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Employers bow to tech workers in hottest job market since the dot-com era

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Re: Employers bow to tech workers in hottest job market since the dot-com era

#271

Post by robotresearcher »

the_only_law wrote: post #222
sirmike_ wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are you saying crazy self-fulfilling prophesies? Do you hate money? Take the leap into something you WANT. Skills, Sschmills! You can learn can't you? Life means learning new stuff all the time. Learning never takes a time out. The military was a bastion of learned lessons for me. One key takeaway: You are your own best advocate. Everything in an interview or negotiation related to you springs from that viewpoint…

> Take the leap into something you WANT. Skills, Sschmills! You can learn can't you? It’s just about time really. I could skill up but what’s the market going to look like by the point I’m ready.

Get the job and then learn the skill. The value proposition you present is that you can learn stuff.

This is not a flippant reply! I’m totally serious.

Re: Employers bow to tech workers in hottest job market since the dot-com era

#272

Post by indymike »

yosito wrote: post #89
warent wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This may sound weird but it's easier to do this when you don't need it. When we're negotiating, people can smell desperation. If you can easily walk away from a negotiation/offer, you're suddenly in a much more powerful position. Once you're there, figure out how much sounds like a lot and ask for even more. Either they'll surprise you and accept the terms, or you will negotiate "down" to the amount that sounded like…

This negotiation tactic works fine if you don't have to do full day coding challenges to get to that phase, while also working a full time job.

If that is the process, and you've survived the gauntlet, you have the leverage.

Re: Employers bow to tech workers in hottest job market since the dot-com era

#273

Post by lostcolony »

sokoloff wrote: post #268
lostcolony wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"If they already have their budget in mind before the interview process began" This is impossible to know though, as is its breakdown. Many places have very fixed limits on salary and bonus, for instance, but RSUs and sign on they have a lot of freedom. Even the places that have fixed budgets all around may have multiple openings of varying levels; a strong interview showing may cause them to bump the level they'd lo…

If you’re closing off opportunities that you wouldn’t take anyway, it’s just another form of time savings. I make sure we’re at least in the same chapter if not the exact same page on comp before spending more than a 25-minute intro.

As I mentioned elsewhere, I upped my RSU comp 4x what was initially offered by bringing it up at the end, for a position I -was- interested in. Had I come out of the gate saying I expected that, I'm quite certain the response would have been "we can't do that" and moved on.

Fair enough if you only want to work for a company that offers your target comp -without- negotiation (since even if they're open to negotiating at the start, you're doing so when your hand is weakest), but otherwise there is nothing to be gained by bringing it up at the start.

Re: Employers bow to tech workers in hottest job market since the dot-com era

#275

Post by caoilte »

sparker72678 wrote: post #240
TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you care about cover letters? I haven’t written one of those in probably 20 years. If I’m hiring and a candidate includes one, I usually ignore it (when hiring for an individual contributor, engineering role).

I trash every application that doesn’t include one. Because most likely they’re just spamming openings, and didn’t read anything about the position. Every applicant that included a cover letter was way above median quality, and worth interviewing. I might miss some decent people this way, but it’s been a very helpful first-level filter of applicants.

I suspect most of us have had semi-competent recruitment agents doing the first stage filter for us.

When I look at a CV ahead of a 2nd or 3rd stage interview I take it for granted that they are serious about the role and qualified for it.

Re: Employers bow to tech workers in hottest job market since the dot-com era

#276

Post by hdhjebebeb »

_dark_matter_ wrote: post #205
giantg2 wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's only a catch-22 if you don't have the senior people. At least in my experience, companies have 80%+ senior and midlevel developers. The issue is that companies want to be cheap by letting other companies do the training and then taking them.

Honestly at this point as a staff level eng, not having junior levels to work with is a big turn-off. I love being able to break down projects in to tasks and not have to carry out every single one of those. Convincing one of my senior-level peers to work on a project or task can be near impossible, while the junior level folks will jump on them.

Lol I've seen this in action, lots of staff devs being architecture astronauts or diving super deep on a hot new technology, and meanwhile some intern is building the stupid webapp that actually gets used and makes money.

Re: Employers bow to tech workers in hottest job market since the dot-com era

#277

Post by gavinray »

MathYouF wrote: post #233
gavinray wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You would abandon your company and current position for a slight pay increase? Do you not actually care about the company you work for and you're just there for the pay? You make so much money already -- what is the thought process here Man imagine trying to hire people and knowing they would all leave in a heartbeat for a slight pay increase. What ever happened to working somewhere because you believe in what you're…

How many companies are building something worth believing in? The ones who are (few) defintiely don't worry about this problem as much. If a company is having problems with it it's probably that their estimation of their own moral self worth is what's incorrect, not the attitude of their employees.

So, so many. The world is full of them.

I work at my current job because I used their OSS tool at a past position and felt like I had my life changed. Then wanted to share it with every other developer.

So I got in contact with them and told them how I felt, and now that's what I do.

If I ever feel like the tool doesn't represent the same quality as when I started or the company values have changed, welp, then it's quittin' time and on to the next thing I go I suppose. But I don't see that happening -- or at least I really hope so.

Nobody's integrity and happiness should be compromised or up for sale, unless that's what they want.

I've slept under bridges and I'll go back to it again before I sell myself out, tell lies, or pretend to be someone I'm not.

Here's some examples of things I think are genuinely valuable and jobs I would do:

- Software for addiction treatment centers and rehabilitation

- Bioinformatics and genomics for disease, especially making information accessible to regular people. Genomics for fitness/sports performance.

- Software reform in partnership with state/governmental agencies for criminal justice

- Anything to do with LLVM. LLVM is fucking cool.

- GraalVM is fucking cool.

- Music software -- production (DAW's), plugins, education software to make music theory accessible

- Software to make learning programming accessible. Stuff like repl.it, Codesandbox, Scrimba

I could go on and on. The world has so many serious issues, and interesting problems/challenges to work on -- just pick one you like and relentlessly hunt companies + people down + study (if you need to, to learn the domain) until you get a job.

If I can claw myself out of poverty, drug-addiction, and homelessness as a highschool dropout, into a white-collar career then I'm pretty sure most people with less disadvantaged life scenarios can too.

---

Not to pull the cliche, stupid "by-your-bootstraps" argument. But look, humans are driven and intelligent beings that drive the force of history.

Don't tell me that there's no company in the world doing something you believe in, and you can't get a job doing what you like, etc.

That's really pessimistic and defeatist.

Re: Employers bow to tech workers in hottest job market since the dot-com era

#278

Post by EastSmith »

dilap wrote: post #33
derwiki wrote: post #2

> But now, these technical interviews are often being waived Huh? First I’ve heard of that

Not sure I'd want to work somewhere that didn't do tech interviews (or something equivalent, e.g. project).

If the company pays well, it seems to me that not asking bubble sorting questions during interview does not matter?

Re: Employers bow to tech workers in hottest job market since the dot-com era

#279

Post by EGreg »

Alright I'll bite, and ask the obvious question:

Can anyone here share the links to where we would start to apply for such jobs? StackOverflow Jobs? Indeed? FlexJobs? Or some smarter approach, like putting google keywords when they search themselves or something?

Last time I worked doing FTE in the industry I was making $175,000 a year in NYC, and due to the pandemic, working from home. Say I wanted to do better salary-wise, where would I look for such jobs?

I have a distaste for full-time employee setups, btw, I much rather prefer to work on projects for businesses, bring my own team and solve their business problems directly. But the steady paycheck does attract a lot of people.

PS: At our company we experimented with alternatives to full-time compensation: https://qbix.com/blog/2016/11/17/properly-valuing-contributi...

Re: Employers bow to tech workers in hottest job market since the dot-com era

#280

Post by tikhonj »

version_five wrote: post #63

An interesting corollary is that certain types of business are no longer economically viable. If I have a business that competes with advertising companies for niche talent, my business model has to be able to generate the same outsized returns on that talent if I want to be able to afford them, so this limits the work I can do. I don't think people should work for below market wages, only observing how it can change…

There are a lot of ways to compete besides salary, but my experience is that companies paying below-market-rate salaries tend to be less competitive on other axes too—with the exception of fields like research that have no trouble attracting far more superb candidates than the field can take.

In my experience, autonomy, impact, psychological safety, remote work and flexible hours can all make up for substantial differences in pay, and would make the team more productive to boot. These are all aspects of the job a company can directly control; I'm not even talking about things like prestige, "mission" or super-deep technical problems. And yet, it seems like these aspects are all positively correlated with pay: higher-paid positions also come with more respect and a better work experience.

What's keeping companies from changing this? Trust and respect go a long way. Of course, everyone and their dog claims they have a great culture, so a team would need a way to show rather than tell, but that's an eminently solvable problem.

I've seen this work first-hand. For the same level of pay, hiring people on a Haskell project was markedly easier than other projects at the same company: people actively want to use Haskell and it also acts as a real signal that the team is willing to do things differently. The latter might actually be more important!

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