I think I know why you can't hire engineers right now • Hacker News Board

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

#691

Post by kodisha » Thu, Jan 13, 2022, 2:08 PM UTC

tablespoon wrote: post #685

elihu wrote: post #559

I think there's something else that's necessary that doesn't align well with the things in the article, and which is currently lacking in my current work environment, but which is kind of hard to describe succinctly. Basically, my job requires using a lot of tools and technology and processes created by other people, but none of those tools are easy to use or well documented. In order to get stuff done you have to ha…

> These things might be reasonable in a startup with a dozen people, but we have over a hundred thousand. My opinion is that once an organization is a certain size, everything really needs to be written down and easily accessible. I shouldn't have to regularly ask people how to do basic things, it should be on a wiki. If it's complicated, it should be in a training video, or a user manual. Here's the root cause of yo…

I you could once a year do +100 votes instead of regular +1 vote, I would do in right here, even though it's not even half of January.

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

#692

Post by fnord123 » Thu, Jan 13, 2022, 2:09 PM UTC

bluGill wrote: post #618

fnord123 wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> specially compared to the US where quite some companies will match our European amenities (talking about software engineering jobs). Debatable. In most European countries, if you lose your job you still have health cover. If you lose your job in the US you do not keep the company benefit health insurance (except as part of a severance package for a limited time). For H1-B visa holders, they must leave the country (…

But it isn't hard to find a job, and there are other options for health care while you are looking. I agree that it is stupid to tie health insurance to your job, but it isn't the big deal you make it out to be, so long as you have savings

I'm not an expert in american insurance policies (not even a novice, tbh) but if you have an ongoing condition and then lose insurance, and then get new insurance with your easy-to-get new job then would the ongoing condition be considered a pre-existing condition and hence fall into question regarding cover?

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

#693

Post by __float » Thu, Jan 13, 2022, 2:10 PM UTC

reikonomusha wrote: post #100

Apocryphon wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the flip side, dissatisfaction about engineering work conditions at AMZN (the notorious PIP culture) is a rising deterrent.

I can't say for certain, but it seems there are lots of squeaky wheels about it and lots of chatter on the internet about them, but AMZN/FB/whoever else aren't actually facing any serious repercussions in terms of being able to hire. (I hope I'm wrong, because I do feel there needs to be a moral reckoning about how we technologists—whatever the specific discipline—are contributing to the world, and whether it's truly…

FB definitely has been struggling, see https://www.protocol.com/workplace/facebook-docs-hiring-recr... with leaked internal docs describing it.

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

#694

Post by _rtld_global_ro » Thu, Jan 13, 2022, 2:10 PM UTC

jyounker wrote: post #638

wreath wrote: post #616

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends where in Europe. In Germany, if you lose your job you still have to pay for health insurance, at least the first three months until your unemployment kicks in (assuming you're eligible for it, like in most cases) and I don't know if unemployment covers your health insurance. If you are married and you and your spouse were on the same statutory health insurance, then you're covered by your spouse. Which can be…

Once you are unemployed you do have to pay for your health insurance, but it's heavily subsidized, costing (as a 50 year old) around 200 a month. Compare that to 1200 per month in the USA. It's a huge difference.

Get ACA, should be a lot lower than $1200/month if AGI isn't really high (assuming unemployed), now if you want CORBA that could be a different story.

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

#695

Post by marginalia_nu » Thu, Jan 13, 2022, 2:11 PM UTC

saiya-jin wrote: post #656

elihu wrote: post #559

I think there's something else that's necessary that doesn't align well with the things in the article, and which is currently lacking in my current work environment, but which is kind of hard to describe succinctly. Basically, my job requires using a lot of tools and technology and processes created by other people, but none of those tools are easy to use or well documented. In order to get stuff done you have to ha…

Sounds like every multinational org with 100k+ emplyees, certainly this fits my own. Fun part is, there is no realistic way out of this. It only takes one obscure critical legacy app to add so much integration mess into whole ecosystem that nobody ever will be re-doing those. Plus business won't put in the budget necessary for practically no change from their point of view.

I've worked at a 500 employee-company that had many of these issues, mostly from misguided attempts at copying the way FAANG worked without any regard for our own needs or scale. The entire code was a tangled mess of git submodules, transitive dependencies and the build system was contingent on a domain-specific language that was partially developed in-house and partially based on some unstable open source project, incredibly janky, and only two people got to see the sources for it or even knew how it really worked.

Dumpster fire doesn't even begin to describe the outcome.

There was always this strange spooky-leftpad-at-a-distance thing where stuff just kept inexplicably breaking, and nobody ever quite knew what had gone wrong, who to talk to, or when it was gonna get fixed.

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

#696

Post by ghaff » Thu, Jan 13, 2022, 2:13 PM UTC

eertami wrote: post #563

eyjafjallajokul wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, ... If you are in your 20's, it is totally worth moving to the US where you can get paid 500K+ per year if you navigate your career efficiently. I posit that making this much money more than covers any of these additional expenses that you call out.

Moving from Western Europe to the US is such a QOL decrease that even for 500k, people are only going to do it if they are desperate.

Because Western Europe and the US are such homogeneous entities.

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

#697

Post by yowlingcat » Thu, Jan 13, 2022, 2:13 PM UTC

elihu wrote: post #559

I think there's something else that's necessary that doesn't align well with the things in the article, and which is currently lacking in my current work environment, but which is kind of hard to describe succinctly. Basically, my job requires using a lot of tools and technology and processes created by other people, but none of those tools are easy to use or well documented. In order to get stuff done you have to ha…

I think you are touching on the right problem but your solution seems a bit more on the idealistic rather than realistic side.

I've had this conversation before where documentation is proposed as a silver procedural bullet and it never works. Documentation gets stale and eventually out of date. Do you really want to be in a position where you have to /recompile/ all of those documentation/training video/user manual materials? Unless you're selling it, probably not.

The solution you are looking for is not documentation but automation and training. The things which can be automated to make the process closer to obvious should absolutely be automated. The things which are intrinsically more challenging and can't be solved through automation should be covered through training -- and not a "training video" but a real set of sessions where someone (likely your manager or a tech lead responsible for ensuring clean consumption of their modules) is walking you through the right way to do things and leaving time for questions.

I say this having worked at a place that touted a documentation centric culture at the level of organizational scale you suggested. If you're doing anything remotely challenging, documentation only gets you to the starting line. It doesn't get you to being useful and autonomous.

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

#698

Post by Mezzie » Thu, Jan 13, 2022, 2:15 PM UTC

elihu wrote: post #559

I think there's something else that's necessary that doesn't align well with the things in the article, and which is currently lacking in my current work environment, but which is kind of hard to describe succinctly. Basically, my job requires using a lot of tools and technology and processes created by other people, but none of those tools are easy to use or well documented. In order to get stuff done you have to ha…

Good luck convincing organizations to invest in this + finding people to do it. I have the background to organize this (I'm actually doing this for my own, smaller organization right now just because the situation is driving me insane) and the main problems are:

1.) The people who can do this aren't going to do it for 30k or $10/hr. Properly solving this problem requires an understanding of tech and the development process, pedagogy/communication/instructional design, and information management. Lacking any one of those would result in a system that's an unusable vanity project. I have a couple of decades of small-shop coding experience, experience as an instructional designer at an Ivy, and graduate education in information management, but if you want me to use all of those it's going to cost you and companies are resistant to that. (See: How a lot of non tech product companies treat their IT teams since they don't generate revenue). Now imagine if the project were led by someone more qualified, which it should be for a company of your size.

2.) Most companies don't have a culture which would allow this to be done well. This is the sort of work which requires both a lot of honesty and a lot of careful planning. A lot of information ends up hidden or inaccessible due to people's egos, or executives not being able to handle the information so it's buried. People need to be honest about their workflows and what they don't understand, and they need to feel comfortable being honest about such things. This gets really messy. On the dev side, a common cultural issue is "I had to learn it, they should too" or the urge to make understanding the complexities into a shibboleth for the in-group.

So I agree with you, but it's unlikely to change soon in my opinion.

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

#699

Post by gnud » Thu, Jan 13, 2022, 2:15 PM UTC

hoffspot wrote: post #684

metafunctor wrote: post #666

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if it's all documented with a README, with container images and Ansible playbooks or whatever to make it all happen… still people will be complaining that it's oh so complex and that's not how we did it in my previous job and what about secret management, or load scaling, or full disk encryption, or how would this be deployed to a moon-based server, or whatever they can think of how the probably less-than-averag…

I second this emotion. We have spent years and countless hours investing in documentation and automation as we re-engineered a very large legacy application into cloud based technology (AWS). The application and supporting CI/CD pipeline is far better documented and supported than most and all of the underlying technology is within 5 years current. There are video based tutorials on nearly every aspect of the platfor…

> video based tutorials

there's your problem.

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

#700

Post by PragmaticPulp » Thu, Jan 13, 2022, 2:19 PM UTC

colonwqbang wrote: post #562

reikonomusha wrote: post #29

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 compa…

I'm not a US person. Is it common to see a 50-100% pay raise on switching jobs? Sure if you pay me twice my current salary, I will probably do whatever you ask me to without complaint. But around here such a big pay increase would be a fantasy.

HN really exaggerates these things.

The mythical 50-100% pay bump can happen if you’re making the leap from some local, no-name small business to a FAANG type job, but it’s not like you can continue repeating that over and over again. It’s kind of a one-time leap that people make from average jobs to top paying jobs. Going into the $500K type jobs isn’t as automatic as people here like to make it sound, unless you’re looking at people who started at rocket ship startups before the stock took off. Even those engineers struggle to get back to those compensation levels when the dust settles and their RSUs go back to normal.

It’s also not as common to find remote work combined with sky-high salaries as HN suggests some times. While I do know a lot of people with remote FAANG jobs, it wasn’t easy. Basically years of working their way specifically into those positions with hard work and building a reputation to warrant it.