Ask HN: How to attract perm Snr Engs when the contract market is so lucrative?

This.

I'm a senior engineer. I'm passing good at what I do.

When I left my last company, I started looking for work in a culture that has changed significantly since the last time I'd looked for work (I was at that company for 27 years).

It was a shock. The naked and unapologetic disrespect and ageism has been pretty crazy. I threw in the towel, after a few months, and I'm now working with a nonprofit, for no money, and loving it. You couldn't drag me back into the rat race with wild horses.

I'm quite aware of the value of my skills and experience. I was actually willing to work for half that, if the work was interesting. I have my retirement set. I don't need to work, if I don't want to, but I love to work. When I die, the coroner is gonna have to rub "QWERTY" off my cheek.

I'd suggest that having a culture of basic respect for folks with experience would go a long ways towards your goal. Maybe less of the "cultural fit" stuff, and the "Draw Spunky" tests.

Experienced people can make things happen, which is what we are really after. I ran a shop with experienced C++ programmers for 25 years, and got used to doing really difficult stuff, and regularly shipping our work. One of the shocks I encountered was how rare that kind of thing is.

Many folks in the consultant market are there, because no one wants them as employees, or insist on treating them badly, when they are employees. These are folks that can write their own tickets. They don't need to be treated badly, and would often drop their gigs in a heartbeat, if they found a culture that valued and respected them.

Here's a suggestion: Hire them at market rate. Make their experience with you a joy. Down the road, say "We can't afford to keep paying you this rate, but we'd be beyond honored to have you on our staff at half that rate."

You'd be surprised. I got one of my best and most loyal senior engineers that way.

There's the old story about the retired engineer that was brought back in as a consultant to look at a problem that no one could solve. Engineers on the payroll had been looking at it for weeks, with no solution.

They looked at the system for five minutes, said "There's your problem. Just do this...", and the issue was solved.

They then invoiced the company $10,000. The company responded, saying "You only worked for ten minutes! How can you expect us to pay that much? Please resubmit the invoice with specific line items."

The engineer resubmitted the invoice:

    1. Finding the problem: $10
    2. 38 years of experience, six years of school, so I could find your problem in five minutes: $9,990

I'm a senior eng out of work for a year (per my own choice) slowly looking to get back into the market. These points are my own:

- My managers have always been a point of friction. If you hire an expert, stop telling them what they do and don't know. I'm afraid of full time work because of incompetent managers or tech leads.

- I don't care if your company is a unicorn. I care that I'm going to be happy doing the work that I do.

- Agile is a time stuck and time waster. Proudly advertising it as your Modus Operandi is a sure way to get your cold-email dumped in the trash.

- If you're approaching me claiming you've seen my work, you better not mention a technology I haven't used in a decade. I don't care, personally, if you've done your research on me, but don't act like you have if you haven't.

- My #1 priority at this point in my career is being comfortable - in work and out of work. Showing that the company cares about that - work life balance, good pat, etc. - is a little thing but helps a lot in recruiting people like me.

- I'm probably not with your product or service's target demographic (yes, even if it's some fancy SaaS). Don't knock me if I'm not. Most senior engineers I know of don't like SaaS products and tend to keep things fairly vanilla to retain control over the system. We're probably not going to use your service in our personal lives, and that's okay.

- Working remotely, especially these days, is almost a must. I want to be with family, especially now that we're making some life altering changes to catch up after the pandemic (moving, new jobs, getting married, etc.)

- Stop drowning us in processes. The more we have to play around with your gold-plated project management system, the less we're interested in writing code for you. Remember that a lot of us get by with GitHub issues and nothing else.

- A lot of us are tired of the industry. Going to be real. If you can figure out that problem, you'll be fighting us off with bats.

Yeah, I'm also a little confused. I'm in Germany, but the market for contracting isn't actually a huge deal for a lot of companies. I know a lot of Freelancers but they couldn't even work at 3/4 of the companies that employ software developers (at any level). Most of them are contracting for large businesses, and often for months at a time, but the overlap of "is available for fulltime/is available for contracting" is kinda miniscule - and on the other end of the table there might be some companies that would want to employ a contractor they like fulltime, but just as often they wouldn't as it's just a time-limited "overstaffing".

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-technical meetings, personality trainings and yearly reviews. They make me feel like a kid.

I also miss the luxury of buying VAT-free tax-deducible gadgets.

Start by not calling them Snr Engs. That makes it sound like you don't value them and view them as a comodity that you can't be arsed to write out completely. Not to mention, it won't come up in a search when active, motivated candidates are looking for new opportunities.

This is not just a nitpick. If someone emailed me looking for a "Snr Eng", the email is getting deleted and flagged as spam.