I think I might be underpaid.
Employers bow to tech workers in hottest job market since the dot-com era
561–570 of 596 posts
Re: Employers bow to tech workers in hottest job market since the dot-com era
#562This is very real. I run Defiant Inc (at defiant.com) which makes Wordfence (at wordfence.com) - a popular firewall and malware scanner for WordPress. We're hiring PHP devs that are senior level only. The job demands it because we deploy code weekly to over 4 million sites on a wide range of environments and configs, many of which are mission critical. We started hiring in 2015 and have always been 100% remote. We ha…
Contrary to what the sibling comment says, I think $150k with a signing bonus is very solid rates for the WordPress ecosystem. It's definitely tempting! :)
Re: Employers bow to tech workers in hottest job market since the dot-com era
#563Earlier quoted context omitted.
You don't make doctors go through 8 years of med school and residency because you want to make them great at treating colds and sewing up stitches, you do it so when the edge case appears they don't accidentally kill someone. In the same way, even 364 days a year the dev is doing completely boring work that someone making 80k could do, the one day they have the potential to do work that takes down the site for even m…
This doesn’t ring true to me. Everybody makes mistakes and it seems to me that popular big engineering companies are more likely to try to understand root (technical) causes of outages and mitigate them rather than blaming people for being around when a fragile system fails (which is what it sounds like you are suggesting with the emphasis on not making errors.)
The point I was trying to make was that even if 99% of the job doesn't involve any algorithmic knowledge and is boring crud work, the one day a year (or even less) where one of those engineers has to recognize how to do optimal graph traversal or memoization makes it all worth it.
When seconds of latency even for hours can be hundreds of thousands of dollars or more, hiring to make sure someone is less likely to screw up one day a year is worth it.
Re: Employers bow to tech workers in hottest job market since the dot-com era
#564Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Do you realize that when seen from the outside there's literally no difference between what I'm doing and me being a "bar raiser" or "preventing false positives"? I'm simply using the system against itself within its own rules. When someone comes in and is able to solve the 2 hardest problems I have cold there's no way I can reject this candidate in a debrief. There's people out there who are able to do this, either…
Yes there is a difference, a 'bar raiser' is still looking to hire someone and trying to evaluate if a candidate would be a good addition to the team.
You said it yourself you aren't trying to evaluate candidates you're trying to make it so no one can get hired. It's no different than if you asked the most obscure piece of technical trivia you could find and failed everyone who didn't know it. Sure someone might know it but that doesn't make it anymore or less of a dick move.
You just found a way to spike people that you think you can get away with. Insane.
Re: Employers bow to tech workers in hottest job market since the dot-com era
#565Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why are you saying crazy self-fulfilling prophesies? Do you hate money? Take the leap into something you WANT. Skills, Sschmills! You can learn can't you? Life means learning new stuff all the time. Learning never takes a time out. The military was a bastion of learned lessons for me. One key takeaway: You are your own best advocate. Everything in an interview or negotiation related to you springs from that viewpoint…
> Take the leap into something you WANT. Skills, Sschmills! You can learn can't you? It’s just about time really. I could skill up but what’s the market going to look like by the point I’m ready.
Better, for you?
Re: Employers bow to tech workers in hottest job market since the dot-com era
#566Earlier 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…
Hey, by stagnating I mean I’ve barely written code in over a year, and haven’t done any significant greenfield work my whole career. The work I have done has been mostly in legacy or obsolete technologies, and by that I mean mostly old version of stuff that’s still out there. So by stagnating I don’t only mean not up on all the new hype tech, but also the caricature of a “code monkey”. Certainly on paper at least. >…
Get on with a contracting firm. They will place you on a dev project and have you coding in no time.
A lot of companies are not allowed to interview the contractors (since they are not employees) and the contract firms can swap anyone into a spot after they get the contract signed. (Granted there is a lot of wink and nod stuff that goes on)
Horrid pay, not allowed to say you worked for (GE, Microsoft, whoever...) and crap benefits but you get real world experience and may even get lucky. You can say..."while at Microsoft I..."
Re: Employers bow to tech workers in hottest job market since the dot-com era
#567Earlier quoted context omitted.
They pay top-end for the local market. However, if a competitor comes in paying Bay Area salaries for remote work, that can be a lot higher than local wages.
After extensive research, I've found that almost no companies are paying Bay Area salaries for remote work outside the US.
The thing, specifically with Canada, is that they don't have a big home grown VC landscape and a few home grown firms. This, coupled with their out of control immigration quotas, creates a market where there's an oversupply.
Now, that creates two markets, those who can't move to the US (won't pass the higher bar for US immigration) and those who won't. I've seen SV comp for the latter. But we're talking O-1 tier engineers.
Re: Employers bow to tech workers in hottest job market since the dot-com era
#568Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm at a FAANG-like company with 1m USD TC because of stock appreciation. Where would I get a job like this? I hate my job a little but the hate is not strong enough for me to leave a 1m TC job for a lower TC. I'm stuck basically. I'll be gone after 4y definitely
At a point, probably really soon, you’ll have enough money that you’ll never need to work again. With that type of salary, I’d be surprised if it was more than 2 years. Don’t stay in a job you hate just to earn money that you don’t really need anymore! Though I admit, it’s hard to imagine walking away from 1m per year, even if you don’t necessarily need it...
Yeah, key is to find a job you can add value :)
And by my experience if you don't need to work, live gets really boring quickly. All your friends are at work, can only do such travel, if you do your hobby 8/5 a week it gets boring.
Re: Employers bow to tech workers in hottest job market since the dot-com era
#569Earlier quoted context omitted.
Could those long coding projects be a strategy to force you into sinking so much effort into the process that you're now in a weak negotiating position due to the sunk cost? I admit I'm speaking from ignorance here, and am only curious to gain more insight into this.
Could those long coding projects be a strategy to force you into sinking so much effort into the process that you're now in a weak negotiating position due to the sunk cost? Yes, absolutely they can! And almost nobody talks about this. Most of the conversation about take-home projects surrounds cost/benefit ratio, but almost never as a negotiating tactic and sunk costs.
The worst kind are the coding challenges were they don't even respond back to you after delivering it. Happens a lot in London.
Re: Employers bow to tech workers in hottest job market since the dot-com era
#570Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, but that's kind of my point - it's not easily calculated, so how can we say a senior easily provides an extra $40k. If we are saying the manager can make a lot because they're basically directing 10 people. If you have a security expert on a team of 10 people, should they be worth similar? After all, the tool is likely worthless if it's insecure, making all those efforts by others fruitless. I guess I'm just sk…
You are being pedantic developer fixated on numbers as a measure of value across the group. The world does not work this way. The business makes a decision based on what it takes to get what they need and salary can easily vary based on social aspects afterward. The number tells you something, but not everything.
"You are being pedantic developer fixated on numbers as a measure of value across the group. The world does not work this way."
Then how does it work? It seems that senior devs should make the same as junior devs if the numbers aren't tied to value.
"The business makes a decision based on what it takes to get what they need and salary can easily vary based on social aspects afterward. The number tells you something, but not everything."
On an individual level that might be true, but that doesn't address it at the aggregate level.