[HN Gopher] What good cash-strapped hiring looks like
___________________________________________________________________
What good cash-strapped hiring looks like
Author : hunglee2
Score : 201 points
Date : 2022-06-01 07:56 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (commoncog.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (commoncog.com)
| neilwilson wrote:
| This can be summarised as "don't follow the crowd".
|
| You can take the same approach with being hired, which I call
| "The A Team" approach.
|
| "If you have a problem... if no one else can help... and if you
| can find them... maybe you can hire... The A-Team"
|
| Those who know what you can do, know where to find you.
| lordnacho wrote:
| The thing to remember is not everyone thinks of themselves as a
| superstar, and thus not everyone has superstar expectations.
|
| A reasonable salary with reasonable prospects, a mission that is
| interesting but not world changing, pressure that's moderate not
| 996, a lot of people will be in that market. So market yourself
| that way and you'll definitely find someone.
|
| There's an iceberg effect here too. We know who the glamour
| businesses are, we see them all the time. Most shops are not the
| ones in the media, but they still somehow find staff.
| langsoul-com wrote:
| Cash strapped? No worries, just pick a low wage country and send
| them to Singapore to work for a bit. Not exactly THAT cash
| strapped...
| allcentury wrote:
| Not in today's high fuel costs world but those flights are very
| cheap, it be like going from LA to Vegas on Southwest. It be
| $100
| [deleted]
| CraigJPerry wrote:
| Having seen this happen several times in my social circle over
| the past 5 years or so, there's a high end talent pool you can
| tap with limited resources. I know a few folks maybe 5-10 years
| older than me (so mid to late 40's) who have had impressive
| careers (e.g. their names are associated with popular industry
| techniques or otherwise recognised as heavyweight contributors)
| but are just burned out doing the same boring problems. Several
| have taken massive pay cuts to go work in tiny firms.
|
| These folks by virtue of their commercial history can be useful
| in ways beyond just coding too - some of them can add a level of
| glitz, glam and respectability to your firm that you might
| struggle to figure out for yourself (they've seen it all before -
| they know what kinds of small firms are attractive to people with
| budgets in big firms).
|
| You can get these folks for a song by: 1.
| Giving them something interesting to work on 2. Showing
| them that they won't gradually be asked to take on BS assignments
| over time 3. Letting them take every friday to go fishing
| or whatever it is they do
| TimPC wrote:
| If we want more of this we need to get housing under control.
| If you can pay a mortgage from 25-40 and finish paying a house
| then lots more people will be willing to take pay cuts for
| better jobs at 40. With high homeownership rates among
| developers it's difficult to have this happen with modern 25-30
| year mortgages.
| matwood wrote:
| There was a quote from American football player Ray Lewis where
| he said something like 'you pay me for Monday to Saturday, I
| give you Sunday for free'.
|
| Coding, solving fun problems I like doing, and even do on my
| own time. Useless meetings, bureaucracy, driving, and all the
| other job annoyances is what causes me to start adding
| multipliers to my salary requirements.
| dontbenebby wrote:
| Or you could give them a cash signing bonus enough that after a
| year with you they'll no longer feel economically precarious
| and just... own that they may be a bit flaky forever after.
|
| I had really hoped to be hired in at Mozilla when I interned,
| since unlike many other companies, they paid a relativey decent
| wage then pay out cash rather than only give stock in "The
| Company" (then extort you over 2 to five years to break the
| internet and or the law, as your rent goes from an excessive
| 1500ish USD when I was last spending the summer in Frisco, to
| more like 4500 for a similar sized studio like I'd been looking
| into today.)
|
| That combined with folks who know words like "schadenfreude" or
| "Neue Deutsche Harte" but not "cash for keys" or "duty to
| mitigate loss" can really grind the gears of folks who don't
| have the resources nor inclination to let neoliberals or worse
| "save face".
| selimthegrim wrote:
| For God's sake don't say Frisco to anyone below 70.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > I was last spending the summer in Frisco
|
| What do the Dallas suburbs have to do with this discussion?
| padolsey wrote:
| [redacted]
| CraigJPerry wrote:
| I don't know. From talking to them, they seem really happy
| with the deal.
|
| One example - one of the original creators of a mega-popular
| open source enterprise messaging product, that product is the
| defacto standard in its space, he created it around 2007-ish
| with 4 other folks. Today i don't see his name on recent
| commits but i'd be pretty sure he's still involved on the
| apache project board or something. He was a lead developer in
| a big org at that time but then levelled up to MD level over
| the course of a decade or so.
|
| He builds houses now (not a typo - a moderately famous
| programmer who now has his own house building company), he
| teaches elderly folks in his community how to use the
| internet without falling to scams and he cranks out code for
| 2 startups on a part time basis.
|
| From the things he engages with today it seems to me that
| he's not chasing money (he could walk into a mid 6-figure MD
| level role tomorrow if he relocated back to NYC) but
| fulfillment.
|
| Another example, one of the most skeptical people i've ever
| met, i just can't imagine a scenario where someone
| manipulates him but anyway, he's maybe a year into pairing up
| with a fintech startup and best i can guess, he's paying
| them. I.e. i'm pretty sure he's invested money in them and i
| can't imagine they're providing his previous salary. He
| relocated so i only see on social media these days but he
| certainly appears to be having a blast of time and i've never
| seen him in as high spirits.
|
| If it was manipulation then i'd be expecting to see
| underhanded tactics but that's not the suggestion here. The
| suggestion here is to meet demand for more interesting job
| roles with better flexibility for life and in return get the
| benefit of a top level developer in your org.
| blorenz wrote:
| There isn't any manipulation going on there what the parent
| comment suggests. When a business is cash strapped it does
| not have the funds to compete with salaries. However, the
| business can offer other benefits such as what the parent
| comment says and these are a benefit alternative to the
| mundane jobs and tasks an enterprise may have. The
| prospective engineer can absolutely decline the offer. I feel
| like you miss the point of being cash strapped. You can't
| just create funds out of thin air at any time. The parent
| commenter did not even suggest you perpetually exploit the
| engineer.
| padolsey wrote:
| [redacted]
| hef19898 wrote:
| Being in the lower age bracket of OP, I have to agree
| with OPs point. There is quite a considerable pool of
| experienced, motivated and not career, and no longer
| really money motivated, people out there. We can be had
| by all OP said. I'll add an incomplete, and highly
| personal, points: 1, give us hard problems to solve with
| smart people 2, spare us corporate BS, careerists and all
| that 3, listen to us and give us aithority to decide
| things 4, don't have us report to some people who's only
| professional experience is in your young start-up
|
| Good news, we are avaiable on all levels in the hierachy.
| Less on C-level, or even just VP, but we are there. And
| to be honest, to get your company of the ground the last
| thing you want is an accomplished VP from big corp in
| your industry. Those career politicians are best suited
| for your board.
| ryanmercer wrote:
| > but the characterization of appealing to burned-out
| engineers, especially older folks,
|
| It's not just "older folks" that are burnt out from being
| effectively abused by employers for years or decades. I
| left my last employer after just shy of 16 years as I
| didn't have a cost of living increase in over a decade,
| worked over 400 hours of overtime in a calendar year and
| was constantly being asked for more, with every single
| thing I did being micromanaged with a time stamp down to
| the second with it going as far as some managers asking
| employees to notify them when they'd be AFK to use the
| toilet to justify a few minute gap in activity, while my
| CEO gave himself a 40-something million dollar annual
| raise (while being a multi-billionaire).
|
| In the past year and a half roughly half of that office
| has quit, heck when I put in my notice one of my team
| leads had put his in day before and the one I directly
| reported to put in his the day after I did.
|
| People are tired of being treated like crap, with or
| without "enough" pay.
|
| Sometimes being trusted, being treated like an adult, and
| being given some amount of freedom is far more attractive
| than more money.
| Clubber wrote:
| It seems like "older folks" in tech is like older folks
| in the NFL. Around 30. You can get pretty grizzled /
| salty pretty fast with bad environments.
| bathyspheric wrote:
| Far from heavyweight, I was building innovative solutions for a
| small consultancy that became more successful and more
| practised at the same old solutions. Cue same boring problems.
| I took two years part-time to retrain with an education degree
| and now teach bright young minds 9-3 each day for 40 weeks a
| year. Pay cut worth it. All I was asking for at the end, was
| interesting problems to solve, but now I know that young people
| are more interesting and more worthwhile than any neural net or
| optimization problem. My 2c.
| sfriedr wrote:
| I do wonder what it was _specifically_ that you didn 't like
| training NN's. At least when doing research on NN's,
| everything is very interesting, as many many aspects of them
| aren't well understood.
| short_sells_poo wrote:
| So you went from training artificial neural networks to
| training biological neural networks? The latter takes longer
| I believe but the biological networks go on to solve much
| more interesting problems :)
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > but are just burned out doing the same boring problems.
| Several have taken massive pay cuts to go work in tiny firms.
|
| I hires for a remote office that was near a certain FAANG
| office. We had applicants out of the FAANG company every week
| who just wanted out and many even let us know in their cover
| letters that they were willing to take a significant pay cut.
|
| I know the HN trope is that FAANG jobs are all about doing some
| LeetCode to pass the interview and then it's all easy from
| there, but that's not actually the norm in FAANG jobs. If
| you're collecting a high salary and working for a highly-paid,
| highly-motivated boss, the pressure is going to be high. It's
| not for everyone and a lot of people discover that the high pay
| isn't entirely worth it after a few years.
| masterof0 wrote:
| Maybe, but that's very unlikely. Usually FAANG workers (I'm
| one myself) if they are young will move to new hot startups
| in the hopes of a big pay off at IPO time, or if they are
| older ,then will take a small pay cut for better WLB (to
| raise their kids, etc.), the other pattern I have seen is
| people move to companies that are fully remote or allow
| working from other countries (digital nomads friendly). One
| thing many people ignore about FAANG is: you get to choose
| what project you work on, at least at Amazon and Google, you
| can work on anything from Finance, Robotics, Retail, and
| front-end , back-end, etc... Obviously there will be people
| who quit FAANG for other reason, and just want to be the lead
| of a small team at a smaller company, etc. Another myth you
| seem to believe is thinking high pay equates to high pressure
| or bad WLB , also wrong, plenty of datapoints on sites like
| Blind, Glassdoor, etc. I do agree is not for everyone, but it
| definitely worth the effort to get in, you learn a lot, and
| you get expose to all kind of problems.
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| IME: in my career I'm always a bit under or overworked it
| seems. Getting better at boundaries, but I suspect this is
| the case for many in our industry. Choose your poison, and
| realize it may not be what you want your whole life.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| _> 1. Giving them something interesting to
| work on 2. Showing them that they won't gradually be
| asked to take on BS assignments over time 3. Letting
| them take every friday to go fishing or whatever it is they do
|
| _
|
| #1 would have been fine, for me. When I left my job (after 27
| years, running a C++ image processing shop), I was looking for
| work that was interesting to me. I had my retirement set, and
| would have been quite happy to take a good deal less than many.
|
| I have a pretty vast and varied skillset. I'm not famous, and
| never have been interested in that stuff, but I did work for a
| _very_ well-known company, at a pretty deep level. I had an
| almost "perfect match" of skills for a startup (and I didn't
| mind taking a bit of a risk, as my retirement was set, anyway).
| I was looking for places where I could make a difference.
|
| I also have an _enormous_ portfolio of work, so there 's
| absolutely no question at all, about what I can and can't do.
| Take fifteen minutes, browsing some of my repos, and it will
| tell you a _lot_ more than some "Draw Spunky" leetcode test.
|
| I was appalled at the way that I was treated -even by small
| shops (actually small shops and recruiters were the worst. Big
| shops treated me fairly well, but didn't have a compelling
| draw). I have come to learn that this was directly because I'm
| older. I was unaware of the animosity so many young folks have
| against us; but I am now painfully aware of it.
|
| In my case, I just gave up, and accepted that I'm retired;
| whether or not I want. I found some non-profit folks that
| couldn't afford to pay me, and I work with them. I pop out a
| couple of small apps; from time to time; just to stay in
| practice, while I work on bigger stuff.
| mizzao wrote:
| Want to come check out https://parsnip.ai - "Duolingo for
| cooking?" We're here in NYC.
| belval wrote:
| I really like the idea, do you have plans to release on
| Android?
| mamcx wrote:
| Being older requiere adjustments in how you sell yourself,
| imho.
|
| I think is a losing proposition go to be another "employee",
| you are a mentor, a consultant, or something alike. Be in the
| "same" pool than younglings not work because you are not in
| the range, but playing good the "nice grandpa" can works
| well, imho.
|
| Also: In the case of small companies is easier to "own" the
| interview process if is totally pointless or wrong. Take the
| experience and run with it: If fizbbuzz is on the path,
| derail the conversation and show something more impressive
| and how it could be teached to the team (this is by accident
| something that happened to me in one of my earlier roles long
| ago: I already bust the first interview and the second time I
| only remember going for the same company on site (!)... but
| that time I just sit with one of the developers and talk/code
| a little about something cool...)
| mistrial9 wrote:
| I had a similar experience with less stellar product history
| but solid computer science and current practice. Many of
| those advertising were associated with phones+web .. those
| people are actively dismissive of previous software
| development, and leaned heavily on the whiteboard
| interrogation and control session. What a negative..
| meanwhile, I found out that a skilled co-worker on the net,
| with excellent English, better modern C++ than me, and domain
| knowledge, was working for about $27/hour USD out of Poland
| and London. After covid-19, I discovered some abusive
| contracting companies who were treating young males very
| harshly and inflating their credentials.
|
| I really did not expect this, I got negative seniority and
| quick NO from people with money.
| cageface wrote:
| I'm over 50 and recently did a job search and I have to say
| this wasn't my experience. I had to do all the same coding
| tests etc that all the other candidates did but I never felt
| like I was treated with disrespect. Maybe I just got lucky or
| maybe it was because the tech job market was still extremely
| frothy but I was braced for a bad experience that never came.
| csomar wrote:
| > I'm over 50
|
| > I had to do all the same coding tests
|
| I don't know man.
| cageface wrote:
| I've worked with people my age that stopped updating
| their skillsets literally decades ago so I don't think
| it's fair to expect employers to take your abilities on
| faith.
|
| I also deliberately avoided companies known for leetcode
| style interviews although I can do those kinds of tests
| too.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| _> I don 't think it's fair to expect employers to take
| your abilities on faith._
|
| I have a current portfolio that is _massive_.
|
| In fact, I just got done updating several apps and
| packages, so it's current as of about five minutes ago.
|
| I wouldn't dream of taking me on faith. I never did, as a
| hiring manager, but I was also fairly good at evaluating
| folks. I would have _killed_ for the kind of info I can
| provide; which makes it really weird, that people
| immediately dismiss it.
|
| In any case, that's all water under the bridge, these
| days. Barn doors, horses, etc.
| cageface wrote:
| I also only interviewed for 100% remote positions at
| startups, mostly doing fairly common React/Rails kinds of
| stuff so we might have been targeting different markets.
|
| In any case if you're financially in a position that you
| can work on whatever you want it sounds like things might
| have worked out for the best despite the unpleasant
| interviewing experiences?
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I'm glad to hear it.
|
| I suspect that part of the reason is that the smaller shops
| I looked at were based in Brooklyn.
|
| Brooklyn's agesim is _much_ worse than Silicon Valley.
| Also, I was interested in the kinds of startups that are
| probably dominated by energetic younger folks. I do native
| Swift (Apple) stuff, and have a lot of experience with
| things like SDKs, and hardware control /communication.
|
| The bigger shops tended to have a lot less interesting
| work, but were also a lot more "stolid" in their approach
| to recruitment.
|
| Like I said, I was looking for work that I found
| interesting. I'm sure I would have been able to find work
| that was less motivating.
|
| As it has turned out, what I'm doing now, is _highly_
| motivating, and I no longer have a desire to go back to the
| rat race. In the aggregate, I 'm glad things turned out the
| way they did. A couple of startups missed out, but I'm sure
| they'll be OK. I'm not God's gift to programming. I know
| that I am doing great.
| hguant wrote:
| >Brooklyn's agesim is much worse than Silicon Valley
|
| Is that a Brooklyn/hipster thing, or a NYC finance
| culture thing seeping into the tech world?
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| That's a good question, and I'm not entirely sure. I have
| ideas why, but I don't think it's helpful to speculate.
| It's not like anyone is actually willing to change
| things.
|
| In my experience, "classic" companies (which now include
| former "rebels," like Meta, Google, and Apple) are more
| likely to be professional and courteous (we won't talk
| about IBM, though), when it comes to dealing with older
| folks.
|
| I'll bet that my experience as a manager also spikes my
| chances. I have _no interest, whatsoever_ in being a
| manager again, but it gave me some great viewpoints and
| experience with things like strategy and pitching.
| version_five wrote:
| An anecdotal observation: working at a startup, I found that
| they were able to get some highly experienced developers, but
| had filled most of the management positions with young,
| inexperienced people. I didn't see ageism, rather than just
| bad management that didn't understand how to work with
| experienced people because they had this beginner notion that
| managing means "telling what to do" instead of coordinating.
| I suspect that kind of behavior is at the root of challenges
| like you saw, junior "leaders" who think they have the be the
| superior of other teams members because of some notion of
| hierarchy.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| > I have come to learn that this was directly because I'm
| older. I was unaware of the animosity so many young folks
| have against us; but I am now painfully aware of it.
|
| I think it's less animosity and more incompetence.
|
| I remember once when I was younger - around ~26 - being
| interviewed by a ~22 year-old fresh out of college, and the
| interview was more like a college test.
|
| What relevance did this have to what I would do at the
| company? Most likely - nothing.
|
| But this was basically all this person knew.
|
| The younger you are, the less ability you have to 1) know
| what's valuable, and 2) assess it.
|
| Not that this is a particularly easy thing for anyone to do.
|
| That being said - younger people are going to place close to
| no value on your decades of battle scars and experience. They
| don't have any. They probably like to think it's not worth
| anything - because it makes them feel better about not having
| it.
|
| You know - never attribute to malice that which is adequately
| explained by incompetence.
|
| I'd also caution on the things you perceive to actually be
| animosity - they're probably mostly jealousy. You're someone
| who has WAY more options available - so you can be demanding
| and picky about your employer. Younger people might hate
| _that_ - but that 's really jealousy. They probably don't
| actually hate _you_. There 's a big difference.
| caffeine wrote:
| I was a younger, inexperienced tech lead sitting in on an
| interview led by an engineer about 10 years older than me.
|
| I was shocked when he spent the whole hour asking soft
| questions like "So describe your previous team structure.
| How did ideas and plans arise? Who took responsibility? How
| was conflict resolved? What were your impressions?"
|
| I always went hard on technical stuff when interviewing,
| was always worried that an incompetent would sneak through.
|
| I asked the senior engineer his rationale. He told me "This
| guy went to X school and got Y degree and worked at Z
| company. So I know he's smart enough. And I can teach him
| to write good software. But I can never teach him not to be
| a prick."
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Good point.
| kevstev wrote:
| Completely agree. I recently left a top hedge fund, and for a
| period around 2019, their hiring process got so silly that it
| could be succinctly described as they only wanted to hire
| Linus Torvalds to do linux administration. Around this time,
| a previous boss of mine was back in the market, at least
| theoretically, and I convinced him to at least have a
| conversation with my firm. I even spoke with the HR recruiter
| beforehand, and was like listen, you need to sell Impact
| here, and not just in dollar terms, but in organizational
| change, openness to open source, etc... and the HR rep seemed
| pretty taken aback- they seemed to feel that just the name on
| the wall should be all thats needed.
|
| It was so ridiculous though, you aren't going to get people
| that have defined internet standards, started successful
| companies, invented important things... to come work at a
| place to bang out Jiras and get beat up over made up
| deadlines. And on top of that they were being completely
| inflexible and were not allowing remote work. Even if you pay
| them 7 figures, most of these types are already independently
| wealthy and that's not their motivation at that point in
| their careers.
| justsomeguy123 wrote:
| The odd thing is... this works for senior talent too!
|
| The biggest road block I saw with recent job ads is they want 8
| hours / day. Companies just don't have the flexibility to take
| a senior dev at 4-6 hours a day.
| jstx1 wrote:
| Sure they do, they just aren't explicit about it.
| justsomeguy123 wrote:
| If they are not explicit and not explaining this even to
| the 1st recruiting filter... it means the only way it
| happens is if you get in the company, do 8 hours for a
| while, prove your worth, then switch to 4-6 hours. It's a
| silly dance and takes time.
|
| I did see it once, and even then they just _wink-wink_
| approved 6 hours with a reduced pay but legally you were on
| the hook for 8 hours (at the reduced rate). Flexibility
| varies...
| paulmd wrote:
| The element that I've never been sure about that is
| benefits though. If you are taking 50% time do you get
| benefits at all, or 50% benefits, or what?
|
| tbh in that context, the wink-nudge "you're 40 hours a
| week and we have a mandatory no-meetings friday, _be sure
| you don 't go do something fun_ because it'd be a real
| shame if you missed something important!" is actually
| potentially a better deal from the employee perspective
| because it's legally clear that you're a FTE.
| justsomeguy123 wrote:
| You are right, it is a better deal in a way, but it's
| also a bit iffy. There's no reason one couldn't get the
| same benefits as a full-time employee while working lower
| hours. In the end it's all about total compensation and
| you can adjust pay for that to make sense.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| Say more. I'm not sure if you mean mean they'll accept that
| even if it's not in the job posting; or if you mean they'll
| tolerate you working for less than you are supposed to
| without being above-board about it.
| ryanbrunner wrote:
| It's always worth talking about. I think most companies
| avoid putting part time explicitly on a job posting
| because that sends a message that this is a side gig vs.
| something you should be focused on. I know for sure for
| the right candidate I'd be open to 30 hours a week or
| something like that (less than 20 to be fair is where I'd
| probably draw the line).
| jstx1 wrote:
| I mean there's people who are barely working right now,
| including many people who are barely working at multiple
| companies and getting paid for full time employment at
| all of them. With that in mind, scaling back from 8 hours
| to 4-6 while still delivering everything you need to
| deliver seems very achievable. And in many places that
| level of commitment is the norm - everyone including
| management is working those reduced hours - companies
| just aren't spelling it out in their contracts.
| burntoutfire wrote:
| Just take a remote position, no one knows or cares if you veg
| out in front of PC for full 8 hours.
| awkward wrote:
| That's the bad part though. Engaged problem solving is fun,
| staying just plugged in and aware enough to please your ass
| in seat manager is the opposite of fun.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| 4 8-hour days instead of 5 would be what I want.
|
| It does seem somewhat rare.
| l33t2328 wrote:
| Trying to make your programmers work 40 hour weeks seems so
| out dated. Sure, a brave few can regularly work for 8 hours
| straight, but for many after a few hours they're better off
| stopping for a decent while.
| ehnto wrote:
| I have been surprised at how flexible some places are once
| asked. I think advertising for the job they show full-time
| because that's what most people want. Though the majority are
| indeed pretty rigid.
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| Thank you, you just described me. After spending about 7 years
| doing deep learning gigs with very high pay, lots of
| responsibility and pressure, and more hours in my work week
| than I liked, I recently took a job as an advisor and some
| Common Lisp development responsibilities and with very reduced
| working hours. I work 15 hours a week. I have written a few
| Common Lisp books and my new company is all-in using Common
| Lisp.
| CraigJPerry wrote:
| Hey Mark, you had me at "Common Lisp" so i googled and i had
| a skim through https://leanpub.com/lovinglisp - it looks
| right up my street. Over the past couple of months I've taken
| to coffee breaks in the garden with lisp / scheme / clojure
| books. Books about the size of the little/reasoned schemer
| work well but stuff like HTDP is hard to balance! Anyway,
| your section on ql setup & integration with emacs is way
| better than the official docs having gone through this only a
| few months ago.
|
| Am i able to buy a physical copy / print on demand? Neither
| Amazon nor LeanPub are giving me the option (I'm UK based).
| Waterstones will let me POD your "Common Lisp Modules" book
| but that doesn't look as relevant for me (someone who's
| fallen for lisp but still very much learning). I do have a
| kindle but i've become one of those divisive types who now
| freely writes margin notes in his books.
| raverbashing wrote:
| Pretty much this (also remote work and free from big company
| sameness)
|
| A job is not only a salary. Yes, salary is important, but I
| wouldn't take a 50% increase to work on a very inconvenient
| office location with no free coffee.
|
| Also, don't waste the candidate's time with a BS hiring
| process. You want to bring this person you don't put them under
| the steamroller. Be gentle.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| For a 50% increase I could literally pay someone to chauffeur
| me to this inconvenient office and also to buy and bring me
| coffee from my favourite coffee shop, and I'd still be taking
| home more.
| asoneth wrote:
| I agree with you on the coffee but not the commute.
|
| I had a long commute for a few years -- 9 hour workday with
| 3.5 hour round-trip commute, 5 days a week. I traded ~50%
| of my free time for ~50% more salary.
|
| After factoring in commuting costs, taxes, and the time-
| saving services for things I used to do myself it wasn't as
| much of a net increase as I thought it would be.
|
| But more importantly, what's the point of having money if
| you don't have time to use it?
| ryanbrunner wrote:
| If the commute takes an hour each way, I don't really care
| if someone's driving me if that's two extra hours away from
| my family (and likely missing dinner every night).
| charlie0 wrote:
| Money is not important, but only after you have enough of it
| first.
| tristor wrote:
| After my first proper full-time job, every single position I've
| taken was based on being interested in working on the product.
| I've taken pay cuts, changed roles from engineering to product
| management, and in the future may change back to engineering (I
| keep my chops up). At no point have I ever taken a job because of
| the pay, and I don't see that ever changing. I think many people
| are like this.
|
| So, my advice is that you should focus on having a compelling and
| interesting product. If you have this, you can hire high-quality
| people for a reasonable rate of pay. I'm still invested in my
| current role, but now I often get reached out to by recruiters
| looking for early hires for new startups where I know I'd mostly
| be taking equity not pay, and I'm in a position where I can
| afford to do that. That's likely what I'll end up doing in my
| next role.
|
| Nobody wants to work on boring stuff. Boring stuff is just a fact
| of life that we all have to do some of the time. But the main
| thing is, to make sure that the product is compelling and
| interesting enough to make the boring stuff worthwhile when it
| happens in between the bouts of interesting stuff. If a job is
| just non-stop boring stuff and bureaucracy at a high rate of pay,
| people who are longer in tooth are going to leave and you're
| going to have brain drain.
| tacitusarc wrote:
| TFA explicitly mentions this is about companies that do not
| have an interesting product.
| [deleted]
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| This essay is about: how we do we get talent if we can't pay at
| the top of the scale?
|
| It says that the conventional wisdom is you have to instead
| attract people with "vision", some really exciting thing that the
| company is targetted at.
|
| But suggests instead, basically (this part is more my
| interpretative summary, what do you think?) that you can identify
| the people who _couldn 't get_ those top of the scale jobs (for
| example don't have a degree), but nevertheless are well-suited
| for your particular company/roles.
|
| OK, sure, that makes sense, just on an economic basis. It's a
| kind of "hiring arbitrage" -- and at it's worse may be treating
| the employees as much as commodities as that phrase sounds like.
| Like, I'm not sure the people will stick around if working at
| your company for a couple years makes them now more competitive
| for higher-paying jobs, and all you had to attract them was that
| you were willing to hire them when others weren't. But maybe
| that's fine, there will be more where they come from.
|
| But how about instead considering what could attract an employee
| in addition to top-scale salary or "vision"?
|
| How about "quality of life"?
|
| This could be internal -- you will like your co-workers, our
| managers are good at managing, we have a non-toxic work
| environment, you will feel like you have the support and freedom
| to actually do good work here toward understood organizational
| goals. (It's amazing how rare that is, right? I think a lot of
| people would take a salary drop for it).
|
| This could be work/life balance -- our hours are reasonable and
| predictable, our time off is flexible and plentiful.
|
| Or, even take a risk and offer 4-day weeks for the 'full' salary
| you can afford to offer -- you'll honestly probably be getting
| nearly as much productivity as 5-day week.
|
| Etc.
| bigbacaloa wrote:
| It might help your communication to use far less jargon instead
| of onboarding ...
| gadders wrote:
| I think this is advice is a great approach for finding under-
| valued people and hiring them.
|
| I would say, though, that once you have trained up your developer
| and they have gained experience, they will begin to realise their
| value. You will either have to bump salaries up for the
| experienced people, or have a continuous pipeline of hiring of
| the undervalued people to replace them.
| MikeCapone wrote:
| There's a podcast interview with the author, Cedric Chin, here:
|
| https://www.libertyrpf.com/p/cedric-chin-what-operators-can-...
|
| Covers the study of expertise and a bunch of different topics
| (operators vs investors, etc). It doesn't cover hiring
| specifically.
| bdcravens wrote:
| Allow remote. Give autonomy. Give them good equipment. Pay well
| for their area. "Cash strapped" doesn't have to mean you hire
| cheap. It means you've gotta make it count.
| trhoad wrote:
| TLDR; If all you can afford is the B-team then you'll get the
| B-Team
| madmax108 wrote:
| LOL... the irony being that for a lot of folks whether they are
| A-Team or B-Team or C-Team depends a lot on the company
| culture, impact of work they are assigned on, problem
| statement, team (esp. foundational team), exec alignment and a
| tonne of other factors that may or may not be in their control.
|
| A supposed "A-Team" Engineer at FB who was part of the early
| team that built out a messaging platform that is used across FB
| Engineering will still be seen as a "B-Teamer" at a 20 person
| startup if she's unable to create similar impact (again, not
| because she's intrinsically a different person between FB and
| the new company).
|
| Heck, the easiest way to be considered a 10xEngineer/A-Teamer
| today is to bring 15% increments to 10 teammembers'
| productivity rather than be some insanely productive,
| busfactor=1 developer.
|
| We really need to stop with this silly ranking of devs
| ghaff wrote:
| In addition to agreeing with your points in general, hiring
| processes are also sufficiently random that it's not like the
| big SV companies are capable of actually skimming the cream
| of prospective employees--even if everyone who could get a
| job there actually wanted to.
| amusedcyclist wrote:
| The reality is almost all of the best devs work at top places
| and get paid top money. If you need that quality of dev you
| need to pay that kind of money, now theres a strong argument
| that in some cases mediocre devs are fine and I'm sympathetic
| to that argument but from my experience the FAANG+ devs are
| better than others on average (maybe even most of the time).
| indymike wrote:
| > We really need to stop with this silly ranking of devs
|
| Or realize that past performance isn't indicative of future
| results.
| fasteddie31003 wrote:
| I think engineering onboarding is one of the most overlooked ways
| to increase organizational productivity. I'd guess that the
| average tenure of an engineer is about 3 years. From my
| experience I feel confident in my abilities at a new company
| after 6 months. That gives 2.5 years of good work per engineer.
| I've been working on an engineer onboarding tool to reduce new
| hire ramp up time. I'd love to hear your feedback
| https://gainknowhow.com/software-companies.html
| username_my1 wrote:
| One thing I would say from personal experience (because I've been
| hiring on budget for 6 years now).
|
| Don't go for the big names / nba level, don't even go for the
| second league candidates, go for 3rd and 4th and find people
| who're looking to do a great job (there is a lot of them) and
| give them the environment to do so.
|
| I think Microsoft had a study about creating effective teams from
| ordinary people, and I've seen it a lot at my company. make sure
| that you have a good engineering culture and people who want to
| learn and do a good job, you will end up with superstars.
|
| also, there is loads of engineers doing shit jobs and dying to
| work on something a bit more interesting or more rewarding.
| Brajeshwar wrote:
| You sounds really like the two founders I'm friends/neighbors
| with. I love the way they hire, train them, while still
| expecting few will still leave them for "better opportunities".
|
| For those interested, Zoho[1] is doing this in a pretty big
| way. I had been lucky to be one of those very few outside-
| people that Zoho had agreed worked with. I even visited one of
| their location in a very remote corner of India and love what
| they are doing. They can practically change the landscape,
| education, and family wellbeing of an entire village/town.
|
| 1. https://www.zoho.com
| [deleted]
| BlargMcLarg wrote:
| At least rationally this should be obvious.
|
| Extraordinary people are extremely limited. The recruitment
| process is not perfect. The performance equation consists of
| far more than just the individual's capabilities. Every
| variable is subject to diminishing returns upon investment.
|
| Microsoft study aside (I couldn't find it either, mostly
| redirects to Teams), there are tons of studies coming out over
| and over pointing out how capable the ordinary person is when
| put in the right environment. We see this every day too, a
| complete "nobody" rises to fame within a year of dedicated
| work, to levels most people would claim "you need 5-10 years to
| be at that level", if not more. And these people aren't doing
| it in unimpressive ways like making a meme game or a joke
| website or whatever, no; they are making things which put
| companies with millions of dollars in budget to shame. If
| individuals can do this on their own accord, so too can a team
| with a specialist open to teach others, in work far less
| glamorous and difficult.
| username_my1 wrote:
| I don't think many people at VC backed companies or FAANG are
| 'extraordinary' it's not like Zillow or robinhood app
| developers or whatever are unique people I would argue that
| they are usually people who ether went to great schools
| (money) or connected or learned to ace the interview process.
|
| I've yet to see open source code from FAANG or other big
| players that looks like it was done by a genius. it's just
| professionals who know how to read documentations, and know
| how to write clean code and know how to work in a good
| engineering process.
|
| also when you're building an app (web, mobile, SAAS ...) I
| really really doubt you need or want 'extraordinary' people
| ..
| BlargMcLarg wrote:
| Yeah, I was kinda alluding to that. If ordinary people can
| do amazing things in a single year with almost no prior
| skill, it shouldn't be difficult to rationalize why/how a
| company could find ordinary people to do their much-less-
| glamorous work given just a few basic background checks and
| a single specialist in a primarily supportive rather than
| developing role, instead of the complete charade going on
| right now. And studies keep coming backing this up (or at
| the very least unable to refute this).
|
| Then you add on top of that, companies tend to give pretty
| strong incentives to do their work anyway (you know,
| survival and luxuries). Even "cash-strapped" ones tend to
| pay well over median.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > Microsoft study aside (I couldn't find it either, mostly
| redirects to Teams), there are tons of studies coming out
| over and over pointing out how capable the ordinary person is
| when put in the right environment.
|
| I'm skeptical of what Microsoft considers an "average
| contributor" considering they were known to have a pretty
| high bar for recruiting (they were notorious for rigorous
| algorithmic interviews even back in the 90's). And the comp
| was also pretty strong especially considering stock
| performance back then.
|
| [0] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/10/25/the-guerrilla-
| guid...
| livinglist wrote:
| but do you lowball them though?
| username_my1 wrote:
| no ... we pay market salary ... but we can't pay VC money,
| every 3 months company retreat, spa ... and we can't pay FANG
| amag wrote:
| Personally, company retreats are generally a big turn-off
| for me. I prefer traveling with my family. And if I have to
| travel for work, I prefer it to be about the actual work
| and not about going someplace with the rest of the company
| to stand in a conference room chanting weird slogans or
| what not. If the work is interesting, I'd rather keep doing
| that and if it isn't, a company retreat is _not_ going to
| help.
| throwaway1777 wrote:
| Company retreats have nothing to do with traveling on
| your own during your pto...
|
| With remote work it's going to be extremely common for
| teams to "get together" a couple of times per year in
| person. This doesn't seem like a bad thing? It's fine not
| to like it but it seems valuable.
| murderfs wrote:
| > we can't pay VC money
|
| > we can't pay FANG
|
| So you're not paying market salary.
| brabel wrote:
| If you think FANG is market salary you understand neither
| what the FANG acronym represents (the very top companies
| in the industry) nor what market salary means (average
| salaries - NOT what top companies can pay in SF).
| username_my1 wrote:
| lots of people think that vc money rates are market
| rates.
| compiler-guy wrote:
| It turns out supply and demand are both curves, not
| points. A "market salary" is the entire graph--and even
| that is vastly oversimplified.
| sokoloff wrote:
| They're not paying the _top of market_ salary. They are
| paying a market salary.
|
| People who want the full FAANG experience are welcome to
| chase/choose that. This article and comment thread is
| about a hypothesis that there are very good developers
| who _don't want_ that full FAANG experience and how
| employers might meet them at another point on the multi-
| dimensional frontier defined by (company, interesting
| problems, pay, colleagues, BS, on-call, work conditions,
| tech approach, remote, etc.).
|
| Different points in that space have different market
| rates. The rate to work 3 days/week, full remote, with
| three other great colleagues on a project personally
| meaningful to you is different than a 5-day per week job
| on-site in an open bullpen pushing software to wring more
| value from a warehouse worker or target ads 0.0001%
| better.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| How much?
|
| Have you tried raising more? What went wrong?
| Glawen wrote:
| Interested in the study if you have it, but yes I agree
| totally. Superstars can be very tough to steer.
| username_my1 wrote:
| unfortunately I couldn't find it. but I hope someone else
| will share it.
| UglyToad wrote:
| Fairly certain it wasn't but was it this Google study
| instead? https://rework.withgoogle.com/print/guides/5721312
| 655835136/
| soco wrote:
| And the other way around, when you read a job ad heavy on the
| vision thing, you should expect that other aspects of the job
| will be struggling. But what exactly, you won't be able to figure
| out until asking.
| caffeine wrote:
| Have a look at this comment I saw on here previously, it's a
| great example of the article's idea in practice:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31451536
| goldcd wrote:
| I was a bit cynical when I started the article, but actually
| seems to make sense.
|
| I think the TLDR is: "The job you're offering is likely not to be
| the best job available - so find a target audience where it's the
| best job available to them"
| matchagaucho wrote:
| The lede is buried, but the premise is "Hiring in Vietnam".
|
| We had similar results in the Philippines, where working from
| home was unheard of.
|
| You give an employee back 2 hours of their day in commute time,
| pay their monthly Internet bill, and support a 4-day work week,
| then you suddenly have access to top-tier talent in countries
| where competing employers still impose Manufacturing, 9-to-5
| labor laws on IT workers.
| spacemanmatt wrote:
| This article makes me feel so seen. I started out a self-trained
| junior developer and now I'm hiring selectively for that same
| basic capability. I thought it was just required for the career,
| but now I'm surprised at how hard it is to find.
| pyb wrote:
| What do you mean? Can you no longer find candidates who learned
| to code by building things at home?
| spacemanmatt wrote:
| Well, I'm sure they're out there, but many have optimized for
| salary and I'm not hiring into a VC/startup type environment.
| They're harder for me to find, given that constraint.
| onion2k wrote:
| _I started out a self-trained junior developer and now I 'm
| hiring selectively for that same basic capability._
|
| Hiring people using the criteria of 'people who are like me'
| leads to _immensely_ myopic teams who fail to implement even
| basic and obvious features in my experience. Recognizing that
| there are many routes to becoming a great dev is very useful
| because it creates a team with a breadth of knowledge and
| experience that you just don 't get if you're laser-focused on
| specific criteria.
| tomp wrote:
| It's not "hiring people like me", it's just a way to separate
| the wheat (people who are intrinsically interested in
| programming) from the chaff (people who picked programming
| instead of law/finance/medicine because it pays better right
| now)
|
| Literally all other personality features are irrelevant,
| hence definitely not "people like me".
| onion2k wrote:
| Some people who studied compsci at university chose that
| because they'd been coding since they were 6 years old and
| they absolutely love it and want to master it. They're not
| all there because they decided it pays better than law.
| brabel wrote:
| Amazing what someone wanting to see "something" will see
| "something"... if anything , going through the pain of a
| CompSci degree and not giving up (more than half my class
| gave up in the first 2 years) is about the best proof you
| can get the person is interested in programming.
|
| Self-taught people may also be truly talented and
| interested, but it may just well be that they studied for
| a few months and now claim to "know programming" exactly
| because they noticed the profession pays very well (I
| know someone exactly in that situation right now, and
| she's already looking for some other path after just 2
| years in it as clearly she has zero aptitude).
| ghaff wrote:
| CS overlaps with but != programming.
|
| Students will often gravitate to majors that have some
| overlap between "This is pretty interesting" and "I can
| probably make a reasonable living doing this." Outside of
| the arts, programming is rather unusual in that some have
| an expectation that this is something that you've loved
| since you were 6. (And, again, CS only overlaps to some
| degree anyway.)
| lapcat wrote:
| > it's just a way to separate the wheat (people who are
| intrinsically interested in programming) from the chaff
| (people who picked programming instead of
| law/finance/medicine because it pays better right now)
|
| Why would you assume that self-trained developers are
| intrinsically interested in programming?
| spacemanmatt wrote:
| > Why would you assume that self-trained developers are
| intrinsically interested in programming?
|
| Great question, and I'm not sure that I would make that
| assumption. I try to assess the total picture of
| motivation. I know people work in order to get money.
| c16 wrote:
| In my experience, background doesn't tell you if
| someone's passionate. Spending a few minutes talking
| about their (as well as your own) side projects and what
| they've been spending their evenings working on / reading
| about and seeing them light up is a big indicator for me.
|
| Not everyone will do side projects - and that's fine -
| but passionate engineers will have something to get
| excited about without needing to think about it.
| lapcat wrote:
| Passionate about what? If they're more passionate about
| their side projects than about the work you're paying
| them to do, that seems like trouble.
| dc-programmer wrote:
| Definitely not a hypothetical scenario. I've seen this
| play out poorly before where work work takes a cognitive
| and priority backseat to outside work.
|
| I do think passion in a more abstract sense is a strong
| signal thorough. Such as passion for learning new things,
| solving complex problems, investment in collective
| outcomes, etc
| BlargMcLarg wrote:
| So my question, to what degree does it have to match?
|
| I went to university because I had an interest
| specifically in games, media and HCI. I could talk about
| my interest in those things fairly easily. Yet the far
| majority of jobs in my area are oriented around web
| development in its most basic, CRUD form. More often than
| not, I can almost detect a hint of snobbism from the
| other party's side whenever I lightly hint at the fact I
| don't really care for web development in my free time,
| but recognize overlap between various fields.
|
| In extreme cases, I see the above on stack level as well,
| which is even worse. As if preference in stack defines
| who should work where, when a few stack combinations
| heavily dominate the market.
| tomrod wrote:
| Tautological. You spend your time on things that interest
| you at the point you spend your time on them.
| onion2k wrote:
| You're ignoring the "intrinsically" part. The OP is
| assuming that being self-taught is a signal that someone
| is interested in coding, because that's the journey they
| were on. People could be interested in getting a
| lucrative coding job and use that as motivation to learn
| to code on their own. That doesn't mean they're
| interested in coding itself. They might just want to get
| paid a lot.
| SamoyedFurFluff wrote:
| Picking a career purely for profit and being good enough at
| it without passion to compete with the passionate people
| shows a calculated grit and intelligence that I think you
| might be passing on. You might be missing the person who
| can make the calculated decisions without emotional
| investment, the person who can give you hard truths as to
| the viability of the business, the person who can take
| their personal out of decisions and act.
| allcentury wrote:
| Optimizing for money is a guaranteed flight risk for any
| employer. High attrition is something to avoid at smaller
| companies as it greatly effects morale
| ameister14 wrote:
| I don't agree because I think optimizing for money in the
| absence of alternatives is perfectly normal and a fairly
| good idea.
|
| If someone has consistently chosen to favor cash over
| anything else, that's a different story, but if someone
| chose an industry or type of career with money as the
| deciding factor I don't think that is terribly important.
| People need and want money.
|
| If I don't know what to do and have no guidance, how am I
| to decide? I'll look at difficulty, social benefits,
| moral impact and economic benefits. A 20 year old won't
| necessarily understand how to parse difficulty, social
| benefits or moral impact but will absolutely be able to
| understand basic economic benefits, so I think it's
| appropriate to use that as a method for choosing a career
| direction and I wouldn't object to hiring them.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Just because you do something for money doesn't mean you're
| not good at it. I'm no big capitalist, but incentives 101
| tells us that people try harder at things when you pay
| them.
|
| edit: and to make an unfair generalization, pay is the most
| predictable and intelligible motivation for an employee. An
| activist can be motivated by doing good through their
| organization, but an employee who isn't motivated by their
| pay is also certainly not motivated by helping their
| employers get wealthier. So their motivations are weird,
| not straightforward.
| spacemanmatt wrote:
| Is that a bit reductionist? I'm not hiring because they're
| like me. I'm hiring for /just one/ of my foundational
| attributes due to cost constraints.
| [deleted]
| ggeorgovassilis wrote:
| Last year I landed two great hires who fell through HR's sieve
| for lack formal of qualifications. I made up my mind quickly
| after giving them a few hands-on tasks (w. screen sharing).
| dsoftware234 wrote:
| moss2 wrote:
| Article aside, that font is awful. At 100% zoom on 1080p it looks
| like someone took their thumb and smudged the newly inked text.
| Anyone else notice this?
|
| I'm using Edge v101 with 100% zoom on a 1200p screen.
| Wildgoose wrote:
| It looks blurry to me as well.
| ryanmercer wrote:
| The font is definitely less than desirable for a smooth read.
| richardwhiuk wrote:
| Suspect it's the Caluna font that's the cause - it's got
| exaggerated serifs.
| wccrawford wrote:
| I'm not seeing that on Firefox or Edge, personally. I'm not
| sure what's up, but it looks pretty crisp here.
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