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Employers bow to tech workers in hottest job market since the dot-com era

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Re: Employers bow to tech workers in hottest job market since the dot-com era

#251

Post by gavinray »

tcbumperino wrote: post #227
gavinray wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You would abandon your company and current position for a slight pay increase? Do you not actually care about the company you work for and you're just there for the pay? You make so much money already -- what is the thought process here Man imagine trying to hire people and knowing they would all leave in a heartbeat for a slight pay increase. What ever happened to working somewhere because you believe in what you're…

Imagine caring about your employer who employs 100k+ other people and who would fire you without hesitation. (Or glee even.)

Why would you ever work for a company that employs that many people and would treat you like shit?

For the (slightly more) money? Well then that's your own doing, innit?

The great thing about having any sort of skills is that you can pick and choose what you want to do with them.

If you choose to work for someone like that, you're willingly subjecting yourself to misery, and to (probably) wasting some of the best years of your life working on things you don't give a flying fuck about.

For people who also don't give a flying fuck. There are no fucks to be given -- the organization is, for lack of a better term, Fuckless.

Working in a Fuckless org does not, as Marie Kondo would say, "Spark Joy".

If you have to choose between:

  - $150k Salary @ small startup working on something you're passionate about with a close-knit team 
  - $250k Salary @ $BIGCO to be COG_IN_WHEEL_#3356
The tradeoff you're making there is pretty clear

I'm not a judgmental person and don't ride moral high-horses. Personally, I value happiness, mental wellbeing, and have a fulfilling life more than slightly more money.

If you don't and you choose to subject yourself to all that awful stuff for the money, that's well and good, but you also can't turn around and complain about it or act like it's the only/a normal choice.

Re: Employers bow to tech workers in hottest job market since the dot-com era

#252

Post by nostromo »

JMTQp8lwXL wrote: post #203
cxx wrote: post #115

Not my experience at all. For context, I'm a L6 at FB right now and have more than a decade of experience. I've never seen tech interviews become as stupid as they are now. In the last 3 months I've applied to a few places, including one where I literally built from scratch what the hiring team wanted to do (and got promoted for it at FB), and I've never seen the difficulty of the programming rounds so high as now. I…

You could change the process by being the person who rubber-stamps everyone, regardless of how silly the "process" is. If the person didn't get the PhD algorithm perfect, yet still did a good job, let them in. Anyone who is good enough to be considered for an interview at FB or G is good enough to do the job. That's the truth of the matter. Be the change you want to see-- this somewhat reads as a 'stick-in-mud' appro…

Most companies track how many people you green light and if you do it too often you may not be given any more interviews.

Re: Employers bow to tech workers in hottest job market since the dot-com era

#253

Post by nine_zeros »

yaitsyaboi wrote: post #93
nine_zeros wrote: post #65

If companies (specifically management) were actually competent, they would know that it takes $20k-$40k to fill one position, $80k-$100k for that individual to optimistically ramp up to an existing employees productivity. All this takes at least 1 year. Instead of the time and money spent, they could easily boost the compensation of an existing employee by $25k and not lose money or time. But of course, nobody ever c…

I've always assumed a bean counter somewhere crunched the numbers and when you adjust for people who don't leave because of the stress of interviewing + friction of switching + uncertainty of new manager, it works out better for them to not do this.

It only works out because existing employees are squeezed of every drop of productivity, leading to them to quit. Ultimately, the end game for the hiring manager herself is to get poor ratings and quitting.

There's a reason why FIRE is so popular in tech industry. It is led by incompetent fools in positions of making arbitrary decisions without consequences, until it's too late to salvage anything.

Re: Employers bow to tech workers in hottest job market since the dot-com era

#255

Post by apozem »

mmaunder wrote: post #141
dbish wrote: post #4

Even if you think you’re well paid, now is the time to look around. I’ve had a lot of friends, mentees, and coworkers get huge bumps on total compensation even as relatively senior engineers and managers. Pay is jumping and companies aren’t doing a great job keeping that up for their people who have been around for a few years. As an employer, that should be the top worry, keep comp up, don’t lose your people because…

Exactly this. We just gave all our devs a significant raise - way above the norm, and way way earlier than we would. We're acknowledging the reality of demand, scarcity and wage inflation. My co-founder (also my wife) and I immediately felt our blood pressure drop once we did that. Market conditions are making it hard to retain and very hard to hire. We've done a bunch of other stuff to recruit - which I described in…

That is very smart.

My old employer gave me a 3% raise in January and tried to make it some big gift. I left anyway in April for a 50% bump. New company, same level of responsibilities.

The old employer underpays everyone, so that percentage is higher than it otherwise would be, but still.

Re: Employers bow to tech workers in hottest job market since the dot-com era

#256

Post by zinclozenge »

gavinray wrote: post #214
JMTQp8lwXL wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I told myself I'd be fine at 300k. Now I'm there, and I've picked up more hobbies. Doesn't stop me from looking for new gigs, from time to time. Going super deep into optimizing for one thing might be a good short-term, but bad long-term proposition. A lot of getting to 700k, I imagine, is luck. So long as you're competent, it's right place, right time. You can't force that situation to happen, so it's wasted energy…

You would abandon your company and current position for a slight pay increase? Do you not actually care about the company you work for and you're just there for the pay? You make so much money already -- what is the thought process here Man imagine trying to hire people and knowing they would all leave in a heartbeat for a slight pay increase. What ever happened to working somewhere because you believe in what you're…

Is this a joke? No I don't care about the companies I work for in the slightest. A company is only as good to me as their last paycheck, to paraphrase from The Sopranos.

Re: Employers bow to tech workers in hottest job market since the dot-com era

#257

Post by mixmastamyk »

cxx wrote: post #115

Not my experience at all. For context, I'm a L6 at FB right now and have more than a decade of experience. I've never seen tech interviews become as stupid as they are now. In the last 3 months I've applied to a few places, including one where I literally built from scratch what the hiring team wanted to do (and got promoted for it at FB), and I've never seen the difficulty of the programming rounds so high as now. I…

Just say no to those kinds of interviews. Of course you’ll need to be senior with a small nest egg first.

Re: Employers bow to tech workers in hottest job market since the dot-com era

#258

Post by cxx »

baby wrote: post #185
cxx wrote: post #115

Not my experience at all. For context, I'm a L6 at FB right now and have more than a decade of experience. I've never seen tech interviews become as stupid as they are now. In the last 3 months I've applied to a few places, including one where I literally built from scratch what the hiring team wanted to do (and got promoted for it at FB), and I've never seen the difficulty of the programming rounds so high as now. I…

The programming interviews are getting ridiculous. It is really an immense pain to go through an interview for a senior developer role nowadays, and it is super arbitrary. I did like 5 at the end of last year and I was just sooo tired. Got mixed results as well even when I felt like I understood the problem better than some interviewers. On the other hand, I got two companies that gave me take home assignments which…

Yeah I agree, also with the home assignments. Personally I prefer home assignments infinitely more than leetcode interviews and they are much more realistic to what you do on the job. The problem is that some companies are doing both, first the assignment and if they like it the standard 4-8 interviews.

Re: Employers bow to tech workers in hottest job market since the dot-com era

#259

Post by AQuantized »

gavinray wrote: post #158
the_only_law wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What sort of software do you have to be writing besides magic money printing machines for it to be worth that amount of money? My understanding is that you have to get into FAANG or be in certain roles at certain HFT firms. I’m also pretty sure these are TC numbers are large chunks of those numbers are stock options.

Even in FAANG I have a hard time understanding how any developer is worth that amount of money though. I know a solid number of FAANG and ex-FAANG devs -- the stuff they work on (from what I've heard) isn't much different from the sorts of software I assume most people in SaaS startups work on. Outside of scale (which is significant). A lot of it is internal tooling though, which never hits absurd amounts of scale. I…

Google and Facebook are making hundreds of thousands of (almost endirely advertising derived) dollars per employee. They have functional monopolies on search and social media advertising respectively, so every company in the world looking to use those advertising vectors is at their mercy. Maintaining that extremely lucrative position is worth paying an excess to achieve even small advantages in staying ahead of the curve.

Re: Employers bow to tech workers in hottest job market since the dot-com era

#260

Post by kevinventullo »

cxx wrote: post #115

Not my experience at all. For context, I'm a L6 at FB right now and have more than a decade of experience. I've never seen tech interviews become as stupid as they are now. In the last 3 months I've applied to a few places, including one where I literally built from scratch what the hiring team wanted to do (and got promoted for it at FB), and I've never seen the difficulty of the programming rounds so high as now. I…

I am baffled by your approach toward “improving” coding interviews at FB.

If you want them to change, you should be taking positive steps towards that change, by getting involved with things like debrief/candidate review, mentoring new interviewers, or making a proposal for a new interview type that could be A/B tested. Large changes to things like interviewing practice do happen, but they don’t come from out of nowhere, and they certainly don’t come from a single engineer passive-aggressively tanking all their interviews.

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