Ask HN: How do SMBs afford such expensive software engineers in the US?

A dreadfully frustrating file transfer protocol.

My wife owns a ~$1M business in retail. She's never hired a software engineer and primarily relies on SaaS, though I research/setup everything for her.

SaaS solutions these days are pretty robust. Some examples of what she uses:

- Shopify + a number of add-ons to run the store, including Shopify running on iPads + bluetooth scanners for the POS.

- WordPress + Gravity Forms to run the jobs site with an automated job application flow.

- WordPress + Gravity Forms for custom order flows.

- Quickbooks

- Nest for remote security system

- Shopify email marketing (used to be Constant Contact)

- Google Workspace for email/docs

- Misc. apps like TSheets for employees clocking in-out.

- Facebook/Instagram for marketing, including weekly Facebook Live shows they started during the pandemic and continued because people love them.

They have thousands of products so inputting/maintaining inventory, adding images and unique descriptions, etc. is still cumbersome (e.g. getting CSVs from vendors).

With one company I worked for, that was completely impractical. The company thought they were doing the right thing by asking me to declare whatever outside works I might be producing, and they would be 100% fine with that so long as it didn't compete with the company's products.

In practice, that meant every time I was reading some mailing list and would like to reply to something with a small patch, I would first need to contact my company, add that mailing list's project to the set of outside works, write a bit about the project and get approval. It would turn a 10 minute action into a multi-day administrative action involving managers - completely impractical.

The company just didn't have a way to model someone whose idea of outside works was to contribute to countless random projects in small ways every evening, without knowing in advance what those would be.

I tried to talk with the company about this problem, and they weren't interested enough to solve it, and didn't see it as a real problem. They thought I was making waves about something unimportant, and perhaps I was misjudging its importance. Perhaps it would all be fine. But I didn't want to accidentally produce things that the company later decided it had a claim on.

This was a significant factor in my relief when I was made redundant, as I felt free to finally pursue my interests instead of holding back. I didn't know how much it meant to me until then, but the relief made it obvious that this one issue had been seriously weighing me down throughout the employment, and that I should be more mindful of it in future.

If the company had found a good solution to this problem early on, I expect I would have been very much happier working there. Clarity is all that was needed, really.

That was before GitHub. I'm guessing companies are a lot more used to their employees doing small outside contributions like that now. I am still wary of doing so without a clear line. Fortunately, all my recent engagements have contracts that limit what the company is interested in, and exist in a context which recognises and even encourages that outside works will take place.

Some tech companies offer "unlimited vacation" these days as the official vacation policy.

It's great if you feel you can actually take it, but most people don't.

It generally means there isn't a defined amount or minimum amount, and everyone knows if you actually take a lot of time off, your output will not look as good compared with your colleages.

The undertone of competing with colleages for recognition hasn't gone away after all. Even if you're not ambitious, you probably value job security, so you don't want to look like a slacker or low output person.

So in practice, at "unlimited vacation" companies people tend to take less vacation than they do at companies with a defined amount of vacation.

Local culture also ends up influencing what people do. I'm working for a company that has "unlimited vacation" and also a very international, fully remote workforce. What they have found is, even though the company policy is the same everywhere, people in the USA choose to take much less official vacation (up to about 2 weeks) than people in France (about 5 weeks). This is the individual's choice remember. Also the amount people have taken has reduced during the pandemic.

They are actually trying to get people to take more vacation, and have set a minimum amount to try to enforce this. My guess is people don't want to be seen as slacking during a time when alternative employment prospects are uncertain and keeping remote work is a priority.

I took 3 months off paid for parental leave and will have taken about 4 additional weeks this year and it has not hurt my performance reviews or career trajectory at all…