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Want good programmers? Then pay them.

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Re: Want good programmers? Then pay them.

#241

Post by masterzora »

horsehead wrote: post #213
throwaway1979 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm really glad you mentioned "cute little puzzles". I am sick of them. I'm not really sure who has sufficient time to spend blazing the employer with feats of their programming prowess (I was going to say only undergrads would do that - however, many undergrads in top programs have little time to bathe). If this was big companies being stupid, I'd get it. The HN crowd ... some of the smartest hackers around do littl…

Maybe I'm just incredibly naive, but are fizzbuzz tests really that necessary? I have a hard time believing anybody could get an interview, let alone graduate with a BS in compsci, without being able to do something THAT simple ....

Yes, yes they are. I don't even see all of the resumes submitted to my company since they are filtered through the recruiters and our HR guy but the ones I do see still need a fizzbuzz test more often than not.

Granted, it is not a thing you should give everyone. I can usually tell when I look at a resume that such a thing is likely to be pretty pointless (It points me to a github account I can look at instead? Why bother? The resume is clearly written by someone who knows what they're talking about and isn't stuffing everything they've ever done onto a page in a game of buzzword bingo? Probably safe.) so I don't give fizzbuzz tests to everyone but sometimes you have to be sure.

Re: Want good programmers? Then pay them.

#242

Post by moocow01 »

LinXitoW wrote: post #34

German dev here. Here, you hear companies complain about qualified laborer scarcity("Fachkräftemangel") and the politicians eat it up. It's not true though; it's just that the companies have totally wrong ideas of what they can demand/offer. There are a lot of unpaid internships, entry-level pay with senior-level experience jobs and a lot of the companies file much more job offers than they actually need, just so the…

Maybe they picked up on that technique from the US - our politicians eat it up as well :(

Re: Want good programmers? Then pay them.

#243

Post by sliverstorm »

Apreche wrote: post #93

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…

You need six figures to make rent?

Re: Want good programmers? Then pay them.

#244

Post by someone-else »

clavalle wrote: post #185
elliottcarlson wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/…

Crisis mode is addictive. 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 cultu…

One place I worked had an unofficial policy: Every hour of overtime allowed you to take 2 hours off some other time. If there's a crisis, things can get done quickly, but nobody gets overworked, and there's a strong incentive for management to avoid crises.

Re: Want good programmers? Then pay them.

#245

Post by forza »

marcusf wrote: post #21
manuletroll wrote: post #11

I'd be very happy to make 2200€. I'm in France, and I'm paid barely above minimum wage. Granted, I don't have a very high level of college education, but even so, I made more when I had a job in a factory a few years ago. And the job market here doesn't seem to be that competitive, unfortunately.

If you're willing to move, come to Sweden. Stockholm is screaming for IT talent, we're open to immigration and the pay for someone with a few years of developer experience is quite a bit beyond that.

....IF you don't mind buying (speculate on) an apartment, paying twice as much as everyone else, or live outside of the city with transportation issues.

Re: Want good programmers? Then pay them.

#246

Post by jebblue »

dagw wrote: post #58
benjaminwootton wrote: post #28

Sometimes small and medium businesses simply don't have the money to pay the big bucks that we think we are worth. I've worked with a number of companies turning over in the low £millions, and it's very rare that the founder is taking lots of money off the table whilst low balling the staff on salaries. These businesses simply don't have the margins and the runways to let salaries get out of hand. As most of the econ…

can can only sensibly offer a salary of 75% of the market rate I'd happily consider working for 75% of market rate, if I could work a 60% week. Add to that the ability to work remotely and things can start to look really enticing. If on the other hand you expect someone to work 100%, plus unpaid over time, plus be in the office every morning by 8 am, plus being on call, plus an absolute minimum of vacation days, and…

I'd like to add to that but for me you hit the nail on the head.

Re: Want good programmers? Then pay them.

#247

Post by frobozz »

ajross wrote: post #227
frobozz wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not even sure they know how to value salespeople's contributions. Compensation in sales is often in the form of a lower salary combined with percentages of sales and/or bonuses for meeting targets. When a salesperson makes a sale, what percentage of that sale has the salesperson brought in? How much of the sale was actually generated by marketing, design and manufacture? Similarly, if they fail to make a sale, ho…

That's just saying that companies cannot value the contributions of salespeople vs "non-sales". Which is isomorphic to "companies cannot correctly value non-sales employees" anyway. You're not arguing with the case, just restating a corrolary. Between salespeople, you can certainly tell who is making more money than their peers.

That's a good point - if you can't calculate the value of anyone but salespeople, then you can't calculate the value of salespeople either.

Calculating the relative value of one salesperson vs. another doesn't say anything about how much value either of them brings to the company, apart from the likelihood that one of them brings more than the other.

Re: Want good programmers? Then pay them.

#248

Post by rmc »

weavejester wrote: post #230
nickik wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny how people allready say EU countries instead of countries in Europe.

Why is it funny? Not all countries in Europe are in the EU.

(And slightly funny enough, not all of the EU is in Europe. French Guiana is in part of France and the EU and borders Brazil http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Guiana)

Re: Want good programmers? Then pay them.

#249

Post by bobbydavid »

phamilton wrote: post #188
sanxiyn wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In a CS class I took, we built a project over the course of a month. The TA's then introduced 5 bugs into the project, locked us in a room for 3 hours and we were required (individually) to find and identify the 5 bugs in that time. If you failed, they do it again a week later for a lower grade. Cool assignment.

I'll assume you simply ran your comprehensive test suite, inspected the five failing tests, and left in five minutes :-)

Re: Want good programmers? Then pay them.

#250

Post by rmc »

horsehead wrote: post #162

Frankly, this is an issue in all industries. The company i work for is always complaining about the quality of people they have to hire. But then they offer salaries of $26,000 a year (not in software obviously). But point is: to get quality, it costs money.

It's probably less of an issue in some industries, like law or surgery or constitutional lawyers. In these places employers pay much more, and they expect to pay more.
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