Exactly. Do not be so cocky. This is free market and while you are entitled to your opinion why should a candidate try too hard to get a position that pays less than half of what he will get elsewhere just because his skills are not up to your standards ?
You cannot really assess my skills in an interview the same way I cannot really asses whether it's actually worth taking your offer. Money talks bullshit walks. Eventually at the end of the day all of us unless really financially secure are in it for the money.
Placing someone at mid / senior / junior is not "cocky"... it's pretty subjective if you do it right. The guy missed questions that over 50% of our applicants knew the answers to.
I'm not talking the "implement this obscure algorithm from scratch on a whiteboard" kind of question HN is so fond of. The hardest coding question we ask is Fizz-Buzz.
But we can't / won't pay him more than we pay other employees with similar or higher skill sets.
If we drew a bell curve of all the applicants we had, this guy would be in the middle.
His resume was impressive though. My guess is the company that hired him didn't do their diligence and only weighed the resume.
I won't comment on whether the guy was or could be a senior because I obviously did not attend the interview but there are many many incredibly skilled people that just suck at doing f2f / online interviews.
> - We are probably priced out of the market
> I work at a startup that isn't profitable yet so our salaries are very low...
... was "too low... if we could afford it I'd pay three times that much" not "oh look what a great deal we are getting! Haha, suckers!"
The fact employers will reject based on a test that is fashionable just because a few coding blogs said so doesn't mean they can't provide value. What about their past work or qualifications?
Cocky. Sounds like a clique i'd want to avoid at all costs.
For years the only way to do zebra striped tables was that way.
Also, I never said...
1. We were taking about front-end.
2. We reject solely based on it. I just used it as an example of a type of question.
In fact we've hired candidates who didn't know what modulo was because when they encountered it they were able to reason through it.
Furthermore... this candidate failed far easier questions that that. I used FizzBuzz as the "hardest" question.
Does not knowing Fizz Buzz mean you won't be productive? No. But it is probably a good indicator you aren't commanding of $150k a year this guy got hired for.
Anyway, this guy you placed as a "lower mid", this is your judgement, how do you know it's correct? Did other people say the same? Perhaps he didn't have the skills you were looking for but was good at other things. Saying the other company didn't do their diligence is easy but is that really what happened?
If you are hiring developers and placing them as lower, mid, lead etc. you are going to get flak anyway as you're just jailing them and hiring a load of people who only agree with what you think.
You're going to get people who are good at developing software who don't care about math(s) or machine learning, give them 2 seconds and Google and they can answer your Modulo question.
Is it not about the willingness and enthusiasm to learn? Or do they have to go through "hard" tests to prove they can work out some academic nonsense they are never going to need to use. To prove themselves to the frat. I'd argue a lot of really clever people good at the hardcore Computer science and data analysis type subjects aren't always as good at writing decent code.
Second one of my other posts talk about how we've had great luck bringing on and mentoring juniors and they have been successful. I have hired people who literally dropped out of school freshman year. Again, you're either not reading or not listening.
I think you may be projecting your pre-conceived image of who I am and I don't think I can convince you otherwise.
I also think the fact I have almost 1700 on my throw away account and you have -1 on your year old account is very telling. I shouldn't have even engaged. I'm done now.
No need to get competitive about who has the highest score - sounds like this guy dodged a bullet from having to work with you anyway. You seem like you would be a nightmare to work for.
Planning to pay people half market value is madness. If you cannot afford salaries, you need a business plan that involves more profits and/or more "runway" of sacrificial capital or debt.
We pay about 70% below market. Unfortunately I am not the one that makes the decisions or the business plans. I am just barely high enough in the org to be privy to what people get paid.
For what it's worth I 100% agree with you.
The result is we get software engineers with much less experience. For what it's worth... they have all worked out very well. But I think someone with more experience would work twice as fast and therefor work out to about the same cost anyway.
I had students leaving my classes at General Assembly in 2014 start between 50-90k, with a pretty good bell curve between. I think the market has gotten tougher for them since then, but whenever a strong student got an offer for 50k I told them to push for 65k.
I'm a senior engineer at my current startup, live in the Boston area and yea... a 90k salary would have me turning down the position likely, unless you had some really good benefits. I'm trying to think creatively about benefits that would make me consider a 90k salary. If you were able to get some bulk rates (making it cheaper than just paying more $) for employees, and paid for things like: laundry service, some amount of Uber credit per month, parking, crossfit membership, phone plans, tax preparation, auto insurance, etc... that could perhaps entice me. Find the pain points in my life and help me fix them.
Perhaps this is just the state of health insurance, but I've been finding my health insurance getting worse and worse too; and even with a 'decent' PPO, I find myself getting random bills for junk the insurance wouldn't cover. Some type of employer-filled reimbursement/savings plan would help there. I don't think I ever got a medical bill 10 years ago.
The #1 thing that could entice me, over salary, would be some way for my employer to help me secure a decent mortgage and help with the down payment. I'd like to buy around Boston, but 20% down payment on $600k is a kick in the teeth (I'm aware you can do lower, but then there's PMI and such). If an employer helped me secure that, and make part of the down payment... as long as the salary paid my mortgage / student loans / food, then I'd be happy camper for a while and not complain about what the technical income number was.
Pay my rent, absolutely free childcare, and 100% covered healthcare costs?
> The #1 thing that could entice me, over salary, would be some way for my employer to help me secure a decent mortgage...
You mean cosign? Otherwise that just looks like a really big signing bonus.
If that's too expensive for the company, perhaps starting a childcare program with some other startups could lower that cost?
You and most other people. But not ALL people. That's why we fill our positions it just takes a lot of time and patience.
1. It compensates for the increased risk of working for a startup (you don't have as much runway as google, might fail to raise your next round). 2. It gives the employee a stake in the company, and aligns their interests with making the company successful. I.e. Not just doing whatever they're told, failing to raise potential issues because "it's not their job".
It doesn't really compensate for reduced pay in my opinion.
I have had a number of heart to hearts with devs to make sure their expectations on stock options are set right.
And the CEO from what I understand went two years without a paycheck. But he is independently wealthy (I am not).
I stay for various personal reasons. Reasons that the other people on the team don't have.
And because 75% underpaid is still enough to support me and my family with a modest lifestyle.
If you're thinking increased equity will compensate for reduced salary in the vast majority of cases that doesn't make financial sense.
Sadly it's not widespread. And I fear most companies wouldn't be well prepared to actually execute on it.
It won't be publicly broadcast, but if you ask around it is an option.
At $75k/year $15k for a day off a week would be roughly "break even" on the hourly rate trade off.
Someone on $100k taking a pay cut to 4 days would see their time valued at an increase in hourly rate. Since you're getting 15% less money in exchange for 20% less time.
Broad brush strokes on the math there but you get the picture.
Being self-employed, I have to make that choice -- "How much value is a day off?" -- every time a customer asks me to take on a project. Converting a 4-day week to annual vacation: 1 day in 5 is about 50 days off the standard 250-day work-year. I'd pay a whole lot more than $15k for 10 weeks off.
We do have the typical stocked fridge and beer and foosball. But so does everyone else.
We've actually found that given the choice between a perk and more money, people almost always take the money up to about $100k. After that priorities change.
> How does your company handle IP assignment also for personal projects? If I can work on side projects freely without worrying about legal junk that weighs heavily into a decision.
Our CEO and myself are vigorously debating this one :)
I love the idea of not requiring that but the math just doesn't work out for us. We have specific goals we need to hit to make payroll and losing 8 hours a week from everyone wouldn't work.
We are actively working to improve our processes so we can make more money with less hours spent though. When we crack that nut we can consider something like that.
If you're running a startup, and not trying to build a remote-friendly team, you really need to consider that.
Some location-bound businesses probably have some eminently poachable employees. For instance, look at the largest employer in the state of Indiana, Indiana University: http://www.indiana.edu/~uhrs/salary/pa-ranges-201617.html#it . A typical mid-level software pro would be classified by them as "3IT". Senior-level would be "3IT" or "4IT". A developer-manager would be "4IT". They probably have at most seven "5IT" employees, one for each campus. I think there is probably only one "6IT" in the entire university; that would be the CTO-level executive of the whole university system.
(I learned most of this a few years ago when driven by curiosity to figure out why anyone would even bother sending them a resume.)
IU pays their mid-level to senior-level tech pros only $53,892.80 to $70,033.60 . Why not target a few for recruitment? They'd likely jump ship immediately for a remote job at $70k. After all, if they are already working for so little, it must be because they don't want to move, right?
Very true. If you're willing to take a risk on someone smart who majored in Cognitive Psychology but is interested in programming, you don't have to pay them anywhere near Google salaries. But you do need to train and mentor them, and give them respect.
this is not only true for developing countries but even for developed countries. I'll speak about my country, Greece. The average wage for a junior developer is a little less than 20 000 euros per month (around 1000 years/month x 14 months + 4000 for insurance etc) while for a senior may be a little more (but probably less than 30 000, depends on years and kind of work). Wages of more than 35 000 euros are seldom found for developers and are mainly reserved for management positions. The wages are more or less the same on most Southern Europe countries (Italy, Spain etc) and are definitely much less in less developed European Countries (Bulgaria, Hungary etc).
So, if you focus on developers from similar countries you can get top talent (and I mean that, there are many great developers here, most of these people are better than the ones in Silicon Valley since they are working in their own country which the jobs are not much instead of migrating to a different place to find a job) for less than 40 000 euros / year.
The only drawback would be that they'd want to work remotely (or else they'd have already migrated). So the best course of action is to create your company's culture to not only allow but to embrace remote work (i.e by trying to only hire remote people -- this'll also save you money). Also, another idea is that migrate the start up offices instead of trying to convince developers to migrate!
Greece is a beautiful country after all :)
These people are better than the ones in Silicon Valley because they refuse to emigrate? I don't follow your logic.
Here in Greece there are not too many jobs on local (Greek) companies because of the economical crisis and repression. Definitely there are more candidates than jobs. So most of these jobs would probably be given to the better / more experienced developers while, other, not so good developers will try to emigrate to other countries to find jobs.
Notice that there was no culture of emigrating here in Greece before the crisis, people seldom emigrated because the family ties are strong here and people are raised with a culture of loving their country and not wanting to leave it (and as I said in a previous comment Greece is beautiful - you only want to leave it if you actually starve). This has changed due to crisis of course but I think that a good developer will definitely be able to find a job here in a local company and not need to emigrate.
This may be true, but it has little relation to quality of the average developer in Silicon Valley.
- 14000 euros / year payment
- 2000 euros / year insurance
- 2000 euros / year tax
For office space well the rents are around 200-300 euros / month for a small office - but he can also work from home.
I have been working hard to improve our processes but we aren't there yet.
I work in a small medtech in Manchester UK (like a scaled down Boston!) and simply currency adjusting these numbers would make for attractive offers here. For example I've a PhD in computer vision, 20 years building and selling medical device approved imaging software in the EU & US and have yet to be offered anything close to $100K (yes dollars) and options that would impact on anything I do. I'm good at what I do too. I just think the UK investment attitude is totally different.
On the other hand, there are additional things that are paid for because of various legal differences between the the UK and the US (such as paid maternity leave, paid sick leave, and employers have to pay a tax for each employee called National Insurance which effectively funds the state pension system). The law also gives all employees 5.5 weeks of holiday (though there often some restrictions on when it can be taken).
> The starting salary for a new graduate in the UK is probably in the range of £25-£33k,
Are you talking about starting developer salary? That seems really really low! Why wouldn't UK devs simply relocate to the US where they could make a lot more right away?
Apologies, I don't mean to pontificate...it just befuddles me why a UK developer wouldn't want to move, if only for a little while.
Almost all companies have a pension scheme too which are usually something like matched contributions - the employee contributes X% of their salary, and the employer contributes an additional X% of their salary up to some threshold (usually 5-10%).
Starting salary for any graduate job is about that in the UK, and most of Europe too. I suppose that the cost of upping and moving is significant enough to put people off. Plus, the difficulty in getting a visa is likely a major factor.
I hear contracting for day rates in London is the route to ££ in the tech field over there (or working for a US-based company), but the salaries/equity on offer in the US even for non-rockstar positions dwarf what UK employers are able or willing to provide.
The UK massively undervalues and under-compensates its technical talent, it's a big part of why I left the country.
Manchester here too, though I work remotely for a mainly London based company. I think salaries are climbing here, as more business comes but we don't have the same size talent pool as London so the demand is pushing things up.
I hope you have left already to get double the salary elsewhere. That's always the right thing to do.
Use startups as a stepping stone when you couldn't do better. Waiting 2 years is rather long.
Perhaps even move to Toronto where those salaries in CAD would actually be in line with market prices.
- Our typical junior makes $50 - 60k
- A typical mid makes $65 - 75k
- Seniors (including CTO) make $90 - 110k
In greater Boston.
It is VERY difficult to hire at those rates. We had someone come in interviewing for a senior that I would place as a mid (generously...) and he accepted another offer for $150k. At our scale he would be making $75k at MOST.
It takes us 6 months to find a single hire.
But I'm not bitter at Google. I think the market is valuing the workforce fairly. Which means...
- We are probably priced out of the market
- We should / do offer higher percentages equity
- We need to hire the people who the Googles of the world won't hire and train and mentor them
That last one works really well. We hired a few people that couldn't get jobs elsewhere that after two years with us left for a job that pays over twice more but they wouldn't have been able to land without our training and mentorship. We actually congratulate and celebrate those people even though we are VERY sad to see them go.