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I think I know why you can't hire engineers right now

cushychicken.github.io

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Re: I think I know why you can't hire engineers right now

#21

Post by HWR_14 »

I have one big glaring early disagreement: Every engineer is at least a little bit techno-utopian.

If you mean they think the future can be made better with technology in the abstract, sure. But I think some, maybe many, engineers think that the current way technology is being developed and deployed is leading towards dystopian futures, not utopian ones. They may tell themselves that the cool problem they are solving would be solved by someone else, and they get money and a good puzzle. They may tell themselves that it's not their work. They may admit that is the future and say they just want to be in an excellent position in the dystopia. But if you look at the efforts put forth by open-source advocates to fight against closed-source, or the work that goes into blocking ads and tracking, or the way that misinformation propagates over the internet/social media and the responses written about things like that on HN, you see that some engineers are pessimistic about the way technology will be used.

Or see how the inevitable (and existing) facial recognition companies are talked about. Some love it, but some don't.

Re: I think I know why you can't hire engineers right now

#22

Post by greatpostman »

I just threatened to walk out at my current FAANG job. Crippling tech debt and unreasonable deadlines. Three levels of management apologized. Any other job market? They would probably be looking for a way to push me out. Very strong signal to me that the market is hot.

Re: I think I know why you can't hire engineers right now

#23

Post by Waterluvian »

irateswami wrote: post #19
Waterluvian wrote: post #15

I’ve gotten 7 recruitment emails since Sunday and none of them have come close to sufficiently explaining what the company or job is for me to even consider responding. It’s bizarre how secretive they are. I imagine the recruiters are looking out for their own interests. Recruiters are in the way.

> Recruiters are in the way. So much this. I've had many conversations with interesting companies that have good pay and cool products, but recruiters/hr keep coming up with bullshit policies and processes that are just obnoxious and only serve to sort out the compliant from the competent.

> compliant vs competent.

I love this distinction. So concise and clear. Thanks.

Re: I think I know why you can't hire engineers right now

#24

Post by MattGaiser »

ianai wrote: post #12

Seems really well written. I’d add that stability in the work environment is something many (most?) people want. Experimental fighter pilots are a rare breed, after all. I’m weighing this against my own career. I’ve worked with very short sighted business managers a lot (IT at a large casino). They absolutely don’t care about tech the way us techies do. They also don’t care about a technician or engineer enjoying the…

> I’d add that stability in the work environment is something many (most?) people want.

Seriously. I have had 7 managers in my 2 year career. Yet to be in a job where more than half of the team I started with stayed a year. It has always been frustrating, but granted I can't blame them and jump around myself as that's where the raises are.

Re: I think I know why you can't hire engineers right now

#25

Post by pavlov »

greatpostman wrote: post #22

I just threatened to walk out at my current FAANG job. Crippling tech debt and unreasonable deadlines. Three levels of management apologized. Any other job market? They would probably be looking for a way to push me out. Very strong signal to me that the market is hot.

They’re probably also looking for a way to push you out now.

Re: I think I know why you can't hire engineers right now

#26

Post by techsupporter »

mrkentutbabi wrote: post #17

That’s weird. I like money more than “work for cool stuff”. Cool stuff don’t pay bills. Heh, maybe this is why I am an average engineer.

> Cool stuff don’t pay bills.

I'm very much on board with this. I put stability and money on about the same pedestal and is why I still work where I do after many years for a salary that is fantastic for 90% of the country but is "merely average" for Seattle.

Working for a rock solid medium-sized that's been in existence for a hundred years and funded by a stable endowment and a pile of public service contracts and has never had a layoff is more interesting to me than knowing that the odds of me still having a job in the 2030s, if I still want it, is well above 90%.

Re: I think I know why you can't hire engineers right now

#27

Post by MattGaiser »

irateswami wrote: post #19
Waterluvian wrote: post #15

I’ve gotten 7 recruitment emails since Sunday and none of them have come close to sufficiently explaining what the company or job is for me to even consider responding. It’s bizarre how secretive they are. I imagine the recruiters are looking out for their own interests. Recruiters are in the way.

> Recruiters are in the way. So much this. I've had many conversations with interesting companies that have good pay and cool products, but recruiters/hr keep coming up with bullshit policies and processes that are just obnoxious and only serve to sort out the compliant from the competent.

A lot of this is employee incentives. I am strongly, strongly, strongly, incentivized to avoid mistakes over taking any kind of risk to make an improvement.

Re: I think I know why you can't hire engineers right now

#28

Post by smokinn »

cushychicken wrote: post #2

Author here. Questions, comments, vitriol - all gratefully accepted.

First off, excellent article. I've read a huge number of these and almost didn't click on this one. I'm happy I did. All your points are excellent and absolutely true.

That said, I think you may have missed an important one for engineers: respect

In my experience, engineers highly value respect in their current position and a slap in the face from the company can breed lasting resentment or an immediate job search in the current environment.

Respect comes in a few forms:

1) Believing you were actually listened to and your ideas were fairly evaluated, even if in the end the decision didn't go your way. If you're repeatedly getting shot down and don't understand why that feels like the company doesn't value you or your opinion.

2) Compensation: While the absolute number itself to a surprising degree doesn't matter all that much, what effort the company puts in when it can, does. If the company posts record profits, gushes about your performance, you max out your rating and get a 2% bump in pay as a result when at the very least inflation seems to be 6% right now that cognitive dissonance hurts a lot. This is another form of lack of respect that engineers rarely let slide.

3) Clear growth path/investment: If the company respects you and your term goals, you'll see it through an established career plan, at least for the short/medium term (1-3 years). If you're going about the same stuff every day with no room for growth and no one seemingly cares that you want to take on more or you don't see how you could given the pile of work you're stuck under, that's demotivating and shows that the company doesn't really care about you, just about your monotonic cog-like output.

4) Impact and impact recognition: Engineers want to do things that matter. (Already a theme in your article) and often they want that to be known. Not in a cheap artificial pat-on-the-back and flattery way, but in a tangible way. Success should lead to greater responsibility. Failure should lead to introspection and another swing with advisors brought in. Given your successes you should be given opportunity to advise others working on similar problems you've been successful solving. If all you're doing is solving problems in a silo and no one seems to notice or care, it gets demotivating again.

I'm sure there are others but I find that a general theme of respect for the individual is usually very important for engineers.

Re: I think I know why you can't hire engineers right now

#29

Post by reikonomusha »

Purely anecdotal: In my experience as a hiring manager seeing trends change over the past 10 years, and selecting from the top 10% of candidates by some vague metric, it's primarily about "does it pay a lot" and secondarily "does it offer full-remote"? A lot of my friends, former colleagues, and candidates I've failed to hire end up going to either a FAANG or a very successful brand-name company (typically a SV company) because

1. The TC is a lot higher, like 1.5-2x.

2. They don't have to move; or they do want to move, just not for a job.

It doesn't matter that the work is boring (really fungible cog low-impact stuff). It doesn't matter if the colleagues are meh. It doesn't matter if the company has a reputation for lay-offs/churn/etc. If you have those two items above, you'll likely have a good hiring success rate.

Even stronger: many of the "fads" (like cool programming languages, toolkits, frameworks, etc.), moral/virtue-discussions du jour (like hating on: FB, crypto, commercial spying apparatus, AMZN work conditions, etc.), etc. also don't appear matter in the large. Someone boycotting AMZN one day will be happy to accept a very healthy salary + benefits package writing legacy Java 6 backend code if it means a good double- or triple-digit percentage in compensatory promotion.

For this thread, I just asked an extremely talented programmer ex-colleague (Linux kernel hacker, expert at C) how his job is at Oracle and why he chose it:

> Ex-Colleague: Funny you ask, because I was stuck on-call over the holidays. I'm basically a plebe to Larry Enterprises. Mostly that and having a side gig. Not writing any cool code for sure.

> Me: Why not go elsewhere where things are a little more interesting for you? You have no shortage of talent.

> Ex-Colleague: Pay is great. Not a lot going on. Not a lot of fuss on the job. I easily own a house and pay a mortgage and have a lot left over. Definitely put in less than 9-5 worth of effort. Probably can retire early at this rate.

This type of attitude doesn't appear to be so uncommon, at least among people I know.

In my case for the company I hire for: Extreme stability (check; been around and stable for ~60 years), excellent work-life balance (check), really cool work (check; cutting edge research and engineering), and really good and diverse colleagues (check; gender balance and representation, stable personalities, highly interdisciplinary skills, sometimes world renowned), open-source and conferences (check), education and 20%-of-9-to-5 time benefits (check). Those things may matter to some extent, but contrary to the article, they don't seem matter as much as an extra $50k to $250k pretax compensation in the bank and being able to do so from a low CoL area at your comfort.

The good news for me at least is that we aren't a mega-growth-kind of company, so we can take our time. Ultimately the candidate that values the above does find us (or we them), considers it a dream job, and tends to stay for 5-25 years.

Re: I think I know why you can't hire engineers right now

#30

Post by thedougd »

Waterluvian wrote: post #15

I’ve gotten 7 recruitment emails since Sunday and none of them have come close to sufficiently explaining what the company or job is for me to even consider responding. It’s bizarre how secretive they are. I imagine the recruiters are looking out for their own interests. Recruiters are in the way.

I was once told recruiters did this because they didn't want you reading the email and heading straight to the company's site to apply. If you applied directly, the recruiter was out of the loop and thus out of a commission. I suppose I _might_ be able to negotiate that commission in the form of a larger signing bonus. I doubt that's a winning strategy.

It seems like it would usually be in the best interest of the potential candidate to work through the recruiter. By having been sought out, you have an advantage. You can actually talk to a recruiter and check status of your progress, where as a web application is a black box of which you may never hear another word. At some point the recruiter is going to feel invested in you.

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