and in some countries having too many companies on the CV isn't well seen, it appears the candidate isn't able to fit-in anywhere.
It is changing though in the tech field. Yes, it used to be that 10 years in the same company showed that you're loyal and dependable, but now it's more like "so you haven't learned anything new or been in a different environment in 10 years?". There's a difference between changing jobs twice a year and every few years.
Also better have a good answer why having changed so much between companies, saying it was for more money isn't going to be a good outcome on an interview.
If you want a good answer for that question, tell them you switch jobs once it's become clear that there's not enough room for growth in a company anymore. And this growth isn't just about salary; it's also about learning new skills, new technologies, new responsibilities. If they want to keep you longer than that, they need to keep investing in you.
Many people just want to try out new tech and when that fun is over and they have introduced the cost of complexity for that new toy, they run off to the next job. "Improving" the world in another place.
Fun for them, maybe, but bad for the employer. 2 years is often barely enough to have experienced maintaining the full system of the employer for a while and have felt the costs of complexity. Someone who runs from that every 2 years ... I would be careful with that. I am not saying, that this is the case with everyone, who follows the 2 years strategy, but often it is.
In comparison, if I was visiting interviews and if someone interviewed me and asked something like: "So you haven't learned anything new or been in a different environment in 10 years?". I would probably start to laugh and mention to them, how I had a major hand in basically everything that was developed in the whole organization, have done everything from dev-ops to backend and frontend and more in my job and I have maintained it. If that is nothing to them, then they are probably do not value experience or have no idea what to look for.
For example, after 2.5 years, I am looking for a new job, as the company is simply refusing to make adjustments based on the market prices, even after a promotion, I am making 20 percent less than I should be making right now, and this is not an isolated incident.
Staying at a company for 10 years either means that the company is the perfect place (then, why are you trying to leave?), or you just acquired tons of skills in your job that are not transferable to your next job, which both do not look good. Especially, when the job market is so hot right now, it's either that you can not find a new job after withering your skills, or something unpleasant happened in your perfect company and you are looking your way out.
> For example, after 2.5 years, I am looking for a new job, as the company is simply refusing to make adjustments based on the market prices, even after a promotion, I am making 20 percent less than I should be making right now, and this is not an isolated incident.
OK, that is just one job change. It is not like 5 in 10 years. It becomes increasingly unlikely, that every company you work in behaves like that, the more years and job changes you add. As in 6 jobs in 12 years makes that explanation more unlikely than 2 jobs in 4 years. I think everyone is fine with a few quick job changes. Just don't let it become a pattern. And even then I mentioned, that I would not immediately reject, but caution. I am not seeing, what is ignorant about that, tbh. So yes, if the company does not want to adapt, or pay for experience, then I would not argue against job change. However, also one should consider, that most people make way less money in the job market and that they are not in the position to ask for a raise every so and so many years, just because those years have gone by. Software developers already earn good wages usually, in many areas, and I am not merely talking about the valley or stuff like that. Just compare your wage with nurses and similar.
I am also not arguing about wanting to get paid a proper wage. Maybe I would argue a bit against always wanting more, because you can have more elsewhere. That does not really entitle anyone to "have a right to get paid more". Of course you are free to aim for money rather than solidity, but if you do it frequently, you will one day have to face the consequences. Those being, that people might have a hunch, that you will be gone at the first sign of higher pay elsewhere. (Exaggerating here, ofc.)
But now to the points, where I think you misunderstood me:
> Staying at a company for 10 years either means that the company is the perfect place (then, why are you trying to leave?), [...]
Well, I did use the conjunctive form there. I am not.
> [...] or you just acquired tons of skills in your job that are not transferable to your next job, which both do not look good.
And those are the only 2 options you see? That either skills are not transferable or that it must be the perfect place? Sorry, this is waaay to black and white. It is also possible, that you learn many skills on your job, which are indeed transferable. That is a possibility you do not consider.
> Especially, when the job market is so hot right now, it's either that you can not find a new job after withering your skills, or something unpleasant happened in your perfect company and you are looking your way out.
Why do you automatically assume, that everyone who works somewhere for a longer time has "withered their skills"? It's non-sense in that generality.
Doing the same job in the same company does give you blind spots, as 90 percent of the companies do not allow novelties in their processes and tech stacks, e.g. you might not be allowed to do containerize your applications, as the current procedure "just works". If your job allows you to sharpen your skills, keep up with the tech stack, allows you to learn new algorithms and add new skills to your arsenal, even after 10 years of work: Congratulations! You have the perfect job, please let me know of the company, so that I can apply.
>OK, that is just one job change. It is not like 5 in 10 years. It becomes increasingly unlikely, that every company you work in behaves like that, the more years and job changes you add. As in 6 jobs in 12 years makes that explanation more unlikely than 2 jobs in 4 years.
Exactly! The frequency needs to be slower, as with more experience, you are supposed to have a good sense what works out for you and choose a job that you won't be leaving after a year or two. That is why you are expected to stay longer as you get more experience, from what I understand with my measly 6 years of experience in the field.
But, maybe you should also consider that the job market has changed and 2 year turnovers may not present a huge red flag, as long as the candidate can explain why they wanted to switch jobs. Although, many companies are now optimizing their salary/perks/promotion structure and their culture for developers staying for 2-4 years, instead of 10 years as it is used to be. All my three companies were like this, maybe I am just too unlucky, I guess.
This is self-correcting though: if you end up with a CV with so much job-hopping that you don't get any more offers because of that, you'll just stay where you are until your last experience is long enough to prove that this is not a concern anymore. So I wouldn't worry about that.
No hard evidence here, but I think you really have to push it to end up in this situation, and I don't think 3 or 4 two-year stints put you in this position (especially not in SV, but even elsewhere as long as you have a story to tell). Talking about the market in general, of course some companies might have biases for candidates who only had longer experiences.
I get what you're saying about the salaries -- our company just recently started a program to normalize salaries with the market and it was certainly sorely needed as we had become notably out of sync. But from the perspective of the business, we don't start getting a strong positive ROI out of a new hire until about a year in. To turn over staff after less than two years is a real cost to us and potential employees that are prone to that are often not the best choices when that risk is factored in.
I also reject your false dichotomy. There are not just two reasons to stay at a company for 10 years. You could, as just one example, strongly care about the mission of the organization and/or the work that you are doing. People do work at nonprofits despite their generally lower salaries.
I'm sure you have pursued all avenues with the company you are currently at, but on the off chance you haven't tried it, I suggest talking frankly with your manager about your market value (backed up with hard numbers from reputable sources) and pointing out that their cost to replace you _and train your replacement_ would greatly exceed the cost of bringing you up to a competitive salary. If the manager has latitude and a brain, this might work for you.
The discussions with my team leader/manager has been going on for more than 6 months now, and it always hit up the same wall: The salary bands are inflexible and the short sighted approach of "making an offer after the employee puts their notice in" culture continues. The HR team believes that (as this is what they have been doing pre-COVID), they can just import people below the market value abroad and replace the people asking for more salaries, although this is just a false notion right now, and they are having extreme problems with hiring.
> You could, as just one example, strongly care about the mission of the organization and/or the work that you are doing. People do work at nonprofits despite their generally lower salaries.
Yes, but this is something that needs to be explained to the hiring manager. Leaving after 2.5-3 years are now the norm, and staying for 10 years is now an outlier, unlike what the GP trying to picture 2 years stays as red flags. I do not feel pressured to explain why I want to leave the company, mostly what I am being asked is what I am looking for in the new company.
I am talking from a position of never having had to ask for a raise, so I am probably biased as well. My job is not a job, in which one can sit back and do a lot of busy work. We have new challenges often and are developing the core product, while the organization is growing and there are more customers all the time. We are thinking about scalability of the product and such things. Many things are in the making. Is it the perfect job? Maybe not. It depends on what you value in a job. Pay, work-life balance, what you work on, co-workers, office setup. There are many things, so the answer might look different for different people.
Best wishes for the future and hopefully you will get that raise.
Well, interestingly, they are not being logical at all. I am not sure why, probably they think that they are making some kind of "savings" by underpaying their employees, as long as they can get away with it.
> Pay, work-life balance, what you work on, co-workers, office setup.
Exactly. I would be lenient on salary if the other factors were nice, but they are pushing heavily on not making working from home available. They are now pushing for a hybrid model, but, from their actions and the messages they are conveying, when the pandemic ends, they will ask everyone to return to the offices and cancel the hybrid model once and for all.
> Best wishes for the future and hopefully you will get that raise.
Thank you very much! I hope that as well.
If you are in your 20's, it is totally worth moving to the US where you can get paid 500K+ per year if you navigate your career efficiently. I posit that making this much money more than covers any of these additional expenses that you call out.
I’m sure some can but this is not the norm and expectations need to be checked and called out when wrong.
SBF earned what... $22B in the last three years in crypto by the age of 29? If he posted his earnings on Levels.fyi at Alameda Research can I start suggesting people can earn $1B by 30 by moving to Hong Kong and working for top crypto trading firms because out of the massive amount of people trying to do that, it happens to people from time to time?
> If you are in your 20's, it is totally worth moving to the US where you can get paid 500K+ per year if you navigate your career efficiently.
I don't want to say that it's "easy" to hit numbers in this ballpark as a senior engineer in the US, but the way to do it is relatively straightforward and doesn't require any particularly unusual skills, connections, knowledge, etc.
1) There is a set of companies which pay that kind of money
2) Those companies employ a non-trivial percentage of the software engineers in the country
3) Those companies are _always hiring_ more software engineers at those levels
4) The interview processes for those companies are public and quite similar
Obviously nobody is guaranteed to get a job paying that well at one of those companies. Some people simply won't be able to clear the bar (either technically or socially). But the bar is not "one in a thousand". These companies already employ something like 8-10% of the software engineers in the country, so "one in ten" is a hard _upper bound" on how strict they are (and obviously, since their selection process isn't perfect and they don't in fact have every single 10%ile engineer or better locked up, the bar is lower, probably much lower).
Also keep in mind bonuses are rarely guaranteed or part of packages, so they are completely speculative for new grads.
It's also baseline entry-level comp at Jane Street, and Hudson River Trading goes even higher.
First-year bonuses are generally guaranteed, and after that are "speculative" in the same way that stock compensation is speculative - largely dependent on firm performance (though personal performance can actually pull it them significantly in finance, unlike with stock).
I didn't say this was the majority of devs, I said this was entry-level comp for "top-end finance shops", which is true. It is also true that there are competitors in that space which pay much less, just like there are tech companies which pay much less FAANG & Co, but does not mean that FAANG & Co don't exist or shouldn't be relevant to people's decision-making.
assuming the latter, you're looking at getting hired in at level as a senior engineer (maybe one level higher depending on the company) at most of your brand name tech companies that value engineering talent.
Want to retire early? Easy! Just become a managing partner at JP Morgan in your late 20s and you’ll be rich enough by 30.
I was in a partnership in a small plane, and one of the guys was "in his 20's making $500k+" at google as an L6 plus retention bonus. Several engineers in my circle (early 30's) are on $500k+.
Currently I'm living in Europe but leaving back to SF. I tell people all the time about salaries in the US and point them to levels.fyi, but these salaries are so detached from their realities that they seem simply unable to believe them. Go look at levels.fyi, it matches very well with what I've heard on the ground.
But more broadly, higher salaries correlate with better working conditions. That warehouse worker will have targets to hit every single shift, get in trouble for being five minutes late, will get written up for taking sick leave without a doctor's note, and will have to pay for their own food and drinks.
On the other hand, most jobs that pay a six-figure salary? There might be quarterly department-level targets, but you won't get fired for missing them. Flexible working hours, and no checks you're putting in your hours. Illness? Take as long off as you need. Of course there's free tea, coffee and snacks. Maybe there's also free breakfast, lunch and dinner.
Just because a job is highly paid, doesn't mean it'll be particularly onerous - in fact, often the opposite!
Amazon is obviously notorious. Facebook also seems to involve longer hours. Can't speak for Apple. My friend at Netflix reports working 40h/w on average as well.
I would argue that hours/week and salary are not necessarily directly correlated in the Silicon Valley tech companies.
Personally my most arduous job (50-60+h/w at a Korean conglomerate) was also the least paying (starting salary $35k, left after five years making $60k).
That said, while everyone's circumstances and desires are different, I would say typical quality of life making $300-500k at an above average 50h/w is arguably better than making <$100k USD equivalent at 35h/w even if you include all the European country social benefits. At some point an absurdly high compensation sort of lets you steamroll and acquire those benefits for yourself privately if you want them.
So I think it is reasonably plausible for someone towards the older end of the range with a bit of skill and good fortune. It feels unlikely that the trend which I described above (of company stock going up 2x every two years) will continue so I would expect effective compensation to go down a bit. But on the other hand compensation can be pretty sticky and plenty of people will be willing to quit after reaching the 4 year cliff (where their stock awards would no longer be worth 2x what they were meant to be worth) to look for high pay elsewhere.
If the job doesn't work out, you can just pack and go home.
Worst case, you get to see a new city, meet new people, and have some memories.
And in so many cases, you might be losing out. Did you want vacation time or do you simply want to work while you are young?
Do you want to have children in your 20's? If so, maybe not move to the US. Your child probably will have citizenship of your home country - but maybe not, especially if you don't move back. Worse, though, is that the child automatically becomes a US citizen. This means that if you move away, your child must have a US passport if they ever want to visit again... or must pay $2350 to renounce. It means that the child will, until they renounce, be taxed by the US government on their global earnings.
You probably won't get 4-5 weeks of vacation a year - and even if you do, it isn't a legal requirement that they let you use much of it. And they probably won't let you take 3 weeks off at a time.
Or you might find that you get sick and lose your job. You might fall in love and realize that your partner isn't eligible to move to your country with you. You might find that your retirement in your home country isn't as much because you haven't paid into it as much (depending on the system). Or you could very easily find that your retirement is tied up in a 401k that failed miserably, leaving you without.
If you have dark skin, you might find yourself dealing with a US police force at a traffic stop in ways you didn't in your home country. Good luck if you are trans, and in some places, a same-sex relationship will get you ostracized. Of course, the places in the US where that happens most aren't places paying 500k - in no small part because those places are few.
So no, it isn't totally worth it to move to the US.
It shouldn't be an issue to take all of your vacation time all at once if you should so choose.
I did the calculation for my current job (Germany, huge telekommunications company, city of 200.000 inhabitants). It goes like this
* 72'000€ a year * 38 hours of work per week, distributed to my choosing * 44 days of paid vacation per year * approximately 20 days of paid sick leave per year * 10 days of paid child sick leave per year * covered health insurance
To match those conditions, a job in the US must pay 180'000$ per year (in cash) plus health insurance for me, my family and their education.
Though I do not know what equity is worth. Can those 500k$/y earners get their compansation in cash?
- That salary certainly does seem realistic, even though I'm on the higher end and have a base salary above that;
- I also get the same amount of paid holidays, might be even a couple more;
- we have great hospitality insurance, mutuality (general health care) has to be paid by ourselves however, even though that's cheap;
- they do help me save for pension in the form of a contribution, but it certainly isn't enough to retire of, I see it more like a nice base, but will definitely need money on top of that to actually keep living a good live (at least if I want to stay in Belgium);
- they are flexible in timing for sure, that is something I'm grateful for, as long as I get the work done it's cool;
- they do not expect work in the weekends or after office hours (if you do flexible hours it's of course up to you to do the promised hours at some point or another of course);
However, never ever:
- have I get overtime paid, in any of the companies I worked for in Belgium or the UK;
- have I get the chance to be in some kind of union that's standardised within the companies I work for, haven't even heard ever of a union for software developers;
Further more I'm always been told that despite the fact that they earn their 200k salaries they on top of that get also nice bonuses, options on stocks, 4k pension saving and premium health insurance covered. Or is that too much rainbows and unicorns I heard of?
If you have a modicum of talent and a flair for interviews, they will gladly buy your soul for $250k/year + bennies from heaven.
DC/Mid-Atlantic salaries at an established (non-FAANG) company are more like $85-$100k for a recent grad, $130-$170 for senior developer positions. Most of those jobs are in the suburbs, where a nice house is in the $500-$1million range.
A Senior Dev would be expected to operate mostly independently on day-to-day tasks, capable of contributing back to their immediate team (mentoring, working with product manager, etc), work directly with customers and leadership as needed, and be recognized as somebody with answers to problems within their immediate area.
In such cases is it still considered the terminal title, the one you either earn or are pushed out for not earning, but are not required to go beyond?
Assoc to Senior or Lead - being successful at normal tasks over time gets you there without much active career management.
Senior to Principal - you'll have to seek out interesting work, prove capable of working across product/business or technical boundaries, and start interacting with leaders outside you team.
Senior Principal - all of above, plus interacting regularly with VP, leaders in Product Management group, capable of high level design/analysis, trusted by peers and leaders across your organization. High level of ability mentoring and leading.
Funny to compare that with my previous experience at an IIOT startup, where I was employee ~#30 and the third or fourth engineer doing cloud stuff. Started at Staff, left at Senior Staff after two years but would have been Principal if I stayed another 2-3 months. The gap is big!
I'd say this applies to HCOL areas too like NYC or even the SFBA. If you're working for a cludgy old Fortune 500 tech-is-a-cost-center enterprise company (where the majority of SWEs are working), you're probably not making more than $200k-250k at best as a senior SWE with many, many years of experience unless you have some niche specialty.
Not at all. You're expected to be productive to a certain standard (and even that is sometimes iffy), not to be 24/7 available.
However, given that more and more companies are becoming more open to WFH setting, it will hopefully make the things better for the devs outside the States.
Technical skills wise, for areas from above, you'd usually be looking at the strong background in algorithms, math & statistics, internals of operating systems, underlying hardware but mostly about the CPU at the microarchitectural level and strong expertise in at least one programming language.
More info can basically be found on https://werk.belgie.be/nl/themas/werkbaar-en-wendbaar-werk/a... (also available in French).
As for unions, normally if a company reaches 50 employees they are required by law to have a union rep. How exactly that works I don't know. Also while I personally also have never heard of a software specific union, you can always just go with the big normal unions if you want, it's not like they're going to turn you away.
Now you have: https://prospect.org.uk/tech-workers/ or https://www.unitetheunion.org/ in the UK.
I had colleagues in both at a previous job, depending whether their jobs were more scientific (we'd call it data science now) or engineering.
Both unions are more general than just software/IT.
Also all inclusive contracts are quite common or some legal workarounds with payed overtime after x amount of hours (where x amount would be working 2 times as much per week), never heard of unions for this sector in DACH either.
Frankly getting a 10k salary bump in Europe is still pretty solid - for 20k I would bet most engineers around here would make a switch. (note that you tax down ~50% above the 60k you earn from now on).
> Ah, and in some countries having too many companies on the CV isn't well seen, it appears the candidate isn't able to fit-in anywhere.
True, but if someone switched jobs every year it feels like a red flag to me anywhere where the cost of hiring actually matters I would say.
Debatable. In most European countries, if you lose your job you still have health cover. If you lose your job in the US you do not keep the company benefit health insurance (except as part of a severance package for a limited time). For H1-B visa holders, they must leave the country (this is relevant for anyone based in Europe who is trying to determine whether to stay in Europe or use a visa programme to relocate to the US).
If you are married and you and your spouse were on the same statutory health insurance, then you're covered by your spouse. Which can be the case in the US depending on your spouse's coverage.
It's a huge difference.
And yes, if you earn below 450€ a month, you're generally covered by your spouse or family's health insurance with many little rules and exceptions. None of those exceptions are deal breakers though.
This page (https://allaboutberlin.com/guides/german-health-insurance) explains more, and has a very accurate calculator that takes those edge cases into account.
I agree that it is stupid to tie health insurance to your job, but it isn't the big deal you make it out to be, so long as you have savings
That phrase is key. Most Americans don’t have savings. Even among the professional class, savings are often nowhere near high enough to pay OOP for insurance at market rate.
That’s quite a hill to climb before I see a penny of income into my pocket.
You mean, to avoid the social security fees (health/pension/unemployment/…)? After all, as a consultant (whether incorporated or not) you still need to pay taxes and the rates are pretty similar to tax rates for employees.
It's not only diminishing returns at work but simply crossing that comfort threshold severely drops the incentives from "survival mode" to "eh... yeah... maybe".
And sure, if you like living just above your means you'll always be in "survival mode". Always the better car, the better house, the better vacation, they need to be financed and every little bit will count. I think that's not where most people are.
I just left a job at a major bank where all the non-engineer roles got paid, or at least could be paid more than I got. There were 5 pay scales for engineers, the top 2 of which weren't even being used. I got there from a freelance contract, and I had to take a serious pay cut to continue working on the project. It was a really cool project, which I wrote the initial prototype for, and guided a growing team in its development, and I accepted the pay cut because I loved the project so much, but a year later I left to go back to freelancing. I think that's the only way to get paid your worth here. Meanwhile the company is wondering why they can't retain senior engineers. If I wanted to be paid more, I'd have to take on more organisational duties outside my team, and I just wasn't interested in that, so I left. For an interesting freelance project that pays even more than that bank paid me when I freelanced for them.
It doesn't have to be 6 figures, but I think senior software engineers absolutely should be getting manager-level salaries, without having to dilute their technical focus by taking on other responsibilities.
The 1st was the real product, the 2nd the nice-to-have
Obviously core tech in banking is infinitely more critical than an app but the point is the same; the tech in banks, unless its 'quant', HFT or ML is not the money maker and therefore won't be paid as such
Of course for very specific high-value transactions, it may be useful to talk to someone, especially when it's something that also involves advice, but most people only do that kind of thing two times in their life: for mortgage and pension.
Modern banking does not function without the app (be it web or mobile).
Yes, there are some consumers for whom those everyday services are everything and they'll go to some 'app only' bank that does that well and without excessive fees. From the point of a traditional bank, that's not a problem, good riddance - if they don't use other products and aren't willing to pay excessive fees for everyday things, there's no money in having them as customers, and when they'll want to do something profitable (e.g. take a mortgage) they'll come back from that app-only bank as that product (the financial product, not the tech product) is actually competitive.
Note: this is from an EU viewpoint. USA may have a bit different perspective as the regulations there allow quite a lot revenue streams (e.g. bounced check fees) from people with no money and no other products, in EU much of exploitative payment practices have become restricted, so these customers simply become unprofitable and not really desired, the main value of "having them" is that this might help you sell profitable products to them later when they have more money and/or more plans for credit.
I've heard Goldman Sachs has attempted to make some strides in running their Marcus product more like a Silicon Valley tech company (within reason). But I've also heard that ultimately that it too fell prey to the burden of the old conservative bank culture. A friend who worked there until recently told me not to fall for the glitzy marketing, and that it was just all more of the same. Would be interested what someone who is actually working there now has to say, esp. someone that has worked in both SV tech companies and Goldman to compare.
>> ([..] most businesses these days) are driven by tech and would fall apart without it
Yup. It's like, is Coca-cola a "tech company with soda department"? Pretty sure they have programmers and some non-trivial IT infra as well.
At one bank, I was in a team that straddled the line between the international and domestic sections of the bank, which used to be more independent from each other, but we had to deal with both. Getting a simple firewall opened up between two systems on either side took 6 months.
[0] One bank that arguably took the tech company most seriously, wanted to be a bit too much on the cutting edge in my opinion. They were very active in the Angular community, which was absolutely great, but they also wanted to do CICD, which just didn't fit with all the security checks necessary at a bank. Parts were moving very fast, and parts were moving very slowly.
At that same bank, we also had a very clear mandate that we could say no to business. At some point, after we felt we put too much in production in rapid succession with insufficient testing, we had to block a next thing that a business guy really wanted to see in production. Really pissed him off, and he threw a tantrum I hadn't seen before or since at any workplace, but we insisted and our manager backed us up, so that was definitely good.
Meanwhile, IT is an internal "cost centre", a necessary evil, a bunch of resources preferably outsourced.
- Where/how do you (as a freelancer) find your clients? (Do you focus on clients from the financial industry?)
- Where are those clients from (location-wise)?
- Do you work remotely? If yes, does your timezone need to match your client's timezone? Put differently: How flexible are you when it comes to working hours?
My projects tend to be 1-2 years where I'm part of a team working on the same thing. A single client at a time.
My clients are mostly from Amsterdam, where I live. I want to be able to bike to work. Well, normally; these days I work from home, but we're in the same timezone and I work normal working hours.
Contractors are paid from the project budget (capex) and often don't have to go through the central HR department which allows projects to pay what they need to in order to attract the right people. We typically work alongside FTEs but we get "rolled off" projects as they ramp down at the end whereas the FTEs either stay on or get reassigned within the company.
For me, contracts typically last 1-3 years.
- I find my clients through my network of people I've worked with in the past
- My clients are usually based in Toronto like me
- I've been 100% remote since March 2020.
With respect to remote, my current client is trying to get people back to the office in a hybrid model. If they force it then I'll probably look elsewhere.
I'm always angered by these over-generalizations for the whole of Europe. Europe is not a single country with identical laws and working conditions but they differ wildly by borders.
The minimum amount of vacation days by EU law is 20 per year for every full-time worker in the EU but workers can get more based on union negotiations of each individual country or individual company perks that wish to attract talent.
In Austria, the norm is 25 paid vacation days a year for all full-time workers including tech workers. I rarely saw more that 25 days of vacation offered for tech workers here even at supposedly "top" companies which Austria doesn't have many of.
>paid overtime
Same for this. In Austria, most tech jobs don't pay overtime (thanks to shitty "all-in" contracts) but, factory style jobs with clocked shift-work do, since those are usually unionized and the metall workers union is one of the strongest in the country. Also many jobs, especially in public healthcare sector do a lot of unpaid overtime due to underfunding and staff shortages. In low-skilled jobs with high competition, like hospitality and cleaning services, unpaid overtime and your boss being abusive is pretty much the norm.
>Ah, and in some countries having too many companies on the CV isn't well seen
Gee, let me guess, hyper-conservative, 100-year-old German boomer companies(factories)? They're free to expect that, but staying 10+ years at the same company was good way-back-when there wasn't rampant inflation, and rampant real-estate prices, and a factory worker could support a family and buy a home from his income and he'd be employed till retirement and the company would always invest in his training. Those days are long-gone now thanks to globalization, offshoring of jobs and unrestricted immigration, so any company is happy to keep your wage growth below asset inflation levels as you loose out and the company wins as inflation is eating their loan paybacks and the salary they have to pay you, so the only way for you to claw back some of those losses is to job-hop (if you can).
And if you don't like it, there's nothing you can do about it if you don't have skills in high demand in a filed suffering from a shortage in your domain, as unlike the 1960's when even workers with basic education(high-school) had leverage, the company can now hire through a plethora of more candidates thanks to easy immigration, or offshore your job completely to a palace with less employee/environmental protection, while paying fuck-all in taxes through their shell company registered at a post-box in Luxembourg, basically depriving workers of most of their leverage they had in the past. That's why political parties on both extremes of the spectrum are seeing a resurgence in Europe. If we don't fix the rampant wealth inequality yesterday, we're gonna see political extremes and civil unrest growing stronger in Europe. Which is why I guess the EU nation states are so keen on gaining more surveillance powers and banning encryption, to make sure they stomp out any civil unrest before it happens.
The biggest perk we have in most EU countries is paid sick leave and health insurance if you lose your job. If your health ever declines and you end up loosing your job this is invaluable to not becoming homeless. Although many of those social benefits suffered cutbacks and receiving them became stricter in some countries after the 2008 recession.
Yes benefits are better in Europe, but not so much that you're better off earning $100k here than $200k in America.
Contract normally specify the paid leave excluding such Bank Holidays, so will be a minimum of 20. It is only the days above those 20 where the employer is giving one something extra.
Like I live in a European capital and am just below $100k after almost 8 years of experience.
We're just colonised by massive US corporations which ship the profits back to the US (and avoid as much tax as they can!).
We're colonized by the over-regulation that doesn't appreciate entrepreneurship and stifles innovation. That's why big tech almost never starts in Europe. For better or for worse.
The effect of immigration on wages is overblown.
If you have more people competing for the same job, then the wages go down, and vice-versa, the less potential employees you have, the higher the wages have to go to fill the position.
The supply/demands fraction is basic math. Are you saying math doesn't work?
That statement is pretty vague and pretty obvious on some levels but provides no concrete numbers and evidence that's generally applicable (basically it's easy to cherry pick some results and make generic claims afterwards that don't hold water).
I'm not pro-immigration and I'm not anti-immigration but I know math and personally experienced that whenever you have a lower supply of candidates then I have much more leverage for negotiations and better work conditions and have experienced the opposite, of employers being dicks due to over-supply of labor.
I therefore take those "research" findings with a generous train load of salt.
edit: sorry, just seen your edit. Care to elaborate why you think they are dismissible?
Also get knowledgeable about work law and have a legal insurance.
Even downgrading my example to how things go back home in Portugal versus DACH where I have been for the last 20 years, I would pick our conditions over FAANG salary without the social part.
Claiming everyone in Europe gets 30 vacation days when that's obviously false is not a stereotype, but a gross over exaggeration. Just because you get that perk doesn't magically make it true for the whole EU.
The standard is 20 days of holidays, although if you've been in the workforce for long enough (I think it's 10 years) or completed tertiary studies and worked for a few less years you'll get 26 days of holidays each year.
There is paid overtime with a maximum number of days and hours that you can work per year. Though in my industry some people end up chewing through that within the first few months. Things are better in this company for now.
As far as job hopping on the resume, I think the optimal thing to do is to hop every few years, but I don't see that as a negative.
* 25 paid days off (vacation)
* + 13 paid days (national holidays/bank holidays)
* + 1 personal paid day off (this is quite new)
* + 5-10 paid days off to care for a sick child
* + 1-3 paid days off for moving/wedding
* + up to 40 days paid sick leave (per case)
* + 40-80 days paid off for pregnant women (Mutterschutz)
* + some companies/contracts offer more than that
additionally to that you have:
* Karenz - up to two years maternity leave (paid, but capped)
* Bildungskarenz - up to one year education leave (paid, but capped)
* Arbeitslosengeld - unemployment insurance for at least six months, but up to 5 years (paid, but capped)
All this stuff does not depend on your employer. For some
(everything based on 5 day workweek)
We should build up our own European industry like we had with Linux, MySQL and Nokia, etc.
>Healthcare
That's definitely a you problem, the US is the outlier here.
>30 paid holidays
24. Based on 6 day workweek. So 20. More is optional.
>Unions, Paid overtime
Rarely are there Unions specifically for the IT department. Employers here like "Vertrauensarbeitszeit", which means count your own hours, which usually ends up with you doing more (unpaid) work.
>weekends and calls off work come extra
Also very much depends on the job, many people do it without asking for compensation. In one place just being on call got me a good extra 20% salary, in another they refused to pay for it and now it's "non-mandatory" - but they know someone will likely still pick up the phone.
>Retirement
Biggest scam in history. I get the need for such a programm, but I'll be getting maybe 10% of what I put in out. Fuck being a millennial I guess.
>Flex Time
Already said. Mostly a negative because your performance review will check if your projects, planned with way too little time, will be completed. At least that's the case in development teams. I stick to platform teams for this reason.
Quite a well known names do it.
Cherry picking a specific company/domains doesn't help your argument of "everyone in Europe has it so good".
Yeah, everyone knows IG metal in Germany has it good. Others? Maybe not so much.
In my current situation (UK) I have all the benefits you mentioned with none of the drawbacks, especially not the salary $60k salary cap (which I think is a misconception since some jobs I looked at during the whole Brexit fiasco were in Europe and paying closer to €90k).
They might if you're in a teacher's union, or working in some minimum-wage job with a mandatory union.
But for any high-paying position like software engineering your union is there to have your back if you're being screwed over on your employment contract, to bust the balls of employers who worked you for 41 hours, but only paid out 40 etc.
It's essentially a form of collective employment insurance for your industry, for which you'd pay a small monthly fee.
That, to me, shows that my salary is still well below the well off people in the city who can afford those houses (for an idea of what I'm talking about: houses in the more affordable areas around the city where you can get 20mins commutes or less, or even ride a bicycle to work, cost upwards of €700,000... with my current salary, the recommendation is that I shouldn't borrow more than €350,000 - around 4.5 times the yearly salary before taxes, so I need to first save around €350,000 or sell my current house and hope I'll make this much in return to be able to buy a house where I want... even then I would be playing with fire as interest rates are set to increase and any increase could get me just below water if I tried something like that). I would say that, given this, to be considered well off you need to make enough to be able to afford a house like I am talking about here, which would require you to probably earn at least €100,000 per year, which is well above my current pay and I don't know any companies here that pay this much for developers no matter how experienced (though I've heard it's possible - just never seen it concretely and never seen offers above 75,000).
But (in Western Europe at least) all jobs offer the same nice things: tons of vacation days, unions, paid overtime, healthcare. So switching jobs becomes only about: am I going to get significantly more money or not?
30 days PTO instead of 15 or 20 and being paid overtime instead of just being paid 3-5x as much with overtime being “included” isn’t obviously better to me.
Didn't the parent directly say that? Money not matering after a certain point means that it still matters before that point.
> People will absolutely leave your company if they think they can get paid more elsewhere.
Maybe you will. Maybe they won't. Everyone has his own bar for "enough" money. For some there is no such bar.
In my eyes, this is a good point.
Currently working in Latvia and getting a net salary of around 2k euros a month now - staying at the same company makes it increase by a few hundred euros per year. Actually provided more information in another comment of mine, compared some of the public sources for software dev salaries in the adjacent countries too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29595158
Also wrote about my savings and financial circumstances on my blog a while ago as well: https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/on-finances-and-savings
Thus, job hopping even for comparatively small increases is the smart thing to do, as well as looking for opportunities like side hustles and attempting to take advantage of a globalized economy that lends itself well to remote work (something that i'll inevitably need to explore once i'll have finished a pretty large enterprise migration and some pilot projects in my current place of work).
Now, my salary is still liveable and certainly better than those of who work for the local government, who receive about half of what i do (according to https://www-visasalgas-com.translate.goog/valsts-iestades?_x... which is a site that displays the published data per government org) and many other seemingly essential jobs (like teachers, medics, firemen, policemen all of which are comparatively underpaid). Even as a software dev, buying my own house anytime soon is unlikely, as is buying a new car, or many other luxuries that others take for granted.
In short: the original argument definitely holds true for those who are well compensated, but yours is also valid for those less so. Already, there is talk locally of not having enough engineers, especially in those aforementioned government jobs.
As a newly graduated CS student in Denmark I got a job earning $74k a year. I got warned by my union that my salary was on the low side and, come the first negotiation round of the year, I should ask for a larger raise than simply a yearly adjustment. And based on my union's numbers I don't think almost any developer is working for $60k or under in this country.
Indeed, the population of people who post on this board are very binomial, and it often causes blanket statements to be confusing to one side or the other.
Let's take Mountain View. Looking at "houses" and "townhouses" on Zillow, the cheapest one is this one[1] for $1,295,000. Zillow says the estimated monthly cost is $6,176. I don't think that's possible on a $100k salary once you factor in taxes. Zillow also says the rent "Zestimate" is $3,949/mo, so Zillow thinks it would be cheaper to rent than to buy. One hypothetical reason that renting could be cheaper than buying is that landlords buy for the expected price growth rather than just for the rental income.
> you're presumably living somewhere right now.
Maybe with roommate(s). If you buy 50% or 33% or 25% of a house with your roommate(s), that's not really $100k buying a house, that's $200k or $300k or $400k buying a house.
[1] https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/1993-Plymouth-St-APT-8-Mo...
Still, it's not "unusual" to outsource your job to somewhere cheaper: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-21043693
I'm personally in that boat, and frankly, I'm a little bored but not bored enough to go back to work as an SE full time. If companies offered more part time work and highly flexible work, it might be enough to drag me back in.
Even large six figure salaries just aren't enough money for the soul crushing reality of renting out my brain full time to solving someone else's problems now that I have enough.
Maybe a small subset. The median dev salary is $110k. So no, only a very small number are able to retire in their 30s.
If you have a high salary, you are probably living in a HCOL area.
If you have a low salary for the same kind of work, then you are probably living in a LCOL area.
The savings rates of these different individuals could be the same if the salary difference is proportional to the cost of living difference.
Earning (made up numbers because I don't even live in the USA and I don't know what is reasonable) $100k and spending half of it on rent with no hope of buying a house is still better than earning $50k in an area with much cheaper housing.
Of course if you can score a remote job then you can have the best of both worlds, but that isn't always possible (and some companies seem to pay differently based on your COL now).
However, today’s high inflation rates make all these computations iffy, and if you rely too much on inflation beating stock market returns, you won’t be able to ratchet down on risk as you get closer to your preferred early retirement date (a crash can dump you back in the workforce at a bad time). Also, many people in HCOLs don’t want to downgrade to LCOLs after they retire.
Too bad Medicare doesn’t transfer to low cost but nice southeast Asian countries.
Desirable places to retire like Santa Fe are already getting expensive.
Cheap private healthcare works for small things, but you are paying out of pocket for everything and if something big comes up you might not even be able to access the care you need. Guam might work instead, but they aren’t cheap and are pretty far away from anything.
Sorry, having lived in Mississippi for 4 years, that is not really true. Or I guess it depends on what you mean by "many", because there are many bad cheap places out there (e.g. Gary Indiana, Port Gibson Mississippi, Monroe Louisiana, ...). It also depends on what you mean by upgrade: many people like big city amenities (food and cultural options) and would see moving to the sticks as depressing, just like many would see the opposite (they love the country side, hate big cities).
Internationally, LCOL areas are generally in developing countries, and even a city like Bangkok will get expensive after awhile (though big cities in the west might get more expensive faster). It is still a trade off, many can't make (and many can, good for them).
Who can blame them? You can take your money to your grave, but what use is it then?
I for one don't want to live in a society that exclusively prioritizes now and doesn't sacrifice anything to plan for the future.
"A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they know they shall never sit."
I'd probably feel that way too. But I have to ask - how much thought have you really given it? I vaguely remember reading a surprising number of posts from HNW people that regretted not trying certain hobbies / activities when they were young enough fully enjoy them. That saying that no one on their deathbed says their biggest regret is that they didn't work harder, is probably a trope for a reason.
Do you really think you can save 90% of your income and retire after 3 years? This is terrible financial advice and completely ignores functions and changes in spending due to life events. Not to mention, I don't believe that function is legitimate depending on retirement age and current age combinations.
You certainly can if you make 5 million a year! Which means that absolute income is absolutely relevant.
The article you link to obviously makes it sound like it's an exclusive function. But it simply dismisses the fact that not everyone can reasonably sustain the savings rates mentioned.
Sure, there's reports of very motivated people that live on next to nothing and have a huge savings rate for the first 10 years of their working life, abstaining from everything including having a family and such. For the vast majority of people this is not something they can achieve and that is not taken into account by the 'simple math'.
I would agree with the author that having Starbucks coffee twice a day is not worth retiring later. I'd even give him Cable TV. But I'm not going to live like a hermit. Different people are on different places of this gradient. If I increase my take home pay, I can stay on the same savings rate as before and retire earlier (assuming that I don't want to make a certain percentage of my last pay during retirement and instead have a fixed goal for my retirement income).
I chose freedom. While my colleagues were living in fancy high rise apartments, buying new gaming rigs and cars, taking extravagant international vacations, and getting married and having kids, I was living in a basement studio with my college mattress on the floor and no car for several years while biking to work.
I'm retired and they're still slaving away with no end in sight.
No risk and sacrifice, no reward.
i have not met anyone yet who is married with kids but would have preferred an earlier retirement instead. kids are more expensive than all the other things combined that you listed - no amount of living in the basement or saving 30k on having no car is going to make up for that.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/m9vh8a/serious_p...
https://www.reddit.com/r/Parenting/comments/1wvx04/serious_d...
all parents go through difficult periods where they do regret not sleeping, or the work. but on the whole, the vast majority would not trade their kids for lonely family-less early retirement.
just because you found 10k comments on the internet doesnt imply this sentiment applies to 7bn people.
it's great that you'll have no regret about never having kids but instead have a ton of money and free time to spend on something else for 40 years.
No, but at least the parent provided some kind of source to back up their assertion. Where's yours? I don't think it's safe to assume "nearly everyone who has kids don't have regrets".
I went through a phase 5+ years ago where I was reading a lot about this sort of thing, and found that there are more people who regret having kids (entirely) than I would have expected, and way more people who regret the timing of when they had kids than I would have expected.
As the parent points out, it is very very taboo -- especially for a mother -- to admit this sort of thing, so we can expect this to be under-reported.
having one kid will delay any kind of FIRE strategy significantly for all but the top 0.01%.
the GP's argument is that people just dont have the willpower to make the necessary sacrifices to retire early...such as simply skipping having those pesky, retirement-draining offspring!
I have 2 daughters, I love them but in hindsight if I had to start over I don't think I would have kids. And it is not necessarily about the money. I realize I give up waaaay to much of my own needs and freedom. It may just be also about how I am. While many people will tell their kids to litterally go fuck themselves (well with different words) while they are watching football or leave them unattended while they go for a bicycle ride, I am one of those who will never say no when my daughters ask me to play or require assistance for some creative stuff. Yes I enjoy doing stuff with them but I'd rather go for a bicycle ride, play music or do carpentry. Thanksfully there are a few things we have in common, like playing basketball. Now that I am divorced and we share custody of the girls, it makes it feel somehow harder, as I can't just get away from my ex-wife. There is always something to negociate/organize. Thanksfully the pandemic has opened a lot of possibilities regarding work from home so I could change employer without having to move to another place but I'd rather use the remote work possibilities to become a digital nomad and travel all over the world. I would also be happy living in a camper moving from place to place every few weeks/months. Having kids while being separated from their mother makes it impossible.
This is one of my biggest fears.
And sure, Reddit is full of humans, but it's nowhere close to a representative sample of the populations. That should be clear as soon as you start reading.
You're only on this planet for a few years. You can only taste so much of the human experience. A huge part of the human experience is raising a child. Not experiencing it means leaving a big part of what's possible to experience on the table.
If it's a choice, and you choose, and you're secure in your life, and financially / emotionally / mentally stable, I think regret isn't likely.
FWIW, I'm completely with you on living below one's means. I don't think the math is as simple as the article makes it out to be. It's missing a few value functions that need to be taken into account that influence what savings rate are reasonably possible at various absolute salaries. Your value functions are different from mine though mine are much closer to yours than the ones your colleagues seem to have with a few key differences.
I'm with you on the fancy high rise. Strike that, nobody needs that. Basement studio with a mattress on the floor? Not worth the <$200 savings for a proper bed frame if you ask me. I've lived in a basement apartment for some years as well and it definitely wasn't bad at all. Very livable but it depends on where. One of my colleague's basement studio is not something I could've lived in. The house I now live in is the "cheapest house in the fanciest neighbourhood I can afford" (i.e. no, we did not buy a house at the top of what the bank would lend us).
I'll give you gaming rigs (and games) as well. I've never been a fan of consoles. Regular "business laptops" for not much money can run reasonably good games that are a few years older perfectly fine. And you get to pick and choose the good ones as you have a treasure trove of information from people that have already played them. I would add cell phones to this (and laptops/computers for that matter). Buy a generation or two behind the new fancy one and you're not worse off at all but save a ton of money. Nobody needs the newest iPhone or fancy MacBook.
(International) vacations is something that our value function would assign a relatively high value to. Can't do without. They aren't extravagant. Nobody's gonna get me to shell out 10k to go to Disney Land, sorry. But yes, we will spend the money to make memories together on a backpacking trip through some exotic country. Best ~500EUR flight and very cheap living costs while there that we ever spent. You can use simple math all you want to tell me how much earlier I could've retired if I had not spent the 500EUR and it won't change my mind.
Which brings me to the next value function: family. Definitely worth it. Even retiring later is worth having a family.
Of course, this starts from the assumption that work is inherently an undesirable activity and that conversely, pleasurable activities are incompatible w/ work. IMHO, it's not necessarily black and white: it's certainly possible to find satisfaction/fulfillment in one's work (to the extent that some people even choose to work despite not having the financial need to). Personally, I try to find alignment between being a "productive member of society" and deriving happiness from my efforts (both in terms of my work output as well as material gain). I'm sure much more can be said about the drivers of motivation as it relates to finding the meaning of one's life, and the whole thing about life being about the journey, rather than the destination.
In terms of financial independence, I'd be wary of the word "freedom". It can be quite the loaded term, in the sense that one could equally argue that greatly restricting expenditure is "slavery to a run rate", whereas a steady income and a more lavish budget is "liberating". For someone like me who seeks well-roundedness, loaded terms irk me. Though to be clear, I'm not criticizing one lifestyle over another; both FIRE and career-ladder lifestyles are perfectly fine life choices IMHO.
That would be extremely unwise - if your savings rate hasn't changed then that means your lifestyle has inflated, and so your fixed retirement income will be a bigger step down and harder to sustain. This isn't just theoretical - people set a retirement goal when they're young thinking they can live like a student, gradually get accustomed to a more comfortable lifestyle, and then get a pretty sharp shock when they try to retire early and realise they're not actually willing to go back to living like that.
The only way increasing your take home pay lets you retire earlier is if you use it to increase your savings rate, by not letting your lifestyle inflate proportionately.
Now as for your claim, I would agree that it is generally unwise to do that. It doesn't necessarily mean that your lifestyle has inflated in a bad way though.
If I make 50k with 10% savings rate (5k savings), single bread winner w/ a family of 2 and I get a raise to 55k, I will now save 6k w/ a 10% rate. The other 4k are used to finally be able to go to the museum with the kid, buy them some used skates so they can go skate in the park in winter whenever they want instead of renting skates once per winter etc. While I agree that this is "a lifestyle inflation" I wouldn't say it's one that affect the retirement in the way you mentioned.
Now if we are talking lotto winner kind of raise while keeping the savings rate at the exact same and low mark, I would totally agree with you. 50k w/ 10% gets a raise to 300k and starts behaving like the parent mentioned (fancy apartment, extravagant travel etc.) I completely agree with you.
But you don't have a counterexample, not unless you can show someone actually succeeding in retiring on a different savings rate. Plenty of people think they'll be happy to live more cheaply when they've retired, but experience suggests that this isn't actually true, which is what the article is going by.
> The other 4k are used to finally be able to go to the museum with the kid, buy them some used skates so they can go skate in the park in winter whenever they want instead of renting skates once per winter etc. While I agree that this is "a lifestyle inflation" I wouldn't say it's one that affect the retirement in the way you mentioned.
Of course it does. You get in the habit of buying things for the kid. You get in the habit of going to these places. (I don't think it's bad to spend money on things you enjoy, especially if what you enjoy is helping others, but it's important to be aware that it's extremely habit-forming).
Quoting myself:
an example to refute the absolute claim of the parent and the article that only the savings rate matters for when you will be able to retire. This one counter example disproved that.
not unless you can show someone actually succeeding [...] Plenty of people think they'll be happy to live more cheaply when they've retired [...] Of course it does. You get in the habit of buying things for the kid. You get in the habit of going to these places.
I'm not claiming how many people do and can do this. Just that it's absolutely possible. It's probably in the ballpark of people that can take 10 years of the beginning of their career to live so frugally that they retire at 32 with millions in the bank :)
This is very unlikely long term. Right now treasuries are 5% less then inflation. Lots of FIRE people are going to get shafted.
Your point may be that we should expect significant economic turmoil in the near- and medium-term, much more than "fluctuations", which may be true, or may not be. Impossible to predict the future.
Consider that the 2021 inflation rate is likely a symptom of COVID. Monthly inflation rates for the last few months of 2021 were trending downward. Hopefully we can expect inflation to get back to something approaching normal by the end of 2022. Even if it takes a couple more years, there's no reason to expect that 7% inflation is the norm going forward.
(Also consider that people who are doing FIRE certainly don't have much in treasuries. It's going to be mostly in stocks. That certainly carries other risks, of course.)
It's mostly a symptom of reckless monetary and fiscal policies.
> Monthly inflation rates for the last few months of 2021 were trending downward
It's the opposite if CPI is to be believed (which is a big if): https://www.bls.gov/charts/consumer-price-index/consumer-pri...
... as a result of the pandemic...
The US public will not tolerate sustained high inflation. Congresspeople and presidents who push monetary and fiscal policies that increase inflation (and nominate Fed leadership that do the same) will get voted out over time.
Saving rate is bounded above by your income. It's relevant.
I'd rather work 3 days a week until I'm dead then let my skills start deteriorating now and live the next 60 years in fear that my fixed income won't be able to sustain me.
I've got savings enough for fun projects or holiday's, and my 3 day job simply pays the rent/gas/electricity bills.
Sure, you might encounter a black swan event which force you out of retirement only 3 years after you started, and at that point your security margin won't have increased your stash by much, but at the same time your skill won't have deteriorated much in 3 years.
It also work even if the black swan even happens 20 years after your retirement. You just need to take a security margin your are comfortable with, and project how much you will have after 3, 10, 25 years to see how much you have for unforeseen events.
I would also love to work 3 days a week, but no employer I've encountered is interested in this.
- Pay roughly $30K in taxes - Spend $30K, which is close to the median American's individual expenditure - Invest the remaining $50K
At that rate, you can achieve lean FIRE in 15-20 years. So not quite mid-30s, but not far off.
Of course, in a high cost of living area, you might need to spend more than $30K, but you'd also make more than $110K. (For what it's worth, I lived in SF for several years and spent less than $30K annually.)
...in the country with the world's highest dev salaries.
And conversely, there's plenty of engineers who have kids (hence, very much not FIRE). The vast majority end up going down that route, in fact, at least in my experience.
I don't disagree with your overall point, but I don't think "number of FIRE bloggers who are engineers" is a good proxy for "number of FIRE people who are engineers".
Yea, but:
1. Do you want to die coding for someone else, on boring enterprisey stuff with bad project managers telling you what to do?
2. What if you physical or mental health degrades when you're older, and you simply can't?
Fixed it for you
That's cuz your numbers are too small. Offer a 50% raise instead of a 20k raise and you will see different results.
> Yes I could quit and get a ~20k raise by shopping my resume around, but I don't need the money
Plenty of stories on Blind of people shopping around and going from 150k TC to 350k TC, so I guess it really depends on your situation.
Also, those highly paid engineers in other companies might be tired of working on surveillance tech but aren't willing to stomach 50% pay cuts because your company is shooting for "market rate" compensation instead of market clearing compensation.
One way is to try switching from a regular industry job to a “giant” such as a FAANG. But these are quite rare in most countries.
Another way would be switching into specific industries like finance - but the high comp there traditionally means giving up some other things such as a guaranteed 40h-or-less workweek. Hard pass from many established engineers.
A third option would be switching to a larger share of non cash comp, but again, equity large bonuses are not commonly part of European comp and comp in traditional industry.
I think most people of working age now have been part of the individualism movement, which leaves us pretty ill-prepared to deal with the feelings of discontent when we finally succeed at "getting ours" and realize it wasn't all that fulfilling. Solving problems that matter to the community you live in, or the greater society you're part of, has so much more intrinsic reward.
It is now internalised, a strong demotivation happens each time something abstract comes my way, no matter how technically exciting the task is. Something else wroth mentioning, the whole remote work somewhat becomes also a factor against content to be part of a labor community. It's not an issue the first few years, but total remote work for over 5 years has started to make me value proximity to business circles. proximity with my colleagues and proximity with who use whatever we make. there is a sort of guilt that builds up when benefiting from the hard work of the local community to provide physical services (coffee shops, organic food markets, drivers, etc) and have our time spent online contributing to solutions with colleagues and paying users residing thousands of miles away, who only appear to exist as email addresses and occasional faces/voices spit out by a laptop.
> 3. Some degree of repeatability in work environment.
Instead of the above point, I am looking for...
A place where I make greater impact in a small company working along side ethical people who are not trying to exploit their customers/consumers, rather than a FAAMG where you're replaceable within a few days and follow no ethics just revenue in mind...
A place where managers are accommodating of suggestions just because I write code doesn't mean my ideas about the product/solution aren't worth listening to...
A place where you admire or atleast respect the CEO and the company's business tactics instead of my ex-company whose past CEO is now an "astronaut" just to play a marketing gimmick I guess... :p
Please connect with me if you consider your startup/company is one such place... ;)
Now I’m in a very adversarial relationship with my manager who seems to think $100k is insane compensation, he’s owed the world, and my senior status means I should just know internal processes and make me immune to debugging headaches.
In the past when people struggled with tooling/debugging that was just the way the cookie crumbled. There was sympathy and understanding. Now I work with a jackass that just assumes someone is screwing up, and lashes out at people when things aren’t going well.
If the money is the same, I'll happily take learning a new skillset, a new org, a new set of expectations. When I had not accumulated enough money early in my career, I consciously had to think about stable income. Now that I have accumulated non-trivial sum of money, I'd happily and readily take new and exciting challenges - i.e. I can take more risks as I can afford to, and I'm willing to take more risks for non-monetary reasons. And if the money is better, even better! Thus, in fact, that's exactly what I did in 2021 - I switched my job.
clearly you've never been poor.
even a poor person can tell you that an extra $10M in their pocket will be no more life-changing than an extra $1M.
if you were previously living on streets and frequently going hungry, then you can likely sustain yourself very well still without working. 1M translates to 27 years at $3k/month expenses. if you chose to supplement that with work, you can easily double that runway.
obviously it's not the same as $10M, which would allow you and your children to never work again, but jump between that and no food/no shelter is not as significant. for those who already have financial stability, $1M only serves as a safety net or retirement fund and cannot act as an early retirement plan without significant cutbacks, so the jump from 1->10 is significant. in the same way that 10M->100M extra income for Bezos is not gonna change much.
All the things you mention matter to me, but I added 50% to my salary on my first jump, then another 110% on my second. All in just over a year.
Money is still my primary driver. It will be until I am fully financially independent. Not just able to live on a FIRE budget of $30k a year, but able to chase my own fairly expensive interests.
You're right, I'm not going to leave for another $10k, but another $100k, sure, and right now that's not that difficult to achieve.
I don't know... as soon as you do the stability of an existing job seems more compelling.
> For many engineers, the answer is: “No.” Yes I could quit and get a ~20k raise by shopping my resume around, but I don't need the money.
Would you feel the same if you were enticed to switch jobs with offers of 1.5x, 2x or more than what you're currently making?
I think plenty of people would consider leaving their current employer, even with the headaches that comes with doing so, to make 50% to 100%+ over their current compensation package. I know I would.
I agree that engineers might not jump ship for a $10k increase in income, and it seems to me that the market rate for engineers based on current demand isn't captured by offers of $10k to $20k above current salaries. That would suggest that if employers are truly that desperate for engineers, like they say they are, then they'd need to offer more money to outbid their competitors' offers.
Truthfully, I have a feeling that many employers' choices of not offering larger compensation packages to potential employees don't stem not a rational economic choice, but from a feeling that such offers are "too much" for engineers. Some companies would rather not hire, and make less money, than hire new employees at their market rates and profit from their work.
Oh no! You don't code in lang $x, but know 12 other languages? Clearly, you're not a fit for this job!
When you are out of school a change of 1000€ per year means nicer vacation. Go for it.
The same 1000€ is something I would not even consider. I am at a plateau where it requires significantly more money to change your way of life, and the 1000€ would not be perceptible.
Maybe that of you add the "retire early" part it may make sense to optimize your income, but it is too late for me anyway.
I dunno... maybe for hotshot FAANG jobs?
I mean, I love where I work now, but if some company were to offer me 250k to jump ship, I'd be MIGHTY tempted!
Not to mention how much effort has to be put into the interview process, my time is worth money, I'm not giving away minimum 6 hours of it for free if I don't need to.
Money just needs to be enough. After that you have enrich the job sufficient to hook people in.
Perhaps the first thing a business needs to do before it starts hiring is learn how to hire.
That's a moving target though, if your market value changed and you could now easily get +50%, your current comp won't be enough anymore.
I've never seen in the eurozone the US-style crazy-high 100k+ salaries. In general, here an IT engineer hired fulltime fetches a rate which is comparable to many other regular jobs, and generally lower than other engineering positions. However the churn and stress is much, much higher in my career experience. We joke about JS, but almost everything around the IT has now super-fast refresh cycles which require never-ending honing of your skills just for the sake of it.
That initial candidate surplus is now starting to age and drain. These CS candidates have now a decades-old experience in the current tech stack which is worth gold, but are also tired of the churn. You can still get them, but be prepared to pay them a lot more. Many companies which were founded on entry-level salaries will now see their workforce explode in cost. This is going to be huge with the current inflation in the next 2-5 years, where your average company raise won't cut anymore and you're forced to jump ship to maintain your purchasing power.
The young talent is still there of course, but it's often more specialized than what I remember a few decades ago due to the growth of the field. This means that finding a good fit reduces your pool significantly, unless you accept your candidate will be learning for a long time.
> For many engineers, the answer is: “No.”
> Yes I could quit and get a ~20k raise by shopping my resume around, but I don't need the money. I have enough for a down payment on a house, I meet my expenses for the month with 1/2 of one paycheck, I can buy a new car on a credit card if I wanted to.
This entire thread is mind-blowingly backwards though it totally explains why we the industry is in this position. It starts with people saying that "they don't need more money" because they can borrow or they can $20k more by shopping around their resume if they need to, followed by people waxing about how $50k-$80k is a decent salary, followed by people saying "no one gets paid $250k out of college"
It is very simple: $20k extra over a period of 52 weeks is extra $384 per week, which is less than extra $10 an hour.
Here's why you cannot hire engineers: you are not paying them enough money.
Engineer: $55k is good if i have <blah blah blah>
Someone who wants to hire him and has no toys: $80k
Engineer: I guess but only if I get to work only really cool projects
Someone who wants to hire him and has shitty projects: $100k
Engineer: And I want to have super smart people working with me
Someone who wants to hire him and does not have smart people as he wants to build a team around this kind of engineer: $150k
Engineer: Yeah, i guess it will work.
Someone who wants to hire him and does not want him to shop around: $170k
Engineer: hell yes! I'm going to unshitty these projects and make people around me smart!
Oh, you don't want to pay $170k/year for an engineer because you think those plebeians should be working for $55k? Well, that's your problem.
P.S. Can't hire at $170k/year? Offer $220/k.
P.P.S. $10k/year is not a raise.
I would be genuinely amazed if you couldn't fill your positions once you started offering upwards of $1.5m yearly.
Extra X a year for a couple of year? No.
Extra X a year for the rest of your working life? Yes.
Consider that some employers anchor salaries to previous salaries ala "we won't pay you more than Y more than your previous salary" - so any raise represents an increase in all future offers.
So despite the downsides, working for a couple of years under a new salary has essentially increased your worth in the eyes of the market.
Not too long ago, I was at a Very Large Tech Firm. Base pay was great, and the RSUs were really great. I ended up leaving for a smaller company where IT is considered a cost center. The tech stack isn't all that exciting, total comp is a significant step down, and the only way to stay here and get a substantial raise is to get promoted... but I get along well with the people there, and I don't have to worry about off-hours emergencies. The only companies that might be willing to offer enough for me to take the jump away from that, would likely be a well-capitalized tech firm, of which few have a physical presence here.
True. But... When I hear "Best year ever!" But then hear, "Sorry, we can't give more than 3% raises". Someone is getting theirs. I want mine, too! I helped make this the best year ever, in very substantial ways.
I'd move jobs if someone I knew and liked through my network wanted to hire me for the right job for a nice increase, but the idea of taking a +20k job with some random boss I have never seen under pressure or on a bad day--no way.
Taking a job when you are older is like buying a house without an inspection--you better really know and like the bones. Who you work for is the #1 factor for me. Nothing worse than hitting 50 and having some hateful blowhard breathing down your neck. Stress just sucks in your 20s and 30s, it can kill in your 40s and 50s.
1. The TC is a lot higher, like 1.5-2x.
2. They don't have to move; or they do want to move, just not for a job.
It doesn't matter that the work is boring (really fungible cog low-impact stuff). It doesn't matter if the colleagues are meh. It doesn't matter if the company has a reputation for lay-offs/churn/etc. If you have those two items above, you'll likely have a good hiring success rate.
Even stronger: many of the "fads" (like cool programming languages, toolkits, frameworks, etc.), moral/virtue-discussions du jour (like hating on: FB, crypto, commercial spying apparatus, AMZN work conditions, etc.), etc. also don't appear matter in the large. Someone boycotting AMZN one day will be happy to accept a very healthy salary + benefits package writing legacy Java 6 backend code if it means a good double- or triple-digit percentage in compensatory promotion.
For this thread, I just asked an extremely talented programmer ex-colleague (Linux kernel hacker, expert at C) how his job is at Oracle and why he chose it:
> Ex-Colleague: Funny you ask, because I was stuck on-call over the holidays. I'm basically a plebe to Larry Enterprises. Mostly that and having a side gig. Not writing any cool code for sure.
> Me: Why not go elsewhere where things are a little more interesting for you? You have no shortage of talent.
> Ex-Colleague: Pay is great. Not a lot going on. Not a lot of fuss on the job. I easily own a house and pay a mortgage and have a lot left over. Definitely put in less than 9-5 worth of effort. Probably can retire early at this rate.
This type of attitude doesn't appear to be so uncommon, at least among people I know.
In my case for the company I hire for: Extreme stability (check; been around and stable for ~60 years), excellent work-life balance (check), really cool work (check; cutting edge research and engineering), and really good and diverse colleagues (check; gender balance and representation, stable personalities, highly interdisciplinary skills, sometimes world renowned), open-source and conferences (check), education and 20%-of-9-to-5 time benefits (check). Those things may matter to some extent, but contrary to the article, they don't seem matter as much as an extra $50k to $250k pretax compensation in the bank and being able to do so from a low CoL area at your comfort.
The good news for me at least is that we aren't a mega-growth-kind of company, so we can take our time. Ultimately the candidate that values the above does find us (or we them), considers it a dream job, and tends to stay for 5-25 years.
Compensation, WLB, and benefits matter FAR FAR more for the majority of people than "good projects" or "smart colleagues". If you want those and can't get it in your job, well that's what open source work is for.
So if I'm looking to jump...well, either my current environment isn't great, or the salary is enough to attract me. There is no situation where my current environment is good, and you offer me a salary comparable to what I'm making, and I would make the jump, because you are a -complete unknown-.
So you can talk to me about the brilliance of my colleagues, the amazing projects, the great work/life balance, the autonomy to work on what matters in the most efficient way possible...and all of that might be true. Or it might not be. I've been lied to by hiring managers in the past, both intentionally and unintentionally. But ultimately the only thing I can truly rely on, that is protected by law, is compensation.
In some countries, the working time is also protected by law, hence your hourly wage as well, which makes it easier to compare offers. Too many people focus on the TC without realizing that working 2x the time for 1.5x the pay is often not worth it.
Those are very very good for retaining people you already have though, so while not super important for hiring they are important for keeping the folks you hired (after all, what is the point if you keep losing people you hire).
> If you want those and can't get it in your job, well that's what open source work is for.
Not necessarily. If your area of interest aligns with your work then even open source work is more productive if you have a use case for it. For example - say my interest is distributed systems, then technically my work will have more impact if it is being used on large clusters with large number of concurrent systems. Open source does not happen in vacuum.
Trust me - among people who can get those jobs - they are getting less views. Of the people I know in SV - and I know a few - all have very unfavorable views of Amazon and working there. People only take it as a stepping stone or last resort. The top experienced candidates who are able to get offers from most companies are not going to Amazon these days. I haven't seen any of the people I know who are good engineers go to Amazon. And - I mean - I am with them. I am at a place that is known to work their engineers to death as well and I'm getting too much shit thrown down at me. But I'm here because I needed this as a stepping stone for rep before I can find a better place that'll let me coast as a staff eng instead of churning through one hellish startup one after another.
I politely say no every time not giving any reason other than I don't want to relocate for the job, but the reality is I don't want to either work at that company due to the horrible things they are doing or the horrible reputation of the working environment.
I've asked other engineers if they have similar requests and they do and the reject for the same reasons I do.
Not exactly on your schedule though.
I make... nowhere near 300k-500k. But I got decently lucky with a startup earlier in my career. And a bit later I got some hefty bonuses at another company.
But that hasn't really happened the last, say, 8 years. If I kept hitting that luck, I could have been around 500k/year average total comp. But I didn't and I'm not in the 300k+ club.
You suck at interviewing, you suck at applying to high-paying jobs, or you don’t live near high-paying jobs.
But you’ve been complaining about your job for months and you’re still there. And you talk about all other jobs like they’re beneath you.
Source? I haven't said any jobs are beneath me.
"only make it easier for you"
Basically what I'm saying - I don't suck at interviewing etc. There aren't many high paying jobs in my area. I do just generally suck.
I don't think you need to be a master to get more money. What I have noticed as a hiring manager/tech lead is candidates/team members fall into either asking for more money or not.
I have guys on my team who if they asked for money I could easily add 20 - 50k to their salary. But they don't, they also don't shop themselves about. They're low risk of jumping ship and if they do, I can offer them a huge amount to stay or with the savings I have made over the years I can replace them at market rates, suffer the disruption of introducing a new team member and still be ahead.
I luckily learnt early on the best thing to do for your career is just ask for more money. Every 6 months I ask for a pay rise. I don't always get it and if I don't I ask 'what do I need to do get more money'. Your boss should be able to tell you what you need to do to justify another 10 - 20k to your salary
This is more or less difficult depending on the company. In a few cases, I had to go to war with HR to get a deserving employee a raise who deserved it but hadn't asked for it. Other companies have processes that are highly amenable to it.
In many cases, if employees have to ask for more money when they've earned it then it is a management failure.
It bothers me to see a coworker getting underpaid just because they have certain personality traits (that are unrelated to their actual work).
I will be less likely to stay at such a place, even if for me personally the pay is fine.
If a manager is just plainly average at their job, then they'll probably prioritize what is very clearly and evidently an issue/task for them to do, which is usually what their boss is asking them to do, for better or for worse.
So it's not that a manager is being deeply unethical and withholding promotion potential because they're evil, they just may not see it as a priority among everything else they have to do, especially if the subordinate in question appears happy and fulfilled.
I agree with some others here. To really ensure you're being paid fairly as an employee, you do have to normalize making it a discussion with your boss. If it's a priority for you, it'll more likely be a priority for them, assuming they look at you in favorable light.
Give them a raise, proactively.
A few decades ago I started working at a place where a couple of really talented people had never asked for a raise. I negotiated indirectly by talking about better opportunities and head hunters with my boss as well as asking for more pay. I got it every year. After a couple of years someone asked me what I was making and it turned out I was making a significantly amount more money than a lot of the senior staff members.
This was very nice for the budgets, but it eventually lead to everyone important to the department finding new jobs over a period of five years. When I stated it was a great place to work with really talented people, when I left it wasn’t because the talent had left and management had a really hard time convincing their managers that they needed to up the starting wages, because the budget had been just fine for so long.
This is very anecdotal of course, but underpaying technicians for years can be a very dangerous strategy under the right circumstances.
and the talented, who are focused on their craft - will feel that the company will take care of them _as a matter of course_.
If the talent feels a Quality of Life upgrading process is met - then they will stop wondering how green the grass is somewhere else. Then and only then will the business be ready to foster a culture of mentorship, collaboration, and documentation from Senior to Junior.
It makes me very sad to see a junior developer I had taken onto my team at my last company 3 years ago - a budding talent in systems who didn't know how to ask for help - is still considered a "junior developer." if you don't know how to give people hope don't be surprised if they're hopeless.
Unlikely these are the same people tbh
It could be that their disdain for AMZN was disingenuous virtue-signaling (supporting your thesis), or it could mean the money is just simply the trump card to their personal ethics (supporting my thesis).
Also, are they working on Java 6?
These are important questions because Amazon pays 300K for Rust. That seems like a combo that makes folks wonder maybe let's give them a shot, right?
So you could always go to another company competing with them for talent with a given offer and (assuming you performed well enough to justify it) you'd have no problem getting something similar. If there was a gap in comp after that you'd be talking single digit percentages, nothing near 3x.
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For most people in my circles Amazon is no longer a realistic choice for anything than using as a competing offer at a place like Google (which is known to lowball you without a competing offer).
And it's not even a philosophical or moral issue: Amazon just has a terrible reputation now due to URA/Focus shenanigans, on-call nightmare stories, etc... why go with the "worst-in-class" employer?
If you're good enough to get Amazon to give you some band busting offer, some other FAANG company likely will too and you just go with them. Amazon doesn't even have exciting work or prestige compared to the others anyways, so it's not like you're giving up some intangible benefit...
It could be argued that $180k is not a fair number to judge a 3x increase on for the reason you state, but it is what it is, this is a real salary that real people get paid. Not everybody flocks to FAANG as their first career move.
You don't have to already be working at one.
In fact a good number of companies are likely to be closer to 550k/year than 180k since they're also aware they need to compete with FAANG offers.
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Meanwhile Amazon is not particularly easier to join than the rest of FAANG (modulo the specific team), they're not particularly more prestigious than the rest of FAANG, the work is not particularly more exciting than the rest of FAANG... meanwhile the culture aspect is a huge negative outlier.
Amazon almost has this cartoonish level of negativity hovering over it ever since things like URA and Focus have slowly come out to actually as real things... between all that and the on-call and the general work you'll be doing, it's just not an amazing choice.
Turns out financial + lifestyle security is a good antiethical motivator
A 3rd factor for me however has always been the tech stack. Engineers I recruit are keenly aware that if they get stuck in a non-modern or too-modern tech stack that it could hurt their future career opportunities.
You can’t just contribute to open source and reach a high level, at least not very quickly very often. They want to jump into a high growth company and contribute to large interesting apps / services that get used in production. Open source is great, but on a resume, it’s nothing like saying you launched an app that handles millions of dollars in transactions, or billions of API requests.
Most of my colleagues have children or grand-children, and have been working here for at least 10 years.
Many, many middle aged people with families actually say they prefer the office because it's impossible to get any work done at home with 4 kids. That may be a consequence of their home or their family, but it's what I hear very frequently. In any case, we have a WFH policy, so we are very flexible and accommodating to family needs.
Statistically, fresh college grads vying for excellent resume decor aren't attracted to stability, 401k's, etc. So we see proportionally fewer.
The kids are supposed to be at school pretty much during the same office hours, so I am not sure what you mean. There may be more or less 1 hour of overlap in the morning and late afternoon but that's about it. Morning is usually the times I go through my emails and schedules so I can do that while the kids are taking breakfast and preparing themselves, when they come back home I give them a snack and ask them to do their homework. Sure there is the occasionnal arguig between each other but that is only covering a tiny fraction of my work time. I definitely trade that tiny parenting time against commuting time and I'd rather be at home than finding out they burned the house while I was at the office.
The gilded cage.
As you get older, you have seem to have less time. It's some sort of biological illusion, but having to spend time prepping for interviews, running your life, family and so on, means the incentive to move from a very comfortable job to another has to be a lot more than when you were in your 20s.
Sure if you pay me twice my current salary, I will probably do whatever you ask me to without complaint. But around here such a big pay increase would be a fantasy.
I'd say 20% is more likely and considered significant.
The mythical 50-100% pay bump can happen if you’re making the leap from some local, no-name small business to a FAANG type job, but it’s not like you can continue repeating that over and over again. It’s kind of a one-time leap that people make from average jobs to top paying jobs. Going into the $500K type jobs isn’t as automatic as people here like to make it sound, unless you’re looking at people who started at rocket ship startups before the stock took off. Even those engineers struggle to get back to those compensation levels when the dust settles and their RSUs go back to normal.
It’s also not as common to find remote work combined with sky-high salaries as HN suggests some times. While I do know a lot of people with remote FAANG jobs, it wasn’t easy. Basically years of working their way specifically into those positions with hard work and building a reputation to warrant it.
This _used_ to be true. Post-Covid, many (all?) FAANGs offer remote to almost anyone requesting it.
It's my case too. I worked until 40 with a great job doing cool things, with a lot of free time. I'm not materialistic at all, don't care about wealth, social status and stuff. Yet, I started worrying for my retirement and savings, wasn't able to buy a house. Now I work for a FAANG for 5 times my previous salary. It's not easy, I don't always adhere to the company's values, oncalls suck, it's a lot about patching broken systems I didn't build. But money is important.
Basically, my job requires using a lot of tools and technology and processes created by other people, but none of those tools are easy to use or well documented. In order to get stuff done you have to have a social network of people who know how to do the things you need to do, and know all the secret tricks. The right environment variables to set. The right arguments to pass to simulators. How to find the important bit of data buried webapp developed by people who apparently like to invent new words for old concepts. I get a lot of terse autogenerated emails that probably mean something to somebody, but not to me, and don't have human return addresses or really any way to discern the context of where they came from or why. A lot of tools use domain-specific configuration languages that are usually just python scripts that call a bunch of functions that are defined elsewhere and have no documentation.
These things might be reasonable in a startup with a dozen people, but we have over a hundred thousand. My opinion is that once an organization is a certain size, everything really needs to be written down and easily accessible. I shouldn't have to regularly ask people how to do basic things, it should be on a wiki. If it's complicated, it should be in a training video, or a user manual.
Technological + organizational debt?
In the open source world, I've developed a large low quality codebase that is very complex from when I was less experienced. This project has gotten plenty of contributions over the years, some from less experienced and some from more experienced.
The experienced developers know how to get around the codebase, but the lesser experienced ones tend to complain about quality. I see this in the workplace as well.
I had this exact same issue when I was less experienced. New codebases was very difficult to understand, but now that I've been through a lot of them in various languages and quality, it's not as bad as it used to be.
I guess the argument here from the business point of view is that we write code for the less experienced? In a way this makes sense, but paradoxically some complex codebases that I thought was messy in the past have become more elegant today as I've gained more experience.
Meanwhile the newer, less experienced developers probably still have a bit of... let's say naive optimism, and try to give feedback more.
The inexperienced developers in my case have not contributed much, but rather complained in other channels. (it's game related, the community is on discord, in game, etc)
write code for the center of the bell curve (at your organization). the bottom will never understand anything, the top understands it all. You need to make the majority in the middle be comfortable.
that means slowly bringing in new language features, as they become widely known and practiced.
Your code practices will probably resonate differently on each of those groups, so you will probably have to choose. And I don't think there's a generic correct choice like you imply.
Also, by how much are people even capable of choosing the (required) expertise level of the code they create? I'm not sure we can deviate a lot from our natural level.
it is possible to go down in expertise, but not up. sometimes "fortran in any language" can be a viable approach depending...
note i didn't say a the best approach.
All in all, this strongly reminds me of the "Collapse of Civilization" described by Jonathan Blow: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko
More money does not compensate for this. I thought it would when I interviewing a few months ago (50% salary increase). I was wrong.
This %100. Automate all the things, but for any part of the process that cannot be automated/scripted, write it down. And don't just put it in some random Google Doc or Sharepoint where it is lost forever in the ether. Put it in a README that lives with the code or have a shared Wiki for the team. It need to be somewhere that is generally available, searchable, version controlled, and easy to update.
Otherwise you're setting your company up for a miniature re-enactment of the Butlerian Jihad at some point in the future.
So, even if you have everything 100% automated, most people will look at that and conclude that your automation is complex legacy bullshit and you should have automated in some other way.
Just saying.
there's your problem.
Maybe "Institutional Complexity"?
Some degree of complexity is intrinsic to the problem domain, but it's the incidental complexity that emerges as a thoughtless side-effects of other efforts that is the most annoying, especially when it compounds.
To flip your comment on it's head... Some of my most satisfying projects have been the ones that eliminated this type of complexity where I work, because they improved the quality of life of everyone I work with and gradually remove all but the necessary work. However because these things are usually difficult to isolate and deeply engrained, this is only usually possible once you've gained enough trust and autonomy, which I suppose makes it a hard sell for a new job.
It's for similar reason that I like to keep unreliable dependencies to a very strict minimum. I can rely on my compiler, my editor, my OS, and to a lesser extent a bunch of extremely popular libraries. But as soon as we get to internal tools & processes or obscure third party libraries, certainty goes downhill very quickly.
Plus business won't put in the budget necessary for practically no change from their point of view.
Dumpster fire doesn't even begin to describe the outcome.
There was always this strange spooky-leftpad-at-a-distance thing where stuff just kept inexplicably breaking, and nobody ever quite knew what had gone wrong, who to talk to, or when it was gonna get fixed.
Fortunately, that’s often me (a supervisor), so I get to be self-deprecating when conveying this requirement.
It doesn't necessarily imply or require stupidity, but in my experience on both sides of it (writing docs now, and having been that intern), they actually make pretty great litmus tests for documentation and how accessible organizational knowledge is.
To me, what it sounds like you are describing is the developer experience. Or "devX".
Here's the root cause of your bug:
> Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
> Working software over comprehensive documentation
I remember when my employer adopted agile. One of the first things they did was lay off their team of technical writers.
Also you wasting your time flailing about probably makes some manager's budget numbers look good, because they got to "save" the money that would have prevented you from flailing about.
Hang on, don't blame the agile manifesto here. Blame the management that adopted the agile manifesto as "do all the exact same things we used to do that didn't work, but call it 'agile'".
I totally can, and will. It's on them if they popularized slogans that can be too-easily misunderstood. That's meant that agile, in several respects, has been an exercise of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
> Blame the management that adopted the agile manifesto as "do all the exact same things we used to do that didn't work, but call it 'agile'".
That's clearly not what my employer did.
We’re now at a point where the widespread and rampant destruction that’s been wrought in the name of agile is so bad that it’s not reasonable to say “oh you’re not doing it properly”.
That excuse could be used to avoid responsibility for literally anything.
Hype bros use that to defend token scams (“you just don’t get it”).
There’s an increasing mountain of evidence that shows agile just doesn’t work, makes things actively worse by forcing the creation and then concealment by neglect of engineering problems, and (as discussed above) actively reduces documentation so that agile cheerleaders can pin their incompetence on the engineers that inherit their mess when they cruise on up the ladder oblivious of their failures.
All of this and not a shred of empirical evidence, ever, that it actually achieves anything other than obscuring management stupidity.
Do you have any keywords I can search for to find this evidence?
I haven’t looked at in in ~4 years, but the Project Management Institute (PMI) used to publish some reports based on surveys that said ~70% of corporate projects fail. I am interested in comparing the evidence you’ve seen with the evidence the PMI has put together.
Edit: I think the language is “70% of projects fail to realize the planned benefits”
I haven’t looked at it in years, so I could be way off. I believe that projects that are completed 2 weeks late are classified as failures the same way a project that is abandoned half way through is.
If I hear that damn mantra again, I'm going to puke. Xtreme Programming had it right If you aren't writing the damn manual, you aren't delivering an entire dimension of product to your user.
I sat down a little while ago to an old 80's handheld digital business organizer. The device itself was meh.
The manual tho! My God, I'd forgotten what it was like to read a primer on a product that had actually had some effort put into it. People think UX replaces training/SOP's/manuals, and it really doesn't. Your manual is how you mass produce user expertise. Your manual, at least by consumer's opinion is the difference between Yet Another Agile Heap Of Kludged API's and Business Processes and a truly coherent whole.
The problem with most Agile extremists though, is they never take Minimum viable documentation to heart. Or they completely externalize the cost of clear, complete communication to the User. If I had to put my finger on why, it would be because Engineering spends too much time writing and not enough time using their code outside of bench testing.
This isolates from the consequences of poor decisions; and prevents people from facing the One Great Problem of Humanity: Communication.
But... you're not doing it right. Like, not at all. Where on earth do you get "don't provide user manuals" from the agile manifesto?
> But... you're not doing it right. Like, not at all.
Nope, sorry. You can't honestly say someone's doing it wrong, especially when "it" is defined so vaguely, or when "doing it wrong" seems to emerge from the document at least as much as "doing it right," if not more so.
> Where on earth do you get "don't provide user manuals" from the agile manifesto?
Where do you get "provide user manuals" from the agile manifesto"? The problem is that it's most easily read as a rejection of documentation, in general.
That fault lies with the manifesto.
> Working software over comprehensive documentation
and use it as a reason not to do documentation at all. It's ambiguous, and can clearly be read as "you should not work on documentation when there is software to work on", and there's always software to work on.
I used to run public community driven online video game servers in a different era and they were quite popular, sometimes the most active/hearts in their communities. One thing I always struggled with was writing down rules for player behavior on the servers. Once I write a rule it does two things: establishes what NOT to do explicitly, but opens a huge gray area of what isn't explicitly defined that can be done or opens up a subjective gray area that shouldn't be done but is not clearly defined. I now have to enumerate everything I don't want people to do which may be a massive list if you want clarity and no ambiguity. People get creative, always, and find new undesirable behaviors within your rule framework.
In the end, when you write some base rules, the only real solution is to continually ammend the bounds of your rule system over time to adapt and adapt, leaving less surface area to attack. This is why the US legal system is so darn complex. Basic constitional laws are established, some explicit don'ts, some explicit dos, and everything missing becomes questionable. I didn't want to do this on a video game server because... it's a video game server, nor did I have the time. I instead took the "it's private property and I am the tyrrant approach" and wrote a very simple rule to play with etiquette, then ruled over the server benevolently (at least I think so, joining anonymously for occasional sampling to adjust some server settings I found being abused and never banning people just because they were unenjoyable to play with) and it worked well. The servers remained the most popular servers.
The agile manifesto never adapted and business leadership is who calls the shots. A culture said let's adopt this and businesses said ok, sure, then this is how we're going to interpret these poorly defined bounds. You said this is what you wanted and everyone agrees so here you go. For the US constitution, vagueness and broadness works well because it was designed to be a living, extendable, changeable document. The agile manifesto is not. Given how well businesses skirt around the meaning of law to do legally, ethically, and morally questionable practices, what hope does some silly manifesto with no teeth someone writes have? Business rule as small little hierarchical dictatorships with tyrants ontop within a democracy and I've found the characteristics that compose leadership is often the opposite of benevolence. Be careful what you ask for in such environments, your requests will be twisted against you.
His problem, as with all these types of things, is management. Of all people, we here on this forum ought to be able to call a spade a spade. But even we fall victim to blaming the process or the tool. Over and over again, the problem is management, and we should call it out.
The biggest problem with large corporations is managers who sacrifice long-term company success for short-term personal success. Smaller corporations can often get rid of such managers, but past a certain size -- and that's not really very large -- bad managers can become entrenched as they hire and/or promote sycophants to prop up their power plays. I have 27 years in the blue-chip Fortune 250 world, and I've seen it over and over and over again.
We're going to have to change large parts of the tax code in order to fix this problem, so that companies do NOT get a tax break by giving stock options as compensation. Until that is no longer the case, you will have people -- and rightfully so -- deliberately and predictably responding to huge financial incentives to do LONG TERM damage to the company with SHORT TERM thinking. The C-levels should stop this nonsense, despite the tax incentives, but, of course, the problem is only worse at that level.
A number range for when it starts getting really dangerous would be interesting
Agile might not be my problem, but even so what the comment you're replying to kind of sums up the situation:
> I remember when my employer adopted agile. One of the first things they did was lay off their team of technical writers.
We had a big round of layoffs a few years back. I don't know if technical writers were affected more than others, but we did have a team whose main job was to run training sessions; how to write better code, how to be a more effective technical organization, that sort of thing. That whole team was laid off.
Management may be the problem. It's hard to point the finger at any one person in particular when everyone is just trying to do what they need to do to ship product, and the underlying problem seems to be a sort of emergent behavior that you end up with if you get a bunch of generally smart, helpful, friendly people together and apply all the wrong incentives.
Stock incentives might be part of the problem, but I expect that's more of an issue for the upper layers of management. Lower-level manager can't individually do much to affect the stock value one way or the other. I think maybe a mandatory long vesting term could help. Like, if you're a CEO your stock doesn't vest for ten years. (Maybe "vest" is the wrong word, since that implies you lose it all if you move jobs before it vests. I'm thinking of a system where if you leave you still get the stock eventually.)
- actually need tools and processes designed to set the conditions for healthy interactions among individuals.
- actually need to spend time improving the documentation to enable them to produce working software.
- actually need to have a meeting-of-the-minds so they can collaborate with customers.
- actually need to spend some time planning so they can respond effectively to change.
Part of the problem here is that good technical leadership is waaaaaay more difficult than can be reflected in a 4-point manifesto. Whole books[1] are written about it. Part of the problem is information flow. It takes courage to speak clearly enough to tell leadership that they're so focused on being agile that it is harming social trust in their organization and preventing their teams from acting with agility.
[1] recommendations: The Toyota Way, Leadership is Language, Ego is the Enemy.
The points should be phrased "Processes and tools after individuals and interactions", meaning we want both, but one side first. In this case, it better implies we want processes and tools that work well for the individuals and their interactions.
Same for the other points of the manifesto.
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
and we have mandatory processes and tools to control how those
individuals (we prefer the term ‘resources’) interactGoing Agile basically meant a return to caveman times. The only way to know anything about the code base is for the tribe's Elders to sit around the fire and tell stories.
Code doing weird thing X? Is it a bug? Is it intended? No way to tell unless I interview everyone who has ever touched the code base, and they happen to remember why they did that.
I get that the manifesto says favor "this" over "that" but don't discard "that", but everywhere I have ever seen it implemented they discarded "that".
"That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more"
So it's doesn't say forget all processes and tools. Also I would say that most of these automated things the OP is talking about are processes and tools.
Writing good documentation is a skill that takes a non-trivial amount of time to develop. It also takes time to write.
Keeping documentation up to date is hard and takes time/effort.
Poorly written or out of date documentation is worse than no documentation.
No, it's not. I _can_ be, but it can also be much better. Documentation is hard, we know that. But it's also incredibly useful in many cases. There are plenty of times where software is nearly useless, or the time required to use it becomes untenable, without documentation.
Honestly, I feel the same way about the code; if you can't be bothered to put a note in a file indicating what it's for (unless it's clearly obvious to a casual observer with limited domain knowledge), then you shouldn't be writing software at all.
To some people in some kinds of organizations, this is a feature. The people with the hidden knowledge are more powerful than those without it.
If the software is written well enough that it doesn't need much or any documentation, then great! If that's not true, though, there had better be documentation if you want people to use it.
When I first moved into management roles I didn’t fully understand how much of my job would be simply saying “no” to a constant stream of engineers wanting to write or rewrite custom tools, libraries, frameworks and platforms when otherwise sufficiently good alternatives already existed. Not all engineers, but once you get into a big enough organization there are a lot of engineers who want to do meta-work and rework things instead of actually shipping things.
The worst offender I worked for had meta-tools on top of everything. You couldn’t use GitHub, Slack, or even our cloud platform without first learning how to navigate all of the custom tools and bots that had been put together to gate access to everything and make it work. And like you said, it was poorly documented. It turned into little fiefdoms where you had to know who to talk to if you wanted to get past the systems to get things done.
This can all be avoided with good management at an organizational level, but of course some managers want to get in on the situation because it puts them in a perceived stronger position in the company if their team is at the center of everything.
First time in a really big org and I can see this as well. The worst part is trying to tie someone down to explain how to use their custom tool or bot or even entire systems. How do I use that custom BI tool that you setup ... oh no-one wants to even send me an email reply when I ask a simple question about these things.
The way most stuff gets done in these orgs is various maverick people who find some way to work around all this crap. The problem is you have to have political clout to do that most employees don't have that.
I think these "meta-tool" are initially well intentioned but as you say they become empire building tools.
Worst still is that the teams that build them often leave or are disbanded. Then no one is responsible and no one wants to touch them and they sit in this weird limbo state.
I've had this conversation before where documentation is proposed as a silver procedural bullet and it never works. Documentation gets stale and eventually out of date. Do you really want to be in a position where you have to /recompile/ all of those documentation/training video/user manual materials? Unless you're selling it, probably not.
The solution you are looking for is not documentation but automation and training. The things which can be automated to make the process closer to obvious should absolutely be automated. The things which are intrinsically more challenging and can't be solved through automation should be covered through training -- and not a "training video" but a real set of sessions where someone (likely your manager or a tech lead responsible for ensuring clean consumption of their modules) is walking you through the right way to do things and leaving time for questions.
I say this having worked at a place that touted a documentation centric culture at the level of organizational scale you suggested. If you're doing anything remotely challenging, documentation only gets you to the starting line. It doesn't get you to being useful and autonomous.
1.) The people who can do this aren't going to do it for 30k or $10/hr. Properly solving this problem requires an understanding of tech and the development process, pedagogy/communication/instructional design, and information management. Lacking any one of those would result in a system that's an unusable vanity project. I have a couple of decades of small-shop coding experience, experience as an instructional designer at an Ivy, and graduate education in information management, but if you want me to use all of those it's going to cost you and companies are resistant to that. (See: How a lot of non tech product companies treat their IT teams since they don't generate revenue). Now imagine if the project were led by someone more qualified, which it should be for a company of your size.
2.) Most companies don't have a culture which would allow this to be done well. This is the sort of work which requires both a lot of honesty and a lot of careful planning. A lot of information ends up hidden or inaccessible due to people's egos, or executives not being able to handle the information so it's buried. People need to be honest about their workflows and what they don't understand, and they need to feel comfortable being honest about such things. This gets really messy. On the dev side, a common cultural issue is "I had to learn it, they should too" or the urge to make understanding the complexities into a shibboleth for the in-group.
So I agree with you, but it's unlikely to change soon in my opinion.
So I already had all the skills needed once the field started. I cheated.
If I were getting started now, my advice would be to remember that the human element and the tech element are of equal importance in Instructional Design. So you'd want to take stock of what skills you currently have and how best to a.) get the necessary knowledge you don't have and b.) take advantage of your particular skill set.
Since you're on HN, I'm assuming you're of a techy bent vs. an educational/people bent. So if you have any teaching/tutoring/etc experience, I would lean on that. If not, I would get some. You can do this by volunteering somewhere + doing some basic research. I highly recommend this since a large portion of instructional design (like most front-end things) is planning for all the weird things humans do when interacting with your stuff and, more importantly for instructional design specifically, how people who can't computer at ALL think. When doing ID, you're often designing for people who can't figure out how an email works and are taking a work training, for example.
Also since you're techy, I'd recommend spending some time with UI/UX and specifically focus on designing for different populations/audiences. From a tech perspective, your competing instructional designers are worst at the 'boring' things like accessibility guidelines, making sure things can run on terrible machines, coding fall-backs, etc. So a tech background is of great assistance as long as you communicate the problems it can help you avoid.
As for the actual 'how to get a job', I literally applied for my first job off of Indeed out of grad school and I'm a first-generation student so trust me that was not the most polished resume or CV.
Problem is, at mature companies there aren't enough greenfield problems to match the large number of engineers who are looking to climb the ladder. So stuff is rewritten, then rewritten again since nobody understands the rewrite, and so on. Managers kind of look the other way because retention and the ecosystem becomes messier and messier over time as promoted folks leave and new folks come in that need to be promoted.
This is the world of professional software development at pretty much every company not a startup.
The article mentions 3 things engineers care about: Technology, Intellection and Stability. Perhaps your pain fits into the 3rd category (if extrapolate a little).
If so, ironically, the first 2 at scale is what causes the lack of the 3rd.
When you make wider roads, the traffic will get worse, not better. Perhaps it's similar technology organizations. It's almost inevitable.
Anecdotally Amazon figured this stuff out by mandating well defined organizational boundaries (kind of like solid white dividers on some section of the highway, eh?) and by making each team responsible for its own developer infrastructure. It seems wasteful at first, but maybe less so at scale. Maybe someone working there can confirm/deny whether this is the case.
* The highest paying software companies employ LeetCode style interview. That is off-putting to a lot of people even though the money would be super sweet to have.
* Some wannabe startups also employ LeetCode style interview even though they don't pay anywhere near FAANG/Unicorns.
* You know what's worst than LeetCode style interview? LeetCode style interview with really long rounds. It's super off-putting to be tossed around for weeks.
* You know what's even worse than that? Lowball offer after completing the entire circus.
* PIP culture is scary and it's hard to judge if the new company have it or not, except Amazon. We all know Amazon has PIP culture.
* Long hour culture is not desirable and hard to judge. What's the point of making 20% more if you ended up working 40% more?
Otherwise you're saying something like a 250k base, 1MM RSUs before stock appreciation... which is a very lopsided looking offer
If you're senior L5, it can be around 100% per year even before appreciation. Above that and it starts going above 100% per year.
An exceedingly charitable view is that they're limiting downside, but realistically they're limiting upside so that you don't end up with people reaching targeted compensation for the next 4 years in a year or two and then leaving regardless of unvested shares
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But I also mentioned in a comment above, I think my view is skewed because I negotiate base aggressively
As an L6 I make 250k base, and my initial grant was just over 600k in RSUs at a non-FAANG company. I think that's a higher base than median but lower equity than median for FAANG
Barely removed from a lot of people taking massive haircuts as COVID darlings are down 50%+ from ATH
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To me equity is an investment you can't back out of for 4 years.
I'm not sure the bottom isn't going to fall off the market for tech period, so I'm happy to trade equity for the ability to have some control over my investment
My L5 comp is ~$150k base and $140k equity per year (I'm based in UK, would be higher if I was in the US)
I work at a company in a similar situation (we get a lot of Xooglers and pay accordingly) and my L6 base is 250k and I have 150k worth of RSUs vesting per year for the next 3 years.
I do negotiate base aggressively vs equity so that might be skewing my view of things
The only company I see doing that somewhat consistently is Fa.. Meta, and they're slipping into the same place Amazon is, where they need to pile on TC to make up for an image problem
It's common at top companies - they are all competitive with FAANG comp. You will easily pull in $400-500k in total compensation as a mobile dev at sayyyy an AirBnB or similar. Roughly even split between base and equity.
If 400k (where I am with 250k base) to 500k (where I'd be with a 50:50 split) is the entire range you're mentioning, that's the same as saying "250k - 350k RSUs with 250k base is uncommon" isn't it?
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It might be relative to my situation: I have 8 YOE experience, I'm in mobile, and most people I can talk to candidly about salary are similar. So the numbers I hear directly might be tinted by the fact ~8 YOE isn't usually enough for band topping L6 offers
That being said, even Levels.fyi isn't showing me mobile devs negotiating 250k base without giving up anything on RSUs is a common situation (it definitely wasn't when I got my job, but even with the current market craze that feels like a stretch)
If I'm missing something I'm glad to know more, one undersold upside of the current market is you don't absolutely have to job hop to push for more comp
I was going by my tax filings, and because of the stock growth (and additional grants), I end up with 100+% yearly, but that's quite different from the initial award.
Thanks for pointing this out.
Ugh yeah it’s ridiculous. We can’t hire anyone! Have you considered not putting candidates through months of studying to memorize a bunch of algorithm tricks and then grilling them for 5-10 hours total on those? No - that’s not what the cargo cult manual says.
What kind of team is that? Are you going to be surrounded by mentors? Free of bozos? In a world of competent executioners?
Unlikely. Look at how terrible a lot of the products are that these companies make.
They're fundamentally selecting for the wrong set of attributes. Look at the turnover rate - how many projects go nowhere and collapse, the quality of the output. Nobody ever leaves a job, they leave a team. The evidence is all around us that this process produces total shit results but it's become too much of a cult to change it.
Whenever I'm looking around for potentially better work and I see companies doing that, I don't even bother. It doesn't lead to better teams, more competent execution or better products.
Why on earth would I squander my time with some random ship of people who know how to do a sliding window? I'm sure they're all friendly, but we're doing hard things here and need the right mix.
I mean what on earth, fix the fucking process and maybe they'll stop incinerating dumptrucks of money on badly executed technology
And just product-wise, it's just way too easy to find counterexamples, like, how worse would the world be off if there was never invented google, gmail, chrome, iphones. Before google, there was no reliable way to search the web. Before gmail, there was no such thing as a dynamic web application. Before chrome, we were stuck with microsoft making up their own standards with IE and an inconsistent web spec. Before iphone, we were stuck with feature phones. The list just goes on and on.
There's four excellent examples of things that were better 10 years ago before this practice was instituted. The youngest thing on that list (chrome) is 14 years old.
Both Apple and Google used to not hire in this 3-4 interviews of canned programming question way. Then they did. Those products are now stagnating and deteriorating so much that it's obvious to everyone.
If you think it's exclusively a FAANG practice, you're mistaken. There's tiny firms that do it and really large ones that don't.
Bringing the worst practices of standardized testing into the tech hiring process produces the same kinds of problems that standardized testing does elsewhere. Silicon Valley used to be better than this.
It's a dumb arbitrary ceremony - might as well be a physical challenge from Nickelodeon's Double Dare.
(Also your narrative history is wrong, but that's not the point)
Ok, I understand that google search is worse, but it isn't obvious to me that's a result of engineering vs executive choice.
FWIW, I interviewed with Google in 2009 and the interview was 100% pure leetcode (not even design/architecture questions). It was exactly a series of four back-to-back 1-on-1 meetings, which consisted of "Hello" followed by an algorithmic puzzle.
If anything they seem to have broadened the scope of interviews since then.
I'm not a researcher in the field but I'd love to see some study. Let's say measuring for deadline slippage, budget overshot, and retention rate.
The testing groups will be teams that use these tactics almost exclusively and those that use a variety of other methods.
If my assumption that this is a mostly arbitrary attribute is correct, their averages would be nearly the same.
If they produce statistically better results then I'd literally quit my job and go work for one. I'd be happy to be wrong about this but I don't think I am
More likely has to do with monopolization and business models that favor advertising over users.
This is why the web is stagnating with near Chrome monopoly, just like during (shudder) the IE years.
Same for Google itself. Bing/DDG are only half-assed competitors. Google seems to be making search worse for all kinds of bad reasons, just because they can.
I'd guess most people who use an alternative to gmail specifically don't want to use Google, not because something else is better.
That I commonly see complaints about how other people "without" skill were getting job offers just because they put in the months studying, seems to indicate that it's actually quite a generous chance.
The vast majority of tech companies including startups are asking algorithm style questions these days. It’s adapt or die.
Not only off-putting but out of reach to older engineers with family responsibilities. I would also add that the value proposition for working at a FAANG isn't nearly as competitive if based outside the US.
People that are in their 40s aren't confused by the question but are more confused by why it's the question as being able to answer it is so disconnected from any metric of competency or quality.
It'd be like saying "so you have an engineering degree, oh a masters from 20 years ago. Cool, remember Lagrange multipliers and Hamiltonians? I'm sure you do. Here's a problem. You have 10 minutes"
That's why we keep seeing the failures of the past repeat. Tech selects for people too young to know it and too arrogant to study it.
I don't advocate for a free ride nor am I saying the tests are hard (they really aren't), just that they have a very weak correlation with building strong teams of the right people
Your day job is writing CRUD services. That's the job.
Our tech interview - ~8 hour take-home assignment, it was well-paid consultancy - asked people to basically demonstrate they could write a CRUD service. It had reading XML, some business logic / calculations, a REST/JSON API and a front-end.
Ten years later, I'm still working with that basic model. I mean sure, it's been broken up here and there by a different tech stack (Angular instead of React, Go instead of Java, native iOS instead of web) but the basics are still the same.
I haven't had to invert a graph or do a depth / breadth first search since college. The most algorithmic thing I do is implement a comparator function for sorting.
In the past that was fine, candidate pool was large enough that a heavy-handed filter was okay. That may be changing.
It is much more important for a company to filter out likely low performers than it is to avoid filtering out likely high performers, because the costs of hiring an incompetent person are enormous. Not only do they not produce as much, they eat up others' bandwidth by asking too many questions, implementing super buggy code, or not communicating effectively. They make other people on the team feel like they're not pulling their weight. They're a pain to fire depending on company culture and laws.
This process is designed to overfilter and maintain an A-player roster as much as possible, vs putting butts in seats. It's hard to tell whether the pool is exhausted here - by some indications, there's a lot of attrition but also a lot of hiring...
This is why these big companies do it, because it is actually quite hard to be fired from someplace like google whereas at these small companies you'll be working directly with the owners.
Also people will do all these take home tests and 5 rounds of algo interviews and CCAT tests ... etc for large well known companies as it is prestigious to work for them. They literally won't do them for small companies. For small companies unknown companies all you'll get is desperate people you are actually filtering out all the decent candidates. I went through this process last year it's very hard to hire as a small unknown company.
That's why if you're a small start up, trying to hire like Google is the dumbest thing you can do.
I have done take home projects before, which often resulted in low ball offers. At most it made me angry for the time wasted, but now having children I just don't even bother anymore.
And I do the same for all other parts of an interview too. If I were asked to knit a scarf during the interview process, my reaction would be similar.
Money should be a big factor. Imagine a job where year 1 you work and year 2,3 you get to do whatever you like and own 100% of the equity. That is what 3x TC basically could mean.
Even rewinding to just 5 years ago, there were much fewer companies flush with cash. Now with the hyper-capitalization of so many up-and-coming startups, a lot more companies are now at the bidding table for the same pool of candidates. And even large incumbents have big plans to double in headcount, effectively making the tech market talent side constrained (it always has been to a large degree, but even more pronounced now). So now companies are largely competing on compensation packages, because the ball is very much in the candidate's court. Amazon is starting to pay up to ~$400k in total compensation for an L5 mid-level engineer due to retention and hiring issues, and it's commonly known within tech that Amazon has traditionally lagged behind other large companies in compensation.
Job seekers have options and are very much in a position of leverage. That is why it is hard to hire right now, because everyone needs to hire, and your company probably isn't paying as competitively as others.
I mean, I'm not saying I'm mediocre, but I wouldn't pass a 'do you work with cool tech' (machine learning, crypto, iot, microservices?) or a leetcode test.
I can go back to Java though, I guess.
It’s bizarre how secretive they are. I imagine the recruiters are looking out for their own interests.
Recruiters are in the way.
So much this. I've had many conversations with interesting companies that have good pay and cool products, but recruiters/hr keep coming up with bullshit policies and processes that are just obnoxious and only serve to sort out the compliant from the competent.
I love this distinction. So concise and clear. Thanks.
It seems like it would usually be in the best interest of the potential candidate to work through the recruiter. By having been sought out, you have an advantage. You can actually talk to a recruiter and check status of your progress, where as a web application is a black box of which you may never hear another word. At some point the recruiter is going to feel invested in you.
Why would I skip the recruiter and apply directly unless the recruiter is a non-helpful middleman? I’d love to have a direct contact to negotiate the whole process.
I've toyed with the idea of finding a for-fee recruiter on my own to spam these companies and their listings and pre-negotiate out something really interesting for myself. But that's more like a sports agent. Anyone know a tech sports agency to Jerry Maguire myself with? :D
(I know, first world diva problems, sigh... it's still grating though)
tldr - they do exist, but in very short supply (like many skilled/talented people in most industries)
Sure, he's getting like $30k from my employer in a month, but whatever. That $30k has almost no impact on my compensation.
He mainly does Dallas, but my position is fully remote.
Email is my username with one less 0, at gmail
Not exactly an agent, but you can hire a negotiation consultant at levels.fyi. When you get to the nosebleed levels of comp, it makes sense to have a specialist in your corner.
The fact that there seem to be more recruiters than competent developers sometimes tells me a diva status is deserved.
The thing is, a recruiter's pay can easily be 10K per placed candidate. Looking at my current pay, that means they only need to place a handful of people a year to earn as much as I do.
I've heard this a few times as well over my career, I wonder what-beyond missing out on that sweet contingency fee-recruiters have to lose by, as the article suggest: just being freaking transparent with candidates
Asking for a friend. Does anybody know what this commission is?
Think of all the engineers that hate recruiters. A recruiter has to talk to those folks every day.
The only roles I've ever accepted were roles that involved a hiring manager reaching out directly to me. There's a reason for this, namely that the only recruiters worth a damn seem to be working in boutique firms and want to take a significant bite out of my future pay.
Really, just avoid them if possible.
- the transactional part of setting up interview loops, coordinating schedules, etc is extremely tedious for a field of 3-5 serious candidates for a given role. Internal recruiter takes all of this away from a hiring manager who has other duties.
- an internal recruiter can plow through LinkedIn to find solid candidates, identifying ones for the hiring manager to review and, if qualified, reach out to. Again, tedious work for a hiring manager with other responsibilities.
Your job should also include lots of time on LinkedIn searching, as many HMs do today. Letting a recruiter do this for you will give you many more bad interviews (expensive) than you'd get otherwise.
But apparently "tedious work" is above a HM. Have fun being on conference calls all day, pretending that you and not the engineers are the ones who do the work. Worker self management needs to become more of a thing in this field in general if we can't trust HMs to take an active role in candidate selection. Companies that disvow managers and empower their employees produce far more excellent work (e.g. valve) even if they don't always do it on the schedule that execs want - so this would be a net positive for the industry.
In most cases that I've seen the internal recruiters have strong relationships with the hiring managers and are incentivized to make sure the hires actually succeed.
Oh well! Guess it will be remote work at a normal company for me then.
In all seriousness, my experience with third party recruiters overall has been quite good. One sought me out and continued to follow up until it sounded like a good deal, and in the end I won a sign-on bonus, decent salary, and felt like I started a good working relationship with the recruiter themselves, too.
Now, this guy hits me up for when he has potential matches for my team. It's been really good. I'm sure like most things, there are good recruiters and bad ones, regardless of first or third party.
Might be worth a try if you like having a clean inbox.
Like, I just don't understand the audacity of most of them. Especially when almost invariably their competitive pay is 30% of what even base level fangs would offer. Its a complete waste of everyone's time.
They tend to stick around the industry for a while, not treat you like a mushroom (keep you in the dark, bury you in bullshit), and respond humanly to human requests.
You can safely block the one you're describing here, and we'll all be better if that's the standard response.
One of the most accurate descriptions I’ve ever read about it is “Don’t feed the beast - the great tech recruiter infestation” [1 - though an archive since the original has been taken down].
[1]: https://gist.github.com/CumpsD/696599d1bd4cd472a056586967293...
I’m a software engineer that started a recruiting company. The current state of the industry is pretty bad. We are trying a different approach- we are transparent. We share all the details about the company right out of the gate. Including salary info. We refuse to work with companies that won’t let us publish salary ranges. I’d love feedback (https://app.facet.net/jobs/search)
Indeed I think many recruiters have it backwards. I've had good and bad experiences. There are recruiters who understand the long term game as a salesman, who build win-win relations and check in on you every few years. Those are the people that will absolutely sell your CV to your future boss and those are the people I have no problem in acting on my behalf as an intermediary.
Edit: I see now that it is filtering on salary (which is visible if you look at the listing details), but the summary is showing total comp.
One recruiter just couldn't understand that the commute for me was major. I had just left a job which had a 1-1.5hr commute each way for me, and I was looking exclusively for something with no more than a 30 minute commute. They kept trying to toss my resume at jobs that had equivalent or longer commutes because "the perks are really nice" or the "pay was really good". Which I took to mean their commission would be really good.
I'm astounded at how awful recruiters have gotten. What's insane to me is how no one in the industry seems to question the spray and pray approach to recruiting.
There are a few "whoa that's neat!" things on my resume such that if a recruiter or hiring manager looked at it they would certainly notice. This works as a great test for if a recruiter is really looking at me or just spamming a keyword on my linkedin. This filters out essentially all recruiter spam.
What's funny though is how much energy companies spend to pretend like they've read your resume and want the actual you as a candidate in any way. Facebook recently tried a tactic of sending email from the hiring manager. "I really want you on my team, let's find a time to chat!" But clearly it was just an automated email since the message didn't mention any of my resume that might make me a particularly interesting candidate for the team. Another company clearly automatically scraped my resume to make it sound like the read it, but picked the most bizarre, nonsensical things to pull from it.
The funny thing is, even though I love my current job, if you came to me as said "it_does_follow, I've noticed that you worked on XXX and YYY projects, we really need someone who could do that type of work for our team, we're working on exactly these type of problems" and they touched on the actual work I've done that I'm proud of, I would jump on a call in a heart beat.
Every engineer really would prefer to work on problems in their particular domain that interest them, for a team that values them as an individual. I am certain that if recruiters spent their time targeting a much smaller pool of good candidates that really are a match for the role, they would have much higher success rates.
Instead I get wordy yet vague e-mails or dodgy calls where they don't dare drop the actual name of the companies until you've agreed to go on an interview. And of course, being recruiters instead of actual engineers, they don't actually know what they're talking about.
I just don't get it. I've only been approached by a 'first party' recruiter once, for Google Docs in Germany. I didn't want to relocate or work on Docs though so that was a pass for me, and that was after the 'shine' of Google had passed as well.
Looking at it from the candidate's point of view: Being rejected is actually something that psychologically kind of sucks a lot. Even if at the level of higher cognition you are perfectly aware that it's just a numbers game, and that you shouldn't let rejection get to you in a psychological way, we are not vulcans but humans. Rejection means cognitive dissonance in a big way: You applied for the job, so that means you wanted it. But they rejected you, so that means that you're not getting it. It's also a threat to your identity, because you think of yourself as being pretty good, and now there's someone who thinks you're not good enough for them. It just sucks.
So what do you do? You engage in cognitive dissonance reduction. You look at that recruiter spam, and you immediately start looking for reasons not to apply. Because if you find any reason not to want the job, then they can't hurt you by not giving it to you.
Recruiting is broken in a big way: We need to find ways of doing it that causes much less psychological friction.
On top of my resume, you want me to fill out multiple text boxes with information about why I want to work at Random No Name Company, what I expect from my time there, what my personal ethos is... Then you ask me for a cover letter?! This is literally to just initiate a lottery where it seems the odds of the next step happening are less than 1%.
It's more brutal than dating. I do not envy any single engineers who are juggling both games.
It could equally well be that some candidates get rejected 1000 times, while others get hired pretty quickly.
Nowadays, work is just signing into my machine every morning and joining a Zoom meeting for standup. Interacting with coworkers is either via Zoom meetings or via Slack. I hardly need to interact with them apart from work-related matters. There isn't an opportunity to chat at the coffee machine, or grab lunch together, or get drinks after work. The work is now just the work that I do and not the people I work with or the building that I commute to.
What does this all mean for me? It means if I find the kind of work I do boring, or I don't think I'm paid well enough, I can just quit. I can judge companies I work for based on pay, type of work I do, likelihood of promotion (for more pay), and how many hours I need to put in. All the other things that could impact how much I love working for company X are gone. It's purely "what is the job doing for me?" now. I think that's playing a role in people wanting to quit. They're no longer tied to their jobs as much as they used to be. They're realizing if they don't like it, they can just leave.
The difference in how the day-to-day activities 'feel' between company A and company B just isn't as big anymore now with full remote.
We're struggling to hire senior talent, well, senior, entry level, anything but apprentice. The thing is: So is everyone else. There are statistic on these things, there aren't anyone to hire, you have to get people to leave other jobs, but then those companies are just shorthanded and you solved nothing.
So we hire as many apprentices as we're able to handle and legally have. When their training is done, 4 years from now, the majority of them will receive a job offer. So far we hired all but one of our former apprentices.
Engineering isn't the only line of work with this issue. My wife business is in the same situation. Unemployment rate is at 0,7%. The people not employed are all in that situation due to personality issues. The only available people they can hire are those toxic enough that most would prefer not to hire them if ANY other option is available. Other than that, take in as many apprentices as they can handle and ofter them a job in 3,5 years time.
This is debated in Denmark ever year, in July, when schools announce who got in to which universities, colleges and so on. Every year: We're missing nurses, engineers, STEM, all the usual. Not once have I hear anyone mention which subjects people need to stop applying for. My personal favorite subject that can be cancelled: SoMe marketing manager. The amount of people applying to those educations are insane and they can't even market themselfs well enough to get a job.
The apprentices are paid a fixed salary, they are allowed to work 37 hours a week, when not in school. We pay their salary while at school. We're allowed to have four per senior employee, to ensure that we can actually help them learn. In return we can more or less dictate what we teach them, so we can provide them with the education we need. They normally get the boring trivial tasks initially, but that's okay because it's new to them and they feel like they're help and doing actual work (which they are). As they progress we give them more and more responsibility, until they, in our case, get to handle customers on their own and do their own projects.
It's more or less the same deal with the student my wife has, they're just organized differently, because they're pharmacy workers.
On the surface it seems expensive, but it's a good way to hire people and in the end I believe apprentices actually make us more money than they cost.
We're not obligated to hire them afterwards, but normally most are interested in staying for at least a few years.
I wonder if we have something like this in the US.
Any < 100 person startup which is doing Leetcode interviews is letting go of so many great candidates who will actually get the job done.
A lot of times interviewers turn interview into an ego contest where they are looking for reasons to reject. Try your best to remove those biases. If you are a company, have a predefined set of 10 questions that your interviewers can ask from -- make the evaluation criteria as objective as possible. There is no place for "vibe check" in technical interviews.
If any company offered me a shot at management right now, despite the fact that I have no management experience, I would do it in a heartbeat.
Do you have any ideas about how to match the kind of compensation so that it is aligned with that investment. If I employ somebody and build up their skills, what's to stop them from just jumping ship and capturing the payoff for my investment all for themselves?
Tragedy of the commons. Coase theorem.
> what's to stop
Reciprocity. If an employer is good to me, I'm inclined to be good to that employer in return. If an employer acts like a greedy self-interested econ, then I, too, will act like a greedy self-interested econ.
Heh, maybe this is why I am an average engineer.
I'm very much on board with this. I put stability and money on about the same pedestal and is why I still work where I do after many years for a salary that is fantastic for 90% of the country but is "merely average" for Seattle.
Working for a rock solid medium-sized that's been in existence for a hundred years and funded by a stable endowment and a pile of public service contracts and has never had a layoff is more interesting to me than knowing that the odds of me still having a job in the 2030s, if I still want it, is well above 90%.
How do you know you're still around by 2030? I've had 3 people from my close circle die off in the past 6 months. One of them my age, left behind a spouse and two kids. That really changed my perspective. If I'm gonna spend most of my waking hours labouring away in a cubicle away from home then I at least want it to be meaningful. I'm not going just to tick-tock my life away doing meaningless shit for boatload of money that I may or may not get to use eventually.
Now I can be choosy, for even more money
Hard lessons I learned over the last 24 months:
- Titles don't matter. Promotions provide minimal pay increases. It's better to focus on finding another job.
- Job difficulty doesn't scale linearly with salary. I'm working roughly the same as I did in jobs where I earned 1/3 the salary I get now.
- RSUs are the way to get crazy money. I completely disregarded them early in my career.
"The term restricted stock unit (RSU) refers to a form of compensation issued by an employer to an employee in the form of company shares. Restricted stock units are issued to employees through a vesting plan and distribution schedule after they achieve required performance milestones or upon remaining with their employer for a particular length of time. RSUs give employees interest in company stock but no tangible value until vesting is complete. The RSUs are assigned a fair market value (FMV) when they vest. They are considered income once vested, and a portion of the shares is withheld to pay income taxes. The employee receives the remaining shares and can sell them at their discretion."
The truth of hiring is nobody is actually honest about it, most of the advice you read online is unrealistic. Engineers mostly care about compensation, working conditions, and future job prospects. Companies mostly care about whether you fit some pre defined funnel and can pass their interview hoops they don’t care about how interested you are or “how much value you can bring” like you read online.
Companies will hire the engineer who passed all 5 technical interviews with good feedback over the engineer who got medium feedback but has experience and interest in the field. And engineers will turn down the most interesting job with middling pay for the high paying boring job that offers remote.
I think this is overly cynical. Companies do want these things but at large companies you:
1. Cannot maintain a network of trust amongst people making hiring decisions to keep the bar high.
2. Want a plausibly "objective" process to avoid complaints or lawsuits for discrimination
This leads to modern hiring practices. Smart smaller companies put up fewer hoops, most aren't so smart and just ape the big companies not understanding the forces that led to those hiring practices.
If you can get a strong enough recommendation from someone within the central network of trust of an engineering organization you can skip interviews even at large companies like Google.
I definitely prioritize a certain level of money over cool stuff. However i make money to spend on things that make me happy - what's the point if you don't spend it. Taking a lower paying but cooler job, is just another way of spending your money.
This is the plain fact that those well off with their jobs just don't understand. Education is far too expensive, causing anyone but the funded kids to have to work - not focus on education. Walk into any university and see it in realtime. We treat students like cash cows, give them no support, and expect they will want to take on a hard degree when seniors are being turned down left and right? Yeah, no. American companies have created this problem for themselves and deserve to close their doors.
The problem with offloading it to universities is you turn the academic and foundational theoretical into the practical, thus making them vocational schools.
There needs to be a system of apprenticeships in software, not just internships for some and co-ops for University of Waterloo students.
I think a lot of companies are like an ecological niche that is tuned to a particular kind of candidate. That is actually part of the business model.
Someone in my team recently left because they wanted a short commute to a sociable office which we could not offer them. They had already been given a promotion and pay rise without having asked for it. And the company has all the normal career development stuff. Yes they "graduated" and that is fine. It was the right choice for them.
And our business model has limited flexibility in terms of salary anyway. We are honest about that. But it is still a good fun job with lots of oppurtunities within the company or in the wider industry. But their is always a risk that those graduates will be exploited and that risk does make me uneasy.
Tuition and housing costs of university, at the cheapest of uni's just barely is covered by FAFSA federal and state grants + student loans at a $0 income. One of those grants are also dependent upon you working as a student. Private loans are a necessity and are not deferred, meaning you have to work even more. This does not include the cost of living in regards to buying lively goods.
When running the numbers it is a net negative. You cannot attend a university without an external income. That doesn't include anything else, no other costs.
Call BS as you wish, this is a fact I'm seeing infront of me. This is why people are up in arms about degrees and costs. This is why defunding universities is a necessary requirement to bring education back.
Granted I grew up poor, so perhaps middle class students are trapped. I assumed that college educated, middle class parents would otherwise step in where means testing kicks in.
In the end the project failed, but the guy got promoted. It was just like a play. The script was pre-ordained by the management chain and we all had to play our parts.
Productively - we have to understand that different people are motivated differently. Some are motivated by money, some are motivated as in the article by cool tech. But others simply want time to learn, a contractual obligation by the company to provide time to work on open source, compassion, or any number of things.
The issue becomes when an organization continuously tries to filter people into an exact box. Systemic hiring produces systemic outcome - but if we value diversity, then we can equally value diverse motivations. A key part of managing properly is recognizing and working with the differences in people, helping them (and by nature all of us!) be the best we can be.
Okay, second /rant over.
On "hygiene" — quoting from Clayton Chirstensen's "How Will You Measure Your Life?":
“Hygiene factors are things like status, compensation, job security, work conditions, company policies, and supervisory practices,” he writes. Critically, it turns out that compensation is also a hygiene factor (as opposed to a motivational factor): “You need to get it right. But all you can aspire to is that employees will not be mad at each other and the company because of compensation.”
“If you instantly improve the hygiene factors of your job, you’re not going to suddenly love it. At best, you just won’t hate it anymore. *The opposite of job dissatisfaction isn’t job satisfaction, but rather an absence of job dissatisfaction.*”
On motivation:
"Motivation factors include challenging work, recognition, responsibility, and personal growth … The theory of motivation suggests you need to ask yourself a different set of questions than most of us are used to asking. Is this work meaningful to me? Is this job going to give me a chance to develop? Am I going to learn new things? Will I have an opportunity for recognition and achievement? Am I going to be given responsibility? These are the things that will truly motivate you. Once you get this right, the more measurable aspects of your job will fade in importance."
Many are perhaps realizing they may have decent "hygiene" in their work life, but "motivation" adjacent factors have been dragging, and continue to drag.
(* Not all managers are good)
I’d rather make half faang compensation and work half as much.
My priority is my SaaS products I’m making on the side.
Why would I risk my ability to work on what I care about with a change? I could get an asshole manager, shitty coworkers or bad projects at a new job. If you stay at a non-tech company that doesn’t know what they’re doing, you’ll end up being the only person who knows how everything works after a few years. I can just coast maintaining that software now. Screw big-tech, they’re a bunch of pro-censorship authoritarian assholes, even if I could get a job at one of them I wouldn’t.
> I Think I Know Why You Can't Hire Engineers Right Now
But nothing on the article touches on an exploration of why these factors (which seem reasonable, in general) are any more relevant now than they were a year ago. Or five years ago.
Funny how my career started in electronics and embedded software and one of the cool things I saw back then was smart home. It was before "IoT hype" and I really thought that controlling your lights or curtains remotely via XMPP is cool. Now I'm building a house and hell no - I want to stay away of this crap, I want "dumb house" not smart. But still, technologically it's kind of cool
It's overwhelmingly a work force of thwarted techno-utopians. And that means many of the disillusioned workers have crossed the floor to become techno-dystopians, possibly bordering on luddites towards the very tech they are creating, which is an extremely demoralizing position to be in.
But to me it's just wild that working to bring about a net positive impact to the world isn't mentioned anywhere.
And no: that's not even remotely the same as "cool stuff". Making a rocket taxi for the super rich or tunnel for SOVs is not it. We are on the brink of a global environmental collapse, and a lot of the blame is on the "cool stuff" designed by engineers.
Engineers need to seriously start asking: would the world be better or worse off if this company trying to hire me didn't exist at all?
EDIT: and those rare islands of sanity are mostly small companies where the hiring process is entirely conducted by the software engineers themselves.
I get bombarded by recruiters all the freaking time, but I tell them straight up that I will not be offering any references except straight to an employer after an offer in hand (this kills off most of their interest) and that I would never entertain an offer unless it was a significant pay increase (which means it's gonna have to be an SV company doing the hiring).
On the other hand, there is more money floating toward more startups than ever, across every imaginable industry. They all need people.
Taken together, demand is through the roof, and the massive companies are pulling salaries up as someone senior or higher could ostensibly get a job there vs. your random Series A-C startup.
If you can't pay top dollar, you are in the zone described by the author. You need to offer whatever a particular candidate is after: respectable salary; a chance to own some massive new development area; a chance to go deep on a set of technologies; and/or a schedule that supports their lifestyle.
His view was that he didn’t need the money, he is a 25 year veteran, pre 2001. He was sick of incessant meetings, being a bum on a seat, a pawn to empire building, a body to throw at a problem. He became an Engineer to build cool shit and was being kept from doing it.
I did promise post grad level Engineering problems day in day out and that sealed the deal.
If the company becomes successful I would bump up pay as best I can, but it’s so risky ATM that I wouldn’t make a promise of better future pay part of the offer.
Plus I find that the imagined value of equity tends to keep people together longer than ideal. He is free to leave the moment it no longer suits him to stay.
The other part is on blind/levels/hn etc people regularly expect 300,400,500+ but those jobs seem to be just for people with the right background.
They pay $180K full remote for Rust. (I may try to go there myself, so if you want to avoid me, keep that in mind...)
A ton of people in my professional network doing RF, ME, and EE are getting a taste of how sweet WFH is for the very first time. Many have been in industry for decades, and never had that kind of flexibility before. We're also in fields where people can't solve a hiring shortage by offering $400k total comp. There just ain't that kind of budget at hardware companies. (Except maybe Apple.)
The kind of raises offered just ain't worth giving up a cushy gig right now! The pull of money alone isn't strong enough.
1. Senior position with junior-compensation.
2. Junior position with intern-compensation (but senior skill profile)
3. No intern positions at all, or, if there are intern positions, they demand 10E12 years of job experience for the exciting opportunity to haul cables and monitors around all day every day...which is not only badly compensated, bu also provides ZERO useful experience for the next job.
I've spent more than 2 decades in various large corporate environments and things couldn't be more different on the ground...
Most developers aren't Star-trek types at all, and not even engineers. They don't have a strong talent or appetite for tech. They're what some call "bread programmers". At best, they do a reasonable job, and then go home.
I've worked with many "senior" developers in this space and even they do a terrible job in keeping up. They seem to have a large disinterest in the field altogether. These people are invisible, you will never find them online in forums like these.
But there's another aspect: age. It's fun being on top of tech in your 20s. It's quite different when having a fulltime job and a family, in your 40s.
Most never get to work on anything cool or fun.
In this large group of bread programmers, which I estimate may be the majority of the market, there's still people with useful skills or experience that other companies would look for. The reason you can't get them to move is because in most parts of the world, you don't get a 50-100% increase simply for moving jobs. It's more like 10%. Since they're already comfortable, they won't move.
Also people don't want ping pong tables or mission statements where we "push ourselves beyond our limits". They want a life.
I hate my job, and would likely hate any tech job at this point. Shitty companies are having trouble hiring because people know they're shitty. People examine they're being used.
This is the first time in my career that I’m happy to finish a contract without having another with paperwork all signed as I know I can get another one with the minimum of effort.
This makes life a lot less stressful and less likely to put up with nonsense, I am alot less stressed tbh.
Imagine you have ambition and you work in a team of 100 people. How do you get promotion if you don't want to leave? Headline-grabbing stuff, not good, solid, written down, maintainable stuff. It is said many times but it is true.
The only other way you might choose the good over the noticeable (assuming you want promotion) is when you get genuine recognition from someone you look up to. Imagine getting called out at a department meeting for sorting out the documentation or automating a load of rubbish stuff.
I guess either way you want to be noticed/make a difference right? This is easy in small companies because everyone makes it better or worse. Once you reach 50+, I think it all starts going downhill. Maybe some of these companies just need to organise as microbusinesses - something that microservices promised, so that everyone can make a difference.
Software pays way better than hardware in Silicon Valley. I would argue that the current engineering "shortage" is because a bunch of hardware companies haven't adjusted to the fact that they're competing against the FAANGs.
I’m weighing this against my own career. I’ve worked with very short sighted business managers a lot (IT at a large casino). They absolutely don’t care about tech the way us techies do. They also don’t care about a technician or engineer enjoying their work past whether it means they can pay less or ship faster. They probably assume all techs/engineers are or should be equally skilled. Many might even take learning on the job as a sign that employee lied in their interview or something.
I’m definitely jaded against management. For them to “learn” from the current environment the current environment will need to hit their revenues directly for a quarter or two-as a guess.
Seriously. I have had 7 managers in my 2 year career. Yet to be in a job where more than half of the team I started with stayed a year. It has always been frustrating, but granted I can't blame them and jump around myself as that's where the raises are.
Actually, programmers are a dime a dozen these days (soon to be a penny a dozen), but companies (we’re hiring!) want only “special programmers”. They can’t actually describe what they want, other than for entry-level programmers, but they’ll remain ever hopeful someone special will turn up…
We’re hiring!
What's interesting here is not the engineers becoming wise to the poor value proposition, but rather, the market's failure to respond with alternatives. In some cases, there is an inability to pay (e.g. "startup X cannot match FAANG company Y"). But in many others, perhaps the optimism of the person making the equity offer is blinding?
as far as engineer or IT jobs are concerned, I have been wondering for years: is the root cause that we can't produce enough STEM graduates? starting from k-12.
I have no strong evidence, but my current company could not even find candidates(we're doing chip design), in the past it would have to work with H1B workers but covid19 made that a slow and impossible task.
some could argue H1B is just cheaper, per my understanding it's not always the case, it is more likely that we just don't have enough STEM graduates to fill the pipeline over the last 3 decades.
A lot of people think that as software engineers they get to develop the product. In practice, I have mostly been an ticket processing Oompa Loompa. You can get some input, but that requires arguing with people you would often rather not argue with. That drives a lot of people away.
If so, I'd bet it's a large and relatively untapped pool of candidates, especially outside of the CS/EE departments. A lot of fields now make pretty heavy use of programming, ML and other tech. It's true that some folks are definitely in the "I tweak the script that gives the numbers" camp, but there are proper coders as well. Plus, you're pulling from a pool that's smart, good at teaching themselves, and probably making $25-$60k.
I do care about how much money you'll pay me, and how little of my time you'll ask for in return though. I don't need a corporation to provide me with "meaningful work" in my life. I need them to pay me an obscene amount of money with as little commitment as possible to facilitate my own self actualization.
While we are off topic, that opening by apenwarr (linked in the article) was epic:
> Recently a security hole in a certain open source Java library resulted in a worldwide emergency kerfuffle as, say, 40% of the possibly hundreds of millions of worldwide deployments of this library needed to be updated in a hurry. (The other 60% also needed to be updated in a hurry, but won't be until they facilitate some ransomware, which is pretty normal for these situations.)
The default expectation (from business school?) seems to be if for a given job interview you are left (95% of the time) with say 1-4 (reasonably) good choices mangement is quick to cry wolf: you see, this is the skill's shortage everybody is talking about.
You can make this - at least here in Europe there is a tendency for that - a numbers thing (i.e. performance indicator) which mangement is "measuring". Meanwhile what "specialization" in the labour market meant in the 70's and what it means now a half decade later has changed significantly, multiple times.
For example: We are long at a point now where paradoxically time spent in the educational system is simply time lost for developing and honing skills (for a rapidly changing environment) which is exactly the opposite of acquiring as much "competence" as possible in order to "catch up" with the pace of innovations.
You want to expose young people to real challenges in the world as soon as possible and when they become frustrated with a problem you offer them teaching fundamentals they obviously lack. I am mostly oblivious about my ignorance but when someone can show me how e.g. a mathematical concept can possibly package my problem to make it manageable I will bite.
My reaction was "OK, this is the guy everyone is talking about".
A few months later - the job market was entirely different. And that stuck for many years after that.
Or maybe I have too much stuff I work on on my own to worry about it...
The example he brought up in his speech was some boring banking middle layer which he had with him on a cd-rom.
For myself, this certainly rings true. I was fortunate to get my salary in a comfortable spot early on in a career (outside of tech), and spent a few years in that comfort zone to begin dialing it back often taking salary cuts to move towards things that were more interesting and/or had better working conditions. The security kept me around, and now that I have the physiological and safety needs "locked in," I can't imagine myself pivoting into anything else - it's a rat race to the finish line from here, and maybe I'll climb up the levels of the next 3 in the hierarchy.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs
For "senior" devs, I think there are two additional things just as important as the mentioned three: good compensation & minimal BS.
The techno-utopian perspective tends to fade away with time (and acquiring of a significant other), replaced with pragmatism and realism which brings these two elements much more into focus with time.
This is literal - you can't hire engineers because you don't hire good ones. The process is more broken than before.
It's both hilarious and sad to hear complaints of employers. The non-hiring is on their side, there is little engineers can do if they aren't considered good - great experience notwithstanding.
When I was at Microsoft, pre-COVID, my daily commute was no big deal. But having lunch every day with other nerds was definitely one thing I enjoyed about the office environment. So when the pandemic started, we immediately lost that, and that's definitely one reason why I left several months later.
I am the "kind of engineer" that stereotypically should be throwing themselves into the cogs -- mid twenties, bachelor, etc.
I have the fortune of working for a B2B shop that is exactly like this, and sure -- I might not have quite as much experience now as a guy that has spent the last 18 months doing 60-80 hour weeks. On the other hand, I have been able to focus on my writing and speaking, build some cool projects and work on an open-source team, not to mention really improve my physical health.
Living to work is not worth it to me, and I am very hesitant to look at low-to-mid-level positions in FAAMG or startups as a result.
How did you do that?
My company gets tons of candidates. We reject 90% of them because: they do not pass our tech interview (I couldn't pass them either and I have been working here for 3 years!); when do they pass we cannot pay what they are asking for.
In my (admittedly brief) experience at a FAANG I also noticed there were some very menial tasks taking up engineer time. I'm pretty confident there is work to be done at these larger companies that could be satisfactorily accomplished by someone within their first year of training.
In that case, wouldn’t it theoretically be possible to convince an engineer to work for free given enough awesomeness? Or, conversely, convince them to work on something profoundly uninspiring given infinite salary?
for free given enough awesomeness = FOSS
something profoundly uninspiring given infinite salary = facebook
I was really disliking the tech stack, I could not change it even after trying. But there were lot of nice people, pay was above market levels. But i was still not satisfied, I could have stayed there and earn good increment every year by just doing 4-5 hours daily work.
The new company is a big Australian start up. My hope is that in the new company I’ll get to work with smart people and learn new things which I consider as an investment for my future growth.
I once had a recruiter tell me: “Elon Musk is one of the easiest people on earth to poach senior leadership out from under.” After eighteen months in the gulag of rocketry/EVs, many managers are ready to cry “Uncle”.
What does it mean when someone poaches “leadership out from under” — does it mean that leadership grows internally, rather than sourced externally? Or that they’re fleeing away (assuming “poaching out” mean the reverse of “poaching”)
And I assume that the “uncle” in this case is Elon?
Since you can only hire people willing to quit, you currently can’t find many software engineers that were rare even before Covid. Developer leaving their job by the masses is probably not a real thing at least from my experience. Maybe in some regions of the US. But a shortage of qualified personnel in general probably is.
Even hiring people from within Europe is hard, many companies are hiring from the Far East or India still because there is too much work. I think we have a decent company with some great positives but we might struggle to even get 5 applications and that is via a recruiter.
All jobs can be scored on three metrics:
1. The nature of the work;
2. The compensation;
3. The people you work with.
The article is really just zeroing in on points under #1, but #2 and #3 matter to most people, too. You can do cool work at home alone for free, but that wouldn't be a very good JOB.
In my 30 year career, I've had some jobs that scored poorly across the board (but hey, paid the rent). I've only had 2 jobs where all THREE were at least B+.
My job right now -- 14+ years! -- scores B+ on the work, but A and A+ on the other two points. Which helps explain the 14 years.
The completionist in me notices you didn't mention NeuroLink - his wiring of brains to computers. It's not often in the news.
It does sound unlikely that neuralink actually accomplishes anything impressive, but I don't think it's a joke to try and maybe it will be a step towards something that does succeed.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drive:_The_Surprising_Truth_...
There are 2 hard problems in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-1 errors.
-- Phil Karlton, Leon Bamboogiewoogie @secretGeek, Martin Fowler
https://martinfowler.com/bliki/TwoHardThings.html
• Naming things
>> Technology -> Cool Stuff to Work On
>> Purpose — The desire to do something that has meaning and is important.
• Cache invalidation (forgetfulness)
>> Intellection -> Smart People to Work With
>> Mastery — The urge to get better skilled.
• Off-by-1 errors (self or greater Good)
>> Certainty -> Repeatability in Work Environment
>> Autonomy — Our desire to be self directed. It increases engagement over compliance.
I think the desire for Technology, Intellection, and Certainty are more tactical considerations that engineers want in their day to day duties. I find that those tare things that engineers can easily visualize themselves having access to in a new role. These feed into a feeling (or the hope of feeling) a sense of Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose in their career as a whole.
Only thing I can add is that due to the difficulty hiring, you can attract mid-level talent with more money (they're more likely to be underpaid). I'm sure the efficacy of that approach is diminishing as steady-state is reached by people in that experience level.
I wouldn't take an extra 10k for being able to take my dog for a nice walk at 2PM every day.
Would my mind change for an extra 20k? Probably not.
For an extra 50k? ...maybe, let's talk.
For an extra 100k? ...where do I sign?
That said, I think you may have missed an important one for engineers: respect
In my experience, engineers highly value respect in their current position and a slap in the face from the company can breed lasting resentment or an immediate job search in the current environment.
Respect comes in a few forms:
1) Believing you were actually listened to and your ideas were fairly evaluated, even if in the end the decision didn't go your way. If you're repeatedly getting shot down and don't understand why that feels like the company doesn't value you or your opinion.
2) Compensation: While the absolute number itself to a surprising degree doesn't matter all that much, what effort the company puts in when it can, does. If the company posts record profits, gushes about your performance, you max out your rating and get a 2% bump in pay as a result when at the very least inflation seems to be 6% right now that cognitive dissonance hurts a lot. This is another form of lack of respect that engineers rarely let slide.
3) Clear growth path/investment: If the company respects you and your term goals, you'll see it through an established career plan, at least for the short/medium term (1-3 years). If you're going about the same stuff every day with no room for growth and no one seemingly cares that you want to take on more or you don't see how you could given the pile of work you're stuck under, that's demotivating and shows that the company doesn't really care about you, just about your monotonic cog-like output.
4) Impact and impact recognition: Engineers want to do things that matter. (Already a theme in your article) and often they want that to be known. Not in a cheap artificial pat-on-the-back and flattery way, but in a tangible way. Success should lead to greater responsibility. Failure should lead to introspection and another swing with advisors brought in. Given your successes you should be given opportunity to advise others working on similar problems you've been successful solving. If all you're doing is solving problems in a silo and no one seems to notice or care, it gets demotivating again.
I'm sure there are others but I find that a general theme of respect for the individual is usually very important for engineers.
They are too different from the hiring companies to be of interest for them. Or too risky, because they are sick or from suspicious countries.
It's a hodgepodge of cloud toys, stitched together by multiple teams who do not want to talk to each other, hiding behind "microservices".
#remote should mean remote
I often wonder how many of the people working at cool places are doing cool stuff and how many are doing the same things as elsewhere.
Does it help working in a place building autonomous cars, rockets if you’re not doing that, but doing the same web dev or door knob release software that you could do in a hedge fund, accountancy firm, or evil corp.
Anyone have any experience?
Even web dev is interesting. lots of bespoke visualization and debugging tools had to be created from scratch because nothing on the market solved the problems that autonomous cars pose. Look at webviz created by cruise as an example.
Using my bad examples - if developing the same door knob release system or dealer booking system - feels better because you're doing it in Tesla than say Ford or Skoda? And how much
now throw a pandemic into the mix. everyone’s lifestyle has been disrupted to a lesser or major degree. everyone’s rethinking certain key aspects of their life, whether intentionally or emotionally. relevant to this: employees are just a lot more discriminating in their job evaluation than they used to be. the pool of jobs i’m willing to take has shrunk by 2-3x. again, that doesn’t mean the total matches must fall. but it does mean that it’s going to take more effort to locate matches. i.e. “it’s harder to hire engineers”.
Here "what would you do for +10k" -> "ANYTHING"
I've been there - that company you didn't like, the boss that didn't like you, etc.. Every since that company I have been a LOT more selective of who I want to work with and don't just take a salary bump over SUPER job stability.
I may be living in a bubble (I've been building https://4dayweek.io) but for me and those around me, the main attraction is a better work-life balance, then technology etc
I politely replied to each that, I interviewed, thought it went quite well and then got ghosted (never heard anything, zero), hence not going thru that again. Besides current job pays more and is interesting
For one everyone is looking to hire talent but not develop them. This means that most companies don't have talent development plan.
There are huge amount of engineers who have kids and mortgage that they need to pay off, so for the right price they will work on any none cool tech.
What is he now, He-who-shall-not-be-named?
> (I ain’t speakin’ his name; the dude gets enough press without me helping his SEO.)
I hope this comment was tongue-in-cheek. This person's SEO comparatively speaking does not even register.
I don't mean that in a bad way. The article is well written and, to some extent, well thought. The problem is they usually -as in this case- extrapolate a fairly limited experience to a very general explanation of just about everything. This can be also noticed in some of the absolutely tiring clichés of engineers being Trekkies and dorks and whatever. But more than that, it usually ends up being that the conclusions reached are mostly a mishmash of reasonable things which miss the point, at least as a general explanation.
But, as I can't consider myself an expert in the USA job market -or should I say "the quite specific USA FPGA / RTL design engineers job market"-, I'll do something else instead. I'll paint you the picture of a very different market, the Spanish IT job market. The common point is they also whine a lot about an engineer shortage and a lack of available skilled force.
Here the market is defined by the following:
- The market is mostly dominated by a handful of big players. At the tipping point, there's maybe 6-8 large companies that hire a lot of developers -even though I personally think they don't really need so many-. These are, mostly, bank and insurance. There's also one or two more directly IT related.
- The market is actually layered through a pile of leeching^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hconsulting companies. There's an initial layer of larger "IT consulting" and "IT Integrators" who provide the above banks and large companies. Then there's the smaller ones which mostly provide bodies to the bigger ones. It is not uncommon for a particular job to involve at least 2 subcontracting steps. It's also not uncommon for them to lie about it at the beginning of the hiring process.
- Salaries are being contained or even lowered right now. It's hard to break around this because of hidden price collusion. Right now, as I said, salaries are low. Every time someone mentions "talent shortage" there's at least half a dozen of comments saying "well, pay more" or "don't pay so low, then". Personally, I'd say that most IT related jobs, and particularly those that actually create/operate/maintain the things, are being pushed into being considered as an "operator level" job. Low pay, easily disposable. Experience is, generally, an uninteresting trait beyond 2-3 years, and job offers reflect that. Entry level jobs are, again, paying low to very low. I know it can't be but it all feels kind of orchestrated. I mean, it can; it has been done before, but I'd rather think it can't be.
- Job offers hardly even mention anything. I've seen some hiring companies which will simply not put any details at all, not even technologies involved or anything. In any case, there must be fierce competition there because they all tend to be more secretive than usual. Not only will they not give you the name of the company -which may be understandable- it can sometimes be hard to even get general information like what sector it works on or an approximate location. This is most frequent, obviously, when it is not one of those big, few banks or insurance companies.
- Hiring processes are mostly clueless. They are heavily focused into that "operator mode" and usually ask for stupid things like very specific versions of tools -e.g. like "I see Spring Boot mentioned in your resume, but which version? You don't mention which and I'm looking for version 2.5.x" or "I need to ask you exactly how much experience in years you have with Angular 8 and how much with Angular 11"-. You can easily have to go through technical tests -and I mean things like building a 40+ hour demo project- even before they will even talk to you at all. In a couple of cases these were so specific and large one could even wonder if they were actually getting some smaller tools done for free through this.
- Job security is mostly a myth. During 2020 and 2021, quite a few of the big hiring companies and many of the body providers simply dropped hundreds or thousands of developers with little more than a snap of their fingers. To some extent they are trying to re-hire now, but not as much and, naturally, with lower salaries.
- There is, sure, a smaller market where smaller companies hire. This is a bit of a hit or miss. Most of them don't/can't pay too much but are, usually, better places to work at. There are also a number of startups -and companies calling themselves "a startup" because it's cool-. Most of these come and go, of course, and only a few of them aren't working on yet another "customer experience optimization" thing -i.e. tracking and advertising- or on "online gaming which actually turns out to be online gambling". One or two of those startups have even thought about a business model that is not crossing their fingers very hard.
- There's also the "agile market". Even if you like Agile, this is a circus. I've seen ratios of "agile coaches to sw engineers" which would make anyone wonder if anything is done at all in there. And the answer is no, obviously. I spent some months watching one of those big banks which don't want to be called a bank any more and it was absolutely ridiculous. I vividly remember some sort of retrospective meeting or whatever they called it where literally everyone was lying to avoid saying no progress at all had been made in the last 3 month period. And everyone knew everyone was lying. And still, these "agile coaches" were doing some happy dances and saying "good, good, this is very good, we're doing very well". I don't mean this as an attack on Agile, but more on the fact that it has been co-opted to burn loads of money at some of these larger companies. I mean, it's business as usual, but now under the name of Agile. It's sad.
All in all, here in Spain the answer to why it's hard to find engineers right now is... it isn't. But some players have twisted and broken the whole system so much that the job isn't that interesting any more.
I would rather do anything else. Try my hand at the markets while traveling, launch a project or two, fly a girl out for free using my rewards points and be a fun host that’s not preoccupied with meetings.
Hiring is not agile.
No matter what the personal choices and predilections of any engineer, the software industry is fundamentally constrained by the twin forces of capital and engineering talent. When there is lots of capital, there are a lot of companies, and there is insufficient talent. When there isn't a lot of capital, no one can nor wants to pay for talent so they can weather the storm. That's been the case since at least the 1970s.
Through this cycle, there are so many "engineers" working tirelessly to put other "programmers" out of work (not the shift in labels there, because there is always an unjustified scent of snideness in the air) as well to reduce the cost of engineering. All the no-code revolution now is part of this cycle.
There's a wonderful book angling for a Marxist revolution of engineers from 1977
Kraft, 1977. Programmers and Managers. The Routinization of Computer Programming.
I love it because it's cute, and since it's 2022, proven to be a dud. Like any Marxist analysis, it is accurate in assessing the problems and hopeless at prescribing a solution.
Regardless, the main lesson I have taken in my career is the absolutely top priority a senior engineer should have is building tools and processes to eliminate the need for code to generate business results. You will never be able to hire warm bodies fast enough, so all you can do is radically increase the power of each engineer on the team.
Those have always been the most fun teams I've worked on. It almost feels like being a wizard.
p.s. All that being said, I'm hiring. :)
We started with C++ which is very flexible. As I built it and optimized it we had two problems. One the SVG spec was a moving target and second the same optimizations we learnt had to be applied across the entire codebase in many classes simultaneously.
The obvious solution is to build a domain specific language right? But we couldn’t afford to run an interpreter at runtime. So I wrote the spec as a mix of C++ structs, enums and comments and a Perl script (it was 2000) to compile that code into optimized C++ for the parser and DOM and rendering loop.
I also built my own metabuild tools (this was 2000) to generate makefiles and the like to quickly cross compile to new mobile phones. We were able to cross compile and deploy to a new handset from a manufacturer once while the bigwigs were in a meeting talking terms. That definitely impressed.
Another example was that I was brought in 4 months into a VoIP SIP hardware phone project that was floundering. It had gotten nowhere. I had never built such a thing but I had to quickly build a working phone.
We had a very detailed spec from the distributor of the set of use cases we had to implement.
In my opinion, hardware has this annoying requirement to never crash or have bugs because hotfixing is a nightmare. These phones were for trading desks so I think the pressure was high as well to not go down.
With four months lost I know most people would just dive in and start coding and never stop until a spaghetti ball was shipped.
However that is the road to hell as you are just creating chaos in the codebase instead of order. The whole point of logic is to create order.
So yes I did dive in to the code just long enough to spike one phone call with the SDKs to make sure I knew how the tools worked.
But my solution was to “waste time” after that to draw out the spec document as a hierarchical finite state machine in PowerPoint.
Once I had a simpler visual of what the spec was saying, I then wrote a hierarchical finite state machine library. And I then wrote out the phone logic as in the language of the HFSM instead of as a spaghetti ball of smash smash code.
This let me contain all the mutex logic in a tiny part of the code base so I could stop worrying about race condition bugs which plague phones.
I was also able to build a test first library with another domain language. I wrote the tests as message sequence charts (2D arrays with mock objects) that drove the phone. The spec had a number of MSCs so this made it a lot easier to prove correctness.
By going “insane” like this I did save the project’s bacon. Not only did I deliver on time, but I was able to prove the SIP SDK the distributor ordered us to use was broken fundamentally and survive the obvious, “must be your code!” objections rather handily.
Those are fun stories; I painted myself in the best light of course. 95% of the time I was panicking before I came up with a solution and the other 95% I was panicking management would wonder why I spent two months on a side quest. Those are so long ago that I think it is ok to tell them.
Nowadays we have package libraries that full of modules like this. It’s amazing how much people have simplified with better ways of expressing ideas as data instead of code.
I’m not. Although I’m more of a technologist than an engineer.
If anything I’m techno-dystopian.
The world’s biggest problems are political, technological. And fantasies of fixing them with technology are just that.
The author touches on this a bit, mentioning Elon Musk and Tesla/SpaceX, but focuses more on cool products like rockets and self-driving cars and not about, say, the future of humanity in space, or reshaping personal transportation. These are the kinds of impacts that really matter: What is the company actually doing for its users? Does it solve a real problem? Is society better off because of it?
Start by addressing these concerns and I will be much more interesting in working for your company.
This quote is great. Explains how our career evolves into doing less and coaching/guiding more.
Questions? Comments? Get at me on Twitter - @cushychicken
If you earn a lot you somewhat have to deliver but more importantly you [should] want to deliver. Sure, there exist jobs where one is paid a great salary without having to do much beyond sitting around not doing much of anything. I consider those prisons. If you have such opportunity and take it you will become good at not doing anything.
The contrast is with jobs for which you are overqualified, can use and expand your skills and earn very little. There is no obligation to deliver here, its fun if you can but not at all required. There is no pressure, you can walk away whenever you like and find or forge 10 such jobs the same day. In this setting you can give the employer a sense that you are there because you actually want to be there. Its quite surreal. Almost anything you ask for in exchange for a pay cut you will get.
Now the real joke is that I work really hard for the small pay check but I work 3 days, perhaps 4 per week. I go home if there is not enough to do but work 7 days if the situation requires it. The 4 day weekend is a blast! It feels like the whole year is one giant vacation but that is not the big joke of it. In order to grow either physically or mentally you have to push yourself to your limit. If you push yourself like that for more than 3 days per week you won't grow, you will destroy your body, your mind or both.
I run circles around coworkers who work 5 days. Their performance usually declines while mine gradually improves. Their head is full of work stuff while mine is mostly empty ready to take in whatever comes next (which could be the next job)
If the situation requires me to work 15 hours for 30 days I'm up for it. Ill work a 2 day week after that for each 8 hours. Call me if you need me, ill probably show up. Even if they hate me or are the psycho dictator type they are quick to remember how much money I make for the company, how I got their things done before the deadline, the credit they took for my accomplishments.
I also learn that it doesn't matter how much you make, you can always find ways to run out of money before the end of the month.
Sure, if you have a bigger salary and work full time you can buy the fancy new car but why? To drive to work? Its just sitting there outside on the parking lot. You are not doing anything with it. It's for work. You've worked to earn it and use it for work. You can buy the big house but you are never there. You can eat in fancy restaurants but the satisfaction is mostly because you don't have time to cook elaborate meals. If you engineer your meal to the best of your ability restaurants are pretty disappointing. I'm slacking off but if you grow some of your own food the satisfaction is 10 fold.
What I found annoying was the repeated use of Elon Musk and his companies as examples, while refusing to type out the name fully due to not wanting to "help his SEO". That just struck me as being fundamentally dishonest, and made me quite skeptical toward the content.
For example, I abort discussions gravitating towards "oh hey could you do this coding exercise" with a simple "No, I don't do coding exercises, ever. Good luck finding a junior engineer for your role.". I keep it polite but such a question basically means I'm talking to the wrong person that obviously has no idea why they should be begging on their knees for me to consider working for them.
The first contact should be with a decision maker that knows exactly why you are interesting for them. An HR person or recruiter does not qualify for this. Use them for screening CVs but don't ever let them do the initial out reach. If based on a CV, github profile, linkedin profile, etc. a you are not able to figure out why someone is interesting for a particular position or not willing to do the work to find that out, a phone call with an HR person is not going to be helpful. And if the match is obvious, you should move much more aggressively and faster.
Like everybody in the industry I get a lot of very poorly targeted outreach from completely clueless and incompetent recruiters. Most half decent engineers in this industry are busy, not looking, and blowing off recruiter spam on a daily basis. Inviting them to engage with your HR bureaucracy via some recruiter is a non-starter. The more qualified people are the less likely they are going to be interested in your coding exercises, screening mechanisms, job application bureaucracy, etc.
Cut all that bullshit and figure out what you want before even reaching out to someone and figure out how you differentiate from your competition (hundreds of other companies looking for the exact same thing). If some HR drone reaches out with some templated drivel, chances are extremely low that I even respond. It's not personal, I just don't have time to keep up with all the inbound nonsense I get. However, if a CTO of or engineering manager reaches out with a well motivated reason why I might be interested and what they are looking for, they'll get a reply and a conversation starts. I'm actually pretty approachable; you just need to do it right.
The way to fix hiring is to get HR and recruiters out of the loop as much and as early as possible. Their role is to screen and never to act as middle men. These people scare away all the good leads you might get, if any at all. They are the last persons you want people to talk to. In the case of HR quite literally, you involve them when you get to the salary negotiation phase. Screen based on the available resources. Use Google. Look at their Github profile, linkedin, etc. If you like what you see, make a plan for reaching out in the most effective way. E.g. find a way in via a mutual acquaintance (preferred) and be ready to move very quickly. If these people are available at all exactly when you need them, it's not going to be for very long. If they aren't, you need to be ready to really to sell leaving their comfy job for you. That starts with not treating them like numbers.
Nothing in this article wasn't true two years ago; This could of just as well been titled "I think I know why you can't hire engineers" and been posted any time in the last 50 years.
If you mean they think the future can be made better with technology in the abstract, sure. But I think some, maybe many, engineers think that the current way technology is being developed and deployed is leading towards dystopian futures, not utopian ones. They may tell themselves that the cool problem they are solving would be solved by someone else, and they get money and a good puzzle. They may tell themselves that it's not their work. They may admit that is the future and say they just want to be in an excellent position in the dystopia. But if you look at the efforts put forth by open-source advocates to fight against closed-source, or the work that goes into blocking ads and tracking, or the way that misinformation propagates over the internet/social media and the responses written about things like that on HN, you see that some engineers are pessimistic about the way technology will be used.
Or see how the inevitable (and existing) facial recognition companies are talked about. Some love it, but some don't.
Would you have an engineer any other way? I'd argue you can't be a good engineer without an objective worldview - because engineering is the art of making physical things outside your body do what you said they would, reliably. Yes, code eventually runs on physical things.
It doesn't matter what you believe, how you think the world really works, whose side you're on politically - it matters that the bridge stands. That the networking router ASIC routes 100G of traffic accurately and with low latency, without randomly locking up. That the airplane's fuel burn is what you say it will be. These are all pretty hard objective external truths that don't care what you think about them - they are what they are.
On the other hand, especially in the "consumer tech" spaces, I think a lot of engineers (at least those I know and converse with) are looking towards early retirement, or at least "not doing that which they've done." The state of modern computers can be described as "broken and getting more broken," with the fixes for the last complex hacks breaking and requiring yet more new complex hacks. Do that for 20 years, and you end up with this teetering pile of... something, and then you do the same thing with the software on top of it. Piles of libraries, running on a pile of libraries, running on gigabytes of God knows what, running on... all the way down. It's a security mess.
Then what do we largely choose to do with it? There's some neat stuff, yes, but a lot of the tech industry is based, tightly or loosely, around collecting all the data, processing all the data, and using it to predict all the things, then sell those predictions about human behavior to whoever will pay. It's the default model for a company these days, and it's increasingly hard to ignore that - even for an awful lot of money. If you've looked at the past 15 years of your work and realized that it's gone to some pretty human-toxic ends, "not doing that anymore" is pretty appealing.
The security, similarly, is a pile of crap, and everyone knows it. But, despite that, nobody is willing to consider alternatives to "Well, patch it and carry on." Say what you will about the conveniences of digitalization, things like the OPM "theft of everyone who's ever applied for a clearance's life history" wouldn't have happened if the data had been stored on paper. It's mighty convenient to have it digital, but it's a lot harder to have someone haul out 500 tons of paperwork without someone noticing.
So, yes, there's been some interesting work going on, but there's also an awful lot of "Well, it sounded interesting, but it's definitely been not used how I hoped..." work done in the past decades.
And if someone is in that state, you're unlikely to hire them for much. They're probably planning their exit already to go be a gentleman farmer of llamas or goats or something. Emus are just too mean to bother with.
I know a lot of people somewhere in this pipeline.
Another issue I've seen is that there are a good number of engineers (again, I talk to a variety of them) who are a bit hesitant about the Covid vaccine mandates - especially those who have already recovered from a bout with it before the vaccines were available. Quite a few companies are covered by some variety of uncertainty with that, so there's some decently sized pool of engineers (typically older, more experienced) who just aren't going to go work for some large set of companies. You can agree with them or disagree, but it doesn't change the fact that it's going on, and people are trying to figure out how to work with it.
I think we'll just see a big wave of retirements in the next few years of senior engineers who have no interest in the tech field anymore, and are happy to let it spin in the wind after what it's done for 20 years.
People/Environment -- If I hate the people I'm working with, I'm not going to stick around long. I've quit jobs for that reason before, and I would do it again. I have a low tolerance for assholes. For example, worked for a vending machine OEM that shall not be named. Boss was filthy rich and said "oh we'll pay for you to go out here to X!" and then had me ride a fucking Greyhound. I should have bailed right then and there, but I gave it a try, since I was young and fairly new to actually getting paid for my work. Guy had a new secretary every other week, and they always looked like they were one sharp comment away from swan-diving into a wood chipper. I've never seen office workers with that much terror in their eyes and voices before. Needless to say, I didn't stay with him long. Paid well, but getting technical specs, tools, and the data I needed for projects was like pulling teeth from a methed-out rhinoceros, and that proved to be the last straw. I remember once I was told to my horror and disbelief that they had literally completely lost core technical specs that I needed for the project, then they wanted to know why work was progressing slowly. At that point I just quit. Tried to ship his equipment back to him but the cheap motherfucker wouldn't even pay for the shipping, then just stopped talking to me when I asked him to. Guess he didn't care about the vending machine parts. Ironically they were worth more than the shipping, and totally worthless to me.
Integrity -- I look for a company that isn't actively making the world a worse place. I don't mind boring code, as long as I can write it well and be proud of what I've created at the end of the day. What I do mind, however, is predatory practices, unethical dark patterns, and user-hostile design and terms of service. If I think you're Facebook 2 Electric Boogaloo, I won't apply in the first place. If I think you're the "good guys" however, you'll have undying loyalty. *Sidenote: Sickens me to hear that so many of my fellow developers are willing to worsen the world for an extra zero on their check.*
Technology -- You must be asking me to use a language/toolkit/etc that won't make me want to blow my brains out every day at 5:01pm. I can work with tools and languages I don't particularly like, but do not, for example, ask me to build you an Electron app, PHP backend, or Java app. I will walk rather than endure that. Maybe some help in an emergency, but if you make that my main duty, I'm done. I'm fussy, but that's just me. It's very important to me personally to be able to respect the tools I'm using.
Autonomy -- I hate being micromanaged. I'm not incompetent. I've created programs with hundreds of thousands of lines of C++ and Python code by myself. If you second-guess every tiny decision I make over long periods, I will descend into quietly loathing you at the very least.
Money? -- I'm not a greedy person, but don't insult me. At least pay me something close to market. There's great irony in that statement right now, as I'm not making even close to what I'm supposed to (basically poverty wages for some of these months), as I'm trying to help a tiny startup keep its head above water because the boss is actually a decent guy and someone I respect. I suppose it illustrates just how much the kind of people I work with matters to me.