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Comment by sosuke | Hacker News Reader

Just on the subject of programmer salaries, I was talking with someone who had much more experience in the computing industry than myself and he pointed out something I'd never known. He said that programmer salaries from pre-bubble days was six-figures, and that we're still in that range, and not higher is proof that salaries have been kept low. Six-figures today is not what six-figures was worth in 1998. Inflation alone from $100,000 1998 to 2014 is $144,877.91 using http://www.usinflationcalculator.com

And yes, I don't trust anyone who cries foul about a shortage of workers and then offers 40% under market wages, anecdote of course.

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> anyone who cries foul about a shortage of workers

Those people generally use the phrase to mean "a shortage of workers willing to accept below-market wages and invest all of their time and energy in a company while bearing the downside risk of a entrepreneur but none of the upside."

I can't stress this enough.

In Germany all kinds of industries have been whining about shortages for ages, but in reality they're all looking for unicorns that work for peanuts in combination with an absolute unwillingness to train anyone (let someone else or big gov foot the bill, if that doesn't work cry for immigration reforms).

In the US, it's popular for Valley companies to complain that they can't hire for what they're willing to pay, but at the same time they are totally unwilling to train—if you're a developer who wants to advance and improve your skillset, well, that is going to be up to you on your nights and weekends. Funny how that works.

On the subject of risk, I found "Capital vs labor: who risks more?" convincing. The author opines labor risks more, and I agree.

http://yosefk.com/blog/capital-vs-labor-who-risks-more.html

> Those people generally use the phrase to mean "a shortage of workers willing to accept below-market wages and invest all of their time and energy in a company while bearing the downside risk of a entrepreneur but none of the upside."

I agree that salaries are an issue, but I can't agree with this attitude which seems so prevalent on hacker news recently.

First of all, the downside risk an entrepreneur faces is huge. We like to say we are the type of nation and culture that accepts failure and encourages risk, and compared to other places that may be true. But the reality for an entrepreneur coming out of a business is usually not super easy. Few companies are looking to hire people who ran unsuccessful businesses - the entrepreneur skillset tends to make it hard to market oneself. On the other hand, an engineer coming out of a failed startup will have the same trouble finding work they had as they went in.

In terms of upside, negotiate a position that makes sense for you. You're the only one responsible for how much of the upside you share.

> But the reality for an entrepreneur coming out of a business is usually not super easy. Few companies are looking to hire people who ran unsuccessful businesses - the entrepreneur skillset tends to make it hard to market oneself.

That's just about 100% opposite to my experience, both firsthand and by observing others.

Why do you state this with such certainty? Keep in mind that there are huge differences from country to country about how failure is perceived. In Germany what you write might by true to some extent, but in NL it wouldn't be and in the US it would be a badge of honour and people would be more than glad to have you.

True that I don't have any citation, like you only going off my own experience. My own experience in hiring has been that short of consultant positions ex-CEOs don't have specific enough skillsets to be put to work in many places in a company. When I have worked with them they have been unmitigated disasters.

I'm curious about your experiences because, correct me if I'm wrong, I think you were pretty successful early on in your career. I'm sure you've had failures, but having a win behind you tends to temper failures quite a bit.

Regardless, the entrepreneur will have to either change careers (go back to being a programmer - which is not difficult in this market), or negotiate successfully for much rarer positions than the programmer. I'm not saying it's impossible, I'm just saying the concept that there is a risk for entrepreneurs, and more so than their employees (at least the engineers).

Edit: And I'm curious what your thoughts on the comment I was replying to are as well.

Well, I've always been a programmer so I guess that's a marketable skill. The only thing that probably stops me from getting a 'day job' is that I'm too expensive and I like my freedom but it's not as if I would have trouble finding a job. Rather the opposite, offers from all over the globe with some regularity.

I specialize in work for the financial sector and do the occasional interim management / project rescue job, high pay, very intense and fun to do with both a defined beginning and end.

As for the failures, they're too numerous to recount :) Having one 'win' and a string of failures still adds up to a win (for me), but it was a pretty slow road upwards with one stroke of good luck in between somewhere. For the most part it was simply hard work.

The first contracting job I landed sustained me for quite a while, you're definitely right in that (and it became a very large success over the longer term but I did not see any revenues from that).

CEOs without specific skill-sets are usually not the best CEOs to begin with, that might be where the failure correlation comes in. I don't think I'm the best CEO either (or CTO for that matter), but I know how to spot talent and when to get the hell out the way and I think those are the major skills you should have as a manager at any level (as well as knowing how to keep people motivated).

As for the parent comment: I think it's spot on. The worst possible position to be in is early hire in a start-up. You're going to see all of the downsides but only 1% of the upside of being a founder. If you're going to be taking that much risk you might as well be a founder.

> The worst possible position to be in is early hire in a start-up. You're going to see all of the downsides but only 1% of the upside of being a founder.

Let's expand on this, because that's me and I'm quite happy (but also willing to be convinced otherwise :D).

Financially, you're balancing lower salary with a potential for a large upside later. That upside can be great if you believe in the company and/or the value of the stock options offsets the lower salary, which it probably has the last two times I've done it, and definitely didn't the first 3. That being said, the first three gave me access to the last 2, and allowed me to see why the last 2 would work in a way that the first 3 didn't. Edit: also, comparing to the risk an entrepreneur takes, the salary cut tends to be much higher for an entrepreneur than an early hire (often the entrepreneur takes little to no salary for a long time).

In some ways you miss out on working with specific talent. You work with fewer people, so by definition you have access to fewer viewpoints. That's a very real opportunity loss, for sure. On the other hand, you get to work on a wider variety of things, and working at an early company tends to give you a better work-life balance which can allow you to learn more aggressively outside of work (and allow me to be a happier person in general). You also get far more control over the company's direction, if you care about stuff like that.

In terms of "might as well be a founder" - my CEO puts in way more work, way more hours than I do, is able to attract better talent than I can, is able to attract money in a way I couldn't, is able to administer the business better than I can etc. If I didn't think that was true, I wouldn't be where I am (this is part of the skillset that I can pick up at an early stage company that I couldn't at a later stage company). If I had those skills, yes it would obviously be better for me to found, but I don't so I don't think the way you've laid out the risk is entirely fair.

There are many more trade offs, but it's difficult for me to see why being an early stage employee is worse than a late stage. In either cases a lot is left to the negotiator and in both cases you can get a great deal, depending on what you are looking for.

It's simple math: the equity a founder gets is paid for with less cash than your salary downside as an early hire.

So it makes no sense at all to me. Just about the same risk and none of the upsides.

In contrast, a later hire comes on-board at a time that most of the risk has been absorbed or mitigated.

And in most cases there won't be any later hires because the company has folded.

Again, where do you get the "same risk" from? Edit: and I know we are both comparing anecdotal experiences, not asking for a repeat of that, I'm asking specifically for yours (or an expansion on your point of view).

> It's simple math: the equity a founder gets is paid for with less cash than your salary downside as an early hire.

I'm not sure why that matters. To me the only thing that matters is my salary downside vs. interest I could be making on a larger salary else where. I might be misunderstanding what you mean though.

The risk that the company folds hits the early employees just as hard as it hits the founders.

Founders don't typically provide a whole lot of capital.

Three guys meet in a room somewhere, hash out an idea, assign themselves CEO, CFO and COO, plunk $1000 on the table each, call each other 'founder', then get some funding and then hire you to implement their vision.

Their risk is just about the same as yours, only you get to share - if you're lucky - maybe in 1% or so of the success (assuming you don't get screwed somewhere along the line) and in 100% of the failure.

And if you're in for a profit share the odds are even worse.

If you're good enough to be engineer #1 you're good enough to be a co-founder.

On the other hand, as engineer #1, I didn't personally guarantee any debits of the founder, nor was I the one the IRS was after for years for not paying payroll tax when money was tight.

That sounds like a very bad company to work for. Debts of founders are not guaranteed by the employees for a good reason (even more risk without upside), founders that go into debt in order to finance their start-up and put up personal guarantees are obviously in a different class than founders that externalize all or most of the risk. If the IRS goes after founders for not paying payroll taxes when money is tight then they more than likely have a reasonable cause to do so. I've seen one such case up close and I didn't fault the local tax arm one bit when they decided to go after the founders. After all, if you allow founders enough leeway to pass the risk of their business on to society then they will take even more risk.

Better to fold than to not pay payroll tax, or, alternatively, talk to the tax man and see if you can work out some kind of a deal. Simply not paying is illegal and will get you in seriously hot water.

As an employee you are insulated from that but that's simply bad business and bad management and nobody forces anybody to do such things.

In principle, I agree with most commentators on HN that if there were actually a shortage we'd expect to see salaries rising.

Yet, in practice, it does seem that there's simply an absolute shortage of experienced developers. I've been hiring developers at my job for most of the past year, yet we have never had an offer turned down. Rather, we see only a trickle of applicants, very few of whom are event remotely qualified. If we actually saw a great developer, I'm sure we could put together a fantastic compensation package (despite being an early-stage startup, we pay above market for NYC). Yet all we see are mediocre developers, and few of those. It's hard not to call this a labor shortage when my colleagues hiring for other positions (marketing, writing, etc.) see 100x the number of applicants with 1/10 as much outreach/advertising.

Given that it's impossible to produce more senior developers in a 1-2 year timeframe, what alternatives do people suggest to immigration?

Advertise the salary you're offering. If your positions look like 90k positions but you're offering 150k, how will an applicant know?

EDIT: I noticed that you wrote in a nested comment that publicly listing salaries is a non-starter. I'm not sure why - at the very least you could list the smallest number you'd imagine offering a qualified applicant.

Note that it's pretty strange to claim that you can't attract enough skilled engineers even at higher salaries when you're keeping the fact that you pay higher salaries a secret. How do you expect this mechanism to work?

There are two major problems with listing salaries publicly.

1. We don't really want to make the huge salary discrepancies obvious to our non-tech employees. While it's theoretically true, publicly listing the difference wouldn't be great for morale.

2. There's a huge range, and where a particularly candidate falls in that range requires qualitative judgement. We consider everyone from talented new grads to senior developers with over a decade of experience, but the expected salary range can swing by as much as $100k—publicly listing such a big range isn't helpful for anyone. (Yes, I understand that we could theoretically have different job listings but our criteria are driven more by "how much smart shit can you get done" and "how much will you learn" than by years of experience or anything quantifiable on a careers page.)

> Note that it's pretty strange to claim that you can't attract enough skilled engineers even at higher salaries when you're keeping the fact that you pay higher salaries a secret. How do you expect this mechanism to work?

It's not that I think an unadvertised salary will by itself attract skilled engineers—I'm just using our experience as a counterfactual for the claim that there are loads of senior developers but we aren't willing to pay them enough. Note that in private conversations/outreach, we do try to be upfront about salary ranges.

You don't have to just post a range. The listing just needs to communicate that you're paying well above market, which is a step beyond competitive (and I've never seen "above market" in a job listing). Of course, this is only if your company really is committed to doing so!

I don't have a clever solution for 1. This is definitely a broader cultural issue - non-lawyers at a law firm would completely expect to make less than the lawyers but programmers still don't nearly get that level of respect.

EDIT: I think we're miscommunicating a little. There absolutely are quite a lot of qualified senior developers right now. Most of them are employed. You're just not seeing a lot of qualified senior developers applying to your jobs, which is a different issue entirely. Given that nobody's turned an offer down, there's something that your job postings are missing that people are learning during the interview process. "Not paying enough", in this case, can be effectively synonymous with "not communicating that you're paying enough".

> Given that nobody's turned an offer down, there's something that your job postings are missing that people are learning during the interview process.

You are quite correct—I haven't yet figured out how to convey the interesting product/technical challenges we're working on in a mass way: especially not well enough to overcome must developers instinctual reaction to "publishing."

If you have a minute, I would love to hear your thoughts on how we could better communicate through our listings: http://www.cafe.com/careers

A cynical man would read your salary offer(for lead developer) - " As we haven't taken any outside funding, we can offer you meaningful equity with a competitive salary." as: not-so-good salary , with promises of getting rich on a startup that wasn't even able to convince investors.

Heh, interesting read. Maybe I should adjust. I meant to imply that our equity is sizable (because we're still early-stage) while our salary is still competitive with later-stage startups (our founder is self-funding off his last $545M exit).

If you add the last part about $545M, things would sure look different. :)

Is that because you're reading "competitive" as competitive with other companies that haven't taken outside funding?

Because i'm reading competitive as standard market rates.

And standard market rates aren't good?

No, I think "standard market rates" are what employers are paying their engineer who has been there for a few years (and whom they are currently paying below what he/she could get if they left for another job) or possibly what someone would pay for a "standard software engineer" who really needed a job.

If you want to attract exceptional engineers then by gosh, you might just have to pay exceptional salaries.

At the end of the day, it's a business relationship and an intelligent engineer is quite justified in capturing some of the value that he or she generates.

Yeah, those career listings are pretty bland. Not much sense of what you'd actually be doing, or even what the company is hoping to do in a bigger sense. If nothing else, more specificity in both those areas would help you stand out. Especially since, as you say, it's publishing and techies are kind of skeptical about their role in that.

And "competitive compensation" to me signals "eh compensation". It's a pretty weaselly word.

Also, I didn't see any technical people mentioned on the About page? Are they not part of the team?

Here's what I'm getting at- sell people on the vision and what their specific role in it would be. What impact are they going to have, both in the company and in the world? As a startup, you've got the vision thing, or at least you damn well better, and it's your advantage. :-)

Thanks for the feedback.

> And "competitive compensation" to me signals "eh compensation". It's a pretty weaselly word.

What do you think would sound better? Above market compensation?

> Also, I didn't see any technical people mentioned on the About page? Are they not part of the team?

Good catch. I'm on there (Director of Product & Technology) but we haven't done a good job of keeping it up to date with new hires.

> What impact are they going to have, both in the company and in the world?

Yes, I definitely need to work on this. I've done a pretty good job of refining the technical vision and how it fits with the overall company, but haven't yet distilled it down to a good description. How's this:

Cafe is building technology for discovering, publishing, and sharing great stories. We're building: web scrapers which analyze content across the web (with NLP and Amazon Mechanical Turk) to identify promising writers, a platform which makes it easy for non-technical writers to publish interactive stories, and analytics which model how ideas and stories flow across the web in real time. As a developer at Cafe, you'll be using technology to inform and entertain millions of people while driving clickbait off the web.

Yes, "Above market compensation" is better. It makes me curious to find out what it is, and that's what you want.

I like the reworked description too. Definitely implies some interesting work to be done.

If listing the salaries for the technologists will make the non-technologists in your firm jealous, then perhaps you should raise their wages, too.

I suggest looking outside of NYC for a developer that would be willing to move to NYC.

In Silicon Valley, the talent pool is very picked over. I suggest to anyone in SV to look outside the immediate area. Post ads in Kansas or Michigan. Some place where getting paid a NYC salary seems great.

You have to get creative.

Even if there was a dramatic increase in engineers - there is no guarantee that they would be interested in cafe.com.

I did look at your job postings and I do have some suggestions:

1. List your tech stack - not as a requirement but just to let applicants know what they are signing up for. 2. List your tech stack for SEO purposes- I can't think of any google search that would put the cafe.com jobs high on the list. 3. What are you doing to market the job - be aggressive with linkedin, github, stackoverflow. Every single week I get interview requests by all three channels.

If you are not aggressively recruiting people who are not actively looking then you are missing the boat.

The last time I actively looked for a job was a decade ago. Most job connections come to me via friend/network/etc.

Thanks for the feedback! We do actively recruit outside the NYC area, but could probably ramp this up somewhat (admittedly, recruiting is not my favorite part of the job).

We avoided listing our tech stack because people frequently read it as a requirement, but I think you're right. Will add it soon.

We aggressively recruit on LinkedIn, GitHub, Stack Overflow, and AngelList, but the majority of our qualified applicants have actually come through my network and Hacker News. I'm trying to expand this though, particularly because I want to avoid building a mirror image engineering team (young, white, males in their 20s).

Who can I connect with on LinkedIn to learn more about open positions at your org?

Feel free to email morgante@cafe.com

> Given that it's impossible to produce more senior developers in a 1-2 year timeframe, what alternatives do people suggest to immigration?

Why do we operate under the assumption that these companies are entitled to as many unicorns as they want? Why shouldn't they just go out of business?

After the whole collusion ordeal when it became abundantly clear that on one side there are VCs, founders, and C-levels who work to suppress our wages -- and on the other side, us, I actually want to see them lose and get hurt after all the terrible things they did to us.

The world isn't nearly as binary as that.

I'm not a VC or founder. I'm a developer just like you, trying to deliver cool products—but doing so requires more developers.

If my company was trying to suppress wages, or refused to pay above market, then I'd agree with you that we have no right to ask for more talent. But we're perfectly willing to pay for talent—we just can't find any.

I wouldn't be surprised if the number of senior developers on the market was less than 10% of the number of open positions.

So the thing is, I share your general opinion -- there is a legit shortage of talented developers, and it's hard to find them.

BUT: I guarantee you that there is in fact a wage and benefits package you can offer that would get you more good applicants. Maybe it's more money (sure, "above market" is nice, but I'm not going to leave a job for $5K more than my "market" rate -- but for $50K more, well, let's talk). Maybe it's perks and benefits (the Google package, for instance).

Whatever it is, there is absolutely money you can spend that would end up getting you noticeably more applicants one way or the other. That the company doesn't WANT to spend that money is exactly what bothers people.

And yes, yes, it's all well and good to say that developers are paid and treated well -- they are -- but if their talent and skill is really that rare and that in-demand, maybe they should be paid and treated even better.

Okay, let's assume we were willing to offer substantially higher salaries than the market (though the practicalities of our funding certainly limits that to some degree).

How would we communicate said information in a way that doesn't actively distort the hiring process? When was the last time you saw a job ad with salary listed?

Put it in the ad. It's not common, but it's not super-rare, either. And the main reason you don't do it is that you don't want to eliminate your chance at hiring someone at a below-market rate (or of alerting your below-market-rate current employees that they're being screwed and should be getting big raises). If you're committed to paying the rates you'd need to pay to get good talent, then put that upfront.

See above: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8805687

This is what I'm running into right now. Our CEO will not buy health insurance or computers for Dev. In a second breath, he gloats about paying people damn near nothing because they 'want to work in the industry.'

Where are you based? It seems absurd to not buy (great) computers for developers, at least by NYC startup standards.

I am currently looking at jobs in NYC. With 2 years of experience I am fielding offers between 60k-80k in a cheap state to live in. Two comments above you make great points: (1) Developers should be making more than what they are and (2) Why should startups be entitled to cheap labor?

That being said my point is if I had the 5+ years of experience you probably are looking for and was moving to NYC I would expect to be making 150k+. Which if that is what you are offering, great. But if it's not then you can find the talent you are looking for, you just can't afford it.

> (1) Developers should be making more than what they are

As a developer, I'd love to agree with this. In fact, I do. But in our experience this isn't directly related to the talent shortage (again, we have never been unable to make a compelling offer to a candidate).

> (2) Why should startups be entitled to cheap labor?

I don't think they should be. All our senior devs have generous compensation which easily adds up to $150k+.

150k is pretty bad for a senior dev in NYC fyi. Perhaps you have answered your own question.

Banks will pay at least 2x more and large tech companies closer to that than what you are offering.

Note I'm not talking about truly great developers, merely good senior ones.

I'm not sure I agree, especially when you factor in substantial equity. We have interviewed numerous people from banks and large tech companies and our salaries certainly don't seem out of whack.

For reference, $150k is right on target according to AngelList data: https://angel.co/salaries

To you, that "substantial equity" might be a real cost, but to the applicant it's essentially a lottery ticket. The expected value of your equity is zero. I've worked in many silicon valley firms that offered stock options but the only time one ended up having any value to me was as a bargaining chip - I was able to tell the next firm that wanted to hire me "gee, I'd love to take your offer but if I leave now I'm giving up all these unvested options worth lots of imaginary money" which helped negotiate a signing bonus.

Most companies fail, making their stock options worthless. And even the few companies that succeed usually hit bumps in the road that dilute the stock options or put their value underwater.

So if you have a reason to think your idea of "substantial equity" is much more likely than average to ever be worth anything at all, you should make that fact a key part of your pitch. (Or if you're indifferent between equity and salary, offer more salary and less equity.)

"especially when you factor in substantial equity"

Unless your company ends up being the next Google or Facebook (which is a statistically unlikely outcome for any startup), your "substantial equity" may never be worth any significant amount of money. Living in NYC is expensive, and you can't pay your rent with stock options.

To somebody who watched the equity bubble unfold in '99-00, this is what a labor shortage looks like.

Maybe the AngelList data is why startups have trouble finding good engineers? There is no good way of finding out what a good developer should get, and that is because the companies (including yours) like it that way.

I only have anecdotal data, I don't think many people have more, but I am very sure a decent senior dev can get way more than what you are offering.

I think there is more to a job than just the salary, but at least be open about the fact that there are open positions doing similar work in the same city offering significantly more.

You've never been unable to make a compelling offer to a candidate you've attracted to apply in the first place.

What about those you haven't?

You're right that our biggest challenge is in getting people to apply in the first place.

What do you think is the highest value of deploying monetary and other resources to make that happen, given that publicly listing salaries is a non-starter?

If you want the benefit of offering significantly above market salaries, at some point you've got to let it be known that you're doing that. Secretly paying people a lot of money won't attract new talent.

Does your employer use the lots of startupland hiring phrases, like "we're looking for passionate rockstars who believe in our mission to change the world through payroll software"?

A lot of the phrases in vogue right now seem to indicate companies that want employees that work 80 hour weeks and pay entry level salaries. Have you tried "competitive compensation" or some other non-numerical indicator that you guys pay well or phrases that indicate you guys have a professional vs. passionate culture?

I think our job listings are quite fair and free of "startup" phrases. We emphasize the actual problems you'll be working on and try to communicate that we pay professional salaries for professionals.

Then again, I wrote them. So you can see for yourself: http://www.cafe.com/careers

"I think our job listings are quite fair and free of 'startup' phrases."

Just looked at your "Lead Engineer" listing. It says: "We offer a great startup work environment with free beer, snacks, and friendly teammates." That sounds more like a typical startup that expects people to work there for the fun experience than a workplace that wants to attract highly-paid professionals.

And the offer of free beer makes it sound like a frat party. Maybe that's a turn-off to women who don't want to work in a place full of drunken guys. Maybe it's a turn-off to guys who want to have a life outside of work. Skip the free beer and make sure your employees have enough free time after work to get a beer outside if they want to.

>I don't think they should be. All our senior devs have generous compensation which easily adds up to $150k+.

I once got messaged on LinkedIn by a Bloomberg/banking guy looking for me to contract with them in New York at a rate of $144,000/year, and I'm comparatively junior. A properly senior developer, someone with something like 7-10 years of experience in industry, should definitely be making a bunch more than some guy offers me off-the-cuff when trying to recruit on LinkedIn -- especially in an expensive area like NYC!

> I once got messaged on LinkedIn by a Bloomberg/banking guy looking for me to contract with them in New York at a rate of $144,000/year, and I'm comparatively junior.

We have successfully hired people from Bloomberg and finance (including competitive compensation).

One thing to keep in mind is that contracting is very different from full time. $150k is low for senior contractors but normal for senior developers (annualized, I expect senior developer consultants to be making more than $200k if they're based in NYC).

I'm going to concur with selmnoo, but be less rude about it: sorry, but those are the rules of the game. However hard a time you're having finding senior developers, the incentive to produce them domestically gets skewed downwards, making the problem worse in the long term, if we let you "patch" the issue temporarily with immigration rather than signaling higher demand to the market with rising salaries.

Of course, your firm can also do its own part to fix the problem directly: hire more junior candidates and train them up. Yes, I realize this is quite difficult for your situation, but consider that if few to no companies train junior developers into senior ones, that explains why there are so few senior developers on the market.

And then there's the housing shortages around NYC and SF that make land rent eat up most salary rises -- that's worth an entire post in itself.

Training is part of the solution, but I truthfully don't think that can be driven by startups. We might not even be around years from now to receive the rewards from our investment in junior developers.

More practically, I wouldn't feel right hiring junior developers when I don't think we'd be giving them the best training given our current staffing levels and product needs. Since we already have too few senior devs, I'm not sure I could justifiably ask the team to take on the additional burden of mentoring junior developers (though I do hope we can start a robust training program once the dev team is a bit larger).

This is nonsense. I am part of a 5 person company and we do training in the form of mentoring, helping each other, etc.

Training is a benefit - not a cost.

We of course help each other, but bringing on a junior developer is absolutely considered an investment. There is a tangible decrease in the amount of time senior developers have available for other tasks, not to mention the cost of any off-site training we might invest in.

Using that logic, you could say immigration laws are actually what are making the problem worse in the long term - by temporarily keeping salaries higher than what they otherwise would be.

Wait, did startups participate in Collusion-gate? No.

They got a ton of benefit with none of the moral cost!

On the one hand, everything you've said is more-or-less correct. On the other hand, there's an additional problem: as long as cities suppress the construction en masse of affordable housing, every attempt to raise salaries mostly just ends up raising rents, leaving employees only a tiny bit better-off than before.

Agreed 100%. Honestly, saner housing regulations in SF & NYC would do a lot more to ease the tech shortage than allowing in more H1Bs.

"Given that it's impossible to produce more senior developers in a 1-2 year timeframe, what alternatives do people suggest to immigration?"

Don't limit yourself to local candidates. Especially somewhere like NYC.

You, likely, couldn't offer me enough money to move/live there...especially for an early stage startup.

> Don't limit yourself to local candidates. Especially somewhere like NYC.

For many roles we're very open to hiring remote developers. Even that is rather challenging. (Though for lead roles, we do ask that you be based in NYC because it involves a lot of brainstorming with writers/analysts.)

What makes you think that immigration is going to result in an increase in high-quality applicants to your company? This sounds an awful lot like "If you build it, they will come."

While I don't doubt that you see a lot of candidates who aren't remotely qualified for your positions, one of the harsh realities of this market is that it's hard to attract "great" people, even if you're at or above market in terms of compensation. There just aren't enough "great" people to go around, so other factors, such as technical challenges and business viability, are often taken into consideration by quality candidates. Chances are there are other startups competing for the same talent that seem to be working on more challenging problems and have better prospects than you.

Early-stage startups like yours would be wise to consider optimizing their businesses and technology architectures around this fact. Unless you can pay stupid guap or are working on something really, really objectively interesting, one of the best and most underutilized techniques for finding great employees is to hire decent folks with potential and develop them into great employees.

A lot of companies will insist this isn't viable ("We needed 15 unicorns yesterday because we're building the world's most advanced analytics platform for selfies!") but most of them aren't being honest with themselves about their real needs. They're intent on building technology for the business they think they'll have and don't want to admit that they don't know how to develop employees.

> What makes you think that immigration is going to result in an increase in high-quality applicants to your company?

I don't think immigration is a panacea (in fact, my primary point in this thread has just been to rebuke the argument that salaries aren't rising so therefore there isn't a tech shortage). That being said, we do have some overseas contractors who I'd love to bring in-house if the immigration system didn't make doing so incredibly byzantine and challenging.

> Chances are there are other startups competing for the same talent that seem to be working on more challenging problems and have better prospects than you.

I do think this is truthfully a big part of the challenges. Despite the fact that our CEO has a great track record (two successful exits, last one for $545M+) and that we're actually building some cool technology (using data & technology to make it easy for writers to understand how their content flows across the web and to adapt their writing accordingly) many are turned off by the fact that we're working in "publishing."

Unfortunately, at this point it seems almost impossible to hire good developers unless you're Google—even if you have a viable business model and interesting/new technology (microservices, graph analytics, etc.).

> Unless you can pay stupid guap or are working on something really, really objectively interesting, one of the best and most underutilized techniques for finding great employees is to hire decent folks with potential and develop them into great employees.

We're very big on hiring based on potential, but there is a certain baseline. Particularly because our engineering team is small as it is, bringing on junior devs would be somewhat unfair to our existing developers—increasing their workload.

Absolutely; the programmer's wages even today are lower than the were in 2000. Of course 2000 was a peak.

Rather than just looking at general price inflation, you should look at cost-of-living at the tech hotspots (the big cities, silicon valley). That of course makes things even more dire.

Luckily you too can make the next big thing, sell your startup and then live happily as a venture capitalist / philanthropist.

This is something I realized just a few days ago, looking back.

11 years ago I left a Silicon Valley software company's IT department, where I was making $85,000. Doing standard IT work. 11 years ago.

A lot has happened since then, but no I don't think wages have been going up at all.

>He said that programmer salaries from pre-bubble days was six-figures, and that we're still in that range, and not higher is proof that salaries have been kept low.

The pre bubble days had plenty of immigration, not to mention NAFTA was in full swing as well. The job and salary situation seems to be poorly correlated with salaries and job availability.

By Paul Graham's description in that "Let in the 95%" article, companies are standing around with their dicks in their hands hoping that they find "the best" engineers, but on the cheap. If a company wants to hire 30 more "great" engineers, but isn't bumping up their pay to get at least 15 at a higher rate instead... there's something really off happening.

It's standard economic theory that wages are sticky. I think for a while, at least the past three years, junior developers (especially in web dev) have been overvalued and seniors undervalued. From my recent job search, I think this is starting to change, which is why the whole "not enough engineers" is reaching a fever pitch (ie, we can't find seniors at the traditionally understood market rate, as everyone realizes seniors are a better buy right now).

As it stands, career programmers in the US who are good but not celebrities generally try to move into management/consulting/whatever because their career stalls otherwise. Solve that problem (PAY MORE) and we've got our programmers.

And, besides the dick in their hands part, what Graham didn't mention in his warm christmas tale of meritocracy, they also make deals to not competete against others on talent, to fix (i.e. ruin further) what is already an extremely dysfunctional market (when did you last ask your coworker what she made?).

What's even worse is that the whole issue of the wage suppression saga has been conveniently forgotten by the tech elites and media. The case is still ongoing after the judge threw out the settlement Google et all offered, but the last begrudging mention of this in the tech or mainstream media was in Aug.

Nothing at all since then.

How can Paul Graham sit there and not mention the anti-competitive and illegal collusion of the top tech employers while he tells us to vote against our own financial self-interest?

He wants us to vote even more money into his pockets, and vote to undermine our wages, and he doesn't even give the smallest mention to the fact that the most respectable and respected tech employers have been fucking us over for years!

So disingenuous, so pernicious.

What seems to be happening is that Silicon Valley wages are flat or down (relative to 1998) but the rest of the country is improving. There actually is good news here, though it might seem otherwise if one takes a Valley-centric approach.

In 1998, software engineers in the Midwest generally didn't make six figures. $70,000 was a strong salary for a mid-career (5-10 years) engineer. The $100-140k figures were limited to the Bay Area and New York (around Wall Street) and possibly Chicago (also finance).

In 2014, engineers in the Bay Area have lost ground relative to the housing market, and have lost social position relative to well-connected "serial founders" and investors... but on the other hand, you can now work in any of the top ~20 hubs and make 80-95% of what you'd make in the Bay Area.

That is not true - my compensation has grown by about 100% moving from DC to the Valley a half year ago, and it still isn't as high as I believe it should be. From what I understand, DC is one of the better areas in the country for tech as well.

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