Trouble Hiring? Create A Cult. | Hacker News Reader

Trouble Hiring? Create A Cult.

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41 pointsdeepakprakash18 comments

"There's no shortage of smart, hardworking engineers. There's a shortage of smart, hardworking engineers willing to work for very little money." ~ David "Pardo" Keppel

If you're having trouble hiring, it's probably because you're not paying enough. It turns out that talented people are worth paying a lot for.

But isn't there actually a shortage of engineers, based on the lamentations of startup CEOs?

This doesn't really mean anything. Startups don't necessarily pay better than the corporations, and often pay less from what I'm seeing. And their stock or whatever is risky, so that is only a partial offset.

I wouldn't exactly describe the comp packages flying around the Bay Area as "very little money". Honestly, this is Wall Street thinking - the belief that a person's compensation is purely a function of supply vs. demand, completely disconnected from real life.

There is a cap to supply and demand - and that's the real monetary value being created by the worker. Nobody sane will pay someone more than they will in turn make for the company.

This isn't to say that we've reached this point in SV, but I don't think we're that far off. IMO the supply side constraints are so extreme right now that we're seeing a rapid inflation of comp packages, and rapidly approaching that point where the compensation no longer makes any sense compared to the real value of work generated.

One can have a shortage of engineers and high compensation at the same time, if the supply side is sufficiently, and desperately short. I think that's where we are right now.

But isn't their ability to make money for the company exactly what determines demand for engineers (or any worker for that matter)?

I would like to see all these quotes of "shortages" phrased as "shortage of highly skilled workers at $xx,xxx per year working xxxx hours per year doing x, y, and z", and then I'd like to hear what exactly caps the salary at $xx,xxx rather than $yy,yyy other than the CEO decided the number sounds nice and anything more "sounds like too much".

I am incredibly tired of this argument, it's a complete straw man by trying to paint the "other side" as stereotypical MBA suits, and pretends that everyone is out to get those poor, poor engineers.

Fuck that shit. Let's have some perspective:

I wake up every morning. Unlike 90% of this country, I have no hard deadline on when I have to be at work. Unlike most of the country, I also have effectively no limits on what to wear. I can stroll in with shorts and sandals if I so feel like. I get paid well into the six figures to work on things I love. I get free food, luxurious shuttles to ferry my ass around, and in my post-lunch drowsiness (that most of the country can ill afford to even contemplate), I have hammocks to nap in. I have benefits that much of the country would commit bloody murder for. There are things that are expensable which would appear shockingly excessive to any other industry. I attend ridiculously funded parties fueled by my company's largesse, and my office is one of the coolest places in town, because shit, burning through VC cash is fun.

And somehow, in the midst of all of that, you decide there's a penny-pinching CEO character who's being all Scrooge McDuck-like and actively plotting to screw you out of your hard-earned money.

Really.

Sometimes I feel like software engineers, particularly in the Bay Area, have the most over-inflated sense of entitlement I've seen anywhere. I'm all for extracting a fair slice of the value I generate for my employer, but come on, this straw man helps no one. It's has shades of Wall Street greed - we're sitting around, our giant paychecks in one hand, our catered organic/fair trade free food in the other, and loudly complain that we're worth more than this.

Are you guys hiring?

^W^W^W^W Now I think about what you said, the take away I get is this: Some companies in SV need to go bust because the use they make of their engineers (i.e. the value the engineers deliver) is less than the going rate for engineers.

Once they go, this will reduce demand for engineers, bringing equilibrium to wages at current or depressed levels.

Or the job you're hiring for sounds really boring or the working condition sound really harsh. Most engineer I know would happily trade a bit of money for more fun challenges, better R&D opportunities and more autonomy.

Indeed. There are several companies that emailed me multiple times that I never responded to because I heard that their working conditions suck. Maybe not the best way to handle the situation, but that's what I did.

Awesome article.

The two huge takeaways for me were:

1) Company-provided lunches aren't simply the value of the food -- it's the value of the bonding that can be created among co-workers. If people become friends then work isn't "just a job" anymore.

2) The workcation -- I'm rarely surprised by almost anything I read from startups anymore, and I've grown skeptical of founders as being psychologically manipulative of early hires in many ways, but this is truly a great and non-manipulative idea: Let's all go somewhere else and work some of the time and explore/play some of the time.

It's so good because so many people in the US are physically disparate from their families/people they need to visit. Even a fairly solid (by American standards) vacation of 3 weeks turns into a mandatory visiting of divorced parents (separate physical locations). This eats up vacation days like mad.

EDIT: drunken rambling

Wow. Great comment. Agree completely.

Please don't post "me too" comments.

    2) The workcation

Do people bring their spouses/children along on these?

I'm guessing that smart startup didn't have too many married workers.

I imagine companies that do this also have an unspoken policy to not hire people with spouses/children.

My favorite example of the "workcation" is Andyet's month-long stay in a castle, partly because it's not pretending to be much more than an awesome idea: http://andyet.net/blog/2011/mar/3/devcastle/ http://andyet.net/blog/2011/jul/18/devcastle-the-movie/

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