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Comment by lbriner | Hacker News Reader

For us, I would say in the UK, all are hard to hire.

The main background issue is a lack of supply if you are not in a place to hire worldwide remote (which many companies are not).

As a small company, doing the communications required for doing recruitment all in-house, as well as getting your job listings out to where people will find them is hard. However, using Recruiters is expensive and they have less ability to do quality filtering of applicants, especially since they are driven by commission more than quality so I think they would rather get us to interview someone who isn't a great match "just in case".

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> I would say in the UK, all are hard to hire.

I always say that when it comes to lack of candidates there's this magical thing called "money" where if you throw more of it on the table the problem suddenly resolves itself.

Recruiters and getting your job ad in front of more people is only needed when it's a hard sell; if it's an offer most people can't refuse then you just have to show it to a handful of people before you get someone who agrees.

> I always say that when it comes to lack of candidates there's this magical thing called "money" where if you throw more of it on the table the problem suddenly resolves itself.

In the past few years, developers’ salaries have increased significantly in the continent. In Germany they are almost on par with London. So to convince somebody to move to the UK and go through the immigration checks, you have to pay more than the average British employer can afford. For 80-90K£, you are far better off getting 60K€ in Germany or Austria. I wouldn’t advise a EU citizen to move to the UK if they aren’t going to earn more than 120K£.

Many years ago I turned down a great job in London. The high salary wasn't enough to compensate for the far greater cost of living in London.

> For 80-90K£, you are far better off getting 60K€ in Germany or Austria.

That's around €95K-€107K. How is getting that in the UK (far) worse than €60K in those places?

In any case, the parent's point stands: throw enough money at them and they will come.

Because renting a half decent flat (new build, 60sqm, inner London) costs 2000£ per month, good food is extremely expensive (Waitrose would be an average supermarket in Southern Europe), the NHS is not as good as its continental homologues, so you have to pay for healthcare, public transport is very expensive, you have to deal with the immigration office (which western professionals aren’t used to), etc…

The cheapest nursery in inner London cost more than 1600£ per month, so if you have a child you’ll need 4000-4500£ per month (or 75-80K per annum) just to put a roof over your head. If you want to live like a professional or save some money, you’ll have to multiply that by 2.

Living in Berlin, 60k isn't really possible anymore for new hire. I bet there are people in their old jobs making that much, but for our backend hires we had to offer around 70 to find people.

I started the comment saying that salaries in Germany are approaching those of London. Probably Berlin is still slightly below, but I think Hamburg have completed the catch-up.

Later I wrote that you get a better lifestyle in Germany with 60K€ than in London with 90K£.

I don't think it's as simple as that, just ask any large company who is paying £100K+ for developers. It generates even more noise than before since there are plenty of chancers who will apply because if they get in then great but in the meantime, we are struggling to make good assessments of people's skills and values and it is hard to judge in a short time whether someone is working out, in which case you might have lost £30K to a Recruiter and another £15K in salary for someone who didn't work out.

If we had loads more money, we would probably pay for more specialist recruiters but nothing we have tried so far has been brilliant. We are looking at the whole package though, I think there are things that are relatively easy to do that make a job look appealing like duvet days or free posh coffee and stuff like that.

> we are struggling to make good assessments of people's skills

There's an easy solution to that, 10 MORE rounds of leetcode hard level questions.

In the UK, it is notoriously difficult to team-up with someone to build a startup. The mindset is very different. If you go to US, India or China, engineers are willing to take risk. In the UK, the conversation starts something like this:

Me: "I am looking for a tech co-founder; the startup is at an ideation stage, and I have already talked to people who have shown interest in the project. I think having a tech co-founder at this stage will help a lot."

Listener: "How much are you paying for the role?"

Me: "This is an equity-based role because the startup is at an early stage."

Listener: "So you want people to work for you for free??"

This doesn't matter if the listener is an engineer or not. In the UK, there is little understanding of how very early stage startups work. It is equity based, that concept does not go down very well with the population.

Maybe the reason is that in the US, salaries are high enough that most engineers have a significant war chest saved up that allows them to take these gambles? In the UK, it's much harder because engineer salaries are nowhere near what the US pays.

This is it. You can take a lot of risks when you have 4 years of savings from a US-based tech company.

I expect a lot of US founders will emerge from working remotely from a LCOL area for a couple of years, and then launching with a war chest.

I think, yes, this could be the main reason for engineers.

I wonder if something is getting lost in translation. With no particular order:

Hearing the word ideation would cause an allergic in people who are sensitive against Americanisms.

British are also notorius for their indirect way of expressing their thoughts and feelings. Instead of saying they do not believe in your idea or your ability to execute it, they'd prefer to use compensation as a get out.

I just moved from Chicago to Edinburgh, and have about ten years of experience doing full-stack webdev at various startups. I've looked into a few UK jobs and they all seem to pay about a third or at best half what I was making at my previous job with a SV startup.

At some point my hand will be forced if I need a visa sponsorship, but for now it's a pretty tough sell.

Ha, this is just the reality of things in Europe. I guess at least you get "free" healthcare, holidays and sick pay that you might not get in the US. Jobs in London (remote) would pay best I imagine. My role is paying London rate, even though I live in Nottingham. Previous to that I tried contracting which will pay you about twice what permanent work pays (if you have enough work), however that has been complicated since IR35.

Since Brexit, the labour market is missing all Europeans. To work in the UK you have to leave the EU, or be treated as a lower status resident, or do a bunch of paperwork and pay import/export taxes. Employers have not accepted that that is a bill they must pay or workers won't join the UK market.

If you move first, then look for a job, you just have to accept the local market conditions.

Also, as a EU citizen, your time working in the UK would no longer count towards your pension.

Unless you're Irish, be ause that's been grandfathered in.

Although I don't think such an option exists in the UK, several EU countries are offering "Digital Nomad" visas which give you a legitimate status while remaining employed by your SV company.

You won't get the US comp/cost of living ratio anywhere in the world.

The new reality is that UK companies will never be able to hire SW engineers as cheaply as they were able to in the last 15 years.

I started on 30k in 2002 UK, now 150k Australia, goal is to double that in a year or so. Mostly through market over me being much better.

I converted all to us$

Lets play the world's smallest violin for the cheapskate hiring managers of UK.

> if you are not in a place to hire worldwide remote

What prevents you (or others) from hiring remote?

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