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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

#111

Post by mycelium »

boomshucka wrote: post #106
mycelium wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Help me out of dreamland. I've got some money. I want good help, but I'm a dev and this is my first time hiring. What compensation range would you expect for the type of developer in cairo140's description?

I'm in the midwest for reference, but hiring remotely in the bay area is legit too.

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

#112

Post by hifier »

7Figures2Commas wrote: post #59
cairo140 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just sharing my experience here: I've been hiring in SF and found some boot camp grads, usually stronger but still far from mid-career, with expectations around 90-115k. Most of these folks got hired (some of them to us/away from us with offers all in that range). These were folks who were months to years away from hitting the ground running, and the value of the offer was entirely on their future potential. I found…

> I've been hiring in SF and found some boot camp grads, usually stronger but still far from mid-career, with expectations around 90-115k. Most of these folks got hired (some of them to us/away from us with offers all in that range). When the current cycle ends, the funding dries up and companies start running out of money, more folks will recognize this as the insanity it is.

Do you honestly think the demand for software engineers will go down in the next 10-20 years?

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

#113

Post by ThrustVectoring »

danso wrote: post #54

The lede anecdote talks about a 26-year-old math major who went from $20,000/yr as a writer to $100,000/yr as a data scientist, after a bootcamp. Ignoring the "but what is data science" debate for now...this to me seems totally reasonable. He's a math major . Programming is founded upon math...and at the very least, requires the same kind of mathematical deduction and ability to not be freaked out by symbolic represe…

That's basically the demographic that is both the coding bootcamp's core demographic and what you want to look for while hiring. Intelligent, analytical folks who go from under-employed to having enough of a skill-set to do something of value. Engineering school students who had to drop out for non-academic reasons and are flipping burgers, math majors who are for some reason writing for $20k/yr, grad students tired of running experiments for peanuts, etc.

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

#114

Post by 7Figures2Commas »

hifier wrote: post #112
7Figures2Commas wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've been hiring in SF and found some boot camp grads, usually stronger but still far from mid-career, with expectations around 90-115k. Most of these folks got hired (some of them to us/away from us with offers all in that range). When the current cycle ends, the funding dries up and companies start running out of money, more folks will recognize this as the insanity it is.

Do you honestly think the demand for software engineers will go down in the next 10-20 years?

Do you honestly think the demand for "software engineers" with little to no practical experience and modest training at $90,000 to $115,000/year, seen almost exclusively in a few overheated markets, will be sustained?

Companies like Google and Facebook, large, profitable enterprises that can cherry-pick the best college graduates from the best schools and invest in long-term development, are one thing. But unprofitable, angel and venture-backed startups that are pressured to grow (and that includes headcount) are another thing.

A lot of the salary froth at the entry-level end of the market is being driven by the latter, not the former. This has nothing to do with the long-term demand for skilled, experienced software engineers.

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

#115

Post by PopeOfNope »

ryandrake wrote: post #110
PopeOfNope wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Tomato, tomahto. He said "talented" developers and he also said they make offers to 1 in 5 candidates. Based on that, it sounds like they have a steady pool of candidates, so by definition they can find "developers." They reject 80% of them for some reason. Either their hiring process weeds out good candidates, their funnel isn't attracting the right kinds of devs to begin with, or there's an X factor, like they're located in an expensive city with the highest concentration of software companies on the planet (ie: lots of competition for anyone who can even spell fizzbuzz).

Or all three, which was my experience with about a dozen different companies in SF last October. I chose to take the job where I wasn't humiliated during the interview.

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

#116

Post by ryandrake »

mycelium wrote: post #111
boomshucka wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Help me out of dreamland. I've got some money. I want good help, but I'm a dev and this is my first time hiring. What compensation range would you expect for the type of developer in cairo140's description? I'm in the midwest for reference, but hiring remotely in the bay area is legit too.

As someone else replied, cairo140 needs to break his job description into 4 separate job reqs. My guess is that he or she will probably not find a single person capable of or willing to wear all of those hats simultaneously, for any salary. The job description is totally unreasonable.

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

#117

Post by CyberDildonics »

santaclaus wrote: post #63
woah wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another personal anecdote here- I'm self taught so maybe I'm biased. I worked on a side project years ago with a guy who was a proud Stanford alum. He did some kind of data sciencey stuff for his day job, but his ui code in this project was simply horrible. Like 2000 loc jquery spaghetti in a single file. I've also worked with a team of recent bootcamp grads who were highly paid and wrote great ui code quickly. They…

Stanford isn't an Ivy. ;)

People seem very offended by this fact. Stanford isn't an Ivy League school.

Wikipedia: The eight institutions are Brown University, Columbia University, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University, and Yale University.

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

#118

Post by boomshucka »

mycelium wrote: post #111
boomshucka wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Help me out of dreamland. I've got some money. I want good help, but I'm a dev and this is my first time hiring. What compensation range would you expect for the type of developer in cairo140's description? I'm in the midwest for reference, but hiring remotely in the bay area is legit too.

Try 250k and see the responses.

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

#119

Post by mycelium »

ryandrake wrote: post #105
mycelium wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 g…

Thanks for the willingness to discuss actual numbers. Using the BLS stats tool that falsestprophet linked below [1] I dug up some numbers. This is for the the "Software Developers, Applications" occupation:

    Area                               median      75%ile      90%ile
    Chicago, IL Metropolitan           $88,630     $109,640    $126,370
    Los Angeles, CA Metropolitan       $102,310    $126,340    $150,320
    San Francisco, CA Metropolitan     $112,570    $143,390    $174,120
    San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara CA  $137,710    $166,280    >$187,000
I'm from the midwest so my frame of reference is where $150k will get you well into in the 90s percentile-wise. I'm conducting my hunt in the LA area. And just so we're on the same page I included Bay Area numbers. Is $180-200k (on the 190 to 200 side) closer to the right number, with the Bay Area as a frame of reference?

[1] http://data.bls.gov/oes/search.jsp?data_tool=OES

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