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As Tech Booms, Workers Turn to Coding for Career Change

nytimes.com

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Re: As Tech Booms, Workers Turn to Coding for Career Change

#101

Post by PopeOfNope »

seibelj wrote: post #22

We made a conscious decision to try and hire someone from these camps as an experiment. I went to their demo day and winnowed the graduating class of 40 down to 6. Of the 6 we interviewed we decided to give 6 month internships to 3 of them, 2 developer and 1 qa. Despite being hourly with minimal benefits, they were making the yearly equivalent of 50k a year which I found more than reasonable given the fact they had n…

Do you hire programmers fresh out of college? How do they compare with the boot camp grads?

Re: As Tech Booms, Workers Turn to Coding for Career Change

#102

Post by dreaminvm »

eastbayjake wrote: post #43

I knew as soon as I checked the comments on this article there would be a barrage of negativity. I just wasn't prepared for it to be unanimous. I've made similar comments on HN in the past but much of this griping seems to boil down to "I was interested in [thing] way before all these johnny-come-latelys just bum-rushed it for a paycheck!" It's an irritatingly hipster thing to do -- I did X before X was cool, but now…

I disagree. What I got from the comments was that while everyone is capable of learning how to program, the expectation that a 3 month bootcamper can do/learn the same amount of information as a 4 year CS degree is insanity. Anyone who has studied STEM can tell you, 4 years is actually fast pace for a competitive program. What's next, a bootcamp to turn out doctors in 6 months instead of the 8/9 years of schooling?

And yes, most of these bootcampers (regardless of their location) are chasing a big paycheck because VC money is flooding the markets (many references in the article).

Re: As Tech Booms, Workers Turn to Coding for Career Change

#103

Post by jboggan »

sarwechshar wrote: post #21
jboggan wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Salary is not a monotonic mapping of developer productivity. Besides, given the general increase of salaries across the board and the poor raise-negotiating skills of coders in general, it isn't hard to imagine the 25% of salaries under hers were mostly of an older un-altered vintage for underperforming programmers.

I'm just curious, why is there a perception that coders are poor raise-negotiators in general?

Just going off my own admittedly limited personal experience combined with the observations of many around me - but we tend to have very limited ability and information to articulate our business value within our own organizations. It's easier to look at the messages in our LinkedIn inbox and see how switching jobs can give us a bigger and better raise than engaging in a socially-awkward conversation about our own worth. But just empirically, I see many coders far more brilliant and hard working than I am languish at low salaries because they actually stick around a company for several years and merely take small raises proposed by management at levels calculated only to avoid insult.

For most programmers I've met it is a "calling" in a certain sense - many of us would be doing these things for fun anyway, you are only really paying us for the 20% of the time that we are really engaged in true drudgery and "Charlie work". I share a sentiment with several other programmer friends that we still can't quite believe we are paid (and paid well) to create things and play with computers all day.

Re: As Tech Booms, Workers Turn to Coding for Career Change

#104

Post by PopeOfNope »

cairo140 wrote: post #90
winter_blue wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I found great difficulty finding a mid-career developer for the 130-150k range that it started making an "investment hire" feel like a viable alternative. Wow, are talented developer really that hard to find? (Especially, considering you're offering 130-150k.) Are you insistent on a developer being "mid-career" (I interpret that as having "years of experience") -- or would you accept a highly talented who has just…

I felt similarly incredulous when we first started searching. I'll add some details for color. Our hiring needs didn't feel too crazy to me. We were a multi-million dollar a year e-commerce shop, I was the first in-house technical hire, and we wanted to expand the team for personnel redundancy. Ideally, we wanted someone who would be capable of running a business-critical website. On the technical side, I was hoping…

Just out of curiosity, What's your hiring process look like?

We were a multi-million dollar a year e-commerce shop

top to bottom web app security, server ops, managing technical vendor relationships and integrating third-party modules, zero downtime rollouts, performance and architecture, metrics/instrumentation, and fully-independent backend and HTML/CSS/JS skills to build a secure and pixel-perfect feature beginning to end

Even at a lower end startup not making multimillion dollars, you've just described 4-6 engineer's worth of talents for 1.5x of a single developer's salary. I look at that list and think I'm never going to get a decent night's sleep while in your employ.

Re: As Tech Booms, Workers Turn to Coding for Career Change

#105

Post by ryandrake »

mycelium wrote: post #100
ryandrake wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Instead of hiring a developer that would drag you down, did you consider offering more money? When people say there's a shortage of developers, or that they find it really hard to find developers, my guess is that they have to add "at the salary I'm offering" to the end of the statement. I was car shopping a few months ago, and I found there's a dire shortage of brand new $10K BMWs.

Is $150k for a strong full-stack midcareer developer really like trying to get a $10k BMW? What compensation range would you shoot for? We're shopping in that compensation range and my experience has been exactly like cairo140's above: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9964934

Keep going up until the candidate pool improves? Just a personal anecdote: Even though I loved writing software, I moved up and away from development (after 12+ years) mostly because of the salary ceiling we all inevitably eventually hit. But I keep my skills sharp and would always go back for the right price. $150K would definitely not be the right price, at least not in the Bay Area. My guess is there are tons of guys like this out there.

Re: As Tech Booms, Workers Turn to Coding for Career Change

#106

Post by boomshucka »

mycelium wrote: post #100
ryandrake wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Instead of hiring a developer that would drag you down, did you consider offering more money? When people say there's a shortage of developers, or that they find it really hard to find developers, my guess is that they have to add "at the salary I'm offering" to the end of the statement. I was car shopping a few months ago, and I found there's a dire shortage of brand new $10K BMWs.

Is $150k for a strong full-stack midcareer developer really like trying to get a $10k BMW? What compensation range would you shoot for? We're shopping in that compensation range and my experience has been exactly like cairo140's above: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9964934

Yes, it is. You can't just say "I should be able to get x for y". You are in dreamland, pure and simple.

Re: As Tech Booms, Workers Turn to Coding for Career Change

#107

Post by PopeOfNope »

ryandrake wrote: post #83
duderific wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it is really hard to find talented developers. I am a developer who interviews developer candidates at my company, and we only end up giving an offer to maybe one in five candidates. Our standards are fairly high but not ridiculously so. We are desperate for developers, but not to the point where we want to hire someone who we feel like would be dragging us down.

Instead of hiring a developer that would drag you down, did you consider offering more money? When people say there's a shortage of developers, or that they find it really hard to find developers, my guess is that they have to add "at the salary I'm offering" to the end of the statement. I was car shopping a few months ago, and I found there's a dire shortage of brand new $10K BMWs.

When people say there's a shortage of developers, or that they find it really hard to find developers, my guess is that they have to add "at the salary I'm offering" to the end of the statement.

Or they have a hiring process and that weeds out top performers. And/or they have a hiring funnel that appeals to the bottom of the barrel.

Re: As Tech Booms, Workers Turn to Coding for Career Change

#108

Post by boomshucka »

ryandrake wrote: post #83
duderific wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it is really hard to find talented developers. I am a developer who interviews developer candidates at my company, and we only end up giving an offer to maybe one in five candidates. Our standards are fairly high but not ridiculously so. We are desperate for developers, but not to the point where we want to hire someone who we feel like would be dragging us down.

Instead of hiring a developer that would drag you down, did you consider offering more money? When people say there's a shortage of developers, or that they find it really hard to find developers, my guess is that they have to add "at the salary I'm offering" to the end of the statement. I was car shopping a few months ago, and I found there's a dire shortage of brand new $10K BMWs.

Seriously. Virtually all people complaining about hiring are way off base on compensation. If they were to increase (sometimes they literally need to double) comp, they'd see things get a lot easier.

Re: As Tech Booms, Workers Turn to Coding for Career Change

#109

Post by hifier »

ennuihenry wrote: post #32
seibelj wrote: post #22

We made a conscious decision to try and hire someone from these camps as an experiment. I went to their demo day and winnowed the graduating class of 40 down to 6. Of the 6 we interviewed we decided to give 6 month internships to 3 of them, 2 developer and 1 qa. Despite being hourly with minimal benefits, they were making the yearly equivalent of 50k a year which I found more than reasonable given the fact they had n…

What area are you in? 75k in NY or SF for an inexperienced developer seems high.

75 is not high in NY and SF for entry level. Probably low for even average candidates.

Re: As Tech Booms, Workers Turn to Coding for Career Change

#110

Post by ryandrake »

PopeOfNope wrote: post #107
ryandrake wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Instead of hiring a developer that would drag you down, did you consider offering more money? When people say there's a shortage of developers, or that they find it really hard to find developers, my guess is that they have to add "at the salary I'm offering" to the end of the statement. I was car shopping a few months ago, and I found there's a dire shortage of brand new $10K BMWs.

When people say there's a shortage of developers, or that they find it really hard to find developers, my guess is that they have to add "at the salary I'm offering" to the end of the statement. Or they have a hiring process and that weeds out top performers. And/or they have a hiring funnel that appeals to the bottom of the barrel.

I'd agree if they were talking bout "top" developers. But, not everyone needs top developers. Lots of people are simply saying We can't find developers, period, which is baffling, until you find out what they're offering in terms of comp.
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