Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Want good programmers? Then pay them.

irrlicht3d.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

451–460 of 493 posts

Re: Want good programmers? Then pay them.

#451

Post by loup-vaillant »

soup10 wrote: post #448
skerrit_bwoy wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll add that if you LOVE doing what you do for 40 years, straight through retirement, you are one odd duck indeed. The idea of "passion for work" is a power play to get folks to put in more for less. Don't get it twisted. Furthermore, workaholism is for people who don't understand what it means to be human. Steve Jobs was a sucker - almost as much as his followers who didn't realize that he was.

Steve Jobs was a sucker because his values were different than yours? Really?

No. But he probably was a sucker for imagining that everyone was (or should be) as passionate as he was. That's a very common flaw among passionate bosses: they forget that many employees don't enjoy their jobs as much as they do.

Re: Want good programmers? Then pay them.

#452

Post by adrianhoward »

yxhuvud wrote: post #228
adrianhoward wrote: post #29

On occasion I have long complicated discussions with companies about how hard it to find developers. Assuming they're actually asking for a sane skill-set the problem is usually down to two factors: 1) Not paying enough 2) Not doing interesting work (with the very occasional 3 of "having a bloody awful reputation") The trick is, of course, finding a non-blunt way of getting this across :-)

4) Doing interesting work but not being able express that to prospective developers.

That's not one I've ever come across - interesting. Wonder how common it is.

Re: Want good programmers? Then pay them.

#453

Post by pbiggar »

migfromparis wrote: post #49

In France the situation is the same. Starting salaries go from 35k€ to 50k€ gross a year. No wonder a lot of students from college start as investment bankers or quant.

A French e50K salary probably costs the employer the same as a $100K US employer, or at least very similar.

Re: Want good programmers? Then pay them.

#454

Post by gaius »

Jabbles wrote: post #284
cletus wrote: post #264

The comparison to equity being getting paid in lottery tickets is apt (IMHO). Nevertheless there has never been a short of pioneering spirits willing to risk it all to strike it rich (just look at the gold rushes in the Dakotas, California and elsewhere). This is really the modern day equivalent. There was a thread here last year where people talked about their exits. A common story was "worked my ass off for X years…

Is there something intrinsically wrong with giving someone 30 days' holiday per year? Surely this is the same kind of freedom to spend your time as you wish that Google (with its 20% time) is famous for? As you said, in Europe this is common, and the viewpoint that it "smacks of entitlement" is puzzling. Is it just a cultural difference? I'm don't think there is any evidence either way that this affects productivity.

Indeed. How is Airbus able to compete with Boeing? It's not by working longer hours... But the flipside of European culture is entrepreneurship is harder (e.g. failure stigmatized still).

Re: Want good programmers? Then pay them.

#455

Post by gaius »

Apreche wrote: post #219
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…

Oh, I want to add one more thing, since everyone seems to like my comment. You can pay me too much money. If you give me say, a million dollars a year, I will work for one year, and then you will never see me again. I will go home and live my life as I please, and only code what I want to code. The code may or may not make money. I may or may not try. If I work at a startup that cashes out big, then I will travel the…

If someone acquired us as a way of acquiring talent, they will be sorely disappointed.

Typically in that scenario, there would be an "earn-out" period. Leave within n years, get nothing.

Re: Want good programmers? Then pay them.

#456

Post by mseebach »

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #404
mseebach wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a recruiter goes after you, and didn't bother to Google your name and look at your GitHub/OS contributions etc. he's obviously cold calling and wasting your time. He's the guy who asks DHH how much Rails experience he's got. But, on the other hand, if you apply to a company, especially one that's more or less famous, puzzles are a very good way of separating the wheat from the chaff on a level playing field. Evalu…

Do you really think it's fair to require Stripe to assign a member of their engineering team (that means you after they hire you) to review every strangers GitHub accounts, when you refuse to invest even a little time in signalling to them that you're the real deal (the puzzles aren't all multi-day endeavours)? There's no such thing as fairness in the job market. If Stripe can't find enough programmers to fill their…

> If Stripe can't find enough programmers to fill their needs...

... then allocating the programmers they have to sifting through a completely open "jobs" mailbox is still probably not a good idea.

> At some point, the business cycle will swing the other way, and it will become necessary for programmers to put our time into hunting for companies who want to hire even one programmer.

For the level of programmer competence we're talking about here, that hasn't happened yet.

Re: Want good programmers? Then pay them.

#457

Post by mseebach »

kragen wrote: post #408
kstenerud wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd be surprised... But actually, fizzbuzz is just the bottom level. You also want to do basic coding exercises for whatever specific area you are hiring for, such as: - Set up an extremely basic web app that lets the user enter a name and echoes it back to them. - Make a sprite move across the screen. - Display a 3d cube with different colors on each side and make it rotate. - Make it play some music. - Aggregate…

I wonder if there's a harder equivalent to FizzBuzz — one that doesn't take any longer to explain or do, but requires a much higher level of skill to pass. One we used at http://airwave.com/ was "Write a Perl subroutine to determine whether a string is a valid dotted-quad IP address," which is something you can do in various reasonable ways in one to five lines of code.

There are plenty, and yours is a good example of one. In fact I think actual FizzBuzz is not used much in the wild any more as it's too well known and thus drillable.

Re: Want good programmers? Then pay them.

#458

Post by fholm »

cletus wrote: post #264

The comparison to equity being getting paid in lottery tickets is apt (IMHO). Nevertheless there has never been a short of pioneering spirits willing to risk it all to strike it rich (just look at the gold rushes in the Dakotas, California and elsewhere). This is really the modern day equivalent. There was a thread here last year where people talked about their exits. A common story was "worked my ass off for X years…

I'm late to the party, so this is probably not going to be read by anyone, but here's my 0.02$

> Some of the comments in this thread bother me, particularly the 30 days paid vacation a year. In Europe maybe. In the US? Good luck.

What's so wrong about 30 days of paid vacation per year? I have 30, I know some (rare though) people that have even more (40+). I work to live, not the other way around.

> Never working more than 40 hours a week nor staying late? It just smacks of entitlement. I'm not saying you need to kill yourself for the company but it really is a two-way street.

For me, as a someone from Europe (Sweden) this is among the most stupid things I've heard, is it entitlement just because I work as much as my job pays me for? The agreement you sign (usually) says 40 hours per week, 8 hours per day 5 days a week. If they want me to work more, then pay more?

And before anyone from the states try to say anything about the economy in Europe and it suffering because people don't work as much, etc. Yours is so much further down the drain we lost sight of it.

Re: Want good programmers? Then pay them.

#460

Post by markokocic »

Seems like everyone in discussion focuses on vacation, sick leave and salary in the US, and noone is talking why is the software engineer salary in Austria, and similarly in the rest of Europe less than in the US.

The reason is simple. Try to remember one software package developed in Austria? Can you name one software company based in Austria that is successful in selling software or services? Do you know of any, even moderate, company from Austria whose primary role is creating and selling software? That's right, you can't.

That's because software engineers there work for companies where spending money in producing software is a cost, not an investment. If software is not a primary line of business, than there are two things in place. One is that developers are an expense. Second is that you don't need that good or experienced developers working on glorified enterprise internal applications.

So, if you want money, either work for a company where software development is primary line of business and be paid accordingly, or work on your own. You can't make good bucks working for cost center.

Post reply on HN