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Results of Joel Spolsky's "What Programmers Want" Survey
- ck2 15y agoEasy browser viewing https://docs.google.com/gview?url=http://blog.stackoverflow.com/wp-content/uploads/WPW-Summary.pdf https://docs.google.com/gview?url=http://blog.stackoverflow....
- AgentConundrum 15y agoHN automatically adds a Scribd link to any PDF submission. Why not just use that?
- semisight 15y agoI think the most interesting question is not what the "average" programmer (this study is likely skewed) whats, but what they're willing to do to get it. That 93% would take a significant cut to work somewhere is better is staggering to me (although I'd do the same). Money certainly does not buy happiness.
- nbclark 15y agoI'm not surprised by taking a 10% paycut for a better fitting role. I was surprised that having equity or options in the company was one of the least important "wants".
- cheez 15y agoThat's because options are worth less than the paper they are written on, in the end.
- spamizbad 15y agoI took the survey and rated equity/options pretty low. My rationale (which may very well be wrong): 1) Options offerings are typically a fraction of 1%: even for the first engineer at companies with no technical co-founders. This (I think) is a carry-over from the dot-com era where IPO exits came hot and heavy. These days, if you're lucky, you're looking at a low-7 to mid-8 figure exit. And to become fully vested, you're going to have to stick around for 3-4 years. 2) Even with a big successful exit, you never know if the company will pull a Skype/Zynga on you. With that said, I wouldn't scoff at them, I just won't be weighting them heavily in compensation talks.
- nbclark 15y agoYeah I agree. I would not sacrifice (much) salary for equity, but would certainly negotiate to have as much equity as I could. Regardless of how it all shakes out, I would like to think that I am somewhat vested in the eventual outcome of the company.
- mjwalshe 15y agoWell even big companies with bog standard share save schemes can be very lucative one of BT's 5 year scheams if maxed out would have netted you $70k (efectivly tax free) and that is the scheme open to every one. Plus we use to get $400 or so of shares per year as profit share
- michaelochurch 15y agoI don't think anyone solid would take a sub-1% slice as Engineer #1. A pre-funding, pre-code startup is worth $4 million, tops (and that's generous). Vested over four years, that's not nearly enough to compensate for the lower compensation and higher risk of a business at that point.
- mdkess 15y agoI worked at a major tech company, which gave pretty good stock options. The problem was, they then counted their value toward your salary if it went up while determining raises. Stock goes up, no raises this year - look at how much you made! Stock goes down - standard raise this year! (And presumably, stock falls off a cliff, layoffs). Because the company was doing well, new hires out of college were making more base salary than people who had been there for several years and performing well. So it's just unstable income, effectively.
- drcube 15y agoThis would be a lot better without pie charts.
- klodolph 15y agoI was thinking the same thing. Maybe someone will plug the numbers into bar charts so we can read the damn thing.
- alexholehouse 15y agoI'm shocked at how many people are in start ups - does that perhaps reflect the fact that if your a start up you're typically building your own tools from scratch in areas you're less familiar with, so perhaps need access to experts you don't have locally (i.e. in your company)?
- ktsmith 15y agoThe breakdown for start up/small business isn't great. We have less than 25 people but the company has been around for 17 years.
- damian2000 15y agoyeah agreed - the company where I work is 20+ years old, has about 15 ppl but is definitely not a start up.
- whostolemyhat 15y agoAgreed - both companies I've worked for have been around for 7-8 years and only have about 10-15 people.
- vacri 15y agoRemember also that the respondant pool is biased.
- fragsworth 15y agoIt's somewhat unfortunate that there's no breakdown between the different levels of experience. That is to say, those with 12+ years of experience probably have very different views of what is important to them in a workplace than those with 1-2 years of experience. The data for the survey should allow us see this breakdown, right?
- vitovito 15y agoI would not make that assumption. I held a survey for the Austin design community last year, and the things people with 10+ years of experience wanted to learn and felt were missing in the workplaces was not statistically significantly different from everyone else. Surprised us.
- casca 15y agoOne thing that programmers like are decently formatted reports that present the information in a meaningful and elegant manner. Sadly this is none of those things.
- phillco 15y agoWhat, you don't love charts and graphs fresh from Excel 95? With text so crisp, it could have gone through a brand new fax machine? Edit: Apologies, that wasn't meant to be so snarky.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- darxius 15y agoIf an employer were to take anything away from this survey, I'd say it should be the last question. Way too often have I been interviewed by monotonous and unorganized people who misrepresent an otherwise great position. Please. When performing interviews, try and get people who both like what they're doing and are organized.
- vosper 15y agoOn the flipside - interviewers at my previous company were excited and interesting, but misrepresented a monotonous and unorganized [sic] position.
- ricardobeat 15y agoI hate being in the "other" slice. Look at it.
- larsberg 15y agoI found the "would you take a 10% paycut" matched my experience precisely. Back when I worked at Microsoft on developer tools, I would sometimes get contacted by people who were in the finance industry with salaries 2-4x what we could offer, and often transitioning from some nice CTO/Chief Head Architect title to Software Design Engineer. But, universally, they were _excited_ for the opportunity to work on real compilers, tools, etc. and especially to be surrounded by people they could learn from. I'm would expect the lurking Google hiring managers have experienced the same thing.
- gavinballard 15y agoThe raw data is available here: http://s.tk/wpwraw http://s.tk/wpwraw
- thiele 15y agoThe lack of interest in "Stock Options/Profit Sharing Program" should be a sobering reality for business people looking for technical co-founders/employees.
- amcintyre 15y agoI wonder...is it a complete lack of interest, or is it, "I'm not interested in the tiny amount of equity/sharing I typically get offered?"
- sambeau 15y agoThe latter leads to the former. Everyone starts out young and enthusiastic and thinking that they can build something cool that will make everyone rich. Young, clever guys do what they think is the hard work: designing and building a cool product. They think that they are sharing their talent with some lucky money guys and everyone will benefit. Sadly, they learn that they were giving their talent to the money guys and the money guys got rich. I've been bitten four times now. I've never seen a penny from an option. Every time I've wanted to buy some, the rules have changed and I have to wait another year and then realise that my options have been diluted again without my say-so. So at first I assumed that my options would make me rich. Now I assume that my options are just an unobtainable carrot dangled in front of me.
- amcintyre 15y agoDo you ever ask for salary/bonuses/other "real value" up front instead of options, and if so, does it get you anywhere?
- memset 15y agoWhen I answered the question, I meant it in a sense of "I don't expect to get rich if we ever IPO or get bought, and as an employee I haven't any way to prevent dilution or otherwise try to maximize the value of these options. So how about we take another look at our base, hm?"
- mjwalshe 15y ago
- philgo20 15y agoAfter reading about Joel Spolsky "What Programmers Want" survey, I thought it'd be interesting to know how programmers feel about their current employer. Fill up the 3 questions survey, it really takes 3 minues https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dEx6LUNRWHZHWHRBTmxGcEtIM05IeWc6MQ https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dEx6LUN... Thank you already for taking the time, we'll publish the result on matchFWD blog at http://blog.matchfwd.com http://blog.matchfwd.com as soon as we have significant data.
- nod 15y agoPie charts for comparison?! Here, I made you some bar charts instead: http://public.tableausoftware.com/views/wpw/Country http://public.tableausoftware.com/views/wpw/Country Thanks to gavinballard for the CSV link. If you want to see different breakdowns, just download the workbook/software and play with it yourself.
- perfunctory 15y agohttp://public.tableausoftware.com/views/wpw/Experience http://public.tableausoftware.com/views/wpw/Experience Where do developers disappear after 8 years? And then pop back up after 12.
- nodemaker 15y agomanagement?
- jeroen 15y agoI think the right question is: what happened 12 years ago? The answer could be that the bubble burst.
- Cherad 15y agoI think there is a natural tail-off, but the 12+ year category rolls up this long tail into a substantial total.
- troels 15y agokids?
- michaelochurch 15y ago"12+" is a wider bucket than "9 to 11". The half-life of a software engineer is about 5-6 years. To understand this, keep in mind that most of "software" isn't working on cutting-edge problems using high-productivity languages. It's Java/C++ legacy maintenance and crufty business logic. A substantial fraction of law and business school students are programmers who landed in enterprise Java jobs and bored out after a few years.
- 15y ago
- vectorjohn 15y agoI wish that benefits and perhaps vacation related questions were on here. Next time I look for a job, a sane amount of vacation is something I am going to demand, and I think I would sacrifice significant salary to get it.
- mjwalshe 15y agoInteresting there is no mention of Pensions
- willvarfar 15y agoI like pie-charts, but I wish that those who did not respond were shown as a missing slice.
- jalopezp 15y agoI noticed 49 people currently work for a company whose size is 'other'. What's this about?
- sambeau 15y agoPerhaps, they are currently between jobs or unemployed.
- sambeau 15y agoI suspect many managers, if they ever see this report, would only take-away: programmers don't care about money and stock options. I know some of my past managers would (and they would use it as an excuse to justify not upgrading dev machines so often). Unsurprisingly none of them would ever read it as it isn't in the form of a management guru book.
- wisty 15y ago"Good management" wasn't on the list?
- egillie 15y agoWait, where's "food"?