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If you stop hiring juniors, your senior engineers own you

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Re: If you stop hiring juniors, your senior engineers own you

#81

Post by pseudohadamard »

jjmarr wrote: post #51
SR2Z wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and the employer can hire a new senior engineer at below market rates to accommodate the specific learning they have to do It sounds like what you're saying is actually that the last engineer was being paid above-market, because the price that employers are paying new employees is literally the market rate, seeing as it's the rate in the literal market.

> the price that employers are paying new employees is literally the market rate, seeing as it's the rate in the literal market. I want to drill this into anyone that throws the word "below market" or "above market" around. If a company pays below-market, it won't be able to hire anyone. Either the role will remain unfilled, or the employer will have to compromise on experience. If someone is claiming to be paid belo…

That depends on the country. In the US where everything is tied to stock options and employees will jump ship if they get 50 cents an hour more next door, that may be the case. In Aus/NZ you don't have that kill-yourself-for-your-stock-options-and-then-leave culture, if you're not on a barely-subsistence wage where you don't have any choice then people will look at job satisfaction, ease of travel to/from work, and so on alongside what they get paid. I know several guys who have turned down jobs that paid five-figure amounts (this may be a two-figure amount in the US) more than they were currently earning because they were quite happy with their current work environment. Good work environment, laid-back management, the company looked after you (rec room, pool table, beer fridge, after-work gaming, being able to tell the mgt that something wouldn't work and they'd listen to you, etc), not because they saw it as a leash but because they believed in looking after their employees. Some of those guys, and their coworkers, have been at the same company for 20-30 years.

Re: If you stop hiring juniors, your senior engineers own you

#82

Post by SR2Z »

Negitivefrags wrote: post #52
lukeify wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is pretty much what's occurring in New Zealand right now, yes. 2020–2023 had pretty much zero international movement due to closed borders with COVID-19, with a low official cash rate which caused business to be in desperate need of development resource; so salaries were high. Market rate for developers has either stagnated generally or depending on the role dropped as hundreds of applicants are willing to under…

> But most employers don't go around reducing previously-hired people's salaries for a variety of reasons. The main reason being that it's illegal in NZ. The employee would have to agree.

The main reason is that employees will quit. It's not illegal in the US, but it still almost never happens. Companies would rather lay off than risk alienating employees like that.

Re: If you stop hiring juniors, your senior engineers own you

#83

Post by SR2Z »

pseudohadamard wrote: post #81
jjmarr wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the price that employers are paying new employees is literally the market rate, seeing as it's the rate in the literal market. I want to drill this into anyone that throws the word "below market" or "above market" around. If a company pays below-market, it won't be able to hire anyone. Either the role will remain unfilled, or the employer will have to compromise on experience. If someone is claiming to be paid belo…

That depends on the country. In the US where everything is tied to stock options and employees will jump ship if they get 50 cents an hour more next door, that may be the case. In Aus/NZ you don't have that kill-yourself-for-your-stock-options-and-then-leave culture, if you're not on a barely-subsistence wage where you don't have any choice then people will look at job satisfaction, ease of travel to/from work, and s…

In AUS/NZ you're not going to earn even close to the same amount as you would in the US. Every time I've changed jobs, it was for an extra 100k+ per year. The rec room/pool table can't compete with that.

My current manager has been with the company for almost 20 years. He doesn't feel the need to leave because his stock options have made him a multimillionaire. The company doesn't care about him or me, but we're both happy to stay because we don't need them to. We just need them to pay us.

Re: If you stop hiring juniors, your senior engineers own you

#84

Post by SR2Z »

jltsiren wrote: post #63
jjmarr wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the price that employers are paying new employees is literally the market rate, seeing as it's the rate in the literal market. I want to drill this into anyone that throws the word "below market" or "above market" around. If a company pays below-market, it won't be able to hire anyone. Either the role will remain unfilled, or the employer will have to compromise on experience. If someone is claiming to be paid belo…

Only in a market with perfect information. With imperfect information, the market rate is an estimate of the expected or typical rate for a similar good. Because everyone has access to a different subset of the information, everyone's estimate is different, and companies often end up paying above or below the consensus rate.

Yes, this is how markets work. You don't need perfect information to have a market. The price of risk is factored in.

Re: If you stop hiring juniors, your senior engineers own you

#85

Post by hermitShell »

lordnacho wrote: post #26

I was wondering if there's anything behind the idea that people who learned how to code before AI will become the human capital version of low-background steel. Everyone who starts to code after AI has a problem: it's hard to believe you went through the pain and frustration that people often think is required to become a senior engineer. Even if you did, you are in a lemon market with quite a few people who took the…

I partially agree with this idea, but there will always be the Jeff Dean and Fabrice Bellard of the world... but 99% of companies won't ever get the chance to hire the top 1% of programmers. Therein is the problem. Maybe a better way to look at it is the statistical likelihood of producing good engineers and scientists goes down with AI because of poor fundamentals.

In SW this is perhaps the easiest domain to counterpunch. Get young folks learning computer history and understanding how the hardware works down to a register level. We write most software with some mental abstraction of what the hardware is actually doing. That's the crux, I believe, and if we lose widespread hardware understanding then we truly do become lost at sea, practicing the mystic art of non deterministic incantations

Re: If you stop hiring juniors, your senior engineers own you

#86

Post by Obscurity4340 »

jjmarr wrote: post #51
SR2Z wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and the employer can hire a new senior engineer at below market rates to accommodate the specific learning they have to do It sounds like what you're saying is actually that the last engineer was being paid above-market, because the price that employers are paying new employees is literally the market rate, seeing as it's the rate in the literal market.

> the price that employers are paying new employees is literally the market rate, seeing as it's the rate in the literal market. I want to drill this into anyone that throws the word "below market" or "above market" around. If a company pays below-market, it won't be able to hire anyone. Either the role will remain unfilled, or the employer will have to compromise on experience. If someone is claiming to be paid belo…

> If a company pays below-market, it won't be able to hire anyone. Either the role will remain unfilled, or the employer will have to compromise on experience.

Or they lobby the government for slaves

Re: If you stop hiring juniors, your senior engineers own you

#87

Post by SR2Z »

xyzelement wrote: post #45
SR2Z wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is it childish? Not all plumbers cost the same or do the same work. If you wanna hire a good plumber, you'll have to pay them more. Likewise, if people on your team get better at their jobs and you don't want them to leave, you also have to pay them more.

Correct but not the point. The reason you pay your plumber 1x and not 2x is because someone else can do the same job equally well for you for 1x. You don't pay 2x untill you are forced to (eg plumber is the only game on town) not because you are so enlightened.

I don't sit down and decide "here's how much I'm going to pay the plumber." I call a plumber and get a quote. I can keep going until it feels worth it.

My enlightenment comes from talking to a bunch of plumbers and hearing what they're gonna charge. That's the market rate.

If I hire an employee and they get good at their job and someone else offers them a 40% raise, they'll probably leave. That's a lot of money.

Some companies care about retention, most don't really.

Re: If you stop hiring juniors, your senior engineers own you

#89

Post by Dana224 »

For weeks now I have been in my partner's phone with the help of spyhackelite@ gmai1 c om hoping to see if my partner is cheating, I monitored his phone and found a chat. I went through the whole chats and also went through deleted chats only to find out that every Saturdays and Sundays my husband always go for morning jogging and he would text this particular girl to know if she's home, he would jog to her house just to f u c k her. I cried my eyes out because I love and care about him so much only for me to discover he is cheating on me, honestly I feel so heart broken.
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