8 ms·

I can't agree with this more. As much as I sympathize with entrepreneurs and managers having trouble hiring engineers in this current environment, I feel like "

I can't agree with this more. As much as I sympathize with entrepreneurs and managers having trouble hiring engineers in this current environment, I feel like "they" brought it on themselves because wages were probably below what they should've been for years, and because of that, supply became depressed. Now that a lot more infrastructure and tooling is in place, we're seeing the effects of that prolonged depressed supply. It's easy (relatively) to hire junior devs, and much harder to hire senior devs. And even still, I talk to senior devs who have trouble getting a raise. I'm like... ok... well I hear X is hiring.

vonmoltke 11y ago
> I can't agree with this more. As much as I sympathize with entrepreneurs and managers having trouble hiring engineers in this current environment, I feel like "they" brought it on themselves because wages were probably below what they should've been for years, and because of that, supply became depressed. Correction: they are below what people of the quality they want are willing to work for. There are plenty of engineers willing to work for those salaries; the vast majority get rejected. Whether these entrepreneurs and managers actually need the level of quality they are seeking is a subject for a different religious debate.
- fweespeech 11y ago
  > Whether these entrepreneurs and managers actually need the level of quality they are seeking is a subject for a different religious debate. I'd say its more accurate to say "The quality of engineers isn't effectively determined in most hiring processes."
sanderjd 11y ago
What I don't understand is that the X that is hiring likely also has a bunch of senior devs who are having trouble getting a raise. It would be far more efficient to give raises to current employees who already have expertise at the company than to hire externally.
- hayksaakian 11y ago
  But that's the difference between N and N+1 devs.
- Swizec 11y ago
  Company valuations are based on N(engineers). It is said that hiring a full-time engineer increases your valuation by $1M. And it only costs about 10% of that per year to pay the engineer. Winning. Basically, there's no incentive to give raises to current engineers because when your company doesn't care about profits or expenses, but about getting and maintaining investment and stock value, it doesn't matter how expensive it is to train new people and how ineffective they are. As long as they are just effective enough to maintain a N(user) growth, you're good.
  - tallerholler 11y ago
    yes but when we're talking about the real world where maintaining N(user) growth translates into designing, implementing, and maintaining complex systems, it can be fatal to simply view engineers as a commodity that can be discarded or replaced on a whim...
    - seiji 11y ago
      Your argument failed once you said "yes but" — when valuation is a function of number of employees, adding fine-grained nuance and deeper levels of consideration just won't happen. If companies want the best, yes they should do all you said. If companies are just trying to grow grow grow, they can probably do better with an approach of 1,000 coder monkeys instead of 10 expert systems builders. Plus, no reasonable company is going to pay the 10 expert people the equivalent of the 100 coder monkey duties they are actually performing. That would be what... a salary of $10 million to $20 million per expert employee per year. Yes, you are worth that much, but the market finds true-value untenable. We'd rather let companies keep hundreds of billions in spare cash than paying it out to employees who are allowing such hoards of wealth to be, well, hoarded.
      - 11y ago
beambot 11y ago
> wages were probably below what they should've been for years... Not only that... tech companies like Apple, Adobe, Pixar, Google, Intel, eBay, Lucasfilm, and Intuit all illegally colluded to keep them low. The settlement for the affected workers was appallingly low! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
- 0x5f3759df-i 11y ago
  >On September 8, 2014, Judge Koh set April 9, 2015 as the actual trial date for the remaining defendants, with a pre-trial conference scheduled for December 19, 2014. Also, as of early September 2014, the defendants had re-entered mediation to determine whether a new settlement could be reached. Wikipedia seems out of date, what was the final result?
  - jmorrow977 11y ago
    Apparently the payment is increased to $415M, which in my opinion is still too low. https://pando.com/2015/04/14/apple-wage-fixing-plaintiff-accuses-execs-of-hypocrisy-over-discriminatory-labor-policy/ https://pando.com/2015/04/14/apple-wage-fixing-plaintiff-acc...
- AnkhMorporkian 11y ago
  I agree that the settlement was definitely low, but I really disagree that the settlement was absurdly low on aggregate. I've always done freelance/contract work, so I'm not 100% sure what 'significantly' better means in the normal software world, but I'm going to assume 5k/year would be a really significant raise. I know the national average is somewhere around 3%, so 5k seems like it would be absurdly more than average. Please do correct me if I'm wrong. So, just going on $5,000 lost for a year for the 64,000 litigants, that's $320,000,000. They settled for $324,000,000. I swear I didn't presuppose any of those numbers, they just worked out like that.
  - slewis 11y ago
    The period in question is 4 years so multiply by 4 (although not all litigants were present during all 4 years so you can back it off a little). And 5k is too low. Google gave a 10% raise across the board around the time this information came out. So assume 150k salary * 10% = 15k. Salaries also continued to rise more rapidly after the 10% raise, but it's hard to say by how much without having access to the internal data.
meatysnapper 11y ago
My career has basically gone this way: 60k shitty entry level job (< 3 years)... quit for a 90k slightly less shitty job (1 year) ... quit for a 140k + $350k bonus/equity (< 2 years) ... quit for a 160k + much more equity, nearly certain IPO (hopefully for the full 4 years to vest 100%) Don't hate the mercenary, hate the employer who won't pay you what you are worth!
- Chinjut 11y ago
  That was some jump from $90k to $490k! (How'd you pull that off?)
- rev_bird 11y ago
  Echoing Chinjut's question – I've never seen a jump like that, unless it was equity that turned out to be worth $350k, but looked like less when it was offered. How did that happen?!
  - meatysnapper 11y ago
    Mostly equity; I joined a company the week of the IPO but accepted the offer before that. I basically got very lucky, but the base salary + equity any relatively big name post-IPO company would also be $200k-ish. Keep in mind that I stayed at none of these companies for more than 2.5 years! There were 2 brief interludes 1) Non-technical grad school, but that actually netted me a very slick summer internship one year that paid way better than my previous job too. 2) Failed startup, that paid nothing Unfortunately, I think I've maxed out on the software engineer pay scale now unless I get even luckier.
    - ranit 11y ago
      Maxing out is not considered "unfortunate" by most definitions of luckiness. :-)
      - s73v3r 11y ago
        Depends. If he gets bored/unhappy at his current positing, then his options for leaving might be narrowed.

vonmoltke 11y ago

> I can't agree with this more. As much as I sympathize with entrepreneurs and managers having trouble hiring engineers in this current environment, I feel like "they" brought it on themselves because wages were probably below what they should've been for years, and because of that, supply became depressed. Correction: they are below what people of the quality they want are willing to work for. There are plenty of engineers willing to work for those salaries; the vast majority get rejected. Whether these entrepreneurs and managers actually need the level of quality they are seeking is a subject for a different religious debate.

fweespeech 11y ago
> Whether these entrepreneurs and managers actually need the level of quality they are seeking is a subject for a different religious debate. I'd say its more accurate to say "The quality of engineers isn't effectively determined in most hiring processes."

sanderjd 11y ago

What I don't understand is that the X that is hiring likely also has a bunch of senior devs who are having trouble getting a raise. It would be far more efficient to give raises to current employees who already have expertise at the company than to hire externally.

hayksaakian 11y ago
But that's the difference between N and N+1 devs.
Swizec 11y ago
Company valuations are based on N(engineers). It is said that hiring a full-time engineer increases your valuation by $1M. And it only costs about 10% of that per year to pay the engineer. Winning. Basically, there's no incentive to give raises to current engineers because when your company doesn't care about profits or expenses, but about getting and maintaining investment and stock value, it doesn't matter how expensive it is to train new people and how ineffective they are. As long as they are just effective enough to maintain a N(user) growth, you're good.
- tallerholler 11y ago
  yes but when we're talking about the real world where maintaining N(user) growth translates into designing, implementing, and maintaining complex systems, it can be fatal to simply view engineers as a commodity that can be discarded or replaced on a whim...
  - seiji 11y ago
    Your argument failed once you said "yes but" — when valuation is a function of number of employees, adding fine-grained nuance and deeper levels of consideration just won't happen. If companies want the best, yes they should do all you said. If companies are just trying to grow grow grow, they can probably do better with an approach of 1,000 coder monkeys instead of 10 expert systems builders. Plus, no reasonable company is going to pay the 10 expert people the equivalent of the 100 coder monkey duties they are actually performing. That would be what... a salary of $10 million to $20 million per expert employee per year. Yes, you are worth that much, but the market finds true-value untenable. We'd rather let companies keep hundreds of billions in spare cash than paying it out to employees who are allowing such hoards of wealth to be, well, hoarded.
    - 11y ago

beambot 11y ago

> wages were probably below what they should've been for years... Not only that... tech companies like Apple, Adobe, Pixar, Google, Intel, eBay, Lucasfilm, and Intuit all illegally colluded to keep them low. The settlement for the affected workers was appallingly low! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

0x5f3759df-i 11y ago
>On September 8, 2014, Judge Koh set April 9, 2015 as the actual trial date for the remaining defendants, with a pre-trial conference scheduled for December 19, 2014. Also, as of early September 2014, the defendants had re-entered mediation to determine whether a new settlement could be reached. Wikipedia seems out of date, what was the final result?
- jmorrow977 11y ago
  Apparently the payment is increased to $415M, which in my opinion is still too low. https://pando.com/2015/04/14/apple-wage-fixing-plaintiff-accuses-execs-of-hypocrisy-over-discriminatory-labor-policy/ https://pando.com/2015/04/14/apple-wage-fixing-plaintiff-acc...
AnkhMorporkian 11y ago
I agree that the settlement was definitely low, but I really disagree that the settlement was absurdly low on aggregate. I've always done freelance/contract work, so I'm not 100% sure what 'significantly' better means in the normal software world, but I'm going to assume 5k/year would be a really significant raise. I know the national average is somewhere around 3%, so 5k seems like it would be absurdly more than average. Please do correct me if I'm wrong. So, just going on $5,000 lost for a year for the 64,000 litigants, that's $320,000,000. They settled for $324,000,000. I swear I didn't presuppose any of those numbers, they just worked out like that.
- slewis 11y ago
  The period in question is 4 years so multiply by 4 (although not all litigants were present during all 4 years so you can back it off a little). And 5k is too low. Google gave a 10% raise across the board around the time this information came out. So assume 150k salary * 10% = 15k. Salaries also continued to rise more rapidly after the 10% raise, but it's hard to say by how much without having access to the internal data.

meatysnapper 11y ago

My career has basically gone this way: 60k shitty entry level job (< 3 years)... quit for a 90k slightly less shitty job (1 year) ... quit for a 140k + $350k bonus/equity (< 2 years) ... quit for a 160k + much more equity, nearly certain IPO (hopefully for the full 4 years to vest 100%) Don't hate the mercenary, hate the employer who won't pay you what you are worth!

Chinjut 11y ago
That was some jump from $90k to $490k! (How'd you pull that off?)
rev_bird 11y ago
Echoing Chinjut's question – I've never seen a jump like that, unless it was equity that turned out to be worth $350k, but looked like less when it was offered. How did that happen?!
- meatysnapper 11y ago
  Mostly equity; I joined a company the week of the IPO but accepted the offer before that. I basically got very lucky, but the base salary + equity any relatively big name post-IPO company would also be $200k-ish. Keep in mind that I stayed at none of these companies for more than 2.5 years! There were 2 brief interludes 1) Non-technical grad school, but that actually netted me a very slick summer internship one year that paid way better than my previous job too. 2) Failed startup, that paid nothing Unfortunately, I think I've maxed out on the software engineer pay scale now unless I get even luckier.
  - ranit 11y ago
    Maxing out is not considered "unfortunate" by most definitions of luckiness. :-)
    - s73v3r 11y ago
      Depends. If he gets bored/unhappy at his current positing, then his options for leaving might be narrowed.