181–190 of 493 posts
"we're having trouble finding people" is a familiar refrain from people looking to hire developers. if you're having trouble finding people you are, by definition, not paying enough.
Or there is a shortage of developers in your area. My previous company was offering competitive salaries, good environment, challenging work, and we had trouble filling position with decent developers...
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Yeah, to command six figures, you've either many years (10+) of experience under your belt, a masters + experience or you're applying in NYC or LA/SF where cost of living is astronomical. In the midwest, you'd be hard pressed to find a starting salary at 6-figures except at the very bottom of that 6-fig range.
You shouldn't get paid based on your cost of living. You should get paid on value added. TBH, I don't see why living in the midwest should drop the salary a company owes you that much. If you are a good developer, you should command a salary comparable to the value you add plus a profit margin for the business. The only two explanations I can see is that, collectively, software engineers in the midwest are simply not…
Anything within that range fulfills the minimum requirements of both parties.
The incentive to negotiate is based upon proximity to those limits. An engineer who barely makes enough to get by (like one making 90k with a family of 4 in the bay area) has greater incentive to negotiate than one making enough (65k in Boise, ID where a 3 bedroom house is 150k) in a less expensive area.
In more expensive areas, overhead increases. $6k/month for a office in Palo Alto reduces "value added" for an employee significantly. Electricity costs almost double in CA than in Idaho. These and other factors affect the value added. (This doesn't factor in so much when you work remotely).
I'm not going to get into supply and demand too much, but another big reason they pay less is because they can. Because very few employees are irreplaceable. Leaving a crappy 3 bedroom apartment in the bay area and moving to Idaho and buying a house in exchange for a 30% pay cut isn't a bad deal.
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"under no circumstances do I work more than 40 hours a week." Should we take him at his word or assume that he isn't precise when speaking? Both are bad signs.
Exactly - I would completely understand someone insisting on a work/life balance - I want it, and I have no problem with people wanting that; but seeing it worded that way is a red flag to me.
Life is about living, not about working, after all.
I think employers should be cut a little slack with entry-level, straight-out-of-school programmers. They regard them as having no proven value, which is fair, and in most cases they will have to sink a significant amount of time and effort into making them productive in a business environment. The world is more than 19-year-old open source celebrities and wizard start-up coders. There are a lot of regular people with CS degrees and no experience beyond school projects. Entry-level positions exist for people like that. (Even programmers with a history of open-source contributions are an unknown quantity when it comes to their ability to contribute to projects they didn't choose, that don't scratch their own itch, that don't come with public bragging rights, etc.)
Not providing an exceptional starting point for exceptional kids is forgivable, because exceptional contributors have their own contacts already that they are presumably working. If you don't have contacts and are stuck looking at normal entry-level jobs, then forgive the corporate world for being a little skeptical. If we want corporations to hire and train normal graduates (and we do, if we care about unemployment, and our future pool of skilled tech workers) then we should accept them being payed a fair guess at what they'll be worth in their first year of employment. If you think you're worth more, then maybe you should forgive employers for not being psychic enough to take you at your word. If you think you're worth more and you have better options, then why do you think entry-level positions are intended for you? You have your path, and these jobs are for someone else.
So true. I get calls from startup recruiters all the time. They don't seem to realize there's this thing called rent. They want to pay with equity. Might as well pay me with lottery tickets. Here's the minimum I need to even bother talking to a recruiter. That means that for me to accept the offer, it probably needs more than this. Six figures, 30 vacation days, full benefits, infinite sick days, convince me that you…
I agree with a lot of what you said; but stating that you will under no circumstances work more than 40 hours a week bothers me. I try to get out of the office every day on time - but shit happens, and there are instances where someone needs to fix something or else the company is losing revenue. You want financial stability with a high salary - but aren't willing to help make the company stable. Yes, a healthy work/…
It was fun to play the hero and get 'That One Critical Feature' out of the door for an important demo. It is a rush. Investors like it. Engineers like it. Soon a company is always in crisis mode; pushing hard to get the next great thing out. It becomes the culture.
At one company I worked at the VP of Engineering was the hardest, longest working person I'd ever met and a driver of that culture. No matter how hard or long you worked, he could beat you at that metric without breaking a sweat. There was a lot of pressure to live up to that example. Mostly I didn't mind because solving problems on a deadline is fun. Mostly.
Eventually, inevitably, that lifestyle started catching up to us. Nerves were frayed. Small technical disagreements started to stretch on into weeks long religious cold wars. We started losing good people who had the good sense to see what was happening.
Those of us who believed in the company and product stayed on, even thrived at some level.
After a few years of this something drastic changed. Our VPoE mother died unexpectedly. It hit him hard. He realized that he had been ignoring absolutely everything but the business. Everything. And the culture shifted on a dime. Engineers were no longer /allowed/ to be called on weekends whereas before we had to respond in 20 min. He would make it a point to go out with us after the workday, or even during the workday, to chat about life, the direction of the company, whatever. Most importantly, he ran interference when it came to the clients and laid down and enforced very sane timetables for completion of projects and features. And if there was a delay, it was ok...not the end of the world.
The product did not languish. Things still got done. Turns out clients, for the most part, could not care less how hard and fast we worked. Having good information for when something would be complete was sufficient. Sometimes better because we were not breaking ourselves trying to impress them with impossible deadlines that we would sometimes miss. Good information was better than fast information.
On top of that, the quality of the product improved. Crises mode was used too often as an excuse for shipping half baked product.
Creativity blossomed. Several revenue generating products were conceived and executed in the breathing space we all now had.
People started recommending talented friends to fill positions again...
Altogether, it was just a much better scene.
Now our criteria crisis is much more strict. It is basically "Will someone (client) die or lose their house if this is not done by some certain time?" If the answer is no, go home.
If you are managing people and part of your evaluation criteria, formally or informally, is "does that person work a lot of hours" or if your 'business stability' requires that kind of sacrifice on any kind of regular basis you are doing it wrong.
TL:DR Unless a client is going to die or go bankrupt if you or your employees don't work extra hours, go home.
I wouldn't compare European salaries with US so quickly. I have a cautionary tale to tell: when in 1990 the USSR collapsed, many Russian physicists decided to move abroad, some to western Europe, some to the USA. At first the European ones were complaining about their lower salaries, but once they started having kids and needing more medical care, they realized that they were actually much better off than their Ameri…
Of course, we expect US laws to be less generous because it is the government of a federation of states, like something between a European national government and the EU.
most companies don't know how to value the contributions of software developers. i'm not actually sure they know how to value the contributions of most employees, period, except for salespeople. However as a dev, I'm biased some. I do think the potential for high value contributions, and the ability to avoid even costlier mistakes, is higher in the IT/dev dept vs other corporate departments. Several years ago I was o…
I would have killed to make 60k at my first dev job. I made 35k.
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They do teach those things, but a classroom context can not replicate the reality of large-scale long-lived multi-developer projects. There's just not enough time in a college degree to give any realistic approximation of that, plus what does the academic world know about that? They're not qualified to put together that curriculum, and what's the point anyway since you can learn it in the trenches at any company out…
There is no substitute for hard-won experiences, but debugging is a skill that can be taught. The academic world (well, some part of it) knows about debugging and is surely qualified to put together a curriculum. Really, go read "Why Programs Fail". http://www.whyprogramsfail.com/ A lot of what I know about debugging I learned in the trenches, but I also learned a lot from that book. My question is that why I had to…
Cool assignment.
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Why do you cringe? Do you know what the average price of a house is in MV/Palo Alto/Sunnyvale? Cheapest housing I could find that was decent (not fancy but descent by my personal definition) was just over 2K/month in rent. 6 figures in Silicon Valley isn't the same as it is in most parts of the world. That said, what I find strange is that experience in software doesn't seem to be rewarded. I keep hearing about fresh…
A naive search shows you get a 1000 sq feet house for 2K$ in MV/Sunnyvale. If it's really true, that doesn't exactly sound a huge amount. Look at the rents in Paris or Stockholm, and imagine you're paid 50k$.
Take Stockholm as an example. I found it to be ridiculously to be expensive .. even to eat out! That just means people don't eat out as much as they do in NYC or SF. However, the wait staff were wearing far better clothes than me and didn't seem to care about tips ... I believe they get paid better wages than the US. That's good for them. I don't think they should get paid any less. I'm just saying it is a different social structure.
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Yeah, to command six figures, you've either many years (10+) of experience under your belt, a masters + experience or you're applying in NYC or LA/SF where cost of living is astronomical. In the midwest, you'd be hard pressed to find a starting salary at 6-figures except at the very bottom of that 6-fig range.
You shouldn't get paid based on your cost of living. You should get paid on value added. TBH, I don't see why living in the midwest should drop the salary a company owes you that much. If you are a good developer, you should command a salary comparable to the value you add plus a profit margin for the business. The only two explanations I can see is that, collectively, software engineers in the midwest are simply not…