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Turning a Job Opening into a Dream Job for Top Talent

124 points by wilkystyle 9y ago

adjkant 9y ago
I usually hate posts about top job, top tech talent, etc. This post was a lot of great stuff. The idea of pairing talented people of different levels is crucial. A senior lead with shit backup can only do so much. The right balance I think can turn two mythical 10x devs into 100x total instead of 20x. Of course, make sure those people are also compatible, as half the 10x devs I know are loners who don't mix well and work best when left alone.
- kreetx 9y ago
  Agreed, this post gets a lot of things right IMO. An idea I've had on 10x developers (or whatever the multiplier..) is not that they can code and solve problems this much faster, but in the long term they steer the code base as a whole in a direction such that the impact is that large. (But of course recognizing this, or being able to compare it to the other would-be ways the code could have gone, is a non-trivial matter :).
  - matfil 9y ago
    It's unfortunate that we try to measure this kind of thing on a single dimension. There's certainly a type of developer/mentor who does do a good job of setting helpful directions in a large-team setting. At the other extreme, there are people who don't necessarily thrive in a "team setting" at all, but on the other hand can build big things (or, better yet, small things than solve big problems) remarkably quickly. Both "high multiples", but quite different skills. (There does seem to have been a fair amount of devaluation of solo-working over the last few years, which perhaps leads to less appreciation of the second kind of high-multiple than was once the case).
  - humanrebar 9y ago
    > An idea I've had on 10x developers... in the long term they steer the code base... Agreed. And on the flip side, you can have -10x developers that make all the wrong choices, like inventing and entrenching their own language or crappy framework for reasons of boredom or ego. I suspect that junior developers are less likely to be net-negative to that degree. Perhaps it's one unarticulated reason employers tend to prefer inexperienced engineers. If the employer can't tell the difference between a 10X and a -10X developer (the guy pitching the UML-based python code generator or the guy who really likes cucumber?), it's typically easier to hire smart people who are still learning and trust your existing technical leaders can get value out of them.
    - JoeAltmaier 9y ago
      And sometimes they invent a framework that hits all the right design points, but junior engineers can't read a book about them or take a class about them, so don't understand and badmouth them as crappy and a result of boredom or ego. Its hard to invent something, and have it get no traction because nobody else wants to move forward. I've been at two startups that had frameworks that solved all the problems in the product space, efficiently and nearly perfectly. And failed because as the company grew, new Engineers all clamored for something simpler or something they already knew. They outnumbered the designer with their voices and management steered the company off the rails. It's tragic.
      - humanrebar 9y ago
        Well, my thought is that, on average, learning people have less organizational impact than experienced people, both in a positive and a negative direction. You get the risk more concentrated in super-senior engineers. Hiring a dozen net-uninformed college grads would do the trick, too, though.
        JoeAltmaier 9y ago
        Its the medium-experience Engineers that pose the risk then, of having enough knowledge to talk, but not enough experience to appreciate the fine points of what they're talking about. They fool management with plausible but wrong arguments. In my experience anyway. And today, the demographic may be skewed toward just that group.
- wilkystyle 9y ago
  > Of course, make sure those people are also compatible, as half the 10x devs I know are loners who don't mix well and work best when left alone. This is absolutely a great point, and the author also addresses this: > That doesn’t mean that a top-performing developer will write 10x as much code or crank out 10x as many features. What it means is that they’ll deliver 10x as much organizational value. I too have seen developers who are very talented actually cause negative organizational value, due to their inability to work well with others.
curiouscat321 9y ago
People who espouse remote work seem convinced that it’s the end-all way to work. I don’t care if I have to go into an office. I like offices. What I care about is that you don’t mind if I work from home every once in a while. I care that it’s okay for me to leave early or come late.
- usernam 9y ago
  I worked remotely for more than two years because I had to move to another place. I loved the company and they were quite happy as well, so they let me work remotely full time without problems. I absolutely loved it for the first six months, then I quit my job after the second year despite being a "dream scenario" for many. I generally work alone when I want to think, but I loved the interaction with excellent colleagues and sitting at home with skype wasn't exactly the same. I would still work remotely for 2-3 days a week, because it's so much more productive for certain tasks, but no more. I do not consider full-time remote jobs.
  - DLay 9y ago
    I’ve always been hesitant to try remote work because it seems like there’d be an added pressure to seek out face to face interactions or else I’d slowly become a hermit. I consider myself an introvert, but even that has its limits.
    - usernam 9y ago
      My take from the experience was that if you have an active social life outside of your colleagues and work is "just work" for you, then a full-time remote job is probably fine. Saves you the commute too. I do have an active social life, but I expect my work to be something more than "just work". I enjoy what I do, and working at a distance detracts from the experience.
    - invalidOrTaken 9y ago
      Doesn't work in all situations, but what's worked for me is to treat it as something that you need to keep an eye on, and then liberally take trips into the office.
sharkdesk 9y ago
Lots of good ideas in the article - the key is to really stand out. I take 10 weeks off a year to go travelling - true vacation time, not remote work. I know I can get a 20% raise if I switched companies (I know that because I got an offer), but I stay where I am because i can't imagine going back down to 3 weeks of vacation a year.
- x0x0 9y ago
  That's an awesome situation. Two interview cycles ago, I wanted a full month of unpaid vacation on top of the normal vacation package. I told each I would take a 1/12 pay cut in exchange. It was a huge obstacle for employers.
  - freyfogle 9y ago
    The problem is if they give you your special deal, they have to give everyone their own special deal which becomes an absolute nightmare to manage.
    - jakobegger 9y ago
      And here's an opportunity for smaller companies. I have a small company, and I can't offer my employees the prestige or high salary that larger companies offer. But I can offer to accommodate whatever other special wishes people have. Want to work just 4 days a week? Fine. Want to work from 12pm to 8pm? Fine. Want to take a day off on short notice? Fine with me. Larger companies have all kinds of rules and policies in place. In a small company, you can design the policies together with the employees.
      - matwood 9y ago
        This is basically what we do. I think we offer competitive salaries, but also give tons of work flexibility. We judge on work produced, not hours in seats (within reason for meetings or time critical items like customer support) or any other useless metric. Since each person has to be thought of individually, I can see where it would be hard to scale in a really large environment. Some employees also have a hard time without strict policies in place (weird I know). We make sure to let people know in the interview that responsibility comes with the freedom. One last thing, we treat every position in the company this way and not just the developers.
taurath 9y ago
Honestly I kind of feel like any company that is offering market rates for remote workers has a bigger problem filtering developer applications than they do finding great engineers. Complete opposite from the hiree perspective vs in a big tech town where everyone is desperate for talent. Between my last 2 positions I tried looking around at fully remote jobs - sane hours, good pay, good (virtual) environment including codebase - pick 1, maybe 2 if lucky.
drinchev 9y ago
What is missing in the article is the word "freelance". Most of the time within a startup you can see developers stay in the company for ~1 year. Usually they are more willing to find another job than negotiating a salary bump ( which happens to be also mentally easier, since the first action is passive - just reply to a recruiter ). When I completely switched to freelance gigs, I discovered that I stay in a company for far longer time. It is easier for me to index my price per hour with the market, since I have less bureaucracy with my client ( removes FOMO ). I had the best offers ( company shares + bonuses ) to join various companies than being an employee ( because of the FOMO of the employer that you might leave soon ). And finally I improved my code quality, since you always write your code with having your mind that sooner or later you will be not the code-owner. Of course having 3 months off to enjoy the summer also makes it more appealing than the 22 vacation days you usually receive ( in Europe ). Disclaimer - all of this won't work if you are a junior developer. Usually the stronger hands are in your employer then, since your contract can be terminated any day, without any notice. But hiring a senior developer as a freelancer in your team ( IMHO ) will definitely mean that you will work with a highly motivated person, being there to do the job.
- pmorici 9y ago
  “Freelance” has very negative connotations I my book. It brings to mind sites like odesk or whatever it is called now where low quality companies look to find 99 cent an hour talent.
  - user5994461 9y ago
    Freelance is a desperate student who is working for free to create his portfolio. You want to call yourself a "contractor", or better "a "consultant"
staunch 9y ago
Most companies don't provide a work environment even half as good as an average home office. I think remote working may be the first killer app for VR but it would probably require a $3k HMD today to be viable. Most tech companies could easily afford one per worker.
- ttoinou 9y ago
  Your brain's going to melt if you're going to play VR all day
chx 9y ago
What this doesn't talk about enough is work impact -- mentioned yes but doesn't emphasize it. These are shitty years and it eats me I am working for an enterprise gardening their websites instead of literally making the world a better place. I mean, sure, it pays and challenging and whatnot but I miss NowPublic dearly because we made a god damn difference. We ran one of the biggest Katrina missing person boards. We were one of the first "citizen journalism" sites and had photos and reports from places where noone else had. It was amazing. I miss it so badly. And you know what, I would be open to changing, I am still doing Drupal and I need the money but ... if you are doing something meaningful with Drupal, Elixir or Go and have some part time opening? Let's talk :) Click my username for email address.
- humanrebar 9y ago
  > These are shitty years and it eats me I am working for an enterprise gardening their websites instead of literally making the world a better place. It's a peculiar quirk of the tech industry that "changing the world through X" is a reasonable expectation. Bus drivers don't wonder how they can make a difference through bus driving. They do their shifts and then go volunteer at the hospital, food bank, homeless shelter, etc. Point being, you have an urge to help people. Then help people. Now, you'll obviously add the most value to organizations that need Drupal, but free technical help is usually not "free as in beer" as much as "free as in puppies". Setting up someone with a slick technical solution almost always comes with some required maintenance fees, organizational knowledge, operational costs, etc. That is, it's hard to give away tech in a way that's sustainable. Even tech training has limited use if you're not prepared with next steps for the trainees (college applications, concrete job prospects, immediate personal benefit, etc.). That being said, information can be given away effectively, as you learned after Katrina. Maybe some community is just missing certain information presented well. Drupal is great there. Other people are great at writing middleware for CAN buses. They probably have fewer opportunities to apply tech to help humanity than you do. They'd be better off pitching in at Habitat for Humanity, and maybe you would be too, just to start.
  - whatshisface 9y ago
    People want to climb Maslow's hierarchy in every area of their lives. If bus drivers had better pay and job security (so much so that they hit the region of diminishing returns), maybe we'd see more talk from drivers about wishing they were driving especially important buses.
perlgeek 9y ago
I wonder about recommending both remote work and spending quite some time mentoring. How well does remote mentoring actually work? I was positively influenced by people giving me advice remotely (I don't know if I'd really call it mentoring), but my feeling is that face-to-face works much better. Any experiences?
- Phlarp 9y ago
  I had a number of very positive remote only mentors when I was younger and I give them all a large amount of credit for who and where I am now. Mentorship is important,but I don't think face to face is particularly important. Although I wouldn't rule it out if it was convenient to both parties.
TamDenholm 9y ago
Senior developer salaries in my local area (Edinburgh, Scotland, UK) are £30k-£40k which is about $42k - $56k USD. On a £40k salary you pay roughly £9,500 in tax. Ive no idea what the tax rate is in America but the difference in salaries between the UK and the US is astounding.
- Nursie 9y ago
  The UK mostly pays developers a derisory salary. Australia seems to pay roughly on a par with the US, or did when I lived there. But most of the UK is dreadful - software folks are paid poorly and treated like drones. Unfortunately there are enough people that will take the bad salary, have mediocre performance and deliver mediocre software slowly, that a lot of British companies now expect to pay peanuts and get monkeys. I've found the only way to replicate the money you can get elsewhere is to be a contractor. You can make about double your quoted figure outside London (my experience in the Hampshire/Wiltshire/Dorset region), or triple or more if you land something bank related in London. No idea what might be available in Edinburgh.
  - crdoconnor 9y ago
    The contractor premium will get dragged down in a year or two as well - the Tories are planning on kicking up taxes for them in order to bring in an extra £200 mil. That will probably lead to an exodus of the experienced developers from the UK. This will not only have a negative effect on UK software houses it will also exacerbate the existing problems with UK government IT projects, which have already have a multibillion-pound problem with failure to deliver and cost overruns as it is. Meanwhile, Russian oligarchs are still paying peanuts for their empty central London mansions and big companies are barely paying any corporation taxes.
    - user5994461 9y ago
      Not so sure. People who've been living here often can't just go back to where they come from. They wouldn't have moved to the UK if the situation in their countries was better. The effect so far of Brexit is to stop the flood of newcomers, not making establishing people leave. It's good as a developer, less competitors for the same amount of jobs.
madamelic 9y ago
Are people really making these salaries? I mean like mid-level, not god-tier type people. I don't know if I am stupid or just don't say the right things but are there really mid-level devs not at huge companies making $160k a year? I mostly hang out at startups and it is normally around like 130k for a senior dev.
- qaq 9y ago
  "startups" is the keyword here
  - user5994461 9y ago
    Emphasis. One MUST stop working for startups to make a living.
- matwood 9y ago
  Depends on the location, and not just because COLA. If you live in a big gov contracting area or somewhere with a lot of company offices (not necessarily tech), they will push up the salaries. I met a guy once who worked as a programmer at a local plant (steel or something), and between his high base salary and bonuses he made more than anyone else I had ever talked to in the area.
- kod 9y ago
  Yes, absolutely, there are normal people at normal companies outside of the bay area making 160. If you're actually senior and are still making 130 you probably aren't negotiating.
  - madamelic 9y ago
    I am not even making 130... ugh. (And I know others are)
- shoover 9y ago
  Good question. Indianapolis seems to have a thriving tech community, but the Glassdoor data for senior software engineer average base pay comes in a full 30k under your startup number: $99k (based on 1081 anonymous submissions). LinkedIn shows median $100k.
neebz 9y ago
I loved remote work and did a lot of effort to ensure that we adopt a remote-friendly culture. However I will never get over the fact that we found some of our engineers ended up doing freelancing work, over-estimating work and basically just slacking around in the freedom of their homes. I would love to hear if anyone had similar experiences or how they prevent such in remote environments.
- auggierose 9y ago
  That is an interesting point. Personally, I think remote work should be freelance work.
  - maxaf 9y ago
    Are you saying that remote employees should be deprived of full-timer benefits and legal protections, however meager? All because of trust issues that grew out of experience with a bad apple which isn't representative of remote workers in general? Empirically speaking, effective remote employees are more trustworthy and less prone to organizational politics. I can even tell you why: these people have a system of values outside of work that in turn values their professional activities as something that helps enable this desirable lifestyle. In return, work is treated with diligence and virtue. I'm sorry that you or the person you're replying to have had a negative experience with remote workers. As usual, a few bad apples don't spoil the whole bunch.
    - auggierose 9y ago
      I didn’t have any bad experiences with remote workers, and I can definitely see how that can work for non-freelancers. Personally, I just think remote and freelance are an ideal combination for independent creatives.
- skypanther 9y ago
  I've worked remote for over a decade. At the best jobs, I was made to feel fully part of the team. I was included in decision making, kept updated with changing plans, had a means to communicate & stay socially and professionally involved with the team. In those cases, I was fully dedicated to the job. On the other hand, I've worked other jobs where I was essentially ignored for weeks, even months at a time. I was left out of decisions, etc and just handed work to do. At those places, I definitely drifted off into my own stuff.
weeksie 9y ago
I really wish we'd start using a term like journeyman to talk about what people insist on calling "senior developers". A person with 3-6 years of experience isn't senior. That's preposterous on its face. Nor is a 3-6 year developer a junior, but we are woefully inept at using meaningful terms for developers.
- pleasecalllater 9y ago
  This always makes me sad. 3-6 years of experience, and you are senior. 20 years of experience, and you are too old for the "young and dynamic team". I'm slowly hitting 20 years soon... and even now I have troubles with getting a job. I didn't have the problem when I had 3-6 years of experience. A surgeon with 3-6 years of experience is usually too inexperienced to operate on her own. 20 years of experience, and you can lead a team of surgeons. In IT we have some strange cult of inexperience. And this makes me sad.
  - matfil 9y ago
    20 year programmers fairly often get to "lead teams of programmers". In some ways, it's staying hands-on that can be difficult. At least if you want to be recognised and valued as someone who's experienced and can take on challenging problems without a lot of support.
  - user5994461 9y ago
    The surgeon only did his first operation 3 years ago and started studying medicine a few years earlier. The developer did his first program a decade ago when he was around 12 and he's been studying and practicing ever since.
    - delinka 9y ago
      “A decade ago” is more than “3-6 years” of experience - is that your argument? Because he doesn’t have 3-6 years experience working woth others, or realizing that the problems he’s solved were solved decades ago and those solutions can be found in the right places, or living with the reality that out in the workforce he’s most likely not the brilliant unique snowflake his family thinks he is.
user5994461 9y ago
That awkward time when you finish reading the article and you realize with the ad at the last paragraph that it was all just advertising for the author's service.
- genezeta 9y ago
  Most, if not all, of Eric Elliot's writing is just an advertisement for himself. Notice also how most of the references he links are his own articles.
- Tehchops 9y ago
  I mean, it's at least reasonably good content, versus him spamming backlinks into random Disqus feeds.
gingerlime 9y ago
The top thing on the StackOverflow survey was vacation time, but the article hardly touched on it. We have a 45 days holidays policy for all full time employees. Mind you, this includes public holidays, because we're also 100% remote and it's more fair for everyone if we don't align public holidays to one spot. This also means that if you prefer working over Christmas, and then take time off another time - you can. We also heavily encourage everyone to take their holidays, and you can only transfer up to 5 days from one year to the next, so people use it.
- nikanj 9y ago
  Who’s “we”?
mathattack 9y ago
I find the most important thing is the “deal” with the manager. “Here is what I can give you, Here is what I want in return.” Some people want promotability. Some want remote work. Some want new technical challenges. Some flexibility. A manager can’t give everything to everyone but they can say, “I can give you all the flexibility you need as long as the servers never go down” or “I can work to promote you in a year if you hit every deadline and do three or four side projects” That conversation is more important than any perk.
- ben_jones 9y ago
  I agree 100% EXCEPT for the huge asymmetry in information that exists during that phase of an interview. "Hit every deadline", you would then need to know how aggressive and how frequent those deadlines are. You would have to know how stable the team(s) are because if a team has a deadline and loses the head engineer, well shit. Negotiating and accepting an offer letter is way too much like gambling. Whether its start-up equity, growth/lifestyle promises of a manager, or hope that office politics won't grind your soul to dust within 3 months, its a huge risk even saying "yes".
  - mathattack 9y ago
    True. I find this is easier as part of a longer term relationship. There is a gamble, and trust is involved. The one recourse is if they violate your trust, you can leave.
- enraged_camel 9y ago
  This doesn't work in many states because labor laws require companies to give every worker in a given role the same perks. If you allow Bob to work remotely, you also need to give that choice to Jason and Ashley. Texas is like this for instance. This is the real reason why a lot of companies have trouble switching to remote work: they can't slowly transition. It has to be an on-off switch for all workers.
  - mathattack 9y ago
    It's also hard because "Remote first" companies make it look easier because they're designed for it.

124 points by wilkystyle 9y ago

I usually hate posts about top job, top tech talent, etc. This post was a lot of great stuff. The idea of pairing talented people of different levels is crucial. A senior lead with shit backup can only do so much. The right balance I think can turn two mythical 10x devs into 100x total instead of 20x. Of course, make sure those people are also compatible, as half the 10x devs I know are loners who don't mix well and work best when left alone.

kreetx 9y ago
Agreed, this post gets a lot of things right IMO. An idea I've had on 10x developers (or whatever the multiplier..) is not that they can code and solve problems this much faster, but in the long term they steer the code base as a whole in a direction such that the impact is that large. (But of course recognizing this, or being able to compare it to the other would-be ways the code could have gone, is a non-trivial matter :).
- matfil 9y ago
  It's unfortunate that we try to measure this kind of thing on a single dimension. There's certainly a type of developer/mentor who does do a good job of setting helpful directions in a large-team setting. At the other extreme, there are people who don't necessarily thrive in a "team setting" at all, but on the other hand can build big things (or, better yet, small things than solve big problems) remarkably quickly. Both "high multiples", but quite different skills. (There does seem to have been a fair amount of devaluation of solo-working over the last few years, which perhaps leads to less appreciation of the second kind of high-multiple than was once the case).
- humanrebar 9y ago
  > An idea I've had on 10x developers... in the long term they steer the code base... Agreed. And on the flip side, you can have -10x developers that make all the wrong choices, like inventing and entrenching their own language or crappy framework for reasons of boredom or ego. I suspect that junior developers are less likely to be net-negative to that degree. Perhaps it's one unarticulated reason employers tend to prefer inexperienced engineers. If the employer can't tell the difference between a 10X and a -10X developer (the guy pitching the UML-based python code generator or the guy who really likes cucumber?), it's typically easier to hire smart people who are still learning and trust your existing technical leaders can get value out of them.
  - JoeAltmaier 9y ago
    And sometimes they invent a framework that hits all the right design points, but junior engineers can't read a book about them or take a class about them, so don't understand and badmouth them as crappy and a result of boredom or ego. Its hard to invent something, and have it get no traction because nobody else wants to move forward. I've been at two startups that had frameworks that solved all the problems in the product space, efficiently and nearly perfectly. And failed because as the company grew, new Engineers all clamored for something simpler or something they already knew. They outnumbered the designer with their voices and management steered the company off the rails. It's tragic.
    - humanrebar 9y ago
      Well, my thought is that, on average, learning people have less organizational impact than experienced people, both in a positive and a negative direction. You get the risk more concentrated in super-senior engineers. Hiring a dozen net-uninformed college grads would do the trick, too, though.
      - JoeAltmaier 9y ago
        Its the medium-experience Engineers that pose the risk then, of having enough knowledge to talk, but not enough experience to appreciate the fine points of what they're talking about. They fool management with plausible but wrong arguments. In my experience anyway. And today, the demographic may be skewed toward just that group.
wilkystyle 9y ago
> Of course, make sure those people are also compatible, as half the 10x devs I know are loners who don't mix well and work best when left alone. This is absolutely a great point, and the author also addresses this: > That doesn’t mean that a top-performing developer will write 10x as much code or crank out 10x as many features. What it means is that they’ll deliver 10x as much organizational value. I too have seen developers who are very talented actually cause negative organizational value, due to their inability to work well with others.

curiouscat321 9y ago

People who espouse remote work seem convinced that it’s the end-all way to work. I don’t care if I have to go into an office. I like offices. What I care about is that you don’t mind if I work from home every once in a while. I care that it’s okay for me to leave early or come late.

usernam 9y ago
I worked remotely for more than two years because I had to move to another place. I loved the company and they were quite happy as well, so they let me work remotely full time without problems. I absolutely loved it for the first six months, then I quit my job after the second year despite being a "dream scenario" for many. I generally work alone when I want to think, but I loved the interaction with excellent colleagues and sitting at home with skype wasn't exactly the same. I would still work remotely for 2-3 days a week, because it's so much more productive for certain tasks, but no more. I do not consider full-time remote jobs.
- DLay 9y ago
  I’ve always been hesitant to try remote work because it seems like there’d be an added pressure to seek out face to face interactions or else I’d slowly become a hermit. I consider myself an introvert, but even that has its limits.
  - usernam 9y ago
    My take from the experience was that if you have an active social life outside of your colleagues and work is "just work" for you, then a full-time remote job is probably fine. Saves you the commute too. I do have an active social life, but I expect my work to be something more than "just work". I enjoy what I do, and working at a distance detracts from the experience.
  - invalidOrTaken 9y ago
    Doesn't work in all situations, but what's worked for me is to treat it as something that you need to keep an eye on, and then liberally take trips into the office.

sharkdesk 9y ago

Lots of good ideas in the article - the key is to really stand out. I take 10 weeks off a year to go travelling - true vacation time, not remote work. I know I can get a 20% raise if I switched companies (I know that because I got an offer), but I stay where I am because i can't imagine going back down to 3 weeks of vacation a year.

x0x0 9y ago
That's an awesome situation. Two interview cycles ago, I wanted a full month of unpaid vacation on top of the normal vacation package. I told each I would take a 1/12 pay cut in exchange. It was a huge obstacle for employers.
- freyfogle 9y ago
  The problem is if they give you your special deal, they have to give everyone their own special deal which becomes an absolute nightmare to manage.
  - jakobegger 9y ago
    And here's an opportunity for smaller companies. I have a small company, and I can't offer my employees the prestige or high salary that larger companies offer. But I can offer to accommodate whatever other special wishes people have. Want to work just 4 days a week? Fine. Want to work from 12pm to 8pm? Fine. Want to take a day off on short notice? Fine with me. Larger companies have all kinds of rules and policies in place. In a small company, you can design the policies together with the employees.
    - matwood 9y ago
      This is basically what we do. I think we offer competitive salaries, but also give tons of work flexibility. We judge on work produced, not hours in seats (within reason for meetings or time critical items like customer support) or any other useless metric. Since each person has to be thought of individually, I can see where it would be hard to scale in a really large environment. Some employees also have a hard time without strict policies in place (weird I know). We make sure to let people know in the interview that responsibility comes with the freedom. One last thing, we treat every position in the company this way and not just the developers.

taurath 9y ago

Honestly I kind of feel like any company that is offering market rates for remote workers has a bigger problem filtering developer applications than they do finding great engineers. Complete opposite from the hiree perspective vs in a big tech town where everyone is desperate for talent. Between my last 2 positions I tried looking around at fully remote jobs - sane hours, good pay, good (virtual) environment including codebase - pick 1, maybe 2 if lucky.

drinchev 9y ago

What is missing in the article is the word "freelance". Most of the time within a startup you can see developers stay in the company for ~1 year. Usually they are more willing to find another job than negotiating a salary bump ( which happens to be also mentally easier, since the first action is passive - just reply to a recruiter ). When I completely switched to freelance gigs, I discovered that I stay in a company for far longer time. It is easier for me to index my price per hour with the market, since I have less bureaucracy with my client ( removes FOMO ). I had the best offers ( company shares + bonuses ) to join various companies than being an employee ( because of the FOMO of the employer that you might leave soon ). And finally I improved my code quality, since you always write your code with having your mind that sooner or later you will be not the code-owner. Of course having 3 months off to enjoy the summer also makes it more appealing than the 22 vacation days you usually receive ( in Europe ). Disclaimer - all of this won't work if you are a junior developer. Usually the stronger hands are in your employer then, since your contract can be terminated any day, without any notice. But hiring a senior developer as a freelancer in your team ( IMHO ) will definitely mean that you will work with a highly motivated person, being there to do the job.

pmorici 9y ago
“Freelance” has very negative connotations I my book. It brings to mind sites like odesk or whatever it is called now where low quality companies look to find 99 cent an hour talent.
- user5994461 9y ago
  Freelance is a desperate student who is working for free to create his portfolio. You want to call yourself a "contractor", or better "a "consultant"

staunch 9y ago

Most companies don't provide a work environment even half as good as an average home office. I think remote working may be the first killer app for VR but it would probably require a $3k HMD today to be viable. Most tech companies could easily afford one per worker.

ttoinou 9y ago
Your brain's going to melt if you're going to play VR all day

chx 9y ago

What this doesn't talk about enough is work impact -- mentioned yes but doesn't emphasize it. These are shitty years and it eats me I am working for an enterprise gardening their websites instead of literally making the world a better place. I mean, sure, it pays and challenging and whatnot but I miss NowPublic dearly because we made a god damn difference. We ran one of the biggest Katrina missing person boards. We were one of the first "citizen journalism" sites and had photos and reports from places where noone else had. It was amazing. I miss it so badly. And you know what, I would be open to changing, I am still doing Drupal and I need the money but ... if you are doing something meaningful with Drupal, Elixir or Go and have some part time opening? Let's talk :) Click my username for email address.

humanrebar 9y ago
> These are shitty years and it eats me I am working for an enterprise gardening their websites instead of literally making the world a better place. It's a peculiar quirk of the tech industry that "changing the world through X" is a reasonable expectation. Bus drivers don't wonder how they can make a difference through bus driving. They do their shifts and then go volunteer at the hospital, food bank, homeless shelter, etc. Point being, you have an urge to help people. Then help people. Now, you'll obviously add the most value to organizations that need Drupal, but free technical help is usually not "free as in beer" as much as "free as in puppies". Setting up someone with a slick technical solution almost always comes with some required maintenance fees, organizational knowledge, operational costs, etc. That is, it's hard to give away tech in a way that's sustainable. Even tech training has limited use if you're not prepared with next steps for the trainees (college applications, concrete job prospects, immediate personal benefit, etc.). That being said, information can be given away effectively, as you learned after Katrina. Maybe some community is just missing certain information presented well. Drupal is great there. Other people are great at writing middleware for CAN buses. They probably have fewer opportunities to apply tech to help humanity than you do. They'd be better off pitching in at Habitat for Humanity, and maybe you would be too, just to start.
- whatshisface 9y ago
  People want to climb Maslow's hierarchy in every area of their lives. If bus drivers had better pay and job security (so much so that they hit the region of diminishing returns), maybe we'd see more talk from drivers about wishing they were driving especially important buses.

perlgeek 9y ago

I wonder about recommending both remote work and spending quite some time mentoring. How well does remote mentoring actually work? I was positively influenced by people giving me advice remotely (I don't know if I'd really call it mentoring), but my feeling is that face-to-face works much better. Any experiences?

Phlarp 9y ago
I had a number of very positive remote only mentors when I was younger and I give them all a large amount of credit for who and where I am now. Mentorship is important,but I don't think face to face is particularly important. Although I wouldn't rule it out if it was convenient to both parties.

TamDenholm 9y ago

Senior developer salaries in my local area (Edinburgh, Scotland, UK) are £30k-£40k which is about $42k - $56k USD. On a £40k salary you pay roughly £9,500 in tax. Ive no idea what the tax rate is in America but the difference in salaries between the UK and the US is astounding.

Nursie 9y ago
The UK mostly pays developers a derisory salary. Australia seems to pay roughly on a par with the US, or did when I lived there. But most of the UK is dreadful - software folks are paid poorly and treated like drones. Unfortunately there are enough people that will take the bad salary, have mediocre performance and deliver mediocre software slowly, that a lot of British companies now expect to pay peanuts and get monkeys. I've found the only way to replicate the money you can get elsewhere is to be a contractor. You can make about double your quoted figure outside London (my experience in the Hampshire/Wiltshire/Dorset region), or triple or more if you land something bank related in London. No idea what might be available in Edinburgh.
- crdoconnor 9y ago
  The contractor premium will get dragged down in a year or two as well - the Tories are planning on kicking up taxes for them in order to bring in an extra £200 mil. That will probably lead to an exodus of the experienced developers from the UK. This will not only have a negative effect on UK software houses it will also exacerbate the existing problems with UK government IT projects, which have already have a multibillion-pound problem with failure to deliver and cost overruns as it is. Meanwhile, Russian oligarchs are still paying peanuts for their empty central London mansions and big companies are barely paying any corporation taxes.
  - user5994461 9y ago
    Not so sure. People who've been living here often can't just go back to where they come from. They wouldn't have moved to the UK if the situation in their countries was better. The effect so far of Brexit is to stop the flood of newcomers, not making establishing people leave. It's good as a developer, less competitors for the same amount of jobs.

madamelic 9y ago

Are people really making these salaries? I mean like mid-level, not god-tier type people. I don't know if I am stupid or just don't say the right things but are there really mid-level devs not at huge companies making $160k a year? I mostly hang out at startups and it is normally around like 130k for a senior dev.

qaq 9y ago
"startups" is the keyword here
- user5994461 9y ago
  Emphasis. One MUST stop working for startups to make a living.
matwood 9y ago
Depends on the location, and not just because COLA. If you live in a big gov contracting area or somewhere with a lot of company offices (not necessarily tech), they will push up the salaries. I met a guy once who worked as a programmer at a local plant (steel or something), and between his high base salary and bonuses he made more than anyone else I had ever talked to in the area.
kod 9y ago
Yes, absolutely, there are normal people at normal companies outside of the bay area making 160. If you're actually senior and are still making 130 you probably aren't negotiating.
- madamelic 9y ago
  I am not even making 130... ugh. (And I know others are)
shoover 9y ago
Good question. Indianapolis seems to have a thriving tech community, but the Glassdoor data for senior software engineer average base pay comes in a full 30k under your startup number: $99k (based on 1081 anonymous submissions). LinkedIn shows median $100k.

neebz 9y ago

I loved remote work and did a lot of effort to ensure that we adopt a remote-friendly culture. However I will never get over the fact that we found some of our engineers ended up doing freelancing work, over-estimating work and basically just slacking around in the freedom of their homes. I would love to hear if anyone had similar experiences or how they prevent such in remote environments.

auggierose 9y ago
That is an interesting point. Personally, I think remote work should be freelance work.
- maxaf 9y ago
  Are you saying that remote employees should be deprived of full-timer benefits and legal protections, however meager? All because of trust issues that grew out of experience with a bad apple which isn't representative of remote workers in general? Empirically speaking, effective remote employees are more trustworthy and less prone to organizational politics. I can even tell you why: these people have a system of values outside of work that in turn values their professional activities as something that helps enable this desirable lifestyle. In return, work is treated with diligence and virtue. I'm sorry that you or the person you're replying to have had a negative experience with remote workers. As usual, a few bad apples don't spoil the whole bunch.
  - auggierose 9y ago
    I didn’t have any bad experiences with remote workers, and I can definitely see how that can work for non-freelancers. Personally, I just think remote and freelance are an ideal combination for independent creatives.
skypanther 9y ago
I've worked remote for over a decade. At the best jobs, I was made to feel fully part of the team. I was included in decision making, kept updated with changing plans, had a means to communicate & stay socially and professionally involved with the team. In those cases, I was fully dedicated to the job. On the other hand, I've worked other jobs where I was essentially ignored for weeks, even months at a time. I was left out of decisions, etc and just handed work to do. At those places, I definitely drifted off into my own stuff.

weeksie 9y ago

I really wish we'd start using a term like journeyman to talk about what people insist on calling "senior developers". A person with 3-6 years of experience isn't senior. That's preposterous on its face. Nor is a 3-6 year developer a junior, but we are woefully inept at using meaningful terms for developers.

pleasecalllater 9y ago
This always makes me sad. 3-6 years of experience, and you are senior. 20 years of experience, and you are too old for the "young and dynamic team". I'm slowly hitting 20 years soon... and even now I have troubles with getting a job. I didn't have the problem when I had 3-6 years of experience. A surgeon with 3-6 years of experience is usually too inexperienced to operate on her own. 20 years of experience, and you can lead a team of surgeons. In IT we have some strange cult of inexperience. And this makes me sad.
- matfil 9y ago
  20 year programmers fairly often get to "lead teams of programmers". In some ways, it's staying hands-on that can be difficult. At least if you want to be recognised and valued as someone who's experienced and can take on challenging problems without a lot of support.
- user5994461 9y ago
  The surgeon only did his first operation 3 years ago and started studying medicine a few years earlier. The developer did his first program a decade ago when he was around 12 and he's been studying and practicing ever since.
  - delinka 9y ago
    “A decade ago” is more than “3-6 years” of experience - is that your argument? Because he doesn’t have 3-6 years experience working woth others, or realizing that the problems he’s solved were solved decades ago and those solutions can be found in the right places, or living with the reality that out in the workforce he’s most likely not the brilliant unique snowflake his family thinks he is.

user5994461 9y ago

That awkward time when you finish reading the article and you realize with the ad at the last paragraph that it was all just advertising for the author's service.

genezeta 9y ago
Most, if not all, of Eric Elliot's writing is just an advertisement for himself. Notice also how most of the references he links are his own articles.
Tehchops 9y ago
I mean, it's at least reasonably good content, versus him spamming backlinks into random Disqus feeds.

gingerlime 9y ago

The top thing on the StackOverflow survey was vacation time, but the article hardly touched on it. We have a 45 days holidays policy for all full time employees. Mind you, this includes public holidays, because we're also 100% remote and it's more fair for everyone if we don't align public holidays to one spot. This also means that if you prefer working over Christmas, and then take time off another time - you can. We also heavily encourage everyone to take their holidays, and you can only transfer up to 5 days from one year to the next, so people use it.

nikanj 9y ago
Who’s “we”?

mathattack 9y ago

I find the most important thing is the “deal” with the manager. “Here is what I can give you, Here is what I want in return.” Some people want promotability. Some want remote work. Some want new technical challenges. Some flexibility. A manager can’t give everything to everyone but they can say, “I can give you all the flexibility you need as long as the servers never go down” or “I can work to promote you in a year if you hit every deadline and do three or four side projects” That conversation is more important than any perk.

ben_jones 9y ago
I agree 100% EXCEPT for the huge asymmetry in information that exists during that phase of an interview. "Hit every deadline", you would then need to know how aggressive and how frequent those deadlines are. You would have to know how stable the team(s) are because if a team has a deadline and loses the head engineer, well shit. Negotiating and accepting an offer letter is way too much like gambling. Whether its start-up equity, growth/lifestyle promises of a manager, or hope that office politics won't grind your soul to dust within 3 months, its a huge risk even saying "yes".
- mathattack 9y ago
  True. I find this is easier as part of a longer term relationship. There is a gamble, and trust is involved. The one recourse is if they violate your trust, you can leave.
enraged_camel 9y ago
This doesn't work in many states because labor laws require companies to give every worker in a given role the same perks. If you allow Bob to work remotely, you also need to give that choice to Jason and Ashley. Texas is like this for instance. This is the real reason why a lot of companies have trouble switching to remote work: they can't slowly transition. It has to be an on-off switch for all workers.
- mathattack 9y ago
  It's also hard because "Remote first" companies make it look easier because they're designed for it.