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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

#171

Post by greenyoda »

morgante wrote: post #148
zevets wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think our job listings are quite fair and free of "startup" phrases. We emphasize the actual problems you'll be working on and try to communicate that we pay professional salaries for professionals. Then again, I wrote them. So you can see for yourself: http://www.cafe.com/careers

"I think our job listings are quite fair and free of 'startup' phrases."

Just looked at your "Lead Engineer" listing. It says: "We offer a great startup work environment with free beer, snacks, and friendly teammates." That sounds more like a typical startup that expects people to work there for the fun experience than a workplace that wants to attract highly-paid professionals.

And the offer of free beer makes it sound like a frat party. Maybe that's a turn-off to women who don't want to work in a place full of drunken guys. Maybe it's a turn-off to guys who want to have a life outside of work. Skip the free beer and make sure your employees have enough free time after work to get a beer outside if they want to.

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

#172

Post by glenra »

morgante wrote: post #141
kmonsen wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

150k is pretty bad for a senior dev in NYC fyi. Perhaps you have answered your own question. Banks will pay at least 2x more and large tech companies closer to that than what you are offering. Note I'm not talking about truly great developers, merely good senior ones.

I'm not sure I agree, especially when you factor in substantial equity. We have interviewed numerous people from banks and large tech companies and our salaries certainly don't seem out of whack. For reference, $150k is right on target according to AngelList data: https://angel.co/salaries

To you, that "substantial equity" might be a real cost, but to the applicant it's essentially a lottery ticket. The expected value of your equity is zero. I've worked in many silicon valley firms that offered stock options but the only time one ended up having any value to me was as a bargaining chip - I was able to tell the next firm that wanted to hire me "gee, I'd love to take your offer but if I leave now I'm giving up all these unvested options worth lots of imaginary money" which helped negotiate a signing bonus.

Most companies fail, making their stock options worthless. And even the few companies that succeed usually hit bumps in the road that dilute the stock options or put their value underwater.

So if you have a reason to think your idea of "substantial equity" is much more likely than average to ever be worth anything at all, you should make that fact a key part of your pitch. (Or if you're indifferent between equity and salary, offer more salary and less equity.)

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

#173

Post by morgante »

waterlesscloud wrote: post #149
morgante wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. You are quite correct—I haven't yet figured out how to convey the interesting product/technical challenges we're working on in a mass way: especially not well enough to overcome must developers instinctual reaction to "publishing." If you have a minute, I would love t…

Yeah, those career listings are pretty bland. Not much sense of what you'd actually be doing, or even what the company is hoping to do in a bigger sense. If nothing else, more specificity in both those areas would help you stand out. Especially since, as you say, it's publishing and techies are kind of skeptical about their role in that. And "competitive compensation" to me signals "eh compensation". It's a pretty we…

Thanks for the feedback.

> And "competitive compensation" to me signals "eh compensation". It's a pretty weaselly word.

What do you think would sound better? Above market compensation?

> Also, I didn't see any technical people mentioned on the About page? Are they not part of the team?

Good catch. I'm on there (Director of Product & Technology) but we haven't done a good job of keeping it up to date with new hires.

> What impact are they going to have, both in the company and in the world?

Yes, I definitely need to work on this. I've done a pretty good job of refining the technical vision and how it fits with the overall company, but haven't yet distilled it down to a good description. How's this:

Cafe is building technology for discovering, publishing, and sharing great stories. We're building: web scrapers which analyze content across the web (with NLP and Amazon Mechanical Turk) to identify promising writers, a platform which makes it easy for non-technical writers to publish interactive stories, and analytics which model how ideas and stories flow across the web in real time. As a developer at Cafe, you'll be using technology to inform and entertain millions of people while driving clickbait off the web.

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

#174

Post by x0x0 »

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,…

Here's ways to demonstrate there really is a talent shortage.

- wages rising, in real terms, faster than inflation. And not some bullshit fed measure of price inflation (ex the things that inflated), but bay-area inflation that counts the 10% annual increases in rent / home prices.

- getting serious about remote employees

- if location is really so critical, paying enough that talent from the midwest / west moves to the bay / nyc. And not fresh grads, but engineers 10 years into their careers. I currently see experienced engineers leaving sfbay.

- companies, particularly big ones like oracle, google, linkedin, yahoo, fb, salesforce, and even vc coalitions getting serious about addressing local cost drivers, ie housing and transport.

I see zero of those.

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

#175

Post by raverbashing »

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…

And what is the cost of not having an employee?

And surely, if your pay sucks so much your employee jumps ship the minute he/she finishes training maybe your company sucks.

The airline industry has one of the highest training costs of any industry and they still pay for training. Some manage to contract the employee into staying a couple of years (but this is not allowed in all countries)

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

#176

Post by greenyoda »

IndianAstronaut wrote: post #116
curiousDog wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would be nice if someone extrapolated how the wages would look like today if the H1-B program wasn't put into place. Would programmers be making WallStreet salaries? How would that have impacted the start-up ecosystem? Also, numerous H1-Bs are the core of companies like Google, Microsoft, Facebook etc. How would things have looked without any of them?

>lso, numerous H1-Bs are the core of companies like Google, Microsoft, Facebook etc. How would things have looked without any of them? Google would not exist if the US immigration policies were always strict. Sergey Brin is an immigrant. Neither would lots of companies. http://www.economist.com/news/business/21576101-start-ups-fo...

Sergey Brin came to the U.S. with his family at the age of six from the USSR.[1] His family was probably admitted to the U.S. due to the religious persecution they faced: "Michael Brin [his father] claims Communist Party heads barred Jews from upper professional ranks by denying them entry to universities, and that Jews were excluded from the physics departments in particular."[2]

So his story is not very relevant to the discussion of H1-B visas and tech worker shortages.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Brin

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Brin#Childhood_in_the_S...

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

#177

Post by davidw »

bradleyjg wrote: post #24
nitrogen wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regardless of the industry, if the H-1B is designed to allow employers to hire specialists they can't find locally, then a salary-sorted approval process should still be desirable. Machine shops fighting over top-1% welders with deep materials science knowledge should be no different to software shops fighting over top-1% developers with deep computer science knowledge.

That'd be fine if the applicant pool was first sorted by profession and geography and like compared against like. But how do you decide the distribution of visas across those sub-groups?

For that matter, who picks the number of "how many H1B visas should we have", based on what criteria? Is there research backing up this number? Statistics?

I'd be much more willing to let people decide on their own:

http://johnhcochrane.blogspot.it/2014/06/the-optimal-number-...

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

#178

Post by alecco »

JabavuAdams wrote: post #66

There's something interesting missing from this discussion -- do the most-skilled international developers want to move to the US? The US's reputation is at a low ebb. I mean, I like visiting, and I would love to work on some of the projects that are only available in the US, but the idea of actually living there? That's a really tough sell.

Better be a hell of a big compensation. US laws and treatment of foreigners by law enforcement is quite crazy. Spying on my email and all cloud assets, no problem since I'm not US citizen. Even Obama said we have no rights to privacy. And nobody in US bat an eyelash when they hear that kind of xenophobic explanation.

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

#179

Post by codeonfire »

davidw wrote: post #177
bradleyjg wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That'd be fine if the applicant pool was first sorted by profession and geography and like compared against like. But how do you decide the distribution of visas across those sub-groups?

For that matter, who picks the number of "how many H1B visas should we have", based on what criteria? Is there research backing up this number? Statistics? I'd be much more willing to let people decide on their own: http://johnhcochrane.blogspot.it/2014/06/the-optimal-number-...

I'm fairly sure that is the US congress and their criteria is how many minority votes they think they can get during an election year.

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

#180

Post by jacquesm »

waterlesscloud wrote: post #164
raverbashing wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of companies do that already However, it's not as simple as it seems, you think "let's send everybody to Canada and then grow our offices there with all the foreigners we want" but that doesn't happen and you wonder why. Maybe they don't want to outgrow their main offices, or maybe it's got to do with Canadian work culture I've seen people being "parked" in Ireland before applying for their H1B

It seems to be quite common with movie visual effects companies. And the Toronto or Vancouver offices are often bigger than the LA staffs. Of course, that industry is being priced down to survival levels.

That's partly related to the non CGI parts of movies often being shot in Canada because of cost advantages. In Toronto you couldn't walk two blocks without tripping over a film crew.
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