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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

#831

Post by dzdt »

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…

Possibly I am an old fuddy-dud but if your engineers prefer video tutorials to written docs I think you might have hired the wrong engineers.

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

#832

Post by BoorishBears »

pm90 wrote: post #703
BoorishBears wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stripe and Lyft are definitely not aiming to avoid upfront sticker cost with their 1 year grant scheme. An exceedingly charitable view is that they're limiting downside, but realistically they're limiting upside so that you don't end up with people reaching targeted compensation for the next 4 years in a year or two and then leaving regardless of unvested shares - But I also mentioned in a comment above, I think my v…

Why? Unless you’re sure that the stock price will tumble, it makes no sense to increase your base pay aggressively. Most higher engineering levels will top out their base in the 200-300 range and all the rest of compensation will be via RSU.

We're barely a year removed from some of the most volatile stock market action since 2008

Barely removed from a lot of people taking massive haircuts as COVID darlings are down 50%+ from ATH

-

To me equity is an investment you can't back out of for 4 years.

I'm not sure the bottom isn't going to fall off the market for tech period, so I'm happy to trade equity for the ability to have some control over my investment

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

#833

Post by vanusa »

mupuff1234 wrote: post #494
ldjkfkdsjnv wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think amazon is absolutely facing pressure from word getting out about working conditions. They raised their pay band for a middle level engineer 100k.

You'd think it would be cheaper for them to just improve working conditions.

But they don't want to. The working conditions that everyone rags on about there are a feature for them, not a bug.

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

#834

Post by Mezzie »

fuzzer37 wrote: post #790
Mezzie wrote: post #698

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

Can I ask how you got started in the field of instructional design? This is a field that I've not really heard much about until recently, and I'm curious how someone breaks into that field.

Unfortunately, I'm one of the old 'I fell into it because I had experience in both the field's components (tech and education)' stories: I've been coding (mostly but not exclusively front-end) since the 90s and been teaching techy things on and off about that long (I taught my first programming class in '99 when I was 11), and then I went and worked in libraries/studied how people learn outside of formal classroom contexts.

So I already had all the skills needed once the field started. I cheated.

If I were getting started now, my advice would be to remember that the human element and the tech element are of equal importance in Instructional Design. So you'd want to take stock of what skills you currently have and how best to a.) get the necessary knowledge you don't have and b.) take advantage of your particular skill set.

Since you're on HN, I'm assuming you're of a techy bent vs. an educational/people bent. So if you have any teaching/tutoring/etc experience, I would lean on that. If not, I would get some. You can do this by volunteering somewhere + doing some basic research. I highly recommend this since a large portion of instructional design (like most front-end things) is planning for all the weird things humans do when interacting with your stuff and, more importantly for instructional design specifically, how people who can't computer at ALL think. When doing ID, you're often designing for people who can't figure out how an email works and are taking a work training, for example.

Also since you're techy, I'd recommend spending some time with UI/UX and specifically focus on designing for different populations/audiences. From a tech perspective, your competing instructional designers are worst at the 'boring' things like accessibility guidelines, making sure things can run on terrible machines, coding fall-backs, etc. So a tech background is of great assistance as long as you communicate the problems it can help you avoid.

As for the actual 'how to get a job', I literally applied for my first job off of Indeed out of grad school and I'm a first-generation student so trust me that was not the most polished resume or CV.

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

#835

Post by lhorie »

richardfey wrote: post #295
lhorie wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would posit that the OP underestimates the impact of his second point: remote-first in a covid world opened up a large swath of opportunities to get very large total compensation bumps everywhere. I'm part of a slack group comprised of ex-employees of a company I used to work at and some folks there expressed that it is entirely feasible to land jobs today that pay a full 100-200k over their current or previous com…

100k-200k on top of let's say 100k? So they would be making 250k per year? How common is this?

Keep in mind that in conversations about big tech compensation, the baseline is typically Bay Area salaries. This is the area where you can find the most public info on (e.g. levels.fyi). In my specific case, I'm talking about Toronto, where a senior dev salary for a local shop is around CAD 120k/yr. For comparison, a L5 role in Bay Area job offer is around USD 150-200k/yr salary plus another 100-150k equity (plus a few more thousands in yearly bonus). For Toronto specifically, these number more or less translate 1:1 (i.e. you could expect a CAD 150-200k salary + CAD 100-150k equity, for a total compensation of CAD 250-350k). In Bangalore, the total compensation after currency conversion is going to be significantly less than Toronto's in terms of absolute dollar value, though it'd still be quite above the local average.

For a public big tech company, USD 250k total compensation for a L5 in Bay Area is pretty low ball. For a pre-IPO company, you might be looking at USD ~200k/yr cash, and if you're lucky to go through an IPO while holding RSUs, you'd see a huge income spike on the IPO year. Note that pre-IPO companies still count paper equity in their TC numbers, so a 300k total compensation number might actually just be 200k cash + 100k paper money.

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

#836

Post by tharkun__ »

lmm wrote: post #676
tharkun__ wrote: post #662

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, this was simply an example to refute the absolute claim of the parent and the article that only the savings rate matters for when you will be able to retire. This one counter example disproved that. Now as for your claim, I would agree that it is generally unwise to do that. It doesn't necessarily mean that your lifestyle has inflated in a bad way though. If I make 50k with 10% savings rate (5k savings), single…

> FWIW, this was simply an example to refute the absolute claim of the parent and the article that only the savings rate matters for when you will be able to retire. This one counter example disproved that. But you don't have a counterexample, not unless you can show someone actually succeeding in retiring on a different savings rate. Plenty of people think they'll be happy to live more cheaply when they've retired,…

You make statements about all people. You are the one that has to prove that this is true. My counter example works perfectly because I only need one. Specifically we still buy used skates for the kids, even though I would definitely have the money to buy new ones. Same for the vacations. They can tell me about Disney Land all they want and even though I could buy that cash right now, I will not.

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

#837

Post by BoorishBears »

Infinitesimus wrote: post #736
BoorishBears wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess this is just lower base than I'm expecting I work at a company in a similar situation (we get a lot of Xooglers and pay accordingly) and my L6 base is 250k and I have 150k worth of RSUs vesting per year for the next 3 years. I do negotiate base aggressively vs equity so that might be skewing my view of things

L6 (~ Staff eng) new hire offers at rich big co usually are af 250 base and 250-300k/yr in stock. See levels.fyi for some recent ones.

250-300k and 250k base still seems pretty uncommon for my role (mobile development)

The only company I see doing that somewhat consistently is Fa.. Meta, and they're slipping into the same place Amazon is, where they need to pile on TC to make up for an image problem

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

#838

Post by zelphirkalt »

csunbird wrote: post #788
mwigdahl wrote: post #776

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a pretty harsh categorization. I am a hiring manager at my company and I echo GP's thoughts almost exactly. An extended history of 2-year engagements is not necessarily a dealbreaker, but it requires explanation. The hiring and onboarding process is arduous enough without having to repeat it every two years for every position. I get what you're saying about the salaries -- our company just recently started a p…

I have discussed this with my team leader, but, unfortunately, my company's HR/People organization do not believe in opening up Pandora's box by increasing salaries. The discussions with my team leader/manager has been going on for more than 6 months now, and it always hit up the same wall: The salary bands are inflexible and the short sighted approach of "making an offer after the employee puts their notice in" cult…

I feel sorry, that you are in this situation. Consider this: If they are willing to raise wage when employees put their notice in, then perhaps that has become the normal flow in the organization, towards higher salary. Or also: If they are willing to pay higher salary then, why not before one starts drama?

I am talking from a position of never having had to ask for a raise, so I am probably biased as well. My job is not a job, in which one can sit back and do a lot of busy work. We have new challenges often and are developing the core product, while the organization is growing and there are more customers all the time. We are thinking about scalability of the product and such things. Many things are in the making. Is it the perfect job? Maybe not. It depends on what you value in a job. Pay, work-life balance, what you work on, co-workers, office setup. There are many things, so the answer might look different for different people.

Best wishes for the future and hopefully you will get that raise.

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

#839

Post by lhorie »

verst wrote: post #378
Wiseacre wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most? As in over 50% of all senior folk in the Seattle industry make 300-450k?

Definitely not. Total comp of senior engineers at Microsoft in Seattle is nowhere near this. (I am one of those at this point in time)

The point that kinda got lost here is that outside of the big tech circles, equity packages are basically non-existent. So, whereas in, say, Google Canada, you might make CAD 150k salary + 100k equity, in CGI[0], you might only make a CAD 120k salary with no equity grant for a similar level of seniority.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CGI_Inc.

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

#840

Post by mmmmmbop »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #700
colonwqbang wrote: post #562

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

This _used_ to be true. Post-Covid, many (all?) FAANGs offer remote to almost anyone requesting it.

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