Why would you want full time permanent workers? In theory, you shouldn't have to match FAANG rates since you should be hiring a different class of developer (who couldn't make it at FAANG, like bad at LeetCode).
Ask HN: How to attract perm Snr Engs when the contract market is so lucrative?
181–190 of 424 posts
Re: Ask HN: How to attract perm Snr Engs when the contract market is so lucrative?
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 5. Raises that matter. Not some 1 or 2 pct insult. There's no excuse for that. None. Is a big one. I am very unsure why companies seem so reluctant to do this when the cost of hiring and training a replacement are non-negligible.
Because it works? With those 1 or 2 percent raises being a norm almost everywhere, it's hardly a reason to actually leave the company. And saving for not doing 5 to 10 percent on everyone every year are much bigger than an occasional hiring and training costs.
>With those 1 or 2 percent raises being a norm almost everywhere, it's hardly a reason to actually leave the company.
But it is a reason to leave the company because you can easily get 10% or more switching jobs.
>occasional hiring and training costs.
Hiring and training costs are enormous, and they aren't occasional when you're talking about software companies with very high turnover. If you're incentivizing job hopping every few years, the average programmer at your company could be spending 25% or more of their tenure ramping up to full capacity.
Re: Ask HN: How to attract perm Snr Engs when the contract market is so lucrative?
#183I know this doesn't directly answer your question, but here is why the company I work for currently is able to keep me. 1. Interesting work [0]. My day to day is not a slog. I find it challenging and stimulating. 2. I get to the freedom to make decisions. My manager tells me, "I know you have this, so just do it." If I fail (we all do occasionally. Some things just don't work), they don't let the bus hit me. We figur…
This. I was going to write out my own list, but you covered everything I wanted to say.
I would counter that most companies can't attract or retain talent because they don't really want it. Most of the work that needs to be done in the world doesn't require the top 5 percent of the pool.
Re: Ask HN: How to attract perm Snr Engs when the contract market is so lucrative?
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, just as for every company that actually offers competitive payrates there are a dozen who just say they do. But it's not like not caring about management practices magically makes a company good at them either.
You wrote almost exactly the same thing as the other person who replied. I have to ask (both you and jameshart): What makes you so defensive of Agile? What benefit have you seen it bring? Truly curious, not trying to bait anybody here. My experience with Agile—except when another engineer and I basically stealthed rapid development into a company with 12-month release cycles in the mid-2000s—has been overwhelmingly n…
Why do I 'defend' agile?
I guess... for one thing, I have, multiple times in my career, been part of technology organizations that have positively transformed their relationship with business stakeholders by getting the business to buy the underlying truth: building software is a learning exercise; the requirements can and will change.
And the frameworks you have to put in place to make that kind of relationship work, to replace the arbitrary deadlines and deathmarches? Turns out 'agile practice' has a bunch of useful ideas for those.
Teams have limited capacity for 'work in progress'. The upcoming work can be prioritized on a backlog. Loose sizing estimates can help us make decisions about trading off time and features. You can only have one top priority at a time. It helps to let teams understand what problem they are trying to solve, not just tell them to implement a piece of a solution.
That's what I value when I talk about 'agile'. A bunch of useful ideas stolen from scrum and kanban and lean and so on that actually help put developers in a position to solve the right problems in the right way, and get 'management' off their back.
I'm also a fan of daily planning meetings to facilitate collaboration inside teams. I like retrospectives as a way to identify ways for teams to improve how they work. I like short fixed-duration iterations which deliver working code. I like pairing on problems. I like continuous integration and deployment and automated tests written alongside the code. Those are good practices that we, as a small team of developers, can use to help one another do good work, and ship working software.
And those ideas are all also stolen from things like scrum and XP and TDD and devops, which are also all 'agile' practices.
If someone tells me they don't like agile I am confused because... I don't know why you wouldn't want to work on teams that follow those kinds of practices.
I do get that plenty of people have been subjected to environments that use things with the same names as these things in ways that aren't remotely agile. But throwing out the idea that daily standups are a good idea because you've been subjected to a bad implementation of them is like saying you never want to use a programming language that has strings because PHP's string coercion sucks.
I find these practices helpful, and better than not following them. I've been lucky to get to enjoy working in environments that use them, rather than have them badly forced upon me.
Re: Ask HN: How to attract perm Snr Engs when the contract market is so lucrative?
#185I'm going to be a curmudgeonly contrarian in this thread. You can highlight the text of my comment to make it easier to read after the incoming downvotes. :) I'm not desperately searching for work-life balance, using the latest fad of a technical stack, remoting, unlimited vacation, having the best free snacks in the break room, etc. Sure, at a superficial level, all that stuff sounds great. I'll make use of the in-o…
this mini-rant you posted about Basecamp is not just a wild tangent completely unrelated to the topic of discussion, you're also making things up that have no correspondence to the reality of the situation.
to say "They cultivated a workforce that was more concerned with airing political grievances than they were with the success of the company" is just absurd.
they lost Sam Stephenson, who had been there 15 years and authored a sizeable amount of their open source. to shine as an open source contributor at a company with DHH, you've got to produce a lot of good work.
the guy who kicked off the firestorm was another long-term employee, Ryan Singer, and it's true that he did it by posting about politics. (specifically, praising Breitbart.) but he posted about politics after a decade or more of doing great work for the success of the company.
in each case, these people absolutely proved their commitment to the success of the company. and there is absolutely no evidence that the specifics of the political division even had anything to do with airing grievances per se.
if you're going to go off on a wild tangent, at least talk about things that actually happened in real life.
Re: Ask HN: How to attract perm Snr Engs when the contract market is so lucrative?
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 5. Raises that matter. Not some 1 or 2 pct insult. There's no excuse for that. None. Is a big one. I am very unsure why companies seem so reluctant to do this when the cost of hiring and training a replacement are non-negligible.
Because it works? With those 1 or 2 percent raises being a norm almost everywhere, it's hardly a reason to actually leave the company. And saving for not doing 5 to 10 percent on everyone every year are much bigger than an occasional hiring and training costs.
> Because it works?
Only if you have people who crave stability more than they need/want more compensation or who are invested in the work with you (i.e. they find it _really_ interesting). Otherwise it just creates churn, as people need to leave to get much of a bump up and leave the next place next time they want a bump up too.
So it only works overall if most people are in the "wanting stability" group.
This is probably part of the driver towards contract work rather than perm: if you need to switch jobs regularly to keep improving your conditions, then why not have the extra flexibility and/or extra compensation of working contract?
Re: Ask HN: How to attract perm Snr Engs when the contract market is so lucrative?
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
I contracted for 10 years, then switched to a full-time job at a unicorn. Salary-wise, I calculated my yearly netto for the last contracting year, and submitted it to the HR as the netto salary I want to have. They approved in a blink of an eye. The main problem with contracting is lack of career path and random, not very interesting projects where the contractor has little say. The downside of employee life is non-t…
What is personality training?
We had a dumbed down MBTI offspring. And a security training. And the bias/unconscious bias/unknown bias training. And a few more that I can not remember.
Re: Ask HN: How to attract perm Snr Engs when the contract market is so lucrative?
#188I know this doesn't directly answer your question, but here is why the company I work for currently is able to keep me. 1. Interesting work [0]. My day to day is not a slog. I find it challenging and stimulating. 2. I get to the freedom to make decisions. My manager tells me, "I know you have this, so just do it." If I fail (we all do occasionally. Some things just don't work), they don't let the bus hit me. We figur…
> 5. Raises that matter. Not some 1 or 2 pct insult. There's no excuse for that. None.
This x100.
I don't understand why companies see this as acceptable, especially when market rates might be so much higher.
Re: Ask HN: How to attract perm Snr Engs when the contract market is so lucrative?
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because it works? With those 1 or 2 percent raises being a norm almost everywhere, it's hardly a reason to actually leave the company. And saving for not doing 5 to 10 percent on everyone every year are much bigger than an occasional hiring and training costs.
>With those 1 or 2 percent raises being a norm almost everywhere, it's hardly a reason to actually leave the company. But it is a reason to leave the company because you can easily get 10% or more switching jobs. >occasional hiring and training costs. Hiring and training costs are enormous, and they aren't occasional when you're talking about software companies with very high turnover. If you're incentivizing job hop…
>But it is a reason to leave the company because you can easily get 10% or more switching jobs.
Depends on the company. Mine is 100% remote since COVID, has generous benefits, a strict 9-5 M-F culture, and plenty of interesting work to do as much (or as little) as I have an appetite for. I make maybe 10% under market rate, but it would take at least a 50% raise to get me to leave. That's never happening, as it would be well over what anyone short of FAANG would pay for a senior dev, so there are definitely intangibles about a work environment that are worth more to me than another $15-$20k a year.
Re: Ask HN: How to attract perm Snr Engs when the contract market is so lucrative?
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I don't understand this. How can someone trust you that you picked up some new skill if you have no experience in it. Do you put it on your resume anyways? How can somone even pickup software sales ( for example) on their own free time. Well, for anything which produces tangible output you can show off (I'm obviously thinking of programming) it's fairly straightforward to prove you can do it. Software sales? Yeah,…
> it's fairly straightforward to prove you can do it. How? What do you put on your resume ? I am genuinely curious. Forget about sales, how do you prove that you can now implement their machine learning projects.
Contractors can be let go immediately with almost no repercussions, so the bar for engaging them is much lower than the bar for hiring a full-time employee.
When I was contracting, companies would generally contract me for a week or 2 based on nothing but me telling them I could do something. If I delivered on that initial result, they'd come back for more.