Hacker News Reader

Comment by wyclif | Hacker News Reader

If you are an engineer, developer, or programmer the only way to fight the power on this is to refuse to accept offers from companies who treat their employees like cattle. It's amazing that I still hear founders getting very upset about the fact that they can't hire, while enacting "open office" or "bullpen" policies like the one at Yodle.

View on HN

I remember being invited to Facebook (their PA office, before they moved), and was horrified to see the row-upon-row of folding tables being used as desks, with barely enough elbow room. I lost my desire to work there right away.

On the other hand, if I had joined then, ye olde bank balance would have been much fatter. ;-)

Agreed, though I actually think that this happens earlier in the decision tree. A lot of people with the talent to be top software developers never enter the field in the first place, as part of a rational market response to pay, career prospects, and working conditions (keep in mind, we're talking about an academically talented and hard working group of people here).

I don't think it's open offices per se (though they aren't exactly improving the appeal of software dev jobs), so much as the employment conditions that lead to imposing open offices on a class of worker that so clearly benefits from a quiet, focused environment.

Out of curiosity, what exactly are the other fields that top people would enter? Are you thinking of finance, law, or medicine, or something else?

All of the above and more. I do want to be sure I don't come off as claiming that there's no good reason to be a developer, I just don't think that the claims that there is a puzzling shortage of developers hold up when you consider the other options available. If it's hard to hire software developers, that's because the people talented enough to do the job are engaged in a rational, market based decision to do something else instead.

One good place to start is here:

http://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/rankings/the-100-b...

And compare salaries in high cost regions, rather than comparing national salaries. For instance, a dental hygienist in San Francisco earns, at the median, $112,970, a registered nurse in SF earns $127,670, and a Software Developer in San Francisco earns $114,400.

So a software developer in SF, ground zero for the worker shortage, earns a bit more than a dental hygienist, and considerably less than a registered nurse. The median Lawyer in SF (not necessarily a good job, I'll admit) is quite a bit higher, and of course Physicians earn far more.

I think that if you look through the data, it's pretty clear that software developers are paid decent but not remarkable salaries. And I'm not complaining about good salaries for nurses and dental hygienists, that's absolutely great by me. I just think we need to stop acting like there's some great mystery behind why people with choice (i.e., whose career options aren't limited by where and how they can get a work visa to the US) aren't going into software development.

Short of trolling the recruitment process, this is hard to do in reality.

How exactly is it hard to do? Trolling the process isn't necessary. During the interview, you simply ask about the work environment. And you don't have to wait for the interview to ask, you can do it in an email.

I think he's talking about doing this on such a scale that it has a measurable impact on the trend.

I interview 3-4 times/month in the bay area, as a way of keeping myself in tune with the interview process for when I do want a new gig, seeing what new tech trends are popping up in interviews (and what specific gotcha questions are popular), and so on. Generally I don't intend to take the job. It could certainly be interpreted as trolling the process, but I've taken the opportunity to note things I didn't love about the company when I decline offers (I see it as the mirror of wanting a company to be specific about weaknesses if they choose not to hire me), including open or noisy office space, the appearance of high pressure to work unnecessarily lengthy hours, poor clarity in equity granting, and lack of diversity.

>I interview 3-4 times/month in the bay area, as a way of keeping myself in tune with the interview process for when I do want a new gig

Sounds like you're wasting a lot of people's time and resources.

Companies could obviate the need for this sort of reconnaissance by being more open about pay expectations and honest about experience requirements. They aren't because they perceive a benefit to holding an information advantage over applicants. If this information advantage wasn't widely sought by firms, then there would be no advantage to interviewing several times a month. So really, any given firm could avoid their time being wasted by the gp. But presumably they would rather have their time wasted than to give up their information advantage, so it doesn't really make sense to lay all the responsibility for wasting people's time at the feet of the gp. Most candidates just accept the information disadvantage. The gp doesn't, but that's merely a rational response to the incentives put forth by the job market.

This is an aside, but I think there's a strong case to be made for publishing salaries, with names. I know it's an intimidating step, but this information is easily found on line for public service workers. The sky hasn't fallen, and there are a number of real benefits.

One possible angle - perhaps openly publishing payroll info (name, title, pay) should be a requirement for all companies that receive an H1B or other work visa.

Keep in mind, there is precedent. Information about how much a house sold for is public. Imagine if, when you were selling your house, you only had a bit of information gleaned from conversations with neighbors here and there, whereas the buyer had a massive database at his or her disposal with exact prices for every house sold in your neighborhood in the last 50 years. You'd be at a massive disadvantage. That's the situation employees are in.

As of 2001 is was a requirement to post the salary of H1-B employees. That how while at Lucent I found out the one who was if anything better at the particular job we were doing was earning $48K to my $80K :-(.

That alone is pretty important information, though I'd go one step farther and require all employee payroll data to be published.

Yeah, that doesn't work. I used to be really open with what I earned, because I didn't care if people knew. Turns out that sometimes people can get a bit resentful if you do similar jobs and you earn a little more than them. And sometimes people that do similar jobs and earn a little or a lot more than you seem to take this as a social signal and you get a new little social wall between you as you're not on their level.

I had a friend who worked in a job doing social research, and one of the jobs was talking to people about childhood sexual abuse that they had, a job that was only done by the more experienced staff. This is random cold-calling to strangers, and it was handled very delicately, reminding the person at regular intervals that they can stop the survey any time and that all questions were optional. He said the odd thing was that if someone started the survey, they generally completed the 20-minute interview, and it was only in the demographics section at the end that people bridled a little - at the 'salary range' question.

Some people don't care about who makes what salary. A lot of people use it to varying degrees as a social status signaller. I've tried being open about mine, and these days, I'd prefer not to share, though I still do with close friends who I know aren't wanky about salary.

> Yeah, that doesn't work. I used to be really open with what I earned, because I didn't care if people knew. Turns out that sometimes people can get a bit resentful if you do similar jobs and you earn a little more than them. And sometimes people that do similar jobs and earn a little or a lot more than you seem to take this as a social signal and you get a new little social wall between you as you're not on their level.

This is really a consequence of a culture that confuses material compensation with personal worth and success. I wonder if this is different outside of the western/North American job market.

Certainly her/his own. I can understand doing this once or twice a year, maybe once a quarter, but 3-4 times per month! If she/he is going through traditional loops how are they getting all that time off of work?

They're hardly wasted -- I derive a great deal of value by exploiting the current extreme inefficiency in the method by which most companies hire.

I think the poster you replied to was saying that you are wating other people's time by doing interviews in bad faith.

If you think they deserve to have their time wasted because their interview processes are inefficient... well, I guess I'll just say that I disagree with you strongly.

As long as he is open to changing jobs then he is not wasting their time. If anything there wasting his time by not being up front about salary info etc.

So is the whole send in your CV, do a bunch of phone interviews, never hear back spiel.

It's a market, if you find people are consistently wasting your time, you probably just don't have anything good to offer.

How do you feel about companies interviewing say 20 people for a single position?

Loosely related, how do you pull this off? Given that interviews effectively take up whole days, I feel like it'd be really tough for me to routinely work four day weeks and everyone at the office be OK with it.

>> "Given that interviews effectively take up whole days"

Really? I find they are either an hour in the office or a few 30 minute phone calls. At least in tech. I know in other fields they have all day group interviews with lots of team building stuff but I haven't encountered that in tech (well at least with startups).

Onsite interviews are consistently 4-6hr chunks at many places in the bay area.

Wow. What actually takes place in that time?

In my experience, I have had 3-6 hour long blocks with 1-3 members of the company, technical and non-technical. It typically starts with 5-10 minutes of chit-chat about my background and the company, then we do a technical exercise or a series of personality questions (for instance, explaining something technical to an employee in marketing to see if we could work together and if I could communicate across departments). After that, we wrap up with ~10 minutes of Q&A. Since it takes up so much time, it's important to get the phone screen right to not waste time on both sides. I have heard of companies that will have you pair program for a whole day instead of doing whiteboard questions.

I don't think I would do well in those sorts of interviews. I guess my experience is different because I've only interviewed remotely (remote interview, on site job). So they were typically 2-3 30 min Skype calls with different members of the company (CEO, CTO, Investor occasionally) and then I would send through code for them to look at or they would give me a small feature of their product to develop (1-2 days paid remote work) and review me based on that.

That kind of coding interview would be ideal too, but that takes more total time than 4-6 hours. It's 8-16 hours total vs 3-6 hours. When an engineer has a FT position already, they can't easily commit that much time as you can as a freelancer.

As the sister comment notes, many interviews are either by phone/videochat, or an hour or two in the office. I do the occasional all-day meeting, but not more often than every month or two.

One perk of my current gig is a very high level of flexibility (I'm in the actual office maybe 15-20 hours per week, and work from home or coffeeshops the rest of the time), which makes this much more viable.

How is rejecting a bad offer trolling? Please explain.

I make it vary clear that an open office plan bump by salary requirements by 20k/year. It's not really trolling IMO.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com