Stop complaining and pay programmers more • Hacker News Board

Re: Stop complaining and pay programmers more

#51

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

ChRoss wrote: post #22

"Rare commodities are expensive." I do agree on this one. However, money is not always the primary motivation/reason for people to join you. My friend once told me about how he asked his team, what is the reason for them to join a company. From tens of reasons, they finally come out with two only: FUN and TEAM.

The problem is that when you interview you can't really judge those. At best during interview you meet a few team members for an hour each and maybe another hour during team lunch and everyone (including you) puts their best foot forward. There's no way to tell if they'll be a great team to work with or a daily nightmare.

The same goes for fun: rarely you know exactly what you'll be doing or how interesting it'll be.

The thing about money is that easy to compare. If you have 2 offers from companies that are both startups, both well funded with seemingly great people and interesting problems to solve, it's very compelling to decide based on salary, because all other aspects are hard to compare and judge before you spend a few months working at a company.

Re: Stop complaining and pay programmers more

#52

Post by ryanbigg » Thu, Jul 01, 2010, 3:46 AM UTC

chime wrote: post #12

j_baker wrote: post #5

You have to understand: there's more to hiring programmers than paying lots of money. If that were the case, we wouldn't have had a dot-com bust and software companies would be dominated by MBAs. That's the hard part of hiring programmers. How do you incentivize the good ones to work for you? If you have a solution to that problem, I suspect you'll be a very much in-demand person.

> How do you incentivize the good ones to work for you? If you have a solution to that problem, I suspect you'll be a very much in-demand person. Bonuses, perks, and congrats on jobs well-done. If I spend 40 hours between Dec 31 and Jan 2 writing up a new wireless barcoding system because the powers that be decided at the last minute to begin the new year with a different process for warehousing, I better get a damn…

As a programmer bonus and perks are definitely incentives, but a nice steady "I love your work" kind of vibe is a great way to keep me in my job.

Re: Stop complaining and pay programmers more

#53

Post by coffeemug » Thu, Jul 01, 2010, 3:47 AM UTC

I suppose this refers to us (and our Will the real programmers please stand up post). If it doesn't, excuse our self-centeredness and kindly disregard this message.

Our salary structure is designed to select for exactly the type of people we want to attract - the kinds of people that will go through walls to bend the world to their will, for some deeply ingrained reason unknown to anyone but them. For people like that, we pay an incredibly high salary that they're unlikely to find anywhere else (2.25% of everyone's contribution on the high end). If you're the type of person who wants to change the world and have a shot of building a one billion dollar business while doing it, you're unlikely to find a higher compensation anywhere other than choosing to start your own business.

If you're interested in having a stable, $200K job, RethinkDB is not for you. Neither of these choices is better or worse, simply different. It's a question of temperament. We weren't complaining, we were working to recruit great programmers who are driven to change the world. This is exactly what the post accomplished.

Re: Stop complaining and pay programmers more

#54

Post by mkramlich » Thu, Jul 01, 2010, 3:48 AM UTC

mikemainguy wrote: post #29

But there's a perverse side to this. By offering MORE compensation, it would seem likely that MORE unqualified people will apply. For your logic to work, we'd need to show that making a skill more expensive would automatically cause inept people to stop applying. If that doesn't hold true, you could be throwing away 999 out of 1000 candidates instead of 199 out of 200.

That's what I concluded too! If you raise industry standard average pay it's just going to attract even more incompetent people and therefore the flood of applications from non-programmers will increase.

Re: Stop complaining and pay programmers more

#55

Post by kranner » Thu, Jul 01, 2010, 3:49 AM UTC

vaksel wrote: post #8

amock wrote: post #2

How will offering a higher salary deter less qualified people? It seems like it will attract more of all kinds of programmers.

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

The ethical policy you're imputing to most 'programmers' in the real world is far from the reality of it.

I regret not having applied to many great opportunities as a younger programmer because I filtered myself out, when many who are worse off never do.

Self-promotion: http://blog.codeboff.in/2010/06/25/good-programmers-are-hard...

Re: Stop complaining and pay programmers more

#56

Post by jurjenh » Thu, Jul 01, 2010, 3:50 AM UTC

I don't know if it would work, but has anyone tried or heard of a job posting with a "name your price" salary? Similar to the "scariest pricing idea" that was on HN a while ago (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1279660). I'm not sure if this would improve the S/N ratio or make the whole thing more complicated - my idea of what I'm worth is probably quite different to someone else.

Re: Stop complaining and pay programmers more

#57

Post by hello_moto » Thu, Jul 01, 2010, 3:53 AM UTC

damoncali wrote: post #45

jasonlotito wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I'm interested to know who they are. I'm dead serious.

If "great programmers" work attitude is based on mood swing, business owner will be in danger hiring "great programmers". Cause what you just said boils down to human's mood to perform. "I'd like to do this because that's what I want to do now, I don't like to do X,Y,Z" where X,Y,Z are usually "testing, documentation, and mentoring".

Re: Stop complaining and pay programmers more

#58

Post by slashclee » Thu, Jul 01, 2010, 3:53 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.

You mean the signal-to-noise ratio could go down, right?

Re: Stop complaining and pay programmers more

#59

Post by Cornus » Thu, Jul 01, 2010, 3:54 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.

Second most important thing after judging whether you could handle being stuck in a hot office with the guy for a month.

Re: Stop complaining and pay programmers more

#60

Post by hello_moto » Thu, Jul 01, 2010, 3:55 AM UTC

tkahnoski wrote: post #43

amock wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Upvote for being very honest.

Isn't this what happened throughout the industry? (with a very few exceptions).

This is exactly what makes my belief about "great programmers" just went out of the window: no matter how great an individual is, the fact that plenty software houses have terrible code base show something else.

People can blame the businesses, the time-to-market, the deadline or whatnot and I believe you guys.

But at the same time, are you being fair toward your profession at the same time?

If great programmers do exist, I'm expecting them to change these ugly code bases everywhere to the point where 50% of any companies out there would have good code base (and that includes unit-tests)