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

#591

Post by w1nst0nsm1th » Sun, Apr 21, 2019, 2:28 AM UTC

pedrosorio wrote: post #525

neffy wrote: post #505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to mention we get free health care and decent holidays with that. A 7 weeks holiday allowance has more than a monetary allowance.

> Not to mention we get free health care The (many) issues with US health care do not affect upper/middle class professionals. From a "patient perspective", as long as you are employed as a software engineer in SV, health care is not a concern at all (insurance is covered by the employer). If anything, it is superior to anything I experienced in Europe.

Except when you really need an efficient health insurrance system, like cancer level efficiency. At least it's what I learnd from following US politics these last 3 years on reddit.

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

#592

Post by rabidrat » Sun, Apr 21, 2019, 2:29 AM UTC

koala_man wrote: post #399

imroot wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in a similar boat -- my educational background is hardware engineering, but, I've been a Linux nerd/SRE for the last 20 years. I found a great position that would be perfectly in line with what I'm doing now -- specifically managing teams of SRE's for a startup in NYC that would allow me to work remotely, but, during their "technical" interview, I was asked to "humanize" a number using any language that I chose.…

On the other hand, imagine if you asked a programmer to write some novel code and they said "sorry, I can't. There was no Ruby gem or SO answer for this so I don't know how"

"...so it's going to take me more than 30 minutes."

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

#593

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Apr 21, 2019, 2:29 AM UTC

shobith wrote: post #436

Game_Ender wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interviews take 2-3 man days from a company per candidate you end up doing a full onsight interview. That is on the order of $1000’s per interview, and you generally have to do several per role. Then for high demand roles even the best will take several months to ramp up which costs a large fraction, say 25-50% of their total compensation. So replacing a dev can cost you in total $100k+ at least. That is not really c…

I wonder at what point would it make sense to start exposing a part of your "software development pipeline" to the external world and then hiring people after they've proven themselves on your pipeline (with compensation). Think lambda school but for your own company.

[deleted]

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

#594

Post by starky » Sun, Apr 21, 2019, 2:31 AM UTC

jarsin wrote: post #459

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'll never understand why these companies are letting inexperienced employees take any part in interviewing people with significantly more experience. If I owned a company I would never let some inexperienced fresh grad interview a senior engineer. They are letting some kid take part in one of the most important parts of their business. It's yet another area of software development hiring where all logic and reason h…

I started interviewing candidates (including senior level) about 3 years after starting there. Despite being one of the youngest people on the team, the management knew that I had a good grasp on what the people we are interviewing should know to be successful at the company. I'm never the only person interviewing them, but I do have a strong say about whether someone moves to the next round.

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

#595

Post by StavrosK » Sun, Apr 21, 2019, 2:33 AM UTC

physiker1990 wrote: post #448

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…

Hi, can you kindly answer the following questions: How much experience do you have? What is your current technology stack? Is the salary which you stated based on an 8 hour workday 5 days a week schedule? How much late sitting do you do, if any? What is your typical work load, I mean do you solve complex problems all day long or do you just stitch libraries together? The salary which you stated looks a bit unbelievab…

Not the GP, but I make 10k a month, 15 years experience, Python/Django stack, 4 days a week 8 hours a day, no staying late at all necessary, I usually stitch libraries together, although solving complex problems all day long would be better.

I hope that helps!

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

#596

Post by manfredo » Sun, Apr 21, 2019, 2:36 AM UTC

alain94040 wrote: post #478

b212 wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 n…

First of all, who cares about base, what matters is total compensation. In Silicon Valley, I would say it takes about 5 years of experience, for good engineers, to rent a nice place close to work, if they want to. See actual data here: https://thestartupconference.com/2018/09/21/about-that-silic... After 10 years of experience, you are looking into buying a house. Granted, the price of the house is exhorbitant compar…

I'm a bit dubious of that site. A decent studio can be had for 2000-3000k even I'm SF. A good 2 bedroom apartment with 2 parking spaces and a patio close to Google that I was looking at was only 2.7k.

The salaries are also low in my opinion. At just under 4 years experience I'm making 225k yearly in TC, over 170k of that is salary.

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

#597

Post by Rotdhizon » Sun, Apr 21, 2019, 2:37 AM UTC

revvx wrote: post #98

burtonator wrote: post #5

I had a recruiter call me a year ago with what sounded like a really amazing offer. Working for a well funded startup on a problem in which I happen to be a domain expert. They're aren't many expects in my field with my background and skill set and they said the right things to get me to interview (compensation won't be a concern). Anyway... Went in for 4-5 interviews. Took me about 10 hours in total to interview wit…

I had the same thing happen to me a couple times. Long and tiring process. Blackboard, make a project, lots of dirty laundry about "long gone incompetent developers" that made the current system a giant mess. Lots of red flags but lots of promises including a large maximum salary, including bonuses and stock options. The final offer, however, was 60% of my current pay. Lower than the average for someone with my exper…

Would it be possible to tell the recruiter/company something like "This is my current salary and I will not settle for less. So far you have hyped up this position as high paying. From this point forward if you offer me anything less than my current salary, the interview process will be ended and you will be billed for the time of mine you wasted"?

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

#598

Post by kradroy » Sun, Apr 21, 2019, 2:42 AM UTC

Aloha wrote: post #82

loteck wrote: post #40

As an employee, it is valuable to me that my company will not hire someone who doesn't think our business does something important ("get over yourselves, you're not curing cancer"), or who thinks the right way to ask business decision questions is to ask if "you're morons", or who has a problem with the company asking very basic probing questions, such as confirming you've thought through the challenge of changing fr…

I so dislike the ball-gargling exercise of "why do you want to work here?" It's often a "well, I need a job, you're hiring, and what you guys are doing looks at least marginally interesting to me" - I ought not need to find whatever product/service/market they're doing/in inspiring - I should just want to do it for the pay offered.

This is one of the trick questions they can ask to eliminate idiots. It's basically a creative writing exercise. I have a pretty Sartrean view on work. I play at being my occupation. The career/job doesn't define my existence. Deep down I could care less what I do, but I like to put on a good show.

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

#599

Post by mkl » Sun, Apr 21, 2019, 2:46 AM UTC

tyingq wrote: post #512

chronogram wrote: post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those are not nett salaries are they? So keep in mind in Europe it can be 5k times 2 times 12=120k. (How to use asterisks here?)

"How to use asterisks here?" There is a Unicode small asterisk: ﹡ And some other variations: ∗ ＊

https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc

If you surround an asterisk by spaces it works fine: a * b * c * d

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

#600

Post by seattle_spring » Sun, Apr 21, 2019, 2:49 AM 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…

> A high school student with a week of JavaScript and HTML could write AirBnB

I actually love it when a developer says something like this, because it tells me way more than even 2 full days of pairing or interviewing could: They know absolutely nothing about software at scale, and are probably extremely arrogant to boot.