Startups: Stop Trying To Hire Ninja-Rockstar Engineers • Hacker News Board

Re: Startups: Stop Trying To Hire Ninja-Rockstar Engineers

#71

Post by rmc » Tue, Aug 07, 2012, 8:55 PM UTC

dadkins wrote: post #32

patio11 wrote: post #27

The average starting salary for a senior Ruby developer has climbed to $94,000 ($107,000 in Silicon Valley). Compare that with the average salary for a junior Ruby developer, $70,000, ($80,000 in Silicone Valley). These numbers strike me as wildly below current market rates in the Valley, based on my discussions with people in it trying to hire. I'm willing to be wrong on that.

Would you mind being a little more specific? It's hard to get any solid numbers out of anyone, and the article provides some. If those are off, what do you think the current market rates are?

Technically the market rate is what you can get, not what you'd like to get/give. If a company has a budget of $80k and goes out to the market and tries to get a developer, and fails, then the market has decided that $80k is too low. Otherwise you'd be able to buy the labour at that rate. If companies cannot hire at a rate, then that is by definition below the market rate.

If you can get a job at a rate that seems "too high", then that's the market rate.

Re: Startups: Stop Trying To Hire Ninja-Rockstar Engineers

#72

Post by rdl » Tue, Aug 07, 2012, 9:04 PM UTC

dsolomon wrote: post #34

doktrin wrote: post #7

There are certainly some important take-aways in this article. What certainly hit home was the reference to high turnover. In my experience, attracting and retaining (perceived) top 1% developers is no small feat. It's damaging to a project when a "rockstar" developer builds out a product set in her chosen (often bleeding edge) framework / language, and then departs at the sign of another "fun" opportunity elsewhere.…

Personnel retention is easy - just demonstrate on any level that the contributions of the workforce is appreciated. Since I'm in the DC area too, with clearance, the number you're throwing around are a bit of a stretch. We've got junior developers in the high $30K range and senior in the mid $60K range.

Either you are in a particularly underpaid/oversupplied field, or DC is the solution to startup hiring. If there are a substantial number of available "senior developers" in anything useful to Silicon Valley in DC for The only tech company I know which has a substantial number of cleared people, a presence in DC, and is a startup, is Palantir, and there's no appreciable pay difference between Palo Alto and DC. New grads are effectively capped around $127k, but most take around $80k and more equity. It's also an excellent place to work.

Re: Startups: Stop Trying To Hire Ninja-Rockstar Engineers

#73

Post by alinajaf » Tue, Aug 07, 2012, 9:09 PM UTC

patio11 wrote: post #27

The average starting salary for a senior Ruby developer has climbed to $94,000 ($107,000 in Silicon Valley). Compare that with the average salary for a junior Ruby developer, $70,000, ($80,000 in Silicone Valley). These numbers strike me as wildly below current market rates in the Valley, based on my discussions with people in it trying to hire. I'm willing to be wrong on that.

May be true of the valley, but the numbers here are about right for full-time work in London. If you want cheap tech talent, come to the UK!

Re: Startups: Stop Trying To Hire Ninja-Rockstar Engineers

#74

Post by freyr » Tue, Aug 07, 2012, 9:11 PM UTC

jtbigwoo wrote: post #56

freyr wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We've got junior developers in the high $30K range That seems incredibly low, especially for a major metropolitan area. You must give great benefits.

It's not that surprising to me. My friends and I compared offers out of college and then didn't talk at all about salary for over a decade. A couple years ago, I started asking around when I was considering a job offer. I found out that we were making anywhere from 60k to 115k! We all had the same years of experience (~12 years). We all had different specialties, but that didn't really seem to matter. The guys who st…

I'm still surprised. Every single year, magazines & websites rank the top college majors by starting salary, and computer scientists/engineers always are always near the top of the list with numbers in the $55,000 - $70,000 range.

Of course there are below average programmers, and perhaps they deserve a below average salary, but $30,000 less than average? I'm surprised.

Re: Startups: Stop Trying To Hire Ninja-Rockstar Engineers

#75

Post by rdl » Tue, Aug 07, 2012, 9:12 PM UTC

This article seems like an excellent example of "understand the biases of the author to understand why he wrote what he did."

He runs a ruby on rails cram school and some kind of non-infrastructure e-commerce site. From the first, he has an obvious incentive to talk up the market for his graduating junior developers, both to increase demand for the classes and to get them jobs when they graduate.

Designer Pages doesn't look like it has any particularly unique or difficult technical challenges -- it's not Facebook scale (highly interconnected large userbase), it's not super high availability, it's not computationally intensive, etc. That's the kind of thing where a couple of senior developer+ founders plus some junior developers might be useful.

Re: Startups: Stop Trying To Hire Ninja-Rockstar Engineers

#76

Post by rdl » Tue, Aug 07, 2012, 9:16 PM UTC

doktrin wrote: post #61

tocomment wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, where would you find triple? I've never heard of a developer making 180K in DC.

$180k+ isn't inconceivable, but it's certainly approaching a salary range typically reserved for Architects and team leads (in my experience). It's fully realistic for non-management senior engineers to earn up to $150k, however.

We really should be talking about total compensation, not just cash salary. $180-250k isn't unreasonable cash+%+bonus for a sales engineer or consultant who puts in huge hours, or for a senior developer with bonus/stock/etc. I think a lot of people at Google end up hitting $180-200k based on total compensation once they're at the 5-10 year of experience tiers.

Re: Startups: Stop Trying To Hire Ninja-Rockstar Engineers

#77

Post by SatvikBeri » Tue, Aug 07, 2012, 9:54 PM UTC

codeonfire wrote: post #11

mindcrime wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, I think "short-term'ism" is a disease that plagues business (if not society as a whole) in America these days. I also think taking more a of a long-term view can be an advantage on many levels, and I have often said that - when we get to a point where we can hire employees - one thing we will do at Fogbeam Labs is focus on hiring younger, less experienced folks and provide training, education, and mentors…

It won't work. you won't do the promote from within step, or you will promote one guy, or you won't pay enough money with the promotions. It will take your employees 2-3 review cycles to learn what's up. At that point your (now experienced) people will leave for places that pay more for experience.

What's with the cynicism here? I've worked at at least two companies with a great train & promote from within culture, and heard of several more from my friends.

Re: Startups: Stop Trying To Hire Ninja-Rockstar Engineers

#78

Post by codeonfire » Wed, Aug 08, 2012, 4:59 AM UTC

SatvikBeri wrote: post #77

codeonfire wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It won't work. you won't do the promote from within step, or you will promote one guy, or you won't pay enough money with the promotions. It will take your employees 2-3 review cycles to learn what's up. At that point your (now experienced) people will leave for places that pay more for experience.

What's with the cynicism here? I've worked at at least two companies with a great train & promote from within culture, and heard of several more from my friends.

It's not cynicism, it's just logic and my observation of how several tech companies operate. It may seem great that a company would want to promote its novices, but the fact that it operates with novices doing the work precludes this. It's not economical to promote and pay more just for the sake of promotion. All they need are novices so why pay senior wages? Turnover does have some cost, so companies will either bait there employees into staying a bit longer by promoting one or two people and letting everyone know that person's new salary, or they will just not promote anyone. Either way, most people are going to look elsewhere after 2-3 years of flat salaries.

Re: Startups: Stop Trying To Hire Ninja-Rockstar Engineers

#79

Post by dsolomon » Wed, Aug 08, 2012, 3:00 PM UTC

vbtemp wrote: post #41

dsolomon wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personnel retention is easy - just demonstrate on any level that the contributions of the workforce is appreciated. Since I'm in the DC area too, with clearance, the number you're throwing around are a bit of a stretch. We've got junior developers in the high $30K range and senior in the mid $60K range.

Since I'm in the DC area too, without clearance, the numbers you're throwing around are not realistic. Junior developers will start in the 50's-60's (with BS), usually 70-80 with MS, and seniors will generally be 110+... In the contractor sphere with clearances, it will be correspondingly higher. I do know that some agencies tried to give peanut wages to certain fresh-out-of-college students, but everyone I knew scof…

10+ years of working in the DC area supporting the Columbia customer, McLean customer and the Quantico customer for a variety of companies and still no one paying close to the rates you're claiming. It obvious you can't distinguish between the billing rate and a salary rate.

Re: Startups: Stop Trying To Hire Ninja-Rockstar Engineers

#80

Post by dsolomon » Wed, Aug 08, 2012, 3:01 PM UTC

doktrin wrote: post #67

dsolomon wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Benefits: Trying being assigned a practitioner closest to the work location so you'll miss as little work as possible; or benefits that are project dependent (some projects support a 401k, some don't) High salary: 30K starting with sr devs going for around 60K to 70K Flexible hours: 730 to 430 M-F, with Wednesday onsite support needed from 6pm to 10pm (you are allowed up show up no later than 9AM on Thursday)

So, you work for a company that pays bargain basement rates and affords very few benefits and an inflexible schedule. I'm sorry to hear that. That being the case, I'm increasingly unsure as to why you were lecturing me on employee retention.

Because it is easy and you're just being dense.