So, as a 56yo who's been programming professionally since 2004, currently having trouble finding enough contract work, a bit of perspective:
When there are more openings than qualified people, even when you reduce qualifications to what is actually necessary, it seems like there's "nobody" available. Now, when the shoe is on the other foot, it seems like "nobody" is hiring. It's harsh, but it also doesn't take that much of a shift in the supply and/or demand to go from >1 to <1, even though the effect you feel is large.
There is no kind way to put this: a lot of stupid stuff got done with a lot of smart programmers in the last ten years. Meanwhile, boring old stuff like manufacturing was starved for programmers, and eventually gave up trying to get them. Now that it is possible, it takes some time for all the companies who couldn't get (or couldn't keep) programmers before, to realize that it is once again possible. However, anecdotally, I see it happening, albeit slowly.
Programming that actually accomplishes something useful in the world, is still a productive thing, and positions will get created. However, large sectors of the economy take time to pivot, and so it is best to find a way to make ends meet in the meantime, and also do something useful (even if unpaid) with your programming skills, to keep your mind in practice.
To add to your last point: Industry is an area with a huge deficit of properly engineered software and often lacking basics things like version control and testing.
Most manufacturing processes use code that an Automation Engineer with a bare minimum of CS training clicked together in Rockwell/Siemens software. There is no deployment pipeline or staging, data is often "copied" from ERP by typing it in and monitoring is some 20-year old custom solution done in Delphi or Visual Studio that just barely runs. The potential for software engineers there is gigantic.
edit: obviously there is a bit of hyperbole here and there are exceptions, but this has been my experience.
I'd put it differently - programmers of all levels tried to get into companies where their work is a "profit center", where product of engineers adds to profitability. And not a "cost center", where company sells something else, but spends some of their profits on IT.
Latter positions usually associated with a lot of horror stories and uphill battles. Naturally one would avoid them if they can.
So, when outlook is not so great and even profit centers started to cut their OpEx-es too - there is a surplus of engineers on a market and higher competition over positions that are left in profit centers (and those are compensated less).
But I don't believe cost center companies actually gave up on IT, they may found different ways to close the need, but they still have some form of IT, either in-house or outsourced/off-the-shelf products.
But it's indeed of humbling moment in time for some engineers, to realize that they were in very very premium position compared to many. And got used to it too much - why build networks and stay in touch, when one receives 10 inbounds from recruiters a day, why keep skills up to date and stay sharp when the moment you're on a market - there is a queue to snatch you off the market, why part your ways on good terms instead of burning the bridges, when there seems unlimited offerings in front of you, so you never want to look behind...
Well, now we know why - to get through the "thin", until next "thick".
> Meanwhile, boring old stuff like manufacturing was starved for programmers, and eventually gave up trying to get them.
If you wanted to be fully honest, you would have said that they couldn't pony up for programmers, they were only “starved” by their own penny pinching ways.
In many cases it could truly be that programmers aren't worth enough for them to pony up. It isn't that they're being cheap. It's that it doesn't make financial sense. There are plenty of contexts where programmers are useful but still only worth "normal" salaries.
I really hope so. I’ve been looking for non-stupid jobs for 5 years, even willing to a pay cut to work on them, but I keep getting no traction, while yet-another-saas-that-does-x openings have been everywhere.
They are fairly entrenched in their approach, which has been good for individual developers for sure, but has (in my opinion) produced little of actually legitimate societal value.
Probably not, because if you're looking for a Facebook sized opportunity, well, there just aren't many in real life. So, perhaps a good time to look outside of that community for jobs? It's not easy, and it will take time, but it will happen.
It doesn't really matter what the folks in Silicon Valley think.
The innovators left Silicon Valley during the pandemic and spread out throughout the country. Those remaining are desperately clinging to a world that doesn't exist anymore, and probably won't ever again.
Software is about creating automation. Automation is never about increasing costs over existing methods. It is in the end about scaling up. If the system had to have just as many more people to scale it wouldn't be worth it. Therefore devs are scaling themselves out of work.
It's a natural outcome of mega corps and the laws designed to allow them to be mega. Business size should be limited and most tech intellectual property invalidated. That way the devs that can't get hired by the existing market can create new markets.
Good observation. A few of my previous employers simply stopped hiring in house developers. They feel more comfortable relying on either outside vendors or off the shelf software. One reason is the lack of available talent to come in and support legacy in-house software. Maybe that trend will reverse or slow a bit. So much of the off the shelf software is overpriced and inflexible.
Also, "off the shelf" often comes to mean "a proprietary, poorly documented and clunky framework or programming language, disguised as an application".
I remember being a naive college student and hearing about a "software engineer shortage."
I was too young and dumb to understand that meant that the owners of companies that needed software engineers wanted cheaper labor and that I was to play a part in the devaluation of engineering labor by helping supply exceed demand, thereby allowing company owners to commodify software labor to ultimately pay wages proportional to hours worked rather than offering a share in company ownership, which allows for compensation proportional to company success.
If H1B's were legitimately about labor shortages, it would be required that all companies fire/layoff their H1B's first. I am pretty liberal, but market dynamics are market dynamics, and I am surprised I haven't seen more anti H1B sentiment to bring scarcity (and therefore leverage) back into the labor market.
A lot of the history of racial atrocity has been a direct result of desperate (and therefore exploitable) foreign labor de-valuing incumbent labor and the following retribution to the weaker vulnerable foreign laborers, rather than the harder work of solidarity and demanding a fair share via things like trade unions/guilds.
Usually it’s much easier to be liberal when doing so doesn’t cost you meaningfully. I’d encourage you to evaluate for yourself if your stances are truly fair and if you’re truly liberal considering how painful it is for an H1B to lose their job vs you. It’s also easy to say “but H1Bs get exploited!” Considering how many H1Bs come here, maybe they’d rather face this exploitation vs staying in their own country?
In a free market, there's no such thing as a shortage. This isn't a 1980's soviet grocery store. The market for programmers is not centrally planned. Its one of the least-regulated markets extant today.
So anybody complaining about a "shortage of programmers" is just a cheapskate.
In a free market, what signals to us that more of something should be produced? Buehler? Buehler?
> I remember being a naive college student and hearing about a "software engineer shortage."
This is real and it still is real, these positions don't pay over 200k for a 4 year degree because there is an abundance.
>I was to play a part in the devaluation of engineering labor by helping supply exceed demand, thereby allowing company owners to commodify software labor to ultimately pay wages proportional to hours worked rather than offering a share in company ownership, which allows for compensation proportional to company success.
Wow slippery slope fallacy. The medical field has no commodity workers and they aren't given ownership.
Anyway, seems like an axe to grind rather than the reality of things.
I was a contractor for a large financial institution -- one you've heard of. They fired a number of their employees during a layoff a year before my contract ended.
They did it, not because I was cheaper (my contract certainly wasn't) but because they could get rid of the bottom 15%. And company rules limited my contractual ability to remain on.
I was kinda shocked at this. "Why wouldn't you keep the people you hired on over the contractors? Don't you hire the best?"
It turns out they hired to fill seats, not to hire the best.
Perhaps what causes this is managers who want to level up usually do so by commanding ever larger groups of people. And when they hire for that scenario they don't really care what kind of people they hire.
> If H1B's were legitimately about labor shortages, it would be required that all companies fire/layoff their H1B's first.
Not necessarily. If I knew the chances of me being able to stay in the US we're that much lower because of that law, I'd be far less likely to apply in the first place, hence worsening the labor shortage.
I am actively looking to hire - either freelance or full-time - an engineer to write open source golang code for my YC startup.
However, I literally cannot afford FAANG salaries at my stage. It would literally bring my runway from n to n/5 years. And many candidates are asking for 400k+ salaries. I’d love to hire someone who knows what they’re doing but I’m just not able to find people who are both qualified and interested in the work. (If this is you then message me!)
I had one person today - with lots of FAANG experience who’d recently gone freelance - tell me that they weren’t willing to work with me to write code but they were willing to do advising for $450/hr. We just weren’t on the same page.
I don’t know what’s going on, and I hurt for people who are looking for work. I’m launching more slowly than I’d like because I am not able to find a partner to build things with who is willing to work for less than what they made after 10 years at Google.
> And many candidates are asking for 400k+ salaries.
I don’t understand this.
Yes, for some engineers, in some roles, in some locations it makes sense - but that’s a tiny part of the overall market.
I’m 40, live in a rural area in a Southern US state, and have right at twenty years’ experience. I’ve worked a big companies, have been the first tech hire at a startup, and have specialized somewhat in healthtech. I feel like I’m the best I’ve ever been; I have room to grow but I know exactly where that room is and how to make it happen. I’ve done everything from knocking out new tickets every day from a queue to architecting large distributed systems. I love my current job that consists mostly of two things: figuring out what the product side of the org actually wants/needs and making sure it gets done, and supporting all of the other engineers with internal tooling and support.
I make $170k base.
There is equity to consider there as well, but equity in an early-stage startup that doesn’t yet have a firm exit strategy. That’s not compensation - that’s a lottery ticket.
You can get junior engineers in my area for $60-70k, and mid-career around $120k.
I’m at the point where I believe I could _justify_ a salary of $400k… just not in my current role. Not in any engineering role that consists primarily of actual engineering work. That’s the kind of money I’d expect if I were looking at an engineering director or CTO position. I’m very comfortable at my current rate; moving “up” into those roles would require significantly more of my time and energy. My kids are teenagers, and I want to be able not only to spend time with them, but to actually leave work at work sometimes and focus on supporting them. I don’t plan to target those roles for another ~7-10 years.
Worked for 23 years now in professional development. Started in big companies, then moved to smaller companies/startups.
I'm very very good at what I do and my salary is up to the point where small companies are starting to choke on it a bit, and I'm just a tiny bit higher than yours.
Been a senior, team lead, principal, architect, dabbled in some management. Also with successful product launches under my belt.
If I want to move up in salary - it probably won't be in startup land unless I find a relatively big one and I'm CTO.
More likely that I'm just going to start my own companies even if I have to do everything myself.
It feels like jobs, while somewhat available, just aren't what I'm looking for anymore. And the market is turning, or has turned, unfriendly to the super senior.
From my experience the 400k base is very very niche. Plenty of top end engineering talent out there available for less.
and you're right. i know numerous talented engineers in the south who you can pay less and get as good or better of a job done than a FAANG engineer. tbh i might be biased towards a non-FAANG engineer. them southern devs be scrappy.
Many silicon valley companies pay a similar base, but make up the difference in equity. Most individual contributor tech roles cap out at a base between $150k to $250k.
Once you make $200k base and $200k+ in equity, you consider yourself worth $400k+. Even if the equity portion isn't really being paid by your company, it's being paid by the shareholders, it's still money in the bank.
This drastically closes the amount of positions you're willing to consider, as many companies either don't pay in equity at all, or aren't growth companies whose initial offer of equity will double or triple.
To afford to buy a home (average value of $2.2m) where I grew up in a barely middle class area, it requires a minimum income of 400k USD. That's just a middle class home with nothing fancy.
And you're lecturing us that it's preposterous.
I guess you don't understand what things cost and the needs of real people who aren't billionaires.
There are many good programmers available, who could quickly learn Go, who would work for a fraction of that. Look for someone who knows how to program (in any language), who knows the problem space you're in, and they will be able to learn how to adapt to Go fairly quickly. 400k is not at all the market rate.
It doesn’t make sense to try to hire devs whose experience is at the largest companies in the world for an early-stage startup position. You’ll have a mismatch not only in risk tolerance but also skills.
The way to go IMO, is to hire someone who’s experience has been startup-focused and offer generous equity to compensate for the fact you can’t pay market rate.
I think there are people that simply cannot afford to go lower than 400k if you’re looking in the Bay Area. Or it’d take a relatively big hit in lifestyle.
Mortgages are really expensive, kids in school or day care, payment to the new Rivian, etc. Just offering perspective of the other side for the forum.
> I had one person today - with lots of FAANG experience who’d recently gone freelance - tell me that they weren’t willing to work with me to write code but they were willing to do advising for $450/hr. We just weren’t on the same page.
I don't know. If you're not hiring them full time, it might be a bargain, and save you a bunch of money. Particularly if you're trying to architect services from the ground up.
Some people are "force multipliers". In that the work they do can save 10x the engineering time. Dennis Ritchie was maybe a 1B force multiplier.
I was paid $100k/year about a decade ago and saved the company I worked for $4M.
In short, you don't know what you don't know. How much is it worth for you to find out?
It’s always a question of ROI. It’s hard for me to identify any form of technical advice that would be worth that much at my current company stage. I’ve already allocated n% of shares to investors and advisors.
Before spending money I must identify a specific need. I can give a very specific need for code (features, launch dates, customer requests) but frankly do not have a need for technical advice by itself.
400k salaries would also be on quite the high end for your average FAANG! While they may take home that (or more) in total compensation per year due to stock, they'd have to be on the very high end of seniority at a big tech company to have that much in cash.
how much are you offering in equity? the issue i had the last time I went through this is that startups seem to expect you to work for 1/4 the pay but receive only single digit percentages for being the first engineer. it just doesn't make sense to take that much of a pay cut unless we're talking 10-25%, and I found nobody that was.
Years ago when i was much more junior my rate was $85, and if I couldn't get paid more than that today I would be totally ok, but a little disappointed.
Consider hiring remote if possible from South American countries like Argentina; just don't go super cheap on the salary, $100-150k/yo still is a lot to us and I'm sure you can get some really good engineers, PhDs, whatever with that salary. You can go lower if you don't need expert-level.
I'll not apply because I doubt I'm qualified but if you have a link with the job posting I'd be glad to share with my circle.
Why bother with the legal headache of paying people internationally and a language barrier when you can get good people in the states for $100-150k as long as you're outside of super high COL areas?
>because I am not able to find a partner to build things with who is willing to work for less than what they made after 10 years at Google.
Are you looking for a salaried employee or a partner. A partner would share your vision, but get a significant portion of the company. A salaried engineer doesn't have an upside if and when your company takes off.
If you're still looking for someone, I'd be happy to chat with you. I'm an ex-Facebook engineer, but I'd be willing to consider a part time thing if it covers my living expenses.
I've got my own startup idea I'd like to execute on, but I'm not willing/crazy enough to eat through my savings for X years.
I am fascinated by this - how wildly different experiences can be in different pockets of the industry.
The only way I can see 400k+ salaries is if your requirements are a very restrictive Venn diagram of:
* Geographical location (assuming in person, Bay Area / SV?)
* FAANG experience (is it an actual requirement?)
* Seniority (does not necessarily translate to ability... but it does translate to higher asking salary!)
* Niche technical or industry skills
* Golang experience (which wouldn't explain 400k+ by itself, but may restrict the candidate pool further)
If you're seeing $200/hr, that is high but not unreasonable for a good freelancer and smaller engagements. $400k for a 1 year full time freelance contract is pushing it. $400k/year for a salary position seems borderline crazy to me!
Open source should help. Lots of people are cheaper if their work is public (it's better personal marketing and it means they've still got access to the code if they quit or the company folds).
It's worth giving serious consideration to whether the expensive 500k a year dev will outproduce five 100k, or ten 50k developers. There are serious non-linear scaling properties to increasing the headcount of engineering teams.
The traditional answer to this problem is equity, but note that engineers have noticed that illiquid equity is a different thing to salary.
Even in Switzerland, one of the most expensive places in Europe, I would consider 150k USD to be a good deal - and I'd have to pay all the tax and social insurance parts out of that too (I have a company).
For 125k in almost any other country on the continent you'd be extremely competitive, if not beating, any local offer.
I'm in New Zealand. I'm paid approx $120k USD as a staff engineer equivalent at a conaultancy, and I think that's about market rate if you're good. I've never worked for a FAANG (was at Xero in the early days though).
You could hire three and a half of me for the price of one ex FAANG person in your city.
NZ is English speaking and has a fair amount of time zone overlap with the US west coast. We do have proper labour laws though :P
Not to distract from your main point, but I wonder how other employer costs (payroll taxes, insurance and other benefits, etc.) vary between the two countries.
I'm a founder in this exact same boat. Had enough calls with ex-FAANG that have gone this way that if someone has worked there I basically don't even bother.
I appreciate you sharing that as a "never been FAANG", though my annoyance is many companies still bias towards a "wow ex-FAANG" attitude and interview like them, even if comp is a lot lower.
Avoid recruitment channels (like HN!) where FAANG people and FAANG-apirants congregate.
> with lots of FAANG experience
Use FAANG experience as an exclusion filter, not an inclusion filter.
First, as you said, you can't afford the compensation that they're used to.
Second, FAANG companies can absorb tons of bad talent in their hiring process and have mechanisms to both push that talent back out and table it internally once it's known for what it is. There are many awful FAANG engineers. Some of the top performers in the world work for FAANG companies and they're often better at recruiting those people than almost anyone else, but FAANG experience does not identify someone as one of those top performers. It's a really misleading and noisy signal on resumes.
Third, even among talented people who shined in their roles at FAANG, they did so in a radically different work environment than you'll be offering them. The way they spend their days, the pace of deliverables they're calibrated to deliver, the amount of support/independence they need, etc are nothing like what suits your organization. Some may do well (or better) in your startup, but many are not going to be suited to it at all and (if hired into FAANG early) may not even have had the experience to know for themselves.
TLDR; you are not a FAANG company and looking anywhere near FAANG-associated candidates is your problem.
Managers on average are worse than the average coder. And FAANG managers are no exception. At some level it becomes more about winning intra-company fights, than moving the company forward.
You gotta look at the applicant as a whole person: personality, skills, ability to push the needle forward, etc.
My observation is that companies are getting much more precise on their needs. The days of “you’re smart and have a technical background” have given way to “there’s a dozen people in the market who have the exact experience we need, so we will limit our pool to them.”
This is especially painful for college grads, who don’t have specific experience to fall back on.
I think there's also a growing realization that, along with what you've said, putting large emphasis on leetcode skills, or using leetcode at all, is not leading to the best hiring results. That doesn't mean leetcode shouldn't be used in interviews --- I'm sure, for better or worse, leetcode style questions are here to stay in tech interviews; but, that there's a growing sense that people who are simply good at binging and purging leetcode might not be the best fits for experienced roles that require experienced skillsets.
It's partly the result of software dev as a field maturing (quite literally, most are now older) after the ZIRP bonanza of the last couple years.
This isn't new. When I was laid off in 2012, I had a friend at a company with an open position but they were looking with someone with GWT (Google Web Toolkit) experience. Six weeks later they were still looking. You don't think a senior developer could learn GWT in six weeks, and bring a lot more to the table?
Unfortunately in a lot of cases, this means they already know who they want to hire, but they're legally required to post the position publicly. Making the requirements for the position match the person they want to hire, allows them to screen out everyone else.
The first time this happened to me from the other side, when I was the one who was being selected for, it felt very awkward.
If I run a company and need a developer for a specific position, I am fully legally allowed to simply offer it to someone that I want to hire. Without ever posting a job description.
And we're having a hard time finding experienced and skilled engineers... trying to hire for a senior nodejs role, over a thousand applicants (most people just hit apply without reading the description, over half are disqualified for not meeting the basic requirements), dozens interviewed, and we've only managed to hire 1 person that seemed close to being qualified, and he quit after 2 months of barely working. We're around a ~600 person company.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but...out of a thousand applicants--who presumably had college degrees/and or years of experience programming for other companies--there just has to be some who would have been successful at your company. I mean, if you lined up 600 random people grabbed from off the street, you'd find 6 to 10 of them with a genius level IQ.
In fact, you'd have a good chance of finding somebody smarter than anybody in your company. You are obviously filtering too much.
And it would be one thing if the system merely filtered out too many good people, but the ones the system let's pass are not the ones you are looking for! Its bad in every possible way a filter can be bad--filtering out what you want, and letting through what you don't want.
> disqualified for not meeting the basic requirements
What is a basic requirement? If a basic requirement is something like "5 years of Java experience" its filtering out topflight c++ and c# programmers. Good programmers can make anything work; bad programmers will remain bad programmers no matter what programming language is used.
> dozens interviewed
Over my 40-year career, programming interviews haven't changed at all, basically testing how much of corman, leiserson, and rivest you have memorized, and how much oof the book "Cracking the Coding interview" you can regurgitate.
That was ok 40 years ago, when programming was largely creating new systems from scratch. But these days, with all the frameworks, not so much. There's 40 more years of infrastructure which has been created, and to be a successful programmer, you need to be able to leverage other people's code. But who interviews to test that skill?
Again, the fact that the one person the system let through didn't thrive in your company just screams that it is not testing for what you really need. Such a "stringent" process shouldn't be a point of pride.
> Over my 40-year career, programming interviews haven't changed at all
I think they've gotten worse actually. A lot of times they're led by 20-somethings that are looking for only the skills that are limited to their own shallow experience.
"Oh so you wrote compilers in C? Too bad, we're coding node.js here. Have any experience with npm?"
> Akerlof examines how the quality of goods traded in a market can degrade in the presence of information asymmetry between buyers and sellers, which ultimately leaves goods that are found to be defective after purchase in the market, noted by the term 'lemon' in the title of the paper.
> Akerlof's theory of the "Market for Lemons" paper applies to markets with information asymmetry, focusing on the used car market. Information asymmetry within the market relates to the seller having more information about the quality of the car as opposed to the buyer, creating adverse selection.[1] Adverse selection is a phenomenon where, buyers result in buying lower quality goods due to sellers not willing to sell high quality goods at the lower prices buyers are willing to pay. This can lead to a market collapse due to the lower equilibrium price and quantity of goods traded in the market than a market with perfect information.
Yes, but we can't possibly interview 1000+ people, so we have to filter it somewhat based on what they give us: their resume. If you can build me a tool that can find in a stack of 1000 resumes a genius then I'd like to start a company with you and we can make a lot of money together.
Basic requirement is at least 5 years of professional experience. Most of the people who apply don't have that. Then after that, a large number of people who make it to the coding test can't pass the first basic test, or struggle through it: generate a random string using only the standard libraries. If you can't do that then you are not a senior developer. Or they appear to be using ChatGPT and cheat through the test. etc. etc.
And memorizing algorithms wouldn't help you pass our assessment, it's actually easier than that in my opinion.
The applicant pool is not randomly selected, though. The 6-10 randomly selected geniuses are likely all happily and productively employed elsewhere, there's a competitive filter against high-level talent that you have to also get through.
My take is the reason why there is such an emphesis on specific experience (and not just being smart) is modern web apps today are very sensitive with a slew of libraries and frameworks built on top of each other, in a multiservice environment each with different flavors of technologies. Someone coming in fresh without any experience with all of the libraries and tech are just not going to success.
I understand that people gotta hustle to eat, but we get hundreds of applications, and so many resumes are fake and just an attempt to get through the screening... plus lots of cheating, sometimes just good old ChatGPT or someone whispering behind the screen, other times with people giving perfect memorized answers but not a peep when I go off script.
Its a classic vicious circle: if your resume gets auto-dinged if it doesn't have the right keywords, applicants are highly motivated do lard up their resumes with keywords.
And then the companies observe they are getting tons of bogus resumes, and they think they can fix it by making the filters even harder to get through....
Same. I used to really like interviewing, but the AI cheaters combined with development as just a job has destroyed the experience. I did participate in interviewing an intern a few weeks ago who showed some passion and energy, and they got the role, so a small victory.
Shoot me an email. I ran and scaled a nodejs api supporting about 1.5 billion requests per month up until December when I sold it. I have many, many years of experience in the node ecosystem and am currently looking for a new role.
You're first question should be, "How much are you willing to pay?". And if they dodge it, it's not a good sign.
Edited to add:
Sure, be polite, but don't be trapped into 8/16/24 hours of interviewing over the course of a week/month/months before only to get a below average offer
I've had a similar time trying to hire an ML developer with any experience. What I suspect the market has gotten tougher, but not uniformly. If it's bad for experienced people with some form of personal network, it's extra bad for those who were already terrible when the market was tight.
I also love how all the responses blame you and the company; maybe we've developed some unrealistic expectations over the past few years? I don't hear this sort of response outside of development.
Yup. Too much context to give on a HN thread, don't really care to defend it. I'm sure the process isn't perfect and I'm looking for ways to improve it, but it's certainly not an easy problem to solve.
Look for people at banks. We made our first ML Engineer hire a few months ago and almost all the candidates came from people working at banks. The salaries aren't FAANG and the talent is there. The person we hired was a former ME to boot.
Because you're looking for a very specific language or tool experience and not capabilities. This is a common mistake. Many developers might have loads of experience in the problem domain your company needs but not a specific language or framework. Like you do integrations for banking clients. You look for a Java developer and find someone who knows the framework you're using but they've only ever developed APIs for mobile apps. Instead look for the person who might have done some Java a lot of Cobol and has worked with mainframes and banking systems. That person might have even been a sysadmin and learned coding but they'll hit the ground running.
If you're literally trying to hire for a "senior nodejs role" then the brutal truth is that you're simply incompetent and going about recruiting entirely the wrong way. Hiring should be done primarily based on aptitudes and understanding of fundamentals. Experience with a particular language or framework is a "nice to have" at most.
I've done plenty of engineering hiring and never had a hard time finding candidates who were good enough to get the job done. Relax the qualifications, increase the compensation, and improve your company's reputation as a good place to work. Easy.
I hope that person got an exit interview. It might well be that they’re just useless but someone quitting after two months ought to be a warning sign for the company, clearly something went awry.
And here I am with 20 years experience, founded multiple companies, hired and managed engineers, been acquired, worked full stack on B2C and B2B with multiple tech stacks, worked on many of successful projects as an IC... and maybe 1 out of 20 job applications make it to an intro call. Even for sub-200k roles looking for 3+ years experience.
Im going to guess pay isn’t commensurate with the ‘basic requirements’ and or something else is wrong with your interviewing process if they bolted after two months.
I have ~11 yoe and have near 100% callback rate(50% for remote). All positions from 200-450. Friends have similar rates. And ~70% offer rates. Always confused reading these. But I'm also a low level developer, and only ask for ~250-3 salary/bonus. It feels like the people complaining are either really bad, have poor resume's, or have visa requirements. I tweaked my resume after not getting many callbacks and now have the near 100% callback rate.
Instead of calling people you never met bad, maybe you can share your techniques of tweaking the resume?
I've never in my life worked for more than $110K annually and I have 22 years of experience. Can do practically anything on the backend and quite a lot in terms of system administration.
This is also VERY sensitive to location, even if I'm working remote ever since 2011.
There are only a handful of companies in the U.S. willing to pay 200k+ for contract programmers, and these invariably involve highly specialized needs. And if they're in a specialized niche, then their numbers and experience aren't relevant outside of that niche. Note that the parent poster was saying he is a "low level" programmer, meaning close to the hardware, which is niche role.
If you know someone claiming to make 200k+ as a non-specialized programming contractor, they're probably just making numbers up to impress the internet. Regular (non-tech) companies don't pay those sorts of rates to non-specialized programmers, and startups can't afford those rates. That leaves primarily FAANG or large tech companies, in which case YOE is irrelevant; they hire based on pedigree and who you know.
I’d be very curious about which schools you both went to. That seems to make a large difference in career trajectory. Probably the #1 differentiator for first 5-8 years of career path. Edit: Other than country of residence.
I changed alot of it to action/result oriented. What did I achieve. I also added a section at the bottom of my paragraph with EVER buzzword I could find from about 10-20 relevant job postings to get past the filter. Usually has recruiters making a joke.
I’m a senior dev in NYC with ~7 years experience working across the stack (NextJS/ReactJS, Node, Python, Postgres, SQL Server, etc). I’m also not half bad at design.
I haven’t been able to get a response much less an interview.
I'll disagree. The last 20 years I've been a DBA/DA/dev at a slew of medium/large/ultragiant mining/construction/engineering companies. In almost every single one, there's a young gun quietly operating somewhere there, the equivalent of a 10x developer, a "Senior Engineer" in their mid-20's.
Sure, they're the exception, but with enough numbers you'll always find exceptions.
it's definitely a more modern thing, even in Software Development. Probably part on the employee's demands jumping between roles with much shorter tenure, and partly on the employer to justify the higher salaries over the past few years.
I’ve got about ten years with acquisitions and IPO as an early engineer at startups plus some big company experience.
I’ve barely been getting any interviews for the NYC market. When I do, they have weird processes too. I haven’t done a single leetcode interview yet and it’s mind boggling because that’s what I’ve been prepping for this entire time.
That said, I’ve run out of places to interview. The market is insanely dry for nyc and I’m worried I’ll have to move back to SF to get hired.
Not all experience is equal, but people expect to be compensated for the "experience" (time since entering the workforce) they bring to the table regardless. That's the issue here. There is plenty of software that needs engineering, but we can't make a market.
This specific person has 17 years of experience. Are they a staff level engineer, critical to their group? 17 years is more than enough time to become more competent than >99% of software engineers, if they have the aptitude for it. It seems unlikely that a company would layoff someone keeping all the juniors unblocked, unless management is totally incompetent.
Or are they a senior with a decade of negotiated raises, who hasn't learned anything meaningfully new in that same time? They have something like 7 years of real learning, and the company is paying for 17. This is an obvious choice for a layoff.
I haven't seen any signs that smart people who can write software are valued any less. They are just as hard to find, and are getting paid just as much as ever.
Sooo...how do you measure how good a programmer is? You've got to cut $200,000 from your budget. You can lay off 2 junior programmers, or 1 senior programmer.
How, exactly should management determine whether or not the senior programmer is worth twice what a junior programmer is?
This is not a rhetorical question, and generalities like "keeps the juniors unblocked" are not an answer, unless you can give some objective metric which really tracks that. And even if he "keeps the juniors unblocked"--how can a manager tell whether keeping the juniors unblocked is worth $200,000 a year?
Management doesn't agonize for months of who stays and who goes. The directive comes down from Olympus and they have to be executed quickly so that P.R. can move on to another narrative.
I mean.. thats the whole job for the manager? Through performance reviews and keeping track of the work their team is doing. If the senior is actually "unblocking projects" then it should be apparent.
Project not making progress => senior gets involved => project making progress. Or senior gets involved and some architecture decision gets changed to alleviate some risk.
If the senior is doing this but its a visibility problem, then it may suck but they also need to self-advocate if the manager isn't proactively keeping track of their team(like they are supposed to be getting paid to).
Readit News
When there are more openings than qualified people, even when you reduce qualifications to what is actually necessary, it seems like there's "nobody" available. Now, when the shoe is on the other foot, it seems like "nobody" is hiring. It's harsh, but it also doesn't take that much of a shift in the supply and/or demand to go from >1 to <1, even though the effect you feel is large.
There is no kind way to put this: a lot of stupid stuff got done with a lot of smart programmers in the last ten years. Meanwhile, boring old stuff like manufacturing was starved for programmers, and eventually gave up trying to get them. Now that it is possible, it takes some time for all the companies who couldn't get (or couldn't keep) programmers before, to realize that it is once again possible. However, anecdotally, I see it happening, albeit slowly.
Programming that actually accomplishes something useful in the world, is still a productive thing, and positions will get created. However, large sectors of the economy take time to pivot, and so it is best to find a way to make ends meet in the meantime, and also do something useful (even if unpaid) with your programming skills, to keep your mind in practice.
To add to your last point: Industry is an area with a huge deficit of properly engineered software and often lacking basics things like version control and testing.
Most manufacturing processes use code that an Automation Engineer with a bare minimum of CS training clicked together in Rockwell/Siemens software. There is no deployment pipeline or staging, data is often "copied" from ERP by typing it in and monitoring is some 20-year old custom solution done in Delphi or Visual Studio that just barely runs. The potential for software engineers there is gigantic.
edit: obviously there is a bit of hyperbole here and there are exceptions, but this has been my experience.
So, when outlook is not so great and even profit centers started to cut their OpEx-es too - there is a surplus of engineers on a market and higher competition over positions that are left in profit centers (and those are compensated less). But I don't believe cost center companies actually gave up on IT, they may found different ways to close the need, but they still have some form of IT, either in-house or outsourced/off-the-shelf products.
But it's indeed of humbling moment in time for some engineers, to realize that they were in very very premium position compared to many. And got used to it too much - why build networks and stay in touch, when one receives 10 inbounds from recruiters a day, why keep skills up to date and stay sharp when the moment you're on a market - there is a queue to snatch you off the market, why part your ways on good terms instead of burning the bridges, when there seems unlimited offerings in front of you, so you never want to look behind...
Well, now we know why - to get through the "thin", until next "thick".
If you wanted to be fully honest, you would have said that they couldn't pony up for programmers, they were only “starved” by their own penny pinching ways.
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Any reasonable person would agree, but would the people in Silicon Valley agree.
The innovators left Silicon Valley during the pandemic and spread out throughout the country. Those remaining are desperately clinging to a world that doesn't exist anymore, and probably won't ever again.
And some of them would agree even about those projects.
>“The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads,” he says. “That sucks.”
It was cliched seven years ago: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/06/12/click/
It's the incentive structures that keep them in those jobs.
It's a natural outcome of mega corps and the laws designed to allow them to be mega. Business size should be limited and most tech intellectual property invalidated. That way the devs that can't get hired by the existing market can create new markets.
0: https://youtu.be/EmT0i0xG6zg
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I was too young and dumb to understand that meant that the owners of companies that needed software engineers wanted cheaper labor and that I was to play a part in the devaluation of engineering labor by helping supply exceed demand, thereby allowing company owners to commodify software labor to ultimately pay wages proportional to hours worked rather than offering a share in company ownership, which allows for compensation proportional to company success.
If H1B's were legitimately about labor shortages, it would be required that all companies fire/layoff their H1B's first. I am pretty liberal, but market dynamics are market dynamics, and I am surprised I haven't seen more anti H1B sentiment to bring scarcity (and therefore leverage) back into the labor market.
A lot of the history of racial atrocity has been a direct result of desperate (and therefore exploitable) foreign labor de-valuing incumbent labor and the following retribution to the weaker vulnerable foreign laborers, rather than the harder work of solidarity and demanding a fair share via things like trade unions/guilds.
So anybody complaining about a "shortage of programmers" is just a cheapskate.
In a free market, what signals to us that more of something should be produced? Buehler? Buehler?
I’d go so far as to say that is almost part and parcel what a “liberal” is almost always
This is real and it still is real, these positions don't pay over 200k for a 4 year degree because there is an abundance.
>I was to play a part in the devaluation of engineering labor by helping supply exceed demand, thereby allowing company owners to commodify software labor to ultimately pay wages proportional to hours worked rather than offering a share in company ownership, which allows for compensation proportional to company success.
Wow slippery slope fallacy. The medical field has no commodity workers and they aren't given ownership.
Anyway, seems like an axe to grind rather than the reality of things.
They did it, not because I was cheaper (my contract certainly wasn't) but because they could get rid of the bottom 15%. And company rules limited my contractual ability to remain on.
I was kinda shocked at this. "Why wouldn't you keep the people you hired on over the contractors? Don't you hire the best?"
It turns out they hired to fill seats, not to hire the best.
Not necessarily. If I knew the chances of me being able to stay in the US we're that much lower because of that law, I'd be far less likely to apply in the first place, hence worsening the labor shortage.
However, I literally cannot afford FAANG salaries at my stage. It would literally bring my runway from n to n/5 years. And many candidates are asking for 400k+ salaries. I’d love to hire someone who knows what they’re doing but I’m just not able to find people who are both qualified and interested in the work. (If this is you then message me!)
I had one person today - with lots of FAANG experience who’d recently gone freelance - tell me that they weren’t willing to work with me to write code but they were willing to do advising for $450/hr. We just weren’t on the same page.
I don’t know what’s going on, and I hurt for people who are looking for work. I’m launching more slowly than I’d like because I am not able to find a partner to build things with who is willing to work for less than what they made after 10 years at Google.
I don’t understand this.
Yes, for some engineers, in some roles, in some locations it makes sense - but that’s a tiny part of the overall market.
I’m 40, live in a rural area in a Southern US state, and have right at twenty years’ experience. I’ve worked a big companies, have been the first tech hire at a startup, and have specialized somewhat in healthtech. I feel like I’m the best I’ve ever been; I have room to grow but I know exactly where that room is and how to make it happen. I’ve done everything from knocking out new tickets every day from a queue to architecting large distributed systems. I love my current job that consists mostly of two things: figuring out what the product side of the org actually wants/needs and making sure it gets done, and supporting all of the other engineers with internal tooling and support.
I make $170k base.
There is equity to consider there as well, but equity in an early-stage startup that doesn’t yet have a firm exit strategy. That’s not compensation - that’s a lottery ticket.
You can get junior engineers in my area for $60-70k, and mid-career around $120k.
I’m at the point where I believe I could _justify_ a salary of $400k… just not in my current role. Not in any engineering role that consists primarily of actual engineering work. That’s the kind of money I’d expect if I were looking at an engineering director or CTO position. I’m very comfortable at my current rate; moving “up” into those roles would require significantly more of my time and energy. My kids are teenagers, and I want to be able not only to spend time with them, but to actually leave work at work sometimes and focus on supporting them. I don’t plan to target those roles for another ~7-10 years.
Worked for 23 years now in professional development. Started in big companies, then moved to smaller companies/startups.
I'm very very good at what I do and my salary is up to the point where small companies are starting to choke on it a bit, and I'm just a tiny bit higher than yours.
Been a senior, team lead, principal, architect, dabbled in some management. Also with successful product launches under my belt.
If I want to move up in salary - it probably won't be in startup land unless I find a relatively big one and I'm CTO.
More likely that I'm just going to start my own companies even if I have to do everything myself.
It feels like jobs, while somewhat available, just aren't what I'm looking for anymore. And the market is turning, or has turned, unfriendly to the super senior.
From my experience the 400k base is very very niche. Plenty of top end engineering talent out there available for less.
and you're right. i know numerous talented engineers in the south who you can pay less and get as good or better of a job done than a FAANG engineer. tbh i might be biased towards a non-FAANG engineer. them southern devs be scrappy.
Once you make $200k base and $200k+ in equity, you consider yourself worth $400k+. Even if the equity portion isn't really being paid by your company, it's being paid by the shareholders, it's still money in the bank.
This drastically closes the amount of positions you're willing to consider, as many companies either don't pay in equity at all, or aren't growth companies whose initial offer of equity will double or triple.
And you're lecturing us that it's preposterous.
I guess you don't understand what things cost and the needs of real people who aren't billionaires.
The way to go IMO, is to hire someone who’s experience has been startup-focused and offer generous equity to compensate for the fact you can’t pay market rate.
- I've regained perspective on the value of hard-earned money and the plight of the working man AKA majority of America.
- I have no sympathy for complaints that you can't find FAANG salaries anymore. Zero.
[0] I live in Seattle in a studio apartment, so I'm all right.
I don't know. If you're not hiring them full time, it might be a bargain, and save you a bunch of money. Particularly if you're trying to architect services from the ground up.
Some people are "force multipliers". In that the work they do can save 10x the engineering time. Dennis Ritchie was maybe a 1B force multiplier.
I was paid $100k/year about a decade ago and saved the company I worked for $4M.
In short, you don't know what you don't know. How much is it worth for you to find out?
Before spending money I must identify a specific need. I can give a very specific need for code (features, launch dates, customer requests) but frankly do not have a need for technical advice by itself.
400K+ in SALARY is rarefied air. That's basically just Netflix for most software engineers. 400k in total comp is different.
I'll not apply because I doubt I'm qualified but if you have a link with the job posting I'd be glad to share with my circle.
Are you looking for a salaried employee or a partner. A partner would share your vision, but get a significant portion of the company. A salaried engineer doesn't have an upside if and when your company takes off.
It could change the dynamics a lot.
If you're still looking for someone, I'd be happy to chat with you. I'm an ex-Facebook engineer, but I'd be willing to consider a part time thing if it covers my living expenses.
I've got my own startup idea I'd like to execute on, but I'm not willing/crazy enough to eat through my savings for X years.
The only way I can see 400k+ salaries is if your requirements are a very restrictive Venn diagram of:
* Geographical location (assuming in person, Bay Area / SV?)
* FAANG experience (is it an actual requirement?)
* Seniority (does not necessarily translate to ability... but it does translate to higher asking salary!)
* Niche technical or industry skills
* Golang experience (which wouldn't explain 400k+ by itself, but may restrict the candidate pool further)
If you're seeing $200/hr, that is high but not unreasonable for a good freelancer and smaller engagements. $400k for a 1 year full time freelance contract is pushing it. $400k/year for a salary position seems borderline crazy to me!
When I was laid off almost a year ago, it wasn't clear how much of a pay hit I'd need to take to get a job in the new market conditions.
It's worth giving serious consideration to whether the expensive 500k a year dev will outproduce five 100k, or ten 50k developers. There are serious non-linear scaling properties to increasing the headcount of engineering teams.
The traditional answer to this problem is equity, but note that engineers have noticed that illiquid equity is a different thing to salary.
compromise: you'd be able to hire some of the top engineers in the world that live in Europe at half that salary
or accept your business isn't viable and fold
For 125k in almost any other country on the continent you'd be extremely competitive, if not beating, any local offer.
I'm in New Zealand. I'm paid approx $120k USD as a staff engineer equivalent at a conaultancy, and I think that's about market rate if you're good. I've never worked for a FAANG (was at Xero in the early days though).
You could hire three and a half of me for the price of one ex FAANG person in your city.
NZ is English speaking and has a fair amount of time zone overlap with the US west coast. We do have proper labour laws though :P
That could affect the 3.5x number.
Avoid recruitment channels (like HN!) where FAANG people and FAANG-apirants congregate.
> with lots of FAANG experience
Use FAANG experience as an exclusion filter, not an inclusion filter.
First, as you said, you can't afford the compensation that they're used to.
Second, FAANG companies can absorb tons of bad talent in their hiring process and have mechanisms to both push that talent back out and table it internally once it's known for what it is. There are many awful FAANG engineers. Some of the top performers in the world work for FAANG companies and they're often better at recruiting those people than almost anyone else, but FAANG experience does not identify someone as one of those top performers. It's a really misleading and noisy signal on resumes.
Third, even among talented people who shined in their roles at FAANG, they did so in a radically different work environment than you'll be offering them. The way they spend their days, the pace of deliverables they're calibrated to deliver, the amount of support/independence they need, etc are nothing like what suits your organization. Some may do well (or better) in your startup, but many are not going to be suited to it at all and (if hired into FAANG early) may not even have had the experience to know for themselves.
TLDR; you are not a FAANG company and looking anywhere near FAANG-associated candidates is your problem.
Managers on average are worse than the average coder. And FAANG managers are no exception. At some level it becomes more about winning intra-company fights, than moving the company forward.
You gotta look at the applicant as a whole person: personality, skills, ability to push the needle forward, etc.
Investors these days want a return on investment in 18-24 months, not 5 years.
This is especially painful for college grads, who don’t have specific experience to fall back on.
It's partly the result of software dev as a field maturing (quite literally, most are now older) after the ZIRP bonanza of the last couple years.
The first time this happened to me from the other side, when I was the one who was being selected for, it felt very awkward.
There is no training or university pipeline any longer?
In fact, you'd have a good chance of finding somebody smarter than anybody in your company. You are obviously filtering too much.
And it would be one thing if the system merely filtered out too many good people, but the ones the system let's pass are not the ones you are looking for! Its bad in every possible way a filter can be bad--filtering out what you want, and letting through what you don't want.
> disqualified for not meeting the basic requirements
What is a basic requirement? If a basic requirement is something like "5 years of Java experience" its filtering out topflight c++ and c# programmers. Good programmers can make anything work; bad programmers will remain bad programmers no matter what programming language is used.
> dozens interviewed
Over my 40-year career, programming interviews haven't changed at all, basically testing how much of corman, leiserson, and rivest you have memorized, and how much oof the book "Cracking the Coding interview" you can regurgitate.
That was ok 40 years ago, when programming was largely creating new systems from scratch. But these days, with all the frameworks, not so much. There's 40 more years of infrastructure which has been created, and to be a successful programmer, you need to be able to leverage other people's code. But who interviews to test that skill?
Again, the fact that the one person the system let through didn't thrive in your company just screams that it is not testing for what you really need. Such a "stringent" process shouldn't be a point of pride.
I think they've gotten worse actually. A lot of times they're led by 20-somethings that are looking for only the skills that are limited to their own shallow experience.
"Oh so you wrote compilers in C? Too bad, we're coding node.js here. Have any experience with npm?"
> Akerlof examines how the quality of goods traded in a market can degrade in the presence of information asymmetry between buyers and sellers, which ultimately leaves goods that are found to be defective after purchase in the market, noted by the term 'lemon' in the title of the paper.
> Akerlof's theory of the "Market for Lemons" paper applies to markets with information asymmetry, focusing on the used car market. Information asymmetry within the market relates to the seller having more information about the quality of the car as opposed to the buyer, creating adverse selection.[1] Adverse selection is a phenomenon where, buyers result in buying lower quality goods due to sellers not willing to sell high quality goods at the lower prices buyers are willing to pay. This can lead to a market collapse due to the lower equilibrium price and quantity of goods traded in the market than a market with perfect information.
Basic requirement is at least 5 years of professional experience. Most of the people who apply don't have that. Then after that, a large number of people who make it to the coding test can't pass the first basic test, or struggle through it: generate a random string using only the standard libraries. If you can't do that then you are not a senior developer. Or they appear to be using ChatGPT and cheat through the test. etc. etc.
And memorizing algorithms wouldn't help you pass our assessment, it's actually easier than that in my opinion.
Interviewing 600 candidates is incredibly expensive.
And no, you can't really filter by the resume alone. The candidates you don't want have become masters at forging credentials.
I understand that people gotta hustle to eat, but we get hundreds of applications, and so many resumes are fake and just an attempt to get through the screening... plus lots of cheating, sometimes just good old ChatGPT or someone whispering behind the screen, other times with people giving perfect memorized answers but not a peep when I go off script.
Makes me want to hold on to this job...
Its a classic vicious circle: if your resume gets auto-dinged if it doesn't have the right keywords, applicants are highly motivated do lard up their resumes with keywords.
And then the companies observe they are getting tons of bogus resumes, and they think they can fix it by making the filters even harder to get through....
Everybody is incentivized to race to the bottom.
Experienced, skilled engineers are rarely the same as specialists in your languages/frameworks/libraries/etc.
> quit after 2 months of barely working
So between this and inability to hire, it smells like you have a management problem, not a problem with bad strangers from the Internet.
Edited to add:
Sure, be polite, but don't be trapped into 8/16/24 hours of interviewing over the course of a week/month/months before only to get a below average offer
I also love how all the responses blame you and the company; maybe we've developed some unrealistic expectations over the past few years? I don't hear this sort of response outside of development.
I've done plenty of engineering hiring and never had a hard time finding candidates who were good enough to get the job done. Relax the qualifications, increase the compensation, and improve your company's reputation as a good place to work. Easy.
But I only have a CS minor, so...
Bolting after two months suggests something of concern.
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I've never in my life worked for more than $110K annually and I have 22 years of experience. Can do practically anything on the backend and quite a lot in terms of system administration.
This is also VERY sensitive to location, even if I'm working remote ever since 2011.
If you know someone claiming to make 200k+ as a non-specialized programming contractor, they're probably just making numbers up to impress the internet. Regular (non-tech) companies don't pay those sorts of rates to non-specialized programmers, and startups can't afford those rates. That leaves primarily FAANG or large tech companies, in which case YOE is irrelevant; they hire based on pedigree and who you know.
I made the mistake of moving to Eastern Europe, and it is very difficult to get out of here due to relocation.
I’m a senior dev in NYC with ~7 years experience working across the stack (NextJS/ReactJS, Node, Python, Postgres, SQL Server, etc). I’m also not half bad at design.
I haven’t been able to get a response much less an interview.
Edit to clarify my meaning: I’m not trying to come at you, just pointing out that this seems to be symptomatic of the problem as a whole.
Sure, they're the exception, but with enough numbers you'll always find exceptions.
- Accountants become Senior Associates at around the 3rd year.
- Lawyers becomes Senior Associates at around the 6th year.
- It seems that doctors can complete their fellowship around the 7th year mark as well.
- Reddit commenters claim they got a senior civil engineer title at the 5th year.
So, I don't know what you're talking about...
I’ve barely been getting any interviews for the NYC market. When I do, they have weird processes too. I haven’t done a single leetcode interview yet and it’s mind boggling because that’s what I’ve been prepping for this entire time.
That said, I’ve run out of places to interview. The market is insanely dry for nyc and I’m worried I’ll have to move back to SF to get hired.
This specific person has 17 years of experience. Are they a staff level engineer, critical to their group? 17 years is more than enough time to become more competent than >99% of software engineers, if they have the aptitude for it. It seems unlikely that a company would layoff someone keeping all the juniors unblocked, unless management is totally incompetent.
Or are they a senior with a decade of negotiated raises, who hasn't learned anything meaningfully new in that same time? They have something like 7 years of real learning, and the company is paying for 17. This is an obvious choice for a layoff.
I haven't seen any signs that smart people who can write software are valued any less. They are just as hard to find, and are getting paid just as much as ever.
I've seen exactly this happen in every large-scale layoff I've been first-hand witness to (both those I survived and the one that got me).
Sooo...how do you measure how good a programmer is? You've got to cut $200,000 from your budget. You can lay off 2 junior programmers, or 1 senior programmer.
How, exactly should management determine whether or not the senior programmer is worth twice what a junior programmer is?
This is not a rhetorical question, and generalities like "keeps the juniors unblocked" are not an answer, unless you can give some objective metric which really tracks that. And even if he "keeps the juniors unblocked"--how can a manager tell whether keeping the juniors unblocked is worth $200,000 a year?
Management doesn't agonize for months of who stays and who goes. The directive comes down from Olympus and they have to be executed quickly so that P.R. can move on to another narrative.
Project not making progress => senior gets involved => project making progress. Or senior gets involved and some architecture decision gets changed to alleviate some risk.
If the senior is doing this but its a visibility problem, then it may suck but they also need to self-advocate if the manager isn't proactively keeping track of their team(like they are supposed to be getting paid to).
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Bingo. It takes a buyer and a seller to close a deal.
Supply going the wrong way with layoffs, demand going the wrong way with interest rates.
Like a traffic jam, takes time to unwind the backlog.