Re:Ask HN: Do software engineers have leverage?
by cloverich on Monday June 21, 2021 @12:06PM
(#27580514)
It probably depends on the company. I expect the engineers Netflix is paying 500k plus a year value their domain knowledge greatly. I also expect if you showed up to an interview with said skills they would recognize them (to a greater degree than otherwise). I've started to use that as an actual filter when I interview. Do I have relevant experience beyond the e.g. languages I've used, and is the company actively soliciting that information from me? If not, I treat it as a red flag. Not necessarily a deal breaker, but if the place treats engineers as line coders who need to clear only very generic entrance criteria, they probably run a feature factory. We all know how those places turn out.
Do you actually think so? I'm actually feeling that compared to other professions domain knowledge and specialization is less valued and searched for, since more companies look for generalists and operate on higher levels of the stack.
My personal experience is I get 99% of linkedin messages for generic "React" or "Java" jobs, where leverage would certainly be low. That is despite having a huge amount of expertise in fundamental technologies that these companies are using (and sometimes even having written the code for those). But those are not the immediate problem for the recruiter and manager, so they usually don't care.