5 ms·

This thread is both illuminating and depressing for me. I hire engineers at an academic medical center who work on really tough biomedical problems. Let's just

by JunkDNA 13y ago

This thread is both illuminating and depressing for me. I hire engineers at an academic medical center who work on really tough biomedical problems. Let's just say that I would have to move heaven and earth to get annual percentage raise amounts that are being thrown around here. I wonder how industries like healthcare can hope to have the best people with this job market. At some point, even if you are doing work that really matters in a big way, you can't be stupid about your career and leave money on the table. I wonder if this further drives non-IT focused organizations to SaaS offerings since they can't get talent to do things in house?

jseliger 13y ago
I wonder how industries like healthcare can hope to have the best people with this job market I hear the same discussions about teaching high school all the time (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6969363 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6969363), and the answer is... they can't, for the most part. Occasionally you'll get heroes who'll do it for less, but mostly things just don't function very well.
- blueskin_ 13y ago
  They have to take chances on people with less of a long work history. Sometimes they're mediocre or bad, sometimes they're excellent, but the great people in that situation don't stay long as they need to use jobs as stepping stones to work up towards a decent pay level.
pekk 13y ago
> I wonder how industries like healthcare can hope to have the best people with this job market. It's like saying "I wonder how I can hope to have steak dinners with Safeway charging such high prices for steaks." That's what they cost. If you can afford it, pay it. If you can't, don't have steak dinners. This is the market. It's not a special problem for you that requires an intervention. You aren't entitled to anyone's labor at any specific price. If your business cannot be sustained unless certain people are coerced into working a lower price, your business is not sustainable! Anyway, in reality, the US healthcare industry has a massive and powerful lobby, so it can exert a lot of control over markets through its purchased representatives. For example, everyone in the country has to throw business their way (for good or ill). The healthcare industry isn't about to go belly up because engineers aren't cheap enough. Maybe your job is hard because you have a small budget. So sorry, but don't blame the candidates. > At some point, even if you are doing work that really matters in a big way, you can't be stupid about your career and leave money on the table You make an offer and because it's dodgy or not good enough, you have to belittle people and call them stupid in the hopes that they will be insecure and weak-willed enough to believe you and back down. I guess this is one solution to the exorbitant expense of keeping people happy: "Don't be stupid, baby. You can't live without me. You're nothing without me."
- JunkDNA 13y ago
  Your tone is incredibly rude and uncalled for. Where in my post did I ask anyone to intervene? You are imputing motives that I did not state. Furthermore you are interpreting my last comment in a way that I did not mean. I meant that there are limits to people's altruism. At some point, no matter how personally meaningful the job is, a sane rational person can't afford to limit themselves when they can do better elsewhere. I don't get to set the rates I pay software developers. I have no say in that at all beyond a very narrow band dictated to me. Nowhere did I state that I expect people to work for below market wages. I do not expect this and I do not begrudge anyone for making such decisions. It sucks for me when recruiting, but that is my problem. My larger point is that there are finite numbers of employable people who write software and that it appears to me that it is becoming more and more professionally rewarding for those individuals to concentrate themselves in dedicated software companies. As this happens, it becomes harder and harder for non-software companies to employ such people.
- roel_v 13y ago
  You didn't understand what the GP said. He was clearly saying that people would be stupid if they would come work for what he can offer them. May I suggest working on your reading comprehension before you go off on people.
aphexairlines 13y ago
I don't understand that viewpoint -- how do they pay their management and legal teams then? Those probably cost even more than technology staff.
- JunkDNA 13y ago
  In most organizations, the people at the top intuitively understand that you need to pay management and legal people market rates because that is part of running a successful enterprise. They are less clear about what it is all these "computer people" do. That makes it a hard sell.
  - laurencerowe 13y ago
    Tech lacks the clear professional hierarchy of Medicine or Law which makes it difficult for management to differentiate between roles salary wise. Working for a private university I'm a little better off than I would be working for a state one. It aims to pay median market rates for computer people across all industries. As such the bonuses you'd expect work in tech are excluded from comparison, but you're not going to be on the poverty pay of a postdoc.
fecak 13y ago
If you can't compete with salary, compete on something else. The most effective way for you to compete for talent could be offering remote work. People are generally quite willing in my experience to leave money on the table for this particular perk. Giving developers interesting problems to solve (that happen to also make positive impact on the world) from the comfort of their homes will have appeal.
- EdwardDiego 13y ago
  That's a very good point. A lot of the places paying "rockstar" salaries are reluctant to allow remote working, so being willing to offer it to high performance candidates would be a way to attract them.
  - erichocean 13y ago
    I think insisting on on-site work is mostly fear driven. The founders don't know how to work with peers effectively, and slip into manager/employee mode, and since they have no management experience, fear sets in and they need "as much" control as they can get over those employees. Hence, they need to be on-site. All that guarantees is these founders won't be hiring peers (or better). Better to overcome their fears and let professionals do their jobs, remotely if that's what it takes to get them to work with them to achieve their vision.
    - EdwardDiego 13y ago
      > I think insisting on on-site work is mostly fear driven. Hmm, I disagree, but that's based on my experiences with our attempts to integrate remote workers into a strong team environment (two of our people displaced following an earthquake so we waived our normal dislike of remote working.) Basically, it doesn't happen. You can't integrate them into a strong team environment. Now when I say strong, I mean that the team decides how it works, the team decides how much work it can fit in its sprint, and the team decides who it hires. We live or die by our teams, and so we focus on team culture, and team cohesion, and we reap a lot of benefit that falls from regular personal interaction. Strengths complement weaknesses, teams develop cultures that they are proud of and protect, and we deliver quality. If you're a remote worker in this environment it sucks. You're out of sight, out of mind (despite Skype and Hangouts, if someone has to open an internet application to talk to you, communication becomes that much harder). But more importantly, you're out of the culture, you have no stake in it, and you feel left out. However - if our environment was one where we worked solo (as opposed to pairing on all production code), and placed far more emphasis on individuals than teams, then remote workers would fit far better. So yeah. It could be fear, or it could be that people are trying to build a team, and teamwork is vastly easier when you're interacting with others in person.
sjg007 13y ago
I mean how much does an academic medical center pay their Doctors? At UCLA the head transplant guy makes $2 million or so. Why not pay engineers more? You could probably justify it by taking a product oriented approach, with external sales or patents or whatnot.
- laurencerowe 13y ago
  I believe medical doctors are paid much the same as other scientists for research, i.e. the more time they dedicate to research the more money they forego.
- JunkDNA 13y ago
  Remember though: doctors are the ones who bring the dollars into medical centers. It is very easy to draw a line from an individual "rockstar" surgeon to the revenue they bring in. It is also the core mission of a healthcare organization to treat people, so doctors and nurses are the primary focus. There are enormous opportunities for software to make a difference, but this is hard to quantify except in very extreme circumstances (e.g. identifying systematic billing errors).
  - sjg007 13y ago
    Right but you could make software a core focus by selling your product to other medical centers or doctors or whatnot. It would be hard to get it started but it should be possible.
interstitial 13y ago
This is exactly the formerly revolutionary model of SV 1960s: equity stake for engineers! The East Coast model of private bank investment owning all of a company is over (for 50 years now).
laurencerowe 13y ago
I took an engineering job in an academic lab. I traded salary for the opportunity to work on an interesting problem with interesting people. I expect to move on once I've achieved what I want to with my current project. The problem is not the money per se, but the same problem I see in working for any non-engineering company. There is simply no career path available when your role is perceived as being outside the core mission of the organisation. To progress in academia one must write papers, not software. The NIH has begun recognise the need for funding software and databases, but there seems little prospect of university career structures adapting any time soon. As far as they're concerned we're only the staff.
- gaza3g 13y ago
  Would you care to share more about that academic lab job that you took? I'm currently interviewing at a few of those types of places that does research. My main role there would be to develop applications that will help them gather data for their research. Did you have any other bad experiences or lessons that you think a developer should know about before working at a place like that?
  - laurencerowe 13y ago
    I'd previously done freelance consulting with university administrative IT departments. They tend to be service based rather than project based so have a different focus. Though research projects run for several years, culturally it has been most similar to work I've done with a consulting firm. My colleagues work hard, care about the work they do, but also about each other. What I miss most from working in an engineering company is the technical feedback I received from my colleagues. Now, they're experts in a different area. In that respect it's not that different to working in any other non-tech company. You'll probably spend a significant chunk of time introducing good development practices (testing, etc.) But expect to be asked to justify them too. This can be great, but hard work without the common experience to fall back on. Like any organisation there is huge variability between teams and projects. I'm not sure I'd read too much into my comments. An anecdote is just that.
  - collyw 13y ago
candybar 13y ago
Lots of people get paid way more than average software engineers in health care industry, which pays very well in general, so I don't think that's the problem. Your problem may be that you're trying to hire software engineers in support roles in academia, where pay is customarily low due to prestige. But while it's prestigious to be in research but it's not that prestigious to be a software engineer supporting research.

by JunkDNA 13y ago

jseliger 13y ago

I wonder how industries like healthcare can hope to have the best people with this job market I hear the same discussions about teaching high school all the time (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6969363 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6969363), and the answer is... they can't, for the most part. Occasionally you'll get heroes who'll do it for less, but mostly things just don't function very well.

blueskin_ 13y ago
They have to take chances on people with less of a long work history. Sometimes they're mediocre or bad, sometimes they're excellent, but the great people in that situation don't stay long as they need to use jobs as stepping stones to work up towards a decent pay level.

pekk 13y ago

> I wonder how industries like healthcare can hope to have the best people with this job market. It's like saying "I wonder how I can hope to have steak dinners with Safeway charging such high prices for steaks." That's what they cost. If you can afford it, pay it. If you can't, don't have steak dinners. This is the market. It's not a special problem for you that requires an intervention. You aren't entitled to anyone's labor at any specific price. If your business cannot be sustained unless certain people are coerced into working a lower price, your business is not sustainable! Anyway, in reality, the US healthcare industry has a massive and powerful lobby, so it can exert a lot of control over markets through its purchased representatives. For example, everyone in the country has to throw business their way (for good or ill). The healthcare industry isn't about to go belly up because engineers aren't cheap enough. Maybe your job is hard because you have a small budget. So sorry, but don't blame the candidates. > At some point, even if you are doing work that really matters in a big way, you can't be stupid about your career and leave money on the table You make an offer and because it's dodgy or not good enough, you have to belittle people and call them stupid in the hopes that they will be insecure and weak-willed enough to believe you and back down. I guess this is one solution to the exorbitant expense of keeping people happy: "Don't be stupid, baby. You can't live without me. You're nothing without me."

JunkDNA 13y ago
Your tone is incredibly rude and uncalled for. Where in my post did I ask anyone to intervene? You are imputing motives that I did not state. Furthermore you are interpreting my last comment in a way that I did not mean. I meant that there are limits to people's altruism. At some point, no matter how personally meaningful the job is, a sane rational person can't afford to limit themselves when they can do better elsewhere. I don't get to set the rates I pay software developers. I have no say in that at all beyond a very narrow band dictated to me. Nowhere did I state that I expect people to work for below market wages. I do not expect this and I do not begrudge anyone for making such decisions. It sucks for me when recruiting, but that is my problem. My larger point is that there are finite numbers of employable people who write software and that it appears to me that it is becoming more and more professionally rewarding for those individuals to concentrate themselves in dedicated software companies. As this happens, it becomes harder and harder for non-software companies to employ such people.
roel_v 13y ago
You didn't understand what the GP said. He was clearly saying that people would be stupid if they would come work for what he can offer them. May I suggest working on your reading comprehension before you go off on people.

aphexairlines 13y ago

I don't understand that viewpoint -- how do they pay their management and legal teams then? Those probably cost even more than technology staff.

JunkDNA 13y ago
In most organizations, the people at the top intuitively understand that you need to pay management and legal people market rates because that is part of running a successful enterprise. They are less clear about what it is all these "computer people" do. That makes it a hard sell.
- laurencerowe 13y ago
  Tech lacks the clear professional hierarchy of Medicine or Law which makes it difficult for management to differentiate between roles salary wise. Working for a private university I'm a little better off than I would be working for a state one. It aims to pay median market rates for computer people across all industries. As such the bonuses you'd expect work in tech are excluded from comparison, but you're not going to be on the poverty pay of a postdoc.

fecak 13y ago

If you can't compete with salary, compete on something else. The most effective way for you to compete for talent could be offering remote work. People are generally quite willing in my experience to leave money on the table for this particular perk. Giving developers interesting problems to solve (that happen to also make positive impact on the world) from the comfort of their homes will have appeal.

EdwardDiego 13y ago
That's a very good point. A lot of the places paying "rockstar" salaries are reluctant to allow remote working, so being willing to offer it to high performance candidates would be a way to attract them.
- erichocean 13y ago
  I think insisting on on-site work is mostly fear driven. The founders don't know how to work with peers effectively, and slip into manager/employee mode, and since they have no management experience, fear sets in and they need "as much" control as they can get over those employees. Hence, they need to be on-site. All that guarantees is these founders won't be hiring peers (or better). Better to overcome their fears and let professionals do their jobs, remotely if that's what it takes to get them to work with them to achieve their vision.
  - EdwardDiego 13y ago
    > I think insisting on on-site work is mostly fear driven. Hmm, I disagree, but that's based on my experiences with our attempts to integrate remote workers into a strong team environment (two of our people displaced following an earthquake so we waived our normal dislike of remote working.) Basically, it doesn't happen. You can't integrate them into a strong team environment. Now when I say strong, I mean that the team decides how it works, the team decides how much work it can fit in its sprint, and the team decides who it hires. We live or die by our teams, and so we focus on team culture, and team cohesion, and we reap a lot of benefit that falls from regular personal interaction. Strengths complement weaknesses, teams develop cultures that they are proud of and protect, and we deliver quality. If you're a remote worker in this environment it sucks. You're out of sight, out of mind (despite Skype and Hangouts, if someone has to open an internet application to talk to you, communication becomes that much harder). But more importantly, you're out of the culture, you have no stake in it, and you feel left out. However - if our environment was one where we worked solo (as opposed to pairing on all production code), and placed far more emphasis on individuals than teams, then remote workers would fit far better. So yeah. It could be fear, or it could be that people are trying to build a team, and teamwork is vastly easier when you're interacting with others in person.

sjg007 13y ago

I mean how much does an academic medical center pay their Doctors? At UCLA the head transplant guy makes $2 million or so. Why not pay engineers more? You could probably justify it by taking a product oriented approach, with external sales or patents or whatnot.

laurencerowe 13y ago
I believe medical doctors are paid much the same as other scientists for research, i.e. the more time they dedicate to research the more money they forego.
JunkDNA 13y ago
Remember though: doctors are the ones who bring the dollars into medical centers. It is very easy to draw a line from an individual "rockstar" surgeon to the revenue they bring in. It is also the core mission of a healthcare organization to treat people, so doctors and nurses are the primary focus. There are enormous opportunities for software to make a difference, but this is hard to quantify except in very extreme circumstances (e.g. identifying systematic billing errors).
- sjg007 13y ago
  Right but you could make software a core focus by selling your product to other medical centers or doctors or whatnot. It would be hard to get it started but it should be possible.

interstitial 13y ago

This is exactly the formerly revolutionary model of SV 1960s: equity stake for engineers! The East Coast model of private bank investment owning all of a company is over (for 50 years now).

laurencerowe 13y ago

I took an engineering job in an academic lab. I traded salary for the opportunity to work on an interesting problem with interesting people. I expect to move on once I've achieved what I want to with my current project. The problem is not the money per se, but the same problem I see in working for any non-engineering company. There is simply no career path available when your role is perceived as being outside the core mission of the organisation. To progress in academia one must write papers, not software. The NIH has begun recognise the need for funding software and databases, but there seems little prospect of university career structures adapting any time soon. As far as they're concerned we're only the staff.

gaza3g 13y ago
Would you care to share more about that academic lab job that you took? I'm currently interviewing at a few of those types of places that does research. My main role there would be to develop applications that will help them gather data for their research. Did you have any other bad experiences or lessons that you think a developer should know about before working at a place like that?
- laurencerowe 13y ago
  I'd previously done freelance consulting with university administrative IT departments. They tend to be service based rather than project based so have a different focus. Though research projects run for several years, culturally it has been most similar to work I've done with a consulting firm. My colleagues work hard, care about the work they do, but also about each other. What I miss most from working in an engineering company is the technical feedback I received from my colleagues. Now, they're experts in a different area. In that respect it's not that different to working in any other non-tech company. You'll probably spend a significant chunk of time introducing good development practices (testing, etc.) But expect to be asked to justify them too. This can be great, but hard work without the common experience to fall back on. Like any organisation there is huge variability between teams and projects. I'm not sure I'd read too much into my comments. An anecdote is just that.
- collyw 13y ago

candybar 13y ago

Lots of people get paid way more than average software engineers in health care industry, which pays very well in general, so I don't think that's the problem. Your problem may be that you're trying to hire software engineers in support roles in academia, where pay is customarily low due to prestige. But while it's prestigious to be in research but it's not that prestigious to be a software engineer supporting research.