Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

321–330 of 424 posts

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

#321
post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you say that, perhaps, you value working software over comprehensive documentation?

I can always read source code. Any programmer worth a damn can. Docs are out of sync with the code the second the code changes in any non-trivial way. However, code always documents how it works (sometimes poorly, of course).

The code I write is going to be used for 20-30 years, and then when the platform is replaced I assume someone will read the code to see what they have to do to get the system working on the new platform. I have documentation for end-users and documentation for maintenance / troubleshooters and zoomed out documentation that explains the problems and approaches taken, and sometimes justifying any tradeoffs.

If code is temporary then it might not be worth the effort to document, but my documentation is what everybody except one person 20 years from now sees along with the user interface, so for my application the code doesn’t matter and the documentation matters quite a bit!

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

#322
post #33

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…

You’re shooting yourself in the foot by ignoring companies that take pride in offering an agile development environment. There are, sure, places that have control-through-forced-scrum as their management philosophy who will call themselves ‘agile’; but there are also places that practice exactly what you’re looking for: getting out of the way of tech practitioners, giving them direct access to stakeholders to decide…

If they're really interested in talking about how agile they are, the signal to me is that this is a management-run company, not an engineer-run company.

Plenty of engineer-run shops are lowercase a agile, but it's not something they bring up constantly.

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

#323

Focus on what FAANG can’t usually give — high signal/noise ratio, feeling of being really important and appreciated, opportunities of making big impact, near zero bureaucracy, big stock options etc. It’s basic marketing thing, no? Differentiate if you cant compete directly.

> FAANG can’t usually give

> big stock options

?

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

#324
You likely are underestimating the market rate for senior software engineers, this is a common problem for small companies that don't have too much experience in what they are hiring for.

If you're not willing to pay >$175k, you're not going to get good senior engineers.

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

#325

Full time work just doesn’t offer a competitive amount of holiday. I can contract 2/3 to 3/4 of the year and take the rest off to travel, work on my own projects, meet friends etc. The money works out about the same but 25 days leave (or whatever the standard amount is) just doesn’t cut it for me. The older I get, the more I value time over money.

> The older I get, the more I value time over money.

This! When I have enough money to take a year (or more!) leave without pay, but you say "sorry, you've used up your annual leave", the only option I'm left with is quit.

And when it comes time again to get another job, that company that wouldn't give me more time off is not going to be my first choice.

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

#326

Lots and lots of equity. For the most part, money talks. But it doesn't have to be guaranteed cash. You can offer a risky gamble instead. FAANG pays $1000, but instead you can offer a coin flip for $2200, or a snake-eyes dice-roll for $50k or something like that instead. People will tell you all kinds of other things that simply do not matter as much for people who are not already wealthy. Good team, nice people, imp…

> But give a person the choice between all those things and an extra $100k income, and I'm pretty sure you can guess what they'll choose. At least most people. i suppose "most" can mean a range of things. but i think that if money was even top 3 for somebody, we'd see them studying for FAANG interviews continuously, and applying over and over. in all my years i've run into maybe one person who behaved like that. mayb…

I think the norm now is that most people continuously study for leetcode / FAANG interviews, and the problem is that a lot of companies (maybe more than 80% ???) have taken over this ridiculous interview process now. It's infuriating and insulting, and it needs to stop.

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

#327
post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> incompetent managers or tech leads. This is one of the things that ruined my last gig. I have 3 decades of experience. Managers and tech leads are unlikely to have a fraction of that, so let me do my job. > Agile is a time stuck and time waster This was the other thing. We fell into the hands of Agile cultists (really no other way to portray them) and wound up getting buried in process, useless meetings, etc. > I'm…

Describing agile as a cult is spot-on. Regardless of its intent, I've never seen nor heard of it being implemented in a way that promotes iterative R&D on a development team. Agile is more suited toward software maintenance IMO, not building new software. Rarely are senior engineers looking for the former.

> Agile is more suited toward software maintenance IMO, not building new software.

One other learning that I've taken from big-A Agile is that it is only suited for teams where everybody is a "generalist" within the team. By "generalist" I mean that any developer on the team can work on any issue within that team's purview.

If your team is responsible for any component where only a subset of the team has the specialization to work on it, team-wide sprint planning actually hinders progress.

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

#328
post #137

Have a really bold mission and focus on autonomy and culture. Senior developers can work anywhere they want. Don’t make the job description about what they will do, but about the impact that will have. We are hiring Staff and Sr. Engineers at ClearAngel and it’s easier because our mission is so clear and empowering: build the YC 99% of online founders. The work we are doing will have ripple effects through the econom…

I don't care about the impact I will have, but I do care about what I will be doing day to day and who I will work with, and most of all, I care about being paid really well. Not because of greed but because tech metros are extremely expensive places to live, and because I want a return on my investment of years of studying, learning and sacrificing a lot of my spare time, which is something people in other professions rarely have to do.

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

#329

I 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…

> I'll take interesting work over tech stack any day. I don't give a rat's ass about language wars For me, having a Windows (Server) environment is enough to kill my interest. I know several shops in my area (mostly medical field adjacent tech) that are entirely Windows. That's probably more because of my extensive *nix background than anything. Language doesn't matter, but platform can/does to some

I'm kinda the same, except one further: I don't think I ever want to use Visual Studio again.

I cut my teeth on Emacs and find VSCode a decent compromise but Visual Studio is just such a clunky editor. Extremely limited UI customization and code highlighting options and such. I don't like it at all

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

#330
post #196

Why are they leaving? Is it just the money? Are you sure? Is there some other sweetener missing? A recruiter friend of mine says she could probably steal half of most corporation's engineers just by learning the non-financial pain points and addressing them. Businesses often have weird ideas about how nasty / ruthless they can be. Usually though its little things not even on the nasty / ruthless scale. Direction/Mana…

tell your recruiter friend to go ahead. do it. then let us know how that went.
Post reply on HN