Hacker News Reader

Comment by mooreds | Hacker News Reader

> All of this to say: if you want C++ programmers, you need to pay competitive enough rates to pull them away from there.

I'd modify this to say "All of this to say: if you want programmers, you need to pay competitive rates."

I worked in real estate for a while (as a software dev) and my boss, who was a realtor, always said "there's no house problem that price can't solve".

The labor analogy for me is "there's no labor shortage that salary can't solve". It may take some time (as people get trained up) but employers complaining about talent pool issues but paying get little sympathy from me.

For example, from a link in the article, consider this job https://www.efinancialcareers.co.uk/jobs-UK-London-C_Develop...

150k pounds for a job in London that is a tech lead position seem low to me.

View on HN

> The labor analogy for me is "there's no labor shortage that salary can't solve".

Perhaps not in SW, but there are plenty of labor shortages that salary can't solve. Some positions are simply not economically viable in certain markets - the pay required to get people to do them is more than a given business can afford. And I don't mean in the "cutting into the compensation of the business owner" type, but "not enough revenue to pay such salaries".

Try living in countries with very different economies (1st world, 3rd world, etc) and this becomes obvious. You'll see jobs in one country that simply cannot exist in another.

> labor shortages that salary can't solve. Some positions are simply not economically viable in certain markets

Your two sentences are opposite of each other? If someone can't afford to pay employees market rate, they need to rethink viability of the business not say that they can't find someone.

> If someone can't afford to pay employees market rate, they need to rethink viability of the business not say that they can't find someone.

Your statement is pretty much what I'm saying, with the added "in certain markets" clause. That a market can't support such jobs doesn't preclude it from being a labor shortage.

Think of it this way: A given business has a certain job that was economically viable, and they could find the labor to do it. Then over a few years the economy changes significantly (feds raise rates, cost of living changes, etc), and slowly that job no longer is viable in that market. The change will not be sudden, so there will be a period of a few years where businesses still find people to do the work, but the pool of such employees keeps shrinking before it hits zero. It's fair to call that a labor shortage in the transition period.

> It's fair to call that a labor shortage in the transition period.

I don't know about fair, but I find it misleading. When I hear "labor shortage", my intuition is that just having more people around (Advertise job offers better? Give more work permits?) would solve it, not that the market is such that this type of work doesn't make financial sense anymore.

"Labor shortage" sounds like some macroeconomic temporary situation to which businesses shouldn't need to adapt to beyond temporary measures, while what you're describing seems like a failure from a business to adapt to a new stable situation.

Although the pound has recently crashed, the general rule for comparing UK salaries to US ones is to 1.5x it to dollars. A £150k salary in London is equiv to a ~$200-250k salary in the US. Not bad, I'd say.

That's fair, I was using 1:1, even though London is surprisingly cheaper than Denver, CO (according to the cost of living website I found).

London can be as expensive or cheap as you want it to be. I worked for a startup on 23k when I first started working and my now wife was an undergrad, we still had a studio in Central London (zone 1). On the other hand you can have a town house in Belgravia for prices similar to Atherton.

>~$200-250k salary in the US. Not bad, I'd say.

In SF or NYC? For a junior dev who can maybe write a for loop without supervision sure.

While it's of course good by local UK standards, I still think sometimes London needs to recalibrate to pay closer to US norms. Cost of living in London is often just as bad as major US coastal cities. At my work, they recently introduced a London office paying eng roles in similar salary range, and lots of opportunities to move there with help provided for relocation fees. For many the interest evaporates when they see typical dev pay package and CoL in London.

>While it's of course good by local UK standards

understatement, £150k is outstanding, london or otherwise

> The labor analogy for me is "there's no labor shortage that salary can't solve".

Assuming the labor you need is fungible.

For a sandwich shop, raising pay will probably solve a labor shortage. But even salaries of $10,000,000 a year won't produce more surgeons. It might inspire more people to get into the pipeline, but that's a 10-15 year lag.

It will solve the shortage by allocating labor to the most economically valuable uses.

If you can't find developers at the price you can afford to pay, then make do with fewer devs, raise your prices or go out of business. The market doesn't owe it to you to make your business model profitable.

There might be a 10 year lag creating more surgeons from scratch, but you'll have existing surgeons suddenly working for your company today.

Your 10-15 year lag assumes untrained workers. You'll have a stream of people transitioning from other medical professions or surgical specialisations to your $10mm job category, many of whom require much less than 10 years of additional training (1-2 years? on the job?).

UK salaries on the whole are shockingly poor. That's actually a really decent salary here. Devs can start anywhere from £20k to £35k depending on background/where in the country you are.

150k plus bonus. It's at a quant firm, so the bonus is likely to be ~50% of base salary if you do okay, and multiples of that if you do great.

Thanks, that's fair. I've never worked in the finance space, so didn't know that. TIL!

Maybe, but C++ developers who haven't worked at hedge funds before wouldn't know it from this advert, and probably won't apply.

Perhaps. I note that position is being advertised by Oxford Knight, a high-touch recruitment firm. Their main modus operandi is to make contact with someone looking for a job, find out what they are looking for, and then suggest particular openings on their books to them; they would have plenty of opportunity to explain about the compensation. I think these public job listings are a bit of a cheap additional thing, and aren't that important to them.

As a C++ developer hoping to move back to London, this side of the market is still very opaque.

I would recommend joining with some recruiters from Durlston Partners. They are fairly upfront about the compensation on offer and for C++ in London it is significantly better than the numbers I've seen in this HN thread. For example, I've seen roles with base salaries of £250k and generally large (or even uncapped) bonuses on top of this...

For example: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/rahnpreet-sandhu-2b84a515a_co...

Amen to that!

What are hours like at HFs and quant firms? I’ve heard they can be bad.

That's another load of BS spread by people not in the industry. They equate HFT's and quantitative hedge funds the same as investment banks. At most HFT's, mine included, devs are mostly doing 40-45 hours a week. Some places like Citadel, Headlands, the work hours are terrible (still not IB level bad), but the rest of the places it varies between 40-50.

What IBs have bad hours for devs? I worked in the markets team at a BB IB and did similar hours to you. I wasn't sitting with traders, to be fair.

In my very limited experience (n = 1), hours per week is the same as anywhere else i've worked.

One quirk is that the trading day starts at seven in the morning, so at least one dev in the team has to be awake(-ish) and logged on to handle any technical issues. Before the pandemic, that meant being in the office, so an 05:45 alarm clock for me, but these days we do it from home. Another quirk is that trading winds down after six in the evening (exact time varies), and some releases have to wait until after that, so sometimes you've finished a piece of work but have to loiter to actually release it. Again, these days we can do that from home, so less of an impact, but still can be annoying.

Also, my team does its own out of hours support on a very unstructured basis, so you could get an alert in the middle of the night (but not weekends) you need to respond to, although this is rare (and is mostly in our hands to keep rare!).

I expect that better-organised teams have better ways with dealing with all this!

160k puts you in the top 1% of UK earners. With bonus that job is comfortably in that bracket. UK salaries are no where near US levels.

Edit: my point is that a top 1% salary seems about right relatively for a tech lead position.

But sheiks and oligarchs are buying all the real estate, so the cost of living is pretty similar.

In central London perhaps. But it's by no means important to live actually in London and work in London. Commuter culture is (or at least was) big. Many people commute from the surrounding 100+ miles by train each morning and pocket those London salaries while living in low cost of living areas.

And some part of them slowly dies each morning when they have to wake up extra early just to waste time on train delays.

Commutes over 30 minutes extremely sucks, unless they are taken from your work day time.

if you live in the fucking shard, maybe. london is expensive but let's not exaggerate: a £150k earner is not worried about the cost of living.

Bigger demand for higher-level housing creates price pressure on all levels.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com