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Comment by fiatmoney | Hacker News Reader

There is no such thing as a developer shortage; there is a shortage of wildly, identifiably competent developers willing to work for the salaries you're offering. Offer more money (and especially, advertise it), and perhaps offer remote work to expand your search pool if you'd rather pay "Cincinnati well-off" than "Mountain View well-off" salary, find yourself with no shortage. The sense of entitlement is astounding.

Or, as this article states, you can offer interesting work in a good environment - that's worth something (have you tried offering a 4-day week?), but really, your core problem is probably building something very boring with very high maintainability and reliability.

So just offer more money, and advertise as such. It's really really simple.

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Exactly! It amazes me that this day and age so many companies are stuck in the prehistoric era of working onsite. Some of us have experience building whole companies and product remotely and they're going to tell me that "company culture" is the reason they want people onsite? No! It's the terrible working conditions that necessitate people being onsite. Or not having an option of a 4 day week (with 10 hours a day that's still 40 hours).

I always said, there is only one thing I require of my job: to be afforded the respect that any stranger off the street would be. Doesn't seem like much, but believe me, it is. If most companies can't even afford that, the rest of the perks are really meaningless. (As a side note, it's really hard to truly disrespect me remotely).

10 hour work days! Jeez, I have a life outside of the office. If you're going to offer a 4 day work week, stop making me miss my daughters bedtime (or evening surfing time) for the privilege.

I actually prefer to work on site when possible.

It creates a nice 'event boundry' so I can switch gears. The office also has fewer distractions while at the same time allowing me to just chat with people about what is going on business wise. Not to mention the ease of grabbing someone for lunch.

It is nice, however, to have the option of working offsite when it is more convenient for whatever reason.

Most long-term remote workers have solved most of these problems. You have to have an office (a separate room, with a door), and use it only for work.

The just chatting part is more difficult.

I have an office with a door. What I really need is a time lock on the refrigerator and pantry.

> There is no such thing as a developer shortage; there is a shortage of wildly, identifiably competent developers willing to work for the salaries you're offering.

Depends on the subfield.

If you want to hire 1,000 ARM JIT superhackers, those people just don't exist in the entire world. There are just not 1,000 people total that know ARM, know JITing on ARM, and are strong hackers.

You could advertise double the usual salaries for those positions, and still those people would not show up, because they don't exist. So your only hope if you need 1,000 of them is to train them, which takes time and has risk.

For something like web development on the other hand, sure, I do think the market is far more flexible and if you double salaries, more developers will show up fairly quickly.

> ...if you double salaries, more developers will show up fairly quickly.

Because throwing money at a problem is always the best way to solve it, right? Why would anyone consider hiring the type of developer they actually need?

Here's the inconvenient truth about startups in the Bay Area... lots of them have basic CRUD apps with little to no traffic that a self-taught programmer out of high school could build. They don't need "engineers" with CS degrees from top schools who are Google or Facebook material.

Hmmm. I talked with a taxi driver in Dublin last year. His friend was in the IT business. The friend said that couldn't find enough experienced developers. Well, they were there, but they were asking for too much money.

> lots of them have basic CRUD apps

What's hilarious is they love to throw CS interview questions at you. There should be some sort of term for it; delusions of grander[sic] engineering?

Let me make it obvious: technologists don't want to write CRUD apps.

Your attitude sucks.

I was with you up until the point where you said that your only hope is to TRAIN them. The developers that I have met are almost all really interested in technology and constantly learning new things. Few developers wait to be trained if there is a useful new technology out there that could solve problems that they would like to solve.

So there is a 3rd way, and that is to identify the developers who are into constantly learning new things. It is not hard since you just have to weed out the 10-15% of developers who have given up on learning for one reason or another.

If you need developers, just hire a few people who have done some kind of development before, are at least vaguely familiar with the tools and problems that you have, and are willing to work for a graduated salary where they start around 10% lower than normal and work their way up to the full salary in 3 months or so. You will still have to lose a few before three months is up, but the upside is that you will never again have trouble finding people.

I used the word normal up there instead of a particular salary number because numbers vary by country and region. The right number for you is probably somewhere above the average salary for your region because if you are weeding out 10-15% of field, then you are by definition hiring above average people.

Sure you may miss one or two really great people who demand a high salary or they won't leave their employer. But can you honestly say that you KNOW that these people are good if they are not willing to go through a short trial by fire? You could even rig the graduated salary so that the final yearly total earned is exactly the same as if they had been given a normal salary offer from the beginning.

There are lots of smart and skilled people who can learn a new language and a new platform in FAR LESS TIME THAN IT TAKED TO LEARN YOUR CODEBASE AND YOUR BUSINESS. And don't tell me that you only hire people who already know your code and your business, because if you are not churning out mindless Wordpress sites, then I don't believe you.

Save this comment to show folks why spell checking is no replacement for proofreading. My brain said TAKES but my fingers wrote TAKED and because I trusted the spellchecker, the error is now forever frozen on the Internet.

There's no shortage of people smart enough and willing to become JIT ARM superhackers.

Do you feel there are thousnds of unemployed developers just holding out of the market until salaries rise, remote work and 4 day weeks are the norm, and the work is always interesting? I'm all for remote work and paying market value, but I still think we're short on people.

Don't discount simple inertia!

No, they are not unemployed. They are employed by firms that are not using them efficiently, because it's not worth their while to do so, because they're underpaid (you might say they're underemployed). If you actually started offering pretty large salaries to reasonably competent developers, the market would shift.

Hiring contract shops, and letting them handle the actual recruiting (you're building "foursquare for trunk sales", what do you know about finding good developers?) is the other route.

Software developer salaries in the bay area start at 80k/year for computer science graduates fresh from state colleges. If you feel this is indeed being underpaid, what do you believe salaries ought to be?

Google's profit is a few hundred thousand per employee per year. Let's call that an anchor for how much room there is to give in salary.

We are going to use Google as the standard for profit? Do you think Google's success might be characterized as a bit of an outlier, as opposed to the norm?

As long as Google is hiring, you have to compete against them though. You don't get to offer $50K for the same job Google is offering hundreds of thousands for just because you are a small company not making any money. I mean, you can, but don't expect anyone to give you a second thought.

"for the same job" - there's almost nothing like 'the same jobs' google hires for and 90+% of the rest of the tech jobs out there. No, most companies aren't competing against Google for hiring people, unless by "most" you're only looking in SV.

I was contacted by Google last summer for a potential job. I was shocked at how mediocre their recruiting staff were - unfocused, intentionally vague/evasive, rambling, didn't answer my questions, didn't followup when they said they would. Perhaps Google can't convince some people to uproot their lives and move across country because they're not doing a very convincing job in their initial outreach?

"what do you believe salaries ought to be?"

The economics of a free market says that salaries should be at the point where supply meets demand. If there's a shortage of labor, it implies that salaries are not high enough. And there's nothing in economic theory that precludes a developer from being paid more than a CEO, if that's the price it takes to hire a developer.

Unfortunately, we know that the big Silicon Valley companies don't believe in a free market for labor since they were busted for conspiring to keep salaries down by not recruiting each others' employees (while simultaneously lobbying the government to allocate more H1-B visas).

I love the congnitive dissidence demonstrated in calling for free markets in labor, while simultaneously exulting in artificial barriers to entry against your would-be competitors in other countries.

  > The economics of a free market says that salaries should
  > be at the point where supply meets demand. If there's a
  > shortage of labor, it implies that salaries are not high
  > enough.

This is only true if supply is easily increased. The percentage of the population willing and able to be trained as software developers appears to be strongly inelastic.

  > lobbying the government to allocate more H1-B visas

If a company is willing to pay above market rates to import a developer from another country, doesn't that imply that there is indeed a lack of local talent?

"This is only true if supply is easily increased. The percentage of the population willing and able to be trained as software developers appears to be strongly inelastic."

If the salaries of software developers go up relative to the salaries of Wall Street analysts or neurosurgeons, more smart young people will quickly start going into CS. Conversely, if word gets out that tech companies are doing everything they can to hold salaries down while making their employees work long hours, fewer people will major in CS. The number of people willing to enter a field is a function of the job prospects in that field. Also, people in other fields who already write code as part of their jobs (e.g., scientists using NumPy) wouldn't be that hard to train as software developers. I've known some excellent software developers who used to be scientists.

"If a company is willing to pay above market rates to import a developer from another country, doesn't that imply that there is indeed a lack of local talent?"

If a company has been caught illegally colluding with other companies to artificially hold down the salaries of local employees, wouldn't you be somewhat suspicious that its goal in importing more workers (increasing the supply of workers and thus the competition among workers for jobs) might also be to keep down the price of labor?

An alternative would be to offer higher salaries, at which point they'd have a much better chance of recruiting developers from other parts of the U.S. to move to Silicon Valley, which is one of the most expensive places in the country to live. If a Silicon Valley company offered me 50% more than what I'm making now, my standard of living would probably decline, especially due to the quality of housing I could afford within easy commuting distance of work.

Your question kind of reflects the backwards thinking that causes the situation the OP was talking about, IMO.

Instead of going into it with the mindset of "Well, I want to hire a software developer for $80k because that's what they should make" the thinking should be more based on "how much value will be added to the company/product/etc if this particular software developer we are seeking is hired, and what number can we afford to offer him or her based on that?"

People can argue until they are blue in the face if the best developers are 2x, 5x, 10x or 100x better than the worst, but whatever it is, there is certainly a wide variation in productivity and overall talent. Assuming that there should be a nearly fixed salary number based on years of experience is as ridiculous as assuming that all NBA players should make some flat rate based on years in the league or whatever else.

The software industry pays a lot of lip service to "meritocracy" but then they often throw the idea out the window when it comes to compensation of non-founders, which is goofy.

I want to hear what HN thinks the minimum software developer salary should be. A college graduate with no work experience from an unremarkable school is a decent proxy for that, because they'll likely be in the bottom percentiles in terms of both raw skill and trenches experience.

If a fresh grad is making $80k, then a junior developer (say 2-3 years experience) will probably be making $160k (x2), a senior developer might pull $400k (x5) or more, and beyond that you start to get into the world-famous engineers who receive whatever they ask for.

According to Google's financials at http://investor.google.com/financial/tables.html, they have approximately $220k of unallocated profit per employee. Even if they were to take all of that and convert it into salary, it would likely only bump the fresh grad's compensation to around $100k because the junior and senior developers will demand percentage-equivalent increases in their own pay.

  > Assuming that there should be a nearly fixed salary
  > number based on years of experience is as ridiculous
  > as assuming that all NBA players should make some flat
  > rate based on years in the league or whatever else.

Years of experience is useful as a rough approximation of value, because someone who is not constantly improving their skillset is unlikely to be promoted and will eventually leave their position for greener pastures.

"I want to hear what HN thinks the minimum software developer salary should be."

I doubt you'll get that from anyone, too many variables to set a minimum, IMO.

"If a fresh grad is making $80k, then a junior developer (say 2-3 years experience) will probably be making $160k (x2), a senior developer might pull $400k (x5) or more, and beyond that you start to get into the world-famous engineers who receive whatever they ask for."

It doesn't really work like that. I mean, sure there are articles about how Google pays $3 million or whatever to keep a top developer, but if you read past the headline you see it isn't salary, mostly one-time RSUs or such and the person is actually more of a project manager or even executive rather than a developer. The industry's issues with compensation extend up into the higher end too where there's somewhat of a loose glass ceiling at around $150k-175k or so (which can vary quite a bit based on region/cost of living, but the general idea of a glass cap is pretty universal) beyond which it is very difficult to go without being a Linus-level name brand, or going into management or founding your own company and hitting the startup lottery. Of course there are exceptions to this that prove the rule, like people doing HFT/financial software can make quite a bit more because they are compensated like financial sector workers instead of like software industry workers.

"Years of experience is useful as a rough approximation of value, because someone who is not constantly improving their skillset is unlikely to be promoted and will eventually leave their position for greener pastures."

As someone who is 40 and still an active non-managerial software developer, I should find this somewhat flattering, but I've seen plenty of evidence that suggests you are simply incredibly optimistic about the efficiency of the industry at weeding out those who aren't productive or talented.

In what world are 2-3 years of experience going to double your salary? And $400k is not what your average senior dev is making. I don't know where your 2x/5x numbers came from, but I've never seen anything close to that.

From your profile I see you live in New York. Silicon Valley is a different world, where the total compensation (salary+stock+bonus) for a senior developer can exceed a million per year: http://www.itworld.com/cloud-computing/399839/man-or-myth-3-...

I don't think NYC is that different. Starting salaries here are pretty similar ($100k+ for people fresh out of college is becoming fairly normal outside of startups).

Maybe the spread is bigger in Silicon Valley? If so, I wonder why. Doubling your salary based on 2-3 years of experience doesn't happen here, and 5x for senior engineers would require a very narrow definition of senior.

If 80k/year is what the market clears at, that's the right salary. If it is 40k/year or 120k/year, that's the right salary too.

The free market works for buyers and sellers of labor too, not just of goods. (Within certain limits, of course--labor isn't fungible like books.)

And outside of the Valley: A well respected software firm in my area is advertising $40-60K salaries in their job postings and they seem to pick up some really good talent. A friend of mine has his PhD in computer science, working in the next city over, and he is also making around that $60K mark last I spoke to him.

For comparison, the average male high school graduate who has experience under his belt in this same region will will earn $52K per year. $10K above that average is not exactly what I would expect a shortage to look like for a supposedly rare skill that is in high demand.

Maybe you could argue that it is only a Valley shortage, but it makes you wonder why the Valley isn't attracting some of these people outside of that region? Perhaps $80K (or even $120K) isn't interesting enough for them to give up their current life to make the move?

That's refreshing to hear that outside silicon valley that the salaries are at least comparable to here in Europe. I feel very short changed reading this site and seeing what the average US developer seems to earn.

Cost of living must be a big one. I released that with different tax rates I would need to add around 50% extra onto my Spanish salary to make a move to Germany worthwhile.

80k for the Bay area is underpaid for graduates these days if they are any good.

That might work out somewhere like Texas.

Not quite. I'm in San Antonio. Fresh grads start at $55-60k here and move up to $80k within 3-4 years with senior devs making >$100k pretty easily.

I'm in Austin (though I have friends in and visit SF often).

When I graduated UT quite a few years ago, friends were getting offers of between 75 and 85K. Granted, they were really, really good and were already consulting on the side.

San Antonio might be a bit cheaper.

You /might/ be able to find a decent Texas State grad for 60K. Maybe.

it's not where you start, it's where you are in your 30s, particularly when you start thinking about starting a family or owning a home. This is a very expensive place to live, and having 1-2 roommates and still paying $1200-$1600 a month gets old.

if you want to have 2 kids, you're staring at a $600k+ condo, or a $1mm+ house; 2 cars; and daycare so you can both work. Plus 9% CA income tax. Oh, and if you ever want to retire, you're going to pay the state $1200/mo of rent just to be allowed to continue to live in the home you fully own (ps: don't take this the wrong way, I understand the state needs money, but $20k+ a year between property tax, insurance, utilities, and a handful of repairs is hard to budget into retirement.)

A couple I'm friends with just left to move back to MI. One was a developer with a masters from a top 10, making $140k. The partner was an account manager and made $90k, for a total of $230. The engineer took a paycut to $105 and the partner took a paycut to $60, for a total of $165. However, you can buy a pretty nice home for $350k; they live near family to help with daycare (saying $400/week for infant childcare); and taxes are lower. It's a much better deal for them. And again, to own a home, they need $100k+ as a downpayment and still have a housing/income ratio of 600/230 for a condo and 1100/230 = 4.8 for a detached house. Compare to MI where they have a housing/income ratio of 350/165 of 2.1. That makes an enormous difference in your financial lives, particularly as you think about savings, retirement, paying for college, etc.

So there is no "should" here. It's what do people need to be paid to live in an insane housing market with a busted ass public transport system, when there are far cheaper deals available elsewhere.

That's an interesting concept. So you feel that if we took all the world's developer horsepower that they could supply all the world's demand for developer horsepower, but because we have people underemployed (could accomplish more given a different environment or salary) that are doing less than they could, we have a perceived shortage?

I don't think it's reasonably up for debate that MegaCorps especially (which still hire the vast majority of the total dev pool) don't use talent as efficiently as they might.

And it's not like there's a static pool, either. Hire enough developers at a high enough salary and people will be drawn to the profession. You'd be surprised how many spreadsheet jockeys are basically doing programming already, albeit in a roundabout fashion and a sketchy language/environment, and can be converted into "real" developers in relatively short order.

EDIT:

Here's an idea: take a group of actuaries (ie, people with quantitative skills, pre-screened IQ and diligence, and exposure to some sort of programming environment) and offer them jobs if they teach themselves Python on their own time. They'll even take a pretty rigorous test at the end if you ask them to; they're used to it. Their salary data is here: http://www.dwsimpson.com/2013_Actuarial_Salary_Survey.pdf

Do you think you might be able to hire developers for those kinds of salaries? I'd think so.

Well, I for one develop software and farm. For the right price, I might give up farming and spend all my time developing software, but I haven't seen any offers that are attractive enough for me to consider that yet. Just because someone has developer abilities, it does not mean they are necessarily even working as a developer at all.

I'm sure that there are plenty of people like me that are holding out (probably forever) from moving to SV until salaries rise high enough. I currently have a good job with reasonable hours and a short commute. And I have nice house which has separate bedrooms for my kids and a fenced yard. In the rest of the US this really isn't anything to brag about, but in the valley this would be millionaire living. Is anyone there going to pay me enough so I can keep my standard of living? I doubt it. It's either naive or disingenuous for SV companies to complain about developer shortages. It's all about the economics.

Not quite. You have to offer a good work environment as the article suggests. I suppose you could theoretically pay large salaries that make up for really bad ones, but unless you're a running high volume 95% margin type of business, you probably won't find them affordable...

"Good work environment" as in, "don't be an asshole if they're getting their job done". The things actually mentioned in the article as recruiting tools (see below) absolutely have a pretty reasonable compensating differential in the form of cold, hard cash.

And my, who are the (even non-technical) executives who have this much time to devote to seducing their developers with loving care? Just offer them money; you have a business to run.

To quote: "Moreso, find out what is important to them besides coding and perks. Do they have a family? Find a way for them to bring their kids in a few times a week, or have a family meal on Fridays. Do they like to travel? Invent a travel bonus, where they get to go where they want one week every three months. Do they want to speak at conferences? Become their agent, allow them time to commit to open source."

"The things actually mentioned in the article as recruiting tools (see below) absolutely have a pretty reasonable compensating differential in the form of cold, hard cash."

Absolutely. "Walk in the park, go to a movie, meet their spouse"? Don't waste my time with that, I really don't care about socializing with my future boss. Offer me 50% more money than I'm making now and you'll have my attention.

I agree. I work as the database developer for a scientific institute. I occasionally do something smart and my team leader says, maybe you could write it up and get a paper out of it. I am not in research, what use is (another) paper to me? A payrise would be appreciated.

> So just offer more money, and advertise as such.

I don't think it's that easy.

There are a good deal of early stage startups in the Bay Area offering very competitive salaries. But for most of them a cursory look at what they've raised and the traction they have in the marketplace raises questions about how long they'll be able to sustain their burn.

As a developer I don't just care about how much you're paying me. I also care about how long you're going to be able to pay me.

Hence "offer more money"

If you make $80k/year in a stable job, but a company could be reasonably expected you'll crash and burn in 6 months maybe that company will have to offer $120k to account for the 3 months the dev is looking for work after you crash unexpectedly.

It might not be your cup of tea to take jobs like that, that's fine someone will. And if you don't find anyone at 120k maybe it needs to be 130, or 140 to make up for that mean time to failure.

Your numbers are off for major markets. The startups offering market (6 figure) salaries for experienced engineers aren't looking for the developers who are making $80,000 today. They want to hire the engineers who are already making a comparable salary. They can't afford them, and most of the time the non-financial value propositions aren't that compelling either.

The things I would do for a 4-day work week.

1. Learn French for 2-3 hours every day with no holidays until... 2. Write the DELF [http://www.europa-pages.com/france/DELF-DALF.html] 3. Move to France 4. Find a job ( stick this into Google... emploi developpeur informatique site:.fr 5 Profitez alors!

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