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

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

#531

Post by fleddr »

I think the article is heavily biased for a rare breed of engineers: adventurous ones, looking for the bleeding edge, moving from startup to startup, and getting richly rewarded for it.

I've spent more than 2 decades in various large corporate environments and things couldn't be more different on the ground...

Most developers aren't Star-trek types at all, and not even engineers. They don't have a strong talent or appetite for tech. They're what some call "bread programmers". At best, they do a reasonable job, and then go home.

I've worked with many "senior" developers in this space and even they do a terrible job in keeping up. They seem to have a large disinterest in the field altogether. These people are invisible, you will never find them online in forums like these.

But there's another aspect: age. It's fun being on top of tech in your 20s. It's quite different when having a fulltime job and a family, in your 40s.

Most never get to work on anything cool or fun.

In this large group of bread programmers, which I estimate may be the majority of the market, there's still people with useful skills or experience that other companies would look for. The reason you can't get them to move is because in most parts of the world, you don't get a 50-100% increase simply for moving jobs. It's more like 10%. Since they're already comfortable, they won't move.

Also people don't want ping pong tables or mission statements where we "push ourselves beyond our limits". They want a life.

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

#532

Post by daniel-cussen »

jmchuster wrote: post #315
redisman wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The highest paying software companies employ LeetCode style interview Ugh yeah it’s ridiculous. We can’t hire anyone! Have you considered not putting candidates through months of studying to memorize a bunch of algorithm tricks and then grilling them for 5-10 hours total on those? No - that’s not what the cargo cult manual says.

I dunno if it's that ridiculous. Having to spend a couple of months studying to get a 100k raise, seems not a completely unfair trade.

If you get it.

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

#533

Post by weatherlite »

mcv wrote: post #463
menzoic wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://levels.fyi

Looks like there are plenty of $200k SE jobs in Amsterdam. It's just that most of them are at Booking and Adyen.

Plenty idk. Could be that high earners really like reporting about their salaries? I mean it must feel much better to go into a salaries website and tell everyone you're making 200K than it is 70K, so it could be biased upwards. Truth is these Dutch companies don't have to pay that much - so many people from all over the world want to work there 80-100K is more than plenty. Maybe super high management will get 200K.

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

#534

Post by ChuckNorris89 »

pjmlp wrote: post #489
sascha_sl wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have a Germany anecdote. >Healthcare That's definitely a you problem, the US is the outlier here. >30 paid holidays 24. Based on 6 day workweek. So 20. More is optional. >Unions, Paid overtime Rarely are there Unions specifically for the IT department. Employers here like "Vertrauensarbeitszeit", which means count your own hours, which usually ends up with you doing more (unpaid) work. >weekends and calls off work co…

Pick companies that have IG Metal deals, for example. Quite a well known names do it.

>Pick companies that have IG Metal deals

Cherry picking a specific company/domains doesn't help your argument of "everyone in Europe has it so good".

Yeah, everyone knows IG metal in Germany has it good. Others? Maybe not so much.

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

#535

Post by prmoustache »

reikonomusha wrote: post #400
warner25 wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that "pay a lot" and "full remote" are basically the dream for anyone who's currently responsible for supporting a family. Your company sounds like it offers some great things, but those things would be much more valuable to single and empty-nest folks. At this point in my own life, with four growing kids and an overwhelmed spouse, I don't have the luxury of being able to trade time and money for "really cool…

It's actually the opposite. While the company I work for doesn't do remote, the absolutely rock-solid stability and superb work-life balance alone attract people who support families and people with mortgages. The average age is also a lot higher, since we have zero qualm interviewing people with 25+ years of unfashionable industry experience. Their family—husband, wife, kids, pet cat—can basically always depend on t…

> Many, many middle aged people with families actually say they prefer the office because it's impossible to get any work done at home with 4 kids

The kids are supposed to be at school pretty much during the same office hours, so I am not sure what you mean. There may be more or less 1 hour of overlap in the morning and late afternoon but that's about it. Morning is usually the times I go through my emails and schedules so I can do that while the kids are taking breakfast and preparing themselves, when they come back home I give them a snack and ask them to do their homework. Sure there is the occasionnal arguig between each other but that is only covering a tiny fraction of my work time. I definitely trade that tiny parenting time against commuting time and I'd rather be at home than finding out they burned the house while I was at the office.

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

#536

Post by quasiprime »

It always baffles me how companies say hiring is hard when the experience I have as a candidate is abysmally frustrating. The state of hiring (in software) right now is mostly nonsensical with some rare islands of sanity here and there.

EDIT: and those rare islands of sanity are mostly small companies where the hiring process is entirely conducted by the software engineers themselves.

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

#537

Post by [deleted] »

mcv wrote: post #439
pjmlp wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Over in Europe and East Asia, $50 to $60k salaries are the norm Yes, and we have plenty of nice stuff that goes along with it Healthcare, 30 paid holidays, unions, paid overtime, weekends and calls off work come extra (it is 40h week period, want more pay for it), retirement, flex time, ... Like the OP, my expenses are more than covered, getting more isn't worth the hassle to change. Ah, and in some countries havin…

Despite all of that, I think engineers are underpaid in Europe (and presumably East Asia). I just left a job at a major bank where all the non-engineer roles got paid, or at least could be paid more than I got. There were 5 pay scales for engineers, the top 2 of which weren't even being used. I got there from a freelance contract, and I had to take a serious pay cut to continue working on the project. It was a really…

[deleted]

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

#538

Post by weatherlite »

nivenkos wrote: post #481
IshKebab wrote: post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah same in the UK. 25 days is the norm. 28 days is good. 30 days is very rare. Also nobody gets paid overtime, the company's pension contribution is 5% of your salary. Yes benefits are better in Europe, but not so much that you're better off earning $100k here than $200k in America.

And you will rarely even earn $100k. Like I live in a European capital and am just below $100k after almost 8 years of experience. We're just colonised by massive US corporations which ship the profits back to the US (and avoid as much tax as they can!).

100K is really high for Europe unless you're in Switzerland/UK. Was living in Netherlands and 85K Euro is really really good, that's probably the top 10% of engineering earners.

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

#539

Post by kristopolous »

jmchuster wrote: post #504
kristopolous wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'll be working with other people who jumped over some arbitrary hurdle. What kind of team is that? Are you going to be surrounded by mentors? Free of bozos? In a world of competent executioners? Unlikely. Look at how terrible a lot of the products are that these companies make. They're fundamentally selecting for the wrong set of attributes. Look at the turnover rate - how many projects go nowhere and collapse, th…

I don't know if FAANGs are so deserving of such vitriol. I would probably say that big companies overall just fundamentally have a set of issues, and FAANGs are probably above average in many aspects relative to the rest of the big ones. Now, if you prefer certain small companies, or other humanitarian or mission-focused ones, that's not a FAANG-specific complaint, in my mind. And just product-wise, it's just way too…

> google, gmail, chrome, iphones

There's four excellent examples of things that were better 10 years ago before this practice was instituted. The youngest thing on that list (chrome) is 14 years old.

Both Apple and Google used to not hire in this 3-4 interviews of canned programming question way. Then they did. Those products are now stagnating and deteriorating so much that it's obvious to everyone.

If you think it's exclusively a FAANG practice, you're mistaken. There's tiny firms that do it and really large ones that don't.

Bringing the worst practices of standardized testing into the tech hiring process produces the same kinds of problems that standardized testing does elsewhere. Silicon Valley used to be better than this.

It's a dumb arbitrary ceremony - might as well be a physical challenge from Nickelodeon's Double Dare.

(Also your narrative history is wrong, but that's not the point)

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

#540

Post by snakke »

gdcbe wrote: post #406
pjmlp wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Over in Europe and East Asia, $50 to $60k salaries are the norm Yes, and we have plenty of nice stuff that goes along with it Healthcare, 30 paid holidays, unions, paid overtime, weekends and calls off work come extra (it is 40h week period, want more pay for it), retirement, flex time, ... Like the OP, my expenses are more than covered, getting more isn't worth the hassle to change. Ah, and in some countries havin…

Dunno where you live but in Belgium: - That salary certainly does seem realistic, even though I'm on the higher end and have a base salary above that; - I also get the same amount of paid holidays, might be even a couple more; - we have great hospitality insurance, mutuality (general health care) has to be paid by ourselves however, even though that's cheap; - they do help me save for pension in the form of a contrib…

In general in Belgium if you work overtime that time is then alloted to "inhaalrust" up to a certain point (you're never able to work more then 11h/day or 50h/week). Only if you have like a specific agreement where you work "voluntary" overtime, which is not counted towards inhaalrust, but is the standard 50% extra or 100% extra on sundays/holidays.

More info can basically be found on https://werk.belgie.be/nl/themas/werkbaar-en-wendbaar-werk/a... (also available in French).

As for unions, normally if a company reaches 50 employees they are required by law to have a union rep. How exactly that works I don't know. Also while I personally also have never heard of a software specific union, you can always just go with the big normal unions if you want, it's not like they're going to turn you away.

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