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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

#581

Post by hinkley »

the_only_law wrote: post #164
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…

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. >…

Nobody writes tools that only work on brownfield code, and there are plenty of tools that only work if you start a new project using their tools.

Green field code is easy-mode, not hard mode. Nothing is in your way, nobody expects anything from you (yet) because they have no basis of comparison. The real reason people want to do rewrites is that they want that greenfield experience without having to quit. It almost never works.

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

#582

Post by hinkley »

zomglings wrote: post #410
ProjectArcturis wrote: post #10

My personal experience has been quite different. I got a bit burned out on my job and sent in my resume to 10 new places. All remote, some a bit of a stretch, others I was well qualified for. (Data science management and senior DS IC, respectively). I got zero hits. Not a single phone screen. Honestly I was pretty lazy about it, and didn't write cover letters or anything. That might be a contributing factor. That, or…

I think the problem is the focus on data science. Companies are realizing that their money is better spent on software engineers rather than data scientists, especially now that data science has effectively been "democratized".

Someone recently pointed out to me that overfertilizing young trees makes them spindly and prone to leaning or even breaking. The wood is just not strong enough.

In the 90's they scoured every math and science field for people to throw into 'web developer' positions. When the bubble collapsed a few of them had learned a lot and stayed around, the rest had to wander off and find something else to do, often back to what they were doing before, if they still could.

The data sciences growth was not organic, which means it probably isn't sustainable either.

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

#583

Post by unishark »

WalterBright wrote: post #482
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…

It's interesting reading this thread after the scores (hundreds?) of previous threads saying one cannot negotiate with employers because of power and information asymmetry.

Society has moved beyond possibility/impossibility (i.e. behaviors prohibited by law and lack of opportunity) and we've moved on to decrying the emotional difficulty in doing things that are hard because they feel awkward or uncomfortable, like asserting one's self and asking for a raise.

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

#584

Post by unishark »

the_only_law wrote: post #226
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 learned to ask for things just a bit too late. For my current role, the job description explicitly noted there would be no relocation assistance. I ended up paying for my move out of pocket. They were actually looking for two people for the role I was applying to. After starting, I met the other guy that was hired a few months before me. He had moved from even further than I had. After talking, he mentioned he was…

No relocation assistance means no guilt when you switch to another job in under a year. Or at least less, if you got a signing bonus too.

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

#585

Post by wdb »

californical wrote: post #574
wdb wrote: post #568

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, the plan is to have enough money to do whatever you want, regardless of the pay. So you don’t ever need to work a job you “kinda hate”, and can maybe find a startup or something that you think is good for the world. I totally get that it would be so dull to do no work for more than a few weeks, ha. I’ve taken a couple months off between jobs before and had plenty to do, though.

Yeah, few months is fine but after a year I had done everything on my list :)

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

#586

Post by jjromeo »

throwaway321654 wrote: post #292

Does anyone have any info/data/anecdotes for the UK job market. (or infact any non-US market) My story (hence the throwaway account)... Last year we got no pay rises and were told "no increases this year because covid uncertainty". This year it's a rather megre 2% percent that doesn't even beat inflation, even more so when viewed over two flat years. I'm obviously looking around and can likely get some small increase…

Yes the market for contractors is very buoyant at the moment. I've always found the uk perm market slow to react.

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

#587

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

FractalParadigm wrote: post #537
hinoki wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Salaries in Japan are 65-70% of SF Bay Area (for FAANG, local is much worse) London, U.K. is about the same as Japan. I don’t have experience with India, and my knowledge of Canada is too far out of date to be useful. All those salaries are very good for the local market, but are also much lower than SF.

> my knowledge of Canada is too far out of date to be useful All I can say, is in personal anecdotal experience, I make about the same money (with better hours!) in my current factory job than I would have if I finished my degree and went into software, and with none of the stress or crunch time or deadline associated. For example, looking at Glassdoor they have Google's Toronto office reporting starting salaries of…

Glassdoor is pretty bad for salaries at FAANG. That might be the average base for someone in Toronto. But they're getting a bonus of 15%, plus RSUs usually of about ~50%+ of base - but in the last year these RSUs have doubled, so ~100%+ of base.

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

#588

Post by [deleted] »

dvtrn wrote: post #362
MeinBlutIstBlau wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

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

#589

Post by MeinBlutIstBlau »

mark-r wrote: post #443
dragonwriter wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, I hear people talk about .NET desktop apps all the time and they are understood quite well. .NET (and, frankly, everything that isn't HTML/CSS/JS) may be less used outside of backend use than was once the case, but I don't think .NET is conventionally understood to be backend-specific in any general sense.

Perhaps that's still true in casual conversation, but in the hiring world .NET appears to be about server applications exclusively. At least in my observations.

Yeah when I see anything .NET related, it's always backend or fullstack oriented positions.

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

#590

Post by johnmyleswhite »

mtc010170 wrote: post #422
VirusNewbie wrote: post #379

Earlier 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…

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.

I think this is a genuine possibility given that the poster describes themself as an L6, whereas a FB engineer would typically refer to themself as E6 or IC6.
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