Ask HN: Who is hiring? (January 2017)

Caura Consulting, a sponsoring organization of http://www.innerjoins.org, is looking for a very experienced Analyst to help grow the non-profit community, InnerJoin. Your job is to facilitate conversations, help answer some analytical questions, and prompt new topics for discussions.

Daily availability is required. Hours are flexible.

Flexport is a platform for global trade in an industry that comprises 15% of the global GDP. We are building products that are enabling anyone to participate in trade regardless of geographic, regulatory or logistical boundaries. By dramatically simplifying the process of importing goods from overseas, we aim to empower a new generation of entrepreneurs benefitting from the wonders of international trade.

To do so, we need a mix of brilliant technologists and logistics experts interested in solving challenges that result in reshaping a trillion dollar industry.

To keep up with our explosive growth and international expansion, we’re looking to grow the team by ~2-3 engineers per month in our downtown SF HQ.

Check us out if you:

-Want to be part of a close-knit engineering team that releases new code every day

-Take a product-first approach to building software

-Care about the real world functionality of your programming

-Have a desire to build scalable programs that standardize information flow and increase operational capacity

-Have amazing coding skills and CS fundamentals

Our stack: Our continuous releases are integrated with Travis and Github. On the frontend, we use React for the views, organize the data flow with Flux, and test our application with Jest. On the backend, we're a Rails shop riding on AWS and Postgres RDS.

Want to learn more? Email kerianne@flexport.com or check out our site @ flexport.com/careers.

Maintaining the idea of fairness is often important in the eyes of employees, but I wonder if it's actually a good idea in practice. Really, you want to hire the best people you can for the money that you've got. So with the system you have in place, if you have 2 equally skilled people, then there is a pretty big incentive to hire the cheaper one.

The end result is likely to be a bit of a skewed culture. Very skilled people are more rare than less skilled people. They are hard to hire, so you will tend to hire whoever you can find. Less skilled people are much easier to hire, so you will find them in almost any geographical location.

The end result will be a company where only the best people will be hired in the expensive region, while the inexpensive regions will have a mixed bag. Because very skilled people are rare, you will end up having inexpensive regions being overwhelmingly represented by lower skill levels (low skill -> easy to hire -> available in any geographic location -> cheaper geographic locations will be hired first)

This will create a power imbalance in the company because the highest density of high skilled workers will be geographically close and therefore in the same timezone. High skilled workers in lower paid regions may have a stigma attached to them because they come from a lower paid region -- and hence are associated with the higher occurrence of lower skilled workers. This may result in considerable friction over time.

I think you can mitigate this problem by creating a second tier pay system for your most skilled workers. This should be a harmonised pay scale and you should pay attention to trying to evenly distribute positions in this pay scale across geographic boundaries. To make it obvious which pay scale people are attached to, you can create new titles for the positions.

You will still have an "Us vs. Them" problem, but at least it will be people you have consciously decided that you want to promote in the company. It is explicitly not fair (in that not everybody is equal), but it makes a clear message of how you want the leadership to work.

It also makes salary negotiations a bit easier. Often people aspire to the highest level of compensation, even if their contributions do not warrant it. When people ask to be promoted to the special pay tier, it creates an opportunity for having a frank discussion about the person's performance. This can clear the air and set proper expectations -- or possibly indicate clearly to the employee that they aren't as valued as they wish to be. Even if someone leaves in this circumstance, it can often be to the benefit of all parties.

Hope you find this interesting/useful. It's always a tricky balancing act, so I wish you luck :-)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CrtDb88suvw

We're always looking for people who are smart and play nice with others to get things done. We're more interested in what you've been creating than how many degrees you have.

Here's our co-founder and MD, Marty Andrews, speaking about one of the visible consequences of our focus on values, open salaries:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sf5r4yLTc9k

We are currently seeking people for the following roles:

+ Mid-Level Software Developer - Ruby, Java, .NET, FrontEnd, AWS

+ Principal Product Manager

+ Senior Software Developer - Ruby, Java, .NET, FrontEnd, AWS

Get in touch with Ruby (yes, that's really her name!) at ruby@cogent.co :)

Once you have decided, definitely list the exact neighborhood with every job ad. Los Angeles is a big place and most do not want to travel to a far off area.