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In principle, I agree with most commentators on HN that if there were actually a shortage we'd expect to see salaries rising. Yet, in practice, it does seem th

In principle, I agree with most commentators on HN that if there were actually a shortage we'd expect to see salaries rising. Yet, in practice, it does seem that there's simply an absolute shortage of experienced developers. I've been hiring developers at my job for most of the past year, yet we have never had an offer turned down. Rather, we see only a trickle of applicants, very few of whom are event remotely qualified. If we actually saw a great developer, I'm sure we could put together a fantastic compensation package (despite being an early-stage startup, we pay above market for NYC). Yet all we see are mediocre developers, and few of those. It's hard not to call this a labor shortage when my colleagues hiring for other positions (marketing, writing, etc.) see 100x the number of applicants with 1/10 as much outreach/advertising. Given that it's impossible to produce more senior developers in a 1-2 year timeframe, what alternatives do people suggest to immigration?

selmnoo 12y ago
> Given that it's impossible to produce more senior developers in a 1-2 year timeframe, what alternatives do people suggest to immigration? Why do we operate under the assumption that these companies are entitled to as many unicorns as they want? Why shouldn't they just go out of business? After the whole collusion ordeal when it became abundantly clear that on one side there are VCs, founders, and C-levels who work to suppress our wages -- and on the other side, us, I actually want to see them lose and get hurt after all the terrible things they did to us.
- morgante 12y ago
  The world isn't nearly as binary as that. I'm not a VC or founder. I'm a developer just like you, trying to deliver cool products—but doing so requires more developers. If my company was trying to suppress wages, or refused to pay above market, then I'd agree with you that we have no right to ask for more talent. But we're perfectly willing to pay for talent—we just can't find any. I wouldn't be surprised if the number of senior developers on the market was less than 10% of the number of open positions.
  - PhoenixWright 12y ago
    I am currently looking at jobs in NYC. With 2 years of experience I am fielding offers between 60k-80k in a cheap state to live in. Two comments above you make great points: (1) Developers should be making more than what they are and (2) Why should startups be entitled to cheap labor? That being said my point is if I had the 5+ years of experience you probably are looking for and was moving to NYC I would expect to be making 150k+. Which if that is what you are offering, great. But if it's not then you can find the talent you are looking for, you just can't afford it.
    - morgante 12y ago
      > (1) Developers should be making more than what they are As a developer, I'd love to agree with this. In fact, I do. But in our experience this isn't directly related to the talent shortage (again, we have never been unable to make a compelling offer to a candidate). > (2) Why should startups be entitled to cheap labor? I don't think they should be. All our senior devs have generous compensation which easily adds up to $150k+.
      - waterlesscloud 12y ago
        You've never been unable to make a compelling offer to a candidate you've attracted to apply in the first place. What about those you haven't?
        morgante 12y ago
        You're right that our biggest challenge is in getting people to apply in the first place. What do you think is the highest value of deploying monetary and other resources to make that happen, given that publicly listing salaries is a non-starter?
        waterlesscloud 12y ago
        If you want the benefit of offering significantly above market salaries, at some point you've got to let it be known that you're doing that. Secretly paying people a lot of money won't attract new talent.
- cscurmudgeon 12y ago
  Wait, did startups participate in Collusion-gate? No.
  - cheepin 12y ago
    They got a ton of benefit with none of the moral cost!
- eli_gottlieb 12y ago
  On the one hand, everything you've said is more-or-less correct. On the other hand, there's an additional problem: as long as cities suppress the construction en masse of affordable housing, every attempt to raise salaries mostly just ends up raising rents, leaving employees only a tiny bit better-off than before.
  - morgante 12y ago
    Agreed 100%. Honestly, saner housing regulations in SF & NYC would do a lot more to ease the tech shortage than allowing in more H1Bs.
Implicated 12y ago
"Given that it's impossible to produce more senior developers in a 1-2 year timeframe, what alternatives do people suggest to immigration?" Don't limit yourself to local candidates. Especially somewhere like NYC. You, likely, couldn't offer me enough money to move/live there...especially for an early stage startup.
- morgante 12y ago
  > Don't limit yourself to local candidates. Especially somewhere like NYC. For many roles we're very open to hiring remote developers. Even that is rather challenging. (Though for lead roles, we do ask that you be based in NYC because it involves a lot of brainstorming with writers/analysts.)
antiics 12y ago
Who can I connect with on LinkedIn to learn more about open positions at your org?
- morgante 12y ago
  Feel free to email morgante@cafe.com
no_wave 12y ago
Advertise the salary you're offering. If your positions look like 90k positions but you're offering 150k, how will an applicant know? EDIT: I noticed that you wrote in a nested comment that publicly listing salaries is a non-starter. I'm not sure why - at the very least you could list the smallest number you'd imagine offering a qualified applicant. Note that it's pretty strange to claim that you can't attract enough skilled engineers even at higher salaries when you're keeping the fact that you pay higher salaries a secret. How do you expect this mechanism to work?
- morgante 12y ago
  There are two major problems with listing salaries publicly. 1. We don't really want to make the huge salary discrepancies obvious to our non-tech employees. While it's theoretically true, publicly listing the difference wouldn't be great for morale. 2. There's a huge range, and where a particularly candidate falls in that range requires qualitative judgement. We consider everyone from talented new grads to senior developers with over a decade of experience, but the expected salary range can swing by as much as $100k—publicly listing such a big range isn't helpful for anyone. (Yes, I understand that we could theoretically have different job listings but our criteria are driven more by "how much smart shit can you get done" and "how much will you learn" than by years of experience or anything quantifiable on a careers page.) > Note that it's pretty strange to claim that you can't attract enough skilled engineers even at higher salaries when you're keeping the fact that you pay higher salaries a secret. How do you expect this mechanism to work? It's not that I think an unadvertised salary will by itself attract skilled engineers—I'm just using our experience as a counterfactual for the claim that there are loads of senior developers but we aren't willing to pay them enough. Note that in private conversations/outreach, we do try to be upfront about salary ranges.
  - eli_gottlieb 12y ago
    If listing the salaries for the technologists will make the non-technologists in your firm jealous, then perhaps you should raise their wages, too.
  - no_wave 12y ago
7Figures2Commas 12y ago
What makes you think that immigration is going to result in an increase in high-quality applicants to your company? This sounds an awful lot like "If you build it, they will come." While I don't doubt that you see a lot of candidates who aren't remotely qualified for your positions, one of the harsh realities of this market is that it's hard to attract "great" people, even if you're at or above market in terms of compensation. There just aren't enough "great" people to go around, so other factors, such as technical challenges and business viability, are often taken into consideration by quality candidates. Chances are there are other startups competing for the same talent that seem to be working on more challenging problems and have better prospects than you. Early-stage startups like yours would be wise to consider optimizing their businesses and technology architectures around this fact. Unless you can pay stupid guap or are working on something really, really objectively interesting, one of the best and most underutilized techniques for finding great employees is to hire decent folks with potential and develop them into great employees. A lot of companies will insist this isn't viable ("We needed 15 unicorns yesterday because we're building the world's most advanced analytics platform for selfies!") but most of them aren't being honest with themselves about their real needs. They're intent on building technology for the business they think they'll have and don't want to admit that they don't know how to develop employees.
- morgante 12y ago
  > What makes you think that immigration is going to result in an increase in high-quality applicants to your company? I don't think immigration is a panacea (in fact, my primary point in this thread has just been to rebuke the argument that salaries aren't rising so therefore there isn't a tech shortage). That being said, we do have some overseas contractors who I'd love to bring in-house if the immigration system didn't make doing so incredibly byzantine and challenging. > Chances are there are other startups competing for the same talent that seem to be working on more challenging problems and have better prospects than you. I do think this is truthfully a big part of the challenges. Despite the fact that our CEO has a great track record (two successful exits, last one for $545M+) and that we're actually building some cool technology (using data & technology to make it easy for writers to understand how their content flows across the web and to adapt their writing accordingly) many are turned off by the fact that we're working in "publishing." Unfortunately, at this point it seems almost impossible to hire good developers unless you're Google—even if you have a viable business model and interesting/new technology (microservices, graph analytics, etc.). > Unless you can pay stupid guap or are working on something really, really objectively interesting, one of the best and most underutilized techniques for finding great employees is to hire decent folks with potential and develop them into great employees. We're very big on hiring based on potential, but there is a certain baseline. Particularly because our engineering team is small as it is, bringing on junior devs would be somewhat unfair to our existing developers—increasing their workload.
pm24601 12y ago
I suggest looking outside of NYC for a developer that would be willing to move to NYC. In Silicon Valley, the talent pool is very picked over. I suggest to anyone in SV to look outside the immediate area. Post ads in Kansas or Michigan. Some place where getting paid a NYC salary seems great. You have to get creative. Even if there was a dramatic increase in engineers - there is no guarantee that they would be interested in cafe.com. I did look at your job postings and I do have some suggestions: 1. List your tech stack - not as a requirement but just to let applicants know what they are signing up for. 2. List your tech stack for SEO purposes- I can't think of any google search that would put the cafe.com jobs high on the list. 3. What are you doing to market the job - be aggressive with linkedin, github, stackoverflow. Every single week I get interview requests by all three channels. If you are not aggressively recruiting people who are not actively looking then you are missing the boat. The last time I actively looked for a job was a decade ago. Most job connections come to me via friend/network/etc.
- morgante 12y ago
  Thanks for the feedback! We do actively recruit outside the NYC area, but could probably ramp this up somewhat (admittedly, recruiting is not my favorite part of the job). We avoided listing our tech stack because people frequently read it as a requirement, but I think you're right. Will add it soon. We aggressively recruit on LinkedIn, GitHub, Stack Overflow, and AngelList, but the majority of our qualified applicants have actually come through my network and Hacker News. I'm trying to expand this though, particularly because I want to avoid building a mirror image engineering team (young, white, males in their 20s).

selmnoo 12y ago

> Given that it's impossible to produce more senior developers in a 1-2 year timeframe, what alternatives do people suggest to immigration? Why do we operate under the assumption that these companies are entitled to as many unicorns as they want? Why shouldn't they just go out of business? After the whole collusion ordeal when it became abundantly clear that on one side there are VCs, founders, and C-levels who work to suppress our wages -- and on the other side, us, I actually want to see them lose and get hurt after all the terrible things they did to us.

morgante 12y ago
The world isn't nearly as binary as that. I'm not a VC or founder. I'm a developer just like you, trying to deliver cool products—but doing so requires more developers. If my company was trying to suppress wages, or refused to pay above market, then I'd agree with you that we have no right to ask for more talent. But we're perfectly willing to pay for talent—we just can't find any. I wouldn't be surprised if the number of senior developers on the market was less than 10% of the number of open positions.
- PhoenixWright 12y ago
  I am currently looking at jobs in NYC. With 2 years of experience I am fielding offers between 60k-80k in a cheap state to live in. Two comments above you make great points: (1) Developers should be making more than what they are and (2) Why should startups be entitled to cheap labor? That being said my point is if I had the 5+ years of experience you probably are looking for and was moving to NYC I would expect to be making 150k+. Which if that is what you are offering, great. But if it's not then you can find the talent you are looking for, you just can't afford it.
  - morgante 12y ago
    > (1) Developers should be making more than what they are As a developer, I'd love to agree with this. In fact, I do. But in our experience this isn't directly related to the talent shortage (again, we have never been unable to make a compelling offer to a candidate). > (2) Why should startups be entitled to cheap labor? I don't think they should be. All our senior devs have generous compensation which easily adds up to $150k+.
    - waterlesscloud 12y ago
      You've never been unable to make a compelling offer to a candidate you've attracted to apply in the first place. What about those you haven't?
      - morgante 12y ago
        You're right that our biggest challenge is in getting people to apply in the first place. What do you think is the highest value of deploying monetary and other resources to make that happen, given that publicly listing salaries is a non-starter?
        waterlesscloud 12y ago
        If you want the benefit of offering significantly above market salaries, at some point you've got to let it be known that you're doing that. Secretly paying people a lot of money won't attract new talent.
cscurmudgeon 12y ago
Wait, did startups participate in Collusion-gate? No.
- cheepin 12y ago
  They got a ton of benefit with none of the moral cost!
eli_gottlieb 12y ago
On the one hand, everything you've said is more-or-less correct. On the other hand, there's an additional problem: as long as cities suppress the construction en masse of affordable housing, every attempt to raise salaries mostly just ends up raising rents, leaving employees only a tiny bit better-off than before.
- morgante 12y ago
  Agreed 100%. Honestly, saner housing regulations in SF & NYC would do a lot more to ease the tech shortage than allowing in more H1Bs.

Implicated 12y ago

"Given that it's impossible to produce more senior developers in a 1-2 year timeframe, what alternatives do people suggest to immigration?" Don't limit yourself to local candidates. Especially somewhere like NYC. You, likely, couldn't offer me enough money to move/live there...especially for an early stage startup.

morgante 12y ago
> Don't limit yourself to local candidates. Especially somewhere like NYC. For many roles we're very open to hiring remote developers. Even that is rather challenging. (Though for lead roles, we do ask that you be based in NYC because it involves a lot of brainstorming with writers/analysts.)

antiics 12y ago

Who can I connect with on LinkedIn to learn more about open positions at your org?

morgante 12y ago
Feel free to email morgante@cafe.com

no_wave 12y ago

Advertise the salary you're offering. If your positions look like 90k positions but you're offering 150k, how will an applicant know? EDIT: I noticed that you wrote in a nested comment that publicly listing salaries is a non-starter. I'm not sure why - at the very least you could list the smallest number you'd imagine offering a qualified applicant. Note that it's pretty strange to claim that you can't attract enough skilled engineers even at higher salaries when you're keeping the fact that you pay higher salaries a secret. How do you expect this mechanism to work?

morgante 12y ago
There are two major problems with listing salaries publicly. 1. We don't really want to make the huge salary discrepancies obvious to our non-tech employees. While it's theoretically true, publicly listing the difference wouldn't be great for morale. 2. There's a huge range, and where a particularly candidate falls in that range requires qualitative judgement. We consider everyone from talented new grads to senior developers with over a decade of experience, but the expected salary range can swing by as much as $100k—publicly listing such a big range isn't helpful for anyone. (Yes, I understand that we could theoretically have different job listings but our criteria are driven more by "how much smart shit can you get done" and "how much will you learn" than by years of experience or anything quantifiable on a careers page.) > Note that it's pretty strange to claim that you can't attract enough skilled engineers even at higher salaries when you're keeping the fact that you pay higher salaries a secret. How do you expect this mechanism to work? It's not that I think an unadvertised salary will by itself attract skilled engineers—I'm just using our experience as a counterfactual for the claim that there are loads of senior developers but we aren't willing to pay them enough. Note that in private conversations/outreach, we do try to be upfront about salary ranges.
- eli_gottlieb 12y ago
  If listing the salaries for the technologists will make the non-technologists in your firm jealous, then perhaps you should raise their wages, too.
- no_wave 12y ago

7Figures2Commas 12y ago

What makes you think that immigration is going to result in an increase in high-quality applicants to your company? This sounds an awful lot like "If you build it, they will come." While I don't doubt that you see a lot of candidates who aren't remotely qualified for your positions, one of the harsh realities of this market is that it's hard to attract "great" people, even if you're at or above market in terms of compensation. There just aren't enough "great" people to go around, so other factors, such as technical challenges and business viability, are often taken into consideration by quality candidates. Chances are there are other startups competing for the same talent that seem to be working on more challenging problems and have better prospects than you. Early-stage startups like yours would be wise to consider optimizing their businesses and technology architectures around this fact. Unless you can pay stupid guap or are working on something really, really objectively interesting, one of the best and most underutilized techniques for finding great employees is to hire decent folks with potential and develop them into great employees. A lot of companies will insist this isn't viable ("We needed 15 unicorns yesterday because we're building the world's most advanced analytics platform for selfies!") but most of them aren't being honest with themselves about their real needs. They're intent on building technology for the business they think they'll have and don't want to admit that they don't know how to develop employees.

morgante 12y ago
> What makes you think that immigration is going to result in an increase in high-quality applicants to your company? I don't think immigration is a panacea (in fact, my primary point in this thread has just been to rebuke the argument that salaries aren't rising so therefore there isn't a tech shortage). That being said, we do have some overseas contractors who I'd love to bring in-house if the immigration system didn't make doing so incredibly byzantine and challenging. > Chances are there are other startups competing for the same talent that seem to be working on more challenging problems and have better prospects than you. I do think this is truthfully a big part of the challenges. Despite the fact that our CEO has a great track record (two successful exits, last one for $545M+) and that we're actually building some cool technology (using data & technology to make it easy for writers to understand how their content flows across the web and to adapt their writing accordingly) many are turned off by the fact that we're working in "publishing." Unfortunately, at this point it seems almost impossible to hire good developers unless you're Google—even if you have a viable business model and interesting/new technology (microservices, graph analytics, etc.). > Unless you can pay stupid guap or are working on something really, really objectively interesting, one of the best and most underutilized techniques for finding great employees is to hire decent folks with potential and develop them into great employees. We're very big on hiring based on potential, but there is a certain baseline. Particularly because our engineering team is small as it is, bringing on junior devs would be somewhat unfair to our existing developers—increasing their workload.

pm24601 12y ago

I suggest looking outside of NYC for a developer that would be willing to move to NYC. In Silicon Valley, the talent pool is very picked over. I suggest to anyone in SV to look outside the immediate area. Post ads in Kansas or Michigan. Some place where getting paid a NYC salary seems great. You have to get creative. Even if there was a dramatic increase in engineers - there is no guarantee that they would be interested in cafe.com. I did look at your job postings and I do have some suggestions: 1. List your tech stack - not as a requirement but just to let applicants know what they are signing up for. 2. List your tech stack for SEO purposes- I can't think of any google search that would put the cafe.com jobs high on the list. 3. What are you doing to market the job - be aggressive with linkedin, github, stackoverflow. Every single week I get interview requests by all three channels. If you are not aggressively recruiting people who are not actively looking then you are missing the boat. The last time I actively looked for a job was a decade ago. Most job connections come to me via friend/network/etc.

morgante 12y ago
Thanks for the feedback! We do actively recruit outside the NYC area, but could probably ramp this up somewhat (admittedly, recruiting is not my favorite part of the job). We avoided listing our tech stack because people frequently read it as a requirement, but I think you're right. Will add it soon. We aggressively recruit on LinkedIn, GitHub, Stack Overflow, and AngelList, but the majority of our qualified applicants have actually come through my network and Hacker News. I'm trying to expand this though, particularly because I want to avoid building a mirror image engineering team (young, white, males in their 20s).