7 ms·
Jeremy, I think you'll wan't this job
- silversconfused 7y agoIf they are going to pay for 1/10 a developer, is anything stopping you from picking up 10 of these orgs as employers at the same time and delivering 1/10 of your effort to each?
- biesnecker 7y agoThe switching costs alone would eat half your day, and of course they're hoping to get much more than 1/10th of a developer despite only paying for 1/10th of one.
- floren 7y agoSo if you're a 10X developer, and switching jobs will eat up half your time... you could take 5 jobs and provide 1 developer's worth of skill to each, right? Until Fred Brooks shows up and slaps you.
- martin1975 7y agoBrooks slapped everyone decades ago and it's still ringing in all of ours' ears.
- x3ro 7y agoNot sure if serious, but probably the contract you'd sign (at least in Germany there's usually a non-compete in there somewhere). Also it feels like this would be a lot more effort than just working one well-paying job. Imagine all the context switching...
- marcus_holmes 7y agoI thought everyone had agreed that non-competes weren't enforceable (because they're basically a restriction on trade, and that's illegal)? Are they still a thing?
- kingnothing 7y agoNon-competes are legal and enforceable in many states in the US.
- marcus_holmes 7y agogood to know, thanks.
- cannonedhamster 7y agoNon competes only matter if they're competing. At the price they are offering I'd spend about 1/2 an hour trolling stack overflow for random bits of code, push whatever I find whether it is relevant or not and call it a day. This kind of blind abuse is literally to encourage H1B abuse. They are just going to use this to claim they couldn't find a local resource and export the job. It's illegal and should be cracked down on harder than a fleck of marijuana in Texas. It's apparently a felony to have weed in Texas, why is it not a felony to commit employment fraud/H1b fraud? You're destroying lives other than your own in one case and just enjoying yourself in another.
- jjeaff 7y agoNo, because these people are expecting full time work for 1/10 pay.
- magashna 7y agoBut if you get paid that 1/10 10 times in one month then fired, who cares, you already made out with 10 checks.
- gcheong 7y agoI think andrew_19’s comment about the guy who subcontracted the jobs out to people where 1/10 salary is thought to be hitting the jackpot is probably the better way to go here if you’re even seriously considering the job in the first place. The main problem there is making sure your contract explicitly allows or at least doesn’t prohibit you from farming the work out.
- jeffbarg 7y ago> "if you want to see the other applicants, you have to upgrade your account and pay $375/mo until you call them to cancel (I know, because I still pay $10/mo to keep my account on pause because I don’t feel like talking to people, and $10/mo is probably less expensive over 2 years than fighting with them to cancel my account is is worth, and they know it… fuckers)." I hate sites that allow you to subscribe without talking to someone, but don't allow you to unsubscribe without picking up the phone. I'm surprised it's not downright illegal. I've found Privacy.com[1] is a good service for these kinds of subscriptions, because you can just cancel the card to avoid keep getting charged. Not sure if anyone has a better solution. [1]: https://privacy.com/ https://privacy.com/ (I am not associated with this site, just a user)
- silasdavis 7y agoFrom privacy.com terms: >You grant us and our subsidiaries, affiliates, and successors a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, fully-paid, transferable, and sub-licensable right to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, prepare derivative works of, distribute, publicly perform, and publicly display your Content throughout the world in any media in order to provide and promote the Services. You retain all rights in your Content, subject to the rights you granted to us in these General Terms. You may modify or remove your Content via your Privacy Account or by terminating your Privacy Account, but your Content may persist in historical, archived or cached copies and versions thereof available on or through the Services.
- leetbulb 7y agoGoogle the first bit of that sentence. It's likely just some generic ToS they used. But yeah, still not good. That said, I'm a happy user of Privacy.com It's great.
- thekyle 7y agoSo what? Privacy.com pretty much just provides proxy card numbers for online shopping. What content are you afraid of giving them a license to use?
- andrew_ 7y agoI had a common acquaintance many years back of someone with, let's call them "questionable" morals, who aggregated postings like this and contracted with dozens, farming them out to offshore developers who'd thought they hit the jackpot. From what I know, the guy made a killing. Not something to celebrate, but perhaps tangentially related to why these kinds of job offerings still see daylight.
- azhenley 7y agoI would never do such a thing (my morals, ethics, and personality) but I am always amazed that it works. If they are able to keep the employer/clients happy, then good for them!
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- toomuchtodo 7y agoThis seems to be more common than people would believe. I had a colleague many years ago, who managed his remote offshore contractors from his workplace office, while spending his free time finding more work for them. There's always money to be made from market inefficiencies.
- anbop 7y agoWhy is that questionable morals? The company got their work done. The offshore developer got more money than they would have otherwise. Basically the guy found an inefficiency in the system (companies not believing that the offshore developers themselves were capable of doing the work).
- gcheong 7y agoDepends on if the contract allows it or not. Companies sometimes prohibit this due to non-disclosure agreements or security concerns.
- jedberg 7y agoI think the immoral part was that he would do the interview and get the job, and then hire someone else to actually do the work, which he submitted under his own name. He wasn't honest with the companies that the work product was not his.
- tschellenbach 7y agoIt clearly says founder/CEO in my profile and I still get these type of emails all the time. On the hiring side I see the other side of the problem though. Basically nobody has managed to adequately match supply and demand in the labor market. Huge opportunity, someone should go solve it
- dreamcompiler 7y agoIs the matching algorithm the problem, or is it just that most companies don't want to pay people what they're worth?
- gnulinux 7y agoPeople are worth what most companies are willing to pay them.
- msbarnett 7y agoThat doesn’t follow. Like this blog post points out, there’s a ton of postings out there with these absurdly low pay expectations. And yet, companies can, and do, struggle to fill $120,000 a year jobs. It can simultaneously be the case that the majority of the market is willing to pay peanuts AND the average developer routinely signs for far, far more than that. The majority of the market simply never finds any takers whatsoever for their “genius social media idea I own it you have to sign an NDA for, you do all the work, $15/hr”.
- gnulinux 7y agoYes I don't disagree with that. I must correct myself, for my wording wasn't precise. People are worth what most employees' employers are willing to pay.
- ABCLAW 7y ago>People are worth what most employees' employers are willing to pay. Companies must transact for labour at a rate that transfers wealth to them. On average, employees must be able generate more value to a firm than their wages, otherwise employing people would be a net negative to a firm.
- magashna 7y agoI changed my title to simply "employee" on Linkedin and get waaay less cold calls/emails. Putting anything IT related seems to be carte blanche for recruiters to send you anything they have. CTO for Microsoft? Are you interested in this $5/hr. 3 month contract? Obnoxious
- pentae 7y agoI deleted my LinkedIn profile a few years back and haven't looked back. It's cathartic. I honestly don't see the reason to have it unless you're actively looking for a new role. Speaking of obnoxious - they don't let you hide your profile either, you have to completely delete it.
- jedberg 7y ago> Speaking of obnoxious - they don't let you hide your profile either, you have to completely delete it Of course not, because then the people who pay them money would get fewer results in their searches! And they don't care if you delete it because they keep all the data anyway.
- Glyptodon 7y agoOne of the reasons I don't believe there's a real developer shortage is that so much of the job market is joke postings.
- turtlecloud 7y agoI agree. It’s just a way to get more H1B devs and pressure them with deportation to get good workers. The dev/ engineer shortage is total nonsense.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- jedberg 7y agoMy name is Jeremy and I thought someone hacked either HN or my computer to change the title of this to match the viewer's name. It's like the time my friend Tyler discovered that when you do 'shutdown -h now', if your username is Tyler, it says, "Hello Mr. Tyler, going down.....?"
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- projectramo 7y ago"OMG! Now Aerosmith sang a song about the incident! What is going on?"
- twic 7y agoI hadn't heard of this! Not a wind up: http://www.eeggs.com/items/32546.html http://www.eeggs.com/items/32546.html Although it seems that this no longer works on most modern Linuxes - not since the shutdown command was taken over by systemd. Another thing to curse it for.
- sp332 7y ago3/4 years clearly means "3 or 4 years" and not three-quarters of a year. MS Word probably autocorrected 3/4 to ¾.
- JustSomeNobody 7y agoBut who writes "3 or 4" as 3/4?
- fastball 7y agoI have done that before. Never followed by a '+' though.
- jermaustin1 7y agoSo "3/4+" would mean what exactly? 3+ or 4+ years? 3 years or 4+ years? 3+ years?
- JMTQp8lwXL 7y agoI would interpret that as "three or four, or more", as in, they wouldn't penalize additional years of experience.
- rocky1138 7y agoIt's super annoying that this person is pushing for the elimination of including the currency in the job posting. There are more than one country which use "dollars" or the $ symbol you know. It reminds me of "Falsehoods programmers believe about names" https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/ https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...
- jermaustin1 7y agoBUT in the United States, where these jobs are being advertised and employing the works, there is only 1 currency. I wouldn't expect to get paid in Argentine Pesos in NYC... would you expect to get paid in Rubles in Sydney Australia?
- rocky1138 7y agoIt depends on if it's remote work. Not everyone who works at a company in a given country needs to physically be at that location or paid in the local (to the business) currency.
- azhenley 7y agoThe job posts he quoted were all New York. I don't think he is suggesting to eliminate the currency, but rather to eliminate dev salaries that are lower than the poverty line.
- shiftpgdn 7y agoI have a conspiracy theory that a lot of these comically low offers are completely fake to push down average compensation for roles. No one is obviously taking these jobs and many of them seem to be fairly non-sensical in their description and requirements. But these salary asks get calculated into averages when Dice/Zip Recruiter/Whoever put together their recommended compensation suggestions.
- jschwartzi 7y agoI just think there are a lot of people out there who have no idea how much money we make for a typical job, and therefore don't know what's reasonable. They may have worked hourly jobs in the past and have calibrated their hourly rates to those going rates rather than doing any kind of market research. $20/hr would be pretty good for a journeyman carpenter in some areas I've lived.
- TrackerFF 7y agoThey get tons of desperate devs. Lots of people fresh off boot-camps, or fresh college grads with no experience. Then they hit them with low-ball offers, and work them for a year or two - until the devs learn their worth, and switch jobs for triple salary. And the cycle starts over.
- CM30 7y agoYeah, it's pretty much this, except also with a sort of class element to it. A lot of people from poorer backgrounds flat out don't know their worth, or how much money they should be making according to market rates. They're so used to friends and family having low earning jobs that they think that's the baseline, even in fields where you can earn three/four times that by shopping around, negotiating and knowing who to work for. It's also probably why many immigrants work for low wages; because they're too used to the amount of money they would have made in their home country to realise that even double/triple that may be significantly less than market rate in their new location.
- Viliam1234 7y ago
- bencollier49 7y agoIn some countries you have to show that you've attempted to hire locally before importing labour from abroad. I almost wonder if that's what's going on in some of these cases.
- stickydink 7y agoQuite possibly? As part of PERM I've had to advertise in a local newspaper for a minimum amount of time, and be ready justify rejecting each applicant. You can imagine how many applicants there were though...
- la_barba 7y agoAFAIK You have to advertise the position with the prevailing wage for the region and the position. And you have to keep a copy of every resume received for legal reasons.
- james_s_tayler 7y agoYeah. If there is one thing I've observed over the years is that systems usually function as the design goal intended. So if you think the system is broken because the behavior is odd then there is a high chance you just misunderstood the design goal.
- repler 7y agoRecruiters just parrot words they hear without knowing what they mean and always have.
- azhenley 7y agoI don't think that is true. I've spoken with some very helpful and knowledgeable recruiters. You can't expect them to be engineers.