How the Other Half Works: an Adventure in the Low Status of Software Engineers | Hacker News Reader

How the Other Half Works: an Adventure in the Low Status of Software Engineers

michaelochurch.wordpress.com

205 pointsgreenyoda19 comments

This is bloody depressing to read, and rings true in my experience.

One of my pet peeves is relocation costs. Companies in nyc try to hire me at least every six months, particularly since I used to live there. You can tell who is an asshole by asking about relo packages. If they start at $5k my wanker detector goes off. Assholes offer maybe up to $10k, often as a hiring bonus, so it's taxed; maybe $6k might land in my checking account. That's a joke for a mid-30s data scientist. A trip to nyc for me plus partner to shop for apartments alone is $2.5k (2 airline tickets, taxis, meals, boarding a dog, 3 nights in manhattan hotels). Then the costs of apartment rental, job search for partner, winding down an apartment lease here, selling a car, and moving a grown up apartment -- ie I own a real bed and dressers and a couch and a table -- across the country. A relocation would cost me on the order of $15-$20k after taxes.

Yet ceos whine endlessly about the lack of good employees. You never see them in a bwm dealership bitching they won't sell a 5-series for $30k though.

Michaelochurch has another blog post about exactly this.

It's called "Never relocate unpaid", and I posted it on HN a few days ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8003073

What? You don't love the 6month contract offers to relocate to 3 states away even though you're current employed? :/

I've had a number of offers die on relocation. It's a surprisingly high percentage. In addition to the shitty DIY lump sum packages that never cover more than a fraction of the expenses, you see the shitty clawbacks. It's nuts.

I feel like being a programmer is like being an 18-year-old girl on a college campus: so easy to get activity, but so hard to get respect.

Relocation is a great filter against activity-without-respect jobs.

Maybe there's a much less sinister reason for companies shying away from relocation. We had a few applicants that we were willing to offer relocation and all of them flipped at the last moment. They all said their significant others had a change of heart. I suspect the changes a relocation will bring, hits home really late. Once bitten twice shy; I am not considering people who are not in my geographical area anymore.

You're absolutely not obliged to offer any relo to a programmer, any more than a Denny's is obliged to offer relo to a fry cook. This is completely within your rights. I truly mean it. You'll lose out on some candidates, but you may gain in other ways, and if the trade-off is worth it to you, that's absolutely your call.

My problem with employers isn't that they want to hire an unusually skilled person at what they've decided is "market rate", with no relocation. Or that they want to subject candidates to interviews amounting to intense all day (at times, multi-day) oral exam on undergraduate CS coursework, or that they don't want to hire anyone over 35.

What gets me peeved is when, after doing all this and discovering that they can't hire, they go to congress with claims of a "shortage", and congress actually believes it. This "shortage" is absolutely a self-inflicted wound, an outcome of all those things I described above. Software employers are not offering jobs that are competitive with what other industries are offering talented people. If that changes, you'll get your candidates. If not? Why on earth should the gov't create special programs to allow tech companies to bestow residency on workers (under conditions that limit the worker's personal freedom)? They can hire any of the 1.2 million immigrants who come to the US as free citizens able to choose their own path in life, just like in any other segment of the economy.

If an employer accepts this, then I have absolutely no problem with whatever salary they want to offer. If they can hire, hey, well done. If they can't, well, talented people are in demand, in software and elsewhere, that's how it goes.

You have provided a reason for not offering relocation. Not an explanation for offering a bad relocation deal. You and OP are talking about very different things.

If that was the case, why would you extend a job offer with a bad relocation deal rather than not offering the job at all? Are you hoping the applicant sees how bad your deal is and turns you down? Why wouldn't you just not make the offer?

Not really IMHO. If hcho's candidate leaves quickly after an expensive relocation, hcho's boss is not gonna like it ("come on, you made us spend 20k on relocation for this guy who ended up leaving after one month!"), while the pill will have a less bitter taste if the relocation cost is much cheaper.

Being in business is inherently risky. If that hypothetical employee leaves five years later, in the middle of a critical unfinished project that she's been holding together with her unique mix of skills and domain knowledge, it will cost the company much more than $20K. Or if the company hires a lesser-qualified candidate because they don't require relocation, that could also easily cost the company much more than $20K in the long term.

Also, an employee with a stable work history isn't likely to leave quickly after finding a new job unless (1) there's something terribly wrong with the company's culture or work environment, or (2) they've been lied to (e.g., told in their offer letter that they'd get fully-paid health insurance and four weeks of vacation, only to have them taken away a few months later by a "policy change").

Yet somehow this never seems to be a problem for managerial hires...

Everything in a job offer is open to negotiation. Sometimes I have to go back to my boss to extend my range if I like a candidate a lot. If the candidate flips after that, the failure is much more public than I would like.

I think you're proving OP point.

As I move further and further beyond 30 I encounter the assumption or at least question as to whether I am or am aiming to be a manager more and more often.

I've actually been thinking about whether I should try and remake myself in the same way for the same sort of reasons related.

For instance, bits like this...

>'...praise for doing things that would just have been doing his job if he were a managed person.'

...and...

>'It’s far better, unless you’re applying for a junior position, to start at 70 and get credit for everything you do know, than to start at 90 (or even 100) and get debited for the things you don’t know.'

Read as pure truth in my experience.

Coming off a period where my final title was 'Program Manager' my technical credentials seemed to be treated as gospel and an incredible bonus. Later, with a purely technical 'Engineer' title and no less responsibility those same credentials are heavily scrutinized and interviewers seem puzzled by an inability to fully categorize my experience.

I've come to think there's a lot to be said for and gained by properly managing titles / signals of status and managing the sort of interactions that are easy to dismiss or deride as 'playing the game'.

> Instead of being a programmer auditioning to sling code, he was already “part of the club” (management) and just engaging in a two-way discussion, as equals, on whether he was going to join that particular section of the club.

Hmm! The latter is typically how I approach interviews (I'm a developer). I feel that if that's not the case then why am I here? Sometimes you get people that are smart in a dumb way, like the last interview in the story here. Just looking to be intellectually dominant, the "winner". But you just have to recognize those situations for what they are and not get discouraged. Developers are in demand, we get to act like it. And sometimes people get treated like shit because they allow it to happen.

Most programmers seem to avoid conflict at all costs, which is a bad trait in a corporate environment. But you can minimise the discomfort by standing your ground at the right times.

The best time is when accepting the employment offer and not signing anything that will put you in a position of having to stand your ground against shitty conditions later. Things like non-compete clauses (and relinquishing all IP rights), no side projects (because you have to be 110% for the job) or mandatory overtime with inadequate or no compensation shouldn't be accepted as-is.

Otherwise you will have zero status because you signed it away at the start.

Conflict avoidance is pretty much always a losing strategy and a very bad habit. It makes you less efficient in a company (as flawed decisions aren't challenged until to late), but more importantly, it makes you vulnerable and ensures that you often get unreasonably bad deals.

It can be fixed, as almost everything else, it's a trainable skill/habit.

It's a better skill to be teaching our children than simple conformity to authority that seems to be core to school curriculum.

A fascinating analysis. Anecdotal, of course, as a controlled double-blind test is hard to do for in-person interviews on behalf of a single person, but this presents some interesting possibilities for further research, along the lines of these:

http://www.nber.org/digest/sep03/w9873.html http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/09/14/1211286109#aff-... http://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/49392/2/MPRA_paper_49392.pdf

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