Stop complaining and pay programmers more • Hacker News Board

Re: Stop complaining and pay programmers more

#41

Post by kjksf » Thu, Jul 01, 2010, 3:26 AM UTC

There are 2 problems with your proposed solution.

a) Salary is rarely disclosed in a job posting. Salary negotiations usually happen after a candidate was interviewed and deemed worth hiring.

b) Even if you were to disclose a salary in a job post, an unusually high salary might make it easier to find a qualified programmer (because more people will apply) but it is not likely to increase an average quality of submitted resume, so you'll still have to look at 200 resumes to find 1 good candidate.

Re: Stop complaining and pay programmers more

#42

Post by mkn » Thu, Jul 01, 2010, 3:32 AM UTC

baddox wrote: post #25

mkn wrote: post #18

If you've been around yc for more than a month, you've doubtless seen a number of links to articles on motivation as it pertains to creative activities like software development. The consensus is pretty clear. Incentives hurt productivity in creative activities. This seems to have something to do with the relationship between creative effort and intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation. The prospect of an incentive seems t…

I don't think that's necessarily the case. If you're looking for very talented programming, chances are they'll already have a somewhat decent job. To pull them from that job to yours, you'll have to offer at least as much as they're already making. Sure, 60,000 USD a year may be plenty, but someone making 65k will probably immediately subconsciously ignore the ad (unless of course they're very displeased with their…

This just begs the question, though. If you assume that talent chases money and nothing else, then it follows that talent chases money and nothing else.

Particularly your second point about developers ignoring jobs salaried at less than their current pay. Working in a toxic environment, or doing meaningless work, or staying where one's range of expression is limited, all have a cost. You won't know until you get there, but when you do, you will.

Re: Stop complaining and pay programmers more

#43

Post by tkahnoski » Thu, Jul 01, 2010, 3:32 AM UTC

amock wrote: post #4

staunch wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It should improve the ratio though.

Maybe, maybe not. I think a better way to filter people would be something like Justin.tv or Facebook does where they have applicants write code as part of the application. I don't have any experience with hiring so i don't have any real data, but I'd love to know how effective those are.

Company I work for issues a basic data structures test to be completed in 1 hour for all resumes worth their paper (about 10 to 15 out of 100 candidates). The test boils down to 'fill in these two functions'. About 20% finish both functions correctly in an hour (I still had an infinite recursion at the 1 hour mark and submitted a correct entry 10 minutes later).

In conjunction with a phone interview we typically only have an actual sitdown with 2 to 4 candidates out of the initial pool of 100. We recruit out of college so resumes get handed in like candy, but this process has effectively helped us find candidates that are at least capable of learning the monolithic code base and getting fully up and running in a few months.

Our company still has an absolute terrible code base. It is very feasible to nuke skilled programmers once you have them.

Re: Stop complaining and pay programmers more

#44

Post by jafl5272 » Thu, Jul 01, 2010, 3:32 AM UTC

mikemainguy wrote: post #34

ojbyrne wrote: post #28

I have a simple theory. Most managers are still educated according to Taylor's Scientific Theory of Management, where the managers are more intelligent than the "factors of production," and their role is to "scientifically" direct their work so that they create additional value (which is multiplied by how many workers they have reporting to them). Their salaries reflect that model, and thus is proportional to the sal…

That's silly, physicians, mechanics, lawyers, and many other skilled tradesmen are just like programmers. The problem is that many folks see programmers as somehow different than these folks.

But lawyers don't normally work in a management hierarchy, do they? And I'm pretty sure hospital administrators hate physicians just as much as managers hate programmers. (Not all of them do, of course, but I'm guessing it's similar.)

Re: Stop complaining and pay programmers more

#45

Post by damoncali » Thu, Jul 01, 2010, 3:34 AM UTC

jasonlotito wrote: post #36

damoncali wrote: post #7

I think you have it exactly backwards. The best programmers I know seem to be indifferent to cash. They work on the most interesting project they can find that pays them enough to live. Hiring people like that is really tough.

> The best programmers I know seem to be indifferent to cash. No, they do care about cash. How do I know? >They work on the most interesting project they can find that pays them enough to live. There. That's why. If they weren't making enough money to meet their needs, they'd be looking to trade up. Money isn't the only answer. Everyone likes to talk about how money isn't the solution. I'm pretty sure every one is ma…

Yes, but offering more money to someone who feels like they already make enough is amazingly ineffective. My point is that, in my experience, great programmers place a much higher value on doing interesting work than they put on making more money.

Re: Stop complaining and pay programmers more

#46

Post by danudey » Thu, Jul 01, 2010, 3:41 AM UTC

scott_s wrote: post #17

timr wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"How will offering a higher salary deter less qualified people?" You've got it exactly backwards: it's not intended to deter the unqualified, it's meant to attract the qualified. And yes, high salaries do tend to attract good people. Maybe not exclusively , but it's an important factor. So, if the complaint is that "there are no good programmers" (and we assume that your screening process isn't totally arbitrary), th…

You may attract more qualified people, but the number of unqualified people may increase as well. Put another way, you may get more qualified people in absolute numbers, but the signal-to-noise ratio could go up, too.

One option is to find a qualified technical individual - either someone on staff (such as a systems administrator), or someone from outside the company whose opinion you trust (perhaps a service provider, or perhaps the lead developer at your friend's startup, etc.).

Find someone who doesn't actually want the job, but who has the skills to help you narrow things down. Trim out the people who obviously aren't qualified (or who didn't even read the job application properly). Pay him by the hour (his normal IT wage, $75-150/hr, whatever he's worth) to sift through the resumes you've narrowed it down to. Have him pick out the most qualified or most interesting candidates with little annotations as to why yes or why no. Doesn't have to be complex - notes like 'Only Microsoft experience listed', or 'lots of experience with web app development' or 'he lasted four years at BlahTech; if he weren't awesome they'd have fired him after three months', or 'he wrote half the code on the database system you're using'.

It's something he could probably do in his spare time, lounging at home on the couch with a stack of PDFs. If he spends five hours at $100/hr over the course of a week, that's $500 that went towards not wasting your time in useless interviews, or less risk of hiring the wrong person and wasting far, far more. That could be a dozen first-round phone interviews you've skipped over by narrowing the candidates down. If each interview is an hour long, that's a day and a half of everyone's time saved.

It's pretty easy to find someone with technical skill if you do your research; the hard part is finding someone who's looking for a job, or at least the one you're offering specifically. A 'clueless' manager won't know what to look for in a candidate, but if they can narrow things down and then hire someone else who can, it can save a lot of time and money.

Re: Stop complaining and pay programmers more

#47

Post by xenophanes » Thu, Jul 01, 2010, 3:42 AM UTC

How exactly does offering a higher salary prevent hordes of unqualified candidates from applying?

Re: Stop complaining and pay programmers more

#48

Post by danudey » Thu, Jul 01, 2010, 3:43 AM UTC

dedward wrote: post #23

vaksel wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd imagine the incompetent ones wouldn't bother applying to jobs that are "way out of their league". If you are "sucky" you might still apply for a $60K job, thinking that you might slide through. But you wouldn't bother applying to a $100K job, thinking that there'd be way more competent people applying so it'd be a waste of time

You'd imagine that, but you'd be wrong - there are a great many technical employees who don't realize they are way out of their league and will apply anyway.

"Hey, I've got 'two years of experience with .NET'! I remember, because it was my birthday last week and on my birthday two years ago I wrote a little digital clock app from a tutorial I found in a magazine. Man, who ever thought ten minutes in Notepad would net me a $100k job! I'm totally going to apply, and when I get this job I'm never working at another Burger King again!"

Re: Stop complaining and pay programmers more

#49

Post by mkramlich » Thu, Jul 01, 2010, 3:44 AM UTC

mikemainguy wrote: post #34

ojbyrne wrote: post #28

I have a simple theory. Most managers are still educated according to Taylor's Scientific Theory of Management, where the managers are more intelligent than the "factors of production," and their role is to "scientifically" direct their work so that they create additional value (which is multiplied by how many workers they have reporting to them). Their salaries reflect that model, and thus is proportional to the sal…

That's silly, physicians, mechanics, lawyers, and many other skilled tradesmen are just like programmers. The problem is that many folks see programmers as somehow different than these folks.

Doctors and lawyers can't engage in their profession since the age of 10 or so, like programmers can. Doctors generally cannot be self-taught like programmers (what practice surgery on a neighbor?). Programmers can literally envision things in their minds, and then make them come to life after putting hands on keyboard -- there's no effective equivalent in medicine and law. (Biology/biochem/chem, sure.) Also doctors and lawyers have to be accredited by a government board at least at the state level, programmers do not. Doctors and lawyers generally have to spend (or go into debt for) 10's to 100's of thousands of US dollars before being officially allowed to practice in their field -- programmers do not. And in general, the cost of mistakes in programming are small, with no lives or fortunes at stake (in the general case.), unlike law and medicine. Lastly, from what I can tell, in the US the average programmer will make anywhere from 1/2 to more likely 1/10 what a lawyer or doctor will make in their respective careers.

There are many differences between the professions of programming, medicine and law. So it's hard to make sweeping generalizations and use that to draw definitive conclusions.

Programming is very different.

Re: Stop complaining and pay programmers more

#50

Post by runT1ME » Thu, Jul 01, 2010, 3:45 AM UTC

mkn wrote: post #18

If you've been around yc for more than a month, you've doubtless seen a number of links to articles on motivation as it pertains to creative activities like software development. The consensus is pretty clear. Incentives hurt productivity in creative activities. This seems to have something to do with the relationship between creative effort and intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation. The prospect of an incentive seems t…

You're looking at the problem in the short term. What offering more money can do is increase the prestige of a profession, and increase the number of intelligent people going into the field.

Right now a large majority of very smart, creative people are going into medicine because they want to be challenged and most likely also want the prestige and security of a well paying job. I know more than a few very bright friends who took some CS classes in college and weren't challenged, they ended up going into physics.

Software Engineering should be a high prestige job, to better attract talent to the field, not necessarily to keep your star programmer working for you.