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This 1000x. I have never found it difficult to hire for my dev shop in San Jose and I don't pay anywhere near what I'm told the "market" rate is. I hire engine

by throwaway022014 13y ago

This 1000x. I have never found it difficult to hire for my dev shop in San Jose and I don't pay anywhere near what I'm told the "market" rate is. I hire engineers fresh out of no-name colleges, self-taught programmers, former freelancers who decided they wanted the stability of a salary and people over the age of 35. Basically I will hire the people who won't get the time of day from a lot of the big tech companies and rocketship startups and who wouldn't make it through the interview process there if they get through the front door. And you know what? Most of my hires turn out to be entirely adequate and the duds are not nearly as difficult to deal with as everyone says they will be. Granted my company is not building database engines or running social networks with a billion users but we do enterprise web apps for good clients and we are profitable. This idea that you have to give every employee 10% of the company and 130k a year to get people who can get the job done is a terrible, terrible myth and posts like this perpetuate it.

dustingetz 13y ago
enterprise consulting teams face a perverse incentive to be less efficient than product teams - a consultancy can actually kill itself by being too efficient
- throwaway0314 13y ago
  That's not always true. Most of our projects are fixed price so efficiency is very important. If the scope doesn't change and we're inefficient I lose money.
Iftheshoefits 13y ago
Your post is a bit baffling. You state flat-out that your "dev shop" does "enterprise web apps" (almost certainly of the most pedestrian and easily automated variety) and that you target groups filled with people who are either desperate or unlikely to understand just how much you depend on them in order to take advantage of them by paying much less than you should. There's nothing mythological about that.
- throwaway0314 13y ago
  Wow! How to respond? First off, while I appreciate your attempt at criticising the type of apps we build for clients who collectively generate billions of dollars in revenue per year I must point out that most web apps could be called pedestrian. Go through a list of the latest batch of YCombinator startups and I think you'd have a hard time finding many whose apps couldn't be called pedestrian too. An app doesn't have to be complex to be incredibly useful and/or profitable and by the way a lot of the work done at companies like Google and Facebook is pretty pedestrian too. So what's your point? As for paying my employees less than I should, that's quite a statement given that you don't know how much I pay them. All of my engineers make $65-95k a year. At the lowest end is a recent community college grad who is really talented but didn't have the grades or money to go to a 4 year school because he was taking care of his sick father. I was literally the only company he applied to that gave him the time of day. I constantly hear (from people like you) that my wages are too low and that I'm going to find it hard to hire good engineers but I have yet to experience this. I can't pay $110k to a new college grad or $140k to an engineer with 3 years of experience but from what I see the number of those jobs is far lower than the number of engineers in SV. Should the engineers who aren't going to even get an interview at Google remain unemployed? I mentioned on another thread that I have one employee who I know is unhappy with his salary. He has about 4 years of experience and makes close to $90k a year but apparently he got it in his mind that the streets of Mountain View are lined with 6 figure jobs. He's a decent engineer who writes adequate code but he's not the type of guy who is going to pass a white board algorithm test. I know he has been looking and interviewing for the past 8 months and he's still here. If I'm taking advantage of him please explain why apparently no other company has offered him the 6 figure salary he (and you!) thinks engineers are entitled to. By the way when I started in this industry in the 90s my salary as a programmer was the equivalent of about $38k today. I didn't feel taken advantage of or desperate then and thankfully to this day never got a big enough head to feel entitled to a significant income just because I can write some code.
  - Iftheshoefits 13y ago
    I won't argue with your point re: web apps being pedestrian. I'd be the first to agree, if it isn't obvious. I have multiple comments here on HN where I scarcely hide my negative view of the pervasive fad-hopping "rockstar" macbook wielding silliness that seems to suffuse certain segments of the Valley. My point wasn't that you won't be able to hire developers adequate to the tasks you require. It was that your target labor pool doesn't intersect with the labor pool target of companies building "database engines" or scaling up to "billions" of users, and so to compare your compensation packages to companies who are looking for engineers capable of building those things is a bit daft.

dustingetz 13y ago

enterprise consulting teams face a perverse incentive to be less efficient than product teams - a consultancy can actually kill itself by being too efficient

throwaway0314 13y ago
That's not always true. Most of our projects are fixed price so efficiency is very important. If the scope doesn't change and we're inefficient I lose money.

Iftheshoefits 13y ago

Your post is a bit baffling. You state flat-out that your "dev shop" does "enterprise web apps" (almost certainly of the most pedestrian and easily automated variety) and that you target groups filled with people who are either desperate or unlikely to understand just how much you depend on them in order to take advantage of them by paying much less than you should. There's nothing mythological about that.

throwaway0314 13y ago
Wow! How to respond? First off, while I appreciate your attempt at criticising the type of apps we build for clients who collectively generate billions of dollars in revenue per year I must point out that most web apps could be called pedestrian. Go through a list of the latest batch of YCombinator startups and I think you'd have a hard time finding many whose apps couldn't be called pedestrian too. An app doesn't have to be complex to be incredibly useful and/or profitable and by the way a lot of the work done at companies like Google and Facebook is pretty pedestrian too. So what's your point? As for paying my employees less than I should, that's quite a statement given that you don't know how much I pay them. All of my engineers make $65-95k a year. At the lowest end is a recent community college grad who is really talented but didn't have the grades or money to go to a 4 year school because he was taking care of his sick father. I was literally the only company he applied to that gave him the time of day. I constantly hear (from people like you) that my wages are too low and that I'm going to find it hard to hire good engineers but I have yet to experience this. I can't pay $110k to a new college grad or $140k to an engineer with 3 years of experience but from what I see the number of those jobs is far lower than the number of engineers in SV. Should the engineers who aren't going to even get an interview at Google remain unemployed? I mentioned on another thread that I have one employee who I know is unhappy with his salary. He has about 4 years of experience and makes close to $90k a year but apparently he got it in his mind that the streets of Mountain View are lined with 6 figure jobs. He's a decent engineer who writes adequate code but he's not the type of guy who is going to pass a white board algorithm test. I know he has been looking and interviewing for the past 8 months and he's still here. If I'm taking advantage of him please explain why apparently no other company has offered him the 6 figure salary he (and you!) thinks engineers are entitled to. By the way when I started in this industry in the 90s my salary as a programmer was the equivalent of about $38k today. I didn't feel taken advantage of or desperate then and thankfully to this day never got a big enough head to feel entitled to a significant income just because I can write some code.
- Iftheshoefits 13y ago
  I won't argue with your point re: web apps being pedestrian. I'd be the first to agree, if it isn't obvious. I have multiple comments here on HN where I scarcely hide my negative view of the pervasive fad-hopping "rockstar" macbook wielding silliness that seems to suffuse certain segments of the Valley. My point wasn't that you won't be able to hire developers adequate to the tasks you require. It was that your target labor pool doesn't intersect with the labor pool target of companies building "database engines" or scaling up to "billions" of users, and so to compare your compensation packages to companies who are looking for engineers capable of building those things is a bit daft.