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Stop complaining and pay programmers more

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Stop complaining and pay programmers more

#141

Post by ido »

timr wrote: post #19
scott_s wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 may attract more qualified people, but the number of unqualified people may increase as well." ...which is why you have a screening process. When people are complaining that there are no good programmers (and this is a common complaint on HN; it's not just a straw man), there's at least one of two things going on: 1) Their screening process sucks. 2) They aren't attracting good programmers. High salaries help wi…

Maybe the interviewing process is different where you are, but around here the salary is normally not mentioned in the posting - you'd normally get asked about your salary expectations once you've been through the interview.

Re: Stop complaining and pay programmers more

#142

Post by parbo »

binaryfinery wrote: post #133
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.

Assuming you get everything else right, you have to offer more money. It has been suggested that this will cause your inbox to fill up too fast. How about an online test? A web server that runs sandboxed C? Or maybe a character in Lambda MOO that requires you to complete a "quest" in a time frame that would require a programmed response? (telnet://lambda.moo.mug.org:8888)

Spotify recently ran an online programming competition to find suitable candidates.

Re: Stop complaining and pay programmers more

#143

Post by dirtyaura »

I feel that good/great programmers ask too little. Because there's order of magnitude of variance in skill sets and productivity, there should be much more variance in salaries.

In Finland, if you leave out top 0.5%, the variance is between 2000€-5000€. And most of it settles around 3000-4000€. Finland is very eqalitarian society when it comes to salaries and thus that has to be taken into account. But still. 2.5 is not much, think how much variance there is in salaries of managers, lawyers, doctors.

How's it in States, what are the typical salaries for good or great programmers vs. below-average progammers? Leave out top 0.5% - i.e. rare individuals with specialized skill sets in e.g. bank security.

Re: Stop complaining and pay programmers more

#144

Post by RiderOfGiraffes »

Having tried this approach I can tell you that offering more money results in perhaps a doubling of the number of barely competent programmers, a ten-fold increase in the number of completely clueless, and no apparent increase in the number of people we'd actually want.

My results are not statistically valid, I've only gone through the hiring cycle five times, but my impression from actually trying it is that salary is not what it's about.

Dan Pink said it well:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=782171

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1357390

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1439939

The problem isn't attracting candidates, it's getting the candidates to see your job opening, to understand that it's a great place to work, and then filtering out the clueless.

Re: Stop complaining and pay programmers more

#145

Post by ulrich »

ido wrote: post #141
timr wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"You may attract more qualified people, but the number of unqualified people may increase as well." ...which is why you have a screening process. When people are complaining that there are no good programmers (and this is a common complaint on HN; it's not just a straw man), there's at least one of two things going on: 1) Their screening process sucks. 2) They aren't attracting good programmers. High salaries help wi…

Maybe the interviewing process is different where you are, but around here the salary is normally not mentioned in the posting - you'd normally get asked about your salary expectations once you've been through the interview.

I will not attend a long interview process if the salary is completely unknown. The least I do is to tell the possible employer what my expectations are and check whether this is ok for them.

Of course it would be better to make them define a salary range, but until now I was never able to do this.

Re: Stop complaining and pay programmers more

#146

Post by rosejn »

ww520 wrote: post #70
mikemainguy wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, dentists, and lawyers have legislated their jobs so that they can maintain monopoly through their guilds and licenses. That's why they can charge such a high rate. If programmers can get non-licensed programmers writing code go to jail, their rate would go up, too.

I am incredibly happy that this will never happen in software development. Elitist, protectionist mechanisms like this would dramatically limit the talent pool, slow down innovation, and restrict thinking to a set of norms agreed upon by a conservative organization intending to maintain the status quo. Programming is more of a meritocracy than in many other fields, and I think we should be proud of this. If people want to earn more then they should practice and learn more. Certifications are codifying yesterdays knowledge. How valuable do you think that is to most organizations, as opposed to keeping up with the latest research or the latest developments in open source? And I don't mean reading the headlines, I mean understanding data structures, algorithms, and architectures. Certificates do things like quiz people on how well they know an API. This is absurd, wasteful, and degrading. These training programs attempt to generate assembly line programmers, but it's like trying to learn history by memorizing dates of past events.

Re: Stop complaining and pay programmers more

#147

Post by _urga »

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.

Incentive == Money. Incentive !== Money.

Re: Stop complaining and pay programmers more

#148

Post by conanite »

watmough wrote: post #112
mikemainguy wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Isn't it even worse? None of those professions have access to copy and paste! We all know programmers who would be sunk without it.

hmmm ... organ transplants? I suppose that's cut-and-paste though.

Re: Stop complaining and pay programmers more

#149

Post by roel_v »

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…

What the OP is rallying against aren't the typical 'managers' in big companies. The people who complain here (and on their blogs) about how difficult it is are small companies, at the cutting edge of technology, usually startups run by twenty or thirty somethings. The same people who, a couple of years ago, ranted and raved about how programmers aren't cogs etc. just like in your post. Now these people need to make a profit and all of a sudden they find out - "hey, it's not as easy as I thought". So then their strategy switches to 'let's pay people peanuts to work on "interesting problems" so that they can "do the things they love" - with the next step being incessant whining about how they attract only unqualified applicants.

Re: Stop complaining and pay programmers more

#150

Post by blasdel »

mkramlich wrote: post #62
scumola wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Job postings have salary ranges. If I have 80 years of experience and ask for $500k/yr salary, I'm not going to get it.

The whole "years of experience in X" thing is horribly broken and ridiculous. Because there isn't a uniform way of measuring it. It's apples-to-oranges with any one else's way of measuring it, even if you yourself were consistent within your own system. Plus every job is different. Plus, in software you can be programming for many years in a language but never at a day job -- only on home projects or (more recently)…

It's not a joke — they're just using it for a completely different purpose.

It's illegal to filter applicants based on age, but you can require '15 years experience with enterprise java'

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