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Hard to take this seriously with all the straw men and broad generalizations. Reality check: there has never been a hotter seller's market for software enginee

Hard to take this seriously with all the straw men and broad generalizations. Reality check: there has never been a hotter seller's market for software engineering talent. The fact that you have not landed a job does not mean that supply is not short in general. Rather than blowing your stack at some recruiter who you heard on a podcast interview, you might want to reflect on yourself and how you might be coming off in job interviews. As far as low pay goes, yeah, welcome to the labor market. It's easy to write a blog post about how companies need to pay more, but hard to reconcile the reality that if they don't have FAANG cash flows, "market rate" for developers may not be viable, regardless of management's good intentions or lack thereof. And with regard to bad interviews, remember interviewers are individuals, with skillsets all over the map. Once you get more senior it gets even more frustrating to be judged by someone who has a fraction of your experience. Trust me when I say there is no value in dwelling on this or getting your undies in a bunch. Suck it up and figure out how to play the game (read CtCI, practice on interviewing.io, ask for feedback) and land the job, then do the best work you can every day. Angry screeds will not change anything about the industry and will not help you.

emadabdulrahim 5y ago
This
Apocryphon 5y ago
> It's easy to write a blog post about how companies need to pay more, but hard to reconcile the reality that if they don't have FAANG cash flows, "market rate" for developers may not be viable, regardless of management's good intentions or lack thereof. Is that a sign of monopoly? When a handful of corporations have vastly more resources than the rest of the industry?
- zepto 5y ago
  It might be if it wasn’t false: https://www.economist.com/business/2021/05/16/how-to-thrive-in-the-shadow-of-giants https://www.economist.com/business/2021/05/16/how-to-thrive-...
- lazide 5y ago
  No, that's just reality. There are vastly more small companies than large in every industry. They all find their niches. Swift Energy still exists even though Shell and Exxon are a million times larger. Do Shell and Exxon have more resources, throw their weight around more, etc? You bet. Are they monopolies? Not in any plausible way I've heard anyone describe.
- karmasimida 5y ago
  It will be monopoly if you have no other choices but to work for FAANG, which can't be further from reality. On the other hand, complaining about FAANG, only after failing their interviews makes it hard to take that person's intention seriously.
  - JAlexoid 5y ago
    Out of Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google - Apple's interview process is actually quite gentle. It's definitely the most human focused out of all of them. I flipped the bird at Facebook and Google, and got frustrated with Amazon's to cancel my interview mid process.
    - karmasimida 5y ago
      I actually had quite the opposite experience, Apple absolutely grilled me at the spot for its interview, even though I did pass it, but I didn't take their offer.
      - JAlexoid 5y ago
        They definitely grilled me... It's just that they actually had humans talk to me and answer questions, not just throw a website with an automated judge and intentionally confusing problems. (My first language isn't English) Facebook was very robotic in their process, with a lot of demands for preparation. Google and Amazon aren't that far off.
        namdnay 5y ago
        > just throw a website with an automated judge and intentionally confusing problems Who did that??? Never heard of automated tests
        username90 5y ago
        I think Google and Facebook does that for some interns.
- MattGaiser 5y ago
  I can't personally confirm this, but Hacker News abounds with anecdotes about how there are similarly paying non FAANG companies.
tshaddox 5y ago
Okay, but I just don’t think it makes sense to say that companies who cannot afford to pay market rates for software engineers are experiencing a shortage of software engineers, unless there is something preventing market clearing.
- JumpCrisscross 5y ago
  > companies who cannot afford to pay market rates for software engineers are experiencing a shortage of software engineers, unless there is something preventing market clearing By definition, the market rate should involve zero shortage. That said, search costs and regulatory barriers are significant frictions. In the midst of an unforecasted surge in aggregate demand and you have an explicable event.
  - bestouff 5y ago
    "By definition" if you believe in the Free Market religion. There ain't no such thing in the real world.
  - josephg 5y ago
    Good point, but it sounds like you’re disagreeing on the terms, not the ground reality of the situation. Lots of companies can’t afford to compete with G / Fb / etc for principal engineers. (And many companies who should hire good people cheap out and don’t spend the money.) Thus lots of important, otherwise valuable projects are staffed by people who struggle to take technical responsibility for the tasks in front of them. This becomes self reinforcing - senior engineers have a lot of market power. They (we) generally don’t enjoy working on projects with mountains of technical debt alongside the processes which have a track record of creating them. “You’re really talented. Why would you work at a bank / corporate?”
  - mandelbrotwurst 5y ago
    > By definition, the market rate should involve zero shortage. Labor supply isn't perfectly elastic - there are only so many people who are capable of doing a particular job, and it takes time to train more. On top of that, of the pool of folks who could get trained up, some of them wouldn't be interested in the work at any rate of pay!
ditonal 5y ago
It's basically both. When I graduated with my CS degree, I was _thrilled_ to be offered 50k. Now new grads feel lowballed at 200k TC. So hard not to say that the market hasn't adjusted somewhat. At the same time, part of the reason companies even have to pay so much is because they've made interviewing so damn hard. I personally know many people at great companies like Google and Twitter who are _desperate_ to change, but they are too afraid to interview. They feel they got lucky and got through the process once and are unlikely to be able to repeat it, and they might be right. The industry has taken "false negatives are better than a false positives" to an absurd extreme and then complain there's a shortage. It's one or the other. If you're saying "a false negative is ok" you are implicitly saying "it's totally fine if we fail to hire good developers", and you can't say that then turn around and complain it's too hard to hire good developers. Which is _exactly_ what all my recent employers have done.
- pm90 5y ago
  There are very good reasons why developer compensation has swelled to the levels that we are seeing today. Technology firms have grown astronomically. They’ve also built processes and systems to onboard new developers and enable them to generate a lot of value. Developers are being compensated higher to reflect the efficiency gains made my technology firms. Is it unfortunate that firms that are unable to generate that much value suddenly can’t hire developers? Must be for those firms. But there’s nothing wrong with compensation growing astronomically and nothing moral in it being low.
  - trhway 5y ago
    absolutely. Google generates $1.5M/employee/year in a high margin business. Considering that the engineers is the main revenue producing asset it is not surprising that Google pays $600K+/year to the best engineers they can get to continue generate those $1.5M. >Is it unfortunate that firms that are unable to generate that much value suddenly can’t hire developers? Must be for those firms. yep. Our BigCo generates paltry $350K/employee/year. Looking at our salaries - we're relatively cheap engineers, and the company wastes our time in a myriad ways, and it is no wonder that we can't hire anybody here really - one can say we do experience the shortage of engineers. In SV we regularly lose people (who get 2-3X increases at new places, and only morons like me (even when i got an offer from Google it was just L5 and a very low one, basically just a match of what i have here) are still sitting here), and we're able to hire only in cheap remote locations.
nxpnsv 5y ago
If you can’t pay market rate salaries, your business is not working... EDIT: It seems people took this to mean I think everybody should get maximum salary, when what I meant was you should get a fair salary. Maybe I don't understand what market rate means in the US.
- johnnyanmac 5y ago
  market rate =/= "most extreme salaries from the largest tech companies". By statistical definition, the highest salaries can't be the median income for newgrads.
  - nxpnsv 5y ago
    Both of these statements are true. Neither of them is what I meant.
    - johnnyanmac 5y ago
      As a follow up to your edit: I think we agree on what market rate is, but what market rate actually is for tech is subject to a wide variety of answers. So that may be where the discrepancy comes from. that and the article in question giving questionable numbers like: >50-70k is a junior’s salary. Your people with 10 years of experience with C++ or whatever should be paid closer to 300k 50-70K out of school is normal in the US, but not necessarily all of US (70K in expensive areas like San Fransisco would be low balling, even as a new grad). 300K, even after 10 years, is not normal, not unless you started at a top company and/or have been aggressively chasing pay raises, internally or through job hopping. BUT, while abnormal it's also not a surprising number to hear either. It depends on so many factors.
      - ev1 5y ago
        Note that 70k for one person in SF is considered low income/needs assistance/basically not a living wage by hud.gov. The bare minimum is somewhere around 90k. At about ~140k for one person, you will still have difficulty renting a single housing unit because you will not be able to meet % of income = rent calculations. I have experience with this (and unrelenting corporate managed rentals charging several hundred in nonrefundable application fees just to reject for low income at 6 digits..).
anticristi 5y ago
Totally agree. I have an acquaintance in "evolutionary biology". She is unemployed for 1 year and trying hard to get a job. I get a "hey how are you" on LinkedIn at least weekly. That! Is how oversupply on one side and shortage on the other side looks.
nwellinghoff 5y ago
Great advice
renesansz 5y ago
harsh, but true. I also feel the author's struggle, in my opinion there are a lot of factors to consider why some of us don't get what we expect. The only thing we can do is to constantly improve and give our best in every interview we got
jjav 5y ago
> Suck it up and figure out how to play the game Unless you're desperate, it's best for all the industry if people don't. We can't mature the software industry hiring practices by playing along. > Angry screeds will not change anything about the industry and will not help you. Granted, they won't help the OP directly at the moment. But there is value in constantly calling out how broken hiring has become in this industry. Change won't happen by keeping quiet. I do my little part (in a technical leadership position) by never interviewing using the algorithm monkeydance. I don't care if you can regurgitate this or that algorithm on a whiteboard. Because we don't do that in the day jobs I'm hiring people for. I interview based on your real world experience because at my company we build real world products. I've never hired anyone to a role of sitting in a room rewriting algorithms on a whiteboard (almost certainly never will), so I'm not going to interview for that irrelevant skill set. To anyone who has been less than ~15 years in this industry, it's good to know that it wasn't always this way. Interviews used to be sane, based on experience. It's a relatively recent phenomenon how things have gone so wrong.
masonic 5y ago
read CtCI CtCI?
- rficu 5y ago
  Cracking the Coding Interview
belter 5y ago
You are underestimating the stupidity of most interview processes... The Interview (By Doug Milford) https://youtu.be/9fvyAqWfPtk https://youtu.be/9fvyAqWfPtk
imtringued 5y ago
>It's easy to write a blog post about how companies need to pay more, but hard to reconcile the reality that if they don't have FAANG cash flows, "market rate" for developers may not be viable, regardless of management's good intentions or lack thereof. Working for less than market rate is a misallocation of labor. Of course this is under the assumption that your skills are not far below the average developer. If the market rate is high, there are more profitable companies out there that need the labor more than your business, taking labor away from those companies is a net loss for everyone involved (your own company loses potential customers, the worker loses out on salary, the competitor loses out on labor).

emadabdulrahim 5y ago

This

Apocryphon 5y ago

zepto 5y ago
It might be if it wasn’t false: https://www.economist.com/business/2021/05/16/how-to-thrive-in-the-shadow-of-giants https://www.economist.com/business/2021/05/16/how-to-thrive-...
lazide 5y ago
No, that's just reality. There are vastly more small companies than large in every industry. They all find their niches. Swift Energy still exists even though Shell and Exxon are a million times larger. Do Shell and Exxon have more resources, throw their weight around more, etc? You bet. Are they monopolies? Not in any plausible way I've heard anyone describe.
karmasimida 5y ago
It will be monopoly if you have no other choices but to work for FAANG, which can't be further from reality. On the other hand, complaining about FAANG, only after failing their interviews makes it hard to take that person's intention seriously.
- JAlexoid 5y ago
  Out of Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google - Apple's interview process is actually quite gentle. It's definitely the most human focused out of all of them. I flipped the bird at Facebook and Google, and got frustrated with Amazon's to cancel my interview mid process.
  - karmasimida 5y ago
    I actually had quite the opposite experience, Apple absolutely grilled me at the spot for its interview, even though I did pass it, but I didn't take their offer.
    - JAlexoid 5y ago
      They definitely grilled me... It's just that they actually had humans talk to me and answer questions, not just throw a website with an automated judge and intentionally confusing problems. (My first language isn't English) Facebook was very robotic in their process, with a lot of demands for preparation. Google and Amazon aren't that far off.
      - namdnay 5y ago
        > just throw a website with an automated judge and intentionally confusing problems Who did that??? Never heard of automated tests
        username90 5y ago
        I think Google and Facebook does that for some interns.
MattGaiser 5y ago
I can't personally confirm this, but Hacker News abounds with anecdotes about how there are similarly paying non FAANG companies.

tshaddox 5y ago

Okay, but I just don’t think it makes sense to say that companies who cannot afford to pay market rates for software engineers are experiencing a shortage of software engineers, unless there is something preventing market clearing.

JumpCrisscross 5y ago
> companies who cannot afford to pay market rates for software engineers are experiencing a shortage of software engineers, unless there is something preventing market clearing By definition, the market rate should involve zero shortage. That said, search costs and regulatory barriers are significant frictions. In the midst of an unforecasted surge in aggregate demand and you have an explicable event.
- bestouff 5y ago
  "By definition" if you believe in the Free Market religion. There ain't no such thing in the real world.
- josephg 5y ago
  Good point, but it sounds like you’re disagreeing on the terms, not the ground reality of the situation. Lots of companies can’t afford to compete with G / Fb / etc for principal engineers. (And many companies who should hire good people cheap out and don’t spend the money.) Thus lots of important, otherwise valuable projects are staffed by people who struggle to take technical responsibility for the tasks in front of them. This becomes self reinforcing - senior engineers have a lot of market power. They (we) generally don’t enjoy working on projects with mountains of technical debt alongside the processes which have a track record of creating them. “You’re really talented. Why would you work at a bank / corporate?”
- mandelbrotwurst 5y ago
  > By definition, the market rate should involve zero shortage. Labor supply isn't perfectly elastic - there are only so many people who are capable of doing a particular job, and it takes time to train more. On top of that, of the pool of folks who could get trained up, some of them wouldn't be interested in the work at any rate of pay!

ditonal 5y ago

It's basically both. When I graduated with my CS degree, I was _thrilled_ to be offered 50k. Now new grads feel lowballed at 200k TC. So hard not to say that the market hasn't adjusted somewhat. At the same time, part of the reason companies even have to pay so much is because they've made interviewing so damn hard. I personally know many people at great companies like Google and Twitter who are _desperate_ to change, but they are too afraid to interview. They feel they got lucky and got through the process once and are unlikely to be able to repeat it, and they might be right. The industry has taken "false negatives are better than a false positives" to an absurd extreme and then complain there's a shortage. It's one or the other. If you're saying "a false negative is ok" you are implicitly saying "it's totally fine if we fail to hire good developers", and you can't say that then turn around and complain it's too hard to hire good developers. Which is _exactly_ what all my recent employers have done.

pm90 5y ago
There are very good reasons why developer compensation has swelled to the levels that we are seeing today. Technology firms have grown astronomically. They’ve also built processes and systems to onboard new developers and enable them to generate a lot of value. Developers are being compensated higher to reflect the efficiency gains made my technology firms. Is it unfortunate that firms that are unable to generate that much value suddenly can’t hire developers? Must be for those firms. But there’s nothing wrong with compensation growing astronomically and nothing moral in it being low.
- trhway 5y ago
  absolutely. Google generates $1.5M/employee/year in a high margin business. Considering that the engineers is the main revenue producing asset it is not surprising that Google pays $600K+/year to the best engineers they can get to continue generate those $1.5M. >Is it unfortunate that firms that are unable to generate that much value suddenly can’t hire developers? Must be for those firms. yep. Our BigCo generates paltry $350K/employee/year. Looking at our salaries - we're relatively cheap engineers, and the company wastes our time in a myriad ways, and it is no wonder that we can't hire anybody here really - one can say we do experience the shortage of engineers. In SV we regularly lose people (who get 2-3X increases at new places, and only morons like me (even when i got an offer from Google it was just L5 and a very low one, basically just a match of what i have here) are still sitting here), and we're able to hire only in cheap remote locations.

nxpnsv 5y ago

If you can’t pay market rate salaries, your business is not working... EDIT: It seems people took this to mean I think everybody should get maximum salary, when what I meant was you should get a fair salary. Maybe I don't understand what market rate means in the US.

johnnyanmac 5y ago
market rate =/= "most extreme salaries from the largest tech companies". By statistical definition, the highest salaries can't be the median income for newgrads.
- nxpnsv 5y ago
  Both of these statements are true. Neither of them is what I meant.
  - johnnyanmac 5y ago
    As a follow up to your edit: I think we agree on what market rate is, but what market rate actually is for tech is subject to a wide variety of answers. So that may be where the discrepancy comes from. that and the article in question giving questionable numbers like: >50-70k is a junior’s salary. Your people with 10 years of experience with C++ or whatever should be paid closer to 300k 50-70K out of school is normal in the US, but not necessarily all of US (70K in expensive areas like San Fransisco would be low balling, even as a new grad). 300K, even after 10 years, is not normal, not unless you started at a top company and/or have been aggressively chasing pay raises, internally or through job hopping. BUT, while abnormal it's also not a surprising number to hear either. It depends on so many factors.
    - ev1 5y ago
      Note that 70k for one person in SF is considered low income/needs assistance/basically not a living wage by hud.gov. The bare minimum is somewhere around 90k. At about ~140k for one person, you will still have difficulty renting a single housing unit because you will not be able to meet % of income = rent calculations. I have experience with this (and unrelenting corporate managed rentals charging several hundred in nonrefundable application fees just to reject for low income at 6 digits..).

anticristi 5y ago

Totally agree. I have an acquaintance in "evolutionary biology". She is unemployed for 1 year and trying hard to get a job. I get a "hey how are you" on LinkedIn at least weekly. That! Is how oversupply on one side and shortage on the other side looks.

nwellinghoff 5y ago

Great advice

renesansz 5y ago

harsh, but true. I also feel the author's struggle, in my opinion there are a lot of factors to consider why some of us don't get what we expect. The only thing we can do is to constantly improve and give our best in every interview we got

jjav 5y ago

> Suck it up and figure out how to play the game Unless you're desperate, it's best for all the industry if people don't. We can't mature the software industry hiring practices by playing along. > Angry screeds will not change anything about the industry and will not help you. Granted, they won't help the OP directly at the moment. But there is value in constantly calling out how broken hiring has become in this industry. Change won't happen by keeping quiet. I do my little part (in a technical leadership position) by never interviewing using the algorithm monkeydance. I don't care if you can regurgitate this or that algorithm on a whiteboard. Because we don't do that in the day jobs I'm hiring people for. I interview based on your real world experience because at my company we build real world products. I've never hired anyone to a role of sitting in a room rewriting algorithms on a whiteboard (almost certainly never will), so I'm not going to interview for that irrelevant skill set. To anyone who has been less than ~15 years in this industry, it's good to know that it wasn't always this way. Interviews used to be sane, based on experience. It's a relatively recent phenomenon how things have gone so wrong.

masonic 5y ago

read CtCI CtCI?

rficu 5y ago
Cracking the Coding Interview

belter 5y ago

You are underestimating the stupidity of most interview processes... The Interview (By Doug Milford) https://youtu.be/9fvyAqWfPtk https://youtu.be/9fvyAqWfPtk

imtringued 5y ago

>It's easy to write a blog post about how companies need to pay more, but hard to reconcile the reality that if they don't have FAANG cash flows, "market rate" for developers may not be viable, regardless of management's good intentions or lack thereof. Working for less than market rate is a misallocation of labor. Of course this is under the assumption that your skills are not far below the average developer. If the market rate is high, there are more profitable companies out there that need the labor more than your business, taking labor away from those companies is a net loss for everyone involved (your own company loses potential customers, the worker loses out on salary, the competitor loses out on labor).