Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Hiring Without Agencies - Lessons Learned

wip.engineroomapps.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 80 posts

Re: Hiring Without Agencies - Lessons Learned

#41

Post by bugsy »

dspillett wrote: post #6
jasonkester wrote: post #3

Is it possible that this experience was influenced in any way by the fact that they're trying to find a "Senior iPhone Developer" for under £40k? That's ~$65k, and thus roughly $100k shy of what you'd need to offer before you started to pique the interest of any good iPhone Developers in the current market.

Irrespective of the appropriateness or not of the rate actually offered, the edited version is quite simply a lie perpetrated by lying liers and unfortunately this sort of behaviour seems to be the norm for the recruitment industry in my limited experience. The amount of blatant untruths I've had to be polite about as I've taken calls from recruiters trying to hawk their wares. Actually, I've stopped being polite: re…

Recruiter repostings are completely irrelevant to the problems they are having. The article makes it as if that is the problem they are having, but their woes have nothing at all to do with recruiters.

That recruiter that reposted "up to £40k" was a good guy who was doing them a big favor by making clear that the biggest problem with their ad, that which most needed to be changed was the salary offering. And he didn't even charge them for that insight. What a nice, generous fellow.

Re: Hiring Without Agencies - Lessons Learned

#42

Post by bugsy »

ig1 wrote: post #22
edderly wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The UK has relied for too long on relatively cheap but willing tech. labour. I believe one major factor that enabled this was the boom in home computing in the early 80s. I don't know whether it is fair to call this unique (to the UK), but it certainly helped to have the BBC heavily involved with the BBC Micro effort and even TV coverage: ' http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Computer_Programme . I remember back then ev…

The bump in CS uptake was due to the dotcom boom rather than any long term trend. CS still has a higher average salary than most other subjects.

"CS still has a higher average salary than most other subjects."

Right, but don't qualified UK developers now have the option of working anywhere in the european community without complicated work visa hassles.

Perhaps for a job that requires specialized skills the competent ones are going to where the jobs with reasonable salaries are. Which is not the UK.

Re: Hiring Without Agencies - Lessons Learned

#43

Post by bugsy »

tzs wrote: post #39
jasonkester wrote: post #3

Is it possible that this experience was influenced in any way by the fact that they're trying to find a "Senior iPhone Developer" for under £40k? That's ~$65k, and thus roughly $100k shy of what you'd need to offer before you started to pique the interest of any good iPhone Developers in the current market.

They are looking for a permanent employee, not a consultant. Is $165k (presumably plus benefits) really the going rate for that?

$165k is indeed the minimum rate for iPhone developers with experience, as employees with benefits. Realize though that taxes come out of that, whereas I understand that in EC salaries are posted as after-tax values.

For an iPhone consultant with experience shipping real products, expect to pay $150/hr minimum. Top guys are quite a bit more.

Re: Hiring Without Agencies - Lessons Learned

#44

Post by ig1 »

bugsy wrote: post #43
tzs wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are looking for a permanent employee, not a consultant. Is $165k (presumably plus benefits) really the going rate for that?

$165k is indeed the minimum rate for iPhone developers with experience, as employees with benefits. Realize though that taxes come out of that, whereas I understand that in EC salaries are posted as after-tax values. For an iPhone consultant with experience shipping real products, expect to pay $150/hr minimum. Top guys are quite a bit more.

Care to post some link to employers hiring in the $165k+ range?

Re: Hiring Without Agencies - Lessons Learned

#45

Post by bugsy »

bostonpete wrote: post #2

This has been going on for a quite some time. There's another side-effect of this strategy that the author doesn't explicitly mention. Even if you're willing to pay the recruiter's fee, you'll sometimes get to the point of making an offer to a candidate and they'll essentially be offended by the offer, since it's lower than the amount listed in the recruiter-overhauled job description that they saw. I had one candida…

Seems pretty clear that the recruiter provided you with a very valuable service, that the qualified candidates you really wanted to make offers to weren't willing to respond to ads citing the insulting salary range you thought you could get away with.

The simple fact is that if you can not afford to hire qualified developers, you should not be in business. Please leave software development to the professionals who are able to make money at it.

Re: Hiring Without Agencies - Lessons Learned

#46

Post by Silhouette »

ig1 wrote: post #38
jasonkester wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, that's the range you get if you include PHP devs and corporate IT folk. For specialist iPhone devs who are provably good at what they do, however, $150/hr is a pretty good starting point, and there are plenty of companies willing to pay more than that. With that in mind, I don't imagine you'd find many good devs with solid iPhone experience willing to work for less than $75/hr, which coincidentally translates…

You can't just compare permanent salaries to hourly rate contract roles directly (you need to take into account downtime, risk, vacation, overheads, etc. in order to make a fair comparison). I don't know what the standard is in the US but in the UK you can generally earn 1.5-2x as much contracting on a day rate as you can in a permanent job.

That's all true, and even then, basically no-one in the UK pays £90/hour contracting rates for routine software development without specialised skills, not even London banks.

Re: Hiring Without Agencies - Lessons Learned

#47

Post by parasubvert »

ig1 wrote: post #38
jasonkester wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, that's the range you get if you include PHP devs and corporate IT folk. For specialist iPhone devs who are provably good at what they do, however, $150/hr is a pretty good starting point, and there are plenty of companies willing to pay more than that. With that in mind, I don't imagine you'd find many good devs with solid iPhone experience willing to work for less than $75/hr, which coincidentally translates…

You can't just compare permanent salaries to hourly rate contract roles directly (you need to take into account downtime, risk, vacation, overheads, etc. in order to make a fair comparison). I don't know what the standard is in the US but in the UK you can generally earn 1.5-2x as much contracting on a day rate as you can in a permanent job.

The rule of thumb with contracting is to take your base salary, divide by 1000, which becomes your hourly rate.

This roughly coincides with paying your own benefits and 1/3 of annual downtime. Not that you're planning for 1/3 -- it's risk adjustment.

Re: Hiring Without Agencies - Lessons Learned

#48

Post by parasubvert »

bugsy wrote: post #43
tzs wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are looking for a permanent employee, not a consultant. Is $165k (presumably plus benefits) really the going rate for that?

$165k is indeed the minimum rate for iPhone developers with experience, as employees with benefits. Realize though that taxes come out of that, whereas I understand that in EC salaries are posted as after-tax values. For an iPhone consultant with experience shipping real products, expect to pay $150/hr minimum. Top guys are quite a bit more.

$165k total comp I buy; that factors in bonus, medical, etc. Base salary would be $130-140k or so which is reasonable for (truly) senior engineers.

Re: Hiring Without Agencies - Lessons Learned

#49

Post by bugsy »

ig1 wrote: post #44
bugsy wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$165k is indeed the minimum rate for iPhone developers with experience, as employees with benefits. Realize though that taxes come out of that, whereas I understand that in EC salaries are posted as after-tax values. For an iPhone consultant with experience shipping real products, expect to pay $150/hr minimum. Top guys are quite a bit more.

Care to post some link to employers hiring in the $165k+ range?

adobe.com apple.com google.com microsoft.com facebook.com
Post reply on HN