81–90 of 119 posts
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I agree with you. Generally, there is no shortage of tech resumes on Wall Street - because wages are higher.
Also because there are fewer choices in NYC than engineers have in the SF Bay Area.
also if engineers had fewer choices, wages would be lower, wouldn't they ?
I think the subtext of "I would hire thirty great programmers tomorrow!" is "I would hire thirty great programmers tomorrow! They just need to think 55 hours a week is a nice relaxing pace, have impeccable pedigrees, and be capable of spinning up within single-digit weeks. Also, we're looking for top-of-the-skill-curve at a combination of five technologies, two of which are fairly niche. For a variety of reasons we'd…
That doesn't address the question of whether or not we should increase immigration quotas though. I don't think there's any question that if the only thing we do to increase the supply of great coders is to increase immigration quotas, then this basically just amounts to a pyramid scheme to further enrich the silicon valley elites at the expense of the public. But pg never says that this is the only thing we should d…
I think the subtext of "I would hire thirty great programmers tomorrow!" is "I would hire thirty great programmers tomorrow! They just need to think 55 hours a week is a nice relaxing pace, have impeccable pedigrees, and be capable of spinning up within single-digit weeks. Also, we're looking for top-of-the-skill-curve at a combination of five technologies, two of which are fairly niche. For a variety of reasons we'd…
It seems highly improbable that cash-based Wall Street compensation packages could be offered by Silicon Valley startups. Maybe established companies could, but it would massively increase the fundraising requirements for early stage companies, with probably bad effects on the SV ecosystem. Perhaps you can argue that startup equity grants should be higher. Would hiring issues be resolved if the average equity grant t…
IMO, no. The difference between founder and employee #1 is still too large, even though the risk is not significantly higher.
Assume there are two founders, splitting 50/50, then there's a 10% employee option pool, so the founders have 45% each. Moving from 1 -> 3% is not enough incentive, but moving from 1->10% might be.
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It seems highly improbable that cash-based Wall Street compensation packages could be offered by Silicon Valley startups. Maybe established companies could, but it would massively increase the fundraising requirements for early stage companies, with probably bad effects on the SV ecosystem. Perhaps you can argue that startup equity grants should be higher. Would hiring issues be resolved if the average equity grant t…
> It seems highly improbable that cash-based Wall Street compensation packages could be offered by Silicon Valley startups. Maybe this would force VC companies to be more selective in who they fund, vs "fund 100 and hope for 1 to be the next google".
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Also because there are fewer choices in NYC than engineers have in the SF Bay Area.
Citation needed for this. The New York metro area has more than 2x the population of the Bay Area and an extremely diverse economic base. That makes claims about availability of choice being limited in NYC in comparison to SF pretty hard to believe.
I've seen many studies of tech hiring/jobs across the country. I'm sure you can find any research you're looking for.
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It's a pity your thoughtful comment is losing visibility as the submitted story has been flagged off the front page.
Sadly, it hasn't truly been "flagged off", it was done by the volition (or rather, the acquiescence of HN mods). This has happened for almost every immigration-related submission critical of pg's point-of-view. When you call them out for this, they go back to the excuse "the users voted it off!" But that's not really a good response, since they do routinely take the initiative of bringing to life stories that were vo…
To be precise, this thread now has about 80 comments and about 70 upvotes. In the past, at least, HN's software has considered that a "flamewar". Perhaps it's too bad, in this case, since TFA is so much more cogent and reasonable than PG's original self-serving bullshit, but unless you credibly suggest that someone is either inflating comment numbers or deflating upvotes, it is exaggeration to say this has been "killed".
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Sadly, it hasn't truly been "flagged off", it was done by the volition (or rather, the acquiescence of HN mods). This has happened for almost every immigration-related submission critical of pg's point-of-view. When you call them out for this, they go back to the excuse "the users voted it off!" But that's not really a good response, since they do routinely take the initiative of bringing to life stories that were vo…
...it hasn't truly been "flagged off"... To be precise, this thread now has about 80 comments and about 70 upvotes. In the past, at least, HN's software has considered that a "flamewar". Perhaps it's too bad, in this case, since TFA is so much more cogent and reasonable than PG's original self-serving bullshit, but unless you credibly suggest that someone is either inflating comment numbers or deflating upvotes, it i…
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Also because there are fewer choices in NYC than engineers have in the SF Bay Area.
My guess is high frequency trading jobs in California pay more than startup jobs in California also if engineers had fewer choices, wages would be lower, wouldn't they ?
That said, if you're an experienced engineer and you told me you wanted to make $200k next year, if you're in NYC I would say "go into finance" which is far more limited than the advice I would give in SFBA which is "go work for just about any publicly traded tech company, or slightly more risky go work for a tech company that seems to have an imminent IPO, or more risky still go work for a well-funded private marquee tech company (many of these companies would overlap with the 2nd group). In the end, it's a much bigger pond.
Look, I'm not saying NYC is void of these types of opportunities. I've got friends who work in the city for Tumblr and Spotify among others. I'm just saying, it's about density. You could take the skyline of SF and put it in a few blocks of lower manhattan. And you could take the tech population of NYC and put it in a "few blocks" of SF.
All that said, the relation to wages is more complicated than you suggest. Less variety doesn't speak to the balance between labor talent and demand.
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Using job ads to gauge market salaries will leave you at a disadvantage. There aren't many engineers in the bay area taking work today at $100k or below. Those that are are usually right out of school, or working for a cause they believe in.
It's very hard to get real data, so I can't really fault you for the lack of a good cite. However, it's not like the companies claiming a shortage are exactly forthcoming with the data themselves. Here's a pretty eye-opening story about a journalist and professor trying to get good data to study the issue http://blog.sfgate.com/nov05election/2013/09/20/profs-immigr... I find it remarkable that people make claims of s…
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We humans are greedy species. If given opportunity we would always hire superstar (even janitors or hamburger flippers) especially if they don't cost any extra. If you can find superstar, great! but stop crying "shortage" if you are not in the business of open heart surgery. EDIT: And yes every average heart surgeon is capable of doing heart surgery otherwise they would not get a degree in the first place. There is n…
heart surgery is very complex and success depends on a lot of things. How a human body will react to a highly invasive procedure is unknown hence if it reacts in a way that your average surgeon has no idea on how to deal with the patient would die. Have you heard of specialists? Do you know why people go to specialists? Why is there a need of specialists if every average heart surgeon can do heart surgery? So you see…