Readit NewsAll of my friends are either reporting layoffs or belt tightening at work. It's hitting recent graduates and retrained workers really hard.
On the other hand, Germany is about to dramatically lower the residence permit and citizenship requirements, as it panicks about its aging population. This might further depress the wages.
The skilled worker shortage (Fachkräftemangel) is constantly in the news, although the worker response is the same as in other Western countries: have you tried paying more? Relaxing job requirements? Training people?
Like in Switzerland it's not 42.5h week but actually 47.5h if you include the unpaid lunch. When I tell this to a British/Canadian/American they are kinda surprised.
Have you been plagued by applicant fraud? We've found for all of our remote engineering roles, we get 100's of amazing applicants who are all fake (clearly not actually in the US) once you get them on a screening call. They're often reading from a script, broken english, and say strange things like they're born and raised in Texas, yet can't speak fluent English or have a heavy accent.
My best guess is it's dev shops overseas who are using an English-speaking "front" person who then delegates the work to other people with the "front" person being the one who joins company meetings, etc.
Really frustrating because it's making us have to do silly things like require photo ID verification over video on the first screening call (which I would rather not inconvenience applicants with, but there are just SO many candidates lying about residing in the US).
With our most recent role, about 60-70% of applicants were fake ("fake" = candidates who lie about living/residing in the US)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25991485 Launch HN: Opstrace (YC S19) – open-source Datadog
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22376732 Launch HN: PostHog (YC W20) – open-source product analytics
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26079389 Launch HN: SigNoz (YC W21) – Open-source alternative to DataDog
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36774611 Launch HN: Highlight.io (YC W23) – Open-source, full stack web app monitoring
The monitoring space is heating up after the Datadog IPO.
Edit 2023-07-18T22:42:00Z: added PostHog
The small team should have a lot of support in terms of an infrastructure platform, strong culture and tooling for development/testing, project management set up for them, an escalation path and check-ins where they can raise blockers. There is a template but essentially the small team is left to work how they want to work.
After the 'chunk' is delivered, there is a week of wrap up, and then a week of maintenance where people are allowed to work on whatever they think is the most pressing issue.
We also have too many decision makers. We also have too bad and always changing requirements/spec.
Yet we double every year because of pmf and a solid core product.
I think what to work on has also a big impact how productive (measured in $$$ instead of slocs) a team is.
At Google my team got $1600/wk because of the required SLA. At a startup I worked at, we didn't get paid extra, but we got an extra day of PTO for every week on call. (This is technically pointless, as we had unlimited PTO, but we did the rotation Thursday-Thursday and specifically didn't have meetings etc. on Friday so that the 2 people that were oncall last week could take a day off and not miss anything.)
Frankly, I preferred the cash. Many people on the team didn't want to be oncall, and so that meant more money for people that didn't mind, like me. It was good at the time, but certainly not for everyone.
Big companies with critical services do 24 hour oncall by having 3 offices and by having the oncall folks only be on call for their normal 8 hours. (12 hours is also somewhat do-able.) Even with this setup, extra compensation is expected. You can't go for a walk, or take lunch away from a computer, see your doctor, etc. And, you probably weren't going to work the weekend. So even 8 hours oncall requires compensation. I believe the Google SRE book goes into detail on the strategies that Google uses; SRE teams and SWE teams have different models.
At startups, this doesn't really work, because you're by definition a big company by the time you have 3 offices with dedicated SRE teams. (These places might call themselves startups so they can underpay you, but ... they're not.)
If I were starting my own company and needed oncall, I'd just expect that the founders/executive team take on the off-hours duties. You're the one whose company goes out of business if you have a bad outage. Being mad at some underpaid software engineer after the fact doesn't bring your customers back. And basically, it's unreasonable to ask people to be oncall. Some people with no life will do it, and they appreciate the cash, but other people literally don't have the ability to be available 24/7 unless you hire them an employee to take care of their kids or sick relatives or whatever.
With tech looking like a seller's market again (thanks AI!), I don't think you'll be able to build a team of talented and experienced developers if you require oncall. So get ready to do it yourself, or pay accordingly.
How often are you on call.. the whole week Mo-Su?