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Experienced engineers are struggling to get hired

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Re: Experienced engineers are struggling to get hired

#211

Post by zengid »

memset wrote: post #66

I am actively looking to hire - either freelance or full-time - an engineer to write open source golang code for my YC startup. However, I literally cannot afford FAANG salaries at my stage. It would literally bring my runway from n to n/5 years. And many candidates are asking for 400k+ salaries. I’d love to hire someone who knows what they’re doing but I’m just not able to find people who are both qualified and inte…

change your stack from Go to C# and you'll find amazing folks who'd work for a quarter of that salary.

Re: Experienced engineers are struggling to get hired

#212

Post by dnissley »

gamblor956 wrote: post #209
pdimitar wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Instead of calling people you never met bad, maybe you can share your techniques of tweaking the resume? I've never in my life worked for more than $110K annually and I have 22 years of experience. Can do practically anything on the backend and quite a lot in terms of system administration. This is also VERY sensitive to location, even if I'm working remote ever since 2011.

There are only a handful of companies in the U.S. willing to pay 200k+ for contract programmers, and these invariably involve highly specialized needs. And if they're in a specialized niche, then their numbers and experience aren't relevant outside of that niche. Note that the parent poster was saying he is a "low level" programmer, meaning close to the hardware, which is niche role. If you know someone claiming to m…

200k is just 100/hr, no? Seems like there are many more than just a handful of companies willing to pay that rate

Re: Experienced engineers are struggling to get hired

#213

Post by John23832 »

memset wrote: post #66

I am actively looking to hire - either freelance or full-time - an engineer to write open source golang code for my YC startup. However, I literally cannot afford FAANG salaries at my stage. It would literally bring my runway from n to n/5 years. And many candidates are asking for 400k+ salaries. I’d love to hire someone who knows what they’re doing but I’m just not able to find people who are both qualified and inte…

>And many candidates are asking for 400k+ salaries.

400K+ in SALARY is rarefied air. That's basically just Netflix for most software engineers. 400k in total comp is different.

Re: Experienced engineers are struggling to get hired

#214

Post by alex_c »

memset wrote: post #66

I am actively looking to hire - either freelance or full-time - an engineer to write open source golang code for my YC startup. However, I literally cannot afford FAANG salaries at my stage. It would literally bring my runway from n to n/5 years. And many candidates are asking for 400k+ salaries. I’d love to hire someone who knows what they’re doing but I’m just not able to find people who are both qualified and inte…

I am fascinated by this - how wildly different experiences can be in different pockets of the industry.

The only way I can see 400k+ salaries is if your requirements are a very restrictive Venn diagram of:

* Geographical location (assuming in person, Bay Area / SV?)

* FAANG experience (is it an actual requirement?)

* Seniority (does not necessarily translate to ability... but it does translate to higher asking salary!)

* Niche technical or industry skills

* Golang experience (which wouldn't explain 400k+ by itself, but may restrict the candidate pool further)

If you're seeing $200/hr, that is high but not unreasonable for a good freelancer and smaller engagements. $400k for a 1 year full time freelance contract is pushing it. $400k/year for a salary position seems borderline crazy to me!

Re: Experienced engineers are struggling to get hired

#215

Post by gamblor956 »

dnissley wrote: post #212
gamblor956 wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are only a handful of companies in the U.S. willing to pay 200k+ for contract programmers, and these invariably involve highly specialized needs. And if they're in a specialized niche, then their numbers and experience aren't relevant outside of that niche. Note that the parent poster was saying he is a "low level" programmer, meaning close to the hardware, which is niche role. If you know someone claiming to m…

200k is just 100/hr, no? Seems like there are many more than just a handful of companies willing to pay that rate

I know a lot of people who claim to make 200k+ as contract programmers doing vaguely web-related stuff.

But as a tax guy, I generally see the actual financial data (i.e., the actual 1099-reportable payments), and I rarely see anyone who actually does make 200k+ as a contractor. And all of those positions are always niche positions, and almost all of these roles are for less than a year: meaning: the 200k is the amount they would make if the role lasted a full year. So if they're making 200k+, it involves multiple gigs, which is a very different situation from making 200k+ at a single gig.

Re: Experienced engineers are struggling to get hired

#216

Post by PartiallyTyped »

pdimitar wrote: post #189
maldev wrote: post #187

I have ~11 yoe and have near 100% callback rate(50% for remote). All positions from 200-450. Friends have similar rates. And ~70% offer rates. Always confused reading these. But I'm also a low level developer, and only ask for ~250-3 salary/bonus. It feels like the people complaining are either really bad, have poor resume's, or have visa requirements. I tweaked my resume after not getting many callbacks and now have…

Instead of calling people you never met bad, maybe you can share your techniques of tweaking the resume? I've never in my life worked for more than $110K annually and I have 22 years of experience. Can do practically anything on the backend and quite a lot in terms of system administration. This is also VERY sensitive to location, even if I'm working remote ever since 2011.

> This is also VERY sensitive to location

I made the mistake of moving to Eastern Europe, and it is very difficult to get out of here due to relocation.

Re: Experienced engineers are struggling to get hired

#217

Post by sangnoir »

comte7092 wrote: post #182
sinatra wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Usually it’s much easier to be liberal when doing so doesn’t cost you meaningfully. I’d encourage you to evaluate for yourself if your stances are truly fair and if you’re truly liberal considering how painful it is for an H1B to lose their job vs you. It’s also easy to say “but H1Bs get exploited!” Considering how many H1Bs come here, maybe they’d rather face this exploitation vs staying in their own country?

>it’s much easier to be liberal when doing so doesn’t cost you meaningfully I’d go so far as to say that is almost part and parcel what a “liberal” is almost always

That applies across the board, and I suspect is a personality trait independent of political alignment. I've witnessed people on the right who were against handouts or abortion until they were personally impacted.

When there is a real personal cost, a good chunk of people become surprisingly flexible about their politics, or spectacularly fail to resolve the cognitive dissonance and resort to "My circumstances are different."

Re: Experienced engineers are struggling to get hired

#218

Post by greenie_beans »

Ancapistani wrote: post #198
greenie_beans wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

sounds like you're in bham or atl? and you're right. i know numerous talented engineers in the south who you can pay less and get as good or better of a job done than a FAANG engineer. tbh i might be biased towards a non-FAANG engineer. them southern devs be scrappy.

Nope - I'm in a town of <15k people. The nearest city of the size of Birmingham or Atlanta is 2.5 hours away from me.

nice! love that for you.

Re: Experienced engineers are struggling to get hired

#219

Post by greenie_beans »

selimthegrim wrote: post #191
greenie_beans wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

sounds like you're in bham or atl? and you're right. i know numerous talented engineers in the south who you can pay less and get as good or better of a job done than a FAANG engineer. tbh i might be biased towards a non-FAANG engineer. them southern devs be scrappy.

Why should I (in NOLA) take a salary that I got as a team lead 10 years ago on the West Coast?

idk, ask your boss that.

Re: Experienced engineers are struggling to get hired

#220

Post by rhelz »

h02 wrote: post #192
rhelz wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but...out of a thousand applicants--who presumably had college degrees/and or years of experience programming for other companies--there just has to be some who would have been successful at your company. I mean, if you lined up 600 random people grabbed from off the street, you'd find 6 to 10 of them with a genius level IQ. In fact, you'd have a good chance of finding somebody smar…

Yes, but we can't possibly interview 1000+ people, so we have to filter it somewhat based on what they give us: their resume. If you can build me a tool that can find in a stack of 1000 resumes a genius then I'd like to start a company with you and we can make a lot of money together. Basic requirement is at least 5 years of professional experience. Most of the people who apply don't have that. Then after that, a lar…

> If you can build me a tool ... I'd like to start a company with you and we can make a lot of money together.

If you can't tell how good a programmer is by his resume, then....why the hell does everybody use resumes to try to do it???

The kicker is you can't sort good programmers from bad programmers by keyword filtering. Asking for specific languages, or specific frameworks, is a particularly egregious sin. If one of the magic keywords is "nodejs", you'll filter out that guy who has been using javascript + PHP for Facebook for 10 years. That guy is not going to have any trouble picking up nodejs.

If "5 years experience" is a magic keyword, you'll filter out all geniuses who decided that 4 years at Amazon is enough for anybody and wants to make a move.

So, if you are a genius, and you are one of the 1,000 people who applied, what are you to do? If your resume is pre-filtered by keyword, there is a HUGE incentive to put those keywords in--at least their resume would have a chance to be seen by a person, and its not like he'll face any repercussions for it.

Its a classic vicious circle: companies are too picky on the requirements, which prompts applicants to fudge on their resume--which prompts companies to be EVEN MORE picky in their requirements, in desperate hope that if they just put enough keywords in, they will only get the resumes they want. The industry has got to break out of this cycle.

> wouldn't help you pass our assessment,

I hate to put it in such stark terms, but if your assessment is ruling out good programmers and letting through bad programmer(s), its worthless. You need replace it with something that actually works.

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