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Make Stronger Offers to Engineering Candidates and Boost Your Closes

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Re: Make Stronger Offers to Engineering Candidates and Boost Your Closes

#111

Post by literallycancer »

metafunctor wrote: post #94
notyourday wrote: post #2

So. Much. B.S. There is only one thing that people who have not been dropped on a head interested in. It is called money . Money buys them stuff. Money lets them have a nice roof over their head. Money lets their family not worry about a slum in the economy. Everything else is secondary. Here's a magic formula: MaxMoney(Min(work)) 402 "PAY_ME_MORE_MONEY" P.S. That's why it is called a job and not hobby or volunteerin…

I've turned down jobs that would have paid a LOT more than I made at the time, because I thought the hiring people were assholes (in the finance sector, no less). Based on your other comments here, I think they were probably much like you. There's more to it than money. Maybe some day you'll figure it out.

There's no job that's so fun that I'd take it over working on things I want to work on (e.g. that same job), but only when I feel like it. Which is what you get when you are financially independent. Which you won't be if you work for peanuts.

Re: Make Stronger Offers to Engineering Candidates and Boost Your Closes

#112

Post by pc86 »

saosebastiao wrote: post #102
pc86 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to Glassdoor (which is notoriously 5-15% below actual numbers pretty much across the board) a senior dev at SpaceX in Los Angeles will make $160k cash and nearly $200k/yr in total comp with 20-25% of that in stock. That's not too shabby even for a California city.

In absolute terms, it's pretty good. Relative to competing offers for similar experience levels, it isn't.

You're right, it's actually quite a bit higher.

Sticking with Glassdoor (so it's apples to apples) cash comp for a senior developer averages $101k (4% above the national average). So I'd say SpaceX is doing pretty good at $155k.

Re: Make Stronger Offers to Engineering Candidates and Boost Your Closes

#113

Post by mediocrejoker »

CydeWeys wrote: post #77
dragonwriter wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you think that more money doesn't motivate you, either you've never been paid enough Or you have; there's significant evidence that behind a certain level, additional income doesn't actually provide additional improvement in most measures of satisfaction and subjective quality of life (IIRC, some studied in the 1990s showed this on average at somewhere around $250,000 in then-current dollars in the US.) Once you…

It is certainly true that money has diminishing returns. Think of it as an asymptotic function approaching a maximum level of happiness as income tends towards infinity. However, it's also important to take into account the cost of living. That $400K/year figure (accounting for inflation), which marks something like 90% of the way up the asymptotic curve, is an average across the US. But if you're living in very expe…

This doesn't make sense to me. Cities are the most expensive place to live, no? I would have thought that living in some small town and making 500k would give you even more buying power than it does in the city.

Where does your friend live that $500k does not pay for rent or a mortgage on a nice house, dinner at restaurants on a regular basis, and still money in the savings account?

Re: Make Stronger Offers to Engineering Candidates and Boost Your Closes

#114

Post by octasimo »

maxxxxx wrote: post #78
CydeWeys wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of these are independent from salary, however, and usually uncorrelated. I pretty have all of these at my current job, certainly the best I've ever had at any job (and I'd throw in a #5: Perks). And my current job, at a Big 4, also happens to pay by far the most of any job I've ever had too. I would certainly never sacrifice any of these for a minor bump in pay, but oftentimes you don't have to sacrifice any of…

Most people have this idea that either you get paid less and have a good job environment or you are highly paid in a bad environment. From my experience it's the opposite. Companies that pay well also have a good environment.

Same for me!

Re: Make Stronger Offers to Engineering Candidates and Boost Your Closes

#115

Post by pm215 »

dmitrygr wrote: post #47
pm215 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, so how do I buy a 3-day working week with my extra salary?

You can. Yes. Go to your boss. Ask to be paid 60% of your current salary to work M-W. I'm sure you'll get a yes.

Perhaps, but that would be exactly valuing the extra free time over the pure amount of cash, which is a counterargument to your "solved by money" idea. I would take "$60,000 and a 3 day week", but "solved by money" suggests you should take "100,000 and a 5 day week".

Re: Make Stronger Offers to Engineering Candidates and Boost Your Closes

#116

Post by jasode »

saosebastiao wrote: post #97
jasode wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>an interesting problem is worth more than 25k, but you haven’t stated where that ends. It doesn't matter where it ends in the context of the reply to notyourday 's assertion that only _one_ thing matters to non-mentally impaired people and that is _money_. >I hated working for Amazon more than any other job. But I’d do it again for double my previous salary. Totally understandable and that's why I began my comment t…

I'm not disagreeing with you at all, but I'm not disagreeing with notyourday either (except for the idea that if you're interested in anything other than money that you've been dropped on your head, but I read that as hyperbole to make a point). I guess I should have said you're talking past each other. From the perspective of the recruiter, you can't change the problems you are working on and hiring for, you have li…

>You can really only pay more money.

No, the company can also _not_ pay more money and use that constraint as a hiring filter. Example from the article:

>There is one motivation that should raise a red flag, though. “The candidates that I don't usually want to spend much time on are folks who are basically just looking for the next big check.

Another personal related story... In my of my past jobs, the hiring manager said upfront that "We pay a lot but we never pay the most, and we never match other offers. We want candidates to look at our whole package and decide we're the right choice."

I have to admit that when I first heard the manager brazenly admit that they didn't pay the most and that they don't get into bidding wars for talent, it seemed like corporate self-sabotage. However, I later realized it was very creative game theory to hire the specific type of people they wanted. I ended up taking that job because they were at the forefront of data warehousing which I really wanted to get into. It was one of the best jobs I ever had. Although they didn't have the highest starting salaries, they did have the highest raises and bonuses but I didn't know that at the time I took the job.

(I'm not recommending that companies not pay people the most. It's just interesting that one company used a seeming "disadvantage" of lower salary and flipped it around as a advantageous hiring tool. Very interesting reverse-psychology.)

Re: Make Stronger Offers to Engineering Candidates and Boost Your Closes

#117

Post by notyourday »

kalimeh wrote: post #80
notyourday wrote: post #2

So. Much. B.S. There is only one thing that people who have not been dropped on a head interested in. It is called money . Money buys them stuff. Money lets them have a nice roof over their head. Money lets their family not worry about a slum in the economy. Everything else is secondary. Here's a magic formula: MaxMoney(Min(work)) 402 "PAY_ME_MORE_MONEY" P.S. That's why it is called a job and not hobby or volunteerin…

I am in management at a company that pays top quartile salaries and I concentrate on exactly the sort of selling that the FRC article talks about. Geat candidates get multiple offers, so I want my offer to be money plus valued intangibles, while my competitors just offer money. That way they have to outbid me to get the candidate; whereas I just have to _match_ them to win.

I guess your time is not valuable.

Re: Make Stronger Offers to Engineering Candidates and Boost Your Closes

#118

Post by metafunctor »

literallycancer wrote: post #111
metafunctor wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've turned down jobs that would have paid a LOT more than I made at the time, because I thought the hiring people were assholes (in the finance sector, no less). Based on your other comments here, I think they were probably much like you. There's more to it than money. Maybe some day you'll figure it out.

There's no job that's so fun that I'd take it over working on things I want to work on (e.g. that same job), but only when I feel like it. Which is what you get when you are financially independent. Which you won't be if you work for peanuts.

I completely agree on financial independence. I have optimized for personal freedom in my career. That's why, for example, I haven't taken (many) consulting jobs, even though I would have made a lot of money in the short term. I ended up running a small software product business that I own 100%, make at least a steady $250k per year, can choose where I live, work maybe 20-30 hours per week, and can take a few weeks off whenever I like (this year I worked maybe 9 months out of 12).

Re: Make Stronger Offers to Engineering Candidates and Boost Your Closes

#119

Post by saosebastiao »

pc86 wrote: post #112
saosebastiao wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In absolute terms, it's pretty good. Relative to competing offers for similar experience levels, it isn't.

You're right, it's actually quite a bit higher. Sticking with Glassdoor (so it's apples to apples) cash comp for a senior developer averages $101k (4% above the national average). So I'd say SpaceX is doing pretty good at $155k.

Tech is a pretty heterogeneous market. A senior dev at a big 5 tech company is going to be paying at least double that, and the quality they get is lightyears above the Senior Developer at Generic Widget Corp in Omaha. And Space X isn't getting Generic Widget Corp's senior devs, they are getting people who are downgrading their salary for a chance to work on something that excites them.

Re: Make Stronger Offers to Engineering Candidates and Boost Your Closes

#120

Post by notyourday »

derekp7 wrote: post #14
notyourday wrote: post #2

So. Much. B.S. There is only one thing that people who have not been dropped on a head interested in. It is called money . Money buys them stuff. Money lets them have a nice roof over their head. Money lets their family not worry about a slum in the economy. Everything else is secondary. Here's a magic formula: MaxMoney(Min(work)) 402 "PAY_ME_MORE_MONEY" P.S. That's why it is called a job and not hobby or volunteerin…

As an employee, I don't want to work for a place that is paying me more than they feel I'm worth. Because then they start to resent you. "What do you mean you can't read my mind? That's what I'm paying you [large sum] for." Had this at a previous job (I was actually right at market rate, or slightly below, but a year prior the company was offering about 20% below market for this position). And every time I asked for…

> As an employee, I don't want to work for a place that is paying me more than they feel I'm worth. Because then they start to resent you. "What do you mean you can't read my mind? That's what I'm paying you [large sum] for."

They are not going to pay you more than you are worth. That's the maximum they would pay you. The argument made in the article is how to pay below maximum and get away with it.

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