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I was about to raise, "they're over-focusing on low pay jobs" because this happened on my team. It's incredibly hard to hire for my team because we require poly

by kodah 5y ago

I was about to raise, "they're over-focusing on low pay jobs" because this happened on my team. It's incredibly hard to hire for my team because we require polyglot programmers at a minimum. I do know that it wasn't "me" or anything that I had control over on the team (mostly technical things).

908B64B197 5y ago
> It's incredibly hard to hire for my team because we require polyglot programmers at a minimum. I do know that it wasn't "me" or anything that I had control over on the team (mostly technical things). Have you tried paying more?
- kodah 5y ago
  Heh, well, no. Unfortunately some companies interpreted "equal pay for equal work" as "everyone makes the same". In effect, polyglot engineers that work on infrastructure-y applications make the same as someone who only works on a web app backend. Infrastructure teams have tried to fix this by promoting quickly or hiring ultra-senior only positions, but then that breaks the promotion model, which has some specific steps and outcomes to it.
  - 908B64B197 5y ago
    > Unfortunately some companies interpreted "equal pay for equal work" as "everyone makes the same". It worked at NeXT. But unless you have a world class founder and are hiring in a top tier market, good luck. The real question you need to ask yourself is: is it equal work and are you an HR company that happens to write software or a tech company?
    - kodah 5y ago
      > is it equal work and are you an HR company that happens to write software or a tech company? In my software we deal with complexities in OSI layers 4-8, in multiple languages, with multiple protocols. As long as I've been working in core infrastructure software it's always been this way, and I think that's why I stay in the domain. The challenges are always new and this space sees a lot of constant iteration, but it's usually iteration down in the stack. We deal in systems technology all the way up to HTTP. There's a big variance to the nature of work you'll take on is my point. Additionally, this team seems to benefit from fundamental knowledge in math, systems, and software engineering. When I worked strictly on web backends the most amount of Layer 4 I ever touched was a load balancer. I dealt in a few protocols but they were all fairly predictable. The system was not really something that we touched, improved, or even really relied on. It was more a consequence of development, so patch solutions were okay. I don't see the kind of fundamental knowledge on my team being required when I filled these kinds of positions, but maybe it could. The thing I have trouble reconciling is whether I judge web backend development more harshly (and thus think, this is not the same work) purely because it wasn't interesting to me, or because my company doesn't mandate that kind of attention to detail (or tries to provide broad solutions and discourages individual problem solving), etc... It's hard for me to tell on an individual level.

by kodah 5y ago

908B64B197 5y ago

> It's incredibly hard to hire for my team because we require polyglot programmers at a minimum. I do know that it wasn't "me" or anything that I had control over on the team (mostly technical things). Have you tried paying more?

kodah 5y ago
Heh, well, no. Unfortunately some companies interpreted "equal pay for equal work" as "everyone makes the same". In effect, polyglot engineers that work on infrastructure-y applications make the same as someone who only works on a web app backend. Infrastructure teams have tried to fix this by promoting quickly or hiring ultra-senior only positions, but then that breaks the promotion model, which has some specific steps and outcomes to it.
- 908B64B197 5y ago
  > Unfortunately some companies interpreted "equal pay for equal work" as "everyone makes the same". It worked at NeXT. But unless you have a world class founder and are hiring in a top tier market, good luck. The real question you need to ask yourself is: is it equal work and are you an HR company that happens to write software or a tech company?
  - kodah 5y ago
    > is it equal work and are you an HR company that happens to write software or a tech company? In my software we deal with complexities in OSI layers 4-8, in multiple languages, with multiple protocols. As long as I've been working in core infrastructure software it's always been this way, and I think that's why I stay in the domain. The challenges are always new and this space sees a lot of constant iteration, but it's usually iteration down in the stack. We deal in systems technology all the way up to HTTP. There's a big variance to the nature of work you'll take on is my point. Additionally, this team seems to benefit from fundamental knowledge in math, systems, and software engineering. When I worked strictly on web backends the most amount of Layer 4 I ever touched was a load balancer. I dealt in a few protocols but they were all fairly predictable. The system was not really something that we touched, improved, or even really relied on. It was more a consequence of development, so patch solutions were okay. I don't see the kind of fundamental knowledge on my team being required when I filled these kinds of positions, but maybe it could. The thing I have trouble reconciling is whether I judge web backend development more harshly (and thus think, this is not the same work) purely because it wasn't interesting to me, or because my company doesn't mandate that kind of attention to detail (or tries to provide broad solutions and discourages individual problem solving), etc... It's hard for me to tell on an individual level.