Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

latimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

361–370 of 596 posts

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

#361

Post by stubish »

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?

Remote work will make it worse. Having worked for a remote-first company for over a decade, one thing I noticed is that every position was effectively senior level. Because you need staff able to work mostly autonomously, and at a minimum you need people experienced enough to pick up what they need to learn quickly from peers at the other end of a text chat or phone line. I'm sure we will work out how to do this better, but I think it is still a work in progress.

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

#362

Post by dvtrn »

MeinBlutIstBlau wrote: post #261
stakkur wrote: post #254

This seems…extremely California-centric. Anecdotally, in the Portland area I don’t see this at all.

Us in the midwest are told to go back to the office still. Management certainly cannot handle change here whatsoever.

Just to add to the pile of anecdotes, also in the midwest, Chicago city limits.

Mentioned in another comment but I've had a noticeable increase in interviews (locations have included Chicago predominantly, Minneapolis, San Jose and DC) the last few weeks, I've made a point of asking about remote and I've been consistently hearing "we don't care where you work". Even of the local companies.

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

#363

Post by ghaff »

nemo44x wrote: post #147
chrisseaton wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At a certain level of seniority people get the 'white glove' treatment where the interview is more about convincing them to take the job. Makes sense to me - if someone already has a reputation and track-record, and it's you that reached out to them, then why are you asking them to prove themselves to you? Most important thing is to prove yourselves to them!

Experience and reputation play a big part in this too. As your colleagues branch off to other opportunities they’ll bring your name up when the new company is looking to fill a role. At this point you’re being contacted by VP’s or Directors to gauge your interest.

Whether it's very top-level salaries or not (or necessarily developers), lots of people take good opportunities in at least somewhat less expensive areas that are very much in keeping with their interests and that are perfectly in keeping with their goals.

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

#364

Post by lostcolony »

pedrosorio wrote: post #343
lostcolony wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I mentioned elsewhere, I upped my RSU comp 4x what was initially offered by bringing it up at the end, for a position I -was- interested in. Had I come out of the gate saying I expected that, I'm quite certain the response would have been "we can't do that" and moved on. Fair enough if you only want to work for a company that offers your target comp -without- negotiation (since even if they're open to negotiating…

What was X here? Did this involve any competing offers? It seems so strange that they’d offer X and just after being asked would switch to 4X. That’s a huge range.

100k vesting over 4 years -> 400k vesting over 4 years. No; only that I didn't have to leave my current place of employ. The total comp was toward the upper end for my market, though slightly lower than FAANG for the area (and with a company whose stock ticker is less aggressively/consistently rising, so less likely to be a huge gain come vestment). I did not make it explicit that I did not have competing offers, instead using phrasing that may have implied it (for instance, "will next week work for your timeline?" "Yes, though please let me know ASAP if it slips as I can't speak to after that").

Yes, I was surprised as well that they were willing to move that much. However, I know RSUs tend to be a lot easier to move on for companies than salary or bonuses (in fact, the salary offered was about 5% lower than my prior; I didn't even touch on that, instead looking to make up the difference, and then some, in the RSUs), and vary a lot more in the market. There are some companies that don't offer RSUs at all, pre-IPO startups whose grants are of questionable value, companies that grant RSUs yearly but only to a percentage of their employees, companies that give comparatively small amounts of RSUs to all their employees, and companies that give comparatively large amounts of RSUs to all their employees. That means the market range is huge and increases can more easily be justified; market range for salary tends to be far more constrained.

It's possible this may have also been due to being outside of SV; while the company has an office in my metropolitan area, I don't believe it's mostly dev, and while they have salary guidelines for outside of SV for dev, they may not for equity. So it may have been that the initial RSU offer was tailored to the locale, and my ask was okayed because it was in line for dev. Point still stands; they were incentivized to move, and they were able to. Had I asked at the start they would likely not have, simply because a recruiter isn't going to ask to make an exception for a candidate they haven't even interviewed yet.

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

#365

Post by boring_twenties »

xondono wrote: post #347
iorrus wrote: post #336

I live in Ireland and get less than €70k as a senior dev. Ireland is considered to have relatively high salaries for software developers, at least in a Europe.

Here in Spain I’ve seen people with +20y of experience contracting for Salaries for senior devs range from 30k to 50k, with very little exceptions.

Yikes.

How much does a beachside bartender make?

And why would anyone so much as look at a C++ compiler error message even once for those wages?

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

#366

Post by inreverse »

gavinray wrote: post #302
the_only_law wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why do you work for a company you don't care about, instead of one you do? Because they don’t exist?

That's so bleak. I think I'd sooner go back to drugs and homelessness than face the thought of waking up every day to give the majority of my waking hours to something I don't care about. For almost the rest of my life. Or even worse, something I disliked/working for trash people. I used to have panic attacks thinking about this when I worked mundane, dead-end jobs. Pardon my language but: the fuck is the point even?…

Money can be exchanged for goods and services.

In addition, work doesn't need to consume the majority of waking hours. If you have a high-paying job at a company with a nice culture you can spend ~4 hours a day or less working, with the rest of the time spent reading articles on the internet, browsing hacker news, occasionally replying to Slack messages etc.

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

#367

Post by thrwyoilarticle »

mooreds wrote: post #305
MattGaiser wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For my current job the posting said 4 years of experience. I had 1 at the time. Officially, my company is only hiring seniors, but if a decent junior applied (at least a year of experience inclusive of internships), I could see us taking them, especially with the right tech stack. So, apply anyway.

This bums me out. On two levels: * The company doesn't have a clear idea of what they want, so they fall back on 'years of experience'. Lazy. I've written job descriptions and I know it's hard, but c'mon. * This will turn off talented folks that might make great team members (esp folks who don't apply unless they have 100% of the qualifications).

>esp folks who don't apply unless they have 100% of the qualifications

This group disproportionately including women and excluding referrals (people who have the same experience, hobbies and education as your current employees)

- got his last job via referral.

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

#368

Post by aoms »

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…

This!

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

#369

Post by quadrifoliate »

mmaunder wrote: post #322
unnouinceput wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

120k / 12 months => 10K/month salary 10K / 22 working days / 8 hours each day => ~$57/hour. Kinda low, don't you think? Especially for senior level.

You picked the bottom of the range and didn’t add benefits. Top of the range with cost of benefits, which a contractor would have to pay for themselves is over $100 an hour. Keep in mind we pay for all certifications, exams, college degree programs, 21 days PTO which accumulates to even more, matching 401K, conferences with biz class travel, healthcare, etc.

I won't say too much about pay scales because others have, but 21 days of PTO is not "incredible" by any means, especially if you make people use it for sick time as well. At least if I was looking in a strong market, that would reduce the value of your other numbers downward to me. I recommend explicitly creating separate sick time, or switching to a minimum PTO (making sure employees take that time off).

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

#370

Post by giantg2 »

mooreds wrote: post #307
giantg2 wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's only a catch-22 if you don't have the senior people. At least in my experience, companies have 80%+ senior and midlevel developers. The issue is that companies want to be cheap by letting other companies do the training and then taking them.

> The issue is that companies want to be cheap by letting other companies do the training and then taking them. It's not cheap if they are willing to pay for it. That's why senior salaries keep going up. It's a tradeoff--they are willing to pay more for the privilege of not losing the time.

I don't really see it that way. Training people is more expensive than hiring a senior dev for the simple fact that you have to use a senior dev's time to train the new person anyways.
Post reply on HN