I had a recruiter call me a year ago with what sounded like a really amazing offer. Working for a well funded startup on a problem in which I happen to be a domain expert.
They're aren't many expects in my field with my background and skill set and they said the right things to get me to interview (compensation won't be a concern).
Anyway... Went in for 4-5 interviews. Took me about 10 hours in total to interview with them.
Kept hearing that they have a difficult time filling the position. Reports directly to the CTO, etc, etc.
They came in at 1/2 my current salary. It was about 30-40% of what you would pay a decent engineer with experience.
I told them my salary level BEFORE the interview...
Gave them a hard now. They came back and said they can offer more stock and remote work.
Why in the heck would I turn down a bird in the hand for 1x in the bush?
Part of the problem is that if you're interviewing you need to know what you're buying!
You can't go to a ferrari dealership and offer to buy one or $20k.. that's just not how it works.
I had the same thing happen to me a couple times. Long and tiring process. Blackboard, make a project, lots of dirty laundry about "long gone incompetent developers" that made the current system a giant mess. Lots of red flags but lots of promises including a large maximum salary, including bonuses and stock options.
The final offer, however, was 60% of my current pay. Lower than the average for someone with my experience and position.
I had good rapport with the HR recruiter and flat out asked why they proceeded, even though she knew I was already getting more, at a better company, with more benefits.
The answer: they assumed I was lying about my current salary and I was just bluffing. Recommended me that I lie in my next interview.
Is this an American thing? I live in Eastern Europe and make decent buck here (close to 5000 EUR/mo after taxes in a country where you can cover all expenses under 1000 EUR/mo). I never had any trouble getting quality work in my country but a few times I got approached by companies from the US and oh boy, weeks of tiring recrutation process and the pay was ALWAYS worse than local. I feel like they do it on purpose maybe some people really fall for it after investing so much time? Once or twice an US SV startup asked if I’ll allow them to install some tracking software on my machine. Meanwhile no developer in my country even responds to offers if the salary is not given in the offer even before the interview kicks in. What’s wrong with the American market? Are there too many developers or what?
(sorry for the typos, fat fingers and small phone)
Well, a number of people use Eastern Europe location as a filter for 'cheap labor'. And SV startups tend to have crap wages to begin with, but offer equity to compensate. I could imagine a few startups seeking to crimp further.
> Meanwhile no developer in my country even responds to offers if the salary is not given ... before the interview
Posting salaries is rare in the US. It's becoming the law in California, but this is hardly universal. There's an expectation that you'll negotiate, but they're really hoping you won't. And plenty of US engineers assume if you don't post a salary, it's because the budget for the position is low.
> Posting salaries is rare in the US. It's becoming the law in California, but this is hardly universal.
Citation needed on that. I really hope you’re right and I’m ignorant here, but I think you may be confusing it with the recent state law that makes it illegal for prospective employers to ask about salary history and theoretically requires them to give a salary range to an applicant when asked. I say “theoretically,” because there’s no way for anyone outside the company to verify that the salary range they give is in any way related to the budgeted range.
>...wages were artificially lowered — an estimated $9 billion effectively stolen by the high-flying companies from their workers to pad company earnings — in the second half of the 2000s...
All these firms settled for a measly $334 million to make this problem go away, despite damning evidence.
This was a shameful crime that occurred at the highest levels in Silicon Valley. This illegal cartel should have been prosecuted under RICO laws with CEOs taken away in hand cuffs. Instead, the worker bees got peanuts. I received a $1300 settlement instead or the hundreds of thousands in lost wages that I was robbed of.
A lot of what people in power driven by greed do in the absence of long term vision or compassion, is depressing.
However, such actions are also detrimental to sustainable/thriving business. So smart people find more constructive and humane ways to be profitable. The book ends on a high note and carries the potential to help leaders correct course before self destruction.
Well, here in SV, everyone kinda knows what other companies pay. You just didn't have friends in SV to tell you before the interview how much that company pays.
In general, there are top-tier companies, FAANG + Uber + Lyft + AirBnB, that pay X. Then there are lower-tier companies and startups that pay roughly X / 2. So, you're unlikely to get FAANG total comp at a no-name startup.
happened to me in Italy, about same script. salary expectations set from the start, two phone and two on site interviews with stellar feedback then they offered 2/3rd of current total comp.
I apologize because I've worked for people who truly think eastern europe is nothing but goat farmers etc. Literally I think american corps in some aspect are trying to scrape talent from places (they think) are 3rd world countries.
Those people are overpaid and should not work in any corporate setting, since they are clearly missing basic highschool level education about how society works. Eastern Europe is/was very obviously the second world and is kind of defining what's the 3rd world (neither team East nor team West).
But we're talking about someone who already has a job, and the new company wants to entice away from that. What kind of negotiating tactic is it to start at 60% of current salary?
Well, the OP mentioned that the recruiter thought the candidate was lying which is why they low-balled. So that explains the logic at least. They're not stupid, but they don't trust candidates I guess. Which is a whole different thing.
My understanding is that it IS common to lie, or else to redirect the conversation from what was made in the last position to what is desired for the new position. Why should it matter? You're being hired to fill a position that's worth x amount of compensation; the primary reason to ask for prior compensation seems to be to to get a "deal" (i.e., rob an employee of potential earnings).
There's no such thing as "worth X amount of compensation".
The way it's supposed to work is that you and your employer (who represents the capital) generate a return from your joint venture.
But the actual return is hard to predict. And there is no fair and obvious way to divvy up the return. So it comes down to negotiation power.
There also may not be any condition where you and the capital agree to join. The capital may have better options to generate a return and you may have better options to get a salary.
There is no shortage of ideas how to distribute profits, and no shortage of arguments which one is "fair" or which one is the best for whatever reason.
This particular scheme means you are paying janitors as much as people who went to school for a decade or more. Some people would not find that equitable and fair. Few academics would find that offer competitive.
And depriving the executives of large salaries also means you are increasing the incentive for corruption. If somebody has the power to squander a billion Dollar, you better pay her more than 100k.
And you forgot to include capital gains, or you included it with expenses. Whoever owns the equity will want some return, otherwise they will invest elsewhere (or not at all).
In my country there are very good statistics provided by the technical unions as to what compensation can be expected by region, technology domain, and seniority. I tend to quote those to set my salary and then argue up if need be.
Yeah, the recruiter told me the whole hiring team thought I was bullshitting about my salary.
It was a problematic company from the get go. I was cold called and the recruiter was very insistent. Their engineers were very unprofessional during the technical interview and complained A LOT about technical debt left by past co-workers during the interview.
Now, when I tell recruiters my minimum salary I refer recruiters to Glassdoor, just in case they doubt me.
I had that same experience interviewing with a startup in 1996, if you can believe it. They were looking at their "burn rate" by literally spending extra on airfare, but when I told them what I was earning, they said, "with that site?" No, doofuses, with my consulting; the site was just brochureware.
They didn't actually give me any answer until I asked them to give me one - then they said my attitude with the top management made it clear I wasn't a good candidate for the position.
The inevitable result of that is the people making bank will be sure to tell you, and ones making low salaries will not. The employer will therefore still know if you're making above or below the usual salary.
Businesses don't like risk (just like employees don't) and hiring a new person poses a lot of risk. It's expensive, and the employee may not work out at all. The more risk there is in hiring someone, the lower the salary offer will be to compensate. Salaries are a proxy for one's value when hiring. Removing that piece of information increases risk, and hence will lower the salary offers.
> The employer will therefore still know if you're making above or below the usual salary.
Thats still way better than being forced to give an exact number. Now the employer has to kinda sorta guess. Instead of getting underpaid by 30%, you might only get underpaid by 20%.
> The more an employer has to guess, the more risk there is in hiring someone.
An employees current salary is only barely correlated with a employees skill. They have a multitude of other, much much better factors that they can use to determine if someone is a "risk" or not.
> Also, if you wind up getting a salary that's more than you produce for the company
You are describing something that is close to impossible to measure, for the vast majority of situations. A company does not go around making exact measurements on programmers, and thinking to themselves "Is this person *really 18.2% more effective than the lower paid employee?".
Thats just not how it works. Instead, a person might be 3 times more effective, or half as effective, as the other employees, and salary will be almost entirely unrelated to how much they "produce", which can't really be measure very well anyway.
And this is without even getting into more complicated things, such as sunk costs, and the replacement costs. IE, you may be 10% less effective, but the costs to replace you are equal to 6 months of your salary, so in reality, it makes zero financial sense to do so.
And finally, you are ignoring the fact that an employee can just lie about their previous salary, and there is basically nothing the employer can do about this. I have never, in my life, had someone demand my tax returns, or call up a previous employer to verify my salary, and in many places this can even be illegal. I can just lie about my current salary, and easily get away with, as I have done so multiple times in the past, as well as has many other people that I know.
> I can just lie about my current salary, and easily get away with, as I have done so multiple times in the past, as well as has many other people that I know.
You're not fooling employers, they likely know you and your friends are lying, and discount the offer accordingly. Try bringing a paystub next time, your prospective employer will appreciate it. It's worked out well for me.
There have been some high profile cases of people who've worked for decades for a company, rose to the top echelon, and were discovered to have lied on their resume. They were out the door without their severance package.
> You're not fooling employers, they likely know you and your friends are lying, and discount the offer accordingly.
It's worked out pretty damn well for me and my friends, actually. I've gotten multiple 25% raises, each time by doing that. (Along with a healthy dose of job hopping)
> were discovered to have lied on their resume
I've never lied on my resume. Only about salaries, while talking to someone in negotiations.
That's just how the negotiation games goes. The employer makes blatant lies all the time in negotiations, also.
For the record, I've gone from a starting salary of 100k, when I just got out of college 6 years ago, to where I am today, which is 270k total comp, at a big 5 tech company.
I am pretty happy with those results. Especially so, because I've only ever considered myself to be an average engineer.
Or are you going to try and flatter me by saying that I could have been doing even better than going from 100k to 270k in 6 years? Perhaps. But I'd hardly say that I haven't done alright for myself.
> The employer makes blatant lies all the time in negotiations, also.
I've heard such justifications for submitting fraudulent college applications, cheating in college, doping in sports, etc.
I've done significantly better than my peers with salaries, without lying about it.
Remember that fable about Steve Jobs' dad painting the back of the fence that no one would ever see? My father once told me that honor is what separates men from animals. Honor is what you do when nobody is looking. How much is your honor worth to you? I'm no saint, but wanting my father to be proud of me is worth a lot to me, even though he's passed away.
Actually if you work a while and are lucky enough to have done well, you may want to pick a place to work for reasons other than it has the highest salary. In that case you may not want to advertise your salary history because it can scare away employers. It shouldn’t but it does.
Because experience is a very weak signal and skills are hard to quantify and extremely hard to measure in the relative brevity of the interview process.
There are obviously problems with a reliance on salary as a signal of quality/value produced. But I don't understand the impulse to pretend that there isn't nontrivial signal in a previous salary.
There are now services like Equifax Workforce Solutions and The Work Number (and another I can't remember) that records this information for inquiry by future employers. If you have third-party payroll your salary info is almost certainly reported to such a bureau.
> Their engineers were very unprofessional during the technical interview and complained A LOT about technical debt left by past co-workers during the interview.
That was them just warning you: "Dude you won't hear it fom HR and I am not allowed to tell you directly but you most likely don't want this job."
The OP also mentioned the offer was below the average market price for somenone with a similar work experience, which is simply absurd if their goal is to entice you away from your current job.
Which means that they haven't done the bare minimum research into the position, they hired incompetent people, or they themselves are incompetent. None of these options really screams good place to work.
In Eastern Europe, you can also negotiate and make gains that way. The point is that you come to the interview with a known baseline of what they intend to offer to the candidate that meets their expectations. Thus, you can skip offers where it's so low that it's clearly not worth the trouble even trying to negotiate over. And if you do go to interview, you know the number below which you shouldn't go (and they know that you know).
Thats not always what's happening. I've turned down jobs that came in beneath the expected salary range I gave them and then tried to sound offended when I said it wasn't good enough, they weren't interested in negotiating.
My anedata for EU is that varies a lot between States.
In Germany, I had salary negotiation closer to what I was used to in the US (e.g.: two competing offers, etc).
In Denmark, very little room to maneuver. I had no luck negotiating salaries in big corps here (Final comp in DK mostly from salary). Every attempt I made to initiate a salary discussion/negotiation seemed to make the hiring managers uncomfortable as in “we don’t do this here”..
About the only thing I could see you getting in Denmark is a cost of living raise or maybe something to the whole department or team.
Some EU countries have a much stronger emphasis on sectoral bargaining. (Often there's a formal mechanism for everyone to work together to negotiate more pay)
Hi, can you kindly answer the following questions: How much experience do you have? What is your current technology stack? Is the salary which you stated based on an 8 hour workday 5 days a week schedule? How much late sitting do you do, if any? What is your typical work load, I mean do you solve complex problems all day long or do you just stitch libraries together? The salary which you stated looks a bit unbelievable. Thanks.
Not the GP, but I make 10k a month, 15 years experience, Python/Django stack, 4 days a week 8 hours a day, no staying late at all necessary, I usually stitch libraries together, although solving complex problems all day long would be better.
It is not just American companies but big companies treat different labor markets differently.
For example, I used to work for a big company in Denmark that has a sattelite office in Bucharest.
It is questionable to see that even the equipment the developers get there was subpar. The fulltimers there were treated as contractors (e.g.: no career incentives), expendable (high turnover).
The office just existed because when the company was smaller and needed more than now cheaper labor, they made it so that remote managers could be there as a proxy.
Joke aside, what you said above also applied in my case to my ex German employer in Eastern Europe. We got cheap machines with half the specs of the German counterparts but the management in The Mother Land expected the same productivity as the German colleagues.
Now, having migrated West to Austria(similar culture to Germany) tings don't get better an all accounts, even if you speak German. Sure, now you get nicer machines, and even if you manage to negotiate a salary close to local levels, your career development opportunities are close to zero as management will only propose the locals for promotions and trainings as those are the guys managers spend their lunches and cigarette breaks with, even if they're mildly incompetent. You'll be left as that guy who just needs to sit as his desk, do what he's told and be grateful to his masters he's been given a job as if you're coming form a country of goat hearders.
This horrible discriminatory culture in EU countries is not something the EU can't fix unfortunately and it's one of the reasons countries like Germany or the EU as a whole will never catch up to the US on innovation or salaries in tech.
Hehe, I’d sadly say no, chances are we don’t have the same employer but the general tech in Europe is still old IT / cost center.
I am not in a stage of life for pursuing promotions to give more anedata on that, but I can see that a lot of senior managers here in Denmark are not immigrants. I do see however that there is a wave of immigrant founders here. Let’s see if the economic environment will perdure long enough to see a greater change.
Does it? I see a large concentration of red dots over Poland, and some over Belgium-France border, all due to coal plants. Then there's UK.
Poland takes second place with an overall score of
5.5/10. The carbon dioxide emissions in poland are
7.63 tonnes per capita per year, which is higher than
the winner Turkey. The concentrations of PM2.5 are 22
µg/m3 which is almost half of Turkey’s concentrations.
There are 69 deaths attributable to air pollution per
100,000 capita per year. Poland consists of 30.8%
forest area and 38.10% protected terrestrial and
marine area. Each year, the citizens of Poland discard
304.9 kg of waste per capita.
5k after taxes is nice! I’m in Western Europe and make only 3K after taxes but rent and utilities is half my take home. Suffice to say I’m juat getting by.
US salaries are on a whole new level when it comes to senior programmers. $200K+ base is normal, if you're good. $150/hr for consulting gigs is also normal if you're good.
So your $5K after taxes wouldn't even register on my radar.
5000€ is $5623. You can maintain a "normal" life standard around here for about $800 (renting a studio / two room flat in the city centre + all the expenses, no car but I never needed one - the subway takes me to the furthest parts of town in 25 minutes, walking to work is not unusual). So you're saving more or less 5000$ every month.
How much do you have to earn in SV to rent a place for your own next to your office and still save 5 grand a month? :)
Anyway I get your point and in general yeah, US salaries are of course on a whole new level and I won't even argue with that.
I'm not trying to say Warsaw is better for programmers than SV because it never was and never will be - yet we still managed, within last 5 years or so, managed to do something you somehow can't do - we trained HRs, agencies, recruiters etc. And they willingly act as we please. Because there's an incredibly high demand for programmers and no one has time for games like US companies play. And I still can't wrap my mind around this - if company Y or X is so desperately seeking for employees and pays them bazillions of dollars - why they even consider burning so much time on the process of hiring? Hiring is hard, I get that, but it's much easier if you disclose the salary. And in Poland right now hiring is impossible if the salary is unknown. And it's not even required by law (though it is supposed to be).
> And I still can't wrap my mind around this - if company Y or X is so desperately seeking for employees and pays them bazillions of dollars - why they even consider burning so much time on the process of hiring?
It's a leverage thing. Companies in high cost of living locations can just wait for someone else and they will. That doesn't work in a low cost of living locations, since their isn't much urgency from the perspective of the applicant.
First of all, who cares about base, what matters is total compensation. In Silicon Valley, I would say it takes about 5 years of experience, for good engineers, to rent a nice place close to work, if they want to. See actual data here: https://thestartupconference.com/2018/09/21/about-that-silic...
After 10 years of experience, you are looking into buying a house. Granted, the price of the house is exhorbitant compared to its size, but that's the market.
I'm a bit dubious of that site. A decent studio can be had for 2000-3000k even I'm SF. A good 2 bedroom apartment with 2 parking spaces and a patio close to Google that I was looking at was only 2.7k.
The salaries are also low in my opinion. At just under 4 years experience I'm making 225k yearly in TC, over 170k of that is salary.
Bargaining doesn't seem to work at scale (countries with bargaining habits don't do good economically) and it rapidly becomes a big waste of time for everybody.
As someone who always disliked visiting markets where bargaining is expected, this intrigues me. Can you recommend a book or documentary about this, or maybe explain a bit of the theorized causal connection?
Seconding nitrogen's request – I'm very interested in any pointers to further reading.
A potential cause for this effect might be that widespread bargaining reduces a market's efficiency, since prices are less transparent for buyers and sellers.
> How much do you have to earn in SV to rent a place for your own next to your office and still save 5 grand a month? :)
If you want a nice 1BR apartment ($3000) + a very generous budget for monthly expenses ($3000), you need to earn $11000 after tax to save 5 grand a month - i.e $132k a year.
Take a look at these sources to see what top companies are paying software engineers in SV (spoiler: it's more than 200k, and you can add ~60% of each dollar above that to your savings):
https://www.levels.fyi/https://www.paysa.com/salaries
These are not normal base salaries even for senior programmers in the bay area. The 60th percentile for senior software engineers is around $180k per year in the Bay Area. Total compensation is commonly $200k or more, easily, but not base. Outside of the Bay Area, even in NY, Chicago, etc., base salaries are lower. In most places they're much lower--below $100k.
In large companies, there's another factor to consider, which is that if you're a few years into the company, the stock grants that you received a few years back and that are still vesting now are now possibly worth a lot more... your total yearly comp increases quite a bit if your company stock did well for the few years you've been with them.
A 50th percentile base salary for a senior engineer in the Bay Area is around $150k-$160k per year. Most companies offer a cash bonus (10%-15% of base); including this puts a typical cash compensation total for a 50th percentile senior engineer is between $165k and $184k per year. Most companies offer stock, but the grant and value of these varies wildly. Public companies' stock is actually worth something but you have your places like Google where RSU grants are a huge portion of salary and other places where it's closer to the cash bonus portion of salary.
This is all gross, pre-deduction salary; not salary net of taxes, deductions, etc.
Base salary is a ruse. Median total compensation for qualified experts in the bay is currently $450-750k at reputable firms. Everyone knows this. Any company offering less is simply not in the running and is staffed by absolute morons and won't make it. So sad to be them.
I can't say I've seen people talk about their net salary in Europe, but we do typically galk about monthly salary. (Even if they did say net salary, paying an effective income tax of 50% would be quite exceptional; I would need to make a bit over $300 000 for that in Sweden, which is insanely high.)
$600/hr is the equivalent of about $1.2M/year salary. That's exceptionally rare. Unless you're being cheeky with "should be", I think you have beliefs that are misaligned with reality.
Most contractors I know don’t work 40hrs day, every week. Also if you look around at advice you’ll find that you shouldn’t quote an hourly rate, you should quote “for the job”. If you’re good and the work you’re doing is even mildly specialized you can get a job done quickly enough that the effective hourly rate is pretty absurd.
What counts as "independent expert in specialized field"? Because as an independent backend contractor (java/spring/scala/akka) that straddles the line between architectural consulting and staff augmentation (usually long-term contracts), I see real resistance to going above $200/hr since even in the bay area you can hire full teams from vendors at around that price point for man hours.
Seems below average for law firm partners [1], and there's a lot of them out there, so it doesn't surprise me at all that technical consultants with genuinely rare skills could command hourly rates like that.
Don't forget it's 200k a year whereas the EU salary is 5k per month - still way below, but as op said: once you factor in the cost of living, it starts to make more sense :)
The salary he mentioned is 5k/month _after_ taxes, so 60k/year. Which according to a Polish income tax calculator I found would be about 85k/year EUR before taxes. With current rates that's about 95k USD.
The (many) issues with US health care do not affect upper/middle class professionals.
From a "patient perspective", as long as you are employed as a software engineer in SV, health care is not a concern at all (insurance is covered by the employer). If anything, it is superior to anything I experienced in Europe.
I've experienced American healthcare and European healthcare. I'll take European any day of the week, over the Silicon valley version (and seriously if that's the best, god help the rest. I'm actually lucky I survived the US system.)
The issue in America is essentially that the system is paid by piecework. So the entire system optimises for the number of tests/procedures/operations etc. that can be performed. And that might not be so bad in and of itself, if 21st century medicine was reliable. But it's not, and the sad truth of the US system is that many of the (very expensive) procedures it performs have worst outcomes than leaving the patient alone.
That's interesting, because I had a different experience. What Europe are you talking about here?
In the Netherlands, a patient should not expect from a doctor to conduct any tests at all. I had no experience with the Dutch healthcare myself, but I've heard horrendous stories about it, for example how Irish expat went to a doctor with a problem of pain while swallowing, received nothing more than an advice "well, swallow less, then" (like in a bad joke about doctors), went home to Ireland a got diagnosed with a throat cancer there.
Except when you really need an efficient health insurrance system, like cancer level efficiency. At least it's what I learnd from following US politics these last 3 years on reddit.
I mean, I have cancer and my health insurance in the US is about as good as can be expected, which unfortunately means almost nothing because we're terrible at cancer we can't cut out of the body. If I didn't have this healthcare I'd probably be dead already and leaving a mountain of debt for my family. The costs to my insurance company are insane for treatment. I'm easily costing over 100k/mo for basic treatment.
Though the costs are invisible to you, our model raises prices and essentially gentrifies care, making it more difficult for those lower on the ladder to afford care (bringing along the associated public health issues) and robbing other priorities (like medical research) of cash.
This is because a sr programmer with experience and likely a family needs to think about saving for healthcare, retirement, education costs for children, housing costs that may also be more inefficient or expensive in the US than other nations
Even in Silicon Valley there aren’t that many companies other than FAANG offering $200k base salary. $200k total compensation, including stock and bonuses, is a different matter.
I described their abilities with the word great. And said they all make over a certain amount. They didn't always make this much. One used to make 140k working in gaming just 3 years ago. He was still great, just getting paid a fraction of what he could make. But that's gaming for you.
I've posted this elsewhere (forgot here or reddit). I'm gainfully employed. A former colleague who is now in a hiring position at a new company reached out to me. Said they have several openings and are having a hard time hiring good people. It would be a much longer commute, working/rewriting some older tech to be cloud ready (I did that at my current and previous employer). We started talking about salary. I told him what I made. He told me...he could match that.
I thought to myself...that's not how it works. I'm sure I could have negotiated higher. But I wonder if he thinks I inflated my salary and those said match.
Keeping in mind my current company has some of the best benefits I've seen outside of Silcone Valley...
Never make that mistake. Never ever disclose your salary information to someone that you potentially could work for.
I think a situation where we were required by law to disclose, or a company where such a thing was common (GitLab) would be exceptions. But otherwise, I've found it to be a huge mistake to disclose your exact salary or numbers to anyone.
> Never make that mistake. Never ever disclose your salary information to someone that you potentially could work for.
In general I agree, except he did say the person was his friend. My close friends and I all know what each other makes. It helps a lot when negotiating for a new job, because I now have additional data to know that what I'm asking for is not crazy.
One of these friends I have worked for in the past and could work for again, but he readily admits he can't afford me right now.
EDIT, I read colleague as most likely a friend now. Perhaps not, but my above point still stands about friends.
It's worth disclosing it to rule out pointless conversations early on if you have strong reasons to believe you're on the higher end of the salary distribution. I wouldn't say it precludes you from asking for more if you can articulate a value proposition that makes you an even better fit for the next opportunity.
Given what I've been reading in this thread, it seems like if some employers are going to think that you're going to lie, there's no point in sharing your salary. And the salary that should only matter is the one you'd accept to change companies.
Because it creates an information asymmetry. They now know what you (are willing to) work for, but you don't know what they're willing to pay, or what everyone else in the company makes.
It does not benefit you to disclose the information, even if you think your number is high. They might assume you are lying, or they might already be anchored at an even higher number - you don't know.
I kind of wonder about these things, but I'm not in sales.
I've heard two stories about car dealers that each say different things.
One story was about a car dealer that told its salesmen the actual wholesale price of the cars they were selling. The salesmen would deal from that price upwards and would always sell the cars close to that price. They changed to only telling them the retail price of the car and then sales from that point on were much higher as the selling prices clustered nearer to retail.
But the other story was from a friend who used to work at a car dealer. The top sales guy would move an enormous number of cars. He would sell them for $250 over invoice. My friend said he was amazing, and it was common for other salesmen to spend hours haggling with a customer on one car, and meanwhile the top guy would move 4 or 5 cars.
Trouble is you can't sell yourself 4-5x as often as a total job length without that starting to reflect poorly on you. You don't get paid per job. Maybe a valuable lesson for contractors, though: there's value in simplicity if it leads to volume.
It’s not a clear cut never do. If you know you’re expecting the higher end of a salary range then it’s absolutely in your interest to signal that from the outset. Telling them your current salary is doing just that.
But otherwise I agree. The company always has such a strong hand that it’s in your best interest to play every one of your cards as strategically, carefully as possible.
Can't you just tell them not to bother with the interview any further and refrain from wasting everyone's time if they're not prepared to offer what you've asked for?
Because they use for the basis of their offer. Most people don’t really know what the market is paying for the skills and experience, so they are already operating blindly. A 15-20% increase over current salary sounds like a lot, particularly if the potential employee is unaware that the market supports 50% (or more) above their current salary.
This practice favors the employer so much that it is illegal in California (and a few other states) to ask for salary history.
>>This practice favors the employer so much that it is illegal in California (and a few other states) to ask for salary history.
That's interesting....when submitting resumes for US Federal government (GS) jobs, their resume guidelines include salary, hours worked, and points of contact for each position. I wonder how positions advertised in the State of California can be reconciled with what you've shared?
Lemme clarify: your application FOR a Federal position is expected to include your PREVIOUS salaries, regardless of whether they were public or private sector. So if you are a California resident and you submit an application for a Federal position in California, but you don't disclose your previous salaries, I wonder if they consider your application incomplete? If that was used as justification for rejecting your application, would you have grounds to dispute that rejection legally?
That’s easy: California has no jurisdiction over the Feds. The Federal Government isn’t a private employer subject to California labor laws and regulations.
First off, you'll almost never get an indication of why your resume was rejected. Secondly, as someone already commented, federal positions don't have tho play by state rules.
They do sometimes even ask for pay stubs to prove salaries claimed
I'm saying, the reason the restriction is present on private employers is so they don't make a low offer to someone who had been paid less before.
My understanding of federal employment is that the pay scales are published and public record, and job postings state which scale it's on. This level of disclosure seems to minimize the possible harm here, as there's far less room for negotiation for anyone.
Because it has no bearing on how much you are worth to them and is only used by the new employer to gauge how little they think they can offer you. There is no benefit in disclosing it.
I’ll happily tell someone my current salary but I’ll never accept a new salary that I’m not happy with. I also try to accept 10-20% below market. You can get away with a lot when they think you’re the schmuck who didn’t know what he was worth.
Rule number 1, IMO, never discuss salary. I find listing your salary requirements before starting a process weeds out a lot of silly interviews. If you know your worth and have a goal for your salary, it is the most effective way I know to avoid dumb offers.
My favorite was something that happened 2+ years ago. I had closed down my business, and was speaking with folks, including a well funded startup in Milpitas area. I was in the area for a different interview, and spent the evening before that interview with this startup.
I knew the CEO from a previous effort. After much discussion, I thought they had something interesting, though I was hard pressed to find real differentiators. I thought I could help, and the senior leadership of the company did as well. We talked over a number of projects.
Started negotiations, I was asked about what it would take to get me over. I gave them realistic sets of numbers and conditions.
CEO's response to me was priceless.
"But that's more than I make."
Um ... yeah. And this matters ... how?
I know, startups push the equity side hard, as they tend to be cash poor and stock rich.
He then suggested a number that was under half of my minimum acceptable (covering costs, maintaining something that looks like a quality of life). And not so much equity.
Yeah. Didn't go there. CEO was out within a few months.
My company has no investors. The first years were a bit hard revenue wise.
The first engineers were paid a lot more than myself and the other cofounders until we got proper traction.
Never had any issue with that.
They promise that amount up front, and then renege? That's not even deceitful, that's just intentionally wasting your time. I would send them an invoice for the time spent on the interview.
I've been promised a job by the CEO after all the interviews and he reneged a few days later. Companies lie all the time like that. At least I got a nice trip to SF out of it, but I expect this to happen. I always set salary expectations beforehand but I'm not surprised if they are not met.
If they replied that they could match the asking price but after all the song and dance they actually low-ball with an offer of 60% what the candidate was already earning, which is nearly half of what they initially mentioned, then that's pretty close to fraud.
Oh yeah people love that. They're usually so thankful to have been taught a lesson about this technicality that they not only don't mind having been told the wrong thing, they instantly become loyal to that person for life. Immense profit follows.
The legal side is almost irrelevant. The situation is that they're trying to initiate what should be a mutually-beneficial, longish-term working relationship. Leading into it with this kind of letdown isn't a good start.
The hiring company just counters they "can give X" for an imminently qualified candidate but after the interview process they feel the candidate has too little experience or aptitude and is being offered a job in spite of their shortcomings and should be so happy with the offer.
Sorry, didn’t get that when I read your previous post.
If that is the case: screw those guys. If you can’t trust a company with _writing an employment contract_, how can you trust any future interaction.
If your skills are in demand, move on. Not worth your time and being able to walk away is the single most valuable card one can play during a negotiation.
Recruiters make money as a percentage of your hiring salary, why on earth would they try to place you somewhere that you are making less? They should be shopping you to whoever will give the most money.
Actually, most recruiters I've run into tend to try to force a candidate to accept a "reasonable" offer rather than holding out for the best offer. They only get paid if a deal closes; while it may be in your best interest to hold out for another $10K, that will likely cost them a commission (and be opposed)
100% correct, recruiters want to close the deal, not let it slip away over salary negotiations. And they want to get hired again (they get paid by the company, not the recruit) so saving that company 10, 15k is definitely in the best interest of the recruiter.
The incentives don’t always work out that way. There comes a point of diminishing returns for the recruiter; trying to get an extra $20k a year for you, might take time away from them closing two or three other candidates. Also, a recruiter does not get any real benefit out of negotiations that involve things other then salary. Extra vacation, bonuses, guaranteed severance packages, etc.
Key take a way from this: never let your recruiter negotiate on your behalf. Once you are at the stage, tell your recruiter to F off and get the best deal you can for yourself.
This approach has come up a number of times in the comment that it makes me think that many candidates are bluffing and so this might well be a rational (if very sleazy) approach.
To add to the 'sucker' anecdote, when I was young and stupid (at least I am not young anymore), I was contacted by a NYC recruiter looking to hire for Bloomberg. Here was his tack to extract salary information: "being a financial company, it is required for us to know what you currently make." On this aspect, I think I know better now, hopefully.
I recently explicitly gave my salary requirements up front, went through an arduous process and got an offer of about 2/3 of what we had BOTH agreed upon in the first informational interview.
This from a very profitable mid-large sized established tech company in the US.
I agree with the rule and wish it was easier to put into practice. What I've noticed however, is that a lot of recruiters stonewall you if you don't tell them a number, or at least a range. They even say things like "Well I need to put something into this internal web app." It's super frustrating!
> What you should think: “You’re lying to me to attempt to get me to compromise my negotiating position.”
> What you should say: “Give me git access and I’ll fix it in a jiffy! both people laugh No, seriously, speaking, I’m more concerned at the moment with discovering whether we’re a mutual fit… Oh, it’s physically impossible? Put in $1 then to get the ball rolling, and we’ll circle back to this later.”
It's not that straight forward, especially if you charge on the high end. Without them getting to know you and your benefits, a high price up front would just drive them away. If you're shooting for mid market rate, it's obviously different; but if you're selling them on your value, that value needs to be demonstrated before money talks.
> The answer: they assumed I was lying about my current salary and I was just bluffing. Recommended me that I lie in my next interview.
My first interview for a job after law school, first interviewer. Guy begins to look at my resume, tosses it aside, and says “I don’t read resumes. Everyone lies in their resume. Hell, I lie on my resume.” After that, the whole time I’m thinking to myself “what kind of moron lies on a legal resume? The bar calls every employer you’ve ever had since high school.”
This - we really need a law requiring companies post what the jobs pays. It would solve so many problems - including ones like this, gender discrimination, etc.
> This - we really need a law requiring companies post what the jobs pays. It would solve so many problems - including ones like this, gender discrimination, etc.
A much simpler solution: if lots of programmers would strongly avoid to take jobs at companies that do not tell the salary upfront, the problem would disappear by itself.
You are supposed to lie to inflate your salary even more? So rather than offer of 60% current pay they'd be offering 30% wink wink current pay. I hope you no longer communicate with that recruiter.
This is common practice, but it’s playing into a bad power dynamic where the employer is trying to anchor the negotiation to a number. It’s a predatory question, and giving a bullshit answer to a bullshit question is a reasonable response.
As I mentioned in another comment, I personally prefer just setting a salary range I’d be willing to accept. I walk away if given an offer below that range. It gives me the initiative of anchoring the negotiation to a number I want.
It also saves me a lot of time by screening out companies that aren’t willing to actually negotiate.
> they assumed I was lying about my current salary and I was just bluffing
That's commonplace, I've heard many engineers say they overstated their current salary. When I'd apply for jobs, I'd include a copy of a paystub, because I knew the companies knew about the practice and would discount the offer accordingly.
I like the balance California now strikes: while employers can't ask about salary history, if a candidate voluntarily shares the information unsolicited, they can verify it and make the offer conditional on the verification passing.
So, California employers won't be able to avoid a complaint if they press for a current (as opposed to desired) salary number and disadvantage or reject the candidate on that basis, but they can still check for honesty.
While I definitely don't want to discriminatorily let low salaries have a bad knock-on effect at subsequent jobs, I also don't want to hire or work with liars.
Inflating one's salary on a resume was so common it's like the Tour de France - you have to dope to even get on the field, because everyone does it, and everyone expects it.
So I just sidestepped all that bs by including a paystub. And the resulting offer was a nice raise.
> I also don't want to hire or work with liars
I'm with you there. Lying on a resume is an automatic "no hire" from me. By including a paystub, I don't feel forced to lie, and the employer doesn't feel forced to assume I'm lying. It's a good start to the relationship.
Sure. I just realize that so many people have been underpaid for no good reason, whether due to negotiating inexperience or discrimination or simply coming from a different geography or the nonprofit sector, that requiring pay history is not something I can support as a routine requirement.
Verifying any pay history info that is provided, however, seems fine to me. This could certainly be via pay stub, or it could be by contacting the former employer with candidate consent after the official offer letter is issued and accepted (worded to be revocable if the verification fails).
> While I definitely don't want to discriminatorily let low salaries have a bad knock-on effect at subsequent jobs, I also don't want to hire or work with liars.
You may not "want" the discrimination, but if you don't allow everyone to say the magic words that get them treated fairly, "I was paid the market rate", you're encouraging the discrimination.
I think it's pretty easy to make a moral defense for telling a lie about what group you're in purely to avoid discrimination.
These laws put no restrictions on what candidates can say, absolutely none whatsoever. They just affect the employer side of the conversation.
Employers in California (and NYC and a few other places) cannot ask about salary history, but they can ask what salary the candidate wants, and the candidate can decide on their own initiative to share salary history info. If candidates share such info voluntarily and unsolicited, employers can use (and verify) it.
So any candidate who wants to can say those market rate words you quoted. Similar phrasings that answer the still- permissible "what salary are you looking for" question also work fine.
One of the most likely wordings to get a good outcome without losing respect is: "I want whatever number is market rate for someone with my skills and experience at an employer like yours. I'll make inquiries through my professional network to learn what's appropriate so that I can consider your offer in the correct context, and I'll try to be fair to the company as well as myself in the resulting negotiation."
Notice how that doesn't depend on salary history info at all.
For California specifically - not currently the other places with this type of law - employers must
also share the "pay scale" with "applicants" upon their "reasonable request" (these phrases have been clarified legislatively in sensible ways). So that's even more help in avoiding discrimination while staying honest.
> Notice how that doesn't depend on salary history info at all.
Does that get you the same salary as showing off your previous good pay stub?
If it does, then we're fine.
If it doesn't, then it doesn't matter that it's voluntary, the system still strongly encourages discrimination based on previous pay.
Imagine a similar system with a protected class. "You don't have to tell us your age, but if you prove you're under 45 we'll treat you better. If you say the wrong age, you're a dirty liar and don't deserve to be hired." That would be blatantly illegal and universally shunned.
I'm not saying this kind of discrimination is anywhere near the same magnitude. I'm just saying that whether it's voluntary or not is a distinction without a difference.
> For California specifically - not currently the other places with this type of law - employers must also share the "pay scale" with "applicants" upon their "reasonable request" (these phrases have been clarified legislatively in sensible ways). So that's even more help in avoiding discrimination while staying honest.
Yes, my suggested phrasing above should get you a fair salary without reference to previous good pay stubs, assuming you make inquiries as stated. If you weren't overpaid before, you should get at least a similar outcome, but you would get a better one if previously underpaid as many people in protected classes unfortunately still are.
If you were overpaid, and want to try to keep being overpaid, see below for a scenario that you can mentally adjust from fixing underpayment to preserving overpayment (in which case verification is even more important if the employer decides to bite that bullet).
Underpayment of disadvantaged colleagues is so much more common and so much more long-term impactful than overpayment of anyone involved in this style of negotiation; I care more that the law addresses the former than that it prevents the latter. People have useful indirect ways to signal high pay anyway even if they were forbidden from saying it explicitly, far more than underpaid people.
The prior pay information is illegal for employers to solicit in these jurisdictions, even if they are willing to make it voluntary by accepting no for an answer. The only way the info will make it to a law-abiding California employer is if the candidate decides it's to their advantage to volunteer it, as they probably would if the initial offer is a low-ball. If the candidate doesn't volunteer it unsolicited, the info can't legally come up (and if it somehow does [e.g. turns up in a third party background check] the employer can't use the info during the hiring process).
As for why that needs to be allowed, consider this scenario:
Company: What salary are you looking for?
Candidate: Market rate.
Company: How about $X? We like you and it's the highest we usually offer for this position to a new hire.
Candidate: Hm. While I agree $X is within the market rate range, I currently make $X+10k which is also within that range. Can you at least match that?
Company, after consideration: Hm. Yeah given that we don't want to force you to take a pay cut, we'll make that exception.
Or, even more compelling last two lines:
Candidate: Hm, my current company is already paying me $X, and has been doing so for 3 years now despite my skills growing significantly in that time. Can you recognize that growth with a modest pay raise?
Company, after consideration: Hm, we realize you won't trust our willingness to support you if we keep your compensation stagnant for a fourth year and counting. We can't break our salary band, but we'll at least give you $10k/year extra in restricted stock units [assume a public company].
In such scenarios, verification makes sense to require and allow.
Also note that these jurisdictions generally have explicit bans on paying differentially based on protected attributes like old age or gender, and that these laws about salary history (which are just a tightening of their former greater permissiveness that still prevails elsewhere) don't override those rules.
I don't see why someone who makes no claims about their previous salary is riskier than someone who proactively provides a pay stub. If Bob is inclined to lie in general, either he could be giving a true pay stub to engender confidence and hide some other prior/contemporaneous/subsequent lie, or he could have doctored the pay stub.
Other things being equal, neither Bob nor Fred is more likely to be a liar. Should I want to verify salary history, I'd seek permission to verify directly with the former employer (a routine request for any HR department assuming employee consent). If anything, it might feel suspicious that Bob was proactively trying to give me the easier form of proof to render fraudulent; but that alone wouldn't seem concerning in the absence of other signals, I expect.
Note that before the new law, the employer could legally have insisted that both Bob and Fred give their salaries or refuse to consider them. If Fred was severely underpaid and Bob was not, the employer would almost certainly have given Fred a lower offer than Bob. Since persistent underpayment also correlates with a more precarious personal financial situation, and since any other employer could legally have insisted on the same policy, Fred would probably have ended up accepting a comparatively low-ball offer for lack of a better option, thus staying underpaid.
> I don't see why someone who makes no claims about their previous salary is riskier than someone who proactively provides a pay stub.
Because the person not giving salary information likely believes such will negatively affect their offer (as you say), and the one who does likely believes it will positively affect their offer.
Sure, a lower salary may have nothing to do with job performance. But it is an indicator, and a good one.
BTW, paystubs are "stubs" because they are on the same paper as the check which is more difficult to forge.
> The law still helps.
Not providing salary info makes one a riskier candidate, and risk means a lower offer.
It's like buying a car. The less you know about the car's condition, the less you're likely to be willing to pay for it. That's why having receipts for work done on the car by a reputable shop, being the original owner, owner is a grandma rather than a teenager, etc., commands a higher price for the car.
There is very little correlation between relative pay and relative performance. I know first-hand many people who have been underpaid and many who have been overpaid.
I mean, sure the correlation is nonzero, but it's low enough as to not be usefully predictive for hiring. The correlation is much higher between relative pay and relative privilege, which is not at all about who would be a good employee.
Also, most of my pay stubs throughout my recent career have actually been electronic-only pay statements, and my pay is usually electronically direct-deposited too.
Therefore, any employer-provided pay statement which I pass along would be in the original PDF form, printed from the original, or redacted in a visible and non-fraudulent way by me to remove any irrelevant sensitive info (e.g. before the accepted offer stage I might redact any full bank account number or SSN).
If I were a fraudster, the modified PDF I would share would look just as credible as the original. Far safer to just obtain permission and ask the former employer.
Would it be possible to tell the recruiter/company something like "This is my current salary and I will not settle for less. So far you have hyped up this position as high paying. From this point forward if you offer me anything less than my current salary, the interview process will be ended and you will be billed for the time of mine you wasted"?
The ultimate problem is that people want "unicorns for peanuts". Google, Facebook and a few other large tech companies have hired most of the top of the labor market, the "ferraris" in your analogy. Most companies want the ferrari but can't afford the price when others are willing to pay much much more.
The only way to really balance the market is for more of the talented engineers to start their own companies (reducing labor supply and possibly increasing demand). Arguably the proliferation of one-person or small bootstrapped startups is a reflection of the state of the labor market.
This happens to me a lot. I get a recruiter who calls, tells me they are looking for someone who can do what I do, and they are competitive compensation wise. Except the way that they get to be competitive from a compensation perspective is to offer a "huge" stock grant that will be worth "at least a few million" going forward. Oh but the base pay is kind of what you get for being on your second or third position (say 5 years of experience).
People buy that line of reasoning. It is sad but they do, and I have colleagues who have worked in several such positions and failed to increase their 401k savings by much (given the low base pay) and after 10 years of work and haven't seen a dime from the so-called "valuable" equity. Worse they are now considered 'old' so they are pushing headwinds when they even get to an interview (much like the original author).
When I talk with newly minted engineers today about compensation I will often recommend that they "do the math" which is to say they compute their living expenses and assume they are going to save the maximum allowable 401k and they are going to pay taxes at what ever the current rate is. To take those numbers, try to plot them out with inflation and the stock market return, take a million off the top for each kid they expect to have if their future spouse isn't working, a half million if they are working. And then see if they exit 20 - 25 years with enough to live on or not.
Once you have the basic model you are in a much better position to understand how the base salary you are being offered helps or hinders your future self.
I find it strange, as software developers, that we discuss the effects on automation all the time, but no one seems to understand that automation has made searching for new employees incredibly inexpensive and efficient compared to the past.
So in technical roles there are a lot of companies that are always hiring. Recruiters work for free until they find you someone and placing job listings online is so inexpensive it barely registers as a cost.
On top of that, most states are "at will" employment, so even if a company does not have any openings, if they find someone better, and cheaper, than another employee that is currently working at the company, they can hire them and then eventually let that other employee go.
For example, I'm not in the market for a new laptop, but if a brand new, top of the line laptop came up for sale at half price, I'd probably buy it.
Its so cheap to look for new talent due to automation, so most companies will shop around in case they get lucky and land a fantastic bargain. Many are not seriously looking to fill an immediate need.
With that said, there are still plenty of companies out there with an immediate need, so please do not get discouraged by that group of companies that are "always hiring".
Interviews take 2-3 man days from a company per candidate you end up doing a full onsight interview. That is on the order of $1000’s per interview, and you generally have to do several per role. Then for high demand roles even the best will take several months to ramp up which costs a large fraction, say 25-50% of their total compensation. So replacing a dev can cost you in total $100k+ at least.
That is not really cheap, I am sure technology has helped reduce the amount of man administrative man hours, and helped fill a pipeline, but you still need to train new hires and actually interview them, which is no cheap.
This happens because high costs that are not easily measurable (such as the productivity hit from interviewing candidates) don't show up on spreadsheets and thus don't result in recriminations from on high. But the relatively low, one-time cost of a new hire shows up immediately on the spreadsheet and that means whoever did the hiring is going to get yelled at for paying too much. Given this incentive structure, it makes sense to drag out the hiring process as long as possible.
I agree with this, but practically no one ever does this math. (Paradoxically, even the people who claim to understand this, and who mention how expensive interviewing is -- even they still fall back into the old patterns)
Interviewing at all companies is always "free", because once your an employee, your time has "no cost", irregardless of what anyone's wages are, and regardless of any opportunity costs for the time.
It's exactly those managers that are the problem. They're incompetent and not needed for self-managed agile teams. So they keep rotating developers to safeguard their positions.
Meanwhile those managers are getting the salaries that better be spent on a team of great developers.
I think it is also how budget for hiring seems to be allocated. New funding round, hire a bunch, got budget approved, hire a bunch. Senior management and above seems to not like to give money with time conditions against their expectations.
There's some derived value in the interviewing.
It might be to gain insight from an expert in a field. It might be test out interview/hiring practices.
For OP, it seems like they were never really intent on hiring someone at the time but put out a lowball offer on the chance it would get picked up.
I wonder at what point would it make sense to start exposing a part of your "software development pipeline" to the external world and then hiring people after they've proven themselves on your pipeline (with compensation). Think lambda school but for your own company.
Open source projects started by or significantly invested in by tech companies must be a huge recruiting tool. I can think of several people in the React community that ended up working at Facebook.
The current data we have about hiring practices seem to disagree with you. So either, this process is not as expensive as you think it is, or companies believe it is less expensive than it actually is.
searching is easier in terms of internet ads and reviewing candidates. But hiring dev candidates is extremely hard. Virtually everyone has a job who is experienced already, college students get offers somewhere in the early junior year, so you hire them with at most 2 internships. It's very difficult to pull people out of an existing job, it's kind of begging them to consider you. Then for random applicants to a company, you can check their resume, but many people end up failing our interview.
So it's not easy to actually hire. I'm not at amazon, but we do offer reasonable rates - example, new college hires get 130k+stock, benefits at our company.
We compete with top companies, although we are a startup. Don't want to say the name. But each year it creeps up. If you want top students who work on backend infra, that's what you pay.
Yes, we are in seattle and/or sf. Don't want to say the name.
$60k seems low to me for any decent size city in the US too. From experience, new grads were offered much more even in late 00s, after recession started.
* don't care if you have a CS degree (we have hired plenty of bootcamp grads)
* are 100% remote which is super valuable to some folks
* aren't looking for super specialized skills--we build websites and web applications on some common open source stacks.
* explicitly don't pay top dollar. As the CEO says in the typical hiring conversation, every so often we'll be talking to folks who are also talking to Microsoft and Facebook, and we'll quietly back away--we choose to compete on different axes than dollars.
But maybe we're on the lower end. We definitely pay above that band for folks with 1-2 years of experience.
Fwiw, when I interned in a suburb of Atlanta, as a sophomore at a company no one cares about, I made $25/hr. I believe the people who went there full time started at ~75k.
Even at the top end of that range it's less than what a competitive internships annualised compensation would be. Are you really able to hire people at those rates?
I do know we must miss some good candidates. We have been discussing lowering our bar, I'm in favor of changing it. We do the usual 5 or 6 questions. One thing that is interesting about our company is we have a list of x questions (x is less than 20), and we generally ask the same questions, everyone is calibrated on them the same way. Most people who make it through the screening pass the interview loop and get an offer. All our interns got offers the last 2 years. Maybe half the industry people say yes and a smaller percentage of students. For students I think we just don't offer enough.
But what metric are you determining that those 5 or 6 questions are correct?
For example, have you put together a pool of current workers that are successful at your type of work at different companies and seen how many can pass your interview test? Its pretty easy to find a recruiter that will reach out to their network and you pay 10 employed quality engineers $1,000 that do similar work to attempt the questions. If you find a significant amount of successful engineers cannot do it, then you may want to recalibrate.
I have helped several different companies fix their hiring process, purely by recalibrating their interview test questions to their specific needs. This sometimes actually means, more difficult or simply different types of questions. But very often people just do some Google searches for interviewing at FAANG and repeat those questions without tailoring them to their specific roles.
With that said, in the case of your company, it may very well be the case that the work you do requires particularly high IQ candidates, which is actually what most interview questions at the big tech companies test. In that case, you will always have a difficulty finding candidates as there are only a limited amount of high IQ people in the world. So changing your interview questions may not apply. But when that is the case, you can often save yourself quite a bit of time by asking potential hires to take an IQ online. This will cost your organization almost nothing and will likely screen out the vast majority of people that will not be able to pass those types of interview questions.
Are you being sarcastic?
At least in the US, you aren't allowed to discriminate based on a protected class(race, religion, sex, age, physical/mental handicap) but iq isn't a protected class.
To be clear, while not outright forbidden, the IQ tests are instead called "personality tests" or "aptitude tests" or "coding interviews" because of this landmine legal vaguery (for example, you mentioned mental handicap -- i.e. lower IQ score -- as a protected class).
Sorry, I didn’t mean to deflect the convo towards your company’s hiring practices.
What I was trying to say that lot have been said about hiring metrics and standards around here and elsewhere. Yet, at the end of the day still like arbitrary in both ends and makes the job transaction cost higher than what could possible be.
Anyways, as I read your company’s interview process. Something came to my mind, why not let the candidate decide which questions to pick? I say so because I find the a lot of interviews are so hit or miss but if I was given a bit of control over the process, things could be different (or at least I would like to think this way).
As someone in Canada looking at an offer for much lower than that, I'm not sure what to do to negotiate upwards. I can't find concrete enough numbers that others are making up here for example.
This isn’t right. The cost of finding an employee at my current company (which Is considered an excellent company in the games industry) is near $70k.
The reality is outside of very early resume screening very little of the process is automated. Recruiting spends most of their day contacting people on sites like linked-in trying to find talent as not nearly enough shows up at our door.
My colleagues at FAANG companies tell me similar stories.
The cost of replacing an existing employee is also very high. In most domains can’t just plug that cheaper developer in, they need training and expertise building.
Outside of some very simple domains I don’t think your hypothesis holds up.
And yet, despite all the difficulties, most job ads just look more or less the same- 3 pages of tech requirements, a ton of self praise about the company and 3 lines about what successful applicant would get: bean bag in the corner, Foosball and a spot in an open space office...
If it's cheap for them to waste our time with bogus interviews, it's also cheap for us to compile lists of deceitful employers and recruiters. Let's blackball them.
There is actually a Dutch site that tries to do something like that [0], but those recruiters are not even remotely as bad as these stories. They may be annoying parasites, but at least when they mention a number, it's fairly reliable.
"I find it strange, as software developers, that we discuss the effects on automation all the time, but no one seems to understand that automation has made searching for new employees incredibly inexpensive and efficient compared to the past."
Yes, just like Tinder and other assorted dating apps and sites have made it incredibly easy and efficient to search for a mate, but relatively few people end up in a relationship because of it. The act of swiping endlessly appeals to people, apparently. I vaguely remember hearing that once you are given 2 or more options, it induces strong paralysis, whereas if you have one option you tend to just jump at it and move forward with your life. I imagine the dynamics of dating and hiring are quite parallel.
> Anyway... Went in for 4-5 interviews. Took me about 10 hours in total to interview with them.
The experience of the poster you are responding to doesn't seem to align with the situation you are describing. Sure posting an online job ad is pretty cheap. The rest of the hiring process, not so much.
Believe it or not, those interviews usually aren't that expensive. You probably have a mix of managers, which spend all their time in meetings anyway, and engineers, which are paid salary so they typically end up putting in a couple extra hours when they fall behind due to interviewing.
Sure it isn't free, but remember, this person had made it all the way to the end of the process. The determination was made that they represented such a large gain, for the low salary they were paying, that it was worth the risk of that small cost to get an employee at a 30% reduction in salary.
If you are going to save 30% of $140k, that means you will save $42k. It would take a lot of interviews to make up that gap.
>so they typically end up putting in a couple extra hours when they fall behind due to interviewing
Mind letting me know where you work so I can avoid it? Interviewing is part of the job and needs to be accounted for. You don't just make your employees do overtime because you don't want to plan out your companies work well
Yeah... no. Most engineers and programmers don't interview for free. They do it on company time.
If their other work falls behind because they spend too much time interviewing, well that is the company's problem. I have never worked with anyone that would stay late because they interviewed someone that day. That is ridiculous.
And as for staying late "to get the work done", what job do you work in where the work is ever "done"?
If there are 10 hours of interviews, and each one is attended by an average of 1.5 current employees, who make, on average, $100K, then the labor cost (not including opportunity cost) of that round of interviews with that candidate is on the order of a few hundred to a thousand dollars. So you might have a point there.
Searching for new employees is incredibly inexpensive == I now know you don't do any interviewing or hiring.
Eg when we post a senior eng job on eg glassdoor, stackoverflow, or linkedin, we are deluged with resumes. Just the ad easily costs $250. Then we get applications who ignore that we don't sponsor visas, clearly don't have the skills required (6 year SAP programmer who wants to be a senior fullstack eng? No thanks), or are junior eng trying to make a huge jump. 1.5 years experience does not make you a senior SE who can be trusted to design and land large features with minimal oversight.
The first problem is an eng manager reviews all those resumes. It easily requires 10 minutes per, including writing nice rejection letters. And that's just for inbound. Outbound can take 30+ minutes per.
If someone passes the resume filter, we do a phone screen with one of our senior eng shadowed by a junior. A 45 minute call plus prep plus decision afterwards costs me 2 hours of eng time.
If you come in, we do about a 3.5 hour interview across 6 people. We cover travel expenses and lunch if an interview runs over lunchtime.
The whole thing easy costs us $1.5k, plus tons of eng time. And that's if we source. If a recruiter sources, we're looking at 20%.
>1.5 years experience does not make you a senior SE who can be trusted to design and land large features with minimal oversight.
Yes and 25 years experience doesn't make them one either, especially if it is the same 25 years.
You could find a 2.5 jr with the skills required.
I mean if they started their own start up they could be designing and landing features with no oversight within 18 months.
>The first problem is an eng manager reviews all those resumes.
Yes it's better to have actually engineers do the initial review. They understand the job, will see through the BS and scale better. The more people you hire, the more resumes you can review.
$1.5k is a significant expense for your organization?
A $250 ad listing is a lot for your organization?
I'm sorry, but this sounds very strange from someone claiming to know about interviewing and hiring.
You need an engineering manager to filter out SAP programmers who want to be a senior full stack engineer? You need an engineering manager to figure out someone only has 1.5 years of experience?
How many people are you interviewing? How many positions are you filling? Seems like you would realistically need about 5-10 phone screens plus 1 or 2 in person interviews to fill a position. 3 if your phone screens were really off the mark.
I'm actually curious who hired you. Because this sounds like dismal operations management. Seriously, you seem to be a great example of how much a bad hire can cost a company.
Reading the original post it seems to say 1.5K plus "tons of eng time", I'd imagine that it's the opportunity cost of the engineering time that ends up being by far the most expensive part in this and that the 1.5k figure was just the other fixed costs.
"Seems like you would realistically need about 5-10 phone screens plus 1 or 2 in person interviews to fill a position. 3 if your phone screens were really off the mark." Just curious what your thought process is to arrive at these numbers?
This should have been obvious, but buttresses my thesis: we do more than one ad. Run rate order of $140k for 2019. obviously $2k is not a significant expense, but that's per position per interview. So we pay that well more than once.
Also in this thread: piles of people complaining hr runs hiring. We have an eng manager run hiring for our eng. You: bring back hr to review resumes!.
We're hiring on the order of 15 eng over the next calendar year. Ask anyone who has actually done this (say, for example, the folks at yc) hiring is incredibly expensive. I saw an interview where an Asana founder said he spent perhaps 20% - I can't recall, but significant percentage -- of his time hiring. That's super senior executive time focused on getting employees in.
I wonder if automation actually distorts the recruitment market? As the initial cost of recruitment goes down, thanks to automation, more recruiters gets involved because it's cheaper to enter the market.
As more recruiters offers their services to employers the employers starts to feel like there are more potential hires than there actually are.
As a thought experiment we could assume that there used to be two recruiting firms for each employer but then costs went down and now there are ten.
This gave the illusion that there are five times as many potential hires even if everyone should take a step back and realize that the recruiters are still all trawling in the same pool in their search for talent.
I don't totally buy this argument. It's not cheap to hire. They might have increased the number of candidates in the pipeline sure, but I don't think the turnaround time to hire is any less. Also, there's the paradox of choice. The more candidates you have, the harder it is to hire. You actually need to apply filters to reduce the overall quantity you will pick from.
There's also cost of switching itself which could be pretty steep. Pay someone to learn his role being essentially useless for the first month or so, and having several other people distract to show him/her the way around.
You've clearly never worked on the hiring side of a company. I mean that literally and not snidely: you're completely unaware of the costs and complications and risks that go into hiring from the company's side.
those are some good points, I been wondering if they are doing things like that myself.
I also wonder how much of it is also #1 data gathering, #2 advertisement, and #3 slightly counter to what you are saying - bad tools/people using said tools.
for point one, I can learn a lot on what microsoft is doing by pulling resumes from microsoft workers, even more if I interview them. you can quickly glean direction, head count, tech stack, etc.
for point two, tech companies especially have to remain relevant in the news. Imagine if you post positions for great ML shiny positions, that gets seen by tens of thousands of people for 0 cost. "Did you see that great posting at company X? wow they have an impressive Y team"
point 3, I have seen recruiters get thousands of resumes for a position they posted on the web, really want to hire someone, but instead send people through the hiring loops because of direct contacts. Its like they search for skills, the resumes on the website dont get searched well so they assume there are no matches. its baffling to me this happens given the tools you mentioned
My last job search, I was cold-called by a recruiter who was working with a local bank. Salary range was acceptable, and there were a few factors pressing for finding a job quickly.
Interviews went well, liked the people I met; things looked good. As a condition of the offer, the recruiter told me they needed my current salary. I provided that, and they dropped their offer ~$15,000 below the low end of their range because my income (in another state and a different industry) was lower.
I told them, "that's not how this works. You base your offer on what the work is worth here, not on what I was making in another role."
Walked, and got an offer two weeks later - $30,000 above their original range and no bullshit trying to tie it to my current income.
Did you say that on the phone or email? Did they reach out to you first after two weeks of radio silence? I’m always curious how these negotiations go since I just got off the job market.
I want to give a slightly different perspective on this as a cofounder of a startup. First of all it sounds like there was some really dishonest communication and there is no excuse for that.
As far as salary goes, I absolutely cannot afford to compete and hire at market rate prices so I rely on:
-People who are motivated by other factors than money (everyone at our company took a pay cut to join). We have schedule flexibility, we are like-able, our tech is interesting, our mission and vision are inspiring I hope, we are good at selling ourselves.
-People who like the gamble of stock options
-People who are unaware of their market value
This is how every startup in seed round works pretty much.
That said, I don’t go around complaining that there is a talent shortage. I’m well aware of the situation we are in.
As an employer it is not my job to assess and pay an employee their market value. I’m not a career counselor. I have positions I need to fill and those have salaries associated with them. Someone who is overqualified might accept a role when I think they could do better, but that’s me projecting a vision onto them. The employee has mobility to reject my offer, or leave and seek a better job.
Also people are complex I don’t necessarily know why the engineer accepted the job for 70% of what I think they could earn elsewhere. It could be an intangible reason.
An employee’s market value has nothing to do with the job openings I have available. You’re equating the two. When I do salary research I do it based on similar roles that are open. Let me give you a concrete example: A CS Phd applies to be our front desk receptionist. I’m offering them the value of the position they applied for, which has nothing to do with the fact that they could be making $300K+ doing CS research.
I think there's a big difference between floating a number like "2X" to entice someone into an interview, then presenting an offer for "X"... versus just floating "X" in the first place, and maybe someone is too timid or unaware to ask for more.
Honestly, we're not SKU's. Once you get some experience, the main difference between, say, a $100k developer and a $150k developer is that the latter simply decides that's their price and interviews longer until they find it.
I've seen very-underpaid people go through the realization that they've been taken advantage of.
Sometimes it's worked out; the company gives them a big raise, a lump sum in the key of "Sorry!" and the person remains a happy and productive -- and wiser -- member of the team.
Usually they're gone within months, though. And often other people follow ("You got /how/ much at OtherCorp?").
There is if the candidate makes their salary a very clear upfront condition of employment and the employer pushes them through a lengthy interview without disclosing zero chance of them being paid that much because the company does not have the money. They are leading a candidate on in bad faith.
1) every company I have interviewed with has lied to me at some point in the process. Sometimes those are small lies, sometimes they are very big ones. I get that hiring is a complex process but a company's recruiters and hiring managers should make an effort to not over-promise and under-deliver to people that want to work there.
2) I have never received an offer from a company that asked me my salary expectations. I consider that question a loud signal that I am just being regarded as a data point by the recruiter, and I basically write them off.
>> Sometimes those are small lies, sometimes they are very big ones.
Been there. But lies cut both ways. Once a company is dishonest with you, it is 100% fair game for you to be dishonest with them:
- Side consulting gigs
- During work consulting gigs, especially if you have "unlimited vacation"
- Sneaking off during the day to do whatever
That said, that isn't healthy for either party. The best situation is where both sides are honest and both sides work their hardest to reach a shared goal.
Oh lol. I just applied for a job that asked for salary expectation. Well I guess its ok. I spent minimal amount of time uploading my resume and entering data into 4 webpage.
Maybe I'm out of touch but 4-5 interviews when they have sought you out and you're a domain expert seems like a big red flag.
I've had a few short interviews that quickly turned into a sales pitch on why I should work for them. I've also had the same you experienced: they act like they really want you specifically then feed you into the human resource machine. Basically made me feel scammed so I bowed out after the first 30 minutes.
I get the sense that a lot of tech companies' hiring playbook is all about making you feel special and elite then feeding you into the machine.
For my current job I took a 30 minute phone interview followed by an offer. The offer was what I was making as a consultant + benefits/vacation. So really it was a huge net pay increase. The project isn't super inspiring but I almost never work overtime, get 6 weeks vacation and it's 100% remote. This is honestly the best job I've ever had. I really don't understand why people put up with 4-5 interviews, homework, etc.
I guess I could understand it if I REALLY wanted to work at company X and company X happened to have annoying interview practices. But is that the condition for most people seeking jobs? Or is there some selection bias of who is posting about their experiences?
Everyone who currently has a job, that isn't at imminent risk of losing that job, is in a position of power against a company that needs labor.
I'm certainly not widely known in the industry. I don't have any public projects/repos. I've been doing this for almost 20 years, so I do have a pretty extensive resume. But I didn't have extensive resume when I was starting out in the early 2000s just after the internet bubble burst and times were relatively rough in the industry. And I wouldn't have done 4-5 interviews or homework projects even then.
We don't need to accept this kind of treatment from potential employers.
Same thing happened to me. Exciting company, leadership opportunities, etc.
The asked how much I was looking for, I told them X, which was 25% more than I was getting now and on the high-end for a similar role. They say ok.
Interview goes great, everyone loves me, offer time. They offer me X-20%. WTF? That’s basically what I’m making now and they didn’t offer big company perks like 401k match, stock grants, etc. So in fact, the offer was less than I was currently getting. They were willing to go up to X-15%, but no higher.
Why say ok when someone says they want X, then make an offer way lower than X?
The ones who are good salesman do get takers. I don't really know why or how but they get them. Not the greatest engineers but also not bottom feeders. It's surreal. Granted it's usually people who don't realize their own worth or are naive about how much equity is actually going to be worth.
Hey, uh. So, I'm going to be graduating with a B.Eng soon. Any tips on how to realize my own worth? I have a tendency to let myself be taken advantage of... I mean, I'm currently doing a research internship at a computer vision lab at my uni for very little compensation (grant + departmental top-up). I told myself I was doing it "for the experience." I... I feel like I might be a candidate for the behavior you describe, so I'd like to snap myself out of that if possible. Any resources you could point me to would be stellar, please and thank you.
The best way is to interview at good companies and get offers from them. That means the usual Google, Facebook, Apple, etc. and also up-and-coming ones (Uber, Lyft, etc.). You don't even need to want to work for the company but getting an offer will tell you your worth for the future. You will need to study hard for those interviews but it's well documented online what you need to study specifically (read Cracking the Coding Interview, practice Hackerrank, LeetCode, etc.).
There's generally threads online where recent grads say what offers they've gotten from companies and websites like www.paysa.com that try to aggregate them but those are all biased.
Equity is a gamble not in your favor, read up on how many startups fail outright, how many sell for basically nothing, and how much you're going to get diluted in funding rounds. Founders will say otherwise but it's their job to sell you so don't trust them. So if you do want to gamble on a startup make sure to heavily discount the value of equity when negotiating.
Equity is literally a scam at this point because there's the stock options that they give you, the private stock they give themselves, and the stock the VCs get. You're literally last on the list to get paid and first on the list to get shafted. It's not like it used to be where stock meant everyone shared risk and reward.
> You're literally last on the list to get paid and first on the list to get shafted
Isn't that a given with equity? You're literally saying that you're a residual claimant in the enterprise. Yes, with stock options and such things you might be even "more" residual than others in the capital structure, but it's not a "scam".
The unhappiest people I know are the golddiggers. They cannot escape the feeling that they’re being taken advantage of. That the pie is so big anyways, and they deserve a little more, you know? And oh look, here comes somebody offering just a little more. What kind of sucker wouldn’t want to get paid what they’re really worth?
They’re unhappy because they let other people control their sense of self-worth.
If the company is pre-ipo then look for top 10 venture capitalists as investors (Kleiner Perkins etc). This signals a company with good prospects! You do research - if you have to, pay the money to join CrunchBase - and figure out what each share is worth in the last funding round in dollars. Sometimes it's published in news articles and sometimes in Delaware Corp filings ($$$ to retrieve; crunchbase is easier). Their offer should be market if the (stock grant) x (last funding round price/share) + your base and bonus is average for a person at your level. Check levels.fyi. check Glassdoor salaries. If it's a unicorn check the university of bc unicorn report to see if there are ratchets or preferred shares (bad for you, a common stock grantee) in previous funding rounds. Then make a guess if they can IPO. 95% of silicon valley companies cannot. I picked one that was already getting ready to file an s-1 (IPO disclosure).
My biggest mistake as a new grad PhD was local cost of living. I wanted the prestige of working at a well known university. Turns out I didn't have the safety net or family wealth to work there.
Use an online calculator to estimate after-tax take home pay. Look at home price per square foot. A good offer nationally will pay 300 sq ft of real estate (take home pay) per year. My salary has varied from 110 to 1800 sq ft per year. I quit the 110 sq ft job after 2 years I just couldn't afford it; that is unsustainable! The 1800 sq ft job was in Phoenix; one house (new) per year! My current salary is ~250 sq ft a year which sucks nationally but is good for one of the most expensive cities in silicon valley (400+ sq ft just a few blocks away in a lesser school district); I am very Senior with 30 YOE.
Brush up on Cracking the Coding Interview, interview at the top N companies wherever you can face living, research salaries for that area (levels.fyi is good if you're in the bay area, I'm told)
I imagine the people that would accept that are 'lifers'.
Where they get comfy, rationalize that they know their job, and the company never has to spend more than 98k on this person for the next 35 years.
Weirdly enough, it seems like Fortune 500 pays best for the brightest and they have them working on high level concepts and paying suppliers to perform the nitty gritty engineering.
I don't quite understand the rationale behind this hiring phenomenon.
Its not that hard if you've worked in corporate america.
Executives like to work with people that they "like", so its frequently people who went to similar schools, have a similar sense of humor, don't say stupid shit etc. Even if these people are totally ineffective and have no skills, they will keep getting hired. Then, they make use of the new labor markets, where you can just outsource everything and hire consultants/contractors to do the actual implementation.
If the project succeeds, the hired person is a star and gets showered with money, poached by other firms where they try to replicate a similar, completely short sighted way of building business value.
If the project fail, blame the contractors get new ones.
And because everyone knows this, a contractor can easily charge 2-3 times what an employee makes - aka what they're actually worth. The system works (Except of course for the employees)
I've been on both sides. Depends on the company, of course, but all else being equal:
- Contractors don't always get the best projects. Often the coolest, most strategic projects go to employees. Of course, if no one internally is qualified, contractors then get the best projects.
- When cuts happen, contractors are at the front of the line, and when cuts need to go deeper, employees then are at risk.
- It is a pain to collect. You are often not the primary contractors, there is usually a pass-thru company that is well-connected and gets the receivables and then pass them onto you. Sometimes they delay payments 45 days. Sometimes 60 days. I've had some months paid 4 months late. On rare occasions you never get paid.
- You pay the employer payroll tax if you are in the US and on 1099 (on W2 you only pay half the payroll tax).
- Benefits you purchase are often not the best benefits. The benefits you would get at a large company are often well negotiated and much better and much cheaper than what you purchase a la carte.
Obviously for a contractor premium high enough, none of the above really matters. But contract work isnt worth it, for say, a 40% premium IMHO, especially with a family. At higher premiums (250%, 300%) it can make sense assuming you like what you will be doing.
Aren't most startup founders straight out of school and never worked anywhere full time in software? Maybe that's why they behave like they do with only small guidance from their VCs that could well be detached from reality too.
There's a possibility that someone agreeing to work for less than market, in software, given everything else about them is stellar, is a phenomenally positive signal.
I'm a tradesperson with knowledge-worker experience.
Had a software company offer me a position, tech support + some maintenance of existing codebase. I have a demonstrated capability to meet the requirements. Remote + onsite work at client premises. Existing employees doing the roll are way overloaded and obviously stressed.
The person I'd report to travelled to interview me. This person admitted they hadn't received a pay rise in four years.
I told them my current pay grade BEFORE the interview.
Their offer: $45,000 BELOW my current pay, then another $5000 per year I'd spend paying for my dependants to be cared for during the time suggested I'd be at clients premises.
At this point, I flat-out tell recruiters what I'm looking for and ask if they're going to be able to offer something in that ballpark before we proceed to an interview. I let them know that it'll be a hard no if it's below what I'm asking, regardless of stock/benefits/whatever. That's drastically cut down on the amount of time folks have wasted.
This happens on Hired.com all the time. Company makes an offer that meets your expectation. Phone interview comes to an end and then HR say "Actually we want you to move on salary before proceeding" and that's if you are lucky.
I finished an interview in London, UK and they start umming and ahing over a measly five grand. It happened in Toronto too last year.
I was put in touch with a business by a recruiter. I stated my salary expectations, received the typical "that's a little high..." from the recruiter; as per usual, the offers I received justified my stance.
They offered me 15% below what I wanted alongside a very uninspiring business in advertising. I was honest and said I was interviewing elsewhere and wasn't about to accept that offer quickly, though it wasn't off the table. They waited one week and pulled the offer. I accepted a better offer pretty much the next day.
The recruiter got back in touch with me a week or two later and said quite frankly that they regretted their decision as they've struggled to find anyone comparable in my salary range. Because, as it finally dawned on them, my salary expectations weren't even that high - I intentionally put them in the mid-range for my skill-set because I care deeply about work/life balance and I'm picky about tech stack.
Unrelated, but I also had a similar experience last year when buying my first home. First place we put an offer in with was poorly advised by their agent, and they came back begging a few months later by which point it was too late. It's only two anecdotal data points but it does seem to be that people are willing to lose a lot in order to gain a pittance.
5k... and god knows how much lost productivity. That's just penny wise and pound foolish... but also IMO a bad sign if that is how they make decisions.
After the housing bubble burst I decided it was time to buy a new house. I made an offer on a house and we went back and forth but we hit the ceiling I was willing to pay so we went our separate ways.
After the seller had an agreement with two other families fall through they called me 9 months later asking if I was interested. I went back to my first offer from the start and told them I'd close in two weeks. Deal was done.
Hell, I've literally asked for a non-pay title increase and been shot down before. I was doing significantly more than the job description and literally doubled my salary at the next place. I was not paid well and didn't realize my worth. Now I'm on the other end and despite 3 people accepting offers they all back out on the hire date for a reason no one seems to want to share. There's things I can fix, things I can't fix, and things I just plain don't know about.
After one instance of that routine I learned to unashamedly [at least loosely] state my asking rate, and ask about salary up front (or early) after hearing the interview process.
It's saved me. I would have faced the same interview length for [same as you] half of my current salary, and would have had to share a machine as a matter of principle. For an intermediate->senior role. With longer hours, and fewer benefits (but there would be a ping pong table and exposed brick walls...).
Though the situation I experienced seems especially endemic to Toronto's dev mills. I've since learned to recognize them at the outset and stay away.
I wonder in what situation exactly would a company legitimately have a need to interview a candidate for a total of 5 rounds? Wouldn't they run out of questions to ask? Are you applying for a CEO position?
All it does is displaying for everyone to see their indecisiveness and wasting other people's time. They obviously couldn't make up their mind even after the first four rounds and that's just bad in any businesses.
If I ever had to go through a five-rounds interview and they ended up turning me down, I will not care if it burns bridges as I will track down their boss and he/she will receive some nice hand-written letters from me to let them know how their company performed. A working relationship always goes both way and they obviously have not valued much of your time.
I don't do the 4-5 interview thing any more either. If you cannot make a determination in 1 or 2 interviews in person - in combination with my work history and references then you are wasting my time and yours.
Completely agree with you, and if am going on a 4-5 interview step thing and blackboards are presented etc then I want you to be able to offer same sign on bonuses and perks big companies can offer.
If the only thing you have to offer is equity (risk) and a lower salary than what I was getting/market salary why don't I just save me some time and risk it all by starting my own company.
I have also had some dealings with Stryker and without getting into too many specifics I will say they seem horribly disrespectful to their candidates.
Years ago, I was at a social gathering of some sort. Another guest worked in tech for an organization that had an opening, for which a friend of mine seemed qualified. I took the information about the outfit, and emailed my friend.
She replied that she was pretty sure this was an organization she had interviewed at some time before. They found her qualified, and made her an offer substantially below what she had clearly said she required. They said, Well, we thought you'd find the work so interesting that you'd be willing to work for that. They thought wrong.
>You can't go to a ferrari dealership and offer to buy one or $20k.. that's just not how it works.
That's how employers work though. Next step is to whine about a Ferrari shortage and bribe (I mean lobby) the goverment to increase immigration of Ferrari knock of builders in order to reduce the shortage.
Then when the locals get indignant about all these new Ferraris depressing sale price of Ferraris, if your the UK you blame the EU and have a vote on brexit.....
It seems to me that they're not contradictory. A "talent shortage" would be if, when you consider all roles requiring some particular qualification or experience, there aren't enough people to fill them.
If there aren't many people that meet the requirement, but there are at least as many as jobs that need to hire them, then there's no shortage - that small number could even be too many, if some of those people are overqualified for the jobs they end up doing.
They may honestly not have the money/resources to afford you.
Most startups and new businesses fail. Part of that is a lack of funding and a lack of information/knowledge about the specifics of the markets they are working in.
They may not know that they are looking for a Ferrari or what the market for Ferraris looks like.
This is totally fine, but it isn't a "shortage". It is poor product market fit, poor pricing, or just a bad business. If a business cannot support input costs, the business is just a bad business.
If I start a business that sells Ferraris for 20k, then complain how I cant buy them cheap enough wholesale, there isn't a shortage.
This example certainly constitutes a "shortage", especially from the point of the employer. He has a demand which he can't fulfill. Due to not fulfilling it, he has problems investing his capital as productively as possible.
The idea that job applicants get offered wages which they perceive as too low does not mean that there is not a shortage of similar talent on the market, even at reasonable wages, if there even is such a thing.
The analogy with the Ferraris breaks down for developers and engineers because their qualifications are hard to quantify and their added value is hard to predict.
Employers will especially talk about talent shortages when they can't hire additional talent at the wages of their existing workforce. That may be because they got lucky and found very cheap engineers ("suckers"), but it also may be that they are running against the wall of the talent shortage, meaning they can only hire new people if they embark on a potentially ruinous wage competition with other employers...
If wages are perceived to low compared to profits, than I'd rather question the potential collusion among employers. There have been dramatic cases of such sollusion in silicon valley, as I recall. Less drastically labor market regulations and workforce protections will also play a role.
>> The idea that job applicants get offered wages which they perceive as too low does not mean that there is not a shortage of similar talent on the market, even at reasonable wages, if there even is such a thing.
In the Bay Area, I rarely hear friends complaining of wages "perceived" as too low, usually it is more absolute in terms or it wont pay rent. This isnt usually the case for entry level or medium level jobs. But I constantly hear of this so called shortage of experienced engineers. The fact about experience engineers (10yrs, 15yrs, whatever) is that experience is also correlated with age, family, children and throwing $150k at someone with family simply doesnt work. It isnt a perception issue, you literally cannot fit a family into a studio apartment and afford braces, health premiums, co-pays, etc.
So, what are the experienced engineers with families and an expensive life style doing then?
Unless they prefer to be unemployed, or work outside the industry (and Silicon Valley), their turning down a job offer because of too low compensation does not preclude a real talent shortage. Usually they are already employed at a wage that pays rent, right?
All this talk about low wages seems to assume recruiters and employers are stupid. But they aren't, for the most part. If they think they could make a higher profit by doubling the wage offer and thus hiring an additional engineer, they would do it. Stupidity or stupid greed is not a smart way to reject that basic economic imperative for an industry as a whole.
On the other hand, other tech-hubs than Silicon Valley have the same talent shortage. Even outside the US, the picture is always the same, except for maybe developing countries.
Your arguments only make sense if you assume the worth of an engineer to be virtually limitless, or else there is no shortage. That companies should ruin their business models by treating engineers like kings and handing them all the profits.
I cannot fully agree on this. What is your definition of "shortage"?
From a supply/demand perspective, there is no such thing as a shortage. At least not without further qualifications. Prices adjust so that the demand meets the supply. In theory that should always be possible. Concept of a shortage per se does not have a place in this theory. You can only speak about a shortage/oversupply at a certain price level but such a thing has no significant meaning because that price level is just an arbitrary number.
Thus to speak about a shortage you must add some other components to your model. Those other components will always be partially subjective (i.e., what you want to maximize?) and fairly complicated. (I believe.)
In any case, one could for example argue that there are not enough engineers to fill the roles "needed" in the economy at a sustainable price. (What is "needed", though?) But I am very sceptical about such a claim, considering the huge profits many US companies are making, even the software companies for that matter.
>This example certainly constitutes a "shortage", especially from the point of the employer. He has a demand which he can't fulfill.
There are certainly localised shortages (hence the popularity of remote work)
>they can only hire new people
if they embark on a potentially ruinous wage
Or cut profits or lower CEO wages to fund it, or move the company to a lower cost of living area.
If your a software company your biggest expenses are probably staff and offices and well cheaper areas also have excellent connections to cloud services.
You can pay half as much in salary in 1/4 area and everyone is better off.
I feel like a broken record, but I'm going to say it anyways.
There is NOT a shortage of software developers. That myth was developed by big tech, and pushed all the way up the ladder, to the top of government. The goal? Reduce labor costs.
Big tech has always been 1 step ahead of the employee, just like coal, and metal working was. They saw the huge need for developers and realized their costs would increase unless they actively pursued ways to prevent that from happening.
And that's how you get organizations like code.org. That's how you get President Obama on the big screen, telling everyone to learn to code. That's how you get a GREAT job, and make it BLUE COLLAR.
I’m so tired of feeling constantly at war with the industry to justify my own existence. The business people desperately need you but they hate you for what they have to pay. They’re always thinking what if?
What if we could outsource this to some magic 3rd world slave mine? What if we could hire some recent graduates or interns instead? What if we could get someone on an H1B and chain them to the desk?
It’s the natural result of being labor. Don’t like it? Be an owner.
The only alternative I can think of is for software to become a true profession with licensing and standards. This makes a lot of sense in a world fraught with security risks and ethics concerns about the usage of data.
In the meantime, I’m getting ready to hang up the keyboard. All the dynamism and potential has been ground out of this career path. What’s left is crushing demands and compensation that just doesn’t cut it anymore.
I've been at a Fortune 50 firm that thought they could do this. They went through two rounds of offshore firms, got burnt each time (large contractors delivered nothing, L1 workers cycled through every 4 months as they job hopped, etc., slick talkers did the sales and left the company holding a bag full of barely-legible-English workers actually trying to deliver the promised work)
After two cycles, they started treating their local employees well. This was a big firm with much momentum. A small firm could be ruined by this. Sometimes the firm just needs to see the grass isnt necessarily greener on the other side. I got paid well and my business counterparts always know that when I said 3mo, I meant 3mo.
Wow I thought I was the only one. I dont know how many years experience you have, but with 5 years experience my sentiments are the same. When I interview now it feels like "Dance monkey Dance", or dealing with a gatekeeper. Had plenty of interviews that were a waste of time, or I personally felt I was just invited to interview just for the Hiring Manager to deny and say they couldn't find the right "Talent"
I agree every interview I’ve had has just been a variation of a coder wars puzzle with no help and asking for help renders you an inferior programmer not worth their time.
Unions are the immediate solution. We need an industry wide union so it's hard to hire scabs and easy for us to refer each other after layoffs.
The longer term, better solution is to be owners. Worker owned tech companies only don't exist because they're not our currently accepted default. If people stop defaulting to the venture backed capital model we can turn this industry around.
Or you could fight for a strong socialist state and recognize that this whole article supports the labour theory of value. Especially when the other option aside becoming an oppressor is to build stronger walls around your slightly nicer gated community.
Trying to teach “everyone” to code is like teaching everyone to draw in high school art classes. It gives a lot of people exposure to what it means to code/draw, the fundamental steps of coding/drawing but doesn’t increase the supply of coders/artists in the world to the point where the skilled artists/programmers become commonplace.
What you say is true, but it's also true that the bar is lower than it was 20 years ago and it continues to move that direction, at least when we talk about simple "apps" as opposed to bleeding edge technologies now.
For example, "Chart.js" makes it really easy to create beautiful charts in a web app. Because of tools like that it's much easier to learn how to build a feature rich app now than 20 years ago.
Still, the guy who can create "Chart.js" (an artist) should be getting paid a lot more than a guy who can only use it (a craftsmen).
Some people can do both, but choose the second (using a library) because of all the reasons reusing existing libraries instead of rolling your own. From this point of view, I'd rather hire someone who doesn't suffer from the "not invented here" syndrome.
I did a coding boot camp and oh man half the class was IMO unemployable as far as a job coding goes.
It's one thing to code what you see in front of you, another to think about problems and solve them thoughtfully, research, debug, and etc. Troubleshooting(debugging) in particular is a hard thing to learn.
Yup. And they're missing the point that this isn't 1985 anymore. A high school student with a week of JavaScript and HTML could write AirBnB. Or at least, JavaScript and similar languages make programming much, much easier (and hence the barrier to entry much easier).
As coding difficulty drops, and supply increases, the net effect will be a much higher demand for jobs than supply. And that's exactly where big tech wants it to be.
edit: here comes the javascript developer downvotes.
> A high school student with a week of JavaScript and HTML could write AirBnB
I actually love it when a developer says something like this, because it tells me way more than even 2 full days of pairing or interviewing could: They know absolutely nothing about software at scale, and are probably extremely arrogant to boot.
I actually love it when I get a response just like yours.
It informs me that you're probably a JQuery developer, personally offended because you believe that your work is incredibly advanced and challenging. In reality, what you do is probably some of the easiest "coding" to have ever come to fruition. Yet, you toss out the "at scale" comment ad nauseam because you think it'll make you sound important.
Just by the fact that you denounce anyone who recognizes the simplicity of it modern development tools shows me you probably fail to recognize the simplicity yourself. Or you don't want to admit the simple fact that programming has gotten much easier. That's been intent of so many modern languages, yet we're always going to have someone like you who claims we all don't know what we're talking about because we've never built anything "at scale".
Yeah all those useless frontend engineers (sorry, "jQuery developers") at Facebook and Google, being paid $500k+ / year to work on their 10k hits / day blog.
I don't know - I still think that you can replace twitter in a weekend. You just need a couple of markov chain outrage bots shouting at each other, porn scraping bot and a bare metal web server that can process couple of million requests per second.
Jokes aside - the biggest error this software developer makes is not realizing that software is not the crtitcal part of AirBNB success. It is the thousand manyears of boots in streets promoting the app and getting people onboard.
I see this hyperbole a lot, any kid within a week can copy an online tutorial on how to make a static site, but it takes a long time to begin to think in a way that let's you do interesting/useful things on your own.
All I can say is LOL.. good luck with that. Maybe if they were Little Man Tate. Knowing where to start, the permutations of frameworks & libraries & algorithmic knowledge & design patterns etc.. That's like the whole.. I know how to build a blog when all you did was click a button on digital ocean to deploy wordpress and now you think you know how to deploy it. Then client says they need it to be on GCE or AWS. Yes you can always use PAAS products, but experience plays a role.
These kids would be competing with incredibly prolific web developers who not only output an insane amount of code themselves but manage OSS at massive scales. One example is Jordan Harband, responsible for:
1. Enzyme, the current top used React testing library
2. NVM, kind of the only game in town for managing node versions
3. qs, a tool for converting search to json objects and back
4. tc39 proposals, the committee that determines new JS features
This is all in addition to his developer work at Airbnb. I would like to see a high schooler have that kind of maturity, drive, and focus.
I disagree with the direction gp is taking, big projects involving money and people are not easy. On the other hand your example might support his argument.
You've drawn attention to an Airbnb engineer with a bunch of other interests that don't seem directly related to the infrastructure behind the company. I'm sure they use these things, but they aren't going to be critical to the success or failure of the site. That suggests the technical challenges of Airbnb aren't enough to keep someone with a large amount of maturity, drive and focus busy and interested.
That's totally possible but if you're the CTO of Airbnb would you want the high schooler for cheap (who may be unreliable when it comes to managing schedules, following protocols, having the maturity to deal with failing systems) or do you want the guy who's been managing all of these OS products for years? It's a person issue, not really a competency issue.
You're exaggerating, but it's basically true that on the technical side everything from AirBnB to Zillow are just CRUD apps, with varying degrees of nice UI stuff on the front-end. Once you've built one, you could kind of build any of them. (Not sure a high-schooler with a week of JS would be up to it though, LOL.)
Anyway it's important to note that coming up with the business idea and then executing it well is kinda where the money comes from, not from the app itself per se. A business may have a website; it might even use a web app to deliver its core business value; but having a website or web app doesn't necessarily mean you have a business.
You honestly sounds like a broken record, looking at the cynicism from your comment history. If someone coming from just trainings on "code.org" is threatening your job safety, or god forbid making you "blue collar" like "those people", perhaps you should rethink whether your skill sets are adequate.
It's an inherently high-paying field with room for both huge advancement and a lot of specificity/niches, not to mention that by its nature software engineering creates more software engineering jobs.
God forbid we open that up to people who should be resigned to whatever you think "blue collar" means?
When you increase supply, wages decrease. Wages will decline if you open the field up to everyone. Understandably, not everyone in tech wants wages to decline. If you want your wage to decline in the name of opportunity, that is your choice to make, but it is not your choice to have someone else's wages decline. What you're saying is, "God forbid you care about your quality of life so much you're not willing to keep running harder, faster on a treadmill until you lose your job and are no longer able to find another one due to so many candidates applying per job". No thanks.
There's nothing wrong with trades and blue collar work. There's a reason you can't outsource plumbers, electricians, and other technicians who must be on site to practice their craft. But there's also a reason that work is so expensive: the skills required take time to acquire, and there's a limited pool of talent with those skills.
Disclaimer: My personal stance is I want the labor market as tight as possible, for as long as possible, to push wages up for as many people as possible, while using government policy to put backstops in place that are progressively ratcheted forward.
>If you want your wage to decline in the name of opportunity, that is your choice to make, but it is not your choice to have someone else's wages decline.
Why is it your choice to make? Shouldn't it be the new people trying to get into the computer science industry who get to make that choice?
It feels like what you're saying is "God forbid someone else tries to join your industry and tries to make a better life for themselves, and god forbid others for trying to help them."
It's not my choice. It's the technology industry's collective choice to decide how welcoming the technology industry is to newcomers. I hope you have a more compelling argument than, "It's not fair." Life ain't fair; people have mortgage payments to make, kids to feed, and aren't likely to be willing to support emotional appeals that are going to decrease their quality of life, without any benefit to them.
Your argument is "I got mine fuck everyone else" which I think is about as uncompelling as an argument gets.
My argument is that getting more people into tech increases opportunities and raises the standards of living for everyone. When entire industries are disappearing due to automation I think it is rather ridiculous to try to restrict people from becoming programmers.
You are right, it is not your choice, and thankfully society is making a very different choice.
We restrict immigrants to the US so we don’t flood the country with low skilled labor. Most first world countries do this. We’re reducing H1Bs, as they were used to depress wages. This is no different, and it saddens me that you think this is “I got mine fuck you”. Is that what you think of the GM workers losing their jobs in Ohio? I desire high wages for as many workers as possible.
> it is not your choice to have someone else's wages decline
By your own logic, every time I help someone learn something to do with coding - for free - I undermine the wages of everybody else in the market whose job that person is going to be able to "steal" now.
It is your choice, and I fully support you having that choice. I speak of doing so at scale. You alone aren’t going to cause industry wide wage depression.
1000X yes. It’s the result of a PR campaign to increase the H1B Visa allotment. Love H1B employees, they are just delicious! Low wages and zero bargaining power otherwise it’s out of the country with you.
It’s also funny because this creates a problem where wages have been driven down to a point where skilled workers can barely afford to support a family in tech zones. So because of these depressed wages in software engineering, there are fewer skilled workers living in these regions. Make no mistake this is software engineering specific. Otherwise show me roles in tech where there are lots of H1B visa employees.
I keep hearing this 'H1B low wages'. Here's my startup idea.
You create a website with a list of job skills that 'slave wage companies (SWC)' are claiming to need to fill.
You collect resumes from unemployed U.S.candidates with these skills and send them to the SWCs.
If the candidate gets hired you keep a recruiters fee.
If the candidate is rejected your startup lawyers sue the pants of the SWC for violating U.S H1B law. You pass on the settlement money to the rejected U.S. candidate keeping a percentage for your lawyer and your retirement fund.
US H1B law is clearly explained online [0], there are searchable databases [1] and most recruiting/HR people will gladly spill the loophole secrets that they have (posting jobs in obscure local newspapers, tailoring job description to an existing known foreign candidate etc).
> If the candidate is rejected your startup lawyers sue the pants of the SWC for violating U.S H1B law.
Is this an easily winnable lawsuit? Can't the company just show that the candidate failed their interview process suggesting they lacked the actual job skills required?
- Set high minimum wage for H1B ($150,000+ annual salary, set to increase in response to inflation in technology salaries)
- Incorporated an automatic green card "path to citizen" into the process, which will be portable between employers (with a decent provision for unemployment or family leaves).
Seems like:
- Dramatic improvement in living conditions for higher end H1B roles (less beholden to employer, more career mobility)
- Immediately eliminates abusive lower-tier H1B roles (you could grandfather existing arrangements for the duration)
- Opens up entry level tech roles to native-born trainees
- Opens up unencumbered path to citizenship for top talent
I'm sure there's a way for politicians to screw this up... but seems like this might be a good first step towards ending the current abuses within this system...
Capitalist: I firmly believe in demand and supply economics. That is why I raise my prices all the time!
Also capitalists: I refuse to raise my wages in response to a low supply labour market for my labour demands. I will instead lobby the government to let me hire wage slaves that I can abuse from overseas labour markets where living costs are much lower.
This "H1B causes low wages" meme need to stop. It is such lazy thinking it is amazing. On this very thread people are commenting about outrageous salaries in the valley and peanuts pay in Europe and Canada. Guess which place is full of H1Bs.
The field of software is growing. It will change. That change may be for the better or worse.
But I feel it’s unethical for those of us privileged to be in this field to act as gatekeepers and prevent others from having the same opportunities I (and I suspect many others had) when I entered it.
If you want to keep making the big bucks, continue to provide meaningful value and skills that justify it.
What would have to be true for you to agree that there is a shortage of software developers? Big tech cos have total comp of ~$600k/engineer. Would you think there is a shortage if they had to pay $6m/engineer? $60m? How do you define "shortage"?
Those aren’t market wages. Those are compensation packages awarded to long tenured employees at cash cow companies as a form of golden handcuff to keep experts on specific in-house systems. They are paid out to keep employees from taking company secrets to competitors. They work because these compensation packages are so far off market that these employees would suffer a huge pay drop if they moved. So in no way do these rates reflect the market. However it is great food for this skill shortage narrative BS.
I'd argue that this is closer to a market rate than it seems because, as you mention, on the open market they can go somewhere else and paying them this much is needed for them to not do that.
How are you defining market rate if not by how much someone thinks they need to pay an employee to stay?
Even after paying $600,000 per employee, Facebook still makes $600,000 profit per employee.
So it is currently at a 50/50 split of the value created between the employee and the company.
I would expect, in a skills shortage, that the employee would be able to demand a much greater share, something closer to -- or even temporarily above -- 100%.
The absolute number, $60,000 or $600,000 or $6,000,000 doesn't seem relevant.
> I would expect, in a skills shortage, that the employee would be able to demand a much greater share, something closer to -- or even temporarily above -- 100%.
It would be really interesting to compare salary/profit ratio of the tech industry to recognized labor shortages in other industries.
I think much of what people are trying to say here is that there is no such thing as a labor shortage in any industry (assuming no artificial wage controls). Also, in the USA you often hear about insufficient supply of workers in certain work categories: software engineer, nurse, teacher. Are those the very highest paid work categories? If not, why aren't the highest paid categories said to be suffering from insufficient supply?
You are of course right that the ratio of profit per employee and salary is irrelevant.
Do you have anything to back this up? The OP article is a lot of complaining but almost no data except what seems like to be one lousy anecdote. I actually had been a hiring manager desperately needing people to fill open positions I had. I'm not saying I got zero resumes. The problem was that most resumes were sort of "I learned JavaScript and HTML 3 month ago" or "I'm a founder of my own company with 3 funky iOS apps". Nothing wrong with that but the folks I needed for my jobs had to have some experience with distributed computing, solid CS background with high performance algorithms design skills (yes, we actually used those complicated graph algorithms you only find in CS textbooks). These stuff you can't learn by going in to code school for a month. These skills requires years to master and possibly CS education. I would probably come across may be 1 candidate with anywhere close to this kind of background per month total. It would take me 3-6 months to fill one position - if I'm lucky. Often such candidates will have multiple offers and the probability that they would actually come onboard is less than 50%. Think about that for a bit and you should feel the frustration you might have if you actually were hiring manager for such positions.
Sounds like you are looking at junior resumes for some reason, when what you need are experienced folks. You know, older people. If they need a refresher on an algorithm or two, well then you hand them a book or teach them. Like in the old days.
Industry today wants a solution on a silver platter but the universe doesn’t work that way.
150% - devs are slowly waking up to this fact. Behind the efforts to teach everybody to code are more sinister motives: lowering the salaries for engineers.
However,the reality is that most people simply can't do it. Take an average office and try to teach everyone how to code. after a month, 99% will know how to output text to console, 10% would probably be able to write a loop or two and maybe 1 or 2 guys will realise that development is their real calling. Those 2 guys will spend the next 5-7 years just to get to the point where people would start taking them serious and some senior engineer may even listen to what they have to say about system design. Writing a simple web based calculator is easy, however doing a proper enterprise level solution isn't something any bootcamp student gets anywhere near without 10 years of experience..
Also, don't forget that development is pretty difficult job on its own,so as soon as it becomes a commodity,people will stop training and applying for these jobs,as there are plenty other jobs that are easier to do and pay the same.
Depends on the dev; most higher level coding roles require proficiency in many domains and a certain level of polish. Frequently to cover the tail of the person hiring them.
I've been paid quite a bit for coding... but the premium was due to the projects requiring: a) statistical expertise, b) finance & pricing knowledge, c) transaction system design, d) discretion to deal with HR / restructuring information, e) quality assurance required for contentious BOD projects, and f) willingness to accept a fair amount of uncertainty, screwed up schedules, and outright abuse from senior level leaders without snapping back or ripping their heads off.
This is just market at work. If it becomes cheaper to invest into teaching and grooming more engineers than it is to pay exorbitant salaries to the existing limited supply, then companies will do so.
I'll say the same thing about security people. There's an executive who's been whining on LinkedIn about the major skills shortage in this area. Here's an ad his company put up. I've had it confirmed every individual line is non-negotiable.
On the contrary. He could go to Defcon and find it just validates his views. After all, it's a huge security gathering and noone meets his requirements.
>There is NOT a shortage of software developers. That myth was developed by big tech, and pushed all the way up the ladder, to the top of government. The goal? Reduce labor costs.
What is the line of reasoning than goes from 'there is a shortage of developers' to 'therefore, we need to pay less.'?
> You haven't explained how a shortage can lead to paying less on the part of companies.
There is no shortage. They promote the story of the shortage to pressure government to let in more indentured foreigners, with the slower goal of encouraging more locals to pursue those careers.
You'll notice that "paying more" (the classical/rational economic solution) doesn't seem to be an option.
Made my first ever HN throwaway account to respond to this.
I have been running a successful business, but it's not "tech". I want to get back into the software industry. I didn't have a software business idea, so I explored some tech company jobs.
I am well-qualified at the VP/Director level for startups and even larger companies.
I did go so far as to do an on-site interview for one company. I have verifiable proof that I can generate huge returns in their exact industry.
They didn't want to give away any equity, even though hiring someone at this high of a level would generate huge returns for their business.
They had a completely undefined budget not only for this role, but for the 4-6 people who would be underneath this role starting out.
They weren't even sure they wanted to hire someone full-time, but they knew this position was a clear gap in skillsets of their current executive team.
And the kicker to all of this was that they were already doing 8 figures a year in revenue. This wasn't a broke startup.
I rapidly came to the same conclusion as the post's author. There are so many companies that want to hire a "VP of X", but they really don't understand what that means or how to pay someone who doesn't just want a 6-figure a year salary for the rest of their lives.
You have to admit there are loads of unscrupulous people out there who will take the compensation you're referring to, deliver nothing and leave. I've seen it myself at one start up I was at. The founders recieved a generous investment (on the order of $40m) to grow the business. They hired sr vp of sales and a sr vp of marketing who did exactly zero to move the business forward after 12 months. Both left having accomplished nothing, but were very well compensated (going from rumors and a few off the cuff comments from one of the founders son, I never saw concrete numbers). Granted their lack of production was probably just as well attributed to the owning cabals lack of agreeing on any damn thing rather than malice, but my point stands.
So ok, you have proven track record, how are you proving that again? I mean just coming in off he street and promising rainbows and money to fall out of the sky is easy.
I was working at a company that went public. They hired a CTO that produced negative value. He decided we need to rewrite the software in .Net and left...
There is a difference between promising a unicorn and having a proven track record. That you are too lazy to verify the background your potential hire is providing you is 100% your problem. Bite me.
This seems to be a common theme on HN where folk who purport to be senior level profess their ignorance as to how one goes about performing one of the very basic tasks their role would require of them.
If you don't know how to do background verification on people then you have far bigger problems than your fears of being gamed.
a) hire the best developer you know and pay them whatever they ask, or
b) hire the best developer who falls within your budget (which, I presume, cannot be very high when you are starting)
If you answered b), then I guess you already know the problem. No matter how qualified you personally think you are (and you are, I am not doubting that) - the only thing that matters is whether you fit into the plans of your employer, which includes whatever nebulous salary range they have in mind.
I suppose you will say that you are already running a successful business. But IMO that doesn't actually amount to much when you are creating a software business. Why? Because you are now competing with the FAANGs of the market. And there is already a lot of talk that FAANGs are actively hiring to take the best labor off the talent pool even if they don't need the services of those hires. So suddenly you have just lost almost all opportunity you had to create arbitrage - that wonderful and probably mythical situation where you buy labor low and sell the output high and take home a handsome profit.
So you recalibrate your expectations and go one rung lower. And you do grow your company quite successfully, because, lets be honest, if you can "do things which do not scale" at first to grow companies, it pretty much follows that you can make plenty of money despite hiring ordinary talent in the beginning stages if you have a good business background - which you do. And at some point, because you grew so fast, you will face a similar shortage for some kind of skillset, only to find that you suddenly cannot really afford to pay what the very well qualified person wants because that isn't even a part of your culture anymore.
And ironically, said person then goes and writes a post about how your company completely lowballed them :-)
If no equity was available, but profit sharing was? i.e if you brought in X million you get a % of that. Would you have taken the position?
I'm starting a company, but want to retain 100% ownership. I don't want to give equity as I don't want to lose control. Been there, done that. I'd much rather go down the road of profit sharing based on the results.
Revenue, maybe. Profit? I don't have any control over how you define profit, and you have an enormous amount of control over how you manage your revenue. Additionally, even a unicorn is going to stay in the red for years. Unless you have some financing structure that is radically different from typical startups and don't plan to reinvest in the business, profit sharing makes no sense.
Personally, no, for a variety of reasons. A founder who is a control freak is a massive red flag on it's own. Profit sharing is also easy to game either for or against someone as the movie industry proves constantly. So I don't personally feel like playing under-handed games constantly (and if I don't, other will so we're back to square one) to maximize how much revenue is attributed to me. If I wanted to play politics I'd have joined a larger company and gotten paid a lot more than any startup.
edit: Also, incentives people to think short term and pump us revenue at all costs (then find another job when it comes crashing down) which is not a great environment to work in.
Equity and control are two different things. Board seats, voting rights, stock classes etc are all tools at your disposal to create the corporate structure. Furthermore, with control you can allocate yourself options as part of your compensation, which undo some of the dilution.
You certainly don't want to retain 100% ownership. You need partners who treat this business as their own and share your burden. I think cofounders are vastly overrated, while hiring key personnel and granting them significant options is not emphasised enough.
I might have been interested, depending on the startup.
One way to solve for both preferences, in tech, is to create an option pool. I broached this with an executive. He said they were looking into it, but it wouldn't be available until next year at the earliest. My interest in working full-time for them declined to 0 at that point.
Sounds like one of jobs I had. They treated options/warrant as something really really special, like awards/gift.
I couldn’t make them realize it was part of my compensation expectations and for that I wanted to know company valuation and dilution, even if a ballpark.
The problem with this is defining what profits are when you're reinvesting them or take VC and burning. At the end of the day you can't control how the CEO intends to spend the profits.
There’s a huge difference between losing control and giving equity. Namely, 50% (and that’s assuming equal voting eight per share). Why do you not want to give equity at all then?
Personally I'd see that as much more attractive for any not already pretty much 'made it' startup. It's a nearer term reward, and a more direct incentive (not just because it's nearer, but because `profit => reward` vs. `profit => ceteris paribus 'worth more' => might IPO/sell => reward`).
How many new companies are profitable, and if they are, why would you want to work for a new company that isn't plowing all of its profits back into research, product development, and growth?
Because I get a share of their profits? If they plow all of its profits back into R&D, assuming I got no equity, what do i get as a reward? A potential chance to say i worked for a company that IPO’d? More coworkers?
Profit sharing means money in the pocket for me. Actual hard, green cash.
That's exactly my point. Ideally, you should take a competitive salary. If you have to take some kind of alternative compensation because you believe in the mission or whatever, most startups aren't profitable even at IPO/aquihire stage, and in the case of Amazon, could have been profitable years earlier but reinvested everything and then some. I just can't see a scenario where it makes sense to take profit sharing at a new, growing, unproven company.
I'm starting to suspect that the best way to interject utter panic into a mid-level corporate interview is to mention an independent business venture.
While this may earn respect at the very top of the company from another founder or former founder, there more typically a lovely process of watching an insecure middle manager do the math about what you did and freak out....
I want to hear more of these experiences, and to learn how to manage my career this way. I care about my client's satisfaction and get tired of corporate mentality. I hope someday you can share your experiences without fear of anonymity.
As a former "VP of X" at a startup, titles don't mean shit at startups. If a startup can hire a janitor for less if they call him a "VP of Janitorial Services", they will offer that title to a janitor. I'm exaggerating, of course, but not by very much.
The corrolary of this is: not everyone knows this, so _after_ you're done negotiating salary, equity and benefits, it might be a good idea to inquire about a grandiose title to go with all of that. "Head of Javascript" if you're junior, or "VP of Backend" if you're senior, stuff like that. :-)
Becoming principal engineers is usually just playing the cards right in general. Very rarely does anyone get this far on technical merit alone. I know several people at Google who easily deserve the title based on quality and volume of their contributions, and several "principal" engineers who do not. Life isn't fair, what can I say. In addition to being good, you have to be at the right time at the right place, please the right set of people, and "play your cards" in other ways. In fact, if you do the "soft" things right, "being good" at technical stuff matters very little, beyond a certain basic threshold.
Very true, I see that the higher one goes with the increasing requirement of greater influence radius turns into politics.
However what I have noticed recently is that title inflation has arrived to big companies too; mostly to increase retention. So, when I mention played their cards right, I wasn’t referring on how they leverage the soft skills, etc. It was more on individual ability to do salary negotiation each perf review, bluffing/threatening to leave, etc.
At the end of the day I guess it is good for them and everyone who is in those markets. But again, my main point was around title inflation is not exclusive to startups, although director level and above seems still to be hard to get in FAANG (at least in the companies I worked for those require board approval) while in startups they are given more freely.
Threatening to leave is not the best strategy at Google BTW. You never know (by design) if a counter-offer will be extended, and you're very likely to be taken up on your bluff. :-)
But HR isn't the only problem. In my experience having worked for a company that hired heavily for several years, it was the engineers who lacked the talent necessary to conduct proper interviews. Great candidates were being rejected by the truck load. Us engineers, we're great at engineering but many of the junior and mid-level ones don't have much experience interviewing people and usually no training whatsoever. So interviewers tend to ask different questions with every candidate (whatever they feel like it that day), then make some decision based on a random feeling they get. There's not much objectivity. There's not much thought that goes into the questions. Most engineers think intervewing is a game of "how to stump the candidate".
As an inteviewer, you're job is not to stump the candidate. Your job is to figure out how well they can do the job. The questions you come up with should reflect the actual job, and the actual tasks that will be assigned (that's where you should draw your questions/inspiration from), rather than some random data structures question you remember from college or some random questions you found on a google search.
I worked at a non-tech company in the southeast before my current job at a FANG company, and the lead data scientist at this company wrote up the most ridiculous interview questions I've ever seen. WAYY harder than FANG questions, and this company honestly needed business analysts far more than it needed ML researchers. The salary was like $100k for a junior data scientist position. Some of the questions were things like describing forward mode vs reverse mode differentiation, describing Hamiltonian Monte Carlo, and explaining Judea Pearl's concept of causality. Considering there were like 30 data scientists in the whole city, I'm not sure what the point was other than to make potential candidates feel stupid.
I would have told the interviewer to go become a professor and teach his highfalutin causality mumbo jumbo at some university and stop wasting everyone's time.
What would you do if a candidate turned down your home coding assignment, but gave you one of the coding assignments he completed for a different job interview?
(I'm not OP)
My concern would be that the candidate might have memorized the explanation for his code, and would be able to discuss it despite not having written it.
I agree with the DRY intuition though: making coders repeat code challenges/assignments is stupid. Some sort of verification or credentialing after completion of assignment, signed by a 3rd party, would be really cool.
Hmm. We had one candidate who had an exceptional resume and walked us through an open source project that he wrote. It was an adequate substitute. We wouldn't compensate for a project like you mentioned but the real goal of the exercise is to gain an understanding of how you approach a problem and use your tools.
We give it after the initial screen and after we mutually decide that fte is a good path (as opposed to contract to hire). We don't pay until after the code review.
I'm not sure what kind of abuse of the compensation you are thinking of?
I agree that the most valuable thing is not seeing how the solution was implemented (we want to keep the total hours expended to less than 20 for the senior engineer challenge and less than 5 for the junior challenge) but seeing how someone navigates their environment and how they talk through how they arrived at the solution. It's especially interesting to ask about alternatives, areas for extension and tradeoffs.
Maybe you’re on to something. Maybe there should be a “recruiting engineer” role who focuses on doing nothing but hiring, and also keeps track of their candidates performance after they’ve started and adjusts their approach accordingly. There could be an element of career coaching/mentoring as a full time part of the job.
Interviews in their traditional form hardly need to exist at this point. There's no good reason that members of a team can't pair in person or remotely with a candidate on a realistic coding task(even completing an actual ticket) to assess their aptitude and ability to work with others. Instead, engineers are still subject to "where do you see yourself in 5 years" bullshit, yet it the reason companies are struggling to find talent continues to go right over their heads.
One time after I was hired I learned that one of the engineers didn't want to hire me because I didn't wear a tie to the interview. This was a few years ago.
> I ask candidates to tell me about something they created they are proud of, and why.
Never be proud of anything that you created - since it probably is not of "top of the world quality". Even in the rare case that it is - it is very likely that even "top of the world" can still be improved.
I love my current work (in research). But it is nothing that I would ever claim to be proud of. Doing work on top of the world level is not something to be proud of, but a minimum qualification to be even suitable for research.
I've always assumed that the so-called "talent shortage" was an excuse to get cheap labor from abroad. They make job ads such that it's improbable that a local will meet the highly specific requirements, after which they complain of a skills shortage, and then they have their excuse to import cheap labor.
The rest of it is suggesting to the population at large there's such a high demand for these positions they should enter the market and pursue that career. The idea is to flood the market with labor to drive labor costs down by pretending there aren't people qualified to do the work.
I actually recently spoke to somebody who said his job was to exactly this. He said they'd find a remote candidate, with random skills X, Y, Z, and his company would then craft a very specific job opening that could only ever match this particular employee.
After enough people couldn't be found locally they'd have a legal justification for a work visa.
Did you ever imagine if both ends of the spectrum are true? Maybe there is a talent shortage and maybe there are companies trying to get cheap labor from abroad. We are a reasonable sized company trying to recruit people with advanced skills. Finding talent that includes large number of H1B's is hard on its own. Forget finding talent that excludes 95% of the world (aka H1B's). Most of the candidates I get to interview are usually immigrants. Why? I don't know. We have zero motivation to hire immigrants specifically. We pay way higher than an average company and are more interested in talented candidates than saving money. It's just that immigrants are the ones with the skills that we need.
Also, the notion that H1b's are cheap is not always true. With the added costs of filing H1b visa and green card, the true costs are much higher, especially in a cutting edge industry.
This isn't specific to justifying a visa. This same method is sometimes used when the obvious choice non-cheap-labor hire has already been picked by the hiring manager, but they're required (for any of a variety of reasons outside the manager's control) to post the job.
When it's not used for visa indentured servant games, it's arguably a relatively decent way to to do things (don't put applicants through a charade of being considered, and you're already certain who you want to hire), but better would be to not post the job at all in that situation.
e.g. "We need nodejs, mongo, grpc, golang, etc - decades of experience in software is not what we need. We need exactly those things - and we are going to give you an online code challenge to solve an irrelevant puzzle while a 27 year old sits there watching you." And then when you get the job its nothing more than spending hours upon hours updating a web front end, tweaking a database, and watching logs.
> Outright Age & Lifestyle Discrimination
I'm only 36 and I feel old sometimes. I apply for jobs where I have to talk to a panel. It looks like everyone on the panel is less than 30. You can feel the lack of experience exuding from their pores. Everything this panel says sounds like some misconceptions I had sever years ago when I was their age and only had experience working on small projects. Where are the older more experienced workers? I mean are people over 30 not applying for jobs?
> What Are Your Salary Requirements?
Someone tried to hire me for 85K after decades of experience for a very early stage startup. They were offering equity but equity doesn't mean anything if the company folds in 2 years. I need more than that.
> Stop wasting people's time and make experienced candidates a real offer.
When I was a new developer many moons ago, I worked with many old guys and gals who would always let me know how green I was (no matter how much I studied and tried to impress them). Now, if I was to look for a job, I would be working with very young guys and gals who think experience == 2 weeks of reading a book on Facebook's React framework. Hey times have changed.
They apply to different jobs. Larger companies and so on. Some move into management or consulting. Startups in general make little economical sense and the downsides are rather high if you have a family.
I'll never understand why these companies are letting inexperienced employees take any part in interviewing people with significantly more experience.
If I owned a company I would never let some inexperienced fresh grad interview a senior engineer. They are letting some kid take part in one of the most important parts of their business.
It's yet another area of software development hiring where all logic and reason have gone out the window.
I find perceptive junior employees extremely useful in judging candidates. The way people act with someone they perceive as inferior is very telling about their personality and how they'll work with others. People are in my experience a lot more likely to drop their guard and show their true selves when they think no one important is watching. Soft skills matter and someone senior is both capable of providing great value and doing great harm to a team.
That belief can be true, but its not enough to make me want to have a guy 2 years in interviewing candidates. I wouldn't want experienced developers walking away.
In general, I prefer to lose potential candidates than hire someone bad since bad hires tend to become expensive. Moreover, if an experienced engineer walks because they got interviewed by someone junior then I view that as a bullet dodged. Assuming the junior engineer has been coached in the questions to ask and so on. It should be an easy win interview that will teach you a lot about the company since junior engineers tend to be worse at knowing what not to talk about.
I find it hard to believe that anyone with any real experience would advocate having a Jr. interview for experience candidates. Are you sure you are not self-righteous Jr. yourself.
No disrespect, but what you are saying borders on unreasonable. You would trust a Jr. developer to interview a more senior developer? That is laughable. Think about that in the context of a law firm, or a federal agency, or the military, or basically any other context.
I started interviewing candidates (including senior level) about 3 years after starting there. Despite being one of the youngest people on the team, the management knew that I had a good grasp on what the people we are interviewing should know to be successful at the company. I'm never the only person interviewing them, but I do have a strong say about whether someone moves to the next round.
I also did my first interviews around 3 years into my career (almost 2 decades long so far).
It was too early - I didn't have the technical expertise yet to judge someone else, but much more than that, I didn't have the soft skills or indeed any idea how the hell to interview another dev. I shouldn't have been doing it, but at the time I was the only dev at the company. I look back now and cringe at my naivety.
Its all context dependent of course. If you are at a place for three years doesn't mean you can't interview. Three years at an organization is a long time. I've seen people interview after 6 months at an organization. Depends on the organization. Having a person start interviewing people after three years development experience total is probably not a good idea - depending on what you are interviewing for.
> Someone tried to hire me for 85K after decades of experience for a very early stage startup. They were offering equity but equity doesn't mean anything if the company folds in 2 years. I need more than that.
Wow. That's how much someone ought to make after a few years. You ought to have straight up told them why their company is going to be dysfunctional in a few short years.
I broadly agree with the basic point this guy is making, we have an issue where the HR gatekeepers (who don't have the knowledge to make accurate technical assessments) are effectively searching for a perfect match, rather than someone who could do the job well.
Don't put box tickers in charge of a critical function unless you want every thing they touch to be turned into an exercise in box ticking.
> HR gatekeepers (who don't have the knowledge to make accurate technical assessments) are effectively searching for a perfect match, rather than someone who could do the job well.
IMO, that's just a symptom. The real problem is that the hiring managers/engineers find the job of "recruitment" beneath them.
All of us know the recruiter might not really understand the difference between "java", "scripting" and "javascript". But then, why should that role exist? That role exists because the engineers/managers/leads/architects (generally, the tech folks) just don't want to do the grunt work (search and source candidates, co-ordinate and schedule interviews etc). The actual folks in need of teammates/additional people want a piece of the action alright, nobody wants to miss being an interviewer where one gets to go on a power trip asking the poor candidate to balance B+ trees or some such thing, while letting out tch-tch noises like a lizard watching the poor candidate struggle on the whiteboard.
All that needs to be around is a tool/system that can make the job of searching/sourcing/co-ordination easier for the actual hiring managers/leads who are looking to add people to their teams and have got the necessary budgetary stuff covered already.
One of the best interview experiences I had was with a firm where nearly everyone participates in the hiring process. I don’t know any details beyond what I experienced as a candidate, but they interview tons of people, and everyone who makes it all the way through ends up interacting with at least a handful of would-be peers, managers, and a C-level officer.
I imagine that everyone is expected to dedicate a significant chunk of their time to the recruiting process. I don’t see how else they could pull it off. I suspect the arrangement is something like “everyone must dedicate one day every (other?) week to recruitment efforts.”
Moreover, they had a fixed set of well-thought-out questions and exercises. For programmers, you write code in an actual IDE with one of their programmers sitting beside you. You can bounce ideas off them, you can consult the interwebs (as you might in real life), etc. The questions and programming challenges were relevant, and reasonable.
It was an extremely well oiled machine, and it showed.
I've done that, and during peak hiring periods it does get a bit intense, but I think it's essential it's done by a coder, not an HR person. It's also something to give your day a bit of variety. And the big plus is you get to decide who you want to work with.
Do you think Resumes made in LaTeX get screwed by the HR robot screening programs that scan documents for keywords? I mean, if your document has some weird formatting going on, I could see the program miss some crucial keywords buried inside a nested table or something
And if this screwing is happening, would that make you more or less likely to use LaTeX to create your resume? It would make me more likely to use it...
Sure, if you enjoy being unemployed because you only want to work at a mythical company that tailors their HR processes to your obscure formatting preferences, or is so undesirable that they have time to read all resumes that come in.
I don't know if enjoy is the right word, but prefer is certainly correct. Sending someone a resume as a PDF file generated from LaTeX is far from an obscure format.
Why should you get a say in who works with you? As a team lead I'm trying to find the right balance. If we hire only people the current devs like we endup having too many similiar developers with the same mindset and shortcomings.
Trying to have a more diverse, balanced team means you don't get a say.
Actually, doing that means everyone getting a balanced say.
Two way street.
If you make it one way, it is all on you, and when that team says that, you get all the credit. Good or bad, and the team knows it. Will definitely throw you under a bus, given cause.
If you make it a balanced discussion, everyone taking shared ownership, then it is on everyone.
The difference shows up in two places:
One, bad call. The team can come together, own it, and letting the bad call go is not so rough. The follow on discussion is rational and productive.
The other one is getting that different point of view. Having that discussion sets great expectations. Being challenged, getting better, all that is welcome. A team that does this successfully tends to congeal and do extremely well.
Play it how you want to play it, but I definitely prefer to have it all on the table, open, team discussion, frank, high value.
Mix in a reluctance to blame and shame, favor choices outcomes and data and you get a team that can weather the good and bad, everyone helping everyone too.
The lead is responsible for cultivating that culture, empowering people, resolving conflicts, etc. Also owns team business meetings, data, all that.
I've been in both situations and places inbetween.
If the team lead owns it they should take the blame and give credit to the team. If the team kind of owns it then everyone is off the hook or on. It also invites the owner/vp to talk directly with the programmers which undermines the lead.
No one mentions this but the lead in development is one of the rockier jobs. You rarely have power to hire/fire without a manager, all development problems come your way, credit goes to developers. You have very little power compared to other industries.
The feeling of autonomy is quite important for a lot of modern knowledge workers. There's more than one lever, but if you force enough of them, it becomes a crap place to work.
I would like some evidence that balanced teams are good.
Given that in higher dimensional finite spaces all the points are close to the edges of the space you would expect the most unbalanced teams to be the most successful ones because they can explore the parts of the solution space where you have the highest chance of finding a profitable solution.
Unix was not build by well rounded people. Xanadu was.
Why do you think your good people don't want to work with people that complement them?
Why do you think you are so much better than them
at balancing a team? I pity the team that has to work with such an egostistical openly hostile lead, but I imagine it must give you plenty of experience with recruiting and hiring.
You want someone as equally as good as you who complements your skillset. I want someone different than you who renforces areas where you are weak so the product is stronger overall. Getting along is good overall but being able to debate from different perspectives is important.
What you think of the hire shouldn't matter because you are looking to perserve your place on the team and that taints your judgement. You shouldn't hire your own boss for similiar reasons. You should never hire your peer.
On the flip side, I had the pleasure of working with a fantastic HR recruiter at my previous company. He would do a ton of legwork to ensure applicants had the basic level of skills and, frankly, common sense. For one position we were hiring, every single applicant he forwarded to us we interviewed and wanted to hire. There is a common thread here that great tech skills are under appreciated or often missed by HR, but I think great HR skills are also under appreciated by tech sometimes. If you find someone in HR recruiting who really is a “partner”, they are worth every penny.
> every single applicant he forwarded to us we interviewed and wanted to hire
But doesn't that support what the article says? It suggests he applies a filter with very few false positives, which generally can only be done at the expense of a lot of false negatives.
Yeah right! This is not a problem of the HR, this is a problem of the upper management. HR is only doing what they are paid to do, and if there is no oversight how they do it the it's an issue with the leadership. But I don't buy that. I think they are trying to buy "suckers" and only shell out for "experts" when they really need to. Unfortunately I think they are hurting themselves, but hey, it's a free world...
The theory is that the market adjusts to compensate so in theory, competitors will offer reasonable opportunities.
The practice is that a culture had been subscribed to across the board and there's no shortage or urgency because if there was, these positions would loosen or employers would be more aggressive and even offer training instead of leaving needed positions unfilled.
1000% agree. Drives me nuts when they demand experience in xyz. Xyz = some SaaS or library that no one uses but would literally take anyone with a pulse an afternoon to become competent.
> are effectively searching for a perfect match, rather than someone who could do the job well.
Maybe they actually aren't doing either. Perhaps they are simply building a log of candidates for a position that does not exist currently but may exist or another future hypothetical position related or unrelated. In other words doing the legwork way in advance and figuring if they dangle a large enough offer (at that time) someone will leave what they are doing and join the company.
There are usually 2 reasons why a company/individual hires someone else (1) expertise & (2) time.
(1) An HR employee is hired to cover certain areas (recruiting in this case) of expertise that the individual manager may not have or may be biased towards.
(2) Manager(s) may look to outsource a segment of their work.
In most cases, it is a combination of the two that leads to HR being the gatekeeper. I would argue that if there was no HR, society would simply blame the next person in charge of the hiring segment.
HR is the cause of this issue, either the ossified silo, or the general company policy to HR, which results in too big of asks for too low of wage from folks that have to use that policy.
You can keep saying this but it's just not true. In the number of companies in which I've been involved, engineering managers are solely responsible for writing the reqs.
HR is just an easy scapegoat. I'm sure that often HR is primarily responsible, but often HR just works with what they're given.
Tell me about the approval process, training, and underlying incentives the engineering managers have to go through to get their requisition approved and posted. A priori, I'm confident it is a bad HR process.
It does not surprise me that this is out of Atlanta. One of the former Atlanta Business Chronicle writers that covered tech rightfully calls it the Bangalore of the South. https://twitter.com/Urvaksh/status/1092948535627137024https://twitter.com/Urvaksh/status/893087188451196928 Tech in ATL is a second class citizen and the salaries reflect that, plus there is a glut of marketing and business people. The other issue with Atlanta is that from an IT/corporate headquarters perspective (which is a significant driver for the job market) Suntrust just merged with BB&T and is moving the headquarters out of Atlanta along with Turner combining with AT&T. Layoffs will ensue at some point. Most tech companies located in high cost areas such as New York, San Fran etc. that open up a location in ATL do it to reduce costs.
That said, in general, all of these efforts to "learn to code" etc. are all just trying to increase the supply and lower wages. The challenge is that there often is a difference between the developers what will accept the lower offers and the ones who will hold out for more. Many still believe the a larger number of cheaper people is better than a few top devs... Despite the fact that this was proven be a bad strategy over 30 years ago in "The Mythical Man Month".
I would have loved to stay near Atlanta since it's near my family, but you're right. It was difficult to find tech jobs there, despite Georgia Tech having a world class CS program. So I moved to the Bay Area.
There is a good pool of talent in ATL and the cost of living is low compared to SF. Kabbage, Cardlytics, and a couple others operate a model of high turnover and low pay. It costs more than the mythical man month method overall, but the output of the product group is more predicable and there is less risk of a small group of 10x engineers leaving and gutting the product team.
One of the things that always surprised me at a previous company was seeing the H1B hiring notices posted for easily-trainable positions.
I have nothing against people coming to work in the United States, but I thought those visas were specifically for roles where the skills weren’t available.
In this case, by making the skills super specific, like that Home Depot sales portal in this article, they made them rare.
That's the whole point of the nit-picky requirements: they often don't want to fill the positions with locals. They really want a more malleable, and often cheaper, workforce using H-1B's etc. but can't go that route until they can document that there is no locally available talent.
The other possibility is that they are going to hire internally, but for some legal reasons they have to make a public job post. Requiring some super specific thing like "Home Depot sales portal" sounds like a tipoff that this is going to be an internal hire. The place I currently work is like that. The decision makers already know who they want to give the job to before it's even posted, but they still make three other poor bastards come in and go through the interview process even though they have no chance. The interviewees will no doubt end up second guessing every answer, handshake, etc. when really it was just never going to happen. To be extra obnoxious the job listing is left up for months after it's filled.
I knew someone who used to work for a company where they had a policy to only hire developers on work visas. The management treated them as indentured servants rather than employees, using the threat of losing their visas and making them pay ‘legal fees’ as tools for coercion.
The guy I knew only got out because my then employer promised to endorse his visa and deal with any legal stuff.
H1B doesn't require any recruitment nor does it require any specific skill. So the OP has no idea what he is talking about. H1 only requires bachelor degree and a job in the same field. The PERM process in green card requires the recruitment process, but that has been around since forever and it is for someone internal whose greencard is being filed
When filing an H-1B, the employer only has to promise that the hiring won't have an adverse effect on employees already employed at the firm, NOT that they made a good faith effort to hire anyone locally, much less train someone into it.
What I find interesting is that if you point all of this out to HR/management, sometimes they don't believe you!
I just left a company for which I was the random unicorn (perfect intersection of 3 different skillsets and relevant past experience) after one year. I was referred because someone at the company knew I had the exact skillset they needed, and ended up joining right as they were planning to expand to several other states.
Two months in, I brought up the rarity of finding someone with such an intersection of skills. Looking for an exact match would not be realistic. Especially when trying to expand to states with a much more competitive job market that requires a higher salary than what they offered me. Of course, my concerns were shot down with such confidence that I thought, "maybe they already have the perfect set of candidates lined up."
One year later, expansion plans have completely 180ed because they simply cannot find the personnel that they need. They cannot even entice those who are capable of learning and performing in the role because they aren't willing to pay market rates. And now I left because they weren't willing to give me a reasonable raise or additional benefits like more equity.
This experience has made me wonder if cognitive dissonance plays a larger role in blinding HR/companies.
Earlier in my career I saw exactly this situation come up with a manager of mine, had the perfect overlap of a few skills that don't frequently come up together but this was completely taken for granted. As a result there was an amazingly bad plan for expansion/handover/etc as it was taken for granted that it would be easy to hire a replacement.
> This experience has made me wonder if cognitive dissonance plays a larger role in blinding HR/companies.
I think cognitive dissonance was also at play in the case I'm referring to. There's probably a lot of biases at play when people are trying to estimate what skills someone has. Also its easier to delude yourself into thinking the Bayesian priors are different when you have someone who has the rare combination of skills on staff, I remember hearing a few versions of: "how rare could it be when we already have this manager on staff?".
The role it plays is in how people may respond to evidence that runs counter to their perception of reality. The blinding happens when HR/management decides that rejecting feedback and evidence is the best route to resolving the contradiction of reality vs belief. If they ignore it, then no such conflict exists.
Obviously this isn't the ideal way to handle cognitive dissonance. However, it is a way of handling and one that you often see. Another bad way of handling it is when you see people "explaining things away" without ever really addressing anything of substance.
In my case, I saw it manifest in the sheer confidence they displayed all year despite our rollout plans failing. It did not matter how many market signals they received either. There was always another excuse as to why things will eventually go smoothly.
"Why Are You Reposting Jobs With Over 1000 applications?"
Because over 95% of them are completely random and do not meet even one single criteria of the job. Or, are fake resumes from H1B consulting shops.
Post a senior software developer job in New York? Get ready for over half of the applications to be from a Burger King employee in South Carolina, a security guard in Florida, a mechanic in Idaho, etc. They spam their resume to every open job in America. The next 25% will be from grad students desperate to get an H1B sponsorship before their OPT runs out. They will, yes, spam their resume to every open job in America. The final 24% will be fake C2C resumes from H1B consulting shops. "Yes, he is my consultant, how can you pay on the corp to corp for this job?" They, yes, spam their resume to every open job in America.
Out of those 1000, I bet you over 95% do no match one single qualification posted
I changed careers and was inundated with recruiters contacting me..... a total n00b. Nice huh?
Not really, every one of them just seemed to be sweeping up resumes and names and faces and not paying attention.
I'd talk to them on the phone "no I don't have 5 years experience, just like it shows on my resume"...
One after another, total waste of time.
Then I'd get a bite, or even interview and ... some would just go radio silence. Man how hard is it even to send a cookie cutter "we went in another direction" email?
I wish I could have only talked to people who actually looked at my resume first and wanted to talk to that guy. Maybe it wouldn't be many but it would save a lot of time, looking for a job is hard enough as it is.
Meanwhile every job does require 5 years experience but I'm pretty sure they don't. I'd hear the actual job and no man a n00b could do that just fine.
Meanwhile my last job now requires a CS degree where really a high school grad who is mildly capable with a CCNA could do just fine, but they're still looking to fill my position a year later... They could have brought on two people for like 6 months to just try them out and but they'd rather not.
I'm fairly sure there's just a lot of busy work being made by HR and head hunters who have no clue anyway.
After moving to California in 2011, I decided I missed the office banter and started looking for a job. I found a listing on a large, tech-based recruiting firm (cybercoders) and the job was perfect for my skills. I applied but heard nothing back.
After a week I reached out to the recruiter, and she replied with a curt, "You're not qualified for this role so we're looking elsewhere." I was a bit surprised as the reqs they described in the job listing were exactly what I had been doing for the last 3 years. But it got me thinking whether the company (HR, Hiring Manager, etc) had made the decision or if the recruiter had?
In addition, there was no additional offer from the recruiter to work with me? It was literally that one line. It got me thinking that maybe my experience(s) wasn't valued by the recruiter as someone worth pursuing, as I may be more "work" to land a job than she would want to invest?
Anyway, with my pride slightly dinged, I immediately wrote off the recruiter (and cybercoders as a whole) as someone I wouldn't want to work with in the future. I got a job at a larger company and a few years later, enjoyed responding to the SAME recruiter asking if I was interested in some jobs she had to offer (nothing bridge-burning worthy, but it felt great saying "NO THANKS")
I've found the recruiting community to be very self-serving and manipulative. Recent example - someone who I had spoken with (shared the stage) at a conference indicated one of her clients needed someone with the my background. Naturally, a resume was on her desk before the end of the afternoon...
A few weeks later, I get a call from a retained recruiter I had worked with previously, after having had my resume sent to her by the company. She basically proceeds to "force me" out of the running for the position by talking it down. She clearly had some firm favorite sitting in the wings...
[in reality, I was out as soon as they asked me to relo my family for a lower total comp package than I was currently receiving. Yeah right.... not that hungry yet...]
Best one a recruiter pulled on me was putting me (a freelancer) in an interview for a full-time position, without me knowing.
They initially contacted me and indicated that they just raised a funding round and now have to staff the position ASAP, potentially with a freelancer for some time. So I thought: "Great, I'll freelance for them for a few months and they can kick me out once the found someone to employ!" This is unironically one of my favourite scenarios, so I went for it, and let the recruiter set up a meeting.
I was a bit surprised that HR was also invited for the meeting, as I usually haven't seen that done when bringing freelancers on in other companies, but tried to not interpret to much into it. So the meeting rolls around, and voilà, it is a full blown job interview! I went with it, acing the interview, but when they asked "Why are you looking to switch away from freelance?", I had to tell them that I don't, and it turned out that the recruiter told them something completely different.
WTF WOULD A RECRUITER THINK THAT THIS WOULD EVER WORK??? Do they think that 1 in 10 freelancers just resigns to his new fate during the interview and accept to work as an employee now? Truly one of my strangest recruiter experiences.
Pricing leverage is a factor, but the major thing for me is that I usually don't like working with a client for more than 3-4 months. If you go beyond that time frame (in my experience) you usually see dependencies between the freelancer and the company cropping up, which I want to avoid as much as possible, as that often leads to the expectations of either party to be hurt sooner or later. This also puts me in a position where I can transition to a more interesting/lucrative client very quickly, with the old client still being happy.
I had so many similar experiences. People writing me off right after the recession and then work picked back up around 2013. Got tons of offers and job opportunities only to have the same previous recruiters pinging me. "yeah, no thanks, got a job already".
Completely agree. I'm still getting emails from them for positions that have the word "designer" in them. Turns out that there's a lot of positions not in the tech world that have the word "designer" in the job title.
I had an interview with a company working in the ML space. There is a semi-difficult problem that their particular industry needs a solution for so I spent a couple hours in the hotel the night before writing up a solution for it.
I was doing an interview with their head of ML and brought this subject up in general without mentioning that I had already solved it. His immediate response was: "that's impossible." And it was totally concrete, not some sort of challenge. He had no interest in discussing the topic at all.
Those kinds of people are out there. Best to detect them early and move on.
At some point I was working for a shop that did smartcard-based payment systems. I was patching some smaller bug when I noticed a call that was suspiciously close to an assert() that was accidentally left in. Merely commenting it out made the payment handshake complete 50% faster. Being an eager junior as I was I went to the principal dude who wrote this part (and pretty much the rest of the core) and he dismissed me with exactly that - that's impossible. I decided to push it a bit and went to PM with my demo, he was equally awed and summoned the dude... to which the dude said, and I'm paraphrasing to soften, "this fucking bonehead just commented out the RSA sig verification for the handshake."
That is, sometimes the claimed "impossible" is indeed just that and the speed of response comes from the experience rather than ignorance or arrogance.
It sounds to me that this might be a problem with startups. I've been working in the enterprise space for 5 years, and I've never come across this sort of hiring.
The last job I applied for was open from February 1 - March 1. After that, they pulled it down and began interviewing candidates. Six weeks later, I have an offer letter for a specific role with a well-negotiated compensation package.
Personally if HR treats you the way OP is saying, my guess is you don't want to work for that company anyways. Interviewing experienced people is more the company needing to sell themselves to the candidate, rather than the candidate sell themselves to the company.
You might have not experienced it and if you didn't, congratulations! I'm happy for you (honestly!). But these problems exist all across the board.
My last job hunt (signed a new contract just a few weeks ago) has taken me 3 months and I've seen all of the issues OP (and some of the comments) mentions, not only in startups, but also in fortune 500 companies and everything in between (including quite a few companies in the "best place to work" ranking). I've probably sent about 60-70 cv's and most of them have gotten me at least a phone interview (about 50? I lost count but in the document I was using to keep track of open processes I have 30 companies).
One of my ex-managers (and one of the best I've ever had, at that) is also job hunting (after taking a year off after being made redundant in a merge). He's in his 50's and the stuff he tells is even worse than my own experiences.
> I've probably sent about 60-70 cv's and most of them have gotten me at least a phone interview (about 50? I lost count but in the document I was using to keep track of open processes I have 30 companies).
Genuine question: why are you applying to so many companies? Are you just coming out of school or unemployment?
That seems like a ton of work to juggle and you can't possibly be interested in them all. In this hot market it seems like you should be able to be a lot pickier, especially if you've already got a job.
In my most recent round of "should I get a new job" I only applied with 3 good companies that I knew I was interested in and even that felt like a lot to juggle on top of a day job.
Of the companies you apply to, 10% will get back to you.
Of those 10%, 10% will result in an offer.
My last job search (conducted 2017) bore this out: I applied to about 90 or so companies, got 8 interviews, and one offer. I have about 20 years of experience in tech.
No, I'm not fresh out of school and I wasn't unemployed (...well, see below). I have about 20 years of experience and have worked in 5 countries. However, my situation was... well, not unique (unfortunately), but challenging:
- Yes, I was employed. In a startup paying me about 60% of the current market salary, no benefits of any kind (they promised shares and many other stuff, never delivered), with incompetent managers and going downhill towards bankrupcy (I don't understand why the only investor they have keeps giving them money). Obviously I wanted to leave.
- I joined said startup because of my personal situation. I was diagnosed with leukaemia in 2015 and spent almost a year in the hospital. When I finished that part of the treatment, even thinking was difficult (chemo brain is a real *&%#) and I still had 2 years in front of me of daily chemo ("only" tablets) and weekly visits to the hospital. Even after I finished the chemo, it took me almost a year to go back to normal. The founders of this startup were friends of a friend, gave me a lot of flexibility and the minimum salary that I needed to live (pay rent, utilities, food...). I started going to the office to help with database queries and ETL processes, ended up managing the data science and data engineering teams and looking after most of the infrastructure of the company. But neither my salary or benefits changed.
- I made many mistakes in my first interviews. I hadn't done an interview in 9 years and even then I used to interview for engineering roles while now I was going for senior manager/VP level roles (basically, what I've been doing for the last 7 years). It took me a while to learn the lingo, to identify the red flags and prepare good answers for all the common questions. Funnily enough, not many people asked me about the obvious 1 year gap in my cv.
- Hot market depends on your location and what roles you look for. Developers with a couple years of experience? Sure, way more companies looking to fill in roles than people wanting to move. Specialists in a niche field? Might have problems finding a new job. 40 year old generalists looking for management positions? Not that many open positions that are posted online and not filled in by personal recommendation (and yes, most of the jobs I've applied to have been through my network).
- Many of the companies I interviewed with had all the issues OP mentions and a couple more. Some gave me topcoder-style interviews, where I had to come up and code efficient algorithms for complex problems. I understand (and welcome!) a technical test to prove that I'm not lying and I do have a technical background, but asking a VP of engineering to code an efficient solution for the knapsack problem in 1 hour is stupid, any way you look at it. Personally, all the code I've written in the last 6 years has been either a) as a hobby, b) small, non-critical-path tasks that helped me maintain some familiarity with the different environments and reduced a bit of load from my team(s) or c) stuff that no one else in the company understood (mostly around infrastructure). Ask me about sofware architecture, data storage, distributed systems and machine learning and I can easily argue with you pros and cons of different stacks and approaches. Ask me how to manage fully remote/distributed teams and I'll talk about lessons learnt, things I tried and worked and mistakes I made. Ask me about hiring, mentoring, budgeting, project managing, investor relations... Whatever you want, and I'll be completely honest about what I know, what I've done and what I don't know/haven't done. But ask me to write a java class and I'll need to google the correct way of declaring a constructor ("public void"? "public static void"? How did you declare the args parameter? an array of Strings?).
- Why I applied to so many? Because I had to. I would have loved to get an offer from the first 2-3 companies I applied (and I applied and got interviews from some really cool companies, including the one I've signed with). But I didn't. So I had to continue searching in a race against time before the place that I was working at imploded. After how my life has been the last decade, I have no safety net and can't afford to be unemployed.
- Interested in all of them? Of course I was. I didn't apply to any company I disliked, for example consulting companies, offshore/nearshore and most of fintech. Either you are much pickier than I am (at the end of the day I mostly look for a few things: Good, professional people, a company that values its employees and a decent compensation package, anything else is a bonus) or seriously underestimate the amount of companies out there that are doing interesting things even in the most boring environments.
- A lot of work? Well, yes and no... I've spent most of my vacation days on half-day offs to go to physical interviews and working evenings to recover time spent in phone/video interviews. But in general it's being easy managing the latter and if you look at it as a time management problem, there's plenty of tools out there to help you keep track of everything (calendar, trello, job alerts...).
Also in the enterprise space, but for almost 2 decades. This stuff absolutely exists, and in Europe as well as the US. Fact is, the recruitment process is broken as hell - seems like it's been this way forever, with no light at the end of the tunnel :/
I had a ludicrous experience with an AR startup in Toronto last year where I was offered $35 an hour - worked a week, and then was told they could only afford to pay $20/hr.
They made me work 60-80 hour weeks and didn’t pay me overtime.
When I criticized them, they fired me after a month.
I’d love to expose them here, but I’ll be the better person than them.
How does not reporting them to the labor board make you a better person? There’s more to this story than you’re telling us or it’s made up. This story doesn’t add up.
Who said he didn't? Him not going through that process doesn't make him a liar either. The fear of being blackballed or being a shy person or the experience of knowing what a waste of time it is are all valid reasons not to.
Second off - I am the type of individual who believes karma will come back to people. I have a very very comfortable position at the moment somewhere else and I personally just don’t want to stir up any trouble.
I’ve been through enough in the past year, from sexual assault to the passing of my mother, to add the trauma of lawyers chasing after me for an HN comment to boot.
I spent the last year looking for a new job and it was extremely demotivating at times.
The company that I ended up accepting an offer for started off with a recruiter who talked to me about my background and then asked a few technical questions to screen whether or not I knew the technologies that they were hiring for. Passed the recruiter screen.
Interviewed with a hiring manager and then interviewed with the team with some technical challenges that were more to see how it would be like to work together. Talking to the team made me feel excited to work with them and the technical challenges were straight forward. I was able to look up and use some code that I had written previously to solve part of the challenge.
I ended up with an offer higher than what I asked for. Part of me feels as though this is almost too good to be true but I don't know if I am just really jaded by the entire hiring process.
I faced so much rejection that landing the position that I am starting soon makes me feel like I am either extremely lucky or maybe I'm just another sucker; however, this company definitely set the standard for me as far as interviewing/hiring process.
I've experienced the same, honestly it's a numbers game and it took me many rejections and turning down toxic roles to find a good team of people I could enjoy being around 40+ hrs a week.
> What you're missing is that while you may need someone like me to get this done, people like me don't necessarily need you to create that kind of value.
> I may not want to assume the risk of startup business right now but if you're going to offer the deal on those terms...
The author is asserting that a company needs him or her more than they need the company, then confesses to being reluctant to take the risk of starting a business themselves. As such they're actually depending on the company to shoulder the risk they're not willing to take; they actually do need the company to create value.
The author should decide which of the two statements quoted above has precedence. Either they depend on some other company to shoulder the risks, or they start one themselves.
As an employee, it is valuable to me that my company will not hire someone who doesn't think our business does something important ("get over yourselves, you're not curing cancer"), or who thinks the right way to ask business decision questions is to ask if "you're morons", or who has a problem with the company asking very basic probing questions, such as confirming you've thought through the challenge of changing from remote work to a commute.
In short, if this post is representative of the way workers are thinking and communicating, then we do have a talent shortage, it's just not the talents you're thinking of.
Well, I believe there is a surplus of companies who think they are doing something important. Can you imagine answering "Why do you want to work here" if you apply to a company like Marlboro? Sometimes requiring people to believe in what your company is doing is not that important because the majority of startups just aren't that interesting.
Accept that people work for money, not because they believe in your company.
A lot of startups and companies are centered around advertisement. And ads & martketing are not exactly the most popular thing in the world.
Disclaimer: my job is basically making sure our customers can send you commercial email spa... sorry, interesting product offers from their line of business. It's also making sure the tracking is properly working and detect if opened the email/clicked on a link.
It's really hard to get motivated about that. One, ecologically minded for example, could even see it as damaging for the environment as it pushes people to buy things they don't really need.
However, it's also where a lot of the the money is, and also some of the interesting technical challenges, for which an engineer could be motivated.
I like how you've identified the moral qualms with your current profession.
How do you continue to justify to yourself working in that domain? Do you struggle with the question each day or perhaps have a philosophical framework to rely on? (maybe just /r/NatureIsMetal is enough?)
At my previous job, I was working on things like Nuclear plants systems or on military systems (not something to "evil" however, it was a part of their ATC system, not something meant to kill people).
And it could be worse, I could work for the finance industry.
Technically, it's quite interesting, it's a large infrastructure, it also permitted me to have my first taste of AWS and Azure and other cool bits of technology.
It was also a big change from my last job where, because of lack of budget, I had to scavenge for old disused servers for the dev infrastructure (yay, Compaq Proliant G1 with dual CPUs Pentium IIIs and 512MB of RAM, I had to use a floppy disk to install Debian on these... in 2012).
It's also not as clear cut as purely sending spam, our system can also be used for password resets, order confirmations or newsletters for example. I am also not completely 100% against marketing (hey, if I create a new product, it is useful to make people know about it), even though I think the world could do with ~90% less marketing. Maybe it's the way I trick myself, that, and simply not thinking too much about it.
It also pays relatively well, not that I'm that attached to having a big pay, living quite frugally, but I'm currently hunting for an apartment, and a big paycheck helps to get the mortgage.
It was also an opportunity for me to work for a big US company and see how it was to work with people all over the world. And it also confronted me with the American Optimism, which is really fascinating, at time annoying because it feels a bit fake, but also at time because it de-inhibits people from not attempting difficult challenges as opposed to a more cautious and critical European mindset. Not sure which mindset I prefer, but still, fascinating.
I'm also not the kind of guy switching jobs every 6 months. I also feel I'm kind of letting other people down if I leave (not completely rational I know). Also, a job is bit like a book, an (almost) never ending book, even if it's not that great, you are still curious about how it will unfold, and it's really hard (at least for me) to leave it in the middle.
At one point, I will probably search for a new job. And finding a job I at least find "neutral" but if possible "benefic" (from my moral point of view) will be high in my priority list.
So many times, I wanted to ask back why their company does what they do. Businesses exist primarily for earning potential. Why do you expect your employees to be different? I could understand determinjng if the candidate may hate your company, that's useful to find out but the vast majority of people are neutral to your business practices or they wouldn't even apply. If they happen to truly love some aspect of your business then that's great but it doesn't make much difference when so much weight is put on functional requirements... so why pretend you care about anything but the functional requirements.
If I'm ineffective at making you money but fit your business culture, you should hire me on principle then!
Agree, most people simply want a paycheck to pay bills and have some disposable income and don't care about the startup's vision 'to change the world'. Startups should hire people because they can get stuff done. If someone happens to believe in the mission then it's more power to them but it shouldn't be a requirement.
I so dislike the ball-gargling exercise of "why do you want to work here?"
It's often a "well, I need a job, you're hiring, and what you guys are doing looks at least marginally interesting to me" - I ought not need to find whatever product/service/market they're doing/in inspiring - I should just want to do it for the pay offered.
Given two candidates for a Phd, which do you accept:
- the one who needs a Phd because that earns more money (duh!)
- the one who has been obsessed with X for years, did research into X, has burning questions and wants to dedicate some years to answering them, and found your place to have the researchers who publish the most relevant, interesting and insightful papers over the last few years.
I ought not need to find whatever product/service/market they're doing/in inspiring - I should just want to do it for the pay offered.
You don't need to find it interesting. But if another candidate will do it for the pay offered, /and also/ likes the product and has a clear plan for their life, expect them to get the job instead of you.
And, expect you'd do better if you /did/ find a job offering where you were also interested and motivated.
All of that is true, but all of that is easily deduced from other parts of the interview. Why ask a question when you know 2/3rds or more of your candidates are going to lie? So much of the modern interview process is essentially filtering for highly skilled liars.
I've noticed that I was interpreting the question incorrectly. In the past I thought it was "why did you chose this company over all others?". But if you think of it as "what aspects of our company do you find interesting?" it becomes a quite regular question which I can easily answer honestly.
This is one of the trick questions they can ask to eliminate idiots. It's basically a creative writing exercise. I have a pretty Sartrean view on work. I play at being my occupation. The career/job doesn't define my existence. Deep down I could care less what I do, but I like to put on a good show.
"Well, your construction firm is well-established and routinely delivers projects on time and under budget, but for this job, we need to know that you believe in our mission -- that deeply impacts your ability to frame walls and pour concrete!"
>In short, if this post is representative of the way workers are thinking and communicating, then we do have a talent shortage, it's just not the talents you're thinking of.
Cute and snarky, but lets not misdirect. The article isn't a representation of how people communicate to REASONABLE employers, so your comment doesn't make much sense. Its in response to the pervasive disconnect that is prevalent in the current hiring industry.
And if after that clarification you still think the article takes an unjustified tone, I'd say you are just as much a part of the problem.
> it is valuable to me that my company will not hire someone who doesn't think our business does something important
Is it not possible to identify those people without paying them less to prove it?
I'm not really sure what you're getting at here otherwise I would think if someone is a perfect fit with the org and the org isn't willing to compensate that person accordingly then all you're doing is picking up suckers who may not even be worth the reduced pay rate. A good engineer knows what they are worth.
Hint, your business isn’t important. The business I’m working for makes lives a lot easier, but if it disappeared tomorrow it wouldn’t hurt anyone overly much.
Very few businesses actually matter, despite your opinion of the business. If your argument is you only want to work with other suckers (who “care” about the business over comp and tangible compensation), I suppose that’s an opinion that could be held. Is that a rational opinion to hold?
I don’t come to work because I care about your business, I care because you pay me. I’d like to work with others who have the same rational outlook, not with a cult.
Successful businesses support the livelihoods of all of the families that depend on that business's continued success, including employees and clients. All such businesses matter very much to those people, regardless of their industry.
An incredible achievement matched only by literally every other employer, and requiring the level of emotional investment immediately supplied by any employee with recurring rent/mortgage payments.
In other words, "get over yourselves, you're not curing cancer". If you need employees to "care", because the company supports their livelihood - don't worry, they already do. If you need them to "care" more than that, you need a better justification.
Successful businesses support the livelihoods of all of the families that depend on that business's continued success,
Just want to point out that this point is entirely back-peddling your original point (an objection to "get over yourselves").
If the point of a given company is that it supports a person and maybe dependents, then you really don't need to ask someone why they want to work at the company or whether they believe in the company, because the answer is obviously "because you will pay me." I mean, corollary to the value of most companies being that they support people via the salaries and wages they pay, is the companies shouldn't be injecting the implication that their employees should sacrifice and work for less given the importance of the work the company does (and that ethos is widespread).
One of the smarter folks I know makes this point repeatedly and firmly. Delivering reliable value to customers and a good environment and career path to employees is a worthwhile and valuable achievement. Even if in the process you aren’t “curing cancer”.
I’m interested in trying to solve this problem by helping people express how they have relatable skills, rather than direct experience. In particular, I believe that the opportunity is to highlight during person to person conversations during an interview a person’s relevant, but perhaps not directly related, skills. Interviewers often just ask, “have you written in X” as an example, and candidates don’t know how to properly answer that question as “Not directly, but I’ve written in Y which is similar. Happy to discuss my experience there with you.”
If anyone is interested in trying out this process at their company, my email is in my profile.
I did this with an interview recently and I think it was the only reason why I got an offer.
I think the challenge is that you need to have related experience in order for this to work; if you don't, you will be scrambling for an answer. I didn't even realize I was doing this when I started directing the hiring manager to my related experience until after the interview.
It worked out that I didn't have direct experience with what they were looking for but have a lot of related experience in the same language but different domain as well as with other languages, all of which was visible on my github profile.
I recently had a mentoring session with a person going for a lead position, but they haven’t been an “on paper lead” before. I had to talk them through it but I think they understood at the end how to position themselves.
I do not find most people know how to adequately fill in the dots for people on the other side of the table because businesses aren’t always terribly forethcoming about what they are looking for. If you’re not an excellent communicator (which many people in IC roles are not) it can be easy to not pull sufficiently the information needed to position oneself sufficiently.
Honestly, I think it comes down to personal values.
I like doing unit testing even though my current employer doesn't; in that regard, when I was asked about testing experience, because I spent time writing packages in python, php, node, and ruby with full unit tests, it was really an easy question to answer.
The hiring manager asked about my testing experience at my current job. Explained that I have 0 testing experience at my current job, but have created packages in various languages on my own time, all with test coverage and static code analysis because I feel as though these are important for maintaining quality software.
I think a better term may be "culture fit" as the company I will be working at is more engineering focused than my current gig. It was simple to refer to related work because I believe automated testing is important which is very much in line with the needs of the role.
Let's assume pay is the only parameter in a job offer.
Also assume Big tech (FANG) set the ceiling for software engineer salary.
These companies hire every engineer that meet their criteria.
Most engineer given an offer from one of them would accept it since that is the highest possible offer they can get.
If there is no talent shortage, these companies should have no open recs or fill them as soon as they're opened because they are the best possible jobs for any engineer.
Since they have open recs (sometimes open for months), there is a talent shortage at the skill level they require.
Think about an ugly, unemployed dude with a bad attitude and bad personality saying that there is a shortage of girls in the dating pool who meet his attractiveness standards.
He is technically correct, the number of attractive ladies who want to date him is much lower than the number of dates he is available to go on.
But no one is going to be sympathetic to that shortage, why should anyone be sympathetic to this one.
> Let's assume pay is the only parameter in a job offer.
It's not.
> These companies [FAANG] hire every engineer that meet their criteria.
They don't hire anywhere close to that. Their hiring practices are notoriously capricious.
> Most engineer given an offer from one of them would accept it since that is the highest possible offer they can get.
I had an offer like this and turned it down because they wouldn't let me work on my open source project.
> If there is no talent shortage, these companies should have no open recs or fill them as soon as they're opened because they are the best possible jobs for any engineer.
These companies have more money than they know what to do with, and more is coming in all the time. The more they hire, the more things they make, and the more they want to hire.
I am at the other side of the spectre, I have less than 2 years of experience, but I have the same feeling that there's no shortage, just unnecessary friction.
I am moving to LA from Brazil next month. I am a self-taught frontend developer. I am 39 years old, but still a junior as I changed careers less than two years ago.
I participated in two process with the standard remote technical interview solving a problem live coding in communication with a senior developer.
I realized I won't pass this kind of interview unless I focus on studying solely for it. I am planning to buy "Cracking the code interview" because I cannot afford to not have a job in LA, but it feels such a waste of time. I am almost 40 and tired of pretending that some trivia and practice on a simulated environment is transferable to real jobs.
I am the kind of developer that agrees with the idea that software developers' job is to solve business problems, not coding. That knowing what to code is more important than coding fast. That communication with people in and out of the team, developers and not developers is an essential skill.
But that's not what the hiring game values.
I have no ambitions of being a "real software engineer" that will work on cutting edge technology. I am happy building complex websites that will make a company money.
I hope that once in LA I will meet some entrepreneurial types with promising business models that value what I can do well. But the reality is that I will have to learn to play the hiring game.
I never understood why the hiring process in IT is so tedious compared to let's say...construction work or driving?
Can you imagine that if on hiring a new truck driver the company was passing him trough 50 different routes on snow, ice and wet road. Or forcing a construction worker to build a house or something.
Yet if one of these two professions fucks it up - people might die, if a coder fucks up - he'll be fired and someone will remove 10 lines of code boo hooo.
It's incomparably harder to judge the output of a coder vs a truck driver (where you pretty much have 100% visibility into work performance). Hence, companies are wary of hiring slackers or people of low talent, because they know that if they hire one, his low performance may never be detected afterwards. This leads to interviews checking for raw ability (whiteboard tests) and "passion" (show me your github etc.), as both are resonable insurance against hiring a dumbo or a slacker.
Colleagues can usually tell, tech lead less so, and manager is often clueless. Basically the only way to judge someone’s output is to work alongside him for a couple months, and only a few colleagues in the team do that. Maybe methodically reviewing someone’s commits every 6 months or so would also work, but that ignores one’s input into decision making, help and mentoring of colleagues etc.
Years ago, I worked at an unnamed MA-based "start-up" with $100MM in revenue and 400+ employees worldwide with a footprint in AWS. I was brought on as a "junior" Operations person and within two years I was basically indispensable to the team and had acquired a reputation as "the guy that finds the most interesting bugs".
What I didn't know at the time, was that in those two years I'd obtained experience and knowledge that at any other company would have warranted a 25% pay increase from what I was getting at this start-up.
The excuse? You have "options". That you can "exercise". And maybe eventually be worth something. Maybe.
Except this company had gone well past Series B. And had no exit strategy.
Given what I know now, I've resorted to telling recruiters and HR people that I'm not interested in "stock" or "bonuses" or anything else of the sort. The company pays me for my expertise and my hours, I give them what they pay me for. No promises, no gimmicks, no dice-rolling.
TBH, people in high-school and college looking to enter the workforce need a series of workshops on compensation, benefits, and HR before they start their first "real" job.
Had I known that the "options" I was being given access to would: A) "vest" over time, B) not be worth anything even 5+ years later, C) be IMPOSSIBLE to sell on the secondary market, and D) would result in a deflation of my take-home wages... I'd have told them "skip the options, bump my pay by 10%, and maybe I'll take you more seriously".
People need to realize that equity != pay. Equity is so dependent on so many other factors that you have ZERO control over that the risk-reward ratio is heavily slanted toward the former.
So to try to distill what this is -- I guess it's just a post to vent about some frustrating anecdotes?
I don't see any larger conclusion here. Let's assume HR talent falls on a normal distribution: just like you'll meet some absurd engineering candidates you'll also meet some absurd HR people.
I imagine companies that make really bad hiring decisions are put under selection pressure and are less likely to continue to exist. It's a problem that I think can be fixed by the marketplace, but I don't know if a post makes any tangible impact.
I've been looking for jobs recently. Have a background building pretty robust Node/React apps. At the 4 places that have given me an interview. I've been told that I don't meet their needs. The reason for this. I'm unable to solve their pet coder wars function challenge. Being a self taught programmer, not having a 'learned' background has proven to be a hindrance. Because I don't have the traditional algorithmic chops. In the time I've been working as a programmer I've had the need to use recursion one maybe two times. 3 of the 4 interviews have required me to over use recursion because iteration is to 'easy'.
Apparently my ability to answer some random function that in no way shows my ability to do day to day engineering work disqualifies me from employment. Yet these same companies are posting month in and month out looking for engineers and complaining that they are unable to find viable employees.
I'm in a similar boat -- my educational background is hardware engineering, but, I've been a Linux nerd/SRE for the last 20 years. I found a great position that would be perfectly in line with what I'm doing now -- specifically managing teams of SRE's for a startup in NYC that would allow me to work remotely, but, during their "technical" interview, I was asked to "humanize" a number using any language that I chose.
Knowing that ruby has a humanize gem (and python's humanize module doesn't get as granular as they wanted their example to be), I mentioned this to the interviewer, saying, "Hey -- why would I want my development team to spend an hour re-inventing the wheel when it can already be done with a code import?" -- while showing him the gem, and providing a sample code.
Suffice to say, he wasn't interested in that, he wanted to see how I'd implement something like that...
...so, I provided my code...which was as clunky as it could be in 30 minutes -- and then was almost certain that I lost this specific position because I didn't interpret my numbers from right to left vs left to right.
Seriously -- if you've booked a hotel room in the US, there's a 50% chance you've booked it on infrastructure that I've designed and implemented from the ground up. I've led teams of 20+ SRE's around the world in a 40 billion dollar company. My references speak for themselves. The reality is that they're going to still be looking for a SRE manager position in three months, and I won't be looking anymore because I would have found something that I'm interested in (and isn't me doing a containerization of a Windows-based ERP system in 96 hours).
On the other hand, imagine if you asked a programmer to write some novel code and they said "sorry, I can't. There was no Ruby gem or SO answer for this so I don't know how"
I agree. But these tests do nothing to validate that I can be a useful programmer on a team. Nothing about those types of questions prove that I’m unable to build a viable web app. I’m not applying to be a embedded programmer just continuing to do what I’ve done for years.
It sounds as though you have some basis of where you need to improve, I would continue to look for jobs but also try to improve in those areas (recursion and algorithms).
I spent the last year looking for jobs and it's definitely a weird market right now. I got offered a position that another company told me I lacked the relevant experience for.
You would be surprised by how a company may value your talents. It seems like the companies you've interviewed for don't require the talents that you have which is a good indicator that you probably would not want to work for those companies.
Keep looking for the company that values your talents and shares your values, but make sure to learn more in the areas that you have identified as needing improvement.
You may want to try applying for roles as a system development engineer. You still write a lot of code, but the role is less focused on algorithmic stuff. You should ensure during the interview you acquire a deep understanding of what the company expects you to do, and express to them what you'd like to do. IMO the sysdev role varies too far between permanent oncall and software developer, so you'd want to make sure you are embedded into the software side.
There's an obvious distortion that makes bad recruiters overrepresented: good positions in good companies tend to be filled immediately, typically through personal contacts and headhunters without posting ads, while mediocre positions require a serious recruitment effort (with mediocre recruiters, mediocre job postings and mediocre candidates) and really unreasonable morons need to shout very long and very loudly to select suckers.
That is a very popular sentiment, but entirely without basis in fact.
It requires there to be a large pool of highly qualified candidates who don't work in the industry right now (and more likely completely unemployed) who would want to work in the industry if the conditions were "just right".
But such a pool just doesn't exist. All employers can do, especially considering wages, is to try and poach candidates from competitors, other industries, other countries.
There clearly is a perception of depressed wages. I believe this mostly is an issue of a distorted labor market. There seems to be an issue of collusion among employers not entering into mutually harmful wage competition. Maybe regulations don't give employees enough power in the process. Unionization is also rare, and may not work in any case.
I think there's a problem with MBAs in general who want to decrease costs, expecting the market to cater to their desires.
The problem is a limited supply of labor for them, and they just haven't figured out that their business plans will not come to fruition until they change their assumptions.
I see this in healthcare all the time:
Healthcare MBA doesn't want to pay market rate for nurses. Experienced nurses quit and take jobs elsewhere with sign on bonuses. Hospital hires inexperienced nurses to fill gap. Inexperience causes burdens on surgeons and physicians and other nurses. More experienced nurses quit, surgeons and physicians quit, ad nauseum.
Saving some money short term leads to the inevitable destruction of the institution. Who gets paid bonuses for this clever trick? Healthcare MBAs who move onto the next victim.
When a company wants to hire a specific person and they have already found that specific person, to comply with employment law, they have to write up a job description so other people can apply for that job. By making that job description so specific that only one person in the known universe satisfies it, they comply with employment law and get to hire the person they want.
I know this because I have gone through this process several times.
Tell me, where is this the law? I know that government positions (VA, universities, etc.) often have to do this, but where is a private company required to allow competitive application to these positions? As I understand it, it's simply corporate policy. But I'd be interested to know where it's actually illegal to hire someone based solely on referral/networking.
I once interviewed at a company and I was shocked at the job description as it was network & server support + IT support + full stack developer in python, java & .net but the ad was for "an experienced python developer". My career history is, I started in IT support then became a developer in .net & later moved to Python. Maybe that is why they called me. But none the less, I told it was not possible for 1 person to do it all. But they said thats how they have it in the company with 3 member IT team. Interestingly, no member of the IT department or IT manager was at the interview. They refused to give any more details without me joining the company & signing a non-disclosure + non-competence + 2 yr bond.
Then once I was done with the interview, I went to the near by restaurant and casually asked if they knew anything about the company and luckily, a person from the accounts dept was there. So, he told me how the company initially had 12 members in the IT department when 6-8 would be enough. Then on a cost cutting sphere, they axed 6 on 1 day and then it thinned out to 3. Of which, the IT manager has resigned leaving just 2 members, both related to the owner. While the owner's son, a 1st yr cs grad student is the IT manager.
This is an extreme tale and I couldn't verify the story. But now this trend of making 1 person do the job of 2-3 for the salary of 1 seems common nowadays.
Based on my experience this is very true. It's very annoying when you want to find a job, but you don't want to be a sucker, so you end up looking for a job for a long time. I don't get it. You want to hire someone talented or smart, obviously, you are gonna have to pay them good money. What's the problem with that? I'm sure they will bring much more value than a usual sucker.
Personal story ahead. I've been looking for a job for around two months already. I'm Ruby/JS dev, so there are a few offers I can choose from. The problem is, half of that offers pay very little. Based on my experience, related to working with other people and to my previous salaries, I'd be a sucker to apply to those cheap offers. What I'm even more afraid is the people I'd work with. I'm pretty young and ambitious and I learn fast and I want to learn a lot, but if you don't have a good mentor you are not gonna learn that much.
Unfortunately, the offers, that interest me, require much more experience than I have. I doubt that I'd have a real problem with adapting and doing the job unwell. But I don't even get invited to any interview from that offers, because my CV has one year or two years of experience less than they expect :( How can I show that I could be a good fit then?
I know it's not that much related to the topic, but I've been a bit frustrated.
The advice is fairly obvious (or at least is the default course you're likely to take anyway): just keep at it. If someone really cares about the difference between 24 and 36 months of experience, you probably don't want to work there anyway...
Dude, get those jobs and leave in 6 months. They don’t pay you enough? Then do 8-5 and still look for jobs. Not paying you your market rate means you are already a flight risk.
Yeah. I moved to the Bay Area for an interesting gig, and now I get 3-5 recruiter pitches a day, many of which are from interesting companies. Same Ruby/Js background. It’s so much recruiting it’s gone from amazing to annoying actually, but it’s a good problem to have. If you can find a way to get here I think you’ll have an easy time finding a nice job.
Question - why even bother having "box tickers"? When you post a job listing, write a short blurb about the company culture and what the job itself involves. Don't bother listing "requirements" or "boosters", because the fact of the matter is, people will send resumes which don't meet your "requirements" and in order to put a boost-worthy resume at the top of the pile, you need somebody to read it in the first place to decide whether it deserves to be boosted to the top of the pile, in which case... it was already read in the first place. And that's assuming you even have a stack of resumes in the first place, which in engineering is a reason to put your hands together in silent thanks that you've become successful.
The hiring manager should already have an idea what level of experience is needed, what kind of budget exists, and how quickly the hire needs to be made by. Winnowing down from a stack of resumes to an offer is the art of compromising on those three axes. If your job opening can actually legitimately be kept open for that long (i.e. for a year plus, with no consequences), you should probably reassess whether you need to hire for the position in the first place.
Because once you run into somebody who decides that your subjective judgement represents illegal discrimination, you’ll wish that a third party checked the boxes you.
And it's not evidence of illegal discrimination if you eventually decide to hire somebody who didn't have the "required" level of skills or experience but submitted their resume anyway and you happened to give them an interview anyway but found them much more impressive in person?
If anything, it would seem to me that the more you put down on paper, the more legally exposed you are if you don't follow it to the letter. Of course, this doesn't absolve companies whose hiring managers do stupid things in interviews that are almost guaranteed to get their company sued; but that's a concern to be trained against regardless of how discerning your textual job posting is.
I agree with this article. But maybe not so much HR but the hiring managers that is the root cause. HR takes its marching orders of who to recruit/hire from the hiring managers.
What's going on here? What we have here is a min-max problem. In one case, the hiring manager would like to reduce risk of a bad hire and reduce amount of time needed to train an engineer. On the other side of the scale, the hiring manager needs to hire someone and get a butt in seat to get the work done. So what to do?
A couple of things come to mind. First, there is an algorithm for this, the optimal stoppage problem. That is you review a certain amount of candidates, lets say X, then pick the best one after X. The problem comes down to solving for X. I forget the solution, but there is one out there that is based on how long you want to wait.
Second thing that comes to mind is relying on core attributes, like hard work, motivation, overall intelligence, team-player, etc... versus overly specific skills.
Yes in both cases a lot is still left up to subjectivity and can still lead to long lead times in filling a position.
I'm sorry people, but one job posting != one job opening. That position was taken before it was even posted. Posting the job is purely a legal formality.
There is either an internal candidate already identified or there is a h1b candidate who needs their work authorization. Either way, that job was never going to be yours regardless of your qualifications.
I skimmed but there’s a kind of sucker I think he missed:
“Yes, ten other companies are doing the exact same thing our company does, and there is open source that almost does what we want but we’ve hired fifty developers to reinvent that wheel because reasons.”
There are too many people out there who could cut and paste most of my job descriptions onto their resume. That’s only partly a failure on my part. Most of my bosses don’t value my specialized skills (or only 3 months out of the year), and there are too many people repeating my work or vice versa.
There are a lot of custom CMS systems out there. If we refused to build them or insisted on making them thinner layers over standard modules, we would have plenty of people to go do other things. And I bet HN could name at least three other tropes that repeat all over the industry like that.
This happens in other industries too. A few years ago 60 Minutes did a story about a manufacturing company desperately looking for people to fill their positions. They interviewed the CEO and he said that the shortage was so extreme that they had to partner with a local college to create a training program to get the needed workforce. They went on an on about how hard it was to fill their positions and could not understand it since at the time the unemployment rate was relatively high. Finally, the interviewer asked what the salary for the position was. They, in an extremely serious tone, responded with $13.00/hour. And this was at a time when you could get a fast food job for $10-$11 without a bit of experience.
I'm typically cynical about claims like this but the situations he describes are absurd and support his claim.
Super Narrow Selection Criteria in particular however is not absurd; it means they have a specific candidate in mind. I don't mean to defend the practice (it either means the company has a screwed up hiring process or more likely they are trying to hire a specific domain expert from overseas and want to minimize the number of interviews of less qualified people) however I do believe this one case doesn't support the thesis.
I had an interview with a recruiter for an apparently (from what I hear) good AI company in Montreal, Canada. Their business is happening so they need to find a lot of people of various specialities. So they hired some ultra junior and not very bright full time recruiters. They are the ones that make lots of initial rejections stopping good candidates from actually getting to the proper subject matter interviews. The recruiter was confused because I applied for a UX/UI design position - my focus last 10 or so years - but I actually studied computer science so I have lots of coding experience not only design skills. This is an actual quote from the conversation: 'So, I see you _also_ have programming experience, but you applied for UX/UI design position, so I am not sure it is _good_...'.
I did manage to navigate through completely retarded 45 minute HR conversation and got invited for the interview with the director of UX. From the moment I walked in the guy was ultra uncomfortable and shy because he was obviously 15~20 years younger than myself. Also clearly never interviewed people before. I never heard back from them, but I see that the position is still open...
And every shitty little startup thinks they’re Google, and demand so called “unicorn” developers while hoping to pay them 60k a year. And if you don’t know exactly “Home Depot Vendor System” then in their mind you’re marked as not the developer they want, despite having experience in like 5 other super similar technology. That seriously grinds my gears, those companies deserve to not be able to hire anyone.
I agree with most things in this, but one point about the "super narrow criteria" part. It's annoying but in reality the list of "must haves" is actually a list of "want to haves" If you check some of the requirements, go ahead and reply. Maybe 10% of the companies actually mean it, the rest will consider hiring you.
I'm reaching 40 next year, 20 years of code experience. What's bizarre about the whole thing is that I would be consider to be reaching my productive peak in the next 10 years in any other field.
In tech you are treated like a dinosaur, as if not knowing what the latest hipster JS framework of the week makes you obsolete.
Also there is no reason why a 50 year old can’t learn Vue, React, Rust, Blockchain, PWA, Docker or anything else that is hot. It’s all logic, all 1s and 0s. Someone with 20 years experience can probably learn it faster.
Exactly my point, I don't mean to brag but just picked react and redux 4 months ago. I'm already one of the most productive react-redux sr. engs at my current job
Is not about me being a "ninja" is about me doing this computer science thing for over 20 years
The problem is that somebody with 20 years experience knows Vue and React are really just older technologies refried and served to new programmers who weren't around the first time. Hiring too many people who can say "this looks suspiciously like what I was doing 10 years ago" ruins the tech marketing cycle.
1) The majority of companies don't understand what they want and/or need in terms of personnel. Why that is can be a discussion some other time.
Of course there are exceptions. Typically they are the successful companies, the industry leaders, etc. Those who fail to make this cut believe these companies are auccessful because of open floor plans, ping pong tables, etc.
Collins said "Get the right people on the bus."
That's kinda true but also incomplete. It's actually: "Get good people on the right bus and get rolling in the right general direction. No ping pong tables required."
2) What most job posters don't seem to realize is that better / great people typically have a well serviced bullshit detector. Post your nonsense all you want. The ones you wish you could get can smell your turd-scented confusion and won't bother. It's not them. It's you. Suck it up and deal with it already.
Talent shortage and sucker shortage are not mutually exclusive. In fact, there is good evidence that the former can drive the latter. Basically, most of the talentless people also tend to lie about their experience, educational background, knowledge level, previous salaries, career preferences, etc to compensate for their lack of talent. It does NOT work of course, most of the time, but what do they stand to lose?
So, when this goes on for some time the HR departments start to assume everybody is a talentless, lying, P.O.S. as it is simply cheaper and less taxing on corporate resources to go with that assumption if the majority of interviewers truly are like that. Yes, they may miss a star here and there, but they will also save themselves an HR-wide (and beyound) burnout and a ton of wasted money.
I will be the "negative Nancy" in this thread and say that unfortunately there has been a drastic drop in IQ scores around the world over the last 30 years.
https://raypeatforum.com/community/threads/iq-scores-have-be...
That is bound to manifest itself in the generally quality of prospective employees. The term "idiocracy" takes that idea to the extreme...but unfortunately is not far from the truth. In my experience, a general rule of thumb in Fortune 500 HR (and even large federal agencies) is that a star will almost never apply directly through the front door. There will be either recommended by a trusted insider or will find an ingenious way to demonstrate their talent. For all the rest, the assumption (mostly correct) is that they are junk or at the very least significantly overrating their self-professed abilities/talents/worth/salary/etc. So, what looks like a sucker shortage is simply the trend for lower value default offers most HR departments will put out there based on the (reasonable) assumption of the (low) quality of the person up against them.
I think we do have a talent shortage, seriously, I see it all the time in the companies I work for. And if you run in an interview like the author describes, it is very likely that the interviewer just lacks talent and happens to be in that position, otherwise he or she would recognise the opportunity and go for a good deal.
But there are also good reasons why companies are often extremely careful hiring new staff. Many companies are desperately seeking the right dev's because they know that the wrong pick can cost them tons of money. The mess a wrong dev can create can do so much damage to the product while it often has to be released within a certain timeframe. I've seen a startup failing because of that.
> Many companies are desperately seeking the right dev's because they know that the wrong pick can cost them tons of money. The mess a wrong dev can create can do so much damage to the product while it often has to be released within a certain timeframe
That suggests problems in management and organization. Likely also with existing seniors and their communication with management. If not having developer causes less issues then hiring average one, then the company really needs to rethink their processes and onboarding.
I've been seeing this a LOT lately. There is plenty of work out there, but some of the offers I have been seeing are PATHETIC.
Check out this job posting: metaltoad dot bamboohr.com/jobs/view.php?id=103
> 90k max salary
> 9 years of industry experience
Totally clueless. Good luck with that.
Recently talked to a certain Beaverton, Oregon based shoe company. APPARENTLY, they hire a lot of their new hires as "contractors" and dangle the "full time" carrot in front of their face for a year. Swear up and down you are not a second class citizen... except you can't use the gym. Or go to the holiday party or use a lot of their facilities. And your badge is a different color.
Yeah, go sell that to someone else. Good luck finding a competent engineer.
Rule #1, know going in that they know what your salary requirement is. Ask them many times throughout the process, if they flinch at any point drop them. Then continue on with your interviews. If you're asked to go in for an interview more than a few times, it's a major red flag. There is zero reason for this. They can do background checks on you. They can ask for references to people you worked with etc. Don't be led on. At this point, you're time is worth more than theirs because this process drains you mentally & physically, and likely drains your vacation time / pay, so it's literally costing you $$$$ when you interview at new companies.
Sorry to bring this up, but then again if he's gonna get all old-school and freely call people "suckers," "crazy," and "morons," I guess I don't feel too bad asking: What kind of crazy sucker moron makes a site that is perfectly simple and lightning-fast, almost to the point of looking like motherfuckingwebsite.com, and then allows AMP into the picture? The one very small & economical image on this particular page doesn't load unless I enable scripts from ampproject.org and the AMP CDN. I mean AMP is for speeding up bloated pages and sucking Google's proverbial... bandwidth... isn't it?
The amount of inflationary BS on "senior engineer" resumes I've read when hiring is astounding.
5 years of this, 4 years of that, 5 frameworks, 3 languages, the whole AWS alphabet soup in the toolbox.
The more senior I've gotten, the more I've removed from my resume. I used to stuff it with everything I had learned over the years. But my real profession is just "software engineer." You give me a language and a problem, and let me figure out the rest.
Reminds me of what I hear over and over and over about the "crisis" shortage of truck drivers in America, and because of this "crisis" they just have to spend billions developing automated trucks that will put millions of current drivers out of work.
It's simple economics - if there truly is a shortage of drivers, offer a higher salary. Yes, it really is that simple.
There's no shortage of drivers - or of people who would become drivers. There's a shortage of people who will accept a low-ball wage, whereas with an autonomous truck you don't have to deal with inconvenient things like salary, health insurance, union dues, etc.
> So apparently you won't be considered for a senior position unless you've worked in almost exactly that role in a company that was almost exactly the same at almost exactly the same career level.
A lot of this may be due to the H-1B -> Green Card application process. I think the company has to prove their existing H-1B employee is the only possible person who can fill the role by posting the job publicly, so the lawyers will craft the req as narrowly as possible. As a result, many of these listings were never intended to be filled with external hires.
I moved from where there was not IT, to a bigger city. I was pretty well compensated and have the same thing now.
They promised me to be partner, I felt bad leaving there for my colleagues. But I would never return, as their promise was just for keeping me interested.
Just 1/5th of the stress of before now. Thank god, sometimes being a sucker is doing too much.
Eg. Night calls because one of my applications ( e-commerce) was for fast-food, who did their orders at 01:00 am. Guess who had to fix other's people's sync services at night.
Even when I went swimming, I had to check phone calls. Urgh
I've been applying to jobs for about 5 months now and I haven't even managed to get a single technical interview, let alone a job offer. Can somebody please take a look at my linkedin and tell me if I'm stupid (www.linkedin.com/in/niyeturner)? Honestly if I'm completely out of my league and just need to quit making software I just want to hear it from somebody, rather than just all of a sudden being ignored. I guess there's also the possibility my web traffic is being attacked by my house mates
Your linkedin shows zero experience (<1 year, but two jobs?) and a 4 year gap between college and any technical work, plus you don't actually expand on any of the technologies you've worked on.
Show continuity of experience over a long time (even if it's just a project, list it in your experience section) and put "Javascript" or "Python" in your headline. Talk about some of the things you've done, and skip the video game references imo. Don't let it get you down, 5 months is not really that long, and definitely don't give up.
Have you tried Tripplebyte https://triplebyte.com/iv/TpOcf1q/cp (referral link). I found their interview process to be quite helpful in my job search.
Can you add any bullet points to the experience you have on your LinkedIn? Talk about what role you had and what things you have accomplished in those roles even though they are relatively new.
> I'm 45 and have gray hair. /.../ It apparently indicates I am completely ignorant about technology and social media.
One has to be on serious drugs (or profoundly ignorant on the not-very-bright-kindergartener level) to think somebody 45 years old working in tech is ignorant about tech or social media. This is the generation who had computers since they were 10. And back then computers required real investment of time and knowledge to use.
Is it a real thing that happens? Are there recruiters like that?
I feel like the way to deal with this situation is to ask them to pay a $1000-2000 deposit to take a day to interview, refundable in the event that the company makes an offer meeting certain conditions (e.g cash salary >= $amount)
Most companies will say 'no', the tiny minority that say 'yes' are the ones that are serious.
Clearly only works if you have enough 'dealflow' to end up with nonzero takers
The part about companies being too picky doesn’t ring true. LinkedIn allows people to apply en-masse to jobs without any cost to them, so you end up getting a lot of nonsense applicants. That’s why it’s not surprising to see 1000 people applying to that person‘s job. I wish LinkedIn had more built in (but optional) ways of pre-filtering candidates before they reached the employer.
> "Experience with Home Depot’s Vendor Portal required" Posted by a national recruiting firm, no less. So let me get this straight. You're going to toss a resume in the trash because they haven't been keypunching data into a particular retailer's portal? For a Sales Director Job? Are you people complete morons?
Maybe simply a barrier to someone who is not knowledgeable enough to know the true intent of that question. Let's take an extreme. Say there was a job listing and part of the listing said 'must be able to cook hotdogs at barbecues'. Nobody would take that seriously and a vegan would still apply. Right? Or perhaps a vegan would not apply because they are not able to figure out what the intent of the 'trick' question was.
A 'sales director' is someone who understands sales and is above all not afraid to get past some sales barrier 'sorry we aren't interested right now' but will keep pressing on even after 'no' is the repeated answer (if of course they deem the opportunity appropriate).
I buy high end good. You don't know how many times I get back a reply which says 'sorry it's not for sale at any price'. That always means the same thing 'show me the money'. Of course there are things that are 'not for sale at any price' but typically not what I have found to be the case. What they are saying is 'I don't think someone will offer a price I would ever consider accepting' or 'I don't know the current market enough to even know what I have is valued at' and so on.
This is not unique to the employment area. I got a buyout offer from one of my larger customers for my company. After a lot of back and forth the offer ended up being 2x EBITA (i.e. 2 years profit) but with a 3 year workout. Even they were sheepish after that offer. According to them this sort of offer was often accepted.
this is a big trend in business, startups, and HR right now (and growing for the last 10 years+). Don't rush to hire a good candidate, put time into the perfect candidate.
Good or bad, i think its debatable. but most of the experience and "meta" these days is to wait for a great candidate.
If we don’t have a shortage of talent, then why are people with one set of talents (software developers) making so much more money than people who lack those talents? A talent supply that reflected the needs of the economy would result in a flat distribution of incomes.
The author treats requirements as necessary - but they never are. I think that at most positions I applied to and got offer for, I haven't checked at least half of those "ticks". In the end, nobody treats them as if they're really required.
It's doubly self sabotaging because some of the most talented juniors and mid-level engineers I've worked with are the types that will say "oh, I can only do half of those things, I probably can't get that job anyway".
"Why Are You Reposting Jobs With Over 1000 applications?"
This would seem to indicate that there is a huge oversupply of coders. The fact that knowing how to code wasn't even considered important in the "Startup School" curriculum does as well.
This article is true for jr devs too. I program and study everyday. I've been trying to get into tech lately and it seems pointless. HR only wants senior devs and recruiters want to make a buck filling those positions. Seems like a racket.
I'm not in position of hiring people but, a priori, the maxim - trial most, hire the best - seems correct. I consider CV and interviews to be a waste of time. Any thoughts about this?
In tertiary education and the state and federal government system here in Australia the pay banding is well understood. Asking how a job equates in responsibilities and renumeration can work.
Maybe there is some kind of survivor bias in open jobs.
That is, jobs that are desirable are filled in a few days. Crummy jobs stay open for months. So, therefore, most open jobs are bad.
I was curious about this too and got about halfway through a project to parse historic "Ask HN: Who's Hiring" data and find companies with the same job posting over and over. Use it to generate a "Who's Not Actually Hiring" list :) Wasn't curious enough to finish it though...
Looks like this page is AMP. Disabling the AMP cdn with uMatrix causes the page to take a whopping 11 seconds to load an 18kb page. I'm not sure where this is going.
If you are conscientious and have some passions beyond making money, you will always be a sucker to the cluster B personalities that run many businesses. I don't think you can beat this system - the only way to win the game is to give up who you are. The main advantage of being careful and sticking to your guns is that you repel a lot of cluster B's, who do the filtering for you. You will be happier ending up with those who remain.
"Sucker" is a pejorative that implies you can beat the system if you're smart enough. You can only beat the system by breaking rules and becoming what you hate.
Like a lot of people here, I've been on both sides of the table. Currently on the hiring side of the table interviewing web application developers. I agree with a lot that's said in TFA, especially as someone who's suffered through a months-long motivated job search where I shared the pain. For example:
> There are easily several thousand people in the town who are capable of building that business. Get over yourselves and just freakin hire someone. You're running a website, not curing cancer.
I hear you here. I've posted my team's hiring principles here:
- Hiring cycles will be structured and as short as possible.
- When we start a hiring cycle, we will finish it by hiring the most qualified applicant who accepts our offer.
But on this point, I'm a little confused:
> So let me get this straight. You want me to bootstrap a multi-million dollar business, from scratch, operating with minimal marketing and operating funding in a highly competitive channel. Or get your consumer product slotted at a major retailer. Or launch your new web application. For $100,000 a year and no equity.
The general advice I come across here is to treat equity as a lottery ticket and focus on salary. Is the complaint here that salary is an insult? In the Bay Area, sure. But Atlanta? This comes off a bit self-entitled to me. At least without more context.
I think there's also signs of what I'll call premature hindsight bias (feel free to offer a better term). You assume, perhaps reasonably, that once hired, you're going to come in, make friends, kick ass and provide value. I want to believe that you can do it at a salary we both find fair. But until you get here and have been on the job for a few weeks or months, it's going to be really hard for me to know if that's what's going to happen. And if you happen to not be a great fit for unexpected reasons, how do we deal with that? That can be a lot of stress for everyone if not a full-scale disaster. In short, you don't want to get suckered, I don't want to get suckered.
There's a lot of risk and uncertainty in hiring and I imagine risk aversion drives a lot of it. I know it does for me even as I do my best to control it. Hence the 4-5 interviews mentioned in the top comment. (That seems excessive to me. I always wonder what a company gets out of the 5th interview that they didn't get out of the 4th, or the 10th hour of meeting with a candidate that they didn't get out of the 9th.)
Here's an exercise I call Black Boxes that I came up with recently for one of our hiring retrospectives. I think we have a pretty good hiring approach but I'm always looking to improve it. I share it here because I'm interested in hearing the ideas of others:
BOX OPTIONS (alphabetical order):
- Car Type (what type of car does applicant drive?)
- Cover Letter (box may be empty)
- Gender
- LinkedIn Profile (box may be empty)
- Phone Conversation (20-30 minutes)
- Resume
PART 1
Ten people have applied for our web application position. You know nothing about them. You have only a black box for each one. Ten black boxes. You get to look into each black box. Then you have to hire one of these ten applicants.
You get to choose the contents of the box from the options above. Which type of box do you choose to make your hiring decision? In a comment below, list your box. You may include a brief explanation if you wish. Example:
> Resume: This is the first thing I always look at. It should contain the most relevant info and is pretty low investment as it's a standard part of application.
PART 2
Now rank the rest of the boxes above in order of utility.
PART 3
What other boxes would you like to have as an option? Consider time/money costs associated with each box.
Maybe laws are different where you're at, but mentioning or considering gender in a role is the biggest of no-nos. Grounds for firing and large lawsuits.
In my experience, this is a new development in the software industry.
In the past, the software industry was far more constrained when it comes to talent acquisition.
I vividly recall an old-guard software CEO in the mid 1990s lamenting the beginning of the dot-com era: its overwhelming demand for engineers and seemingly skyrocketing staffing costs.
I've been in the industry for decades and to me this feels like an effect whereby there is now a massive, seemingly endless stream of candidates for recruiters or companies to choose from.
I can only imagine there are many problems that can arise from an environment whereby there are effectively an infinite number of candidates.
Analysis paralysis for instance?
I feel like it's high time for companies to consider posting salary ranges up front. It is understandable that salary will vary depending on experience, but when the offer can vary between companies by as much as 2-3x, it's a total waste of time for me (and for the prospective employer) to interview at companies which pay one third of what I'm making now. You could say there's Glassdoor and Blind, but both are pretty unreliable, albeit in different directions (Glassdoor usually shows too little, and on Blind people brag too much), and leave room for the kind of negotiation that assumes the hire is a sucker.
I sometimes get pings from Japanese and European recruiters, and it's not uncommon to see the ranges in those. They're usually pretty hilarious by US standards, though, so I politely decline without wasting anybody's time interviewing (even though I wouldn't mind spending a few years in Europe or Japan). At the very least, this is respectful of my time and effort.
Should note: there is quite a schism in 'market value' - it's a hard one to nail down. It's a range and it depends on a lot of factors.
There are people who just want a decent job with decent pay and a decent place to work. They will do consistently decent work for stability, neat stuff to work on. They are not heavy negotiators, and maybe don't realize they could make '40% more elsewhere' - or frankly are not willing to move their wife/husband and 3 kids.
Real 'market value' is what you are being offered, or rather, what people are accepting. So if people are accepting those supposedly low-ball numbers, well, that is 'market value'.
Because companies will always want better talent at a better price - in that context, there will always be a 'shortage'.
Markets for labour are obviously clearing - we're seeing tons of hiring (and laying off) - so people are getting hired.
Many companies are also looking for specialized talent, for specific jobs, which are actually hard to fill. In some areas there is definitely a 'shortage' for opportunity cost.
One could argue 'they could just pay more' - but it's not like industry will boost wages for some job by 30% in the hopes that more people will start to study and train for that subject! It's a short-run/long-run problem.
For broader industry trends, this happens: software is a 'good paying job' in many places, ergo, more devs. But for specialization it's hard. And often it's difficult to clearly justify the ROI. This ambiguity is tantamount to just a lower real value due to the inherent risk.
The offers being made for most jobs are ballpark near 'market wages'. Companies have a lot more data than individuals.
Well yeah, companies will always want better employees that cost them less and employees will always want better jobs that pay them more. These desires are somewhat at odds with each other.
"Talent shortage" is the language employers use to imply that rather than this just being an eternal truth and their current situation being the current market equilibrium, there is some kind of societal problem that society should help them solve (at society's expense of course).
The OP is so spot on. This still frustrates me. The HR, the contract recruiters including technical recruiters are completely disconnected from what the organization needs. On top of that the applicant systems some of these companies employ is horrendous. You have to retype every elfin piece of work history like an FBI background check and in the end your application becomes a metric of the recruiter who can show they have really worked hard to get as many applications as possible. Remove the middle men.
I often see some former co-workers who often tell me I should apply at my old job should I ever sell my business. That happened four months ago and, during that time, I couldn't find any contact information to apply. I called the company's main number and was transferred to a voice mail of someone who never called me back. I applied online to a different job, explaining the situation, but never heard back.
The situation was this: I had two former managers and one co-worker all advocating for me for the one job they knew was available--my old job!
I have not been able to get any response from the company at all.
"There are easily several thousand people in the town who are capable of building that business"
I agree with most of the sentiment, but not this one.
Someone with the right experience, skills, maturity, 'get go' and initiative ... there are not 'thousands' of people like that in a mid tier city. More likely only a handful.
One important point I didn't see mentioned was the other side: engineers also think they're worth more than they are.
I posit the big VC-backed or FAANG companies 1) can offer huge initial salaries to not have to deal with competition 2) hire juniors at high salaries because they can afford to spend 1-2 years training them. Combine with the sheer volume of hiring they all perform, and it starts to set some false expectations. Maybe smaller companies are failing at capitalism by not competing?
Anecdotally, I have seen engineers refuse pretty good gigs because they were expecting to be treated like royalty without much to back it up. This industry is skewed, in many ways.
In one way I do agree with you (there are some clear cases where a junior candidate is asking for way too much, without skill to back it up), but my impression of recruiting in the tech space is that, in large part, this industry is undergoing a shift in the balance of power, where employers are finding it difficult to dictate salaries for job titles. In my opinion, it is really refreshing to see that talent actually feels empowered enough to ask themselves if they are worth more, and confident enough to turn down roles for ones that pay more.
My personal anecdote is that I took the first tech job that was offered as a junior, a little bit before this reversal started taking place, and as a result, I left a lot of money on the table. Years later, I realized that if I had just said no, and extended my search a little bit longer, or had role models telling me my knowledge at the time was worth a lot more, I might be worth a lot more right now (factoring in compound interest with sensible investing of excess profit from work + modest lifestyle).
I don't really blame either the engineers or the small companies. There's just a market situation right now where engineers who can get an offer from one of the big tech firms, are willing to live where they're located, and mostly just care about salary (which there's absolutely nothing wrong with) should probably just take that offer. No one else, except maybe big fintech, is probably going to be able to compete on salary. That's just the way the market is right now.
There’s a lot of brain drain going on at consulting companies as everyone flees a dying industry for 30% raises at FAAMG companies as they start to tackle vertical industry offerings. They’re all aggressively attacking the enterprise space.
These companies just have profit margins high enough to afford to blow everyone out of the water with their offers. They’re competing with each other for the top talent, and it makes it really hard for companies in other industries to retain their best and brightest.
IBM doesn’t belong; their revenue has been flat for 20 years and they have almost no influence in the tech world anymore. My clients view IBM as a consulting company with a market position somewhere between Infosys and Accenture.
On the other hand, Microsoft is still quite relevant to the future; Azure is getting a lot of traction in the enterprise world as an alternative tech stack to AWS. VSTS is rapidly displacing the whole Jira ecosystem and VS Code needed 6 months to become one of the most popular development tools.
I agree; and if you want to have a conversation about media you need to include the top 4 telecoms as well. Netflix doesn’t really belong with the company it’s often mentioned in.
And yes, VSTS is good. The interface and tools are easy to use, the defaults are way better than Jira and it integrates with damn near everything (even tools it replaces, like Jenkins).
The Microsoft of the late 2010s is almost the polar opposite of the late 1990s Microsoft. It’s all about open tools that link together via proprietary orchestration platforms. Those platforms provide the bulk of the business value, so I’m ok with them not being as open.
> Maybe smaller companies are failing at capitalism by not competing?
Pretty much. It makes sense for employees to land where they can create the most value. If FAANG can get 4x the value out of a junior engineer than your small company can, of course they are going to outcompete you in hiring top junior engineers.
Figure out how to extract more value or set your sights lower (and regardless probably want to keep your contempt to yourself).
There's a common economic fallacy that prices have anything to do with the cost of production, but the only relationship is that if the price people are willing to pay for a product is less than the cost, that item simply doesn't get made and sold.
When you have companies attempting to produce goods that cannot be profitably produced, below market wages are a common earmark. Whatever widget the company is selling only has a market at $X, but has a cost under current market conditions of $2X, so they are trying to pay people half market salary to bring the two numbers together.
When I was hiring developers, I wrote the job role hoping for the perfect rock star candidate.
"Must have experience with the Home Depot vendor system"
I mean, what if someone fulfilled all my "musts"?!? That'd be the perfect person.
But you hardly ever find rock stars. And so you hire the best person who doesn't have all the required skills. Don't let job requirements stop you from applying. And don't think that I'm being unrealistic for asking for what I probably won't get.
There is scope for putting "experience with x an advantage/bonus" instead of "must have x" if don't want to put off the vast majority of well-qualified applicants that are not likely to have x, but would like to be noticed by the people that do.
Especially if x isn't something very useful like experience with a framework you use, but something relatively trivial like knowledge of a CRUD app they periodically do a bit of data input into.
I try to review our job requirements every time they are posted (for a new hire or backfill) and move more things from "requirements" to "advantages". It is hard, though, because hope springs eternal.
Why go to a restaurant and ask "can I get a diet Coke, please"? Why not admit that you'd consider other sugar free, carbonated, cola flavored soft drinks?
Because both parties should already be aware that it's a negotiation between people and not a blockchain contract to be mechanically evaluated according to a spec.
Indeed, you say "can I get a Coke please", not "it must be a diet Coke" - or if you do, you probably want to make it clear that you'd not consider alternatives. Similarly, enough companies use actual-must in job offerings (for all or for some requirements), and enough companies are clear about (some) requirements being a preference that expecting candidates to divine which employers do and which don't mean it when they say "must" means you'll loose out on some candidates, for no good reason.
So that it weeds out rational, reasonable, honest people and the company can continue to receive people who are prone to overconfidence, lying, and other pro-social psychopathic traits.
They're aren't many expects in my field with my background and skill set and they said the right things to get me to interview (compensation won't be a concern).
Anyway... Went in for 4-5 interviews. Took me about 10 hours in total to interview with them.
Kept hearing that they have a difficult time filling the position. Reports directly to the CTO, etc, etc.
They came in at 1/2 my current salary. It was about 30-40% of what you would pay a decent engineer with experience.
I told them my salary level BEFORE the interview...
Gave them a hard now. They came back and said they can offer more stock and remote work.
Why in the heck would I turn down a bird in the hand for 1x in the bush?
Part of the problem is that if you're interviewing you need to know what you're buying!
You can't go to a ferrari dealership and offer to buy one or $20k.. that's just not how it works.