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“Moving down” can be more difficult than it looks. Anecdotally, employers can be reluctant to hire “overqualified” people (indicated by a high previous salary),
by em500 4y ago
“Moving down” can be more difficult than it looks. Anecdotally, employers can be reluctant to hire “overqualified” people (indicated by a high previous salary), because they believe these people will jump ship at the earliest higher paying opportunity elsewhere.
- hgsgm 4y agoNew employer has no reason to know previous pay.
- maxilevi 4y agoThey can infer it from the employer name or just buy salary market data
- red-iron-pine 4y agoUnless they're small they have HR, and HR has the time to do the research. Which is logging into Glassdoor or levels.fyi and checking. Shit you can do that right now and get some rough ballparks.
- sokoloff 4y agoIf you were a Senior SWE at Google for 5 years, how do you imagine that a new employer won't realize that you were making a lot more than the $150K/yr they're proposing to stretch their budget to offer you?
- pklausler 4y agoWouldn't anybody jump ship for a better job, though?
- em500 4y agoSure, but an ex-FAANGer probably has a better shot at actually getting hired at another FAANG (when the job market improves) than someone who's only worked at no-name shops or local governments.
- nostrademons 4y agoThe implied logic behind that is "I know my company is a worse option than many of the other ones out there, so I'm going to only hire people who those other companies would not do business with." It's inherently a low self-esteem attitude. People leave, sometimes suddenly and without warning. The high self-esteem way to deal with it is to do your best to provide an attractive working environment, accept that some people will leave, and try to learn from each departure. That way you have the option of profiting from the talented employee who totally could make more at a FAANG but happens to like your company because you provide good management, a worthwhile purpose, or the actual ability to write code rather than deal with company politics.
- mixmastamyk 4y agoReminds me of this chestnut: "We don't train our people! What if we do, and they leave?" "What if you don't, and they stay?" Heck, having someone sharp with a new perspective even for a year could significantly improve things for the better. If you get out of their way of course.
- taude 4y agoI don't think an elevated salary at a FAANG implies over-qualified, though. I phone-screened someone from a FAANG, and they knew very little about non-proprietary technologies that we used on a day-to-day. Any of the big-branded commercial apps, they weren't familiar with, and I can hire someone for a lot less with the required working knowledge AND know that they won't be resentful about it. I think it's going to take a year for some of the young engineers to level-set their careers in some places. I'm trying to remember how long it took after dot-com bubble busting, and back then I know a lot who went back for their MBAs, Law degrees, etc. during a softening market. And I know personally how long it took for me to recover to the same economic level. Also, I get emails a few times a week from recruiters saying something like "Ex-Meta Employee/ex-Faang available for employment", leads....
- jghn 4y ago> and they knew very little about non-proprietary technologies that we used on a day-to-day. I had an eye opening experience several years ago. My group was partnering with a group at Google. Their developers were sharp, as one would expect. But were very lacking in what would otherwise be considered table stakes, the reason always wound back to they had a proprietary Google equivalent of X, so thus they weren't familiar with X. The one that really hit it home was that we had to teach them how to use Google Cloud, because at least at the time, internally Google folks didn't use GCP but instead used their own internal versions of things.
- stcroixx 4y agoI'm running into this with increasing frequency, particularly people coming from Amazon. For example, they know nothing about something like Kafka because they've been using some Amazonified version of something similar instead. They of course we'll never be able to match what they used to make and it would be more risk than I want to take to have them use us as a stepping stone while they try to get back to that level.
- QIYGT 4y agoYou can learn everything most devs need to know about Kafka in a couple hours. I can't imagine why companies would ever hire based on current knowledge rather than problem solving skills and ability to learn.