Want good programmers? Then pay them. • Hacker News Board

Re: Want good programmers? Then pay them.

#471

Post by dlgeek » Fri, May 04, 2012, 2:52 PM UTC

Periodic wrote: post #433

fleitz wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't dig for gold, sell shovels. 30 days of paid vacation? This is easily achievable, say OK, normally for this position we pay $150K and 2 weeks vacation, so we'll cut the pay by 4% and give you an extra 2 weeks. Then it turns into $144K and 30 days. Most people realize vacation costs money, those that prefer the cash to vacation simply wait til the end of the year and get cut a cheque for their vacation time.

So, in all the companies I've worked for so far you accrue vacation up to a cap, and if you leave the company you get paid out for vacation you don't take. This has lead to a nice chunk of change when I switched jobs in the past. So what a lot of people don't realize is that you pay for every vacation day. If you would get paid out for it at the end then you are opting to get less money overall for some vacation now.…

Once you hit the cap, refusing to take vacation costs you money, as you can't accrue any more.

Re: Want good programmers? Then pay them.

#472

Post by eli_gottlieb » Fri, May 04, 2012, 2:56 PM UTC

mseebach wrote: post #456

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 compet…

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

Define that level non-tautologically then, please.

Re: Want good programmers? Then pay them.

#473

Post by physicslover » Fri, May 04, 2012, 3:26 PM UTC

At my last company I had 20 days vacation and about to transition to 25 days. However, work was so busy that I had to plan and request my vacations 3-6 mos in advance. I now have less vacation but more freedom to take it when i want.

If one really wants to maximize free time contract work is where its at.

Re: Want good programmers? Then pay them.

#474

Post by weavejester » Fri, May 04, 2012, 3:47 PM UTC

ericd wrote: post #425

luser001 wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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)? Yes.

Then you're being unrealistic, because the expected value of a random applicant's ability is not that high.

But it works the other way around, too. The expected value of a random company is not that high unless the candidate considers themselves to have a good chance of success. Given how opaque the hiring process is from the point of view of an applicant, how do they know if it's worth spending their time solving a random puzzle?

Investing time in open source software is a better use of time from the point of view of a candidate, as they can show the same code to many different companies.

So it comes down to who is more in demand. Is your company so desirable that good programmers will invest a significant chunk of time just to have a chance with you? If the answer isn't an automatic 'Yes', maybe you should rethink your hiring strategy.

It also doesn't seem particularly hard to automatically filter out candidates with no GitHub account, or a GitHub account but few contributions.

Re: Want good programmers? Then pay them.

#475

Post by mryan » Fri, May 04, 2012, 3:59 PM UTC

reinhardt wrote: post #413

mryan wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, but here's one: http://www.fashiolista.com/content/fashiolista-jobs/ :) You can contact us via that page, or feel free to email me directly (email in profile).

Ah, thought your startup was Cloudfrag. I've seen Fashiolista before and was on my list of potentially interesting startups to join. I'll probably contact you when I'm back in the market :)

Don't worry, you don't need a sense of fashion to work here. It was one of the first things I asked in my interview - if it was a pre-requisite, I would have had no chance :-)

Re: Want good programmers? Then pay them.

#476

Post by malandrew » Fri, May 04, 2012, 4:38 PM UTC

patio11 wrote: post #414

malandrew wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... and working to put profit only in someone else's pocket. If a firm is in Memphis instead of NYC and selling their services to essentially the same clients, then the owners of that business are already earning a greater profit on other cheaper operating costs like commercial real estate. By accepting a lower salary that simply covers a comfortable style of living you're simply putting even more money in the owner'…

There is no reason that good developer in any market shouldn't be living at the exact same standard of living as the good doctors, lawyers, finance people in that market. They should be living in the same homes and sending their kids to the same schools, etc. These words should be stapled to every CS degree, and reinforced with classes if necessary. The lawyers/doctors have an ingrained culture in their professions o…

Since you already got the audience, twould make a great blog post.

It's should be an obligation of every professional in our industry to negotiate higher and be seen as valuable as we actually are to society. The fact that most professional software engineers know their value and demand it severely hurts the salary bar for every other software engineer.

Silicon Valley and NYC are the only two places where I see developers actually beginning to demand what they are worth.

Many entrepreneurs in a lot of areas outside software were able to do what they did because they were highly paid professionals in a prior life that could afford to invest a chunk of their own money in their endeavor.

If we, as a profession don't ask to be paid according to value added, then in general there are going to be a lot less of us starting our own businesses and when we do, we'll have to cede control to non-technical types that did demand their worth like lawyers and finance guys.

My theory is that the first dotcom boom paved the road for the growth we are experiencing now because it took money from Wall Street and used it to line the pockets of technical folks with cash.

Re: Want good programmers? Then pay them.

#477

Post by weavejester » Fri, May 04, 2012, 5:11 PM UTC

gaius wrote: post #54

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…

Quite; allowing for inflation, developer salaries have been flat since 2001. There is not a shortage of developers, and that is provable.

Provable how? Not raising developer salaries might be indicative of there being no shortage of developers, but it's not proof by any stretch of the imagination.

In markets of asynchronous information, supply and demand fails. It's quite possible for developer salaries to remain constant or even decrease at the same time as demand for good developers goes through the roof.

Re: Want good programmers? Then pay them.

#478

Post by ricardobeat » Fri, May 04, 2012, 5:49 PM UTC

iangm wrote: post #467

ricardobeat wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brazil: 44h, 30 days PTO, ~12 public holidays, 13th salary (yeah...). If you're not working as a contractor, that is, which is way too common in the IT field.

It's not really 30 days PTO, isn't it? It's "30 consecutive days", which might even include holidays/weekends. And you don't have much flexibility on taking them. Also, it's not uncommon to have 40h agreements.

In Brazil you get paid monthly, not weekly, so weekends are part of the math. 30 weekdays would make it 42 consecutive days vacation - now that would be awesome.

Re: Want good programmers? Then pay them.

#479

Post by facorreia » Fri, May 04, 2012, 6:15 PM UTC

thdn wrote: post #159

facorreia wrote: post #4

In my experience, from what I see in Brazil, entry-level programmers with no professional experience are paid much more than the equivalent in other professions. And, even after years of "training" in college, they will need a year of two of actual on-the-job training before they start adding enough value to justify their cost. In short, a company that hires fresh-out-of-college programmers is making an investment in…

Im interested on moving on to Brazil, how much its the average salary ? and there's some craiglist like site for IT jobs ??

It's a bit hard to compare, with different costs of living and the overvaluation of the Brazilian Real exchange rate. But salaries are mostly way below American levels. A decent programmer can make US$ 20k/year. More gratuated developers, analysts and architects will make US$ 30k - 50k. Over US$ 60k would be considered a very good pay. As for websites, I suppose one of the biggest is http://www.catho.com.br/. As a foreigner you would probably want to go to São Paulo because it's the main economical center and it's pretty safe for Brazilian standards.

Re: Want good programmers? Then pay them.

#480

Post by ericd » Fri, May 04, 2012, 10:21 PM UTC

weavejester wrote: post #474

ericd wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then you're being unrealistic, because the expected value of a random applicant's ability is not that high.

But it works the other way around, too. The expected value of a random company is not that high unless the candidate considers themselves to have a good chance of success. Given how opaque the hiring process is from the point of view of an applicant, how do they know if it's worth spending their time solving a random puzzle? Investing time in open source software is a better use of time from the point of view of a ca…

Sure, I didn't say anything about that, but in this scenario it's implied that you're applying to this company, so presumably you know something about it and like it. You likely know a lot more about the company than it knows about you.

The Github filter is a bad one, though - lots of good programmers don't do the whole open source thing, and we need to stop this pretense of a good Github account being necessary for hiring. What started as a suggestion in some hiring blog posts has become overblown into dogma now.