27 ms·

Stop complaining and pay programmers more

227 points by wake_up_sticky 16y ago

It seems like every time I check HN someone is bitching and moaning about how difficult it is to find competent programmers. Newsflash: competent programmers apparently have a skill that is extremely rare. Rare commodities are expensive. It strikes me as senseless to complain endlessly about how 199 out of 200 candidates who are interviewed for a programming position are literally incompetent. No competent hiring manager should put out more than one ad posting which attracts a horde of unqualified candidates. Why not? Because the second time around he will offer a much more attractive salary. And that's really the end of it. Enough of this nonsense.

Russelldb 16y ago
My theory on this is that it is a market for lemons. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons Solve that problem to solve this one.
- silverlake 16y ago
  Extend the idea of "lemon laws" to hiring. Every new hire has a 3 month try-out period (as a contractor?) where they will be fired if it doesn't work out. If you make this point forcefully during the interview, some low-quality applicants will seek safety elsewhere rather than risk losing their job, while high quality applicants won't be deterred.
amock 16y ago
How will offering a higher salary deter less qualified people? It seems like it will attract more of all kinds of programmers.
- staunch 16y ago
  It should improve the ratio though.
  - amock 16y ago
    Maybe, maybe not. I think a better way to filter people would be something like Justin.tv or Facebook does where they have applicants write code as part of the application. I don't have any experience with hiring so i don't have any real data, but I'd love to know how effective those are.
    - tkahnoski 16y ago
      Company I work for issues a basic data structures test to be completed in 1 hour for all resumes worth their paper (about 10 to 15 out of 100 candidates). The test boils down to 'fill in these two functions'. About 20% finish both functions correctly in an hour (I still had an infinite recursion at the 1 hour mark and submitted a correct entry 10 minutes later). In conjunction with a phone interview we typically only have an actual sitdown with 2 to 4 candidates out of the initial pool of 100. We recruit out of college so resumes get handed in like candy, but this process has effectively helped us find candidates that are at least capable of learning the monolithic code base and getting fully up and running in a few months. Our company still has an absolute terrible code base. It is very feasible to nuke skilled programmers once you have them.
      - hello_moto 16y ago
        Upvote for being very honest. Isn't this what happened throughout the industry? (with a very few exceptions). This is exactly what makes my belief about "great programmers" just went out of the window: no matter how great an individual is, the fact that plenty software houses have terrible code base show something else. People can blame the businesses, the time-to-market, the deadline or whatnot and I believe you guys. But at the same time, are you being fair toward your profession at the same time? If great programmers do exist, I'm expecting them to change these ugly code bases everywhere to the point where 50% of any companies out there would have good code base (and that includes unit-tests)
        mikecotton 16y ago
        Unless management has made the decision to invest in a solid-wall backstop of functional tests, then no amount of great programmers can clean up a codebase. I've known and learned from some of the best coders alive, and none of them would wade into a known-good codebase that they didn't have solid experience with or responsibility for and start refactoring. Code that they were on the hook for? Open season. Code that someone else was going to get the call on at 3 a.m.? Wouldn't touch it with a ten-foot pole. Given that, I wouldn't expect '50% of any companies' to be good. "If it ain't broke..." is really good advice about 95% of the time. If you're 50-100% overbooked, you don't screw with other peoples' code just to try to make things better around the office.
- vaksel 16y ago
  I'd imagine the incompetent ones wouldn't bother applying to jobs that are "way out of their league". If you are "sucky" you might still apply for a $60K job, thinking that you might slide through. But you wouldn't bother applying to a $100K job, thinking that there'd be way more competent people applying so it'd be a waste of time
  - starkfist 16y ago
    I'd imagine the incompetent ones wouldn't bother applying to jobs that are "way out of their league". Never done hiring before, eh?
  - DomesticMouse 16y ago
    You'd imagine wrong, if my past experience is anything to go by.
  - dedward 16y ago
    You'd imagine that, but you'd be wrong - there are a great many technical employees who don't realize they are way out of their league and will apply anyway.
    - danudey 16y ago
      "Hey, I've got 'two years of experience with .NET'! I remember, because it was my birthday last week and on my birthday two years ago I wrote a little digital clock app from a tutorial I found in a magazine. Man, who ever thought ten minutes in Notepad would net me a $100k job! I'm totally going to apply, and when I get this job I'm never working at another Burger King again!"
      - kranner 16y ago
        Upvote for satire!
        kranner 16y ago
        I'm curious about why this was downvoted. Is "upvote for x" too reddit-y?
- timr 16y ago
  "How will offering a higher salary deter less qualified people?" You've got it exactly backwards: it's not intended to deter the unqualified, it's meant to attract the qualified. And yes, high salaries do tend to attract good people. Maybe not exclusively, but it's an important factor. So, if the complaint is that "there are no good programmers" (and we assume that your screening process isn't totally arbitrary), there's a pretty good bet that you're not attracting good programmers from the places where they currently work. High salaries are a good way to do that.
  - scott_s 16y ago
    You may attract more qualified people, but the number of unqualified people may increase as well. Put another way, you may get more qualified people in absolute numbers, but the signal-to-noise ratio could go up, too.
    - timr 16y ago
      "You may attract more qualified people, but the number of unqualified people may increase as well." ...which is why you have a screening process. When people are complaining that there are no good programmers (and this is a common complaint on HN; it's not just a straw man), there's at least one of two things going on: 1) Their screening process sucks. 2) They aren't attracting good programmers. High salaries help with #2.
      - el_chapitan 16y ago
        Hopefully higher salaries are also going to help keeping your existing programmers, which will alleviate the need to go and get more programmers. Also, if you have a stellar programmer in an interview, they tend to stick out more than their non stellar counterparts.
      - kranner 16y ago
        I'm trying to bring up an automated screening service at http://codeboff.in/ http://codeboff.in/ (self-promo alert) because I think we need way more of these, especially being the sort of people who could make them. Edit: by 'we' I meant 'we as programmers'.
j_baker 16y ago
You have to understand: there's more to hiring programmers than paying lots of money. If that were the case, we wouldn't have had a dot-com bust and software companies would be dominated by MBAs. That's the hard part of hiring programmers. How do you incentivize the good ones to work for you? If you have a solution to that problem, I suspect you'll be a very much in-demand person.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- chime 16y ago
  > How do you incentivize the good ones to work for you? If you have a solution to that problem, I suspect you'll be a very much in-demand person. Bonuses, perks, and congrats on jobs well-done. If I spend 40 hours between Dec 31 and Jan 2 writing up a new wireless barcoding system because the powers that be decided at the last minute to begin the new year with a different process for warehousing, I better get a damn bonus, at least 1.5 x 40 hours of my rate. You know what I got upon successful completion of my last-minute project? "chime, if you had originally developed a flexible enough system to accommodate changing of bin/zone locations, you wouldn't have had to work in the last minute." I resigned from that job.
  - ryanbigg 16y ago
    As a programmer bonus and perks are definitely incentives, but a nice steady "I love your work" kind of vibe is a great way to keep me in my job.
    - jquery 16y ago
      > "I love your work" Nothing says "I love your work" more truthfully than a bonus or a raise.
      - Loic 16y ago
        Where have you been working for the past few years? A bonus you get it twice a year, a boss respecting your work and saying thank you, you have it every single day. If you are paid correctly, you should not even need a bonus but you cannot go long without respect from your boss and peers. By the way, it is proved by countless experience that once salary is good enough, it is disconnected from happiness at work. Good pay and respect will bring you way further than good pay, bonus and "you are my slave".
jeffepp 16y ago
In software development, like most anything else, you really get what you pay for. Being a non-technical co-founder, I did learn this the hard way a few times. I totally agree that having a competent, hardworking and passionate programmer is probably the most important part of a startup.
- mikemainguy 16y ago
  "In looking for people to hire, you look for three qualities: integrity, intelligence, and energy. And if they don't have the first, the other two will kill you." — Warren Buffet CEO, Berkshire Hathaway My Buffet said it best IMHO... I've worked with some competent, hardworking, and passionate with no integrity who have really caused a lot of problems.
damoncali 16y ago
I think you have it exactly backwards. The best programmers I know seem to be indifferent to cash. They work on the most interesting project they can find that pays them enough to live. Hiring people like that is really tough.
- jasonlotito 16y ago
  > The best programmers I know seem to be indifferent to cash. No, they do care about cash. How do I know? >They work on the most interesting project they can find that pays them enough to live. There. That's why. If they weren't making enough money to meet their needs, they'd be looking to trade up. Money isn't the only answer. Everyone likes to talk about how money isn't the solution. I'm pretty sure every one is making a bit more than minimum wage or aren't looking to get compensated in some other way in the future.
  - damoncali 16y ago
    Yes, but offering more money to someone who feels like they already make enough is amazingly ineffective. My point is that, in my experience, great programmers place a much higher value on doing interesting work than they put on making more money.
    - jasonlotito 16y ago
      > Yes, but offering more money to someone who feels like they already make enough is amazingly ineffective. Which is completely besides the point. Listen, I understand that point of view. I agree with it. I live it. > My point is that, in my experience, great programmers place a much higher value on doing interesting work than they put on making more money. Only after they have enough money to not have to worry about it. Offering programmers minimum wage isn't going to entice them from their 6-figure job, even if the work is challenging and fun. Most likely their 6-figure job is already exciting and fun enough.
      - mavelikara 16y ago
makecheck 16y ago
Money doesn't always attract people to a job. The purpose of good pay is to keep people from leaving! Nothing will destroy a code base like having its original designers leave; there has to be someone who can answer questions quickly. I've never known the salary for a job at the time I applied. I'm not even sure I had a ballpark. It does come up in interviews, since companies tend to want to know what you're expecting. But why should I care? That's what an offer is: if I don't like the offer, I don't have to accept. To attract good talent, you have to put your requirements right into your job posting. Ask for proof of work on open-source projects, for example; things that are hard to fake. A candidate that feels daunted by your application won't even make it to the interview.
- mgkimsal 16y ago
  "But why should I care?" If you know ahead of time they're only interviewing for a position that tops out at $35k and you don't want anything less than $60k, it's better to not waste everyone's time.
  - makecheck 16y ago
    If they're surprised that I expect more than they were planning to offer, they might also ask themselves why the difference would be so drastic. Maybe they compare their experience interviewing me, with others who seemed to want less, and make a connection. Or maybe that's wishful thinking. :)
    - mgkimsal 16y ago
      I think it's wishful thinking. Most companies (large and small) I've worked at or known about (via friends) have ranges for particular positions. It doesn't really matter what you want if you're vastly outside of what they've been allocated to pay. Yes, occasionally orgs will bend the position to fit you and modify pay accordingly, but it's rare enough to be the 'exception that proves the rule' when it does happen.
ary 16y ago
Let's also address the issue of interviewing. Most people can't tell a good programmer from a bad one (which is sad, really). There are also a ton of people out there that mistake higher percentile technical competence with software development competence. This recently got posted to HN and sums up the overall situation nicely: http://www.rethinkdb.com/blog/2010/06/will-the-real-programmers-please-stand-up/ http://www.rethinkdb.com/blog/2010/06/will-the-real-programm... Pay is but one factor, and resume (or job description) plus salary requirements aren't going to communicate what you really need to know. More than 90% of the jobs I've interviewed for had laughable interview processes. I've asked harder questions of my interviewers than they've ever asked of me. Most people just don't get it. A "competent" developer needs to be hard working, interested in your particular problem set, and like the work environment you've created. You need to dig in and find out what this person is really about. Even if they're competent they may not like your company, idea, or even you. These are things you, and they, need to find out before the hire. You/They aren't finding competence because you/they aren't looking for it.
rubinelli 16y ago
The best way to hire good programmers is by tapping into the network of the good programmers you already have. Everyone with a few years of experience has a short list of developers they'd like to work with again. EDIT: sponsoring hackathons may be another way of finding great programmers. And don't forget the colleges in your area: if you have an interesting piece of technology you can show off, you can present a talk and hopefully get a handful of resumes.
- kranner 16y ago
  Networking is a good strategy, but you have to temper it with interviewing and portfolios or it can turn into nepotism and a mushroom cloud of bad hires. Hackathons and design contests like topcoder.com are great for employers but really bad for contestants, most of whom are left with nothing. http://codeanthem.com http://codeanthem.com might turn into something of an inverted marketplace where employers can compete for the attention of good programmers. (I'm not associated with codeanthem.com)
- binaryfinery 16y ago
  Yes, and they all, without exception, have well paid, highly rewarding jobs. What would make them risk leaving that job?
mkn 16y ago
If you've been around yc for more than a month, you've doubtless seen a number of links to articles on motivation as it pertains to creative activities like software development. The consensus is pretty clear. Incentives hurt productivity in creative activities. This seems to have something to do with the relationship between creative effort and intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation. The prospect of an incentive seems to gum up the creative works. When you compound that with how difficult it is to recognize, let alone find good talent, especially with an interview process, you have a real conundrum. Real conundrums are rarely solved by naive one-dimensional solutions like "offer more money." An actual solution would have to solve the dual problems of finding good help and not spoiling it with overt incentives. Clearly there is a real problem here. Perversely, if you could solve it, you could make a lot of money!
- alttab 16y ago
  Hey, you rationalize your pay grade anyway you want buddy, but speak for yourself. I do what I do because I enjoy it, but I never take my eye off the bottom line - and either should you.
  - mkn 16y ago
    I don't see 1) how I was "rationalizing [my] pay grade," nor 2) what the remark about not taking one's eye off the bottom line has to do with anything. The idea that the OP put forward was that simply offering more will solve the problem of finding competent programmers. My comment was related to recent and compelling research into motivation in creative work. It seemed related. I'm not sure I mentioned my pay grade. Having one's eye on the bottom line is different from being subject to an incentive program, and different still from being competent. The latter is the more to the point. Anyone can be greedy. Even the incompetent. In fact, due to the Dunning-Kruger effect, it might even be suspected that the incompetent are likely to feel more entitled to a higher wage than the competent. I am not your buddy. However, I will offer the following friendly advice: You might enjoy the level of discourse on Reddit or Digg more than that on YC.
  - tsally 16y ago
    Next time you decide to be an asshole you should probably construct a proper English sentence.
ChRoss 16y ago
"Rare commodities are expensive." I do agree on this one. However, money is not always the primary motivation/reason for people to join you. My friend once told me about how he asked his team, what is the reason for them to join a company. From tens of reasons, they finally come out with two only: FUN and TEAM.
- kjksf 16y ago
  The problem is that when you interview you can't really judge those. At best during interview you meet a few team members for an hour each and maybe another hour during team lunch and everyone (including you) puts their best foot forward. There's no way to tell if they'll be a great team to work with or a daily nightmare. The same goes for fun: rarely you know exactly what you'll be doing or how interesting it'll be. The thing about money is that easy to compare. If you have 2 offers from companies that are both startups, both well funded with seemingly great people and interesting problems to solve, it's very compelling to decide based on salary, because all other aspects are hard to compare and judge before you spend a few months working at a company.
  - jshen 16y ago
    "the problem is that when you interview you can't really judge those" this is a real challenge. I'm trying to get better at judging if a company is good to work for, but so far it still feels like a crapshoot. Of course, we often cheat and go to places where we already know someone :)
    - ChRoss 16y ago
      well, it applies to everywhere I guess, you just gamble it. I myself still in quest to find 'good' one (but I'm not a job hopper :))
Towle_ 16y ago
A relative of mine works as a database administrator making $120k/year and lacks fluency in HTML/CSS. By contrast, Google regularly comes under fire for underpaying their employees, and their average employees are more talented than those of perhaps any other large corporation in the world. It's not about money.
- hello_moto 16y ago
  I'd take DBA if that would be the last job I ever had (leading to retirement). Otherwise it might be a career killer. I'd take Google job if I'm fresh out of college for the sake of experience so I can get better position, salary, and wide-range of opportunities in the future. But check this out: if there's a better place than Google and they pay better, do you not expecting Google's employees to jump ship? (for example, Facebook pays more or Facebook has a good potential to make yourself to become a millionaire) These 3 examples are strategy to position yourself for a better future. A better future usually involves better position and/or compensation. Sometime it's not about money, but it's about power. Power to tell fellow developers that they're not that good so they have to do TDD, code-review, and help QA to test their own shit. Yes, it's not _entirely_ about money, but at the end of the day, mostly it is about money, especially for people who can accept other negatives.
- ww520 16y ago
  Branding has value, which is factored into the total compensation.
ojbyrne 16y ago
I have a simple theory. Most managers are still educated according to Taylor's Scientific Theory of Management, where the managers are more intelligent than the "factors of production," and their role is to "scientifically" direct their work so that they create additional value (which is multiplied by how many workers they have reporting to them). Their salaries reflect that model, and thus is proportional to the salaries of their direct reports times the number of direct reports they have. This is well-ingrained in the workplace, and in society. Unfortunately programming is really the first discipline where the primary determinant of the "factor's" productivity is not the manager's skill but actually the intelligence of each individual. There's huge conflicts created, not just about salaries, but job roles, and really the structure of society (which is really built around an educated managerial class overseeing (and living apart from) a less educated working class. The primary issue with paying programmers more is that they're butting up against those managerial salaries and life roles. Programming doesn't fit Taylor's theory. To change that isn't just about micro changes in business, it's about macro-changes in society.
- mikemainguy 16y ago
  That's silly, physicians, mechanics, lawyers, and many other skilled tradesmen are just like programmers. The problem is that many folks see programmers as somehow different than these folks.
  - vishaldpatel 16y ago
    Docs, mechanics, skilled tradesmen, lawyers,...hell even accountants have location knowledge and expertise that is location specific. - You won't drive your car cross country to a cheaper mechanic. - You won't get a lawyer from India to represent you in America. - You don't go to a doctor... well thats changing isn't it? Too bad doc education still costs so damn much in America. Its about group supply and demand. Don't forget that homes cost and arm and a leg and that a programmer in a particular neighborhood should be able to afford a home in that neighborhood and should charge accordingly.
    - deleted 16y ago
mikemainguy 16y ago
But there's a perverse side to this. By offering MORE compensation, it would seem likely that MORE unqualified people will apply. For your logic to work, we'd need to show that making a skill more expensive would automatically cause inept people to stop applying. If that doesn't hold true, you could be throwing away 999 out of 1000 candidates instead of 199 out of 200.
- mkramlich 16y ago
  That's what I concluded too! If you raise industry standard average pay it's just going to attract even more incompetent people and therefore the flood of applications from non-programmers will increase.
- binaryfinery 16y ago
  Actually you'd be throwing away <=998 of 1000 instead of 199 out of 200: we're proposing that the net result would be more hires. We don't have to show that it would make inept people stop applying. We just have to be able to get better at weeding out the rubbish ones - i.e. in less time, lower cost.
brown9-2 16y ago
How many job postings even mention salary beyond "salary commensurate with experience"? We must be seeing different types of postings.
- scumola 16y ago
  Job postings have salary ranges. If I have 80 years of experience and ask for $500k/yr salary, I'm not going to get it.
  - mkramlich 16y ago
    The whole "years of experience in X" thing is horribly broken and ridiculous. Because there isn't a uniform way of measuring it. It's apples-to-oranges with any one else's way of measuring it, even if you yourself were consistent within your own system. Plus every job is different. Plus, in software you can be programming for many years in a language but never at a day job -- only on home projects or (more recently) open source projects, and yet this experience wouldn't count in some people's eyes. Plus there's the whole multi-variable thing where someone with say 2 years of Ruby preceded by 6 years of Java is generally going to be a more experienced/senior programmer than someone who has 4 years of Ruby ONLY (nothing before that) -- but each person is "farther along" experience-wise depending on your particular crazy-ass assumptions about measuring experience. It's an utter joke.
    - blasdel 16y ago
      It's not a joke — they're just using it for a completely different purpose. It's illegal to filter applicants based on age, but you can require '15 years experience with enterprise java'
    - kmak 16y ago
      I think it's just an easy way to justify hiring -- if the hire turns out to be awful, you can say, "hey, he/she had 10 years of experience!"
kjksf 16y ago
There are 2 problems with your proposed solution. a) Salary is rarely disclosed in a job posting. Salary negotiations usually happen after a candidate was interviewed and deemed worth hiring. b) Even if you were to disclose a salary in a job post, an unusually high salary might make it easier to find a qualified programmer (because more people will apply) but it is not likely to increase an average quality of submitted resume, so you'll still have to look at 200 resumes to find 1 good candidate.
- ww520 16y ago
  I believe Rethinkdb did post their salary range and stock option at one point.
  - JoachimSchipper 16y ago
    Yes, at http://rethinkdb.com/jobs/ http://rethinkdb.com/jobs/. It's quite public.
xenophanes 16y ago
How exactly does offering a higher salary prevent hordes of unqualified candidates from applying?
- CyberFonic 16y ago
  It doesn't, that's why you need to have good hiring selection processes in place. But paying the good programmers you already have a much higher salary and looking after them well will deter them from jumping ship.
- cheald 16y ago
  Why are you concerned about who applies? Wouldn't you be more concerned that offering a low salary is going to have the same hordes of unqualifieds applying, without the benefit of the actually qualified people applying as well?
coffeemug 16y ago
I suppose this refers to us (and our Will the real programmers please stand up post). If it doesn't, excuse our self-centeredness and kindly disregard this message. Our salary structure is designed to select for exactly the type of people we want to attract - the kinds of people that will go through walls to bend the world to their will, for some deeply ingrained reason unknown to anyone but them. For people like that, we pay an incredibly high salary that they're unlikely to find anywhere else (2.25% of everyone's contribution on the high end). If you're the type of person who wants to change the world and have a shot of building a one billion dollar business while doing it, you're unlikely to find a higher compensation anywhere other than choosing to start your own business. If you're interested in having a stable, $200K job, RethinkDB is not for you. Neither of these choices is better or worse, simply different. It's a question of temperament. We weren't complaining, we were working to recruit great programmers who are driven to change the world. This is exactly what the post accomplished.
- waterlesscloud 16y ago
  ..and yet you aren't attracting the people you want. Hmmmm.
  - coffeemug 16y ago
    Of course we are. We just need more :)
    - binaryfinery 16y ago
      So you've found all the ones who have low expenses. Well done. I have a family, a mortgage (or high rent), extremely expensive car insurance, and a shit-ton of experience. I love programming no less than I did when I was 10. If you would like to hire me, and people like me, you will need to offer more money. But if your business can handle being understaffed, by all means keep offering the same salary. $125k to work in Silicon Valley? Will that even cover my rent? I used to work in Palo Alto - shared a 1 bedroom apartment - took turns on the couch. It was fun, when I was straight out of college.
- 16y ago
jurjenh 16y ago
I don't know if it would work, but has anyone tried or heard of a job posting with a "name your price" salary? Similar to the "scariest pricing idea" that was on HN a while ago (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1279660 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1279660). I'm not sure if this would improve the S/N ratio or make the whole thing more complicated - my idea of what I'm worth is probably quite different to someone else.
- pyre 16y ago
  Then problem becomes one of differentiating between the people over-value themselves, the people that under-value themselves, and the people that correctly value themselves...
faitswulff 16y ago
Well how about the other side...how do employers take mediocre to crappy programmers and teach them to shine?
- Enlightenment 16y ago
  Beavis...no matter how much you shine a turd...it is still a turd! fire them!
- fsniper 16y ago
  This never happens. 1. Employers do not have the incentive and time to educate employees in the first place. 2. Employees, most of the mediocre ones, do not want to learn more, do more or work more. Because, the process is always about practicing and working.
JeffJenkins 16y ago
My impression is that most programming jobs don't give a salary range in the job description. If they do include one, the Dunning–Kruger effect[1] could make the more qualified people who are humble think they weren't qualified and they could decide to skip on the job. If Salary.com tells me that the 75th percentile for my general qualifications in my area is 80k, I'm not going to believe that I'm qualified for a job paying 120k. My mind would resolve that discrepancy in favour of the job requiring something I don't have, not just they employer's willingness to pay well. This may even be true if they say why the salary is so high [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
noonespecial 16y ago
The same thing is (and has been) happening with nursing. They complain endlessly about the "nursing shortage" unable to figure out why people might be unwilling to do a hard job for long hours requiring extra education and incurring outsized liabilities for extremely low pay. The really bad news is its starting to catch up with many doctors as well.
- huhtenberg 16y ago
  > for extremely low pay Not sure where you are from, but here in Canada nurses lead very cushy lives. Salaries of 80 to 120K are not uncommon, and that's with 4 weeks of vacation, 1 day in / 3 days out schedule, etc.
  - chrisa 16y ago
    Here's a link to information about base pay for nurses in the US (2006). It actually mentions the nursing "shortage" at the top: http://www.allied-physicians.com/salary-surveys/nursing/ http://www.allied-physicians.com/salary-surveys/nursing/
    - Alex63 16y ago
      Thanks for the link! Good to see supporting evidence.
    - earl 16y ago
      2006 and 2010 are a world apart economically
    - deleted 16y ago
      [deleted]
  - Alex63 16y ago
    As the spouse of a former Canadian nurse, and friend of others, I think you might be stretching the definition of cushy. Average salary for an RN in Canada a couple of years ago was about $32/hour. You probably would clear $80K if you were a full time nurse, because of all the mandatory overtime. If being an RN was cushy, I think there'd be less of a shortage of working nurses in Canada.
binaryfinery 16y ago
Managers assume that because one good programmer will do the job for $100k that all good programmers will. Many here point out that good programmers will generally find a job that challenges them, and that pays them enough to live. They then conclude that if $100k fills one seat, then $100k is the right price. This is totally wrong, and the key is "enough to live". I love programming as much as I did when I was 10. My expenses, however, are now somewhat higher than when I was 10. I have a wife, two kids, will not live in a small house, have very expensive car insurance, and I road-race big cars, hard on tires. If you want to hire me, it will cost a lot more than $100k. Then there is the issue of mobility. Programmers tend to be loyal. They tend to be realists. If I make X here, and I know here to be fun, why would I risk moving for 1.1X, or even 1.5X? What you have a reversible reaction in equilibrium. You want to bind seats to programmers. Programmers will bind to a seat for a while. But not all programmers will bind for the same price. Sure you can fill a seat for $100k. You might be able to fill a seat for $20k - but you'll have to wait a loooong time. If you want to fill all your seats, you're going to have to appeal to the largest possible pool of good programmers, and some of us need more money. Even if you ignore the fact that those of us with higher expenses have more experience, the simple math of the equilibrium reaction tells you that if you want to fill more seats, you have to have a bigger pool. Even if we are of no more value than the 20 year old, the question is: Are 5 programmers better than 4 for your business? Whether or not that makes economic sense for your business is up to you. So yes RethinkDB, $125k for an Engineer III will get you some hires, but are you going to insist that this is the right price, even if it means that you have empty seats? What is your opportunity cost? It may be the right decision. But it may not.
- starkfist 16y ago
  They have $1.2 million dollars, they can't pay more. $125K is a huge pre series-a salary.
  - binaryfinery 16y ago
    They're also offering stock of course, and it actually looks interesting :-) Plus they may not be so time sensitive: 4 programmers for 10 months vs 5 programmers for 8 months (yes I know). But if its $125k vs $150k will that $25k break the bank? Maybe. Maybe not.
gersh 16y ago
I think you can hire good programmers for cheap, but the tricky part is retaining them. Programmers can be hired for relatively low-wages, but then they should raises every few months. Turnover can be really expensive, and it often isn't factored in. Further, maintenance work may not help the programmers develop marketable skills, so they strong incentive to quit.
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jseliger 16y ago
The same problem happens in grant writing, my family's field, to the point that I wrote a longish blog post on the subject: http://blog.seliger.com/2008/08/08/tilting-at-windmills-why-there-is-no-free-grant-writing-lunch-and-you-wont-find-writers-for-nothing http://blog.seliger.com/2008/08/08/tilting-at-windmills-why-... . My guess is that it happens in many others too, and people who are smart eventually realize they'll have to pay for quality or accept lower quality. Sometimes bargains can probably be found, but they're probably rare and difficult and don't last very long. Getting really good grant writers (like us) is going to cost at least $100 an hour, and probably more like $125 – 200. The same is, as far as I can tell, true of web consultants. Good lawyers? $300/hour. Escorts? Probably also $300 in most of the country. If you don't realize how much things and services costs, you'll end up with sub-par quality, or you'll pay, and/or you'll complain. A lot of people do the latter. I wouldn't expect it to stop.
dirtyaura 16y ago
I feel that good/great programmers ask too little. Because there's order of magnitude of variance in skill sets and productivity, there should be much more variance in salaries. In Finland, if you leave out top 0.5%, the variance is between 2000€-5000€. And most of it settles around 3000-4000€. Finland is very eqalitarian society when it comes to salaries and thus that has to be taken into account. But still. 2.5 is not much, think how much variance there is in salaries of managers, lawyers, doctors. How's it in States, what are the typical salaries for good or great programmers vs. below-average progammers? Leave out top 0.5% - i.e. rare individuals with specialized skill sets in e.g. bank security.
- tl 16y ago
  Different parts of the US have such large variances in the cost of living that it's hard to give a meaningful answer (i.e. non-skilled labor here has greater variance than that).
  - dirtyaura 16y ago
    How about e.g. in Bay Area? What's a typical range for skilled programmer and what a horrible coder can earn while hiding inside some clueless big co?
- earl 16y ago
  The knowledge that there is huge variance in productivity level of programmers is kind of useless, because we mostly lack the ability to reliably measure true productivity. Similar to advertising: "I know I waste half of my advertising dollars...I just wish I knew which half." You can really only pay amazing devs more if you can figure out which devs are the amazing ones.
RiderOfGiraffes 16y ago
Having tried this approach I can tell you that offering more money results in perhaps a doubling of the number of barely competent programmers, a ten-fold increase in the number of completely clueless, and no apparent increase in the number of people we'd actually want. My results are not statistically valid, I've only gone through the hiring cycle five times, but my impression from actually trying it is that salary is not what it's about. Dan Pink said it well: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=782171 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=782171 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1357390 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1357390 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1439939 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1439939 The problem isn't attracting candidates, it's getting the candidates to see your job opening, to understand that it's a great place to work, and then filtering out the clueless.
- jasonlotito 16y ago
  > The problem isn't attracting candidates, it's getting the candidates to see your job opening, to understand that it's a great place to work, and then filtering out the clueless. And then offering them enough money so they don't have to worry about it. Because, I'm sorry to say, minimum wage isn't going to cut it.
- binaryfinery 16y ago
  2ND VIDEO: 4m50s: "IF YOU DONT PAY PEOPLE ENOUGH, PEOPLE WONT BE MOTIVATED." "THE BEST USE OF MONEY IS TO PAY PEOPLE ENOUGH TO TAKE THE ISSUE OF MONEY OFF THE TABLE". "ONCE YOU DO THAT THERE ARE THREE FACTORS THAT LEAD TO BETTER PERFORMANCE..." Once you do that. Clear? Once you pay people enough to take the issue of money off the table. This is your link dammit. For me, with a wife, two kids, and a car racing habit, that "enough" is a lot higher than it is for a 20yo student. Its about $130k in fact. As for your results, as you say: "not statistically valid". That actually means something.
BrandonM 16y ago
What about those Hacker News members who are looking for jobs? Is there a good resource of tech positions available? Personally, I'd love to see a nicely-indexed list of jobs. Things like location, work environment, remote working arrangements, languages used, expected number of hours worked, typical responsibilities, schedule flexibility, vacation possibilities, who I'd be working with, degree of autonomy, level of recognition for work, perks and benefits, etc. are all factors that go into liking a job. And that's not even mentioning money. Personally, I'd love to start a job working remotely at $40/hour for 20 hours a week or so. Once it was determined that I'm a good fit, I'd be willing to relocate to a lot of different places (e.g., Baltimore, Chicago, Denver, Atlanta, New York, pretty much anywhere warm and coastal). I think the question isn't so much why is it so hard to find the right employee or job. The real questions are: What are the actual job requirements? I don't mean traditional notions of what a reasonable work week are. I mean what do you truly need? It might be possible to get a rock star developer working for you at a cost of $40K per year, if you can eschew the standard notion of a 2000-2500 hour per year commitment. If you're a potential employee, what do you really want from the job? Focusing on the money is not the answer. Make sure that what you'll be doing, who you'll be working with, and where and when you're working all fit well with your personality and work habits. And why is it so hard to match jobs and people up? Is there a decent resource anywhere that I could use to actually narrow down job opening according to a slew of criteria? In a high-demand field, doesn't it make sense for the potential workers to post what they want in a job, and have the jobs bend to that? Maybe I'll make a submission along those lines...
c00p3r 16y ago
That was solved years ago. Just consider how a professional soccer team (including the double) are managed and paid. ^_^ hint: it is not just a performance and productivity, its also morale, influence and starness factors. And it works.
Enlightenment 16y ago
Some HR departments need a major overhaul. I've interviewed at some manufacturing companies that have large numbers of blue collar workers and small numbers of engineers, yet the moronic HR department tries to run the engineers through a similar hiring mentality as the blue collar workers. Why the fck do I need to fill out a fcking job application that is targeted with lots of blue collar type questions...OMG! Every so often, upper management needs to hire some specialist to anonymously go through the hiring process to determine how good or bad their HR department is doing!
Vivtek 16y ago
Looking at a lot of the posts on here, it seems that the bar to finding good programming staff is (1) finding good programmers and allowing them to find you and (2) weeding out the chaff. Furthermore, it seems that weeding out the chaff is something probably everybody could agree on - that is, what would be nice is some kind of informal certification process or standard test. Nothing like an AMA board certification or the attorney's bar in terms of formality and obligatory nature, but perhaps some kind of hoops to jump through. Perhaps some kind of list of programming tests and a way to administer them?
- Sukotto 16y ago
  There are a bunch of certifications already. They are either too simple or too narrow to be particularly useful for hiring purposes (imho). The best way I've seen to evaluate the ability of a programmer and their* fit at your company is to: 1) Ask them to program something simple in the language you expect them to use. 2) Present them with a problem your team recently faced and ask them to talk through how they would approach finding a solution. 3) Ask them about things that relate to your startup/corporate culture (eg. if you're a bunch of practical jokers, ask them about practical jokes they've done or been victim to) 4) Ask them what part of your product sucks the worst. What specific thing would they do to improve it? Why would that be an improvement? 5) Have all your short-list people meet and spend some time together. In a followup interview, ask each about their opinions of the others. * I hate to use "they" and "their" as a gender-neutral, singular pronoun but haven't really found anything better :-(
chrisbennet 16y ago
Employers: It's not about pay it's about value. I agree with the original poster to the extent that I see some employers trying to get a "deal" on a great programmer without compensating the lower pay with great work, meaningful equity, or good work/life balance. You've seen the job posting by Big Dumb Company that wants a "rock start programmer" but has strict policies that won't let them pay rock start salaries or give more than 2 weeks vacation their first year, telecommute, etc. Then there are the small guys that want you work for peanuts in exchange for worthless stock options i.e. they want you to take $30K less pay per year and if they ever have a liquidity event your diluted stock would be less than that $30K you per year you gave up. If they fail (and they usually do) you'll get squat.
ianloic 16y ago
Hiring managers don't list a salary. If they do they're looking to hire really junior engineers who probably can't write a linked list reversal program anyway. In my 13 years working at startups I've never applied for a job that listed a salary range. Ultimately, within reason, good programmers are worth whatever you have to pay them and bad programmers aren't worth what you pay them. There are way more bad programmers than good programmers and money isn't the way to attract the good ones. You have to attract them with interesting problems and a great work environment. If they're there for the money then they're probably no good anyway.
- sdfx 16y ago
  Different people are attracted by different things. For one it's the money, for others the environment, culture or challenges. But usually it's a combination of all of these factors. You can't just disregard money as an influencing factor in the decision making process of a potential employee. After all, you wouldn't be working for free. Sure, there is always the exception to the rule - the person that isn't interested in money at all. But in general money is a pretty good incentive for doing something. The salary that a company offers might not be listed in a job offering, but the culture and many other factors are neither. And even though they are not listed you probably heard of companies with a great culture etc. Don't you think the same is true for salaries?
r3570r3 16y ago
Most companies have highly stupid standards and requirements. Most of them prefer older platforms and frameworks just because their customers require older versions. Top notch enterprise solutions are still using IE6 to check compatibility of their products. That gives them all the possible negative Karma. On the other hand, innovative tech giants like Google are using their closed proprietary technologies, which is not doing the world any good. MS actually seems to be the better one here allowing people to use their Visual Studio, making a product out of it. Every language has its weaknesses. A developer proficient in programmer should not stick to a company for his development works and venture off privately. That will create the likes of DuckDuckGo and all the good that is out there changing the way we look at the tech world right now.
terra_t 16y ago
When it comes to wall street bankers, there seems to be a consensus that money is the only thing that's going to bring in good talent. When it comes to programmers, the consensus seems to be the opposite. I mean, they ought to be motivated by having a refrigerator full of Red Bull or being able to bring their dogs to work -- I mean, the Linux kernel got developed by people who work for free... Why do we need to pay people anything at all to develop applications for our intranet? Although you'll find programmers with very different stories, I think that we'd see a healthier IT ecosystem if software people got more pay and respect (a friend of mine and myself both got offered a particular job... for him this was a big step up in pay and benefits, and for me it would have been a step down -- I've seen the compensation of programming jobs where people do comparable work vary by more than a factor of two.) I think the "equity culture" is often part of the problem. There are startups in my town that pay $10 /hour, no benefits + equity (which might be worth something, otherwise not.) I also interviewed at a place where people were starting a new job shop; they seemed like a nice bunch of folks, they had all the trappings of "good management" (the CEO was a freshly minted MBA from an Ivy League school) but the biz plan didn't make a lot of sense to be and they were talking low base pay + some equity... This is a frickin' job shop... The kind of place where you might get $50,000 worth of equity and really be able to cash it out for $40,000 if you're insanely lucky. That said, the interview question they asked me was the best interview question I'd ever been asked. They asked me to estimate a project they'd done for a client. I was smart enough to ask questions rather than blurt out a quick answer ... I estimated about 160 hours for the project, and they told me it really took 200. That's not far off for a "seat of the pants" estimate, but driving home I thought... These guys probably charge $150/hr to clients; their client spend $30k for a really crappy intranet app that tortures end users... they "need" it for regulatory compliance, but there's no way that this app creates $30k worth of value. For christsake they wasted 40 hours dealing with a deadbeat D.B.A.! So that got me thinking about where my career was going and about software economics. For instance, if you want to get paid $150k a year, that money has to come from somewhere. Unfortunately, the shortest path to that is to get in a position where you can collect that as a rent, but assuming you're (i) the average unlucky joe, and (ii) somebody who wants to make a contribution, you need to be in a place where you're (a) creating > $150k a year in value and (b) in a position (politically) to get a good chunk of that pie. Marx will tell you to work on (b) and that makes some sense, but I'll tell you from experience that it's a much better life to make $X for your boss and get paid $X/2 and it is to make $X for your boss and get paid $2X. Practically, Job Shop work tends to be pretty marginal; the usual business model is to underquote work, lose money, but make it up in volume. It can be a nice biz if you've got sugar daddy customers who do stuff on a T&M basis, but otherwise job shops that look really profitable and productive today are frequently gone in a decade. Now, you can make a lot more for your employer, potentially, if you're making a software product [or developing a SaaS-y service these days] but it's not at all unusual to put a man-decade into a product, spend $100K trying to sell it, and end up with $20K of revenue. "Getting paid more" is therefore a matter of (a) making more value, and (b) getting a bigger piece of the pie. (a) interests me more these days -- I find it disturbing how much it costs to create business software and how bad the quality is usually is.
wake_up_sticky 16y ago
Obviously I worded some things wrong in my original submission. I realize that offering a (much) higher salary won't necessarily (or even probably) prevent a "horde of unqualified candidates" from applying. What I meant was that if a hiring manager places an ad which fails to attract an adequate number of qualified candidates--the ratio between qualified and unqualified candidates being of secondary importance--he would have to be incompetent not to offer a better salary the next time around. Also, the main point of the submission wasn't that programmers ought to be paid more. It was that I find it offensive when people claim that there are no good programmers out there but don't even seem to consider offering higher salaries. I'm reminded of the woman who is asked out five times a week by reasonably good-looking men of average social status, rejects them all out of hand, and then laments, "There are no men out there!" Actually, this is worse. The woman may not be able to alter her personality or appearance enough to attract the caliber of man she's interested in; but companies can always offer higher salaries.
lessthanideal 16y ago
Money is obviously part of it, but now the whole picture. The difficulty in finding programmers that are gifted is not that you are competing with other companies, it's that you are competing with the programmer taking his ability and resulting wares directly to the consumer. Between startups and lifestyle businesses the lone programmer has a lot of options that other professions don't necessarily have (nurses, for example). You have to keep in mind that you are competing with the excitement and potential earnings of running your own show.
winternett 16y ago
I am tired of being offered $120k for a 3month contract without things like parking, vacation, and health benefits. I am lucky to be employed full time currently. I always ignore recruiter calls of that kind because what it really means is $30k for 3 months, which creates a "mercenary" job environment out of what should really be a more full time/stable developer job environment. I can do that by marketing my own skills. Employers need to end the short-term hiring practices, they're artificially boosting the economic outlook and creating shoddy work that is a piecemeal result of several developers that work on DEV projects temporarily.
Rickasaurus 16y ago
As a highly skilled programmer, what I really want is a fair piece of the pie percentage wise. Even a high salary for the field compares little to the prospect of making exponentially more. Also, nothing motivates like having the product of your work bring you money or prestige directly. Because I'm currently only a few years out of school, no one would come close to paying me what I really feel I deserve. Even in the best case, the long term for a programmer doesn't look all that great. This is an extremely ageist industry. For this reason in my off hours I've been working on trying to increase my prestige through writing books, blogging, and speaking at events. Eventually, I hope this helps me either find a startup with excellent prospects or allows me to charge large amounts to existing companies for consulting. I can't see doing this with a family though. It's a difficult road either way.

227 points by wake_up_sticky 16y ago

Russelldb 16y ago

My theory on this is that it is a market for lemons. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons Solve that problem to solve this one.

silverlake 16y ago
Extend the idea of "lemon laws" to hiring. Every new hire has a 3 month try-out period (as a contractor?) where they will be fired if it doesn't work out. If you make this point forcefully during the interview, some low-quality applicants will seek safety elsewhere rather than risk losing their job, while high quality applicants won't be deterred.

amock 16y ago

How will offering a higher salary deter less qualified people? It seems like it will attract more of all kinds of programmers.

staunch 16y ago
It should improve the ratio though.
- amock 16y ago
  Maybe, maybe not. I think a better way to filter people would be something like Justin.tv or Facebook does where they have applicants write code as part of the application. I don't have any experience with hiring so i don't have any real data, but I'd love to know how effective those are.
  - tkahnoski 16y ago
    Company I work for issues a basic data structures test to be completed in 1 hour for all resumes worth their paper (about 10 to 15 out of 100 candidates). The test boils down to 'fill in these two functions'. About 20% finish both functions correctly in an hour (I still had an infinite recursion at the 1 hour mark and submitted a correct entry 10 minutes later). In conjunction with a phone interview we typically only have an actual sitdown with 2 to 4 candidates out of the initial pool of 100. We recruit out of college so resumes get handed in like candy, but this process has effectively helped us find candidates that are at least capable of learning the monolithic code base and getting fully up and running in a few months. Our company still has an absolute terrible code base. It is very feasible to nuke skilled programmers once you have them.
    - hello_moto 16y ago
      Upvote for being very honest. Isn't this what happened throughout the industry? (with a very few exceptions). This is exactly what makes my belief about "great programmers" just went out of the window: no matter how great an individual is, the fact that plenty software houses have terrible code base show something else. People can blame the businesses, the time-to-market, the deadline or whatnot and I believe you guys. But at the same time, are you being fair toward your profession at the same time? If great programmers do exist, I'm expecting them to change these ugly code bases everywhere to the point where 50% of any companies out there would have good code base (and that includes unit-tests)
      - mikecotton 16y ago
        Unless management has made the decision to invest in a solid-wall backstop of functional tests, then no amount of great programmers can clean up a codebase. I've known and learned from some of the best coders alive, and none of them would wade into a known-good codebase that they didn't have solid experience with or responsibility for and start refactoring. Code that they were on the hook for? Open season. Code that someone else was going to get the call on at 3 a.m.? Wouldn't touch it with a ten-foot pole. Given that, I wouldn't expect '50% of any companies' to be good. "If it ain't broke..." is really good advice about 95% of the time. If you're 50-100% overbooked, you don't screw with other peoples' code just to try to make things better around the office.
vaksel 16y ago
I'd imagine the incompetent ones wouldn't bother applying to jobs that are "way out of their league". If you are "sucky" you might still apply for a $60K job, thinking that you might slide through. But you wouldn't bother applying to a $100K job, thinking that there'd be way more competent people applying so it'd be a waste of time
- starkfist 16y ago
  I'd imagine the incompetent ones wouldn't bother applying to jobs that are "way out of their league". Never done hiring before, eh?
- DomesticMouse 16y ago
  You'd imagine wrong, if my past experience is anything to go by.
- dedward 16y ago
  You'd imagine that, but you'd be wrong - there are a great many technical employees who don't realize they are way out of their league and will apply anyway.
  - danudey 16y ago
    "Hey, I've got 'two years of experience with .NET'! I remember, because it was my birthday last week and on my birthday two years ago I wrote a little digital clock app from a tutorial I found in a magazine. Man, who ever thought ten minutes in Notepad would net me a $100k job! I'm totally going to apply, and when I get this job I'm never working at another Burger King again!"
    - kranner 16y ago
      Upvote for satire!
      - kranner 16y ago
        I'm curious about why this was downvoted. Is "upvote for x" too reddit-y?
timr 16y ago
"How will offering a higher salary deter less qualified people?" You've got it exactly backwards: it's not intended to deter the unqualified, it's meant to attract the qualified. And yes, high salaries do tend to attract good people. Maybe not exclusively, but it's an important factor. So, if the complaint is that "there are no good programmers" (and we assume that your screening process isn't totally arbitrary), there's a pretty good bet that you're not attracting good programmers from the places where they currently work. High salaries are a good way to do that.
- scott_s 16y ago
  You may attract more qualified people, but the number of unqualified people may increase as well. Put another way, you may get more qualified people in absolute numbers, but the signal-to-noise ratio could go up, too.
  - timr 16y ago
    "You may attract more qualified people, but the number of unqualified people may increase as well." ...which is why you have a screening process. When people are complaining that there are no good programmers (and this is a common complaint on HN; it's not just a straw man), there's at least one of two things going on: 1) Their screening process sucks. 2) They aren't attracting good programmers. High salaries help with #2.
    - el_chapitan 16y ago
      Hopefully higher salaries are also going to help keeping your existing programmers, which will alleviate the need to go and get more programmers. Also, if you have a stellar programmer in an interview, they tend to stick out more than their non stellar counterparts.
    - kranner 16y ago
      I'm trying to bring up an automated screening service at http://codeboff.in/ http://codeboff.in/ (self-promo alert) because I think we need way more of these, especially being the sort of people who could make them. Edit: by 'we' I meant 'we as programmers'.

j_baker 16y ago

You have to understand: there's more to hiring programmers than paying lots of money. If that were the case, we wouldn't have had a dot-com bust and software companies would be dominated by MBAs. That's the hard part of hiring programmers. How do you incentivize the good ones to work for you? If you have a solution to that problem, I suspect you'll be a very much in-demand person.

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
chime 16y ago
> How do you incentivize the good ones to work for you? If you have a solution to that problem, I suspect you'll be a very much in-demand person. Bonuses, perks, and congrats on jobs well-done. If I spend 40 hours between Dec 31 and Jan 2 writing up a new wireless barcoding system because the powers that be decided at the last minute to begin the new year with a different process for warehousing, I better get a damn bonus, at least 1.5 x 40 hours of my rate. You know what I got upon successful completion of my last-minute project? "chime, if you had originally developed a flexible enough system to accommodate changing of bin/zone locations, you wouldn't have had to work in the last minute." I resigned from that job.
- ryanbigg 16y ago
  As a programmer bonus and perks are definitely incentives, but a nice steady "I love your work" kind of vibe is a great way to keep me in my job.
  - jquery 16y ago
    > "I love your work" Nothing says "I love your work" more truthfully than a bonus or a raise.
    - Loic 16y ago
      Where have you been working for the past few years? A bonus you get it twice a year, a boss respecting your work and saying thank you, you have it every single day. If you are paid correctly, you should not even need a bonus but you cannot go long without respect from your boss and peers. By the way, it is proved by countless experience that once salary is good enough, it is disconnected from happiness at work. Good pay and respect will bring you way further than good pay, bonus and "you are my slave".

jeffepp 16y ago

In software development, like most anything else, you really get what you pay for. Being a non-technical co-founder, I did learn this the hard way a few times. I totally agree that having a competent, hardworking and passionate programmer is probably the most important part of a startup.

mikemainguy 16y ago
"In looking for people to hire, you look for three qualities: integrity, intelligence, and energy. And if they don't have the first, the other two will kill you." — Warren Buffet CEO, Berkshire Hathaway My Buffet said it best IMHO... I've worked with some competent, hardworking, and passionate with no integrity who have really caused a lot of problems.

damoncali 16y ago

I think you have it exactly backwards. The best programmers I know seem to be indifferent to cash. They work on the most interesting project they can find that pays them enough to live. Hiring people like that is really tough.

jasonlotito 16y ago
> The best programmers I know seem to be indifferent to cash. No, they do care about cash. How do I know? >They work on the most interesting project they can find that pays them enough to live. There. That's why. If they weren't making enough money to meet their needs, they'd be looking to trade up. Money isn't the only answer. Everyone likes to talk about how money isn't the solution. I'm pretty sure every one is making a bit more than minimum wage or aren't looking to get compensated in some other way in the future.
- damoncali 16y ago
  Yes, but offering more money to someone who feels like they already make enough is amazingly ineffective. My point is that, in my experience, great programmers place a much higher value on doing interesting work than they put on making more money.
  - jasonlotito 16y ago
    > Yes, but offering more money to someone who feels like they already make enough is amazingly ineffective. Which is completely besides the point. Listen, I understand that point of view. I agree with it. I live it. > My point is that, in my experience, great programmers place a much higher value on doing interesting work than they put on making more money. Only after they have enough money to not have to worry about it. Offering programmers minimum wage isn't going to entice them from their 6-figure job, even if the work is challenging and fun. Most likely their 6-figure job is already exciting and fun enough.
    - mavelikara 16y ago

makecheck 16y ago

Money doesn't always attract people to a job. The purpose of good pay is to keep people from leaving! Nothing will destroy a code base like having its original designers leave; there has to be someone who can answer questions quickly. I've never known the salary for a job at the time I applied. I'm not even sure I had a ballpark. It does come up in interviews, since companies tend to want to know what you're expecting. But why should I care? That's what an offer is: if I don't like the offer, I don't have to accept. To attract good talent, you have to put your requirements right into your job posting. Ask for proof of work on open-source projects, for example; things that are hard to fake. A candidate that feels daunted by your application won't even make it to the interview.

mgkimsal 16y ago
"But why should I care?" If you know ahead of time they're only interviewing for a position that tops out at $35k and you don't want anything less than $60k, it's better to not waste everyone's time.
- makecheck 16y ago
  If they're surprised that I expect more than they were planning to offer, they might also ask themselves why the difference would be so drastic. Maybe they compare their experience interviewing me, with others who seemed to want less, and make a connection. Or maybe that's wishful thinking. :)
  - mgkimsal 16y ago
    I think it's wishful thinking. Most companies (large and small) I've worked at or known about (via friends) have ranges for particular positions. It doesn't really matter what you want if you're vastly outside of what they've been allocated to pay. Yes, occasionally orgs will bend the position to fit you and modify pay accordingly, but it's rare enough to be the 'exception that proves the rule' when it does happen.

ary 16y ago

Let's also address the issue of interviewing. Most people can't tell a good programmer from a bad one (which is sad, really). There are also a ton of people out there that mistake higher percentile technical competence with software development competence. This recently got posted to HN and sums up the overall situation nicely: http://www.rethinkdb.com/blog/2010/06/will-the-real-programmers-please-stand-up/ http://www.rethinkdb.com/blog/2010/06/will-the-real-programm... Pay is but one factor, and resume (or job description) plus salary requirements aren't going to communicate what you really need to know. More than 90% of the jobs I've interviewed for had laughable interview processes. I've asked harder questions of my interviewers than they've ever asked of me. Most people just don't get it. A "competent" developer needs to be hard working, interested in your particular problem set, and like the work environment you've created. You need to dig in and find out what this person is really about. Even if they're competent they may not like your company, idea, or even you. These are things you, and they, need to find out before the hire. You/They aren't finding competence because you/they aren't looking for it.

rubinelli 16y ago

The best way to hire good programmers is by tapping into the network of the good programmers you already have. Everyone with a few years of experience has a short list of developers they'd like to work with again. EDIT: sponsoring hackathons may be another way of finding great programmers. And don't forget the colleges in your area: if you have an interesting piece of technology you can show off, you can present a talk and hopefully get a handful of resumes.

kranner 16y ago
Networking is a good strategy, but you have to temper it with interviewing and portfolios or it can turn into nepotism and a mushroom cloud of bad hires. Hackathons and design contests like topcoder.com are great for employers but really bad for contestants, most of whom are left with nothing. http://codeanthem.com http://codeanthem.com might turn into something of an inverted marketplace where employers can compete for the attention of good programmers. (I'm not associated with codeanthem.com)
binaryfinery 16y ago
Yes, and they all, without exception, have well paid, highly rewarding jobs. What would make them risk leaving that job?

mkn 16y ago

If you've been around yc for more than a month, you've doubtless seen a number of links to articles on motivation as it pertains to creative activities like software development. The consensus is pretty clear. Incentives hurt productivity in creative activities. This seems to have something to do with the relationship between creative effort and intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation. The prospect of an incentive seems to gum up the creative works. When you compound that with how difficult it is to recognize, let alone find good talent, especially with an interview process, you have a real conundrum. Real conundrums are rarely solved by naive one-dimensional solutions like "offer more money." An actual solution would have to solve the dual problems of finding good help and not spoiling it with overt incentives. Clearly there is a real problem here. Perversely, if you could solve it, you could make a lot of money!

alttab 16y ago
Hey, you rationalize your pay grade anyway you want buddy, but speak for yourself. I do what I do because I enjoy it, but I never take my eye off the bottom line - and either should you.
- mkn 16y ago
  I don't see 1) how I was "rationalizing [my] pay grade," nor 2) what the remark about not taking one's eye off the bottom line has to do with anything. The idea that the OP put forward was that simply offering more will solve the problem of finding competent programmers. My comment was related to recent and compelling research into motivation in creative work. It seemed related. I'm not sure I mentioned my pay grade. Having one's eye on the bottom line is different from being subject to an incentive program, and different still from being competent. The latter is the more to the point. Anyone can be greedy. Even the incompetent. In fact, due to the Dunning-Kruger effect, it might even be suspected that the incompetent are likely to feel more entitled to a higher wage than the competent. I am not your buddy. However, I will offer the following friendly advice: You might enjoy the level of discourse on Reddit or Digg more than that on YC.
- tsally 16y ago
  Next time you decide to be an asshole you should probably construct a proper English sentence.

ChRoss 16y ago

"Rare commodities are expensive." I do agree on this one. However, money is not always the primary motivation/reason for people to join you. My friend once told me about how he asked his team, what is the reason for them to join a company. From tens of reasons, they finally come out with two only: FUN and TEAM.

kjksf 16y ago
The problem is that when you interview you can't really judge those. At best during interview you meet a few team members for an hour each and maybe another hour during team lunch and everyone (including you) puts their best foot forward. There's no way to tell if they'll be a great team to work with or a daily nightmare. The same goes for fun: rarely you know exactly what you'll be doing or how interesting it'll be. The thing about money is that easy to compare. If you have 2 offers from companies that are both startups, both well funded with seemingly great people and interesting problems to solve, it's very compelling to decide based on salary, because all other aspects are hard to compare and judge before you spend a few months working at a company.
- jshen 16y ago
  "the problem is that when you interview you can't really judge those" this is a real challenge. I'm trying to get better at judging if a company is good to work for, but so far it still feels like a crapshoot. Of course, we often cheat and go to places where we already know someone :)
  - ChRoss 16y ago
    well, it applies to everywhere I guess, you just gamble it. I myself still in quest to find 'good' one (but I'm not a job hopper :))

Towle_ 16y ago

A relative of mine works as a database administrator making $120k/year and lacks fluency in HTML/CSS. By contrast, Google regularly comes under fire for underpaying their employees, and their average employees are more talented than those of perhaps any other large corporation in the world. It's not about money.

hello_moto 16y ago
I'd take DBA if that would be the last job I ever had (leading to retirement). Otherwise it might be a career killer. I'd take Google job if I'm fresh out of college for the sake of experience so I can get better position, salary, and wide-range of opportunities in the future. But check this out: if there's a better place than Google and they pay better, do you not expecting Google's employees to jump ship? (for example, Facebook pays more or Facebook has a good potential to make yourself to become a millionaire) These 3 examples are strategy to position yourself for a better future. A better future usually involves better position and/or compensation. Sometime it's not about money, but it's about power. Power to tell fellow developers that they're not that good so they have to do TDD, code-review, and help QA to test their own shit. Yes, it's not _entirely_ about money, but at the end of the day, mostly it is about money, especially for people who can accept other negatives.
ww520 16y ago
Branding has value, which is factored into the total compensation.

ojbyrne 16y ago

I have a simple theory. Most managers are still educated according to Taylor's Scientific Theory of Management, where the managers are more intelligent than the "factors of production," and their role is to "scientifically" direct their work so that they create additional value (which is multiplied by how many workers they have reporting to them). Their salaries reflect that model, and thus is proportional to the salaries of their direct reports times the number of direct reports they have. This is well-ingrained in the workplace, and in society. Unfortunately programming is really the first discipline where the primary determinant of the "factor's" productivity is not the manager's skill but actually the intelligence of each individual. There's huge conflicts created, not just about salaries, but job roles, and really the structure of society (which is really built around an educated managerial class overseeing (and living apart from) a less educated working class. The primary issue with paying programmers more is that they're butting up against those managerial salaries and life roles. Programming doesn't fit Taylor's theory. To change that isn't just about micro changes in business, it's about macro-changes in society.

mikemainguy 16y ago
That's silly, physicians, mechanics, lawyers, and many other skilled tradesmen are just like programmers. The problem is that many folks see programmers as somehow different than these folks.
- vishaldpatel 16y ago
  Docs, mechanics, skilled tradesmen, lawyers,...hell even accountants have location knowledge and expertise that is location specific. - You won't drive your car cross country to a cheaper mechanic. - You won't get a lawyer from India to represent you in America. - You don't go to a doctor... well thats changing isn't it? Too bad doc education still costs so damn much in America. Its about group supply and demand. Don't forget that homes cost and arm and a leg and that a programmer in a particular neighborhood should be able to afford a home in that neighborhood and should charge accordingly.
  - deleted 16y ago

mikemainguy 16y ago

But there's a perverse side to this. By offering MORE compensation, it would seem likely that MORE unqualified people will apply. For your logic to work, we'd need to show that making a skill more expensive would automatically cause inept people to stop applying. If that doesn't hold true, you could be throwing away 999 out of 1000 candidates instead of 199 out of 200.

mkramlich 16y ago
That's what I concluded too! If you raise industry standard average pay it's just going to attract even more incompetent people and therefore the flood of applications from non-programmers will increase.
binaryfinery 16y ago
Actually you'd be throwing away <=998 of 1000 instead of 199 out of 200: we're proposing that the net result would be more hires. We don't have to show that it would make inept people stop applying. We just have to be able to get better at weeding out the rubbish ones - i.e. in less time, lower cost.

brown9-2 16y ago

How many job postings even mention salary beyond "salary commensurate with experience"? We must be seeing different types of postings.

scumola 16y ago
Job postings have salary ranges. If I have 80 years of experience and ask for $500k/yr salary, I'm not going to get it.
- mkramlich 16y ago
  The whole "years of experience in X" thing is horribly broken and ridiculous. Because there isn't a uniform way of measuring it. It's apples-to-oranges with any one else's way of measuring it, even if you yourself were consistent within your own system. Plus every job is different. Plus, in software you can be programming for many years in a language but never at a day job -- only on home projects or (more recently) open source projects, and yet this experience wouldn't count in some people's eyes. Plus there's the whole multi-variable thing where someone with say 2 years of Ruby preceded by 6 years of Java is generally going to be a more experienced/senior programmer than someone who has 4 years of Ruby ONLY (nothing before that) -- but each person is "farther along" experience-wise depending on your particular crazy-ass assumptions about measuring experience. It's an utter joke.
  - blasdel 16y ago
    It's not a joke — they're just using it for a completely different purpose. It's illegal to filter applicants based on age, but you can require '15 years experience with enterprise java'
  - kmak 16y ago
    I think it's just an easy way to justify hiring -- if the hire turns out to be awful, you can say, "hey, he/she had 10 years of experience!"

kjksf 16y ago

There are 2 problems with your proposed solution. a) Salary is rarely disclosed in a job posting. Salary negotiations usually happen after a candidate was interviewed and deemed worth hiring. b) Even if you were to disclose a salary in a job post, an unusually high salary might make it easier to find a qualified programmer (because more people will apply) but it is not likely to increase an average quality of submitted resume, so you'll still have to look at 200 resumes to find 1 good candidate.

ww520 16y ago
I believe Rethinkdb did post their salary range and stock option at one point.
- JoachimSchipper 16y ago
  Yes, at http://rethinkdb.com/jobs/ http://rethinkdb.com/jobs/. It's quite public.

xenophanes 16y ago

How exactly does offering a higher salary prevent hordes of unqualified candidates from applying?

CyberFonic 16y ago
It doesn't, that's why you need to have good hiring selection processes in place. But paying the good programmers you already have a much higher salary and looking after them well will deter them from jumping ship.
cheald 16y ago
Why are you concerned about who applies? Wouldn't you be more concerned that offering a low salary is going to have the same hordes of unqualifieds applying, without the benefit of the actually qualified people applying as well?

coffeemug 16y ago

I suppose this refers to us (and our Will the real programmers please stand up post). If it doesn't, excuse our self-centeredness and kindly disregard this message. Our salary structure is designed to select for exactly the type of people we want to attract - the kinds of people that will go through walls to bend the world to their will, for some deeply ingrained reason unknown to anyone but them. For people like that, we pay an incredibly high salary that they're unlikely to find anywhere else (2.25% of everyone's contribution on the high end). If you're the type of person who wants to change the world and have a shot of building a one billion dollar business while doing it, you're unlikely to find a higher compensation anywhere other than choosing to start your own business. If you're interested in having a stable, $200K job, RethinkDB is not for you. Neither of these choices is better or worse, simply different. It's a question of temperament. We weren't complaining, we were working to recruit great programmers who are driven to change the world. This is exactly what the post accomplished.

waterlesscloud 16y ago
..and yet you aren't attracting the people you want. Hmmmm.
- coffeemug 16y ago
  Of course we are. We just need more :)
  - binaryfinery 16y ago
    So you've found all the ones who have low expenses. Well done. I have a family, a mortgage (or high rent), extremely expensive car insurance, and a shit-ton of experience. I love programming no less than I did when I was 10. If you would like to hire me, and people like me, you will need to offer more money. But if your business can handle being understaffed, by all means keep offering the same salary. $125k to work in Silicon Valley? Will that even cover my rent? I used to work in Palo Alto - shared a 1 bedroom apartment - took turns on the couch. It was fun, when I was straight out of college.
16y ago

jurjenh 16y ago

I don't know if it would work, but has anyone tried or heard of a job posting with a "name your price" salary? Similar to the "scariest pricing idea" that was on HN a while ago (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1279660 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1279660). I'm not sure if this would improve the S/N ratio or make the whole thing more complicated - my idea of what I'm worth is probably quite different to someone else.

pyre 16y ago
Then problem becomes one of differentiating between the people over-value themselves, the people that under-value themselves, and the people that correctly value themselves...

faitswulff 16y ago

Well how about the other side...how do employers take mediocre to crappy programmers and teach them to shine?

Enlightenment 16y ago
Beavis...no matter how much you shine a turd...it is still a turd! fire them!
fsniper 16y ago
This never happens. 1. Employers do not have the incentive and time to educate employees in the first place. 2. Employees, most of the mediocre ones, do not want to learn more, do more or work more. Because, the process is always about practicing and working.

JeffJenkins 16y ago

My impression is that most programming jobs don't give a salary range in the job description. If they do include one, the Dunning–Kruger effect[1] could make the more qualified people who are humble think they weren't qualified and they could decide to skip on the job. If Salary.com tells me that the 75th percentile for my general qualifications in my area is 80k, I'm not going to believe that I'm qualified for a job paying 120k. My mind would resolve that discrepancy in favour of the job requiring something I don't have, not just they employer's willingness to pay well. This may even be true if they say why the salary is so high [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

noonespecial 16y ago

The same thing is (and has been) happening with nursing. They complain endlessly about the "nursing shortage" unable to figure out why people might be unwilling to do a hard job for long hours requiring extra education and incurring outsized liabilities for extremely low pay. The really bad news is its starting to catch up with many doctors as well.

huhtenberg 16y ago
> for extremely low pay Not sure where you are from, but here in Canada nurses lead very cushy lives. Salaries of 80 to 120K are not uncommon, and that's with 4 weeks of vacation, 1 day in / 3 days out schedule, etc.
- chrisa 16y ago
  Here's a link to information about base pay for nurses in the US (2006). It actually mentions the nursing "shortage" at the top: http://www.allied-physicians.com/salary-surveys/nursing/ http://www.allied-physicians.com/salary-surveys/nursing/
  - Alex63 16y ago
    Thanks for the link! Good to see supporting evidence.
  - earl 16y ago
    2006 and 2010 are a world apart economically
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
- Alex63 16y ago
  As the spouse of a former Canadian nurse, and friend of others, I think you might be stretching the definition of cushy. Average salary for an RN in Canada a couple of years ago was about $32/hour. You probably would clear $80K if you were a full time nurse, because of all the mandatory overtime. If being an RN was cushy, I think there'd be less of a shortage of working nurses in Canada.

binaryfinery 16y ago

Managers assume that because one good programmer will do the job for $100k that all good programmers will. Many here point out that good programmers will generally find a job that challenges them, and that pays them enough to live. They then conclude that if $100k fills one seat, then $100k is the right price. This is totally wrong, and the key is "enough to live". I love programming as much as I did when I was 10. My expenses, however, are now somewhat higher than when I was 10. I have a wife, two kids, will not live in a small house, have very expensive car insurance, and I road-race big cars, hard on tires. If you want to hire me, it will cost a lot more than $100k. Then there is the issue of mobility. Programmers tend to be loyal. They tend to be realists. If I make X here, and I know here to be fun, why would I risk moving for 1.1X, or even 1.5X? What you have a reversible reaction in equilibrium. You want to bind seats to programmers. Programmers will bind to a seat for a while. But not all programmers will bind for the same price. Sure you can fill a seat for $100k. You might be able to fill a seat for $20k - but you'll have to wait a loooong time. If you want to fill all your seats, you're going to have to appeal to the largest possible pool of good programmers, and some of us need more money. Even if you ignore the fact that those of us with higher expenses have more experience, the simple math of the equilibrium reaction tells you that if you want to fill more seats, you have to have a bigger pool. Even if we are of no more value than the 20 year old, the question is: Are 5 programmers better than 4 for your business? Whether or not that makes economic sense for your business is up to you. So yes RethinkDB, $125k for an Engineer III will get you some hires, but are you going to insist that this is the right price, even if it means that you have empty seats? What is your opportunity cost? It may be the right decision. But it may not.

starkfist 16y ago
They have $1.2 million dollars, they can't pay more. $125K is a huge pre series-a salary.
- binaryfinery 16y ago
  They're also offering stock of course, and it actually looks interesting :-) Plus they may not be so time sensitive: 4 programmers for 10 months vs 5 programmers for 8 months (yes I know). But if its $125k vs $150k will that $25k break the bank? Maybe. Maybe not.

gersh 16y ago

I think you can hire good programmers for cheap, but the tricky part is retaining them. Programmers can be hired for relatively low-wages, but then they should raises every few months. Turnover can be really expensive, and it often isn't factored in. Further, maintenance work may not help the programmers develop marketable skills, so they strong incentive to quit.

didtrade 16y ago

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jseliger 16y ago

The same problem happens in grant writing, my family's field, to the point that I wrote a longish blog post on the subject: http://blog.seliger.com/2008/08/08/tilting-at-windmills-why-there-is-no-free-grant-writing-lunch-and-you-wont-find-writers-for-nothing http://blog.seliger.com/2008/08/08/tilting-at-windmills-why-... . My guess is that it happens in many others too, and people who are smart eventually realize they'll have to pay for quality or accept lower quality. Sometimes bargains can probably be found, but they're probably rare and difficult and don't last very long. Getting really good grant writers (like us) is going to cost at least $100 an hour, and probably more like $125 – 200. The same is, as far as I can tell, true of web consultants. Good lawyers? $300/hour. Escorts? Probably also $300 in most of the country. If you don't realize how much things and services costs, you'll end up with sub-par quality, or you'll pay, and/or you'll complain. A lot of people do the latter. I wouldn't expect it to stop.

dirtyaura 16y ago

I feel that good/great programmers ask too little. Because there's order of magnitude of variance in skill sets and productivity, there should be much more variance in salaries. In Finland, if you leave out top 0.5%, the variance is between 2000€-5000€. And most of it settles around 3000-4000€. Finland is very eqalitarian society when it comes to salaries and thus that has to be taken into account. But still. 2.5 is not much, think how much variance there is in salaries of managers, lawyers, doctors. How's it in States, what are the typical salaries for good or great programmers vs. below-average progammers? Leave out top 0.5% - i.e. rare individuals with specialized skill sets in e.g. bank security.

tl 16y ago
Different parts of the US have such large variances in the cost of living that it's hard to give a meaningful answer (i.e. non-skilled labor here has greater variance than that).
- dirtyaura 16y ago
  How about e.g. in Bay Area? What's a typical range for skilled programmer and what a horrible coder can earn while hiding inside some clueless big co?
earl 16y ago
The knowledge that there is huge variance in productivity level of programmers is kind of useless, because we mostly lack the ability to reliably measure true productivity. Similar to advertising: "I know I waste half of my advertising dollars...I just wish I knew which half." You can really only pay amazing devs more if you can figure out which devs are the amazing ones.

RiderOfGiraffes 16y ago

Having tried this approach I can tell you that offering more money results in perhaps a doubling of the number of barely competent programmers, a ten-fold increase in the number of completely clueless, and no apparent increase in the number of people we'd actually want. My results are not statistically valid, I've only gone through the hiring cycle five times, but my impression from actually trying it is that salary is not what it's about. Dan Pink said it well: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=782171 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=782171 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1357390 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1357390 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1439939 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1439939 The problem isn't attracting candidates, it's getting the candidates to see your job opening, to understand that it's a great place to work, and then filtering out the clueless.

jasonlotito 16y ago
> The problem isn't attracting candidates, it's getting the candidates to see your job opening, to understand that it's a great place to work, and then filtering out the clueless. And then offering them enough money so they don't have to worry about it. Because, I'm sorry to say, minimum wage isn't going to cut it.
binaryfinery 16y ago
2ND VIDEO: 4m50s: "IF YOU DONT PAY PEOPLE ENOUGH, PEOPLE WONT BE MOTIVATED." "THE BEST USE OF MONEY IS TO PAY PEOPLE ENOUGH TO TAKE THE ISSUE OF MONEY OFF THE TABLE". "ONCE YOU DO THAT THERE ARE THREE FACTORS THAT LEAD TO BETTER PERFORMANCE..." Once you do that. Clear? Once you pay people enough to take the issue of money off the table. This is your link dammit. For me, with a wife, two kids, and a car racing habit, that "enough" is a lot higher than it is for a 20yo student. Its about $130k in fact. As for your results, as you say: "not statistically valid". That actually means something.

BrandonM 16y ago

What about those Hacker News members who are looking for jobs? Is there a good resource of tech positions available? Personally, I'd love to see a nicely-indexed list of jobs. Things like location, work environment, remote working arrangements, languages used, expected number of hours worked, typical responsibilities, schedule flexibility, vacation possibilities, who I'd be working with, degree of autonomy, level of recognition for work, perks and benefits, etc. are all factors that go into liking a job. And that's not even mentioning money. Personally, I'd love to start a job working remotely at $40/hour for 20 hours a week or so. Once it was determined that I'm a good fit, I'd be willing to relocate to a lot of different places (e.g., Baltimore, Chicago, Denver, Atlanta, New York, pretty much anywhere warm and coastal). I think the question isn't so much why is it so hard to find the right employee or job. The real questions are: What are the actual job requirements? I don't mean traditional notions of what a reasonable work week are. I mean what do you truly need? It might be possible to get a rock star developer working for you at a cost of $40K per year, if you can eschew the standard notion of a 2000-2500 hour per year commitment. If you're a potential employee, what do you really want from the job? Focusing on the money is not the answer. Make sure that what you'll be doing, who you'll be working with, and where and when you're working all fit well with your personality and work habits. And why is it so hard to match jobs and people up? Is there a decent resource anywhere that I could use to actually narrow down job opening according to a slew of criteria? In a high-demand field, doesn't it make sense for the potential workers to post what they want in a job, and have the jobs bend to that? Maybe I'll make a submission along those lines...

c00p3r 16y ago

That was solved years ago. Just consider how a professional soccer team (including the double) are managed and paid. ^_^ hint: it is not just a performance and productivity, its also morale, influence and starness factors. And it works.

Enlightenment 16y ago

Some HR departments need a major overhaul. I've interviewed at some manufacturing companies that have large numbers of blue collar workers and small numbers of engineers, yet the moronic HR department tries to run the engineers through a similar hiring mentality as the blue collar workers. Why the fck do I need to fill out a fcking job application that is targeted with lots of blue collar type questions...OMG! Every so often, upper management needs to hire some specialist to anonymously go through the hiring process to determine how good or bad their HR department is doing!

Vivtek 16y ago

Looking at a lot of the posts on here, it seems that the bar to finding good programming staff is (1) finding good programmers and allowing them to find you and (2) weeding out the chaff. Furthermore, it seems that weeding out the chaff is something probably everybody could agree on - that is, what would be nice is some kind of informal certification process or standard test. Nothing like an AMA board certification or the attorney's bar in terms of formality and obligatory nature, but perhaps some kind of hoops to jump through. Perhaps some kind of list of programming tests and a way to administer them?

Sukotto 16y ago
There are a bunch of certifications already. They are either too simple or too narrow to be particularly useful for hiring purposes (imho). The best way I've seen to evaluate the ability of a programmer and their* fit at your company is to: 1) Ask them to program something simple in the language you expect them to use. 2) Present them with a problem your team recently faced and ask them to talk through how they would approach finding a solution. 3) Ask them about things that relate to your startup/corporate culture (eg. if you're a bunch of practical jokers, ask them about practical jokes they've done or been victim to) 4) Ask them what part of your product sucks the worst. What specific thing would they do to improve it? Why would that be an improvement? 5) Have all your short-list people meet and spend some time together. In a followup interview, ask each about their opinions of the others. * I hate to use "they" and "their" as a gender-neutral, singular pronoun but haven't really found anything better :-(

chrisbennet 16y ago

Employers: It's not about pay it's about value. I agree with the original poster to the extent that I see some employers trying to get a "deal" on a great programmer without compensating the lower pay with great work, meaningful equity, or good work/life balance. You've seen the job posting by Big Dumb Company that wants a "rock start programmer" but has strict policies that won't let them pay rock start salaries or give more than 2 weeks vacation their first year, telecommute, etc. Then there are the small guys that want you work for peanuts in exchange for worthless stock options i.e. they want you to take $30K less pay per year and if they ever have a liquidity event your diluted stock would be less than that $30K you per year you gave up. If they fail (and they usually do) you'll get squat.

ianloic 16y ago

Hiring managers don't list a salary. If they do they're looking to hire really junior engineers who probably can't write a linked list reversal program anyway. In my 13 years working at startups I've never applied for a job that listed a salary range. Ultimately, within reason, good programmers are worth whatever you have to pay them and bad programmers aren't worth what you pay them. There are way more bad programmers than good programmers and money isn't the way to attract the good ones. You have to attract them with interesting problems and a great work environment. If they're there for the money then they're probably no good anyway.

sdfx 16y ago
Different people are attracted by different things. For one it's the money, for others the environment, culture or challenges. But usually it's a combination of all of these factors. You can't just disregard money as an influencing factor in the decision making process of a potential employee. After all, you wouldn't be working for free. Sure, there is always the exception to the rule - the person that isn't interested in money at all. But in general money is a pretty good incentive for doing something. The salary that a company offers might not be listed in a job offering, but the culture and many other factors are neither. And even though they are not listed you probably heard of companies with a great culture etc. Don't you think the same is true for salaries?

r3570r3 16y ago

Most companies have highly stupid standards and requirements. Most of them prefer older platforms and frameworks just because their customers require older versions. Top notch enterprise solutions are still using IE6 to check compatibility of their products. That gives them all the possible negative Karma. On the other hand, innovative tech giants like Google are using their closed proprietary technologies, which is not doing the world any good. MS actually seems to be the better one here allowing people to use their Visual Studio, making a product out of it. Every language has its weaknesses. A developer proficient in programmer should not stick to a company for his development works and venture off privately. That will create the likes of DuckDuckGo and all the good that is out there changing the way we look at the tech world right now.

terra_t 16y ago

When it comes to wall street bankers, there seems to be a consensus that money is the only thing that's going to bring in good talent. When it comes to programmers, the consensus seems to be the opposite. I mean, they ought to be motivated by having a refrigerator full of Red Bull or being able to bring their dogs to work -- I mean, the Linux kernel got developed by people who work for free... Why do we need to pay people anything at all to develop applications for our intranet? Although you'll find programmers with very different stories, I think that we'd see a healthier IT ecosystem if software people got more pay and respect (a friend of mine and myself both got offered a particular job... for him this was a big step up in pay and benefits, and for me it would have been a step down -- I've seen the compensation of programming jobs where people do comparable work vary by more than a factor of two.) I think the "equity culture" is often part of the problem. There are startups in my town that pay $10 /hour, no benefits + equity (which might be worth something, otherwise not.) I also interviewed at a place where people were starting a new job shop; they seemed like a nice bunch of folks, they had all the trappings of "good management" (the CEO was a freshly minted MBA from an Ivy League school) but the biz plan didn't make a lot of sense to be and they were talking low base pay + some equity... This is a frickin' job shop... The kind of place where you might get $50,000 worth of equity and really be able to cash it out for $40,000 if you're insanely lucky. That said, the interview question they asked me was the best interview question I'd ever been asked. They asked me to estimate a project they'd done for a client. I was smart enough to ask questions rather than blurt out a quick answer ... I estimated about 160 hours for the project, and they told me it really took 200. That's not far off for a "seat of the pants" estimate, but driving home I thought... These guys probably charge $150/hr to clients; their client spend $30k for a really crappy intranet app that tortures end users... they "need" it for regulatory compliance, but there's no way that this app creates $30k worth of value. For christsake they wasted 40 hours dealing with a deadbeat D.B.A.! So that got me thinking about where my career was going and about software economics. For instance, if you want to get paid $150k a year, that money has to come from somewhere. Unfortunately, the shortest path to that is to get in a position where you can collect that as a rent, but assuming you're (i) the average unlucky joe, and (ii) somebody who wants to make a contribution, you need to be in a place where you're (a) creating > $150k a year in value and (b) in a position (politically) to get a good chunk of that pie. Marx will tell you to work on (b) and that makes some sense, but I'll tell you from experience that it's a much better life to make $X for your boss and get paid $X/2 and it is to make $X for your boss and get paid $2X. Practically, Job Shop work tends to be pretty marginal; the usual business model is to underquote work, lose money, but make it up in volume. It can be a nice biz if you've got sugar daddy customers who do stuff on a T&M basis, but otherwise job shops that look really profitable and productive today are frequently gone in a decade. Now, you can make a lot more for your employer, potentially, if you're making a software product [or developing a SaaS-y service these days] but it's not at all unusual to put a man-decade into a product, spend $100K trying to sell it, and end up with $20K of revenue. "Getting paid more" is therefore a matter of (a) making more value, and (b) getting a bigger piece of the pie. (a) interests me more these days -- I find it disturbing how much it costs to create business software and how bad the quality is usually is.

wake_up_sticky 16y ago

Obviously I worded some things wrong in my original submission. I realize that offering a (much) higher salary won't necessarily (or even probably) prevent a "horde of unqualified candidates" from applying. What I meant was that if a hiring manager places an ad which fails to attract an adequate number of qualified candidates--the ratio between qualified and unqualified candidates being of secondary importance--he would have to be incompetent not to offer a better salary the next time around. Also, the main point of the submission wasn't that programmers ought to be paid more. It was that I find it offensive when people claim that there are no good programmers out there but don't even seem to consider offering higher salaries. I'm reminded of the woman who is asked out five times a week by reasonably good-looking men of average social status, rejects them all out of hand, and then laments, "There are no men out there!" Actually, this is worse. The woman may not be able to alter her personality or appearance enough to attract the caliber of man she's interested in; but companies can always offer higher salaries.

lessthanideal 16y ago

Money is obviously part of it, but now the whole picture. The difficulty in finding programmers that are gifted is not that you are competing with other companies, it's that you are competing with the programmer taking his ability and resulting wares directly to the consumer. Between startups and lifestyle businesses the lone programmer has a lot of options that other professions don't necessarily have (nurses, for example). You have to keep in mind that you are competing with the excitement and potential earnings of running your own show.

winternett 16y ago

I am tired of being offered $120k for a 3month contract without things like parking, vacation, and health benefits. I am lucky to be employed full time currently. I always ignore recruiter calls of that kind because what it really means is $30k for 3 months, which creates a "mercenary" job environment out of what should really be a more full time/stable developer job environment. I can do that by marketing my own skills. Employers need to end the short-term hiring practices, they're artificially boosting the economic outlook and creating shoddy work that is a piecemeal result of several developers that work on DEV projects temporarily.

Rickasaurus 16y ago

As a highly skilled programmer, what I really want is a fair piece of the pie percentage wise. Even a high salary for the field compares little to the prospect of making exponentially more. Also, nothing motivates like having the product of your work bring you money or prestige directly. Because I'm currently only a few years out of school, no one would come close to paying me what I really feel I deserve. Even in the best case, the long term for a programmer doesn't look all that great. This is an extremely ageist industry. For this reason in my off hours I've been working on trying to increase my prestige through writing books, blogging, and speaking at events. Eventually, I hope this helps me either find a startup with excellent prospects or allows me to charge large amounts to existing companies for consulting. I can't see doing this with a family though. It's a difficult road either way.