We Don't Have a Talent Shortage. We Have a Sucker Shortage • Hacker News Board

Re: We Don't Have a Talent Shortage. We Have a Sucker Shortage

#381

Post by b212 » Sat, Apr 20, 2019, 10:01 PM UTC

bufferoverflow wrote: post #346

b212 wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this an American thing? I live in Eastern Europe and make decent buck here (close to 5000 EUR/mo after taxes in a country where you can cover all expenses under 1000 EUR/mo). I never had any trouble getting quality work in my country but a few times I got approached by companies from the US and oh boy, weeks of tiring recrutation process and the pay was ALWAYS worse than local. I feel like they do it on purpose ma…

US salaries are on a whole new level when it comes to senior programmers. $200K+ base is normal, if you're good. $150/hr for consulting gigs is also normal if you're good. So your $5K after taxes wouldn't even register on my radar.

This is relative.

5000€ is $5623. You can maintain a "normal" life standard around here for about $800 (renting a studio / two room flat in the city centre + all the expenses, no car but I never needed one - the subway takes me to the furthest parts of town in 25 minutes, walking to work is not unusual). So you're saving more or less 5000$ every month.

How much do you have to earn in SV to rent a place for your own next to your office and still save 5 grand a month? :)

Anyway I get your point and in general yeah, US salaries are of course on a whole new level and I won't even argue with that.

I'm not trying to say Warsaw is better for programmers than SV because it never was and never will be - yet we still managed, within last 5 years or so, managed to do something you somehow can't do - we trained HRs, agencies, recruiters etc. And they willingly act as we please. Because there's an incredibly high demand for programmers and no one has time for games like US companies play. And I still can't wrap my mind around this - if company Y or X is so desperately seeking for employees and pays them bazillions of dollars - why they even consider burning so much time on the process of hiring? Hiring is hard, I get that, but it's much easier if you disclose the salary. And in Poland right now hiring is impossible if the salary is unknown. And it's not even required by law (though it is supposed to be).

Re: We Don't Have a Talent Shortage. We Have a Sucker Shortage

#382

Post by ianai » Sat, Apr 20, 2019, 10:02 PM UTC

pault wrote: post #58

no1youknowz wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If no equity was available, but profit sharing was? i.e if you brought in X million you get a % of that. Would you have taken the position? I'm starting a company, but want to retain 100% ownership. I don't want to give equity as I don't want to lose control. Been there, done that. I'd much rather go down the road of profit sharing based on the results.

Revenue, maybe. Profit? I don't have any control over how you define profit, and you have an enormous amount of control over how you manage your revenue. Additionally, even a unicorn is going to stay in the red for years. Unless you have some financing structure that is radically different from typical startups and don't plan to reinvest in the business, profit sharing makes no sense.

Not to mention revenue sharing should count as an additional cost in the profit calculation. So they should be doing that regardless.

Re: We Don't Have a Talent Shortage. We Have a Sucker Shortage

#383

Post by liquid153 » Sat, Apr 20, 2019, 10:02 PM UTC

throwaway9980 wrote: post #343

rubicon33 wrote: post #208

I feel like a broken record, but I'm going to say it anyways. There is NOT a shortage of software developers. That myth was developed by big tech, and pushed all the way up the ladder, to the top of government. The goal? Reduce labor costs. Big tech has always been 1 step ahead of the employee, just like coal, and metal working was. They saw the huge need for developers and realized their costs would increase unless…

I’m so tired of feeling constantly at war with the industry to justify my own existence. The business people desperately need you but they hate you for what they have to pay. They’re always thinking what if? What if we could outsource this to some magic 3rd world slave mine? What if we could hire some recent graduates or interns instead? What if we could get someone on an H1B and chain them to the desk? It’s the natu…

Wow I thought I was the only one. I dont know how many years experience you have, but with 5 years experience my sentiments are the same. When I interview now it feels like "Dance monkey Dance", or dealing with a gatekeeper. Had plenty of interviews that were a waste of time, or I personally felt I was just invited to interview just for the Hiring Manager to deny and say they couldn't find the right "Talent"

Re: We Don't Have a Talent Shortage. We Have a Sucker Shortage

#384

Post by hash872 » Sat, Apr 20, 2019, 10:02 PM UTC

"Why Are You Reposting Jobs With Over 1000 applications?"

Because over 95% of them are completely random and do not meet even one single criteria of the job. Or, are fake resumes from H1B consulting shops.

Post a senior software developer job in New York? Get ready for over half of the applications to be from a Burger King employee in South Carolina, a security guard in Florida, a mechanic in Idaho, etc. They spam their resume to every open job in America. The next 25% will be from grad students desperate to get an H1B sponsorship before their OPT runs out. They will, yes, spam their resume to every open job in America. The final 24% will be fake C2C resumes from H1B consulting shops. "Yes, he is my consultant, how can you pay on the corp to corp for this job?" They, yes, spam their resume to every open job in America.

Out of those 1000, I bet you over 95% do no match one single qualification posted

Re: We Don't Have a Talent Shortage. We Have a Sucker Shortage

#385

Post by mooreds » Sat, Apr 20, 2019, 10:03 PM UTC

caprese wrote: post #206

mooreds wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We switched from a random set of questions to a take home coding assignment (that we compensate for) and a discussion of said coding assignment. It's pretty clear what kind of work someone will do when you can look at work they've done.

Great! Have you encountered any abuse of the compensation aspect? I typically want to see how people use resources and deliver with real IDEs and collaborative tools like git

I'm not sure what kind of abuse of the compensation you are thinking of?

I agree that the most valuable thing is not seeing how the solution was implemented (we want to keep the total hours expended to less than 20 for the senior engineer challenge and less than 5 for the junior challenge) but seeing how someone navigates their environment and how they talk through how they arrived at the solution. It's especially interesting to ask about alternatives, areas for extension and tradeoffs.

Re: We Don't Have a Talent Shortage. We Have a Sucker Shortage

#386

Post by HillaryBriss » Sat, Apr 20, 2019, 10:04 PM UTC

> Get over yourselves and just freakin hire someone. You're running a website, not curing cancer.

this pretty much describes the landscape, even for positions at companies like Google

Re: We Don't Have a Talent Shortage. We Have a Sucker Shortage

#387

Post by rootusrootus » Sat, Apr 20, 2019, 10:05 PM UTC

bufferoverflow wrote: post #346

b212 wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this an American thing? I live in Eastern Europe and make decent buck here (close to 5000 EUR/mo after taxes in a country where you can cover all expenses under 1000 EUR/mo). I never had any trouble getting quality work in my country but a few times I got approached by companies from the US and oh boy, weeks of tiring recrutation process and the pay was ALWAYS worse than local. I feel like they do it on purpose ma…

US salaries are on a whole new level when it comes to senior programmers. $200K+ base is normal, if you're good. $150/hr for consulting gigs is also normal if you're good. So your $5K after taxes wouldn't even register on my radar.

That's SV/NYC numbers. Plenty of great programmers in other parts of the country don't make that.

Re: We Don't Have a Talent Shortage. We Have a Sucker Shortage

#388

Post by ianai » Sat, Apr 20, 2019, 10:06 PM UTC

throwaway25475 wrote: post #123

Making a throwaway to share my anecdote. What I find interesting is that if you point all of this out to HR/management, sometimes they don't believe you! I just left a company for which I was the random unicorn (perfect intersection of 3 different skillsets and relevant past experience) after one year. I was referred because someone at the company knew I had the exact skillset they needed, and ended up joining right…

Can you expand on how cognitive dissonance would play a role here?

Re: We Don't Have a Talent Shortage. We Have a Sucker Shortage

#389

Post by marcinzm » Sat, Apr 20, 2019, 10:06 PM UTC

externalreality wrote: post #336

This is very relevant in software these days > Super Narrow Selection Criteria e.g. "We need nodejs, mongo, grpc, golang, etc - decades of experience in software is not what we need. We need exactly those things - and we are going to give you an online code challenge to solve an irrelevant puzzle while a 27 year old sits there watching you." And then when you get the job its nothing more than spending hours upon hour…

>I mean are people over 30 not applying for jobs?

They apply to different jobs. Larger companies and so on. Some move into management or consulting. Startups in general make little economical sense and the downsides are rather high if you have a family.

Re: We Don't Have a Talent Shortage. We Have a Sucker Shortage

#390

Post by rdiddly » Sat, Apr 20, 2019, 10:08 PM UTC

rubicon33 wrote: post #306

_57jb wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you are making the mistake that enterprises who employ thousands of developers are looking for quality over butts in seats.

Yup. And they're missing the point that this isn't 1985 anymore. A high school student with a week of JavaScript and HTML could write AirBnB. Or at least, JavaScript and similar languages make programming much, much easier (and hence the barrier to entry much easier). As coding difficulty drops, and supply increases, the net effect will be a much higher demand for jobs than supply. And that's exactly where big tech w…

You're exaggerating, but it's basically true that on the technical side everything from AirBnB to Zillow are just CRUD apps, with varying degrees of nice UI stuff on the front-end. Once you've built one, you could kind of build any of them. (Not sure a high-schooler with a week of JS would be up to it though, LOL.)

Anyway it's important to note that coming up with the business idea and then executing it well is kinda where the money comes from, not from the app itself per se. A business may have a website; it might even use a web app to deliver its core business value; but having a website or web app doesn't necessarily mean you have a business.