18 ms·

Spending more on retaining developers reduces the cost of hiring developers

417 points by signa11 5y ago

torbTurret 5y ago
I wonder how things are at Amazon with the recent base salary changes. I imagine if most technical people don’t see a decent salary bump there will be a mass exodus, which is ironic given the increase seems to be in response to attrition.
- jhoechtl 5y ago
  I don't know for the US but in Europe inflation rise mostly driven by energy costs will call for a substantial adoption of wages anyhow. Inflation adjusted wages will not yet mean increased disposable income, I know.
  - moonchrome 5y ago
    If energy price increases are dominating your budget as a developer you should probably ask for a raise anyway or consider adjusting your energy consumption. If anything the constant growth of real-estate pricing (now driven by low interest rates and inflation fears) should impact developers much more.
    - Gareth321 5y ago
      He's not saying energy dominates his budget. He's saying European CPI increases are mostly due to energy prices.
      - moonchrome 5y ago
        What I'm saying is that if you're upper middle class income you are probably more concerned about the cost of housing than the cost of energy/food/etc. CPI increases started way before Russia and the energy price instability - the things energy will immediately reflect in will not be a big % of your income so increases aren't that dramatic. If my heating bill goes up 300% that's still going to be less than 2% of my household monthly income and that's during winter when we keep the heating on the entire time.
  - ChuckNorris89 5y ago
    > but in Europe inflation rise mostly driven by energy costs For now, yes, if you happen own your own place. If you don't already own it, your rent or planned house purchase will go up as well from the increased demand from the 2.5 million of refugees already here and millions more on the way as the war goes on. Whatever is left of the EU middle class who aren't real estate owners will be obliterated.
    - physicsguy 5y ago
      Even if your place is mortgaged - most people in the UK for e.g. are on short fixed interest rate deals, usually 2 to 5 years. If you're on a shorter term deal and your interest rate increases at the end, you're going to struggle to pay your mortgage.
  - makomk 5y ago
    The European energy crisis is mainly one of supply - most of Europe chose to be dependent on Russia for their gas supply despite US warnings that Russia would use that to try and get away with invading neighbouring countries, and now they have there isn't enough gas available and it will take years to build and switch to new sources. (The market was already pretty tight due to a higher-than-expected surge in demand after all the lockdowns.) So quality of living and real-terms wages after inflation have to go down for most people because there isn't the energy to support their old quality of life. It's possible that developers and other Big Tech employees will manage to dodge this, but there's no guarantee of that.
- bigcat123 5y ago
- saagarjha 5y ago
  Anecdotally, Amazon recruiters have far more slack to work with these days when recruiting. No idea how this affects compensation internally, of course.
- strgcmc 5y ago
  I think it's not really that ironic, if you consider that the mass exodus was anyways likely to happen, if Amazon had done nothing. So really the only thing that changed, is Amazon trying to make an attempt to stave off the default exodus (which was already being observed/starting); in that sense, by analogy: is pumping water on a fire ironic? The fire is a given, it's already happening, so the water is just a genuine attempt at firefighting (might work, might not).
  - torbTurret 5y ago
    The irony analogy I envision is pouring a bottle on a small fire, expecting it to be water, and having it turn out to be gasoline. That is, in an effort to solve problem A, you introduce solution B, but solution B only makes A worse than it was.
- zebnyc 5y ago
  My wife joined Amazon in Jan. She says that in her department (does not work in engineering), they are yet to see a change in comp and they are trying to figure out if it is real or just a PR stunt.
EnKopVand 5y ago
This is just my anecdotal view but it’s based on a few decades in non-tech organisations, from startup to emerging-into-enterprise to enterprise (my path was enterprise -> startup -> e2e) and I think we’re a while out from non-tech organisations understanding the value of their own development resources. Its everything from how IT is still often viewed as a “them-and-us” resource drain similar to HR but less understood (and this less valued by the organisation) even though 95% of the people in every organisation now works with IT devices that wouldn’t operate without IT. To how development continues to live in the weird spectrum of the business that actually needs something more than excel, being under digitalisation (efficiency) and IT (operations and development are natural frenemies). It’s having to live in a 2022 where the “standard” solutions, the “document libraries” the “data-warehousing”, the “data-management-systems”, the “enterprise-architecture”, the “data/ml/bi-architecture “ is still just a bunch of really shitty systems and drawings that can’t connect together and quickly become a nightmare for anyone trying to do any real work leading back to massive excel usage and a constant need for “connection-inhouse-solutions” to make things actually work. Leading to developers still being one of the best paid resources inside organisations with almost limitless tolerance for their non-conformity and rolling eyes in management meetings because most of us simply don’t understand the organisation lingo or the internal political power plays (yes, the bullshit). Anyway, I’ve seen no change in change management to suggest that developers are going to be more valued going forward. If anything I think the want and belief in “standard” solutions might just birth the opposite in the coming decade, until the money managers once again realise that developers are simply necessary in a world where every “standard” solution is just as shitty as it was 20 years ago.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- Animats 5y ago
  There's a big difference between organizations where IT is a cost center and ones where software and computer services are the product itself.
  - dijit 5y ago
MattGaiser 5y ago
The white hot market for developers has been going on for over a year and besides Amazon raising its salary cap, I have yet to hear of a single retention initiative, even outside of tech. I have spoken to more former colleagues just today (well, yesterday) who did not get meaningful raises this year while the new hires got 30% more.
- Arcanum-XIII 5y ago
  Yup, changing job is still the best way to get a raise — rinse and repeat. It seems "all dev can do everything, all manager can manage everything" means "we can replace any cog by any other cog since they're all the same". Yeah, well, no. I don't understand why, when they have a good fit, they don't fight for it. I even have seen some senior replace by out of school grad "because that's we can find".
  - BigJono 5y ago
    It's because big companies are optimised specifically for this. The entire enterprise dev culture is built around it. If you have to actually code, some devs are going to 10x other ones. But if you stack in as many dependencies as you can to the point where everyone is just reading documentation trying to get caught up, and the entire measure of productivity is whether you've used a library before so you come into a project with it's API pre-memorised, all devs look the same. Any dipshit can look at a few code examples and copy the basic patterns out of them. It's literally impossible to gain any real expertise in these codebases. I've been using React since 2015. I've got more specific experience in React front-ends than basically anyone I've ever worked with. I've run into virtually every NPM library in the ecosystem at least once over that time. It doesn't matter. I've forgotten 90% of the interesting details in all of them except for a small handful that I truly believe are quality. I can write some basic code using whatever from memory, but as soon as you hit anything with any real complexity it's back to the docs and back to trawling Github issues for everything that's not in the docs. You're in the same boat as everyone else, grinding out a scrap of knowledge just to abandon it at the start of the next project when you find out that there's a new set of fad dependencies you need to learn the internals of because their abstractions leak like a sieve. This works for big companies because they can afford the severe productivity hit with their momentum and market dominance. It's a death sentence for startups though. That's why everyone hires 20 year olds to run their startups. You might leave a ton of great experienced candidates on the table, but you dodge all their colleagues that have spent 20 years learning how to fuck everything up and get away with it because their individual contribution has always been indistinguishable in the company's revenue.
lordofgibbons 5y ago
I joined a pre-IPO unicorn 9 months ago, and am having very serious doubts about my compensation now. Given the direction the public markets are going, there is no way companies will be going IPO in the next few years. Even if the company goes public in a few years, it will take a while for the markets to climb to the exuberant levels they were at when the fair-market-value for the stock options were determined. Now, I have to do the hard maths of if I want to stick around with my comp being stuck for years, or head to greener pastures after my 1 year vesting cliff.
- spoonjim 5y ago
  If you joined a late stage private company recently, your options are completely underwater and as soon as the stock market seems to have stabilized you should jump ship, even just resign and re-interview for your existing company to get new options.
  - shapefrog 5y ago
    Why wait for the stock market, bin the options (which are now worth zero) and take advantage of the extremely good job market.
  - englebert 5y ago
    Can you talk more about the dynamics and timing here? Joining recently vs reinterviewing, and the factors that influence the underwater situation?
- Apocryphon 5y ago
  So does this mean right now the most lucrative roles would simply be public companies that offer stock?
  - l30n4da5 5y ago
    or public companies that simply offer a competitive salary, imo
- livinglist 5y ago
DeathArrow 5y ago
3 months ago ME: I got a work proposal from some company MANAGER: That sounds awful! Don't you like here? ME: I like the people. MANAGER: Is there anything that can change your mind? ME: It actually is. MANAGER: It's money, isn't it? ME: Well, yes. Inflation is 10%, I haven't got any raise. MANAGER: How much do you want? ME: The other company is offering me +25%, so that's the amount. MANAGER: I will try to speak to the higher ups, but there's already an order from above not to raise wages. ME: Please do. How much do you think it will take? MANAGER: speak to me in one week. Two weeks after. ME: Hey, did you speak with the higher ups? MANAGER: Yes, and they said we shouldn't raise your wage. ME: Ok then, we should talk about my resignation. MANAGER: But couldn't you still not leave? You don't have a small salary after all. ME: The prices are crazy, next year there is a prognosed high inflation too, and I have kids to take care of. So, regretfully, I will have to say good bye. I wasn't the only one who resigned and for three seniors who left, they only found a junior to joined them now. I don't feel sorry for the company, I feel sorry for my former colleagues who have to endure a higher workload, because business people don't care there is a smaller number of people to do the same jobs.
- whiplash451 5y ago
  Alternative (observed in my company six months ago). MANAGER: your salary was just raised by 25%. SWE: wait, why? MANAGER: that's the new market salary for you. SWE: ok...
  - Freak_NL 5y ago
    For a lot of companies, this is economically sound thinking. If someone who is considering leaving because of a low salary is already a good few steps towards the door in terms of decision making, pre-empting any such motivation from occurring can be a lot cheaper than losing employees who are fully up to speed and have a lot of internal know-how. They're not getting an adequate replacement for the same salary after all.
  - krona 5y ago
    The same happened to me this past week. A 30% "re-benchmarking".
hunglee2 5y ago
an under appreciated consequence of remote working is the radical reduction of switching costs to a new job. In the on-premise world, this would require all sorts of calculations outside the immediate considerations of the job itself - the commute, the parking, the new office amenities vs old office amenities, the degree with which you 'click' with colleagues - all of this is reduced or eliminated in the world of remote work. You will be sitting at the same (home) desk, at the same set up, probably using the same tech environment. It will make switching easier, cos it means less.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  Yeah, but it also makes more likely to replace the position with the Wipros of the world.
  - manuelabeledo 5y ago
    I have found, multiple times, that externalisation of higher level roles hurts product development. This is less obvious in traditional entities, where they may care more about yearly checks and balances than long term consequences, but it eventually hits them still. Not saying that there isn’t great and cheaper talent out there, but they aren’t usually fond of these big meat machines that are IT consulting companies.
    - pjmlp 5y ago
      All the time I saw some situations escalate they ended up being fixed by upper management with some give and take agreements. The hard truth, is that most companies are like consumers that go routinely buy stuff from 1 euro shops.
  - hunglee2 5y ago
    yeah maybe. Definitely remote is a stepping stone to what we used to call 'off shore'. Only govt legislation will stop this, though with the decoupling we are seeing from the Russo-Ukraine war we can expect govts to do precisely this
  - 5y ago
hirako2000 5y ago
HR isn't getting any memo, they are threatening me with disciplinary measures because I refuse to follow their return to the office location policy. They even proposed to cut my salary in half if I persist in preferring to stay remote to save on expenses. I think some fast growing tech companies are causing many developers to leave their jobs for better pastures, and that's mostly because some tech companies are performing poorly hence not keeping up with decent salary increases. Easy to get a job with a salary bump ? My recent attempts took well over 6 weeks each, with 3 to 5 interview rounds, mostly being screened by developers and managers having significant tech skills gaps, making the questioning a painful dissonance exercise. But sure. The market is hot for developers and compensation are on the rise.
- KarlKemp 5y ago
  You’re complaining that the company is unhappy, but not to the point of firing you, when you literally refuse to show up for work?
  - saagarjha 5y ago
    Why show up for work if you can just do it?
    - DaiPlusPlus 5y ago
      Unfortunately for me, I've had a WFH gig since 2018, so Covid hasn't affected me all that much. But I do feel like I'm missing out on power-trip fantasies of getting to say "no" to the CEO's face about returning to the office in a Zoom call and grinning while knowing they have zero leverage because I'm the only domain-expert in an incredibly niche field at the company and they'd be unable to replace me - and if they did, I'd be able to walk-in to a higher paying job within a few months besides. Has anyone on the Internet recorded and shared their "negotiation" Zoom calls? Genuinely curious - not least for the entertainment factor...
      - saagarjha 5y ago
jfo 5y ago
Do we see this trend continuing through the remainder of this year? Is there any reason to expect a shift back in favour of employers in the labour market here in the near future?
- erosenbe0 5y ago
  In the long-term, an increase in full-remote positions and offshoring will be broadly implemented to cut costs. But that takes time to do without affecting quality and productivity.
  - manuelabeledo 5y ago
    Offshoring has been happening for a while now. The results haven’t been so good that there will be an increase in the next decade. Many people seem to forget that talent always comes at a cost.
    - erosenbe0 5y ago
      Offshoring wages and management have traditionally militated against quality parity. Cutting costs 75% is just a set up for failure in that regard. On the other hand, cutting only 20% or 30% you will find a lot of leetcoders on other continents. We aren't talking about top surgeons or airline pilots who need access to rare equipment, simulators, and hands-on training. We are talking about people who need to train by leetcoding on a 12 year-old laptop in a dank basement with a 3G phone hotspot
gregdoesit 5y ago
Unless you work at a company that “gets” it (as listed below): instead of hoping or arguing for a raise that puts you and your colleagues in tech in-line with the market, just go out and interview for offers that should increase your total compensation 30-50%. I’ve been writing about this topic for months, including publishing how much companies in 2021 did one-off adjustments as discussed on HN [1] (a list of about 50 companies, between 5-30% as one-off increases outside annual raises) and suggesting to those in charge of budgets to do one-off adjustments ASAP to retain their engineers. Although many CTOs and VPEs read and understood the rationale, the majority could not get meaningful budget increases. The reason? Their non-technical CEO and CFO. This very hot market is only the case for tech and the rest of the business struggles to understand why tech should be any exception at annual budgeting. I see it as the typical story of execs assuming tech leaders are crying wolf when there is no wolf. By the time the wolf takes away most the sheep, it’s too late. The only exceptions I’ve seen are: 1. Companies seeing attrition impossible to ignore. In May 2021 a company in the UK announced no pay raises till Apr 2022 answering an all-hands question. 25% of senior engineers left the next 3 months, and the company did an emergency 15% raise across engineering in November. 2. Companies that collect, and act on market data. This is mostly Big Tech. It’s why Amazon has been decisive in increasing base salaries, and why Meta increased RSU refreshers by ~20-25% this year. They know the market better than any salary benchmarking company does (which companies’ data is outdated). I still get messages of engineering managers asking how they can make their leadership understand their dire situation. I tell them that unless their company is in the #2 category, the only way is to put them in #1, and suggest these engineering managers lead by example in securing much higher offers, leaving, and after enough people leave, non-technical leadership might eventually act. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29320889 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29320889
- iamacyborg 5y ago
  > This very hot market is only the case for tech and the rest of the business struggles to understand why tech should be any exception at annual budgeting. This is not correct. Digital marketing skills are in super high demand over the last 18+ months and salaries have risen accordingly. I suspect this is true of other areas as well.
- 5y ago
lordnacho 5y ago
If you have even the slightest doubts about your current job, go have a look right now. I'm not a recruiter but even I have made a number of placements lately. People literally have written to me out of the blue on LinkedIn, and when I tell them I've recently moved they ask if I have friends who are looking. I certainly do. Particularly if you're remote, it's super easy just to schedule interviews during your day.
lr4444lr 5y ago
Eh... the dev market has been hot for about a decade now. Remote work has lessened the friction of labor movement, but is this really a sea change, or just a continuation of a preexisting trend?
TameAntelope 5y ago
It blows my mind that the most effective way of getting a market level pay increase is to switch jobs. That makes no sense; successful companies will figure this out and unsuccessful companies will lose their talent. For companies that aren’t in tech it’ll probably not matter, but tech companies will have to adapt or die.
- MoSattler 5y ago
  This always confused me as well. Isn't it much more expensive to find my replacement, train them AND pay them the extra percentage points you didn't want to pay me?
- TrackerFF 5y ago
  But the constant job hopping among engineers can come at a cost: Higher expectations of productivity from the go. Less training. and similar. If you hire someone, knowing that they'll only stay for 1-2 years, you obviously want them to be as productive as possible for that time period. In traditional engineering firms, you'd probably spend the fist N months on training, and won't get to touch production in a long, long time. This culture kind of reinforces the "hire fast, fire fast" mantra that tech companies love.
- ukoki 5y ago
  > That makes no sense; successful companies will figure this out and unsuccessful companies will lose their talent I think there's a rational argument for it. Yes they will lose some talent by not raising wages to the market rate, and maybe they will lose a lot of talent this way. But they will also keep talent cheaply that: * finds job interviews exhausting * hates negotiating * has good relationships with colleagues they don't want to lose * has a comfortable commute or WFH arrangement they don't want to change * is proud of becoming an expert / go-to-person in some part of the business and doesn't want to lose that source of social capital * is proud of product or service they have made a big contribution to and wants to "see it through to the end" * is generally impresionable and does what management want without too much complaint
- tuckerpo 5y ago
  You've got to consider the fact that interviewing is kind of a nightmare process in tech that involves lots of ramp-up time off the clock and takes months to get through. Most people just want to do their 8 hours and then zone out - not do their 8 hours and then do 6 more hours of Leetcode and CTCI practice, despite the potential for comp increase that comes at the end.
physicsguy 5y ago
I've had 21 LinkedIn messages this week, and I'm not even really looking for a job. Almost all are an increase on my current salary. But I've just switched job, so going to bide my time for the next 12 months and then see where I'm at.
- dadkins 5y ago
  You got 21 recruiter messages _with salary_?? Amazing. I have had almost no luck getting that information from recruiters without hopping on a call. None have ever provided that information upfront. I only managed to get that info from an Amazon recruiter after pushing the issue pretty hard. At first he bragged that Amazon had upped their bands, without mentioning any numbers. When I asked how much, he pointed to a reddit thread and levels.fyi, still not mentioning any numbers. I finally straight-up asked him to stop being coy and just name the range, after all it's law in California and I'm going to keep asking until I get an answer. It took him a couple of days to respond, then I never heard from him again. And this is the only recruiter that has ever actually given me an answer. Ever. (350-475k total for "L6" in California FWIW)
  - physicsguy 5y ago
    This is UK so different culture for recruiters I think.
xupybd 5y ago
I predict we will not be in such great shape in 6 months. I'm really worried that current inflation and rising oil prices are going to knock the wind out of the global economy. I'm not sure it's going to be easy to find a job soon.
Cthulhu_ 5y ago
The developer market may be hot, but I'm also seeing that they - and I - are getting more picky, especially at my current salary (which isn't high for modern standards, I think?). I'd like a new job doing full-stack development with some Go involved, but there's very few jobs like that, or their requirements are well beyond my abilities (despite 10+ years of experience in half a dozen languages across half a dozen domains). I have a comfortable job at the moment; it's nothing exciting, but I earn well enough and I get to work from home (and the company says they'll keep this up, at most they'll go back to two days a week at the office, but they're thinking of moving to a more comfortable / fancy co-working space instead of dedicated office space). This means I get to be picky, and I don't need to accept lowball offers (below what I earn). I rejected an offer two years ago that was 25% above what I earn now; it was going back into consultancy and I wasn't convinced I actually had the skillsets they needed for what they were offering, their tech interview was a take-home assignment and at most an hour of reviewing it. I didn't feel like I had earned it. While I haven't had an offer like that since, it did set me a benchmark. Unfortunately, nobody's made me an offer like that since.
- lordnacho 5y ago
  If they offered you the job, they must have thought you had the skills? Even if it was something that you didn't quite know, you could learn on the job?
  - borski 5y ago
    I see this a lot. I call it “negotiating against yourself.” I’ve always been a little scared when starting a new role for this reason, but you always figure it out - or it’s a bad hire! Only one way to find out.
- torginus 5y ago
  In my experience, the demand for Go devs far outstrips the supply - which isn't true for things like Java or Node. Also, companies that list a zillion technologies as requirements either don't mean it, or won't be able to hire a single soul - usually the former.
stackbutterflow 5y ago
Starting a sub thread for underpaid developers. How do you feel reading about this "white hot market" on a regular basis while not experiencing it? Be it because of geography, not having the right experience, or working on techs that don't pay well.
- SideburnsOfDoom 5y ago
  Would I take a 20% raise for a new job? I guess. But. But not if I'm going to hate the new job. Not if the people suck. Not if the company is hopelessly mired in bureaucratic process, not if they can't do continuous improvement and continuous delivery. I would be looking for good experience with good engineering practices. I would be looking for "autonomy, mastery, purpose" - look it up. I would be looking for working for a company that builds something that I think the world is better off having. In other words, I'm fortunate enough to be at a point where I can think of things besides only "need more money". If I'm in the market for "I can do better" then simply more cash is not the only factor for "better".
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- k8sToGo 5y ago
  Nothing, because at the end what matters is that I am happy. I am not a fan of pursuing the rat race of always more money. It will create a tunnel vision and, at the end, FOMO and stress. I am also not in my 20s anymore where I would be willing to move across the Ocean for more money.
  - GrigoriyMikh 5y ago
    I'm myself quite tired of this money rat race. But recently i've been literally heart broken. I work at a small company that tried to do build their own Cloud product, but wasn't very successful at promoting it. So now it outstaffing me to one big name company that was previously tried to adopt our solution but now is building they own. Which i quite dissatisfied with as i completely lack any sense of ownership working on it. So i started to look into job market. So i found cscareerquestionsEU sub on reddit. And literally the first post i saw from a fresh graduate who got offer at Amazon(in Germany) with base more than my base and first year bonus more than mine. On top of that he got RSU. And i have 7YoE, contributed to big projects in K8s eco and gave talks at conferences. Seeing this just destroyed my whole motivation to do anything at my job.
dschuetz 5y ago
As long companies keep using human resources and labor instead of investing in intellectual assets or partners the situation will never get better. People are no longer motivated by money alone, as money is just compensation, not incentive. Companies tend to be ignorant in that regard.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  I hate that in Portugal everyone is now a "collaborator" instead of an employees. To my mind that only enforces the replacable cogs mindset.
  - dschuetz 5y ago
    In Germany employee is just a status, and "collaborator" or Mitarbeiter is a general term for an employed person in a company or team. I was talking not just about terms or words, but new organizational concepts as well.
ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
I’m not sure that things are sustainable. COVID was just one more stressor. Wages have been rising for software people since long before COVID, and the average tenure of engineers has been 2 years or less, for close to a decade. The entire industry is formed around it. This (IMNSHO) has led to many, many problems, like project architectures, designed to compensate for many engineers of mixed skill levels, working on the code, instead of a smaller number, with consistent skills, shepherding the project from start to finish. This is opposed to designs for deliverable-focused Quality and market fit. It’s nice to think about making lots of money, but I prefer writing and delivering projects that make me proud, and that I design and implement from napkin sketch to shrink-wrap. I don’t find it attractive at all, to contemplate an industry that is totally focused on keeping developers happy, because it won’t keep all developers happy; just ones that “play the game.”
- kqr 5y ago
  The short tenures also lead to a bias toward technologies and techniques that look good in their first 0.5--1.5 years of usage but then ages badly with increased maintenance.
  - gitfan86 5y ago
    NPM packages are by far the worst offender of this. Some packages are great, but others drop maintnentece completely after a year of support. Then you have to move off of them because they are tied to old versions of react or other core packages.
    - nicoburns 5y ago
      > Some packages are great, but others drop maintenance completely after a year of support. Indeed. I would consider it one of the key skills for a JavaScript developer to be able to differentiate between packages that will be maintained and those that won't. Luckily JavaScript itself is quite straightforward, so JS devs should have plenty of time for learning this stuff.
nonrandomstring 5y ago
After the war it was not just individual people that who traumatised, but the whole of society. Being robbed of years of life, facing death and disruption on a daily basis has long term effects. It brings home mortality and makes one focus on the more important things in life, like spending time with family and looking after your health. After WW2 we entered a period of extraordinary economic growth. Most of "modern America" was built in this time. But something is different about COVID, climate emergency and the emerging Ukraine crisis. While they are all similar types of stressor in creating societal trauma, the upshot is a withdrawal toward slower economy, low growth and even regression in some areas. We all know the "party is over", at least until fusion is here. It's not just an aging population either, I hear this from 19 year old kids. What's the solution? William James wrote a fascinating long-essay/booklet called the "Moral equivalent of war". Some people read it as a call for something simplistic like "National Service", but it's actually a psychologically astute account of human (and he claims especially male) need to feel "useful and part of something". Technological capitalism is failing to deliver that. On the contrary it is making us weak and dependent. Resignation means two things. One is quitting a job. The other is "surrender in the face of despair" Make of that what you will about our societal disposition in 2022.
astannard 5y ago
My previous company had had such a stable team with no-one leaving for two and a half years. The pay was not amazing but we all got on well and the company seemed to treat us all well. A new CEO came along and got the CTO to make a third of the team redundant. Soon after everyone left apart from 2 devs and one tester (16 in team originally ). They will struggle to offer support and introduce new features now. Its a big shame really good things were happening and then bang it all fell apart.
- ihateolives 5y ago
  > stable team with no-one leaving for two and a half years Amazing how times change. 15 years ago I left a company after 6 years and they were "really? why? we're just getting started with intresting things, honest." They weren't.
  - l30n4da5 5y ago
    > They weren't. This made me giggle. Mostly because I recall a very similar experience.
  - Clubber 5y ago
    Yes, I've had 8 year and 6 year tenures in my career, sprinkled with 2 year stints. The 8 and 6 year tenures were great, so I stayed. At least until we got acquired by a larger company which made it not so great, so I left. I can't imagine the cost of a software company not being able to release quality releases because of brain drain. I can't imagine executives being so isolated from the ground that they don't realize this or don't care. US business seems so short sighted today. Perhaps that's necessary to make the quickest buck. I've noticed this trend in mostly larger corporations, so I stay away from them and usually work at smaller, fast growth companies when I can find them.
rob_c 5y ago
Not to dismiss this, but what part of that title isnt as obvious as "water is wet" I.e. who would argue the contrary and why would they think that?
thenerdhead 5y ago
If anything has been apparent, it's that many companies are okay with losing their "hit by bus" factor employees over a salary adjustment or working conditions. I don't think HR departments realize just how much money this costs them in the long run. They are just enforcing a policy and that policy is never in the best interests of the people (including the managers). I suppose maybe they will get the memo when teams are too small to function, people are being over-promoted for retention reasons out of desperation, and then they use that leverage to get what was wanted at the beginning; autonomy.
- danjac 5y ago
  HR departments know this well, but they're not the decision makers here. They can advise on legal practices around hiring but ultimately management sets the direction - much like as a developer you can push back on this or that technical thing but you still have to build what management wants.
  - thenerdhead 5y ago
    HR/payroll usually works closely with senior management. I think the big challenge is that there's not enough "in case of emergency" money or flexible work agreements to go around to those bus factor employees. Guess they'll have to learn the hard way that one person who does 3 jobs will mean the company will have to pay for the sourcing and retention of those 3 new roles.
cosmiccatnap 5y ago
Dave3of5 5y ago
One of the interesting things about hiring in tech is that most companies when they try to hire will say it's very hard to hire someone. On the other side of that I see that the same company will get dozen to hundreds to resumes / cvs. Speaking to these candidates I see that many seemed competent enough to do the day to day work that most companies require from a dev. The problem it seems it that to get candidates that are willing to complete your insane process not the lack of qualified people.
zebnyc 5y ago
I don't want to look for a new job but it seems like my current company is practically begging me to start a job search. My job, which I joined last year, moved equity grant to quarterly vesting mid last year and my vesting date has been moved back 3+ months. This directly violates the terms of my offer letter which explicitly mentions vesting on 1 year anniversary of join date. The change was made after I joined and they made the change retroactive. But asking the equity team is like talking to a wall
blindmute 5y ago
It's not rational at all, but I'm much more likely to be satisfied at a job if they offer some token benefit, like free smoothies, than if they offer the equivalent smoothie per day price to my salary. Anyone else?

417 points by signa11 5y ago

I wonder how things are at Amazon with the recent base salary changes. I imagine if most technical people don’t see a decent salary bump there will be a mass exodus, which is ironic given the increase seems to be in response to attrition.

jhoechtl 5y ago
I don't know for the US but in Europe inflation rise mostly driven by energy costs will call for a substantial adoption of wages anyhow. Inflation adjusted wages will not yet mean increased disposable income, I know.
- moonchrome 5y ago
  If energy price increases are dominating your budget as a developer you should probably ask for a raise anyway or consider adjusting your energy consumption. If anything the constant growth of real-estate pricing (now driven by low interest rates and inflation fears) should impact developers much more.
  - Gareth321 5y ago
    He's not saying energy dominates his budget. He's saying European CPI increases are mostly due to energy prices.
    - moonchrome 5y ago
      What I'm saying is that if you're upper middle class income you are probably more concerned about the cost of housing than the cost of energy/food/etc. CPI increases started way before Russia and the energy price instability - the things energy will immediately reflect in will not be a big % of your income so increases aren't that dramatic. If my heating bill goes up 300% that's still going to be less than 2% of my household monthly income and that's during winter when we keep the heating on the entire time.
- ChuckNorris89 5y ago
  > but in Europe inflation rise mostly driven by energy costs For now, yes, if you happen own your own place. If you don't already own it, your rent or planned house purchase will go up as well from the increased demand from the 2.5 million of refugees already here and millions more on the way as the war goes on. Whatever is left of the EU middle class who aren't real estate owners will be obliterated.
  - physicsguy 5y ago
    Even if your place is mortgaged - most people in the UK for e.g. are on short fixed interest rate deals, usually 2 to 5 years. If you're on a shorter term deal and your interest rate increases at the end, you're going to struggle to pay your mortgage.
- makomk 5y ago
  The European energy crisis is mainly one of supply - most of Europe chose to be dependent on Russia for their gas supply despite US warnings that Russia would use that to try and get away with invading neighbouring countries, and now they have there isn't enough gas available and it will take years to build and switch to new sources. (The market was already pretty tight due to a higher-than-expected surge in demand after all the lockdowns.) So quality of living and real-terms wages after inflation have to go down for most people because there isn't the energy to support their old quality of life. It's possible that developers and other Big Tech employees will manage to dodge this, but there's no guarantee of that.
bigcat123 5y ago
saagarjha 5y ago
Anecdotally, Amazon recruiters have far more slack to work with these days when recruiting. No idea how this affects compensation internally, of course.
strgcmc 5y ago
I think it's not really that ironic, if you consider that the mass exodus was anyways likely to happen, if Amazon had done nothing. So really the only thing that changed, is Amazon trying to make an attempt to stave off the default exodus (which was already being observed/starting); in that sense, by analogy: is pumping water on a fire ironic? The fire is a given, it's already happening, so the water is just a genuine attempt at firefighting (might work, might not).
- torbTurret 5y ago
  The irony analogy I envision is pouring a bottle on a small fire, expecting it to be water, and having it turn out to be gasoline. That is, in an effort to solve problem A, you introduce solution B, but solution B only makes A worse than it was.
zebnyc 5y ago
My wife joined Amazon in Jan. She says that in her department (does not work in engineering), they are yet to see a change in comp and they are trying to figure out if it is real or just a PR stunt.

EnKopVand 5y ago

This is just my anecdotal view but it’s based on a few decades in non-tech organisations, from startup to emerging-into-enterprise to enterprise (my path was enterprise -> startup -> e2e) and I think we’re a while out from non-tech organisations understanding the value of their own development resources. Its everything from how IT is still often viewed as a “them-and-us” resource drain similar to HR but less understood (and this less valued by the organisation) even though 95% of the people in every organisation now works with IT devices that wouldn’t operate without IT. To how development continues to live in the weird spectrum of the business that actually needs something more than excel, being under digitalisation (efficiency) and IT (operations and development are natural frenemies). It’s having to live in a 2022 where the “standard” solutions, the “document libraries” the “data-warehousing”, the “data-management-systems”, the “enterprise-architecture”, the “data/ml/bi-architecture “ is still just a bunch of really shitty systems and drawings that can’t connect together and quickly become a nightmare for anyone trying to do any real work leading back to massive excel usage and a constant need for “connection-inhouse-solutions” to make things actually work. Leading to developers still being one of the best paid resources inside organisations with almost limitless tolerance for their non-conformity and rolling eyes in management meetings because most of us simply don’t understand the organisation lingo or the internal political power plays (yes, the bullshit). Anyway, I’ve seen no change in change management to suggest that developers are going to be more valued going forward. If anything I think the want and belief in “standard” solutions might just birth the opposite in the coming decade, until the money managers once again realise that developers are simply necessary in a world where every “standard” solution is just as shitty as it was 20 years ago.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
Animats 5y ago
There's a big difference between organizations where IT is a cost center and ones where software and computer services are the product itself.
- dijit 5y ago

MattGaiser 5y ago

The white hot market for developers has been going on for over a year and besides Amazon raising its salary cap, I have yet to hear of a single retention initiative, even outside of tech. I have spoken to more former colleagues just today (well, yesterday) who did not get meaningful raises this year while the new hires got 30% more.

Arcanum-XIII 5y ago
Yup, changing job is still the best way to get a raise — rinse and repeat. It seems "all dev can do everything, all manager can manage everything" means "we can replace any cog by any other cog since they're all the same". Yeah, well, no. I don't understand why, when they have a good fit, they don't fight for it. I even have seen some senior replace by out of school grad "because that's we can find".
- BigJono 5y ago
  It's because big companies are optimised specifically for this. The entire enterprise dev culture is built around it. If you have to actually code, some devs are going to 10x other ones. But if you stack in as many dependencies as you can to the point where everyone is just reading documentation trying to get caught up, and the entire measure of productivity is whether you've used a library before so you come into a project with it's API pre-memorised, all devs look the same. Any dipshit can look at a few code examples and copy the basic patterns out of them. It's literally impossible to gain any real expertise in these codebases. I've been using React since 2015. I've got more specific experience in React front-ends than basically anyone I've ever worked with. I've run into virtually every NPM library in the ecosystem at least once over that time. It doesn't matter. I've forgotten 90% of the interesting details in all of them except for a small handful that I truly believe are quality. I can write some basic code using whatever from memory, but as soon as you hit anything with any real complexity it's back to the docs and back to trawling Github issues for everything that's not in the docs. You're in the same boat as everyone else, grinding out a scrap of knowledge just to abandon it at the start of the next project when you find out that there's a new set of fad dependencies you need to learn the internals of because their abstractions leak like a sieve. This works for big companies because they can afford the severe productivity hit with their momentum and market dominance. It's a death sentence for startups though. That's why everyone hires 20 year olds to run their startups. You might leave a ton of great experienced candidates on the table, but you dodge all their colleagues that have spent 20 years learning how to fuck everything up and get away with it because their individual contribution has always been indistinguishable in the company's revenue.

lordofgibbons 5y ago

I joined a pre-IPO unicorn 9 months ago, and am having very serious doubts about my compensation now. Given the direction the public markets are going, there is no way companies will be going IPO in the next few years. Even if the company goes public in a few years, it will take a while for the markets to climb to the exuberant levels they were at when the fair-market-value for the stock options were determined. Now, I have to do the hard maths of if I want to stick around with my comp being stuck for years, or head to greener pastures after my 1 year vesting cliff.

spoonjim 5y ago
If you joined a late stage private company recently, your options are completely underwater and as soon as the stock market seems to have stabilized you should jump ship, even just resign and re-interview for your existing company to get new options.
- shapefrog 5y ago
  Why wait for the stock market, bin the options (which are now worth zero) and take advantage of the extremely good job market.
- englebert 5y ago
  Can you talk more about the dynamics and timing here? Joining recently vs reinterviewing, and the factors that influence the underwater situation?
Apocryphon 5y ago
So does this mean right now the most lucrative roles would simply be public companies that offer stock?
- l30n4da5 5y ago
  or public companies that simply offer a competitive salary, imo
livinglist 5y ago

DeathArrow 5y ago

3 months ago ME: I got a work proposal from some company MANAGER: That sounds awful! Don't you like here? ME: I like the people. MANAGER: Is there anything that can change your mind? ME: It actually is. MANAGER: It's money, isn't it? ME: Well, yes. Inflation is 10%, I haven't got any raise. MANAGER: How much do you want? ME: The other company is offering me +25%, so that's the amount. MANAGER: I will try to speak to the higher ups, but there's already an order from above not to raise wages. ME: Please do. How much do you think it will take? MANAGER: speak to me in one week. Two weeks after. ME: Hey, did you speak with the higher ups? MANAGER: Yes, and they said we shouldn't raise your wage. ME: Ok then, we should talk about my resignation. MANAGER: But couldn't you still not leave? You don't have a small salary after all. ME: The prices are crazy, next year there is a prognosed high inflation too, and I have kids to take care of. So, regretfully, I will have to say good bye. I wasn't the only one who resigned and for three seniors who left, they only found a junior to joined them now. I don't feel sorry for the company, I feel sorry for my former colleagues who have to endure a higher workload, because business people don't care there is a smaller number of people to do the same jobs.

whiplash451 5y ago
Alternative (observed in my company six months ago). MANAGER: your salary was just raised by 25%. SWE: wait, why? MANAGER: that's the new market salary for you. SWE: ok...
- Freak_NL 5y ago
  For a lot of companies, this is economically sound thinking. If someone who is considering leaving because of a low salary is already a good few steps towards the door in terms of decision making, pre-empting any such motivation from occurring can be a lot cheaper than losing employees who are fully up to speed and have a lot of internal know-how. They're not getting an adequate replacement for the same salary after all.
- krona 5y ago
  The same happened to me this past week. A 30% "re-benchmarking".

hunglee2 5y ago

an under appreciated consequence of remote working is the radical reduction of switching costs to a new job. In the on-premise world, this would require all sorts of calculations outside the immediate considerations of the job itself - the commute, the parking, the new office amenities vs old office amenities, the degree with which you 'click' with colleagues - all of this is reduced or eliminated in the world of remote work. You will be sitting at the same (home) desk, at the same set up, probably using the same tech environment. It will make switching easier, cos it means less.

pjmlp 5y ago
Yeah, but it also makes more likely to replace the position with the Wipros of the world.
- manuelabeledo 5y ago
  I have found, multiple times, that externalisation of higher level roles hurts product development. This is less obvious in traditional entities, where they may care more about yearly checks and balances than long term consequences, but it eventually hits them still. Not saying that there isn’t great and cheaper talent out there, but they aren’t usually fond of these big meat machines that are IT consulting companies.
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    All the time I saw some situations escalate they ended up being fixed by upper management with some give and take agreements. The hard truth, is that most companies are like consumers that go routinely buy stuff from 1 euro shops.
- hunglee2 5y ago
  yeah maybe. Definitely remote is a stepping stone to what we used to call 'off shore'. Only govt legislation will stop this, though with the decoupling we are seeing from the Russo-Ukraine war we can expect govts to do precisely this
- 5y ago

hirako2000 5y ago

HR isn't getting any memo, they are threatening me with disciplinary measures because I refuse to follow their return to the office location policy. They even proposed to cut my salary in half if I persist in preferring to stay remote to save on expenses. I think some fast growing tech companies are causing many developers to leave their jobs for better pastures, and that's mostly because some tech companies are performing poorly hence not keeping up with decent salary increases. Easy to get a job with a salary bump ? My recent attempts took well over 6 weeks each, with 3 to 5 interview rounds, mostly being screened by developers and managers having significant tech skills gaps, making the questioning a painful dissonance exercise. But sure. The market is hot for developers and compensation are on the rise.

KarlKemp 5y ago
You’re complaining that the company is unhappy, but not to the point of firing you, when you literally refuse to show up for work?
- saagarjha 5y ago
  Why show up for work if you can just do it?
  - DaiPlusPlus 5y ago
    Unfortunately for me, I've had a WFH gig since 2018, so Covid hasn't affected me all that much. But I do feel like I'm missing out on power-trip fantasies of getting to say "no" to the CEO's face about returning to the office in a Zoom call and grinning while knowing they have zero leverage because I'm the only domain-expert in an incredibly niche field at the company and they'd be unable to replace me - and if they did, I'd be able to walk-in to a higher paying job within a few months besides. Has anyone on the Internet recorded and shared their "negotiation" Zoom calls? Genuinely curious - not least for the entertainment factor...
    - saagarjha 5y ago

jfo 5y ago

Do we see this trend continuing through the remainder of this year? Is there any reason to expect a shift back in favour of employers in the labour market here in the near future?

erosenbe0 5y ago
In the long-term, an increase in full-remote positions and offshoring will be broadly implemented to cut costs. But that takes time to do without affecting quality and productivity.
- manuelabeledo 5y ago
  Offshoring has been happening for a while now. The results haven’t been so good that there will be an increase in the next decade. Many people seem to forget that talent always comes at a cost.
  - erosenbe0 5y ago
    Offshoring wages and management have traditionally militated against quality parity. Cutting costs 75% is just a set up for failure in that regard. On the other hand, cutting only 20% or 30% you will find a lot of leetcoders on other continents. We aren't talking about top surgeons or airline pilots who need access to rare equipment, simulators, and hands-on training. We are talking about people who need to train by leetcoding on a 12 year-old laptop in a dank basement with a 3G phone hotspot

gregdoesit 5y ago

Unless you work at a company that “gets” it (as listed below): instead of hoping or arguing for a raise that puts you and your colleagues in tech in-line with the market, just go out and interview for offers that should increase your total compensation 30-50%. I’ve been writing about this topic for months, including publishing how much companies in 2021 did one-off adjustments as discussed on HN [1] (a list of about 50 companies, between 5-30% as one-off increases outside annual raises) and suggesting to those in charge of budgets to do one-off adjustments ASAP to retain their engineers. Although many CTOs and VPEs read and understood the rationale, the majority could not get meaningful budget increases. The reason? Their non-technical CEO and CFO. This very hot market is only the case for tech and the rest of the business struggles to understand why tech should be any exception at annual budgeting. I see it as the typical story of execs assuming tech leaders are crying wolf when there is no wolf. By the time the wolf takes away most the sheep, it’s too late. The only exceptions I’ve seen are: 1. Companies seeing attrition impossible to ignore. In May 2021 a company in the UK announced no pay raises till Apr 2022 answering an all-hands question. 25% of senior engineers left the next 3 months, and the company did an emergency 15% raise across engineering in November. 2. Companies that collect, and act on market data. This is mostly Big Tech. It’s why Amazon has been decisive in increasing base salaries, and why Meta increased RSU refreshers by ~20-25% this year. They know the market better than any salary benchmarking company does (which companies’ data is outdated). I still get messages of engineering managers asking how they can make their leadership understand their dire situation. I tell them that unless their company is in the #2 category, the only way is to put them in #1, and suggest these engineering managers lead by example in securing much higher offers, leaving, and after enough people leave, non-technical leadership might eventually act. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29320889 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29320889

iamacyborg 5y ago
> This very hot market is only the case for tech and the rest of the business struggles to understand why tech should be any exception at annual budgeting. This is not correct. Digital marketing skills are in super high demand over the last 18+ months and salaries have risen accordingly. I suspect this is true of other areas as well.
5y ago

lordnacho 5y ago

If you have even the slightest doubts about your current job, go have a look right now. I'm not a recruiter but even I have made a number of placements lately. People literally have written to me out of the blue on LinkedIn, and when I tell them I've recently moved they ask if I have friends who are looking. I certainly do. Particularly if you're remote, it's super easy just to schedule interviews during your day.

lr4444lr 5y ago

Eh... the dev market has been hot for about a decade now. Remote work has lessened the friction of labor movement, but is this really a sea change, or just a continuation of a preexisting trend?

TameAntelope 5y ago

It blows my mind that the most effective way of getting a market level pay increase is to switch jobs. That makes no sense; successful companies will figure this out and unsuccessful companies will lose their talent. For companies that aren’t in tech it’ll probably not matter, but tech companies will have to adapt or die.

MoSattler 5y ago
This always confused me as well. Isn't it much more expensive to find my replacement, train them AND pay them the extra percentage points you didn't want to pay me?
TrackerFF 5y ago
But the constant job hopping among engineers can come at a cost: Higher expectations of productivity from the go. Less training. and similar. If you hire someone, knowing that they'll only stay for 1-2 years, you obviously want them to be as productive as possible for that time period. In traditional engineering firms, you'd probably spend the fist N months on training, and won't get to touch production in a long, long time. This culture kind of reinforces the "hire fast, fire fast" mantra that tech companies love.
ukoki 5y ago
> That makes no sense; successful companies will figure this out and unsuccessful companies will lose their talent I think there's a rational argument for it. Yes they will lose some talent by not raising wages to the market rate, and maybe they will lose a lot of talent this way. But they will also keep talent cheaply that: * finds job interviews exhausting * hates negotiating * has good relationships with colleagues they don't want to lose * has a comfortable commute or WFH arrangement they don't want to change * is proud of becoming an expert / go-to-person in some part of the business and doesn't want to lose that source of social capital * is proud of product or service they have made a big contribution to and wants to "see it through to the end" * is generally impresionable and does what management want without too much complaint
tuckerpo 5y ago
You've got to consider the fact that interviewing is kind of a nightmare process in tech that involves lots of ramp-up time off the clock and takes months to get through. Most people just want to do their 8 hours and then zone out - not do their 8 hours and then do 6 more hours of Leetcode and CTCI practice, despite the potential for comp increase that comes at the end.

physicsguy 5y ago

I've had 21 LinkedIn messages this week, and I'm not even really looking for a job. Almost all are an increase on my current salary. But I've just switched job, so going to bide my time for the next 12 months and then see where I'm at.

dadkins 5y ago
You got 21 recruiter messages _with salary_?? Amazing. I have had almost no luck getting that information from recruiters without hopping on a call. None have ever provided that information upfront. I only managed to get that info from an Amazon recruiter after pushing the issue pretty hard. At first he bragged that Amazon had upped their bands, without mentioning any numbers. When I asked how much, he pointed to a reddit thread and levels.fyi, still not mentioning any numbers. I finally straight-up asked him to stop being coy and just name the range, after all it's law in California and I'm going to keep asking until I get an answer. It took him a couple of days to respond, then I never heard from him again. And this is the only recruiter that has ever actually given me an answer. Ever. (350-475k total for "L6" in California FWIW)
- physicsguy 5y ago
  This is UK so different culture for recruiters I think.

xupybd 5y ago

I predict we will not be in such great shape in 6 months. I'm really worried that current inflation and rising oil prices are going to knock the wind out of the global economy. I'm not sure it's going to be easy to find a job soon.

Cthulhu_ 5y ago

The developer market may be hot, but I'm also seeing that they - and I - are getting more picky, especially at my current salary (which isn't high for modern standards, I think?). I'd like a new job doing full-stack development with some Go involved, but there's very few jobs like that, or their requirements are well beyond my abilities (despite 10+ years of experience in half a dozen languages across half a dozen domains). I have a comfortable job at the moment; it's nothing exciting, but I earn well enough and I get to work from home (and the company says they'll keep this up, at most they'll go back to two days a week at the office, but they're thinking of moving to a more comfortable / fancy co-working space instead of dedicated office space). This means I get to be picky, and I don't need to accept lowball offers (below what I earn). I rejected an offer two years ago that was 25% above what I earn now; it was going back into consultancy and I wasn't convinced I actually had the skillsets they needed for what they were offering, their tech interview was a take-home assignment and at most an hour of reviewing it. I didn't feel like I had earned it. While I haven't had an offer like that since, it did set me a benchmark. Unfortunately, nobody's made me an offer like that since.

lordnacho 5y ago
If they offered you the job, they must have thought you had the skills? Even if it was something that you didn't quite know, you could learn on the job?
- borski 5y ago
  I see this a lot. I call it “negotiating against yourself.” I’ve always been a little scared when starting a new role for this reason, but you always figure it out - or it’s a bad hire! Only one way to find out.
torginus 5y ago
In my experience, the demand for Go devs far outstrips the supply - which isn't true for things like Java or Node. Also, companies that list a zillion technologies as requirements either don't mean it, or won't be able to hire a single soul - usually the former.

stackbutterflow 5y ago

Starting a sub thread for underpaid developers. How do you feel reading about this "white hot market" on a regular basis while not experiencing it? Be it because of geography, not having the right experience, or working on techs that don't pay well.

SideburnsOfDoom 5y ago
Would I take a 20% raise for a new job? I guess. But. But not if I'm going to hate the new job. Not if the people suck. Not if the company is hopelessly mired in bureaucratic process, not if they can't do continuous improvement and continuous delivery. I would be looking for good experience with good engineering practices. I would be looking for "autonomy, mastery, purpose" - look it up. I would be looking for working for a company that builds something that I think the world is better off having. In other words, I'm fortunate enough to be at a point where I can think of things besides only "need more money". If I'm in the market for "I can do better" then simply more cash is not the only factor for "better".
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
k8sToGo 5y ago
Nothing, because at the end what matters is that I am happy. I am not a fan of pursuing the rat race of always more money. It will create a tunnel vision and, at the end, FOMO and stress. I am also not in my 20s anymore where I would be willing to move across the Ocean for more money.
- GrigoriyMikh 5y ago
  I'm myself quite tired of this money rat race. But recently i've been literally heart broken. I work at a small company that tried to do build their own Cloud product, but wasn't very successful at promoting it. So now it outstaffing me to one big name company that was previously tried to adopt our solution but now is building they own. Which i quite dissatisfied with as i completely lack any sense of ownership working on it. So i started to look into job market. So i found cscareerquestionsEU sub on reddit. And literally the first post i saw from a fresh graduate who got offer at Amazon(in Germany) with base more than my base and first year bonus more than mine. On top of that he got RSU. And i have 7YoE, contributed to big projects in K8s eco and gave talks at conferences. Seeing this just destroyed my whole motivation to do anything at my job.

dschuetz 5y ago

As long companies keep using human resources and labor instead of investing in intellectual assets or partners the situation will never get better. People are no longer motivated by money alone, as money is just compensation, not incentive. Companies tend to be ignorant in that regard.

pjmlp 5y ago
I hate that in Portugal everyone is now a "collaborator" instead of an employees. To my mind that only enforces the replacable cogs mindset.
- dschuetz 5y ago
  In Germany employee is just a status, and "collaborator" or Mitarbeiter is a general term for an employed person in a company or team. I was talking not just about terms or words, but new organizational concepts as well.

ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago

I’m not sure that things are sustainable. COVID was just one more stressor. Wages have been rising for software people since long before COVID, and the average tenure of engineers has been 2 years or less, for close to a decade. The entire industry is formed around it. This (IMNSHO) has led to many, many problems, like project architectures, designed to compensate for many engineers of mixed skill levels, working on the code, instead of a smaller number, with consistent skills, shepherding the project from start to finish. This is opposed to designs for deliverable-focused Quality and market fit. It’s nice to think about making lots of money, but I prefer writing and delivering projects that make me proud, and that I design and implement from napkin sketch to shrink-wrap. I don’t find it attractive at all, to contemplate an industry that is totally focused on keeping developers happy, because it won’t keep all developers happy; just ones that “play the game.”

kqr 5y ago
The short tenures also lead to a bias toward technologies and techniques that look good in their first 0.5--1.5 years of usage but then ages badly with increased maintenance.
- gitfan86 5y ago
  NPM packages are by far the worst offender of this. Some packages are great, but others drop maintnentece completely after a year of support. Then you have to move off of them because they are tied to old versions of react or other core packages.
  - nicoburns 5y ago
    > Some packages are great, but others drop maintenance completely after a year of support. Indeed. I would consider it one of the key skills for a JavaScript developer to be able to differentiate between packages that will be maintained and those that won't. Luckily JavaScript itself is quite straightforward, so JS devs should have plenty of time for learning this stuff.

nonrandomstring 5y ago

After the war it was not just individual people that who traumatised, but the whole of society. Being robbed of years of life, facing death and disruption on a daily basis has long term effects. It brings home mortality and makes one focus on the more important things in life, like spending time with family and looking after your health. After WW2 we entered a period of extraordinary economic growth. Most of "modern America" was built in this time. But something is different about COVID, climate emergency and the emerging Ukraine crisis. While they are all similar types of stressor in creating societal trauma, the upshot is a withdrawal toward slower economy, low growth and even regression in some areas. We all know the "party is over", at least until fusion is here. It's not just an aging population either, I hear this from 19 year old kids. What's the solution? William James wrote a fascinating long-essay/booklet called the "Moral equivalent of war". Some people read it as a call for something simplistic like "National Service", but it's actually a psychologically astute account of human (and he claims especially male) need to feel "useful and part of something". Technological capitalism is failing to deliver that. On the contrary it is making us weak and dependent. Resignation means two things. One is quitting a job. The other is "surrender in the face of despair" Make of that what you will about our societal disposition in 2022.

astannard 5y ago

My previous company had had such a stable team with no-one leaving for two and a half years. The pay was not amazing but we all got on well and the company seemed to treat us all well. A new CEO came along and got the CTO to make a third of the team redundant. Soon after everyone left apart from 2 devs and one tester (16 in team originally ). They will struggle to offer support and introduce new features now. Its a big shame really good things were happening and then bang it all fell apart.

ihateolives 5y ago
> stable team with no-one leaving for two and a half years Amazing how times change. 15 years ago I left a company after 6 years and they were "really? why? we're just getting started with intresting things, honest." They weren't.
- l30n4da5 5y ago
  > They weren't. This made me giggle. Mostly because I recall a very similar experience.
- Clubber 5y ago
  Yes, I've had 8 year and 6 year tenures in my career, sprinkled with 2 year stints. The 8 and 6 year tenures were great, so I stayed. At least until we got acquired by a larger company which made it not so great, so I left. I can't imagine the cost of a software company not being able to release quality releases because of brain drain. I can't imagine executives being so isolated from the ground that they don't realize this or don't care. US business seems so short sighted today. Perhaps that's necessary to make the quickest buck. I've noticed this trend in mostly larger corporations, so I stay away from them and usually work at smaller, fast growth companies when I can find them.

rob_c 5y ago

Not to dismiss this, but what part of that title isnt as obvious as "water is wet" I.e. who would argue the contrary and why would they think that?

thenerdhead 5y ago

If anything has been apparent, it's that many companies are okay with losing their "hit by bus" factor employees over a salary adjustment or working conditions. I don't think HR departments realize just how much money this costs them in the long run. They are just enforcing a policy and that policy is never in the best interests of the people (including the managers). I suppose maybe they will get the memo when teams are too small to function, people are being over-promoted for retention reasons out of desperation, and then they use that leverage to get what was wanted at the beginning; autonomy.

danjac 5y ago
HR departments know this well, but they're not the decision makers here. They can advise on legal practices around hiring but ultimately management sets the direction - much like as a developer you can push back on this or that technical thing but you still have to build what management wants.
- thenerdhead 5y ago
  HR/payroll usually works closely with senior management. I think the big challenge is that there's not enough "in case of emergency" money or flexible work agreements to go around to those bus factor employees. Guess they'll have to learn the hard way that one person who does 3 jobs will mean the company will have to pay for the sourcing and retention of those 3 new roles.

cosmiccatnap 5y ago

Dave3of5 5y ago

One of the interesting things about hiring in tech is that most companies when they try to hire will say it's very hard to hire someone. On the other side of that I see that the same company will get dozen to hundreds to resumes / cvs. Speaking to these candidates I see that many seemed competent enough to do the day to day work that most companies require from a dev. The problem it seems it that to get candidates that are willing to complete your insane process not the lack of qualified people.

zebnyc 5y ago

I don't want to look for a new job but it seems like my current company is practically begging me to start a job search. My job, which I joined last year, moved equity grant to quarterly vesting mid last year and my vesting date has been moved back 3+ months. This directly violates the terms of my offer letter which explicitly mentions vesting on 1 year anniversary of join date. The change was made after I joined and they made the change retroactive. But asking the equity team is like talking to a wall

blindmute 5y ago

It's not rational at all, but I'm much more likely to be satisfied at a job if they offer some token benefit, like free smoothies, than if they offer the equivalent smoothie per day price to my salary. Anyone else?