There comes a point where the money just isn't a motivating factor anymore, and companies are struggling to figure out how to work in that environment. This bit from the author hits the nail on the head:
>Is an extra $10k per year worth learning a new org, a new skillset, a new set of expectations, a new set of coworkers, and a new boss?
For many engineers, the answer is: “No.”
Yes I could quit and get a ~20k raise by shopping my resume around, but I don't need the money. I have enough for a down payment on a house, I meet my expenses for the month with 1/2 of one paycheck, I can buy a new car on a credit card if I wanted to. More money would be _nice_, and I imagine I'd be singing a slightly different song if I had kids, but it's much less important than knowing the work that I do has meaning and an immediate impact on the world, and about as important as working with new/interesting technology. I imagine there are a lot of early career (26-30 year old) software engineers who are in a similar boat. If money was a motivator I'd be serially founding companies and striving to be The Next Big Thing. I'm just not. I'm happy being hire number 13, or 99, and working with people I like doing work I find value in.
I do not disagree with your take, but I think you may only be speaking for a subset of engineers that are already fairly well compensated. The article likewise seems to discard the importance of money in favor of three other more immaterial factors, but I do not think this is representative of the situation of the global job market right now. I also think such a perspective can not fully explain the difficulties that many companies are having with regards to hiring engineers at the moment.
If you look outside of coastal cities, there are plenty of job offers for engineering jobs that pay less than 6 figures. Over in Europe and East Asia, $50 to $60k salaries are the norm. And people job hop frequently for a few extra $k because that corresponds to a significant increase in quality of life for them. The difference between a 2 br and 3 or 4 br apartment, between another kid or not, etc...
People will absolutely leave your company if they think they can get paid more elsewhere. People will absolutely pass over your job offer if they think they can get more elsewhere.
You also see the reverse phenomenon which is that you'll find plenty of engineers doing soul-wrenching, boring jobs in toxic environment who still say because they are very generously compensated (hello FAANG).
> Over in Europe and East Asia, $50 to $60k salaries are the norm
Yes, and we have plenty of nice stuff that goes along with it
Healthcare, 30 paid holidays, unions, paid overtime, weekends and calls off work come extra (it is 40h week period, want more pay for it), retirement, flex time, ...
Like the OP, my expenses are more than covered, getting more isn't worth the hassle to change.
Ah, and in some countries having too many companies on the CV isn't well seen, it appears the candidate isn't able to fit-in anywhere.
I would posit that the OP underestimates the impact of his second point: remote-first in a covid world opened up a large swath of opportunities to get very large total compensation bumps everywhere. I'm part of a slack group comprised of ex-employees of a company I used to work at and some folks there expressed that it is entirely feasible to land jobs today that pay a full 100-200k over their current or previous compensation, thanks to big tech companies expanding engineering operations outside of Silicon Valley.
Considering that each of these tech companies are trying to hire in the order of hundreds of engineers, and willing to accommodate remote work from locations that they previously did not consider, is it really a surprise that other companies with less competitive compensation packages are struggling to find talent?
> engineers doing soul-wrenching, boring jobs in toxic environment who still say because they are very generously compensated (hello FAANG).
This is also what a lot of europeans do with FAANG jobs.. get a FAANG job, move to america, live there for 3-5 years in a 4 bedroom apartment with 12 roommates, eat ramen, come back home, and buy a house.
There's also a question of how much more money do you get... 5% more to do something shitter than now... not worth it... but 50% more, is enough to think it through, if nothing else, how much sooner can you retire with that.
As a newly graduated CS student in Denmark I got a job earning $74k a year. I got warned by my union that my salary was on the low side and, come the first negotiation round of the year, I should ask for a larger raise than simply a yearly adjustment. And based on my union's numbers I don't think almost any developer is working for $60k or under in this country.
> If you look outside of coastal cities, there are plenty of job offers for engineering jobs that pay less than 6 figures. Over in Europe and East Asia, $50 to $60k salaries are the norm. And people job hop frequently for a few extra $k because that corresponds to a significant increase in quality of life for them. The difference between a 2 br and 3 or 4 br apartment, between another kid or not, etc...
In my eyes, this is a good point.
Currently working in Latvia and getting a net salary of around 2k euros a month now - staying at the same company makes it increase by a few hundred euros per year. Actually provided more information in another comment of mine, compared some of the public sources for software dev salaries in the adjacent countries too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29595158
Thus, job hopping even for comparatively small increases is the smart thing to do, as well as looking for opportunities like side hustles and attempting to take advantage of a globalized economy that lends itself well to remote work (something that i'll inevitably need to explore once i'll have finished a pretty large enterprise migration and some pilot projects in my current place of work).
Now, my salary is still liveable and certainly better than those of who work for the local government, who receive about half of what i do (according to https://www-visasalgas-com.translate.goog/valsts-iestades?_x... which is a site that displays the published data per government org) and many other seemingly essential jobs (like teachers, medics, firemen, policemen all of which are comparatively underpaid). Even as a software dev, buying my own house anytime soon is unlikely, as is buying a new car, or many other luxuries that others take for granted.
In short: the original argument definitely holds true for those who are well compensated, but yours is also valid for those less so. Already, there is talk locally of not having enough engineers, especially in those aforementioned government jobs.
> If you look outside of coastal cities, there are plenty of job offers for engineering jobs that pay less than 6 figures. Over in Europe and East Asia, $50 to $60k salaries are the norm.
Indeed, the population of people who post on this board are very binomial, and it often causes blanket statements to be confusing to one side or the other.
None of your points are untrue, but "engineers that are already fairly well compensated" is exactly who OP and the article are referring to:
> Read any publication that cares about business, from the NYT to the Wall Street Journal, and you’ll see a ton of hand wringing about The Quittening, and the accompanying talent shortage.
These publications aren't talking about the workforce in general, they're pseudo-gossip articles about the wealthy top engineers and how well-off they are that they can focus on things other than how much they put into savings each paycheck.
Also, I feel like engineers are much more likely to be attracted the FIRE mentality and tend to have the incomes and low spending habits that can get them retired easily by their mid 30s.
I'm personally in that boat, and frankly, I'm a little bored but not bored enough to go back to work as an SE full time. If companies offered more part time work and highly flexible work, it might be enough to drag me back in.
Even large six figure salaries just aren't enough money for the soul crushing reality of renting out my brain full time to solving someone else's problems now that I have enough.
Exactly. Once your needs and wants are met, every extra dollar can just get saved, and means less time until retirement. For this reason, there is never “a point where the money just isn't a motivating factor anymore.” If you are already comfortable and have the trajectory to retire at 55, why not job hop if only to be able to retire at 45? To me, the only point where moar money is truly useless is the day you retire, and even then, maybe you want to pay for your kid’s college or something?
Thanks for writing that. Agreed, many technical people want the spare time and creativity to work on things that interest them. At some point, for those who enjoy intellectual pursuits, time becomes the limiting reagent, not money.
I haven't really seen a whole lot of evidence that there's any stronger correlation between FIRE and engineers compared to other jobs (in fact, many FIRE blogs are from non-eng people).
And conversely, there's plenty of engineers who have kids (hence, very much not FIRE). The vast majority end up going down that route, in fact, at least in my experience.
Also, those highly paid engineers in other companies might be tired of working on surveillance tech but aren't willing to stomach 50% pay cuts because your company is shooting for "market rate" compensation instead of market clearing compensation.
50% raises are extremely rare to get once you are an established Engineer in my experience. At least if you want to keep the other factors (working time, city etc) and not simply advance by switching to management or similar.
One way is to try switching from a regular industry job to a “giant” such as a FAANG. But these are quite rare in most countries.
Another way would be switching into specific industries like finance - but the high comp there traditionally means giving up some other things such as a guaranteed 40h-or-less workweek. Hard pass from many established engineers.
A third option would be switching to a larger share of non cash comp, but again, equity large bonuses are not commonly part of European comp and comp in traditional industry.
Don't forget to tax out of that. And if they are well compensated to begin with that's at a high tax bracket. And for some of these people, the remaining amount just isn't worth it.
Nah, not for some. I've never made a six figure salary. I have quit jobs in the past that would be six-figure jobs in today's market. They demand too much time and become the central focus of your life and identity. That's not for me.
My take: at least in the places where I've been, IT tech in the last ~20 years was dominated by enthusiastic youngsters like me. CS and CS-related fields were the default go-to job in my circles around the '90ies, creating a large surplus. If you wanted a job in the beginning of your career, you had to accept either a crappy job or a low-paying one.
I've never seen in the eurozone the US-style crazy-high 100k+ salaries. In general, here an IT engineer hired fulltime fetches a rate which is comparable to many other regular jobs, and generally lower than other engineering positions. However the churn and stress is much, much higher in my career experience. We joke about JS, but almost everything around the IT has now super-fast refresh cycles which require never-ending honing of your skills just for the sake of it.
That initial candidate surplus is now starting to age and drain. These CS candidates have now a decades-old experience in the current tech stack which is worth gold, but are also tired of the churn. You can still get them, but be prepared to pay them a lot more. Many companies which were founded on entry-level salaries will now see their workforce explode in cost. This is going to be huge with the current inflation in the next 2-5 years, where your average company raise won't cut anymore and you're forced to jump ship to maintain your purchasing power.
The young talent is still there of course, but it's often more specialized than what I remember a few decades ago due to the growth of the field. This means that finding a good fit reduces your pool significantly, unless you accept your candidate will be learning for a long time.
> ...and I imagine I'd be singing a slightly different song if I had kids,
Depending on the person, that may be a good motivator for them to not seek more money, but to seek more time instead. I'm certainly there. I've turned down more money when the position would mean that I was responsible for an awful lot more and it would take time away from my kids. When they're older and possibly out of the house, that may change, but for now? I'd rather have the time than the money because, like you, I have "enough." It's just not a limiting factor at this point in what I care to do, but time is.
> "There comes a point where the money just isn't a motivating factor anymore, and companies are struggling to figure out how to work in that environment. This bit from the author hits the nail on the head:
>Is an extra $10k per year worth learning a new org, a new skillset, a new set of expectations, a new set of coworkers, and a new boss?"
> For many engineers, the answer is: “No.”
> Yes I could quit and get a ~20k raise by shopping my resume around, but I don't need the money. I have enough for a down payment on a house, I meet my expenses for the month with 1/2 of one paycheck, I can buy a new car on a credit card if I wanted to.
This entire thread is mind-blowingly backwards though it totally explains why we the industry is in this position. It starts with people saying that "they don't need more money" because they can borrow or they can $20k more by shopping around their resume if they need to, followed by people waxing about how $50k-$80k is a decent salary, followed by people saying "no one gets paid $250k out of college"
It is very simple: $20k extra over a period of 52 weeks is extra $384 per week, which is less than extra $10 an hour.
Here's why you cannot hire engineers: you are not paying them enough money.
Engineer: $55k is good if i have <blah blah blah>
Someone who wants to hire him and has no toys: $80k
Engineer: I guess but only if I get to work only really cool projects
Someone who wants to hire him and has shitty projects: $100k
Engineer: And I want to have super smart people working with me
Someone who wants to hire him and does not have smart people as he wants to build a team around this kind of engineer: $150k
Engineer: Yeah, i guess it will work.
Someone who wants to hire him and does not want him to shop around: $170k
Engineer: hell yes! I'm going to unshitty these projects and make people around me smart!
Oh, you don't want to pay $170k/year for an engineer because you think those plebeians should be working for $55k? Well, that's your problem.
Your thinking is so resonating with mine too... Also I'd like to add...
> 3. Some degree of repeatability in work environment.
Instead of the above point, I am looking for...
A place where I make greater impact in a small company working along side ethical people who are not trying to exploit their customers/consumers, rather than a FAAMG where you're replaceable within a few days and follow no ethics just revenue in mind...
A place where managers are accommodating of suggestions just because I write code doesn't mean my ideas about the product/solution aren't worth listening to...
A place where you admire or atleast respect the CEO and the company's business tactics instead of my ex-company whose past CEO is now an "astronaut" just to play a marketing gimmick I guess... :p
Please connect with me if you consider your startup/company is one such place... ;)
> > Is an extra $10k per year worth learning a new org, a new skillset, a new set of expectations, a new set of coworkers, and a new boss?
> For many engineers, the answer is: “No.” Yes I could quit and get a ~20k raise by shopping my resume around, but I don't need the money.
Would you feel the same if you were enticed to switch jobs with offers of 1.5x, 2x or more than what you're currently making?
I think plenty of people would consider leaving their current employer, even with the headaches that comes with doing so, to make 50% to 100%+ over their current compensation package. I know I would.
I agree that engineers might not jump ship for a $10k increase in income, and it seems to me that the market rate for engineers based on current demand isn't captured by offers of $10k to $20k above current salaries. That would suggest that if employers are truly that desperate for engineers, like they say they are, then they'd need to offer more money to outbid their competitors' offers.
Truthfully, I have a feeling that many employers' choices of not offering larger compensation packages to potential employees don't stem not a rational economic choice, but from a feeling that such offers are "too much" for engineers. Some companies would rather not hire, and make less money, than hire new employees at their market rates and profit from their work.
Being able to work alongside the people you're solving the problem for is a really great intrinsic motivator. You can be abstracted away quite a bit as an engineer, which makes it so most of your motivations have to come from within and it ends up being quite a narcissitic evaluation of your role. You're not always going to love the problems you're solving, but when you know it's part of a bigger picture you believe in I think that's a huge motivator.
I think most people of working age now have been part of the individualism movement, which leaves us pretty ill-prepared to deal with the feelings of discontent when we finally succeed at "getting ours" and realize it wasn't all that fulfilling. Solving problems that matter to the community you live in, or the greater society you're part of, has so much more intrinsic reward.
I've come to this realisation as well. there is a tipping point where the impact we have starts to become a critical factor. when i started in the industry I'm in, I apparently had absolutely no problem being entirely detached from the people I impact. Even not knowing what exactly my value to society was didn't scratch my curiosity. 8y later, I'm desperate for any initiative no matter how small that I get to know who it's helping.
It is now internalised, a strong demotivation happens each time something abstract comes my way, no matter how technically exciting the task is.
Something else wroth mentioning, the whole remote work somewhat becomes also a factor against content to be part of a labor community. It's not an issue the first few years, but total remote work for over 5 years has started to make me value proximity to business circles. proximity with my colleagues and proximity with who use whatever we make.
there is a sort of guilt that builds up when benefiting from the hard work of the local community to provide physical services (coffee shops, organic food markets, drivers, etc) and have our time spent online contributing to solutions with colleagues and paying users residing thousands of miles away, who only appear to exist as email addresses and occasional faces/voices spit out by a laptop.
It's interesting that I came to a very different answer than "many engineers" you quote.
If the money is the same, I'll happily take learning a new skillset, a new org, a new set of expectations. When I had not accumulated enough money early in my career, I consciously had to think about stable income. Now that I have accumulated non-trivial sum of money, I'd happily and readily take new and exciting challenges - i.e. I can take more risks as I can afford to, and I'm willing to take more risks for non-monetary reasons. And if the money is better, even better! Thus, in fact, that's exactly what I did in 2021 - I switched my job.
I was quite satisfied with the position I was in at the last two companies I left.
All the things you mention matter to me, but I added 50% to my salary on my first jump, then another 110% on my second. All in just over a year.
Money is still my primary driver. It will be until I am fully financially independent. Not just able to live on a FIRE budget of $30k a year, but able to chase my own fairly expensive interests.
You're right, I'm not going to leave for another $10k, but another $100k, sure, and right now that's not that difficult to achieve.
This is classic HN bubble. I would estimate that most software engineers around the world never come into this luxury situation where you can say that money just isn't motivating you anymore when considering new job opportunities.
>Is an extra $10k per year worth learning a new org, a new skillset, a new set of expectations, a new set of coworkers, and a new boss?
Not to mention how much effort has to be put into the interview process, my time is worth money, I'm not giving away minimum 6 hours of it for free if I don't need to.
For reasonably dynamic careers and standard way of life (like mine), I feel that there are plateaux in "quality of life".
When you are out of school a change of 1000€ per year means nicer vacation. Go for it.
The same 1000€ is something I would not even consider. I am at a plateau where it requires significantly more money to change your way of life, and the 1000€ would not be perceptible.
Maybe that of you add the "retire early" part it may make sense to optimize your income, but it is too late for me anyway.
For say travel or big events or the like. Still, there are many things that are equally or more enjoyable in this new post covid Era, like a jet ski, boat or RV. Depends on what you like doing I suppose.
> There comes a point where the money just isn't a motivating factor anymore,
True. But... When I hear "Best year ever!" But then hear, "Sorry, we can't give more than 3% raises". Someone is getting theirs. I want mine, too! I helped make this the best year ever, in very substantial ways.
> >Is an extra $10k per year worth learning a new org, a new skillset, a new set of expectations, a new set of coworkers, and a new boss?
>
> For many engineers, the answer is: “No.”
Not too long ago, I was at a Very Large Tech Firm. Base pay was great, and the RSUs were really great. I ended up leaving for a smaller company where IT is considered a cost center. The tech stack isn't all that exciting, total comp is a significant step down, and the only way to stay here and get a substantial raise is to get promoted... but I get along well with the people there, and I don't have to worry about off-hours emergencies. The only companies that might be willing to offer enough for me to take the jump away from that, would likely be a well-capitalized tech firm, of which few have a physical presence here.
Wishful thinking at best, anchoring the narrative at worst. It is always about compensation (which money is one big part of). Sure, there is some overhead to changing jobs, but if it is all covered people will switch. It is pretty easy to see if one looks in the other direction. Would people who supposedly passionate about their jobs do it for free? If yes, they are either lying or it is not strictly a job. It is always a function of compensation with a capital C, even if it is expected to not be frank about it.
I have kids, well 1 kid, and it still applies if not more so. Is making a bit more worth the stress of changing all of my childcare arrangements? My current job I can clearly state that I have school pickup/dropoff at this time so no meetings. A prospective employer could promise the same flexibility and after the initial 6 month grind I would be comfortable demanding it, but starting a employer/employee relationship that way is much easier said than done.
Extra X a year for the rest of your working life? Yes.
Consider that some employers anchor salaries to previous salaries ala "we won't pay you more than Y more than your previous salary" - so any raise represents an increase in all future offers.
So despite the downsides, working for a couple of years under a new salary has essentially increased your worth in the eyes of the market.
I understand yours and authors view about money, but for some people 10k per year raise is a really good amount. I was recently on that boat, jumped companies for a close to 10k/year raise because that was 1/3 of what I was making in my previous company. Development jobs aren't at all paid in the same scale in the US vs rest of the world (I'm in Europe).
So this. I guess I have had around 17 bosses (direct and dotted line) in around 26 years of I.T., and yeah, there is a point where you hit a kind of pay "glass ceiling" in your region if you are a decent but non-stellar engineer (70-95%ile) such that an extra 10-20k teaser is just not worth leaving a cool/familiar boss/situation for an unfamiliar one.
I'd move jobs if someone I knew and liked through my network wanted to hire me for the right job for a nice increase, but the idea of taking a +20k job with some random boss I have never seen under pressure or on a bad day--no way.
Taking a job when you are older is like buying a house without an inspection--you better really know and like the bones. Who you work for is the #1 factor for me. Nothing worse than hitting 50 and having some hateful blowhard breathing down your neck. Stress just sucks in your 20s and 30s, it can kill in your 40s and 50s.
> There comes a point where the money just isn't a motivating factor anymore, and companies are struggling to figure out how to work in that environment. This bit from the author hits the nail on the head:
I dunno... maybe for hotshot FAANG jobs?
I mean, I love where I work now, but if some company were to offer me 250k to jump ship, I'd be MIGHTY tempted!
That is how I feel as well. Sure I could increase my salary if I switched jobs and industry (like finance), but do I want to? The recruiter kept harassing me because he could not understand why I would not want to earn 30k more a year. Like you, I also do not have kids, so that makes things much simpler.
If money isn't motivating people, you're not using enough. $10k is not worth learning a new skill, but $100k might be. "Learn Rust and pay for your kids' college in three quarters" sounds more appealing than "Learn Rust and maybe get a nicer trim level on your car"
I onboarded the concept of 'risk to reward ratio'. If you're a gambling man, you might call this '+EV moves only'. +10/20k is nice (if you need it), but the risk is great in a new team, new environment etc.
10k raise is not worth adding extra anxiety - unless your current job pays so little it will make a difference.
Engineers are severly underpaid that's why money seem irrelevant, because these sums are too small to be.
Also got the whole golden handcuffs thing. Unless a company is going to offer me a $800k signing bonus nothing is worth me change roles for another year and a half.
To add to this. I am already in the 49% tax bracket. So a 10k raise would not be worth learning a new organization and the risk of getting a worse boss.
Agree with this idea. Every job promises that it will be the best. But after a few new job experiences, i know how bad it can get. Yeah i could get another 20-50k but the chance its going to be a nightmare again isn't worth the risk I think. Some managers, idk what they're thinking.
Yup this just happened to me for a measly $9k that I could have made working paid overtime in my last gig. It was my time to leave and the right call for other reasons, but I would not have picked this again if things were going well.
Now I’m in a very adversarial relationship with my manager who seems to think $100k is insane compensation, he’s owed the world, and my senior status means I should just know internal processes and make me immune to debugging headaches.
In the past when people struggled with tooling/debugging that was just the way the cookie crumbled. There was sympathy and understanding. Now I work with a jackass that just assumes someone is screwing up, and lashes out at people when things aren’t going well.
the implication is that most people have a limit to how much money they can reasonably spend before they start seeking things other than more money in life.
even a poor person can tell you that an extra $10M in their pocket will be no more life-changing than an extra $1M.
Maybe not today, if you haven't saved, but if you have no major debt now, there is noplace in the country where six figures won't allow you to buy a house once you have a downpayment. Mortgages are cheaper than rent, and you're presumably living somewhere right now.
You nailed it for me. Once I met a certain pay level I just started leveraging for lifestyle. The way to get me to jump to your org is less work for the same pay.
Purely anecdotal: In my experience as a hiring manager seeing trends change over the past 10 years, and selecting from the top 10% of candidates by some vague metric, it's primarily about "does it pay a lot" and secondarily "does it offer full-remote"? A lot of my friends, former colleagues, and candidates I've failed to hire end up going to either a FAANG or a very successful brand-name company (typically a SV company) because
1. The TC is a lot higher, like 1.5-2x.
2. They don't have to move; or they do want to move, just not for a job.
It doesn't matter that the work is boring (really fungible cog low-impact stuff). It doesn't matter if the colleagues are meh. It doesn't matter if the company has a reputation for lay-offs/churn/etc. If you have those two items above, you'll likely have a good hiring success rate.
Even stronger: many of the "fads" (like cool programming languages, toolkits, frameworks, etc.), moral/virtue-discussions du jour (like hating on: FB, crypto, commercial spying apparatus, AMZN work conditions, etc.), etc. also don't appear matter in the large. Someone boycotting AMZN one day will be happy to accept a very healthy salary + benefits package writing legacy Java 6 backend code if it means a good double- or triple-digit percentage in compensatory promotion.
For this thread, I just asked an extremely talented programmer ex-colleague (Linux kernel hacker, expert at C) how his job is at Oracle and why he chose it:
> Ex-Colleague: Funny you ask, because I was stuck on-call over the holidays. I'm basically a plebe to Larry Enterprises. Mostly that and having a side gig. Not writing any cool code for sure.
> Me: Why not go elsewhere where things are a little more interesting for you? You have no shortage of talent.
> Ex-Colleague: Pay is great. Not a lot going on. Not a lot of fuss on the job. I easily own a house and pay a mortgage and have a lot left over. Definitely put in less than 9-5 worth of effort. Probably can retire early at this rate.
This type of attitude doesn't appear to be so uncommon, at least among people I know.
In my case for the company I hire for: Extreme stability (check; been around and stable for ~60 years), excellent work-life balance (check), really cool work (check; cutting edge research and engineering), and really good and diverse colleagues (check; gender balance and representation, stable personalities, highly interdisciplinary skills, sometimes world renowned), open-source and conferences (check), education and 20%-of-9-to-5 time benefits (check). Those things may matter to some extent, but contrary to the article, they don't seem matter as much as an extra $50k to $250k pretax compensation in the bank and being able to do so from a low CoL area at your comfort.
The good news for me at least is that we aren't a mega-growth-kind of company, so we can take our time. Ultimately the candidate that values the above does find us (or we them), considers it a dream job, and tends to stay for 5-25 years.
I’ve also been recurring for the last 10+ years and can concur with total comp is the #1 factor by far, followed by remote-friendly / remote-first work.
A 3rd factor for me however has always been the tech stack. Engineers I recruit are keenly aware that if they get stuck in a non-modern or too-modern tech stack that it could hurt their future career opportunities.
You can’t just contribute to open source and reach a high level, at least not very quickly very often. They want to jump into a high growth company and contribute to large interesting apps / services that get used in production. Open source is great, but on a resume, it’s nothing like saying you launched an app that handles millions of dollars in transactions, or billions of API requests.
> > Ex-Colleague: Pay is great. Not a lot going on. Not a lot of fuss on the job. I easily own a house and pay a mortgage and have a lot left over. Definitely put in less than 9-5 worth of effort. Probably can retire early at this rate.
The gilded cage.
As you get older, you have seem to have less time. It's some sort of biological illusion, but having to spend time prepping for interviews, running your life, family and so on, means the incentive to move from a very comfortable job to another has to be a lot more than when you were in your 20s.
I can't say for certain, but it seems there are lots of squeaky wheels about it and lots of chatter on the internet about them, but AMZN/FB/whoever else aren't actually facing any serious repercussions in terms of being able to hire. (I hope I'm wrong, because I do feel there needs to be a moral reckoning about how we technologists—whatever the specific discipline—are contributing to the world, and whether it's truly for the better.)
One of my friends said: "In this market good people can choose where they want to work, but even the bad ones can choose where they don't want to work"
Is dissatisfaction with PIP dissatisfaction with work conditions? I thought it was dissatisfaction with job security and the knowledge that your job was less dependent on your work than on political games your manager had to play on your behalf.
I was looking for this comment. The OP and the current top comment seem to think that many engineers wouldn't jump for 10-20K increases. While that is true if they are in a good role, many salary increases from jumping are high double digits right now.
Compensation, WLB, and benefits matter FAR FAR more for the majority of people than "good projects" or "smart colleagues". If you want those and can't get it in your job, well that's what open source work is for.
One other thing - in evaluating a new role, the thing I can be SURE of...is comp. Everything else is a nicety, but I can't rely on it.
So if I'm looking to jump...well, either my current environment isn't great, or the salary is enough to attract me. There is no situation where my current environment is good, and you offer me a salary comparable to what I'm making, and I would make the jump, because you are a -complete unknown-.
So you can talk to me about the brilliance of my colleagues, the amazing projects, the great work/life balance, the autonomy to work on what matters in the most efficient way possible...and all of that might be true. Or it might not be. I've been lied to by hiring managers in the past, both intentionally and unintentionally. But ultimately the only thing I can truly rely on, that is protected by law, is compensation.
Those are very very good for retaining people you already have though, so while not super important for hiring they are important for keeping the folks you hired (after all, what is the point if you keep losing people you hire).
> If you want those and can't get it in your job, well that's what open source work is for.
Not necessarily. If your area of interest aligns with your work then even open source work is more productive if you have a use case for it. For example - say my interest is distributed systems, then technically my work will have more impact if it is being used on large clusters with large number of concurrent systems. Open source does not happen in vacuum.
I think that "pay a lot" and "full remote" are basically the dream for anyone who's currently responsible for supporting a family. Your company sounds like it offers some great things, but those things would be much more valuable to single and empty-nest folks. At this point in my own life, with four growing kids and an overwhelmed spouse, I don't have the luxury of being able to trade time and money for "really cool work."
It's actually the opposite. While the company I work for doesn't do remote, the absolutely rock-solid stability and superb work-life balance alone attract people who support families and people with mortgages. The average age is also a lot higher, since we have zero qualm interviewing people with 25+ years of unfashionable industry experience. Their family—husband, wife, kids, pet cat—can basically always depend on them being there outside of standard work hours. We don't even allow work to be on people's personal devices, including cell phones, so no off-hours Slack or email buzzes.
Most of my colleagues have children or grand-children, and have been working here for at least 10 years.
Many, many middle aged people with families actually say they prefer the office because it's impossible to get any work done at home with 4 kids. That may be a consequence of their home or their family, but it's what I hear very frequently. In any case, we have a WFH policy, so we are very flexible and accommodating to family needs.
Statistically, fresh college grads vying for excellent resume decor aren't attracted to stability, 401k's, etc. So we see proportionally fewer.
I really wish hiring managers understood that there's a second class of people who value #2 over #1 a lot more. Last time I worked as an employee I was making ~$175k TC (which is apparently a entry level salary these days) and completely miserable commuting 1 hour each way on Bart every day. I'd happily take a $75k fully remote job now that I've lived in the middle of nowhere and found that I like it very much.
It's an under-discussed topic that this apparent utopia isn't available to everyone. Race, gender presentation, academic background, country of residence or origin, Twitter blue-check, etc. all seem to be correlated (no numbers; purely anecdotal) to those who enjoy (or don't) this utopia. Being masterfully technical, social, or political have a lot to do with it too, it seems.
I'm not a US person. Is it common to see a 50-100% pay raise on switching jobs?
Sure if you pay me twice my current salary, I will probably do whatever you ask me to without complaint. But around here such a big pay increase would be a fantasy.
The mythical 50-100% pay bump can happen if you’re making the leap from some local, no-name small business to a FAANG type job, but it’s not like you can continue repeating that over and over again. It’s kind of a one-time leap that people make from average jobs to top paying jobs. Going into the $500K type jobs isn’t as automatic as people here like to make it sound, unless you’re looking at people who started at rocket ship startups before the stock took off. Even those engineers struggle to get back to those compensation levels when the dust settles and their RSUs go back to normal.
It’s also not as common to find remote work combined with sky-high salaries as HN suggests some times. While I do know a lot of people with remote FAANG jobs, it wasn’t easy. Basically years of working their way specifically into those positions with hard work and building a reputation to warrant it.
It's not common, no, unless you're going to a FAANG-like or extremely well-funded startup and are in a favorable negotiating position. The big numbers typically come from stock compensation; base salaries rarely soar.
I'd say 20% is more likely and considered significant.
It depends but it is not uncommon in certain fields (only computer adjacent fields are growing like this in the US). At lower levels for high performing individuals in FAANG adjacent areas it is very doable. Having spent a good portion of my twenties massively underpaid it was pretty easy to double pay a few times over but it helps to start 50% below the median. Moreover a company will not give you pay increases while you work there that are commensurate with the market rate. A job swap is the primary way to realize the benefits of personal growth and a rapidly ballooning market.
There are differences on that order of magnitude between tier 2 and tier 1 employers at the same seniority, and between different seniority levels. So yes these bumps exist, but it’s not like they stack repeatedly if you switch 4 times.
Re: Amazon, I think most of other faang or establishing growing company employees usually don't even response to amazon recruiter which seriously limits their capability to hire even if the comp was going to be very high, there is no way to convey the pay increase they'd get until they respond.
> This type of attitude doesn't appear to be so uncommon, at least among people I know.
It's my case too. I worked until 40 with a great job doing cool things, with a lot of free time. I'm not materialistic at all, don't care about wealth, social status and stuff. Yet, I started worrying for my retirement and savings, wasn't able to buy a house. Now I work for a FAANG for 5 times my previous salary. It's not easy,
I don't always adhere to the company's values, oncalls suck, it's a lot about patching broken systems I didn't build. But money is important.
> Someone boycotting AMZN one day will be happy to accept a very healthy salary + benefits package writing legacy Java 6 backend code if it means a good double- or triple-digit percentage in compensatory promotion
It could simply be extremely small sample size, but I know 5 (!!) people personally who fall into this intersection. All of them are quite talented. All jumped ship from meh-paying start-ups to a high-paying role at AMZN after railing on AMZN the years prior for being an awful company. One of them even took a department leadership role (or whatever the title equivalent is) and cited a 3x increase in TC.
It could be that their disdain for AMZN was disingenuous virtue-signaling (supporting your thesis), or it could mean the money is just simply the trump card to their personal ethics (supporting my thesis).
I think the trick here is that there's definitely a break point in TC that can buy someone's boredom. Sort of the inverse of "fuck you" money. Call it.. "fuck it" money.
Not publicly (prefer to keep work and personal presence delineated), but if you can relocate to SoCal and you're a US citizen, you can send me an email.
I think there's something else that's necessary that doesn't align well with the things in the article, and which is currently lacking in my current work environment, but which is kind of hard to describe succinctly.
Basically, my job requires using a lot of tools and technology and processes created by other people, but none of those tools are easy to use or well documented. In order to get stuff done you have to have a social network of people who know how to do the things you need to do, and know all the secret tricks. The right environment variables to set. The right arguments to pass to simulators. How to find the important bit of data buried webapp developed by people who apparently like to invent new words for old concepts. I get a lot of terse autogenerated emails that probably mean something to somebody, but not to me, and don't have human return addresses or really any way to discern the context of where they came from or why. A lot of tools use domain-specific configuration languages that are usually just python scripts that call a bunch of functions that are defined elsewhere and have no documentation.
These things might be reasonable in a startup with a dozen people, but we have over a hundred thousand. My opinion is that once an organization is a certain size, everything really needs to be written down and easily accessible. I shouldn't have to regularly ask people how to do basic things, it should be on a wiki. If it's complicated, it should be in a training video, or a user manual.
> These things might be reasonable in a startup with a dozen people, but we have over a hundred thousand. My opinion is that once an organization is a certain size, everything really needs to be written down and easily accessible. I shouldn't have to regularly ask people how to do basic things, it should be on a wiki. If it's complicated, it should be in a training video, or a user manual.
> Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
> Working software over comprehensive documentation
I remember when my employer adopted agile. One of the first things they did was lay off their team of technical writers.
Also you wasting your time flailing about probably makes some manager's budget numbers look good, because they got to "save" the money that would have prevented you from flailing about.
Indeed. It is too easy to read this as a rejection of tools, processes, documentation, and plans. That interpretation makes it harder for at-the-coalface employees to get help from leaders when they...
- actually need tools and processes designed to set the conditions for healthy interactions among individuals.
- actually need to spend time improving the documentation to enable them to produce working software.
- actually need to have a meeting-of-the-minds so they can collaborate with customers.
- actually need to spend some time planning so they can respond effectively to change.
Part of the problem here is that good technical leadership is waaaaaay more difficult than can be reflected in a 4-point manifesto. Whole books[1] are written about it. Part of the problem is information flow. It takes courage to speak clearly enough to tell leadership that they're so focused on being agile that it is harming social trust in their organization and preventing their teams from acting with agility.
[1] recommendations: The Toyota Way, Leadership is Language, Ego is the Enemy.
Maybe I have been lucky to never have experience a process heavy work place, but those two parts of the manifesto never made much sense to me.
Going Agile basically meant a return to caveman times. The only way to know anything about the code base is for the tribe's Elders to sit around the fire and tell stories.
Code doing weird thing X? Is it a bug? Is it intended? No way to tell unless I interview everyone who has ever touched the code base, and they happen to remember why they did that.
I get that the manifesto says favor "this" over "that" but don't discard "that", but everywhere I have ever seen it implemented they discarded "that".
Im going to have to disagree based on personal experience at my huge ass fortune 50 megacoprp. They JUST started adopting agile...JUST, I kid you not many teams are still officialy waterfall, even officially agile teams are effectively waterfall. It's going to take another 5 years for anything to stop looking like waterfall. And let me tell you, as much as people hate agile, the old way is not working, it may even take the company down. Anyway having had no agile...OPs Post rings very very true in my ears. There is an obscene amount of tribal knowledge that needs to get aquired. Sometimes if you're lucky and in the right chat, there's a one-note that gets passed around. We just started getting wikis.. and now they're transitioning to a different vendor. So some high profile teams working on safety critical teams have docs on both...but they aren't the same and both are woefully out of date, also you need manger approval to get access to either of them.
You're taking those statements out of context read just a tiny bit further and it says:
"That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more"
So it's doesn't say forget all processes and tools. Also I would say that most of these automated things the OP is talking about are processes and tools.
Hang on, don't blame the agile manifesto here. Blame the management that adopted the agile manifesto as "do all the exact same things we used to do that didn't work, but call it 'agile'".
> Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
The points should be phrased "Processes and tools after individuals and interactions", meaning we want both, but one side first. In this case, it better implies we want processes and tools that work well for the individuals and their interactions.
> Basically, my job requires using a lot of tools and technology and processes created by other people, but none of those tools are easy to use or well documented.
When I first moved into management roles I didn’t fully understand how much of my job would be simply saying “no” to a constant stream of engineers wanting to write or rewrite custom tools, libraries, frameworks and platforms when otherwise sufficiently good alternatives already existed. Not all engineers, but once you get into a big enough organization there are a lot of engineers who want to do meta-work and rework things instead of actually shipping things.
The worst offender I worked for had meta-tools on top of everything. You couldn’t use GitHub, Slack, or even our cloud platform without first learning how to navigate all of the custom tools and bots that had been put together to gate access to everything and make it work. And like you said, it was poorly documented. It turned into little fiefdoms where you had to know who to talk to if you wanted to get past the systems to get things done.
This can all be avoided with good management at an organizational level, but of course some managers want to get in on the situation because it puts them in a perceived stronger position in the company if their team is at the center of everything.
> You couldn’t use GitHub, Slack, or even our cloud platform without first learning how to navigate all of the custom tools and bots that had been put together to gate access to everything and make it work.
First time in a really big org and I can see this as well. The worst part is trying to tie someone down to explain how to use their custom tool or bot or even entire systems. How do I use that custom BI tool that you setup ... oh no-one wants to even send me an email reply when I ask a simple question about these things.
The way most stuff gets done in these orgs is various maverick people who find some way to work around all this crap. The problem is you have to have political clout to do that most employees don't have that.
I think these "meta-tool" are initially well intentioned but as you say they become empire building tools.
Worst still is that the teams that build them often leave or are disbanded. Then no one is responsible and no one wants to touch them and they sit in this weird limbo state.
> My opinion is that once an organization is a certain size, everything really needs to be written down and easily accessible. I shouldn't have to regularly ask people how to do basic things, it should be on a wiki. If it's complicated, it should be in a training video, or a user manual.
This %100. Automate all the things, but for any part of the process that cannot be automated/scripted, write it down. And don't just put it in some random Google Doc or Sharepoint where it is lost forever in the ether. Put it in a README that lives with the code or have a shared Wiki for the team. It need to be somewhere that is generally available, searchable, version controlled, and easy to update.
Even if it's all documented with a README, with container images and Ansible playbooks or whatever to make it all happen… still people will be complaining that it's oh so complex and that's not how we did it in my previous job and what about secret management, or load scaling, or full disk encryption, or how would this be deployed to a moon-based server, or whatever they can think of how the probably less-than-average crap you've built isn't maximally convenient for them.
So, even if you have everything 100% automated, most people will look at that and conclude that your automation is complex legacy bullshit and you should have automated in some other way.
Write it down even if it can be automated. And make sure the documentation is also comprehensible to people who don't already know how the system works.
Otherwise you're setting your company up for a miniature re-enactment of the Butlerian Jihad at some point in the future.
Note that I'm not saying we shouldn't do as best as we can with documentation, clean code, etc, BUT:
In the open source world, I've developed a large low quality codebase that is very complex from when I was less experienced. This project has gotten plenty of contributions over the years, some from less experienced and some from more experienced.
The experienced developers know how to get around the codebase, but the lesser experienced ones tend to complain about quality. I see this in the workplace as well.
I had this exact same issue when I was less experienced. New codebases was very difficult to understand, but now that I've been through a lot of them in various languages and quality, it's not as bad as it used to be.
I guess the argument here from the business point of view is that we write code for the less experienced? In a way this makes sense, but paradoxically some complex codebases that I thought was messy in the past have become more elegant today as I've gained more experience.
It could be that the more experienced developers are just burnt out in trying to give that kind of feedback, and instead just grit their teeth and get through the code base as they need.
Meanwhile the newer, less experienced developers probably still have a bit of... let's say naive optimism, and try to give feedback more.
it is probably because the new devs know so much more and are able to identify and communicate problems in code that others have written.
write code for the center of the bell curve (at your organization). the bottom will never understand anything, the top understands it all. You need to make the majority in the middle be comfortable.
that means slowly bringing in new language features, as they become widely known and practiced.
Good luck convincing organizations to invest in this + finding people to do it. I have the background to organize this (I'm actually doing this for my own, smaller organization right now just because the situation is driving me insane) and the main problems are:
1.) The people who can do this aren't going to do it for 30k or $10/hr. Properly solving this problem requires an understanding of tech and the development process, pedagogy/communication/instructional design, and information management. Lacking any one of those would result in a system that's an unusable vanity project. I have a couple of decades of small-shop coding experience, experience as an instructional designer at an Ivy, and graduate education in information management, but if you want me to use all of those it's going to cost you and companies are resistant to that. (See: How a lot of non tech product companies treat their IT teams since they don't generate revenue). Now imagine if the project were led by someone more qualified, which it should be for a company of your size.
2.) Most companies don't have a culture which would allow this to be done well. This is the sort of work which requires both a lot of honesty and a lot of careful planning. A lot of information ends up hidden or inaccessible due to people's egos, or executives not being able to handle the information so it's buried. People need to be honest about their workflows and what they don't understand, and they need to feel comfortable being honest about such things. This gets really messy. On the dev side, a common cultural issue is "I had to learn it, they should too" or the urge to make understanding the complexities into a shibboleth for the in-group.
So I agree with you, but it's unlikely to change soon in my opinion.
Can I ask how you got started in the field of instructional design? This is a field that I've not really heard much about until recently, and I'm curious how someone breaks into that field.
Alan Kay has similar talks where he has some subtle condemnations of what the industry as a whole has devolved into. He uses terms like Cargo Cult and he calls out the wide spread hubris for not knowing and/or actively ignoring the history of the field.
Sounds like a lack of repeatability to me: complex tools, combined with lack of documentation, makes for a fairly unstable work environment.
It's for similar reason that I like to keep unreliable dependencies to a very strict minimum. I can rely on my compiler, my editor, my OS, and to a lesser extent a bunch of extremely popular libraries. But as soon as we get to internal tools & processes or obscure third party libraries, certainty goes downhill very quickly.
As somebody who has been writing software for two decades the most important ingredient for me is maturity. I am not going to leave the employment I currently have if signals of maturity are weak.
More money does not compensate for this. I thought it would when I interviewing a few months ago (50% salary increase). I was wrong.
It's a problem of the incentives we've setup. We reward engineers for building things. Promotions, pay raises, etc. for engineers are typically based on impact and technical complexity, not how good their documentation was. I've been at a few places that handwave at such things in their level expectations or skills matrix or whatever, but having been in promo discussions at a variety of medium and large companies it always comes down to what was shipped.
Problem is, at mature companies there aren't enough greenfield problems to match the large number of engineers who are looking to climb the ladder. So stuff is rewritten, then rewritten again since nobody understands the rewrite, and so on. Managers kind of look the other way because retention and the ecosystem becomes messier and messier over time as promoted folks leave and new folks come in that need to be promoted.
This is the world of professional software development at pretty much every company not a startup.
I admit I quickly searched my company directory to see if you work where I do :)
The article mentions 3 things engineers care about: Technology, Intellection and Stability. Perhaps your pain fits into the 3rd category (if extrapolate a little).
If so, ironically, the first 2 at scale is what causes the lack of the 3rd.
When you make wider roads, the traffic will get worse, not better. Perhaps it's similar technology organizations. It's almost inevitable.
Anecdotally Amazon figured this stuff out by mandating well defined organizational boundaries (kind of like solid white dividers on some section of the highway, eh?) and by making each team responsible for its own developer infrastructure. It seems wasteful at first, but maybe less so at scale. Maybe someone working there can confirm/deny whether this is the case.
I think you are touching on the right problem but your solution seems a bit more on the idealistic rather than realistic side.
I've had this conversation before where documentation is proposed as a silver procedural bullet and it never works. Documentation gets stale and eventually out of date. Do you really want to be in a position where you have to /recompile/ all of those documentation/training video/user manual materials? Unless you're selling it, probably not.
The solution you are looking for is not documentation but automation and training. The things which can be automated to make the process closer to obvious should absolutely be automated. The things which are intrinsically more challenging and can't be solved through automation should be covered through training -- and not a "training video" but a real set of sessions where someone (likely your manager or a tech lead responsible for ensuring clean consumption of their modules) is walking you through the right way to do things and leaving time for questions.
I say this having worked at a place that touted a documentation centric culture at the level of organizational scale you suggested. If you're doing anything remotely challenging, documentation only gets you to the starting line. It doesn't get you to being useful and autonomous.
Corollary: the documentation must be written to speak to the stupidest person in your team/company who you expect to use the product it describes. Otherwise, you may end up with a documented system that you can’t use or fix.
Fortunately, that’s often me (a supervisor), so I get to be self-deprecating when conveying this requirement.
I also find that hypothetical "interns" are great for this. Something about "this person without a degree, who probably hasn't been working for very long, who doesn't know your organization or who to ask, and is probably very scared of looking or sounding stupid."
It doesn't necessarily imply or require stupidity, but in my experience on both sides of it (writing docs now, and having been that intern), they actually make pretty great litmus tests for documentation and how accessible organizational knowledge is.
When I write process/operating docs, I write it for the person who is on call, at 02:00 Sunday morning, after overindulging in alcohol Friday night. I don't assume stupid, just not firing on all cylinders due to being half awake and distracted.
Some degree of complexity is intrinsic to the problem domain, but it's the incidental complexity that emerges as a thoughtless side-effects of other efforts that is the most annoying, especially when it compounds.
To flip your comment on it's head... Some of my most satisfying projects have been the ones that eliminated this type of complexity where I work, because they improved the quality of life of everyone I work with and gradually remove all but the necessary work. However because these things are usually difficult to isolate and deeply engrained, this is only usually possible once you've gained enough trust and autonomy, which I suppose makes it a hard sell for a new job.
Sounds like every multinational org with 100k+ emplyees, certainly this fits my own. Fun part is, there is no realistic way out of this. It only takes one obscure critical legacy app to add so much integration mess into whole ecosystem that nobody ever will be re-doing those.
Plus business won't put in the budget necessary for practically no change from their point of view.
I've worked at a 500 employee-company that had many of these issues, mostly from misguided attempts at copying the way FAANG worked without any regard for our own needs or scale. The entire code was a tangled mess of git submodules, transitive dependencies and the build system was contingent on a domain-specific language that was partially developed in-house and partially based on some unstable open source project, incredibly janky, and only two people got to see the sources for it or even knew how it really worked.
Dumpster fire doesn't even begin to describe the outcome.
There was always this strange spooky-leftpad-at-a-distance thing where stuff just kept inexplicably breaking, and nobody ever quite knew what had gone wrong, who to talk to, or when it was gonna get fixed.
Sounds like you are describing “institutional knowledge”. In addition to good documentation, an org needs to maintain employee retention, so you have people that know the what and why’s of all the automated processes you’re seeing.
Institutional knowledge is an okay thing, the problem is when it's passed down by oral tradition or actively kept secret unless you email exactly the right question to the right person.
The article is concise but missing a lot of real-life examples:
* The highest paying software companies employ LeetCode style interview. That is off-putting to a lot of people even though the money would be super sweet to have.
* Some wannabe startups also employ LeetCode style interview even though they don't pay anywhere near FAANG/Unicorns.
* You know what's worst than LeetCode style interview? LeetCode style interview with really long rounds. It's super off-putting to be tossed around for weeks.
* You know what's even worse than that? Lowball offer after completing the entire circus.
* PIP culture is scary and it's hard to judge if the new company have it or not, except Amazon. We all know Amazon has PIP culture.
* Long hour culture is not desirable and hard to judge. What's the point of making 20% more if you ended up working 40% more?
> The highest paying software companies employ LeetCode style interview
Ugh yeah it’s ridiculous. We can’t hire anyone! Have you considered not putting candidates through months of studying to memorize a bunch of algorithm tricks and then grilling them for 5-10 hours total on those?
No - that’s not what the cargo cult manual says.
>* The highest paying software companies employ LeetCode style interview. That is off-putting to a lot of people even though the money would be super sweet to have.
Not only off-putting but out of reach to older engineers with family responsibilities. I would also add that the value proposition for working at a FAANG isn't nearly as competitive if based outside the US.
In the US, thats not generally true. It takes longer to prep from scratch if you have a young family. If you have an older family (and are even older yourself) that constraint is reduced. Realistically you can prep doing a few questions a week, it will just take longer. It’s not pleasant. But it’s more about the commitment, the plan, and enough research to justify it. If you can reasonably expect a 50%+ pay increase and that would translate into a better life, most people at most ages can make time. It’s about experience and practice with generally well known algorithms on well known problems. It’s not rocket science or intelligence nor nearly as much prep as many other high paying jobs (my MD took a decade of study for instance). Yes, annoying as hell. But not insurmountable.
I had a take-home assignment not long ago for some... dodgy recruitment-consultancy-disguised-as-training company. It was the exact same assignment as my previous employer used ten years ago. Ended up just showing and talking about my current project, which is basically the same thing.
Definitely. My last job prospect would have required me to lock myself in the room for a weekend or more doing a chain of low dopamine tasks.
I have done take home projects before, which often resulted in low ball offers. At most it made me angry for the time wasted, but now having children I just don't even bother anymore.
Related to the last point: There is no way to estimate how much work a new job is in reality. I'm currently working 10-20 hours a week remotely. I think my salary could be improved, but taking a risk of actually having to put in 40 hours or more of work every week is not worth the small(ish) increase I could reasonably get by changing jobs.
People have been bitching about LC interviews for 10 years. That's eons in tech, yet companies continue to use it. Maybe, because it works extremely well? Tech companies are taking it in more every year.
Depends on how you define works. It does effectively filter the people that can't code, but it also filters a lot of people that can code and just can't or don't care to do it under time or environment pressure.
In the past that was fine, candidate pool was large enough that a heavy-handed filter was okay. That may be changing.
Can confirm, we do a low-pressure, non-timed, non-puzzle, somewhat realistic, short take-home exercise. But we don't (and can't) add 20+% to your salary in RSUs.
Do they typically offer RSUs? I'm asking because my RSU awards double the total compensation, so if you're counting 80% of just the salary part, then that number would end up being 40% in my case (and I assume for everyone else at my level).
Looking at it internationally,
I could earn 3x by FAANGing in the US, but I would be on a sponsored visa and massively disrupt my life if fired. The risk factors put me off.
Money should be a big factor. Imagine a job where year 1 you work and year 2,3 you get to do whatever you like and own 100% of the equity. That is what 3x TC basically could mean.
PIP stands for "Performance Improvement Plan". PIPs are a relatively common tool to give employees advance notice about getting fired, but Amazon has a notably brutal setup that uses stack ranking. Described here: https://www.reddit.com/r/csMajors/comments/kh9ztt/can_someon...
“Performance Improvement Plan”, it’s what you get put on when your company wants to fire you but wants to show due diligence that they tried to give you a chance so you can’t sue them. By “PIP Culture” I take it to mean Amazon where the expectation is some % of the team is always expected to be fired so PIPs are a frequent occurrence.
Picture in Picture is the most common use of the acronym, but here they mean performance improvement plan, which in many places is basically a kiss of death.
Yeah - if a company does leetcode and cannot justify it, I'm out. One justification would be that the job actually requires understanding/writing a lot of algorithmic and very performance sensitive code, but that's not the case for the vast majority of jobs.
And I do the same for all other parts of an interview too. If I were asked to knit a scarf during the interview process, my reaction would be similar.
"Performance Improvement Plan". The "PIP culture" mentioned is a culture where there is an (perhaps unspoken) quota of people that need to be put on PIPs, so they are quick to pull the trigger. Very uncomfortable as it keeps people on edge.
Personal Improvement Plan. Usually used as either a blunt instrument to goad people into working harder or a sneaky way to fire people. Topped with a sauce of double-speak of course.
Money is actually a bigger deal than you think. A lot of people are in effect doubling their salaries by switching jobs right now.
Even rewinding to just 5 years ago, there were much fewer companies flush with cash. Now with the hyper-capitalization of so many up-and-coming startups, a lot more companies are now at the bidding table for the same pool of candidates. And even large incumbents have big plans to double in headcount, effectively making the tech market talent side constrained (it always has been to a large degree, but even more pronounced now). So now companies are largely competing on compensation packages, because the ball is very much in the candidate's court. Amazon is starting to pay up to ~$400k in total compensation for an L5 mid-level engineer due to retention and hiring issues, and it's commonly known within tech that Amazon has traditionally lagged behind other large companies in compensation.
Job seekers have options and are very much in a position of leverage. That is why it is hard to hire right now, because everyone needs to hire, and your company probably isn't paying as competitively as others.
In a certain kind of environment, maybe cool tech and loyalty could have been the tiebreaker for engineers in the job market, but it's very difficult to stare a 100% raise with similar WLB in the face and not think about making a move.
I mean, 100% raise for me would be unfathomable - that carries me over to five figures, which over here is high-end managerial compensation, definitely not something for a mediocre code monkey.
I mean, I'm not saying I'm mediocre, but I wouldn't pass a 'do you work with cool tech' (machine learning, crypto, iot, microservices?) or a leetcode test.
I’ve gotten 7 recruitment emails since Sunday and none of them have come close to sufficiently explaining what the company or job is for me to even consider responding.
It’s bizarre how secretive they are. I imagine the recruiters are looking out for their own interests.
It’s because if you apply directly, they don’t get paid for their work. So they hide the details until you talk to them.
I’m a software engineer that started a recruiting company. The current state of the industry is pretty bad. We are trying a different approach- we are transparent. We share all the details about the company right out of the gate. Including salary info. We refuse to work with companies that won’t let us publish salary ranges. I’d love feedback (https://app.facet.net/jobs/search)
First off great concept. The salary transparency seems like a huge selling point.I also love the aspect of being able to search by tech stack within your jobs, very frictionless.
Indeed I think many recruiters have it backwards. I've had good and bad experiences. There are recruiters who understand the long term game as a salesman, who build win-win relations and check in on you every few years. Those are the people that will absolutely sell your CV to your future boss and those are the people I have no problem in acting on my behalf as an intermediary.
Very cool site. The salary filter is a little unintuitive: the minimum filter appears to apply to the _lower_ end of the listed range, and be non-inclusive. For instance there is a job listed at Netgear with a range of $300k-400k, if I set the filter to $300k, it is not shown. I would probably expect it to show until I set the filter to $401k or more.
Edit: I see now that it is filtering on salary (which is visible if you look at the listing details), but the summary is showing total comp.
Played with the search. Hard to evaluate on salary alone, especially for senior roles if equity is part of the offer. Showing equity as well may help (percent times last valuation)
So much this. I've had many conversations with interesting companies that have good pay and cool products, but recruiters/hr keep coming up with bullshit policies and processes that are just obnoxious and only serve to sort out the compliant from the competent.
A lot of this is employee incentives. I am strongly, strongly, strongly, incentivized to avoid mistakes over taking any kind of risk to make an improvement.
I was once told recruiters did this because they didn't want you reading the email and heading straight to the company's site to apply. If you applied directly, the recruiter was out of the loop and thus out of a commission. I suppose I _might_ be able to negotiate that commission in the form of a larger signing bonus. I doubt that's a winning strategy.
It seems like it would usually be in the best interest of the potential candidate to work through the recruiter. By having been sought out, you have an advantage. You can actually talk to a recruiter and check status of your progress, where as a web application is a black box of which you may never hear another word. At some point the recruiter is going to feel invested in you.
Why would I skip the recruiter and apply directly unless the recruiter is a non-helpful middleman? I’d love to have a direct contact to negotiate the whole process.
I was once told recruiters did this because they didn't want you reading the email and heading straight to the company's site to apply.
I've heard this a few times as well over my career, I wonder what-beyond missing out on that sweet contingency fee-recruiters have to lose by, as the article suggest: just being freaking transparent with candidates
I actually had a recuiter get angry at me recently for asking them for a basic job description and salary after their cold email had literally zero information other than the expectation I'd set up a call with them for a "very competitive role".
Like, I just don't understand the audacity of most of them. Especially when almost invariably their competitive pay is 30% of what even base level fangs would offer. Its a complete waste of everyone's time.
This was (and I assume nothing has changed) an endemic problem in the UK, especially for contractors.
One of the most accurate descriptions I’ve ever read about it is “Don’t feed the beast - the great tech recruiter infestation” [1 - though an archive since the original has been taken down].
There are good recruiters. They're relatively rare.
They tend to stick around the industry for a while, not treat you like a mushroom (keep you in the dark, bury you in bullshit), and respond humanly to human requests.
You can safely block the one you're describing here, and we'll all be better if that's the standard response.
I'm astounded at how awful recruiters have gotten. What's insane to me is how no one in the industry seems to question the spray and pray approach to recruiting.
There are a few "whoa that's neat!" things on my resume such that if a recruiter or hiring manager looked at it they would certainly notice. This works as a great test for if a recruiter is really looking at me or just spamming a keyword on my linkedin. This filters out essentially all recruiter spam.
What's funny though is how much energy companies spend to pretend like they've read your resume and want the actual you as a candidate in any way. Facebook recently tried a tactic of sending email from the hiring manager. "I really want you on my team, let's find a time to chat!" But clearly it was just an automated email since the message didn't mention any of my resume that might make me a particularly interesting candidate for the team. Another company clearly automatically scraped my resume to make it sound like the read it, but picked the most bizarre, nonsensical things to pull from it.
The funny thing is, even though I love my current job, if you came to me as said "it_does_follow, I've noticed that you worked on XXX and YYY projects, we really need someone who could do that type of work for our team, we're working on exactly these type of problems" and they touched on the actual work I've done that I'm proud of, I would jump on a call in a heart beat.
Every engineer really would prefer to work on problems in their particular domain that interest them, for a team that values them as an individual. I am certain that if recruiters spent their time targeting a much smaller pool of good candidates that really are a match for the role, they would have much higher success rates.
A recruiter contacted me for a position at the company that I co-founded. Unfortunately I didn’t have the time to play along, so the only outcome was a message to the hiring manager.
As a rule, I don’t trust any third party recruiters but that generally limits me to mid sized and up companies unless I actively seek them out. On the other hand, I get an email from Amazon recruitment nearly every day and I have zero desire to work the bozos.
In all seriousness, my experience with third party recruiters overall has been quite good. One sought me out and continued to follow up until it sounded like a good deal, and in the end I won a sign-on bonus, decent salary, and felt like I started a good working relationship with the recruiter themselves, too.
Now, this guy hits me up for when he has potential matches for my team. It's been really good. I'm sure like most things, there are good recruiters and bad ones, regardless of first or third party.
If you're willing to do a minimal amount of screening to figure out which ones are the good ones, third party recruiters are worth their weight in gold. They make the hiring process significantly easier.
I was also getting multiple Amazon recruiter emails per day until I actually called one recruiter who listed his phone number on the email up. He was willing to mark me as "Not Interested" or something like that in their candidate pool, and since then, I actually haven't had any more Amazon recruiter spam!
Might be worth a try if you like having a clean inbox.
That's just it, also in my neck of the woods. I don't get it. Aren't there companies that just hire one of their own, internal recruiters? That way, they can directly approach people going "Hi, I'm a recruiter for company X, I'm looking for an Y developer and you match our profile. This position's pay range is A - B. Would you like to have a quick chat with one of our engineers to see if this is a match for you?"
Instead I get wordy yet vague e-mails or dodgy calls where they don't dare drop the actual name of the companies until you've agreed to go on an interview. And of course, being recruiters instead of actual engineers, they don't actually know what they're talking about.
I just don't get it. I've only been approached by a 'first party' recruiter once, for Google Docs in Germany. I didn't want to relocate or work on Docs though so that was a pass for me, and that was after the 'shine' of Google had passed as well.
These are the trash recruiters. The good ones are trusted by hiring managers so you have a better chance getting noticed by going through the recruiter.
Yup. I mean I've worked with a couple good recruiters that were genuinely helpful, but many are exactly as you said, just in the way.
One recruiter just couldn't understand that the commute for me was major. I had just left a job which had a 1-1.5hr commute each way for me, and I was looking exclusively for something with no more than a 30 minute commute. They kept trying to toss my resume at jobs that had equivalent or longer commutes because "the perks are really nice" or the "pay was really good". Which I took to mean their commission would be really good.
I feel 3rd party recruiters are such a massive waste of time and a drag on the overall process. Has anyone built a true job search engine that simply links back to the original company's site (instead of some recruiting agency)? It seems that even the big job sites like Indeed are so fully of recruiters that their quality is pretty low.
Internal recruiters as they currently are should not exist. That's the hiring managers job, including negotiation of pay.
The only roles I've ever accepted were roles that involved a hiring manager reaching out directly to me. There's a reason for this, namely that the only recruiters worth a damn seem to be working in boutique firms and want to take a significant bite out of my future pay.
As a hiring manager I’ve worked with internal recruiters and a good one is invaluable.
- the transactional part of setting up interview loops, coordinating schedules, etc is extremely tedious for a field of 3-5 serious candidates for a given role. Internal recruiter takes all of this away from a hiring manager who has other duties.
- an internal recruiter can plow through LinkedIn to find solid candidates, identifying ones for the hiring manager to review and, if qualified, reach out to. Again, tedious work for a hiring manager with other responsibilities.
Internal recruiters are kind of a necessity, though: hiring managers often don't have skills in sourcing candidates, have calendars filled with other responsibilities, and are generally more expensive per hour than recruiters, for the kinds of work that either could do (screening, communicating with candidates about progress, organizing interviews, etc.).
In most cases that I've seen the internal recruiters have strong relationships with the hiring managers and are incentivized to make sure the hires actually succeed.
Companies nowadays seem to have a fixed expectation that if they're not rejecting 99 candidates for every candidate they hire, they are somehow not doing it right.
Looking at it from the candidate's point of view: Being rejected is actually something that psychologically kind of sucks a lot. Even if at the level of higher cognition you are perfectly aware that it's just a numbers game, and that you shouldn't let rejection get to you in a psychological way, we are not vulcans but humans. Rejection means cognitive dissonance in a big way: You applied for the job, so that means you wanted it. But they rejected you, so that means that you're not getting it. It's also a threat to your identity, because you think of yourself as being pretty good, and now there's someone who thinks you're not good enough for them. It just sucks.
So what do you do? You engage in cognitive dissonance reduction. You look at that recruiter spam, and you immediately start looking for reasons not to apply. Because if you find any reason not to want the job, then they can't hurt you by not giving it to you.
Recruiting is broken in a big way: We need to find ways of doing it that causes much less psychological friction.
This is very insightful. I've personally gotten better at handling rejections, but it's still very difficult. The amount of effort individuals are expected to invest in each prospective job is mind blowing.
On top of my resume, you want me to fill out multiple text boxes with information about why I want to work at Random No Name Company, what I expect from my time there, what my personal ethos is... Then you ask me for a cover letter?! This is literally to just initiate a lottery where it seems the odds of the next step happening are less than 1%.
It's more brutal than dating. I do not envy any single engineers who are juggling both games.
I knew that someone was going to pick up on the scent of Bayesian fallacy here ;-) ...though I think there's probably an economics-style-argument that can be made here that a market where companies reject a lot of candidates won't be in equilibrium if there are a lot of candidates who seldom get rejected. -- Whether the exact number is 9, 99, or 999, and what kind of measure of central tendency that number represents, whether it's a mean, a median, a mode, or whatever, has no real bearing on the argument I was making.
To me, working from home during the pandemic has made my employer fungible. Having to commute to work used to mean that where my job was located mattered. Being physically located at the office meant more socializing with coworkers, so companies could offer perks, like free food, or social events. They could differentiate from other companies by offering these things or selling their "culture". None of that matters anymore.
Nowadays, work is just signing into my machine every morning and joining a Zoom meeting for standup. Interacting with coworkers is either via Zoom meetings or via Slack. I hardly need to interact with them apart from work-related matters. There isn't an opportunity to chat at the coffee machine, or grab lunch together, or get drinks after work. The work is now just the work that I do and not the people I work with or the building that I commute to.
What does this all mean for me? It means if I find the kind of work I do boring, or I don't think I'm paid well enough, I can just quit. I can judge companies I work for based on pay, type of work I do, likelihood of promotion (for more pay), and how many hours I need to put in. All the other things that could impact how much I love working for company X are gone. It's purely "what is the job doing for me?" now. I think that's playing a role in people wanting to quit. They're no longer tied to their jobs as much as they used to be. They're realizing if they don't like it, they can just leave.
Readit News
>Is an extra $10k per year worth learning a new org, a new skillset, a new set of expectations, a new set of coworkers, and a new boss?
For many engineers, the answer is: “No.”
Yes I could quit and get a ~20k raise by shopping my resume around, but I don't need the money. I have enough for a down payment on a house, I meet my expenses for the month with 1/2 of one paycheck, I can buy a new car on a credit card if I wanted to. More money would be _nice_, and I imagine I'd be singing a slightly different song if I had kids, but it's much less important than knowing the work that I do has meaning and an immediate impact on the world, and about as important as working with new/interesting technology. I imagine there are a lot of early career (26-30 year old) software engineers who are in a similar boat. If money was a motivator I'd be serially founding companies and striving to be The Next Big Thing. I'm just not. I'm happy being hire number 13, or 99, and working with people I like doing work I find value in.
Edited for spelling
If you look outside of coastal cities, there are plenty of job offers for engineering jobs that pay less than 6 figures. Over in Europe and East Asia, $50 to $60k salaries are the norm. And people job hop frequently for a few extra $k because that corresponds to a significant increase in quality of life for them. The difference between a 2 br and 3 or 4 br apartment, between another kid or not, etc...
People will absolutely leave your company if they think they can get paid more elsewhere. People will absolutely pass over your job offer if they think they can get more elsewhere.
You also see the reverse phenomenon which is that you'll find plenty of engineers doing soul-wrenching, boring jobs in toxic environment who still say because they are very generously compensated (hello FAANG).
Yes, and we have plenty of nice stuff that goes along with it
Healthcare, 30 paid holidays, unions, paid overtime, weekends and calls off work come extra (it is 40h week period, want more pay for it), retirement, flex time, ...
Like the OP, my expenses are more than covered, getting more isn't worth the hassle to change.
Ah, and in some countries having too many companies on the CV isn't well seen, it appears the candidate isn't able to fit-in anywhere.
Considering that each of these tech companies are trying to hire in the order of hundreds of engineers, and willing to accommodate remote work from locations that they previously did not consider, is it really a surprise that other companies with less competitive compensation packages are struggling to find talent?
This is also what a lot of europeans do with FAANG jobs.. get a FAANG job, move to america, live there for 3-5 years in a 4 bedroom apartment with 12 roommates, eat ramen, come back home, and buy a house.
There's also a question of how much more money do you get... 5% more to do something shitter than now... not worth it... but 50% more, is enough to think it through, if nothing else, how much sooner can you retire with that.
As a newly graduated CS student in Denmark I got a job earning $74k a year. I got warned by my union that my salary was on the low side and, come the first negotiation round of the year, I should ask for a larger raise than simply a yearly adjustment. And based on my union's numbers I don't think almost any developer is working for $60k or under in this country.
In my eyes, this is a good point.
Currently working in Latvia and getting a net salary of around 2k euros a month now - staying at the same company makes it increase by a few hundred euros per year. Actually provided more information in another comment of mine, compared some of the public sources for software dev salaries in the adjacent countries too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29595158
Also wrote about my savings and financial circumstances on my blog a while ago as well: https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/on-finances-and-savings
Thus, job hopping even for comparatively small increases is the smart thing to do, as well as looking for opportunities like side hustles and attempting to take advantage of a globalized economy that lends itself well to remote work (something that i'll inevitably need to explore once i'll have finished a pretty large enterprise migration and some pilot projects in my current place of work).
Now, my salary is still liveable and certainly better than those of who work for the local government, who receive about half of what i do (according to https://www-visasalgas-com.translate.goog/valsts-iestades?_x... which is a site that displays the published data per government org) and many other seemingly essential jobs (like teachers, medics, firemen, policemen all of which are comparatively underpaid). Even as a software dev, buying my own house anytime soon is unlikely, as is buying a new car, or many other luxuries that others take for granted.
In short: the original argument definitely holds true for those who are well compensated, but yours is also valid for those less so. Already, there is talk locally of not having enough engineers, especially in those aforementioned government jobs.
Indeed, the population of people who post on this board are very binomial, and it often causes blanket statements to be confusing to one side or the other.
> People will absolutely leave your company if they think they can get paid more elsewhere.
Maybe you will. Maybe they won't. Everyone has his own bar for "enough" money. For some there is no such bar.
Didn't the parent directly say that? Money not matering after a certain point means that it still matters before that point.
> Read any publication that cares about business, from the NYT to the Wall Street Journal, and you’ll see a ton of hand wringing about The Quittening, and the accompanying talent shortage.
These publications aren't talking about the workforce in general, they're pseudo-gossip articles about the wealthy top engineers and how well-off they are that they can focus on things other than how much they put into savings each paycheck.
I'm personally in that boat, and frankly, I'm a little bored but not bored enough to go back to work as an SE full time. If companies offered more part time work and highly flexible work, it might be enough to drag me back in.
Even large six figure salaries just aren't enough money for the soul crushing reality of renting out my brain full time to solving someone else's problems now that I have enough.
Maybe a small subset. The median dev salary is $110k. So no, only a very small number are able to retire in their 30s.
And conversely, there's plenty of engineers who have kids (hence, very much not FIRE). The vast majority end up going down that route, in fact, at least in my experience.
That's cuz your numbers are too small. Offer a 50% raise instead of a 20k raise and you will see different results.
> Yes I could quit and get a ~20k raise by shopping my resume around, but I don't need the money
Plenty of stories on Blind of people shopping around and going from 150k TC to 350k TC, so I guess it really depends on your situation.
Also, those highly paid engineers in other companies might be tired of working on surveillance tech but aren't willing to stomach 50% pay cuts because your company is shooting for "market rate" compensation instead of market clearing compensation.
One way is to try switching from a regular industry job to a “giant” such as a FAANG. But these are quite rare in most countries.
Another way would be switching into specific industries like finance - but the high comp there traditionally means giving up some other things such as a guaranteed 40h-or-less workweek. Hard pass from many established engineers.
A third option would be switching to a larger share of non cash comp, but again, equity large bonuses are not commonly part of European comp and comp in traditional industry.
I've never seen in the eurozone the US-style crazy-high 100k+ salaries. In general, here an IT engineer hired fulltime fetches a rate which is comparable to many other regular jobs, and generally lower than other engineering positions. However the churn and stress is much, much higher in my career experience. We joke about JS, but almost everything around the IT has now super-fast refresh cycles which require never-ending honing of your skills just for the sake of it.
That initial candidate surplus is now starting to age and drain. These CS candidates have now a decades-old experience in the current tech stack which is worth gold, but are also tired of the churn. You can still get them, but be prepared to pay them a lot more. Many companies which were founded on entry-level salaries will now see their workforce explode in cost. This is going to be huge with the current inflation in the next 2-5 years, where your average company raise won't cut anymore and you're forced to jump ship to maintain your purchasing power.
The young talent is still there of course, but it's often more specialized than what I remember a few decades ago due to the growth of the field. This means that finding a good fit reduces your pool significantly, unless you accept your candidate will be learning for a long time.
Depending on the person, that may be a good motivator for them to not seek more money, but to seek more time instead. I'm certainly there. I've turned down more money when the position would mean that I was responsible for an awful lot more and it would take time away from my kids. When they're older and possibly out of the house, that may change, but for now? I'd rather have the time than the money because, like you, I have "enough." It's just not a limiting factor at this point in what I care to do, but time is.
> For many engineers, the answer is: “No.”
> Yes I could quit and get a ~20k raise by shopping my resume around, but I don't need the money. I have enough for a down payment on a house, I meet my expenses for the month with 1/2 of one paycheck, I can buy a new car on a credit card if I wanted to.
This entire thread is mind-blowingly backwards though it totally explains why we the industry is in this position. It starts with people saying that "they don't need more money" because they can borrow or they can $20k more by shopping around their resume if they need to, followed by people waxing about how $50k-$80k is a decent salary, followed by people saying "no one gets paid $250k out of college"
It is very simple: $20k extra over a period of 52 weeks is extra $384 per week, which is less than extra $10 an hour.
Here's why you cannot hire engineers: you are not paying them enough money.
Engineer: $55k is good if i have <blah blah blah>
Someone who wants to hire him and has no toys: $80k
Engineer: I guess but only if I get to work only really cool projects
Someone who wants to hire him and has shitty projects: $100k
Engineer: And I want to have super smart people working with me
Someone who wants to hire him and does not have smart people as he wants to build a team around this kind of engineer: $150k
Engineer: Yeah, i guess it will work.
Someone who wants to hire him and does not want him to shop around: $170k
Engineer: hell yes! I'm going to unshitty these projects and make people around me smart!
Oh, you don't want to pay $170k/year for an engineer because you think those plebeians should be working for $55k? Well, that's your problem.
P.S. Can't hire at $170k/year? Offer $220/k.
P.P.S. $10k/year is not a raise.
> 3. Some degree of repeatability in work environment.
Instead of the above point, I am looking for...
A place where I make greater impact in a small company working along side ethical people who are not trying to exploit their customers/consumers, rather than a FAAMG where you're replaceable within a few days and follow no ethics just revenue in mind...
A place where managers are accommodating of suggestions just because I write code doesn't mean my ideas about the product/solution aren't worth listening to...
A place where you admire or atleast respect the CEO and the company's business tactics instead of my ex-company whose past CEO is now an "astronaut" just to play a marketing gimmick I guess... :p
Please connect with me if you consider your startup/company is one such place... ;)
> For many engineers, the answer is: “No.” Yes I could quit and get a ~20k raise by shopping my resume around, but I don't need the money.
Would you feel the same if you were enticed to switch jobs with offers of 1.5x, 2x or more than what you're currently making?
I think plenty of people would consider leaving their current employer, even with the headaches that comes with doing so, to make 50% to 100%+ over their current compensation package. I know I would.
I agree that engineers might not jump ship for a $10k increase in income, and it seems to me that the market rate for engineers based on current demand isn't captured by offers of $10k to $20k above current salaries. That would suggest that if employers are truly that desperate for engineers, like they say they are, then they'd need to offer more money to outbid their competitors' offers.
Truthfully, I have a feeling that many employers' choices of not offering larger compensation packages to potential employees don't stem not a rational economic choice, but from a feeling that such offers are "too much" for engineers. Some companies would rather not hire, and make less money, than hire new employees at their market rates and profit from their work.
I think most people of working age now have been part of the individualism movement, which leaves us pretty ill-prepared to deal with the feelings of discontent when we finally succeed at "getting ours" and realize it wasn't all that fulfilling. Solving problems that matter to the community you live in, or the greater society you're part of, has so much more intrinsic reward.
It is now internalised, a strong demotivation happens each time something abstract comes my way, no matter how technically exciting the task is. Something else wroth mentioning, the whole remote work somewhat becomes also a factor against content to be part of a labor community. It's not an issue the first few years, but total remote work for over 5 years has started to make me value proximity to business circles. proximity with my colleagues and proximity with who use whatever we make. there is a sort of guilt that builds up when benefiting from the hard work of the local community to provide physical services (coffee shops, organic food markets, drivers, etc) and have our time spent online contributing to solutions with colleagues and paying users residing thousands of miles away, who only appear to exist as email addresses and occasional faces/voices spit out by a laptop.
If the money is the same, I'll happily take learning a new skillset, a new org, a new set of expectations. When I had not accumulated enough money early in my career, I consciously had to think about stable income. Now that I have accumulated non-trivial sum of money, I'd happily and readily take new and exciting challenges - i.e. I can take more risks as I can afford to, and I'm willing to take more risks for non-monetary reasons. And if the money is better, even better! Thus, in fact, that's exactly what I did in 2021 - I switched my job.
All the things you mention matter to me, but I added 50% to my salary on my first jump, then another 110% on my second. All in just over a year.
Money is still my primary driver. It will be until I am fully financially independent. Not just able to live on a FIRE budget of $30k a year, but able to chase my own fairly expensive interests.
You're right, I'm not going to leave for another $10k, but another $100k, sure, and right now that's not that difficult to achieve.
Not to mention how much effort has to be put into the interview process, my time is worth money, I'm not giving away minimum 6 hours of it for free if I don't need to.
When you are out of school a change of 1000€ per year means nicer vacation. Go for it.
The same 1000€ is something I would not even consider. I am at a plateau where it requires significantly more money to change your way of life, and the 1000€ would not be perceptible.
Maybe that of you add the "retire early" part it may make sense to optimize your income, but it is too late for me anyway.
True. But... When I hear "Best year ever!" But then hear, "Sorry, we can't give more than 3% raises". Someone is getting theirs. I want mine, too! I helped make this the best year ever, in very substantial ways.
Not too long ago, I was at a Very Large Tech Firm. Base pay was great, and the RSUs were really great. I ended up leaving for a smaller company where IT is considered a cost center. The tech stack isn't all that exciting, total comp is a significant step down, and the only way to stay here and get a substantial raise is to get promoted... but I get along well with the people there, and I don't have to worry about off-hours emergencies. The only companies that might be willing to offer enough for me to take the jump away from that, would likely be a well-capitalized tech firm, of which few have a physical presence here.
Fixed it for you
I would be genuinely amazed if you couldn't fill your positions once you started offering upwards of $1.5m yearly.
Extra X a year for a couple of year? No.
Extra X a year for the rest of your working life? Yes.
Consider that some employers anchor salaries to previous salaries ala "we won't pay you more than Y more than your previous salary" - so any raise represents an increase in all future offers.
So despite the downsides, working for a couple of years under a new salary has essentially increased your worth in the eyes of the market.
I'd move jobs if someone I knew and liked through my network wanted to hire me for the right job for a nice increase, but the idea of taking a +20k job with some random boss I have never seen under pressure or on a bad day--no way.
Taking a job when you are older is like buying a house without an inspection--you better really know and like the bones. Who you work for is the #1 factor for me. Nothing worse than hitting 50 and having some hateful blowhard breathing down your neck. Stress just sucks in your 20s and 30s, it can kill in your 40s and 50s.
I dunno... maybe for hotshot FAANG jobs?
I mean, I love where I work now, but if some company were to offer me 250k to jump ship, I'd be MIGHTY tempted!
Oh no! You don't code in lang $x, but know 12 other languages? Clearly, you're not a fit for this job!
Money just needs to be enough. After that you have enrich the job sufficient to hook people in.
Perhaps the first thing a business needs to do before it starts hiring is learn how to hire.
That's a moving target though, if your market value changed and you could now easily get +50%, your current comp won't be enough anymore.
I don't know... as soon as you do the stability of an existing job seems more compelling.
Now I’m in a very adversarial relationship with my manager who seems to think $100k is insane compensation, he’s owed the world, and my senior status means I should just know internal processes and make me immune to debugging headaches.
In the past when people struggled with tooling/debugging that was just the way the cookie crumbled. There was sympathy and understanding. Now I work with a jackass that just assumes someone is screwing up, and lashes out at people when things aren’t going well.
clearly you've never been poor.
even a poor person can tell you that an extra $10M in their pocket will be no more life-changing than an extra $1M.
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1. The TC is a lot higher, like 1.5-2x.
2. They don't have to move; or they do want to move, just not for a job.
It doesn't matter that the work is boring (really fungible cog low-impact stuff). It doesn't matter if the colleagues are meh. It doesn't matter if the company has a reputation for lay-offs/churn/etc. If you have those two items above, you'll likely have a good hiring success rate.
Even stronger: many of the "fads" (like cool programming languages, toolkits, frameworks, etc.), moral/virtue-discussions du jour (like hating on: FB, crypto, commercial spying apparatus, AMZN work conditions, etc.), etc. also don't appear matter in the large. Someone boycotting AMZN one day will be happy to accept a very healthy salary + benefits package writing legacy Java 6 backend code if it means a good double- or triple-digit percentage in compensatory promotion.
For this thread, I just asked an extremely talented programmer ex-colleague (Linux kernel hacker, expert at C) how his job is at Oracle and why he chose it:
> Ex-Colleague: Funny you ask, because I was stuck on-call over the holidays. I'm basically a plebe to Larry Enterprises. Mostly that and having a side gig. Not writing any cool code for sure.
> Me: Why not go elsewhere where things are a little more interesting for you? You have no shortage of talent.
> Ex-Colleague: Pay is great. Not a lot going on. Not a lot of fuss on the job. I easily own a house and pay a mortgage and have a lot left over. Definitely put in less than 9-5 worth of effort. Probably can retire early at this rate.
This type of attitude doesn't appear to be so uncommon, at least among people I know.
In my case for the company I hire for: Extreme stability (check; been around and stable for ~60 years), excellent work-life balance (check), really cool work (check; cutting edge research and engineering), and really good and diverse colleagues (check; gender balance and representation, stable personalities, highly interdisciplinary skills, sometimes world renowned), open-source and conferences (check), education and 20%-of-9-to-5 time benefits (check). Those things may matter to some extent, but contrary to the article, they don't seem matter as much as an extra $50k to $250k pretax compensation in the bank and being able to do so from a low CoL area at your comfort.
The good news for me at least is that we aren't a mega-growth-kind of company, so we can take our time. Ultimately the candidate that values the above does find us (or we them), considers it a dream job, and tends to stay for 5-25 years.
A 3rd factor for me however has always been the tech stack. Engineers I recruit are keenly aware that if they get stuck in a non-modern or too-modern tech stack that it could hurt their future career opportunities.
You can’t just contribute to open source and reach a high level, at least not very quickly very often. They want to jump into a high growth company and contribute to large interesting apps / services that get used in production. Open source is great, but on a resume, it’s nothing like saying you launched an app that handles millions of dollars in transactions, or billions of API requests.
The gilded cage.
As you get older, you have seem to have less time. It's some sort of biological illusion, but having to spend time prepping for interviews, running your life, family and so on, means the incentive to move from a very comfortable job to another has to be a lot more than when you were in your 20s.
Compensation, WLB, and benefits matter FAR FAR more for the majority of people than "good projects" or "smart colleagues". If you want those and can't get it in your job, well that's what open source work is for.
So if I'm looking to jump...well, either my current environment isn't great, or the salary is enough to attract me. There is no situation where my current environment is good, and you offer me a salary comparable to what I'm making, and I would make the jump, because you are a -complete unknown-.
So you can talk to me about the brilliance of my colleagues, the amazing projects, the great work/life balance, the autonomy to work on what matters in the most efficient way possible...and all of that might be true. Or it might not be. I've been lied to by hiring managers in the past, both intentionally and unintentionally. But ultimately the only thing I can truly rely on, that is protected by law, is compensation.
Those are very very good for retaining people you already have though, so while not super important for hiring they are important for keeping the folks you hired (after all, what is the point if you keep losing people you hire).
> If you want those and can't get it in your job, well that's what open source work is for.
Not necessarily. If your area of interest aligns with your work then even open source work is more productive if you have a use case for it. For example - say my interest is distributed systems, then technically my work will have more impact if it is being used on large clusters with large number of concurrent systems. Open source does not happen in vacuum.
Most of my colleagues have children or grand-children, and have been working here for at least 10 years.
Many, many middle aged people with families actually say they prefer the office because it's impossible to get any work done at home with 4 kids. That may be a consequence of their home or their family, but it's what I hear very frequently. In any case, we have a WFH policy, so we are very flexible and accommodating to family needs.
Statistically, fresh college grads vying for excellent resume decor aren't attracted to stability, 401k's, etc. So we see proportionally fewer.
Sure if you pay me twice my current salary, I will probably do whatever you ask me to without complaint. But around here such a big pay increase would be a fantasy.
The mythical 50-100% pay bump can happen if you’re making the leap from some local, no-name small business to a FAANG type job, but it’s not like you can continue repeating that over and over again. It’s kind of a one-time leap that people make from average jobs to top paying jobs. Going into the $500K type jobs isn’t as automatic as people here like to make it sound, unless you’re looking at people who started at rocket ship startups before the stock took off. Even those engineers struggle to get back to those compensation levels when the dust settles and their RSUs go back to normal.
It’s also not as common to find remote work combined with sky-high salaries as HN suggests some times. While I do know a lot of people with remote FAANG jobs, it wasn’t easy. Basically years of working their way specifically into those positions with hard work and building a reputation to warrant it.
I'd say 20% is more likely and considered significant.
It's my case too. I worked until 40 with a great job doing cool things, with a lot of free time. I'm not materialistic at all, don't care about wealth, social status and stuff. Yet, I started worrying for my retirement and savings, wasn't able to buy a house. Now I work for a FAANG for 5 times my previous salary. It's not easy, I don't always adhere to the company's values, oncalls suck, it's a lot about patching broken systems I didn't build. But money is important.
Unlikely these are the same people tbh
It could be that their disdain for AMZN was disingenuous virtue-signaling (supporting your thesis), or it could mean the money is just simply the trump card to their personal ethics (supporting my thesis).
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Basically, my job requires using a lot of tools and technology and processes created by other people, but none of those tools are easy to use or well documented. In order to get stuff done you have to have a social network of people who know how to do the things you need to do, and know all the secret tricks. The right environment variables to set. The right arguments to pass to simulators. How to find the important bit of data buried webapp developed by people who apparently like to invent new words for old concepts. I get a lot of terse autogenerated emails that probably mean something to somebody, but not to me, and don't have human return addresses or really any way to discern the context of where they came from or why. A lot of tools use domain-specific configuration languages that are usually just python scripts that call a bunch of functions that are defined elsewhere and have no documentation.
These things might be reasonable in a startup with a dozen people, but we have over a hundred thousand. My opinion is that once an organization is a certain size, everything really needs to be written down and easily accessible. I shouldn't have to regularly ask people how to do basic things, it should be on a wiki. If it's complicated, it should be in a training video, or a user manual.
Here's the root cause of your bug:
https://agilemanifesto.org/
> Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
> Working software over comprehensive documentation
I remember when my employer adopted agile. One of the first things they did was lay off their team of technical writers.
Also you wasting your time flailing about probably makes some manager's budget numbers look good, because they got to "save" the money that would have prevented you from flailing about.
- actually need tools and processes designed to set the conditions for healthy interactions among individuals.
- actually need to spend time improving the documentation to enable them to produce working software.
- actually need to have a meeting-of-the-minds so they can collaborate with customers.
- actually need to spend some time planning so they can respond effectively to change.
Part of the problem here is that good technical leadership is waaaaaay more difficult than can be reflected in a 4-point manifesto. Whole books[1] are written about it. Part of the problem is information flow. It takes courage to speak clearly enough to tell leadership that they're so focused on being agile that it is harming social trust in their organization and preventing their teams from acting with agility.
[1] recommendations: The Toyota Way, Leadership is Language, Ego is the Enemy.
Going Agile basically meant a return to caveman times. The only way to know anything about the code base is for the tribe's Elders to sit around the fire and tell stories.
Code doing weird thing X? Is it a bug? Is it intended? No way to tell unless I interview everyone who has ever touched the code base, and they happen to remember why they did that.
I get that the manifesto says favor "this" over "that" but don't discard "that", but everywhere I have ever seen it implemented they discarded "that".
"That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more"
So it's doesn't say forget all processes and tools. Also I would say that most of these automated things the OP is talking about are processes and tools.
Hang on, don't blame the agile manifesto here. Blame the management that adopted the agile manifesto as "do all the exact same things we used to do that didn't work, but call it 'agile'".
The points should be phrased "Processes and tools after individuals and interactions", meaning we want both, but one side first. In this case, it better implies we want processes and tools that work well for the individuals and their interactions.
Same for the other points of the manifesto.
Writing good documentation is a skill that takes a non-trivial amount of time to develop. It also takes time to write.
Keeping documentation up to date is hard and takes time/effort.
Poorly written or out of date documentation is worse than no documentation.
When I first moved into management roles I didn’t fully understand how much of my job would be simply saying “no” to a constant stream of engineers wanting to write or rewrite custom tools, libraries, frameworks and platforms when otherwise sufficiently good alternatives already existed. Not all engineers, but once you get into a big enough organization there are a lot of engineers who want to do meta-work and rework things instead of actually shipping things.
The worst offender I worked for had meta-tools on top of everything. You couldn’t use GitHub, Slack, or even our cloud platform without first learning how to navigate all of the custom tools and bots that had been put together to gate access to everything and make it work. And like you said, it was poorly documented. It turned into little fiefdoms where you had to know who to talk to if you wanted to get past the systems to get things done.
This can all be avoided with good management at an organizational level, but of course some managers want to get in on the situation because it puts them in a perceived stronger position in the company if their team is at the center of everything.
First time in a really big org and I can see this as well. The worst part is trying to tie someone down to explain how to use their custom tool or bot or even entire systems. How do I use that custom BI tool that you setup ... oh no-one wants to even send me an email reply when I ask a simple question about these things.
The way most stuff gets done in these orgs is various maverick people who find some way to work around all this crap. The problem is you have to have political clout to do that most employees don't have that.
I think these "meta-tool" are initially well intentioned but as you say they become empire building tools.
Worst still is that the teams that build them often leave or are disbanded. Then no one is responsible and no one wants to touch them and they sit in this weird limbo state.
This %100. Automate all the things, but for any part of the process that cannot be automated/scripted, write it down. And don't just put it in some random Google Doc or Sharepoint where it is lost forever in the ether. Put it in a README that lives with the code or have a shared Wiki for the team. It need to be somewhere that is generally available, searchable, version controlled, and easy to update.
So, even if you have everything 100% automated, most people will look at that and conclude that your automation is complex legacy bullshit and you should have automated in some other way.
Just saying.
Otherwise you're setting your company up for a miniature re-enactment of the Butlerian Jihad at some point in the future.
In the open source world, I've developed a large low quality codebase that is very complex from when I was less experienced. This project has gotten plenty of contributions over the years, some from less experienced and some from more experienced.
The experienced developers know how to get around the codebase, but the lesser experienced ones tend to complain about quality. I see this in the workplace as well.
I had this exact same issue when I was less experienced. New codebases was very difficult to understand, but now that I've been through a lot of them in various languages and quality, it's not as bad as it used to be.
I guess the argument here from the business point of view is that we write code for the less experienced? In a way this makes sense, but paradoxically some complex codebases that I thought was messy in the past have become more elegant today as I've gained more experience.
Meanwhile the newer, less experienced developers probably still have a bit of... let's say naive optimism, and try to give feedback more.
write code for the center of the bell curve (at your organization). the bottom will never understand anything, the top understands it all. You need to make the majority in the middle be comfortable.
that means slowly bringing in new language features, as they become widely known and practiced.
1.) The people who can do this aren't going to do it for 30k or $10/hr. Properly solving this problem requires an understanding of tech and the development process, pedagogy/communication/instructional design, and information management. Lacking any one of those would result in a system that's an unusable vanity project. I have a couple of decades of small-shop coding experience, experience as an instructional designer at an Ivy, and graduate education in information management, but if you want me to use all of those it's going to cost you and companies are resistant to that. (See: How a lot of non tech product companies treat their IT teams since they don't generate revenue). Now imagine if the project were led by someone more qualified, which it should be for a company of your size.
2.) Most companies don't have a culture which would allow this to be done well. This is the sort of work which requires both a lot of honesty and a lot of careful planning. A lot of information ends up hidden or inaccessible due to people's egos, or executives not being able to handle the information so it's buried. People need to be honest about their workflows and what they don't understand, and they need to feel comfortable being honest about such things. This gets really messy. On the dev side, a common cultural issue is "I had to learn it, they should too" or the urge to make understanding the complexities into a shibboleth for the in-group.
So I agree with you, but it's unlikely to change soon in my opinion.
All in all, this strongly reminds me of the "Collapse of Civilization" described by Jonathan Blow: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko
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It's for similar reason that I like to keep unreliable dependencies to a very strict minimum. I can rely on my compiler, my editor, my OS, and to a lesser extent a bunch of extremely popular libraries. But as soon as we get to internal tools & processes or obscure third party libraries, certainty goes downhill very quickly.
More money does not compensate for this. I thought it would when I interviewing a few months ago (50% salary increase). I was wrong.
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29826152
Problem is, at mature companies there aren't enough greenfield problems to match the large number of engineers who are looking to climb the ladder. So stuff is rewritten, then rewritten again since nobody understands the rewrite, and so on. Managers kind of look the other way because retention and the ecosystem becomes messier and messier over time as promoted folks leave and new folks come in that need to be promoted.
This is the world of professional software development at pretty much every company not a startup.
The article mentions 3 things engineers care about: Technology, Intellection and Stability. Perhaps your pain fits into the 3rd category (if extrapolate a little).
If so, ironically, the first 2 at scale is what causes the lack of the 3rd.
When you make wider roads, the traffic will get worse, not better. Perhaps it's similar technology organizations. It's almost inevitable.
Anecdotally Amazon figured this stuff out by mandating well defined organizational boundaries (kind of like solid white dividers on some section of the highway, eh?) and by making each team responsible for its own developer infrastructure. It seems wasteful at first, but maybe less so at scale. Maybe someone working there can confirm/deny whether this is the case.
I've had this conversation before where documentation is proposed as a silver procedural bullet and it never works. Documentation gets stale and eventually out of date. Do you really want to be in a position where you have to /recompile/ all of those documentation/training video/user manual materials? Unless you're selling it, probably not.
The solution you are looking for is not documentation but automation and training. The things which can be automated to make the process closer to obvious should absolutely be automated. The things which are intrinsically more challenging and can't be solved through automation should be covered through training -- and not a "training video" but a real set of sessions where someone (likely your manager or a tech lead responsible for ensuring clean consumption of their modules) is walking you through the right way to do things and leaving time for questions.
I say this having worked at a place that touted a documentation centric culture at the level of organizational scale you suggested. If you're doing anything remotely challenging, documentation only gets you to the starting line. It doesn't get you to being useful and autonomous.
Fortunately, that’s often me (a supervisor), so I get to be self-deprecating when conveying this requirement.
It doesn't necessarily imply or require stupidity, but in my experience on both sides of it (writing docs now, and having been that intern), they actually make pretty great litmus tests for documentation and how accessible organizational knowledge is.
Maybe "Institutional Complexity"?
Some degree of complexity is intrinsic to the problem domain, but it's the incidental complexity that emerges as a thoughtless side-effects of other efforts that is the most annoying, especially when it compounds.
To flip your comment on it's head... Some of my most satisfying projects have been the ones that eliminated this type of complexity where I work, because they improved the quality of life of everyone I work with and gradually remove all but the necessary work. However because these things are usually difficult to isolate and deeply engrained, this is only usually possible once you've gained enough trust and autonomy, which I suppose makes it a hard sell for a new job.
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Plus business won't put in the budget necessary for practically no change from their point of view.
Dumpster fire doesn't even begin to describe the outcome.
There was always this strange spooky-leftpad-at-a-distance thing where stuff just kept inexplicably breaking, and nobody ever quite knew what had gone wrong, who to talk to, or when it was gonna get fixed.
Technological + organizational debt?
To me, what it sounds like you are describing is the developer experience. Or "devX".
* The highest paying software companies employ LeetCode style interview. That is off-putting to a lot of people even though the money would be super sweet to have.
* Some wannabe startups also employ LeetCode style interview even though they don't pay anywhere near FAANG/Unicorns.
* You know what's worst than LeetCode style interview? LeetCode style interview with really long rounds. It's super off-putting to be tossed around for weeks.
* You know what's even worse than that? Lowball offer after completing the entire circus.
* PIP culture is scary and it's hard to judge if the new company have it or not, except Amazon. We all know Amazon has PIP culture.
* Long hour culture is not desirable and hard to judge. What's the point of making 20% more if you ended up working 40% more?
Ugh yeah it’s ridiculous. We can’t hire anyone! Have you considered not putting candidates through months of studying to memorize a bunch of algorithm tricks and then grilling them for 5-10 hours total on those? No - that’s not what the cargo cult manual says.
Not only off-putting but out of reach to older engineers with family responsibilities. I would also add that the value proposition for working at a FAANG isn't nearly as competitive if based outside the US.
That's why if you're a small start up, trying to hire like Google is the dumbest thing you can do.
I have done take home projects before, which often resulted in low ball offers. At most it made me angry for the time wasted, but now having children I just don't even bother anymore.
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In the past that was fine, candidate pool was large enough that a heavy-handed filter was okay. That may be changing.
Money should be a big factor. Imagine a job where year 1 you work and year 2,3 you get to do whatever you like and own 100% of the equity. That is what 3x TC basically could mean.
And I do the same for all other parts of an interview too. If I were asked to knit a scarf during the interview process, my reaction would be similar.
Even rewinding to just 5 years ago, there were much fewer companies flush with cash. Now with the hyper-capitalization of so many up-and-coming startups, a lot more companies are now at the bidding table for the same pool of candidates. And even large incumbents have big plans to double in headcount, effectively making the tech market talent side constrained (it always has been to a large degree, but even more pronounced now). So now companies are largely competing on compensation packages, because the ball is very much in the candidate's court. Amazon is starting to pay up to ~$400k in total compensation for an L5 mid-level engineer due to retention and hiring issues, and it's commonly known within tech that Amazon has traditionally lagged behind other large companies in compensation.
Job seekers have options and are very much in a position of leverage. That is why it is hard to hire right now, because everyone needs to hire, and your company probably isn't paying as competitively as others.
I mean, I'm not saying I'm mediocre, but I wouldn't pass a 'do you work with cool tech' (machine learning, crypto, iot, microservices?) or a leetcode test.
I can go back to Java though, I guess.
It’s bizarre how secretive they are. I imagine the recruiters are looking out for their own interests.
Recruiters are in the way.
I’m a software engineer that started a recruiting company. The current state of the industry is pretty bad. We are trying a different approach- we are transparent. We share all the details about the company right out of the gate. Including salary info. We refuse to work with companies that won’t let us publish salary ranges. I’d love feedback (https://app.facet.net/jobs/search)
Indeed I think many recruiters have it backwards. I've had good and bad experiences. There are recruiters who understand the long term game as a salesman, who build win-win relations and check in on you every few years. Those are the people that will absolutely sell your CV to your future boss and those are the people I have no problem in acting on my behalf as an intermediary.
Edit: I see now that it is filtering on salary (which is visible if you look at the listing details), but the summary is showing total comp.
So much this. I've had many conversations with interesting companies that have good pay and cool products, but recruiters/hr keep coming up with bullshit policies and processes that are just obnoxious and only serve to sort out the compliant from the competent.
I love this distinction. So concise and clear. Thanks.
It seems like it would usually be in the best interest of the potential candidate to work through the recruiter. By having been sought out, you have an advantage. You can actually talk to a recruiter and check status of your progress, where as a web application is a black box of which you may never hear another word. At some point the recruiter is going to feel invested in you.
Why would I skip the recruiter and apply directly unless the recruiter is a non-helpful middleman? I’d love to have a direct contact to negotiate the whole process.
I've heard this a few times as well over my career, I wonder what-beyond missing out on that sweet contingency fee-recruiters have to lose by, as the article suggest: just being freaking transparent with candidates
Asking for a friend. Does anybody know what this commission is?
Like, I just don't understand the audacity of most of them. Especially when almost invariably their competitive pay is 30% of what even base level fangs would offer. Its a complete waste of everyone's time.
One of the most accurate descriptions I’ve ever read about it is “Don’t feed the beast - the great tech recruiter infestation” [1 - though an archive since the original has been taken down].
[1]: https://gist.github.com/CumpsD/696599d1bd4cd472a056586967293...
They tend to stick around the industry for a while, not treat you like a mushroom (keep you in the dark, bury you in bullshit), and respond humanly to human requests.
You can safely block the one you're describing here, and we'll all be better if that's the standard response.
I'm astounded at how awful recruiters have gotten. What's insane to me is how no one in the industry seems to question the spray and pray approach to recruiting.
There are a few "whoa that's neat!" things on my resume such that if a recruiter or hiring manager looked at it they would certainly notice. This works as a great test for if a recruiter is really looking at me or just spamming a keyword on my linkedin. This filters out essentially all recruiter spam.
What's funny though is how much energy companies spend to pretend like they've read your resume and want the actual you as a candidate in any way. Facebook recently tried a tactic of sending email from the hiring manager. "I really want you on my team, let's find a time to chat!" But clearly it was just an automated email since the message didn't mention any of my resume that might make me a particularly interesting candidate for the team. Another company clearly automatically scraped my resume to make it sound like the read it, but picked the most bizarre, nonsensical things to pull from it.
The funny thing is, even though I love my current job, if you came to me as said "it_does_follow, I've noticed that you worked on XXX and YYY projects, we really need someone who could do that type of work for our team, we're working on exactly these type of problems" and they touched on the actual work I've done that I'm proud of, I would jump on a call in a heart beat.
Every engineer really would prefer to work on problems in their particular domain that interest them, for a team that values them as an individual. I am certain that if recruiters spent their time targeting a much smaller pool of good candidates that really are a match for the role, they would have much higher success rates.
In all seriousness, my experience with third party recruiters overall has been quite good. One sought me out and continued to follow up until it sounded like a good deal, and in the end I won a sign-on bonus, decent salary, and felt like I started a good working relationship with the recruiter themselves, too.
Now, this guy hits me up for when he has potential matches for my team. It's been really good. I'm sure like most things, there are good recruiters and bad ones, regardless of first or third party.
Might be worth a try if you like having a clean inbox.
Instead I get wordy yet vague e-mails or dodgy calls where they don't dare drop the actual name of the companies until you've agreed to go on an interview. And of course, being recruiters instead of actual engineers, they don't actually know what they're talking about.
I just don't get it. I've only been approached by a 'first party' recruiter once, for Google Docs in Germany. I didn't want to relocate or work on Docs though so that was a pass for me, and that was after the 'shine' of Google had passed as well.
One recruiter just couldn't understand that the commute for me was major. I had just left a job which had a 1-1.5hr commute each way for me, and I was looking exclusively for something with no more than a 30 minute commute. They kept trying to toss my resume at jobs that had equivalent or longer commutes because "the perks are really nice" or the "pay was really good". Which I took to mean their commission would be really good.
The only roles I've ever accepted were roles that involved a hiring manager reaching out directly to me. There's a reason for this, namely that the only recruiters worth a damn seem to be working in boutique firms and want to take a significant bite out of my future pay.
Really, just avoid them if possible.
- the transactional part of setting up interview loops, coordinating schedules, etc is extremely tedious for a field of 3-5 serious candidates for a given role. Internal recruiter takes all of this away from a hiring manager who has other duties.
- an internal recruiter can plow through LinkedIn to find solid candidates, identifying ones for the hiring manager to review and, if qualified, reach out to. Again, tedious work for a hiring manager with other responsibilities.
In most cases that I've seen the internal recruiters have strong relationships with the hiring managers and are incentivized to make sure the hires actually succeed.
Looking at it from the candidate's point of view: Being rejected is actually something that psychologically kind of sucks a lot. Even if at the level of higher cognition you are perfectly aware that it's just a numbers game, and that you shouldn't let rejection get to you in a psychological way, we are not vulcans but humans. Rejection means cognitive dissonance in a big way: You applied for the job, so that means you wanted it. But they rejected you, so that means that you're not getting it. It's also a threat to your identity, because you think of yourself as being pretty good, and now there's someone who thinks you're not good enough for them. It just sucks.
So what do you do? You engage in cognitive dissonance reduction. You look at that recruiter spam, and you immediately start looking for reasons not to apply. Because if you find any reason not to want the job, then they can't hurt you by not giving it to you.
Recruiting is broken in a big way: We need to find ways of doing it that causes much less psychological friction.
On top of my resume, you want me to fill out multiple text boxes with information about why I want to work at Random No Name Company, what I expect from my time there, what my personal ethos is... Then you ask me for a cover letter?! This is literally to just initiate a lottery where it seems the odds of the next step happening are less than 1%.
It's more brutal than dating. I do not envy any single engineers who are juggling both games.
It could equally well be that some candidates get rejected 1000 times, while others get hired pretty quickly.
Nowadays, work is just signing into my machine every morning and joining a Zoom meeting for standup. Interacting with coworkers is either via Zoom meetings or via Slack. I hardly need to interact with them apart from work-related matters. There isn't an opportunity to chat at the coffee machine, or grab lunch together, or get drinks after work. The work is now just the work that I do and not the people I work with or the building that I commute to.
What does this all mean for me? It means if I find the kind of work I do boring, or I don't think I'm paid well enough, I can just quit. I can judge companies I work for based on pay, type of work I do, likelihood of promotion (for more pay), and how many hours I need to put in. All the other things that could impact how much I love working for company X are gone. It's purely "what is the job doing for me?" now. I think that's playing a role in people wanting to quit. They're no longer tied to their jobs as much as they used to be. They're realizing if they don't like it, they can just leave.
The difference in how the day-to-day activities 'feel' between company A and company B just isn't as big anymore now with full remote.