The software engineers willing to pay $10k to help them land a coding job
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
https://consumer.gov/scams-identity-theft/job-scams-explaine...
> Never pay to get a job. Honest employers won’t ask you to pay to get a job. And they won’t send you a check and tell you to send some of the money back. That’s a scam. The check will end up being fake.
Ideally, my "agent" would have max 2-3 other candidates, and offer a totally white glove service: They know my comp preferences, my location (or remote) preference, my ideal company size, industry, desired job level. They would know my schedule and go out and do all the searching and filtering, the application legwork, and basically only get back to me when the interview is scheduled and I need to show up. Then, afterward, they would take care of all the salary negotiation/maximization and let me know the offer and starting date. I'd probably be willing to pay 5-15% of my first year's salary for that level of service.
Don't quote me on that, but as a rough approximation, I feel like the toil of job hunting is so extreme that I'd be willing to part with a significant chunk of change for someone who could actually reduce that toil and deliver a real job offer or two.
I was thinking this too recently. But the entertainment is a little bit different. Jobs are shorter (even TV shows take only a few months) and talent agents get 10 % of all your work - but would you pay your IT agent for 2-3 years (I'm guessing the average length of a programmer's tenure at a single company) 10 % even when he literally does nothing most of the time?
I'm not sure why there aren't any "free agents" running around Silicon Valley like they do in Hollywood. If I had to guess, it's probably because the same skills you need to do that job in Silicon Valley pay more in other sectors, like Hollywood.
PS, my references: I have never used cursor, I am quite bad at vibe coding and don't enjoy it at all. I rarely even use AI for help. But I am quite decent at FPGA design and embedded developemnt. If you have a job for me in germany or remote in europe, then I will pay you with very bad humor every week. Possibility of using linux+neovim is a requirement though. (Yes, I really need a job)
I’m sorry to inform you you did not pass our informal vibe check and therefore we will not be able to extend a job offer to you.
Have a good life!
~ Sillycon Valley
Programmer salaries have diverged a lot between the United States and Europe in the last 30 years. (This comes up basically every time remuneration is discussed on this forum). Hardware engineer pay has not seen such rises in the United States or Europe though I don’t know how much FPGA work ends up in the hardware bucket rather than the software one.
Some financial firms will pay well by American standards in Europe and also make use of FPGAs, though I don’t know how many you’d find in Germany.
Programmers are also well paid in Switzerland.
Maybe one thing to add: ‘bad humor’ is a bit hard to parse in English – it sounds like a cross between ‘bad humored’ which roughly means ‘unpleasant to be around’ and ‘bad sense of humor’, which is what I think you intend.
This whole “we hire the best of the best” and interviews with 5+ rounds should be eradicated asap.
This in particular has always perplexed me. Every company says they only hire the best, but then if that’s the true, then like basically everyone with a job is “the best”.
Places that actually hire people that approximate "the best" are known by reputation, and don't have to say that.
I have a hypothesys that there is a huge layer of companies who do not "hire the best" because this is not crucial for them and I just do not have experience of what is going on in there, having only exposure to the people who did pass this filter in the software-first companies I have worked at (and I have always enjoyed working with people I have landed with in every company). I do not feel strong enough to do a deeper research on this hypothesis though.
"We only hire the best"
-> "I'm judging who is best"
-> "I must be pretty good then"
One of my takeaways from that is that like attracts like. People are biased to hire people who are similar to themselves. And people apply for jobs at places they will fit in. 8/10 programmers don’t take jobs at 5/10 shops. 5/10 shops don’t hire 3/10 developers. Lots of people think that everyone “out there” is like them. But that’s really not true. I think most people just have an incredibly biased sample.
I was a programming teacher for a couple of years and in my experience, there is a huge range of aptitude between the best and worst people in my class. It’s all incredibly unfair - the weaker students needed to work many times harder to keep up with the better students. My best students could just intuitively figure things out that my weaker students could struggle with for weeks.
And it’s obvious if you spend enough time interviewing. I’ve interviewed over 400 people. (I did it professionally for awhile). In our interview, the best people could get an order of magnitude more done in the time we had available compared to the weaker candidates. I wish I could show you the videos. The difference is obvious.
But that still doesn't explain my classroom experience. Some of my weaker students worked much harder than some of my more talented students. The weaker students also ended up getting a lot more 1-on-1 time from me as a teacher. That helped a bit - but the ranking in assessments was - for the most part - depressingly stable. I think the world would be a much fairer place if ability was purely a function of how much work you've put in. But unfortunately I don't think the data backs that up.
* more advanced refactoring tricks,
* patterns to improve mental management
* project layout methodologies
* SQL techniques and learning
I've also made sure to give others project sizes that I think they can handle - and when I'm wrong, I make shrink the task into smaller bits that they can then probably handle, and all of that builds confidence and experience without breaking them down. I think it even helps to build them up.
So, yeah, definitely more than 10%.
I'm speaking especially about the work environment. When I was going through college, sure, there were fellow students that had rougher times; but once I got into the industry everyone has been sufficiently skilled to work through things. Now, sometimes I was better at specific areas of work than people of the same or higher rank; but stepping back and watching, they were better at other areas than I was - a lot better.
I've encountered a few 1's and 2's but they generally don't last too long. I've also encountered a few brilliant ones, but their code was understandable only to themselves, and often didn't meet a spec.
Note that I’m not commenting on the ethics or other wider aspects around why prospective employees might feel like they want to pay this, I’m only pointing out that the number is not unreasonable or abnormal
The percentage is a negotiation point.
I’ve got 10% rates in the past. Always negotiate.
1. There are many more qualified candidates than jobs. That happened with outsourcing and remote, well before AI. That makes hiring errors are mostly undiscoverable.
2. Chemistry matters -- a lot -- in working together, leading to premiums for connections and a bias towards mutually-beneficial referral networks, which makes performance evaluation very difficult. (Objective standards tend to make success game-able, particularly with inside knowledge.)
Desperation is not pretty, opportunity distribution is far from optimal, and teams are rarely open and objective about membership.
Always apply directly to the company you are interested in attending. Once you are in a staffing agencies database the hiring firms are often contractually obligated not to directly hire you.
If an agency asks for money, free labor, or other stupid scams... than you probably don't want to work there anyway. =3
This company was legitimate at one time, but YMMV with these types of services:
> So if you want to make some extra cash for referrals,
Lots of companies were already shooting themselves in the foot, by introducing conflicts of interest in paying referral bonuses.
But for the companies that weren't already insane in the membrane, regarding referrals, it looks like a bribe.
Is this just based on some guy's sarcastic LinkedIn post and then transitions to just a regular story about the job market?
And then later:
>But it had the desired effect: helping him stand out.
But actually:
>While De La Rosa is still looking for a full-time staff position, he's gotten contract work in the meantime.
wtf? It didn't seem to do the thing at all ...
I feel like their journalistic standards used to be fairly high, but they're like Forbes now. A shell of what they used to be, it seems.
Forbes used to be good, but that was when Malcomb Forbes, Sr. was alive. He died in 1990.
If your pool of interviewers becomes calibrated to external candidates who either use competitive programmers in their stead or well tuned AI - it wont be practical to hire.
I'm desperate to land a WFH position again.
[0] but no academic track record in AI, just github
Plenty of tech companies that aren't The Big Ones that will pay those salaries though, even in non-HCOL areas (in the US).
Child care and health care are really expensive, though, and can burn a surprising amount of that in a hurry. Even in “lesser” markets where housing’s within reach of someone making that much, healthcare and child care can hurt the ol’ pocket book.
Entry level in hotter cities will be over $100k, and the lower end of mid-tier in weaker cities will be over $100k.
You don’t have to be good at all, the handful of truly-bad developers I’ve met seem to do fine.
* The United States (80k - 300k USD)
* Europe (50k - 90k Euro)
* Canada (70 - 120 CAD)
Northern and western Europe, maybe.
I gave numbers, it'd be awesome if you provided some too so the parent and grandparent post can have a good idea of what's going on :)
1. Where you live
2. What your current job is
Landing a 6-figure job requires either merely living in the Bay area, or finding a remote job with ~5 years experience.
Though I would love to get some general honesty in company recruiting state, to know where to spend my time. LinkedIn posts that keep being "reposted" are ... problematic, imo.