331–340 of 373 posts
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Nice! The same conversation in the context of sports, where they really do want the best: "We hire only the best" "What do you pay?" "Between 10 and 30 million USD per year"
So...... market rate? (I know, I know, it was a terrible joke.)
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I'm not 100% sure what you mean by "market worth." Do you mean salary? Because if so, no. Do you mean something like "net value to company"? Then maybe. Another way to say that would be "you start to get paid what you're worth after 30 or 35."
I'm mid 30's and the salary cap is what I'm experiencing. Inversely, many of my friends in business, law, medical, etc. made less than I throughout their 20's and have now caught up, with potentials to earn far more. For example, the lawyers I know are now making partner in firms, the business majors getting percentages based on sales and earnings. I'm looking to become a consultant but the very idea of increasing pa…
At 30 I was just getting started. If you feel you peeked, find some new jobs and technologies that you'd like to have on your resume and find new jobs. How about java and distributed systems at a place like google or facebook, c++ on a major database? Look for those things.
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"You can teach everyone to be a great programmer" Flat out dead wrong. If you hire "anyone" and try to teach them to be a programmer then you will probably fire them. This is the sort of attitude that leads companies to outsource their development overseas: "Our programmers are people hitting keys. We'll get overseas people to hit keys and overseas people hit keys for less money.", cause, you know, anyone can do it.…
You know what the irony is? Us programmers thinking that "everyone can be a great programmer" is our preponderant liberal and very idealistic views showing. And we keep going around and shout that and other people believe it. And in turn we are being taken advantage of with long hours, unfair compensation for our contributions and the worse of it all? Ageism in our industry is rampant. I look at physicians, surgeons,…
Then in my 40s I went back to being a dev and learned a bunch of cool stuff at one of the amazons, googles, facebooks of the world. Now I'm 50 and have another great job, get tired of replying to recruiters.
Look for jobs that teach you great stuff, expand on the important tech skills you don't have, pay well, and look good on your resume.
Also: Give the "not-the-best" people a chance to develop. The CEO of one of my past clients, a consulting company, always said: "You can teach everyone to be a great programmer". And he put his money where his mouth was: He hired people with no programming experience (even with no university education) and personally trained them for several months . Also, senior people in the company were encouraged to also help the…
"You can teach everyone to be a great programmer" Flat out dead wrong. If you hire "anyone" and try to teach them to be a programmer then you will probably fire them. This is the sort of attitude that leads companies to outsource their development overseas: "Our programmers are people hitting keys. We'll get overseas people to hit keys and overseas people hit keys for less money.", cause, you know, anyone can do it.…
I'm not a 10x programmer by any means, but I was able to write and sell non-trivial software in middle school, with little more than a pirated copy of Delphi and a book.
Most of the difficulty that does exist has more to do with bad engineering practice and poor documentation than anything else.
tl;dr: The only measure of on the job performance is on the job performance. The only thing that matters to your company is also on the job performance. Why not focus on that? It is utter voodoo. I came up in the late 80s. Interviews were maybe 2 hours long. You might be handed a piece of paper with a problem to aggregate some information distributed in a few different arrays and print them out. You know, write some…
Has it become more costly to fire bad hires since then? In my mind, a lot of the idiotic behavior in hiring is driven by the fact that it seems to be way more expensive to hire the wrong person than to hire nobody. The risk of litigation from firing someone seems real to a lot of places I've worked.
I've had a few folks that I've had to let go folks, including folks in .gov with union contracts and motivated defenders. It is doable.
End of the day, don't be a wuss. Setting up some hunger games "audition" is passive aggressive bs. If you're nervous, hire a contractor and get them on the payroll later. Or just hire the person, and give them a months severance. Problem solved.
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Why would anything ever be grossed up? Because the purpose of the payment is to give the recipient a particular amount of money, usually related to specific costs, not some amount less taxes. The costs of sustaining a job search after being fired are a bit different than the costs of living while you have a reliable income stream. The grossing-up part is meant to reflect a nominal amount of money to cover those kinds…
If I give an employee a $100 Amex gift card as a spot bonus, I do gross that up. If I pay relocation expenses, I require receipts (at which point, it's non-taxable for most situations, so doesn't need grossing up). It's not that I disbelieve the new hire, but rather that I have to make it accountable in order to make it non-taxable. If I pay cash comp (whether as a signing bonus, periodic bonus, commission, in contem…
This might be a deal breaker for me if I was interviewing with someone. It's not that I care about the accountability part, it's more that a ton of relocation costs are unforeseen incidentals, or are private expenses (like first month's rent ... it's not your business what I choose to pay in rent), that should be covered by just paying cash to the new hire. Making them track down receipts for all of it might work out to be more costly, in terms of time lost, than just bearing the taxes, and certainly might involve requiring knowledge of expenses the employee may rightfully prefer to keep private.
Usually, I expect that the company will handle almost all aspects of relocation on their own (e.g. buying plane tickets and hotel rental for housing visit, calling up and hiring the moving company to pack and ship belongings). The part that would be paid as cash would be the cost of rental fees, deposit, and first month's rent, as well as some small amount for incidentals, which should be grossed up.
On the other stuff I guess we just disagree. I don't view sign-on bonus or severance pay as wage pay, even if they are pegged to wage level. For the other stuff, I agree, it's just part of regular income and the employee should bear the tax. But for sign on bonuses and severance, I think it's fair for the employer to bear the tax in light of the purposes of those payments.
Sign on bonuses are very different in this discussion though, since not everyone provides them and the amounts can vary a lot and for low amounts grossing up can matter significantly, while for larger amounts, employees are usually happy to bear the tax cost themselves. I'm not so worried about what an employer's policy is for these.
It would matter to me to negotiate a specific value paid for severance, though, rather than "6 months' salary" which will then have taxes taken out. If an employer was put off by this, it could be a problem, depending on all the other aspects of the job. One way to avoid this is that if secretly what I want is 6 months severance grossed up, then I'll try to negotiate 9 months severance, without mentioning the grossing up part. It's less off-putting to the counterparty, even if it would be nicer if I could just speak plainly.
I'm just speaking from my experience as a candidate in previous roles. I'm sure everyone has different experiences.
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I agree. My friend was a barista with a philosophy degree. But he had the intelligence, the rigor, and the desire to learn. All I had to do was point him in a couple of directions and he picked up programming very quickly on his own with no prior experience. In fact, I would say he's far better at it than me even after just a year or so. Mindset is the key.
A lot of people joke about philosophy majors not being able to find jobs or make any money (the only people worse off are those who studied sociology :D), but that's not really true unless you're actually trying to become a philosophy professor. Then you're screwed. But aside from that, studying philosophy is a great way to hone your critical thinking skills, though of course it's not the only way. It's a lot more th…
Learning, say, Wittgenstein's philosophy regarding grammar and language [1] gives an interesting insight into how humans express ourselves and delves directly into the heart of modern programming, IMHO. Rarely do we software developers write low level algorithms anymore, but writing consistent and complex API's is crucial and shares more in common with be conversant with large volumes of philosophical treatises.
Based on that, it makes sense many philosophy students would have successful careers – being able to reason and solve challenging problems is always key point in making good money. :)
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I'm mid 30's and the salary cap is what I'm experiencing. Inversely, many of my friends in business, law, medical, etc. made less than I throughout their 20's and have now caught up, with potentials to earn far more. For example, the lawyers I know are now making partner in firms, the business majors getting percentages based on sales and earnings. I'm looking to become a consultant but the very idea of increasing pa…
I'm also about 50. I am doing far more senior and interesting work than I was doing when I was 30. I felt like I was just starting to figuring things out then, but now I'm doing way more interesting arch and design for work involving a large team.I had great experience earlier in my career working at large, well respected companies. At 30 I was just getting started. If you feel you peeked, find some new jobs and tech…
The question is: you've been doing higher level work, but has your compensation flatlined?
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Flat out dead wrong. Don't take things too literally. What he basically meant was "anyone with appropriate aptitude and intellectual maturity" -- like you yourself said later on, pretty much. Which may or may not be entirely correct, but is far from "dead wrong." BTW, please be careful about referring to foreigners, in any context, as "monkeys."
Parent may have edited the post (as I don't see "monkey" anywhere), but I frequently hear monkey used for any human (often fellow programmers) and have never read a racial or ethnic overtone into it and the usage has generally been to suggest that humans (of all sorts) aren't particularly different from monkeys. I just got back from an business trip spanning 3 cities and 5 flights. The self-loading cargo in the airpo…
http://theconversation.com/the-ape-insult-a-short-history-of...
"We hire only the best" "What do you pay?" "Market Rate."