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On Immigration, Engineers Simply Don’t Trust VCs

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Re: On Immigration, Engineers Simply Don’t Trust VCs

#131

Post by eli_gottlieb »

morgante wrote: post #124
no_wave wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Advertise the salary you're offering. If your positions look like 90k positions but you're offering 150k, how will an applicant know? EDIT: I noticed that you wrote in a nested comment that publicly listing salaries is a non-starter. I'm not sure why - at the very least you could list the smallest number you'd imagine offering a qualified applicant. Note that it's pretty strange to claim that you can't attract enough…

There are two major problems with listing salaries publicly. 1. We don't really want to make the huge salary discrepancies obvious to our non-tech employees. While it's theoretically true, publicly listing the difference wouldn't be great for morale. 2. There's a huge range, and where a particularly candidate falls in that range requires qualitative judgement. We consider everyone from talented new grads to senior de…

If listing the salaries for the technologists will make the non-technologists in your firm jealous, then perhaps you should raise their wages, too.

Re: On Immigration, Engineers Simply Don’t Trust VCs

#132

Post by zevets »

morgante wrote: post #110
waterlesscloud wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've never been unable to make a compelling offer to a candidate you've attracted to apply in the first place. What about those you haven't?

You're right that our biggest challenge is in getting people to apply in the first place. What do you think is the highest value of deploying monetary and other resources to make that happen, given that publicly listing salaries is a non-starter?

Does your employer use the lots of startupland hiring phrases, like "we're looking for passionate rockstars who believe in our mission to change the world through payroll software"?

A lot of the phrases in vogue right now seem to indicate companies that want employees that work 80 hour weeks and pay entry level salaries. Have you tried "competitive compensation" or some other non-numerical indicator that you guys pay well or phrases that indicate you guys have a professional vs. passionate culture?

Re: On Immigration, Engineers Simply Don’t Trust VCs

#133

Post by pm24601 »

fw109 wrote: post #119
zo1 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>" So for those of you with inflated senses of self-worth complaining about people like me, why don't you go cry to your mommy about how you should have taken a Wall Street job instead, so that you could have earned a lot more money while fucking over the world economy. Because fuck the rest of the world, right? " You're more than welcome to cut your upcoming now-1st-world salary that you boast about and give most of…

You're right, I'm luckier than several billions of people in the world. But my point is simply this: the fact that I wasn't born in the US was not in my control. If I want to move here, some people want me here, and it is in my control to do so, I just feel that I have the right to do so. As far as the last few lines in my comment go: I was expressing bitterness at the fact that we foreign workers are being dismissed…

We are not expressing bitterness at foreign workers - we are expressing the reality of 30+ years of US jobs being exported. Good paying manufacturing jobs in the Midwest. Many, many towns are now empty poor shells inhabited by once middle class families who are now poor because their jobs were exported to foreign countries.

And now Americans are supposed to be willing to give up their jobs even within the U.S.?

Maybe if the 1%ers hadn't been so busy destroying the American middle class, you would be welcomed more generously.

Re: On Immigration, Engineers Simply Don’t Trust VCs

#134

Post by eli_gottlieb »

morgante wrote: post #99
PhoenixWright wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am currently looking at jobs in NYC. With 2 years of experience I am fielding offers between 60k-80k in a cheap state to live in. Two comments above you make great points: (1) Developers should be making more than what they are and (2) Why should startups be entitled to cheap labor? That being said my point is if I had the 5+ years of experience you probably are looking for and was moving to NYC I would expect to b…

> (1) Developers should be making more than what they are As a developer, I'd love to agree with this. In fact, I do. But in our experience this isn't directly related to the talent shortage (again, we have never been unable to make a compelling offer to a candidate). > (2) Why should startups be entitled to cheap labor? I don't think they should be. All our senior devs have generous compensation which easily adds up…

>I don't think they should be. All our senior devs have generous compensation which easily adds up to $150k+.

I once got messaged on LinkedIn by a Bloomberg/banking guy looking for me to contract with them in New York at a rate of $144,000/year, and I'm comparatively junior. A properly senior developer, someone with something like 7-10 years of experience in industry, should definitely be making a bunch more than some guy offers me off-the-cuff when trying to recruit on LinkedIn -- especially in an expensive area like NYC!

Re: On Immigration, Engineers Simply Don’t Trust VCs

#135

Post by pm24601 »

amerliore wrote: post #75
waterlesscloud wrote: post #9

It would be helpful to have some concrete examples of companies who are hurting from this shortage. What projects, specifically, are they not getting done? What specific requirements are they not able to find in potential employees? Why, specifically, is training not an option? How, specifically, is inability to get this project going hurting them? What specific compensation are they offering? If you want some trust,…

Training is seen as competitive suicide, because while you bear the costs of training, your competitors can then poach your trained employees by offering a salary that is less than your total cost for that employee but more than the salary you pay that employee. X = cost to train employee Y = salary of employee Competitor pays Z such that Y The second factor is that if you raise wages for one person, then the rest of…

> Training is seen as competitive suicide, because while you bear the costs of training, your competitors can then poach your trained employees by offering a salary that is less than your total cost for that employee but more than the salary you pay that employee.

Then I guess the company will just have to do without.

Seriously, if the need is so great then maybe, just maybe the company should do the training and should reward employees for staying.

Otherwise, maybe the need really isn't so great.

Re: On Immigration, Engineers Simply Don’t Trust VCs

#136

Post by cheepin »

cscurmudgeon wrote: post #93
selmnoo wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Given that it's impossible to produce more senior developers in a 1-2 year timeframe, what alternatives do people suggest to immigration? Why do we operate under the assumption that these companies are entitled to as many unicorns as they want? Why shouldn't they just go out of business? After the whole collusion ordeal when it became abundantly clear that on one side there are VCs, founders, and C-levels who work…

Wait, did startups participate in Collusion-gate? No.

They got a ton of benefit with none of the moral cost!

Re: On Immigration, Engineers Simply Don’t Trust VCs

#137

Post by 7Figures2Commas »

morgante wrote: post #84
sosuke wrote: post #2

Just on the subject of programmer salaries, I was talking with someone who had much more experience in the computing industry than myself and he pointed out something I'd never known. He said that programmer salaries from pre-bubble days was six-figures, and that we're still in that range, and not higher is proof that salaries have been kept low. Six-figures today is not what six-figures was worth in 1998. Inflation…

In principle, I agree with most commentators on HN that if there were actually a shortage we'd expect to see salaries rising. Yet, in practice, it does seem that there's simply an absolute shortage of experienced developers. I've been hiring developers at my job for most of the past year, yet we have never had an offer turned down. Rather, we see only a trickle of applicants, very few of whom are event remotely quali…

What makes you think that immigration is going to result in an increase in high-quality applicants to your company? This sounds an awful lot like "If you build it, they will come."

While I don't doubt that you see a lot of candidates who aren't remotely qualified for your positions, one of the harsh realities of this market is that it's hard to attract "great" people, even if you're at or above market in terms of compensation. There just aren't enough "great" people to go around, so other factors, such as technical challenges and business viability, are often taken into consideration by quality candidates. Chances are there are other startups competing for the same talent that seem to be working on more challenging problems and have better prospects than you.

Early-stage startups like yours would be wise to consider optimizing their businesses and technology architectures around this fact. Unless you can pay stupid guap or are working on something really, really objectively interesting, one of the best and most underutilized techniques for finding great employees is to hire decent folks with potential and develop them into great employees.

A lot of companies will insist this isn't viable ("We needed 15 unicorns yesterday because we're building the world's most advanced analytics platform for selfies!") but most of them aren't being honest with themselves about their real needs. They're intent on building technology for the business they think they'll have and don't want to admit that they don't know how to develop employees.

Re: On Immigration, Engineers Simply Don’t Trust VCs

#138

Post by no_wave »

morgante wrote: post #124
no_wave wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Advertise the salary you're offering. If your positions look like 90k positions but you're offering 150k, how will an applicant know? EDIT: I noticed that you wrote in a nested comment that publicly listing salaries is a non-starter. I'm not sure why - at the very least you could list the smallest number you'd imagine offering a qualified applicant. Note that it's pretty strange to claim that you can't attract enough…

There are two major problems with listing salaries publicly. 1. We don't really want to make the huge salary discrepancies obvious to our non-tech employees. While it's theoretically true, publicly listing the difference wouldn't be great for morale. 2. There's a huge range, and where a particularly candidate falls in that range requires qualitative judgement. We consider everyone from talented new grads to senior de…

You don't have to just post a range. The listing just needs to communicate that you're paying well above market, which is a step beyond competitive (and I've never seen "above market" in a job listing). Of course, this is only if your company really is committed to doing so!

I don't have a clever solution for 1. This is definitely a broader cultural issue - non-lawyers at a law firm would completely expect to make less than the lawyers but programmers still don't nearly get that level of respect.

EDIT: I think we're miscommunicating a little. There absolutely are quite a lot of qualified senior developers right now. Most of them are employed. You're just not seeing a lot of qualified senior developers applying to your jobs, which is a different issue entirely. Given that nobody's turned an offer down, there's something that your job postings are missing that people are learning during the interview process. "Not paying enough", in this case, can be effectively synonymous with "not communicating that you're paying enough".

Re: On Immigration, Engineers Simply Don’t Trust VCs

#139

Post by sanxiyn »

minthd wrote: post #90
zaroth wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tele-presence has a long way to go, and the network infrastructure too, but it will obviously, eventually, get to the point where it's indistinguishable from being in the same room, minus the physical contact. But to your point, it's not even a given that would help much. Even with that, you still suffer mostly from time zones. You're just not going to collaborate the same ways with someone on the other side of the p…

The time zone issue can be solved easily.find a south american country that is immigration friendly and open an office their ,recruiting from all over the world.

Why not Canada?

Re: On Immigration, Engineers Simply Don’t Trust VCs

#140

Post by eli_gottlieb »

bradleyjg wrote: post #12
jacobolus wrote: post #11

On one of the previous threads about this topic, someone suggested that accepting H1-B applicants in order from higher to lower salaries instead of based on a lottery would clear up a lot of the lottery spots that currently go to the below-market-wage-indentured-servant type shops to be used for more deserving companies and applicants. Seems like a solid change to me, without an obvious downside. (But I am not an exp…

As much as it may sometimes seem like it is, the H1-B isn't a programming or IT visa. It's applicable to a wide range of specialty occupations, across the entire nation. The suggested change would block out virtually all applicants from many other professions.

Salary is a measure of productivity. Free market rules: to do otherwise is to engage in state planning of the labor market on behalf of employers.
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