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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

#421
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?

At least from my perspective. It is a combination of needing a certain number of senior level employees to mentor junior employees and to lead projects and we have a good pipeline of junior candidates through our co-op program such that there is no need for us to post a job when we have known good options.

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

#422
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…

It's seriously an incredible admission. Talk about toxic!

It makes me wonder if this is really a person who works for FB at all, or just someone masquerading for the sake of making an already loathed company look even worse.

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

#423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 yea…

Been in both roles before at Small Fun Startup and BigCo and I'll take BigCo every time now because that extra $100K/yr (and its usually way way way more than that compared to the startup) get me closer to my life goals of total fiscal independence and retirement quicker.

So yea, I'll sell my soul and eat shit for enough $$$.

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

#424

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…

I agree about Facebook engineers especially - the website is just broken. Where is all that talent going, Horizon?

No it's not. Old people with fairly pitiful lives spend the vast majority of their days on in and bring in an absolute dick load of ad revenue.

This is what it's designed for, and it's doing it pretty damn well.

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

#425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This also means that if you can afford to hire junior folks, you can get some real go-getters for a great (read, favorable to the company) salary. But even junior salaries are going up, I've noticed.

I think junior average salary at my company is around $75k now. Seniors are around $115k. A $40k gap is pretty big. I don't know. I feel like most dev compensation is kind of random. Like does that senior really produce $40k more in value per year?

Actually, to me that senior salary feels low. I am on a Colorado slack and check out the salaries in the job postings (yay, Equal Pay Transparency Rule). I see a range from 100k 175k for "senior" developer positions.

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

#426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Get the job and then learn the skill. The value proposition you present is that you can learn stuff. This is not a flippant reply! I’m totally serious.

Ya but companies genuinely don't care about that. We'd all like them to, but when the first step of an interview process is an automatically generated global talent test, administered by an hr person, there's no room for this sales pitch really. "Lets hire this guy who tells us he can learn, or let's hire this new grad who's been grinding leetcode for 2 years straight and happens to test well on the tech we bet our w…

The article you are commenting on literally talks about how lots of companies are skipping the skills tests right now.

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

#427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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. For the first N months, sure, but then, you have a senior and a trained junior, who is hopefully on their way to being a mid. So it's less of an expense and more of an investment in my eyes. But like any upfront investment, there is a time when the costs outweigh t…

The "investment" part of the equation is where I see that model breaking down and failing. There's a lot of poaching and job-hopping, especially motivated by total comp. You could say it's always been that way, but in terms of the senior/mid/junior spread it seems like in our industry, employers would rather hire another senior than hire a junior who needs investment.

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

#428

> He likened it to what’s happening in the real estate market. In other words, make your moves now, and with an eye toward the crash that's coming.

I've been reading comments on HN about the coming crash for 10 years now. I have even believed them at first.

Well, this is the first time I've predicted one, so I suppose we'll get to find out how I do at it - not well, I hope.

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

#429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Amazon, for example, starts at 10 days for FTEs and accrues to a max of 20 days once you've worked for longer than 6 years. We are roughly the same as Facebook and Google who are between 20 to 30 days per year, depending on how long you've worked there.

I am surprised to hear that Amazon is that low (rules them out as a target for me) - but your comp in terms of salary + stock is not competitive with FB/Google, so comparing to them on vacation time is not meaningful either IMO. In my experience, plenty of smaller companies are more flexible on vacation time over 20 days, so those would be the ones you're competing with.

However, if things are working out well for you as an employer with your current pay + benefits stack, you probably grok the market better than I do. Wish you all the best!

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

#430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My lowest offers where 120k CAD Base, 100k USD in options. My best two offers: 200k CAD Base, 390k USD RSU /4 years, 20k CAD Sign on 200k CAD Base, 330k USD in Options / 4 years, 20k CAD Sign on I'm also still waiting on some numbers from Google Canada but I doubt they will match.

These offers show signs of life for Canadian salaries. I am presuming you are in Toronto, and these were IC roles. What types of companies were the 2 best offers?

I'm actually in Vancouver but both roles allowed me remote.

Wish is one so post-ipo.

The other is a Series D startup based in SF.

I think remote is your best bet for high salary in Canada.

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