7 ms·

On the flip side, tech was booming during Covid when a ton of people in retail, restaurants were affected. All industries and all sectors can’t always be boomi

• AlotOfReading 3y ago
  What do you consider "unrealistically high", because I find that hard to apply to what I'm seeing. For example, I was recently contacted about a bay area principal engineer spot for 150-190k. To give some context, a fast food place near my house has signs in the window offering 160k+ for managers. Maybe fast food is paying exceptionally well these days, but I have my doubts.
  • EduardoBautista 3y ago
    I cannot imagine the stress of being a fast food manager. I wouldn't survive a week.
  • hef19898 3y ago
    Depends on the chain, management at McD and Burger King was always rather well paid. Also high turn-over high pressure.
    • throwway120385 3y ago
      Retail management means you're on call 24/7 even when you think you're on vacation. And even when another manager is nominally running the store. Also you're not totally responsible for hiring, and underperformers can and do get stuck on your team. And also you're responsible for your store hitting its sales targets regardless of where it's located and what changes in the environment.
      • infamouscow 3y ago
        In practice, this sounds no different than most engineering manager roles outside of very tech-savvy organizations.
  • infamouscow 3y ago
    Does the bay area role also come with equity? I doubt that's true for the restaurant manager.
    • AlotOfReading 3y ago
      Probably, but the comparison wasn't meant to imply that fast food is a reasonable alternative. The point was to illustrate how bad things in tech are that recognizable companies (Oracle in this case) are hiring for extremely senior positions at salaries that make fast food look even remotely competitive. It's a very different market from two years ago.
      • infamouscow 3y ago
        I think what's happened is compensation packages have normalized or converged. If you live in an HCoL area, you're probably not very happy about this, but if you live in a LCoL area these compensation packages are excellent.
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  • leoqa 3y ago
    I've started interviewing this last two weeks and have 6 interviews scheduled for staff FANG remote. Meta, Amazon, Netflix are all hiring.
  • cj 3y ago
    > What do you consider "unrealistically high“ Sorry, poor choice of words. I should have said “salary expectations above current market salaries”. I’ve interviewed people is 2 yrs experience (2 yrs out of college, or 2 years after doing a bootcamp) asking $160k fully remote outside Bay Area. Basically anyone that entered the tech workforce during the COVID boom has really high expectations around compensation and benefits that are unlikely to be met in future jobs now that the market has cooled/stablized.
• EchoChamberMan 3y ago
  > We have trouble finding good engineers to hire... You're not looking hard enough.
• pm90 3y ago
  > We have trouble finding good engineers to hire And then > while I might have been open to hiring a digital nomad in 2021, I’m not open to that anymore because there are more “normal” candidates out there who aren’t asking for special treatment or unrealistically high salaries. Maybe these things are related. “Normal” has changed. The engineers I know have moved away and are very happy with the flexibility of their new WFH lifestyle and the work life balance it provides. And they will refuse to work for organizations like yours that continue to hold regressive views on WFH.
  • HDThoreaun 3y ago
    Yea I think normal is back a lot more than you want to believe.
    • pm90 3y ago
      Office occupancy levels in SF beg to differ.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • cj 3y ago
    > And they will refuse to work for organizations like yours that continue to hold regressive views on WFH. Which is 100% their right! (But don’t then go on tech forums complaining about how difficult it is to find a job) PS. My company is fully remote (and was remote pre-Covid) so I definitely don’t have “regressive” views on WFH. I rejected a candidate recently who said they wanted to work out of a van while driving the US. As a 100% remote company I’m cool with people working from different places occasionally, but at a minimum I want our employees to have a desk. I don’t want to hire someone for $150k who’s working from the back of a van. I might have hired them in 2021, but in 2024 not having a permanent residence to have an office in is a disqualification.
    • ulfw 3y ago
      What an arbitrary limitation. So you don't hire on merit or what your candidate is able to deliver. You hire on desk space
• oytis 3y ago
  > We have trouble finding good engineers to hire > while I might have been open to hiring a digital nomad in 2021, I’m not open to that anymore Might be related?
  • bboygravity 3y ago
    From what I've seen freelancing for more than 10 years, most companies will rather go bankrupt than allow remote working. The only thing that can explain this perfectly well in my opinion is: manager ego. As simple as that.
    • AnimalMuppet 3y ago
      General rule: When your explanation is that everyone else is an idiot, it almost always means that your view is far too simplistic.
    • mech422 3y ago
      I've had the opposite experience as a contractor and FTE... I've been remote for 20 years, and every year it seems to get easier / more normal...
• themagician 3y ago
  Things are different now. The reality is that probably close to 80-90% of self-described software engineers face permnanet unemployment as they will be replaced by low paid "prompt engineers", likey from India. It's already happening and it's happening at scale. The top 10% will see enourmous income gains as they will be the only people left who actually know what they are doing and how to correct mistakes that can't be corrected via prompt. If you are great you are good. If you are average you are !@#$ed. The shift is happening fast. It won't be measured in years, but weeks and months. By year's end everything will be different. In 24 months entire career paths will be obliterated and there is no time to retrain. It's a cotton gin moment.
  • oytis 3y ago
    That's a very weird market you're describing. Can't the top 10% do "prompt engineering" themselves? What's the point of creating a layer of incompetent human programmers in the middle?
    • marcosdumay 3y ago
      That's the normal market reaction to some kind of automation. The most competent few can do a lot more, and command a higher salary, while the masses discover they are out of jobs. After that, people discover that the product is now cheaper, so they may or may not buy more of it, maybe or maybe not increasing the total they spend, and maybe or maybe not creating more jobs for the mass that was displaced earlier. Anyway, believing that LLM-programming is going to have that impact is just ridiculous.
  • throw1234651234 3y ago
    Genuinely reads like a scare-mongering myths. I am doing the basic of the basic atm - adding an API endpoint to call an internal API and get a subset of data and ChatGPT can't even accomplish that. I have been reviewing the usability of AI for at least a year now, and it's still nowhere near even replacing juniors, despite these posts.
    • EchoChamberMan 3y ago
• hirako2000 3y ago
  >We have trouble finding good engineers to hire > I might have been open to hiring a digital nomad in 2021, I’m not open to that anymore because there are more “normal” candidates out there who aren’t asking for special treatment or unrealistically high salaries. Let me rephrase. "I'm not open to hire people who refuse to be dictated by me, the boss, how they should live their lives. I'm now demanding again that my employees get stuck with locality market constraints as they tend to play in my favor. Except that, I struggle to find good enginners. I find normal people who aren't good enough to make demands though, thanks to the coordinated massive layoffs, so I will keep fighting." See, workers, those who truly do the work that is. Have for the most part figured out the manipulations. A layoff squeeze, or two or even 10 to pressure the job market, to make demands for fairer salary be under control, simply won't work. Temporarily, maybe. As people do need not just to eat but also pay back mortgages. But what it did mostly is creating more noise for the employer side. Great enginners don't get laid off. Those who do know usually very well their value, get recommendations and a new role in no time. The economy isn't collapsing, demands is there otherwise there wouldn't be an inflation to fight , we need more workers than ever. the capital refuses to accept a certain reality. That is that Workers will continue to have access to more information. Hence making it futile to exercise manipulations. I'm for free markets and find the disguised attacks and ambushes against the "working class" appalling. Workers aren't even unionized. They just individually have neurons and access to the internet. The same who have been promoting the idea that we better all get richer finally realized that's not fun, that fewer should be much richer and the rest poorer
• piva00 3y ago
  We have no issues with hiring at the company I work for, dozens of good CVs for each open position. The difference seems to be that we don't have a RTO policy and actually encourage WFH a lot, you just need to live in a country we have a registered entity for tax reasons, so no digital nomads either. Maybe your new normal isn't working, you're paying the price for it.
• carlosjobim 3y ago
  > We have trouble finding good engineers to hire > unrealistically high salaries That's expected if you don't want to pay the salaries your candidates want. Admitting to not being able to find qualified workers is admitting fundamental incompetence as an employer and as a business. Hiring and retaining workers is the foundation of any business that employs people. Haven't it struck you that maybe you are unrealistic about salaries if you are having trouble hiring?
  • hirako2000 3y ago
    This. Of course the comment is not just paradoxal, it's contradictory. Behind a basically bias mind, blinded even by the irresistible desire to basically pay little, bank fat profits, and do nothing. It's an amazing time to be alive. To see how broader access to Information turning against those who used to think the asymmetry would last forever.
    • oytis 3y ago
      It's really funny to see both "times have changed" and "we can't find anyone" in one comment. And it really summarises the attitude of business post-covid. "Doing more with less" is just childish if you think about it. I'm going to do what I like, and there are not going to be any consequences. Oh, there are consequences? That definitely not because what I did.
  • cj 3y ago
    The reality is many people are taking pay cuts especially on the junior side of the spectrum. People were hiring devs straight out of bootcamps with zero experience for $160k a couple years ago. Sorry but I can’t hire someone and match their previous salary (from a company that fired them) with a total of 2 yrs experience.
    • carlosjobim 3y ago
      Consider the same line of thinking for other cost centers of your business. Would a restaurant say they're having trouble finding produce just because they don't want to pay the prices asked for? Would a sawmill say they're having trouble finding lumber when they don't want to pay the prices asked. If the developers you want to hire cannot produce enough for your company to make a profit at the salary levels they are asking, this is a hint that your company is not profitable enough to continue functioning. That happens sometimes when margins get thinner. The equation between what customers are willing to pay for the work, and what profit the company desires, and what salaries the workforce demands for doing the work, doesn't give a positive result anymore. So the business model doesn't work anymore. Otherwise you'd hire them right? If the company will make a profit from their work. Or are you foregoing profits out of spite? Edit: I say all this because I used to be incompetent at hiring and my business at the time suffered as a consequence. My mistake was that I was looking to hire people through networks of friends and family, instead of plain old job ads. Sounds like a dumb mistake, but as mentioned I was incompetent. Once I started publishing ads I had no problem finding a lot of good candidates. Hiring and retaining employees is a skill, the most important skill of a business owner.
• roughly 3y ago
  > while I might have been open to hiring a digital nomad in 2021, I’m not open to that anymore because there are more “normal” candidates out there The folks who took advantage of the ability to leave the city and get a house somewhere other than the Bay or one of the three other cities tech was hiring in are older folks for whom moving back to be near family had some resonance. They've now had 4 years to build a life there. Of course you can't find talented engineers who want to uproot their families and rip their kids away from their cousins, schools, and friends to go live in an apartment in a city and commute to whatever horseshit open floor plan dorm simulator you're calling an office, and especially not if you're not willing to pay an "unrealistically high salary." You'd need to pay me an unrealistically high salary to consider that, too. As usual, there's not a skill gap or a worker shortage, there's an unwillingness to pay talent what it's worth.
  • AnimalMuppet 3y ago
    Hmm. The way you put that, it sounds like you could to some degree "pay" talent by allowing WFH rather than with dollars. I wonder to what degree that is true.
    • roughly 3y ago
      It is absolutely the case that working conditions are part of the overall negotiation for talent. You start offering folks $1M/yr cash and I promise they'll move back to the city and RTO for you. You let them keep working remote and enjoy the work/life balance, and you can get 'em a whole lot cheaper than that.
• bluefirebrand 3y ago
  > whether that be decreased salary levels Who can afford to be taking smaller salaries when everything is getting more expensive?
• mech422 3y ago
  yeah - I think people just didn't realize tech has cycles like all industries, because this is literally the first 'down' in like 14 years...