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Hacker News' “Who is Hiring?” thread, part 2, remote and locations

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Re: Hacker News' “Who is Hiring?” thread, part 2, remote and locations

#141

Post by pat_space »

im_down_w_otp wrote: post #139
devonkim wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those of us that have worked as remote engineers for a lot of our career know that most companies in general are just plain not managed in a way that would work for companies that have lots of remote workers, especially larger companies. Policies that discourage and undermine remote work that are popular with large companies include: 1. Mandatory all-hands meeting times 2. Banning popular communications platforms lik…

You left out: 5. Incompetent IT Ops mostly staffed by cheap contractors to offset overpaying for terrible hardware and software from Cisco to ensure a complete inability to reliably utilize the corporate VPN.

It was a sad day when my old company shuttered the web-based VPN portal, which allowed us to access the company intranet through a browser window. Closing it down required us remote workers to connect and send all of our traffic through AnyConnect, killing our connection speeds. Come to think of it, we were still running Windows XP on all of our laptops when I left in mid-2015 (laboratory information systems).

Re: Hacker News' “Who is Hiring?” thread, part 2, remote and locations

#142

Post by branchless »

metafunctor wrote: post #108
branchless wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The system of usury against land ensures that land costs adapt to absorb all available income after food/clothing/energy costs have been accounted for. Why is silicon valley more expensive to rent in? Because people came with money and the banks agreed to loan at a multiple of the new wage ceiling. If wages increase x4 guess what will happen? We need to stop banks creating debt to issue against land otherwise it will…

This seem to be exactly how it works. A lot of states and countries have tried to fix the problem by introducing housing benefits – but guess who, in the end, gets that money?

Housing benefit is the worst thing you can do. It's landlord benefit. Land value tax is the way forward.

Re: Hacker News' “Who is Hiring?” thread, part 2, remote and locations

#143

Post by S4M »

p4wnc6 wrote: post #116
tensor wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At these rates it doesn't make any sense for any company to hire in the bay area. There are amazing engineers elsewhere in the US and in the world who have much more reasonable salary expectations and also live in places with much more reasonable living expenses. Bay area engineers like to pretend that there are no people of their calibre elsewhere in the world, but that is just flat out wrong.

Not really. Developers who are good enough to command that wage in the Bay Area, but who live elsewhere, also know how good they are. They might be willing to take a slight pay cut from what the lives-in-Bay-Area person would be paid, but whatever the pay cut is, it will not be proportional to cost of living. E.g. if I could earn 400k living in SF, but you offer to pay me 200K living in Lincoln, Nebraska, I'll turn y…

You have to bear in mind that the dollars productivity of a programmer (how much money that programmer brings) doesn't only depend of his/her skills, but also of the company he's working. A programmer can bring tens of millions a year if he works in HFT in a hedge fund, much less otherwise. Companies in the Bay area have access to more funding, and are (I assume) willing to pay good programmers the high salaries you mention to be able to bring quicker their products to market. A standard company isn't in that situation and paying 400k for a top programmer, as good as he may be, isn't probably just worth it (at least if that programmer is an individual contributor).

Re: Hacker News' “Who is Hiring?” thread, part 2, remote and locations

#144

Post by progressive_dad »

thefastlane wrote: post #90
macjohnmcc wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You couldn't afford to get married if you can't afford an engagement ring.

not sure what you mean?

I think I got the gist of OP's comment... Computer programmers make higher than the average salary. If you're barely making ends meet as a programmer your significant other is probably NOT making ends meet. Living together and sharing expenses saves some money but you'll probably be just about back where you started once you're married and co-habitating with your spouse.

Then comes kids...

Re: Hacker News' “Who is Hiring?” thread, part 2, remote and locations

#145

Post by wolfgke »

tensor wrote: post #104
RKoutnik wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

400k is market rate for top-quality bay area engineers, depending on specialty [0]. You don't see job ads for those folks, because hackers like that don't read them. [0] And even for lower-paying specialties (like UI/UX), 400k isn't even 2x market rate.

At these rates it doesn't make any sense for any company to hire in the bay area. There are amazing engineers elsewhere in the US and in the world who have much more reasonable salary expectations and also live in places with much more reasonable living expenses. Bay area engineers like to pretend that there are no people of their calibre elsewhere in the world, but that is just flat out wrong.

> There are amazing engineers elsewhere in the US and in the world who have much more reasonable salary expectations and also live in places with much more reasonable living expenses.

Then hire them either remotely or open an office at a place where the living expenses are much cheaper (but the latter also costs money for the company which it could also spend in salaries). Where is the problem?

Re: Hacker News' “Who is Hiring?” thread, part 2, remote and locations

#146

Post by erkkie »

dschiptsov wrote: post #24

Remote is still rare, it seems, because usual sweatshops are traditional habitat for pointy haired bosses and other parasitic "management". For remote, the way Linux kernel or BSDs are being developed, one needs nothing but git, emacs and browser (well, in case of Linux also a working mail) and no management at all. How could, say, Amazon, even hypothetically switch to remote? More seriously, there is no market for c…

Companies do not pay for code, they pay for problems solved, risks mitigated or value delivered.

Re: Hacker News' “Who is Hiring?” thread, part 2, remote and locations

#147

Post by jedberg »

MichaelGG wrote: post #137
jedberg wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's legal. It's a huge pain in the ass to hire someone whose physical address is outside the US if your company is based in the US. Heck, it's a huge pain in the ass just to hire someone outside of a state you aren't already operating in.

Just ask the person to form a company and hire that company? I've never heard of anyone having any difficulty with this. And even if you're paying an individual you just need to get their W8-BEN or withhold 30%; it's not that difficult. Or, what are you referring to?

Forming a company isn't all that easy. Also, now that person has to pay their own SS and Medicare tax, or if they form a C corp, they have to file incorporation papers and tax returns and filing fees and...

Also, if I pay a person through their company like a contractor for too long, the IRS comes down on me because they assume I'm trying to skirt tax laws (and rightly so, because that's basically what you're suggesting).

Re: Hacker News' “Who is Hiring?” thread, part 2, remote and locations

#148

Post by a3n »

TrickzOnU wrote: post #75
vonmoltke wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with everything you say about the economics of the situation, but ours is the omly industry I know of where inability to make enough money to pay for a sufficient workforce translates into a workforce shortage. A cattle rancher isn't going to compalain about a "ranchhand shortage" if she can't afford to pay enough to attract them.

It is not. The rancher would just hire an illegal immigrant often and it happens all the time on farms and restaurants. It doesn't fly in office environments and in positions where the salary cant just disappear in the books. Secondly, only the technology industry has a massive pipeline of overseas workers available...so naturally there is constantly a "shortage" as a means to increase the pipeline of overseas worker…

The whole thing is based on unrealistic expectations. People work somewhere in the Bay Area, or launch a startup there; it's one of the most expensive areas in the country, maybe the world. Then they don't want to pay enough so that there is no shortage of employees.

So then the talk turns to bringing in H1Bs who will work for the low end of the "prevailing" (Ha!) salary.

Why don't these companies cut to the chase and just open an office in India? Or have the entire operation there?

Or are some of them actually not trying to change the world by delivering better toast to your door, and they just want to live in the Bay Area?

Re: Hacker News' “Who is Hiring?” thread, part 2, remote and locations

#149

Post by aphextron »

devonkim wrote: post #114
ryanSrich wrote: post #43

Remote work is not a silver bullet for solving the faux work shortage. Aside from the fact that there is no shortage in the first place [1], remote work is still very new. Without proper operations in place and a solid, tested, management structure you'll end up with a hodgepodge of culture and unhappy employees. I used to be bullish on remote work until I actually started doing it. It can certainly work, and I still…

Those of us that have worked as remote engineers for a lot of our career know that most companies in general are just plain not managed in a way that would work for companies that have lots of remote workers, especially larger companies. Policies that discourage and undermine remote work that are popular with large companies include: 1. Mandatory all-hands meeting times 2. Banning popular communications platforms lik…

>2. Banning popular communications platforms like Slack, Google Chat, Skype

What? Who would do this?

Re: Hacker News' “Who is Hiring?” thread, part 2, remote and locations

#150

Post by idrios »

p4wnc6 wrote: post #116
tensor wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At these rates it doesn't make any sense for any company to hire in the bay area. There are amazing engineers elsewhere in the US and in the world who have much more reasonable salary expectations and also live in places with much more reasonable living expenses. Bay area engineers like to pretend that there are no people of their calibre elsewhere in the world, but that is just flat out wrong.

Not really. Developers who are good enough to command that wage in the Bay Area, but who live elsewhere, also know how good they are. They might be willing to take a slight pay cut from what the lives-in-Bay-Area person would be paid, but whatever the pay cut is, it will not be proportional to cost of living. E.g. if I could earn 400k living in SF, but you offer to pay me 200K living in Lincoln, Nebraska, I'll turn y…

I agree with the parent comment of this.

The bay area gets a lot of attention because it's the software capital of the world, and software has these crazy gross margins and rapid life cycles that allow companies to be born, experience explosive growth, make insane profits, (potentially) suffer radical declines, leading to a quick boom or bust. Software companies make great news stories, so the bay area gets a lot of attention, and many talented people who aren't sure where to go decide to move there.

I live there now and work out of coworking spaces where I've met a number of startup founders. Many of them are self-proclaimed visionaries hyped up by VR and AR or IoT. Few of them are as smart as my friends who are getting their Masters and PhD degrees at Duke, Wash U, or Case Western. The most impressive startup I saw in the last year was being made by a self-taught programmer/entrepreneur building his own company out of Colorado Springs.

Beyond just my anecdotal evidence, where do MIT and Harvard graduates go? Where do Georgia Tech, Rice U, John's Hopkins, Carnegie Mellon graduates go? Silicon Valley doesn't take all of their students nor just the top in their class. Some people move to DC, Seattle, Chicago, Boston, Austin, NYC, or Denver because they have family or friends there, or because the kind of work in these other cities is more appealing than The Bay.

Apologies for the rant. I realized after writing it that your 'Not really' comment was probably in response to the parent's assertion that companies should hire from outside the bay area, while I took it as 'Not really' in that there are no engineers of the same calibre outside SV.

Regardless, the amount of hubris and hype over the Bay Area is staggering when there are so many equally talented engineers all over the US.

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