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Tech workers demand high salaries despite hiring slowdown

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Re: Tech workers demand high salaries despite hiring slowdown

#61

Post by mullingitover »

ryanianian wrote: post #23
Madmallard wrote: post #11

tech workers deserve higher salaries. companies just don't want to pay it. they want you to make as little as possible

> tech workers deserve higher salaries. That's a loaded statement. Salaries are set based on market conditions.

> Salaries are set based on market conditions.

This is true, but the long-term market condition has been "There are not enough tech workers to meet the demand."

Honestly, I hate how extortionate the higher education system is in the US, but I benefit from it because it does an amazing job of choking off the supply of labor and keeping wages high. I'd still vote to provide free universal higher education, but the lack of it is what's keeping everyone in the tech sector afloat. Look at what the scourge of affordable tuition has done to European tech workers.

Re: Tech workers demand high salaries despite hiring slowdown

#62

Post by riku_iki »

gustavus wrote: post #55

Skilled engineers are just in demand as ever, an engineer is different than a technician however. An engineer can take a problem and solve it using various tools, they can weigh the pros and cons of possible solutions and can determine what fits the situation. A skilled engineer understands the value of good coding practices, understands that even if an activity doesn't create value it is still important, such as doc…

> Skilled engineers are just in demand as ever

the problem is that many companies don't have good interviewing process to distinguish such engineers during hiring, so they are lost in crowd and salaries may receive hit.

Re: Tech workers demand high salaries despite hiring slowdown

#63

Post by 0xDEF »

elcritch wrote: post #52

What's interesting to me is that if you adjust the average salary in the 80's for inflation and productivity gains it'd be close to what (non-FAANG) devs make now. As in the "high salaries" of tech workers is just what average folks used to make relatively speaking previous decades.

Any source for that claim?

Re: Tech workers demand high salaries despite hiring slowdown

#64

Post by Mountain_Skies »

ryanianian wrote: post #23
Madmallard wrote: post #11

tech workers deserve higher salaries. companies just don't want to pay it. they want you to make as little as possible

> tech workers deserve higher salaries. That's a loaded statement. Salaries are set based on market conditions.

Tech companies are complaining, and have been since at least the dotcom era, that the market is incapable of providing the workers they desire. Two and a half decades later, they're still beating that same drum and demanding that the government dance to it by enacting policies that favor employers over workers and somehow it is still never enough.

Re: Tech workers demand high salaries despite hiring slowdown

#65

Post by riku_iki »

0xDEF wrote: post #30

Not just tech workers. 24 year old non-technical product managers at FAANG companies are demanding $190,000 salaries. As a European I wish more FAANG companies started hiring software engineers remotely. The only American companies that have offered me remote jobs with FAANG tier salaries were cryptobro startups.

FAANG have many offices in Europe..

Re: Tech workers demand high salaries despite hiring slowdown

#66

Post by etchalon »

zapataband1 wrote: post #54
etchalon wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We haven't had a problem hiring talented people yet. If we had, that would indicate their price was reasonable and that we needed to change our salary ranges.

Well if the market ever bounces back I think people will be a lot less loyal about leaving places with subpar salaries esp after all the layoffs

My experience has been that salary alone isn't much of a determinate for employee loyalty for the vast majority of people.

If the only reason someone worked for me was because I was willing to pay them the most, I think I'd re-think my entire company culture.

Re: Tech workers demand high salaries despite hiring slowdown

#67

Post by shagie »

Mountain_Skies wrote: post #43

Tech hiring has been broken for a long time and they keep looking to the government to somehow save them from their own incompetence in labor development. The "hiring" pipeline has been highly optimized for finding reasons not to hire a worker instead of finding suitable workers to develop. Each year this optimization gets closer and closer to its final goal of never being able to hire anyone. Meanwhile most companie…

> The "hiring" pipeline has been highly optimized for finding reasons not to hire a worker instead of finding suitable workers to develop.

The hiring pipeline has always been and continues to be hiring the least risky developer instead of trying to hire the "best" developer.

When the applicants far out number the time it would take to give a more in-depth hiring review for each candidate the approach to hiring the least risky candidate is one of "remove everyone who is risky and then see what you've got left."

This can look like "find reasons not to hire" ... but also consider that sometimes when you've got 300 applicants and even a simple test of programing capability rules out 270 of them (not exaggerating here) and the 30 that remain have unrealistic explications of compensation (not every company can match the pay of big tech) or have other red flags that make them a risky hire, well, that's a labor shortage.

When the hiring pool is smaller and the stickiness of hiring a candidate is greater (a new hire jumping to big tech after getting 6-12 months of of experience is a common thing), then you can hire for the potential to develop a worker. Developing an employee for half a year and then having them leave means that you now need to switch (again) to a very risk adverse hiring approach.

Re: Tech workers demand high salaries despite hiring slowdown

#68

Post by falcolas »

mmmBacon wrote: post #42
welder wrote: post #36

Site is unusable from EU. The cookie consent popup has a freaking progress loading bar that reaches 100% after a few minutes only to say it failed to save your cookie preferences.

You’d think by now we’d have our browsers handle some kind of default cookie setting so we don’t have to deal with these annoying pop ups.

Ad blockers can - some do by default - take care of this.

Re: Tech workers demand high salaries despite hiring slowdown

#69

Post by riku_iki »

swalsh wrote: post #59
riku_iki wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

amount/quantity doesn't mean quality. top tier still can see lots of salary increase in growing hot areas, like OpenAI pays 1M to ICs, bottom tiers yes, may be overcrowded.

Supply and demand, a boat load of extremely talented FAANG engineers were dumped on a smaller market. You might not be willing to compromise on the price of your eggs, but your peer might and he might be almost as good as you, and probably 10x as good as what the company previously had access to.

many of them are not that talented, but just got hired during hiring boom.

For example it is likely very different type of people were building Google originally when company had 25k headcount in 2010, and now with 200k headcount and abusing monopoly.

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