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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

#371

Post by skwirl »

Frost1x wrote: post #353
lr4444lr wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think just the opposite: the best time to pounce on them with salary expectations is as late as possible, after they've already invested the interview time on you and seen you excel.

For small businesses this might be true. Small businesses often aren't hiring top tech talent commanding high comp levels, it's usually businesses with loads of capital. If you're playing chicken on who can waste the most capital against these guys, you're probably going to lose (otherwise, you wouldn't be applying for a job there in the first place, they'd be asking you to hire them). They've got a pool of other peo…

I was going to post something longer, but I think I'll keep it short and charitable: you are clearly not a hiring manager.

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

#372

Post by samstave »

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…

Years ago, I heard that Google made $800,000 per employee, I wonder what its at now?

This is why Amazon is as big as it is, because the vast majority of their employees are warehouse and delivery workers at low wages - so the margins they make per employee are insanely higher than Goog...

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

#373

Post by mabbo »

varjag wrote: post #179
mabbo wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've actually seen the opposite. I'm at a FAANG, but based in Toronto. For the first time, recruiters are saying to me that yeah, they can do better than that total comp. Often much better. I like my boss and team, but if someone offers me enough money and a fully remote job, well, it's going to be hard to say no.

FAANG outside of USA/SV is basically any other tech company, this is not surprising.

For years in the Toronto tech scene, Amazon paid top dollar. Not SV prices, but better than anyone else in Toronto. One or two other companies might compete, but they didn't many openings.

Now you've got Shopify, Instacart, Uber, Snap, Wish, and others, all of them strongly competing on total comp, all growing rapidly.

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

#374

Post by giantg2 »

hdhjebebeb wrote: post #276
_dark_matter_ wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly at this point as a staff level eng, not having junior levels to work with is a big turn-off. I love being able to break down projects in to tasks and not have to carry out every single one of those. Convincing one of my senior-level peers to work on a project or task can be near impossible, while the junior level folks will jump on them.

Lol I've seen this in action, lots of staff devs being architecture astronauts or diving super deep on a hot new technology, and meanwhile some intern is building the stupid webapp that actually gets used and makes money.

I would love to be an architect. It's all concepts and not really implementation beyond proof of concept. Concepts and problem solving is right up my alley. Unfortunately I need to be at least a senior dev before they will consider me. Plus it's like double my salary. Oh well.

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

#375

Post by jackcosgrove »

handrous wrote: post #308
TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you care about cover letters? I haven’t written one of those in probably 20 years. If I’m hiring and a candidate includes one, I usually ignore it (when hiring for an individual contributor, engineering role).

The complete mystery re: which elements of an application and interview are must-have or must-ace and which are ignored entirely, downplayed, or even taken as "red flags" ("what might that be?" wearing a suit to an interview, or just dressing above business-casual—required some places, practically a guaranteed "no" others) is one of the most frustrating things about interviews. Which is saying something, really, beca…

I'd recommend presenting yourself and dressing as you'd like. You'll attract companies that are a better fit than one where you're fumbling for the "right" way of doing things.

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

#376

Post by dilyevsky »

slyall wrote: post #327
blacha wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

New Zealand, with our borders closed my company has had multiple job ads open for intermediate/senior developers for over a year. Every candidate we do interview, generally also has multiple other job offers.

The immigrant supply is cutoff and there is upward pressure on wages but employers are not panicking yet. Just grumbling that usual pay is not attracting good enough candidates. Plenty of places have not increased wages yet and interview process seems around the same.

+1. I’ve been hearing grumbling for a while now but as far as i can tell the offer increase has been largely symbolic. Most companies are either in denial still or planning on waiting it out

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

#377

Post by MichaelMoser123 »

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 am very sceptical of the article, the fundamentals of most companies didn't change drastically. It seems unlikely that they would suddenly be able to cover all these expenses, in the form of larger sallaries. The article mentions the dot-com era, now that escape from reality didn't last very long.

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

#378

Post by cowboysauce »

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?…

Here's another viewpoint: just because there's no job that I I would enjoy doing doesn't mean that I don't enjoy anything. There are so many things that I enjoy doing, but no company is going to pay me 100K a year to just do whatever I want.

Furthermore, what I enjoy changes radically from month to month. Earlier this month I was enthralled by geology and thought about how awesome it would be to be a geologist. Now, something else has captured my attention and I rarely think about geology. Soon, I'll move on to something else.

So, at best, a job can keep my interest for maybe 2 to 3 months, I'm burned out within a year and I can usually manage to stay for about two years total before my productivity abruptly drops to near zero. To me a job is solely a means to obtain money and time off so that I can go do what I actually enjoy.

To me, you're just as much as an enigma. How could you possibly enjoy doing the same thing for a long period of time? What do you do when you are consumed by the euphoria that comes when you finally find something new that finally scratches that insatiable itch inside of you? The indescribable joy and obsession that makes everything that's come before seem empty and jejune by comparison?

Though I have been diagnosed with pretty severe ADHD, so that probably explains a lot of it.

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

#379

Post by VirusNewbie »

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…

Wow, I've never seen someone admit to being that much of an asshole on HN in all my years.

People are literally spending months studying for interviews hoping they can get hired at FB and you are sabotaging their chances. You're admitting you aren't even trying to evaluate if they would be someone you want on your team or an asset to the company, and instead just wasting people's time and hurting careers as a protest.

I hope you get fired for said behavior.

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

#380

Post by brundolf »

the_only_law wrote: post #345
alfiedotwtf wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Time sink, especially with people talking about 4-5 stage interviews. From friends who are at FAANGs, it sounds like the prep work has been about 100 hours. That's re-reading things like Sedgewick and burning all your spare time at things like leetcode.

Maybe, but I don’t have much energy anymore, I can’t even manage to pay attention to a 15m YouTube video before describing to slump off back to bed. I also feel slow in general these days, probably from a number of factors. But I was mainly referring to the actually interviews themselves. 4-5 seems like so many, especially if they fly you out vs just being done remotely.

Friend, it doesn't sound like this is really about skills or scheduling. It sounds to me like you're simply depressed. Have you considered talking with a therapist?
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