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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

#331

Post by sjg007 »

bxji wrote: post #297
gavinray wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Scale is certainly a part of it. I work in one of the data platform teams at a social media company. Between our 3 HDFS clusters, we're storing more than an exabyte of data. At our scale, we have to tune our workloads carefully to make sure that problems of scale are not noticeable to internal customers (data scientists, analysts, etc.). We basically have an entire org of highly paid engineers focused on making sure…

This type of infrastructure is worth tooling out and productizing. I know a few places are doing it and it's hard to not have Software Engineers behind the scenes supporting clients.

Maybe you make it a SaaS so companies only need to hire daa scientists if you can optimize the ETL process.

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

#332

Post by dvtrn »

gentleman11 wrote: post #103
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…

I see a ton of jobs posted for seniors right now but almost none for juniors. Are companies being shy about talent risks right now?

I had an interview this week where the recruiter was flat out and honest when I asked them "what's one thing you'd change about this company?" (something I've been asking a lot lately and being very observant to how different company reps answer) and he told me that he lamented and would absolutely change the fact that his hiring managers aren't actively seeking out or even remotely interested in trying to hire more juniors.

Gotta say, I respect the hell outta that fella for being so honest about that, partially because I've observed the very same phenomenon.

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

#333

Post by sjg007 »

AQuantized wrote: post #259
gavinray wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Right but it's a dutch auction right? Highest bidder pays second highest price.

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

#334

Post by rajacombinator »

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…

Unfortunately not true. The top of funnel at these companies is not very good at filtering.

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

#337

Post by lostcolony »

zackify wrote: post #290
lostcolony wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ask for it. Seriously. I interviewed with one company, things went well, I was interested, but they came out of the gate with total comp that was lower than I was looking for. They were looking at a stock grant of X over 4 years. That would have worked, provided that I was basically guaranteed a refresher each year for X (so that by year 4 I'd making X per year in RSUs). I found out that refreshers were usually not f…

I don’t even do a call with the recruiter without listing the salary range or what I want to make. Saves a lot of time.

Out of curiosity, do you think the recruiter would have gone to bat for the comp I was requesting if there wasn't an offer on the line, and I was just another candidate?

I've certainly had recruiters bring up the comp at the start, and I've indicated it was too low, and we've moved on. From the company's perspective, that probably makes a lot of sense, especially if they have no wiggle room. But from a candidate perspective? I've never had a company who wanted to hire me fail to meet my ask (with the caveat my ask has never been completely outside of market, even if it's outside of their own guidelines, and with the stipulation I was willing to take comp increases outside of just salary); if the role sounds good, the company sounds good, I'm willing to spend the time to make them want me before I ask about comp. If they come in high enough, great, no time wasted; if they come in low they have every reason to try and negotiate with me.

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

#338

Post by refenestrator »

dasyatidprime wrote: post #202
caeril wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I’ve stagnated sharply skills wise I'm sorry, but what does this even mean? Nothing has changed in a significant way since 1996, other than ops per second and memory bandwidth. If you're an old school C programmer who knows how pointer arithmetic and memory allocation works, you're better than 99% of the total trash new-school Node.js/Django/Rails/React developers who think JSX is some sort of "innovation". Having…

Do you have any recommendations on how best to sell yourself from such a position? I have a significant C99-era/close-to-the-assembly fundamentals background, but I see a lot of “if you haven't already AWS'd all the AWS at your last company in production at scale, then there's someone behind you who has”, and that kind of thing has both been a notable lacuna in my experience and something that's notably less fixable…

Write a script that deploys something to a fresh ec2 instance.. then you can say you used aws for your side project.

Aws is like 800 services, but under it all is ec2 and s3 -- just get familiar with those and the rest are conveniences.

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

#339

Post by tester756 »

caeril wrote: post #156
the_only_law wrote: post #100

I hate that the market is so great right now because I really can’t take advantage of it. I would love to start the process, to try and get a salary increase anywhere from 30%-100% but unfortunately I’ve stagnated sharply skills wise. Don’t qualify for the jobs I see I think I’d enjoy, and don’t even qualify for the jobs that meet my salary preferences that I’d otherwise dislike. I also would have to be looking at im…

> I’ve stagnated sharply skills wise I'm sorry, but what does this even mean? Nothing has changed in a significant way since 1996, other than ops per second and memory bandwidth. If you're an old school C programmer who knows how pointer arithmetic and memory allocation works, you're better than 99% of the total trash new-school Node.js/Django/Rails/React developers who think JSX is some sort of "innovation". Having…

>If you're an old school C programmer who knows how pointer arithmetic and memory allocation works

bonus points if you created a vuln or two :)

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

#340

Post by rajacombinator »

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 appreciate the cold game theory of your approach. Quite hilarious if others are following it too, although I don’t think so from what I’ve seen. (Edit: I was also reading it from the perspective of forcing companies to raise comp.)
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