Comment by luckylion | Hacker News Reader

Comment by luckylion | Hacker News Reader

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That absolutely makes sense, but I'm not sure it is the reason. I mentioned we're remote first: we hire _everywhere_. I've been with this company for 7 years, and haven't traveled to HQ even once, and have worked from home or a spot of my choosing (but honestly, that spot is almost always home!) every day, that's how remote first we are - nobody has to uproot their life to work with us.

But it's still extremely hard to find senior+. I'm sure our tech stack plays a role, and naturally senior developers are much less common than juniors. But whenever I hear about the job market being super hard, I feel like I'm living in a parallel universe.

AI is not replacing anyone from my perspective, but AI might become our only hope at some point, because we're growing aggressively. I have to keep mediocre people because I can't even replace at that level easily - the only ones I'm pruning are the ones that are net-negative contributors.

Ah, sorry, I misunderstood your original post then, I interpreted "hybrid, remote first" as... You can be remote most days but you _need_ to be in office a couple of days. This just goes to teach mea hybrid model has _a lot_ of variants.

Back to the point, I think I'm pretty senior, mostly embedded SW, thankfully I still have work, but the job market seems to havecratered. I have friends that are pretty good that are looking for jobs for about half of year now.

I'm incredibly curious now what is your tech stack. And how do you guys view people looking to switch tech stacks.

We're very boring, our stack is PHP/postgres/mysql. A lot of Symfony, a lot of Symfony-style-code on top of Wordpress (mentioning that usually puts people off but it's all PHP in the end, and you can choose to write clean code on either).

Lots of people see PHP in general as a dead end career-wise and WP specifically as almost an insult, so there aren't many that advanced their skills and have continued to work with PHP (or Wordpress, but I believe that an experienced PHP developer has no trouble picking up WP).

We're generally very neutral on how someone arrived where they are, we don't require certificates or degrees, we focus on experience and skills. I wouldn't hire someone who isn't experienced with at least one side of our stack though (unless they're extremely good) because it takes time from other developers to upskill them and that's the one resource we don't have.

I won't disclose where I work though as that would dox myself and I much prefer anonymity.

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